Robert Nesta Marley was born in the countryside parish of St. Ann’s, Jamaica on February 6, 1945. His father, a white British naval officer, left before Bob was born. As a teenager, Marley began to work as a welder. One of his co-workers was Desmond Dekker, who soon began to achieve success as a singer and encouraged Bob to audition for the Beverleys label. With the help of Jimmy Cliff, Bob recorded his first song, “Judge Not,” at the age of 15. During the same period, Marley met Mortimo Planno, the presiding force in Jamaica’s Rastafarian movement. Planno became Bob’s life-long mentor, and Mar-ley’s music became infused with a highly spiritual quality that emanated from his Rastafarian beliefs.
In 1964, the Wailers came together in Trenchtown, the ghetto area of Kingston, Jamaica’s capital. The group initially consisted of Marley, Peter McIntosh (Tosh), Bunny Livingston (now Wailer), Junior Braithwaite, Beverly Kelso and Bob’s future wife, Rita. The Wailers began to record for producer Clement Dodd’s Studio One/Coxsone label and enjoyed a remarkable series of Caribbean chart-toppers: “Simmer Down” (their first hit, penned by Bob), “Put It On,” “Rude Boy,” “I’m Still Waiting,” “Rule Them Rudie” and many others.
Meanwhile, by 1966 the Wailers had been reduced to the trio that is now commonly referred to as “the original Wailers”: Marley, Tosh and Livingston (Rita would later rejoin the group as one of the I-Threes, Bob’s female backing singers). Unfortunately, as with most performers in the early years of reggae, the Wailers saw little monetary reward for their efforts. Frustrated, Marley left Jamaica for America, where he lived with his mother, Cedella Booker, in Delaware and worked in several factories.
Marley stayed in the U.S. less than a year, returning to Jamaica reportedly to avoid the military draft. The Wailers were reunited and began to record again. Then, in 1967, Bob met American soul singer Johnny Nash and his business partner Danny Sims. And it is here that the story behind Chances Are begins. Sims and Nash attended a Rasta festival in the Jamaican mountains with disc jockey Neville Willoughby who, according to Sims, “told Johnny and me that there was an artist that was so fantastic that he thought this kid had international potential and could be the biggest Caribbean act ever.” Sims and Nash were immediately intrigued and went with Willoughby to meet Mortimo Planno. As Marley’s mentor, Planno was supervising his career and screening all those who wished to meet with Bob. After first talking with Danny and Johnny, Planno then brought Marley to them.
“I listened to maybe fifty of Bob’s songs,” Sims recalls of his first meeting with Marley, “because he played one song after another after another. All he did when he came to visit me was play his guitar and sing.” Danny and Bob became close friends and, with the blessing of Mortimo Planno, Sims began to oversee his career as a combined publisher/manager/executive producer. This period of Bob’s life is discussed in the recently-published biography by Adrian Boot and Vivien Goldman: “At a time when Marley’s musical career had seemed very shaky after a series of rip-offs, it was Johnny Nash (Sims’s partner in the JAD record company) who stepped in, involving Bob in all manner of excitement . . . ”
So it was that Bob Marley (along with another young Jamaican musician, Paul Khouri) showed Johnny Nash how to play reggae music; and Nash in turn began to record some of Bob’s songs. In 1970, Marley traveled with Danny and Johnny to Sweden to work on a film project. The following year, the trio went to England, where both Marley and Nash were signed by CBS International via Sims and JAD Records. Among their activities in the U.K., Bob and Johnny did an unorthodox tour of secondary schools, combining duo and solo performances with question-and-answer sessions. Near the close of the tour, CBS released Nash’s version of the Marley song “Stir It Up,” which topped U.K. charts in 1972 and U.S. listings in 1973. Among the many other Marley tunes recorded by Nash were “Guava Jelly,” “Bend Down Low,” “Nice Time,” “Comma, Comma” and “You Poured Sugar On Me.” Thus, in an interesting turn of circumstances, it was Nash who gave Bob Marley his first non-Jamaican hits, at least as a writer; but it was ultimately Marley who, at first through the medium of Nash, gave reggae to the world.
