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

by Roger Steffens

  R

  OGER STEFFENS: Once established in Kingston, Bob’s mother entered into an on-again, off-again relationship with Bunny’s father, Thaddeus “Toddy” Livingston. Their affair produced a daughter named Pearl, sister to Bunny and Bob, born in 1964.

  The music swirling in Bob’s head was developed with the help of neighbors in Trench Town, a crowded enclave near the edge of the port area, where so-called government yards [“yard” is a common Jamaica term for a house] had been erected to give poor people housing and running water.

  One of the first friends Bob made as a young teenager was a prize-winning singer named Segree Wesley. He and I met in the studios of WBAI in New York City in May 2003, where we spoke for several riveting hours about the early days of Bob’s training, and his own short career.

  SEGREE WESLEY: I was raised in Trench Town in the government yards. They had what were called L-shaped houses, which were one single room. But on every street there was six double-decker houses, what you called upstairs houses, more than one floor. So my parents and the whole family, we lived in one of those on 16 Row First Street, Trench Town.

  Bob Marley entered in my awareness in the early sixties, and when he came I know for a fact he was at Third Street, same street as Joe Higgs and the rest. That’s where I met him on Pipe’s [Winston “Pipe” Matthews of the Wailing Souls] side. I heard the guys crooning in the back ’cause in Trench Town everywhere you go there’s always a little group. Groups that made it and groups that didn’t make it. But I went over and I heard him singing. But they all knew me and knew who I was. And then after he was living on Second Street, which was behind the yard I was living on First.

  Marley’s childhood friend Segree Wesley in New York City, May 2003.

  And then I know when he was living with Bunny Wailer and Bunny’s father Toddy. And we were friends-–and he would say, Segree, come let’s go rehearse. So we’d go and rehearse in the kitchen. But even then my mom used to say, “Segree, I don’t want you hanging with those boys,” because of course they weren’t working people. They weren’t even going to school.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Trench Town was known as a ghetto and it was difficult for people from there to find jobs once potential employers discovered their address. Among the only ways that law-abiding people were able to escape were through sports or music, and the area was known as an incubator of great talents in both fields. One of the most important was Joe Higgs, among the earliest of Jamaica’s recording artists, who became Bob Marley’s most significant mentor. Higgs not only coached Bob; he was a musical teacher and guide to a host of other Jamaican artists, including superstars from the earliest days of ska and rocksteady, the predecessors of reggae. Today he is widely regarded as “the father of reggae.” For almost twenty years, before his passing in 1999, he lived in Los Angeles. I worked with him throughout the late nineties on his never-completed autobiography, from which his quotes in this book are taken.

  JOE HIGGS: I first encountered Bob Marley when he was on Second Street and I was on Third Street. Bob was known as a very light-skinned chap living in the ghetto. People called him the little red boy, and he would be beaten up by a lot of guys. This is when Bob and Bunny were living in Toddy’s house with Cedella.

  A guy by the name of Errol Williams, whose father was a man who had a scrap iron yard on Spanish Town Road and Bread Lane near Back O’ Wall, used to tell me he’d like me to teach Bob Marley to sing and play music. Errol was like Bob’s father and mother, he’d give him daily ten shillings or a pound. A half Indian guy, from a family of the owners of Queen’s Theatre, King’s Theatre and a Vineyard Town theatre. Errol was always a father figure to Bob, older.

  Errol was a very nice guy, wasn’t doing anything to get anything back. He liked us both. It was as a favor, no money changed hands. He called him Robbie. “I want you to help Robbie,” he said to me.

  We would meet early in the mornings, and whatever I did, soccer, go to the sea, he would be among us. I was always giving him insight into the music. How to use his breath control—talking a lot of times is part of the whole thing. Teach him craft, technique—like I taught a lot of people. When I started with Bob there was hardly any voice there.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Intriguingly, Joe Higgs says Bob Marley lived next to Delroy Wilson, a famous child star of the ska and rocksteady era.

  Neville Garrick, Marley’s art director, and Joe Higgs, the Wailers’ first teacher, Long Beach, California, February 1996.

