Pulphead: Essays (34 page)

Rudie come from jail ’cause Rudie get bail.

Rudie come from jail ’cause Rudie get bail.

There’s a sound on that recording, a vocalized
So!
right between the ninety-ninth and one-hundredth seconds: the Wailers, defending Rudie as always, have just sung,
Remember he is young, and he will live long.
And then someone—you can’t tell who—makes this noise. Intones, rather. It doesn’t seem to come from inside the studio—doesn’t belong, that is, to the texture of the session; it emanates from miles away and has arrived through an open window. Somewhere in the interior of Jamaica a goat herder with a staff has leaned back and loosed this sound into a valley, intending it for no ears but Jah’s.
Soooo!
—the vowel fading quickly without an echo, pure life force. Was that Bunny doing that?

Llewis arrived twenty minutes early the next morning, and he did have the nice car, a blue Toyota model you don’t often see in the States, somehow German-looking, which turned out to be appropriate, because one thing I’d learned about Llewis and would have occasion to learn better over coming days was that he passionately supported Germany’s national soccer team and, no matter what else he was doing, avidly followed their unimpeded progress in the World Cup with half his brain. He was perhaps the only person in Jamaica who felt like that. He talked all about them, about their teamwork, as we drove around.

I asked him if he wanted to sit in on the interview with Bunny. “Sure,” he said. “It might loosen him up.”

“You think I’ll make him uptight?” I said.

“He’s pretty reclusive, right?” Llewis replied diplomatically.

Bunny lived in an area with only every fourth or fifth road sign intact. I was keeping my finger on the map while Llewis counted lefts, U-turning around till we found the curving lane that had to be his. It looked like Cuba, but more drab. The roads were viciously rutted. The houses were miniature compounds; everybody who could had high walls with glass shards or wire on top. Inside, however, there might be civility, shade, nice colors. You didn’t want to show any of that.

I won’t say I was shocked to find that Bunny Wailer lived in a poor area. It wasn’t a slum, and he has always preferred to live humbly. (When he ditched the Wailers’ first world tour in 1973 over disagreements about the direction of the band, he famously went and lived in a ramshackle cabin by the beach, surviving on fish from the sea and writing songs.) Still, the degree of shabbiness surprised me, and Llewis remarked on it, too. How long has Bunny Wailer’s music—songs that he participated in making—been in every dorm room, every coffee shop, and he was driving an aged and dusty Japanese sedan? That was serious baldhead math.

There were two tall corrugated-metal gates with giant Rastafarian lions on them that parted creakily to let you in. A tin sign hung on one. It read,
JAH B WILL BE AWAY UNTIL MARCH 15TH.
It was July 6. I was guessing he didn’t mind the overall message. He was standing there in the courtyard, small and every bit as wiry as he is in the well-known picture of him playing soccer, dreadlocked and shirtless. He had on an excellent brown collarless suit that looked like something Sammy Davis, Jr., would have worn to a hip party in 1970. His beard was long, wispy, and yellowish white. He wore his dreads swirled atop his head into a crown and kept in place with bands.

He greeted us with great politeness but seemed not to want to waste time. He addressed Llewis as “Soldier”! He’d put out chairs for us under a lime tree. His wife, Jean Watt, a gracefully aged woman, brought out orange juice, saying, “Bless, bless.”

“Well,” I began. “It’s an honor to meet you.”

“Well, it’s an honor to be here, on the earth,” he said. “You know what I mean? So we at one. What’s up with you, now?”

One was intimidated, but not in a way that felt inappropriate. That was Bunny Wailer, who taught Bob Marley what harmony was. When we’d come in, I had asked if we could maybe take him to lunch, anywhere he liked. Llewis had warned me to say specifically that it would be an “ital” restaurant, one that served food appropriate for Rastas. “Thanks,” Bunny answered, pausing, “but … the Blackheart Man is very skeptical. He’d rather eat from his own pot.”

The notebook read,
“No. 1, ask him about what’s happening now, the stuff with Dudus,”
but we hadn’t even gotten through the turning-on-the-recorders part when Bunny embarked on an hour-long, historically footnoted breakdown of exactly how the Dudus crisis had come about, tracing it back to the birth of the garrisons in the sixties.

In order to understand anything about Jamaica and why it’s statistically one of the most violent places on earth, you have to know something about garrisonism, the unique system by which the island’s government functions. Before you turn away in anticipation of boredom, let me say that you may find yourself intrigued by the sheer fact that something this twisted is occurring on a U.S.-friendly island five hundred miles from our coast. Garrisonism has been described—in a Jamaican report put out by a specially convened panel—as “political tribalism.” (Bunny called it “a political tribal massacre” in his classic “Innocent Blood” thirty years ago.) The history of garrisonism can be supercrudely summarized as follows. In the 1960s, the island’s two rival parties—the liberal People’s National Party (PNP) and the conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), Jamaica’s version of Democrats and Republicans—started putting up housing projects in Kingston’s poorest neighborhoods. Once the buildings were up, whichever party had built them moved in its own trustworthy supporters and kicked anybody who didn’t want to vote their way out of the neighborhood. Families and groups of friends were shattered. Children had to change schools because their old school’s party affiliation had shifted. Many of these displaced ended up in squatters’ camps.

