SO MUCH THINGS TO SAY
THE ORAL HISTORY OF BOB MARLEY
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY
ROGER STEFFENS
INTRODUCTION BY LINTON KWESI JOHNSON
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York • London
LIVICATION
To the ineffable CC Smith, cofounder of The Beat magazine, devoted friend and partner, without whose efforts on my behalf this book would never have existed.
And to my beloved wife, Mary, and our children Kate, and Devon, whose constant support and tolerant overstanding are a gift from Jah.
There are no facts in Jamaica, only versions.
—Old folk saying
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: THE PEOPLE SPEAK BY LINTON KWESI JOHNSON
PREFACE
CHAPTER 1.Where Is My Mother?
CHAPTER 2.Trench Town Rocks
CHAPTER 3.The Wailers at Studio One
CHAPTER 4.Good Good Rudies
CHAPTER 5.Love and Affection
CHAPTER 6.Rasta Shook Them Up
CHAPTER 7.Wailers A Go Wail
CHAPTER 8.Nine Mile Exile
CHAPTER 9.The JAD Years
CHAPTER 10.Leslie Kong Meets the Tuff Gang
CHAPTER 11.Lee Perry and Jamaican Politricks
CHAPTER 12.Cold Cold Winters in Sweden and London
CHAPTER 13.Island’s Kinky Reggae
CHAPTER 14.Burnin’ Out in London
CHAPTER 15.The End of the Beginning
CHAPTER 16.Natty Dread
CHAPTER 17.Hope Road Runnings
CHAPTER 18.Cindy Breakspeare and the 1975 Tour
CHAPTER 19.Rastaman Vibration and the Fatal Reissue
CHAPTER 20.Ambush in the Night
CHAPTER 21.The CIA and the Assassination Attempt
CHAPTER 22.Smile, You’re in Jamaica
CHAPTER 23.Who Shot Bob Marley?
CHAPTER 24.Exodus to London
CHAPTER 25.Blackwell, Bob and Business
CHAPTER 26.The Bloody Toe in the Paris Match
CHAPTER 27.The One Love Peace Concert
CHAPTER 28.Babylon by Bus from the U.N. to Ethiopia
CHAPTER 29.Charity and Survival
CHAPTER 30.From the Apollo to Gabon
CHAPTER 31.Natty Mash It inna Zimbabwe
CHAPTER 32.Uprising
CHAPTER 33.Madison Square Garden Then Everything Crash
CHAPTER 34.Dr. Issels and the Final Days
CHAPTER 35.Marley’s Legacy and the Wailers’ Favorite Songs
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LIST OF INTERVIEWEES
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
The People Speak
Linton Kwesi Johnson
In an essay I wrote on the lyrics of Bob Marley’s Exodus, voted album of the twentieth century by Time magazine, I said of his lyrical genius that it was based on his “ability to translate the personal into the political, the private into the public, the particular into the universal.”* Genius, it can be argued, is not merely an exceptional personal attribute; it is historical in the sense that it becomes manifest when there is a conjunction of the biographical and the historical. The second half of the 1970s, the period when Bob Marley began to reap the rewards of his long apprenticeship as a musician, was a time of turbulence not only in Jamaica but around the globe. The Cold War was at its most intense; proxy wars were being waged between East and West in developing-world countries; anticolonial wars were still being fought in Africa; there were anti-imperialist struggles taking place in South America. Jamaica was on the brink of all-out civil war as the opposition, aided and abetted by the CIA, sought to wrest power from Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government. Bob Marley almost lost his life during that conflict. His music is resonant of that period; it reflects the zeitgeist. At the apotheosis of his career he had become a kind of Che Guevara of popular culture.
