"If I wasn't a singer," Peter Tosh once said, "I'd be a bloodclaat revolutionary." Funny he didn't think he could be both, because that's basically what he was: six-foot-three, stiff-lipped, carrying a guitar shaped like an M16 (a gift from a fan), cursing every 10 seconds, serially high, and considered such an effective agitator by cops that they beat him half to death in mid-1978. "I survived them by intellect," he said later. Yuh. Tosh may have been a natural mystic, but I'm sure pot helped.
His reggae career started alongside Bob Marley and Bunny Livingston in the Wailers, a group he left in the mid-70s after Island Records' Chris Blackwell refused to release his first solo album. No surprise, really-- compared to Marley, Tosh was nearly unmarketable. On love songs: "You turn on the fuckin' radio, 24 bumboclaat hours a day you hear, 'Darlin I love you.' A man wouldn't sing to the almighty a rasclaat, him love a woman more than the creator who create the sun and the moon and the bumboclaat star." On the enlightenment of the common man: "I am going to kill the fuckery out there. People is going to be in demand for the truth." If "One Love" was Bob Marley's song about paradise, "Equal Rights" was Tosh's: "Everyone is crying out for peace, none is crying out for justice," a reminder that nobody argues against feelgood platitudes, but nobody works to make them come true, either.
But one season's rebel is the next's vogue, and by 1978, Tosh was guesting on "Saturday Night Live" flanked by Mick Jagger dancing like an electrocuted game hen. In 1987, two years after the first digital dancehall single (King Jammy & Wayne Smith's "Under Mi Sleng Teng") radicalized Jamaican music, Tosh won a Grammy for No Nuclear War, a lukewarm hash of roots reggae-- the kind of muck longtime contributors to their fields finally win Grammys for regardless of quality. Months later, he was murdered in a botched robbery.
For the volume and intensity of Tosh's anger, he had a poetic side, animated by magic and religion-- factors more obscure than politics, though equally as susceptible to bullshit. Stepping Razor: Red X-- a documentary packaged in The Ultimate Peter Tosh Experience-- is based on a series of cassettes called the Red X Tapes, part biography, part philosophy, part folktale. Much of it is babble, but it's artful, seductive babble. This is the part of Tosh that sounds unreliable on record, but compelling in the form of a documentary, where anonymous commentators rally to elevate him to the level of myth. Even though the documentary isn't part of Tosh's output as a recording artist per se, it helps highlight what made him interesting: The conflict between art as a tool to disseminate truth to the masses, and as a way to mystify it as private ritual.
Now to the product at hand. The Ultimate Peter Tosh Experience is a $35 package containing one 14-track audio disc and two DVDs: Stepping Razor: Red X (which is already commercially available) and footage of several performances. It's not what it claims to be. His most famous songs-- "Legalize It", "Equal Rights", and "Stepping Razor"-- are either absent or represented by alternate versions. There's nothing from his first album, Legalize It, and there are two versions of "Wanted: Dread and Alive". Why? I'm guessing it has to do with licensing. Shame on Shanachie Records, frankly. Tosh's biography was always more interesting to me than his music, but he certainly wrote some good songs, played with great sidemen, and released some brawny, tuff reggae-- all reasons he deserves a lovingly selected single-disc compilation behind his name. In fact, he has one already. Several. There's a part of the Red X Tapes where he talks about a time the devil wrapped him in barbed wire, which sliced peepholes in his eyelids that let him see the world's hypocrisy and corruption. I wonder what he'd see in this.
