Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright

by Hank Bordowitz

  Over time, the draft of the script I was writing was finished. My evenings with my friends came to an end. My love of Marley spread easily over my family, and it was as neophyte Rastas (having decided that Rasta for us meant a commitment to a religion of attentiveness and joy) that we appeared when we visited Jamaica in 1984.

  What we saw was a ravaged land, a place where people, often Ras-tas, eat out of garbage cans and where, one afternoon in a beach café during a rainstorm, I overheard a 13-year-old boy offer his 11-year-old sister (whose grown-up earrings looked larger, almost, than her face) to a large hirsute American white man (who blushingly declined) along with some Jamaican pot.

  The car we rented (from a harried, hostile dealer who didn’t even seem to want to tell us where to buy gas) had already had two flats. On the way to Nine Miles it had three more. Eventually, however, after an agonizing seven hours from Negril, where we were staying, blessing the car at every bump in the road to encourage it to live through the trip, we arrived.

  Nine Miles (because it is nine miles from the nearest village of any size) is one of the most still and isolated spots on the face of the earth. It is only several houses, spread out around the top of a hill. There are small, poor farms, with bananas appearing to be the predominant crop.

  Several men and many children come down the hill to meet our car. They know we’ve come to visit Bob. They walk with us up the hill where Bob Marley’s body is entombed in a small mausoleum with stained-glass windows: the nicest building in Nine Miles. Next to it is a small one-room house where Bob and his wife, Rita, lived briefly during their marriage. I think of how much energy Bob Marley had to generate to project himself into the world beyond this materially impoverished place; and of how exhausted, in so many of his later photographs, he looked. On the other hand, it is easy to understand— listening to the deep stillness that makes a jet soaring overhead sound like the buzzing of a fly—why he wanted to be brought back to his home village, back to Nine Miles, to rest. We see the tomb from a distance of about 50 feet, because we cannot pass through (or climb over) an immense chain link fence that has recently been erected to keep the too eager (and apparently destructive and kleptomaniacal) tourists at bay. One thing that l like very much: built into the hill facing Bob’s tomb is a permanent stage. On his birthday, February 6, someone tells us, people from all over the world come to Nine Miles to sing to him.

  The villagers around us are obviously sorry about the fence. (Perhaps we were not the ones intended to be kept out?) Their faces seem to say as much. They are all men and boys. No women or girls among them. On a front porch below the hill I see some women and girls, studiously avoiding us.

  One young man, the caretaker, tells us that though we can’t come in there is a way we can get closer to Bob. (I almost tell him I could hardly be any closer to Bob and still be alive, but I don’t want to try to explain.) He points out a path that climbs the side of the hill and we—assisted by half a dozen of the more agile villagers— take it. It passes through bananas and weeds, flowers, past goats tethered out of the sun, past chickens. Past the lair, one says, of Bob Marley’s cousin, a broken but gallant-looking man in his 50s, nearly toothless, with a gentle and generous smile. He sits in his tiny, nearly bare house and watches us, his face radiant with the pride of relationship.

  From within the compound now we hear singing. Bob’s songs come from the lips of the caretaker, who says he and Bob were friends. That he loved Bob. Loved his music. He sings terribly. But perhaps this is only because he is, though about the age Bob would have been now, early 40s, lacking his front teeth. He is very dark and quite handsome, teeth or no. And it is his humble, terrible singing— as he moves proprietarily about the yard where his friend is enshrined— that makes him so. It is as if he sings Bob’s songs for Bob, in an attempt to animate the tomb. The little children are all about us, nearly underfoot. Beautiful children. One little boy is right beside me. He is about six, of browner skin than the rest—who are nearer to black—with curlier hair. He looks like Bob.

  I ask his name. He tells me. I have since forgotten it. As we linger by the fence, our fingers touch. For a while we hold hands. I notice that over the door to the tomb someone has plastered a bumper sticker with the name of Rita Marley’s latest album. It reads: “Good Girl’s Culture.” I am offended by it; there are so many possible meanings. For a moment I try to imagine the sticker plastered across Bob’s forehead. It drops off immediately, washed away by his sweat (as he sings and dances in the shamanistic trance I so love) and his spirit’s inability to be possessed by anyone other than itself (and Jah). The caretaker says Rita erected the fence. I understand the necessity.

