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

by Roger Steffens

  ROGER STEFFENS: On this tour, in support of his hit record, Nash was billed as “The King of Reggae.”

  DANNY SIMS: Johnny would do an hour and Bob would do forty-five, fifty minutes with Johnny Nash’s band. And in the beginning, nobody knew Bob, just a few Jamaican people knew his records from Coxson and his early records that were hits. Few of them would come and see Bob backstage.

  Bob in the very beginning got very little reaction. But as we toured Bob started getting as much reaction as Johnny. Then you could see the little bit of jealousy on Johnny’s part and a little bit of jealousy of Bob on Johnny, because Johnny’s record took off like an airplane.

  BUNNY WAILER: Johnny Nash was very nervous about the Wailers. He didn’t want the Wailers ever to be on the same stage as him. He could tolerate Bob coming to sing two tracks, which were his new stuff that they were trying to break Bob into that kind of a market. New guy you’re trying to introduce, opening for Johnny Nash, the King of Reggae. Bob played without us, singing “Reggae On Broadway” and “Oh Lord I Got To Get There.” He would just sing those two tracks, run off, steamed up the place!

  ROGER STEFFENS: Danny Sims downplays the rivalry.

  DANNY SIMS: I think Bob was content because he was our friend, he believed in us. And Johnny, he owned the company with me. Although all artists are jealous of other artists, especially if they start taking a little bit of the highlight. And we were the hottest tour on the road.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Bunny’s memory is more precise and upsetting.

  BUNNY WAILER: Finally [Johnny Nash] lightened up a little, said maybe he would give us a chance to be onstage. We went way up in the country part of England, a place called Becks Hill, where no black folks are. You walk the whole place and you see not one black face because all windows were opening because this was a bunch of niggas. And we were dread. And we had all red, gold and green, colors were bright. You could see us a mile away!

  That night they put a band on first, they played kind of Osibisa stuff, an African fusion band, little young group coming up with that kind of direction. They brought the house down. They came off, it was our turn next and we went on, because we were going to play the same instruments that the first guys played. When we went on we opened with this song called “Ringo,” an old Skatalites record. But when we started playing we found out that Family Man’s bass was out of tune—the people tuned out the bass. The fucking guitars were out of tune. People’s mouths were open, staring to wonder what the fuck was wrong. And we just say, “Okay, Family Man, you drop out. All the guitars drop out. Just let me and Carly alone hold riddim. Carly playing drums and I playing drums, bongos, percussions. Doing things! Getting the groove, playing things, improvising. Bob had his guitar backstage but they fucked up the strap. When he put it on it fell off. He had to play without his guitar that night. We did “Small Axe,” “Duppy Conqueror,” “Put It On,” “Rude Boy,” “Nice Time,” “Bend Down Low,” “Keep On Moving,” “Stir It Up.” And we had this track we used to do, “Slipping Into Darkness.” That was a foreign song that we did real good, we rehearsed it a lot. By now all the people were standing up dancing. There was a spirit in the place that was our first experience of feeling how the white folks reacted when they heard us. When we did “Keep On Moving” the people formed a line, they got up and put their hands on each other’s shoulders and they formed like a big snake going through this little theater. Everybody got up and joined the line—old, young, everybody! The line went right through the theater, right through the seats, round the theater like a goddamn snake. Big snake! We were doing “Keep On Moving,” we sang for maybe twenty minutes. And the people was just marching, just doing that, arms on shoulders.

  After we mashed down the show flat, leaving the stage, we couldn’t leave. When we went backstage, the promoter begged us, pleaded with us, if we don’t come back we ain’t gonna have no theater left because the people start breaking off the arms of the chairs and start smashing up the goddamn place outside. So we went out and we did “Reggae On Broadway” and two other tracks. We closed with “One Love” or maybe “Love And Affection.” When we left the people were worse than before. But we couldn’t go back. We didn’t have any more songs to sing. So whatever mash was going to be mashed down—Johnny Nash didn’t come yet—the show seemed to be ended.

