A new phase of their lives was being embarked upon by all three principal members of the original Wailers. Two years previously, Bunny Livingston had developed the idea of Peter and himself establishing their own labels, Bunny coming up with the concept of the Solomonic and Intel-Diplo imprints. When he had suggested to Peter that he choose one of them, he picked Intel-Diplo. Although often explained as being an abbreviation for ‘Intelligent Diplomat for His Majesty’, Bunny originally had taken the word-twist from a line in the Bible maintaining that Solomon had been an intelligent diplomat; both label names therefore were a reference to Solomon, the wise man. Bunny had designed each label with visual allusions to Egyptology: Solomonic had a six-point star with two eyes; Intel-Diplo had a five-point star with one eye. It was the label design that impelled Peter to choose Intel-Diplo. ‘Mi love this one,’ he said. Peter Tosh then moved fast; the first tune he had out on his own label was ‘Maga Dog’, followed by ‘Dog Teeth’, and then ‘Ketchy Shubby’.
‘Even from the very beginning, Peter was a powerful musician, a powerful artist,’ said Danny Sims. ‘He sang a lot, he made his own records. But Bob was the singer with the Wailers. Bunny was a very good singer, Peter a good singer, but Bob was the lead singer. Because Bob wrote all the songs.’ (‘They felt after the first two Island albums that they were not getting the chance to record enough of their own songs,’ said Lee Jaffe of the predicament jointly experienced by Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston.)
‘Even in the break-up, I didn’t see a break-up between Peter and Bob,’ maintained Danny Sims. ‘The concept of everybody giving Bob a hard time over the split was a problem of jealousy. Because when Chris Blackwell wanted to work with just Bob Marley … Well, Bob was a better businessman at that time: Bob Marley was a very good businessman. Bunny and Peter were only budding businessmen at that time.’
‘Peter was always difficult,’ thought Chris Blackwell. ‘I found Bunny easier than him, because Bunny was consistently no: he didn’t want to tour overseas, he didn’t want to do this, do that, didn’t want to have anything to do with Babylon. Peter was yes and then no, yes and then no. And that was more difficult. So really I didn’t work with Peter hardly at all after Burnin’. But I did continue to work with Bunny.’
‘Mi really used to work hard, you know,’ admitted Bob Marley. ‘But if you in a group and you get tense … Mi no want say this but mi little bit tense with the Wailers we have first time, Bunny and Peter. Is like them don’t want understand mi can’t just play music fe Jamaica alone. Can’t learn that way. Mi get the most of my learning when mi travel and talk to other people.’
As to explaining the cancellation of the UK Burnin’ dates, Bob Marley was utterly to the point: ‘Well, the thing was, some of the members of the group can’t stand the cold.’
Back in Jamaica, Bob Marley busied himself with writing or improving new material. Amongst the tunes he was working on was one he had played to Benjamin Foot when he had arrived in London for the Burnin’ tour. Appearing at Foot’s home in west London early in the morning, direct from the overnight flight from Jamaica, Marley picked out a song for him on his acoustic guitar that he said he had written on the plane. ‘It seemed to me to be a rather ordinary, semi-folk song. Which probably goes to show why I’m not still in the music business,’ Foot remembered. The song was called ‘No Woman, No Cry’. It contained a line referring back to Bob’s time at Tartar’s yard in Trench Town: ‘Georgie will make the fire light.’ As a mark of respect, the composing rights were given to Tartar, hence the V. Ford – for Vincent Ford, his real name – songwriting credit.
One day, Bob drove down to Trench Town to visit a girl he had been seeing. Georgie Robinson heard he was in the area, but didn’t see the Tuff Gong anywhere. Then he heard Bob had gone up to Boys Town to play football. Finally, Bob came over to Tartar’s yard to see both his longtime friends.
‘Wha’ ’appen, ol’ Georgie?’
‘Nothin’ much.’
Bob leaned on the wall of the yard and asked Tartar to fetch him his old acoustic guitar. Then he started to perform ‘No Woman, No Cry’. The song, with its deeply personal reminiscence of their impoverished life in the yards of Trench Town, moved Georgie to the edge of tears.
When he first heard the song, Family Man was similarly impressed: ‘It was good, like a semi-chant with a little ballad feel. And not only did it play a tempo, but it played a riff within the tempos, to give that soulful feeling. We used a rhythm box to set the feeling.’ To the bass player, ‘No Woman, No Cry’ sounded like a hit: ‘It was good stuff. And when we play it we see the response from the audience. On the first live album it seemed to be the only music that seemed to be mixed to the standard of the time. The rest of it sound too tinny, like live stuff.’
Another new song had been written in Jamaica, a consequence of Bob being held up in a police night-time car check, and given the journalistic title of ‘Rebel Music (3 O’Clock Roadblock)’. Still in love with Esther Anderson, Bob spent much of his time with her, often at Little Bay, a small fishing village with several beaches ten miles from the then hippie haven of Negril, in the far west of Jamaica, a five-hour drive from Kingston. With the original Wailers clearly no longer part of the contract, he had struck a new deal with Chris Blackwell; an important clause gave Bob Marley full rights to 56 Hope Road, so long as he remained with Island Records. With part of the proceeds of this new agreement, Bob Marley had purchased a brand-new BMW. It was in this vehicle, driven by his cousin Sledger, that Bob and his passengers, Esther Anderson and Lee Jaffe, were obliged to run a gauntlet of several police road-blocks on a journey from Little Bay, on each occasion Bob having to throw away his ‘little herb-stalk’ – as he sings in ‘Rebel Music’. As this state of aggressive absurdity manifested itself during their drive, Bob Marley started throwing out appropriate lyric lines; meanwhile, Lee Jaffe, in the rear of the car, accompanied him on harmonica. ‘Bob would work on writing songs nearly every day,’ Jaffe recalled. ‘Usually the process would begin with acoustic guitar. When I was around I’d be playing harmonica along with him. Sometimes Seeco Patterson, the Wailers’ percussionist, would be banging on something. When he started to write he would often keep working on a song for days, weeks or even longer, changing words or lines or altering a melody. When it would reach a certain stage of readiness he’d go into the studio and start to work with Family Man, who would come up with bass lines and work with Bob on arrangements and record demos to start to get the feel of what a record might sound like. I really admired his work ethic and attention to detail.’
