Really, there are three variations of “No Girl, No Cry.” Statistically, there should be a handful of poor souls who know neither the Natty nor the Reside! Model of “No Girl,” however the remix that mixer/engineer Eric “E.T.” Thorngren souped up to sound like a beer business, and which was included on the primary run of Legend, earlier than it was swapped out for the reside lower. My U.S. vinyl copy comprises the Thorngren model, although the again cowl textual content and liner notes confer with the Reside! model, suggesting that Robinson, Thorngren, and/or Blackwell had pretty rapid second ideas. One of many vagaries of upstreaming regional insurgent music to a global viewers was the involvement of trade sorts like Robinson—who, earlier than Island, helped launch the careers of reggae-curious white acts like Elvis Costello and Insanity on his Stiff label—and Thorngren, a revered engineer-for-hire who met Blackwell whereas engaged on the Difford & Tilbrook album after Squeeze’s breakup. Thorngren was a extremely revered studio artist in his day, engineering a handful of basic Sugar Hill singles earlier than engaged on Legend and Speaking Heads’ Little Creatures and True Tales after it, however his 4 remixes on the primary challenge of Legend usually are not solely pointless however type of insulting to the unique data. Island has seemingly realized this: On streaming platforms, Thorngren’s remixes are relegated to the standing of “deluxe” addenda to Legend, and the superior authentic variations have been retconned into the album’s tracklist.
As an try to spiff up the unique Wailers tracks for contemporary pop’s new age of gated drums and costly synths, Thorngren’s remixes have been a C-suite method to one of many core inventive impulses that Afro-diasporic inventive tradition lent the worldwide recording trade: versioning. Caribbean vernacular artwork, particularly, is much less fascinated with originals than palimpsests, the place recordings function templates for others to creatively repurpose—generally eradicating the vocals to toast over, generally altering the tempo or including instrumentation to boost the vibe. However Thorngren’s ears, like Blackwell’s a decade earlier, have been extra tuned to the trade dictates of securing copyrights and sharpening up uncooked data for a fecund world market. Blackwell as soon as referred to himself as Marley’s “translator,” and playfully known as Catch a Hearth, the Wailers’ Island debut, probably the most “pasteurized” model of the band, laden with overdubs designed to attraction to reggae-curious stateside radio programmers and collegiate rock followers. With Marley becoming a member of him on the boards, Blackwell helped codify worldwide reggae’s attraction on Catch a Hearth, initially packaging it with a Zippo lighter that really opened, and later substituting a desaturated, high-contrast picture of Marley puffing an unlimited spliff, a nod to the truth that his goal market seemingly had a Nationwide Geographic-level appreciation for Jamaicans and their music.
Musically, Blackwell’s Catch a Hearth pasteurization was primarily used on the ragged ghetto-survival anthem “Concrete Jungle” and the sultry “Stir It Up.” You may hear an estimation of the starker, Jamaican model of “Stir” on the early 2000s Catch reissue, earlier than Blackwell added a dank Moog swirl to the intro and a clavinet all through, each performed by Houston-born former Johnny Nash sideman Rabbit Bundrick. Keen on the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio’s band on data by Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and the Rolling Stones, Blackwell requested Alabama-born guitarist Wayne Perkins, who occurred to be in London, so as to add a solo to “Stir It Up.” Like loads of American musicians weaned on funk and R&B, Perkins had hassle deciphering the monitor’s reggae pulse—comprehensible, provided that “one drop” beat was so named as a result of the primary beat of the bar (The One, in funk parlance) was left empty. “Something I’d ever heard—the R&B, the church music—this was backwards,” Perkins recalled. However the octave-spanning solo he ultimately laid, run by way of a maintain pedal and slathered with echo, turned the tune into a completely new reggae/rock/R&B hybrid that was born in Kingston, blended in London, and sweetened with the nice and cozy twang of the American South.
