PETER TOSH
Talking Revolution: Live at the One Love Peace Concert 1978
Label : Pressure Sounds
Cat # : PS 48
CD 1 : Live at the One Love Peace Concert 1978
1.Igziabeher (Let Jah Be Praised)
2. 400 Years
3. Stepping Razor
4. Speech
5. Funeral (Burial) Speech
6.Equal Rights
7. Speech
8. Legalise It / Get Up Stand Up
CD 2 : Accoustic Set
1. Fools Die (Wisdom)
2. Jah Guide
3. I am That I Am
4. Fire Fire (Babylon Burning)
5. Pick Myself Up
6. Stop that Train
7. Handsome Johnny
8. Don't Wanna Get Busted
9. Peter Speaks about the Half way tree Incident
10. Legalize It
11. Get Up Stand Up
The Peter Tosh featured on this new amazing Pressure Sounds two CD set is perhaps not the Peter Tosh you are familiar with. Sure, it's the same guy who founded the Wailers alongside Bob Marley, the same Peter Tosh who released commercial reggae records on the Rolling Stones' vanity imprint, and penned that "Legalize It" tune that perhaps you thought you needn't hear again past your freshman year of college. No, the Peter Tosh to be found here is the Stepping Razor at his rawest, most strident and fiery best.
1978 in Jamaica was a very tense time, as the country was precipitously close to devolving into total civil war. The country had been in a state of emergency for two years, with rival political gangs engaging in street warfare, entire sections of Kingston's ghettos looking more and more like harrowing war zones, and army firing squads massacring suspected gang members. In 1977, two incarcerated rival political members decided to call a truce and upon their release they started a new peace movement. They also organized a concert that would call for an end to the internecine warfare and celebrate Haile Selassie's visit to Jamaica a decade earlier. They persuaded Bob Marley to return to Jamaica for the first time since the assassination attempt on his life the previous year, to headline what would be called the One Love Peace Concert. It would prove to be one of the most important events of the decade in Jamaica, with more than fifty-thousand people in attendance, including the heads of both rival political parties.
While most of the acts (Big Youth, Inner Circle, Ras Michael, Culture, Marley, etc.) struck conciliatory tones, Peter Tosh was having none of it. He begins his set with the dread filled "Igziabeher," in which he immediately calls for the evil doers and workers of inequality to be cut down. He then explodes into "Four Hundred Years;" the band plays tough double time as Tosh sounds simultaneously weary and ferociously reproachful. He continues to use the stage as his pulpit, frequently launching into rapid yet wholly coherent speeches in which he lambastes the political establishment who were conveniently sitting at his feet. For a man who had been repeatedly brutalized by the state police, it must surely have been a moment too great to pass up. How antithetical the very idea of a peace concert to Tosh's point of view was surely summed up in a few lines of his classic "Equal Rights" performed that day; "…I don't want no peace, till my brothers get equal rights and justice." No doubt an uncomfortable and alarming moment for the leaders of the shitstem in the audience.
Disc two is comprised of acoustic numbers Tosh performed at various locations the following year. Sounding somewhat like a Jamaican Terry Callier, these songs of protest are nevertheless a welcome and soothing respite from the bruising toughness of his One Love Peace set. [MK]
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