  Soon it is time to go. We clamber back down the hill to the car. On the way down the little boy who looks like Bob asks for money. Thinking of our hands together and how he is so like Bob must have been at his age, I don’t want to give him money. But what else can I give him, I wonder.

  I consult “the elders,” the little band of adults who’ve gathered about us.

  “The children are asking for money,” I say. “What should we do?” “You should give it,” is the prompt reply. So swift and unstudied is the answer, in fact, that suddenly the question seems absurd.

  “They ask because they have none. There is nothing here.”

  “Would Bob approve?” I ask. Then I think, “Probably. The man has had himself planted here to feed the village.”

  “Yes,” is the reply. “Because he would understand.”

  Starting with the children, but by no means stopping there (because the grown-ups look as expectant as they), we part with some of our “tourist” dollars, realizing that tourism is a dead thing, a thing of the past; that no one can be a tourist anymore, and that, like Bob, all of us can find our deepest rest and most meaningful service at home.

  It is a long hot anxious drive that we have ahead of us. We make our usual supplications to our little tin car and its four shiny tires. But even when we have another flat, bringing us to our fourth for the trip, it hardly touches us. Jamaica is a poor country reduced to selling its living and its dead while much of the world thinks of it as “real estate” and a great place to lie in the sun; but Jamaicans as a people have been seen in all their imperfections and beauty by one of their own, and fiercely sung, even from the grave, and loved. There is no poverty, only richness in this. We sing “Redemption Song” as we change the tire; feeling very Jamaica, very Bob, very Rasta, very no woman no cry.

  Marley: Tale of the Tuff Gong (excerpt)

  Written by Charles Hall (from a treatment by Mort Todd); Pencils by Gene Colan, paint by Tennyson Smith, lettering by John Costanza

  (Source: Marvel Comics, September 1994)

  5

  Work: Recording Bob Marley

  Bob Marley only had six years at the top of his game as a touring artist. As such, the majority of people who are familiar with Marley’s music know it through his later studio recordings.

  Legend, the posthumous best-of compilation put out by Island, has become one of those essential records, one of the albums that no collection is complete without. It mostly captures his recordings from those last six years, his days on Island that produced all those global hits.

  What Island brought to the party was something that the Jamaican music industry lacked: international distribution and marketing. Island was not only equipped to offer both, it was in fact initially set up to bring reggae to the world, from the days of “My Boy Lollipop” until Chris Blackwell finally sold the company for hundreds of millions of dollars. He continued to bring the best of global sounds to a worldwide audience with his Palm Pictures records, exposing artists like venerable Jamaican guitarist Ernest Ranglin and renowned vocalist Baaba Maal to an enormous range of listeners.

  But Marley had been recording for over 10 years before his career caught fire on a global scale. As both Rita Marley and Coxsone Dodd said in the first section of this book, there was a time when Bob lived in the recording studio. It
became an environment in which he learned to thrive.

  Bob Marley: In the Studio with the Wailers

  by Richard Williams

  (Source: Melody Maker, June 23, 1973)

  The Rolling Stones are upstairs in Studio 1, where they’ve been for the past five weeks. Jagger strolls around the foyer, looking for something to do, all neat in white blouson jacket and fawn velvet jeans. But that, you may be surprised to hear, is not where the real action is at this night in Island Studios, Notting Hill.

  Not, at any rate, if you’re a Wailers fan. On this occasion, even the Stones’ long-delayed newie comes second to Bob Marley and his brothers from the shanty-towns of Kingston, Jamaica.

  The Wailers have been in Britain for some weeks now, playing various kinds of gigs, and generally doing very well. There have been problems: Bunny Livingston never wanted to come in the first place. He’s happy being poor in Jamaica, he says, and he’d rather not witness the fleshy delights of a European metropolis. The temptation might be too great. Nevertheless, he’s here.

