So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley

by Roger Steffens

  The Wailers Band and I have remained good friends for almost four decades now. In 2013, the Family Man Barrett–led Wailers invited me to go on the road with them for two months as their opening act as they played the entire Survival album live. I slept on the floor of their bus throughout January and February, working in some of the coldest cities in North America, showing pictures I took on the original tour and telling of the crucial importance of the album and explaining its lyrics. It left me with a lasting and enormous respect for the road life that these intrepid warriors have committed themselves to, at great personal cost, carrying Bob’s timeless creations to a hungry younger generation.

  Back in 2002, I approached Norton’s Jim Mairs with an idea for an oral history of Bob Marley. My original conception was for the complete transcripts of some eighty crucial interviews to be published in full, so that readers would know each person’s whole story in their own words and see the context in which each question was answered. I wanted to present the raw material of history for writers in the future to have full access to.

  I had nearly completed the book by 2005 when disaster struck. Having been born in 1942, I’m definitely part of the techno-igno generation, and when my computer suffered an unfixable crash, I lost everything: the manuscript, the interview transcripts and all my notes. I went into a two-year funk and couldn’t face starting from scratch again. When Jim came looking for the book in 2007, I had to confess what had happened. I am eternally grateful for his patience and understanding, and he urged me to get started again. A few years later I sent him about 80 percent of the book. He wrote back that the folks at Norton had decided it would be far more readable if I broke up the voices into topics, in the manner of the superb biography Bill Graham Presents by Robert Greenfield. With a heavy heart, realizing how much more work still lay before me, I agreed. Now I see that Jim’s decision was the right one in so many ways, and I am grateful for him standing by me with infinite patience and belief in the project. In 2015, Jim passed the project over to Norton’s meticulous senior editor Tom Mayer, himself a former reggae broadcaster in California and at Columbia.

  So, to answer the questions posed at the beginning, I have compiled this book with the knowledge that there are several superb books that deal with various portions of Bob’s life, and I do not feel the urge to repeat previous works. Cedella Booker tells A Mother’s Story about his childhood. Her ghostwriter, Tony Winkler, who told me once that he never listens to reggae and only likes classical music, helmed a tome that is curiously devoid of music but does give valuable information about Bob’s youth. For his years in Delaware, Christopher John Farley’s Before the Legend fills in many blanks of that pre-Island period. One of my very favorite books ever is John Masouri’s brilliant Wailing Blues: The Story of Bob Marley’s Wailers, which is basically the autobiography of Family Man Barrett and his drummer brother, Carlton, the very heart of the Wailers sound since 1970. Every song done by Bob since then is deconstructed in this invaluable book. My friend Stephen Davis was one of the first out of the gate with Bob Marley, which gives a fine overview of Bob’s life and remains justifiably in print after more than thirty years. Photographer Kate Simon covers the mid-seventies years in her massive Rebel Music, which is filled with extraordinary intimate photographs and reminiscences by several of those with whom she toured. Likewise, Chris Salewicz’s instructive fiftieth-birthday coffee-table book, Songs of Freedom, gives much detail on Bob’s childhood and European touring. Vivien Goldman’s exhaustive eyewitness account of the making of Marley’s “album of the century,” The Book of Exodus, is a major work of scholarship.

  With all of these already on the shelves, what’s left to add? With So Much Things to Say, named after one of Bob’s most evocative compositions, I have set out to illuminate with first-person depth the parts of his life that have been only partially explored. My main topics include his pre-recording years in Kingston; the backstage reality of Coxson Dodd’s Studio One; his exile from Kingston in 1966 and 1967; the Danny Sims–Johnny Nash maneuverings of the late sixties and early seventies; the perilous history of the group’s relationship with Lee Perry and the disquieting reasons for their split; the breakup of the group in 1973; the assassination attempt in 1976; an inquiry into whether the CIA was complicit in the attempt on his life; the controversial events leading to the One Love Peace Concert; his trips to Africa, including shocking behind-the-scenes stories of Gabon and Zimbabwe; and the history of his fatal cancer and its treatment.

  Over the past thirty-seven years, scores of his friends, associates and family members have shared with me intimate details of their interactions with the Reggae King. Now you can read their revelations too. There are many contradictory accounts, among them the controversy surrounding the recording of the Wailers’ first record, “Simmer Down,” and the circumstances surrounding the wedding of Bob Marley and Rita Anderson. Let history decide. This is its raw material.

