Bruno spent several days going through my drawers of rare singles and tapes, discovering several tracks he had never heard of and getting more and more excited about the prospect of releasing them to the public. Shortly after his return to Paris he arranged a meeting between Danny Sims and his British partner David Simmons, and Jean-Michel Fava of France's A.B. Disques. He got them to agree in principal to the project, with Fava providing the funding, and Sims giving the go-ahead. In August of '96, Blum (pronounced "bloom") returned to Hell A, and together we began two exhausting weeks of exacting l6 - l8 hour days reviewing every single recording the Wailers made in the 1967 - 1972 period - all the dubs, the out-takes, the alternate versions. Playing them back to back, over and over again, looking for subtle variations, lyric differences, added instruments. The process, needless to say, was mind- numbing, especially in light of the various bootleg CDs eminating from Europe and Japan, often with totally mistitled track listings.

Before Blum returned to Paris, he got Sims to sign a contract guaranteeing that all the original creators of the music - the Wailers and their co- writers - will be paid royalties for their efforts - in many cases, for the first time since the tracks were laid thirty years ago! The following month, Jeremy Collingwood, a noted British collector and co- editor of the acclaimed Wailers fanzine Distant Drums, was brought on board in London to handle the legal aspects of the project, and locate near-mint copies of several rare singles to go with the DAT tapes that Blum had made of my collection while in L.A. Once the best sources available for each track had been determined, Blum came to London to work at the Beatles' studio with the engineers who worked on the Fab Four's "Anthology series. "At Abbey Road," says Blum, "I started to sort through the various sources, painstakingly declicking, dehissing, EQing, and restoring them with Cedar and Sonic Solution, and finally mastering them. I worked alongside engineers Ron Hill, Pete Mew, Terry Burch and Simon Gibson; who gave tireless and invaluable assistance.

"We straightened out the claimants' imbroglio with the families, discovered unhoped-for original tapes, found all the singles but two, and scrupulously restored all of them with the best specialists in the world, one crack at a time, one hiss at a time. We mastered everything in some indescribable confusion of different versions, wrongly titled songs, previously unreleased mixes, psycho-neurotic rival collectors and inaudible bootlegs. We tore our dreadlocks late at night but all the piles of tapes and hyper-funky Jamaican singles were finally gathered, sorted, filed and, at last, saved in digitaldom."

Meantime, my writing partner and fellow Wailers' discographer, Leroy Jodie Pierson, who lives in St. Louis, began a long-distance collaboration on the definitive liner notes, taking pains to identify every single musician who played on the tracks, and the periods in which they were originally recorded, so the 10 CDs could be done in proper chronological order. Anecdotes from the sessions' original particpants were published for the first time anywhere, and references were made to all the alternate versions elsewhere in the series. Blum wrote several background pieces on contemporary social history for the four-color booklets accompanying each album, and Collingwood found remarkable Ethopian illustrations of things like a dreadlocked Jesus and early Nyabinghi warriors.

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