Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright (6 page)

What was exciting for me, particularly, was that we had just put out “Road Block” and it was a massive hit. It was a number one record and it featured my harmonica playing, and I knew that we would have to do that song, and there was no way that The Wailers could do that song without me getting up there and playing on it, because I’m playing from the intro on. And just having the harmonica on a reggae track was such a novelty, the novelty aspect definitely contributed to the record having such immediate popularity.

Of course, most important was the lyrical content of that song, because there were road blocks anywhere, anytime, and it was particularly difficult for people like us dreadlocks, because there’s no way that we would be caught in a road block and the police just saying that you could go. And since we smoked herb all the time, we were living in a world that hovered between total apprehension and a heightened state of all-encompassing fear. So I remember being very anxious that whole day. First of all, none of The Wailers were really quite sure if we were going to play. It was going to be the kind of thing where Bunny and Peter would show up at Hope Road, because it was Bob, Bunny and Peter who would have to decide. And there would be some kind of reasoning as to “Are we going to get this together?” and if the vibe was right, there was an outside chance that it just might happen.

The whole town was buzzing over Marvin Gaye’s appearance. It seemed like this buzz over him in some way took some of the pressure off us, and we’re paying some kind of tribute to, or acknowledgement of, Marvin by showing up there. And at the same time it was a matter of playing when the Wailers hadn’t played Jamaica in a long time, and being that we were just opening for this big event that this show had become, there wouldn’t be so much focus of attention on us.

I remember Peter and Bunny showing up separately in the morning, and it was just kind of the vibe of let’s do it. So I was all excited, because I knew what that meant. I was going to have to get out there. We have the number one song and I’m playing on it and it’s totally political about the police busting you for herb, and I’m going to be onstage with the whole consciousness of the island focused on these twenty to thirty feet.

And the show ended up mega-packed, because the Carib Theatre only held 2,500 people, and thousands of people couldn’t get in. The show could have drawn 20 to 30,000 people easily. So the Wailers come out, they play five songs, and the audience is totally loving it, and I’m on the side of the stage, and I know they gotta play it, because everybody’s waiting for it. I remember standing with Skill Cole and he said, “You gotta go now,” and gave me a little shove, and I was out onstage with the lights blaring at me. My locks were really big by then, I had a red tam, I definitely looked like I was in the Wailers, except that I was white. And Bob says into the microphone, “This is Lee . . .” and it flashes through my mind that Bob Marley is introducing me to Jamaica and then he finishes the sentence with an instruction to the engineer, “Don’t turn him up too loud.” And the audience is cracking up and then the first few notes of the intro and then I come in wailing and the place goes completely crazy.

And I’m playing through the rest of the song and my nervousness is dissolving and I’m the highest I’ve ever been in my life, and then I have this big solo that went on and on and I’m trading riffs with lead guitarist Al Anderson through the outro and it’s sounding really good and I’m starting to feel like I passed the test. And it was totally thrilling. It was a coming forward for me and it was like I had been accepted by everybody in the band already, otherwise I wouldn’t have been out there at that moment, no way, and this was kind of like the band presenting me and the audience was so electric. The fact that they had just done five songs, the place was going crazy already before I came out kind of eased the pressure because I just walked into the environment that was already totally scintillating. My nervousness disappeared, dissolved.

I was kind of lost in the music, trying not to step on Bob’s vocals or I knew I’d be in a lot of trouble. I would never get the chance to go out there again. But it was good. By the time it got further down the song to my solo, I was just rocking with it. And I think I did a good job on the solo. And 26 years later I finally got to hear a tape of that performance, and the solo does sound pretty good.

The great thing about it was, after that I was just in The Wailers. Although it was a few months earlier, I believe, that Bunny had pro- nounced while he was at Hope Road, “Lee is Wailers,” being on stage was definitely an initiation. And being part of the group obviously was more than being in a band. It meant that I was accepted into the whole cultural, spiritual, political context which being in this band implied. I could be on the street in downtown Kingston and I was no longer a curiosity, I was now an accepted part of the fraternity of musicians— and more: I was Wailers.

I
T was a wonderful moment of the evening in Central Park when they came out, the real and present long awaited Wailers, tightest band in all of Jamaica and holders of the hip reggae torch. It was in fact a true musical love rush, nothing less—Americans and Jamaicans going giddy with glee at the image of genuine Jamaican religious hippie revolutionaries smoked up on the best grass in the world and ready to blow the crowd along into reggae’s most exotic turn of the rock & roll wheel, this time on a real American tour, complete with praise from Poor Abe the mayor telling them how proud he is and happy to welcome their fresh new reggae sound to New York. Main Wailer Bob Marley just ignores this rather silly attempt at Babylonian co-optation, shouts a Rastafarian credo dedicating the night to His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie the lion of Judah, tosses his natty dreadlocks, and kicks the band into “Trenchtown Rock.” The bass
and guitars come in first with a balance and depth and rhythm catching all the power of the classic reggae rush and Marley cavorts loosely up to the mike: “One good thing about music, when it hits, you feel no pain.” Hypnosis takes hold. Marley is charismatic.

