Born on 19 August 1940, Johnny Nash was a handsome Texan-born singer with a sweet, powerful voice; he had been a local child star, covering R’n’B hits of the day on the Houston television series Matinee. Signed to ABC Records in 1957, he hit the national American charts the following year with a cover of Doris Day’s ‘A Very Special Love’, succeeding again the year after that with ‘The Teen Commandments’, recorded with similar teen prodigy Paul Anka, and George Hamilton IV. When his record label tried to sell him to the middle-of-the-road market, Johnny Nash moved into acting, appearing with Dennis Hopper in the acclaimed Key Witness. He continued to record, yet failed to chart with the saccharine material he was given. In 1965, however, he made the US R’n’B Top Five with the funkier ‘Let’s Move and Groove Together’. The tune also made the charts in Jamaica, where it was a big hit. With his new manager Danny Sims, Johnny Nash travelled there in 1966 to play some live dates.
Danny Sims was the proprietor of Sapphire’s, the first black midtown Manhattan supper club, off Times Square. He also promoted concerts by American artists throughout the Caribbean and South America, as well as having managed Paul Anka, a prolific songwriter. ‘I had all the big show people coming in my restaurant; we were open twenty-four hours and I sold soul food. Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Ossie Davis, all of the entertainers used to come in. Johnny Nash used to be one of my customers. He was a huge artist at ABC/Paramount on the Arthur Godfrey show, he came to me for management, we became partners and we started doing concerts in the Caribbean.’ Sims discovered he could record music for the American market far more cheaply in Kingston. Sims and Nash, along with Arthur Jenkins, an American producer, accordingly formed JAD Records – after the initials of their first names – and all three moved to the island, sharing a house in the uptown area of Russell Heights.
But, according to Sims, there had been a very specific reason for the move to Jamaica: ‘The first R’n’B record that I ever got Johnny Nash to do was “Let’s Move and Groove Together”. That record became number 1 in the R’n’B market. We did a commercial with the track and we put it on every station in the country. And do you know what they put on the commercial? They put “burn baby burn” and this record was number 1 in Chicago and Watts and so the FBI called me and said, “Danny, we finally got you, you are out of your mind, they are burning down Watts, they are burning down the cities.” We got on a plane and moved to Jamaica. We thought we were going to get killed by the CIA and the FBI, for “inciting a riot”, they called it. Detroit went down, Chicago went down, LA went down, the country just went up in flames and we were right in the midst of that. Jamaica was a place to get away from the shooting.’
Some of Nash’s songs began to develop a Jamaican sense. He was the first international artist to regularly co-opt Jamaican rhythms into his tunes, exemplified by the rock-steady feel of a big international hit he had with an interpretation of ‘Cupid’, the Sam Cooke tune. In 1968 he hit the US Top Ten with ‘Hold Me Tight’, recorded at Federal Studios in Kingston.
Many of the musicians Nash met in Jamaica were Rastafarians. To find out more about this baffling religion, Nash accompanied Neville Willoughby, a top Jamaican radio disc jockey who had family connections with the Texan’s girlfriend, to west Kingston on 7 January 1967, the Ethiopian New Year’s Day; taking place there was a ceremony at which the Nyabinghi rituals of drumming and chanting were enacted – a grounation. Present at this event was Mortimer Planner, and also Bob and Rita Marley. As the ganja chalice was passed around the blazing fire, Nash couldn’t believe the number of beautiful, clearly commercial songs Bob Marley sang and had also written. Immediately he came home he told Danny Sims about them. ‘Johnny came back and told me about this fantastic artist he’d seen,’ remembered Sims. ‘He said the songs were great, and he had invited him up to see me at my house in Russell Heights. Bob came up with Peter, and Rita, and Mortimer Planner. And Bob was at my house ever since. He took over my house when I went on the road, and often stayed there for the next two or three years.’
The musician then sent Planno along to negotiate a deal with the American. After Planno and Sims had had ‘a few lickle rough talks’, according to the Jamaican, the American ended up addressing the dread as ‘chief’, and an agreement was struck. Sims promised he would apply his best endeavours to breaking Bob both as a songwriter and as an artist in his own right – the Jamaican’s ambition, he said, was to be ‘a soul singer like Otis Redding’. Bob, Peter, and Rita would receive adequate royalties for their songwriting and a publishing deal for five years with Sims’ company, Cayman Music; in addition, each of them would be put on a retainer of US$200 every fortnight. Ultimately, both as demos and completed studio songs, Bob and the Wailers would record 211 songs for Danny Sims. Bunny Livingston wasn’t with the group at this point; by the time the contract was signed, he was in prison on a trumped up charge, so he was not party to this arrangement. Although Planno had done the deal for each of them, Sims noted that it was only Bob who had an association with the elder: ‘Mortimer Planner had the relationship with Bob Marley, not with Bunny and Peter. Bunny and Peter were really independent of that. But at the time I met them, I never saw anything between Peter and Bob and Bunny, except love. They had things between them, like brothers and sisters – that was always there. And they were just great friends.’
(Five days after Bob signed with Danny Sims he received a message from a man called Dickie Jobson, who had ridden down on his bicycle to Trench Town to try and find him. Could Bob please come and check him? was the message – he might be able to help in some way. Bob came up to see Dickie, who told him he had a close friend in the music business called Chris Blackwell, who ran Island Records. Dickie had heard Bob’s recent music and had been very impressed and would Bob like to meet his friend? Unfortunately, Bob replied, he had just signed a deal with Danny Sims. But maybe another time.)
Considering the Wailers’ relative success and status in Jamaica, Danny Sims had been shocked by the collective members’ hand-to-mouth standard of living: ‘They had no jobs. They had no way to earn money, except sell single records. There was no money. How low could they go? In Jamaica it was hot all year round, where you could go out and pick your food off the tree or you could have your garden, which they had, and could plant their food, and you could go out to sea and catch your fish. That level in America would have been bad, that level in Jamaica wasn’t too bad.’
Bob’s visits to Russell Heights were not as simple as might be imagined. The Trench Town youth would experience serious discrimination when he headed to this affluent suburb. On several occasions, he and Peter Tosh, with whom he would cycle up there, were physically turned away from the area by police. When he did manage to make it to the prestigious property in which Danny Sims and Johnny Nash lived, the maid at first refused to serve Bob food, because she considered him too low-caste. Despite the distance between each house in this uptown district, neighbours would complain that their presence brought the area down, especially the herb-smoking clearly taking place – neither Johnny Nash nor Danny Sims had previously been consumers of marijuana, but they soon fell into this regular cultural practice. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen Peter when he didn’t have a joint,’ said Danny Sims. ‘There’s no such thing as Peter without a joint. Peter, Bunny, and Bob, Rita, all of them, even myself … It’s just part of the environment. They smoked constantly. But so did everybody else. It’s not unusual: you’re in a hot climate, and it seems to just go right out of your body. It just seemed to me, when I was there, that everybody smoked weed.’ Responding to the complaints of the uptight neighbours, the musicians would deliberately sit out on the lawn, writing and rehearsing songs, reasoning, and smoking.
