Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright (20 page)

I stood there staring at what looked like a doll with Marley’s face. It was a very eerie experience, hearing his voice, watching him lie there. His handsome face looked scrubbed, plastic from embalming, but the trance only increased its mystic magnetism. His majestic locks, scorched by radiation aimed at his brain, were laid in twisted ropes almost down to his waist. He was still wearing his gold, red, and green undervest and knitted wool cap in the colors of the Rastafari, and his usual jeans and denim jacket. The stream of faces of a thousand different colors flowed slowly along in step to his voice wailing from huge loudspeakers: “So old man river don’t cry for me/Cause I’ve got a running stream of love you see/And no matter what stages/ . . . No matter what rages. . . changes/Rages they put us through/ We’ll never be blue.”

At 6 p.m. on Thursday, May 21, over 200 police officers and thousands of Jamaicans lined the street outside Kingston Max Field Park Ethiopian Church. His Eminence Archbishop Abouna Yesehey, the Western church head, came to Kingston to officiate at a members-and- invited-guests-only ceremony which began at eight inside the gates the bishops gathered, arrayed in splendid gowns of gold, silver, and crimson. Like wise kings from the East they mumbled prayers in Amharic and Geez as the archbishop lit frankincense, which filled the church. Drums pounded amid the tinkling of bells and the humming of songs and prayers. Journalists and television crews hustled in to take all the space between the altar and the congregation, blocking the view of church members and guests.

A motorcade quickly assembled after the service and cruised across West Kingston, passing by Marley’s Tuff Gong Studios and then turning into the National Arena, where a state ceremony had to commence at 11 a.m. The huge arena was filled to capacity. State politicians, ambassadors, international media, music stars and thousands of Rastas dressed in white with red, green, and gold caps mingled and talked, and then the politicians took turns making speeches: Sir Florizel Glasspole, Michael Manley, and finally Prime Minister Edward Seaga. He announced that a statue of Marley standing with his guitar is to be the first erected in Jamaica Park, a shrine for distinguished Jamaican heroes. “May his soul find contentment in the achievements of his life and rejoice in the embrace of Jah Rastafari,” said Seaga, and the audience jumped to its feet. Thunderous shouts of “Rastafari! Rastafari!” punctuated the applause—in death official society finally recognized Marley and his God.

At the end, Wailer musicians, incensed at the way the establishment co-opted the funeral, pushed aside police pallbearers, and Mar-ley’s lifelong companions bore him outside. Horse-mounted police forced a path through the huge crowd and the motorcade moved. People piled into trucks and buses, some rode motorcycles, others set out on foot. Down through Spanish Town, down past a thousand shanties, up into the mountain passes and through villages where people gathered in solid walls along both sides of the road, deeper and deeper into the heart of Jamaica, they traveled back to the hills from which Bob Marley came.

I arrived at a steep hill atop which the mausoleum stood and fought my way up. I pushed a black-suited man aside and came face to face with a smiling Edward Seaga standing on the threshold of Marley’s tomb. Black-jacketed men flanked him. Seaga arrived by helicopter, avoiding the slow and grueling 55-mile trip in a 90-degree sunsplash. Yes, he had seen Jamaica come out that day. No, he had never seen a funeral like this, yes, it was an incredible sight. He moved aside, I stepped around him and saw the open vault waiting.

I heard the crowd exclaiming and there came the police pallbearers battling uphill like packhorses straining under their heavy load. They headed straight for the vault and pushed the coffin in. “Bob Marley, king of reggae, has chosen to come here to rest,” someone announced over a loudspeaker. And 10,000 voices all rose up. Did they shout, “hail him”? Or was it, “praise him”? Coherence was lost in a roar that reached up to the sky. Again and again, they hailed him.

The photographers scrambled to tree tops and clambered to the roof of Bob’s father’s house. A trumpet pealed. The sun burst between the silhouettes atop the mountain and illuminated Bob’s ledge. His wife and mother sang: “Angels of mercy, angels of light singing to welcome the pilgrim of the night.” The sun dropped behind the mountain and immediately it was cooler. Only the bishop’s voice broke the silence, reading the final sermon. A stout man placed a red metal plate with a gold star of David—this was the first seal. One by one he inserted the studs and fastened them. A heavy steel-wire grill was bolted on—the second seal. They fastened a plyboard sheet in and poured buckets of wet cement between plyboard and metal—this formed the third seal.

Darkness falls swiftly once the sun leaves those hills. The television crews, the police, and the politicians hurriedly boarded vehicles, engines roared, trucks and cars negotiated tricky turnabouts and rumbled downhill at 7 p.m. African drummer Olatunji walked around Marley’s tomb ringing an agogo, a ceremonial bell. The drummer struck out a range of different pitches and rhythms. He stopped at Marley’s head and rang out a long penetrating peal that ricocheted off the mountain sides and lingered in the still darkness. The mountains became giant lumps of coal. Down in the riverbed a fire burned before a small house. Shadows danced and moved in and about the yard. Powerful speakers drove Marley’s voice out the door. It resounded against the hills and filled the night. “How long shall they kill our prophets/ While we stand aside and look/Some say it’s just a part of it/We’ve got to fulfill the bock./Won’t you help to sing/These songs of freedom . . . redemption songs.”

One-legged Abraham Moriah came hopping uphill to the tomb on his crutch to welcome Bob home. “Bob made us hold our beads up. He has to call my father uncle, all of us in the village is one family. He gave us a message of honesty. I believe he is a prophet because many things he talk fulfill.”