  There’s a problem, too, with food. Being Rastafarians, they don’t eat meat at all, or fish with scales. So cartons of vegetables and plaice have been delivered most days to their communal house on the Kings Road, and on the road they’ve eaten mostly out of fish ’n’ chip shops. “Huh,” says Bunny, stuffing most of a battered plaice-and-six into his face, “London’s national dish.” No salt, though—that’s also forbidden by the Rasta creed.

  In general, they’re delighted with the response they’ve received over here. Only one thing puzzles Marley: when they’ve played at black clubs, the audiences don’t applaud. But the white college audiences have applauded each number loudly.

  “Before they came here,” confides an Island person, “they’d never heard of doing encores. So the first night, when they left the stage and the audience carried on cheering, they thought maybe something was wrong. We had to persuade them that it was actually good, and push them back on stage.”

  Tonight, anyway, the Wailers are in Studio 2, the smaller one, working on their follow-up to the brilliant Catch a Fire album. They laid the rhythm tracks down at Harry J’s studio in Kingston, as is their custom, and have already overdubbed voice parts plus extra guitars and keyboards.

  Island boss Chris Blackwell is back from a millionaire-style excursion down the Colorado River, on a 20-foot rubber raft, to supervise the mixing process. He picked up the Wailers for Island in the first place, and is closely involved in their success for various reasons. It’s he who decided that Catch a Fire should be packaged as if it were a major rock album, and projected at a whole new market.

  Amusingly enough, someone is showing round the original copies of two 1966 Wailers records, “Put it On” and “Who Feels It Knows It,” which came out here on Island. It’s ironical because they were, for all intents and purposes, “pirate” records. Bunny sniffs when he sees them, and goes into a long discussion on the iniquities of the Jamaican record scene.

  The session starts with a quick run-through of the rough mixes, which Blackwell is hearing for the first time. As the eight or nine songs glide by, his expression remains on the brighter side of contentment. The raw material is—how shall we put it?—magnificent.

  The mixing proper begins with a Marley song called “I Shot The Sheriff,” a sort of humorous musical version of the plot from The Harder They Come (which you should have seen by now, or heaven help you). Marley’s role as lead singer is similar to that of the outlaw character, Ivan, played by Jimmy Cliff in the movie. The high falsetto chorus, delivered by uncharacteristically strained voices, adds to the comic quality.

  However, it’s the music that carries this track. Listening to Black-well and his engineer bringing separate instrument tracks up and down, hearing either the bass or the drums in isolation, one begins to grasp the mastery of these men. There are, for example, two rhythm guitars here, chopping through and around each other as if by telepathy. Beneath them runs the suavest, lithest, most inventive bass line, courtesy of Aston “Family Man” Barrett, meshing in perfect sympathy with his brother Carly’s drumming.

  Ah, the drumming. Had you noticed that these guys play the bass-drum on 2 and 4, the off-beats? Maybe you remember the fuss when Jo Jones transferred the beat-carrying role from the bass-drum to the hi-hat, with Count Basie’s band in the thirties. Isn’t there just a chance that what the Reggae drummers are doing is equally revolutionary, and might have a similar effect? If that were all they did, it would be noteworthy enough, but when the musicologists start taking this stuff seriously (in, say, ten years’ time), they’re going to find enough material to last them through years of research and analysis.

  It’s a bit early in the session to get involved with a masterpiece, but that’s what comes up next. Whatever you thought was the best track on Catch a Fire, its equivalent on the new album will be a thing called “Duppy Conqueror”. The song will be familiar to most stone Reggae fans because Bob wrote and cut it a couple of years ago.

  The song is reminiscent of both “Put It On” and “Stir It Up” in that it’s built on the familiar “La Bamba” pyramid chord changes, and it resembles “Stir It Up” most of all because the rhythm is a swaying slow-medium. Mostly it’s call-and-response between Bob and the other voices, his nasal asides and interjections growing out of the chorus.

  “Yes me friend (me good friend) they say we free again . . . The bars could not hold me (whoo-hoo), force could not control me now. They try to put me down, but Jah put I around now. I been accused (whoo hoo) and wrongly abused now. . . .”