Between 1968 and 1972, while working with Nash and Sims, Mar-ley recorded in the neighborhood of 72 songs on his own. In addition to his own material, Bob also recorded a series of songs by the R&B writing team of Jimmy Norman & Al Pyfrom (two of which are included on Chances Are). The idea was, quite simply, as Sims notes, “to cut Bob Marley in a rhythm and blues, Top 40 style so we could try to gain acceptance for him in America. For the truth of the matter was that it was to be many years before American radio would become receptive to genuine Jamaican reggae, a situation which has only very recently begun to change. Even in Jamaica, because of his Rastafarian beliefs, Marley’s early records sold without benefit of airplay, through the underground market.
According to Danny Sims, Marley eventually came to feel that the success of Johnny Nash, an American interpreting the reggae feel, was overshadowing his own work. Sims, in turn, had come to realize that Marley and Nash would only be competing with each other for a single record company’s attention, as reggae was still in its infancy. Therefore, at this point, JAD and CBS made arrangements to allow Marley to record for Island Records, while retaining a financial interest in his career. Danny, clearly not wishing to hold up his friend’s career, released Bob from the recording and management portions of their agreement, while continuing to serve as his publisher.
Bob and Danny came in regular contact throughout the ensuing decade, and Sims continued to be involved in Marley’s career. In fact, in 1983 Mortimo Planno, still serving as Bob’s adviser, met with Danny in Jamaica and asked him to return as Bob’s manager. Sims coordinated Marley’s final U.S. concert tour, promoted his biggest U.S. single to date, “Could You Be Loved” (from his last album, Uprising), and was his close companion during his final days.
The songs selected for inclusion on the Chances Are album (a compilation already planned prior to Marley’s untimely death) are described by Danny Sims as “love songs, inspirational songs. Island Records received more controversial or revolutionary type of material from Bob; but the material we recorded is more romantic. It came at a point in Bob’s life when he was seeking emotional release following a series of disheartening recording experiences. The songs that I picked were personal to me and to Bob. I chose songs that really told the story of Bob Marley. I think you really have to get into the words in these songs. This album is a purely lyrical explanation of who Bob Marley really was, because Bob only wrote about life—his life and things around him.”
With the emergence of Chances Are, we are able to hear a marvelous side of Bob Marley largely unexplored on his more recent al- bums. The songs on the LP were produced by Marley and noted producer/arranger/composer Larry Fallon, and they have been thoughtfully chosen by Danny Sims and remixed under his careful supervision. Chances Are now takes its long overdue, much-deserved place in the brilliant catalog of Bob Marley’s work. As Sims notes, the material on the album is dominated by infectious songs of love and moving songs of life, from the full-bodied “Dance Do The Reggae” to the autobiographical classic “Soul Rebel” to the touching, concluding “(I’m) Hurting Inside.” “He had a definite vision,” Sims notes. “He always acted like a superstar. He never behaved like he was just an act trying to make it. He always felt that he had it; he always felt that he was much further along.”
Two songs in particular rank as landmarks in Marley’s prolific career. The opening “Reggae On Broadway” is described by Sims as “the first rock song Bob Marley ever did, the song that distinguished Bob, with his predilection for rock’n’roll, from other reggae artists.” A decade after it was recorded, the song stands among Marley’s most joyous and powerful tunes. Then there is the album’s title track, the hauntingly beautiful ballad “Chances Are.” As Sims relates, “This was a vision he had of the future.” While Bob regularly denied that he was a prophet (“God is the prophet,” he would say), the words of this song remain as a
fitting epitaph for this singular man of remarkable beauty, spirit, energy and talent.
Chances are we’re gonna leave now/
Sorry for the victim now/
Though my days are filled with sorrow/
I see years of bright tomorrows.
2
Stir It Up:
International Attention, 1972–1976
For close to a decade, Bob, Peter, and Bunny—the last of the remaining sextet that started as the Wailers—had on-again, off-again hits. However, because of the corruption endemic in the Jamaican music business (which made the business in the United States look like a Boy Scout jamboree) and the infrequency of the hits—not to mention Bunny’s time in jail for a ganja bust—they continued to ply other trades. During this time, Bob notes he worked at “welding and soldering,” soldering being Jamaican slang for having sex. As Rita says in the previous section, he did work as a welder (and also as a janitor) in Delaware for much of 1967.
