I had been dividing my time—during this period—between Miami and Kingston. In November of 1976, I flew in to Jamaica to handle some personal business as well as Bob’s management portfolio. For rest and relaxation I planned to hang out at two gambling clubs, Norman’s and House of Chen, both offshoots of another club that had been near to Dizzi, the disco Bob used to frequent.
At these clubs, games of chance such as poker, craps or Mah Jong (at all of which I was pretty adept) would commonly continue nonstop for days and nights, with millions routinely won and lost. There the real Jamaican gamblers would mingle, sated with all the whisky and food they could consume.
Christmas was approaching, a more magical season in Jamaica than in many developed countries of the world. Traditionally, the celebrations of Christmas in Jamaica begin as early as October. Nature herself seems to participate in the revelries by bedecking the land in a profusion of red, pink and white poinsettias. Merrymakers would sometimes make the rounds of six or more office and private parties in an evening that would stretch into the wee hours of the morning.
In between partying and attending to my own personal business, I visited Bob at Hope Road to find out what he had in mind for Christinas.
Even by Jamaican standards, it was a time of unprecedented violence and mayhem. Michael Manley had lately imposed a state of emergency on the country. Fresh in the news was a grisly incident known as the Green Bay Massacre, where ten youths had been lured to their deaths by the army and massacred in cold blood on the Hellshire hills. The country later learned that an entire cadre of PNP bad men, following false leads about where they could pick up guns for an anti-JLP raid, had walked into an army ambush. It was a chilling incident, and the kind one could hardly believe would ever happen in Jamaica. Civil war seemed imminent.
The economy had deteriorated rapidly; the treasury was broke; Jamaica had stumbled badly since the heady first days of Independence.
The ghettos had become “hot.” A disastrous fire with political implications had occurred on Orange Street. As Bob said in June of 1976, “We trying to make things easier but y’know, the politics keep its teeth. You have two parties fighting each other so we come like nutten because them guys always fighting and claiming to be the big guys. Plenty people fight for jobs, so the only way to get a job is to be on one side or the other, otherwise you suffer, you suffer and they hurt you bad. They burn houses with people in it, babies in it, in Jamaica, you know. I don’t really understand it bwoy, really can’t understand that. And I know it is politicians doing it. It’s the youth that catches the place afire, but it is the politicians influence. That really not look good. Politics, man.”
The conflict had escalated beyond imagination as larger and larger areas of Kingston became politically tribalized and under the rule of leading gangs of either party. The walls of the ghettos were scribbled with menacing graffiti: “PNP enter at own risk”; “JLP keep out—or death.”
Ulysses Estrada, the Cuban ambassador, was heard to threaten Jamaicans with consequences if they interfered with the “revolution.” No one knew whether he was referring to the Cuban or the Jamaican revolution.
Prime Minister Manley bluntly urged Jamaicans who wished to become rich to leave on one of the “five flights a day to Miami.” The newly emerged middle class, the business trained, both of whom are indispensable to any country, took him at his word and began an exodus to the USA and UK. Many settled in Miami, depriving Jamaica of its best and brightest entrepreneurs and workers. In the panic, many of those fleeing sold their houses for whatever little price in US dollars they could get. Some simply walked away, abandoning the houses to the banks and insurance companies. Foreign exchange poured out of the country in illegal transfers.
The ideological conflict between the Manley/Seaga factions was raging out of control. To say that Jamaica was convulsed by the turmoil of revolution would not have been an overstatement. The ghettos, split into warring political parties, were at boiling point.
It was against this context that Bob felt he wanted to stage a show in Jamaica for Christmas, a Christmas morning show to be exact. I saw his idea as a good money-earner as well as an opportunity to lift the spirits of the embattled, politically weary people.
A concert would fit right in with the traditional Jamaican merrymaking at Christmas, which has always been celebrated with any number of shows. I cherished boyhood memories of dressing up in new clothes and, on Christmas morning, attending a concert followed by a stroll along downtown King Street, where everyone joined in the fun and frolic of street-side vending. These happy memories were of a time long-before the neglect of Kingston and the vicious eruption of partisan violence.
I had assumed that Bob had in mind a paying concert, but he quickly dispelled this notion. He said, “Yu blood claat mad, yu would a mash up everybody business, yu woudda tek weh the little man food. We nuh need nuh more money out of we Jamaican people.” Bob simply refused to make money out of the poor by charging admission to the concert. His own concert, being free, would contrast sharply with the trend of commercial Christmas stage shows that had become as ubiquitous in Jamaica as plum pudding and sorrel and that were staged from one end of the island to the other.