  The engineer silences all the tracks except the voices, and suddenly the truly sublime quality of the Wailers’ harmonies is brought home with a vengeance. Have they ever recorded anything a cappella, without instruments? No, says Peter Tosh. You should, says Blackwell. They should indeed.

  Music like this is Bob Marley’s forte; soft, supremely sensual, and making its point through understatement. It doesn’t shout at you; rather it insinuates, suffusing the brain like a heady wine. Unfortunately, some otherwise intelligent people have missed the point, and expect him to come on like Toots Hibbert or Desmond Dekker, shouting and bashing. That attitude is so patronizing as to be beneath contempt. Does Wilson Pickett invalidate Smokey Robinson? Of course not. At this point, Jagger walks in. “You’ve met Bob?” says Blackwell. “Uh . . . hi,” says Mick, extending a hand.

  The album the Stones are mixing was, of course, recorded in Jamaica, where Jagger met many Reggae musicians until, he says, he got a bit bored with it. He must be getting pretty bored with his own album, too: it’s months since they began it, although he maintains that only seven weeks’ hard work have been put in so far.

  Jagger has come to enlist Blackwell’s aid. It seems that Keith Richard’s old lady, Anita, has been staying in Kingston with a Rasta band which Keith plans to produce. Their house was raided, Anita was busted, and she can’t get bail. Blackwell, being rich and of Jamaican descent, might have some pull. “I don’t really have any,” he says, and asks Tosh: “What are the police like with Rastas now? Are they specially hard on them?”

  “Depends,” Tosh replies. “Depends on the Rasta, and depends on if he knows the right policeman.”

  “Duppy Conqueror” goes round and round, played at least two dozen times, and it could go on for ever. Nobody here would mind. Make a 40- minute tape-loop of it, someone suggests, and there’s your album.

  But, of course, there are other songs. “Get up, Stand Up”, “Reincarnated Soul” (out on the B-side of the new single, “Concrete Jungle”), the fabulous “Rastafarian Chant”, Bunny’s “Oppressor Song”, and a beauty from Marley called “Burnin’ And Lootin’”, with another incredible lyric: “Give me the food and let me grow/Let the roots-man take a blow now/All them drugs gon’ make you slow now/it’s not the music of the ghetto . . . ”

  The “roots-man” is the man who boils plant roots, distilling a drinkable substance of allegedly spiritual properties. It also
makes you high. Nothing one hears suggests that this will be anything less than a worthy successor to the last album, and in “Duppy Conqueror” it will contain a true classic.

  Chris Blackwell: An Interview with the Founding Father of the Reggae Music Industry

  by Timothy White

  (Source: Billboard, July 13, 1991)

  ISLAND Records was founded at 13 Connaught Square in London on May 8, 1962, by Christopher Blackwell, scion of an old Anglo- Jamaican trading family. Young Christopher had been an aide-de-camp to the Governor General of Jamaica, a club owner, professional gambler, manager of 63 rural Jamaican jukeboxes, a motor scooter and water-skiing concessionaire before delving into the Jamaican record business on the production end while also licensing native ska hits for the British market. From the instant he stepped into the Kingston recording arena, Blackwell pioneered virtually every sophisticated modern distribution, production and marketing technique for the reggae industry, as well as rescuing it from the ghetto chaos and sordid technique business practices that commercially had held back the music and the artists.

  “Island make a big difference,” declared Bob Marley in 1975. “No cheatin’, no robbin’. Before I sign with Island, I had three albums that I didn’t even know about.”

  Not only was Island Records the first company to apply the same artistic standards to reggae as had been customary for rock, but it was also the first label to lavish care on the manufacture and promotion of the recording output of the Caribbean and the rest of the Third World. Whether it was the quality of the vinyl and the pressings, the technical levels of studio craft, the often-pathbreaking design concepts for packaging, the distinctly stylish retail drives, the comprehensive radio initiatives, or the dignified and culturally aware press campaigns, Island always found an ingenious way to reinvent the notion of popular music. Without Island, there might never have been a global reggae enterprise of a pan-cultural concept like world music.