Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright (5 page)

The wind hot and crimson circling clouds streaming lavenders and lapis darkening as a near full moon burning silver rose while the last scraps of daylight dipped and dissolved sinking down through the Caribbean horizon in the lazying forlorn west. My harmonica wailed mournful blues from the back seat of Bob’s Capri as Esther chatted nonstop from the shotgun side, Bob maneuvering around potholes— while listening intently—deftly and with a supreme concentration.

We weaved and stuttered our way through to Port Royal, where some three hundred years before a great earthquake had destroyed what was the most bustling town in the whole West Indies: where pirates Morgan and Cook and Bluebeard whored, where slave ships routinely dumped their human cargo, the worthwhile remains to be bartered and auctioned after the interminable voyages from West Africa, during which less than half would survive in the seasick starving galleys in chains and emerging half or three quarters dead from the ship’s hull squinting, iron clanging in the searing white hot sun from their allotted positions arm to arm, head to feet, not an inch wasted, calculated, diagrammed, packaged, the proprietors knowing more or less how many would perish in the premeditated mass murder of beasts of burden needed to cut the cane to be boiled into molasses from which would be extracted and bleached white and therefore “pure”—sugar—to sweet the fancy of the white-wigged pale and powdered white-faced lords and ladies of the boundary-less queen-dom called the British Empire.

And what remains . . . A cannon, a fort ruined beyond ruins. A town of ghosts whistling ballads and jigs cacophonic—fleeing in and out of consciousness, turning curtly, violently to catch what was there or what is not.

We curled through a roundabout and out to the desolate, dark harbour, where women with kerosene lamps sold fried fish—snapper, jack, king and sprat—from creaky wooden tables, topped by flimsy glass cabinets glowing faintly in the hazy firelight. I could imagine these women, some maga with craggy skin, some round and oversized with fatty bum- bums in their day jobs, pounding the cassava root with wooden mallets into quarter-inch thick cakes to be fried and sold with the fish—salted and therefore un-ital—the yellow-white chewy—called bammie.

And Esther ranting about how the Spanish and then the English came to obliterate the indigenous people, the Caribs and the Tainos, their Arawak language centuries lost, and me in my stern silence acknowledging what I knew to be true, and Bob in turn sensing the white youth so recalcitrant, implacable in his revolutionary zeal.

We chose the fish we wanted from the various ladies wishing for a sale and Esther begged me to take a piece of bammie to go with them. They served the poor man’s feast in white newsprint-like paper, and we meandered out onto a dilapidated wooden pier that extended some twenty yards out into the near-still water. I could see the tangerine lights of Kingston pulsing across the bay, the sky argentous, scintillating—the breeze dreamy, warm, wistful.

“You know cassava was more than just a root to be mashed up and fried for the original people here, Lee Jaffe,” Esther continued as if in some remote way in my whiteness I too might need to take on some responsibility for the iniquitous Iberian legacy.

“It was a sacred thing for the Tainos. They believed in a superior being, a life-giving force they called Yucahu and Yucahu represented sea and cassava because both were never-failing sources of sustenance. They sat here six hundred years ago and ate the same t’ing we a-naym now.” She laughed. “A true, mon. . .

“And the Spanish a wicked, you see, mon? Dem would string dem poor innocents up by dem raas feet and light a fire beneet dem and laugh while dey watched dem slowly burn. Or dem would play games seeing who could chop up an Indian de fastest and then feed them to some vicious dogs they did a-bring wit’ dem from Spain. They made slaves of them to dig in mines for gold, but dem never find no raas gold a Jamaica, and some of dem would run away or just hang dem- selves, whole families, children too, rather than subjugate themselves to de pernicious blood-claat who did call themselves Christians.”

I suffered Esther’s ravings which, on the one hand, seemed directed at me, and on the other were for Bob, to show off her radical social consciousness, but I couldn’t help but smile, the fish being so succulent, the bammie sweet from coconut oil. Then Bob produced three twelve ounce bottles of a creamy white liquid and passed them around. “What’s this?” I asked of the label-less bottles.

