Actually, there are three versions of “No Woman, No Cry.” Statistically, there must be a handful of poor souls who know neither the Natty nor the Live! Version of “No Woman,” but the remix that mixer/engineer Eric “E.T.” Thorngren souped up to sound like a beer commercial, and which was included on the first run of Legend, before it was swapped out for the live cut. My U.S. vinyl copy contains the Thorngren version, though the back cover text and liner notes refer to the Live! version, suggesting that Robinson, Thorngren, and/or Blackwell had fairly immediate second thoughts. One of the vagaries of upstreaming regional rebel music to an international audience was the involvement of industry types like Robinson—who, before Island, helped launch the careers of reggae-curious white acts like Elvis Costello and Madness on his Stiff label—and Thorngren, a respected engineer-for-hire who met Blackwell while working on the Difford & Tilbrook album after Squeeze’s breakup. Thorngren was a highly respected studio artist in his day, engineering a handful of classic Sugar Hill singles before working on Legend and Talking Heads’ Little Creatures and True Stories after it, but his four remixes on the first issue of Legend are not only unnecessary but kind of insulting to the original records. Island has seemingly realized this: On streaming platforms, Thorngren’s remixes are relegated to the status of “deluxe” addenda to Legend, and the superior original versions have been retconned into the album’s tracklist.
As an attempt to spiff up the original Wailers tracks for modern pop’s new age of gated drums and expensive synths, Thorngren’s remixes were a C-suite approach to one of the core creative impulses that Afro-diasporic creative culture lent the global recording industry: versioning. Caribbean vernacular art, in particular, is less interested in originals than palimpsests, where recordings serve as templates for others to creatively repurpose—sometimes removing the vocals to toast over, sometimes changing the tempo or adding instrumentation to enhance the vibe. But Thorngren’s ears, like Blackwell’s a decade earlier, were more tuned to the industry dictates of securing copyrights and polishing up raw records for a fecund global marketplace. Blackwell once referred to himself as Marley’s “translator,” and playfully called Catch a Fire, the Wailers’ Island debut, the most “pasteurized” version of the band, laden with overdubs designed to appeal to reggae-curious stateside radio programmers and collegiate rock fans. With Marley joining him at the boards, Blackwell helped codify international reggae’s appeal on Catch a Fire, initially packaging it with a Zippo lighter that actually opened, and later substituting a desaturated, high-contrast image of Marley puffing an enormous spliff, a nod to the fact that his target market likely had a National Geographic-level appreciation for Jamaicans and their music.
Musically, Blackwell’s Catch a Fire pasteurization was primarily used on the ragged ghetto-survival anthem “Concrete Jungle” and the sultry “Stir It Up.” You can hear an estimation of the starker, Jamaican version of “Stir” on the early 2000s Catch reissue, before Blackwell added a dank Moog swirl to the intro and a clavinet throughout, both played by Houston-born former Johnny Nash sideman Rabbit Bundrick. Fond of the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio’s band on records by Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and the Rolling Stones, Blackwell asked Alabama-born guitarist Wayne Perkins, who happened to be in London, to add a solo to “Stir It Up.” Like a lot of American musicians weaned on funk and R&B, Perkins had trouble deciphering the track’s reggae pulse—understandable, given that “one drop” beat was so named because the first beat of the bar (The One, in funk parlance) was left empty. “Anything I’d ever heard—the R&B, the church music—this was backwards,” Perkins recalled. But the octave-spanning solo he eventually laid, run through a sustain pedal and slathered with echo, turned the song into an entirely new reggae/rock/R&B hybrid that was born in Kingston, mixed in London, and sweetened with the warm twang of the American South.
