AL ANDERSON of THE ORIGINAL WAILERS: Life In The World Of Bob Marley
An interview by Sarah Kidd.
Growing up in America in the 1950’s and 60’s, Jamaica and the world of Reggae was not a world that Al Anderson ever pictured himself in. Attending Montclair High School, Al Anderson first learned to play the trombone before moving onto the guitar and bass.
Through a serious of fortunate events Al Anderson ended up in Jamaica and being integrated into The Wailers where he played on some of the most iconic albums to date. Life wasn’t always easy during these times but Anderson never once saw this in a negative light, instead embracing every facet of the experience.
Despite a long legacy of playing with such musical geniuses as Chris Wood of Traffic, Lauryn Hill and Ben Harper; Al Andersons heart has remained firmly rooted in the heart of the reggae scene. Travelling to New Zealand, Anderson and the rest of The Original Wailers promise an evening of outstanding reggae as they perform the Legend album in full.
I caught up with Anderson a few days ago to muse upon his recollections of how he first met the great man himself, Bob Marley and his involvement in albums such as Survival and Uprising…
You first came to work with The Wailers and indeed Bob Marley on the Natty Dread sessions; had you met any of the members or Bob himself before that?
“Well I was at the lead guitarists from Free [Paul Kossoff] you know the guitarist who played on ‘All Right Now’ and ‘My Brother Jake’, ‘Heavy Load’ and all those songs … he was a great friend and the record company called him to play on the Natty Dread album. He had a great touch, Paul was a wonderful guy, but he had health problems and so he told Chris Blackwell [Island Records] that he had an American guitarist that was visiting him and working in Ireland so I substituted for him and I went to Island Records in a mini cab not knowing what to expect. Chris played ‘Katchafire’ and ‘Burnin’ for me just before I went to give me an idea [of the music]. He said ‘Do you know anything about reggae?’ and I said ‘I don’t know anything!’
Chris was way ahead of the game because he lived in England where Reggae, Ska, Rocksteady and DJ’s – the whole Soundsystem thing – was in his area in Ladbroke Grove where all these crazy people were living. He got me to substitute for him and when I got to the studio there was a young man there named Bob who Chris Blackwell introduced me to … Bob was sitting behind the studio desk with a massive spliff and I was like ‘Wow, this guy’s got the most gnarly hair I’ve ever seen in my life!’ Bob was sitting down and Chris said ‘This is Bob, this is Al’ and I said ‘Bob, Chris what can I do for ya?’ and he said ‘Well we’re gonna play a little bit of the music and tell me what you hear’; they played the music, and I told them what I could do for them. I think it was one of the fastest sessions I ever did … it probably took like an hour or like 45mins and I did the whole album”
Wow, that is pretty fast for an entire album!
“Because all the songs were so musical, they weren’t complicated, they were simple and a lot of the overdubs that I did on Natty Dread that I was involved in were one track takes. So I do one take, like I would play ‘No Woman, No Cry’ three times and they didn’t like the second or the third because I had figured the song out and I was playing more than they needed. So they kept the first one and it was pretty much like that on ‘Rebel Music (3 O’Clock Roadblock)’ and all the rest of the songs that I played on, on the Natty Dread album; it was a really fast session and I didn’t get a chance to really meet or talk with him much.
It was like after the session they took the music and the tapes and they sat down and started to mix them and they said ‘Wow, I really like this sound that this guy is doing’. Before that I was a tape op, I was already working at Island Records basically, you know getting something like seventy-five quid a week for just like pouring tea for the Goats Head Soup Stone Session and Low Spark of High Heeled Boys you know? I would go buy sandwiches, clean the tape heads and clean off the tape off the monitor desk and then I went from that and I worked with Steve Winwood and John Martyn where I got to know the Island executives.
I got lucky and they gave me an opportunity … they asked me if I would go to Jamaica and live and work with Bob and try to, you know, stabilize the music with him and his career. At the time I was on my way to Nigeria, Chris had signed me up to a group called Shakatu which means ‘mystic five’ and I said to Chris, ‘I really wanna do this Highlife music and I don’t want to go to Jamaica … and he decided that it was better that I went to Jamaica because there was gonna be a huge record surge in Bob’s music and that I should you know … just enjoy the ride! So I had no idea what was going to happen and then it all started happening.”
So when you got to Jamaica, what was your first impression of Bob Marley when you truly got to spend some time with him?