I have the dubious distinction of having written a critique of Marley’s rise to fame at a pivotal time in his career. As a fan of the Wailers triumvirate of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, I was deeply disappointed when they went their separate ways. Then, on top of that, Marley was being hailed in the rock music press as the new “king of rock” following the release of his first solo album, Natty Dread. As far as I was concerned that was a travesty—and I was not alone in harboring such sentiments. Bob Marley was, after all, a top-ranking Jamaican reggae artist who belonged to the world of black music and was being appropriated by the white rock world. In the article I wrote, titled “Roots and Rock: The Marley Enigma,” published in Race Today in October 1975, I not only criticized the way Marley was being marketed, I laid the blame at the doorstep of Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records.† Back then I was a twenty-three-year-old sociology undergraduate and I had just published my second book of poems, Dread Beat an Blood. Three years later I was signed to Island Records by Blackwell and, a year after that, by Marley to Tuff Gong. With the benefit of hindsight I can say that my analysis of the marketing strategy was more or less correct, even though the sentiments were misplaced.
Linton Kwesi Johnson at Herne Hill, London, May 27, 2003.
When it became clear that Bob Marley would not recover from the cancer he was battling, the newly elected Jamaican government, led by Edward Seaga, awarded him the Order of Merit, the nation’s highest civilian award. It was in recognition not only of Marley’s enormous popularity in Jamaica but also of the kudos he had brought to the nation by his achievements abroad. No other Jamaican has done more to boost the brand name Jamaica. As reggae music’s greatest ambassador, Marley made an enormous contribution to its globalization and its impact on popular culture around the world. Since his demise he has grown in stature from superstar to legend to iconic status, a remarkable achievement for someone from such a humble background. The astute and at times obscene marketing of Marley as a brand cannot detract from the fact that no other recording artist in the late twentieth century, in any genre, has had the global reach and influence that Marley has, continuing into this millennium.
The Rastafarian soul rebel, armed with his distinctive voice, a guitar, a great backing band and fine backing vocals, was a man on a mission to challenge the “isms and schisms” of principalities and powers as he fought against “spiritual wickedness in high and low places.” His legacy of catchy danceable songs of defiance, resistance, rebellion, love and hope continues to reverberate around the world; his lyrical and melodic genius guarantees the contemporaneity of his music. What kind of man and musician was Nesta Robert Marley? Many books have been written about him, including a Marley reader for the academy. He has appeared in fiction too. What makes Roger Steffens’s So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley unique is that the author does not present a portrait of the artist through his own lens but instead presents us with a collage of impressions seen through the eyes of others. For many years Steffens has traveled the world telling Marley’s story with his illustrated “Life of Bob Marley” lecture. Here he allows those who knew Marley to give their versions. Roger Steffens, writer, broadcaster and photographer, a respected scholar of reggae and renowned archivist specializing in Bob Marley recordings and ephemera, has put together seventy-five interviews with people close to Marley who speak candidly about what they witnessed of the singer’s life and times. The respondents range from people who knew Marley intimately to those who crossed paths with him, including family, friends, musicians, record company personnel, journalists, photographers and filmmakers. The evidential nature of this book, w
ith at times conflicting narratives, guarantees a riveting read. Some of the testimonies confirm what was already known, some offer different versions, some contest myths about Marley; others say more about the witness than the man.
There are some startling revelations and contentious claims. We hear from Clement “Coxson” Dodd about the young Marley’s time at Studio One; the reputedly mafia-connected Danny Sims on his dealings with Marley and Johnny Nash; Bunny Wailer on his friend’s composition technique; Beverley Kelso, an original Wailer, on the relationship between Rita Marley and Bob; Joe Higgs on his schooling of the original Wailers and Marley’s character; Dermot Hussey, Jamaican broadcaster and musicologist, on the interview about the breakup of the Wailers that Marley wanted destroyed. There are interviews with all of the original Wailers. Other voices include Cedella Booker, Marley’s mother; Cindy Breakspeare, former beauty queen and mother of Damian “Junior Gong” Marley; Allan “Skill” Cole, Marley’s close friend; Third World’s Cat Coore; and Rastafarian guru Mortimo Planno.