“Irish moss and soursop juice,” Bob replied with the assured confidence that this would blow my mind. “Ital, mon. No sugar, no condemned milk. Only honey use fe sweeten it.” And yes, it was smooth and as dreamy as the soft wind lilting through the coconut trees. Then magically, as if scripted by Jah, some Christmas tree–like buds appeared. “Lamb’s bread, mon. I and I get eet from Sledger who helped grow eet a St. Ann’s, the parish dem call Jah’s parish, the parish where I and I a born. Lamb’s bread a special herb a hard for get eet, seen?”

“Can we go there? I want to see the country. I want to see where you came from?”

“Yeah, mon. We can reach dem parts dere.”

“And can we actually go to the herb field where this came from?” Bob laughed.

“You want to see every t’ing, Lee Jaffe . . .” Esther chimed in.

“Go for me guitar, my youth,” said Bob, as he rolled separate, huge, cone-like spliffs for each of us.

I bounded to the car to get Bob’s acoustic. I could sense the inchoate stirrings of word and music brewing in a soul born of disparate continents. In a soul wailing, tormented with the burden of the criminally poor, the indigent, the starveling, and the destitute of the shanty towns from Kingston to Cape Town, from Bed-Stuy to the stilted slums of Bangkok. But a soul also so free in the mellow moonlight glistening off the tropical sea mingling with the lamp lights and the open wood fires, a soul uplifted by the gift of Jah’s good herb and the intoxication of love at first sight with his Jamaican East Indian peasant-born entertaindom-royalty princess who through a simple phone call— “forget that Hollywood crap and go make a good movie”—had the power to resurrect the languishing career of her ex-boyfriend Marlon Brando and at the same time igniting the career of a budding Italian cineaste, Bernardo Bertolucci, her call being the catalyst for what would become
Last Tango in Paris
. Bob took a long, slow draw off the extravagant spliff, the fire tip glowing amber as I passed him his guitar. Then lighting my own while taking in the celestial night sky, more rich with glitter than any I’d witnessed, I began to follow the ethereal rhythm of his right hand against the steel strings with my trusty D harp, my breathing in and out caressing the metal reeds, careful to augment and not overwhelm his guitar, leaving space for his voice to be intimate without straining. And Bob began to sing:

We were just jamming, and then I remember there were these two really really fat girls dancing when Bob came out with that line. It came from Bob saying “I shot the sheriff.” And then I said, “But you didn’t get the deputy.” ’Cause he was making this joke about him hanging out with this white guy—me. So it was like this comment about that.

It was such a funny song, the beach wasn’t that crowded, but we had a whole bunch of people just dancing to that song. I remember these two huge fat girls just dancing, and all these other people dancing around them. And Bob was playing the guitar and I’m on harmonica.

I wrote down all the lyrics Bob was singing. And I was excited ’cause I knew it was a big song and I felt I was integral in its conception, and then I came up with the line “all along in Trench Town, the jeeps go round and round,” ’cause the police and military drove jeeps and I was thinking of the curfews that were being called in the ghetto and what it was like for the poor people, the “sufferers,” to live in a militarized zone and to have the basic freedom of walking in the street taken away and how it related to politics and the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and the C.I.A. pressure on the Caribbean and Latin America and I flashed on being on the beach in Rio in Ipanema, being with a girlfriend who was a radical student leader and she, pointing out a blonde, crewcut guy with his wife and two pre-teenage daughters relaxing on a Sunday morning and hipping me to the fact that he was an American sent by Nixon to train torturers, and I was thinking of what was taking place in Chile, and how the events there had resulted in me being in Jamaica, and what a genius Bob was for coming out with the line “I shot the sheriff,” because, though it was funny, it was also poignant, so relevant to the global repression, and later he changed the line to “All along in my home town” and that was better, because it made the point that these violent interventions into everyday life in the shanty towns of Jamaica were intrinsically foreign-influenced. And when I said, “But you didn’t get the deputy,” it was ironic and slightly self-deprecating, because what it was saying was, yeah, I got the balls to shoot the sheriff, but I don’t have it together by myself to get all his backup and this is going to be a long, tragic struggle that’s going to need a lot of everyday heroes.

