Years ago, my brother and I found a cassette tape on the floor of the family van. Neither of us knew where it came from or who had left it there (as it wasn’t either of ours), but neither of us are generally likely to refuse free music, so into our collection it went.
Upon first glance, it didn’t seem all that special — Bob Marley and the Wailers ‘Legend’ album. When we tossed it in the stereo and started listening to it, though, it turned out that we were in for a bit of a treat. It turned out that rather being the “normal” Legend album, this tape instead had early 80s-era dance remixes of all of the songs. We were confused: it was all the same tracks in the same order as any other Legend tape, but versions we’d never heard before. Since Kevin is more of a reggae fan than I am, and I’m more of a dance music fan than he is, I ended up with the tape.
Over the next few months, every so often I’d try to track down where the tape came from, all to no avail. None of our friends remembered leaving it in the car, or even hearing it in the first place. Since it was an official factory-produced tape, I took it down to Mammoth Music (the single best locally-run music store in Anchorage) and had them punch the catalog number printed on the shell into their system, and they came up blank — no record of that particular version of the album existing at all.
Over time, unfortunately, the tape died, and I eventually resigned myself to its remaining a mystery.
Then, one day a couple years ago, one of the ladies I was working in at the Microsoft print shop came in with a new two-disc deluxe edition of Legend that she’d just picked up. We listened to disc one, she popped in disc two…and I damn near blew a gasket when the long-lost beats of the mysterious remixes came out of the stereo. I don’t have the liner notes available to me now, so I don’t remember all the details, but it turns out that all the remixes had been done between 1980 and 1984, and had been out of print for years before the deluxe edition was released onto CD.
That deluxe edition is now available on iTunes, complete with every one of the remixes I spent so much time enjoying after they appeared in my car. If you think you can handle the admittedly somewhat odd experience of 80’s dance mixes of Bob Marley reggae tunes, I’d definitely recommend giving it a listen — my personal favorite of all the tracks is the remix of Buffalo Soldier.
“Buffalo Soldier (Remix)” by Marley, Bob and the Wailers from the album Legend: Deluxe Edition (1984, 5:25).