The uptown Jamaican girls hanging out at the house could be similarly snobbish, snootily disappearing into the rear rooms at the arrival of these ghetto boys, a revealing symptom of the island’s vicious class – and skin – consciousness. ‘They smell,’ one of these ‘brownings’ once complained, hardly even registering how light-skinned one of these visitors from the ghetto actually was. On one such visit, Bob Marley caught a brief glimpse of a young girl he would later come to know very well indeed: her name was Cindy Breakspeare.
With their regular tranches of cash, the Wailers finally and quite suddenly were raised out of their former grinding poverty. But their workload doubled: Sims was aware that the American R’n’B market would have no interest whatsoever in tunes with Jamaican terminology or subject matter – let alone references to Rastafari – and required broader-based love-songs, pop music’s staple, which Bob and Peter began to provide. Yet they also continued to work on more localised material for release on Wail’n Soul’m – which at least they now had the money to get pressed up whenever necessary.
In theory, the economics of running their own label made sense for the Wailers. Each single cost 15 cents to press, the label itself adding a further cent to the price. The records would then be sold for 75 cents to a dollar. 1967 was hardly more than a few months old, however, before Bob began to discover that there was more than one side to Mortimer Planner, as there is with so many people. Whilst the Wailers believed the revered Rastafarian leader to be a portal to profound spiritual insight, Planno himself seemed to consider the group as an entrée to music-scene fun and frolics. The Wailers wanted to learn arcane information about Rastafari, huddled over a chalice of ganja; Planno desired to drunkenly party with them in nightclubs and dancehalls, a world which they had already learned offered nothing. At one point, Planno had allegedly been anxious to get Bob off with his daughter, and one evening he also took him to a whorehouse – which caused considerable conflict within the tempted Bob, already confused by his private discovery that his marriage to Rita had not assuaged his attraction to other women who passed through his life.
As one of downtown Kingston’s leading herbsmen, Planno was also something of a don, with a crew who tended towards nefarious activities. When his efforts to persuade Bob to put on a potentially lucrative Wailers live show were rejected, he was said to have threatened him, obliging Bob to call up the supportive protection of a local gang of roughnecks, militant youth who were fans of the Wailers, known as the Vikings.
Bob realised he was in too deep and needed a way out. The near-breakdown he had suffered at the end of 1966 was caused in large part by a creative block – could it have been that the ceaseless exhausting changes of the previous year had overwhelmed his brain? Early in 1967, the Wailers went into the studio and recorded ‘Nice Time’, a song Bob had managed to write but whose lyrics precisely cried out his frame of mind: ‘Long time mi don’t have no nice time/ Fe think about this and think about that’. ‘Nice Time’ was released in July of that year, as the B-side of another song, ‘Hypocrites’, and was in the Jamaican Top Ten during August and September. It was quickly followed by another hit, which in October reached number 5, ‘Stir It Up’, a song that in time would become acknowledged as one of the greatest Bob Marley tunes ever; it was backed by ‘This Train’.
Despite such ostensible success, something needed to shift. There was stress also at Auntie’s house on Greenwich Park Road: Rita’s older brother had become a policeman and was appalled at his sister and her apparently feckless husband for having adopted the faith of Rastafari – on one occasion he even hit her in an argument over this. And as though there hadn’t been enough transformations of late, Bob had just learned that Rita was pregnant – when the baby was born, it would be given the ‘Nice Time’ title as a nickname.
In consequence of this, with Rita and her daughter Sharon, Bob moved back to his birthplace of Nine Miles in St Ann, to farm some of the land Omeriah Malcolm had bequeathed to his mother after he passed away – the same week in 1963 that she had moved to the United States. The rest of the Wailers – Peter Tosh, Bunny Livingston, and also Vision Walker – accompanied them. (Even up in the bush at Nine Miles, however, Bob Marley was not free of Planno’s wily schemes. When he sent some men up to St Ann to administer Bob a talking-to, locals were obliged to see them off.)
Peter almost immediately tired of this isolated life, with no tap-water, no toilet, no electricity, and a distinct lack of cute girls to touch up. At this time there was a very specific female he wanted to spend time with: Shirley Livingston, Bunny’s younger sister, who would give birth on 19 June 1967 to Peter’s first child, a son named Andrew. In addition to Bob and Bunny having become related through Pearl, the daughter born to Bob’s mother and Bunny’s father, now Peter had inserted himself into this collective bloodline, binding the three young musicians even more tightly.
Of all the Wailers, Peter had the greatest fondness for the latest technological trappings of the modern world – he would happily spend hours watching television, drawn to the device even more after the Wailers had appeared on several local shows in the period prior to their retreat to the country. And he had a need for electric light: Peter was by far the keenest reader of the three, his entire life amassing books wherever he travelled. Although he would make sporadic visits to Nine Miles, within a week he was back in Kingston, a move that placed him in demand as a session player, a trusted instrumentalist – mainly on keyboards rather than the guitar, on which he was becoming extremely adept – on sessions at Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle studio.
Yet Peter’s whims, needs, and desires aside, to all intents and purposes the group was in touch with the zeitgeist: that collective semi-hippy need to connect communally with the essence of the earth, more publicly expressed by the desire of the English group Traffic to ‘get it together’ in a cottage in rural Berkshire, and by the Band, who creatively isolated themselves away in Woodstock in upstate New York. Even though they may have had very exact reasons for this, the lengthening of the Wailers’ hair accorded with the emergence of similar more hirsute appearances around the globe.
Both Bob Marley and Bunny Livingston felt utterly at home and at peace within themselves in the land in which they had grown up. Bob and Rita moved into the tiny wooden shack atop a steep rise in which he had first been raised with his mother, and which now had been given to him by his grandfather – ‘My yard,’ as he would proprietorially refer to it. It was chilly at night, on account of its high altitude, and they would watch as clouds and fog drifted around, above and below them, sometimes passing literally through the door of their home. After repeatedly playing the Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’ on a tinny, tiny portable cassette-machine he had purchased in America, Bob wrote ‘Sun is Shining’ and, unsurprisingly, the bare bones of ‘Misty Morning’, which he finally brought to fullness when he was back in Delaware two years later.
It was an existence that epitomised what a decade later in Jamaica would became known as ‘roots and culture’, the roots in this case being somewhat literal. ‘Bob wanted to go back to nature,’ said Vision Walker. ‘Find himself.’ Together, they planted food – yams, potatoes, cabbage. ‘I was there,’ said Vision. ‘Bob, Rita, Bunny was back and forth. We never used to stay in just one place: we used to stay, then leave and go back to town. But that’s where he did plan to go for a certain time to get his head together.’
In the backyard of the tiny house on top of the hill was a large, felled pimento tree. Bob always had an axe stuck in it, ready for the chopping of chunks of wood as they were required for the cooking fire. In the little open-air kitchen its flames flickered undyingly, corn or cocoa, yam or sweet potato roasting. The tree served a further purpose: they would sit on it and rehearse – although the sun would shine down scorchingly on the other side of the building, this side was permanently in the shade, cool and comfortable. In the evenings, their rehearsals would be lit by kerosene lamps, but more by the fire’s dancing flames, the background sparkle of fireflies offering a counterpoint.
Water was collected from ‘Spring’, down the bottom of the hill, in a crevice between two rocks. At times of drought, people would journey there from as far away as Seven Miles, carrying off water in pots, pails, and pans. When the sun rose, around five in the morning, the Wailers collective would head down there to bathe, Rita washing the one pair of underpants owned by her husband and letting them dry on the always warm rocks.
