I left Westmoreland at fifteen to learn. Music was playing me from such time. I was born in music, from ever since I could talk and exchange verbal thoughts I could sing. The first instrument I ever played was a guitar. I made it out of a piece of board, sardine can, and some plastic line, the plastic you use for fishing. Get good sound too. When I left for Kingston all I took was my little grip, and some food to eat on the way, and meself, and Jah in my heart.
Wailers co-founder Peter Tosh at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, Hollywood, wearing a crown with all the words to “Legalize It” on it, made for him by Mary Steffens, September 1979.
JOE HIGGS: Peter came from the country when we were living in Trench Town. He had some family that were cabinetmakers and they used to sell syrup, that’s how I first saw him. He used to sleep in the cabinet shop sometimes. But he was introduced to me by Bob Marley.
BUNNY WAILER: Peter was a revolutionary, Peter was a man arrogant, outspoken, no really worry about if him head a go cut off if him make certain statements. He wasn’t an actor. Everything that he stood for from the early stage, he was really serious about. He was very conscious of Africa from an early stage.
Peter make you laugh for a million different reasons. Peter loves to touch girls [pinching and squeezing them]. You know that’s a serious kind of joke still. You see Peter touch a girl going down the road with her husband and gazes in her eyes in a split second that she almost broke her toe, because this tall, dark and handsome man touches her and gazes, that she almost slips.
ROGER STEFFENS: His habit brought him the nickname Peter Touch, a name that even appeared as a credit on several of his recordings.
BUNNY WAILER: Peter just love to fool around. And we just laugh pure laugh. Anytime Peter come, there is something fe laugh about, ’cause him always have a story to tell you ’bout something what just happen weh him see happen, or something he just hear. He always have a drama. Always! A laugh, a laugh, a pure laugh!
SEGREE WESLEY: I know Peter when he used to come from West Road. Peter was always the type who always portray a sort of rough image. We always used to say, “Peter, you’re resolute.” Peter’s not the type to listen to reasoning. He’ll tell you whatever he wants to tell you but he ain’t listening to what you have to say. Which was the opposite of Bob. If you say something to Bob he’ll listen and he’ll talk back to you and you’ll converse with him for hours. But Peter is not one like that with the kind of patience, you know? As a matter of fact, one day I look at him, I says, “I think Bunny is more Rastaman than all of you guys.”
ROGER STEFFENS: By early 1964, Bunny, Bob and Peter would join with Junior Braithwaite and a pair of female singers to form the nucleus of a group that would change Jamaican music and bring the Wailers and reggae to worldwide attention.
CHAPTER 3
The Wailers at Studio One
R
OGER STEFFENS: After the failure of Marley’s two solo singles on Leslie Kong’s Beverley’s label, Joe Higgs helped shape the group of eager but raw vocalists into a quintet ready to enter the ranks of professional recording artists. Together they were drawn to Kong’s biggest rival, Studio One, owned by producer and sound system proprietor Clement “Coxson” Dodd.
At the time, June 1964, Coxson was one of the most powerful dons of the music business. Though his reputation was mixed, with some artists questioning his fairness, he was respected as a consistent hitmaker. His studio band was the Skatalites, the inventors of ska, and they would play behind the Wailers from their very first session onward, an incredible break for these inexperienced teenagers. Their first release, “Simmer Down,” skyrocketed to number one and a reported eighty thousand sales, marking the group’s initial flowering as professional musicians. But despite recording scores of songs over the next two years, they would end up parting with the producer in frustration over a lack of proper recompense for their efforts.
Dodd’s name is often spelled “Coxsone,” but I have used “Coxson” in this book. In his studio on Brentford Road in Kingston in 2003, he explained the difference to me.
COXSON DODD: Well, when it’s me, it’s Coxson. When it’s the label or the sound system, it’s Coxsone.
ROGER STEFFENS: He then proceeded to autograph an early Wailers seven-inch record “Coxsone Dodd.”