“I got to Jamaica from England at around eleven o’clock at night and there weren’t a lot of street lamps so it was as dark as hell! I went to a whole bunch of hotels and it seemed like there was no occupancy … but what I got to realise was that Bob really couldn’t put up an American guitarist in a hotel for year after year before the release of Natty Dread. We had no idea when they were going to release the album; Chris was waiting for the right moment you know? Wings, The Human League … all these guys were huge so he didn’t really want to put the record out where it would have all this interference as it wouldn’t really get the right attention for Bob, his introduction into his new career with his new guitarist and a new band.
I’ll tell you the truth, I slept outside the first night, Bob didn’t have any money, I didn’t have any money, nobody had money. So for the first night I slept outside in a lawn chair on the beach in Bull Bay. And all I remember is waking up and being like loaded up with thousands of mosquitos and it wasn’t much of what I had expected, it was a rough ride for me you know the first couple of days.
When I met Bob he basically said ‘I’m going to Brazil’. ‘So what am I going to do?’ I said, and he replied ‘Well you can stay here!’ So he put me with his cousin – his first cousin Sledger – and so we just slept wherever until he came back. Two weeks later he came back and then it was putting things in order for me to like go in the band. It was complicated, it really was” [laughs]
It sounds like a pretty rough start to the whole situation! And yet I can hear in your voice that you do not regret any of it!
“You know truthfully I wouldn’t change anything, if I could go back and change it! It was great, I got to live like he lived you know? Bob had a hard time growing up and so I wanted to embrace what the national people were dealing with which was poverty – there wasn’t a whole lot of money- no transportation, no hotels … no popularity; I got to realise that Bob wasn’t as popular as I had imagined him to be in his own country; that all came later on when they released the Natty Dread album.
I mean the underground with ‘Katchafire’ and ‘Burnin’ was huge, with real musicians and real songwriters but the people hadn’t caught onto him. They were more involved with Dennis Brown, John Holt and Jimmy Cliff … the big stars at that time.
So I saw the evolution kinda of happen with him and his music after he left Peter [Tosh] and Bunny [Livingston] it was, it was amazing. He got really popular quick!”
May I ask – why did he travel to Brazil? Musical inspiration?
“I have no idea … I think it was for football. Chris Blackwell came to Jamaica on his plane and said ‘Hey I’m going to Brazil for a couple of weeks’, and he just was gone. I was like ‘Where’s Bob?’
I mean I came down here to be with him … and now I’m with his first cousin learning about Kingston twelve and the pecking order of how things are in the social environment! It was great, it was amazing you know? I had homemade food from the Rasta’s – they changed my diet, my way of thinking … I wouldn’t change anything”
It seems like it was indeed meant to be, your destiny you could say.
“It really was an amazing history for me to have anything to do with Reggae music because I was jazz rock influenced growing up and I had no idea that I would soon be in a small island with one of the most iconic figures in music to come. I was very lucky, it wasn’t planned, I had no idea of my future, I was just going with whatever I could … if there was music I wanted to be involved with it. It didn’t matter if it was Bob, African music, Highlife music, Aswad … any of the musicians that I had to work with.
Before I joined the Island [Records] group I worked with Richard Branson – he had just started Virgin [Records] – Richard was really … he was a visionary, one of the most intelligent men in the music business that I have ever met. He always told me, ‘Ah there’s another record company – Island Records – but don’t go over there because this is where we want you to stay’ and then all of a sudden I realised that Island Records were having big parties with rice and beans, jerk chicken and people like Roxy Music, Free and Traffic and I was like ‘Wow, I gotta go to one of these parties!’ I ended up going to a party and meeting the people over there and graduated from working with Virgin to Island Records.
I mean I was a tape-op! I used to pour tea and roll joints and clean things and just be very subordinate to the producer; but I was learning. I wanted to be an engineer much more than a musician because musicians are crazy! They’re really crazy people, they know what they are doing, whether they are classically trained or not – it’s just all these crazed, mixed up moods and attitude that they can have just trying to find their successful adventure in whatever they study their whole life; and it was the same for me.
But I was ready to improvise with whoever wanted me to play with them. Then I found Bob Marley, I found Peter Tosh and Bunny when I got to Jamaica and that’s kinda where my career started to take off in the reggae world. I played with Santana, Lauryn Hill and Dave Matthews and all these other groups but I kinda stayed in the reggae world, I didn’t really graduate to play jazz in a jazz group after a certain time, it’s just been all reggae and that’s something I never expected would happen in my career”
Obviously you played on ‘Uprising’ which is a deeply iconic album featuring two of the biggest songs synonymous with Bob Marley and The Wailers; ‘Could You Be Loved’ and ‘Redemption Song’ – what was your personal view of the latter, what did it mean to you?
