Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright (17 page)

“Sometimes me just like record old songs,” Marley comments simply. “Yes, mon, we used to have some nice times singing . . . ”

But in 1977, we’re dealing with forward movement. An onward, upward motion flowing like the breezy rhythms of “Jamming”— “Yeah, ‘jamming in the name of the lord’.” Marley quotes softly, “You can be sure of that . . . ‘right straight from yard!’ (i.e., JA).

“Every song we sing come true, y’know,” he adds abruptly. “It all happen in real life. Some songs are too early, some happen immediately, but all of them happen. Burning and looting happen—so much time, it’s a shame. The curfew. Yeeeeees mon, everything happen. Same thing with ‘Guiltiness’. ‘These are the big fish that always try to eat up the small fish, they would do anything to materialize their every wish . . . ’ You always have big fish, ’cos they manufacture them. That’s all. I don’t have to sing no more song, just that one line—just, ‘guiltiness rest on their conscience . . . ’”

Sitting in the placid Chelsea comfort, as Marley intones the biting lyrics, I flash back to an equally placid night in Jamaica. The evening cool settled on Marley’s Hope Road home, many brothers and sisters crammed into the tiny bedroom beneath Family Man’s floor. Bob’s sitting on the single bed, legs crossed at the ankle, in frayed denim shorts, playing an acoustic guitar. He’s staring into the eyes of a pretty young fan who stares transfixed as he sings a song so resonant and moving I’m practically slithering through the floorboards—potent Biblical lyrics about big fish eating small fish, who eat the bread of sorrow every day . . .

I couldn’t forget the song, and when I hear it again eight months later, propped up against a brown-carpeted studio wall in West London, the slither-effect comes back with double force. All the magic and mystery of Jamaica returns—a naturally mystic land, where duppies (ghosts) are tangible as gunmen. So I don’t blink when Bob says, “JA one of the heaviest places in the West spiritually, regardless of what a go on,” and tells me about the ‘Three Little Birds’ of the song—

“That really happened, that’s where I get my inspiration.” Birds sang to Marley, “don’t worry ’bout a thing, ’cos every little thing’s gonna be alright . . . ”

Marley’s sung similar positive messages before now, but this sounds strangely slick on first hearing, in its chirpy, nursery-rhyme setting.

“The people that me deal with in my music,” Marley replies confidently, “them know seh what I mean. People are gonna like that song, people that don’t even know about Rasta, and it will make them want to find out more.

“Like with that song, ‘Waiting In Vain’. That nice tune, mon, that from long time back. It’s for people who never dig the Wailers from long time, ’cos dem just couldn’t relate. So, what I do now is a tune like ‘Waiting In Vain’ so dem might like it and wonder what a go on. A different light. It’s movement time.”

Family Man is the band leader. He’s called Family Man (going strictly on vibes this time) because he’s the perfect image of a family man, warm, sympathetic, easygoing, humorous . . . in fact, he’s got eight kids, so the name fits in more ways than one.

I remember wanting to meet him in Jamaica and Dirty Harry the horn player telling me, “Just follow the music. You’ll always find Family there.”

He was absolutely right. At home in Kingston, Family breaks into a sturdy, stepping dance, arms swinging rhythmically, head bent gazing down at the expanse of floorboards in this big, square, light room; the wall backing onto the verandah is lined with records, tapes, record, cassette, and reel-to-reel equipment; Family’s dancing by huge box speakers. A piano, mikes, guitars and basses, no other furniture (except a little three-legged stool by the Revox, for threading ease, and a fridge full of fruit).

In Chelsea, Family dances on plush neutral carpet in a smaller room full of Habitat-catalogue furniture, round white tables and a fitted white slatted cupboard with built-in sink, crinoline lampshade . . .

Family counteracts the antiseptic Holiday Inn decor with—what else?—music. A mini-mixer between the speakers, singles all over the white lace bedspread, “Black Skin Boy” lying top of the pile . . . marked contrast to Bob’s portable mini-cassette machine.

And on the bus, Family’s toasting along to his massive portable cassette; a huge ends upturned grin slicing his silky apple cheeks, just like the man in the moon. He toasts and sings along to Dillinger’s ‘Bionic Dread’, the Meditations, Culture, ‘The Aggrova-tors Meet The Revolutionaries’, Rico’s ‘Man From Wareika’, and lots of rocker 45’s.

