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

by Roger Steffens

  Bob loved to exercise. He loved to train like us. We were hard, jogging all over: Cane River, Seven Mile Beach. Anything we do—if we run ten miles, Bob run ten miles. Tosh didn’t go jogging like Bob. But he was a serious character man, and a physical man, into yoga. He exercised and trained differently from Bob, a little jogging here and there, swimming and all of that. But Bunny now was like Bob in a sense. He loved to train hard also. He was with us also jogging on the beach, running to Cane River. When we finished doing that we ate the best fish, the best doctor fish, the best sprat, with the dread named Gabby Dread. He was like an inspiration to them, because he was the man on the beach that have the steam chalice ready, and have the roast fish ready, and fish tea. On Bull Bay Beach, out on Eleven Mile.

  I don’t see no other entertainer right now who can step in Bob’s shoes. Bob took this thing serious. He was no joker-smoker. He was something special. One of a kind.

  ROGER STEFFENS: As the violence increased almost daily, a kind of civil war reached into every part of daily life in Western Kingston. Bob had friends on both sides and tried his best to avoid being forced to choose one side over the other. Being affiliated with a particular faction could put one’s life in jeopardy in a country where to the victor went all the spoils. Voters on the losing side of an election could be forced from their homes and jobs—and worse.

  BEVERLEY KELSO: I didn’t go back [to Hope Road] until ’74 at the death of my mother, right after the people there in Trench Town started the war. Everything start to get [bad], you know, the shooting, the fighting and whatever. So I said I have to move out from Trench Town now. I was looking for a place to move out, so I went up to Bob. He showed me around the place and he said if I need a place to stay and I need anywhere to live, he showed me one side of the house and said, “This belongs to you. This is where you should live.” So, when shots were firing and I wanted to leave and couldn’t get any place, I went up there one evening. And when I go there, [Joe’s wife] Valerie Higgs, she first me [i.e. beat me to the place, got there first]—when I go up there that even Valerie was living up there. It was in the same place that I was supposed to, you know? So, when I see that, I said, you know what? I am not gonna say anything because Valerie was there.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Beverley wasn’t the only one made to wait while Bob played soccer or rehearsed. In September 1975 JBC anchorman Dermot Hussey recorded a landmark interview with Bob that later would be incorporated into the posthumous Talkin’ Blues album. Despite Hussey’s prestigious position, Bob tested his patience for days at a time.

  DERMOT HUSSEY: Bob never said much, he was kind of shy, really. Those days were remarkable. I mean, I caught him in that period when he was just about to go solo. I was around him at several rehearsals. I saw them prepare for that Natty Dread tour. I was also there when they were rehearsing for the last show that they did together, the Dream Concert with Stevie Wonder on October 4, 1975. It took me a while to get the interview. In the first place I had made several attempts to get that interview, by waiting patiently, watching him rehearse. Bob used to have sessions around four o’clock, five o’clock, there’d be a serious football game played, he used to use that really to condition himself. And then as it grew dark and they couldn’t play anymore they’d come off the square there, shower, get ready for rehearsal. Rehearsal used to start sometime around eight o’clock and would go on straight through till two o’clock in the morning. So I used to sort of wait patiently and in fact, Skill Cole, I have to really give him credit here because he was the one that made it possible; Bob stipulated that he didn’t want to come into the radio station so I had to find a neutral place and we went to a small recording studio which was on an avenue off Hope Road and he did it there with Delroy Butler as the engineer. But he came and was in good spirits. But he was still smarting from the breakup of the Wailers.

  ROGER STEFFENS: In those early Hope Road days, if one could penetrate the circle that gathered around Bob, glimpses into his creative process were everywhere. He was at ease at last, because he had found a home.

  CAT COORE: For me, moments that stand out are like when he was rehearsing at 56 Hope Road, when I first saw the Wailers Band with Al Anderson and everybody, and he was rehearsing these tunes “No More Trouble” and “Midnight Ravers,” just over and over and over again. I couldn’t believe it. I’m saying, “How many times this guy going to sing this tune?”

