As the 1960s progressed, Jamaican politics began to display elements that were almost anarchic. It also started to demonstrate an unhealthy symbiosis with the local music business. Political parties began to co-opt the gangs who served as protection for sound systems. In 1966, Edward Seaga, who had set up his West Indies Record Label before becoming a Jamaica Labour Party politician, employed the crew associated with Duke Reid; he was the first politician to do this. Michael Manley, the son of Norman Manley and his People’s National Party rival, soon linked up with the rude boys who performed a similar function for Coxsone Dodd. By the middle of the 1960s, guns were beginning to be smuggled into Jamaica, at first – so ran the legend – in children’s teddy-bears.
The political tension on the island heightened after Walter Rodney, the Guyanese university professor and advocate of Black Power, was banned from Jamaica in October 1968. Across the island, the manner in which Hugh Shearer had suppressed the ensuing riots created great bitterness. From then on, political violence in Jamaica escalated until it reached devastating consequences in the murderous election of 1980.
Following the Rodney incident, the JLP became increasingly unpopular. Polls suggested that, at the next election, Hugh Shearer would be ousted from office by Michael Manley’s PNP. Yet the PNP still needed to show a truly populist side; accordingly, Manley’s media-savvy wife Beverley posited a concept that could show clearly how forward-thinking the PNP had become. The project was to be called the PNP Victory Bandwagon of Stars; it was essentially a package tour of top acts, whose performances around Jamaica would commence after a suitably tub-thumping, rabble-rousing speech from the gifted orator into whom Michael Manley had developed.
Thanks to the zeal of Skill Cole, the Wailers had played several shows that summer in Jamaica, with the Barrett brothers as a permanent rhythm section: Family Man and Carly, smelling the wind, had moved away from Scratch Perry, which led to the break-up of the Upsetters, infuriating the producer. On 18 July, they played the Miss Jamaica 1971 Water Pageant Festival at the National Stadium swimming pool in Kingston, with Hopeton Lewis and Judy Mowatt; and later that month at the Red Stripe Award concert. In August there were a pair of concerts, one at Ferry Inn with the Fabulous Five and a re-formed Soulettes; and at the Sombrero Club for the Miss Chariot contest on the last day of the month.
The PNP Bandwagon shows, however, were truly big events. In charge of the evenings, working for no payment, was Clancy Eccles, who had helped promote the Christmas-morning shows the Wailers had performed in 1964 and 1965. Part promoter, part record-producer, part solo star, Eccles was a militant socialist who allied himself to Michael Manley’s firebrand political style. During the 1970s, he had hits with songs celebrating the PNP, including ‘Rod of Correction’, ‘Power for the People’, and ‘Generation Belly’. Manley, said Eccles, had requested he become involved in the project following a show he had performed in Kingston at the Ward Theatre entitled ‘The Rod of Correction’: during it, Manley had come onstage, presenting him with a wooden staff. It was as a consequence of this, claimed Eccles, that Michael Manley had reinvented himself, giving himself the name Joshua, as if he were a biblical figure treading through the wilderness brandishing a ‘rod of correction’ in chastisement of unbelievers. He began to dress in a bush jacket of the type favoured by Third World revolutionaries; it was an effective image that fitted his brand of left-wing politics.
Performing in their own right on the PNP Bandwagon shows and as backing band for the other artists was Inner Circle, a group of uptown musicians formed by Ian and Roger Lewis, who would come into their own right internationally by the end of the 1970s. This Inner Circle lineup included keyboards player Ibo Cooper and guitarist Stephen ‘Cat’ Core, who would later depart to form Third World, another Jamaican group who enjoyed a measure of international success. ‘The bandwagon’ said Roger Lewis, ‘was really the beginning of a melting pot, a fusion of the earlier music and the new music, as well as a bridging of the Jamaican society and Rasta. The climate and the music were so free. The musicians weren’t politically connected. It was not as though we were using the music to politically mastermind the people. It was just fun to be playing music, we never even thought about politics.’