Bob’s reasoning was simple: Jamaicans had been good to him; in this time of turmoil and divisiveness, he felt a need to do something to relieve the pressure on the people. I heartily agreed with his thinking. Bob and his musical accomplishments were, at the time, the only really good news coming out of Jamaica. He had become a symbol of hope and escape to the downtrodden.
Sitting on the verandah, Bob suggested that the concert be called the “Smile Jamaica” concert. He had penned these lyrics on that theme:
Help my people help them right
O Lord help us tonight
Cast away the evil spell
Pour some water in the well
Where would the concert be held? Bob wanted the venue to be a place where the rich, the poor and the middle class could mingle without tension. I suggested as a site the grounds of Jamaica House, location of the prime minister’s office and only a stone’s throw away from Hope Road.
Originally designed to be the official residence of the prime minister, Jamaica House, built in 1963, was meant to be the Jamaican equivalent of the White House and 10 Downing Street. But it had seldom served as the official residence of the head of government. Sir Alexander Bustamante had occupied it only briefly just before retiring as the first prime minister of an independent Jamaica. Hugh Shearer, a bachelor who took over as prime minister from Sir Donald Sangster (who died only a few weeks after winning the general elections of 1967), had no use for such an enormous house. When Michael Manley assumed office in 1972, he converted Jamaica House from a residence into the office of the prime minister.
With its vast grounds, Jamaica House struck me as the perfect venue for Bob’s idea of a concert appealing to all the people. Located midway between the neighborhoods of the haves and the have-nots, it was a site guaranteed to make everyone feel safe and protected.
Bob liked the idea so much that he picked up the phone, called the prime minister, and was immediately put through—an indication of his power. In fact, Bob and Manley had grown close over the years. Manley never hid his admiration for Bob’s musical achievements and had written many pieces on reggae music and its global cultural impact.
The prime minister responded with great enthusiasm and invited Bob to come Jamaica House immediately for a discussion. We were admitted by the guards at the gate without hesitation and drove up the impressive driveway past the expansive lawn. We climbed the semicircular staircase to the prime minister’s office, which was guarded by charming secretaries, the prime minister’s personal assistant, as well as security men who discreetly observed us from a distance.
Anxiously awaiting our arrival, Manley, who virtually greeted us at the door, was his usual impressive self, his six-foot stature clad in a hallmark Kareeba suit, his hair graying at the temples, his manner oozing the kind of charm usually reserved for the stage. As he focused all his geniality on me, a stranger he was meeting for the first time, Manley was not only self-possessed and confident, he also radiated a hint of mischief. This must be what they call charisma, I thought to myself, feeling like a long-lost brothers.
He asked Bob how his career was going and spoke briefly about the problems ravaging the country and how this gesture by Bob would help ease the tensions. Bob explained that he did not want the concert to be politicized, repeating himself to emphasize this point.
The prime minister then had his secretaiy call his minister of state, Senator Arnold Bertram, whom I had only heard of through press reports. Bertram arrived, was introduced, listened to our proposal, and then invited us to adjourn to his office—a trailer-like building across the lawn erected during the conversion of Jamaica House into prime minister’s office. Bob again emphasized the unifying intent of the concert and his wish for all Jamaica to share equally in a nonpartisan celebration.
The preliminary details settled, Bob and I called a press conference at Hope Road to announce the concert, billing it as a joint production by Bob Marley and the government.
Almost immediately afterwards, with timing that struck me as hurried and contrived, the government announced the date of the next general election. The die was cast, and the vibes became sinister, as if a dark cloud had suddenly descended over the island and the concert. People around Bob became edgy and concerned.
We did not know then that that the cold war had come to Jamaica, that our small island had become one of its flash points, that Jamaica was being manipulated to further the ideological ends of opposing global powers. Between the political factions among us, a yawning gulf had opened. Stoked by outside influences, political tribalization on the island was goaded to extremism. No longer was the game played locally and solely between JLP and PNP. The major players were now East and West (Russia and Cuba vs. USA, symbolized in the rivalry between East Kingston and West Kingston). With the revelations of the role Noriega and Panama played in events then boiling in the Caribbean, the factionalism of those hot-blooded days, in hindsight, now take on a sinister appearance. Not in our wildest nightmares did we think that the CIA would traffic in drugs and then funnel the ill-gotten profits to selected Jamaican partisans.