In the country, Bob Marley’s creativity came back. Working on the land during the day, he and his fellows would return to their rehearsing and writing of an evening and further songs – ‘Trouble on the Road Again’ and ‘Comma Comma’ – were quickly completed.
Shortly, however, Bob Marley suffered an accident that was potentially extremely serious. Tilling the land one morning, barefoot as ever, he stepped with his right foot, the one with the black toe, on the razor-sharp blade of a hoe, almost slicing his foot in two. In agony, he dug deep into the earth, grabbing handfuls of dark soil, damp from the frequent rainfalls, and packed it around the bloody wound, then tore a strip of cloth from his shirt and tied it tightly around it. Then he continued to work on the land for the rest of the day. By the next morning, he was unable to walk. This was now the third time he had badly injured that foot. Were the seeds of something much worse now in place?
The wound took almost a month to heal, during which time he travelled everywhere on Nimble, an old donkey that belonged to the Malcolm family and was treated as much as a pet as a beast of burden. Bob would even feed Nimble vitamin supplements and bee pollen, religiously purchased on Rita’s regular weekly trips to Kingston to oversee their business there: the record store at 18a Greenwich Park Road was still operating, run by local brethren. After a few months, it shifted location, to Crescent Road, off Waltham Park Road, but soon moved back again to Rita’s auntie’s. During this time, Wail’n Soul’m releases included ‘Hurting Inside’ and, on the B-side of a song called ‘Funeral’, Peter’s prophetic tune ‘Pound Get a Blow’. At the time he wrote and recorded it, the UK pound was relatively stable; almost as soon as it was released, however, its value took a nosedive, and the currency was devalued: ’Cost of living get high, pound get low’. Inevitably, the endlessly wry, almost Chaucerian figure of Peter Tosh claimed full responsibility for this financial downturn. The song, which had introductory brass from Johnny Moore and Tommy McCook, also contained an implicit criticism of the business practices of Coxsone Dodd, with whom the Wailers were now ceaselessly engaged in a verbal war (as in the lines: ‘The money you did say you gonna give me/ Pound get a blow.’). For having had the temerity to start up their own label, the Wailers worried established producers.
Meanwhile, Rita was pregnant with her husband’s first child. On that initial four-hour bus ride to Nine Miles from the terminus in Parade in downtown Kingston, the driver had been obliged to pull the bus over for her to vomit, as Rita was suffering from morning sickness in the early stages of her pregnancy.
‘It was different for me, because I’d never been exposed to a country,’ said Rita of the move to Nine Miles. ‘I’d been in Kingston all my life. It was different: I had to carry water, collect wood to make the fire, and I had to sleep on a little, small bed on the dirt, because they didn’t have flooring. But it was all out of love – I had decided to do so, and it didn’t matter. I was going into the faith of Rastafari, and I was seeking to find an independent sort of self.
‘Because Bob was already exposed to this lifestyle, it was a thrill for him to see me just living it. It was something he had decided he would do eventually – just be a farmer and stay in the country and live. So this was always his feeling: his need to go back into the open country, and just be himself.
‘We did a lot of writing and singing there, sharing a lot of special times, special moments, when I was getting to know the other side of him more so than just being in the studio.
‘We did things like “Chances Are”, and a lot of his songs – sometimes Bob only write one verse today, and then when he gets into the studio he finds the chorus and the other verses. He’d try out stuff on me. Listen to this one, listen to that one. And look up into the sky and the air – a lot of inspiration coming from there.’
In Stepney, close to Nine Miles, there was a medical clinic to which Rita would regularly travel for check-ups. As someone who had trained to be a nurse, however, she began to feel some concern over its effectiveness, specifically over its approach to hygiene. Rita and Bob made a decision: a month before the baby was due, they would return to Kingston, to Auntie’s – the difficulties with her brother would not recur, they were aware, as he had left Jamaica. Their daughter Cedella was born on 23 August 1967, in Kingston Public Hospital.
Bob decided that he and his family needed some help, this time in the form of a tractor to help plough the land at Nine Miles. He had rarely spoken of his absent father, who had died in 1955: ‘There was nothing to talk about, really. How can you talk about someone you never know?’ explained Rita. All the same, Bob made a great personal decision. With Rita beside him he went to uptown Kingston, to the offices of Marley and Co., his late father’s family firm, to ask if he could borrow a tractor.
But, after Bob had introduced himself, his request was met with embarrassed bewilderment on the part of his father’s two brothers whom he found there. ‘Their attitude,’ recalled Rita, ‘was “Why you come to us? Yes, Norval might be your father, but he didn’t leave anything here for you.” And so we left very disappointed, very upset. That had been the only hope: let’s go and check these people and see if we can get some help. Because we didn’t have nothing, we didn’t have anything.’
Early on in their stay at Nine Miles, another blow had occurred, this time one that affected the entire future of the Wailers: Bunny was busted for herb. Like the move to the country, in retrospect this can seem like another zeitgeist moment – pop stars suddenly becoming the targets of drug laws. That summer in England the Rolling Stones had been at the centre of a celebrated drug case, and John Lennon and George Harrison of the Beatles would also soon feel the full weight of the UK judiciary. The charge against Bunny was definitively trumped up. Was this a consequence, Bob wondered, of some of the rude-boy anthems released by the group? Or, more likely, of a disagreement at Studio One. After an argument had broken out between Peter Tosh, Bunny, and Coxsone, the label boss had called the police; when they arrived, Bunny had launched into a vitriolic tirade against the forces of law and order.
The facts of the bust were simple. Around the Wailers there was always plenty of herb, which was pretty much a way of life in Trench Town. One of the reasons many musicians preferred to work at Studio One rather than Treasure Isle was because Coxsone Dodd was not against the smoking of marijuana – former policeman Duke Reid adamantly was. Also, both Planno and Tartar sold herb. Often the Wailers would leave Betsy, their collectively owned guitar, at Tartar’s yard. One day in July 1967 Bunny had gone over there to pick up the instrument. Bunny had 9½ pence in his pocket. Just as he was suggesting that they buy some lunch with it, Brother Sam, who was the caretaker of the park on First Street, came to buy a half-stick of herb from Puku, the youth who dealt ganja at Tartar’s yard. At the same time, Bunny asked C-Lloydy, another brethren, to go to buy the food with his money. Whilst he did so, Bunny went with Puku to fetch the herb for Brother Sam from where it was stashed nearby.
By the time they returned, however, Brother Sam had temporarily gone elsewhere. Puku took out the half-stick and put the bag of weed from which he had taken it behind a curtain. Yet a jeepful of plainclothes police who were driving by on Collie Smith Drive had seen Puku go to his stash. C-Lloyd, Puku, and a man called Tom, another guitarist, were sitting with Bunny in Tartar’s yard, playing on Betsy. Suddenly, Bunny saw three of the plainclothes cops enter the yard, each from different directions: they found not only the half-stick but also the main stash-bag. The policemen announced that everyone present would be jointly charged with possession of marijuana. Then they discovered that Puku was a juvenile and therefore could not be tried in the adult courts, so they let him go. Although Tom was initially charged, the case against him was ultimately withdrawn. And Bunny Livingston was left holding the metaphorical smoking gun.
