Peter Tosh’s manager, Herbie Miller, wrote a most trenchant memorial to reggae’s most righteous rebel in last Sunday’s Observer. In it, he lamented, “There must be a reason both at home and abroad that prevents Peter Tosh from being recognised as the musical giant he was and continues to be. Whether it is a lack of communication between those who oversee his interest and the record labels for which he recorded, I don’t know.” There are several reasons why this might be so, and of course, most of them are commercial considerations. His sales are miniscule compared to the gold standard of Bob Marley’s catalogue. But it’s not as if the various record companies aren’t trying. It is important to know that all of his basic catalogue, though fairly slender by reggae’s bloated standards, is still in print. His greatest hits package, a few years ago for Columbia/Legacy, was a long-time fixture on Billboard’s reggae charts.

Certainly, there could be more advertising around him, but record companies always return to sales figures to defend what appears to some as inactivity. However, it’s all out there and fairly easy to obtain in this iwah of the world-shrinking Internet.

I have had the honour of annotating his entire standard catalogue, from Legalize It, right through Honorary Citizen, the three-CD box set, also from Columbia. All of the EMI-controlled albums from Bush Doctor through No Nuclear War are back in print, fully notated.

A few years back, Danny Sims, to whom Peter was signed as artiste and composer from 1968-1972, asked me to create some new Tosh material for his resuscitated JAD label. This resulted in the long-awaited release of his historic
(and highly controversial) performance at 1978’s One Love Peace Concert. It was there that the towering singer spat in the face of authority, or at least blew smoke in it, complaining that he no longer had access to the offices of power, and had, therefore, to address them in this public forum. It was one of the most momentous events in Jamaican musical history. The fact that he forced documentary film-makers to turn off their cameras, men he had actually invited himself to film his performance, was one of the greatest misjudgments of his career. But at least a board tape, made by reggae archivist Peter Simon, existed, and it was that we used for the album, Peter Tosh Live at the One Love Peace Concert.

I enlisted Herbie Miller to do a line-by-line “translation” of the speeches (or “livatribes”) that Peter made so movingly that tension-filled night, so that an international audience would overstand exactly what Peter was saying.

This standard English version was printed in the accompanying booklet opposite the actual words, rich with patois, that Peter spoke.

Next we turned to a concept that was inspired by the format of Bob’s posthumous Talking Blues interview/unreleased songs project, and produced I Am That I Am. It contained 13 previously unheard live acoustic tunes played during interviews in many different cities as he toured the world. Interspersed with the tracks were the most powerful interview excerpts I could find: prophecies, sometimes chilling (in 1983 on our LA Reggae TV show he said, “Right now I know there is a plot to assassa-f’ing-nate me!”; rants against the music biz-mess and at African-Americans who refused to acknowledge their roots; and a deep-seated, constantly expressed desire to return to the mother continent of Africa, the only place he could truly feel at home.

The final part of JAD’s Tosh trilogy was another live show in Jamaica - November 1982’s Jamaica World Music Festival. During Tosh’s sunrise set, the power went off on everything but his hand-held mic, so he used it for a lengthy rant on the lack of respect that reggae encountered in its own country of birth. The sensitive engineer of many of the music’s greatest moments, Karl Pitterson, created a new backing track for the speech.

Sad to say though, that these three important additions to Tosh’s catalogue have been deleted and dismembered by those who now control it (even to the point of removing my production credits from shoddy repackaging). But savvy collectors can still troll the Internet and find reasonably priced copies of the originals. (Try amoeba.com)
I have long hoped that other projects could be created though, unlike Bob, there are no known Tosh treasures lingering in the vaults. An album of his dub tracks would be a solid venture. Likewise, a true chronological set, in the manner of Heartbeat’s fine reissue series of Studio One’s Wailers cuts, that collects all the Tosh-led Wailers songs, combined with his own instrumental and vocal singles, would be of great benefit in keeping his progressive works alive.

I continue to offer a multimedia tribute show, presented at UWI at the Tosh Seminar in 2001, but sadly, lately there don’t seem to be any takers. I am baffled as to why this is so, and shall nevertheless continue to speak of his major contributions to the Wailers and to the music in general, acknowledging the debt all of us fans owe to him.
With the multitude of radio stations on the island, an outcome that Tosh could only have dreamed of, it is more crucial than ever for the local airwaves to carry his immortal works and introduce them to the next generation of creators.

Source - Jamaica Observer

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Peter Tosh - The Baddest

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