ROGER STEFFENS: The popular myth, sometimes promoted by his record companies, is that Bob blew Sly off the stage.
JOE HIGGS: In that era Sly was a total influence, the in thing of the time. People came to see Sly because of what he had to say, what he looked like, his latest design. How was Bob a threat to Sly Stone? People said they can’t hear us, our accent they couldn’t understand and our rhythm was too slow. We weren’t happening and our outfits were inappropriate and we were rebels.
All I can remember is that we were opening for Sly and the Family Stone and when he got to Las Vegas we were fired. We had played five shows together: in Homestead and Tampa, Florida, Lexington, Kentucky, Denver, Colorado, and Las Vegas, when Sly left us and our luggage on the side of the road, rejected from the hotel. Somebody [San Francisco’s KSAN DJ Tom Donahue] took us to Sausalito. We made a broadcast there and did some club shows.
ROGER STEFFENS: Gayle McGarrity went to see the band in the autumn of 1973 in San Francisco at the Matrix.
GAYLE McGARRITY: We went backstage, my friend and fellow Stanford student Michael Witter and I, before the show, and I remember having a distinct feeling that this was such a special moment. It was like a transcendental event for me, ’cause when I went backstage and I saw Bob, Peter and Family Man, I remember just being totally mesmerized and feeling that I was in a spiritual kind of context, like you know, when you’re feeling like you’re having an out-of-this-world experience—I mean, very intense. And it wasn’t just the herb! And when it started, I mean, I just couldn’t believe that concert! It was a tiny little place and it was the perfect atmosphere for them. And the other thing was that they were so revolutionary and militant, dressed in military khaki stuff, and they played all of their most militant stuff. And, because we were all so into very leftist, revolutionary stages of our lives, this group just became the articulators of our deepest, most innermost political feelings.
ROGER STEFFENS: The fact that the original teacher of the group, Joe Higgs, was drafted for a crucial tour that was designed to introduce the Wailers to the black American audience left a foul taste in the teacher’s mouth when he realized he wasn’t going to get paid.
JOE HIGGS: Bob Marley was a user in a lot of ways. For example, here is a man who had a tour pending, his first U.S. tour, and at the very last minute, maybe a week before leaving, Bunny walked away for whatever reason. With that short a time, Bob came to me on his knees and asked me as the most appropriate replacement. He said I was the “most fitting replacement for Bunny,” I can play drum, I can sing harmony. He got us to go on the road voluntarily, I wasn’t offered a salary or anything. I wasn’t paid; at the end of the tour, Bob said there were purposeful mistakes made by Peter on the tour. In rehearsal he was always trying to change things. If you look at the tension [on the video of a Wailers rehearsal in the Capitol Records building in Hollywood] Bob never said a word. I was not being thanked, no compensation at all.
My brother died in ’74. We had no money to bury him. I decided to play the role of a madman. I went to Bob’s at Hope Road and I stood up and wasn’t saying anything. He looked at me, “Wha’ppen, Joe?” He called me by name. I never respond. Bob said, “Well, them finally fuck up Joe now. Joe is mad now!” Offer me spliff, banana, I never respond to anything. So he would think I was really out there in space. However, I waited for a while, an hour or so. Finally I said, “Can I talk to you a moment?” Him say, “Yes, man,” and took me upstairs to the end of the rooms there. I said, “You don’t really owe me any money because I never really sign a contract with you, but I told you as a member of the Wailers I never got nothing from you.” Bob said, “How much I owe you?” I said, “Just give me something.” Bob say, “I’ll give you two thousand dollars [Jamaican].” The check had to be signed by him and Skill Cole. So we went to National Stadium where Skill was training, got his signature and the check was fifteen hundred dollars. First money I got from that tour.
I used some of the fifteen hundred to bury my brother.
ROGER STEFFENS: Marley returned from tour only to be told by Peter that he was leaving the group for a solo career. Although they didn’t realize it as it was being cut, Burnin’ would be the Wailers’ valedictory collection. Its sales would at first be lukewarm.
