Bob Marley & The Wailers: The Night Sly's House Redeemed Them

Sly and the Family Stone dropped the Wailers from their US tour after five dates. The band was stranded in Las Vegas with no money and no plan. They hitchhiked to California and called Scott Piering at the Matrix in San Francisco.

Piering had booked them in April 1973 as a last-minute replacement for the Sons of Champlin. That run sold out. When they came back in October, he booked them again and brought them to the Record Plant.

Twelve days earlier, Burnin' had shipped on Island Records. Most of America still hadn't heard of them. Tom Donahue introduced the set on Halloween night to a small room at 2200 Bridgeway.

The broadcast opened with three voices and hand drums. Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Joe Higgs sang Rasta Man Chant acoustically before the full band came in. Bunny Livingston had refused to tour and wasn't there. Earl Lindo played keyboards. The Barrett brothers held the bottom.

The set pulled from Catch a Fire and Burnin': Burnin' and Lootin', Kinky Reggae, Get Up Stand Up, Stop That Train, and You Can't Blame the Youth with Tosh taking the lead. What Tom Donahue put on KSAN that night reached the whole Bay Area.

Joel Selvin wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in May 1981 that without Donahue's broadcast and Piering's groundwork, it's hard to imagine how the Wailers would have built the West Coast following they needed. They came to Sly Stone's home studio after Sly's tour stranded them. That irony is documented and provable.

Both Tosh and Higgs were gone from the group within weeks of this broadcast. The Capitol Session '73, filmed seven days earlier at Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood, is the only other document of this exact lineup. These two recordings are what survives of the classic Wailers in their final weeks together.

Tuff Gong released Talkin' Blues in 1991. Most of that album came from the Record Plant broadcast. It's one of the most-heard posthumous Marley releases and its source is 2200 Bridgeway.