Jamaica World Music Festival, Montego Bay, Jamaica, 11-25-1982, Part 1: Toots & the Maytals

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. Funk 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. 

Also, the audience was very quiet for the entire festival, a common side effect of soundboard recordings that capture what's happening on the stage but only get crowd noise by accident. So I also carefully boosted the volume of the cheering after each and every song in the entire festival. 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.

This album is 46 minutes long.

01 Pressure Drop (Toots & the Maytals)
02 Get Up, Stand Up (Toots & the Maytals)
03 Beautiful Woman (Toots & the Maytals)
04 Never Get Weary Yet (Toots & the Maytals)
05 Going Away (Toots & the Maytals)
06 All the Time (Toots & the Maytals)
07 You Don't Know (Toots & the Maytals)
08 Reggae Got Soul (Toots & the Maytals)
09 talk (Toots & the Maytals)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16400544/VA-JmicaWrldMsicFstvlMntgoByJmica__11-25-1982Prt01TootsnthMytls_atse.zip.html

I was able to find cover photos from the festival for most of the acts, but unfortunately not for this one. One fact I know about the festival is that the concerts didn't start until 7 P.M. each night. So I found a photo of the band's lead singer Toots Hibbert in the dark, since I figure the different sets generally took place in the dark. This cover photo is from a concert in Chicago in April 1982.

As far as the text goes, I used the same font used on some of the promotional materials for the festival. I also used some of the same colors. I'm sure it's not a coincidence that those colors - green, red, and yellow - are closely associated with reggae music.