So we go in, record the tracks, leave with the tapes, went away and pressed about a thousand copies of blank white-label seven-inch singles. “Freedom Time” was our cry of liberation from Coxson. The other side, though, became the hit. “Row fisherman row, you reap what you sow.” So now we could be reaping the rewards for our own work. And even then Coxson took a cut of “Bend Down Low” and released it himself, though he didn’t have the rights to it. We spent our own money and paid Coxson studio time and whatever it took to record that tune on our own label, and he put it out as his own. So it’s a whole heap of tricks Coxson go on with. He’s the father of the vampires.
“Bend Down Low” sold something like fifty thousand copies. It was number one in about two, three weeks. Initially the blanks would sell for twenty-one shillings, then we would drop it down to twelve-and-six and eventually to seven-and-six. When we recorded for Coxson, all we got was nine pounds a record, no matter what it sold. Now we were getting 100 percent. Coxson charged twenty-one shillings for a pre-released twelve-inch, and the musicians we being paid ten shillings a side total. Imagine how the musicians felt when they got ten shillings a side, and a single copy of that tune would sell for twenty-one shillings to the public. It fucked them up, like it fucked up Don Drummond. He used to sit down and think and his head couldn’t take that kind of treatment, it just spun. [In 1966 the British pound was worth $2.80, so Don Drummond was being paid less than a dollar and a half per song.]
ROGER STEFFENS: It wasn’t only money that was causing strife for the newly returned Marley. Conflicts continued to fester within the group and domestically as well. By 1966, even before Selassie’s arrival, Beverley Kelso had left the group and become increasingly concerned about Bob’s actions toward Rita.
BEVERLEY KELSO: After Bob and Rita get married, Bob didn’t leave for a while. Before he leave for America, he build that record shop right in Rita’s yard. Right in front of Rita’s house, they build a little board record shop. 18A Greenwich Park Road, Kingston 5. And that record store was selling and doing a good little business. I did not used to go there regularly because I didn’t like what I was seeing after the record shop in term of how Bob started, the lifestyle of how they start to live now.
SEGREE WESLEY: I know in the beginning Bob would rough her up. ’Cause there’s one trait in him, he’s a very stern person. If he say red he means red. That’s the way he operates. If you say something that’s what he’s gonna do. He’s not violent, but if you say something he says, “What do you mean?” It’s like seeing the ball, you see he’s going after that ball and he don’t care what’s up, he’s gonna go get it. He was a real aggressive player.
BEVERLEY KELSO: And then when Bob married to Rita and he more getting more family [i.e. more kids], Bob starts straying. Other woman coming in, other woman seeing Bob now. They moved the shop from Greenwich Park Road to Orange Street. Then Beeston Street. But when the shop was on Orange Street it was like, Bob start to get popular, the group getting more popular. Woman coming around now, different, different woman. Precious was going with Bunny as I said. Then Bunny coming down back in Trench Town get involved with this other girl from First Street, her name was Dulcie. Her sister used to go by the shop also with Dulcie and Bob get her sister pregnant. Her sister name was Pat. Robert Marley Jr.—that would be his second child. So, in between that, I didn’t like the whole setup because his [Robbie’s] mother and his mother’s sister was my friend. I was pissed over the whole situation to see that he didn’t want Rita. He used to treat Rita so bad. I feel like she didn’t deserve that treatment.
ROGER STEFFENS: A violent encounter would bring an end to Beverley’s friendship with Rita and her final break from the group.
BEVERLEY KELSO: One evening me and Rita were walking in the area. Pat saw us coming down the street and she come down the stairs to fight Rita. Rita didn’t know her. Rita didn’t know anything. And I get involved. I almost lose my eye because the girl push her finger right into my eye. Bob hear about it and he didn’t talk to me after it because I almost kill her. With a belly she could push her finger in my eye and I grab a stone and her family, her brother and everybody was there, they didn’t say anything. So, because of that now I didn’t go back up there. I just stayed and pull away from the group. I leave the group because of she, the advantage that I see Bob was taking of her.
