Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright

by Hank Bordowitz

  The Chapel of Love: Bob Marley’s Last Resting Place

  by Chris Salewicz

  (Source: The Face, June 1983)

  On a hillside in a peaceful corner of Jamaica’s lush rural hinterland— Natural Mystic Country—perches the simple white-washed chapel erected on the spot where Bob Marley is buried. Standing in a small garden alongside a single, carefully tended ganja plant and two doves of peace, the chapel overlooks the tranquil hills and valleys where Marley returned to end his days with friends and family before his death in a Miami hospital on May 11, 1981. It was here, in the village of Nine Mile in the parish of St. Anne’s, that he was born 38 years ago, spent a poor childhood and the first years of his marriage to Rita. Their home for the first six years was a small hut. Here was where he was laid to rest in a gold coffin—dressed in a denim suit with his guitar in one hand and his bible in the other—after an ostentatious state funeral in Kingston and a cross-island motorcade carrying the body to this remote spot. On the second anniversary of his death Tuff Gong and Island Records are releasing a “new” Marley album. Chris Salewicz traveled to Jamaica to discover that the wound left by Bob’s tragic death has almost healed but that the musical and political legacy of his life and work has not faded with time.

  With the red, gold and green Ethiopian flags flying high in a heat haze either side of a fortress-like gateway, the headquarters of Tuff Gong International these days resembles not so much a source of Love and Unity as a mediaeval Moorish castle.

  This semi-barricaded state, which is really closer in style to a Kingston adventure playground, is in the tradition of most Jamaican businesses. Channel One, the Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation, and the Red Stripe factory are all similarly protected from unwelcome visitors by high walls, barbed wire fences and officious gatekeepers. And these days Tuff Gong is definitely a business. Rita Marley and her posse of able female aides even brought in a firm of management consultants to advise how the company may best turn its millions of dollars of assets into a profitable investment.

  Perhaps these business experts are behind such neat signs as the one in front of the main house that reads “No Ball-playing”. To see this next to the yard where Bob Marley loved to play football all day long does ring a little oddly. But it is only intended to discourage the multitude of hangers-on who became permanent fixtures at 56 Hope Road. None of Bob’s true friends have been excluded—Vincent Ford, the dread who lost both legs in a car crash and to whom Bob gave his songwriting credit for “No Woman No Cry” and several other tunes, is still there in his wheelchair.

  If you seek significant slogans, the Tuff Gong motto is a truer touchstone—“We Free the People with Music”. Or pay heed to the words painted large on the building’s stairwell—“Do Good and Good Will Follow You”. These speak of the real spirit of Tuff Gong.

  For years reggae had confidently developed in the slipstream of its figurehead; Bob Marley’s death in May 1981 stunned the music and stunted its growth. Developments that did occur were tangential, as though no-one had the confidence to make a major move: the rise of the New Wave DJ and DJ double-acts has been the most significant advance of the past two years. Figures like Eek-A-Mouse, Brigadier Jerry, and women toasters like Sister Nancy helped move the music on, or at least prevented it from falling back. A toasting superstar like Yellowman was an adequate jokey distraction but hardly fulfilled reggae’s need for a leader.

  But the wound seems to have almost healed. A number of acts on major labels have achieved real international success—Black Uhuru, Gregory Isaacs, Third World, Peter Tosh. Moreover, reggae is now a thoroughly integrated influence in contemporary music: Radio One pop is packed with reggae rhythms.

  Now, on May 11, the second anniversary of Bob’s death, Tuff Gong, through Island Records, will release a new Bob Marley album, Confrontation. Some of the songs are out-takes from the Survival and Uprising sessions, others have been worked up from demo tapes, with The Wailers and The I-Threes adding overdubs. Bob Marley was in my view the only popular musical figure who never released a bad song. So it is good to be able to report that all the Confrontation numbers match his own inspiring standard.

  Briefly, they are: “Mix-up, Mix-up,” built up from a two-track that had Bob’s voice on one track and his own scratchy ska-like guitar and a drum machine on the other—edited down from an original eight minutes, it has a rhythm uncannily close to that of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing”; “Give Thanks,” similar in rhythm and melody to “If the Cap Fits” on Rastaman Vibration, and written at the same time; “Jump Nyabingi,” again from a 2-track demo, a master having been lost; “Chant-down Babylon”; “Blackman Redemption,” released as a single on Tuff Gong in 1979; “Trenchtown,” currently a Tuff Gong single; “Stiff-necked Fool”; “I Know,” a Rastaman Vibration out-take; “Buffalo Soldier,” which will be released as a single and has as its subject the American Indians.

