Remembering Peter Tosh, born on this day in 1944. —Ed.
Live at My Father’s Place 1978 offers crisp audio clarity of a Peter Tosh performance originally broadcast live over radio via New York’s WLIR FM. While it’s unlikely to alter many opinions, positive or negative, of Tosh’s work at this stage of his career, it does accurately represent the man’s musical direction during a commercially productive and musically transitional period.
Flash back to 1978, and Peter Tosh was in the midst of his most fertile commercial run. That year saw the release of Bush Doctor, his first album for Rolling Stones Records, a set that found him duetting with Mick Jagger on a Temptations tune. If Tosh wasn’t reggae’s biggest star at the time, he was sitting pretty secure in the number two spot.
While album-focused listeners might disagree, Peter Tosh’s early recordings endure as his strongest work, cohering into an unimpeachable stretch of singles both solo and as part of the Wailers; alongside Bob Marley and Bunny Livingston, the Wailers eventually cut a string of crucial LPs in the early ’70s, prior to Tosh and Livingston’s departure and the Wailers effectively shifting to Marley’s backing band.
However, the appraisals of Tosh’s post-Equal Rights LPs are decidedly varied. This is partly due to an increased attempt at scoring crossover success, which as detailed above, was fully realized. Although he’d been frequenting studios since the mid-’60s, Tosh didn’t release his full-length solo debut until 1976, after signing with Columbia. The record, Legalize It, remains his most well-known, and for reasons that should be obvious; for decades, its title track was an anthem for folks who were tired of being hassled for their stash.
Legalize It is an essential album, and it’s one where the artist’s striving to cross over, if subtle, is already apparent. The gestures to a broader audience are more tangibly evident on Equal Rights, which was released in 1977 as Tosh’s final LP for Columbia. Yes, bolder in its desire to crossover, but with nothing so drastic as to put off all but the most hardline reggae fans.
This is unfortunately not the case with Bush Doctor, his first of four for the Rolling Stones’ eponymous label, with Jagger sharing the mic on the album’s opener “(You Gotta Walk) Don’t Look Back,” and Keith Richards playing guitar on the title track and “Stand Firm.” Bush Doctor isn’t a bad record; far from it, as Tosh is in good form, as are his songs, Sly & Robbie are still in the band, and Mikey “Mao” Chung is on lead guitar. But the bottom line is that Legalize It and Equal Rights have dated hardly at all, while Bush Doctor suffers from ill-advised production, both in general slickness and through unnecessary flourishes.
Backgrounding the albums above is important in reviewing Live at My Father’s Place 1978, for its documentation of a performance held at the titular Roslyn, New York music venue draws from all three LPs, with four of the songs from Equal Rights as Bush Doctor was his then current release, indeed described as such by disc jockey Denis McNamara in his spoken intro to this album. The eight song performance begins with “400 Years,” which in its studio version is an outtake from the sessions for Equal Rights (though a recording with Lee “Scratch” Perry as producer has also been released).
Listening to the Equal Rights version of “400 Years,” a strident commentary on slavery and persistent racial injustice, it’s hard to fathom it’s outtake status, for it’s a damn fine song, with its worthiness extending to this album’s live version, as it makes plain, unfurling as it does in a room full of predominantly white (I’m guessing) Long Islanders, that Tosh was disinterested in any sort of soft selling out (and in this case, he was clearly aware the show was going out over the airwaves). Instead, the unabashed hard rock gestures in Chung’s soloing widen the audience for Tosh’s messaging.
The combination is admirable but more importantly actually works, due in no small part to Chung’s presence in the scheme rather than some second-rate hired hack. “400 Years” rolls right into “Stepping Razor,” a song from Equal Rights, with Tosh’s band, Word, Sound and Power, hitting a potent groove and then riding it. Tosh’s singing is warm and Chung dishes out another wicked solo.
“Pick Myself Up” is the first of the album’s three selections from Bush Doctor, and it goes down pretty easy, partly as an effective extension of the set’s established momentum, but also because of its stripped-down gusto, even as a few of the keyboard-synth interjections are undeniably evocative of the period. It’s followed by “African,” another song sourced from Equal Rights that maintains Tosh’s socially conscious sensibility and is largely likeable even as it’s saddled with some performance-based instrumental padding.
The title track to Bush Doctor is next, which finds Tosh deriding cancer-causing cigarettes in favor of the therapeutic potential of marijuana. A sensible and prescient position. Instrumentally, the cut counterbalances the backing vocals (“oooh, oooh, ooo-oooh”) with the string ripping of Chung (who some might say goes a tad overboard) as Tosh’s energies and the rhythm section bring it all together.
It’s with “(You Gotta Walk) Don’t Look Back” (sans Jagger, whose appearance, along with Richards, was rumored prior to the show) that Live at My Father’s Place 1978 enters its homestretch. And risks faltering, as unlike “Bush Doctor” and “Pick Myself Up,” this live version isn’t an improvement on the studio original, which was no great shakes, but was just as far from terrible.
But as “(You Gotta Walk) Don’t Look Back” trucks along, it’s ultimately proves no worse as it sets up Tosh’s set-closing combo punch of “Get Up, Stand Up” and “Legalize It,” the former perhaps more associated today with Marley, but in fact co-written by Marley and Tosh and the opening track on Equal Rights. And the latter song was easily Tosh’s most well-known at the time (likely remaining so today), even as “(You Gotta Walk) Don’t Look Back” was a minor hit.
McNamara’s intro will bring a wash of recollection to listeners old enough to have sat in a room soaking up FM rock radio in its glory days, a nifty fringe benefit as it deepens the aura of crossover. But the set’s overall worth is driven by Tosh and his band. If the songs played from Equal Rights are a little lesser than their studio versions, the opposite is (mostly) true of the Bush Doctor selections, which makes Live at My Father’s Place 1978 enjoyable if not essential, and of possible interest to those for whom Bush Doctor is a jumping off point.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