In court, Bunny pleaded not guilty, insisting that the herb was not his. His defence was not believed and he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Although Bunny was permitted an appeal, the judge refused bail. Bunny spent two months in the anarchic, brutal hellhole of the General Penitentiary in downtown Kingston before his appeal was heard, in front of three judges. Bunny was asked how old he was. When he replied that he was twenty, one of the judges turned to the others: ‘That’s old enough to go to prison.’
Transferred from the General Penitentiary, Bunny Livingston was dispatched to the north coast to Richmond prison farm in St Mary, which held two hundred inmates. The food, bad though it was, was better for many of the prisoners than their habitual fare – at least in prison they ate three solid meals a day. Furthermore, in terms of treatment, Bunny received some dispensation: a good cricketer, his skills honed on the steeply graded slopes of Nine Miles and the rough pitches of Trench Town, he played on the St Mary’s team, and he also received a measure of respect in prison because of who he was. In a suitable irony, he was able to stay stoned for the entire sentence, on ganja sold to him by the warders. The herb was of extremely good quality – Crackie, the number-one ganja dealer in Jamaica, was also serving a sentence at Richmond, and his own product was being sold in the prison. Coolie Boy, another herbsman, about whom Don Drummond had recorded a song, was also a fellow inmate. With time remitted for good behaviour, Bunny Livingston was released from Richmond in September 1968 after serving twelve months. When he emerged from jail, there were those who noted that he was more difficult and awkward than formerly. He seemed to have an outsized chip on his shoulder and some of those around him wondered what had happened to him in prison.
If the Wailers’ retreat to the country had been in accord with a more general unconscious mood, a less benign collective atmosphere was apparent the next year, epitomised by the riots in France in May 1968, the surge for freedom from Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia, and student demonstrations against the Vietnam war across the globe. For followers of the civil-rights movement, there was both a downside and an upside: in April that year, Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee; and on 16 October 1968, the American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos won the 200-metres race at the Olympics in Mexico City, each making a Black Power salute as they received their medals, and to symbolise black poverty, the pair appeared on the podium with bare feet.
Jamaica was not exempt from this current of social ferment. Also on 16 October 1968, there took place what became known as ‘the Walter Rodney riots’. Dr Walter Rodney, a Guyanese university lecturer teaching at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, was a friend of the poor, a hardline socialist and activist in the Black Power movement who had visited Cuba and the Soviet Union; during his time in Kingston he had proselytised against what he considered the ceaselessly self-seeking Caribbean middle-class. After attending a black writers’ conference in Montreal in Canada earlier in October, he discovered that the JLP government had banned him from returning to the island: this edict was under the auspices of Prime Minister Hugh Shearer. On 16 October, university students demonstrated, taking over the campus, and then marching on Shearer’s official residence and the Jamaican parliament. Along the way, the students were joined by thousands more demonstrators; ugly riots broke out across Kingston, and a number of people were killed.
Peter Tosh, who had been seized by the Black Power mood sweeping down from the States as powerfully as he had been by the Afrocentricity of Rastafari, found himself on a number 19 bus, whose route led from Parade to Trench Town. As the vehicle purred slowly through masses of angry demonstrators, he was moved to action. Forcing the driver from his seat, Peter took the wheel – and drove the bus directly into the main display window of a department store, exhorting his fellow passengers to take whatever they wanted from the shop. With the bus crammed with stolen luxury items, Peter resumed his usurpation of the driver’s role, delivering the vehicle to its Trench Town destination, where it was abandoned.
When the police learned who was responsible for this incident, a senior officer named Joe Williams sent a message into the ghetto, demanding that Peter Tosh report to his police station for questioning. Unsurprisingly, Peter ignored the order. Accordingly, some days later Joe Williams personally came down to Trench Town, searching for him. Finally, he came upon the Wailer in an alleyway, and pulled his gun on him. In a move he had observed on numerous occasions in westerns screened at the Carib or Rialto cinemas, Peter simply grabbed Joe Williams and spun him around, leaping over a fence and running off before the policeman could recover himself. Not unsympathetic to the protesters’ views on the day of the Walter Rodney demonstration, Williams did not attempt to pursue Peter Tosh, and there were no further repercussions. By the middle of the next decade, however, Joe Williams had been made Commissioner of Police in Jamaica. Although he may have had some understanding at the time of the incident, he did not forget Peter’s revolutionary behaviour that day in October 1968.
Increasingly militant, Peter Tosh was evolving into the character he would come to represent a decade hence, something akin to a Malcolm X of the Caribbean. Bob Marley, meanwhile, would more closely resemble the figure of the murdered Martin Luther King, a man of peace and justice. ‘More than Bob Marley, Peter Tosh was a revolutionary writer. And a very hardcore revolutionary. Bob Marley could be anything, but he wasn’t hardcore,’ said Danny Sims.
Towards the end of the year, Bob and his family returned to Kingston. Rather than moving back into 18a Greenwich Park Road, he, Rita, and baby Cedella took up residence in shared accommodation with Peter and Bunny in Regent Street, where he had lived with his mother soon after they moved to Kingston. The property into which they moved had formerly been a club and therefore possessed the appropriate facilities for group rehearsals. The Wailers worked on three more singles for the Wail’n Soul’m label. ‘Thank You Lord’ expressed the optimism felt by Bob and Rita, despite the financially hard times; the tune was backed by ‘Nice Time’, and the third was a song called ‘Bus Dem Shut (Pyaka)’, which was produced by Mortimer Planner and sold well: a ‘pyaka’, a word with African origins, is a hawkish person, and the song was a social comment on the situation in Jamaica at the time, as well as on the group’s deteriorating relationship with Coxsone Dodd. The sound was rougher and tougher than the Studio One material had been; the feel was looser, freed up, though that was partially the effect of the slower rhythm of rock steady.
Vision Walker continued singing with the Wailers, and is featured on the very rarest of their songs, ‘Selassie is the Chapel’, written especially for him by Mortimer Planner. According to Planno, the tune was recorded on 8 June 1968 at Kingston’s JBC studios – although Bunny Livingston disputes this date, insisting that he played on the B-side, ‘A Little Prayer’, after he was released from prison in September. Only twenty-six copies of ‘Selassie is the Chapel’ were pressed, twelve of which were later taken to Ethiopia by Bob’s close friend, Jamaican football hero Allan ‘Skill’ Cole. ‘Selassie is the Chapel’ was an adaptation of the American country-and-western song ‘Crying in the Chapel’, a hit in 1953 for Rex Allen, one of the last of the ‘singing cowboys’. Although country music was forever popular in Jamaica, it is likely that the Wailers and Mortimer Planner were more familiar with the Elvis Presley version that had been a hit three years previously, in 1965.
Gathering together some of these songs, JAD Records released an album, in Canada only, entitled ‘Bob, Rita, and Peter’. It failed to sell. ‘That was the first release by them on JAD Records,’ said Danny Sims. ‘I was told I was crazy for putting it out and that the words needed an interpreter. But it was early times for them.’
‘Danny spent a lot of money and time in working with us,’ said Rita. ‘Keeping us in the studio day after day and night after night at Federal Studios. It was owned by Ken Khouri. And before that there had been times when we would have to stay outside the gate, waiting to be seen by the Khouris just to get an audition. And we’d be told, “No, no, no, no, no: next week, next month.” So getting in there with Johnny Nash and Danny Sims was like a feeling of victory. And later we became the owners of it. So life is something else.’