COXSON DODD: Somebody gave me that name. There was a cricket side in England, it was popular. One of its stars was a man called Coxson. So they just label me that way, like making some wonderful catches.
ROGER STEFFENS: In 1983 I visited Coxson’s mother, Mrs. Darlington, at her shop in Spanish Town, just west of Kingston. She recalled her son working in the fields of Florida in the early fifties picking crops, and buying records for her to play on one of Jamaica’s first sound systems. At the time Mrs. Darlington was the girlfriend of another early Jamaican producer, Duke Reid, who had already begun to supply records to her. It was extremely rare to find a woman behind the turntables at that time, so she is considered a groundbreaker. As the fifties drew to a close, Coxson also began to produce records by local artists for use at his dances. Mrs. Darlington had fond memories of those pioneering days, referring to her son respectfully as “Mr. Dodd.”
MRS. DARLINGTON: Mr. Dodd play the radio in the night until three o’clock in the morning, listening to various singers. His favorite was Billy Eckstine. When he start the company, he generally travel and I was in charge of the whole operation, supervising the studio and the factory and the office. At times even a talent scout.
Bob Marley started in the early sixties and he was a young chap at that time, sixteen, seventeen, and he came to the studio and Mr. Dodd interview him. He found that his sound was okay and he started to record him. And he brought his wife in. And they got Marley right in there. Mr. Dodd marry the both of them.
COXSON DODD: My mother has been of great help to me. She was the first person to operate my sound system. A woman DJ! When I worked in the States in the early fifties, I used to send a lot of records to Jamaica, and that’s how my mother started operating the sound, called Coxson’s Downbeat. I had a Bogen amplifier, about 35 watts. Had some English-made speaker, Celestion twelve-inch. They could take a lot of beating and things like that. Along with some University horns to carry the sounds. My mother, Mrs. Darlington, would spin the records.
ROGER STEFFENS: Jamaican radio in the fifties was limited to a kind of cable radio system called RJR Rediffusion, or more properly Radio Jamaica and Rediffusion Network, which played mostly foreign music. Local tunes in a nascent recording industry were limited to cover songs and calypsos, music identified with Trinidad, which originated the form. It was left to mobile discos known as sound systems to give exposure to ambitious young Jamaican creators.
JOE HIGGS: Before Bob Marley, the sound systems kings of those days were Count Nick the Champ, Tom the Great Sebastian, Roderick’s, Dean’s, Sky Rocket and V-Rocket. All of these were before Duke Reid and Coxson.
ROGER STEFFENS: Sound system “clashes” were held between competing systems. The ones with the better records drew the bigger crowds. They often battled sonically at different ends of a field, as the crowd drifted between them searching for the hottest shots of the moment. The bigger the crowd, the more drinks you could sell and the more money you could make. Sometimes, particularly in the early sixties, the clashes would end up in violence, as thugs associated with one or another of the entrepreneurs would “mash up” (destroy) their opponent’s equipment or terrorize their audiences.
JOE HIGGS: The first “Eleven Sound” contest that Reid and Coxson entered into, Duke was third, and Coxson fourth, to Nick the Champ first, and Tom the Great Sebastian second. The contest was at Charles Street and Spanish Town Road. It’s a yard on a corner with a fence around it.
When I was about fifteen, Coxson, we used to call him Downbeat, had a little sound and he always come to a family whose name was Tucker: Harold, Keithy, Leslie, Eddie, Gladstone, Desmond, all these are brothers, and the most famous one, Jimmy. Coxson used to come
by and serenade, play in that yard, gospel music like “Be There When I Come.” You could stand outside and listen, but almost all of the sounds had their speakers in a tree up in the air or on a light post, big speaker horn, sound draw people. I could hear Coxson from miles away, you follow the sound. Duke Reid had a better sound, but Coxson had better selections. During that time, Bob, Seeco Patterson and me used to hang together most of the time, from Trench Town to Back O’ Wall and different ghettos.
