Just added to the Jason Webley Bootlegs collection: No Woman, No Fly (5.1Mb .mp3). The audio quality isn’t the greatest (with Jason’s penchant for going from soft to screaming in nanoseconds, the recording’s a bit overdriven in places), but it’s up.
Thanks to usernamenumber for posting the .mp3, and to RobTav63 for help with the lyrics.
Lyrics follow behind the cut.
(spoken)
How many of you have done much traveling in your lives? Oh, good. Then you’ve probably all noticed the thing. That it doesn’t matter where you go in the world, there’s always an old boombox with one broken speaker playing Bob Marley.
This song doesn’t have anything to do with him, well it does, tangentially related.
I was traveling several years back in South America. I don’t remember where I was. It is what I call the “cloudy period” of my life. It was some kind of small mountain village, and I don’t know how I got there, I definitely didn’t know where I was going to sleep, and I was in some kind of surreal bar-like place.
It was bar-like in that, well, there were no walls, or electricity, but there were men drinking. These men were singing, and it made quite an impression on me. It’s something I think about often, because I don’t think I’ve ever heard humans make such passionate sounds. I like passion in people, I like that, I often talk about that, and this was this very raw, primal, just, men reaching into their throats, wresting out their souls and flinging them across the room at each other. Very passionate singing.
On the other hand, they were singing a Bob Marley song. And they were singing it very out of tune, and they had the words wrong. So, what these gentlemen were singing was…remember, it was much more passionate than I could possibly emulate, but, something like, “NO WOMAN…NO…FLY…WOWOWOOooooo…fly….”
So, tonight, if you don’t object to the idea, I thought perhaps we could all unite our voices and sing the very rarely sung Bob Marley song, “No Woman, No Fly.”
(singing)
No woman, no fly,
No woman no fly!
(You know the words…)
No woman, no fly,
No woman no fly!There was a time, that I had many things,
Oh, those were happy days,
I had a girlfriend, and a little bug with wings,
Bug got squished and the lady went away.No woman, no fly,
No woman no fly!So I once knew this woman, I took her up the tree,
All the way, she only screamed away now,
So much complaining! Alright — I set you free,
Oh, lord I let the woman go.No woman, no fly,
No woman no fly!So I’ve been watching this fly, it’s landed…in her soup!
She’s going to eat it anyway.
Those flies are dirty! They sit on trash! And eat poop!
No! Don’t do it! No! No! (unintelligible)No woman, no fly,
No woman no fly!(spoken)
I’m very sorry…
“No Woman, No Fly (live)” by Webley, Jason (2006, 5:35).