ROGER STEFFENS: The bullet was still in his arm; he went to the grave with it.
CARL COLBY: And he’s standing there—I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that one had lodged in his arm. As I said, he was exhausted and the pressure of the concert, the pressure of the political campaign, and also I had a sense that times had changed. There was this heaviness about him and about the world around him and I think he kind of resented it; he didn’t want to be part of it anymore. I felt that he wanted a more—lighter, Kaya kind of world, which came later, and it was great to see that, when that came later. He had to have a lot of strength. I remember feeling how I really admired this man—this thin, lithe, reedy, intensely alert, and yet humble man standing before me—this creator. It must have been very hard for Bob to come up like that, to be him and to take on all of that—to take on all the wishes and hopes and dreams of the world, of the oppressed world and particularly all the aspirations of the Jamaican people, particularly the Rastafarians, who were all trod upon and who were looking for a way out, not an escape, but looking to build, you know, and yet they foist it on Bob. Every American rock star had rejected the mantle. Nobody took it on, did they? They didn’t have Bob’s strength, they didn’t have Bob’s courage, they didn’t have Bob’s vision. In the end, it’s that—Bob had a vision, and though he is not with us any longer, his vision lives “on and on and on,” to quote the mighty Bob Marley.
ROGER STEFFENS: Another rumor was that you told someone while you were in Jamaica that you could have an army of U.S. troops in Jamaica in twenty-four hours with one phone call.
CARL COLBY: What! No, my dad was out of the CIA. No, why would I say that? No, and I think anybody who’d believe that would be a little bit stupid. Who are these people who write these things? Did I ever have any experience with police forces, armed forces? Yeah, sure, some twenty-five-year-old kid’s calling up, he wants a lot of troops sent down. Yeah, we’ll get right on it! But you have to be aware that any time I hear about that kind of thing, my whole family’s kind of programmed to turn off that sort of thing. I mean, my father had a listed number when he was director of the CIA. We didn’t care about it. Maybe I’m cynical to say I don’t really believe in conspiracy theories. I’ve seen from the inside these guys aren’t—people are fallible, they’re not all that confident.
CHAPTER 24
Exodus to London
R
OGER STEFFENS: Following his time in the Bahamas, Bob flew to the UK to be with his love, Cindy Breakspeare. There he began recording material for his next two albums and preparing for what would have been the largest world tour ever undertaken by a reggae performer.
CINDY BREAKSPEARE: I was in England the night Bob was shot. I had just been crowned Miss World and I was supposed to go do some work that night, and I flatly refused. Because once the news of our relationship hit the newspaper, I mean, it was just amazing. Some of the front-page newspapers: “Miss World and Her Wild Man” and all that stuff. They really went wild over it, let me tell you. So you know there was a lot of talk about it. So for me now not to turn up for things I had been booked to do at the very time that he had been shot! It was just a big drama. It was very hard on me because I really was concerned and I couldn’t make contact and it was rough, yes. We went to Nassau for Christmas that year. Then to London, to Oakley Street, where everybody lived for the time that he spent after he left Nassau and he went to England. We were there for about a year, I’d say. It was very central, right in the middle of London. Lovely place.
ROGER STEFFENS: Bob was anxious to maintain as low a profile as he could, despite living with the reigning Miss World. He gathered the band together, and made contact with a few of his longtime friends both from Jamaica and from his previous stints living in the city. Bob was a hero to the expat Jamaican community, many of whom had been lured to Britain with the promise of jobs in the 1950s, and whose first-generation British children recognized in Bob a Jamaican who had already achieved significant international renown. His status at this point, as one who had just narrowly escaped a point-blank shooting, was almost mythical.
Dr. Gayle McGarrity was aware of the effect Cindy had on Bob both politically and emotionally. She had seen their relationship develop from the start, when Cindy and Bob both found themselves living in the Hope Road house.
GAYLE McGARRITY: Cindy lived downstairs at Hope Road with her brother Stephen, whom everyone called Reds, who was a good friend of mine, and whom I actually dated for a while during this period. Then one day I’m coming over to check Bob at Hope Road and there’s Cindy, lying out on the back lawn, dressed in some shorts, and Bob is there talking to her and clearly a courtship had begun.
Now, Bob had actually already confided in me that he really checked for Cindy. I was working at a club called Dizzy’s, which was up at Liguanea and was managed by Reds. And I was working there for a while, and so was Cindy. Sometimes Bob would come and say to me, “I really like that girl, you know, Gayle, I really want you to help set me up,” and stuff like that. And I would say, “Do you know that she works with the JLP, and do you know that she’s against everything Manley’s doing?” Bob was Bob, and he didn’t give a damn about that—he just liked her.