JLP operatives around Bob—Claudie Massop, Tommy Cowan, Harry J and Tek Life—all warned him that their party did not want his free concert. Claudie, who was then in prison, sent Bob an urgent message to this effect.
The JLP saw the concert as an endorsement of Michael Manley and his socialist policies and took it as a slap in the face. They felt vehemently that the state of emergency had been trumped up only for the purpose of discrediting their party, a view later accepted by an independent inquiry.
In face of the JLP’s opposition, a compromise agreement was struck to move the concert from Jamaica House to National Heroes Circle. Staging the concert at Jamaica House, it was felt, would imply support for the PNP, whose “bad men,” through Tony Welch, had made it clear that they strongly supported the original venue. National Heroes Circle having been established as a graveyard for Jamaican heroes by a previous JLP government, and being the site of a monument to Marcus Mosiah Garvey, seemed to be symbolically neutral ground.
The cauldron, however, continued to boil, especially as the PNP hailed the concert as a grand gesture and strongly voiced their support of it. Even among our immediate circle, there was resentment. I clearly remember that Judy Mowatt opposed the concert because she did not want to be affiliated, even by implication, to any political group.
Meanwhile, T was trying my best to keep the boat upright, while steering through the rough waters.
We began the rehearsing. Sparks continued to fly in many quarters. A feverish tension mounted, and the pressure built up as we discovered daily, if not hourly, the profound partisan feelings people had about the concert. I kept working to convince Judy to participate, arranging meetings with her in an attempt to win her over, but always coming away convinced that she would not budge.
Messages poured in from both sides. JLP emissaries kept telling us that “Seaga say this” or “Seaga say that.” But Bob didn’t seem to care nor to take these messages seriously. His usual reply that he did not accept messages from any messenger boy, that if Seaga had something to say, “Him have to say it to me direct.”
Ignoring the confusion, I began releasing funds to pay for the concert, whose costs were being underwritten entirely by Bob. I went to the USA to hire a crew to film it. Everything would be done exactly right. Even though the concert was free, there would be no corners cut or expense spared.
When I returned from New York, I went to see Bob, who described an unsettling incident that had occurred in my absence. He told me, “Don Taylor, when you were not here, the other day a white boy came here and told me that if I do not tone down my blood claat lyrics and if me no stop tek weh the white people them from America them a go tek weh me visa and me can’t go to America again.” I asked Bob what he had said to the man. He said, “I told him tek yu blood claat out of my yard, before me lick yu up.” Bob had been surrounded by his men with their guns. He said, “You should see the white man run out of Hope Road like a madman into his car and speed away.”
The US, at that time squarely behind Seaga and the JLP, frowned on Bob’s close association with Michael Manley, whose own friendship with Fidel Castro was regarded as disturbing as Bob’s strong appeal to white American youths. After hearing Bob describe the incident, I knew immediately, based on my US army experience, that his visitor had been a CIA agent.
As Bob was undeterred and still resolved to hold the concert, I wired my standby crew in America, confirming the arrangements I had made with them in New York.
Normal life prevailed outside of the tense inner circle of the Wailers, where arguments continued to periodically rage for or against the concert. For my personal relaxation, I continued visiting the gambling clubs.
I was in the middle of a game when I had to leave to go to Miami to pick up a $143,000 check for Bob. I also had arranged to meet with Chris Blackwell, who was in Jamaica at the Sheraton in New Kingston, and to pick him up and take him to the concert rehearsals at Hope Road. Relinquishing my hand to a friend, Dynamite Lyn, to play for me while I tended to business, I flew off to Miami that morning.
On my return the following day, I drove my rented car straight from the airport to the club to find that Dynamite had done considerably better than the sixty thousand dollars I had been losing at my departure and was now breaking even. I ate a satisfying curry goat dinner at the House of Chen before driving to the Sheraton Hotel to pick up Chris. But Chris, it turned out, had already left.
I proceeded straight to 56 Hope Road. In the car I still had a couple cases of whisky I had bought earlier and a briefcase purchased in Miami for a friend. I also had on me the royalty check for $143,000 that I had brought back for Bob.
I parked the car as usual under the driving alcove of 56 Hope Road and entered the house through the front door. Hearing the rehearsal in progress, I peeked into the music room located downstairs next to the kitchen. The full band was at work, but Bob was missing. I found him standing in the corner of the kitchen cutting a grapefruit.
I told him I wanted to speak with him and that I would also like a piece of grapefruit. He beckoned me to come and get it. Just then, as I reached for the grapefruit, I heard a sound like firecrackers. It was Christmas in Jamaica. Firecrackers at this time of the year are a common background noise. I paid little attention. Bob, however, looked startled and asked, “Who the blood claat a bus firecracker in mi yard?”