  As a fierce tropical rainstorm suddenly enshrouds in thick cloud his house in the Blue Mountains overlooking Kingston, Island Records owner Chris Blackwell, who has produced Confrontation, points out that “Buffalo Soldier” is a particularly meaningful song. For in the fact that reggae proclaims self-determination, so American Indians found a soul brother in Bob Marley. Many young Apaches consider him to have been a kind of re-born Indian chief—Marley’s cry at the beginning of “Crazy Baldhead” is identical to that of an Apache war-whoop.

  Blackwell points out that in Jamaica itself it was Bob Marley who destroyed the tradition that your success was almost always in direct proportion to the lightness of your skin. “Before Bob,” he stresses, “the only thing that anyone with Rasta hair could succeed at was being a carpenter or a fisherman. But Bob just had it naturally. He was a really exceptional person. When I first met him, I immediately trusted him. People at first would say to me, ‘Those guys, The Wailers, are real trouble.’ Which usually means that the people in question want to be treated like human beings.”

  It was Bob Marley’s simple, clear perception of life, believes Black-well, that allowed the musician to realize the greatness he was destined to attain. In the hamlet of Nine Mile, deep amidst the steep valleys of the rural interior of Jamaica, he spent an intensely poor childhood. Yet that upbringing indelibly stamped basic country truths on Bob Marley, like the time it takes for things to grow; in his career he would always let time run its course, which is hardly typical of many hustling, would-be reggae stars.

  Nine Mile is now overlooked by the humble chapel in which Bob Marley was laid to rest. Perched at the top of a sharply sloping hillock, it is a small, serene building with white-painted walls and red, gold and green wood-work. From an Ethiopian stained glass window a lion gazes down at a house in the small valley behind, where Bob’s grandmother once lived.

  There is a small garden, with a pair of doves of peace near to a solitary ganja plant growing in a pot. One of several relatives who dedicatedly tend this area tells how it was predicted by a local seer who read in Bob’s hand as a child that he would grow to become a very great man. He does not say whether she also foresaw what a companion helper claims: that Bob Marley was a victim of a CIA conspiracy. On one of his trips “in foreign”, Babylon somehow ensured his body turned cancerous, to destroy the man who was uniting the world’s oppressed.

  The story has a romantic appeal. But it is unlikely; Chris Blackwell insists the standard explanation is the truth. The cancer was a direct result of a football injury to a toe that happened in France in 1977. An English doctor examined the lesion, and diagnosed that the toe should be amputated; a doctor in Miami said he need not resort to such a severe remedy; a Rastafarian doctor also said he believed amputation was unnecessary—“which is what he wanted to hear.”

  His one-time manager Don Taylor also dismisses the conspiracy theory. He claims that Bob’s melanoma cancer was hereditary—he understands his father also died from it. Taylor also is sure that if Bob Marley had survived his illness he would have found himself considered by Rastaf
arians on a par with Haile Selassie. Marcia Griffiths of the I-Threes offers an echo of this idea when she gently mentions that, as Christ’s disciples carried on His work after He was crucified, so Bob’s music carries on his work.

  Hardly the picture of a black music manager—he is probably the only man who can wear a £140 black silk shirt from Bond Street and make it look as though he picked it up for a handful of dollars in downtown Kingston—Don Taylor puts this view another way: “Because there won’t be many more new records from Bob Marley, people will now have time to actually listen to his lyrics, to the gospel of his revolutionary ideas.”

  It seems accepted as a matter of course that Bob Marley’s legend and influence are as yet in their infancy. For example, Jah Lloyd— “elected by the elders of Haile Selassie’s theocratic government to represent the divine structure to the secular powers of Jamaica”— places him alongside such Jamaican national heroes as the nineteenth century rebels Sam Sharpe and Paul Bogle.

