Jimmy Cliff - Wild World
Saturday night is special indeed, courtesy of this homage to one of the great musical ambassadors of our age, who departed this realm just a few weeks ago after a lifetime scrambling the DNA of the Earth in wonderful ways.
Considered the alpha/omega figure of Reggae music -- preceding and superseding even Bob Marley for that title -- no one in all history could have done more to take Jamaica's greatest musical export from regional popularity to global conquest than he.
Because before there was Bob, there was The Harder They Come, and the star at the film's core that propelled it to the worldwide impact that still resonates today, 53 years after the fact.
It's impossible to explain to today's total multicultural world of immersion and instant access to media from far-flung places just how colossal the reaction to and acclaim of the first full-length theatrical feature film ever made on the island of Jamaica -- today, a tourist destination for everywhere, but in 1972 still a remote destination -- was in its moment.
From the time the movie hit theaters, it seemed the floodgates opened. It only took five years for Reggae to take over the world, to where Dolly Parton and Rush were making songs infused with it.
If you want to know who made that shift happen so profoundly so fast, one figure you would have to acknowledge as at the vanguard forefront of it all would be Jimmy Cliff.
He claimed to have coerced Leslie Kong, the legendary early Reggae enabler and producer, to go into the record business with him one night, having stumbled into Kong's restaurant at random towards the end of the 1960s.
The hits soon started flowing, and the island public started knowing that Jamaica was glowing with a vibrant, earthshaking new sound. Kong passed very young in 1971, but by then Jimmy Cliff was on his way to a caliber of superstardom no one from Jamaica had ever experienced.
Once The Harder They Come migrated to theaters outside of the Caribbean, he became Reggae's first real ambassador figure, with a presence everywhere from the huge Rock festivals to Saturday Night Live.
In all honesty when you're talking about the all time Kings, Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley and probably Peter Tosh start on the Mt. Rushmore of Reggae as charter members chiseled in glory at the outset.
Anyhow Jimmy Cliff passed into the ancestral history books on November 24 at 81, after a long career making Reggae and Jamaica monumentally influential forces on global culture for almost 60 years.
Having grappled for weeks with what sort of share fare might dare to compare with a figure of such flair -- and really tired of the same old regurgitated bootlegs of dubious quality anyway -- I at last settled on cooking up a halfway reasonable version of JC's complete Rockpalast performance, from 1984 in Düsseldorf.
Jimmy Cliff
"Rockpalast"
Philipshalle
Düsseldorf, Germany
6.1.1984
01 Rockpalast introduction
02 Spider Man
03 Bongo Man
04 Reggae Night I
05 Youth's a Ball (Beggar's Banquet)
06 Treat the Youths Right
07 Piece of the Pie
08 Rub-a-Dub Partner
09 Reggae Movement
10 Third World People
11 It's Time
12 Many Rivers to Cross
13 The Harder They Come
14 You Can Get It If You Really Want
15 No Woman No Cry
16 Nuclear War
17 Vietnam
18 Wild World
19 Reggae Night II
20 Roots Radical
21 Music Maker
Total time: 2:10:21
disc break goes after Track 11
Jimmy Cliff - vocals & percussion
Bertram "Runchie" McLean - guitar & vocals
Earl "Chinna" Smith - guitar & vocals
Harold Butler - keyboards & vocals
Ansell Collins - keyboards & vocals
Chris Meredith - bass
Uziah "Sticky" Thompson - percussion
Sidney Wolf - percussion
Wilburn "Squiddly" Cole - drums
Tracks 01-13 & 17-21 are sourced from 320/48k mono audio from an HD YouTube file of (almost) the complete concert, converted to 16/44 CD Audio
Tracks 14-16 are sourced from a master off-air stereo FM cassette, and -- together with the main segments above -- form the complete show
edited, repaired, merged & remastered for unity by EN, December 2025
724 MB FLAC/direct link
724 MB FLAC/direct link
This show has never been officially released, possibly owing to the not-always-perfect sound, but until it does see a real DVD or whatever -- probably on that WDR label that puts out all the German TV stuff from back in the day -- this soundtrack might be as good a representation of it as may ever exist. Not perfect, but what is?
I shall be back in a week with more of the vital ital, and I've got quite the present for under the tree taking shape for Christmas morning proper, so you better stay naughty and be nice. And you better start by grabbing your weekend by the Roots Reggae, as we say farewell (and Rasta La Vista! OK, that was bad) to the unquantifiably incredible Jimmy Cliff, who brought the music of his native country to a Wild World that's still flying Irie on the wings of its plentiful charms.--J.
7.30.1944 - 11.24.2025
you can get it if you really want