Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright

by Hank Bordowitz

  Remembering Bob Marley

  by Rita Marley

  (Source: Essence, February 1995)

  ON first impression, you wouldn’t imagine Bob to be a show-business personality. He was quite reserved. I believe he had a lot of complexes, being the son of a White man. I would see him suffer a lot just trying to be himself. We met in the mid-sixties in Trench Town, Jamaica, when I was 18 and he was 19. 1 think he was attracted to me, in part, because I am dark, and also because I bear a close resemblance to his mother, Cedilla Booker. But at first I didn’t like him, the seriousness about him, the standoffishness. Besides, every girl my age wanted a tall, dark-skinned boyfriend, so Peter Tosh was the one who originally caught my eye.

  Then Bob and I started to sing together. He would be the one to work with my group, the Soulettes. He rehearsed us every day, and I liked the way he carried himself, his high level of consciousness. I had a little daughter, Sharon, and I thought to myself, This man looks like he would be a good father. I started to see he was the person I should like.

  I had sympathy for Bob. He didn’t know his father, his mother had moved to America, and he was living in a recording studio, sleeping on the floor. Life was rough for him. Remember that song that said, “Cold ground was my bed last night”? That was real for Bob. Over time I grew and grew in respect for him. It was a sisterly love. I said to myself, Okay, Bob, I’m going to take care of you. 1 took him food, bed linens. It was natural that we started loving each other.

  I felt we were meant to be together. But in February 1966 his mother got a visa for him to join her in Delaware. She wanted a better life for him. He was very upset and said he wasn’t going. Then he said the only way he would go is if “Rita marry to me, so I know she mine.” It was crazy because we didn’t have any money, didn’t have anything. But my aunt said, “If you got love for each other, that’s enough.” So we got all “dolly-dooleyed” up, and we got married.

  When Bob went to America, I wrote him every day. He was very sad. He would not eat. He had a job in housekeeping at a Delaware hotel. One day when he was vacuuming, the machine exploded and dust went everywhere. That was it. So after about eight months, he decided to come back to Jamaica, little Sharon and me. Deep down he always knew he was a singer and that he would not spend his life in America doing odd jobs.

  Our daughter, Cedella, was born in August 1967, less than a year after he returned home. Bob gave her the pet name “Nice Time.” It was inspired by his homecoming. You may know his song that says, “Long time we no have no nice time.” Ziggy came in October 1968, Stephen in April 1972 and Stephanie in August 1974. Bob would take us driving, and we would jam together in the evening. We would sing and he would play his guitar. He was very serious about his music, always serious about it. It was the reality of his life, but also of the lives of millions. Like “Get Up, Stand Up.” This was an encouragement to be strong, be faithful. “One love, one heart, let’s get together and feel all right”—freedom fighters in Zimbabwe say that song got them going when they were seeking their independence from Britain.

  One of the first times we performed in America, we were at Madison Square Garden in New York City opening for a major U.S. group. After we finished, everybody got up and left. Bob Marley outdid this popular American group. That was something—to see an American audience accept us. Another time we were in London, and where we were singing there was a pool in front of the stage. It was full of muddy water, but everybody jumped in just to get closer to us.

  We worked hard. I remember being in the studio back in Jamaica, eight going on nine months pregnant, thinking, I can’t take this. I just knew I was going to have this baby in the studio. But Bob said, “This album must finish.” Sometimes when I was sleeping, he would shake me. “Listen to this,” he would say. And he would play his guitar and sing and I would take down the lyrics.

  Our harmony was tested when word would come that another woman had had a baby for him. At first I said to him, “Are you crazy? Is this something I’m going to have to live with?” But I asked God to give me the understanding, ’cause our love was more than for flesh or looks, it was something so deep. I found tolerance. I grew to love what he loved. Now I have a relationship with the children’s mothers. We were never enemies. And I made sure the children got to school, got to the dentist. Today I say I have 11 children, a bunch of grands, a village in Africa and a world of people. I have acquired a perfect love, which helps me to this day.