Max’s Kansas City was an amazing place. It started in the Sixties as a place for painters, sculptors, visual artists to hang out, and Mickey Ruskin, the guy who owned it, would trade with artists for food. And he had great taste in art, so he wound up with this amazing collection. He died very young, but when he died he had a collection that had become worth millions of dollars. He was trading with everyone from Dan Flavin to Andy Warhol. I was in school for sculpture, so all my heroes were hanging out there. Dan Flavin had a big red fluorescent light piece which was in the far back corner, called
Cross of Fire
. Incredible.

I took the
Catch a Fire
album with the cigarette lighter cover, called up the guy at Max’s who did the bookings, his name was Sam Hood, and made an appointment to see him. And I marched in there and he had this tiny little office upstairs at Max’s, filled with records and posters and kind of messy. Flipped open the album cover—it opened like a cigarette lighter in the middle. He pulled out the vinyl, put it on his turntable, listened to the first track and went to the second track, listened to a few bars of the next track, and he said, “The Drifters with raised consciousness! OK. I’ll do that.” And he gave us this week opening for Bruce Springsteen.

It made sense, right? It was incredibly perfect for us, because the guy had so much hype and his record label, Columbia, was a New York-based record company, the biggest company in the world, and they were promoting him saying he was the next Bob Dylan, and it was Columbia and John Hammond blah-blah-blah. And there was a lot of backlash at this point, because nobody had heard of him. Now everybody’s comparing him to Dylan, so a lot of people resented that. But everybody from the media had to be there to see this guy. So there was no better forum for us, coming from total obscurity, to be able to play with that intense an audience. So we had every single music journalist, plus almost anyone who wrote on culture there to see this.

It could hold a few hundred people, I guess. Long and narrow, like a long loft type of thing. Maybe 250, 300 capacity. It was tight. But when they started to run groups, the whole atmosphere at Max’s started to change. It was no longer just a place for artists to go. . . You also had people like Todd Rundgren, Patti Smith and Lou Reed, all kinds of brilliant people hanging out there.

But first we had to get the band there. I had arranged things with this immigration lawyer, but the work permits didn’t come in time. So this lawyer knew a person that worked at immigration in Niagara Falls. And he worked a certain shift, like four to 12 or something. And we flew to Toronto from Kingston the day before the first New York gig. The idea was to drive to Niagara Falls when this guy was on duty, because he was going to let us in. But, of course, what happens is, we arrive in Toronto and we looked like we were going to overthrow the government. And they went through every piece of luggage. They took hours and hours and hours. By the time we got to Niagara Falls it was two o’clock in the morning. So I got the lawyer’s number at home and woke him up, and he woke up the immigration guy to come, and it was like four o’clock in the morning, and that’s how we got into America . . .

This was another world. I mean, we were all of a sudden right in the center of the heart of rock and roll glamourdom. This was the place in the world, the hippest place in the world you could possibly play, opening for Bruce Springsteen at his first Columbia Records show. I mean everybody who was anybody was there that week. I mean more than once. We were playing two shows a night, and this was the kind of thing where people came more than once. Every writer, everybody from the fashion world, every musician that meant anything who was in New York had to go see this. And we were there and by the end of the week everybody knew who we were. . . We were blowing people’s minds! People were flipping out over us. We were getting amazing respect—it started the love affair of the press with the Wailers that week. And it never ended.

In Jamaica they are very picky about what kind of American music they like, but Marvin Gaye was special. A lot of his popularity had to do with the social and political themes of the songs on the
What’s
Goin’ On
album. He showed up in Jamaica with a 70-piece orchestra. It was a really big event, a hot ticket. The promoter added the Wailers on to the show, but nobody really believed they would play, because they hadn’t played in Jamaica in many years and several previous shows had falsely advertised The Wailers. The reason we played the show was that everyone was swept up in the vibe. There was a new Wailers single out and it was a smash and we felt we wouldn’t be overshadowed by Marvin, that even with his huge crew he couldn’t upstage us. And that proved to be true.