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He was largely absent from his son’s life and died when Marley was ten. His father, Norval Marley, was white, of British descent. Robert Nesta Marley was born on his grandfather’s farm in the Jamaican countryside in 1945. “I don’t think you’ve got another genre where you’ve got that one album.” “It doesn’t just define a career, it defines a genre,” says SoundScan analyst Dave Bakula. In fact, it has been the top-selling reggae album in the U.S.

Legend also defines its genre unlike any other album, introducing record buyers to reggae in one safe and secure package. But if you have one Bob Marley album, it’s probably Legend, which is one reason members of his former backing band, the Wailers, are performing it in its entirety on the road this summer. It’s no wonder that on July 1 Universal released yet another deluxe reissue of the album, this time celebrating its 30th anniversary.įew artists have hits collections that become their definitive works. alone, it has become a rite of passage in pop-music puberty. Selling roughly 250,000 units annually in the U.S.

Unlike the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium, ‘N Sync’s No Strings Attached and many other best-selling albums in recent decades, Legend isn’t a time capsule of a passing musical fad. The result of that coolly pragmatic vision was Legend: The Best of Bob Marley and the Wailers, an album that became one of the top-selling records of all time, far exceeding even the ambitious goals Robinson had set for it. “My vision of Bob from a marketing point of view,” Robinson says, “was to sell him to the white world.” Robinson believed he could sell a million copies of the album, but to do it he would have to repackage not just a collection of songs but Marley himself. I thought that was happening and had restricted his possible market.” “If you don’t get the demographic right and sorted in your mind, you can present it just slightly off to the left or the right. “Record companies can, just like a documentary, slant in whatever direction they like,” Robinson says. He’d seen the way Island had marketed Marley in the past and believed it was precisely this type of portrayal that was responsible for the mediocre numbers. “I always saw Bob as someone who had a strong kind of political feeling,” he says, “somebody who was representing the dispossessed of the world.” “U2 and Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Robert Palmer is what paid your salary.”īlackwell handed Robinson - the cofounder of Stiff Records, famous for rock acts such as Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello - an outline of his vision for the compilation, which Blackwell says presented Marley as somewhat “militant.”

“Marley was a labor of love for employees of Island Records,” says Charly Prevost, who ran Island in the United States for a time in the ’80s. They were not shabby numbers, but they weren’t in line with his profile. Marley’s best-selling album, 1977’s Exodus, had only moved about 650,000 units in the U.S. He took one look at the artist’s sales figures and was shocked. Robinson’s first assignment was to put out a compilation of Bob Marley’s hits. Two years after Marley’s passing, Chris Blackwell, the founder of Marley’s label, Island Records, brought Robinson in to run his U.K.

He was not, however, a big seller.įor Dave Robinson, this presented an opportunity. For Legend, Island Records' Dave Robinson chose a cover photo in which Marley appears more reflective than rebellious.Īt the time of his death, in May 1981, Bob Marley was 36 years old, reggae’s biggest star, and the father of at least eleven children.