The PNP Bandwagon played half a dozen shows around the island, in Port Antonio in the north-east; in Falmouth bang in the middle of the north coast; in Morant Bay to the east; in Browns Town in the interior, on the way to Nine Miles; in Spanish Town, near Kingston; and in Port Maria, again on the north coast. The caravan was filmed by a local director, Perry Henzell, who also made television and cinema advertisements for the PNP. The artists’ positions on the bill rotated. However, the Wailers had a certain prominence, thanks to the PNP’s choice of their song ‘Bad Card’ as a campaign song – notwithstanding that the JLP was using the Wailers’ ‘Crucial’ in its campaign. The Wailers played all the shows – among the tunes performed were ‘Duppy Conqueror’, ‘Small Axe’, ‘Trench Town Rock’, and ‘Keep On Movin’’. Other artists involved included Clancy Eccles (inevitably), Junior Byles, Marcia Griffiths, Brent Dowe of the Melodians, Max Romeo, and Ken Boothe. According to Bunny Livingston, the Wailers – non-believers in ‘politricks’, he insisted – played the PNP Bandwagon only because they were paid $150 a show: but also because Michael Manley had suggested he would ‘free up herb’, legalising ganja. The three musicians felt almost immediately let down by the incoming prime minister when he didn’t follow through on this.
In Spanish Town, the island’s original capital, eight miles from Kingston, the PNP Bandwagon played at Prison Oval, one of Jamaica’s largest, on a playing field used for cricket, football, and stage shows. Dub poet Malachi Smith remembered that, at the show, Bob Marley was ‘red’, a local term for ‘stoned’, from consuming too much herb: ‘Bunny and Peter hugged him every time he tried to skank away, and it appeared as if he would lose his balance and fall. It was a great concert, with the likes of Judy Mowatt, Heptones, Meditations, Derrick Harriott, Clancy Eccles, Max Romeo, and others. I think Bob and Peter Tosh definitely shared Manley’s vision. Bob was very concerned about sufferation and oppression of the poor in the society, in Africa, and throughout the Third World. His music and interviews speak volumes about this.’
The Bandwagon event played at the University of West Indies student union on 7, 8, and 9 October 1971. (There was an issue connected with that show that can be seen as possessing lesser or greater significance, depending upon your point of view: for the first time the posters billed the act as ‘Bob Marley and the Wailers’, not as ‘The Wailers’.) The Bandwagon returned to the same venue on 13 October and then again on 1 November for ‘A Night of Togetherness’, on which, it seems, Inner Circle did not appear. The Daily Gleaner – not known for its support of the PNP – reported that the show had ‘the largest attendance of any of the promotions in the city on that night. This was expected with the team of promoters headed by footballer Allan ‘Skill’ Cole.’
The Gleaner also reported another positive development for the Wailers: that they were about to embark on their first US tour. It announced that they (‘currently on the local charts with the popular “Screwface”’) would be making live appearances in the New York area, playing with the Soulettes, who with a different line-up had been in the USA since August. If that was the case, then the Soulettes must have needed to return to Jamaica in mid-December for, according to Rita Marley, both groups then played a gig in Cuba.
Although the American shows were played to almost exclusively Jamaican audiences, they all the same marked the first attempt by the Wailers to make some kind of breakthrough in the US. The very first concert took place on 31 January 1971, a New Year’s Eve show at the Concourse Plaza Hotel in the Bronx before a three-thousand-strong audience, backed by the Debonaires band. On the same bill was John Holt, Jamaica’s leading vocalist, whose ‘Stick By Me’ had so upset the applecart with Scratch, Syd Joe and his Caribbean All Stars, and the Cinnamon Suns. On 7 January 1972, the Wailers played at the President Chateau, at 71, 84th Street in Brooklyn. Glen Adams, who had moved up to New York following the demise of the Upsetters, went along to the event. Although the Debonaires were backing the Wailers, the organist was not playing as Bob Marley required. In the audience, he noticed Glen: ‘Bob gave me a look to come up. We started playing “Soul Rebel”.’ When local Jamaican rude boys rowdily began exercising their muscle, however, the show was stopped by local police. ‘It was very scary,’ said Glen Adams. The next day they performed at the Manhattan Center, again with Glen Adams. Dates followed in Pennsylvania and Delaware, Bob’s home from home.