Lee Jaffe was of the opinion that both Peter and Bunny felt that all three original Wailers members eventually would reunite. Although they never would work together again in the recording studio, it was not long before they found themselves once more sharing the same stage.
Marvin Gaye, one of Tamla Motown’s biggest pop acts during the sixties, and during the seventies a symbol of not only black consciousness but also of black sexuality, was scheduled to play at the Carib Theatre in Kingston on 28 May 1974; this show would be followed three days later by a larger event, at the city’s National Arena.
The concerts were charity occasions, intended to raise money for the Trench Town Comprehensive Sports Centre – the aware Gaye had been eager to perform at them. Before he had even asked the Wailers, Tony Spaulding, the minister of housing, had put the group’s name on the poster advertising the show. And it was made quite clear to the group that their services as support act were expected. As they rehearsed at 56 Hope Road, a rough-looking individual arrived at a session and let them know quite unequivocally that there would be severe penalties for non-appearance, threatening them with a trumped-up prison charge.
‘Rebel Music (3 O’Clock Roadblock)’ was one of the hits of the evening when debuted before the packed audience at the Carib Theatre. For this yard show as support to Marvin Gaye, who came onstage wearing a discreet tam, the three original members of the Wailers were augmented as per usual by the Barrett brothers, and by Tyrone Downie on keyboards.
Marvin Gaye had only recently returned to live work and – despite playing with a full orchestra – was below par on the Carib show. The Wailers, moreover, were performing in Jamaica for the first time since they had recorded the Island albums and toured hard supporting them. They mashed Marvin down at the Carib, although the second, larger date was a more even match. (Throughout his career, even up to his penultimate dates with the Commodores in New York, Bob was accomplished at appearing as the opening act and irrevocably stealing the show: a guerrilla attack from the ghetto.)
Yet it still seemed almost miraculous that Bob, Peter, and Bunny managed to make it on to the same stage – although they would perform together again briefly, with two other Motown acts: the Jackson 5 and Stevie Wonder.
To all intents and purposes, the hit-making trio from Trench Town was a thing of the past. As though in confirmation of this, in the middle of the summer of 1974, Bob Marley received his greatest recognition as a composer of commercial music: Eric Clapton’s version of ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ went to number one in the US singles charts, his only American number one. ‘I want to say “I shot the police” but the government would have made a fuss, so I said “I shot the sheriff” instead. But it’s the same idea: justice,’ admitted Bob.
(According to Lee Jaffe, ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ was written soon after they had returned from the Trinidad carnival, during a visit to Hellshire beach, about 45 minutes drive south-west from the capital. Hellshire would later become the main beach used by Kingstonians, but that was after a metalled road had been laid. In 1973, Bob had to carefully negotiate potholes along the dirt road so as to avoid damaging the suspension of his Ford Capri. Sitting out on the grainy sand, being sprinkled by ocean spray, Bob was playing the guitar, and Lee Jaffe was on the harmonica, when Bob suddenly threw out the line, ‘I shot the sheriff,’ to which Lee Jaffe riposted, ‘But you didn’t get the deputy.’ The song developed from there. That day on the beach, Bob played with the tune on his guitar and Lee Jaffe riffed on his harmonica. Soon a pair of fat, big-bottomed girls started to dance in front of them, before long joined by most of the people on the beach. This was when they knew that they had written a hit song.)
You might have imagined that such international acclaim would have spilled over, elevating Bob Marley’s status in Jamaica. Instead, there were those in Jamaica who resented him for it, especially as he was nothing but a ‘dutty Rasta bwai’: as the seventies progressed, and the rootsical style of reggae developed into one of the nation’s themes, so the attitude of upstanding Jamaicans towards Rastafari hardened rather than loosened.
Bob and the Wailers still received almost zero airplay on Jamaica’s two radio stations. The large Jamaican record companies had longstanding ‘arrangements’ with the disc jockeys and programme directors which ensured independent labels such as Tuff Gong barely got a lookin. When ‘Rebel Music (3 O’Clock Roadblock)’, recorded for the new album, was released on Tuff Gong as a single, its controversial nature alone precluded it from their playlists. Although Bob’s spar Skill Cole was no longer managing him, the man who had helped set up Tuff Gong was incensed by this lack of airtime. Accordingly, he would drive up to the RJR and JBC stations; wielding a baseball bat, accompanied by the diminutive but intimidating pair of Tek Life and Frowser, the strapping Skill Cole would demand that ‘Rebel Music’ be played immediately. Sitting outside in their vehicle, Bob Marley would hunker his slight frame down in his car seat and wait to hear the tune sail out of the radio.
