“Yes, people rob me and try te trick me, but now I have experience,” Marley said, adding later, “I know, and I see, and I don’t get tricked. Everybody that deals with West Indian music . . . thieves!”
If you’re listening chronologically to Island’s exemplary four-CD set Bob Marley: Songs of Freedom, the move into self-production comes as a dramatic departure. For the first time, the singers and musicians seem to be breathing the same air, producing a superbly organic group sound. The Wailers’ 1967–68 rock-steady sides for Wail ‘M’ Soul ‘M’ are the trio’s first unalloyed masterpieces: “Mellow Mood,” “Bend Down Low,” “Thank You Lord” and the rest still move, instruct and delight.
After Marley took time off to write songs for the American pop-soul singer Johnny Nash (who recorded “Stir It Up” and “Guava Jelly”), the Wailers met Lee Perry, a former sound-system DJ for Sir Coxsone who was beginning to bring a new sense of space and mystery to Jamaican music. Among the session players who worked for Perry were the two Barrett brothers, drummer Carlton (“Carly”) and bassist Aston (“Family Man”). As rock steady mutated into the even trickier, more fluid grooves of reggae, the Barrett brothers staked their claim as the music’s definitive rhythm section. With the hyper-creative Perry, aka Dread at the Control, behind the mixing desk, the wailing Wailers and the Barrett brothers made an imaginative leap into a new and entirely unanticipated sonic landscape. Marley was now a songwriter in a class by himself, and the Wailers-Barretts- Perry team was able to create and sustain a powerfully specific mood and presence for each of his gems. Many hard-core reggae fans consider these recordings, collected on such albums as Soul Rebels and African Herbsman, the high point of Marley’s entire career. That’s debatable; the music’s blinding brilliance is not.
Dog eat dog
Almost 10 years in the forefront of one of the most hectic, intensely creative music scenes on the planet, and what did the Wailers have to show for it? They were still living in Trenchtown, below the poverty line. They never heard their records played on Jamaican radio. “It’s because the music shows the real situation in Jamaica,” Marley said. “Some people don’t like to hear the real truth.” And outside Jamaica and the West Indian communities in the U.K., they were utterly unknown, as was reggae itself.
Through Marley’s Johnny Nash connection, the Wailers, Barretts in tow, went to England, hoping to tour and stir up some interest on the part of a major record label. They managed to secure a bit of session work, record some demos and play a handful of dates in clubs and schools. They awoke one morning—cold and hungry—to find that their erstwhile management had left the country, stranding them cold and penniless.
Enter Chris Blackwell, a white Jamaican who had done well leasing hits from Kingston for the U.K. on his Island Records label and who was currently scoring major pop successes with the likes of Traffic and Cat Stevens. He still thought reggae could win an audience in the wider world, and to that end he gave the Wailers the budget to record an album. This in itself was an innovative move. Any other label honcho would surely have seen the group’s outspoken stand against oppression and exploitation and its embrace of a Rastafarian belief system as potential impediments to commercial success at best. Blackwell encouraged the Wailers to be themselves.
The Wailers’ first two Island albums, Catch a Fire and Burnin’ (both from 1973), represent another new beginning for Marley. Both albums freely raided his enormous back catalog of songs, and while some of the versions issued earlier may be the definitive ones, as albums, Catch a Fire and Burnin’ are themselves definitive Marley records. They are the powerful, unified masterworks of an artist at the height of his powers.
With the release of Catch a Fire, the pressure was on. After a U.S. tour that found the Wailers driving thousands of miles to play for audiences that were frequently small and uncomprehending, Wailer and Tosh elected to drop out of the rat race and go solo. This development broke up one of the era’s greatest vocal groups, but Marley assembled the I-Threes (Rita Marley, Marcia Griffiths, Judy Mowatt) to fill out the band’s vocal sound and kept touring. He was a man with a mission.
the band’s vocal sound and kept touring. He was a man with a mission. “God sent me on earth,” Marley once said. “He send me to do something, and nobody can stop me. If God want to stop me, then I stop. Man never can.” Marley’s next three studio albums—Natty Dread (1974), Rastaman Vibration (1976) and Exodus (1977)—made him an international star. The Wailers were now officially Bob Mar-ley’s band, still piloted through the rhythmic rapids by the incomparable Barrett brothers but now expanded to include a clutch of superb musical individualists who were fundamentally team players, including guitarists Al Anderson and Junior Marvin and keyboard men Earl “Wia” Lindo and Bernard “Touter” Harvey.
