Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright (21 page)

Robert Nesta Marley was born Feb. 6, 1945, in the heavily forested country of St. Ann’s Parish, the child of 19-year-old country girl Cedella Booker and a white colonial then working in the area, Captain Norval Sinclair Marley. The captain did marry Cedella, then abandoned her. Bob grew up in a back-country world whose values and beliefs were still profoundly African, a world more permeable to superhuman forces both natural and supernatural than any city child could know. His grandfather Omeriah Malcolm was a respected man in the parish, a myalman adept in the ways of sorcery and spirit propitiation. Long before he embraced Rastafarianism as a spiritual philosophy and a way of life, Bob Marley was on intimate terms with his culture’s deepest mysteries.

When the teen-age Marley arrived in Kingston, Jamaican music was entering a period of unprecedented expansion and growth. Mento, an acoustic popular music comparable to the calypso of Trinidad and Tobago, was being displaced from the forefront by an increasingly Jamaicanized take on Southern R&B and soul music. As the new ska sound developed, it began to exert a subtle but increasingly significant influence on North American soul.

Island rhythms had been an important ingredient in New Orleans’ musical gumbo since the early days of jazz. Professor Longhair, the founding father of New Orleans’ piano-based R&B, specifically men-tioned his wartime experience playing with “West Indian boys” as a factor shaping his influential polyrhythms of the 1940s and ’50s. By the mid-’60s—when Jamaican tempos slowed, its grooves deepened, and its bass moved out front in the mix, creating the style dubbed rock steady—Jamaican rhythmic ideas were beginning to surface in Memphis soul music as well.

Al Jackson Jr., the seminal Booker T. and the MG’s-Stax Records session drummer, began vacationing in Jamaica, buying records, visiting sessions. Listen to Jackson’s rhythm arrangement on Wilson Pick-ett’s “In the Midnight Hour” back to back with the Silvertones’ rock-steady cover of the tune, and you will readily hear the connections. All rock & roll styles are derivative of earlier musics in the beginning. Jamaican music quickly grew out of this phase, becoming part of a two-way rhythmic dialogue, transcending geographical and national boundaries.

Marley did not spend much time watching these events from the sidelines. A precocious musician with an already distinctive vocal style, he began making records in 1962. He sounded nervous, high-pitched, painfully adolescent on his debut ska recording, “Judge Not.” But already he was drawing on Biblical imagery and themes in original lyrics that had an important social dimension as well as a spiritual and moral imperative: “While you talk about me/Someone else is judging you.”

Marley’s earliest ska recordings were solo efforts, but the ’60s were the heyday of Jamaican vocal groups, and Marley had been wood-shedding with a loose group of friends from Trenchtown. When he became dissatisfied with his original recording situation, he auditioned with the group for No. 1 sound-system man Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd.

Of the original group members, Junior Braithwaite and Beverly Kelso soon dropped out, leaving a tighter-than-tight trio of running partners to carry on. Neville “Bunny” Livingston, later Bunny Wailer, was one of Bob’s earliest and closest childhood friends from St. Ann’s Parish. Marley’s mother and Wailer’s father were living together in Trenchtown when Bob and Bunny met Peter McIntosh, later Peter Tosh, who completed the triumvirate.

This trio’s mesh of voices was never conventionally pretty. The three voices didn’t so much blend as create a constantly shifting ensemble texture, tightly interwoven but with each singer’s timbre remaining distinct. Unlike most singers on the way up, Marley, Tosh and Livingston refused to cosmeticize their back-of-town rawness, realizing from the first that their origins were one of their greatest strengths. They had in fact chosen a group name that called attention to these origins; they were Wailers, they said, because they were ghetto sufferers, born wailing. Dog eat dog; that was the reality of life in the ghetto and in Kingston’s music and recording scene. Producers ruled the roost, paying musicians and singers a nominal one-time fee for recording and reaping the subsequent profits. Nevertheless, in 1966, the Wailers took on the system, leaving Sir Coxsone’s stable (a move tantamount to professional suicide) to start their own record label, Wail ‘M’ Soul ‘M’, and produce the sessions themselves.