‘We go up there and have to beat boy,’ said Skill Cole. ‘We go and fight a system where they just have money power. We are on the street: we are street boy. We beat programme director, disc jockey. We no afraid of no guy. Puncture the man car supposed to get puncture. Box a bwai supposed to get box if he won’t play them tune. Konk them up in them head and kick them batty. They was fighting us because we was Rastas.
‘Bob Marley was the singer: he was a quiet little brethren. Can’t do nothing more than be quiet and give you the best lyrics and the best music. So mi just deal with things the right and proper way.’
Working as tour manager for Marvin Gaye when he played in Kingston was a man called Don Taylor, a garrulous Jamaican based in the United States whose previous experience in the music business had included managing the American doowop group Little Anthony and the Imperials. Before he left Jamaica, Taylor had earned money by diving for coins thrown from tourist ships – he was said to have been the first such individual to own a suit, an indicator of his upward mobility. Having trekked up to 56 Hope Road early in the morning after the first show with Marvin Gaye, Taylor woke Bob and pitched him a plan for becoming his manager. Impressed with his initiative, Bob decided to try him out.
‘Don Taylor,’ said Chris Blackwell, ‘was the person who Bob was able to turn to, to work with. He was able to get him on the road and bring to life what was not going to happen unless Bob toured. Bob broke from people seeing him and saying, “Fuck: I can’t believe this guy!” and then going and buying the record.
‘I realised I was in big trouble if I couldn’t get Bob to tour, and there was nobody I had who could handle his management. And Bob had no use for the guys around in Jamaica. Don Taylor came in and hustled it together. In that respect he is an absolutely key man in Bob’s success – no doubt of it. It wouldn’t have happened if Bob had not gone out and gone touring, and Don got that together for him.’
In Don Taylor, a manager had been secured for Bob Marley and his group. But what group? Who would he play with? It was crisis time, and the dilemma required to be resolved straightaway.
Bob Marley was concerned about precisely who he should be sharing the stage with in the future. Clearly, the differences between himself and Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer were insurmountable. The chance of any further collaboration with Peter Tosh had been irrevocably severed when Chris Blackwell declined to issue a contract for a solo album by the self-styled Stepping Razor; such a release, claimed the Island owner, would conflict with his marketing strategies for Bob Marley. Tosh departed in a huff to release a flurry of militant, powerful singles. Bunny’s reluctance to tour, meanwhile, meant it was impossible to rely on him to be part of the worldwide strategy that Bob was envisaging for his music. To add to the complications, Wire Lindo had announced he was quitting the group, to work with Taj Mahal, the eclectic American blues artist.
So Bob sat down with Family Man and his brother Carly, all that was left of the group that had made and toured Catch a Fire and Burnin’. ‘We have time to sort ourselves out and to close together,’ said Family Man. ‘Mi sit down in an armchair with Bob and say we can work it still: when we go up to UK as Upsetters in ’69, nothing wrong if one man short. And Bob laugh and say ’im going to book some studio time at Harry J’s. ’im say ’im going for two horn men. And ’im want mi to bring two rhythm men. I say, “All right, I know who I’m going to bring.” I went for Gladstone Anderson, who play piano, and Winston Wright to play organ.
‘That was when we began to start the new series – Natty Dread. That is where everything get serious. No problem going forward, no matter what it is.’
Rehearsals for the new album, conducted with customary seriousness and diligence, took place at 56 Hope Road. At the rear of the property was a small garage-like storage room. Together, Bob and Family Man soundproofed the small building, taking care to use the most natural materials. Afterwards, Family Man ceremoniously planted a bamboo tree in front of the building, a seedling he had brought from his farm in the hills by Mount James. Then they were away, Bob’s reel-to-reel tape machine, on which he would assiduously listen to every single run-through, rolling constantly.
Despite the soundproofing, the rehearsals would draw complaints from buildings all around. Only the Indian embassy, sited directly behind the rehearsal building, never made a murmur of complaint: clearly, they knew how to enjoy themselves. Miss Gough, an old English lady living on the premises, would occasionally mention that the music was very loud. More often than not, however, she would smile in appreciation at the musicians.
Following the rehearsals at ‘56’, Bob and the group went into Harry J’s once again. Harry J’s studio was renowned for being equally good for bottom, top, and mid-range sounds; and from 1974 onwards also for having one of Jamaica’s top engineers, Sylvan Morris, who had started out with Coxsone – his cousin – at Studio One, and moved to work with Harry Johnson at the time of the recording of Natty Dread. Morris was capable of empathising with the artists he was working with and bringing out the true feeling of the music in a way that was unparalleled in Jamaica. ‘Some engineer who work for you, you don’t even see them dancing,’ said Family Man. ‘Well, Sylvan Morris is not like that.’
Despite his lack of locks, Morris was an ardent believer in Rastafari. He actively encouraged Bob to bring his Rastafarian brethren to the studio, aware that they were essential in assisting the Tuff Gong to attain the right mood. If it required Gilly, the former national footballer who had become Bob’s friend and juice-man, in the studio’s kitchen blending June-plum juice or Bob’s beloved Irish Moss (a seaweed blend), then surely this could only add to the recording’s effectiveness, and Morris was sensitive enough to realise this. But he was also tough enough to stand up to any artistic arrogance he might encounter. ‘I also determined when the artist I was recording was singing, like even with Bob Marley, whether they needed or not to change a lyric. I would always make sure they did it without any excuses.’
