TYRONE DOWNIE: We take them right up to the door of peace.
BOB MARLEY: Because everyone guilty now. Now that peace come, everyone see what the guy was doing.
TYRONE DOWNIE: What this man was saying, it is a false peace.
BOB MARLEY: If the guy hide and do it, it can’t false. And a Revelation time now. One aim, one God, one destiny, is that overcome all things. Music is a part of the whole struggle right? Music.
ROGER STEFFENS: In Bob’s most militant songs, such as “Burnin’ And Lootin’,” are lyrics that many critics felt incited a violent response to oppression.
TYRONE DOWNIE: If push comes to shove, I mean, Zimbabwe–Rhodesia don’t really want an armed struggle. Nkrumah don’t want an armed struggle [in Ghana]. They’ve lost enough people, but if Smith and Vorster [in Rhodesia and South Africa] and all a them don’t want to give up the land they’ll just have to fight for it. Nobody wants to fight.
BOB MARLEY: Me personally, you see from dem man deal with Rastafari, me no see the solution. ’Cause anything them want deal with, if them no deal with the right thing then you must a go have a next revolution again. I’m not going to say the peace won’t last because you know I no inna that. I just a say, dem have a right to defend Rastafari. That is what can make the peace, the justice and everything. You have two world powers, all right, according to them, Russia and America. Right? That mean we no see where Russia and America no deal with my life forever, seen. Them no inna that. All dem a do is create I and say live forever, who Him name Rastafari. If when man come, you see and talk, the people don’t understand, then God going to talk. And God no talk, Him take action. So you see if America want something to bring the people closer to God dem might get it, you know? So is the word come first. ’Cause remember the action is coming.
GILLY GILBERT: When Bob spoke about Africa in 1977, that was the time he said he wanted to go to Africa, after he went through all that changes in the politics, the shooting. He was on that trek when he said “Movements of Jah people, Exodus.” At that time he had planned to go live in Africa and set up in Africa. But come 1978 they had this peace treaty thing in Jamaica and they got Bob involved and I would say they persuaded him, or convinced him to come back to Jamaica, which I myself, I don’t think he should have done that. We don’t make no war with nobody. We come here in peace, love and harmony, and Bob preach about unity, sing about unity.
ROGER STEFFENS: In September 1979, with the Peace Concert of April 1978 and a near-fatal beating by the police three months later still fresh in his memory, Peter Tosh had this to say about the concert.
PETER TOSH: Legendary Peace Concert, so-called. Anything change? Yes. More people dead. Yes, man. Peace? Then what you think peace is? Peace is death. Your passport to heaven. Most people don’t know that.
CHAPTER 28
Babylon by Bus from the U.N. to Ethiopia
R
OGER STEFFENS: In June 1978, two months after the Peace Concert and in the midst of an international tour, Bob was invited to New York to receive the United Nations Peace Medal of the Third World. It was given to him at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel by an ebullient diplomat from Senegal named Mohmmadu “Johnny” Seka. As the youth ambassador from that country to the U.N. he had lobbied for several years to get the medal for Marley. (He would later die of melanoma at the age of thirty-six—just as Bob did.)
At the ceremony and the press conference after, Bob was presented with the medal and a painting titled Jamma, done by a Mandingo artist. It is now on display at the Marley Museum in Kingston. As he handed it to Bob, Ambassador Seka pointed to his peacemaking initiative at the One Love concert, declaring, “On April 22, in Jamaica, all the artists, Jamaicans, unify, singing and getting together. Because they think we can’t unify by ourselves. That’s good initiative.” He regretted that Bob had not yet come to perform in Africa where “we buy the records of Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder for $20!” [This was about four times the price paid in America at the time.]