To add to his income, Bob opened a small shop on Beeston Street in Kingston selling his Jamaican-pressed recordings. He struggled to know what to do next musically, and professionally.
Reggae’s initial invasion of America had come with the triple explosion of the Wailers’ Island Records debut, Catch A Fire; the captivating roots flick The Harder They Come, directed by Perry Henzell and starring Jimmy Cliff; and its irresistible soundtrack album. With Marley now seen as a potential superstar on his own, several people approached him about managing him. He ended up going with an aggressive Jamaican hustler named Don Taylor.
DON TAYLOR: I met Bob in 1973. I went to Jamaica as one of Marvin Gaye’s co-managers and advisers. Basically, at that stage you don’t manage a Marvin Gaye, you advise a Marvin Gaye. So I was there, I financed the entire thing for the Trench Town Sports Complex. What happened was a guy named Stephen Hill knew me since I was a kid hanging around the theater he ran. So as I grew we kept in contact and stuff. He called me one day from Jamaica and says that his son had become a very main adviser to Tony Spaulding, who was then the Minister of Housing. Michael Manley had just won. And that Tony wanted to do something to build a sports complex in Trench Town if I could help him to get an artist. Right around that time Marvin Gaye was going down to Jamaica a lot, going up in the hills above Montego Bay.
Danny Sims and Don Taylor at the Midem music conference in Cannes, France, April 1997, promoting one of Marley’s posthumous hits, “What Goes Around Comes Around.”
ROGER STEFFENS: Taylor arrived just as worldwide sales of reggae music were starting to produce real money, money unlike anyone had ever seen in Jamaica for music. This would inevitably lead to grim exploitation. For example, Joe Higgs, Jimmy Cliff’s early supporter, publicly lamented the treatment of the artists on the soundtrack album for The Harder They Come, which has never been out of print since 1973, selling steadily ever since..
JOE HIGGS: I met Jimmy Cliff in the early days. Jimmy lived near Tivoli Theatre, which later became the Queen’s Theatre on Spanish Town Road. He was just in from country. There was a guy who had a barbershop on Spanish Town Road who loved to sing and play his guitar. That guy taught Jimmy Cliff lots. He trimmed me a couple of times too. I don’t think Bob and Jimmy Cliff had really a link at those times. Jimmy was an early guy with Byron Lee at an early stage, with Ken Lazarus, the Byron Lee crew.
I started with Jimmy Cliff, and I have seen that he’s a very, very powerful performer. I come in with Jimmy Cliff when he’d been out in the world, after the disappointment with the movie The Harder They Come. I heard it belonged to Chris Blackwell, who sponsored it, even though Perry Henzell produced it. The soundtrack belong to Chris Blackwell. All the participants in the movie were like in their infant stage, and there was no legal adviser in Jamaica who knew about copyright law. In those times no lawyer was interested in that or entertainment law. There was none who could defend you. You had to go to the library. There was no major deal in the music industry. All who did the movie believe they were robbed, underpaid. Jimmy Cliff said he got some money to do an album, but instead he bought a house on Lady Musgrave Road. Chris Blackwell was pissed, and told him that “I made you and I can break you.”
I was ahead of most of the guys, I was the first singer that knew anything about copyrights. Because I never sold a song, and always registered it myself—the only one I never remembered to do that on was “Stepping Razor” and it took a long time to sort that out. PRS [the Performing Rights Society] helps maintain your copyright. I never sold my copyright.
ROGER STEFFENS: Marley himself was involved in a web of complex contracts involving JAD, Danny Sims, Sony and Chris Blackwell’s Island Records.
DON TAYLOR: One of the t
hings that was a problem when we were renegotiating Bob’s deal with Island to get the contract that he has now, is that Danny [Sims] had a contract that was still in effect to CBS Records. Bob was put there by Danny and one of the things that we sat up there and figured out, with Chris Blackwell trying to figure out with us, was a way to deprive CBS with an override of two points, because Bob was starting out selling product now. We see he’s selling those big numbers, and to try to figure out a way to not pay CBS, or get around paying CBS these royalties.