Natty Dread was the first record on which Morris worked with Bob Marley, a crucial, transitional album. ‘His approach was very disciplined. They used to do a whole lot of rehearsals, and when they came by the studio, they would lay down four tracks: bass, guitar, drums, piano. Always just four tracks. But even from the laying down of the basic rhythm, you could hear that certain vibration. You could hear the discipline within. On all of the rhythms, you could hear that basic discipline, and I think it was really because of the rehearsals. Bob was a stickler for rehearsals.
‘Family Man was the individual who you’d call the organiser. They relied on him to do a lot of the arranging. Because he also was very disciplined: for him the thing had to be right. So they relied on him a lot. It was a total effort. But Family Man was the main guy that Bob relied on.’
On the early sessions for Natty Dread, Bob himself would play much of the guitar. He always impressed Morris with what he could play, and with what Morris felt was a unique personal touch.
He also noted the way that Bob introduced the I-Threes to the recording. ‘Again, the main theme always is discipline. Bob Marley was a very disciplined chap. And he commanded discipline within his music. So they had to conform. So probably this was one of the reasons why they became so good, the I-Threes.
‘Bob had this air about him that he would just say something and it had to be right. They always know that, and because they know that, the discipline is there in the sound. And because all these girls were so professional. They were stars in their own right. They were just real good and they knew what they were doing. They weren’t people you would have to train: they were just perfect soloists. And because they knew what they were doing, and because of the discipline, it came out well.’
By this stage Chris Blackwell had invested over half a million dollars in Bob Marley, a colossal figure for that time. ‘I was always sure he was going to make it. Except at this time before Don Taylor turned up when suddenly I didn’t feel I was going to get him out in front of the public.
‘When Natty Dread was finished and the record sounded fantastic, I was really worried. Because if we couldn’t get him to tour, what were we going to do with it? I was gearing it up. And also I was paying him royalties he hadn’t earned. People read they are the greatest thing since sliced bread, but they haven’t got any money actually coming in. So I would advance royalties to Bob that he hadn’t really earned.’
By early October 1974, Bob’s new LP, which had at first been titled Knotty Dread, was ready for release, for sale in the shops on 25 October. It had been recorded at Harry J’s, with Bunny Livingston lending creative support, working on the harmonies; Bob Marley had then flown up to London during the summer where, under the auspices of Chris Blackwell, further production work had completed the record.
At Blackwell’s suggestion, the pivotal recording that was Natty Dread was credited to ‘Bob Marley and the Wailers’. Sparser and harder-sounding than the two previous Island LPs, the circumstances of the recording of Natty Dread meant that every song on the album had the luxurious advantage of being unified by Bob Marley’s voice; on an early listen, it was almost confusing to hear a Wailers album without the distractions of the tones of Peter or Bunny emerging every track or so, or on harmonies. Untrammelled by the necessary compromise of working with Peter and Bunny, Bob Marley’s spirit flowed freely, and he worked decisively as an auteur; from the album opener, ‘Lively Up Yourself’, the record ran perfectly, like a suite. At the same time, Natty Dread contained a number of virtuoso set-piece classics. ‘No Woman, No Cry’, the new song that Bob had played to Benjamin Foot, which – when released as a live version – would become his first international hit single. And counterpointed against this more sentimental work was the hard militancy of both ‘Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)’ and ‘Rebel Music (3 O’Clock Roadblock), as well as the self-explanatory ‘Revolution’. The mellifluously floating ‘So Jah Seh’, meanwhile, contained one of Bob Marley’s most memorable couplets: ‘‘Cause puss and dog they get together/ What’s wrong with loving one another?’ And the title track seemed like a statement of intent, the two words assuming the status of another of Bob Marley’s sobriquets, a useful fallback for writers of newspaper headlines. There were, however, complaints from the Rasta high command in Jamaica about the cover image, a brooding representation of Bob Marley painted by Tony Wright, Island Records’ London-based art director: for his own reasons, perhaps an effort at greater marketability, Wright had omitted to include Bob’s wispy, straggly beard – making it appear as though Bob were contravening the Rasta code of not trimming body-hair.
Whilst in London for the final mixing and overdubbing of the record, Bob was introduced to an American guitarist called Al Anderson, who played some parts on ‘Lively Up Yourself’ and ‘No Woman, No Cry’. Bob invited Anderson to come back with him to Jamaica when he returned to the island.
Other Americans were also interested in Bob Marley: the Grateful Dead revealed that they were big fans of the Wailers. They flew them out to San Francisco for a Dead gig at the Fillmore, taking Bob and Lee Jaffe to dinner, giving them the finest herb. They told Bob they would take him on tour with them as the support act. This would have seemed the perfect bill for the Wailers, as the Dead’s stoned fans would certainly take to the Jamaican act – they were precisely the audience at which Chris Blackwell had been aiming – almost guaranteeing them a quantum leap in record sales. Moreover, there was a suggestion that Bill Graham, the San Francisco promoter who had become one of the most powerful figures in the American music business and already cared for the affairs of the Grateful Dead, would become their manager too. But as a Rasta who did not believe in death, how could Bob Marley accept the offer of a group whose name – to him – certainly suggested that they did? Bob turned down the tour, citing also the fact that Dead leader Jerry Garcia’s junkie lifestyle surely meant that he already was in the ranks of the living dead. Yet Bob Marley gave careful consideration to Bill Graham’s offer of management, though he finally decided against it.