ROGER STEFFENS: Working under the stern tutoring of Higgs, the early nucleus of the Wailers included Junior Braithwaite, Cherry Green, Bunny Livingston, Peter Tosh and Bob Marley, with several others from the neighborhood sitting in at various times.
JOE HIGGS: Junior did have the best voice in the group, I’m positive. Definitely. Bob had no voice. In those days, Junior was withdrawn. He stuttered, but he had a very nice voice. He was a very good singer, there from the start of the group’s training. He had a voice like Frankie Lymon, appealing. “It Was Your Love,” “It Hurts To Be Alone,” were his leads. That [latter] one had Ernest Ranglin on lead guitar and it was one of the Wailers’ biggest songs. Junior was related to my partner, Roy Wilson, cousins perhaps. Junior’s father was a politician, Zebedee Braithwaite, who supported the elder Manley.
ROGER STEFFENS: Junior’s parents migrated to the U.S., so he left with them shortly after the group began recording for the Studio One label in 1964. I spoke with him in Chicago in 1985, one of the only interviews he ever granted.
JUNIOR BRAITHWAITE: I was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on April 4, 1949, on Third Street and West Road. That is in the heart of the ghetto. People now know it as Rema, the Jungle. I was living on Third Street and Bob Marley was living on Second Street. Joe Higgs was also on Third Street. My grandmother raised a youth named Roy Wilson, we were like brothers. Roy Wilson and Joe Higgs were the number one best harmonizing group in Jamaica at that time, and they used to rehearse in the back of our yard. So we as kids hang out around them, ’cause we had something in common, because we loved singing. Singing was a natural gift, I know that I was ordained to be a musician.
Bob, Bunny, Peter and myself, along with a sister, Beverley Kelso, as an early Wailer. The five people in the original Wailers are really Bunny, Bob, Peter, Beverley and myself. And the Wailers was like just a singing group, a harmonizing group. We had nothing to do with instruments. So the commercial Wailers that you had touring later with Bob was like a group of musicians that he needed to back him up and he called the Wailers. But they aren’t the original Wailers.
We grew up in roots and culture, we was born in it, and we as a people then were closely knitted in a social atmosphere. To do anything, whatever projects at any time that we would undertake, would be easy, because it was just a vibe of oneness. We weren’t so clinging to material things, we were like, everything seemed so easily done, so natural to us, in that spiritually we were at our highest level, and we could so easily do anything.
ROGER STEFFENS: In addition to Junior there were two women who sang with the Wailers in their early stages of recording. I tried for over twenty years to get Cherry Green (real name Ermine Bramwell) and Beverley Kelso to speak on the record with me. Although the material on which they appear has never been out of print since the mid-sixties, they never made a penny for their work and were angry because of that. Finally, in May 2003, my friends the Midnight Ravers, broadcasters on WBAI in New York City, arranged for Cherry to fly up from her home in Florida, and for Beverley to come in from her home in the Bronx, to speak with me privately and, in Cherry’s case, live on the air.
CHERRY GREEN: I was born in Upper Trench Town, August 22, 1943. Ermine Bramwell was my original name, my father’s name. My father was a dentist who died in the late fifties. Cherry was just my little nickname ’cause my skin was red, so they called me Cherry. I guess my mother called me that. My brother’s last name is Green. I guess the boys know that, so that’s why they call me Cherry Green. I went to Trench Town School. And I went to a private school, too. My father lived in Jones Town off Oxford Street, we lived there, he do his work there. So after he died we moved down to Trench Town. My mother get one of the rooms and we lived there. We was poor but we was happy. I mean, never dirt poor that we couldn’t go to eat, you know? We always have something to eat and always have something clean to wear. We had bicycle. My father used to take me to school in his car or on his motorcycle. He had two motorcycle when he die and a car.
Early Wailer Cherry Green, a.k.a. Ermine Bramwell, on the Midnight Ravers radio program, WBAI-FM, New York City, May 2003.
We used to have a big radio, you played a record on top. So every Saturday evening when Duke Reid come over the radio, I would turn that up so the neighborhood could hear. He play all the hit songs.