“Yes, people rob me and try te trick me, but now I have experience,” Marley said, adding later, “I know, and I see, and I don’t get tricked. Everybody that deals with West Indian music . . . thieves!”

If you’re listening chronologically to Island’s exemplary four-CD set
Bob Marley: Songs of Freedom
, the move into self-production comes as a dramatic departure. For the first time, the singers and musicians seem to be breathing the same air, producing a superbly organic group sound. The Wailers’ 1967–68 rock-steady sides for Wail ‘M’ Soul ‘M’ are the trio’s first unalloyed masterpieces: “Mellow Mood,” “Bend Down Low,” “Thank You Lord” and the rest still move, instruct and delight.

After Marley took time off to write songs for the American pop-soul singer Johnny Nash (who recorded “Stir It Up” and “Guava Jelly”), the Wailers met Lee Perry, a former sound-system DJ for Sir Coxsone who was beginning to bring a new sense of space and mystery to Jamaican music. Among the session players who worked for Perry were the two Barrett brothers, drummer Carlton (“Carly”) and bassist Aston (“Family Man”). As rock steady mutated into the even trickier, more fluid grooves of reggae, the Barrett brothers staked their claim as the music’s definitive rhythm section. With the hyper-creative Perry, aka Dread at the Control, behind the mixing desk, the wailing Wailers and the Barrett brothers made an imaginative leap into a new and entirely unanticipated sonic landscape. Marley was now a songwriter in a class by himself, and the Wailers-Barretts- Perry team was able to create and sustain a powerfully specific mood and presence for each of his gems. Many hard-core reggae fans consider these recordings, collected on such albums as
Soul Rebels
and
African Herbsman
, the high point of Marley’s entire career. That’s debatable; the music’s blinding brilliance is not.

Almost 10 years in the forefront of one of the most hectic, intensely creative music scenes on the planet, and what did the Wailers have to show for it? They were still living in Trenchtown, below the poverty line. They never heard their records played on Jamaican radio. “It’s because the music shows the real situation in Jamaica,” Marley said. “Some people don’t like to hear the real truth.” And outside Jamaica and the West Indian communities in the U.K., they were utterly unknown, as was reggae itself.

Through Marley’s Johnny Nash connection, the Wailers, Barretts in tow, went to England, hoping to tour and stir up some interest on the part of a major record label. They managed to secure a bit of session work, record some demos and play a handful of dates in clubs and schools. They awoke one morning—cold and hungry—to find that their erstwhile management had left the country, stranding them cold and penniless.

Enter Chris Blackwell, a white Jamaican who had done well leasing hits from Kingston for the U.K. on his Island Records label and who was currently scoring major pop successes with the likes of Traffic and Cat Stevens. He still thought reggae could win an audience in the wider world, and to that end he gave the Wailers the budget to record an album. This in itself was an innovative move. Any other label honcho would surely have seen the group’s outspoken stand against oppression and exploitation and its embrace of a Rastafarian belief system as potential impediments to commercial success at best. Blackwell encouraged the Wailers to be themselves.

The Wailers’ first two Island albums,
Catch a Fire
and
Burnin’
(both from 1973), represent another new beginning for Marley. Both albums freely raided his enormous back catalog of songs, and while some of the versions issued earlier may be the definitive ones, as albums,
Catch a Fire
and
Burnin’
are themselves definitive Marley records. They are the powerful, unified masterworks of an artist at the height of his powers.