“Well the keyboard player wrote it – Bob didn’t write Redemption Song, Earl Lindo wrote it, he wrote it for his daughter when she was born [as] it was redemption to see her born in a very hot political time; he wanted her to grow up and not to be in the control of politicians and poverty. He played the song for me at the Terra Nova Hotel where I graduated to stay in; he was there and he played on guitar and wrote all the words out and I was like ‘Wow, what are you going to do with this song, I mean this is amazing man!’ and he was like ‘I’m going to give it to Bob’. I was like ‘Woah!’
So he gave it to Bob and produced some of it and the rest of it is all … you know how it turned out to be. It’s a great song. They fell in love with the words, they fell in love with the songwriting and the poetry and the musicianship. We played it as a group and then the record company thought it would be more of a … it would get more attention in terms of just having an acoustic guitar and Bob singing by himself. But there were a lot of versions of that song.”
It’s an amazing thing to do though when it was such a personal song – to give it to somebody else like that!
“This guy … Earl ‘Wire’ Lindo passed about three, four months ago. He wrote the intro for ‘I Shot the Sheriff’, he produced a lot of music and was like one of the fundamental musicians on the progressive side of the early seventies of Bob’s music. Both Peter, Bob and Bunny used him, he was number one. He was a child prodigy, he was classically trained and he was very intelligent.
He was one of my best friends in The Wailers, he was an amazing guy, Earl ‘Wire’ … they called him ‘Wya’ …Earl ‘Wire’ Lindo. Genius. And we honour him today. Amazing guy. Just unbelievable, thousands of sessions produced, hundreds of songs and he was on like countless hits. He was like one of the studio favourites; he was like one of the big studio cats in Kingston in his time. Amazing individual.”
Now you also played on Survival, and that was an album that in some ways was quite controversial because of the strong militant themes on it. What were your particular views on it?
“Well you know where I came from it was all about Diana Ross and The Supremes, Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, The Temptations, Marvin Gaye – who I had an opportunity to make music with and be around – so I had never seen an artist like Bob as well as Peter and Bunny take all the elements of poverty and starvation and politics and put it into music like that.
Marvin [Gaye] did later on in his career when he did ‘What’s Going On’ and so did Stevie Wonder … but their earlier songs were more soulful from the Motown catalogue. Bob really liked Motown rhetoric, the music and how everything was in that company. I had just never met an artist that took his environment and his degradation and his limited amount of musical skills to the level that Bob, Peter and Bunny did.
And so by just being associated with them I know I kinda was subordinate to working with them. I didn’t have much to say but I had a lot to play! So I just took my position and got in there where I belonged and I got lucky … they kept me for a while” [laughs]
You obviously have a massive a musical history background – what set you upon the path to where you are now?
“Like I said musicans, artists, songwriters and singers, they’re crazy. You have to be crazy to be in a hotel every day, a studio every night. Where I grew up they put me in a practice room, there was me and a teacher in this little room and I got this big guy in front of me shouting at me ‘No, no, no, no, not that way, this way!. No, no, no, you idiot, mama mia!’ and I was like ‘Wow, this is no fun. This is not fun!’ [mutual laughter] you know?
And then taking tests, I had to go home, do my studies and then come back and please this big guy. I got tired of that. And then I discovered jazz music and improvisational music; it was about play what you don’t know and put what you were familiar with, what you were taught behind you and put improvisation in front of you; then I started having fun! Because it wasn’t like I was taking a test, I wasn’t going to Berklee Music or Juilliard and I wasn’t scared that I was going to embarrass myself in front of thousands of people because of what I didn’t know or who I was playing with.
I got a chance to play with Dizzy Gillespie and all these crazy jazz musicians; Miles Davis I got to meet and be around because I was able to see their moods, their attitudes and how they performed and how they were social, their social environment; and that’s really what I wanted, I wanted to be involved with the people who made the music and the environment of the artist because I could just look into their head and say ‘Wow – look how Miles thinks, or look how he plays, or how he behaves’. And that was my education and the same for when I got involved with Reggae music, I got into the mind of the artist and the soul of their music … and just to be so lucky to have been a part of it … you know I wouldn’t want to change anything, it was just purely luck and your destiny of where you’re trying to find yourself musically.”
You basically lived it – you lived the reggae life really in the way that you spent time with them.
“Yeah I got really lucky; there were a thousand guys in front of me for sure. It wasn’t about Al Anderson it was about the music.”
The Original Wailers finish up their New Zealand tour tomorrow night (Thursday 14th December 2017) at Auckland’s Powerstation. Tickets are still available from Metropolis Touring but get in quick as they’re selling fast!
