Paul say: It's time for me to post another big rock festival. This is a particularly big one - 18 hours of music! The 1982 Jamaica World Music Festival is fairly unique when it comes to such festivals, due to the sheer diversity of the musical acts involved. Fuck star Rick James, who played at the festival, commented during his set, "This is one of the weirdest, strangest, fuckin' combinations of groups ever!" But he also called it "One of the greatest festivals ever in the world."I couldn't find out a whole lot about the festival, as it mostly seems to have been forgotten. But it was meant to be the first of an annual tradition. It was timed to take place near Christmas, so people from other countries, especially the United States, could come to Jamaica to attend and generally have a vacation while they were there (and hopefully spend a lot of money and help the economy). However, apparently it wasn't planned sufficiently in advance, and many people who wanted to attend were unable to, due to the fact that the plane flights were all full. As a result, attendance was below expectations. Somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 people attended, with the numbers rising and falling over the course of three evenings of concerts. Because ticket sales were disappointing, it was written off as a failed experiment and never repeated.
But what matters for us the most is that virtually the whole festival was professionally recorded and somehow leaked to the public as bootlegs. Only a few of the acts aren't included here: Rita Marley, the Wailers, Yellowman, and Ronnie Milsap. I purposely didn't include Rita Marley and the Wailers, because in my opinion they were very poor substitutes for having Bob Marley there. Marley died of cancer the year before, and having his wife Rita and/or only his backing band doesn't cut it for me, because they didn't really have successful musical careers out of his shadow. I couldn't find the Yellowman and Ronnie Milsap sets. Furthermore, Jimmy Buffett was on the bill and was supposed to play, but he cancelled for some reason.
That still leaves 17 albums I'll be posting, one album for each of the musical acts over the three days of the festival. None of it has been officially released as far as I know, but all of it has excellent sound quality. I'd rather the names of the acts be surprises as I post them, but suffice to say there were a lot of great acts from rock, pop, soul, reggae, and even country. Due to the festival taking place in Jamaica, the home of reggae music, there was a particular large reggae representation compared to most festivals like this.
That brings me to this particular set, the first one of the first night of the concert. Toots and the Maytals are one of the greatest reggae acts of all time, in my opinion. Unfortunately, they didn't play some of their best known songs, such as "Funky Kingston," "Monkey Man," "Sweet and Dandy," and so on, and "Get Up, Stand Up" is not the Bob Marley and the Wailers classic, but an original with the same name. Still, it's a fine set just the same. (It's also possible that this isn't the complete set, I'm not sure, but the beginning of the next act's set wasn't recorded.)
On a different note, I should mention that I felt obliged to remix not only every single song in this album, but every single song from the entire festival! That's because while the bootleg recordings are all soundboards, it looks like nobody ever bothered to mix them. The main problem was that the vocals were significantly quieter than the instruments in all the songs. So even if you've had some or all of the sets from this festival, these versions I'll be posting sound better than any prior known version, in my opinion.