ROGER STEFFENS: In 1974 Marley started hiding his copyrights from Danny Sims to avoid paying royalties, putting songs under the names of his wife, Rita Marley, Family Man Barrett, and a friend from Trench Town named Leghorn Coghile.
JOE HIGGS: Leghorn was a student at St. George’s. If Leghorn Coghile is credited with “Talkin’ Blues,” I’m surprised I’m not credited on several of Bob Marley’s songs. “Talkin’ Blues” is a song me and Bob jammed to, we made many lines. Same with “Mr. Talkative,” which I helped him write. Leghorn Coghile was not a bad man or a fighter. He was a brainy boy, one of the early people who associated with Planno, who became a producer and manager with the Wailers. He was never in charge of the Beeston Street shop, as some have claimed. He had a deep knowledge about shipping and clearing, really big knowledge of customs. That was his major input into Bob’s development. Very essential, very progressive. But not in charge.*
DERMOT HUSSEY: I remember once when Leghorn Coghile said he was author of “Talkin’ Blues,” Bob draped him up, actually. He said, “Leghorn, I hear you say you write the tune?” Bob was just asserting himself physically. So when you say draped, he held him by his pants!
ROGER STEFFENS: With the Wailers fading out, Bob sought new vocalists to back him and began composing some of the most militant compositions of his career, as the violence around him grew daily in the festering streets of West Kingston. What once seemed so promising had now, again, turned to dust. Would he survive on his own? Who was his real audience? Marley would answer those questions with one of the most important albums of modern times.
* Higgs does allow that Leghorn “was central in a lot of ways to getting things done for Marley. And he definitely wrote songs with Bob.”
CHAPTER 16
Natty Dread
R
OGER STEFFENS: In 1974 Bob released his first solo album, Natty Dread. Violence in the ghettos of West Kingston was raging out of control as tens of thousands of the professional class were abandoning the country and taking their vital capital with them. Huge import taxes were imposed and essentials like soap and cooking oil were becoming almost impossible to find. Democratic socialism, as envisioned by prime minister Michael Manley, had turned into class warfare, and Rastafarians were often the victims of vicious police repression, blunting the hopes that their movement would become legitimized under a Manley regime.
As Peter and Bunny took their leave from the Wailers, Bob had to make some serious decisions about his own future, renegotiating his recording contract to include Family Man and Carlton Barrett as members of what would become known as the Wailers Band in later years, to distinguish them from the original trio. A new female backing trio was hired to record and tour with him.
After the breakup, Bob became ever more politicized. Natty Dread was a militant masterpiece, in which he vowed to “never make a politician grant you a favor / they will only want to control you forever.” He was being educated in his emerging role as a spokesperson for the disenfranchised by people like Michael Witter, an economics professor at the University of the West Indies, and by Dr. Gayle McGarrity.
GAYLE McGARRITY: The time I first remember reasoning about politics with Bob was very shortly following my return to Jamaica in 1974, following my graduation from Stanford. During that period, I worked at the University of the West Indies at Mona, at the Kingston Legal Aid Clinic, as well as at the Institute of Jamaica. I got very into Rasta, but not in a religious sense—more in a cultural and political sense. An American friend contacted me and said that a good friend of his, Yvette Morris Anderson [no relation to Rita or Esther Anderson], was living with Bob, up at Hope Road. She introduced me to Bob, which for me was like the first time really meeting him.
I remember at that time, because of my political beliefs and convictions, I saw Bob in a particular light. As the original uptown rebel girl that I was, I remember feeling that he was getting kind of contaminated by Blackwell. I’d gone to visit Chris’s house in Nassau with Dicky once, and they very openly had a conversation that I’ll never forget, during which they talked very clearly about the need to separate Peter—to get Peter out of the picture and to have Bob as the head of the group and to neutralize the more radical, revolutionary aspect of the group. I think Chris said something about Peter’s super-black racial thing or something to that effect. Whatever he actually said, it was clearly a putdown of that side of the Wailers. And so, after I heard that, I said to Bob, “You know, I think this is really a shame, because you guys started out together, and I mean, Peter’s message is important too.” By this time, I think Bob was understandably getting used to being a superstar and he didn’t want to hear any stuff like that. So when I would talk to him about such things, he would always look at me kind of skeptically.
