Exodus

The Zoo Crew has got the needle down on "Exodus," the title cut from Bob Marley & The Wailers' 1977 album of the same name, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks for any length of time you already know this one is not background music. It is a slow-burning call to move. Open the windows, let the bass walk, and settle in. Over on THE ZOO we spin the deep cuts and the big ones the same way, no commercials barging in, just the record and the story behind it.

The song did not come out of a calm week in Kingston. On December 3, 1976, gunmen pushed into the Hope Road house where Bob and the crew were living and rehearsing. Bob was hit in the chest and the arm. Rita Marley took a bullet that lodged between her scalp and her skull. Manager Don Taylor and an employee, Louis Griffiths, were shot too. Everybody lived. Two days later, arm still bandaged, Bob walked out at the Smile Jamaica concert and played a long set in front of a crowd that has been put around seventy thousand. He had meant to do one song and stay out of the election fight. He gave the island a lot more than that, then left. Christmas in Nassau at Chris Blackwell's place, then London, and a stretch of recording that became two albums, Exodus and the follow-up Kaya.

Blackwell later told Billboard that Exodus mattered because Bob was depressed and shocked that people in Jamaica would want to kill him. England turned that around. The crowds loved him, the work started flowing again, and the album split in a way you can hear with your eyes closed. Side one is the heavier trip, political and spiritual. Side two is the man in a better mood. "Exodus" sits on that first side like the key in the lock. Junior Marvin, who joined the band for these sessions, remembered the first jam running through "Exodus," "Waiting in Vain," and "Jamming," each one stretched out for something like forty-five minutes while Bob and keyboard man Tyrone Downie kept shaping the words and the chords. Junior said he and Tyrone helped write "Exodus" and "Is This Love." He also said it was the first time he ever saw somebody's aura. Bob was happy to be alive, smiling, comfortable in London.

The lyric is the biblical walk out of Egypt laid over Bob's own walk out of Kingston. Movement of Jah people. Junior Marvin put it plain: everyone is part of that movement, no matter color, creed, or history. In a 1978 Hot Press interview Bob brushed off the idea that he had stepped away from politics on purpose. "They not really move away from anything. 'Tis music. It can't be political all the while, you know? Me never like what politics really represent. So it's not really politic, it's really talking about roots. Mon roots, y'know? And Exodus is really Exodus from Babylon to freedom, seen?" That is the whole sermon in one breath. Another line that stuck after the shooting was his answer to the idea of quitting: the people trying to make the world worse are not taking a day off, so how could he. "Natural Mystic," the album opener, came out of the same shock. He could not quite believe he was still walking around, and he credited the spiritual vibration with keeping him there. "Waiting in Vain" was newer still, written after he fell for Cindy Breakspeare. Same sessions, two different temperatures.

They cut the record at Island Studios in London with the band booked around the clock, which Junior called a dream come true. No one watching the clock. Aston "Family Man" Barrett on bass, Carlton Barrett on drums, Tyrone Downie on keys, Junior Marvin on guitar, the I-Threes on harmony. The title track runs close to eight minutes on the album, a slow burn wrapped around that call to move, and the Jamaican and U.K. single carried a dub version that still sounds like the floor dropping out from under the song. Time magazine later named the album the best of the twentieth century, which is the kind of claim that starts arguments in every record store on earth, and the arguments are half the fun. What is harder to argue is the reach. Exodus broke the band into the British Top 10 album chart for the first time, fed the Jamaican airwaves for the rest of the year, and put more songs onto the later Legend collection than any other Marley album. "Jamming," "Waiting in Vain," "Three Little Birds," "One Love/People Get Ready," and the title cut all walked out of these sessions.

There is a smaller London story that belongs in the same chapter. In April 1977, while they were getting ready to take the album on the road, Bob and Family Man were stopped in Ladbroke Grove. A search turned up ganja, and both men were fined at Marylebone Magistrates Court. The American leg of the Exodus tour later got postponed after Bob hurt his foot in a soccer game, the injury that doctors eventually tied to the illness that took him. None of that dulled the record. Side one still sounds like a man who has been shot at and is not interested in hiding. Side two still sounds like a man who has decided the party is part of the sermon.

The road to that London room started a long way from Island Records. Robert Nesta Marley was born February 6, 1945, in Nine Mile, Saint Ann, to Cedella Booker and Norval Marley, a white Jamaican who was not around much and died while Bob was still a boy. Around twelve, Bob moved with his mother into the government yards of Trench Town in Kingston, the kind of place people compared to an open drain, and that yard is where the music actually started. American rhythm and blues drifted in on the radio. He loved Fats Domino, Ray Charles, the Drifters. He met Neville Livingston, later Bunny Wailer, whose father was involved with Cedella, so the two boys were living under the same roof and singing together. Joe Higgs coached the harmonies and taught Bob guitar. Peter Tosh, then Winston MacIntosh, came in through the same yard lessons.

In 1962, still a teenager and working an apprenticeship as a welder, Bob cut his first sides for producer Leslie Kong at Federal Studios. "Judge Not" was the one that got out, a little moral lesson borrowed from his grandfather, and one of the others, "One Cup of Coffee," went out under the name Bobby Martell. The solo try did not stick. In 1963 he, Bunny, and Peter put a vocal group together with Junior Braithwaite and backup singers Beverly Kelso and Cherry Smith. They ran through names, the Teenagers, the Wailing Rudeboys, the Wailing Wailers, and finally the Wailers. Bob's reason for the name was simple. They started out crying. Coxsone Dodd caught them and took them into Studio One. "Simmer Down," a Marley song he had already used to win a Kingston talent contest, hit the top of the Jamaican charts in early 1964. Ska paid the bills for a while. In 1966 Bob went to Delaware to see his mother and pick up work, then came home, married Rita that February, and through her moved deeper into Rastafari. By the end of the decade the trio had fully taken that on.

The next jump was Lee "Scratch" Perry. Those late-sixties and early-seventies sides, "Soul Rebel," "Duppy Conqueror," "Small Axe," "400 Years," are still the records a lot of yard freaks reach for first. The partnership ended ugly when Perry sold the masters in England without a clean split, but those records are what put the Wailers in front of Chris Blackwell at Island. The 1972 deal changed the shape of the music. Catch a Fire in 1973 was built as an album, not a stack of singles, with rock ears in mind and the reggae core left intact. Burnin' followed, with "Get Up, Stand Up" and "I Shot the Sheriff." Peter and Bunny eventually stepped out on their own. Bob kept the name, rebuilt the band around the Barrett brothers, and by the time the Hope Road shots rang out he was already the Jamaican voice the rest of the world was starting to hear. Exodus is the record where that voice stopped being a Kingston story and became everybody's.

If you want the catalog, the pictures, and the family word straight from the source, the official home is Bob Marley, and the Exodus album page there still tells the Hope Road and London story in the band's own files. The official Facebook hangs out at Bob Marley on Facebook, the photos and day-to-day posts live on Instagram, and the verified word on X is @bobmarley. For the fans who keep the reasoning going between releases, the active circle is the Bob Marley Fans group. Put the record back on. Movement of Jah people. We are right here with you.