Original image by There Stands the Glass.
The biggest regret of my concert-going life is my failure to convince my mom to drive me to Lawrence, Kansas, to see Bob Marley & the Wailers in 1979. I’d just purchased the current release Survival- my first Marley album- so I sensed the import of the performance. I can’t imagine a scenario in which my mom might have acquiesced to my pleas, given it was a school night in December and I was an incorrigible delinquent. She unceremoniously shut me down.
Black Uhuru, Burning Spear and Steel Pulse were soon part of my regular rotation. But my favorite reggae album- then as now- was Toots & The Maytals’ Funky Kingston. It’s one of only a handful of albums I’ve regularly returned to over the past 40 years. Alas, the only other Toots Hibbert album I unequivocally admire is Toots in Memphis, a project on which he affirms his status as the Jamaican version of Otis Redding.
I was overjoyed at my first Toots show in 1983. I couldn’t believe I was singing and dancing along with the titanic talent in a dinky nightclub. The ecstatic evening almost made up for missing Marley a few years earlier. Marley died in 1981. Hibbert died today.