It was whilst living in Regent Street that Bob, Peter, and Bunny began seriously playing football. Nearby were the three champion clubs in Jamaica: Railway, which was the number-one team, Boystown, and George’s Kensington. Railway, based at the bottom of Darling Street, was blessed with Jack Murphy, one of the greatest goalkeepers ever known in Jamaica, a tough, roughhouse player. On practice grounds around the area, the Wailers would play with such top footballers. Eventually the Wailers formed their own team, the Soul Rebels, with Bunny as striker (or ‘scorer’, as the position is known in Jamaica), playing full-scale, keenly contested matches against these top sides, and participating in a local competition known as the Black Shield.
One day in 1969, Bob Marley met and befriended Antonio Gilbert when he called in on the Wailers’ record store on Beeston Street. ‘Gilly’, to which his name was inevitably abbreviated, had been part of Jamaica’s national football team. He was impressed with the rigour with which both Bob Marley and Bunny Livingston were prepared to train. Out at Bull Bay, there was always the promise of a nutritious meal, courtesy of a character called Gabby Dread. Gilly noted that Peter Tosh did not so often partake in their lengthy runs: ‘Tosh was a serious character, and a physical man, into yoga. He exercised and trained differently from Bob. A little jogging here and there, swimming and all of that.’
Although he had enthusiastically played football ever since he was a small boy, in Kingston Bob Marley was at first scorned as a ‘country’ player, zealous but unorthodox and unsophisticated; he was even given the insulting nickname of ‘Miss Marley’ – he played, insisted these ghetto hard-men, like a girl. Obliged, therefore, to up his skills and training, after some time Bob would mete out his full wrath to anyone who dared to slight him, the player who by then, in a typical Jamaican twist of acceptance, had become ‘Mister Marley’. It was during this time that Bob Marley first encountered Allan ‘Skill’ Cole. ‘Skill’, as for obvious reasons he was known throughout Jamaica, was a tall, well-built youth five or so years younger than Bob, a midfield football player of ferocious talent who had been the youngest team-member ever on the Jamaican national side; the Jamaican team was managed by the father of John Barnes, the great English footballer who would later briefly take on his father’s role. Skill Cole wore his hair in locks and professed allegiance to Rastafari, so it was unsurprising that he and Bob bonded, and that they became close friends.
As well as being a member of the national Jamaican squad, Skill Cole played for Boys Town, which was near Trench Town, and also for another team, Universal 11, against whom the Soul Rebels would have matches. Bunny Livingston had already encountered him when each was at senior school, playing in the inter-schools Manning Cup competition. Skill had been a pupil at Kingston’s prestigious Kings College, but he had been expelled from ‘KC’ for dealing ganja. Clearly he and the Wailers were of like mind. Skill couldn’t, however, dissuade Bob Marley from one of his country football habits: he had been so used to playing the game barefoot that he always felt more comfortable without boots – even when the other players wore football boots, he would tackle them in his bare feet. Playing football in this manner, the black toe on his right foot which he had injured in the Nine Miles stream – which now bore a visible scar from when he had sliced it with the hoe – would become bruised and battered, sometimes suppurating with pus.
The shop and label and – most significantly – the deal with Danny Sims brought independence. But it was hard work. Every time the Wailers came out with a new wax, the three members would personally take it round Kingston’s record shops to feel the vibe, then Rita would go from store to store, usually on a bicycle, to sell it to them. Everyone in the record retail business knew about Rita the Rastawoman who sold records, aware that every time they saw her walk into their premises she would be bringing a new tune from the Wailers. Sometimes when she had a heavy load to deliver she would ask Bob to give her a hand. Partly to facilitate this, in 1968 Bob managed to pull the cash together to buy a second-hand Hillman Minx car, a consequence of the deal with Danny Sims, and a sign of a certain ambition. ‘Bob had a car,’ said the American, ‘and if someone had a car in Jamaica in those days it was unusual. But if Bob had a car it was for Bob, Bunny, and Peter – for all of them, to help them, not just for him alone. This was a situation where all three of them were inseparable – from kids they were that way.’
Mortimer Planner and Bob, despite their serious conflicts the previous year, had reconciled – Planno had observed Danny Sims’ efforts with Bob and the Wailers with considerable interest, and came to a positive conclusion: that Sims loved Bob and had only his best interests at heart. One day whilst out with him in the Hillman Minx, Bob let the revered dread drive. Surely the man who was heavy enough to ascend the steps of His Imperial Majesty’s plane to greet Him could steer Bob’s car through Kingston – even if he didn’t have a full driving licence? When they were stopped by the police and this offence was discovered, the pair were imprisoned overnight.
As soon as he was released, Bob left Kingston and returned again to the country. Shortly before the family left the city, on 17 October 1968, the day after Peter Tosh had hijacked the bus during the Walter Rodney riots, Rita had given birth to his second child, David as his name read on his birth certificate, Ziggy as everyone called him. ‘This was his first son, so there was much excitement: what shall we call him?’ wondered Rita. ‘I wanted David, because of how he was born at home in Trench Town: I said, “This little boy must be David.” And I also saw Bob as a great writer: sometimes I would even call him King David. His appearance sometimes is very royal when you look at him – and that was before fame, success, and money. And I also thought it was a good name to make a great son: because he was born so humble in a little house in Trench Town, on newspaper. We couldn’t afford much. Auntie was the midwife: Bob was there helping to clean up blood. It was a special baby to us, a special thing in our life, even though Cedella was there already. But having a boy is important.
‘And Bob said, “Well, this is Ziggy, man,” because his foot was all turned. He said, “This is Ziggy, Ziggy.” And I said, “What is this Ziggy?” And Bob said, “It’s football!” – a name for, what they call it, dribbling. They used to call out to Bob, “Ziggy, Bob, Ziggy!” He was good at that, taking the ball and moving it up and down. And so Bob said, “This is Ziggy, this is Ziggy!” That’s how Ziggy got that name.’
Loving his children, but also needing to absent himself from them to continue his work, Bob had often been spending nights at Danny Sims’ uptown house and also at Planno’s Fifth Street home. This did not go down well with Rita. By now she was becoming vexed over Bob’s regular absences from home, sometimes for two or three days at a time. Although sometimes he was with other women – ‘Bob was always a womaniser,’ said Danny Sims – half the time Bob was merely off with his Rasta brethren, reasoning, making music, smoking herb, or simply hanging out. Rita angrily complained to Bob’s mother that her husband had taken Cedella to a Rasta priest for baptism and that the man had blown ganja smoke in the infant’s face.
But Bob’s own psychic powers were still working actively for his family. One time he had spent the evening working at Coxsone’s studio – which he had hired – and lay down to rest. Immediately he had a dream in which he saw a scorpion crawling towards the bed of Sharon, Rita’s first child. Bob hurried home, and searched Sharon’s room, finding a scorpion on the wall. Carrying the sleeping Sharon into another room, he came back into the bedroom and killed the lethal insect.