I used to be in school play and we always sing. I always try to stay on the back burner, kinda shy. But I be doing something and I be singing, just like when I sing with the Wailers. I used to listen to Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington and those kind of big band people. Joe Higgs was the one who discover me. He used to sing. And we used to listen to him and he would tell us little things.
One day I was washing clothes and [I was singing] an American song, I can’t tell you what it was. But my voice was way up there and he stopped immediately. He said, “Cherry, that’s you?” So I said yeah. So then I guess when Bob need somebody, when Braithwaite left, they get me.
Trench Town, you know, we had nice people live there, but people just sometimes drift away. They migrate to England or to the U.S. We had good people from out of that little area. They make it look so bad now, when I see the houses. It wasn’t like that when we was growing up. It wasn’t like that at all. Most people come from the country. They don’t have running water, they don’t have electric light. There you come, you have nice bathroom, toilet, kitchen. And we keep it clean ’cause, I tell my boss, in my country as poor as we are, people have one room and when you look underneath the bed you can see your face. It’s clean.
The Wailers always rehearse and we were always there. You know, sit around with them rehearsing and we would try to butt in and try to sing. Sometime you go up too high and Joe Higgs would say—he was like a teacher. He tell us what to do to bring the notes out and that kind of thing, technique. He was like that ’cause he know all of that. We just sing, you know. Joe was a boasty kind of guy, ’cause he always dress nice. See, Joe went to Mico Teachers College, so I guess he probably learned all of that from there, you know?
When Bob first come, we used to call him “little white boy” ’cause his hair was curly. He was teenager. Him and Bunny, they used to dress nice in the Fifth Avenue shoes and nice shirt. Bunny, Bob and Peter, when they started, they started down Third Street and West Road. They used to sit on the sidewalk and sing by the branch yard run by the JLP [the right wing Jamaica Labour Party] where they have meetings. So they just sit down there, singing with Cardo and the boys. But, like, we was girls, I mean, we pass and hear them singing, but when they start coming in the yard that’s when we would go, and then Peter come with his guitar.
My earliest memory of Bob, the little girls—like before Rita—come and used to like him. ’Cause he used to come over by me, so then Rita get to come over by me so she could see him. We didn’t call him Bob. We called him Lester [a variation of his birth name Nesta]. That’s what we know him as. Nice boy, he was funny, cracking jokes, teasing. Oh, yes. He used to be shy, though. You know, kinda shy. But I don’t remember Bob being picked on.
ROGER STEFFENS: By now, all the supporting cast was in place. Under the direction of Coxson Dodd, they would have their first release, beginning a steady string of hits, joining the ranks of the most important vocal groups on the island.
One of the biggest puzzles over the years has been to ascertain the circumstances of the first Wailers recording. Most observers credit “Simmer Down” as the first recording and release, but there is wide disagreement among its participants as to the exact details. Perc
ussionist Alvin “Seeco” Patterson, who was close to Bob throughout his life, from his early Trench Town days forward, spoke to me in the summer of 2012 and was precise in his recounting of the momentous day. In his telling the Wailers went to Coxson Dodd for a Sunday afternoon audition, sent there at his urging.
ALVIN “SEECO” PATTERSON: The Wailers come back to me from audition and tell me say, Mr. Dodd turn them down. So me take them back there right away and ask the man, “Why you turn away them, mon?” Him say him couldn’t hear nothin’. So me say, “Simmer Down.” And Mr. Dodd get a smile on him face and say, “I like that. Play that.” And when him hear it he sent me to find Roland Alphonso, the saxophone player. And when we come back, him take us right into the studio and we record the song that night. Next day, dem play it on soft wax on a sound system in Jones Town.
Percussionist Seeco Patterson at Sunsplash ’81, the annual reggae festival which that year celebrated the life of Bob Marley, Montego Bay, August 1981.
ROGER STEFFENS: In a prior interview backstage at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles in 1991, Seeco gave a longer version.
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Page 4
