The concert contained on this DVD took place at The Santa Barbara County Bowl in the autumn of 1979, when Bob was touring in support of his militant Survival album. And the resulting film is an epochal record of a Bob Marley performance; one that stands up as being easily an equal of the better known Live at the Rainbow show filmed on the Exodus tour in 1977.

For all intents and purposes, the Survival tour had kicked off on September 24 1979, when Bob and the Wailers had played a benefit concert for Rasta children in the National Heroes Arena in Kingston: 1979 was the United Nations’ International Year of the Child. At that ‘Heroes’ Park’ show, Bob introduced the audience to a pair of new songs from the imminent Survival album – “Ambush in the Night,” the story of the assassination attempt on his life by gunmen on December 3 1976, and “Zimbabwe,” in which he expressed his militant support of the freedom movement in the country still known as Rhodesia.

Reggae was gaining international respect; there was a feeling of growth, a mood that this was the time to seize opportunities. In October 1979, Bob Marley and the Wailers began a seven-week tour of the United States – they were set to play forty-seven shows in forty-nine days, a colossal work rate. The shows ended with an intensely militant trio of songs: “Get Up, Stand Up,” “War” and “Exodus.” On the road Bob was playing with the structure of a new number he was writing called “Redemption Song.”

These US dates began at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem. Here, in the venue where Marcus Garvey had preached, Bob and the group played seven concerts in four days. Interviewed by Neil Spencer for the British music magazine NME during those Apollo dates, Bob was asked, “What do you feel happiest about that you’ve achieved so far? That you’ve maybe woken people up?” “Yeah, me feel good that plenty people is aware that there is something happening,” Bob replied. “Man can check it out cos I know Rasta grow. I don’t see it deteriorate, I watch them and they grow more and more. It might not be in the headlines every day but dem grow.”

The dates at the Harlem Apollo had been specifically requested by Bob. He was concerned, even distressed, that the black American audience remained elusive; this tour had specifically targeted that market. In Chicago he paid a long visit to Johnson and Johnson Publications, the publishers of Essence and Ebony magazines; despite this, nothing appeared in these publications about Bob Marley. Black radio program directors still considered reggae to be ‘jungle music’ and that it didn’t fit into their formats. Kaya, the predecessor to Survival, had deliberately been a commercial album, in order to allow for albums like Survival to follow. 

In the United States, however, getting the message across continued to be a struggle. Still, Bob relentlessly plugged the Wailers on every local radio station he could get to visit. He was also disguising the fact that for much of the time he was operating in a state of sheer exhaustion, so much so that keyboardist Tyrone Downie would accompany him on press interviews to answer the more mundane questions on Bob’s behalf. 

By the end of this tour, many of those traveling with Bob were extremely worried about his health. Earlier that year in Kingston, I had seen for myself that Bob looked terribly tired and strained; conducting an interview with him in his yard at 56 Hope Road, I felt a measure of guilt for taking up so much of his precious time, even though then I didn’t realize how precious and finite it was. Bob looked terribly tired and strained. During the Prophecies and Messages section of this DVD, you can see for yourself how drawn and thin Bob looks, as in one such press conference he expounds on matters Rastafari. All the same, he glows as he expounds on the truth about Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, as he reminds his listeners that Marcus Garvey, the great Jamaican prophet of black consciousness, had said that we must look for a king from the east, and then in 1930, His Majesty was crowned. “It’s just the truth, you know,” smiles Bob. “Christ is always a lion, a lionheart.” 

The articulate Tyrone Downie offers an explanation of why it is that white people rather than black in the United States have been attracted to Rastafari: he claims that this is because their higher standard of living permits them the time to peruse such matters. But Bob bemoans the fact that black people are not working together; they have wisdom, knowledge and ‘overstanding’, he emphasizes, but they must unite, which was part of Bob’s intention behind playing this tour.

Bob Marley had first played the beautiful natural amphitheatre of The Santa Barbara County Bowl in the late Spring of 1976. He was then promoting his Rastaman Vibration album, the Tuff Gong breakthrough record in the United States, a Top Ten hit, and a record that was almost as militant as Survival. 

And this film begins with that song, a stirring rendition beneath the backdrop posters of Haile Selassie and Marcus Garvey. However, there are a bunch of tunes from the new record: “Ambush in the Night,” “Africa Unite,” “One Drop,” “Zimbabwe,” and “Ride Natty Ride,” that last song an addition to the original video of the show, released in the early 1980s but long missing from the retail shelves. In fact, there are six additional numbers, pieced together by Don Letts, who oversaw this project, pulled in on account of his knowledge and friendship with Bob: as well as “Ride Natty Ride,” there’s “Is This Love,” “Wake Up And Live,” “Concrete Jungle,” “Them Bellyful,” “So Much Things To Say,” and a bonus track of “War” which segues into “No More Trouble;” although this last tune is only covered by one camera, this hardly diminishes at all the evidence that Bob Marley is performing at the peak of his powers.

Credit is due to the entire group: as the show begins in the bright Southern California sunlight, you see that there are a dozen musicians onstage; such long-time stalwarts are there as Seeco Patterson, the percussionist from Trench Town who had helped instruct Bob in the art of music-making as a youth coming up; by contrast with his traditional burru drum sound are the rock guitars of Junior Marvin and Al Anderson, heard to especially fine effect on Crazy Baldheads; meanwhile, the whole is driven along by the looping rock-steady beat of bass-player Family Man and his brother Carlton Barrett’s drumming. Every song is received rapturously, but the show takes a quantum leap as night falls and Bob and the Wailers burst into the masterfulness of “Exodus,” a work of epic poetry, replete with suitable lock-swirling from the Gong. By the time the show is concluding with the militant “Get Up Stand Up,” the entire auditorium is swaying along and mouthing the repeated lines of “Cos I never give up the fight,” a defiant statement of intent that brings this inspirational concert to a close.

A couple of days later, Bob and the Wailers played a benefit concert at the Roxy on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, ninety miles to the south of Santa Barbara; the show was in aid of the foundation run by Sugar Ray Robinson, the former heavyweight boxing champion, to give grants to assist sporting and artistic endeavors in schools in deprived sections of LA. An additional feature on this DVD are the thoughts of fans congregating outside that show; and from it you derive a sense of the impact Bob was creating at that time in the United States. “This is the most positive spiritual message on this planet,” says one girl. 

And it is a message that lives on. Less than a year later Bob collapsed whilst jogging in Central Park with his friend Skill Cole, and was diagnosed as suffering from cancer. But although Bob himself may have passed on, his work indubitably has not: in the furthest backwaters of this planet, you can always hear a Bob Marley tune. 

Jah Lives!

Written by Chris Salewicz

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