ROGER STEFFENS: On Valentine’s Day, 1987, the Wailers Band—Al Anderson, Junior Marvin, Seeco Patterson, Earl “Wya” Lindo and Carly and Aston “Family Man” Barrett—came to see the Reggae Archives on Valentine Street in L.A. It was their first look at a massive assembly of their works: films, videos, records, tapes of hundreds of hours of concerts and other unreleased Wailers material, cabinets filled with clippings, photographs and more. The band was on a ten-hour layover in L.A. en route home to Kingston from New Zealand, where they had played to a huge sold-out crowd. Their tour had also included three dates in Israel. The future looked brighter for the band than it had in a long time, with an album deal almost set and a major summer tour in the works. Carly, the enigmatic drummer, was healthy and coherent, belying recent rumors of emotional problems and obesity. Even Wya joined our conversations, albeit somewhat shyly. That evening, we looked at three hours of videos that have been held back from the public. Most of this footage the band had never seen, including historic moments in London in 1973 with Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, the Smile Jamaica concert in 1976, the Amandla benefit in Harvard Stadium in 1979 and the Zimbabwe independence celebration in 1980. As of this writing in 2016, none of these videos has been officially released, although the Marley estate bought the footage of Amandla and Zimbabwe in 2009.
After viewing the tapes, we spoke about each of the musicians’ favorite tracks that they recorded with Marley. Excerpts from our conversation were broadcast in two parts in May 1987 on the cable TV show L.A. Reggae. The programs marked our final look at Carlton Barrett, the rock-solid heart of the Wailers, together with the men he played with for all those years. He was murdered in April 1987 in Kingston, supposedly by a gunman hired by his wife, although her conviction for conspiracy to commit murder was reversed on appeal. This was his final interview.
JUNIOR MARVIN: My favorite is “War.” The words were written by Haile Selassie. And that’s the message to mankind right now. That’s the best song Bob ever do! Every time Bob sing “War” is like the first time him ever sing it, and the last time. His Majesty said that you must revel in the Bible. And when he said that speech, he didn’t say it for anyone in particular, he said it for the whole world. But people don’t even realize that yet; they’re slowly coming to realize.
CARLTON BARRETT: My favorite is “Forever Loving Jah.” Why? Because we have to!
AL ANDERSON: I’d say “Roots.” I was around when he was writing it, and I saw how it came about to him. It was in Jamaica. Just as he sings the words, that’s how it came about. All the people around him: there were certain people cooking food and motivating certain things, and certain energies were going down. I just hadn’t seen anyone work like that, and use all the elements that were in front of him, and put them into songs like that.
FAMILY MAN BARRETT: Well I’ve got a wide range. What I will do is give you just three! Number one is “So Much Things To Say,” and “Guiltiness” (“rest on their conscience every day”), also “Get Up Stand Up” (“for your rights”).
EARL “WYA” LINDO: The Confrontation album was the heaviest. “Give Thanks” and “Jump Nyabinghi.” I love all of the songs on Confrontation. Some very good songs.
ALVIN “SEECO” PATTERSON: Mine is “Natty Dread.” I’m a part of it! I think I got a few lines there.
ROGER STEFFENS: It’s said that Bob wrote his songs in community, that the band would sit around on the porch or in the studio and people would throw lines at him, and he would incorporate them into a verse; if he found something he liked, he’d work it out a little further.
FAMILY MAN BARRETT: That’s how it worked at times. We were all cowriters.
JUNIOR MARVIN: Bob used to give me ideas. But like my solo on “Waiting In Vain,” that came to me in a dream. I heard the track, and then I tried it once and I said, “OK, I’ll do it tomorrow.” I went home; I slept, came back and did it in the first take. While I was sleeping, I dreamt about the song. And that’s what came out.
ALVIN “SEECO” PATTERSON: You remember the “Work” song?
ROGER STEFFENS: “Five days to go, four days to go.”
ALVIN “SEECO” PATTERSON: It wasn’t days! It was miles. I was coming from the country. I start to run a riddim, and sing about the miles. And him say, “Continue that song. Just pick up the miles and put a melody to it.” And me just go in the studio go work out on some records, and him say, would I work ’pon that, and me say, “Yeah mon,” and me turn the miles into days. And there we go on so.
