Tag: Marley D. Williams

Constant touring fuels Rebelution’s growing status as festival favorite

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From left, Marley D. Williams, Rory Carey, Eric Rachmany and Wesley Finley started the band Rebelution in Isla Vista
From left, Marley D. Williams, Rory Carey, Eric Rachmany and Wesley Finley started the band Rebelution in Isla Vista

They may call Rebelution’s genre “sunshine reggae” and it may appear that the band is as laid back as a beach barbecue, but there’s very little rest time for these guys. The band averages 120 shows a year, not including travel dates, according to Marley D. Williams, their bass player, with tonight’s Santa Barbara Bowl concert just one of those dates.

“We’re really hustling right now, trying to take advantage of every opportunity we’ve got,” he says. “We have to have a personal life too. The thing that we got from UCSB, apart from our degree, you learn to consolidate things. Two birds with one stone. That’s how our recording process came down to Miami and Burbank.”

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The Great Homecoming: Santa Barbara’s Rebelution headlines the Bowl

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Among Persian rugs, potted plants and billows of stage smoke, Santa Barbara band Rebelution finally realized a long-held dream and headlined a concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl on Sunday. MICHAEL MORIATIS/NEWS-PRESS
Among Persian rugs, potted plants and billows of stage smoke, Santa Barbara band Rebelution finally realized a long-held dream and headlined a concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl on Sunday.
MICHAEL MORIATIS/NEWS-PRESS

There were three kinds of cloud cover at the Rebelution concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl Sunday night. One was the marine layer, which by the end of the concert had slithered into town so far that the audience started to get damp; another was the dry ice smoke spilling from the stage; and the third was from the audience and … well, you can probably guess what it was and how it smelled.

This was the audience that had come out to see Santa Barbara/Isla Vista’s Rebelution. Nine years ago they were a reggae jam band who played their “front yard and back yard” as well as garage parties for UCSB students. Most groups like this would have dissipated after graduation, but Eric Rachmany and his group kept at it, releasing three albums, incessantly touring, and garnering followers in Hawaii and beyond, not just here. (Although KJEE has helped them out a lot.)

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