Whilst they were in America, the Wailers’ record shop on Beeston Street was broken into twice. The second time this happened the police caught the culprit, who confessed he had been sent by Coxsone to mash it up and take the turntable. When they returned to Jamaica, the Wailers continued to play PNP Bandwagon dates, including a show at the National Arena on 30 January. In retrospect, this particular performance carried considerable symbolic weight: on 5 February Parliament was dissolved and a general election was declared, scheduled for 29 February 1972.
At a meeting between the two Barrett brothers and Bob and Bunny at the Wailers’ record shop, an agreement had been struck that, from now on, they would work together as a recording and live unit. As soon as that occurred, however, in the middle of Feburary 1972, Bob left the island for London. Danny Sims had suggested he fly up to the UK – he had a potential recording deal for Bob Marley with CBS Records’ Epic label, to whom Johnny Nash was now signed. One of the A&R men involved was Mike Smith, who had turned down the Beatles for Decca Records, redeeming himself by then signing the Rolling Stones to that label. Unity MacLean, a secretary in the A&R department whose husband took up a marketing post with Danny Sims, recalled visits to the office by the Jamaican: ‘Bob used to sit around the office, and everyone was extremely rude to him. I liked him, although he did speak with an awfully weird patois.’
With Danny Sims footing the bill, Bob Marley moved, with his manager, Johnny Nash, and Rabbit Bundrick, into a flat at 34 Ridgmount Gardens. Bang in the centre of London, Bob Marley’s first London address was a short distance from Goodge Street tube station on Tottenham Court Road. Later, they moved to Chelsea, to Old Church Street, off the then extremely fashionable King’s Road. At the end of March, Bob found himself in the new state-of-the-art CBS studios off Soho Square, playing on Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now album, which included Nash’s version of Bob’s ‘Stir It Up’, which the Wailers had first recorded in 1967, as well as ‘Comma Comma’, ‘Guava Jelly’, and ‘You Poured Sugar on Me’, a ballad which Bob Marley and Johnny Nash had written together. Among the musicians on the record were members of the Average White Band, a largely Scottish white-soul group then building a strong reputation who coped more than adequately with what was essentially a reggae record. Tucked away during the sessions, using the same musicians, Bob Marley also found time to record half a dozen of his own songs, including his one and only record release for CBS, ‘Reggae on Broadway’, which he had written – Nash’s version of the song was included on later editions of the I Can See Clearly Now album.
‘Stir It Up’ was released in April 1972 in the UK and became Nash’s first hit in three years, as well as Bob Marley’s first international success. The record made the number-13 slot in the UK, and 12 in the US where it was released the following year. The album’s title track, ‘I Can See Clearly Now’, was the follow-up to ‘Stir It Up’ in the UK, and a much bigger hit, number 5 in the UK and a number 1 in the States when it was released that November. ‘There are More Questions than Answers’, the single released after that, was Nash’s third UK hit of 1972, reaching number 9 in the charts.
Handling public relations for Johnny Nash and introducing him to journalists was Paul Merry, who stressed how influential Nash was in helping to bring Bob Marley to the attention of the world: ‘Johnny Nash took Bob Marley everywhere with him in London during the spring of 1972. He introduced Bob to rock journalists, radio DJs, fellow artists, and so on. Johnny really pushed Bob’s barrow and has never had the recognition he deserves for this. If any one individual introduced Bob Marley to the world, it was Johnny Nash. Johnny brought him to England from Jamaica to promote Bob’s career. Johnny Nash was an extremely nice man who championed Bob Marley’s career unreservedly, with nothing in it for him.’ As to the Afro-haired Bob Marley, Paul Merry could not help but feel that he and Johnny Nash were similar souls: ‘I remember him as a quiet and polite guy, always well dressed. The dreadlocks would come later.’