  JOE HIGGS: When Bunny and Bob were growing up together, Bob was not treated as one of the family. He was like an outcast in the house. His mother today comes with this legacy, as if she were there. Bob was sent to learn welding, while Bunny was sent to school. Toddy didn’t put any money into Bob’s corner. The mother, Cedella, wouldn’t allow anybody to know he was her son. One day he was holding tightly to her, and she box him away. He slept beneath the bottom of the house.

  SEGREE WESLEY: In Joe Higgs’s yard, we used to go like in the evenings, you’d come from school. I remember it wasn’t actually where Joe Higgs lived. A lot of people say it’s where Joe lived, but Joe is from Third Street, [but the gatherings] used to be on Second Street. And there was a guy, Skipper Lako, we used to go on his little veranda. And that’s where we used to rehearse. Bob was really the least among the group but he had more love for it than I’ve seen anybody have love for singing. He had the time and he would get there and like, he would be the first one. He didn’t even know how to play guitar then ’cause the only guitarist in that little group that was formed (we didn’t even know the name of the group, they didn’t even name it yet), it was Peter. But Peter Tosh wasn’t there at the start. There was Bob and the girls. When you went there you’d hear other people singing with them. So I don’t know if other people want to proclaim and say they were part of the group. Cardo Scott was among them, Junior Braithwaite, Bunny and Bob. Every day together. Joe helped them. He used to mentor and like sort of tell them what to do and what not to do. Joe was helping him because Bob never really was a person who had any kind of excellent voice per se. Because even when the group became famous and started doing recordings, in my opinion Bob had the worst voice of all. I think Bunny had the best voice of all of them.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Ricardo Scott, also known as Ras Cardo, was raised in Trench Town in that early time. He has written not only that he was an original Wailers member but also that it was he who came up with the group’s name. He has also claimed publicly that he invented the word “reggae” in 1962 by combining the patois word for a woman of the street, “streggae,” with the Latin rex, regis, meaning “king,” so reggae was of the people but also of King Selassie I. It is questionable that this is true, particularly when one realizes how quickly new words are adopted in Jamaica, so a gap of six years or so between the creation of the word and its first use on the Maytals’ “Do the Reggay” in 1968 seems to put the lie to Ras Cardo’s claim.

  JOE HIGGS: I would not oppose Cardo’s belief that he was an early person around the Wailers. Today you have a set of kids, and tomorrow two or three more. But to say he was an original member of Wailers, I contest that statement very, very strongly—I don’t know of it. The lead singer was Junior Braithwaite (’cause it was not Bob Marley who was leading), but Bob was the one who really put the group together. ’Cause through me Bob did what he wanted to do, and I spearheaded his thought. I believe this group belonged to Bob Marley, not Cardo or anyone—not Errol the Indian guy who brought Bob to me. Cardo neither founded the group nor came up with the name. The Wailers came because I was teaching the kids, especially the boys, how to be accountable as individuals, while we maintain a musical basis. It’s not jazz they were learning, I was teaching them to wail. There were songs the Wailers did without Bob Marley. I have never heard that Cardo came up with the idea for the group to be called Wailers.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Many other people have claimed credit for the Wailers’ name, and suggested various titles for the group. Bunny’s memory of thei
r adoption of the name Wailers is quite mystical.