  There are some important omissions in this book, which can’t be helped. My biggest regret is never having had the chance to speak to Johnny Nash, whose influence on the Wailers from 1968 to 1972 is crucial to understanding the artist that Bob became. Bunny Wailer makes some astounding charges in these pages, and I tried over the decades to get Mr. Nash to respond. His people replied as this book was about to go to press: “Over the many years that there have been numerous accounts of that time frame, John’s posture has and continues to be that of not dignifying them with any sort of response; it would not serve a meaningful purpose other than giving a false platform to get attention. Those events are a part of history, they cannot be relived and those who were a part of creating the historical events of that era know the truth. Debating on any level, for John, would be counter-productive to serve a purpose for whoever’s views are not on point. With all that being said, John sends his appreciation for your concerns of misgivings and wanting to give him a voice, but it’s really not his style, he prefers to remain silent and let the records speak for themselves.” Regardless, Johnny Nash has my utmost respect and admiration for his incredibly important work in exposing reggae to the masses and making vital contributions that molded Bob and the Wailers into finest quality international entertainers.

  There has never been an artist like Bob Marley, “the artist of the century.” His works are more popular than ever, with Forbes magazine listing him at number five among the highest-earning dead celebrities for 2014. Bob was psychic, and he declared that his work would last forever. It was just one of his many prophecies, some of which have yet to manifest. His abilities were recognized in 1976 by the Jamaican poet and author Geoffrey Philp, who wrote about meeting Bob for the first time at the Mona Heights Community Center in Kingston and reconfirmed them to me at a Marley seminar in Florida in 2015: “When I got there Bob was sitting under an acacia tree. I walked up to him, introduced myself and he told me to sit down. This was the first time I had experienced Bob’s so-called psychic ability because he began to tell me things about my life that no one else—not even my mother—knew about me. I still don’t remember the details because I was in a state of shock. I just couldn’t believe that anyone upon meeting me within the space of five minutes could have told me so much about my life.”

  Here, now, his closest friends and associates tell you about the life of the Bob they encountered. As one of the early readers of this manuscript observed, “After reading this I feel like I really know the man.” My hope is that you will too.

  —Echo Park, L.A.,

  July 2016

  SO MUCH THINGS TO SAY

  CHAPTER 1

  Where Is My Mother?

  R

  OGER STEFFENS: Cedella Malcolm Marley Booker, Bob Marley’s mother, was eighteen at the time of his birth. Her white husband, born in Clarendon, Jamaica, was named Norval Marley. He was around sixty-four when Nesta Robert Marley was born on February 6, 1945, in a tiny rural village called Nine Mile, which had no electricity or running water. Christopher Marley, a member of the white
Marley family, has spent years tracing Bob’s bloodline and has been sharing his research with me as new discoveries come to light, debunking many of the false claims that continue to this day, including the idea that Norval was born in England and was an army officer.

  CHRISTOPHER MARLEY: Bob’s father was Norval Sinclair Marley, born to a British father and a “colored” mother. Norval was not a “sea captain,” nor was he a “quartermaster” or “captain” or “officer in the British Army.” He was a “ferro-cement engineer.” His British Army discharge papers show that he worked in various “labour corps” in the UK during the First World War and was discharged as a private. He did not see active service on the battlefield. Norval Marley’s family was not Syrian, as has been suggested. He was a restless, wandering man. He traveled and worked all over the world at a time when travel was not the simple thing it is today—to Cuba, the UK, Nigeria and South Africa.

  He was supervising the subdivision of some rural land in Saint Ann Parish for war veteran housing when he married eighteen-year-old Cedella Malcolm, whom he had got pregnant. He provided little financial support and seldom saw her and their son. He died of a heart attack in 1955, stone broke and living off an eight-shilling-a-week army pension (about US$1.20).

  Norval was seriously unstable, to put it mildly. The rejection of Bob by the Marley family was a rejection of Norval.

  CEDELLA BOOKER: Norval was living in Nine Mile at the time, watching the lands that the government gave people—certain amount of land to work on during the war. He was like an overseer.

  ROGER STEFFENS: If there was any true direction in Bob’s earliest years, it would come from his grandfather Omariah, who was known locally as a myalman—a benevolent practitioner of healing arts—as opposed to an obeahman, whose darker intentions cast fear into the hearts of superstitious country folk. Omariah was reported to have fathered as many as thirty children.

  CEDELLA BOOKER: My father Omariah was a very spiritual person, he’s like the Blackheart Man [a practitioner of traditional healing methods]. He’s a man like, when people sick he can help them and give them medicine and things like that. He had his own medicine that him fix and mix, and just cure people. Omariah taught Bob not to steal, to tell the truth, to obey. He owned enough land, here there and everywhere. Not no big great properties, but good parcels, like thirty acres, twenty acres, ten acres, five acres all over the place. Bob moved donkeys, goats, carry food from up in the field to the home. Then him ride the donkey and pick up corn, cut corn bush to go feed the other animals. Them have to do manual work. We have to go to spring to get water.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Bob’s cousin Sledger, who was raised alongside him in Nine Mile, recalls that Bob was a fearless rider of his favorite donkey, Nimble, and could jump bareback over a five-foot wall with ease, sometimes even doing it backward! He and Sledger loved music and would listen especially on Sundays, when Omariah would plug his radio into a generator and play it for the locals, tuning in to a Miami station. Elvis Presley, Fats Domino and Ricky Nelson were early favorites of the boys. Bob’s nascent musical instruction came directly from Cedella’s dad.