Yet in the manner of many young couples, especially those with very young children, the relationship between Bob and Rita became endlessly quarrelsome. ‘Try to understand one anodder and not fuss so much. See one side and de odder. Look ’pon de odder point of view,’ advised Bob’s mother, suspecting her words would fall on deaf ears.
In early 1968 Danny Sims flew Bob Marley, Rita, and Peter Tosh to New York. Johnny Nash was about to record a new album and Sims wanted their input. Whilst in New York, Peter acquired assorted pedals and devices which greatly enhanced his guitar-playing, leading to the distinctive sound he developed, employed on all subsequent Wailers’ recording. Danny Sims also introduced Bob Marley to Jimmy Norman, a celebrated R’n’B songwriter and musician who had written the lyrics for ‘Time on My Side’, a US hit for the Rolling Stones, and played with Jimi Hendrix before the guitar-player left Greenwich Village for London. Having met Bob earlier in the day in Manhattan, Jimmy invited him and Rita over to his apartment in the Bronx that evening. ‘He wasn’t wearing dreadlocks at the time. He was just a regular cat and he loved rhythm and blues. All he wanted to talk about was music,’ remembered Jimmy Norman. Jamming together that night, they played on three tunes written by Norman and Al Pyfrom, his songwriting partner – ‘Falling in and out of Love’, ‘Stay With Me’, and ‘You Think I Have No Feelings’ – and such Bob Marley songs as ‘I’m Hurting Inside’ and ‘One Love’. (In 2004, a tape of this session was sold at Christie’s in New York.) As Danny Sims had predicted, Bob Marley and Jimmy Norman clicked, and the American was invited to Kingston the following week to work on sessions with both the Wailers and Johnny Nash. Jimmy Norman ended up remaining in the Jamaican capital for the next seven months, staying at the house in Russell Heights.
He was not the only American to fly down to Kingston for these sessions at Dynamic Studios, produced by Johnny Nash and Arthur Jenkins – who was also an adept arranger, keyboards player, and percussionist. Danny Sims flew a number of top musicians to Jamaica to play sessions with the Wailers; amongst them was the great South African trumpeter Hugh Masakela, and the seasoned, celebrated drummer Bernard Purdie. Before they arrived, however, locals were employed, including classical string musicians and a local glee club for backing vocals; horns came courtesy of the Jamaican army band. According to Purdie, plenty of time was given to these sessions, which did not end until everyone was satisfied. Some of the tapes were sent up to New York, where tracks from further musicians and backing vocals were added. After the glee club had been dispensed with, most of the backing vocals on the completed Kingston sessions came from Norman, his songwriting partner Al Pyfrom, Norman’s wife Dorothy, Johnny Nash, Rita Marley, and Peter Tosh.
Bob’s music, Norman noted, ‘was always entertaining, with great rhythm and exceptional melody. When thinking of Bob, here is a picture that always comes to mind: we would leave the studio for a break, Bob would always climb up the hill, find a large rock, lie down upon it, light up, commune with nature and be at peace.’ Among the many gorgeous songs that emerged from these sessions were ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’, a rock-steady update of ‘Put It On’, and a new ‘Nice Time’ on which Hugh Masakela played trumpet; there were fresh gems like the first try-out of a song called ‘Soul Rebel’, ‘Rocksteady’ and ‘Chances Are’. Peter Tosh also recorded and released the first version of a song that would come to personify the gangly, tall youth, ‘Stepping Razor’ (‘I’m a stepping razor/ Don’t you watch my sides/ I’m dangerous’). In subsequent years inspiring many a newspaper headline about Tosh, ‘Stepping Razor’ was often assumed to have been written by him. In fact it was penned by his old, and continuing, mentor Joe Higgs. ‘As well as the spliff and the chillum, these were some of the most inspiring months of my life,’ said Jimmy Norman.
But he claimed that it was he who wrote ‘Soon Come’, which was somehow credited to Peter Tosh; similarly, that ‘The World is Changing’, a socially conscious tune on which Peter sang lead vocals, and ‘Treat You Right’, both credited to Bob Marley, were written by himself and Al Pyfrom. Mostly collected later on the 1998 JAD release The Complete Wailers Part 1, the conversationally coherent songs from these sessions were as militant or magical, or conspicuously atmospheric or sensually abrasive, as anything recorded in the later Island years. Danny Sims was the first international music business figure who recognised and loved Bob’s talents, long before any others did. Bob, moreover, respected Sims’ connections, and the fact that he could get his records played on the radio.
Yet – if even further proof were needed that the Wailers were in a glorious ‘Golden’ phase of their career – the intrinsically unhurried recordings for Danny Sims were about to be surpassed by work of an even greater distinction, tantalisingly world-shaking in its scintillating essence.
First, however, Bob Marley yet again returned with his family to Nine Miles, to reacquaint himself with his creativity. Always pleased to pass on the baton of encouragement and inspiration, he found such an opportunity one morning late in January 1969. Living in the coastal town of St Ann’s Bay, the birthplace of Marcus Garvey, also in the parish of St Ann, was Burning Spear, a vocal trio who had taken the favoured Jamaican form of the three-piece-harmony group to its most roots extreme. The group’s leader was Winston Rodney, who by the early seventies would himself personally take on the Burning Spear title: his gravelly vocals sounded as though they contained every piece of truth the island of Jamaica had ever known – ultimately, he would become the undisputed elder statesman of reggae music.
As a youth, Spear had dug Bob and the Wailers’ early tunes. ‘Bob was Jamaican number-one star. Bob was the man. There was no other man. We have a lot of singers who were even in the business before Bob. But Bob ended up being the man.’
For whatever reason, that late-January morning, Spear found himself in the innermost reaches of St Ann, close to the area of Rhoden Hall. As he stepped out along a rough road, Spear came across Bob travelling in the opposite direction on Nimble, the family donkey. Bob was heading for his cultivation and garlanded about Nimble were a whole heap of plants. Bob and Spear got to reasoning. Dismounting, Bob sat down on the grass verge with Spear and rolled a spliff. And for many hours the two men reasoned upon the matter of Rastafari and its roots, the culture, His Majesty, the music … For many, many hours.
‘Then I remember saying to him, “Jah B,” – I call him Jah B – “’ow can I get started in this business?” And Jah B would turn to I and say, “Check Studio One. Tell Mr Dodd I sent you.”
‘And we were talking like a Sunday, when we meet in the hills, and on the Monday I was back out of the hills and thinking about it. Until the time came when I checked Studio One. That was a Sunday too. I checked Studio One and they were doing an audition thing, listening to young singers. And I was one of the ones who they select my song. My first song was called “Door Peep”.
‘So the whole thing for Burning Spear started, because Bob told I to check Studio One. That was the first time we had really exchanged talk, and we could look at each other and talk and laugh. That was one of my biggest musical experiences. Before I even get started. Dealing with the main man.’
At the beginning of April 1969, the Wail’n Soul’m record store, alternatively known as the Soul Shack, moved yet again, further down the street to 100 Orange Street. At both these Orange Street locations it was run whenever Rita was absent by a friend named Dudley, who was more commonly known as Icewater. Bunny’s mother, who for the previous nine years had lived in London, working in a toy factory in the north-west suburb of Neasden, had temporarily returned to Jamaica, gifting her son with a brand-new stereo record-player, which he set up on the counter at 100 Orange Street, playing tunes at maximum volume in an endeavour to attract passers-by.