There were complications everywhere in 1974 for Bob Marley in his dealings with his fellow men and women. When, late that year, Bob’s mother, Mrs Booker, made her next visit to Jamaica, she found no one had come to pick her up at the airport, so she took a taxi the few miles out to Bull Bay, to the address she had been given for her son’s new home. Shortly after she reached there, Bob arrived, annoyed no one had gone to collect her. It was then that Mrs Booker realised that Bob and Rita were no longer living together, that Rita was living in Bull Bay and Bob was at 56 Hope Road. She also saw that there was a new addition to the family, a baby girl called Stephanie, born on 17 August 1974 while Bob was away in England on business. In her book, Bob Marley: My Son, Mrs Booker writes, ‘one look at her told me that she wasn’t his. Her father turned out to be a friend of Nesta’s, a man named Tacky who everyone called Ital.’ Ital, a local truck-driver, openly admitted to Bob’s mother that he had fathered the girl, and even helped the elderly woman out one day when she found herself financially strapped.
According to Mrs Booker, however, Rita never admitted that the child was not Bob’s. ‘Nesta fretted and fretted as though his heart would break. He kept pressing Rita: How could he be Stephanie’s father? Who was the real father? Inside, it ate away at him. He was like a man tormented by a truth too terrible to face.’
Although she may not have admitted that Stephanie was not Bob’s child, at home in Bull Bay, Rita equally never hid her relationship with Ital, even showing Mrs Booker a ring that the man had given her. With the intention of keeping the peace, Mrs Booker made sure she never told her son about this.
An element of Bob’s anguish over the birth of Stephanie was a personal rule of life that once a woman he had been involved with went with another man, Bob would drop her for ever; he behaved similarly with Pat Williams, the mother of his son Robbie. Bearing in mind Bob’s own behaviour with a considerable number of other women, several of whom bore him children, this could be seen as extremely hypocritical and surprisingly unevolved: but matters are rarely rational when it comes to ways of the heart. Besides, Bob only knew one pick-up line: ‘Yuh wan’ have my baby?’
But what was really going on at 56 Hope Road? Significantly, as 1974 progressed, Bob’s relationship with Esther Anderson seemed finally to be fading away. And Bob Marley was becoming increasingly attracted to a stunningly beautiful white Jamaican girl called Cindy Breakspeare who also was living in the property, having been rented space in another section of the substantial house by Chris Blackwell. This was the same girl whom some said had turned her nose up at Bob and Peter when they would visit Danny Sims and Johnny Nash at their house in Russell Heights.
At one point in 1974, Bob Marley had got in touch with Beverley Kelso, saying he needed her to sign some papers, perhaps part of legally tidying up his past during his contract renegotiations with Island. He asked her to come up to 56 Hope Road. She was distinctly unimpressed with what she found at the address: ‘I went up there with a friend one evening. And that evening when I went up there, Cindy Breakspeare, she take over. It was all white people. I couldn’t go inside to see Bob any more. And so I talked to her and I tell her who I was and Bob came out to me.
‘When Bob came out to me, Bob didn’t know who I was. He was just looking at me and gazing. He was just like in another world, looking at me and, “What your name? Who are you?” And I said, “What?” My girlfriend was just laughing and I start to cry. And I said, “What happened to Bob?” I start to cry. I was living at Forest Hill and I feel down and I actually walked home to Forest Hill that day.’
What sounds like a misunderstanding that could have been created from an excessive consumption of herb on the part of Bob Marley, linked to the everyday on-the-road norm of meeting more and more unrecognisable new faces each day, created a great sense of hurt for Beverley Kelso, a founding member of the Wailers. It must be said, however, that few expressed an equivalent negative view.
In London that summer, in what sounded like a joyous state of herbassisted reverie, Bob Marley, accompanied by his friend Delroy Washington, had auditioned Candy Mackenzie, who was making her way as a backing singer in London, along with a sister, in an effort to see if they could fulfil his need for permanent backing singers. Bob was jamming along on a song that seemed to be entitled ‘Hold Me Now’. Tapes exist of this session, and the atmosphere was clearly flirtatious, on all sides.
‘Yuh talk ’bout inspiration: that’s chat I like/ Some of them keep their minds too shut/ I’m talking to you, lady, how you feeling tonight?’ sang Bob.
‘Irie,’ she giggled.
‘She’s feeling irie,’ he sang, before starting a new song: ‘If I tell you I wouldn’t tame you, I wouldn’t know.’
‘I bet you wish you were from Ladbroke Grove,’ said one of the girls.
‘Not really,’ Bob sang back.
‘I’m from Wolverhampton,’ she replied.
‘I’m from Africa, baby. Hold me now. I’m loose,’ whooped Bob Marley.
‘You need gospel singers, don’t you?’ interjected a girl.
‘I’m loose,’ Bob wailed again, and then again.
‘I bet you are. Which part, baby?’ giggled one of the girls.
‘I’m loose!’
Although Bob Marley decided against taking on the two girls, the problem over a lack of backing singers remained unresolved. At the end of 1974, Bob went out to stay for a few days with Lee Perry at his home in Cardiff Crescent, in the Washington Gardens section of Kingston. ‘We were all of us talking, talking, and Bob said, “Bwai, mi not know what fe do,”’ said Perry’s wife Pauline, who as a girl would see Bob singing under that tree in Trench Town on her way home from school.
‘So I said to him how American artists would all have a very identifiable set of people to work with. And if you have three girls with you, you will look representative of the way people are performing in foreign. Bob laugh and say, “Which three girls?”
‘I say to him, “You have Marcia Griffiths, you have Judy Mowatt, and you have Rita, your wife.” He said to me, “Them girls, deh?” Mi say, “Of course, because those are the three girls mi really see now could go fe back up a man like you.”