ROGER STEFFENS: Beverley left Jamaica before long, after learning that Rita was seeking to end her marriage to Bob.
BEVERLEY KELSO: The last time I saw Rita before I come to the States she was about to divorce Bob. I had a lawyer friend, Mr. Churchill Neita, and she wanted a divorce, right? So, I tell her that Mr. Neita wasn’t a divorce lawyer, he was a criminal lawyer, but it’s my friend so I could take her to him and probably he would get a lawyer for her. On our way to Mr. Neita that Saturday morning I turned to her and I said, “You know something Rita? You better not divorce Bob now because suppose anything should happen to him? You have the children and what you gonna get?” And Rita turned to me that Saturday morning, I never will forget, right at the corner of Orange Street and Spanish Town Road, she turned to me and she started to curse me out. And I just walked away from her and then she come back to me and she said, “No, no Beverley, don’t.” And she said, “All right.” I said, “I’m going home.” I said, “I’m not taking you to Mr. Neita anymore. I am going home, so go wherever you wanna go.” So she turned up Orange Street and said she going by the record shop. This is in the sixties.
ALLAN “SKILL” COLE: What happened in that period, I think it was frustration. Because even some people thought that Bob Marley was getting mad one time in that era. You had some people said, “Bwoi, look like him a get mad,” but it wasn’t that, it was just the pressure. And they were looking at his features, and he’s a man with a feature if, when things are not right you can just see it in his features. In those days he had a permanent, what they call “screw” on his face. Permanent, permanent screw on his face, even more than ever in those days, because things was rough. The screw came off a little bit after a while, that face that people was afraid of in the early days. Because I remember once when we just started touring we came to New York one day and these guys who knew him from Boys Town school, we used to play ball with them in Boys Town, they were like in America for about two years, and when I see them they wanted to go look for Bob and when they got in touch with me in my room I call him, and tell him we coming down. When they went in the room and saw Bob face they come back and say, “Oh my God man I can’t take the face, I don’t understand what happened.” So I said, “Is the same man, no problem, him is a little bit tight up because a gig” and things like that. They said bwoi, they couldn’t take Bob’s face because of his features. But as I said, that type of feature that he had early on, that screw came down a little bit after that. It was more relaxed. It was nothing that he was making up, you know, it was just the pressure. It was nothing like you think a man was acting, nothing like that. It was just Bob. It was just a man who was looking at the earth and looking at what was happening and he saw things and when things didn’t please him, sometimes he’d keep it inside and he’d show it outside.
ROGER STEFFENS: Finally, the pressure became so great that Marley abandoned the chaos of Kingston and returned to Nine Mile. He brought Rita, Bunny, Vision and Peter to help him farm and try to break through what was now a full-scale writer’s block. It was a radical retreat for the always engaged Wailers.
SEGREE WESLEY: It was frustration. Bob went back to the country, he went back to do farming. I think he was frustrated, singing all these songs, doing what he was doing which was very good, all his production was first-class. And he was making no money! He had little kids just born, those days it was tough.
ROGER STEFFENS: It was almost biblical, this figurative exodus into the wilderness, mounting the favorite donkey of his youth on which he was sometimes seen to ride backward, He would experience terrible injury, find a new focus for his art and return with renewed
confidence.
SEGREE WESLEY: Being a man from the woods, man went back to the country start doing some planting. But he used to come through Trench Town sometime. The thing was in him, he had to come back to the city and get back into the music business. Because the music was in him and it had to come out. It’s like Jonah went into the belly of the whale! He had to come back.
CHAPTER 8
Nine Mile Exile
V
ISION WALKER: It wasn’t long after Bob returned that we went up to Nine Mile. Bob wanted to go back to nature. Find himself. Plant food, dig up yams that had been planted from his father’s days. I was there, Bob, Rita; Bunny was back and forth. We never used to stay in just one place; we used to stay, then leave and go back to town. But that’s where he did plan to go for a certain time to get his head together. And there was still music. In the nights up at the same hut where he was born, that’s where we used to do most of the rehearsals. But it would be cold at night! Chilly up there, the fog and the clouds would be passing at your doorstep. Bob wrote “Sun Is Shining” there and later in Delaware Bob wrote “Misty Morning.” We were playing “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles and that’s what gave him the inspiration to write that song. “Misty Morning” too, but we lost that tape! I wish I could find that.