Marley is charismatic and he’s stoned from dreadlocks to toes, and he’s proud of it. And it’s taken for granted with the Rastafarian philosophy in mind, and it’s very charming when you begin to listen to his songs and catch the images of voluptuous revolution in the context of Trenchtown, the cockpit of Black pride, the lives of shit-poor people trying to scrape through, staying loose and friendly, standing up for their rights, dodging Babylon. In his lyrics Marley fuses a Caribbean class-struggle documentary with spunky images of resistance and a benign, spiritual vision of happiness through what comes naturally. And it comes out naturally so’s you can dance to it. What we have here is a whole new high in politico good-time boogie music, like if Jefferson Airplane suddenly found fresh brains and started to dig their own potatoes. Marley is trying to put what matters into music but he also knows how much it’s the music that matters. The best reggae is hypnotic, riding up to the pit of your stomach on massive, smoothjerk bass lines and lulling you out with exotic gospel harmonies: big lows and brilliant highs, just like the hi-fi ads. The best reggae is beautiful, and rude. And Marley works his crowd, too, moving sinuously around the mike, his face a mime with the lyrics, his pearly teeth (cleaned with natural tree bark, no toothpaste here) flashing from the smile of the permanently stoned. Brother Bob, a natural showman. Unlike Jimmy Cliff, whose show has all the sensuality of your standard R&B lounge act, pirouettes and all, Brother Bob is most definitely funky. Very sexy, too. See it now: Marley is the Jagger of reggae, without decadence, which doesn’t apply.

Marley triumphed in Central Park and the Wailers (minus Bunny Livingston and Peter Mackintosh, the other founder members of the 12-year-old band, and plus their replacements and the I-Threes (three perfect women singers) laid it down just right like a good backup band should. Some images remain: Marley swinging softly to himself through the church organ intro to “No Woman No Cry,” and slipping into his finest melody song . . . “Cause I remember when we used to sit / in a government yard in Trenchtown / Observing the hypocrites / Mingle with the good people we meet.”

Then there was “Kinky Reggae,” when he really began to dance and the women went weak; “Rebel Music,” when everyone sang along with Brother Bob’s latest uppity real life in joke (“And
hey Mister Cop,
ain’t got no / (
What you say down there
) / Ain’t got no birth certificate on me now”); then Marley, bathed in applause and stoned messages from his crowd (this was his crowd; chic and scruffy, but all of them movers), announcing “I shot the sheriff!” and proceeding to attack that great song for all its hilarious angles on the rebel life, totally outclassing Clapton’s (ha!) anemic cover version while the I-Threes mimed swinging six-guns and the band just moved along like a monster, the Barrett brothers’ rhythm section living up to its reputation as the official standard for all those who wish to play reggae.

And the revelation of Marley’s tricks—dreadlock-tossing now a spectacular aquatic event, what with the hot lights and all that sweat; skillful use of a towel for said dreadlocks during “I Shot the Sheriff”, the guitar held firm while Marley works his loose ganja-dance around it. There’s also Marley’s stage singing, which incorporates all manner of eclectic quirks not heard on the Wailers’ records. No matter that he wasn’t close enough to the mike to be heard for significant portions of the show—sloppy mike technique and ganja dancing go hand in hand. He’s a superb singer. It was dusk by the time of the grand finale, and the grand finale was, of course, “Get Up. Stand Up,” with Marley’s urgent vocal hammering the message home: a kind of frenzied proletarian battle cry and prayer meeting all in one—“Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, don’t give up the fight!” At this point it became impossible to discern what was Jamaican and what was American. The crowd took it to heart, and was delighted when Marley went straight to the nuts of many a person’s problem with “Excuse me while I light my spliff . . . But don’t give up the fight!”

It was on that note—truly funky, truly righteous—that the event came to a close. Marley had proved that he can still mesmerize, even without Bunny and Peter, whose songwriting and vocal talent contributed heavily to the Wailers’ work for more than a decade, and he had proved—no small thing, this, in light of the Will Reggae Make It? question—that he can move an American audience quite seriously. And two cultures—two at the very least—had met to boogie.

We are now at a silly press conference, an event in which everybody needs an interpreter quite badly, but nobody asks for one. We have personally ascertained at least two facts about Brother Bob. He is 30 (“I am now,” he says when asked) and he is the father of seven children by three women.

Here at the silly press conference, however, nothing quite so concrete is destined to result. The press is attempting to communicate with Brother Bob, who may or may not be trying to reciprocate, but who knows? Besides being a practicing Rastafarian (turn of mind) and a street-talking Jamaican (turn of lip), Marley is far more stoned than any member of the press can afford to be, given the aforementioned obstacles in the path of the old question-and-answer. Consequently, the event begins to take on a markedly tangential quality, like so:

The subject, originally broached in what our lady reporter takes as Rasta lingo (trip across the water means return to Ethiopia) is abandoned. We now know that Marley will be in Europe at some undetermined point in the future.

This form of communication may seem confusing, but at least it is happening and like the man from
Oui
is doing, you can always make arrangements for an interpreter after the fact through the miracle of tape. The last time through New York, two years ago, Marley and the Wailers (who still numbered Bunny and Peter amongst them) holed themselves up in the Hotel Chelsea and spent their time cooking an all-inclusive soup of Rastafarian extraction and smoking massive doses of ganja nonstop, leaving their sanctum only to buy the ingredients for the soup and go to work at Max’s. Those who made it into their room were faced with a knotty problem: In order for communication to happen at all, the stranger would have to smoke the ganja. Once on their level of intoxication, of course, detailed chitchat and personal histories, your usual journalistic ploys, would be preempted by more suitably stoned excursions along the Rastafarian Way. And as the rap becomes more elevated, the accents thicken. . . But this time, Marley and the Wailers seem more accessible. With Marley the obvious Jamaican contender for American success, a certain amount of exposure is more mandatory than simply prudent.