When the A&R man Mike Smith turned down the Beatles, he had instead signed Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, from Dagenham in Essex. After Poole left the group, the Tremeloes had over a dozen worldwide hits for CBS Records with what came to be considered by ‘serious’ fans of ‘underground’ rock as ‘bubblegum’ pop. In 1970, however, the Tremeloes dismissed their fans as ‘morons’ and declared that henceforth they would only make ‘intelligent’ records. Understandably, their career nosedived – which only adds to the surreal vision of the ‘Trems’ sharing a railway compartment with Bob Marley, Johnny Nash, Danny Sims, and Paul Merry on 30 April 1972 on the final commemorative journey of the Brighton Belle, the luxury train that had ridden the sixty miles of track between London and the Sussex seaside town since 1933. ‘Later that evening,’ said Merry, ‘a group of us, including Bob Marley, went as Danny Sims’ guests to Mr B’s, a club in Brixton, South London. We watched a reggae band perform, and it could well have been Bob Marley & the Wailers band, because I certainly saw him perform at Mr B’s in the first half of 1972.’
The date of the Brighton Belle’s final journey and the possible memory of a Wailers performance was significant. For two days previously, Bob Marley had moved into an address at 12a Queensborough Terrace, London W2, a property close to Hyde Park owned by Danny Sims; the accommodation was in the bustling section of Queensway, not far from the West Indian communities of Notting Hill and Shepherds Bush. Here Bob had been joined by his musical allies from Back-a-Wall.
In Jamaica, in Bob Marley’s absence, Family Man Barrett had been hired to form a new group to play at the Green Miss, a club that was opening on the edge of Vineyard Town in east Kingston. The group was called the Youth Professionals and featured Carl Dawkins on vocals, Tinleg the drummer, and a young pianist, still a schoolboy, whom Family Man had heard of called Tyrone Downie, who was a former lead singer with the Kingston College Chapel Choir. (‘I got him into some session first, on the piano. Him did have a nice touch. So I show him a few tricks too,’ said Family Man.) When Family Man was offered a better-paying job, however, he turned over the bass-playing position in the Youth Professionals to another up-and-coming young guy, Robbie Shakespeare.
The gig Family Man Barrett had opted for instead was in the house-band of a Norwegian liner that ran between Miami, Jamaica, and Haiti; by the poolside, Family Man would play soca, meanwhile counting the cash he was saving. Every week the ship would dock in Ocho Rios, and the bass player would urgently attempt to contact his brother. ‘Bob come yet?’ he would demand of Carly. For almost three months, the reply came in the negative.
Then there was an unexpected twist. Danny Sims, Carlton Barrett told his brother, was arranging for plane tickets to carry Peter and Bunny and the Barretts up to London. The idea was that they would play support dates to Johnny Nash, on a UK tour.
In London, the Wailers were rehearsing diligently. Rondor, the music publishers associated with A&M Records to whom Bob Marley would shortly sign his song-publishing rights, was based in Kilburn in northwest London. In the Rondor building were three rehearsal rooms. Whilst Johnny Nash rehearsed in one of these, with his group the Sons of the Jungle, the Wailers occupied another of the spaces. As well as Bob, Bunny, Peter, and Family Man and Carly Barrett, the line-up was augmented by three members of the Cimarons, the UK’s first self-contained indigenous reggae band: Locksley ‘Gishi’ Gichie was on guitar, Carl Levy played organ and piano, and the Cimarons’ drummer doubled up next to Carly.