Brutal as the Wailers’ nonstop touring schedule was, the real brutality was waiting for Marley back home. Jamaica in the middle and late ’70s seemed to be a society coming apart at the seams. The country’s two rival political parties both employed gangs of ghetto gunmen to settle their differences. They also leaned hard on Marley for public support. At the same time, there was a great deal of resentment in the air. Jamaica’s ruling class traditionally despised the Rastafarians for offering scathing critiques of the “shitstem” while refusing to take part in it. The emergence of a dreadlocked Rasta as Jamaica’s No. 1 citizen to the world was seen as a public-relations disaster and, for many, a personal affront.
No rock & roller has ever had so many formidable and sinister forces arrayed against him. Marley found it expedient to maintain social relationships with gunmen and politicians from both political parties. “The devil ain’t got no power over me,” he asserted. “The devil come, and me shake hands with the devil. Devil have his part to play. Devil’s a good friend, too . . . because when you don’t know him, that’s the time he can mosh you down.”
Marley proved miraculously adept at advocating justice and an end to neocolonial exploitation of the increasingly beleaguered island while maintaining a sovereign’s indifference to the machinations of partisan politics. But attempts to manipulate him for political gain continued unabated, and Marley well knew that the slightest miscalculation could have fatal consequences.
In 1976, representatives of the country’s ruling, nominally socialist government persuaded Marley to headline a free outdoor concert in Kingston that would be strictly apolitical, a plea for peace among the ghetto’s warring factions and a celebration of “one love, one heart.” Two nights before the concert, two carloads of gunmen broke into Marley’s house with barrels blazing. Astonishingly, no one was killed, though Marley and several associates were wounded. Showing remarkable courage, Marley honored his promise to sing at the concert. Showing good sense, he left the island the next day and didn’t return for more than a year.
“They claim that I was supporting a political party, which is not true,” Marley insisted afterward. “If it was really true that I was defending politics, then I would have died that night, because me know that the politician is the devil. . . . My job is to come between these politicians and become something else for the people.”
Throughout these difficult years, Marley remained committed to his Rastafarian ideals and to self-determination for his people. In the Third World, especially where liberation struggles were in progress, he was seen as both a popular musician and a revolutionary ally. When Zimbabwe won its freedom from the white Rhodesian regime in 1980, the Wailers played at the independence celebration. Through it all, Marley continued to forge a visionary music that opposed the tide of violence and celebrated the rhythms of life.
His diligence never faltered; finally, it was his own rebellious cells that brought him down. The cancer that finally killed him on May 11, 1981, had apparently developed from an untreated soccer injury—although in circumstances such as these, one can never be entirely certain what happened or why. One can only be certain of Marley’s enduring musical legacy.
The beauty of Marley�
��s music is that while it holds a special significance for the sufferers of this world, it speaks to any listener with an open heart. You don’t have to understand the sociopolitical background or the Rasta subculture—or even Marley’s Trenchtown patois—to get it. The rhythms are as close as your heartbeat, the voice speaks a language the spirit understands. And, yes, when it hits, you feel no pain.
Chanting Down Babylon: The CIA & the Death of Bob Marley
by Alex Constantine
(Source: High Times, February 2002)
DID a soccer accident really cause Bob Marley’s death, as has been widely reported? Or was the dark hand of CIA covert operations behind the death of the greatest countercultural prophet of our time?