  BUNNY WAILER: That’s another mystery now. This is how it went. We always had in mind to call ourselves like maybe the Teenagers or Roosters. One specific day me can remember Joe Higgs cook a nice pot of cow cod soup [soup made with a bull’s penis] when we were rehearsing inna him kitchen there. And the spirit was high. We were closer to going into the studio now. Everybody say Wailers ready, ready, but we never have the name yet. So everybody did call names, you, you, and suggest names, and it’s like a man was there next door or in a bathroom or something, and we just hear a voice that say, “The Wailers.” And every man say: “The Wailers. The Wailers? The Wailers. The Wailers?” No one know which voice or which man say “The Wailers” ’cause him don’t show his face. Him just say “The Wailers” in a big, strong voice, say “The Wailers.” Everybody hear that and them start to say “The Wailers.” The Wailers. Everybody heard that. That sound good, weeping and wailing, ’cause we a weep, ’cause we are in Trench Town there and we a feel the pain. So, “the Wailers” fit. Do you think that a joke thing?! Think that the name Wailers a joke?! Look here, that what the name Wailers mean. Wailing means to suffer, to cry, to bawl, to you name it—and who go through the dark like the Wailers, who go through the sufferation. So the name Wailers wasn’t a name that was given to the Wailers by an individual who would come now and get credit—who is he that can say that? Who is he that can say he was responsible for giving the name—not even a Wailer. We hear a voice bawl out, “The Wailers.” Every man remember that. And we did our first session right after that—like about the next week.

  ROGER STEFFENS: To wail, in Jamaican terms, meant to cry out for justice, to beseech the Almighty and the powers that be for a better life. It was not just crying; it was imploring from the depth of your soul, stripped of all pretense and inhibition. As Joe Higgs says, “Everyone is capable of wailing, like a gospel concept.”

  One of those who recognized early on the potential power of the group was the movie-star handsome Allan “Skill” Cole, a soccer star in Jamaica who became Bob’s closest friend and sometime business associate. He was a frequent guest at the Trench Town home of a charismatic Rastafarian named Mortimo Planno, who kept a library of Black Power books and Rasta tracts in his house. Planno would become deeply involved in Marley’s career following his return from America in late 1966.

  ALLAN “SKILL” COLE: I first met Bob probably about twelve years of age over at Mortimo Planno’s house in 1962. In those days at that time I was going to Kingston College [a high school]. I had schoolmates that lived in that area, Trench Town. So we sometimes, like on a weekend, would pass through and look for them guys. Mortimo Planno was a very famous man in Trench Town, Rasta man, Rasta leader in the area. And we as youth seeking to know certain things pass through, so we get to know Planno.

  The Bob I knew and I met in the very early sixties was a very, very shy young man. He was the type of person that when you look at him you think you were seeing someone who was afraid of even speaking with people, very, very timid. He was so quiet, well reserved, but a very warm young man. Very, very artistic. Very creative.

  Allan “Skill” Cole, soccer star and Marley’s best friend, at the Reggae Archives, Los Angeles, November 1988.

  ROGER STEFFENS: The Wailers group began to coalesce through informal rehearsals in the early sixties.

  JOE HIGGS: I started to teach the Wailers to sing harmony, structuring, and all those different things, basic principles of singing, how to try to preserve as much energy as you can. And I had the Wailers on a certain level at that time, sometimes they would be doing good, but every now and again someone would make a slip in my presence.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Higgs believed they weren’t ready to record yet, but Bob felt the desire to sing so strongly that he auditioned as a solo artist for the Beverley’s label, owned by a sharply dressed, well-groomed producer named Leslie Kong. Bunny tells the story of the roundabout way Bob came to meet Kong.

  BUNNY WAILER: When he left school Bob began working at a big welding shop. He was learning a trade same time, welding, getting maybe fifteen shillings or a pound a week, depending on how Millard the boss felt. One time Bob had a flash when the spark flies from the welding iron, got him in the eye. And he cried day and night. And when he went into the sun, he had to wear glasses. Then he had to have a cap on his nose, to take even the glare of the sun off the glass, because his eyes would just run. A lot of pain, like gravel in your eye, when you squint it’s like gravel’s sticking you under the eyelid and down the ball. Both eyes! We treated it with an herb we call bissy [a popular panacean Jamaican herb that is rubbed on or preferably made into a tea]. But that event kind of made him want to stop working in the welding.

  Desmond Dekker [a preeminent rocksteady singer] had been working at the same welder’s place, and encouraged Bob into going into the studios. He introduced Bob to Beverley’s Leslie Kong. Dekker had recorded “Honor Your Mother And Your Father,” then Bob went in and cut “Judge Not,” his first record, with “Do You Still Love Me” on the B-side.