M
EMORY pictures coming in: two snapshots of Bob Marley. In the first, the Wailers are playing one of their mid-’70s New York City concerts to a theater thick with ganja and dreads. The music unwinds from the first note like an impossibly sinuous Slinky, the groove steady, one song shading into the next without pause or change of key. Marley is a blur of motion, bobbing, weaving, dreadlocks flying, never seeming to quite touch the stage. It’s as if the thick clouds of smoke and the rapt concentration of the mostly Jamaican audience are somehow buoying him up; he’s hovering. No matter how much I squint and stare, his feet seem to be floating a few inches above the boards. Maybe it’s the ganja. Maybe not.

In the second picture, Marley is sitting on the couch in a posh midtown hotel suite, surrounded by protectively huddling brethren and sistren, looking pale, drawn, severe. It’s 1980, and the Wailers—now playing Madison Square Garden—have taken over an entire floor of the hotel, muting the lights in the hall to perpetual twilight, filling their stuffy, carpeted precinct with the unaccustomed smells of ital cooking and, of course, ganja.

There’s been a disquieting change in Marley’s demeanor. In the past, he would deliver even his most biting critiques of Babylon with an unmistakable generosity of spirit, his face friendly and open, his body language expansive. Each toss of his head set his mane of dreadlocks flying.

“It take many a year, mon, and maybe some bloodshed must be, but righteousness someday prevail,” Marley would say. And it would come across more like a prayer than a warning.

This time, Marley sits very still, his head almost swallowed by the knitted cap he’s wearing. His critique of the “politricks” of exploitation is as trenchant as ever, but now it’s straight on, lacking the warmth and humor that were once such outstanding signifiers of his Rasta state of grace. Warmth? Humor? In less than a year, Marley will succumb to the cancer that only his inner circle knows is eating him alive.

The world Bob Marley came from, the Third World of the political philosophers, is a dog-eat-dog world: Trenchtown, a chaotic maze of shacks and dirt and footpaths and concrete jungle slung precariously along the edge of the 20th-century abyss. His life story has many of this century’s most characteristic and horrific leitmotifs—the New World Order’s rape of the planet’s organic and spiritual resources; the obscenity of plenty and poverty living cheek to jowl under the gun; naked force opposed by visionary religion and deep cultural magic.

There really is only one way out, as Marley sang in “Trenchtown Rock”: “One good thing about music/ When it hits, you feel no pain.” With his induction this year into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, he is being honored for his music, which celebrates life even as it embodies struggle. But the music will not let us forget that this is a dog-eat-dog story and that even the big dog gets eaten in the end.

Marley’s extraordinary body of work spans the entire history of modern Jamaican music, from ska to rock steady to reggae. But he never lost sight of the emotional center of his art—his people, the sufferers of Trenchtown, of greater Kingston, of all the world’s ghettos. They placed their faith and hope in him, and he did not let them down. Later works such as “Survival,” “Zimbabwe” and “Coming in from the Cold” are as passionately committed as anything from earlier years.

“It something really serious, is not entertainment,” Marley once said of his music. “You entertain people who are satisfied. Hungry people can’t be entertained—or people who are afraid. You can’t entertain a man who has no food.”

No one in rock & roll has left a musical legacy that matters more or one that matters in such fundamental ways. Yet there has been a reluctance in some quarters to accept Marley’s music and reggae in general as a part of rock & roll. For their part, reggae musicians have been understandably reluctant to identify themselves with rock & roll’s passing parade.

“Me have to laugh sometimes when dem scribes seh me like Mick Jagger or some superstar thing like that,” Marley told
Rolling Stone
in 1976. “Dem have to listen close to the music, ’cause the message not the same. Nooo, mon, the reggae not the twist, mon!”

That was Marley’s sense of humor at work. He clarified his position in an interview with author Stephen Davis: “Reggae music, soul music, rock music—every song is a sign. But ya have te be careful of this type of song and vibration that ya give te the people, for ‘Woe be unto them they who lead my people astray.’”

Marley’s election to the Hall of Fame provides the opportunity for a reassessment of this issue—or perhaps a reintegration. He was right to make a distinction between his music’s singleness of purpose and various pop ephemeras; that doesn’t mean one should separate it from the rest of music in its own proud but insulated ghetto. Because it isn’t enough to identify the man as the crown prince of reggae or the Third World’s first pop-music superstar. As an artist, he was always playing in the big leagues. No matter what category you put him in, his stature stands undiminished.

For that matter, it’s probably high time we stopped looking at Jamaican music as a reflection or derivation of developments on the American mainland. The realities are more complex than that. Memphis, Tenn., and New Orleans created and sustained their own distinctive rock & roll traditions, and so did Jamaica. The processes that shaped all these musics are, in fact, very nearly identical. Arguably, the way these processes work defines rock & roll itself.

It works something like this. Ships come in bringing slaves from Africa, bringing music. In a climate of brutal oppression, the music toughs it out, assuming the importance it had in Africa as the culture’s psychic and social foundation. As in Africa, there is an emphasis on rhythms, and the rhythms have a story to tell—often literally as speech-inflected patterns—and work to do. They bring people together, draw them into participation and serve as mediators between the individual, the community and the world beyond the world, the world of the spirits.

As the culture evolves and slavery’s death grip at last begins to falter, rhythmic fundamentals begin to spread beyond the ritual setting. As populations leave the countryside for the cities looking for oppor-tunity, dance music built on sacred rhythms spreads into urban dance halls, bars and theaters. There the music encounters the mediums of radio and recording: flashpoint. Suddenly, the venerable rhythms are the latest thing, a pop sensation. From plantation drumming and voodoo ceremonies to country-church “shouts” to Bo Diddley to James Brown: That’s the North American version of the tale. The Jamaican version runs from the drumming of the Maroons (runaway-slave societies) to the pocomania and Revival Zion churches to the Rastafarians to mento, ska, rock steady, reggae and Bob Marley.