SEGREE WESLEY: I remember what Bob’s words were. He says, “Segree, when we go up to these places, like, in the country, it’s quiet; we can concentrate. And you know, we’re able to do a lot more than we can do down here.” But he used to come back into the city, occasionally he would visit, but he says up there you ride your donkey and you do this and it’s closer to nature. He didn’t say he was away from the maddening crowd but that was what he meant.
BUNNY WAILER: There was a period where the Wailers dropped out. Bob was having a problem writing songs. So we decided to leave for Nine Mile, where Bob came from and where I had lived for a while with my father. It was just after we recorded “Nice Time” [ca. June 1967], and was brought on by many things. We got frustrated with Planno because of his whole heap of whorehouse things. That cat started to carry us Friday nights downtown to the dancehalls. And we had stopped that kind of life. And we studied and accepted the Nazarene’s vow that you should not cut your hair or drink any alcohol. Also, because we were from Trench Town and connected to musicians like the Skatalites, we were forced out of the limelight. And that was good for the Wailers. That gave us time to go and be strong writers and strong singers.
ROGER STEFFENS: Even as the Jamaican music business was becoming a firmly entrenched part of the island’s economy, those who made the most popular music were often from the most impoverished communities. Great as they were, the members of the Skatalites were considered second-class citizens, as were the perceived rude-boy Wailers.
Nine Mile was a chance for them to regroup and think about what they really wanted to achieve and how to go about it. Tensions were always just under the surface among the trio. Though Bob was raised for some time in Bunny’s father’s home, he was never treated as an equal. This complicated their brotherly relationship.
BUNNY WAILER: All of the Wailers went—me and my girlfriend at the time, sister Jean Watt, Rita, Vision, Bob, Peter. And when we went, the people in the country really loved us, people that we have been used to, people we grew up with at the age of nine and eleven. So everybody was happy and joyful. The people really welcomed us, saying that because we were coming to farm, it made them feel even better, feel important. The Wailers came to farm, showing them what they were doing is good to be doing.
Bob’s grandfather had this piece of land called Smiff [Smith], but we just called it Smit’ or Simit. We used to say, “We a go a Simit, go farm.” It was a beautiful piece of land between two mountains, along a short valley road. Sweet piece of land, not a slope, no way water can damage anything [i.e., flooding couldn’t wipe out a crop]. We planted yams, cocoa, beans, corn, cabbage, chocho, some pumpkin—everything. The place was about three and a half miles walking from where we lived, seven miles round trip each day.
We had this donkey that was Bob’s favorite when he was growing up, a long-living animal named Nimble. So when we went to farm, we had him ride with us. He carried all our heavy stuff in two hampers, our material, flour, whatever. Well, there was one evening now when the period of work was peak. We were cleaning the field with a hoe. We sharpened the hoe so finely that when we weed the bush, the spot was so clean that you could almost eat on the spot. Bob had sharpened the hoe, and must have left it turned up. The blade of the hoe is supposed to be turned down when it’s sharp. Well, he put it back on the ground with the hoe facing up, and accidentally stepped back, forgetting that he left the hoe cocked up, and he cut his right foot bottom in half, from one side of the foot to the next side, right up till it was all white, maybe about half an inch up, opening the whole foot bottom.
He fell and we grabbed him, and tried to look after him. Everybody almost fainted, and Rita started hollering all kinds of things. It was like, what are we going to do? And all Bob did was just say, “Cool,” and just scrape away at the dirt. Scrape the dirt, scrape the dirt, scraping away all the topsoil until there was that pure earth. And he scraped up some of that and just opened the foot, threw the dirt in and locked it up—tore off part of his shirt, and tied it up. And Bob worked on that foot every day until it got better. That’s the kind of person, that’s the kind of leader Bob Marley is. He would never weaken us by wanting us to sympathize with the position that he was in. But we let Nimble carry him, so he didn’t have to walk while he was healing. It took about a month.