Then a few things happened that began the quick, precipitous climb of Bob Marley and the Wailers:
On Bob’s return to Jamaica, the group began working with legendary producer Lee “Scratch” Perry.
As the previous chapter (“The Story Behind Chances Are”) also relates, Marley cut several hits backing Texas soul singer Johnny Nash, including his own “Stir It Up,” which went top 20 toward the end of 1973. Then, while in London during 1971, Marley walked into the Island Records offices and walked out with an advance to record Catch a Fire.
Finally, Eric Clapton cut a version of “I Shot the Sheriff” that topped the U.S. and U.K. charts at the beginning of 1974.
All this built up to international acclaim, not just for the band but for the music they helped create and popularize—rock steady, a slowed down, earthier version of ska, which had brief international success via hits by Millie Small (“My Boy Lollipop”), Desmond Dekker (“Israelites”), and Jimmy Cliff (“The Harder They Come”— both the movie and the song).
For the three years between 1972 and 1975, the Wailers were a band standing on the verge of getting it on.
I Was a Wailers
by Lee Jaffe
(Source: Excerpt from One Love, Life with Bob Marley and the Wailers [W. W. Norton] )
THE first time I met Bob was in January 1973, in New York City. It was at a hotel called the Windsor, on 56th Street and Sixth Avenue. I was visiting Jim Capaldi, the drummer and co-writer of songs for Traffic, whom I’d met in England through the actress Esther Anderson. They were one of the most popular bands in the world, both critically and commercially, and they had just broken up. It was a typical early Seventies rock’n’roll-type scene, with groupies running around the halls and various press and record company people.
Bob Marley was in Jim’s room, sitting in a corner of this big suite, very quiet, very shy. We just started talking. He told me he had finished an album for Island Records, Catch a Fire. He had a cassette of it that we listened to. I had just seen The Harder They Come in England the week before, so I was totally prepared. It was like the movie had just walked off the screen. And I was now face to face with the voice of a group whose music was the most revolutionary I had ever heard, who were both black and white and transcended race, whose music was both spiritually and socially conscious.
That was the beginning of a week that Bob and I spent together in New York. The album was completely contagious. I was very anxious to show off what I had found to all my artist and musician friends in New York.
I was staying in a loft at 112 Greene Street, in Soho, the centre of the art world at that time. On the ground floor was a gallery. Now it’s Greene Street Recording Studios, where some classic hip-hop has been recorded. The floors were all wood and corroded. In the basement, Gordon Matta-Clarke, one of the great sculptors of the 20th century, had “recycled” all these glass bottles. It was the first time I’d ever heard the word “recycle”. He brought a humanistic fire to the art world in a way the Wailers brought it to popular music.
It was at that time, too, that I met Dickie Jobson, then Bob’s manager. Dickie was the best friend of Chris Blackwell, the owner of Island Records, the label that had recently signed the Wailers. Dickie had come to New York with Bob to buy equipment for the band. I went with them to Manny’s on 48th Street, where every musician up to the biggest rock stars would go to buy equipment. I helped them pick out their gear and deal with all the salesmen.
I took Bob around to visit my musician friends. He’d play guitar, I’d play harmonica. The only thing that came close to my friends’ reaction to his album was their reaction to Jimi Hendrix’s first album in 1967.
First week with Bob, New York City, winter 1973
The ice crackled under my feet. The wind taunted my breath. If I had known, really, what a Rastaman was, I would have thought this was no place for a Rastaman. We were cruel weather’s toys, hunched in our coats, begging for Mother Nature’s forgiveness. But we were on a mission. A mission that, for the years we sparred, was interminable, relentless, intractable—the search for the better herb.
I pierced the night air with a high-pitched wail to let Bob know I was a sufferer, too. It was all he could do not to double over laughing as we picked up the pace along Central Park West, trying not to lose our balance on the salted-slick sidewalk, coming down 85th Street, to where my friend Brew, a main distributor of the better strains of Colombian golds and reds, kept a stash house.
Normally only Brew’s dispatcher, the Dile, was ever allowed there. He accepted deliveries of bales enclosed in innocuous cardboard boxes to the brownstone apartment, and in turn distributed them to half-a-dozen dealers scattered throughout the city. But I was a trusted exception.
