Guitarist Al Anderson, keyboard player Earl ‘Wya’ Lindo and singer/ guitarist Junior Marvin all joined Bob Marley during the Island Records heyday, a time when reggae music was trickling into all corners of the globe.

It adds legitimacy to the group’s efforts to capture the spirit of Marley, both in the classic tunes they ply from that period and also in the new material that they’ve been busy recording in Santa Monica Beach.

“In the 1970s, nobody else was identifying politics, love, religion and poetry together like Bob,” says Al Anderson, a man with so many things to say that he sometimes struggles to cram it all down the Californian phone line. “It was all about Peter [Tosh], Bob, and Bunny [Wailer]. I heard Peter’s records, I heard Bunny’s records and I heard Bob’s records and I said, ‘Man, that’s where it is. That’s where I wanna be.’

“They taught me how they lived and how they wrote their poetry. You can’t be a poet and not re-enact what you’re living and what you’re speaking to, so those guys showed me how to do this, and I put a band together that represented their metaphysical thoughts and my life with them. And I called it The Original Wailers not because I came to split up The Wailers – I came to unify them … I called my group The Original Wailers because of what I got from the original Wailers.”

Anderson is originally from the United States and has some serious training to back his musical talent, having studied at the esteemed Berklee College of Music in Boston. He talks easily and with a musicologist’s bent about reggae’s spread around the world, particularly in relation to other genres.

“There was The Grateful Dead, The Rolling Stones, Elton John, The Beatles: they had everything, but they didn’t have Tarzan in the jungle who spoke English. And Tarzan came with Jane and kinda woke up the world saying, ‘Hey, I’m alive. I’ve gotta whole world here in the Western hemisphere that nobody really knows about, and these are my thoughts, this is my culture.’ And marijuana, and politics, and people on a beach moving and grooving. Beautiful women and coconuts and good food. What do you expect? It’s the same thing in Australia and New Zealand: it’s island life, and that’s why they love reggae music.”

More recently, Anderson has been working hard to finalise ‘The Miracle’, the debut recording from The Original Wailers. It’s down to the mixing and mastering, but it’s been a tough year for Anderson pulling it all together.
“Every day of my life since December 6 of last year I’ve put into this record,” he sighs. “I was so captured by the song writing and the musicianship of ‘The Miracle’ that I just decided to be like Buddha: I dedicated my whole world to what I believed. I slept and I ate, I saved money, I went broke, I cried for a weekend, I ran out of money and couldn’t finish the recording, and I got stuck in Holland when the Icelandic volcano fucked up the airways. I couldn’t get back to do the week in the studio, so I lost that week – it was just a horrible start to what I think is a wonderful ending. The record is coming to being finished now … it’s a phenomenon that we have a record.”

And barring any more volcanic interruptions, Anderson and the rest of The Original Wailers will be making it to Raggamuffin 2011, hitting the stage at Pine Rivers Park on January 30.
“The people in Australia have been great fans for us throughout the years. We wanna continue to give that portion of the world our reality and a mixed genre of music that they’ll like. This is my second chance at Raggamuffin where I can perform with my friends and my peers. It’s an opportunity to show them a new CD and new music and at the same time reconnect with a great crowd from the Bob Marley And The Wailers days: they can sing our songs of the past, and maybe they’ll get to sing our songs of the present too!”


The Original Wailers play Raggamuffin 2011, Pine Rivers Park, January 30.