The Waiters’ music was never less than danceable, and Bob assumed the roles of shaman, soothsayer and dance instructor at his concerts, encouraging the audience to fall in step with his lithe rebel’s hop as he transformed the proceedings into a mass mesmerization that owed more to a Pentecostal revival or a Rastafarian Grounation meeting than a rock concert. (Tuff Gong, incidentally, derives from “Gong,” an old street name of Marley’s that was also the nickname of early Rastafarian leader Leonard Howell. There was the ska period (1964 to 1966) with producer Clement Dodd their shaky rock-steady explorations (1966 to 1967) with Leslie Kong on the Beverley’s label the Lee Perry era (1967 to 1970) and the obscure but uniformly excellent material turned out in the late Seventies and Eighties on Marley’s independent Tuff Gong label. The Wailers had gone through several maturation processes to arrive at their sophisticated, heavily rock-influenced sound in the Seventies and Eighties. Blackwell and Marley were thrilled with the response, and a long-term alliance was forged. Intriguingly, the loping, hiccuping stutter-beat that propelled them was the inside-out opposite of funky American R&B tempos. But critical reaction was overwhelmingly positive, with much praise for the record’s hypnotic, sulfurous songs. The first Wailers album to see widespread international distribution, it was not an immediate commercial smash. Island leased and reissued “Judge Not” (albeit under the misnomer “Bob Morley”) in England in 1964, as well as a succession of Wailers singles, but the initial Island LP, Catch a Fire, didn’t appear until 1973. Marley was always open in his gratitude to Chris Blackwell, the white Jamaican producer and founder of Island who rescued him from the shark-infested Caribbean record industry and staked him through thick and, often, thin. “ So skinny, mon! Skinny like a stringy bean!” “I was a skinny child with a squee-ky voice,” he said, erupting in the creaking sandpaper cough that was his laugh. And less than two years later, Marley would be a founding member of the trio known as the Wailers, harmonizing with boyhood friends Neville O’Riley Livingston, now known as Bunny Wailer, and Winston Hubert McIntosh, a.k.a. He was sixteen then, just another poor country boy in the Kingston ghetto of Trench Town who dreamed of hearing his voice blare out of a jukebox. He recalled how excited he was when he sang it at a talent show in Montego Bay. On the day before his triumphant Madison Square Garden concert in 1979 – a sold-out event that would prove to be a turning point for commercial recognition of reggae in this country–Marley talked about his first record, the solo single “Judge Not,” cut in 1961. There was hardly one kid in the Caribbean who did not want to meet, if not be, Bob Marley. Marley was also incredibly prolific, writing and releasing hundreds of songs that were bootlegged under nearly half as many labels in an equal number of far-flung locales. His records have sold in the multimillions and have been covered and/or publicly adored by Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Linda Ronstadt and Paul Simon, among others. But, in fact, he was a man with deep religious and political sentiments who rose from destitution to become one of the most influential music figures in the last twenty years. The pervasive image of Bob Marley is that of a gleeful Rasta with a croissant-sized ganja spliff clenched in his teeth, stoned silly and without a care in the world.