Peter Tosh’s ‘Live And Dangerous: Boston 1976’ Album Reaches New Peak On Billboard Reggae Chart After Vinyl Release
Reggae legend Peter Tosh‘s Live and Dangerous: Boston 1976 album has now reached No. 4 on the Billboard Reggae Albums chart, beating its previous peak of No. 12 on the listing back in September 2001.
The album, first released in July 2001, received a special release on vinyl for the first time, with 3,550 copies made available on April 22, according to Record Store Day.
It sold 2,500 of those vinyl units in the United States last week, according to data provided to DancehallMag from Billboard’s sales tracker Luminate.
Recorded in November 1976 at the Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, MA, the live album captured the last show on Tosh’s first solo US tour with his backing band ‘Word, Sound and Power’, which included the legendary Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare and guitarist Al Anderson.
The tour supported the Legalize It album, which had been released four months earlier, but interestingly, the song Legalize It is not featured on the 11-track set.
The songs featured are Let Jah Be Praised, 400 years, No Sympathy, Burial, Mark of the Beast, Babylon Queendom, Why Must I Cry, Watcha Gonna Do, Stepping Razor, and Ketchy Shubby, in addition to the instrumental intro.
In a review of the album when it was released by Sony Music on CD in 2001, independent international magazine of cultural criticism and analysis, Pop Matters, described it as an “Amazing concert” and a seminal performance by a seminal performer and artist.
Pop Matters noted that Tosh’s “live concerts show him at both his best and his most comfortable”, and that as an artiste he straddled the line between indie and pop, and was accepted in both worlds and respected for his artistry, and as a true dissident.
The magazine described Peter Tosh as the consummate Wailer, and “the only one who fully realized that he could use reggae’s inherent pop sensibility and turn it into an anthem for the struggling and oppressed”.
“Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley both missed their opportunity as artists to meld politics and music as fully as Tosh; Bunny was muttering in the dark and Marley was so fully commercialized that it was hard for him to address the scope of political issues that Peter Tosh could…,” the review noted.
On the Billboard Reggae Albums chart dated May 6, 2023, Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Legend: The Best Of Bob Marley And The Wailers continued its reign at No. 1 for the 172nd non-consecutive week.
Shaggy’s Best of Shaggy: The Boombastic Collection is at No. 2 on the chart, while Sean Paul’s Dutty Classics Collection is at No. 3.
UB40’s Greatest Hits is at No. 5, followed by Stick Figure’s World on Fire, Wisdom, and Set In Stone albums at No. 6, 7 and 8, respectively.
Easy Star All-Stars’ new album Ziggy Stardub, which featured Maxi Priest, Steel Pulse, Fishbone, Alex Lifeson (Rush), Vernon Reid (Living Colour), The Skints, Mortimer, The Expanders, Samory I, and others, has made its debut at No. 9 on the chart.
Lee Scratch Perry and The Orb’s The Upsetter At The Starhouse Sessions, which also received a vinyl released on Record Store Day, has debuted at No. 10 on the chart.
The collection was compiled by The Orb founder Alex Paterson, with all tracks recorded by Alex with Thomas Fehlmann and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. Six of the album’s eight tracks never appeared on vinyl before, only Fuzzball (Deadbeat’s Champions League Dub & Golden Clouds (Blue Space White Cloud 81Neutronz Rmx), have appeared on vinyl previously.