‘’Im say, “OK, mi see how it go.”’
Marcia Griffiths was the diva of reggae, having had a stream of Studio One hits in the sixties before scoring a massive international success, ‘Young, Gifted, and Black’, with her husband, Bob Andy, also a seminal figure in Jamaican music. Judy Mowatt, meanwhile, who came from Gordon Town, in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, had joined a singing trio called the Gaylettes in 1967. When the group split she continued as a solo act. In 1972, Judy Mowatt had been asked to perform in a show at Kingston’s Warwick Theatre in which the Wailers also were playing. Rehearsing the Elvis Presley song ‘Suspicious Minds’, Judy heard someone harmonising at least two octaves higher than her sweet voice was singing. She looked around to see who it was, certain that it was another woman: Judy was amazed when she saw that it was Bob Marley.
‘I knew that he was a great songwriter and he was a man for whom I had great respect. So I said to him, “I want you to write me a song.” And he said to me, “No, man, I have a reservoir of songs down at Trench Town.” He said I should come down to Trench Town and I could get any amount of songs I wanted.’
From this time, Judy began regularly to visit Bob’s home in the ghetto, becoming friends with Rita, whom she had already met. ‘As a Rastawoman, she displayed a lot of qualities that I always wanted to emulate. She displayed the qualities of a perfect mother, and she was very knowledgeable about the faith.’ Brought up as a Christian, it had not been hard for Judy to accept Rastafari. Initially she had difficulty in accepting that Haile Selassie was Christ incarnate. But as a Bible student, she found in Revelation 5 where it is written that Christ shall return in a new name: King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. ‘Then I discovered that His Majesty had that title and I realised His Majesty not only had that title, but His Imperial Majesty is the two hundredth and twenty-fifth king to be seated on King David’s throne. So he’s from the direct lineage of King David. And we learn that Christ shall come through that David lineage.’
They would sit and reason as they waited for Bob to return each evening from his regular games of soccer. Often Bob would be playing with Skill Cole, who eventually became Judy’s ‘kingsman’ – she had three children with him.
Sitting on the doorstep of his yard, Bob would play the guitar and teach them new songs. Judy was particularly impressed with a tune Bob had called ‘Down in the Valley’, written about Lulumba, a great African leader. Although the song was diligently rehearsed in these evening sessions, Bob never recorded it. When Judy made her Black Woman solo album in 1979, she made sure she included the song on it.
To Judy Mowatt, Bob Marley was clearly far more than a musical leader. ‘He was like my father, my brother, my friend … everything. He was someone you could talk to: he had this fatherly aura; he was a young man, but he had a lot of authority; he had a lot of discipline – he was a very disciplined person. When we were on tour, Bob would be first on the bus, so we have to be on time, and often we are trailing after him.
‘He is also a man with a lot of love and respect for all people. Bob cared for humanity. Bob said, “My life means nothing to me. My life is for the people.” And he demonstrated that throughout his life.’
Judy Mowatt and Rita Marley first sang together when Marcia needed some harmony vocals on a song she was recording at Studio One with Bob Andy. The evening that Judy and Rita first worked with Marcia at Studio One, Marcia had been due to perform at a club in New Kingston called House of Chen: she asked them to sing harmony vocals with her on a song by the Supremes called ‘Remember Me’. The performance was received sensationally well by the audience, and Bob got to hear about it.
It was with the line-up suggested by Family Man, augmented by the I-Threes, that Bob Marley played with Bunny and Peter on 8 March 1975, supporting the Jackson 5 at National Heroes Stadium.
During the sixties, Martha Velez, who was of Puerto Rican background, had been a member of the New York-based folk group the Gaslight Singers. After appearing in the Manhattan production of Hair, she became one of the female singers in Van Morrison’s Band and Street Choir, moving to the alternative musical power-point of Woodstock. Signed to New York’s feisty independent label Sire Records by Seymour Stein, the label owner, she recorded three albums, often with musicians from the British blues school, including Eric Clapton, and Jim Capaldi of Traffic, Island Records’ flagship ‘underground-rock’ act. It seemed only a small step, therefore, to work with an artist who had grown up with the rather different ‘blues’ of a former British colony.
After a disco twelve-inch remix of a Velez tune called ‘Aggravation’ became a noted track on the New York underground disco scene, she had approached her label to suggest covering ‘Stir It Up’, the Bob Marley composition which she knew as a Johnny Nash song. Craig Leon, her A&R manager, had met Bob Marley through Alex Sadkin, a friend who worked as an engineer on recordings by Jamaican artists. Leon phoned Bob and suggested that he produce Martha Velez. Bob expressed vague interest, which was heightened after Seymour Stein contacted Don Taylor, with whom the label boss was acquainted.
It seems worth noting that, with her cascading dark-brunette hair and striking sultry looks, Martha Velez seems very much the same female ‘type’ as Cindy Breakspeare. And Bob Marley was certainly attracted to her rebellious lyrics on her earlier records. ‘There was one song that particularly struck him which I had co-written called “Livin’ Outside the Law”. He mentioned that this song really spoke to him,’ she said. After he had flown up to New York with his manager early in 1975, Bob agreed that Martha Velez should come to Kingston in May that year, for a three-week session with him at Harry J’s studio. (Velez noted that at the meeting Bob was clad ‘head to toe’ in black leather, a rock star-like new look – akin to being the Jim Morrison of reggae – he would adopt for most of the rest of his life.)
