At the beginning of 1978, in Kingston, there were only two real topics of conversation: ceaseless complaints about the increasing shortage of goods on sale in the island’s stores, the consequence of Washington’s efforts to bankrupt the Manley government; and the imminent rumoured homecoming to Jamaica of Bob Marley, a hero returned from the self-imposed exile into which he had gone following the attempt on his life on 3 December 1976.
Bob’s flight touched down at Kingston’s Norman Manley airport on Sunday 26 February 1978; as the plane coasted to a halt, he was aware that this return to his home country would only be viable and valid if it contained a direct effort to end the escalating violent hatred that was tearing Jamaica apart and terrifying its population.
Picking up his luggage from the rickety baggage carousel, Bob immediately had it rigorously searched by an officious customs officer. It was as though the man was putting the Gong in his place. Bob’s anger firing up, he snatched his bags back – ‘Bwai, gimme dis bloodclaat!’ – and stormed out of the airport. The next day, Don Taylor received a call from the head of customs, asking him not to let Bob again embarrass his officers in such a way. Bob clearly carried greater weight than his Wailer brethren Peter Tosh. Returning to Jamaica earlier that month, Peter had been obliged to endure a customs officer leaning across towards his ear. ‘I am looking for a reason to shoot you,’ the man had whispered.
This was precisely the thinking that Bob Marley was hoping to alter. Since the meeting with Claudie Massop, Bucky Marshall, and Tony Welch at the Keskidee Centre in London, it had been privately agreed – though not yet publicly announced – that the ‘One Love Peace Concert’ would be held in Kingston on 22 April 1978, under the auspices of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Bob Marley was bankrolling the event, to the tune of $50,000. Profits from ticket sales would go to assorted community projects.
The political parameters that exist in Jamaica are hardly the same as those of the United States or Western Europe – they are more like those of an archetypal, mythical banana republic. Jamaicans often seem to have severely misunderstood the dividing line between reality and art, allowing it to become blurred and indistinct: life in the ghetto area of west Kingston can seem as though it is being lived in a Sergio Leone film, with the body count equally as high. Suddenly, as the sluggish heat hangs torpidly, violence of an extraordinarily desperate and vicious degree can erupt, only to evaporate utterly within minutes.
Someone who had certainly experienced the whims of the spirits, hobgoblins, and duppies that drift sometimes maliciously through the Jamaican psychic ether was Peter Tosh. Since recording his Legalize It album, Peter Tosh had established the beginning of what was a successful solo career. Assisted by Lee Jaffe, he had found an excellent manager in Gary Kurfirst, a young New York-music-world whizzkid whom Chris Blackwell later described as ‘one of the first managers who basically built the rock business’. Kurfirst, who also managed Toots and the Maytals, had secured Peter a good deal with CBS Records in New York, and Virgin Records in London, for the release of Legalize It. Although a man of a liberal, creative persuasion, even Kurfirst had been a little surprised when Peter Tosh had demanded that the manager bring him his advance to Jamaica in cash – which Peter, who sometimes seemed wilfully eccentric, promptly took and buried in a hole in the bush. Early copies of Legalize It, released in late 1976, contained a scratch-and-sniff sticker which gave off the scent of the most potent lambs-bread herb; the cover, shot by Lee Jaffe in a herb field up in the hills behind Bluefields, Peter’s Westmoreland birthplace, depicted Tosh garlanded by marijuana plants, holding his treasured herb pipe. Inevitably, the title track became the potheads’ anthem. Sitting on the album, next to a strong set of other songs – ‘Whatcha Gonna Do?’, ‘No Sympathy’, ‘Why Must I Cry?’, ‘Igziabeher’, ‘Ketchy Shubby’, ‘Till Your Well Runs Dry’, and a ‘do-over’ of ‘Brand New Second Hand’ – the ‘Legalize It’ song came to personify the character into whom Peter Tosh had metamorphosed as a solo act – he was, as he would declare to all and sundry, Jamaica’s Minister of Herb. Putting together Word, Sound, and Power, a hot, tight group that included drummer Sly Dunbar, bass-player Robbie Shakespeare – the rhythm section’s recruitment was expensive, as they needed to be persuaded there was another life outside of their lucrative session work – and both the American former Wailers guitarists Al Anderson and Donald Kinsey, as well as multi-instrumentalist Mikey Chung, Peter Tosh seemed on the cusp of becoming a considerable star. Legalize It was a strong global seller, notching up half a million copies, far more than any other record Peter Tosh had hitherto released. These figures were more than replicated on Peter Tosh’s next album, Equal Rights, released in 1977. An unalloyed masterpiece, Equal Rights is one of the most influential and powerful reggae records ever released. As the title suggests, Peter was making an angry album that was a militant demand for human egalitarianism. ‘Equal rights and justice!’ was Peter’s plea in the title song. The material and its delivery on this record would firmly mark out the position of Peter Tosh as the Malcolm X of reggae – in contrast with Bob Marley’s Martin Luther King-like posture. The Equal Rights album concluded with an excoriating attack on racist South Africa in the song ‘Apartheid’. Every song on the record was a classic, rebellious, on the edge. Kicking off with a ‘do-over’ of ‘Get Up, Stand Up’, to which his sonorous tones seemed to bring ownership, the record ran through the prophetic ‘Downpressor Man’, the bare, open ‘I Am That I Am’, before hitting another ‘do-over’ in ‘Stepping Razor’, which Joe Higgs had written for him a decade previously. Following the title track, the ‘African’ song presented a gorgeous, evolved sense of identity; ‘Jah Guide’, meanwhile, was like a soothing soul hymn. The songs’ subject matters were caressed by intricate, sophisticated musical patterns that only enhanced the accessibility of the entire album. Bunny Livingston and Rita Marley both contributed to a record, produced with visionary clarity, that managed simultaneously to be a definitive Jamaican reggae release and the definition of a crossover hit. Equal Rights sold even better than Legalize It, establishing irrefutably Peter Tosh’s international position as a Jamaican solo star.
On 21 April, beneath a rising full moon, as dusk gave way to night, Bob Marley and his entire group played an extensive sound check, readying themselves for the next day, at the National Stadium, empty apart from various functionaries; it was the first time they had played on the island since the ‘Smile Jamaica’ concert. Present was Mark Rowland, an American writer: ‘There on the bandstand before us, framed by stage lights and gels, stood Bob Marley and the Wailers, and the I-Threes too, seamlessly rehearsing songs for the following evening’s historic occasion. The music resonated from the stage into the crisp night air, and a creamier, more lustrous sound I never heard, or may ever hear again. It was the sound of emotional rapture.’
Planeloads of assorted members of the media had descended upon Jamaica, to the delight of every pickpocket and gunman in Kingston. Seizing the moment with unerring pragmatism, Island Records cleverly had managed to spin this historic event into being simultaneously both a great humanitarian act and a kind of enormous ghetto launch-party for the release of Kaya, Bob Marley’s new album, a collection of love songs and, of course, homages to the power of ganja (the album was also to provide a pair of chart singles, ‘Satisfy My Soul’ and the beautiful ‘Is This Love?’). In effect, the One Love Peace Concert was the first date of the Kaya world tour.
Flying in the face of most predictions, the concert on Saturday, 22 April was a resounding success, a focus for the media of the western world. Sixteen of the island’s most significant reggae acts, including Jacob Miller and Inner Circle, Beres Hammond, the Mighty Diamonds, Trinity, Dennis Brown, Culture, Dillinger, Big Youth, Peter Tosh, and Ras Michael and the Sons of Negus appeared. Twelve-year-old singer Junior Tucker was the opening act.
In a controversial section of the show, fired by a typical selfless arrogance, Peter Tosh harangued Michael Manley and Edward Seaga for persecuting ghetto sufferahs for their fondness for herb, and lit up a spliff onstage. Bob Marley’s action of raising together the arms of Michael Manley and Edward Seaga above his head is the one defining image of the One Love Peace Concert, yet in their own way, the actions of Bob’s compatriot Peter Tosh were every bit as memorable. However, only an audio record remains of them, Peter – who was introduced as ‘Peter Touch’ – having refused to have his section of the concert filmed. ‘Yuh have a some lickle pirates a come from America with camera and their TV business fe get rich off I and I,’ declaimed the Minister of Herb from the stage. ‘But hear mi nuh, man: if a man come to talk to I-man, a lightning flash anywhere in the ends of the earth. I-man flash lightning, so mek sure them a come give me good argument about my rights.’
In fact, Peter Tosh had been reluctant to play at the One Love Peace Concert, though he eventually gave in to Bob Marley’s entreaties. Everyone who played there, Peter insisted, would end up dead. Of course everyone would, given the fullness of time, but this is not precisely what Peter meant. He was discussing a theme of his ‘Equal Rights’ song: ‘Everyone is calling out for peace/ But no one is calling out for justice.’ ‘This concert here, them say is a Peace Concert,’ he declared in a lengthy peroration over an instrumental passage during his performance – appropriately – of the song ‘Funeral’. ‘And I wonder how many people know what the word ‘peace’ means. You see, most intellectual people in society think the word ‘peace’ means coming together.
‘Peace is the diploma you get in the cemetery. On top of your grave that is marked, “Here lies the body of John Strokes that rests in peace.” Seen?’
Peter Tosh also had a distinct vision of the source of Jamaica’s egregious violent turmoil. ‘Learn this,’ he decreed, part of a seven-minute harangue from the stage, before kicking into his final song, ‘when Columbus and Henry Morgan and Francis Drake come on, and dem call dem pirates. And put dem in a reading-book and give us observation that we must look at and live the life and the principle of pirates to the youth: dem now fire up dem gun like Henry Morgan, same way. Yuh nuh see it?’
What really brought the fury of Jamaican officialdom down upon Peter Tosh were his words later in the same tirade. Directly addressing Prime Minister Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, leader of the opposition JLP, both of whom were in the audience, he ranted against the ganja laws, and the manner in which they were abused by the police: ‘I am one of those who happen to be in the underprivileged sector, seen, hassled by police brutality times and times again, and have to run up and down fe wha’? Fe have a lickle spliff in my pocket or have a round of herb or if yuh buy a draw, yuh have to be tense and cork yuh batty until yuh come back because police will lock yuh with a roadblock down the road.’
To the rage of the watching forces of law and order, Peter Tosh then lit up his giant spliff onstage, before launching into ‘Legalize It’. ‘We never knew Peter was going to talk the way he did,’ said Sly Dunbar, drumming behind Peter during his performance. ‘We were surprised when he began to talk: a lotta people said Peter was the star of that show.’ It was certainly Peter Tosh’s finest hour.
Unlike Peter, however, Bob Marley seemed in a state of transcendental bliss. Instead of attacking the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, he attempted to bring them together. How did Bob Marley do this? By spelling out the truisms that many people had vaguely felt or thought. Using the structure of the mythology of Rastafari, he articulated the unconscious rumblings of the soul of global alternative thinking. This was his job, his purpose in life, of which he was fully aware: as he declared in ‘Rebel Music (3 O’Clock Roadblock)’, ‘Check my life if I’m in doubt.’
During ‘Jammin’’ his dancing delivery and scat extemporising on the lyrics were those of someone taken over by the spirit, close to speaking in tongues, channelling Jah Rastafari:
To make everything come true, we’ve got to be together, yeah, yeah. And to the spirit of the most high, His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I, run lightning, leading the people of the slaves to shake hands … To show the people that you love them right, to show the people that you gonna unite, show the people that you’re over bright, show the people that everything is all right. Watch, watch, watch what you’re doing, because … I’m not so good at talking but I hope you understand what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to say, could we have, could we have, up here onstage here the presence of Mr Michael Manley and Mr Edward Seaga. I just want to shake hands and show the people that we’re gonna unite … we’re gonna unite … we’ve got to unite … The moon is high over my head, and I give my love instead. The moon is high over my head, and I give my love instead.
As ghetto gunmen hovered on the edge of the stage, Bob brought together the hands of Michael Manley and Edward Seaga above his head. And held them firmly linked. Both politicians looked uncomfortable in the other’s company. Yet despite the desperate bloodbath into which Jamaica would dissolve by the turn of the decade, this instant remains one of the key civilising moments of the twentieth century.
‘Yes, the Peace,’ Bob Marley said later, ‘is really the Youth of Jamaica started it. Asked me to help and get it together, y’know, knowing that I was one of the victims during the time of the politics. This peace work … it don’t stop … it never stop … We know it never stop. That mean, we the youth got a work to do.’
Peter Tosh’s tour de force performance earned him a record deal from Rolling Stones Records, one of whose owners, Mick Jagger, was in the audience. As though tremendously excited at being at an event that was the quintessence of outlaw cool, Mick ‘Jaguar’ – as he was known in Jamaica – ran around the One Love Peace Concert, hither and thither, on his own, without a bodyguard, which says much about the egalitarian nature of the event and also about Jagger. ‘Maybe we should kidnap him,’ considered Bucky Marshall. When, the day before, Vivien Goldman had asked Marshall why he thought the Peace Concert was taking place at that time, the PNP man had replied, matter-of-factly, ‘Because we shoot harder.’
On a Wednesday afternoon shortly after the Peace Concert, Bob Marley and Don Taylor were taken by Tek Life to McGregor Gully in Kingston. There they found three men tied and bound. Leggo Beast, whom Taylor had previously met, confessed that he and three others had been trained by the CIA, and given guns and unlimited cocaine to attack Bob Marley at 56 Hope Road on 3 December 1976. At McGregor Gully, two of the men were hanged on the spot; the other was shot in the head – the gun for this was offered to Bob. ‘Bob refused,’ said Taylor, ‘showing no emotion whatsoever, and I realised that he was entering a different phase.’ The men screamed as they were led away. A fourth man involved had already died of a cocaine overdose.
The ‘peace’ brought about by the One Love Peace Concert was somewhat illusory: in 1978, almost four hundred people were killed in Jamaica. Two of the ranking gunmen who had organised the One Love Peace Concert were dead within twenty-four months: Claudie Massop was gunned down by police and Bucky Marshall was shot to death in a Brooklyn nightclub in March 1980.
In an endeavour to seclude himself away from Kingston’s gun business, Bob Marley bought a sizable property, a total of seventeen acres, on a headland on the Jamaican north coast in the tiny picture-postcard town of Oracabessa in the parish of St Mary. The residence was one with a legendary reputation: Goldeneye, as it was known, was hard to beat as a creative power-point, In the previous twenty years, the property had become a by-word for glamour, sensuality, and artistic endeavour, a location permanently overhung by the knowledge that this was where the writer Ian Fleming had penned his apparently immortal tales of the superspy James Bond; the first Bond book, Casino Royale, was written at Goldeneye in the winter of 1952. Goldeneye’s endless retinue of famous visitors included not only Noël Coward, a neighbour, but also the painters Cecil Beaton and Lucien Freud, the writers Truman Capote, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh, and the former British prime minister and his wife, Sir Anthony and Lady Eden. That it had been purchased by Bob Marley, a country boy who had moved to the Kingston ghetto, and eventually made his fortune, was a tremendous tribute to his capacities. Unfortunately, the reason that Bob had wanted to buy Goldeneye – its distance and therefore apparent security from the lifestyle of Kingston – was why after only a few months he decided that he was not comfortable living there. Eventually, he sold the house to Chris Blackwell.
Largely, there seemed little domestic peace for Bob Marley. During the Kaya tour, on the Californian leg, Rita Marley confessed to her husband that Ital was Stephanie’s father. According to Mrs Booker, the news broke Bob’s heart. In what seemed clearly an act of revenge, one evening, Bob, acompanied by Seeco, drove Rita out to Kingston harbour, where he threw her wedding ring into the sea. Had there been a measure of vengeance on Rita’s part in telling her husband the truth about Stephanie’s father? On 21 July 1978, the night that Bob Marley and the Wailers played at the Starlight Bowl in Burbank, California, a show on which Peter Tosh appeared as special guest, Cindy Breakspeare gave birth to Damian Marley, another son for the Tuff Gong, a son who in time would be given the sobriquet of ‘Junior Gong’. Bob already had bought Cindy a house in Kingston, in uptown Cherry Gardens, for $49,000. Soon after, he gave her an additional $100,000 as start-up funding for the Ital Craft store that Cindy established.
His own art moved forward. In a promotional interview for Kaya in California, Bob Marley bared his thoughts. ‘People don’t understand that we live on this earth too,’ said Bob of the album. ‘We don’t sing these songs and live in the sky. I don’t have an army behind me. If I did, I wouldn’t care, I’d just get more militant. Because I’d know, well, I have fifty thousand armed youth, and when I talk, I talk from strength. But you have to know how you’re dealing. Maybe if I’d tried to make a heavier tune than Kaya they would have tried to assassinate me because I would have come too hard. I have to know how to run my life, because that’s what I have, and nobody can tell me to put it on the line, you dig? Because no one understands these things. These things are heavier than anyone can understand. People that aren’t involved don’t know it, it’s my work, and I know it outside in. I know when I am in danger and what to do to get out. I know when everything is cool, and I know when I tremble, do you understand? Because music is something that everyone follows, so it’s a force, a terrible force.’
The American leg of the Kaya tour was scheduled to begin in Miami, Florida, on 5 May 1978. But it ran into difficulties: Junior Marvin initially was refused a US visa, his ‘numerous drug convictions’ cited as the reason. The Miami concert was cancelled four hours before showtime, leaving a local promoter furious. The Florida date and others in the American south were re-scheduled, and the tour kicked off at the Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 18 May. After a date at the Music Hall in Cleveland, Ohio, the following night, the tour moved on to Columbus and then to Chicago. In the Windy City, Bob, whose reading matter was usually restricted to the Bible and music publications, visited a number of black bookshops. A large quantity of black-consciousness literature was bought, including various biographies of Malcolm X, as well as work by Angela Davis: Davis had been a professor and friend of Neville Garrick. For the rest of the tour Garrick would see Bob devouring these volumes at every opportunity. ‘You can see how his lyrics matured in terms of clarity over the next records. From Natty Dread to Survival is a big leap.’
The tour continued through Milwaukee, and Minneapolis, and in June hit Pittsburgh, Rochester, Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, and Montreal, arriving at Toronto Maple Leaf Gardens on Friday the ninth. After two more shows, in Buffalo and Washington, DC, Bob Marley and the Wailers arrived in New York City; they played a Saturday-night show at Madison Square Garden, where they were supported by Stanley Clarke and drew a sell-out, racially diverse crowd of over eighteen thousand people. As befitted these larger venues that Bob and the group were now playing, the shows were an exaggeration of their past, heavy with rock guitar from Junior Marvin, and almost histrionic in their presentation. The Wailers were now exhibiting what was possibly the first example of twin lead guitars in reggae. Al Anderson had come to Bob and told him he’d like to play again with the group. Bob had said to Junior, ‘What shall we do about Al?’
‘I said, “If you want to get him back it will be a good thing, because you can get the same sounds on the tracks he plays on records, and the same thing on the ones I play on.” So Al came back and it was really cool – it made the group stronger.
‘Bob would say, “We’ll have a guitar night tonight.” Sometimes he would make a joke, “Tonight the guitar player dem take the stage.” We felt very secure musically, everyone played to their best abilities. There were two keyboard players that were really good – Tyrone and Wire, and they would try and push each other to do better. The same thing happened with myself and Al. We both wanted to sound as good as we could. So competitively it was good. So Bob got the best of everyone.’
Larger than life, the message came across to an audience that was often more used to the melodrama of big rock shows. A conscious decision had been taken by Bob and Chris Blackwell that this was the way to communicate on an even greater scale.
