“The peo­ple who are try­ing to make this world worse aren’t tak­ing a day off. How can I?,” said Bob Mar­ley after a 1976 assas­si­na­tion attempt at his home in Jamaica in which Mar­ley, his wife Rita, man­ag­er Don Tay­lor, and employ­ee Louis Grif­fiths were all shot and, incred­i­bly, all sur­vived. Which peo­ple, exact­ly, did he mean? Was it Edward Seaga’s Jamaican Labour Par­ty, whose hired gun­men sup­pos­ed­ly car­ried out the attack? Was it, as some even con­spir­a­to­ri­al­ly alleged, Michael Man­ley’s People’s Nation­al Par­ty, attempt­ing to turn Mar­ley into a mar­tyr?

Mar­ley had, despite his efforts to the con­trary, been close­ly iden­ti­fied with the PNP, and his per­for­mance at the Smile Jamaica Con­cert, sched­uled for two days lat­er, was wide­ly seen as an endorse­ment of Manley’s pol­i­tics. When he made his now-famous­ly defi­ant state­ment from Island Records’ chief Chris Blackwell’s heav­i­ly guard­ed home, he had just decid­ed to play the concert–this despite the con­tin­ued risk of being gunned down in front of 80,000 peo­ple by the still-at-large killers, or some­one else paid by the CIA, whom Tay­lor and Mar­ley biog­ra­ph­er Tim­o­thy White claim were ulti­mate­ly behind the attack.

Mar­ley doesn’t just show up at the con­cert, he “gives the per­for­mance of his life­time,” notes a brief his­to­ry of the event, and “clos­es the show by lift­ing his shirt, expos­ing his ban­daged bul­let wounds to the crowd.” Erro­neous­ly report­ed dead in the press after the shoot­ing, Mar­ley emerged Lazarus-like, a Rasta­far­i­an folk-hero. Then he left Jamaica to make his career state­ment, Exo­dus, in Lon­don — as much a fusion of his right­eous polit­i­cal fury, reli­gious devo­tion, erot­ic cel­e­bra­tion, and peace, love & uni­ty vibes as it is a fusion of blues, rock, soul, funk, and even punk.

It’s a very dif­fer­ent album than what had come before in 1976’s Ras­ta­man Vibra­tions, which was an album of “hard, direct pol­i­tics” and right­eous, “macho” anger, wrote Vivien Gold­man, “with sur­pris­ing specifics like ‘Ras­ta don’t work for no C.I.A.’” The apoth­e­o­sis that was 1977’s Exo­dus begins, how­ev­er, not with Mar­ley’s pre­vi­ous album but with the Smile Jamaica con­cert. What was meant to be a brief, one-song, non-aligned appear­ance became after the shoot­ing “a tran­scen­den­tal 90-minute set for a coun­try being torn apart by inter­nal strife and exter­nal med­dling,” says Noah Lefevre in the Poly­phon­ic video his­to­ry at the top. “It was the last show Bob Mar­ley would play in Jamaica for more than a year.”

See the full Smile Jamaica con­cert above and learn in the Poly­phon­ic video how “six months to the day” lat­er, on June 3, 1977, Mar­ley left on his own exo­dus and came to record and release what Time mag­a­zine named the “album of the cen­tu­ry” — the record that would “trans­form him from a nation­al icon to a glob­al prophet.” On Exo­dus, he achieves a syn­the­sis of glob­al sounds in a defin­ing cre­ative state­ment of his major themes. Mar­ley was “real­ly try­ing to give the African Dias­po­ra a sense of its strength and… uni­ty,” Gold­man told NPR on the album’s 30th anniver­sary, while at the same time, “real­ly embrac­ing, you know, white peo­ple, to an extent; doing his best to make a mul­ti­cul­tur­al world work.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Bob Marley’s Redemp­tion Song Final­ly Gets an Offi­cial Video: Watch the Ani­mat­ed Video Made Up of 2747 Draw­ings

Watch a Young Bob Mar­ley and The Wail­ers Per­form Live in Eng­land (1973): For His 70th Birth­day Today

30 Fans Joy­ous­ly Sing the Entire­ty of Bob Marley’s Leg­end Album in Uni­son

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

How many songs did Pat­tie Boyd — fash­ion mod­el, pho­tog­ra­ph­er, muse, and wife of George Har­ri­son and Eric Clap­ton — inspire? It’s hard to say, since some of the lyrics pur­port­ed­ly writ­ten for her, like those in Harrison’s break­out “Some­thing,” may have been for some­one else, then diplo­mat­i­cal­ly attrib­uted to Boyd. Or, in the case of “Some­thing” — the first Har­ri­son song to come out as a Bea­t­les A‑side sin­gle and the song that con­vinced the world of his for­mi­da­ble song­writ­ing tal­ents — they might have been about a big, blue super­nat­ur­al some­thing.

