Bob Marley was seething with rage, his eyes simmering like a wild mountain cat’s. Never before had I ever seen him in such a fury.
Slowly he cocked the trigger of the huge, black, automatic 9mm pistol and leveled the muzzle inches from my right eye. Behind him, armed with an identical gun, loomed his road manager, Allan Cole.
“Sign the paper Don Taylor or I am going to blow you away,” Bob whispered. “Just do it man.”
I read the document he waved in my face: it dissolved every verbal and written agreement made between the two of us over the years.
I had dedicated years of my life to Bob’s career, helping him, in a small way, to grow from a ghetto “Tuff Gong” to a poised, respected, multi-millionaire global superstar. Now he was trying to undo everything between us—everything I had worked for—in an act of betrayal.
The afternoon had started routinely enough with a call from Bob, who was staying at his mother’s mansion in Miami between concert tours of Europe and the Far East. He had asked me to come over to chat about something that was worrying him. We began our talk by his huge, shimmering swimming pool. As the conversation grew more and more heated, he commanded Allan and me to move to his room.
Within minutes the three of us were scuffling, and Allan had drawn two evil-looking pistols out of a wooden bedroom wardrobe.
Even with the guns pointed at me, I tried to stay cool. Not that I wasn’t frightened—it occurred to me that Bob just might shoot. But I also understood the old Jamaican technique of intimidation. Like Bob I’d grown up battering about on the streets of Jamaica and understood how Jamaicans used intimidation to get their way. I also knew that the bluster and threats rarely led to bloodshed.
Bob continued screaming and waving the gun at me, “You’re going to sign—what you trying to do to me?”
I met his threatening stare defiantly and told him, “I’m not going to sign.”
At that moment one of the small children, I think it was Ziggy, appeared in the doorway.
“Don and Daddy fighting!” he shouted to his grandmother.
Bob suddenly calmed down. He respected his mother and would do nothing to upset her.
When I finally parted with Bob on that decisive day, I noticed that his moods seemed to be growing more and more unpredictable. I also left knowing that my relationship with him was over.
We had both ascended so far from our humble beginnings that for either of us there was simply no going back. He had risen from the slums of Trench Town in Jamaica to become a worldwide superstar, a global icon of liberation movements.
I, too, had undertaken my own odyssey that began with my thirteen-year-old mother going into labor in Jamaica’s Victoria Jubilee Hospital . . .