Peter didn’t last too long with us at all. He never wanted to be in the country doing any farming, and after about a week he got town-sick. He told us, “Bwoi, me can’t live this life. All dem peenie wallies [fireflies] and t’ings. Cho, me can’t deal with it.”
Finally Bob began to write songs again. He started to pick up again, the vibes came back again, because something really serious was happening to him at the time. And even when he started to write, you could still hear it in the songs he wrote there, like “Trouble On The Road Again.” When we weren’t working we were rehearsing. Many of our songs were born there: “Burial,” “Wisdom,” “Comma Comma.” It was just pure harmony. We used to rehearse at the house on top of the hill that was Bob’s first home. Neville Willoughby came up from Kingston and filmed Bob singing some songs with the big guitar we called Betsy, and riding Nimble over the hills.
ROGER STEFFENS: Neville Willoughby was one of the grand old men of Jamaican broadcasting. A graduate of Kingston College and the University of Toronto, he first worked for RJR and then for the Jamaican Broadcasting Company on radio and in the earliest stages of its TV operations. He would witness Marley’s auspicious meeting with American soul-pop star Johnny Nash at a Kingston Rasta gathering known as a grounation, be an emcee at the historic 1978 One Love Peace Concert, and would go on to conduct two of the most famous interviews with Bob Marley, in 1973 and 1979.
NEVILLE WILLOUGHBY: Around 1967, ’68, l was actually doing both radio and TV. It was the early days of television in Jamaica. I had a TV program and I was working at JBC radio, we jump from the TV to the radio for just about anything. On television one of my first shows was See’t Yah, see it here. It was a talk–music program.
What really first caught my attention to Bob Marley was “Nice Time.” It was so sweet. I loved that record so much and I used to play it a lot. And then one day I was in one of the studios at JBC and in walks this man. I was in the control room, so he went through the door, he went down the passage, and then when you saw him going inside—for some reason there was something about him that I found quite fascinating, something about him in the way he walked. He had a full khaki outfit and desert boots, I remember that distinctly. And he had a guitar in his hand. He was growing locks. This is the first time seeing this guy personally. I actually got up and went outside and asked the telephone operator, “Who’s that man that went into the studio?” He’s no
body in fancy clothes or anything, and he has the guitar case, almost battered one would say. But he walked like he was somebody, regally, that’s the way to put it, I think. And so I asked, “Who is that man?” And she said, “Bob Marley.” Say, “You mean the one who sings ‘Nice Time’?” And from that moment I decided hey, I’m going to try to talk to this man. Oh, it took a little while! Because he didn’t want to talk to anybody. The airplay did interest him, but the talking to him had to be approved by two people: either Rita, his wife, or Mortimo Planno. They had to say that the person gonna talk to him was all right and didn’t want to do something. For apparently he had some bad experiences with producers, interviewers, or whatever. I have no idea if anybody’d interviewed him before. In retrospect maybe it was because he was a shy person, I think.
Veteran Jamaican broadcaster Neville Willoughby at his home in the hills above Kingston, January 2003.
But all I know is when I decided to go and try to interview him and I went to Trench Town (I found out where he lived), Rita opened the gate, and she was smiling, was very nice. You know, she is a very pleasant person, and I told her I wanted to speak with Bob, who I could see sitting down with Planno inside. I don’t remember whose yard it was, but I remember he was sitting inside on a bench with Planno. And I said I would love to do an interview, and she said she was going to have to check with Bob, and eventually she said to come back another day and check whether he said it was all right, because she said she’d tell him that I’m an all-right person. I’m OK, you know! I think I’d met her once in the studio down at Federal, and so when I went back the next time she said, “OK, he’ll talk with you.” I said, “OK!” So actually what I decided to do was do a television interview with him on the same program, See’t Yah. And I decided what we’d do is go to the country and make a film, a little short film: [in portentous voice]
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Page 10