But all of that stuff started putting a slight wedge there between Bob and me because Cindy, as a staunch supporter of the JLP—the party which reportedly financed her participation in the Miss World contest in London, following then prime minister Michael Manley’s announcement that the government and people of Jamaica would not be sending a contestant that year as a protest against the participation of a contestant representing the apartheid regime then in power in South Africa. As the most prominent leader of the international boycott of the apartheid regime, Manley was adamant that Jamaica should send a strong message to the world that we would not participate in a contest in which South Africa was to be represented by a contestant who had been chosen from an exclusively white pool of candidates and who, furthermore, had made official public declarations of her support for white minority rule in her country. Cindy was always talking—as were most members of the upper middle classes—about the Communists this, and the Communists that. That fed into the distaste that Bob already had for the Communists, and I would say politically he may even have been swayed a little to the right of the Jamaican political spectrum as he came closer and closer to the white and brown Jamaican elite, through his association with Cindy. Because once Cindy responded positively to his courting, that went to his head. As a sufferer from an impoverished background, a young man who had lived on the rough streets of Trench Town and been through hell, who had been mistreated by both his father and his mother—as far as I’m concerned—and had been through “nuff sufferation,” Bob now had this beautiful girl—whom many both in Jamaica and beyond Jamaica’s borders, as well, wanted—as his woman.
I think that really affected him politically too, and he got into a lot of things that he wouldn’t have got in before, and very often when I’d go over, he’d ask me what about this girl such and such, referring to uptown, elite, brown Jamaican girls and he would say, “I want to meet her,” and “Can you set it up?” The reasonings on class struggle and Africa continued, but those close to him understood that he was getting familiar with the idea of being an internationally acclaimed superstar. That’s when he started singing more of the songs like “Waiting In Vain,” “Is This Love?” and “Turn Your Lights Down Low.” Which were beautiful songs, but he was clearly into his lover-boy period mode.
ROGER STEFFENS: These songs would form the core of the new recordings he began working on in London, which produced both the Exodus and Kaya albums. Engineer Karl Pitterson recalled in 1995 at his studio in Miami what it was like working in London on Exodus, the album that Time magazine declared “the album of the century.”
KARL PITTERSON: It was really cool. The album was recorded between two Island studios, the Fallout Shelter at St. Peter’s Square and the other at Basing Street Studios at Ladbroke Grove. And to add
a little bit more to it—Bob was involved with Cindy Breakspeare because that was at the time that she got crowned Miss World. So for him to deal with this world beauty queen it only added to the whole thing and it made him even more popular. ’Cause remember he made front-page news, television news—“the Beauty and the Rastaman” how it was termed at the time. But, hopefully, not in a negative manner.
Master producer Karl Pitterson with one of Bob Marley’s mixing boards, Miami, May 2001.
And Exodus, the music, the lyrics, they were on a wider scope now. Because Bob and the Wailers were appealing to a wider cross-section, wider market. So they had to go into a different way of putting their music out to the public. Instead of just catering to the Jamaican community, or mainly the sufferers, now they were dealing with like a blue-collar up to white-collar thing for all those people who think that they were being held back. It makes no difference whether they were with a giant corporation, they started relating lyrics from his songs to their situation. And I think that’s where it started to get so wide. That was like—oops!
All the songs were done at the same sessions, Exodus and Kaya. We’d work from three in the afternoon until six the next morning. But it was cool. And back the next day. And there was a lot of preferred smoking material. The studio was smoky. We recorded the basic tracks first, then the overdubbing part where other musicians would come in, like Rico Rodriguez. And the band members would do theirs. Then the backing vocalists. Because from the beginning you’d have a rough vocal from Bob. And then he’d come in and do his lead vocal. With the mixing process now, Bob wasn’t there on all. Dick Cuthell, Fams and I did it mostly. And it was at this point in the session that Chris introduced Junior Marvin.
ROGER STEFFENS: Bob was now playing much larger venues, and felt he needed someone in the band who could do the kind of theatrics that he normally eschewed, and rev up the audience. Along came lead guitarist Junior Marvin, real name Junior Kerr Marvin Hanson, a black man born in Kingston. The lean and lanky Marvin spoke with me on the morning of March 4, 1987, in his Sunset Strip hotel room while on tour with the Wailers Band. Al Anderson had just stuck his head in the door to say that as he was having breakfast in a nearby coffee shop, he looked at the table across from him and there sat the Wailers’ prime nemesis Chris Blackwell, president of Island Records. At that point the band had received no royalties in over four years, despite millions of sales worldwide. A complicated litigation was in process.
JUNIOR MARVIN: I went to England when I was nine years old. My family name is Kerr, and we were Scots African. My great-grandfather came from a place called Mount Charles, and apparently he owned the whole area. All my cousins, my father, my uncles, all of them had piano lessons from when they were three years old. My mother moved to London. My father went to the U.S. and then eventually got together with us in England. My father played classical piano and then branched out into jazz. I started to play guitar not for the music but to impress girls. I was deeply affected by watching a young American gigging in local clubs, who played with his teeth, practiced fourteen hours a day and never went anywhere without his guitar. He was a child of mixed-blood parents, and in many other ways reminded me of Bob Marley. That was Jimi Hendrix. I’m a believer in that mixed bloods produce magical people.
Wailers lead guitarist Junior Marvin in the Recher Theater dressing room, Towson, Maryland, February 2000.