ROGER STEFFENS: The lyrics counting off the final days of his life became the last song on side one of his farewell album, Uprising, and the last song he sang (in a medley with “Get Up Stand Up”) at his final concert in Pittsburgh.
Years later Wya and Junior spoke of their favorite concerts.
EARL “WYA” LINDO: I think that Ethiopian celebration in London with Bob was my favorite show with him. It was a charity performance in 1978. What made it so special was the momentum, the buildup, it was like all over London prior to the performance. That night I think he was kinda like more specially originative, like not just another performance. That’s when he made an impression, he got over. That was the performance that made him a star.
JUNIOR MARVIN: To me every concert was a high point. They were all a little different. And the way that we looked at things is that every concert is the first and the last we’ll ever do. That was something that rubbed off from Bob. We all feel the same way now. His influence has rubbed off on practically all the forerunners in reggae now. That’s a foundation for reggae, the spiritual foundation. And you can’t go any further than the spiritual foundation. The money and everything else is just part of it. Money can’t buy life. But the spiritual foundation is for eternity.
EPILOGUE
ROGER STEFFENS: For a dozen years after Bob’s passing, the story of the Marley estate was a sad one. Lawsuits abounded. Rita was accused of having forged and predated certain documents so as to transfer Marley’s assets to herself. She admitted to having done so on the advice of Marley’s attorney and accountant, who were found guilty of fraud and criminal conspiracy. Charges against her were dismissed, but she was removed as executor and the new Seaga administration in Jamaica took over the running of the estate for several years.* Eventually eleven children, including three who did not bear Bob’s blood, were given a million dollars each.
Bob had predicted that reggae would just get bigger and bigger until it reached its rightful people. He might as well have been speaking of himself, as he has become one of the most abiding superstars of the twentieth century.
In 1994 he became the first third world inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. At the millennium, the New York Times hailed him as the most influential musical artist of the second half of the twentieth century. A concurrent time capsule, meant to be opened at the dawn of the next millennium, in the year 3000, included the video of Marley’s 1977 Rainbow concert as an example of the finest musical moment of the 1900s.
Time magazine chose Exodus as the best album of the century. And the BBC’s twenty-four-hour coverage of millennial celebrations around the world opened each hour with local renditions of “One Love,” as the millennium’s anthem. A Grammy Lifetime Achievement award, a star on Hollywood Boulevard, the inclusion of Burnin’ in the Library of Congress’s historic music registry, are all indications that his work will never be forgotten.
Marley’s posthumous greatest hits album, Legend, holds the distinction of being the longest-charting album in the history of Billboard magazine’s catalog album chart, topping it frequently between 1984 and the present day.
In the social media era, Bob Marley has the second highest following of any late celebrity, with his Facebook page attracting more than sixty million followers.
Several of his children and grandchildren have successful recording careers, winning Grammys while touring the world with Bob’s material and hits of their own.
Surely Bob Marley, the undisputed
King of Reggae, would approve.
* http://www.forbes.com/sites/trialandheirs/2011/12/05/are-bob-marley-heirs-destroying-his-legacy/#5cdf871127d2.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to thank every one of those whose words appear in these pages. Each was generous with their time and memories, and understood my desire to preserve their stories for posterity in unfiltered form.
My early comrades in the broadcasting world were the masterful Lance Linares of KUSP in Santa Cruz, California, and the hugely innovative DJ–VJ “Duppy Doug” Wendt, who, beginning in 1974, brought Jah music to several commercial stations in the San Francisco Bay area. These precedent-setting men created an environment in which the best of conscious Jamaican music would influence generations of listeners and musicians who have kept reggae alive and thriving in California. To this day, almost four decades later, we are in almost daily touch.
The “reggae recluse,” Hank Holmes, probably taught me more about the music than anyone else ever has. Our seven-and-a-half-year partnership on Reggae Beat made it L.A.’s most popular “appointment radio,” turning Sunday afternoons into a city-wide grounation. In addition, our one-hour syndicated program, Reggae Beat International, was eventually heard on 130 stations around the world including the Voice of America’s Africa service, which led to fan letters in Swahili.