Before he could finish the sentence, the kitchen was shattered by an ominous and repetitious “rat-ta-tat, rat-ta-tat” sound. Suddenly, I felt a strange burning sensation, and even before I realized that I had been shot, my body went limp and I pitched forward on to Bob, whose only exclamation was, “Selassie I Jah Rastafari.”
I recall Bob holding me up in front of him while the shooting continued. When the hail of fire had finally stopped, he let me go, and I tumbled onto the floor, unconscious. Everything had happened as if in a dream.
I regained consciousness and found myself crumpled on the floor of the kitchen, amid a ghastly silence. Gradually I could hear quarreling voices. I heard Bob say, “They shoot up Don Taylor, Don Taylor dead or something.” The Rastafarians were arguing and refusing to lift me up off the floor because they objected to handling “deaders.” I tried to say something but could not speak. A great sense of shock, of amusing reality, swept over me in an absurd wave.
I did not know it then, but my aorta had been punctured. I was rapidly losing blood.
In the shock, I felt as if my consciousness had been split into two separate parts: one hovered in the air, heard and understood everything but was detached from all pain and suffering; the other was crammed inside the riddled body lying on the kitchen floor and struggling through the mist of consciousness to find out how badly it was hurt. The hovering consciousness whispered that maybe my “joint” (penis) had been shot off. On the floor, the wounded body slowly pushed its hand into its waist to assure that its joint was still intact before slumping again into unconsciousness.
Bob and the police lifted me up from the floor and put me in the backseat of the police car. I heard one of the policemen mumble crossly, “Damn, you know mi siren don’t work!” a comment I found quite amusing.
I also heard a policeman say that I had been shot in the abdomen and needed immediate medical attention. Another police vehicle with a siren pulled into the driveway and escorted us to the University Hospital, not far from 56 Hope Road.
Still not able to see or speak, I could, nevertheless, hear everything. I overheard a nurse saying she needed two stretchers as one of the victims was dead, but did not think for a second that she meant me. Obviously, I was not dead. Indeed, my senses were functioning clearly. I could hear everything.
The stretchers having arrived, the nurse checked me briskly and pronounced, “This one is dead, put him in the metal stretcher, and take that one over there”—meaning Bob. Both parts of my consciousness tried to scream, “No, I am alive!” But no sound issued from the torn body bleeding helplessly on the stretcher. It occurred to me, as my hovering self whispered ominously, that I might be buried alive.
I heard the nurse tell the orderly to wheel me to the door of the morgue where the doctor could pronounce me dead before I was tagged. As an orderly began pushing me down the corridor to the morgue, I heard in the background another voice, this one with a Bahamian lilt and an edge of authority that sounded like it belonged to a doctor, ask about my condition. Both my selves begged him silently to take a look, tried to cry out aloud to him but couldn’t. When the orderly explained that he intended deposit me beside the door of the morgue, the doctor said, to my relief, “Let me check him first before you take him to the morgue.” Later I learned that the voice belonged to an intern, Dr. Phillip Thompson.
The doctor approached the stretcher; I felt his touch; I heard him gasp, “This man is not dead, he is alive.”
Jolted by an electric charge of relief and excitement, I was wheeled back into the emergency room under urgent doctor’s orders to be immediately given a blood transfusion. But this was Christmas, and in an incident typical of Jamaica in the seventies, the lady with the only key to the blood bank was away at a party. She turned out to be a Mrs. Trought, wife of the deputy commissioner of police, Larry Trought, the prime minister’s chief man who had himself played an important part in the state of emergency. He was also someone I had known from the days of my youth and whom I always called “godfather,” as a term of respect.
The consciousness in the body sprawled on the stretcher tried to smile feebly at this turn of events. Manley’s experiments in socialism and the resulting decline in the economy had so strapped all Jamaican hospitals that everyone had heard tales of this kind about the ludicrous shortages. The hospitals were in such a pitiful state that patients often had to supply their own food and blankets. And here I was, on a stretcher and bleeding to death, experiencing the desperate shortages firsthand.
Finally the doctor was able to get me stabilized, and I regained consciousness. I opened my eyes, the two parts of my consciousness united, and a burning pain blasted through my body as if someone had rubbed pepper in my wounds. Standing over me were Prime Minister Michael Manley and his wife Beverly, who was weeping. I do not recall what they said, but I could see the concern in their eyes.