  So the promoter had to find something to tell people so he shouted, “OK, calm down, calm down! The King is coming,” ’cause Johnny Nash really the people came to see. So they kicked off and before the first track ended 25 percent of the people got up and walked out. In the middle of the second track another 25 percent of what was left got up and walked out. Because they wanted to meet the Wailers now, they wanted autographs to be signed. And if they stuck around, Wailers might be gone by that time. Johnny’s band got confused, the guy on the Mellotron started to play wrong notes and the band panicked, started playing foolishness. By this time there was maybe about ten people were sitting in the goddamn theater. Johnny panicked and went into his ballads thing. He was supposed to be King of Reggae and he started to sing “Mary’s Boy Child.” That ended it. The rest of the people that was there got up. The place was empty. The band had to stop playing prematurely in the middle of the track.

  By this time Danny Sims had to leave this fucking scene altogether. Nobody could find him, because Johnny Nash was looking for Danny Sims to kill him dead. Then we found Johnny all by himself around the corner, kicking his boots in the walls, pounding his fist in the walls. We couldn’t even stop him, or let him know we saw him in that kind of way, and we walked away and left him. And that was the end of Johnny Nash totally. We didn’t hear about Johnny Nash up to this day. Just disappeared out of the business. Never talked to him again. But he don’t hate the Wailers. He hates Danny Sims, him and Danny broke up, mashed up as partners. They were all at war.

  ROGER STEFFENS: In fact, strictly in terms of sales and exposure Nash was a superstar compared to Marley’s “bubbling under” career, and had succeeded in reaching an overwhelmingly white audience. He is still well known to this day, especially for his single “I Can See Clearly Now,” which appears regularly in commercials and films. Sims does acknowledge, however, the difficulties Nash had in reaching the African-American audience.

  DANNY SIMS: It was like a pop tour, it wasn’t like an electric tour. Johnny was a pop act. Even today, we never got black play on Johnny Nash. He was strictly a white artist.

  ROGER STEFFENS: After a decade of recording, all marked by dashed hopes, Marley was growing increasingly frustrated. He showed up one day at the record company’s offices to register his displeasure.

  DANNY SIMS: Bob was disgruntled. He went into CBS one day, I was told, and the A & R guy—I don’t know why he went there, but they snobbed [snubbed] him. And I went in to CBS and tried to get to the bottom of it. But he shouldn’t have gone there without me anyway. Because we put out two or three records right in a row and nothing happened. So I don’t know whether he figured I was working too much on Johnny Nash and not enough on him. But whatever it was, he was in London now with all these Jamaican people in a big house. They had a car for that crowd. And Sony was spending a lot of money on him. And we started to rehearse for the Sony yearly convention. And Bob was getting very popular and Clive Davis, the head of Columbia Records, was a good friend of mine, and Dick Asher was his guy. And then, the night when Bob was going to do a full show—they had brought over Carly, Family Man, Peter, Bunny and another musician—Sony had them doing a full rehearsal for the show, and Bob’s show was so hot at rehearsal that people started coming to the rehearsals. Bob was so bloody hot and just ready for the show. And Bob came to me and said he wasn’t going to do the show. Clive Davis, everybody, was very disappointed. But Bob was despondent. He thought he got snobbed at CBS, and he thought they were more interested in Johnny than in him.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Enter Chris Blackwell, a white Jamaican from a wealthy family who had been educated in England where, in the early sixties, he b
egan importing and re-pressing Jamaican records. He was a cofounder and silent partner in the UK’s controversial Trojan Records label. Don Taylor, the man who would become Bob Marley’s manager, described the label’s operations.

  DON TAYLOR: Trojan in my opinion, what Trojan was: When Chris Blackwell first went to England, pirating of Jamaican records got big and serious. Because most of the records he put out were records he had no deals on. They were all pirate records. He’d get them and press them but he had no deal with them. Once Chris Blackwell had a chance to become legit after he had Jimmy Cliff and Millie Small hits on Island [his own label] he had to share that piracy, illegitimate underground stuff he was doing. So that’s where Trojan came in with Lee Gopthal as the front.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Contacted by phone in Jamaica in November 2016, Chris Blackwell denied Taylor’s claim about piracy.