When Johnny Nash’s live dates began, the assorted Wailers musicians would travel with him on the tour bus, to study the show. At these concerts, Bob Marley would briefly perform as an opening act. Backed by Johnny’s group, the Sons of the Jungle, which included keyboards player Rabbit Bundrick and Alva ‘Reggie’ Lewis on guitar, he would sing a pair of songs, ‘Reggae On Broadway’, which had now been released as a single by Epic, and ‘Oh Lord I’m Gonna Get You’. (In Jamaica it was released on the CoolSoul label.) A rocking tune whose funk drive could have come from the Temptations, a style that would be fully manifested five years later on the Exodus title track, the lyrics of ‘Reggae On Broadway’ were hardly in the tone of Rastafari, in which the three Wailers’ front-men now regularly proselytised: ‘I’m gonna give you some love now … I go down, down, down, down, down … ehh, hmm …! Give it to me, babe … Good God! Reggae is on Broadway …’
At the California Ballroom in the market-town of Dunstable in Bedfordshire, thirty miles north of London, Johnny Nash headlined on 3 June 1972, with Bob Marley briefly supporting him, in precisely this manner. Although Bob was not formally listed on the bill, Johnny Nash inquired of the DJ if his friend could sing a couple of numbers. It was the same routine at Shades club in Northampton on 25 June, Bob again singing the two sides of his current single, backed by the Sons of the Jungle. Northampton was only a short distance further north up the M1 motorway from Dunstable, and the touring party was easily back in London by just after midnight. At the Speakeasy, a music-business nightclub in Margaret Street, behind Oxford Circus, Bob Marley had been booked in for a show of his own, a promotion specifically set up to publicise ‘Reggae On Broadway’. Again, Bob performed backed by the Sons of the Jungle. ‘It was great fun,’ said Rabbit Bundrick. ‘It was like a family going out on the town together, to do a gig, have some fun, chase some women, get high, drunk, and so on. Just a night out. The gig went great. It was hot and sweaty, and the audience had a great time, judging by their applause.’ On 22 July there was a similar gig, the Grand Midnight Dance at the Commonwealth Social Club in Croydon in south London, very much a Jamaican event. In addition, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh played a show at Alperton School in Wembley, in north-west London; the show was a benefit to raise funds for a new swimming-pool, and plenty of the older schoolgirls showed how happy they would be to jump in the water with the two Jamaicans. Bob also played guitar with the Sons of the Jungle when Johnny Nash himself played dates in assorted English secondary schools.
Meanwhile, Queensborough Terrace was practically an open house, especially where girls were concerned; and when a woman acquainted with Michael X arrived on the doorstep, matters took a further, unexpected twist. Until February 1971, when he had fled to his native Trinidad to evade extortion charges, Michael de Freitas, more commonly known as Michael X, had been a leading Black Power figure in London, a pet cause of Beatle John Lennon. Bob entered into a Black Power reasoning with Michael X’s friend and, inevitably, this led to them ending up in bed. When Bunny and Peter arrived from Jamaica they had brought with them $3,000 of the Wailers’ money to cover expected expenses – a considerable amount of money, then; enough to buy, for example, two brand-new Volkswagen Beetles – but when Bob woke from his post-sex sleep, the money had vanished from its hiding-place in his room.
After the woman was sufficiently threatened, the money was returned, but Bunny and Peter were furious with Bob Marley over this incident: from then on, Bunny cared for the stash of cash. Moreover, all the Wailers agreed that the ‘pure girls-girls-girls’ atmosphere at 12a Queensborough Terrace was becoming less and less conducive to creative work; on 8 June they moved out. Danny Sims initially shifted the musicians into a nearby hotel, but then found them a house in which to live together in the blank suburban wasteland of Neasden, another area with a large West Indian population, close to the North Circular Road and where Bunny’s mother worked in a toy factory.
Under the auspice of Danny Sims’ Cayman Music, the entire Wailers ensemble then went into the CBS studio and recorded five tunes: ‘Concrete Jungle’, ‘Stir It Up’, ‘Midnight Ravers’, ‘400 Years’, and ‘Slave Driver’, with its memorable ‘Catch a fire’ chorus-line.
Throughout this period, the entire Wailers ensemble played only one stage show, a cause of some simmering discontent amongst the rigorously rehearsed musicians during this sojourn in London. In either Bexhill on the east Sussex coast, or Bexleyheath, in the south-east London suburbs, the group supported Johnny Nash, who was touring under the tagline ‘The King of Reggae’, and the Sons of the Jungle. The collective appearance of the Wailers, personified by Peter Tosh’s red, gold, and green militant style, replete with the leather Black Power fist he wore around his neck, caused a measure of consternation: when they walked into a restaurant in which they hoped to eat a pre-show meal, locals walked out.
Before around five hundred people, including a sizable faction of reggae-loving white skinheads, the Wailers came on stage with towels wrapped round their heads in the colours of the Ethiopian flag. Bob, at centre stage, was wearing flared blue jeans; Carly drummed sporting a khaki army cap.