ROGER STEFFENS: Peter and Bob had become increasingly contentious following the misadventure with Lee Perry in 1971. Peter blamed Bob for making bad business decisions and questioned whether Chris Blackwell was trying to break up the group and concentrate on Bob because Bob was half-white, while he and Bunny were “too black.” The packaging of Burnin’ was the final straw. Two pictures in the centerfold shot by Esther Anderson drew his specific ire. In my first interview with Peter in September 1979, at the home of my Reggae Beat partner Hank Holmes, he jammed his finger angrily into a pair of those photographs featuring a man with shoulder-length dreadlocks. Peter Tosh called him the Devil.
PETER TOSH: This is a great album, [but look at] all them pictures of Lucifer! When I come home to Jamaica and I see that, I was grieved. You see any of my picture there, mon? Not one picture is there for I. And yet still I sing on the album. So there was something within those fuckers was trying to keep me out. He Lucifer! The ras-claat. Yes, man, him dread[locks] drop off clean, clean, all his trimmings [referring to the long ropy uncombed braids hanging down his back]. Me ask him, “What happened to it, what happened to your dread, man?” Him say, “Bwoi, look like lice eat it off!”
ROGER STEFFENS: Whatever divine retribution may have been involved, Peter was still determined to go his own way, refusing to call the dissolution of the group a breakup.
PETER TOSH: Well, was not a breakup, you know, is just going three different ways and sending the music in three different directions. Was just that my inspiration was growing and my cup filled and runneth over. . . . One man grow mango, another grow pear.
ROGER STEFFENS: With solo careers in sight, it was time to create titles and logos for their new labels.
BUNNY WAILER: I created both labels: Solomonic and Intel-Diplo. I brought the two of them to Peter and just say pick one and he picked Intel-Diplo. So Solomonic Production was destined to be my label. I designed the two of them. Intel-Diplo is very deep. Solomon was an intelligent diplomat, so that’s its meaning. I only shorted it. Either one of them would mean just the same, because King Selassie I say we have to live as intelligent diplomats among men so you have to be wiser than the serpent and more harmless than the dove.
ROGER STEFFENS: Burnin’ gave an indication of where the group’s members were headed as they stepped out on their own. The two tracks on which Bunny sang lead were “Hallelujah Time” and “Pass It On,” biblically inspired lyrics of the type that would manifest even more clearly on his solo debut, Blackheart Man, considered one of reggae’s most important albums. The verse that Bob invited Peter to contribute to “Get Up Stand Up” was its most biting, although its opening line was ludicrously misrepresented in the transcription that appeared in the al
bum’s lushly illustrated centerfold: “We’re sick and tired of your easing kissing game” instead of the actual words, “ism-schism game,” or—as Peter often sang live—“bullshit game.” These emotions would find full exposure on his 1977 masterpiece Equal Rights, which was filled with anthems of liberation.
Individual interviews with the Wailers at the time helped cement the split.
DERMOT HUSSEY: I did an interview with Bob around the time of the breakup, the one that was used on Talkin’ Blues [a posthumous early eighties release]. It created a lot of friction. Because if you go back and listen to it, he was really responding a lot to what Peter had been saying—I think he said he “throw word”—’cause he said I can deal with Bunny’s position but he had problems with what Peter was saying, that he didn’t get any money. To a certain extent that was true but he came to me and said, “Look, you have to destroy that interview, you know; that interview could be worth nothing as well as could value a million dollars. I want to destroy.” I said, “I can’t destroy that, Bob.” And in fact what I did was I gave him a copy, I never destroyed it.
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Page 19