Steffens sometimes makes editorial interventions, introducing a speaker or providing context for what is being said. He rarely opines, allowing his witnesses to tell their stories in their own words, structured chronologically from Marley’s childhood to his demise. The overall impression we get of Marley is that of a man of some complexity: taciturn and jovial by turns, worldly and spiritual, a sleeping lion capable of violent rage, a peacemaker, a ladies’ man and a man of prodigious generosity. The most striking observation that emerges from several witnesses is how serious Marley was about his art: his single-mindedness and his consummate professionalism. Marley’s story is a poignant one of humble origins, privation, struggle, survival, trials and tribulations, triumph and tragedy.
* Richard Williams, ed., The Poetry of Exile (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007).
† Republished in Theo Cateforis, ed., The Rock History Reader 2007 (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).
PREFACE
There are, it is reported, over five hundred books written in many languages and published all over the world about the Reggae King. So, why this book, and why now? What is left to say?
To provide the proper answer, allow me to explain how this music lover became so deeply involved in researching Bob Marley’s unprecedented life and impact on the world. I have been a fan of the Wailers’ works since discovering them through a revelatory 1973 Rolling Stone article by Michael Thomas, who said that reggae music crawls through your bloodstream like some vampire amoeba from the psychic rapids of Upper Niger consciousness. That unforgettable sentence sent me rushing out the door of my Berkeley apartment to find Catch A Fire, the Wailers’ first international album on Island Records. The following evening I saw The Harder They Come, Jamaican director Perry Henzell’s exuberant film, which brought the imagery of reggae and Rastafari to the outside world. My life has never been the same since.
As a fan, I sought out others who had caught what Peter Tosh called “reggae mylitis.” Among the first teacher-mentors I discovered was a man from Kingston named Ruel Mills who had a small record shop on Fillmore Street in San Francisco called Trench Town Records. There he introduced me to the likes of Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, Ras Michael and the Sons of Negus, Alton Ellis, the Techniques, Slim Smith and a host of obscure singers and musicians whose ethereal works moved my heart and elevated my consciousness.
In 1976, after moving to Los Angeles, my wife Mary and I traveled to Jamaica hoping to find records I had only read about, mainly in British magazines such as Black Music and in occasional Jamaican publications such as Swing magazine. We arrived the week that prime minister Michael Manley declared a national state of emergency, throwing the opposition into prison with no charges and placing tanks on all the island’s crossroads. I felt like I was back in Saigon during the Tet Offensive. We spent most of our time in the bucolic area around Lucea on the northwest coast of the island, but we just had to go to Kingston to check out the Wailers’ record shop as well as Randy’s and Joe Gibbs’s emporiums on the main square of Parade. Our first stop was on a deserted back street where Marley had a tiny shack. There, within two minutes on the ground, one of the biggest reggae stars at the time tried to pick my pocket. A half hour later we found ourselves in Jimmy Cliff’s house, with some of the most important musicians of the era revealing the best and worst of life in Yard, as the locals referred to their island home.
Two years later I met Hank Holmes, an avid collector of omnivorous tastes, who had amassed over eight thousand ska, rocksteady and reggae records without leaving Los Angeles. We became instant friends. I thought with his vast collection and knowledge we could do a great radio show together, as there was no reggae on the air in L.A. at the time. We fought for a year, unsuccessfully, to find a station willing to let us reveal the great wealth of music being created just south of the U.S. Finally, we found a spot on a tiny NPR station in Santa Monica, an L.A. beach city, called KCRW. It had only 110 watts at the time, but there were great plans afoot for it to grow. The station itself was in a tiny converted classroom in a junior high school, across the street from the license holder, Santa Monica College. KCRW was always desperate for monetary support. During the first fundraising drive while we were there, they gave us an extra hour to beg for money—three hours on a Sunday afternoon. That day we made history, amassing in those few hours what the station’s previous fundraising drive had made in ten days. Immediately our airtime was doubled to four hours a week, and our Reggae Beat show became, according to the L.A. Weekly, “the most popular non-commercial radio show in the city.” Hank decided not to do any of the fascinating storytelling he did in private, preferring to “let the music speak for itself.” So it fell on me to do the interviews and study up on things I could add to make our broadcasts stronger. Hank had such a stupendously deep collection that there was hardly an artist who came through our gates who didn’t discover records of their music that they had never seen before—primarily Peter Tosh, who became one of our biggest early supporters.