  When our five were little, I knew they would be somebody. They would beg their father to let them sing a song in the studio. He said to let them go to music school first and learn to read and write music, something he had never done. Poor Ziggy, he was so disappointed. He was always eager to show Daddy. When Bob would go on the road, Ziggy would stand on the side of the stage begging to perform. Today Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers are headliners. Ziggy is similar to Bob in dedication to his work and in his positiveness. And what a thing! I’ve seen father and son look alike but never such a step-out- of-you-into-me–type likeness. But Stephen—he’s Bob, too, in his reserve, the shape of his hands, the way he walks.

  I miss Bob. When I feel things are too much to bear—particularly with the legal battles [over the Marley estate]—I especially wish he were here. It was cancer that took him. It started in his foot and spread up through his body. As a Rasta though, you’d never hear him saying “If I die . . .” or “When I die . . .” To Rastafarians life is an everlasting gift. But one day in the hospital Bob was ready to go. I heard him say, “God, take me please.” I held him in my arms and started singing to him. Then I started to cry. Bob looked up at me. “Don’t cry,” he said softly, “keep singing.”

  Bob Marley at Studio One

  by Hank Bordowitz

  (Previously Unpublished)

  BEFORE Bob Marley became an international hero, before he even became an icon at home in Jamaica, he paid his dues. Like so many other Jamaican artists, he paid them to Studio One Records.

  Started by mobile sound system DJ Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd to ensure that he had music no other DJ on the circuit had (others did the same), Studio One became a major force in Jamaican music. Dodd had an excellent ear for what his listeners wanted and the artists he recorded at Studio One filled that bill. The studio and label became the breeding ground for nearly every major Jamaican star, and just about anyone who is or was anyone in reggae and ska passed through Studio One at one time or another. Dodd says that he didn’t even have to go looking for the artists he signed.

  “I used to have a sound system, what they now call a discotheque, playing all over,” he explains. “It started from the rhythm and blues, and we played a little jazz, until we started recording our own music in Jamaica. I used to visit a lot of live dances. That sound was what we emphasized when we started recording. So I had my fans and when we started recording locally, I had guys rooting for me. Whenever they would hear a good artist, they would bring them.”

  One of these fans was Secco Patterson. “This chap, Secco, he was the one who brought them,” Dodd recalls of how Bob Marley and the Wailers came to Studio One. “He said, ‘Boss, I have a good group here.’ He was a close friend of mine. He loved the music that I played on my sound system. Every weekend, he’d be where we had our session. Secco knew these guys and brought them for an audition. They were four boys and two girls. All singing. He was with them until Bob died. He played conga for them.”

  The six singing sensations Secco secured at Studio One were Mar-ley, Peter McIntosh (who later lost the “McIn” and went by the name of Tosh), Bunny Livingston (who took the band’s name and called himself Bunny Wailer), Junior Brathwaite, Beverly Kelso, and Cherry Green. They sang around Kingston as The Teenagers (which they certainly were at the time), the Wailing Rudeboys, and the Wailing Wailers, which they ultimately shortened to just the Wailers. When they came to Studio One, they were very young and unformed. Mar-ley was barely eighteen.

  “I was the only producer out ther
e building the artists up from the ground floor,” Dodd says. “The other producers wanted somebody who was strong already and in the limelight. I would take a no-name guy by just auditioning and hearing his voice. I understood what it took to put it together. I took a little time putting it together. The more artists hear themselves playing back, the more confident they become. And when they sing a certain way and it sounds good, they know to stick to that method. It just came naturally.”

  As one of the first people to record and release ska in Jamaica during the early ’60s, Coxsone Dodd was instrumental in establishing ska and the rock steady, blue beat, nyahbinghi, and other subcategories of reggae that followed. As opposed to the calypso sound produced at Federal Records, the only other studio in Jamaica when Dodd started recording, Dodd’s music emphasized a strong off-beat, an exaggeration of the strong “one” that characterized R&B, especially from New Orleans, a city close enough that the radio would waft over the Caribbean to Jamaica. “It goes with the way that the West Indians dance,” Dodd explains. “When Bob came up with the ‘one drop’ he really meant that off-beat. That’s the ‘one drop’ he was referring to.”