  CHRIS BLACKWELL: I didn’t pirate any records. I had deals with Duke Reid, Mr. Pottinger, and almost all the Jamaican producers except Prince Buster. Trojan started in 1967 and I got immersed in rock. [The group] Traffic was taking off in England. It was a very exciting time with Traffic, and with Stevie Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group. So I no longer was going down to Jamaica and wheeling and dealing with records. I stopped doing that around 1966.

  DANNY SIMS: [When we were recording Bob at Sony Studios,] a guy called me and said Chris Blackwell had come by the studio and he got our keyboard player to work with Traffic.

  ROGER STEFFENS: It turns out Blackwell had his eye on more than the JAD keyboardist.

  DANNY SIMS: Bob was signed to Sony, he was a Sony artist. And Chris Blackwell had been sneaking over to Sony Studios romancing Bob. And when we found out, Sony sent a stop and desist order to Blackwell.

  ROGER STEFFENS: But Marley had already been swayed, furious over his treatment by Sony executives in London. One of the people who had “snobbed” him was a lawyer named Bob White. Marley was so incensed by the slight that he asked for a release on his contract. At this point he and Sims were still allies, so Danny went to bat for Bob against Sony.

  DANNY SIMS: I got him unsigned from one of the biggest companies in the world. Nobody would let Bob Marley go after putting a year of moneys into him, putting him into a big house, giving him moneys for his band. Chris Blackwell talked about the moneys that he spent, [saying] they were impoverished—with Sony, you’re going to be impoverished? They wanted Bob. The lawyer, Bob White, guess where he went? He became the lawyer for Island Records.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Danny implies that there was some kind of secret arrangement between Blackwell and White to dissuade Marley from continuing with Sony, causing him and the group to move to Island Records.

  DANNY SIMS: The motherfuckers—you know what they did, they set me up. Bob White was the one who snobbed him—that leaked down from the A & R staff. They liked Bob, and they believed that we was fishing, we didn’t know what kind of record to put out on Bob to make him take off. It was Bob White we negotiated with. And when we found out it was White that snobbed him, they fired Bob White. There was a big shakeup with Bob leaving Sony.

  It was my relationship with Dick Asher that got Bob released from the contract. It wasn’t easy to get that done. We took an override. What did Sony want with an override? But my contract with Bob was up now, I’d been with Bob for five years. I asked for another five years of renewal with Bob as a writer and I got it. And an override on the records.

  Did I have to bring some kind of specific pressure on CBS to let him go? Well, I think between you and me that anybody I dealt with would have brought pressure on him. You got to remember who my partner was, where I was. So that’ll put pressure on anybody—except the federal government. [Danny often boasted that he was partners with the Mafia.] Cayman Music continued under my control until 2011. I sold it to some guys in London, I forget the name of the guys. I’d have to think about the fact that contract renewal is after twenty-eight years, so I would have lost it anyway. ’Cause I signed him to ASCAP. If I had signed him to a British society I would have saved myself, but I had to sell because the time was running out.

  And sometimes I think about that and I think that Bob being a friend, I told him, “Bob, give me an extra five years on your contract, so that I publish every song that you put out on Island and an override that I’ll split with Sony.” So to this day, every record Chris has sold from the time Bob was with him, they have to pay us about 20 percent for the publishing. Half goes to Sony, half goes to JAD. And they paid that all the time on all the Island albums through Exodus in 1977. He made more money with me as a publisher, ’cause Barbra Streisand did “Guava Jelly,” Eric Clapton did “I Shot The Sheriff.”

  ROGER STEFFENS: After years of trying to engineer a breakthrough for Marley and the Wailers, Danny surrendered control to Blackwell, knowing that the rough-edged artist he felt he had discovered was now ready in every way for the demands of the world’s biggest stages.