Checking into the Sheraton Hotel in New Kingston, a location that was becoming a fixture of the upmarket end of Kingston’s reggae scene, Martha Velez quickly discovered that recording sessions would frequently be interrupted by trips to the beach and games of football. Sometimes those trips to the beach involved the five-hour drive to Negril: Bob, the Wailers, and Peter Tosh, in a gesture of conviviality, went out to the west end of the island to rehearse the songs before entering the studio. Caught in one of the frequent outbursts of torrential rain that are a feature of Jamaican weather, Seeco was unable to control their car, which span round and round in circles, seemingly indefinitely. As others in the car screamed, Bob Marley laughed through the entire adventure, calling to Jah for assistance. When the car finally slurried to a halt in the roadside mud, Bob laughed and sang as he helped push the vehicle back on to the tarmac.
The album was created between these excursions, in flurries of creative energy. ‘He was a very quiet man, unassuming in manner,’ said Craig Leon. ‘I recall Bob sitting around a lot, talking and getting high, and then going into an incredible rush of energy and productivity and doing the work very quickly.’ Although Bob oversaw the project, permanently entrenched in the studio, he brought in Scratch Perry for his expertise at the production desk, with Sylvan Morris engineering the sessions – as he had those of Natty Dread. Bob Marley concentrated more on the integrity of the material, working with Velez on new songs. ‘The way that Bob worked was through channelling inspiration,’ she said. ‘He would gather the Wailers and begin to jam on an idea of a song. Seeco, his percussionist, usually would play a tape recorder and capture the song and the ideas that were created spontaneously that session. It was very inspired. I got to witness this.’ At Martha Velez’s suggestion, she and Bob wrote a tune together for the LP, entitled ‘Disco Night’. ‘We did it in the American way of sitting down and hammering out ideas, lyrics, and music ideas, hooks, etc.’ Because of complications over his publishing deal, Bob gave Rita the songwriting credit.
All the Wailers, along with the I-Threes, played on the record, as did the Zap Pow horn section; Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith, one of Jamaica’s most sought after guitarists, also contributed to the sessions. On the resulting album, Escape From Babylon, Bob Marley and Lee Perry were credited as the record’s percussion players. ‘The backing vocals of the I-Threes blend particularly well with Velez’s deep timbre throughout,’ said David Katz, ‘and Chinna Smith’s bluesy guitar lead also enhanced some of the beat numbers, but it was the percussion added by Marley and Perry that really gave the album its African-Caribbean flavour.’ ‘Get Up, Stand Up’, and ‘Bend Down Low’ were among the Bob Marley originals included on the record, along with ‘Hurting Inside’ and ‘Stand Alone’, respectively retitled as ‘Happiness’ and ‘There You Are’. Martha Velez’s voice was perfectly suited to the material, and given a sophisticated reggae-pop edge by Scratch’s studio work. ‘Lots of Rastas were lying around the studio,’ said Velez. ‘I didn’t quite know what they were doing there, but they were cool, and then I realised that they were providing energy, a cool energy, a comfortable sound space. The studio experience was a synthesis of cultures – American and Rasta musical styles. And there was a lot of male – female energy. Rasta women are less aggressive than American women, but they manage things in a more subtle way.’
As much as anything, the significance of Escape From Babylon lay in the collaboration of Bob Marley and Lee Perry, and their continuing creative relationship. This would not be the last time in 1975 that they would work together in the recording studio.
‘My most vivid memory of the recordings,’ said Craig Leon, ‘was the size and quantity of the spliffs and the fact that everyone had their own for the duration of the session. None of this hippie social convention of passing around a skinny little joint amongst thirty people.’
By the early spring, the line-up that worked under the name of Bob Marley and the Wailers was even further expanded. As ever, the Barrett brothers were there holding down the rhythm section; Seeco Patterson, Bob’s brethren from Trench Town, became the group’s percussionist; and Tyrone Downie joined to play piano and synthesiser, leaving the Caribs, the resident group at the Kingston Sheraton Hotel; Wire Lindo, meanwhile, returned to the fold on organ. Al Anderson had been asked to join as guitarist.
‘I’ve meet Al in England while he was doing some overdub guitar,’ said Bob Marley of his new guitarist. ‘We talk a little and it’s nice, ya know? So I ask him to come and play with the group. Him think about it for some time and then him decide he would do it. Boy, him great! Fuckin’ good, mon.’
From certain purist quarters – specifically, elements of the UK music press – Bob earned considerable criticism for bringing an American into the group – which meant they knew nothing of Lee Jaffe’s role on harmonica. As usual, Bob Marley had a larger point of view on this: ‘We really not deal with people in categories like if you come from Jamaica you have the right. Regardless of where you are on earth you have the right. I can’t deal with the passport thing. To me him prove himself not an outsider because if him can play with us then him no outsider.’
Natty Dread had been released to great critical acclaim in October 1974. The album, the first to be credited to Bob Marley and the Wailers, had also registered far higher sales figures than either of the Wailers’ two previous Island albums. ‘The Natty Dread album is like one step more forwards for reggae music,’ said Bob Marley. ‘Better music, better lyric, it have a better feelin’. Catch a Fire and Burnin’ have a good feelin’, but Natty Dread is improved.’