ROGER STEFFENS: Eventually Marvin got good enough to audition for Jeff Beck, who turned him down by telling him there wasn’t room for two guitar greats in one group and that Junior should start his own band immediately. He did, calling the band Hanson and releasing two albums on Manticore. He played on Steve Winwood’s debut album and eventually began sitting in on reggae sessions, including Toots Hibbert’s seminal Reggae Got Soul album. One day in early 1977, Blackwell brought Marvin around to the London digs of the Wailers, who were then rehearsing for the Exodus and Kaya albums.
JUNIOR MARVIN: We jammed for three hours straight before we said anything to each other. Then we looked at each other and laughed, slapped five and Bob said, ‘Man wan’ come play with I?’ And I said, ‘I’d love to!’ And I was a Wailer. Time magazine chose Exodus as the album of the century. I feel very honored to be part of that album. And I fought for that album. They mixed the album, and I and I didn’t like the mix and everybody said, “Get rid of him.” And Chris Blackwell stood up for me and Bob stood up for me and we remixed the album, spending sixty thousand pounds, which is like a hundred thousand dollars. And Bob took the chance, and it became an instant success, staying in the British charts for over two years. So I’m very proud (a) that I spoke the truth about how I felt and (b) that it paid off, thank God.
Chris Blackwell wanted to get a fine sound of guitars in the mix, more upfront. Because Europeans and Westerners responded to guitar. And reggae basically never had a lot of lead guitar until Al Anderson came along and added another dimension. And then I came with my thing. And the layers that were put together were to maintain the roots, but have a little bit of the fine top-end coming across. I remember when Bob was doing the vocal on “Running Away” he was very relaxed that day and Seeco used to give him ideas about scatting. We all used to talk, and Bob and Seeco used to have little talks, and myself and Bob, Bob and Tyrone, and Bob would take ideas from us and put them together. He’d work on it with his rhythm guitar—work on it, work on it, work on it—and eventually he’d just come in and just do it—bop!—like that. Sometimes just one take. Nowadays, people do fifty million takes and take one line from this, one line from that. Bob had a talent where he could just go in, and if everything was right, he’d get it!
ROGER STEFFENS: One of the keys to the brilliant sound achieved on Exodus was the contribution of the British sonic innovator Roger Mayer.
JUNIOR MARVIN: Roger Mayer had wonderful ideas. He made pedals for Jimi Hendrix that no one else had. He worked with Ernie Isley and Stevie Wonder. And when I went to work with Bob he gave me a couple of special pedals. One was called the Octavia pedal, which gives a low harmony and in-between harmonies to the guitar sound, sounding out of this world. It split the note into two and you get other vibes in between, low, high and in the middle, like you were playing three guitars at once. He worked on the guitars to get the maximum harmonics out of them, in tune with the keyboards. Roger took Bob’s guitar apart and gave it that real authentic sound that it had. If you listen to Bob’s previous albums, they were all a bit out of tune, so Roger made sure that all the guitars were in tune with the keyboards. You could hear Bob’s scratch coming through clearly. Each of the lead guitars’ notes were perfectly in tune. He gave us distortion pedals too, which were unique, very original; no one else had that sound.
ROGER STEFFENS: In many of the videos of the Wailers in the 1970s you can see Bob go over to Junior and appear to be saying something like, “What a dead crowd, get these people on their feet.” And Junior would come up to the mic and start a chant, or he would start to clap with his hands above his head.
JUNIOR MARVIN: Well, we were very close. Bob, Seeco and myself used to hang out a lot at that particular time. Bob and Family Man were very close, they used to hang out at one time, and then it kinda shifted and became me and Seeco he hung out with. And it would shift to various members. So the three of us used to hang out and I was the new kid on the block. And the two of them used to jive me a lot. And if you made even the slightest mistake Bob would pick it up. And of course I used to make one or two mistakes which weren’t really obvious to the general public, but Bob would hear it and tilt his head to my ear and go, “Wh’appen?” I remember one time we were doing the One Love Peace Concert in Jamaica. It was my first show in Jamaica. You know, coming forward to Jamaica after growing up and going to school in England. Coming home. It was like, to do that concert was the ultimate! I was so excited that night that he was doing a song [“Jamming”], and I played one note wrong, just bent it a little too the wrong way, and Bob said, “Wa-wa-wa-watch what you’re doin’
!” So he was very disciplined, he was a workaholic. And he wanted everything to be perfect, and that’s rubbed off on us. He didn’t just say things, he practiced it as well. We used to love jamming, we could play for hours. That’s how he wrote his songs, too.
When I first joined the band I was like a soloist and I used to solo a lot. And they used to sit back and watch me solo for two or three hours! Look at this kid, you know? And it was fun, it was great, because they gave me great opportunity to express myself and be part of everything that was going on. And they gave me time to fit in, practice to get it right. It was very hard work. Bob never let up on you. He always gave you the impression you could do it better. He brought the best out of you. At one point we had two lead guitarists, Al Anderson and myself. Al would play lead on the songs that he played lead on the album and I would do also the same. But it was also competitive. And Bob knew this, he would play us against each other as a joke and made us try harder to be better and better.
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Page 28