  DANNY SIMS: When we sold Bob’s contract to Chris Blackwell and Island Records in October of 1972, Bob was ready. Bob had great training by Johnny Nash. But they both lent something to each other. Bob taught Johnny how to play the reggae rhythm, ’cause Bob played it. He was an established, polished artist who was able to coproduce with Blackwell or any other producer. He was able to use what he had learned from Johnny Nash, Arthur Jenkins and all the other great people we put him with. From 1967 to 1972 was enough for anyone to get his PhD and be able to go out on the stage of the world. I think the fact that he is the only star from the third world who is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame speaks for itself. [Bob has subsequently been joined there by Jimmy Cliff.]

  CHAPTER 13

  Island’s Kinky Reggae

  R

  OGER STEFFENS: When the Wailers signed with Chris Blackwell’s Island label, it seemed that they had finally found a champion who could bring them and their music to the outside world, a culmination to ten years of dreaming of becoming an international act. He advanced them eight thousand pounds to record an album. The group returned to Jamaica to lay new material at Dynamic Sounds studio’s eight-track facility.

  The UK-based Blackwell had been a distant figure to Jamaican musicians, unapproachable and mysterious. Coming from a once-wealthy family, he maintained an imperious air and was accused of ripping off Jamaican artists by rereleasing their records in England without paying royalties (a charge which, as noted earlier, he denies), including many of the Wailers’ earliest recordings for Coxson Dodd. The group was shocked when they first met Blackwell and he told them about payments that he claimed to have sent them, but which they never saw.

  BUNNY WAILER: When we went to meet Blackwell in London he said, “Well, I’ve given Coxson hundreds of thousands of pounds for the Wailers.” I said, “You’re actually saying that?” He said, “Yes, I’m actually saying that because that’s a fact. I’ve given Coxson hundreds of thousands of pounds for the Wailers. Not for just royalties, but for the Wailers.” Me say, “Well, we never get more than ninety-nine pounds.” We were never to know about the three figure—what a hundred pound feels like.

  COXSON DODD: I only ever received seven hundred pounds from Chris Blackwell for using my Wailers masters. And at the same time to get them for him, he’s telling them that he had paid me large sums of royalty. Because Bunny Wailer, when he saw an article come out [revealing the truth], he had to phone me and say I’m really glad I see this article ’cause Chris tell me how much big royalty him pay you, and this is why we were so mad at you.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Chris Blackwell would dispute that he ever withheld royalties owed the Wailers. Blackwell has stated over the years that his relationship with Marley was a positive one, telling a 2016 interviewer that when he met Bob and the Wailers “they were trying to reach the African-American market. I could see that they had a better chance of reaching white college kids. I worked with Bob quite closely, mixing and producing most of his records. Our collaboration lasted until his death in 1981.”*

  The Wail
ers returned home with big plans, flush with a large sum of money. Eight thousand pounds was a drop in the bucket compared to the budgets of their contemporaries, similar to the weekly cocaine budget of rock stars. Newly freed from Johnny Nash and Danny Sims, they were now being backed by Blackwell, who was beginning to increase his holdings in the burgeoning reggae industry in Jamaica. His right-hand man at the time was Dickie Jobson, from another wealthy local family.

  JOE HIGGS: Dickie Jobson owned Island House at 56 Hope Road in 1972. At that time, Chris Blackwell was putting me in a corner, giving me five hundred Jamaican dollars a month, easing me up and keeping me down.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Higgs had recorded an album for Blackwell called Life Of Contradiction, but it was shelved.

  JOE HIGGS: When I got connected back with Island it was through Harry J, I was on his label at the time, with Bob and Marcia. In ’72 Dickie Jobson was acting like a manager for me. Chris had a deal with Harry J, so I kind of came as a package to Chris.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Harry J, a former insurance salesman, had begun producing records in 1968 and had significant successes in England with an instrumental called “Liquidator” and Bob [Andy] and Marcia [Griffiths]’s “Young, Gifted And Black.”