To continue the record’s promotion, a 27-date American tour was set up, followed by a brief foray into the English market with two London shows, one in Birmingham, and one in Manchester. Under the direction of Don Taylor, Bob Marley and the Wailers were at first consistently booked into halls smaller than they could sell out, to increase the demand for tickets. In Boston, for example, Bob Marley again played Paul’s Mall, for six nights this time, with two shows each day. But in Philadelphia, the ensemble performed at the theatre-sized Spectrum. There was a magical performance in Brooklyn, to an audience that consisted almost exclusively of expatriate Jamaicans. In Los Angeles, meanwhile, they sold out five nights at the prestigious Roxy on Sunset Strip.
Further recordings for Martha Velez’s album took place while the band were in New York, although Bob and the group were kicked out of the snooty Manhattan hotel into which they had been booked for cooking their own food in the corridor outside their rooms. At Bob’s insistence, as the tour continued across America, he was kept in touch with the progress of the mixing of Escape From Babylon by having each new version of the tapes couriered out to him; he would send back notes that contained his suggestions.
Whilst on this American tour, Bob paid a visit to his mother in Delaware for a couple of days. This time Bob had clearly decided to offer his mother instruction in Rastafari to the fullness. ‘Before Bob was born I would go up to this Sunday school where I go and accept Jesus,’ explained Cedella Booker. ‘And I try to live up to that standard. But the strictness and the rules them give, afterwards Bob say to me that all that was hypocrisy, and it didn’t make no sense: all the things you must wear to church – rules – these people only seek power, to rule other people. It have no Christianity in it or Godliness in it.
‘But it take me some time to see it. Bob tell me that His Majesty is the Almighty God – it not Jesus no more. And me with my little thin sense doesn’t even understand what’s going on. Me say, “How you know that? He is a man.” ’Im seh, “Yes, he is a man.” I turn to him and I say, “I think he is a great man. But I don’t think he is God.” And ’im seh, “Oo yuh t’ink is God?”
‘I never ’ave no answer: because I was looking that God is a white man like the picture I have on the wall. Then Bob tell me to take it off the wall. And he showed me the pictures that I should have on the wall.
‘Up until then I had just put things as decoration. And Bob looked at the pictures I had on the wall and said to me, “Do you have any reason for these pictures here?”
‘I said that I just hung them there to go with t’ing and t’ing. But he showed me how it represented an emblem or something. I had a bronze eagle up on top. I also had President Kennedy, Martin Luther King – just the pictures. He is telling me what is the significance of the eagle and the one president over there and the one over here. He reads out the whole symbolism. He said, “This picture you must take down; and this picture you must take down. And these are the pictures you are to let stay.” And he showed me all these little things.
‘’Im said when we reason, “You know, Momma, why is it so hard for you to believe me when I say His Majesty is God? Because from the time you are a little girl growing up, you hear them talking about Jesus Christ: you go to church and you’re into it.
‘“But today ’im come in a new name: no Jesus Christ no more. And ’im said ’is name shall be terrible amongst the heathen – which is the unbelievers. If you wasn’t my mother, him seh, me wouldn’t even bother to talk to you. But, anyway, you is a Rasta from the day you is born. And as time goes on you will see. And as time goes on mi see everything just like how him never have to tell me no heap o’ nothing no more.
‘That night we sit down and me and him reason in my kitchen. From about nine o’clock we sit down at the table and just start to reason. When me look upon the time again, it was three o’clock in the morning.
‘Bob and I sat and talked for all those hours, and it never happened again. It happened that we spent hours together, but not in that intense manner.
‘Whatever it was, it was given to me that night, and I fully received it, and my blessing is there going on now.’
Leaving Los Angeles on 14 July, the musicians flew straight to London.
The buoyant mood of the US tour was more than maintained in London. For the pair of dates in June at London’s Lyceum ballroom, Mick Cater had personally sold every ticket in less than a day: the venue didn’t have a box office of its own. (‘We could have sold out five nights,’ reflected Cater later, as though confirming Don Taylor’s policy of turning the scarcity of tickets for Bob Marley shows into a virtue.) Natty Dread had not only appealed to a hip white audience, but for the first time British-resident Jamaicans had gone for Bob’s music en masse. As a consequence, on the first hot night of the two London dates, the Metropolitan Police’s notorious Special Patrol Group was sent into action to clear the streets around the venue of over three thousand people, mainly Jamaicans, trying to get in to see Bob Marley without tickets. A pair of fire doors was demolished, and Tyrone Downie found himself locked out of the venue, almost not making it back inside in time to perform.
The shows were as extraordinary as the build-up had predicted. Bob Marley and the Wailers tore the Lyceum apart. The road crew had struggled to get good power and sound – a notorious problem at this venue but particularly so as the shows were being recorded for a possible live album – and their painstaking efforts were enhanced a thousand-fold by the electrifying performances produced by Bob and his group. Quite simply, they were fantastic.
Bob held the audience as though they were part of his collective soul; he could have told them to go out into the street and to burn and loot and they would have obeyed his every word. ‘From that gig,’ Dennis Morris remembered, ‘every person who was there decided they were a Rasta, and it snowballed. The whole movement just spread.’
The Lyceum shows were recorded on the Island mobile studio, for what became the memorable album Bob Marley and the Wailers: Live! Natty Dread had already briefly been a top-ten album in Britain, Bob Marley’s first sniff of a hit and, in September, the live record followed it into the charts, climbing higher. Most importantly, it spawned a first hit single, in the live version of ‘No Woman, No Cry’, a song whose status would grow until it was irrevocably intertwined with the existence of Bob Marley. Bob Marley had set out on his own, without Bunny and Peter, only a little over eighteen months previously. If he had had time for a moment’s thought to himself, mustn’t he have felt considerable justification at the subsequent arc of his career?
