Shortly after the tour, Bob called me in Miami to say that he wanted to visit Skill Cole in Ethiopia immediately after Christmas. I applied to the Ethiopian Embassy for visas but was refused after a two-week wait. Bob was undeterred: he insisted that we could get visas if we went to Kenya. But when we reached Kenya, the answer from the Ethiopian Embassy after an interview was the same: no visas.
Bob reacted uncharacteristically by storming out of the interview and taking off alone down the main street. By the time I caught up with him, he was standing in front of an art store talking to a man who claimed he could get us visas. My reaction as a worldly businessman and former street hustler was skeptical. I asked myself silently, “Whey the man no just beg Bob him two hundred dollars and make us go on?” Instead, for the sake of a measly two hundred dollars, we would now have to slog back to the embassy for another disappointment. But Bob insisted. One way or the other, he was determined to get to Ethiopia.
At the embassy, the man walked up to the official who had turned us down earlier and addressed him in Arabic. Without any further questions, the official stamped our passports with visas.
Our benefactor turned out to be one of the original Rastamen who had left Jamaica long before Bob was born and who was now married to the sister of the Ethiopian ambassador. He explained that he had not recognized Bob but on overhearing him muttering under his breath, “Blood claat,’1 had asked, “You are a Jamaican?” to which Bob had replied, “Yes is mi name Bob Marley.” On learning about Bob’s troubles with the embassy, he decided to help us.
I was impressed then; I am impressed now. Bob could accomplish anything. He made a statement in one of his songs: “You ah go tired fe see me face and you can’t get me out of the race,” and today Em convinced that his interpretation of reggae will always be remembered, will outlast all others. His faith in Jah as his provider and guidance was always unshakable.
As he once said, “Eve been here before and will come again, but Em not going this trip through, for there are two roads. One is life and one is death. And if you live in death then you must be dead. And if you live in life you must live. The way the mouth say, make you live.”
The incident in Kenya is a small but classic example of his power as shaman and superstar.
Armed with our visas, we set out to visit Skill in Ethiopia, where he had fled after the Caymanas scam. The visit would also be a fulfillment of Bob’s dreams of visiting Sashemene. During the build-up to the trip, I also discovered that Bob was secretly planning to build a four-million-dollars development for the Rasta community in Ethiopia.
We were accompanied on the trip by a ghetto youth named Lip, whose girlfriend has the only picture of Bob in Ethiopia—a Polaroid shot taken by Lip showing Bob standing under an Ethiopian sycamore tree. Lip was later to meet a tragic death in Jamaica, where he was gunned down by political partisans.
Malachi also came with us from London. It was Malachi who never ceased preaching the glory of Ethiopia and who Bob thought would be the most suitable companion to take on the trip. But after only two days, Malachi began complaining about wanting to go “home” to England. Hearing a Elder calling England his home, Bob said with disgust, “Then Malachi after me spend all my money bring yu to Africa, yu a talk bout England as home and want to return to London.”
We spent four days in Ethiopia buying art and other cultural mementos and mainly following Bob throughout Addis Ababa.
Now that I think about the trip, it strikes me as having been Bob’s pilgrimage to his spiritual homeland. He described his reaction to the Ethiopian experience this way, “Boy I really get the recharge from Ethiopia because the song ‘Zimbabwe’ was written in a land called Sashemene. So you can say it is a full recharge, that, and when the song came out it [Independence] just happen. So can you imagine if it was in Ethiopia where you wrote all your songs, then nearly every song you write could happen, then maybe somebody would say ‘Boy, he is a prophet.’“
Our breakup occurred after this fateful trip.
Although it was not generally known, my management of Bob was not an exclusive arrangement. I continued to represent other performers including Jimmy Cliff, whose career at Island Records reflects Chris BlackwelPs typical style of dealing with artistes.
In 1979, I bought Jimmy Cliffs published work for forty thousand dollars. No one else wanted it. I also began to resuscitate his career, which had gone downhill.
For some fifteen years, Jimmy Cliff had been a part of Island Records. His career, which had been sagging badly, needed rebuilding, and we began by working on the album, / Am the Living. Deniece Williams, whom I was then seeing (my wife Apryl and I having been divorced for some time), helped me with production. Alec Willis, who had once worked for Earth Wind and Fire, assisted. This album jump-started Jimmy’s career and eventually went to the Top 50, becoming his first real success since “The Harder They Come.”
Once again I got into arguments with Chris Blackwell who, I discovered, after ten years, had still not paid Jimmy for his African tour. Eventually I got Jimmy £12,000.
The seeds of the breakup between Bob and me were planted on our second tour to LA when I was approached by a guy called Bobette, then a stranger to me, who had once worked for James Brown. Later I learned that Bobette was regarded in the business as an informer. Rumors about his unreliable behavior, in retrospect, should have made me more careful.
Because Bobette was then representing the family of President Omar Bongo of Gabon, I assumed he was genuine.
We had played at UCLA the previous Saturday to a sellout crowd of fourteen thousand. The night I met Bobette, we would be playing a benefit concert at the Roxy for Sugar Ray Robinson, which had quickly sold out at one hundred dollars per ticket.
That night Bobette turned up with two girls, said to be the daughters of the president of Gabon, one of whom was named Pascalene. They wanted to come backstage to meet Bob and to invite him to a private dinner. Because I was always protective of Bob’s privacy on tour and made every effort to limit the hangers-on, I resisted at first, but eventually relented. I introduced Bob to Pascalene, who invited him to a dinner at their Beverly Hills house.
