In early 1971 Bunny was working on his song Scheme of Things, and had found an attractive line to underpin the melody. Bob heard Bunny playing the swaggering bass line, displayed his broad smile and approval, and started to sing Trenchtown Rock. They both agreed the song was a boss sound, capable of ruling the dancehalls for decades. They rehearsed it with Peter and then decided the harmony should be more massive, as if all the sufferers of Trench Town had a voice.

They recruited the Wailing Souls' nucleus of Winston "Pipe" Matthews and Lloyd "Bread" McDonald to thicken up the harmony and recorded the song in June of 1971 with Bunny playing bass and Peter playing piano. "Give the slum a try," sings Bob, and the appreciative sufferers propel the song to major hit status. Along the way the Wailers ran into a roadblack when the local radio stations refused to allow the song to be played because of its incendiary last verse, "Don't call no cops. We can t'rash things ourselves. Got no stocks on no shelves, but let me tell you behave yourselves."

They decided to remix and rerelease the song with the final verse excised, and thus the original single release of the long mix became an extreme rarity. In the intimate confines of the West Indies studio, Bob cried out in an eerie prefiguring, "One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain. So hit me with music, brutalize me with music." He would sing these word again, only this time outdoors before a tumultuous, roiling crowd of 80,000 people on December 5, 1976, two nights after gunmen shot him in the chest and arm in an unsuccessful assassination attempt. The alternate mix included here was first issued on the Songs of Freedom box set and it contains the final verse.

[BRUNO! the "t'rash" spelling is correct - the word is really thrash]

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