  In addition to recording their early music, he claims to have bought Marley and Tosh their first guitars. As with so many things Dodd did, the motivation was pragmatic rather than generous. “After a couple of months,” he says, “I realized that giving them a guitar would allow them to build their harmony and rehearse by themselves. Peter was more inclined to be a musician than even Bob was. He could play before Bob. He was able to strum on it.”

  While the Wailers, like most Studio One artists—and to be fair, most recording artists anywhere during the early ’60s—never saw much in the way of royalties, the studio helped hone their style and abilities. The house band at Studio One was the legendary ska band The Skatallites, featuring such revered players as Roland Alphonso, Tommy McCook, and Don Drummond. Dodd set up something of a mentoring program at Studio One, and as Heartbeat Records president Chris Wilson points out, “When Bob was first learning to sing in the studio, most of these horn players were like his daddy.”

  “He worked with people like Roland Alphonso,” Dodd concurs. “They helped him a lot.”

  The Wailers’ early repertoire, as heard on Studio One reissues and compilations (through Wilson’s Heartbeat Records in the U.S.), reflected a great deal of the music in Jamaica at the time. For years, they did covers of American and English pop and R&B hits. “American music had an influence on us all the way through,” Dodd remarks. “That’s why, in the early days, we recorded ‘Teenager In Love’ and songs like that. Even then, they didn’t have the right knack or approach to writing original lyrics. As time went by, they picked up on the approach to writing songs and stuff like that.”

  By this time, the band essentially lived in the studio. “They were at the back of the studio,” he recalls. “They occupied a three-bedroom flat back there, so near to the studio. It’s where the water tower is in back of the studio. I had a building behind it. Being that close to the studio all the time helps the artist. What really happened was the freedom that they had in the studio, hearing themselves over time, they got that confidence to say, ‘Well, this is working,’ and they stuck with it.”

  While Dodd may have been the first producer to approach making records like that, he certainly wasn’t the last. For example, one floor of the late, lamented Power Station studio in New York City was basically living space, including beds for musicians and engineers, along with owner Tony Bongiovi’s own office/apartment—complete with waterbed and hot tub.

  Still, the Wailers presented their own set of problems. Certainly one of the working names for the group, The Rudeboys, said a lot for both the nature of the group and their environment. “At one point the behavior of the youth,” he remembers, “we call it the rude boy era, it was hard to control them. That was during rock steady. It was a trip. What made it difficult with the Wailers was the company they kept. It was a rough kind. But being with the sound system from the early days, most of the people who came around had that kind of respect. It kept them from getting out of line.”

  The Wailers also kept on getting better. While Tosh, initially, might have been the better musician, the early seeds of Marley as a pre-eminent songwriter were sown at Studio One. His very early song—and the Wailers’ first hit single—“Simmer Down” points to the direction he would take as a writer and performer in the future. It spoke directly to the audience about one of their chief concerns, what Dodd described as “getting out of line.” It also featured the group’s distinctive harmonies, a sound that would characterize Marley’s music, albeit with different voices.

  Within a few years the Wailers changed in many ways. As Marley became more adept as a musician and songwriter, he took more control of the group. Over the course of the mid-’60s, the group dwindled from a sextet to a trio. “When they started,” says Dodd, “it was Junior the lead singer on ‘It Hurts to Be Alone’ and a couple of more songs, he was definitely the leader, because he had that beautiful, strong voice, that high-pitched tenor. Then he left Jamaica and joined his family abroad. By then I knew that Bob was the right person to really take his place and be the leader of the group.”