Bob, however, would not eat just anybody’s cooking. On those rare occasions when we ate out, our host always had to hire a special lady to do the cooking. The only person in L.A. whose food Bob would eat other than that of his own traveling cooks, was a lady called Delrose, who owned a restaurant called “Delrose’s Jamaican Restaurant.” He agreed to go to dinner only if Delrose cooked his food.
Pascalene’s motives were obvious: She was clearly attracted to Bob. Indeed, after his death, she named her first child Nesta, Bob’s middle name. Not only was she personally interested in Bob, she also told us that she wanted to hire him to play at her birthday party to be held in Gabon, with the bill to be paid by her father. Somehow she got both of us—Bob and me—to agree to schedule the performance which, because we had to charter performance equipment in LA and fly it to Gabon, came to more than $500,000.
Bobette, who by now had revealed himself to be a typical New York hustler, was arranging all the details.
As it turned out, Bobette had promised Pascalene and the president of Gabon that there would be two shows even though he was paid enough to do only one. Told that Bob would do only one show, Bobette, as an alternative, paid me a deposit for Jimmy Cliff to do the other. Where the second deposit came from I never knew.
For this agreement I gave Bobette two separate receipts: one for Jimmy Cliff, another for Bob. Bobette, however, continued to give the president the impression that two Marley concerts would be staged, and we arrived in Gabon to find ourselves in hot water with the president over money.
The president summoned us to account for the misunderstanding. I explained that there were to be two separate shows—by Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff—and that the receipts clearly stated this understanding. Although the explanation seemed to satisfy everyone, T could see that Bob was displeased and seemed to feel that T had siphoned off some of his earnings to Jimmy Cliff. On the return flight from Gabon, I sat apart from him. Even when Rita came over to tell me that Bob realized that his accusation was untrue, I still kept my distance.
My personal management agreement with Bob being due for renegotiation anyway, the estrangement was probably opportune. I had my own future to consider and was seriously wondering if it lay with Bob. I had taken him far, but with his grasp of business and his ability to handle most of his affairs in his own way, I sensed, and had already hinted to him, that he was becoming too big for an independent like me to manage.
On our return from Gabon in early 1979,1 went to Miami; Bob went to Jamaica. Our separation had begun.
Sensing the break, the vultures began to hover. Through his mother, and intermittently by phone, Bob and I continued to stay in touch, but only on strictly business matters.
Skill Cole had returned from Ethiopia and, with Danny Sims, taken over tour management. The two of them actually handled the 1980 world tour, the last US and European tours, and the later tours of the Far East and Africa.
All this time Bob should have been seeing his doctors for a monthly checkup. Indeed, Dr. Bacon continually called me to inquire about his progress. In turn, I would call his mother to find out if Bob was obeying the doctor’s instructions, which included a strict daily medical diet of eight ounces of liver.
In an interview, Bob said: “They don’t want to run this thing like how I run it. Them want to run me on a star trip. But I realize my structure run down, I must rest, but they are not concerned with my structure. Dem run and plan a North American tour. I watch Muhammad Ali and Allan Cole, and I see how them athletes take care of their structure. But them people who set up the tour do not work. Them just collect the money and when night come yu find them in bed with two girls while you buss yu rass claat a work all the time.”
The doctors’ instructions were not being heeded—I learned that from one of my calls. Indeed, I discovered that on one occasion, his follow-up examination had consisted of nothing more than a physical given by a regular British GP, who pronounced him in good health.
Our relationship remained in limbo until Bob returned to Miami for a break after the 1980 UK and European world tour—a normal enough interlude before starting the second scheduled tour, of the Far East.
It was on his return to Miami that the scene between Bob and me, related in the Prelude, occurred. It was then that Bob led me to his bedroom in his mother’s house, where he had been staying, and demanded that I sign a paper dissolving all agreements, verbal or written, that had ever existed between us. It was there that Allan, whom I had not seen since the visit to Ethiopia, actually threatened my life with a 9 mm pistol after a tussle in the bedroom, saying, “If yuh nuh sign the blood claat paper me ah go shoot yuh.”
I refused to sign. A lot of screaming and shouting ensued and, although no real blows were exchanged, guns were drawn.
Glancing into Bob’s eyes, I saw mirrored there a world of conflicting emotions. After the tussle, he said to Allan, in an almost total aboutface, “Now that we have everything under control I guess Don Taylor can come back to work for us again.”
It was almost as if he considered the emotional explosion a cleansing experience, after which we could now resume a normal relationship.
We did not know then that the cancer was spreading. But I had a sense of foreboding that the failure of those around him to grasp his urgent medical needs had taken its toll on Bob, mentally and physically.
The latest episode, however, added to the trauma of my shooting, had firmly decided my mind. I told Bob that the relationship between us could never be resumed, that it was over.
Allan would never have hurt anyone, let alone me. Bob, I still firmly believe, did not ha\e it within him to kill. In the heat of the moment, he was, in plain fact, just being Bob Marley, Tuff Gong—perhaps even trying to impress Skill.
Nevertheless, as a precaution, I reported the incident to the Miami police. And, knowing the kind of people who hung around Bob and depended on him for a living, I went out and bought a .45.
I ended up suing Bob for $500,000 under my contract understanding, which we later agreed to settle for a figure that included a cash payment. Bob died, however, before the settlement could be finalized, even though he had instructed his Miami lawyer to settle with my lawyer, Stephen Fisher.
After his death, Rita approached me, saying that Bob had intended to settle. We agreed on a figure which, for personal reasons, I won’t disclose.
It included settlement cash of US$75,000, which Rita Marley paid.