Asked by a reporter how it felt to be a hero, Bob modestly denied the proposition, pointing instead to Selassie. “This is the generation that see God,” he said, “and Rastafari is the Almighty God. This is where the interest is . . . the Rastafari message. . . . You can’t subdue the message.” In one of his first public statements acknowledging his awareness that he was channeling a divine source he said, “You open your mouth and God speak out of you and you can’t control that. I remember when Jah send Moses to talk and him say him can’t talk and Jah tell him open your mouth and Him talk out of it. . . . This is why Jah use music because you can’t control it. . . . Music is the biggest gun.” Because the oppressed cannot afford weapons, he explained, it’s no use fighting that way because they are outgunned on every level. So love is the answer, and it would be a theme of his 1979 album Survival.
Bob’s 1977 Exodus North American tour had been canceled when the melanoma was discovered in his toe, so it wasn’t until the following year that he returned, in support of his new LP Kaya. Critics were decrying its alleged “softness,” saying Bob had taken refuge in ganja-induced oblivion following the assassination attempt on his life in December 1976, and contrasting it with the seemingly more militant Exodus, not realizing that all the songs had been cut at the same time in the early part of his UK exile.
A skin graft onto his infected toe led Bob to believe he had been healed, so he scheduled a demanding tour of Europe and North America from May through July 1978, more than fifty concerts from Scandinavia to San Diego. Recordings from the tour ended up on his second live album, a two-disc set called Babylon by Bus. Several of those dates would be in California, which is where my path crossed with him for the first time. I had seen Bob at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, California, in 1975, but now I would become familiar with the band members and subsequently with Bob himself, learning what a tightly-knit group he had assembled.
JUNIOR MARVIN: In 1978, at the time, we were touring quite a lot. And the band were really in tune with one another. We were listening to one another, giving each other the right space, appreciating all the points that were brought up by one another about each other. Everyone was totally positive about their criticism. And it helped us a lot, because we were really trying to think positive and make the band as good as possible. At that particular tour everyone was very happy and the vibes, the responses from the audience, were really good. Everyone was singing the vocals along with Bob at the concert, everyone knew the words, and it was very inspiring for all of us. Al Anderson and myself were trading a lot of licks. We were really pushing each other to do better. If you listen to the live album, you will hear both of us playing really well. And Bob feeling very happy about it.
ROGER STEFFENS: The Kaya studio LP was different in style and content. Award-winning photographer Kate Simon took the iconic cover image, which was later chosen for the Taschen book The Photos of the Century: 100 Historic Moments. In her book Rebel Music, she described the day she took the photo of Bob with that beatific smile on his face.
KATE SIMON: I was down in Kingston in ’76 shooting Bunny for his album Blackheart Man. One day I was racing Chris Blackwell at the breaststroke in the Sheraton pool. Chris gave me a little bit of a head start but I’d been a junior Olympic swimmer so I was pretty good. But we swam, Chris won, I got out of the pool and there was Bob Marley sitting at one of those tables with tin umbrellas. And that’s when I took the Kaya portrait. It wasn’t a formal photo session or anything. I was wearing a swimsuit, that’s how informal it was. The photograph to me is a very special one: Bob’s face is so open, his smile is so big, his gaze is so sharp, that the photograph seems to give off light.
Photographer Kate Simon, double-exposed with her cover photo for Kaya. New York, February 2002.
NEVILLE GARRICK: On the back cover of Kaya there was a drawing I did of Bob between two mountains with like sunset coming up, which they later drew into a poster, somebody redrew. And then Bob looked at it and say, “It cool, but too much of me.
Why I am on the back and on the front?” And they needed to get this album out right away. Now I’d gotten this other image [of ganja leaves and a huge burning spliff] from Paul Smykle to make a backdrop from ’cause I liked it so much. So Island had this holding for me, so I just called and said, “Hey, we’re gonna change the back of the cover. Let’s use Smykle’s drawing and put the type over it.” So we designed it on the telephone.
ROGER STEFFENS: Marley and the Wailers’ second live album, released in 1978, was a creatively designed double LP package recorded at several different venues.