Marley knew the drill—in Jamaica, at the height of his success, when music and politics were still one, before the fog of censorship rolled into the island, old wounds were opened by a wave of destabilization politics. Stories appeared in the local, regional and international press downsizing the achievements of the quasi-socialist Jamaican government under Prime Minister Michael Manley. In the late 1970s, the island was flooded with cheap guns, heroin, cocaine, right-wing propaganda, death-squad rule and, as Grenada’s Prime Minister Maurice Bishop described it three years later, the CIA’s “pernicious attempts [to] wreck the economy.”
“Destabilization,” Bishop told the emergent New Jewel Party, “is the name given the most recently developed method of controlling and exploiting the lives and resources of a country and its people by a bigger and more powerful country through bullying, intimidation and violence.”
In response to the fascistic machinations of the CIA, Marley wove his lyrics into a revolutionary crucifix to ward off the cloak-and-dagger “vampires” descending upon the island. June 1976: Then-Governor- General Florizel Glasspole placed Jamaica under martial law to stanch the bloody pre-election violence. Prime Minister Manley’s People’s National Party asked the Wailers to play at the Smile Jamaica concert in December. Despite the rising political mayhem, Marley agreed to perform.
In late November, a death squad slipped beneath the gates at Mar-ley’s home on Hope Road in Kingston. As biographer Timothy White tells it, at about 9 PM, “the torpor of the quiet tropical night was interrupted by a queer noise that was not quite like a firecracker.” Mar-ley was in the kitchen at the rear of the house eating a grapefruit when he heard the bursts of automatic gunfire. Don Taylor, Marley’s manager, had been talking to the musician when the bullets ripped through the back of his legs. The men were “peppering the house with a barrage of rifle and pistol fire, shattering windows and splintering plaster and woodwork on the first floor.” Rita Marley, trying to escape with her children and a reporter from the Jamaica Daily News, was shot by one of the men in the front yard. The bullet caught her in the head, lifting her off her feet as it burrowed between scalp and skull.
Meanwhile, a man with an automatic rifle had burst through the back door off the pantry, pushing past a fleeing Secco Patterson, the Wailers’ percussionist, to aim beyond Don Taylor at Bob Marley. The gunman got off eight shots. One bullet struck a counter, another buried itself in the ceiling, and five tore into Taylor. He fell but remained conscious, with four bullets in his legs and one buried at the base of his spine. The last shot creased Marley’s breast below his heart and drilled deep into his arm.
The survival of the reggae singer and his entire entourage appeared to be the work of Rasta. “The firepower these guys apparently brought with them was immense,” Wailers publicist Jeff Walker recalls. “There were bullet holes everywhere. In the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, floors, ceilings, doorways and outside.” There has since been widespread belief that the CIA arranged the hit on Hope Road. Neville Garrick, a Marley insider and former art director of the Jamaica Daily News, had film of “suspicious characters” lurking near the house before the assassination attempt. The day of the shooting, he had snapped some photos of Marley standing beside a Volkswagen in a pool of mango-tree shade. The strangers in the background made Marley nervous; he told Garrick that they appeared to be “scouting” the property. In the prints, however, their features were too blurred by shadow to make out. After the concert, Garrick took the photographs and prints to Nassau. Sadly, while the Wailers and crew prepared to board a flight to London, he discovered that the film had been stolen. Many of the CIA’s files on Bob Marley remain classified to the present day. However, on December 5, 1976, a week after the assault on Hope Road, the Wailers appeared at the Smile Jamaica fest, despite their wounds, to perform one long, defiant anthem of rage directed at the CIA—“War”—suggesting the Wailers’ own attitude toward the “vampires” from Langley:
Until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
That now hold our brothers
In Angola, in Mozambique,
South Africa
In subhuman bondage
Have been toppled,
Utterly destroyed,
Everywhere is war. . .
Only a handful of Marley’s most trusted comrades knew of the band’s whereabouts before the festival. Yet a member of the film crew, or so he claimed—reportedly, he didn’t have a camera—managed to talk his way past machete-bearing Rastas to enter the Hope Road encampment: one Carl Colby, son of the late CIA director William Colby.