  Beyond that, Marley had fallen in with another of Studio One’s young stars. Rita Anderson sang with another Studio One vocal group called the Soulettes. Dodd had assigned Marley to mentor them. “They met each other by my studios,” Dodd smiles fondly at the memory. “When I found out she was pregnant, being old-fashioned, I said, ‘You’ve really got to get married.’ I didn’t want the people outside to think I was a careless man, letting the kids get together and have kids. So I said they should get married. At that time, there was no other means of income for either of them. Their only means of income was by me. They weren’t working otherwise.”

  Nor was it always an ideal marriage. While the union produced four children, unions between Marley and other women produced seven more offspring that Marley acknowledged. And while he recognized these children from outside his marriage with Rita, sometimes he would even deny being married. While both the Wailers and Rita had long ago left Studio One behind for other labels and producers, Dodd says that he was the one Rita would run to for help. “This is when he caught with the Rasta scene,” says Dodd. “He would say stuff like, ‘We’re not married, she’s just my little sister.’ Then Rita got scared, and she came by saying, ‘Would you have our marriage picture?’ I always had one, and I’d loan it to her and she could bring it by and straighten him out.”

  One of Rita’s better qualities, it would seem, was being very organized, a trait she continues to display in maximizing the exposure of her late husband’s music as well as her own and her children’s. For example, when Bob could no longer find harmony with Tosh and Wailer, musically or otherwise, she put together the I-Threes, a backing harmony trio for the new Wailers that debuted with Natty Dread in 1974.

  Although the Wailers had moved through the ministrations of Lee “Scratch” Perry and into the star-making machinery of Island Records, long after their days at Studio One and the watchful eyes of Coxsone Dodd, Dodd theorizes the battles that followed Marley’s death as a possible reaction to how much influence Rita had come to exert on the business of being Bob Marley. It may well have been sheer orneriness over these familial and professional power struggles, Dodd postulates, that left Marley to die intestate, even though he knew he had a lot of estate to leave and he certainly knew he was dying. “That was a shame and a pity,” Dodd says over the ensuing legalities that would stretch on over a decade after Marley’s death. “It was a needless thing. He knew he was going to die. It was more out of spite. Rita was becoming too strong at that point.”

  What Marley’s Studio One output proves is that even before Rita, Bob Marley was strong musically. Songs like “One Love” date back to initial recordings on Studio One. Wilson believes that an even earlier song, the Wailers’ first Jamaican hit “Simmer Down,” informed every
song Marley wrote thereafter. “When you hear stuff like ‘Simmer Down,’” he contends, “the message of ‘Simmer Down’ he went back to his whole career. He never deviated from his first hit. It really captured the feeling of Kingston in the 1960s, that undercurrent of violence. That was never far from any music he made after.”

  Bob Marley: The Story Behind Chances Are

  (Source: Atlantic Records Biography, October 1981)

  IT is the rare artist indeed who possesses the talent, vision and force to transcend barriers between nations and cultures. The late Bob Marley was such an artist. He was, of course, primarily responsible for bringing the Jamaican sound of reggae to the rest of the globe— both as a performer and as a writer. On that count alone, his place in musical/cultural history would have been assured. But Bob Marley was far more than reggae’s prime ambassador. He was a supremely gifted man, a brilliant musician and lyricist, a charismatic and sensual personality who used his art to convey a deeply felt message of love, peace, freedom and unity among all people. Dubbed a “soul rebel,” a “natural mystic,” Bob Marley remains one of the few truly original voices of this or any other age.

  The final decade of Bob Marley’s life, from his signing to Island Records in the fall of 1972 to his death this past May, has been well-documented and analyzed. However, Marley’s musical career extended back for another full decade—a period that remains largely unexposed to the world. Chances Are is a new album of previously unreleased tracks by the king of reggae, and is being released in the U.S. by Cotillion Records through an agreement with WEA International. Recorded between 1968 and 1972, the eight songs on the album provide a fresh perspective on the complete music of Bob Marley. In order to understand how this music came to be recorded, it is necessary to place it in the context of Marley’s developing career.