Description

Neville Garrick made the cover of Rastaman Vibration while living at 56 Hope Road, Bob Marley's house in Kingston. He painted a watercolour wash of Marley in a military-style jacket over a photocopied picture, cut it out and pasted it onto burlap, the coarse sacking he was using in place of expensive canvas at the time. The result shows Marley with his hand raised thoughtfully to his face, the warm colours sitting on top of the rough weave.

The material carried a message. "Because burlap symbolise sack cloth, the roots of Rasta," Garrick explained. He hung the piece up at the house, and Marley noticed it. "A di album cover dat!" Garrick remembered him saying, and then, "Yeah, I like dat." Island's Chris Blackwell liked it too. Garrick said he would never design anything for an artist without first listening to the music.

Released in April 1976, Rastaman Vibration reached number eight on the Billboard 200 in the United States. It was Garrick's first cover for Marley, and it brought him into the inner circle, where he went on to design Exodus, Uprising and Confrontation and to build the stage backdrops for Marley's tours. In 2023 Billboard ranked the cover 22nd on its list of the 100 best album covers of all time, a few months before Garrick died.

Credit

Artwork and art direction by Neville Garrick