While the band prepared for the concert, a gift was delivered, according to a witness at the enclave—a new pair of boots for Bob Mar-ley. Former Los Angeles cinematographer Lee Lew-Lee (his camera work can be seen in the Oscar-winning documentary The Panama Deception) was close friends with members of the Wailers, and he believes that Marley’s cancer can be traced to the boots: “He put his foot in and said, ‘Ow!’ A friend got in there. . . he said, ‘let’s [get] in the boot,’ and he pulled a length of copper wire out—it was embedded in the boot.”
Had the wire been treated chemically with a carcinogenic toxin? The appearance of Colby at Marley’s compound was certainly provocative. (And so was Colby’s subsequent part in the fall of another black cultural icon, O.J. Simpson, nearly 20 years later. At Simpson’s preliminary hearing in 1995, Colby—who resided next door to Nicole Simpson on Gretna Green Way in Brentwood, a mile from her residence on Bundy—and his wife both took the stand to testify for the prosecution that Nicole’s ex-husband had badgered and threatened her. Colby’s testimony was instrumental in the formal charge of murder filed against Simpson and the nationally televised fiasco known as the “Trial of the Century.”)
Seventeen years after the Hope Road assault, Don Taylor published a memoir, Marley and Me, in which he alleges that a “senior CIA agent” had been planted among the crew as part of the plan to “assassinate” Marley. It’s possible that this lapse in security allowed Colby entrance to the compound. It’s clear that the CIA wanted Mar-ley out of the picture. After the assassination attempt, a rumor circulated that the CIA was going to finish Marley off. The source of the rumor was the agency itself. The Wailers had set out on a world tour, and CIA agents informed Marley that should he return to Jamaica before the election, he would be murdered.
Taylor and others close to Marley suspect that it was more than a threat. Lew-Lee recalls: “I didn’t think so at the time, but I’ve always had my suspicions because Marley later broke his toe playing soccer, and when the bone wouldn’t mend the doctors found that the toe had cancer. The cancer metastasized throughout his body, but [Marley] believed he could fight this thing.” British researcher Michael Conally observes: “They certainly had reasons for wanting to. For one, Marley’s highly charged message music made him an important figure that the rest of the world was beginning to notice. It was an influence that was hard to ignore, least of all because everywhere you went you saw middle- and upper-class white people sprouting dreadlocks, smoking spliffs and adopting the Rastafarian lifestyle. This sort of thing didn’t sit well with traditionalists and authoritarian types.”
The soccer game took place in Paris in 1977, five months after the boot incident. Marley took to the f
ield with one of the leading teams in the country to break the monotony of the Wailers’ “Exodus” tour. His right toe was injured in a tackle. The toenail came off. At first, it wasn’t considered a serious wound.
But it would not heal. Marley was limping by July and consulted a physician, who was shocked by the toe’s appearance. It was so eaten away that doctors in London advised it be amputated. Marley’s religion forbade it: “Rasta no abide amputation,” he insisted. He told the physician, “De living God, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Ras Tafari, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. . . He will heal me wit’ de meditations of me ganja chalice.” No scalpel, he said, “will crease me flesh. . . . C’yant kill Rasta. Rastaman live out.”
He flew to Miami and Dr. William Bacon performed a skin graft on the lesion. The disease lingered undiagnosed and spread throughout his body.
Isaac Fergusson, a friend and devotee, observed the slow death of Bob Marley firsthand. In the three years separating soccer injury from cancer diagnosis, Marley remained immersed in music, “ignoring the advice of doctors and close associates that he stop and obtain a thorough medical examination.” He refused to give up recording and touring long enough to consult a doctor. Marley “would have to quit the stage and it would take years to recoup the momentum. This was his time and he seized upon it. Whenever he went into the studio to record, he did enough for two albums. Marley would drink his fish tea, eat his rice-and-peas stew, roll himself about six spliffs and go to work. With incredible energy and determination, he kept strumming his guitar, maybe 12 hours, sometimes till daybreak.” Reggae artist Jimmy Cliff observed after Marley’s death: “What I know now is that Bob finished all he had to do on this earth.” Marley was aware by 1977 that he was dying, and set out to condense a lifetime of music into the few years remaining.
Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright Page 17