The esteemed bluesmaster Leroy Pierson embarked on his reggae studies in 1977. I was one of the first he contacted when he began a mail-order list of rare Jamaican seven-inch records. At great personal risk, he ventured into Kingston’s no-man’s-lands to unearth tons of vinyl gold. Some of the most cherished parts of my Reggae Archives I owe to him. I love him like a brother for all we have shared together, especially three weeks spent in Bunny Wailer’s company as he poured out his soul to us in a Kingston hotel room. We then collaborated on the definitive discography of the Wailers, the prime resource for Wailers’ vinyl collectors.
CC Smith and I met at Sunsplash ’81 in Montego Bay and became friends and partners immediately. She came to KCRW determined to “straighten out the chaos,” doing a weekly calendar of events and cofounding with me a newsletter originally called Reggae Beat, after our show. It contained playlists of our programs, Hank’s Rastafari reasonings, and a column I called “Ras RoJah’s Reggae Ramblings.” As interest in world music broadened and I became the National Promotions Director of Reggae and African Music for Island Records (1982–83), its focus broadened and the newsletter became a full-fledged magazine called the Reggae and African Beat, which was finally shortened to just The Beat. It lasted an impressive and often precarious twenty-eight years, until in 2009 the Internet’s toll on print publishing and the music industry led to its demise. CC provided the outlet for me to publish my interviews with reggae’s greatest figures, many of which were adapted for this book. I will be eternally grateful to her for her perseverance and tight editorial guidance and counsel, and the great gift of her friendship. She is the prime reason the material for this book exists.
In 1980 I was invited by Trinidadian drummer and videographer Chili Charles, to be the host of his new cable TV show, L.A. Reggae. We worked side by side for twenty-three years. He was only a phone call away and ready with camera and lights for our video vérité interview sessions with the Wailers en route home from New Zealand, Peter Tosh in a Hollywood hotel, Fela Kuti in his underpants, Bunny Wailer in our backyard, Freddie McGregor at a hundred-year-old piano, Judy Mowatt in MoBay. And hundreds more. Without him, much of this book would not have been possible. And special appreciation to Chris Wilson, Heartbeat Records’ longtime collaborator on the reissues of Coxsone’s Wailers catalog.
Many writers have come through the Archives to research their books, and have become friends in the process. Among them are learned folks like John Masouri, Garry Steckles, Chris Salewicz and Stephen Davis, the latter a regular and valued contributor to The Beat magazine, with whom I have shared a laughter-strewn journey. His gregarious partner, photographer Peter Simon, was a willing co-conspirator in The Beat and gave us free some of our most important illustrations. He and I collaborated in 2007 on the award-winning Reggae Scrapbook.
I have also learned much from the distinguished poet, actor and author Kwame Dawes, whose insights in Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius proved invaluable on my “Survival Revival” tour with the Wailers in 2013. Similarly, wise counsel has always been a phone call away from revered broadcaster Dermot Hussey, a cherished friend who is a key voice on the reggae and jazz channels of SiriusXM satellite radio. Impeccable Marley publicist Jeff Walker and his keen-eyed photographer wife, Kim Gottleib-Walker, have been close friends since the mid-1970s. Jeff was our first guest on the Reggae Beat and his eyewitness tales of the assassination attempt’s aftermath proved riveting to our early listeners. I was honored when Kim invited me to write text for her excellent book Bob Marley and the Golden Age of Reggae. The Walkers introduced me to the esteemed oral historian David Rensin, whose precise instruction in the form helped give me the confidence to reconfigure the original conception of this book.
Kate Simon and Vivien Goldman, vivacious partners in the 1970s covering the emerging Jamaican musical revolution, have given me invaluable advice and warm friendship and freely shared stories of their time with Marley and his mates.