The crowd was already hot, as the Wailers were following a group that blended African and Latin rhythms and had brought the house down. When the Wailers kicked off their first number, ‘Ringo’, the old Skatalites tune, they discovered something that seemed suspiciously like sabotage: someone had de-tuned the bass and guitars. Percussionist Bunny and drummer Carly held the rhythm while the others tuned up. But Bob discovered that the strap on his guitar had been swapped for one that would not stay on. He had to put his guitar to one side, performing only as a vocalist. But, as their weeks of rehearsals were demonstrated in a super-tight set – consisting of ‘Small Axe’, ‘Duppy Conqueror’, ‘Put It On’, ‘Rude Boy’, ‘Nice Time’, ‘Bend Down Low’, ‘Keep On Movin’’, and ‘Stir It Up’ – the audience responded in a curious way: as though this were a giant office-party, or – more likely – an afternoon at the Notting Hill carnival, and a large segment of the crowd coiled around the venue in a seemingly ceaseless conga dance.
This party atmosphere turned momentarily ugly, however, when the Wailers left the stage and the audience, screaming for more songs, started to smash up chairs and tables. Even without such demonstrative behaviour, an encore was inevitable: ‘Reggae On Broadway’ had not yet been performed. The Wailers returned, playing Bob’s single release, following it up with a pair of songs from their Studio One past, ‘One Love’ and ‘Love and Affection’.
There were those who insisted that this success by the Wailers visibly dispirited Johnny Nash, ‘the King of Reggae’, who was watching from the wings, resplendent in his stack-heeled, patchwork-leather boots.
Back in Neasden, a serious problem soon occurred, one that could have had severely negative effects on the group’s future in the United Kingdom: the Wailers were all arrested, on suspicion of smuggling ganja.
Using the group’s Neasden address, Jah Lloyd, a friend of Bob’s from Trench Town, had sent his brother Archie in London a large quantity of herb, wrapped up in a bundle of Daily Gleaners. As soon as the weed arrived in London, it was detected by Customs. The next thing the Wailers knew was that their front door was being broken down in the early hours of the morning and all of them were being taken to the local police station and locked up in the cells. Although the house was only being used as an accommodation address for the weed, things looked extremely bad for the group members. Even if imprisonment was not the consequence, deportation looked almost certain – and it would have been nigh on impossible to get re-admission to Britain. In the end, however, an acquaintance of Bunny Lee’s took the rap. According to Bunny Lee, it was Island Records which, hearing of the Wailers’ plight – and in the absence of Danny Sims, who had flown to the United States with Johnny Nash – arranged for their bail.
Then matters took a further, surprising, negative twist. Before Danny Sims went to America, he had left instructions for the Wailers to add harmony vocals on Johnny Nash’s as yet uncompleted I Can See Clearly Now. As they were about to go back into the CBS studio, the Jamaicans realised that, after the manager had taken their passports on arrival in the UK, the documents had not been returned to them. Danny Sims had supposedly delivered them to the Home Office, in order to secure work permits for the various musicians. Concerned, especially after Bob had recounted the problems over finances he had endured in Sweden, the Wailers contacted Danny Sims’ office, threatening not to do the harmony work on Nash’s album until their passports were returned to them. Danny Sims was obliged to fly back to London from New York in order to return the travel documents.
This was the final straw. Bob was tired of the stop-start nature of his career: Sweden had been miserable; the support tour with Johnny Nash had failed to materialise (Bob backing Nash as he played dates in English secondary schools didn’t count); CBS had singularly failed to promote ‘Reggae On Broadway’; life as it was lived in Trench Town had come home to roost in suburban north London, almost landing the Tuff Gong in jail; and now it seemed there was some politrickery – or so some members of the group were convinced – from their longstanding manager.
Bob made a decision. There seemed to be, as far as he could make out, only one avenue of escape. He arranged for Brent Clarke, a record-company promotions man of Jamaican origin who did work for Sims, to effect an introduction with Chris Blackwell, the white Jamaican founder of Britain’s most successful independent record company, Island Records.