Most days, Bunny Livingston would join Icewater in attending to business at the Wail’n’ Soul’m store. By springtime, Bob had decided it was time to visit his mother again in Wilmington, Delaware, accompanied this time by his family – Rita, her daughter Sharon, and their children Cedella and Ziggy, the new baby son. Mrs Booker observed that, as soon as she met the two adults, both tired from a journey which had included a number of changes of planes, they were irritably snapping at each other, Bob saying he had felt embarrassed by Rita breast-feeding Ziggy during the flight, a prickly Rita grunting back that she had had no choice as Ziggy had been hungry; it seemed a long way from the days when Bob would woo his bride-to-be with a can of Cow & Gate babymilk-powder. Soon Bob’s mother was caring for the children for much of the time, as her son and his wife took jobs, Bob once more labouring at the Chrysler car-plant off South College Avenue in Newark, Delaware, twelve miles south-west of Wilmington.
Before he borrowed his mother’s car and drove out to the automobile factory, he asked her to trim his budding dreadlocks, gathering the clippings into a paper-bag and burying them in the backyard, aware that if they were simply thrown away birds might use them to build nests, turning the person on whose head they had grown into a bird-brain; or that they might be used to work obeah on him. Although his hair was still quite long, he wore it brushed back.
At the Chrysler plant, Bob would generally work on the second shift, from 3.30 in the afternoon until half-past midnight, with a half-hour meal break, driving a fork-lift carrying parts for the rear sections of automobiles – the experience was described in his autobiographical song ‘Night Shift’. Although he would affect a red, gold, and green semi-tam, otherwise he was dressed in jeans and work-shirts.
At her house, Mrs Booker would overhear arguments between Bob and Rita, which sometimes ended with Rita sobbing her eyes out. Although her son’s wife took a job as a housekeeper, she was dismissed when the rich old white woman who had employed her was made nervous by the sight of Bob and his family waiting in a car for Rita outside her gate. Rita then took employment as a nurse’s assistant, but was dismissed when her Rasta hair was deemed inappropriate for the post.
Rita wanted a different environment from Trench Town for the children to grow up in: ‘Everyone was getting big, and I said that I couldn’t wait around for records to sell. This was my decision, not Bob’s.’ Cedella and Ziggy started to go to American schools, Rita was employed as a nurse, and their third child, Steven, was born there.
Before he needed to head off to the automobile factory each day, Bob had a measure of time to himself, sitting down in the basement with his guitar. In his mother’s backyard, hidden by a high wall, was an eight-feet-high hedge of herb plants, a horticultural innovation implemented by her son on his previous visit. Bob would set himself up for the day by grabbing a handful of leaves and boiling it up into tea, adding honey; then plucking another bunch, he would lay it out between newspaper pages, iron it dry on his mother’s board and roll it up into a Jamaican-sized spliff cone. Suitably fortified, from time to time he would meander down into Wilmington, where he had made a handful of new friends. Amongst these was Ibis Pitts, who ran an African crafts store, the Ibis Specialty and Gift Shop, on 24th and Market. It was Rita Marley whom the shopkeeper had first encountered, when she had wandered into his premises barefoot, casually dancing around the shop as she glanced at the jewellery on display. Falling into conversation, Rita introduced herself and mentioned the name of her husband, informing Ibis that they were musicians: she said that she would bring Bob down to the store to meet him.
When Bob eventually turned up at Ibis Pitts’s store, he spoke quietly, keeping himself very much to himself: ‘He was very humble, very meek, very quiet. He didn’t say much, but he did a lot,’ said Ibis. He expressed himself far more in his playing of a guitar in the shop, which Ibis Pitts accompanied on the several drums on display in the premises. Soon Bob invited Ibis up to his mother’s home, giving him a copy of ‘Nice Time’, and sitting in the basement with him, reasoning and consuming the new herb crop. Discovering that Ibis Pitts and his friend Dion Wilson were keen soccer-players, he began joining in with them in impromptu games.
As they reasoned, both in Ibis’s store and at Mrs Booker’s home, Bob Marley would assist Ibis Pitts in constructing the wire-and-bead necklaces and bracelets that were a staple product at the Ibis Specialty and Gift Shop. One night they sat up until dawn making such jewellery. The next day, 15 August 1969, marked the beginning of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair – the famous Woodstock music festival – and Ibis was heading up to the site in upper New York state, intending to sell these products. He invited Bob to accompany him, but – more exhausted from this stint assembling necklaces than from nine hours on the Chrysler night shift – the Jamaican bowed out.
During one conversation, Bob Marley made an apparently casual prediction to Ibis Pitts and Dion Wilson. ‘Nesta told us about him not being on this earth many more years than Jesus Christ was,’ said Ibis. ‘I just kind of passed it off, but Dion remembered the details. And when he heard the news about Nesta passing, he said, “Nesta said he was going to be leaving at 36. And when he went, he was 36 years old.”’
Whilst he was in Wilmington, the only postal correspondence with Jamaica that Bob was able to maintain was with Tartar, his old bredren from Trench Town. No one else replied to letters he sent them, specifically, Bunny and Peter. In one letter that Tartar received, Bob was complaining that he had written to both of his spars in the Wailers, asking them to come up and join him in the United States. Yet neither had bothered to respond: he had wanted Bunny Livingston to come up first, followed by Peter Tosh.
As a registered alien, Bob Marley was listed on official American files. With the authorities anxious to find fodder for the body-bags daily being returned from the war in Vietnam, he was ripe for conscription into the armed forces. When one day not long after the Woodstock festival his call-up papers arrived, Bob Marley took his only option: he boarded a plane back to Jamaica.
At the end of the 1960s, many of the decade’s human-rights issues remained still unresolved. Amongst the more specific abuses to which man subjected his fellows was the new apartheid regime in Rhodesia in southern Africa; since that country’s unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, it had emulated the racist regime of its neighbour, South Africa, where black people had been treated as sub-human beings since 1948. In June of 1969, such egregious thinking became enshrined in the breakaway nation when race separation passed into law.
Back in Jamaica, baring his militant side, Bob Marley held discussions about this iniquity with Mortimer Planner. The pair contacted Prince Buster, who by now was leader of the Black Muslims in the Caribbean. ‘They asked me to help with a demonstration that they were trying to get together. We said we’d meet at twelve o’clock the next day for a protest against Ian Smith, who had his hands on Rhodesia. I was at the place at twelve o’clock in King Street, but there was no Bob Marley: maybe he’d got wind of what was going to happen. When the demonstration starts the police come and jump on me. Some big inspector walking down the street with a big stick: “Come here, Prince Buster.” I’d been set up. Peter Tosh was there with me: he went to jail with me, arrested by Joe Williams, who later was head of the police of Jamaica.
‘I didn’t think I was breaking the law, I was protesting. So when I ended there in the night time, I was there to help Peter Tosh. He thought he’d been taken too. To this day, I don’t know exactly what went on.’
Although the pair only spent a night in the police cells, Peter Tosh had yet again been noted by Joe Williams as a militant troublemaker. As for Bob Marley? In typically Jamaican fashion, he had simply been late.