With the release of
Catch a Fire
, the pressure was on. After a U.S. tour that found the Wailers driving thousands of miles to play for audiences that were frequently small and uncomprehending, Wailer and Tosh elected to drop out of the rat race and go solo. This development broke up one of the era’s greatest vocal groups, but Marley assembled the I-Threes (Rita Marley, Marcia Griffiths, Judy Mowatt) to fill out the band’s vocal sound and kept touring. He was a man with a mission.

the band’s vocal sound and kept touring. He was a man with a mission. “God sent me on earth,” Marley once said. “He send me to do something, and nobody can stop me. If God want to stop me, then I stop. Man never can.” Marley’s next three studio albums—
Natty
Dread
(1974),
Rastaman Vibration
(1976) and
Exodus
(1977)—made him an international star. The Wailers were now officially Bob Mar-ley’s band, still piloted through the rhythmic rapids by the incomparable Barrett brothers but now expanded to include a clutch of superb musical individualists who were fundamentally team players, including guitarists Al Anderson and Junior Marvin and keyboard men Earl “Wia” Lindo and Bernard “Touter” Harvey.

Brutal as the Wailers’ nonstop touring schedule was, the real brutality was waiting for Marley back home. Jamaica in the middle and late ’70s seemed to be a society coming apart at the seams. The country’s two rival political parties both employed gangs of ghetto gunmen to settle their differences. They also leaned hard on Marley for public support. At the same time, there was a great deal of resentment in the air. Jamaica’s ruling class traditionally despised the Rastafarians for offering scathing critiques of the “shitstem” while refusing to take part in it. The emergence of a dreadlocked Rasta as Jamaica’s No. 1 citizen to the world was seen as a public-relations disaster and, for many, a personal affront.

No rock & roller has ever had so many formidable and sinister forces arrayed against him. Marley found it expedient to maintain social relationships with gunmen and politicians from both political parties. “The devil ain’t got no power over me,” he asserted. “The devil come, and me shake hands with the devil. Devil have his part to play. Devil’s a good friend, too . . . because when you don’t know him, that’s the time he can mosh you down.”

Marley proved miraculously adept at advocating justice and an end to neocolonial exploitation of the increasingly beleaguered island while maintaining a sovereign’s indifference to the machinations of partisan politics. But attempts to manipulate him for political gain continued unabated, and Marley well knew that the slightest miscalculation could have fatal consequences.

In 1976, representatives of the country’s ruling, nominally socialist government persuaded Marley to headline a free outdoor concert in Kingston that would be strictly apolitical, a plea for peace among the ghetto’s warring factions and a celebration of “one love, one heart.” Two nights before the concert, two carloads of gunmen broke into Marley’s house with barrels blazing. Astonishingly, no one was killed, though Marley and several associates were wounded. Showing remarkable courage, Marley honored his promise to sing at the concert. Showing good sense, he left the island the next day and didn’t return for more than a year.

“They claim that I was supporting a political party, which is not true,” Marley insisted afterward. “If it was really true that I was defending politics, then I would have died that night, because me know that the politician is the devil. . . . My job is to come between these politicians and become something else for the people.”

Throughout these difficult years, Marley remained committed to his Rastafarian ideals and to self-determination for his people. In the Third World, especially where liberation struggles were in progress, he was seen as both a popular musician and a revolutionary ally. When Zimbabwe won its freedom from the white Rhodesian regime in 1980, the Wailers played at the independence celebration. Through it all, Marley continued to forge a visionary music that opposed the tide of violence and celebrated the rhythms of life.

His diligence never faltered; finally, it was his own rebellious cells that brought him down. The cancer that finally killed him on May 11, 1981, had apparently developed from an untreated soccer injury—although in circumstances such as these, one can never be entirely certain what happened or why. One can only be certain of Marley’s enduring musical legacy.

The beauty of Marley’s music is that while it holds a special significance for the sufferers of this world, it speaks to any listener with an open heart. You don’t have to understand the sociopolitical background or the Rasta subculture—or even Marley’s Trenchtown patois—to get it. The rhythms are as close as your heartbeat, the voice speaks a language the spirit understands. And, yes, when it hits, you feel no pain.