It asked about Bob and was told that he had been shot through the arm and nicked in the chest. Rita, I was told, had been shot in her head, between scalp and skull. She underwent surgery for the removal of the bullet and was treated and released. I was the most seriously wounded and needed an immediate operation to assess the extent of the internal damage.
I was still so excited at being alive that, when it was time for the operation, I forgot to tell the doctor or the nurses (and they forgot to ask) about the curry goat dinner I had eaten earlier at the House of Chen.
The operation was as successful as it could have been, and I awoke in the recovery room. Groggy from the anesthesia as I lay on a gurney, I regurgitated the curry goat dinner and began to suffocate on the food. But once again fate played its hand; the doctor, having forgotten his bag in the recovery room, returned just in time to take corrective action.
The next morning, I woke in the recovery room of the University Hospital with a bullet still lodged in my spine. Both my left and right sides were paralyzed. I couldn’t move an inch. I asked Doctor Thompson why he did not operate and remove the bullet. He replied that it was a miracle I was still alive and should consider myself lucky even with the loss of sensation in my sides. To me his answer sounded like an excuse: obviously the hospital was not equipped to treat my type of gunshot wound.
My friends, by this time, had got in touch with my second wife, Apryl Beckford-Taylor, who was then nine months pregnant with my son Christopher. She flew down from Miami as soon as she learned of the shooting.
1 asked her to contact the US Veterans Administration, inform them of my military service and get from them the names of VA doctors experienced in treating bullet wounds. Through the Veterans Administration in Miami, we were put in touch with Dr. William Bacon. Chris Blackwell paid for my transfer to Miami by a chartered medical plane. A two-hour operation was performed on my spine at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, and by the next morning I was walking around the hospital.
I remained in Miami convalescing at my house in the south- west area, a far cry from the overtown slums where I lived when I had first arrived from Jamaica.
In spite of the shooting, or perhaps because of it, many people felt that, if only as a symbolic gesture against the raging gun violence in Jamaica, the show should go on as planned. Prime Minister Manley strongly urged Bob to perform. The concert would now feature Third World, and I later learned that as tributes to Bob poured in on the radio, he wavered in his decision until Tony Spaulding finally convinced him to appear on stage.
Word that Bob had decided to perform spread like wildfire—band members Kinsey, Downie and Carly were located, and Cat Coore chosen to fill in for Family Man, who could not be reached.
Bob bounded onto the stage and by all reports gave a superlative performance. He spoke to the crowd, saying, “When mi decide to do dis ya concert two an a half months ago, me was told dere was no politics, I just wanted to play fe de love of the people,” and then broke into “War”:
That until the basic human rights
are equally guaranteed to all
Everywhere is war.
After the concert Bob went to his house in Nassau to rest, taking with him Rita and all the kids, his as well as hers. We kept in touch by telephone, discussing business and inquiring after each other’s health. We talked about an invitation we had received, through Tony Spaulding, from Fidel Castro, to come and convalesce in the safety of Cuba.
As a sequel, I would later find out that among the crew hired to come to Jamaica was the son of a prominent CIA official who had traveled under an alias. This information convinced me that the CIA had been behind the plot to kill Bob Marley because of his possible influence on Jamaican politics and on the wider world. I also learned that about fifty-six bullets had been fired at Bob but, except for the nick in his chest, none had really hit him. I still vividly remember his heartfelt cry of “Selassie I Jah Rastafari” as the bullets flew around us, spraying the kitchen.
I also learned from Bob that he had told the police that he could prove who had shot him. He also prophesied that the same number of bullets fired at him would one day cut down his attacker. Street myth has it that Claudie Massop, who was subsequently killed by the police, was riddled with fifty-six bullets.
Indeed, suspicion of involvement in the attempted assassination soon fell on the Massop camp, prompting me to recall a visit by Stewbert, a Tony Welch accomplice, to the Hope Road house a few days before the attempted assassination. Stewbert said he had come hoping to speak to Bob. Standing on the verandah, he had asked me, with a serious look, whether I carried a gun. I asked him why I would need a gun with someone like him around. Later, we would learn that Stewbert had just been recently released from prison. Had he come to the house with instructions to warn us?
I also later heard that the gunmen thought they had killed Bob and that it was probably the shield of my body that had saved his life. I didn’t see the gunmen. My back had been turned to the door. I only felt and heard the shooting. But, of course, I’ll never forget it.
I still have a bullet lodged in my left thigh, and when the weather is cold or I’m very tired, it makes me limp.