  As well as the Confrontation record, Tuff Gong has another major release scheduled for this spring, The Trip by The Melody Makers. The Melody Makers are four of Bob’s children: 14-year-old David ‘Ziggy’ Marley sings and plays rhythm guitar; nine-year-old Steve plays drums and even writes some of the songs; 17-year-old Sharon and 15-year-old Cedella also sing. The Wailers provide most of the musical backing. When The Melody Makers’ excellent “What A Plot” single came out at the end of last year on Tuff Gong, the uncanny similarity between Ziggy’s vocals and those of his father was immediately apparent—but this may not be so noticeable on the LP, as his voice has been breaking during its recording. The Trip is being produced by Ricky Walters, Grub Cooper, and Steve Golding, the team that also produced Rita Marley’s fine Harambe LP, a big Jamaican seller at the end of 1982.

  Also in production at Tuff Gong is an I-Threes album, with The Wailers again providing the backing. It is being produced by the stately figure of Cedella Booker, Bob’s mother. This seems a rather strange idea, a bit like your mum producing The Clash.

  Out at Bull Bay, ten miles to the east of Kingston, the sun sets, its last rays of the day finally cracking wide open a previously overcast sky. On the delicious Caribbean waters the fishing-boats bob peacefully up and down, as they must have done in the days of the Arawak Indians. Twenty yards back from this beach—Bob Marley’s favorite when he wanted to swim—Bongo, a 76-year-old dread who joined the Rastafarian faith in 1929, stands framed in the doorway of his shack.

  He listens as a young-back dread from Grenada pours out a variant on the Bob Marley death conspiracy theory. “Everyone of us came here to do a portion of Jah’s work. “I’m rise up as a songster . . . He died because Babylon killed him. He went innocently into their hands. He is mixing with the wrong sort of people. They began to call him the King of Reggae, when there is only one King. His Majesty Haile Selassie I . . . His blood is spattered all over Europe. Europe is responsible for his death . . . They gave him cocaine,” he asserts, as though privy to secret information. “They can cut into that cancer germ . . . and his death is on the shoulders of that harlot in Britain!”

  At the end of this harangue Bongo smiles, waits a moment, then offers his own thoughtful interpretation. “They try to seduce Bob Mar-ley. But he is well alive. Death is not in our language. I and I deal with rest.”

  Late one evening by the front porch of the Tuff Gong house, a white dread, a former American DJ who—inspired by the Natty Dread LP—moved to Jamaica to become a Rastafarian, is standing and reasoning with the gathered brethren. He has heard from Rita Marley, he says, that there are sufficient Bob Marley songs remaining for at least one, possibly two more LPs. With the solemnity of a Biblical prophet, he reels off the titles of Bob Marley’s albums, his tone drawing out the significance in which they string together: Catch A Fire! Burning! Natty Dread! . . . Kaya! . . . Survival! . . . Uprising! . . . And now: Con-fron-tay-shun!

  “Yes-I!” He exclaims. “So the next LP, it must be given the title— JUDGEMENT!!!”

  So Much Things to Say: The Journey of Bob Marley

  by Isaac Fergusson

  (Source: The Village Voice, May 18, 1982)

  He sat with his friends smoking and rapping. Bob Marley. During his lifetime this man had become a mythical figure, yet nothing in his easygoing manner identified a superstar. He did not overshadow or separate himself from the dozen or so Rastamen milling about his Essex House suite. His laughter was uproarious, unpretentious, and free. He blended so snugly with his peers that I could not have picked him out had his face not decorated record jackets, T-shirts, and posters everywhere. A year after his death his words still sustain and warn and fulfill.

  I had read about the millions of records Marley sold worldwide and that he was a multimillionaire. Still, I found it hard to reconcile the slightly built, denim-clad man with the explosive entertainer who danced across the stages of huge arenas or penetrated me with his stare from the cover of Rolling Stone. Marley got up, and politely took leave of the jolly group. He led me to the bedroom. Lying casually across the bed he carefully thumbed through a Bible. Tonight he will talk with me about Rastafari; tomorrow he will go up to Harlem’s Apollo Theater and make more history, more legend.

  Marley recorded his first song, “Judge Not,” in 1961; he was 16 years old then. A helter-skelter music industry was just developing in Kingston where the unemployment rate was 35 per cent and Marley scuffed out a living as a welder. “Me grow stubborn, you know,” he recalled when we talked. “Me grow without mother and father. Me no have no parent te have no big influence pon me. Me just grow in a de ghetto with de youth. Stubborn, no obey no one; but we had qualities and we were good to one another.” In 1964 Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer formed the Wailing Wailers. From the beginning Marley strove to convey meaningful content in his lyrics: “Nothing I do is in vain. There is nothing I ever do that goes away in the wind. Whatever I do shall prosper. Because I and I no compromise I and I music. I’m one of dem tough ones,” Marley said.

