Yearning for Redemption

Bob Marley: One Love a film directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green

“They were nobodies,” recalled the record producer Chris Blackwell of the time in 1972 when Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Livingston breezed into his London office. “But they were like huge stars in their attitude and the vibe they gave off.” The trio of assured harmony singers who called themselves the Wailers signed with Blackwell’s Island Records shortly afterward, and their collective creativity came together in Catch a Fire, their dazzling fifth album and their first for the label.

But the three weren’t just in sync with one another; they were aligned with Jah (Jehovah). Benjamin Foot, the road manager assigned to the unknown Jamaican reggae musicians, remembered that as they toured tiny clubs in the UK in a beat-up old van, they argued nonstop, but not over girls or the order of songs for the set; the earnest Rastafarians were arguing over scripture. Foot said it was like being in a mobile seminary.

Within a couple of years, however, the fissures that appeared early in the Wailers’ association with Island Records widened and unbalanced them, and they fell into disharmony. Eclipsed, disenchanted, and outmaneuvered by Blackwell (or Chris Whiteworst, as Tosh called him), Livingston and Tosh split from their comrade of ten years, leaving Marley to assume authority over the band and the brand. “It was like they’d been three bulls in a paddock,” says the Jamaican writer Viv Adams. “They’d grown big together, grown to be bulls, outgrown the field, and along came Blackwell. He lifted the latch and let one of the three, Brother Bob, go free.” Blackwell later admitted his discomfort at working with the