Babylon By Bus Bob Marley & the Wailers in the netherlands
Martijn Huisman & Gijsbert Hanekroot
Babylon By Bus Bob Marley & the Wailers
in the netherlands
Š 2017 martijn huisman - all rights reserved No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, including being uploaded and shared on any website or platform, without prior permission from the author. Published previously as Babylon By Bus. Bob Marley & The Wailers in the Netherlands (2011) www.mh1986.com
Martijn Huisman & Gijsbert Hanekroot
CONTENTS 1975 | Live in London! Struggles of a pioneer: Dave van Dijk 1976 | The Rastaman in Amsterdam Adventures of a label manager: Evert Wilbrink 1977 | Shortly back in the Netherlands: The Hague Man behind the scenes: Leon Ramakers 1978 | The reggae party of the year in Rotterdam Marley in his own words 1978 | In the ice rink of Geleen A busy festival director: Jan Smeets 1980 | The final goodbye in Rotterdam Passion and dedication: Mike van der Linde Marley and the media Afterword
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1975 Live in London! T
he history of reggae in the Netherlands starts around 1970. A small group of early adopters and enthusiasts plays reggae on Dutch radio, and several songs passed off as reggae have become hits. In 1969, Desmond Dekker scores a number one hit with ‘Israelites’, followed by successes of Dave & Ansil Collins, Greyhound, and the Pioneers in 1971. The international adventures of reggae really take off in 1972, when Chris Blackwell signs the Wailers – consisting of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Livingston and the Barrett Brothers – to his Island Records label. It results in
‘The radio station is looking for songs to mobilize its listeners.’ 1973 in the very first reggae album, Catch A Fire. It is followed the same year by Burnin’. The two albums contain mostly songs already released in Jamaica, but now rerecorded and prepared for an international audience. Blackwell adds electric guitars and keyboards to the record-
ings to make the music more rock & roll and thus palatable for Western audiences. At the end of 1973, before their international breakthrough, Bob Marley and the Wailers have a modest hit in the Netherlands with ‘Get Up Stand Up’ from Burnin’. The protest anthem is played by Radio Veronica, a radio station illegally broadcasting from a ship in the North Sea. With the Dutch government threatening to end its activities, the radio station is looking for songs to mobilize its listeners. Despite these developments, the interest in reggae in the Netherlands develops very slowly according to Evert Wilbrink, at the time label manager for Island Records at BMG-Ariola Benelux. One reason was that the Jamaican film The Harder They Come was still unknown to the Dutch public. The low budget film by director Perry Henzell starring reggae singer Jimmy Cliff had been released in 1973 and, after having little initial success, became an international cult hit. The Harder They Come vividly portrayed for the first time the vibrant music industry, daily life, Jamaicans sporting dreadlocks and consuming marijuana, and
“Reggae music is a music created by Rasta people, and it carry earth force, people rhythm… it is a rhythm of working people, movement, a music of the masses, seen?” Bob Marley
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the struggles and criminality in and around Jamaica’s capital in the early 1970s. Importantly, the film was accompanied by an exceptional soundtrack consisting of songs from Jimmy Cliff himself and other well-known Jamaican reggae artists such as Toots & the Maytals and Desmond Dekker. Two legendary concerts on July 17 and 18, 1975 at the Lyceum Ballroom in London put Marley and the Wailers definitively on a path to worldwide fame. Chris Blackwell of Island Records later describes the London concerts as sensational and a turning point in Marley’s career. Years later, an Island Records press release notes about those two concerts in London that they, “fully established Marley as the most evocative and potent performer of the Seventies. ‘It was reggae’s finest hour’, commented the Melody Maker, whose front-page headline simple stated: “MARLEY, KING OF REGGAE!” Those concerts subsequently provided the band with a stunning live album and their first-ever British pop hit, ‘No Woman, No Cry’. Bob Marley, one of the great street poets of our time, had brought reggae into the mainstream of popular music”. During the two memorable and tumultuous nights in London, Marley and his band built up a great stage reputation in the presence of the international music press. Invited by Island Records and accompanied by Evert Wilbrink, a handful of Dutch journalists traveled to London to attend the concerts and interview Marley. At that point in time, long before the introduction of internet, print media like Dutch music magazine Oor could make or break artists. In the case of Marley and the Wailers, the Dutch press greatly helped to bring the music to the atten-
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Struggles of a pioneer: Dave van Dijk “Bob Marley’s voice sounds somewhat plaintive, sad rather than angry.’’
After the positive reviews of the London concerts, enthusiasm and curiosity about Bob Marley and reggae music rapidly increased. In the Haagsche Post (now HP/De Tijd) two comprehensive and accurate articles written by Dave van Dijk appeared. Van Dijk had already met Bob Marley in the winter of 1968 in the Swedish capital Stockholm. The then little-known Jamaican had spent several months in Sweden together with American singer Johnny Nash to write songs for a film soundtrack. Van Dijk: “He [Johnny Nash] is accompanied by a taciturn Jamaican with a green-yellow-red knit cap on. The few words I try to exchange with the man result in mutual incomprehension. Johnny Nash praises his musical qualities. I cannot stand Nash and forget the incident. Only years later I realize I had met Bob Marley”. Van Dijk becomes interested in reggae in 1974. Reggae is a new and interesting sound for him, with lyrics that really matter. “Bob Marley’s voice sounds somewhat plaintive, sad rather than angry. The music is relaxed and has none of the aggressive ranting that features so much European, supposedly revolutionary, music”. In the years thereafter, Van Dijk tries to get the Dutch public interested in the music from Jamaica. At the instigation of Van Dijk, Marley’s concert in Rotterdam in 1978 is fully recorded for Dutch radio. The writer and radio maker can justifiably be called one of the pioneers of reggae in the Netherlands. In his two articles for the Haagsche Post, Van Dijk appears a particularly well-informed reggae aficionado. This is quite remarkable, for the majority of Dutch journalists knew little about Marley and reggae music, even years