  DENNIS THOMPSON: Bob would do twenty tracks of “Ambush In The Night,” vocals, and he’d say, “Which one you like?” It’s all twenty, but we had to pick one. He never sang the same song same way twice. He do different moods, different feels. He was just prolific. That’s the kind of person he was.

  CAT COORE: I remember he walked out one night and he said, “What’s going on with you? Wait, how come so much people around the place?” And cussing out so much people in this place, people just watching. He was smoking a chalice, him and Skill Cole. And he looked at me, there was a little kid, and he just gave me the chalice like that. What he didn’t realize was that I had been smoking a bag of weed. So I just took the chalice from him, took a big sip and handed it back. And him turned to Skill Cole and say, “Bwoi, dem brown boy dere wicked, now, Ras!”

  ROGER STEFFENS: Another close companion from these times was the Studio One keyboardist Pablove Black, who explained the daily routine at Tuff Gong.

  PABLOVE BLACK: Me used to go watch Bob Marley get up six o’clock in the morning and me make juice fe him. And him say him want to play some table tennis. And we start to play table tennis, and him look and him see two white youth outside, and him say him supposed to do some interview with dem but make dem wait. And we play table tennis for about forty-five minutes till him sweat and him go shower. Him come out, then have callaloo and things fe give him fe eat. Seen? And him leave and go in the rehearsal room with him guitar, ten o’clock the morning! Him walk away into the rehearsal room and them have a blackboard where the songs dem write, a part of the wall dem paint black, and dem tune dem write ’pon it. And him say, “Plug in the amp set fe me.” And me plug it in, and him plug in him the guitar, and we start play. From ten o’clock till two o’clock him rehearse, till a couple of more man come and him cool it. Him start back about four, them never start rehearse till about eight at night the night when every man come. Bob Marley rehearse from eight o’clock till two o’clock the next morning, before rehearsal done. By three o’clock man split up back, and me and him and [Tuff Gong staff producer–composer] Sangie Davis sit down in there 5:30 the morning, same way the man have him guitar in him hands, from ten o’clock the [previous] morning, right back round. Must know say, him no tired fe do it. And do it again. And do it again. And do it again. Him have a spirit, mon, you know that’s why dem call him Tuff Gong. Is a spirit weh indomitable. If you beat him today, you haffe go beat him tomorrow. And him a come the next day come fight you again!

  Keyboardist Pablove Black, Twelve Tribes member and close friend of Marley’s, at the Reggae Archives, Los Angeles, June 1997.

  CHAPTER 18

  Cindy Breakspeare and the 1975 Tour

  R

  OGER STEFFENS: The most glamorous resident of Hope Road when Bob took over was a young white Jamaican woman named Cindy Breakspeare. Bob formed an immediate attraction to her, but she initially rebuffed him.

  Cindy was crowned Miss World in 1976. In the year of her reign, Bob spent much of his time in exile in London with her, eventually fathering their child, Damian, known as Junior Gong. Their public relationship led to bizarre tabloid headlines in the UK which referred to Marley as a “wild man” and the couple as “Beauty and the Beast.” But their time together actually began much earlier, and lasted longer, than many people realize. Interviewed in 1994 at a time when both she and their young son Damian were aspiring professional singers, having toured most recently with Bob’s mother, Cedella Booker, Cindy proved to be gifted with a lightness of being that was at once charming and compelling in its frankness. Many of Bob’s closest frie
nds insist that she was the great love of his life.

  CINDY BREAKSPEARE: I think I must have been about seventeen when I heard Bob for the first time, and I think that was when I really fell in love with reggae, like so many other people. It was Catch A Fire time. I just couldn’t take the album off the turntable. And we went between that and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On. I saw Bob and Marvin play at the Carib Theatre.

