Listen to those voices! It's like smoke curling around smoke, water flowing into water, a meeting of purposeful breezes.
Way down low, anchoring the music to the earth, the solemn baritone of Peter Tosh, the angry one. Way up high, so lofty as to tickle the ears of angels, the fluid falsetto of Bunny Wailer, the calm spiritual one. And in the middle? The distinctive reedy tenor of Robert Nesta Marley, the fledgling icon, his tone as dirty as the Kingston gutter yet kind as a cool hand laid on a fevered brow.
For those only familiar with Bob Marley's mid-career hits, the earliest albums in the recent Complete Island Recordings vinyl box set will be a revelation. Released late last year to celebrate the fact that 2015 would have been Marley's 70th birthday, it's a timely reminder of just how rich The Wailers' back catalogue is, and a sonic history lesson of sorts. If you play these 11 albums chronologically, you can chart the rise of the first "Third World superstar", who died of cancer in 1981, aged 36.
What can I say? I'm a huge fan. The soulful, spliff-ravaged voice; that insistently chopping rhythm guitar; those hefty basslines - this is the music I grew up on, and I love it deeply still. Where others eulogise Dylan, the pivotal Bob in my own life was Marley.
Growing up in Whanganui, his was the first reggae music I heard, back when provincial NZ radio would playlist a little bit of everything. Years later, living in predominantly Maori communities around Rotorua and Gisborne, it was Bob who soundtracked every party alongside Burning Spear, Toots and The Maytals, and Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come soundtrack. And just last week, I woke to the sound of my 11 year old daughter blastingNatty Dread while she made pancakes for breakfast.
Reggae purists will tell you The Wailers' best work was recorded with maverick Jamaican producer Lee "Scratch" Perry before the band even signed to Island, and certainly, these sparse and gritty early-70s singles have a golden grace seldom matched since.
Not yet the dreadlocked Rasta revolutionary that would soon be staring out from posters in a million student flats, Marley was at the time a scrappy little knife-carrying street hoodlum obsessed with American soul and funk. Back then, he sang songs about love and sex as often as songs about spirituality, but his strengths as a songwriter became more apparent after Jamaican music slowed down from the earlier ska and rocksteady styles into early roots reggae.
After releasing a UK single on CBS in 1972, The Wailers toured England, playing a series of ill-attended gigs at suburban school gyms in Dunstable and Croydon. Dejected and penniless, they rocked up to the old church that housed the Island Records studio in Basing Street, hoping to borrow enough money for a flight back to Kingston. Instead, they walked out with a fresh record deal and a 4000 pound recording advance.
A new adventure had begun, and we can hear it unfold across the nine studio albums and two live LPs in this box set. Ironically, given that reggae toe-dippers consider Marley the epitome of Jamaican music, the sound is more closely related to English and American rock and soul than any music being played "back a yard" in Kingston at the time.
Island boss Chris Blackwell, the London-based son of a Jamaican sugar heiress, signed The Wailers on the proviso that he could give their sound a makeover so it might appeal to a white audience weaned on Cat Stevens, The Rolling Stones and David Bowie.