  Soon the world discovered that Marley was no ordinary singer whose words were designed to be hummed for moments and forgotten; here was a messenger whose lyrics call attention to our condition, to the reasons for suffering. The music brings lightness to the feet and makes them dance, but the best is a marching drum, a call to struggle: “Get up, stand up,/Stand up for your rights/Get up, stand up,/Don’t give up the fight.”

  Marley came to be widely respected as a songwriter with a reach that was broad and deep. Eric Clapton had a big hit with Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” Johnny Nash scored with Marley’s “Stir It Up” and “Guava Jelly.” In 1972 Marley and the Wailers signed with Island Records, a small London-based company headed by Chris Blackwell, a white Jamaican. Marley, who writes his songs and arranged his music, made 10 albums with Island. They all went gold; 500,000 copies sold within the first year in England, Europe and Canada. Two albums, Rastaman Vibrations and Uprising, made gold in the U.S. His only comment when asked about his success was, “The man who does his work well, he shall be rewarded.”

  During the late ’60s the Wailers became the first popular Jamaican group to make Rastafari philosophies and Rasta drumming the main thrusts of their music. Inspired by the back-to-Africa beliefs of Rasta-fari, Marley took a deep interest in Africa and the slave trade and wrote some of the most devastating statements of black rage ever recorded. His songs were designed both to tell history and to instill pride and hope in a people indoctrinated with the lie of inferiority. “In my music I and I want people to see themselves,” he said. “I and I are of the house of David. Our home is Timbuktu, Ethiopia, Africa where we enjoyed a rich civilization long before the coming of the European. Marcus Garvey said that a people without knowledge of their past is like a tree without roots.”

  Soon, more and more of Jamaica’s top musicians became Rastas, and reggae, the dominant music of Jamaica, became the main vehicle of expression for the Rastafari movement. Its radical ideas were carried by radio into e
very home and soon Rastafari permeated the society. Reggae singers like Marley became more than mere entertainers, they became “revolutionary workers” and representatives of Kingston’s poor. “Them belly full but we hungry/A hungry mob is an angry mob/A rains fall but the dirt it tough/A pots cook but the food no ’nough.” Sung with simplicity and the clarity of Marley’s skeletal voice, these ideas were easily understood and quickly absorbed by even the most illiterate among the poor. Through music, Marley and other Rasta musicians attacked Jamaica’s skinocratic system that placed whites at the top, mulattos in the middle, and blacks nowhere. Marley sang in “Crazy Baldhead”: “I and I build the cabin/I and I plant the corn/Didn’t my people before me slave for this country/ Now you look me with a scorn/Then you eat up all my corn.”

  The singer became the high priest, prophet and pied piper of Rasta and captivated the people of the third world. Unlike most religious cults Rastafari has no written rules or procedures; its members are united by certain common beliefs and uncommon rituals. The rituals and even the beliefs vary from one Rasta group to another. Bongo-U, a college-trained pharmacologist and now a Rasta medicine man in Montego Bay, says: “You will never know the Rastaman through books. You can tell the Rastaman through deeds, but to know the Ras-taman you must live the experience—it’s the only way.” Some Rastas are devoutly religious and of exemplary moral character; others are thieves and criminals. Some Rastas are hardworking and industrious; others believe employment means surrendering to “Babylon.” The only two beliefs all Rastas hold in common are: Haile Selassie is God; repatriation to Africa is the only true salvation for black people.

  “Rasta is the most dominant, most important thing in my life,” Marley once told me. “You have one man defend capitalist and other man defend socialist . . . finally you have I and I who defend Rastafari.” Marley believed that in the Rastafari way of life there was an urgent message for the rest of the world. He believed that it was his divine mission to spread the word of the living, almighty “Jah,” and also to inform blacks in the West that they are a lost tribe of Israelites sold into slavery in a Western hell called “Babylon.” Marley came to help an uprooted and displaced people establish an identity. Bob Marley, who worked to explode the myth of a white God in a black society, was the first person to tell me that Israel was a man and not a place. He said the people who live in the country of that name are imposters. To Marley and all orthodox Rastas, blacks are the true Hebrews.