I had met Brew through his brother The Fox in the late sixties. I went to college with him at Penn State, where I had been one of the students mainly responsible for elevating the consciousness of a significant portion of the student body by turning them on to various (what were then exotic) controlled substances. We had hung out a lot in New York during our breaks from school; he, an aspiring artist like me, stayed at his parents’ swanky Upper East Side apartment, which had a leopard-skin pattern velvet couch and a perfect view of the East River and the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. His parents were living mostly in Florida. I’d often stay over there, and we’d spend our time getting high, tripping and having sex with as many girls as possible. We did our first pot deals together. We’d scrape together enough money to buy a pound and sell ounces and half ounces. The proceeds got us into concerts at the Fillmore East and clubs like The Scene and Salvation, and helped us buy drugs, which helped us pick up more girls.
When I was done with college, I went off to Brazil, and Brew continued his life in the herb trade, eventually convincing his brother to quit his lucrative Wall Street job to come help him turn his successful pot dealing into a real business. Now we were together escorting the new signee to the label of Traffic and Cat Stevens, eager to impress this third world advocate of herbs and revolution.
The pale din of headlights bobbing, a cab scowling around a corner, a beggar in sundry rags, wheeling a shopping cart overflowing with all his worldly possessions, coughed, floated among the newly floating flakes of snow glowing in the lamplight, teetered on the verge of madness and disappeared from consciousness as we bounded up the brownstone stairs toward the ethereal cathedral of cannabis.
Was I proud. My old buddy made good. Bale upon bale of crocus-sacked mystical foliage, which in turn were clear plastic wrapped and sealed, numbered and graded A or AA, with weights 22.5, 26.3 Magic Markered on the see-through outer covering. I looked into Bob’s deep, mischievous eyes. He glared in return . . . a pause like a pause between Aston “Family Man” Barrett’s bass notes . . . “You t’ink you somet’in’, Lee Jaffe?” Then came the laughter, volcanoing, lyrical, the sounds beading off each other, luminous. Brew shook his head and resisted a smile. He liked to think of himself as hard. He was taking kung fu and had grown a short, scruffy beard to disguise his
baby face. I had turned him on to an advance copy of Catch A Fire, and he had all the lyrics of the songs memorized in just a few days. “Every time I hear the crack of a whip, my blood runs cold. I remember on a slave ship how they brutalized our very soul.” Mimicking Bob’s accent. Then, in falsetto, “Catch a fire,” as he whipped a switchblade from his jeans pocket and, with the shimmering blade, motioned for us to follow him to the back room of the long, cavernous apartment.
The floor was covered with Afghan and Indian rugs and pillows and in the dim transitory light he opened a Moroccan-looking chest containing several small bricks of bud, punctiliously carving an opening in the herbal sheath with the lacerating weapon, pulled out a handful of black, well-defined sticky and, holding it up face-high for us to whiff and contemplate declared, “Cheeba.”
The sound resonated clear through to the mountains and sequestered valleys of Cartagena. Peasants plying the fields, gathering the cured stalks hanging upside down in the steamy afternoon haze. I imagined hundreds of Juan Valdez hats and tiny scissors, clipping the buds off the thick, tough branches, soft pressing them into bales, meandering on donkeys down craggy hillsides to meet ancient generic trucks, the grizzled drivers with machine guns waiting for the chance to deliver the sweet and pungent cargo to a trawler of undetermined origin, parked Federale-protected in the azure glistening Caribbean harbor. . .
Then, the overlong voyage around the Caribbean into the green Atlantic to avoid DEA detection, with designated gringo on board, swinging back in toward the Florida Keys to rendezvous with Miami-Cuban cigarette boats too swift for the Coast Guard to follow, the state-of-the-art speedboats cutting razor-thin wakes in the semi-tropical moonlight, meeting waiting vans ready to scurry up the perilous one-road causeway through the Keys to a Homestead warehouse south of Miami where my other college friend, Robbie, and his harmonica playing Italian partner Johnny B., from South Plainfield, New Jersey, would come to sort through their allotment, paying extra to Stone and Jonni (ultimately a Wailers fan), their Cuban connections, for the chance to pick the best to send in car trunks and false-backed U-Hauls up the coast to the first city.
Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright Page 3
