Yeah, but Jimmy didn't write or perform all of the Harder soundtrack. Bob was a superior overall musician.
Yeah, I know. Like I said, "Marley proved to be the more interesting musician, post-Kong." I just think it's interesting that if Cliff'd been picked, an obvious army of songwriters, especially if Kong'd survived, would easily have kept him at the top of the pile. He was already recording number one hits in his early teenage years! He had, like, 10 of them!
And pm, Cliff left Island after the Jamaican release of
The Harder They Come (1972), but well before the U.S. release, which wasn't until 1975, long after he'd left--part of the problem, all of the screwy timing of things. Leslie Kong died in 1971, and Cliff drifted for a bit, working to finish the film and soundtrack (for which he was supposed to provide the full soundtrack, but was too decimated and directionless to fully flesh out, forcing Perry Henzell to compile what became the greatest compilation, for lack of a better word, in the history of music), and a record or two, but his decision to leave Island in 1973 was, as history tells it, based primarily on the lack of any support for him which the label showed, in the wake of Kong's death and their subsequent choice to begin pushing Marley as the superstar. Motivations notwithstanding, it was indeed after the Marley decision that Cliff departed from Island, moved to Africa for a while, and started making solid, but rarely, if ever, great, records.