Before he was killed during a robbery of his home in Jamaica three months ago, Peter Tosh--a pioneering force in reggae since the '60s when he formed the Walters with Bunny (Wailer) Livingston and Bob Marley--had planned to embark on a world tour that would have begun in November.
There still is a Tosh tour in full swing, but now it's being done as a tribute to the late singer by the Jack Miller Band.
A former resident of Dana Point, Miller is a reggae recording artist in his own right; and the outfit backing Miller for the tribute tour--which includes a Dec. 10 date at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano--features two longtime Tosh colleagues: guitarist Tony Chin and bassist George (Fully) Fullwood.
Discussing the genesis of the tribute tour by phone from his home on the island of Hawaii, Miller said: "Fully and Tony, who've worked a lot with Peter, were planning on going out on that big world tour with him."
"And we all felt that since Peter wasn't here to get the music out, we should at least get the message to the people."
Miller described Tosh as "probably the most outspoken of all the reggae leaders." So "the message" he speaks of was invariably part of Tosh's music--and often quite aggressively phrased--from writing the classic "Get Up, Stand Up" while with the Wailers (he left the band in 1974); to the pro-marijuana anthem "Legalize It," through a number of blunt exhortations on his current album "No Nuclear War."
He gained broader exposure from rock audiences in 1978 when he recorded "Don't Look Back" as a duet with Mick Jagger, and again in 1983 when his loping version of "Johnny B. Goode" (and the corresponding video) earned considerable air play and eye play. Tosh also received a Grammy nomination in 1985 for best reggae recording for "Captured Live."
Tosh clearly recorded a great deal of music over the course of a lengthy career. And Miller promises that fans of Tosh, and of reggae in general, will leave next week's show satiated:
"Yeah, (the audience is) going to get a full evening. We've been doing three sets and then an encore. . . . We've been playing over three hours of music every night.
"What we do is a couple of sets of originals and a mixture of (covers)--we do some of Bob Marley's tunes, some Jimmy Cliff, some Black Uhuru. But it's predominantly originals for the first two sets," explained Miller, a singer-songwriter-keyboardist who has released three albums.