NEVILLE GARRICK: On Babylon by Bus, this one Blackwell collaborated with me a little bit on. There was a group he had there that did real well for him before called Traffic. There was a live album this man had submitted, and he did like the back of a truck, like one of those tour forty-foot trailers, and the group like was coming out of there. I think 10cc did something similar later on. And Chris said something like showing them on tour and moving, and I started to work around that kind of idea: some moving him through a bus or an aircraft or something like that. And the bus idea kind of fit the squareness of a jacket. So the title of the album came from the design concept then, rather than the other way around.
ROGER STEFFENS: Marley fans from California have always been puzzled by the idiosyncratic map of their state in the liner notes.
NEVILLE GARRICK: Somehow Santa Cruz, which is about ninety miles southwest of Berkeley, ended up about four hundred miles north of Berkeley! And imagine, California is where I lived and that’s the only place I mixed up. Well, you have so much earthquake down there, probably sometime it move.
ROGER STEFFENS: According to several of his closest associates, Marley’s favorite concert in North America took place on Haile Selassie’s birthday, July 23, 1978, at the Santa Barbara Bowl. Reggae historian Dr. Steve Heilig was there.
DR. STEVE HEILIG: We in Santa Barbara were stoked to have Marley and the Wailers coming through again for an afternoon show, especially as Bob had just been quoted as saying our open-air bowl was his favorite place to play in America. The Rolling Stones, hot on a comeback with the Some Girls LP, were playing a couple hours south in L.A. at the same time. Marley and the Wailers put on a legendary, smoking show, with encores stretching into the evening. Towards the end, I was standing on the side of the stage and sensed a presence next to me: Mick Jagger. Now wait a minute, I think. Mick’s supposed to be singing right now! As Bob and the boys, drenched in sweat, leave the stage at last, I see Mick bolt for a helicopter waiting in the lot below. Damn, he’s gonna be late, I think, and sure enough, he kept over fifty thousand of his fans waiting a couple extra hours so he could catch the Marley show.
ROGER STEFFENS: The herbal-grounding that had softened the Kaya record and brought him to California was numbingly evident when I met him for the first time, backstage at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium in July 1978. My wife Mary and I had been living that summer in Big Sur, and when we heard Bob was coming, we bought tickets to both his scheduled shows. We were among the first in the auditorium early that evening. The soundboard was right in the middle of the floor, and there was a tall man I didn’t recognize standing by it, curling his nascent dreads around his fingertips. I figured he had to be with the band, so I approached and asked him if they were going to play “Waiting In Vain” that evening. “Why?” he asked. “Well,” I said with excitement, “that’s my very favorite Wailers song, especially that incredible lead guitar solo that Junior Marvin plays in the middle of it.”
“You want to meet Bob,” the dread said, catching us completely off guard. Without hesitation, of course, we both blurted “Yes!” and he began leading us backstage down a long corridor. “What’s your names?” he asked us. I told him and asked his. “I’m Junior Marvin,” he laughed. Boy, I thought, did we say the right thing to the right man at the right time! Junior ushered us into a large back room, where four huge cafeteria-style tables had been pushed together to make a giant table around which the Wailers were seated at great distances from one another. The room was virtually soundless; it looked like a convention of zombies. No one was saying anything to anyone. And each had a tall green anthill of herb piled in front of him with his own individual pack of rolling papers.
I had a poster promoting the Greek Theater show coming up three days later in Berkeley, which had been given out to people waiting in line. Junior said, “Why don’t you ask Bob to sign it?” “Oh, yeah, sure!” I stammered. Junior graciously introduced us, but Bob was definitely “inna de ites” and well red by this time. He signed the poster for me, as did all the other band members in turn, and we left to find seats, speechless and freaked to the max. I still have the poster, and since then, nearly everyone of major import in Bob’s life—forty-one people, saints and sinners alike—has signed it for me, too. When I loaned it to the Grammy Museum in 2011 they insured it for $75,000.