  Bob Marley’s mother, Cedella Booker, atop Mount Wilson above Los Angeles on Mother’s Day, May 1988.

  CEDELLA BOOKER: My father played organ, guitar, a little violin. Everyone in the family played music. My cousin Marcenine, he make a little banjo guitar and they put the string on it. That would be Bob’s first instrument. And when he got bigger he would start holding guitar. Sometimes he hum along with me on songs like “Precious Lord Take My Hand.”

  ROGER STEFFENS: At the age of three, Bob began to evince intuitive powers of surprising accuracy.

  CEDELLA BOOKER: I remember when a woman we called Aunt Zen used to love to play with Bob as a little boy. So she came to the shop where I worked and he start to read her hand and tell her some things. And she said, “Everything that the child tell me is right.”

  Another man, Solomon Black, a district constable, he came to the shop and stopped by and as a little boy, Bob take his hand and start to look at it, start to tell him some things. And whatever he told him, the man say, “You might be taking it for a joke, but everything the child tell me is right.”

  Bob knew he wasn’t going to be here for long, so he have to do what he have to do. I have this friend, Ibis Pitts. He was Bob’s first friend that he made in Delaware in 1966. Ibis said that one day he and his friend Dion Wilson went over to the park where I used to live and Bob climbed into a tree and that Bob said, “When I am thirty-six I am going to die.” This was in 1969.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Cedella Booker, affectionately known as Mother B, has visited my Reggae Archives several times over the years. Many of our conversations went unrecorded, although I made notes of each one afterward. In one she recalled Norval showing up at Nine Mile when Bob was five, asking that she allow Bob to come with him to Kingston so he could educate him and give him a shot at a better life. Cedella agreed, but when Norval and Bob arrived in Kingston—one of the only times they were together—instead of taking him home and enrolling him in school, Norval sent him to live with an elderly woman friend of his named Miss Gray. During the next couple of years Bob was essentially an abandoned child on the streets of Kingston. Cedella would write Norval and ask when she could visit, but he discouraged her every attempt and told her the boy was in a boarding school in St. Thomas. Eventually someone from Nine Mile recognized Bob on a Kingston street and told Cedella where he was and she came and got him.

  CEDELLA BOOKER: Bob was about five when he went to Kingston, not quite two years when he came back, and Mrs. Simpson asked him to read her hand and he said, “No I’m not reading no more hand, I’m singing now.”

  ROGER STEFFENS: Neville O’Reilly Livingston, later to be known as Bunny Wailer, cofounded the Wailers. He first met Bob when they were both youngsters.

  BUNNY WAILER: I was about nine [in 1957] when my father took me up to live in Nine Mile, where I first met Bob. We moved, migrated. My father bought some land there, about twenty-five acres, built a house, built a shop. We stayed there about nine, ten months. I didn’t live there too long though. The place was too cold. Very cold area. I wasn’t prepared for that kind of cold. I used to get cramps in my stomach, so they had to ship me back to the city. And then, a short time after that, Bob came to the city to live with his mother.

  ROGER STEFFENS: As a youngster, Bob would explore the area around Nine Mile, and sometimes went places he was forbidden to go. During one of these excursions he cut open his right foot after stepping on a broken glass bottle. He was afraid to show the wound to his mother for fear of being punished. But it became infected and he was in great pain for months. Eventually his cousin Nathan made a plaster of warm orange pulp and a yellow powder called iodoform, and within a couple of weeks the wound completely healed. This was the first of numerous wounds to the foot in which his fatal cancer would eventually take hold.

  Bunny Wailer in Aspen, Colorado, September 1994.

  BUNNY WAILER: Bob was a wild child. He was like the ugly duckling. He had to find his own little brush to pick, and his own little cornmeal. Nobody wanted him around their corn, so he get what’s left. He just had to survive. His most serious endeavor was just to eat and drink. There were many nights of cold ground for his bed and rock stone for his pillow. Countless nights. Bob was not a child who get anything that he sought. He didn’t get what any other child got.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Bob’s earliest years were filled with neglect and rejection by both races. Whites thought of him as a black child; blacks, critical of mixed-race children, taunted him as “the little yellow boy.” Even his revered great-grandmother, known as Ya Ya, referred to him as “the German boy.” Racism was rampant in those days, and the light-skinned leaders of the country were deeply influenced by four hundred years of British colonial rule. For Bob, his color seemed to be an impediment wherever he turned, causing him to turn inward, a solitary soul relying on his own inner strengths. Even more significantly, the
rejection by his father weighed heavily on him throughout his life.

  His early sojourn in the city of Kingston, where he went weeks without a proper meal, steeled him for his return there when his mother left Nine Mile to join Bunny’s father in 1957. Kingston would force the young Marley outward into a world of crowded slums and stimulating companions, in a nation on the brink of overthrowing the yoke of imperialism.

  CHAPTER 2

  Trench Town Rocks