  I was there when “Terror” was cut, the second [unreleased] session. I was to have been on the session to do “Pass It On,” but I was late. Bob got twenty pounds, and he bought some good clothes.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Unfortunately “Judge Not” and its follow-up, “One Cup Of Coffee,” a cover of a country and western song by Claude Gray, failed to capture the public’s attention. “Pass It On” would not appear until more than a decade later.

  RAS MICHAEL: In 1963 when Bob do his first record, “Judge Not,” Bob was like a little youth in him own style. The vision within Bob was a fullness already. And it led to his most important works like “One Love” and “Them Belly Full.”

  ROGER STEFFENS: Ras Michael was another early supporter. Considered by many to be the most important Rastafarian musician in Jamaica, Ras Michael is the natural inheritor and defender of Rasta dogma, which suffuses the tradition of Nyabinghi music, a style first popularized by the foundational group Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari. He was a lifelong friend of the Wailers and played the penultimate set of 1978’s historic One Love Peace Concert, between Peter Tosh and Bob Marley. We spoke at the Reggae Archives in December 2011.

  RAS MICHAEL: Joe Higgs was the maestro of a lot of things, not just only Bob alone, but most man! Because Joe comes like he was a very stern teacher in nuff things. Many a time he say, “Man, you not hitting that note right.” He coached most of the trios. From you there and sing, him going to get involved in the perfection of certain things what will make you be elevated. Show you how to hit a note and all of that. Him not going to get paid for that.

  Me older than Bob is, yes, but not much years older than him. The whole of us grow in a certain place. Because Bob Marley’s mother and my mother were higglers. Higglers are people who sell in the market—Ewart Street, Princess Street.

  Bob was a loving spirit brother. When them come everybody just irie [joyful] in them own vibration, we had that communical spirit of love within our own self. Because I remember Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, Bob Wailer, Junior Braithwaite, the originals. Man and man were just like brothers. When we see each other, you see a man’s thirty-two teeth, ’cause is pure smiles, happiness. “Wha’ppen, mon, wha’ppen?” And Bob say, “Yeah, mon, everything all right.” We did have that love that money can’t buy. Priceless. We share things. Our togetherness was our richness. It never took money to make we rich. The togetherness alone bring that richness among we. Oxford Street and Salt Lane, Back O’ Wall, were like playgrounds.

  Singers Alton Ellis and Ras Michael, childhood friends of Bob Marley, in Los Angeles, June 1997.

  I remember one of the time, Bob did have a little record shop on Beeston Street near King Street corner, just a little teeny thing. We laugh, me and Peter and him sit down ’pon a step in front of the shop and record blast. Not even one record sell in them days! But we organized. It’s like we achieved the message at the ti
me that we want to see come out. And people step and snap their fingers, and we feel the vibes. So we’re happy for the things that the Almighty allow us to put to the people. Although at that time no great dividends. But we know we score a goal already. Because from the people start listen, them guy start react. Because it is the truth, it is the roots of the people, it is the heartbeat for the people.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Peter Tosh was one of the final additions to the group. Raised on the remote western end of the island in Westmoreland, he arrived in Kingston at the age of fifteen with great optimism about the musical path he wished his life would take. The Wailers were impressed because he had his own guitar, which none of them had as yet, and because of his militant attitude.

  PETER TOSH: I was born in the country, Westmoreland. I didn’t live with my mother, but I am my mother’s only child, and I didn’t grow with her, I was grown with my mother’s aunt, my grand-aunt, when I was three years old until I was fifteen. But she never had a lot of influence in my life. I was three years in size, but fifty years old in the mind, seen? Because I was born with a matured mind, and born with a concept of creativity, and any time there’s a controversy within me, it create an inner conflict, seen? And any time that inner conflict is created, something is wrong, so you must internally investigate it. I grew up with that mind. I was born, raised in righteousness, not to say that my parents was righteous, because they did not know what was righteousness. They were being led away to a shitstem [his word for “system”], or being deceived by deceivers, you see, because they wanted to know what was righteousness.