Accord­ing to Joe Taysom at Far Out mag­a­zine, Har­ri­son “became obses­sive in his stud­ies of Krish­na Con­scious­ness when he wrote the song, and more specif­i­cal­ly, its orig­i­nal intent was as a devo­tion to Lord Krish­na.” Har­ri­son “insist­ed that the orig­i­nal lyric was ‘some­thing in the way HE moves,’ but he changed it.”

The mas­cu­line pro­noun would have removed all spec­u­la­tion about Boyd but also would have con­fused lis­ten­ers in oth­er ways. In any case, Some­thing’s ambi­gu­i­ty, inher­ent in the title, made it a clas­sic. Frank Sina­tra once called it “the great­est love song ever writ­ten.”

Har­ri­son, as usu­al, demurred: “The words are noth­ing real­ly,” he said in 1969. “There are lots of songs like that in my head. I must get them down.” The song first came togeth­er dur­ing the 1968 White Album ses­sions. “There was a peri­od dur­ing that album,” he remem­bered, “when we were all in dif­fer­ent stu­dios doing dif­fer­ent things try­ing to get it fin­ished, and I used to take some time out. So I went into an emp­ty stu­dio and wrote ‘Some­thing.’” Lack­ing con­fi­dence in his abil­i­ty to per­suade the band to record it, he first tried to give the song to Apple Records artist and old Liv­er­pool friend Jack­ie Lomax. The song, he felt, came too eas­i­ly and might not be good enough, and he had lift­ed the open­ing line direct­ly from James Tay­lor.

Lomax went with anoth­er Har­ri­son tune for his first sin­gle, and the Bea­t­le con­tin­ued to work on “Some­thing,” record­ing a demo of the fin­ished song in Feb­ru­ary of 1969. But he still didn’t think of it as Bea­t­les-wor­thy and gave it to Joe Cock­er instead, who released his ver­sion that year, with Har­ri­son on gui­tar. (Har­ri­son lat­er claimed to have writ­ten the song with Ray Charles in mind.) What­ev­er his reser­va­tions, he did, of course, final­ly record “Some­thing” with his band­mates, with results famil­iar to all and every­one. But you’ve prob­a­bly nev­er heard the song as you can hear it here, with iso­lat­ed vocal har­monies “you can’t put a cig­a­rette-paper between,” writes Julian Dut­ton on Twit­ter. “Total­ly in sim­pati­co; a syn­er­gy that began I sup­pose all those years ago on the school bus.”

At the top, hear the mul­ti­track vocals that made the Bea­t­les’ “Some­thing” such an incred­i­ble record­ing (includ­ing a fun, yelp­ing sing-along to the gui­tar solo at around 1:50). Fur­ther up, hear the whole song decon­struct­ed into its parts (with time­stamps for each one at the video’s YouTube page.) And just above, hear the band fig­ure out the har­monies in a stu­dio demo of the song. It was, John Lennon con­ced­ed after Abbey Road came out, “about the best track on the album, actu­al­ly.” Paul McCart­ney said of the Har­ri­son clas­sic that “it’s the best he’s writ­ten.” And Bob Dylan lat­er remarked that “if George had had his own group and was writ­ing his own songs back then, he’d have been prob­a­bly just as big as any­body,” a the­sis Har­ri­son got to prove the fol­low­ing year with his sur­pris­ing­ly amaz­ing All Things Must Pass.

via Julian Dut­ton

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” Con­tains “the Cra­zi­est Edit” in Bea­t­les His­to­ry

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Every Place Ref­er­enced in The Bea­t­les’ Lyrics: In 12 Min­utes, Trav­el 25,000 Miles Across Eng­land, France, Rus­sia, India & the US

When the Bea­t­les Refused to Play Before Seg­re­gat­ed Audi­ences on Their First U.S. Tour (1964)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness