Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright (2 page)

W
hen the Wailers had their first hit, “Simmer Down” in 1964, the Anglo-centric Jamaican daily newspaper,
The
Gleaner,
was more interested in covering the world’s reaction to the Beatles and Jamaican popular success abroad (such as Millie Small, who scored a stateside hit in 1964 with “My Boy Lollipop”) than any local recording act, no matter how in tune they were with
The
Gleaner
’s coverage at that time. “Simmer Down” was an anti- “hooliganism” song, just as
The Gleaner
frequently decried the growth of hooliganism (and the rise in the use of ganja) at the time the single hit.

Therefore, pretty much anything about the Wailers during this period will have the benefit of hindsight. After all, without any onthe- spot, first-hand coverage of the events in Marley’s life from 1962 until the early ’70s, the only information in print comes from interviews and research conducted after the Wailers started making inroads into the international consciousness, largely courtesy of the Island Records media machine. This also gives some license to revisionist history and some
Rashomon
effects from people with different viewpoints on how the band came together and what caused members to leave. Notice, for example, how producer and DJ Cox-sone Dodd conveniently forgets that Rita Anderson already had a daughter before she hooked up with Bob Marley. Or how even an ostensibly well researched bio puts Rita in the original Wailers line-up instead of Cherry Green.

O
N first impression, you wouldn’t imagine Bob to be a show-business personality. He was quite reserved. I believe he had a lot of complexes, being the son of a White man. I would see him suffer a lot just trying to be himself. We met in the mid-sixties in Trench Town, Jamaica, when I was 18 and he was 19. 1 think he was attracted to me, in part, because I am dark, and also because I bear a close resemblance to his mother, Cedilla Booker. But at first I didn’t like him, the seriousness about him, the standoffishness. Besides, every girl my age wanted a tall, dark-skinned boyfriend, so Peter Tosh was the one who originally caught my eye.

Then Bob and I started to sing together. He would be the one to work with my group, the Soulettes. He rehearsed us every day, and I liked the way he carried himself, his high level of consciousness. I had a little daughter, Sharon, and I thought to myself,
This man looks like he
would be a good father
. I started to see he
was
the person I should like.

I had sympathy for Bob. He didn’t know his father, his mother had moved to America, and he was living in a recording studio, sleeping on the floor. Life was rough for him. Remember that song that said, “Cold ground was my bed last night”? That was real for Bob. Over time I grew and grew in respect for him. It was a sisterly love. I said to myself,
Okay, Bob, I’m going to take care of you.
1 took him food, bed linens. It was natural that we started loving each other.

I felt we were meant to be together. But in February 1966 his mother got a visa for him to join her in Delaware. She wanted a better life for him. He was very upset and said he wasn’t going. Then he said the only way he would go is if “Rita marry to me, so I know she mine.” It was crazy because we didn’t have any money, didn’t have anything. But my aunt said, “If you got love for each other, that’s enough.” So we got all “dolly-dooleyed” up, and we got married.

When Bob went to America, I wrote him every day. He was very sad. He would not eat. He had a job in housekeeping at a Delaware hotel. One day when he was vacuuming, the machine exploded and dust went everywhere. That was it. So after about eight months, he decided to come back to Jamaica, little Sharon and me. Deep down he always knew he was a singer and that he would not spend his life in America doing odd jobs.

Our daughter, Cedella, was born in August 1967, less than a year after he returned home. Bob gave her the pet name “Nice Time.” It was inspired by his homecoming. You may know his song that says, “Long time we no have no nice time.” Ziggy came in October 1968, Stephen in April 1972 and Stephanie in August 1974. Bob would take us driving, and we would jam together in the evening. We would sing and he would play his guitar. He was very serious about his music, always serious about it. It was the reality of his life, but also of the lives of millions. Like “Get Up, Stand Up.” This was an encouragement to be strong, be faithful. “One love, one heart, let’s get together and feel all right”—freedom fighters in Zimbabwe say that song got them going when they were seeking their independence from Britain.

One of the first times we performed in America, we were at Madison Square Garden in New York City opening for a major U.S. group. After we finished, everybody got up and left. Bob Marley outdid this popular American group. That was something—to see an American audience accept us. Another time we were in London, and where we were singing there was a pool in front of the stage. It was full of muddy water, but everybody jumped in just to get closer to us.

We worked hard. I remember being in the studio back in Jamaica, eight going on nine months pregnant, thinking,
I can’t take this.
I just knew I was going to have this baby in the studio. But Bob said, “This album must finish.” Sometimes when I was sleeping, he would shake me. “Listen to this,” he would say. And he would play his guitar and sing and I would take down the lyrics.

Our harmony was tested when word would come that another woman had had a baby for him. At first I said to him, “Are you crazy? Is this something I’m going to have to live with?” But I asked God to give me the understanding, ’cause our love was more than for flesh or looks, it was something so deep. I found tolerance. I grew to love what he loved. Now I have a relationship with the children’s mothers. We were never enemies. And I made sure the children got to school, got to the dentist. Today I say I have 11 children, a bunch of grands, a village in Africa and a world of people. I have acquired a perfect love, which helps me to this day.

When our five were little, I knew they would be somebody. They would beg their father to let them sing a song in the studio. He said to let them go to music school first and learn to read and write music, something he had never done. Poor Ziggy, he was so disappointed. He was always eager to show Daddy. When Bob would go on the road, Ziggy would stand on the side of the stage begging to perform. Today Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers are headliners. Ziggy is similar to Bob in dedication to his work and in his positiveness. And what a thing! I’ve seen father and son look alike but never such a step-out- of-you-into-me–type likeness. But Stephen—he’s Bob, too, in his reserve, the shape of his hands, the way he walks.

I miss Bob. When I feel things are too much to bear—particularly with the legal battles [over the Marley estate]—I especially wish he were here. It was cancer that took him. It started in his foot and spread up through his body. As a Rasta though, you’d never hear him saying “If I die . . .” or “When I die . . .” To Rastafarians life is an everlasting gift. But one day in the hospital Bob was ready to go. I heard him say, “God, take me please.” I held him in my arms and started singing to him. Then I started to cry. Bob looked up at me. “Don’t cry,” he said softly, “keep singing.”

B
EFORE Bob Marley became an international hero, before he even became an icon at home in Jamaica, he paid his dues. Like so many other Jamaican artists, he paid them to Studio One Records.

Started by mobile sound system DJ Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd to ensure that he had music no other DJ on the circuit had (others did the same), Studio One became a major force in Jamaican music. Dodd had an excellent ear for what his listeners wanted and the artists he recorded at Studio One filled that bill. The studio and label became the breeding ground for nearly every major Jamaican star, and just about anyone who is or was anyone in reggae and ska passed through Studio One at one time or another. Dodd says that he didn’t even have to go looking for the artists he signed.

“I used to have a sound system, what they now call a discotheque, playing all over,” he explains. “It started from the rhythm and blues, and we played a little jazz, until we started recording our own music in Jamaica. I used to visit a lot of live dances. That sound was what we emphasized when we started recording. So I had my fans and when we started recording locally, I had guys rooting for me. Whenever they would hear a good artist, they would bring them.”

One of these fans was Secco Patterson. “This chap, Secco, he was the one who brought them,” Dodd recalls of how Bob Marley and the Wailers came to Studio One. “He said, ‘Boss, I have a good group here.’ He was a close friend of mine. He loved the music that I played on my sound system. Every weekend, he’d be where we had our session. Secco knew these guys and brought them for an audition. They were four boys and two girls. All singing. He was with them until Bob died. He played conga for them.”

The six singing sensations Secco secured at Studio One were Mar-ley, Peter McIntosh (who later lost the “McIn” and went by the name of Tosh), Bunny Livingston (who took the band’s name and called himself Bunny Wailer), Junior Brathwaite, Beverly Kelso, and Cherry Green. They sang around Kingston as The Teenagers (which they certainly were at the time), the Wailing Rudeboys, and the Wailing Wailers, which they ultimately shortened to just the Wailers. When they came to Studio One, they were very young and unformed. Mar-ley was barely eighteen.

“I was the only producer out there building the artists up from the ground floor,” Dodd says. “The other producers wanted somebody who was strong already and in the limelight. I would take a no-name guy by just auditioning and hearing his voice. I understood what it took to put it together. I took a little time putting it together. The more artists hear themselves playing back, the more confident they become. And when they sing a certain way and it sounds good, they know to stick to that method. It just came naturally.”

As one of the first people to record and release ska in Jamaica during the early ’60s, Coxsone Dodd was instrumental in establishing ska and the rock steady, blue beat, nyahbinghi, and other subcategories of reggae that followed. As opposed to the calypso sound produced at Federal Records, the only other studio in Jamaica when Dodd started recording, Dodd’s music emphasized a strong off-beat, an exaggeration of the strong “one” that characterized R&B, especially from New Orleans, a city close enough that the radio would waft over the Caribbean to Jamaica. “It goes with the way that the West Indians dance,” Dodd explains. “When Bob came up with the ‘one drop’ he really meant that off-beat. That’s the ‘one drop’ he was referring to.”

In addition to recording their early music, he claims to have bought Marley and Tosh their first guitars. As with so many things Dodd did, the motivation was pragmatic rather than generous. “After a couple of months,” he says, “I realized that giving them a guitar would allow them to build their harmony and rehearse by themselves. Peter was more inclined to be a musician than even Bob was. He could play before Bob. He was able to strum on it.”

While the Wailers, like most Studio One artists—and to be fair, most recording artists
anywhere
during the early ’60s—never saw much in the way of royalties, the studio helped hone their style and abilities. The house band at Studio One was the legendary ska band The Skatallites, featuring such revered players as Roland Alphonso, Tommy McCook, and Don Drummond. Dodd set up something of a mentoring program at Studio One, and as Heartbeat Records president Chris Wilson points out, “When Bob was first learning to sing in the studio, most of these horn players were like his daddy.”