The program was the first in a series of events, each building on the one before, that caused me to interact with virtually all of the major players in the Wailers’ careers. Our first musical guest was Bob Marley. We had been on the air for only six weeks when Island Records called and asked if we’d “mind going on the road for a couple of weeks” on his Survival tour. It was one of the most important events in my life, as we shared a wide variety of experiences, both public and private, with Marley and his band. We told Bob about our show and he urged us to remember that reggae music was for “head-ucation, not just jollification.” Ironically, the happiest person on the road with us was the bus driver. He got to sweep up all the roaches at the end of each evening and some nights, he told us, he’d go home with several ounces of discarded herb.
During this period, Bob asked me to arrange for showings of the two most important films of his life at that point: Jeff Walker’s documentary and film of the Smile Jamaica concert and the assassination attempt on Bob’s life that preceded it, and the One Love Peace Concert film, Heartland Reggae. He had seen neither of them before. During both screenings, it was instructive to watch Bob watching Bob, and some of his reactions, described in this book, are sure to be provocative. His final show in L.A. was a benefit concert at the Roxy, and Hank and I were among the very few allowed into the show’s sound check that afternoon. Bob spent close to an hour singing something over and over again that we’d never heard before, about redemption. It would be the last time we would see him before he passed a year and a half later from melanoma.
Peter Tosh came through a few months later, saying grudgingly that at least Bob’s death would make room for other artists to be noticed—a belligerent stance that cost him the support of many of his fans. But he had a very warm and humorous side to him too, and over the next seven years we grew close and I interviewed him several times for Reggae Beat and also for a cable TV show that producer-director Chili Charles
had started called L.A. Reggae. I would get several calls a year from Peter in various far-flung locations, asking for copies of this or that record. He didn’t have any of his own history, he explained sadly; it had all been stolen or begged off. Just before his murder in September 1987, he called asking for a copy of “Here Comes the Judge,” to remake for a sequel to his then-new album, No Nuclear War.
Bunny Wailer came into my life later. A recluse since his departure from the group in 1973, I first met him at the Sunsplash Festival in Montego Bay in 1985, and gave him eleven ninety-minute tapes of old Wailers singles. The following year he called me and asked me to be the publicist for what would be his first foreign show after thirteen on-island years of exile from overseas stages. That show was held in L.A., and he came on the Reggae Beat the next day for a four-hour special. In 1990 Bunny again called, asking this time if I would be willing to cowrite his autobiography. I readily accepted, and requested that I bring along my dear friend Leroy Jodie Pierson, a brilliant blues guitarist and historian and founder of the Nighthawk record label, which had already released some of Bunny’s music. He agreed, and Leroy and I went on to spend three weeks locked in a hotel room in Kingston in October 1990, compiling sixty-four hours of interviews about the entire history of his relationship with Bob and Peter. Sadly, Bunny has never allowed that book to be published; ten years of work, and 1,800 pages of transcripts of the history that every Wailers fan is yearning to read, remains in limbo. (Nonetheless, Leroy and I combined over thirty years of research to complete our 2005 book, Bob Marley and the Wailers: The Definitive Discography, to date the only true discography ever compiled for any Jamaican artist.)
In 1984, NARAS, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, asked me to organize and chair a reggae Grammy committee, which I did for the next twenty-seven years. That same year, I was invited to do a presentation of unreleased Marley films and videos as part of the National Video Festival at the American Film Institute. This drew positive reviews in local press and led to invitations from colleges—and then clubs—to do it again. My multimedia program, “The Life of Bob Marley,” has been presented over 500 times all over the world since then, from the Outback of Australia to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, bringing the words and works of reggae’s prophet to the far reaches of the globe. This has led to hundreds of encounters with those who interacted with Bob personally, each of whose stories I taped or filmed for posterity. Many of these appeared in The Beat magazine, which was cofounded by me and CC Smith in 1981 and lasted for twenty-eight years. Each May I edited a Bob Marley Collectors Edition, which included writing by some of reggae’s finest observers, all working for free for the love of the music.
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Page 1