  As a child I always kind of had a rebellious nature and I left home early. I mean I moved out on my own with my brother and a friend really early, so I was able to make my choices. My parents divorced when I was about seven. And even though I ended up living with my mother up until I was about seventeen, in 1971, she just informed us one day that it was time for us to find our own digs and make our way in life. So my brother Stephen and I ended up at 56 Hope Road. And then I moved away for maybe six months or a year, and then I moved back there a second time, which would have been ’75.

  Cindy Breakspeare, Miss World and Marley’s companion in his final years, in Kingston, Jamaica, January 2003.

  And I worked! I did a multitude of different things. I sold jewelry, I sold furniture, I worked at the front desk of the Sheraton, I ran a restaurant, I ran a nightclub. Whatever came along that looked exciting, I did it.

  In ’75 Bob was about to buy the house at Hope Road from Chris. Bob was there all the time, he and his crew, and he was basically living upstairs. We were the only outsiders who lived there, nobody else was living there at that time, because Dickie Jobson had cleared it out on the basis that he wanted to make the whole place kind of commercial. He never went through with it, and we begged him to let us have the apartment back, ’cause we liked being there so much, and he agreed. So we hastily moved back in.

  I used to live on the ground floor there at Hope Road, and this was in the very early days of our relationship before I was really sure if I was going to enter into a relationship—because I knew from the first time that I ever spoke with him at length, that a deep relationship would change my life permanently. And he would go by the door and kind of glance sideways to see if anybody was around, and attempt to engage me in conversation, and of course it would always be philosophy and talking about how you see yourself, how you present yourself as a woman and all the things you should and shouldn’t do, because of course doctrine was everything then. And he would sit on the steps out the back of my apartment there with a guitar and sing. I remember hearing “Turn Your Lights Down Low” just like that. And he wasn’t a man of words on a one-to-one basis, you know, not a lot. And certainly not when he was just getting to know somebody, he was very shy that way. And gestures were very innocent and very boyish. He would offer a mango as a gift, or simple little things like that, which I thought were very charming, especially since I had been involved with people whose style was quite different. I found it very disarming.

  People have asked if I believe that he wrote “Waiting In Vain” for me. But I don’t know what to say. I mean, I would love to, why not? There’s a line that “it’s been three years since I’ve been waiting on your line.” Well, it took a while! Not three years, but it took a while. But I can say that when that record came out, that was certainly one of the finer times in our relationship. ’Cause you know relationships do go through changes and stresses and strains, and you have times when you’re closer and times when you’re not so close. There were separations and all the pressures that were being brought to bear. But definitely, I mean, when I think of it, when we were in England together on Oakley Street after the shooting attempt and all of that, when I was actually Miss World, those were some very very close days, very very very close.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Bob’s relationship with Cindy unsettled some of his oldest friends and collaborators.

  BEVERLEY KELSO: I had moved out of Trench Town because of the violence and I was living now in Forest Hills, that’s the foot of Red Hills. So, Bob send somebody to my job and call me and said he want me to sign some papers. So I went up there with a friend one evening. And that evening when I went up there I couldn’t go in because Cindy she take over. It was all white people. I couldn’t go inside to see Bob anymore. And so I talked to her and I tell her who I was and Bob came out to me. When Bob came out to me, Bob didn’t know who I was. He was just looking at me and gazing. He was just like in another world, looking on me and gazing and, “What your name? Who are you?” Yeah. And I said, “What?” My girlfriend was just laughing and I start to cry. And I said, “What happened to Bob,” you know? I start to cry. I was living at Forest Hills and I feel down and I actually walked home to Forest Hills that day.

  That was the second time he wanted me to come to him and sign some papers. He sent back and called me a third time. I didn’t go. I didn’t go because of the condition that I hear Bob was in. I tell a guy that Bob must go and (bad word), you know? And the guy said, “What? You cursed a bad word? Say it again!” And I tell the man, I said, “I’m not going to,” and I didn’t see Bob again.

