Blackheart Man

Revered reggae legend Bunny Wailer left us on March 2.

“I am the survivor… representing what The Wailers stood for.” BUNNY WAILER

REGGAE APOSTLE David Rodigan, who named Bunny Wailer’s solo debut Blackheart Man as his favourite ever album, has likened the magnitude of the 1973 split of the original Wailers group to that of The Beatles. The comparison’s easily extended: if revolutionary Peter Tosh was John Lennon and pop superstar Bob Marley was Paul McCartney, then the group’s spiritual envoy and lower-key musical superpower – their George – was Neville O’Riley Livingston, better known as Bunny Wailer.

Short in stature but formidable in charisma and accomplishment, he was born on April 10, 1947 and raised in Kingston and rural Nine Mile, Jamaica. His father Thaddeus, AKA Mr Taddy, was a country shopkeeper and revivalist preacher, and from a young age Neville played drums in church. He was eight when his father started a relationship with Cedella Marley, and her son Bob duly became an admired de facto sibling. Bunny recalled playing bamboo guitar and singing to his older brother, yet it was Marley who made the first move into music. After cutting singles for the Beverley’s label aged just 17, he impressed upon Bunny that they should form a band. Tutored by community-minded professional Joe Higgs, the group’s crucial formation came together in Kingston’s Trench Town when they were joined by singer and guitarist Peter Tosh.

Higgs drilled The Wailing Wailers in their harmonies – he had them sing in the cemetery “for the spirits”, Bunny recalled – and the group would score a nationwide Number 1 in early 1964 with their debut single Simmer Down, a thrusting ska barnstormer instructing the capital’s rudies to leave civilians alone. The same year the group were photographed in sharp suits: in 1979 the image would inspire Jerry Dammers’ design for 2-Tone mascot Walt Jabsco.

Unremunerated, the group’s progress was not easy. They persevered even when Marley was absent in the US in 1965, and, after he returned, carried on when Bunny was sentenced to 14 months in Kingston’s General Penitentiary for marijuana possession in 1967. It was an experience that would colour his worldview and artistic life forever.

“I was sent to a university where I obtained all the knowledge that I would not have obtained had I not been in confinement,” he reflected to MOJO’s David Katz in 2009. “Babylon has made an error sending Bunny Wailer to prison, because… you have strengthened Bunny Wailer.” He later insisted that he had no criminal record, and his sentence was due to administrative error.

On his release The Wailers got back to work, cutting some of their most essential recordings with Lee Perry and embracing Rastafari. The years

of struggle seemed to pay off when they signed an international deal with the Island label, touring the UK and America and releasing the

Catch A Fire and Burnin’ albums in 1973. Yet, wary of touring and suspicious of Island’s promotion of Marley as solo star – and the overdubs which made the band more palatable to white rock audiences – Bunny chose to leave what he considered the “segregated” band, and was followed soon after by Tosh.

Explaining that he had “preserved” himself through Rastafari, his songwriting and voice would at last come into its own on 1976’s roots masterpiece Blackheart Man. Featuring both of his former bandmates, it remains an album of remarkable scope, vision and emotive force. Significantly, it was named for a Jamaican bogeyman figure, recast with telling sympathy.

“That’s what we were at first taught, that the Rasta man is the blackheart man,” Bunny told Sounds’ Vivien Goldman in 1976. “The blackheart man who will take you and carry you away and eat out your heart. [Eventually you] see that he’s a man, that he has habits like a man… growing up, you realise – it’s like yourself. It’s like running from yourself.”

Bunny would never run from The Wailers. He played the One Love peace concert alongside Tosh and Marley in 1978, recorded the superb Sings The Wailers collection in 1979, and never stopped covering Marley’s material. He worked at his own pace and on his own terms, having set up his Solomonic label in 1972, playing live when he wanted to and widening his stylistic range into dub, dancehall and – giving the lie to his stern reputation – disco and rap. 1980’s party tune Electric Boogie would find US success when it was re-recorded by Marcia Griffiths in 1983, though in 2018 she was displeased by reports that Livingston had indicated it was about a vibrator. Quieter from 1990, he would settle into his roles as custodian of The Wailers’ legacy and elder statesman of roots reggae, puffing on his pipe with a Lion Of Judah medallion on his forehead, referring to himself in the third person and dressed, sometimes, in the brilliant white uniform of a spiritual general.

Based at Dreamland Farm, the 142-acre estate in the hills outside Kingston which he posited as a future centre of legal ganja production, his later activities included founding his United Progressive People’s party, recording with his bandmates’ sons Ky-Mani Marley and Andrew Tosh, revisiting

Blackheart Man live in 2016, and, for his 70th birthday, launching a Bunny Wailer museum in Kingston. At the opening of this “tabernacle of The Wailers”, packed with the trophies and memorabilia of a lifetime in music, he reflected, “Robert Marley can’t tell ’im story. Peter Tosh can’t tell ’im story. I have to be the one haffi tell all three Wailers’ story… because I am the survivor. I am here representing what The Wailers stood for.”

He had suffered a serious stroke last summer, soon after his wife Jean Watt, who had been diagnosed with dementia, had gone missing from their home.

“Jah B brought good and righteousness through his life,” said his family in a statement after his death, saluting their “spiritual leader, brother, father and lion.”