Consumer Guide Album

Bob Marley & the Wailers: Talkin' Blues [Tuff Gong, 1991]
With Joe Higgs standing in for Babylon-shy Bunny Livingston, the seven songs they recorded before an audience of half a dozen at the KSAN studios one morning in 1973--maddeningly interspersed with separately tracked bits of a 1975 interview that make a CD you can program a must--isn't just the best live Wailers I've ever heard, but the best Wailers I've ever heard. The ensemble--which by the time of 1976's Live! will substitute the dutifully beautiful I-Threes for his male mates and adjust the instrumentals to arena scale--is at a supple, subliminal peak of interactive intimacy and intensity. The previously unreleased "Am-A-Do" plus three later outtakes are a letdown only by comparison. A−