In The New York Times, John Rockwell reviewed the Madison Square Garden show: ‘The concert was a triumph … for reggae in general but for Mr Marley in particular. There were plenty of non-West Indians on hand, for one thing. And for another, after a slightly slow start, the concert built to a climax that was really wonderful in its fervor and exultation … By the final number, “Jammin’”, and especially in the encores of “Get Up, Stand Up”, “War”, and “Exodus”, Mr Marley was extraordinary. Who would have believed Madison Square Garden would have swayed en masse to a speech by Haile Selassie, the words of which Mr Marley incorporates verbatim into “War”?’ Rockwell expressed a quibble or two: ‘To a casual listener, the steadily rocking, offbeat accents of the music could seem too unvarying, especially with the minimal pauses between numbers and the frequent running together of one song into the next … But the band members overlay the pulse with solos in the traditional jazz and rock manner, and the order is determined with an ear for variety.’
In the edition of the Black American published after the Madison Square Garden concert, there was a further review of the same performance: ‘The crowd was near peaceful hysteria when Marley put down his guitar and did his patented herky-jerky dance across the stage as the Wailers ran through three rhythmic breaks that would have made the best of the disco groups envious.
‘Marley finally danced into the wings while the Wailers kept “Jammin’” onstage. By now, however, Marley’s crowd was too far gone to stop dancing. Cries of “More, more,” began to rise until the noise became deafening. Then a thunderous train-like sound grew as people began stomping their feet in delight. It was really breathtaking.’
After a final East Coast date in Lenox, Massachusetts, the tour headed off across the Atlantic for shows in Paris, Ibiza, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Bingley in Staffordshire – slap-bang in the middle of England. ‘Marley has now taken the best of his material to the absolute limits of interpetation,’ wrote Eric Fuller in Sounds of the Staffordshire show, ‘and the Wailers are much concerned with showy and extended instrumental workouts within the framework of each song to give them some feeling of freshness and supply the extra thrills demanded by live performance. Given that Marley’s melodies are his finest moment, the value of this style of execution is a matter of debate – but certainly lead guitarist Junior Marvin’s exaggerated stage showmanship and US-soul-revue fashion histrionics seem headed in precisely the wrong direction.’
After faulty planning led to three bus-loads of media people arriving long after Bob’s set had begun, the reviewer in New Musical Express assessed the British concert under the headline of ‘Babylon By Bus’. When it was brought to Neville Garrick’s attention, this became the title of the double live album of the tour which Chris Blackwell put together.
The tour then swung over to the American west coast. Bob Marley and the Wailers played in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara. Then they wheeled through the dates in the US south that had been cancelled at the beginning of the tour. And, finally, the Bob Marley posse returned to Jamaica.
But Bob was not there for long. Almost immediately, he took off again, on a flight to Ethiopia. His old friend Skill Cole was still living there. Skill was employed coaching a local football team, and Bob seized the time to visit him in this Holy Land. Although he was only there for four days, during which time he wrote the song ‘Zimbabwe’, Bob didn’t mind leaving: he knew he would be going back there very soon. Although he would often be surrounded by companions, Bob Marley was very rarely accompanied by an official bodyguard. In Ethiopia, however, he was escorted by a Kingston youth named Lips, later killed in a ghetto shoot-out.
Back in Jamaica, Bob Marley spent time with his old spar Scratch Perry. After having linked up again with the increasingly eccentric producer in London the previous year to record ‘Punky Reggae Party’, their relationship had been revived. Now, in one day, Bob cut four tunes out at Black Ark: two recordings that were never released, ‘Who Colt the Game’ and ‘I Know a Place Where We Can Go’; and ‘Black Man Redemption’ and ‘Rastaman Live Up’, both of which came out as singles on Tuff Gong, and which were a marked departure from the softer subjects of Kaya. The militancy of this pair of new tunes pointed the way ahead to Bob’s next two albums. All four songs were mixed at Tuff Gong. ‘You can’t show aggression all the while,’ said Bob Marley. ‘To make music is a life that I have to live. Sometimes you have to fight with music. So it’s not just someone who studies and chats, it’s a whole development. Right now is a more militant time on earth, because it’s Jah Jah time. But mi always militant, you know. Mi too militant. That’s why mi did things like Kaya, to cool off the pace.’