Although inspired by the then current mood for communal country living, the Wailers’, and then Bob’s, moves to Nine Miles also had been motivated by a perennial problem for young people in whatever economic or social circumstances they found themselves – a need to find somewhere to live apart from their relatives. Even the residence in Regent Street had not been especially appropriate. What they needed, they decided, was to buy a property in which they would all live, one that would also incorporate a rehearsal space.
Danny Sims did not have an exclusive deal with the Wailers, and they were free to record for whomever they liked in Jamaica. Accordingly, early in 1970, Bob found himself travelling back into Kingston from Nine Miles and pulling his car up in front of the shop and office of Leslie Kong, the producer with whom he had made his very first records. The previous year, Kong had produced ‘Do the Reggay’ by the Maytals, the unequivocal statement of existence of the new beat that had followed on from rock steady, another extremely significant shift for Jamaican music. Since Bob had first worked with him in 1962 on ‘Judge Not’, his first ever record release, the fortunes of Leslie Kong had taken an exponential leap: the six million worldwide sales of Millie’s ‘My Boy Lollipop’, on which he had been in partnership with Island Records’ Chris Blackwell, and the global successes of ‘007 (Israelites)’ and ‘It Mek’ by Desmond Dekker, Bob Marley’s former welding spar, had made him a millionaire.
Aware that their talents were the only tools they possessed with which to manage to buy a home, the Wailers had a discussion with the producer, by whose store they had briefly set up the Wail’n Soul’m shop at the beginning of 1969. It was Kong’s successful experience with overseas markets that drew the Wailers to him. Conscious that the new international record market embraced albums rather than singles, a change that had initially occurred after the enormous success of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, the Wailers proposed that they also should make a record exclusively for this substantial emerging audience, one that would not feature any songs previously released at 45rpm.
The resulting ten-song album was recorded in Kingston at Dynamic Sound in May 1970. Employed as backing musicans were Leslie Kong’s house-band, the Beverley’s All Stars, who consistently created one of the distinctive sounds of the era, and on these sessions provided a constant uptown groove. Although they would work for other producers under different names, their line-up remained the same: pianist Gladstone Anderson, organist Winston Wright, bass player Jackie Jackson, drummer Winston Grennan, Rad Bryan on rhythm guitar, and Hux Brown on lead guitar.
The sessions from the Wailers would not, however, come anywhere near to emulating the success of Millie or Desmond Dekker, although many of the songs were strong and substantial and would be seen as classics in years to come – ‘Caution’, ‘Cheer Up’, ‘Soul Shakedown Party’ and ‘Do It Twice’ were amongst the numbers written by Bob. Peter Tosh, meanwhile, sang a fiery lead on the protest hymn ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’ and his own hectoring ‘Soon Come’, and yet again reworked the ‘Can’t You See?’ tune he had first recorded for Studio One in 1966; he also contributed the original version of ‘Stop the Train’; ‘Soul Captives’ and ‘Back Out’ completed the album’s songs.
When it came to Kong’s choice of title for the album, there came a considerable controversy. Clearly seeking a marketing angle, Leslie Kong declared that he would name the record ‘The Best of the Wailers’. Bunny Livingston responded with fury. Only at the end of one’s existence could an individual’s best work be judged, he insisted. As all three of the Wailers were healthy and fit men, he declared, such a decision must mean that it was Kong who was near the end of his life.
Leslie Kong laughed at what he considered typical Rasta-reasoning double-think. As well as putting out the LP under the title he wanted, he released three singles from the sessions (thereby devaluing the Wailers’ overriding intention in making the album): ‘Soul Shakedown Party’, ‘Stop the Train’, and ‘Soon Come’. Although ‘Stop the Train’ had the song ‘Caution’ as its B-side, the other two 45s each contained a ‘version’ on the flip. In this, Kong was responding to a significant development in Jamaican music. The previous year, 1969, U-Roy, a DJ who had been working sound systems since the beginning of the decade, had had a success with ‘Dynamic Fashion Way’, which he recorded for Keith Hudson. But this was a small beginning. In 1970, U-Roy mashed up the charts, holding the top three slots for six weeks with such tunes as ‘Wake the Town’, ‘Rule the Nation’, and ‘Wear You to the Ball’, recorded with Duke Reid. Working with previously successful rhythm tracks, he toasted over the top of them in an utterly addictive manner. ‘The thing was like an experiment, and it worked,’ Bunny Livingston said later of the first hit U-Roy tune.
At the same time, Osbourne ‘King Tubby’ Ruddock, who had begun his career as a radio repairman, was working as a mixing engineer for Reid; in 1967, U-Roy had been Tubby’s toaster on King Tubby’s Home Town Hi Fi sound system. It was Tubby who devised the style of slicing out sections of vocal or instrumental parts of an already recorded track and playing with them, dropping them in and out of the tune, literally ‘dubbing’ them. With the addition of a multitude of special effects, notably reverb, King Tubby invented what became known as dub. The combination of Tubby and U-Roy revolutionised not only Jamaican music but eventually music around the world. Rap music itself, and the phenomenon of the dance remix, can be directly attributed to the work of these two men. ‘I used to go and watch U-Roy play King Tubby’s,’ said Dennis Alcapone, who would himself become an internationally renowned DJ. ‘In them days up until now I never hear a better sound. That was the sweetest sound in all the wide world. U-Roy had this echo thing. When introducing a music or advertising a dance, all his words would echo: it blow my mind. It was Tubby’s that introduce reverb in the dance. I never hear a thing like that, because reverb was mostly in the studios. But he had the reverb on the sound system and the echo. It was just brilliant. And you’d have one big steel horn up in a tree, right at the front, two on the gateposts, and some heavy-duty speakers at the front. In the night when the wind is blowing and the music is playing it is out of sight.’
Although the full extent of their influence would take some time to be thoroughly appreciated, U-Roy’s success in 1970 did have an immediate effect on the Jamaican music business: aware of the cost-saving reality of not needing to record a separate B-side, producers began to include what was literally a dub ‘version’ of the A-side song on a record’s flip. Artists therefore would lose the opportunity for the flat fee they would have earned for such a recording; the notion of losing songwriting royalties, of course, never came into the matter, Jamaican producers almost always considering that they bought the copyright of the song when they paid for the studio performance.
U-Roy was already friends with the Wailers. Whilst Bob was in America, Peter Tosh had enhanced his session-playing reputation. He had also worked, with a feeling of extreme religious honour, on Lee Perry’s production of ‘Rightful Ruler’, an ardent and outright expression of Rastafarian belief. The existence of the record was in itself a statement of protest – official behaviour, especially from the police, towards followers of Rastafari had hardly shifted at all since the denouncements from high political quarters during the early part of the decade. All those who contributed to the record were devout followers of the faith: on drums was Count Ossie, who had come down from his eyrie in the Wareika hills; U-Roy, who on the song toasted the first Psalm, was known for strict advocacy of the faith; there was no questioning the position of Peter Tosh; and even ‘Scratch’ Perry, who had not been averse to leading a flash lifestyle, was veering towards belief in the divinity of His Majesty.
But what about Leslie Kong and what some considered to be a curse placed upon him by Bunny Livingston? On 9 August 1971, Kong paid a visit to his accountant. At this meeting he was told, so legend has it, precisely how much money he would earn from The Best of the Wailers. When he returned home, he collapsed and died, from a heart attack.