It was Warren Smith, the impresario of the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, who gave me my first publication as a reggae writer in his broadsheet, Reggae News. That led to my meeting with the flamboyant Liverpool Irish publicist for Bob and Peter, Charlie Comer. He became like a Dutch uncle to me, introducing me to Tosh and treating this neophyte as if I were some bigshot journalist. He spent the last week of his life with me at the Archives and left me his Diamond Record award for ten million sales for Legend. He is one of the behind-the-scenes people most responsible for Marley’s enormous success.
Over the past twenty years I have had the great honor of being a part-time member of the Midnight Ravers posse at WBAI, New York City’s estimable Pacifica outlet. The brilliant Terry Wilson, along with “Sir Henry” Eccleston and their partners, have arranged for some of the most important interviews of my life, finally corralling original ska-era Wailers Cherry Green and Beverley Kelso for hours of amazing conversations about the birth of the group. And thanks to meticulous label chiefs Randall Grass and Chris Wilson for commissioning many Wailers liner notes.
Bruno Blum, from Paris, is one of the most awe-inspiring and talented people I’ve ever encountered. Bruno has been a partner to me on books and discs and magazines, most especially the fifteen-CD series The Complete Bob Marley and the Wailers: 1967–1972. He is France’s greatest gift to reggae, and I value his friendship more than tongue can tell. From Toronto, big-hearted humanitarian Greg Lawson provided some of the most significant records in the collection.
South African documentarian Jo Menell is one of the Earth’s great characters, whether filming Castro’s revolutionary advance into Havana or running Allende’s television network in Chile, or directing BBC-TV’s documentary wing, or seeking the hand of Haile Selassie’s granddaughter at the palace in Addis Ababa, or smuggling reggae tapes to Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment. Jo was hired to be the original director of the official Marley documentary, and his ability to contextualize much of Marley’s puzzling relationship with Chris Blackwell put things into needed perspective for me.
In Jamaica, Marley’s business manager and my dear friend, Colin Leslie, has provided guidance on many levels, determined as he is to find a way for my Archives to be institutionalized in his country. At the University of the West Indies I am deeply indebted to Dr. Matthew Smith, a scholar of immense knowledge and keen perception. He vetted my text and corrected my patois, placing things in proper context. His hand, though invisible, is present in much of the 1960s material herein. I am also grateful to scholars at UWI including Doctors Donna Hope, Michael Witter, Omar Davies and Clinton Hutton. Herbie Miller, Tosh’s former manager, has been a thirty-year font of information
. And I must pay deep thanks to the extraordinary broadcaster and dub poet Mutabaruka for his constant support in my quest to place my archives to Jamaica.
Throughout my reggae career I have been involved in countless projects, writing and otherwise, with my brother-from-another-mother Gary Himmelfarb, better known as Doctor Dread, the founder of RAS Records. He has opened many doors for me and given me many assignments that opened my eyes to new discoveries, and I will always be thankful for the many aspects of his zany creativity. Raggae activists “Native Wayne” Jobson and Amy “Night Nurse” Wachtel have been invaluable friends for decades.
In the present moment, perhaps the most important internet site for the study of the Wailers and their individual legacies is run by the indefatigable Mike Watson at midnightraverblog. With great integrity, he has been a tireless promoter of my work, ensuring that Marley’s message will not be forgotten by future generations.
European collectors have shared their knowledge with me, most notably, in the UK, Dr. Sam Dion and Glen Lockley, founder of the Wailers fanzine Distant Drums. Expert London-based encyclopedist Dave Katz helped correct several points in my final draft. In Holland, I’m deeply indebted to the omnivorous Mike van der Linde. Erudite magazine editors Gilbert Paytel in France and Peter Lilly and Ellen Kohlings in Germany continue to publish my work in translation.
I would be remiss not to mention the support and tolerance of my loving family. My wife Mary, a beautiful Berkeley grad with a fine eye for style, is the first editor of everything I write and is unafraid to tell me when I am off-base. Daughter Kate and son Devon Marley have witnessed virtually every stage of my evolution from crazed young fan to grizzly elder, and both are writers and photographers of impressive ability. My love for them is boundless as they continue to circulate my photographs worldwide on instagram.com/thefamilyacid.
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Page 42