In Santa Cruz that night Bob did two twenty-one-song shows, identical in content (which was rare for him) and both, of course, sold out. He didn’t make any small talk or patter during the sets, preferring that the words of his songs speak for him. Or perhaps it was just a tribute to the gift that a young couple we saw backstage had given him. Dressed all in white, barefoot, and both very blond, the couple had presented Bob with an enormous bud about eighteen inches long. He just smiled, smelled it admiringly, and began building a cricket-bat spliff. A-woah!
We drove down to L.A. the following weekend to catch Bob at the Starlight Bowl in Burbank. It was a nightmare getting inside, because there was only one entrance and they were searching everyone. We missed the Imperials’ opening act, but found our seats just as Bob was introduced. The show was similar to that in Santa Cruz, at least until the encores. Later we learned that stars like Mick Jagger and Diana Ross had been milling about backstage, trying to wangle an invitation to come on stage with Bob, but he was having none of it. So imagine our shock when, as Bob began to sing his final encore of “Get Up Stand Up,” Peter Tosh appeared, loping across the stage with massive strides, just at the part of the song where he comes in on the record. As he reached for the microphone, Bob suddenly caught sight of him and broke into a broad, ecstatic smile. Peter never missed a beat, and the two hugged each other and acted as if they’d never been separated. It was the only time they would ever appear together outside Jamaica after the breakup of the group—a piece of history that, sadly, most people in the audience didn’t realize was happening, as few of them recognized Peter.
Afterward, I encountered Peter walking through the crowd. The next day he would be opening for the Rolling Stones in the Anaheim Stadium, and I eagerly assured him that we, like many others, would be there basically just to see him, and that he had lots of fans in L.A.
A few years later, just after Bob passed, I interviewed Peter for L.A. Reggae, a cable TV show that Chili Charles and I had just started, and asked him whether Bob had known he was going to come out on stage that evening. “No,” he said, indicating that it was the Spirit that had moved him spontaneously and “whatsoever the Spirit tell me to do, I do.” What else did he remember of that night? “Well,” he drawled, thick smoke pouring from his nostrils, “I remember we go backstage and Bob clapped my hand and say, ‘Bwoi, the Pope feel that one!’ ” Then, laughing, he announced, “And three days later, the Pope die!”
ROGER STEFFENS: In 1978 Bob flew to Africa for the first time, landing in Kenya with a couple of friends in an attempt to visit Ethiopia. His efforts were rebuffed until one day, as he walked down a street in Nairobi, a man recognized him and asked him what he was doing in Africa. When Bob told him he was trying to gain entrance into Ethiopia, the man identified himself as an Ethiopian consular official and wrote him a visa.
The short trip opened his eyes to the reality of the situation in Ethiopia following the coup that had ousted Haile Selassie in 1974. All images of His Majesty were forbidden. He was shocked that there was no evidence of the Rastafarian faith, except for the area around Shashamane in the O
romia region of the country. There, land had been given to repatriating Rastafari, mostly from Jamaica and England, who were forming a homeland for their coreligionists. Bob’s idea that he should move to Ethiopia as soon as he had the opportunity was put on hold.
NEVILLE GARRICK: Bob was in Ethiopia for maybe three or four days. Bob was probably in Kenya longer than Ethiopia, trying to get in there. I think he spent most of the time in Shashamane, and maybe a day and a half in Addis, and I think Skill come for him, and then to Shashamane, and spend a few days there and then gone!
There’s a Polaroid picture of Bob under the sycamore tree in Shashamane. Bob’s friend Malachi is on the left and the man called Lips in the middle.
ROGER STEFFENS: The lack of respect for Selassie was deeply disturbing to Marley.
NEVILLE GARRICK: What I think was his most disappointment was seeing all the Marxist or Communist trappings all over Ethiopia. Statues of Marx and Lenin and not seeing His Majesty and Menelik*although some of those statues are still there, but they made those new ones bigger and grander to mark the change. And knowing that you’re being watched, because Bob’s fame had spread enough that everybody know, and you’re defending the monarchy in a Communist state.
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Page 32
