Germaine Smith, Staff Reporter
Luciano (left) and Bunny Wailer perform at Natural Mystic Concert in honour of Bob Marley's 60th Birthday. The concert was held on Knutsford Boulevard, New Kingston on Sunday February 6, 2005. - Winston Sill/Freelance Photographer
THE LEGACY of the Wailers is no fly-by-night story. Books, DVDs, CDs, magazines, radio and television documentaries, have addressed some part of the story of the phenomenal group which helped push reggae from Jamaica's shores to international prominence.
A recent but certainly historic installment in the vast collection of stories about the Wailers will be released soon from one of the group's original members, Neville 'Bunny Wailer' Livingstone.
Bunny Wailer will soon release 40 years worth of Wailers music in a special edition seven disc box CD set, entitled 'Ark of the Covenant'. Of the seven discs in the set, three are narrations by Bunny Wailer himself, with the remaining four containing over 100 songs, dating back from 1964. Bunny tells The Wailers' story from their recruitment through key historical events in music, until their final stages as a group.
In a recent interview with The Sunday Gleaner, he explained that he was pushed to release the set for more than one reason.
"All of those are the recordings that have been bootlegged and pirated over the years," Bunny explained about his collection. "Several attempts have been made by Bob before he passed and since Bob has passed I have been right on top of getting to the pirates, letting them know that what they are doing is totally illegal and trying to see if I can get some compensation for all of those recordings sold, that The Wailers' works are incorporated, but without any kind of success."
ACQUIRING LAWYERS
"I have been spending a lot of money acquiring lawyers and the lawyers come back to say their frustration. They are getting nowhere; they write letters and they get no answers from nobody. Nobody who, when yu look on the records yu see, copywritten by this and that and written by whom, and when you write these people everybody duck."
"So all of that has led to where there had to be something done about the bootlegging and piracy with The Wailers, especially where The Wailers were not getting nutten from all of this, and there was a lot of people out there getting rich doing it, growing with operations that grew from the piracy, while The Wailers inherited nothing. Believe me, nothing at all."
"Everybody just treated it as if...even the product that we produce on our own independent label, they tek it too and put it with the recordings we did for Coxsone's and with everybody's own and everybody is out there making money except The Wailers," Bunny Wailer said.
He said this, plus his legal battle in the United States with producer Clement 'Sir Coxsone' Dodd for royalty payments, pushed him to prepare the CDs for release.
"In the process of the case, yu know although it's an interesting case and it was in court and the law of America saw that I had a right to bring it to them and they were gonna give me the justice. ... The lawyers looked at the whole affair and knowing how long these things can take, said to me that 'Bunny, I think that you should just take some of that money that you are paying legal fees with and put the product out. Get all of those products out and make a box set of it and sell like everybody else, so that you can be making some money to pay legal fees at least, instead of just coming out of your pocket, out of your legitimate earnings to fight an issue that is illegitimate and yu don't know where or when it may end up'," Bunny Wailer said.
COXSONE'S DEATH
Coxsone's death, he said, put that court case in an uncertain position, but he had already done half the work and went ahead with putting the tracks together.
"I just decided that along the way I have been gathering all of the material that relates to those pirate records and, apart from telling a story of The Wailers, 'cause in the active role of trying to put the story of The Wailers together in a book form and all of that which was happening within that same period of trying to get rid of pirates, then I just decided that it's best that I just tell the story of how The Wailers did what we did and all the people who were involved with The Wailers' professional life and the role they played in accordance with what is happening now where piracy is concerned and make that a part of this box set of Wailers that was already out."
"All I am doing is compiling them in another fashion. It has been prostituted all over the globe yu understand, so the real part of this box set is, musically speaking as I call it, where that's the written, narrated, professional history of The Wailers."
Bunny used sound effects in narrating the first three discs, titled 'Musically Speaking'.
The tracks on the music CDs, he noted, were not tampered with, but 'cleaned up' to give them high definition sound to stamp their authenticity.
NOTHING ADDED
"What I did is not tamper with them, not adding anything to them, but cleaning them up and making them satisfying to the buyer, so that if he had one of the pirate ones he would quickly get rid of that, because this one is clean," Bunny Wailer said.
He remains tentative about the price they will go for, but suggested that they will be influenced by the public's reaction to their introduction and at least two foreign record labels which have an interest in them.
"It's ready and there are negotiations taking place with Universal and Sanctuary in accordance with those same recordings, as they have an interest in those recordings having being distributed in a kind of legitimate fashion, but still they are having problems," he stated.
"Right now they are kind of merging to put their muscle together to protect their interest in these products. What I have done is to create the product that we could use to say that anyone not having this is having piracy and bootleg. When we establish that, we would be for the first time in a position to see some justice coming to those people whose works are incorporated in those recordings, including myself, Bob and Peter and their respective estates, and other members of the original Wailers," Bunny Wailer said.