  I want people to know that the fact is I didn’t like the way they treat the whole group. Bob, then, I mean, we start from nothing. We start from nothing. None of us didn’t have a thing. And to see them reach somewhere in life where they’re handling money and it’s like Bob was on a different level by himself, you know? They didn’t remember. It’s like they don’t remember—they remember where they’re coming from but they don’t remember who they start out with.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Whatever Beverley’s reservations, Bob was headed for higher heights (or “irie ites” in Rasta parlance). His debut solo tour of North America and Europe in 1975 would introduce him to much larger audiences, many drawn out of curiosity by the monster hit cover version of “I Shot The Sheriff” by Eric Clapton. An art director, Neville Garrick, was hired to light the shows and paint huge stage banners with pictures of Selassie and Marcus Garvey, the 1920s’ Jamaican national hero and early apostle of repatriation to Africa. The record company finally took notice of Marley’s true potential.

  I caught this tour in the Bay Area, where Bob played a series of solo sold-out dates in San Francisco’s tiny Boarding House club. So great was the demand that promoter Bill Graham, on just a few days’ notice, booked the giant Oakland Paramount Theater for a show that was almost completely sold out on word of mouth. It was my initial exposure to a man whose music I had become enamored of two years earlier. I had seen most of the fifties and sixties legends live, from Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Nina Simone and Jackie Wilson to Janis Joplin at the Fillmore in 1967. But no artist had ever captured me quite as strongly as Bob did that night in Oakland, windmilling his Medusa-like locks, then standing still and mesmerizing the audience, eyes squeezed shut in ecstatic concentration. I sat next to Moe, a well-known Berkeley bookstore owner, who had been told by one of his employees not to miss this unprecedented spectacle. “What the hell’s he saying?” Moe kept asking me, but it really didn’t matter then if you knew what his words were; he could have been chanting in Swahili for all the audience cared, so powerful was his presence that night. Joining the group on Bob’s first solo tour that night was Tyrone Downie.

  TYRONE DOWNIE: When I’d just joined the group in ’75, everybody was so serious. Bob was so serious, Peter and Bunny had left, and everybody was serious. Skill Cole was there and all of these dreads, and I was a little kid, very naive, and I wasn’t used to the aggressive attitude. And always hearing “screwface,” and always “bumbaclaat.” I wasn’t used to that, so I was scared at times. Terrified, actually, of everybody. They were confusing. I mean, Family Man was saying to play in a certain way, and Bob was saying to play another way. And I was getting really confused at one point. Then I get to find out that it’s just like some dogs—the bite is not as heavy as the bark.

  Al Anderson is the one who actually pulled me to tour with them. I used to record with the Wailers, but I never used to get any money. I used to get a spliff, some ital juice. You’re supposed to just be happy with that! And I left school to
play music! I said, “God, if I’m gonna be playing this thing, at least I have to make a living!” So I couldn’t take the ripoff of studio work in Kingston, and I left and went to play in hotels on the north coast. And then I got sick of the north coast after a while and came back to Kingston to play at the Sheraton, which is where Bob came with Cindy Breakspeare one night. It was just before she became Miss World. They were dancing and I was singing this song by Billy Preston, “Nothing From Nothing Leaves Nothing.” And Bob came up and say, “Hey, mon, I want some a dem vibes inna de band, ’cause we a go ’pon tour, we a get international now, we a break a foreign.” And me say, “Wow, if these guys don’t pay me in Jamaica, why are they gonna pay me when I go thousands of miles away?” I was still unsure, reluctant to do that. And then Al used to come to the hotel. I think he had some girlfriend staying there. So he’d come there every night and listen to the band. And Al said, “Tyrone, you have to come, man! Leave this hotel thing here, you don’t know what you’re missing. You don’t know how big this thing is gonna be!” And he was saying it from then, even knew it more than anybody else in the band.