In the studio. Family takes control. You think he’s asleep, leaning back in the padded swivel chair, with hands folded on his turn. Then oh-so-slowly, he leans forward, eyes half-closed, rests a well-shaped finger on an echo button and pushes briefly. The music shifts, deepens, as Family closes his eyes with a satisfied half-sigh, and folds his hand on his turn again, settling back into meditating on the music like a shiny black Buddha.

And outside, Bob’s playing table football.

The table football machine’s a welcome variant in the on-the-road staples of life: food and colour T.V. The patterns repeat, like Wagnerian leitmotifs—after a while it seems like one long round of watching a Clint Eastwood movie on TV (when a hapless soldier falls from the top of a building in flames, Neville cries exuberantly, “See it deh: Catch A Fire!”, and everybody yells “EXODUS!” when the prisoners escape from the dungeons . . . ) while tucking into ackee and saltfish and dumplings ’n’ drinking that Life Protoplasm . . . so the table football machine becomes a cathartic mirror for the emotions of the day. When everything’s going well, when a track’s near completion, Bob plays a keen attacking game.

“Come, Aswad,” he shouts, “I-man gonna’ mash up all o’ dem!” Angus Gaye jumps to the table, and balls fly towards the coffee dispenser as they rock the machine. At 5.30 in the morning, when ‘Jamming’ is into what seems its 18th mix, Bob muffs shot after shot. He’s tense; he can’t understand why every track takes so long to mix . . . “Energy low”, he mutters, as he turns away.

Other nights the energy’s so high it seems as if the whole studio’s about to fly on wings to the sky. Chris Blackwell says, “Call the skip, now,” and someone fetches Bob. Standing on the platform behind the mixing desk, arms folded against the wall behind him, Bob shuts his eyes and listens intently to the final mix of “Exodus.”

Suddenly his eyes snap into superlife; he beams, he shines with joy. It’s almost Jekyll and Hyde, Bob dances, transfigured, flinging himself in the free, athletic, MOTION that thrills onstage. Even here in the dark basement studio, it’s as if a Northern Lights aura throbs round every move. Everyone in the studio’s exultant, it’s a moment of triumph. Could anyone but a geriatric basket case with severe arthritis refuse this invitation to dance, dance, dance?

The “Exodus” party carries over quite naturally to the stage. The band are called back (invariably; they’re magnificent) and perform a ravishing “Get Up, Stand Up,” that has the entire audience swaying in mass ecstasy, then the beat shifts to the intense pulse of ‘Exodus’, shaking the air like the tread of an army crossing the desert to Africa, to freedom, irresistible as the flow of the Nile to the sea.

Marley trembles like a pillar of fire on the stage, thundering a challenge that’s a command.

“OPEN YOUR EYES AND LOOK WITHIN, ARE YOU SATISFIED WITH THE LIFE YOU’RE LIVING, WE KNOW WHERE WE’RE GOING, WE KNOW WHERE WE’RE FROM, WE LIVE IN BABYLON, WE’RE GOING TO OUR FATHER’S LAND—SEND US ANOTHER BROTHER MOSES FROM ACROSS THE RED SEA . . .

“MOVEMENT OF JAH PEOPLE!”

A
fter Bob Marley died of cancer in 1981, his impact only grew.
Among Rastafarians, he was practically deified. Some went so far as to say that, like Selassie, Bob didn’t die. His music became a sort of Rastafarian gospel, offering a far more grounded truth than most religions: “If you know what life is worth, you would look for yours on earth.”

The deification didn’t stop in Jamaica or among Rastas. Throughout most of the “developing nations” of the world, especially in Africa, Bob Marley’s image is ubiquitous, his legend profound. He’s a national hero in Zimbabwe; for years he was more respected in Africa than by official channels in Jamaica, which always regarded Rastafar-ians with suspicion and their musical mouthpiece with the most mistrust of all.

A whole sect of conspiracy theorists speculated that this mistrust led the Jamaican government to enlist the CIA’s help in ridding them of a potentially dangerous leader. Others believe that the CIA did it on their own to either destabilize or stabilize Jamaica. Take your pick.

Marley never copped to being a prophet and certainly disdained “politricks.” He saw his music as a way for Jah to speak through him; the message he delivered was so beautifully universal that anyone could appreciate it, and the way he delivered it could make the dead wanna dance.

For these reasons, the posthumous best-of album
Legend
continues to rank high on the
Billboard
charts. Bob Marley has also become the topic of learned papers, several museums, and albums that recycle his recordings from as early as 1962. And, oh yeah, books. Many of them.

O
n
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 Rastafarians 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.