Someone who might have heeded Bob Marley’s words was Peter Tosh. In September, he was badly beaten by police; he had been arrested in Half Way Tree by a plainclothes cop whilst holding a roach, but it was widely believed that this arrest was in revenge for his proherb tirade from the stage of the Peace Concert. Taken to the police station, Peter was locked in a cell with what he described as eight to ten plainclothes men. Wielding wooden batons, they beat him for ninety minutes, fracturing his skull, breaking his right hand, only stopping their vicious assault when Peter feigned death. Hearing what had taken place, Bob Marley rushed to the police station, bailing Peter and getting him to hospital. When he arrived at the station and saw Peter’s pitiful state, Bob burst into tears. Bunny Lee heard the whole story: ‘Bob come and go to the police and make them drop the charge. But Peter was kind of big-headed too. Bob said he was going to take it to court. But the policeman said to him, “Bob, you can take it to court. But remember when they call your and Peter’s name they are going to hear, “Deceased, your honour.” But eventually they decide to withdraw the charges.’ Many felt that, following this beating, Peter Tosh never fully recovered.
Within weeks, however, Peter Tosh was driving a London-based record-company executive at terrifying speed up the endlessly winding narrow road from Kingston into Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. Racing past a truck, he found another lorry heading straight for him, a head-on collision seemingly inevitable. The record company man screamed. Peter floored the accelerator and – as though by a miracle – slid his Cortina GT between the two vehicles.
When he arrived at his destination, that same mountain-top location of Strawberry Hill to which Bob Marley had fled following the attempt on his life in December 1976, it was clear that Peter was the star of a video-shoot that was about to take place; the filming was for ‘Don’t Look Back’, Peter’s first tune on Rolling Stones Records. Peter was in very good spirits: it was clear his life was taking – even if only momentarily – an upturn. Mick Jagger was present, greeting him with great cordiality. During the course of the shoot, in which Mick Jagger co-starred with him, Peter arranged for the master-tapes of the song to be stolen by an accomplice. The tapes were slipped back the next morning, and later that afternoon ‘Don’t Look Back’ was available in record shacks in Kingston, on Peter’s own Intel-Diplo label.
In the autumn, Bob and the Wailers headed across the Pacific to Australia and New Zealand. From all over the island, Maoris had journeyed into the New Zealand city of Auckland. At a ceremony of greeting, they awarded Bob Marley a name which, translated into English, means ‘the Redeemer’. Bob made sure he spent time at a couple of Maori youth centres.
The most memorable of the shows on this leg of the tour was at Western Springs, a natural amphitheatre to the west of Auckland. This scenario was assisted by the Island label in New Zealand being run by Victor Stent, an enormous fan of reggae: in a competition between the various Island outlets to boost sales of reggae Stent had easily outstripped everyone else.
In Japan, where he played four shows, Bob Marley met an extraordinary reception. At the concerts, the audience would show they knew every song, and would sing every word of the lyrics.
In subsequent years, reggae has enjoyed an immense popularity in Japan, and this may be directly traced back to Bob’s only visit. But how did the Japanese perceive Bob? A little girl, for example, came up to him and bowed down reverentially. ‘No, no: that’s not for me – that’s for the almighty God,’ Bob felt obliged to say.
‘Japan was memorable,’ said Rita Marley. ‘We had a lot of press there saying how well they thought it would be doing there in ten years’ time: how it would be taking over Japan. And we said that it never would! They loved Bob, and Bob played a big part in them absorbing reggae as they have done.’
There was one problem, however: the almost zero availability of herb in this notoriously drug-free nation. To alleviate this problem, it was necessary for a member of the touring party to travel to Japan ahead of the group. Such matters were always the responsibility of the local promoters, although this proved not to be understood in Japan. Alternative arrangements were made, however, and when Bob and the Wailers arrived in Tokyo, they were presented with fifty Thai sticks. The group retired to their hotel, surprised at the minute proportions of their rooms. As a security measure, the floors directly above and below them in their hotel had also been booked.
As was their wont, the group had virtually consumed all the Thai sticks by the time they went onstage. The next morning, they asked their Japanese fixers to bring them some more. The Japanese were amazed – they had believed that such a lifetime’s supply of Thai sticks would certainly last Bob and the Wailers for the duration of the entire tour.