When it was all a question of local island politics, nobody much cared, just as nobody much cares today outside Jamaica about the situation there, or didn’t until Dudus went rogue. Things changed, however, in the seventies, when Michael Manley, the PNP leader, expressed sympathy with Castro. The CIA was terrified about Cuban communism spreading to the other Caribbean islands. It backed the Reaganite JLP leader, Edward Seaga. Now there were more, and more serious, guns flowing into the garrisons. It was Manley against Seaga, socialism against capitalism, PNP against JLP, with the garrisons pitted against one another, fighting on behalf of their parties for control of the island. Kingston emerged as a miniature front in the Cold War.

Only in the eighties did drug running enrich certain dons to the point that they no longer needed the state as much. The garrisons were becoming quasi-states. The dons could afford their own guns; they could supply forces. They started dictating terms to the ministers. That is, if the ministers still wanted all the thousands of votes the dons controlled.

“What I’m saying in ‘Don’t Touch the President,’” Bunny told me, “is that if you remove Dudus, there’s gonna be another Dudus, until you get rid of the source,” namely ministerial corruption. He said Dudus had been a good don. Actually, what he said was, “He’s taking bad and turning it into good, like Jesus Christ.” I asked if he’d ever met Dudus. Maybe at one of the
passa passas,
neighborhood concerts hosted by the don?

“Never seen him in my lifetime,” he said.

He had the metal gates chained up and padlocked again. A sweet but mean-looking mutt was patrolling the patio. Bunny sat forward on his chair, bouncing his toes. His two cell phones went off incessantly. Llewis would back me up on that. Incessant. “And the amazing thing was,” Llewis said, “he never looked to see who it was, but he never turned them off, either.” It was true—he just let them ring and ring. I got used to it.

A little kid came by and knocked. I gathered that people did this fairly often, asking for help. “Who that? Who that? No, wrong time here, check me back likkle more, hear, soldier? Check me back likkle more, right now me in a serious meeting.” The kid wasn’t listening. We could see his eyes through a chink in the gate. “CHECK ME BACK LIKKLE MORE!” Bunny screamed. Every now and then one of his sons walked through the leafy patio. A poster of his daughter, the burgeoning singer Cen’C Love, stood against a wall. This was a good castle for the Blackheart Man.

It seemed he was in a mood to talk, and not only that, but to talk about the old days. I hadn’t wanted to push that too hard, treat him like a fossil. He’s still writing songs occasionally, going on mini-tours. With some artists, if you ask too much about their old stuff, they take it as a criticism.

Bunny started talking about the young Bob Marley, what he was like when they attended the Stepney All Age School in St. Ann together. Back then they had called Bob Nesta, his first name at birth.

“A lot of people don’t know the nature of the individual,” Bunny said. “From a childhood state, Bob was cut out to be this icon, this saint.” The pain of being biracial had deepened his sensitivity early on. His father was a white man, a captain in the British military, Norval Sinclair Marley. The influence of this side of Bob’s childhood had been underemphasized, Bunny felt. Bob had grown up “in the condition of a nobody.” In the Jamaica of that time, “the biracial child was like a reproach, because he brings shame on the family of the white man and shame on the family of the black woman.

“Bob would look at you and say, ‘You think God
white
? God BLACK!’ Ah-haa!” Bunny raised his finger. “And his father is a white person, Captain Marley, and his genes is also in Bob.” Bunny had clearly worked through this. He laughed darkly, shaking his head. “Aha, still the captain,” he said.

Bob was
from
the country, but Bunny’s family had only
moved
to the country; they came from Kingston. Bunny brought knowledge of music—he’d been a champion child dancer. At the revivalist church in St. Ann where Bunny’s father preached, he banged the drum during the songs. “I was a great drummer, you know,” he said. “Sometimes they had to use my influence to build up the vibes of the church.”

Bunny would play his self-made guitar there in the village, and Bob saw how many people came to listen. “It was the only little amusement in those dark woods,” Bunny laughed. He showed Bob how to make one.

The fervor with which Bob picked up music startled Bunny. “I did it as a hobby, for entertaining the community,” he said. “Bob took it as a weapon, to get him out of that kind of condition of being a nobody to being a somebody, a musician.” Bunny spoke about the first, not especially successful Bob Marley singles, issued under various names (one was “Bobby Martell”) by the pioneering Chinese-Jamaican ska producer Leslie Kong. One of them, a song called “Terror,” is a kind of holy grail in the world of Jamaican record collecting. No copy has ever been found. Bunny implied that it had been too radical for release, the government wouldn’t have liked it. “A lot of people don’t know about that song,” Bunny said. “Terrible song, that.” He meant terrible as in fearsome. He blew my mind by quoting a verse of it:

He who rules by terror

Doeth grievous wrong.

In hell I’ll count his error.

Let them hear my song.

“Them hide it,” Bunny said. “That song nobody know, them hide it. It hidden.”

I realized later that these are lines, fiddled with here and there, from an Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poem, “The Captain: A Legend of the Navy.” A poem Bob had been made to memorize in school, maybe? It tells the story of a ship—a phantom precursor of the ship in “Slave Driver”—on which the captain is so cruel that the men commit mass suicide, rushing in to attack an enemy vessel at his command, then laying down their arms, letting the ship be blown to smithereens. Captain Marley, seven years dead, surely haunts this song. He’d abandoned Bob as a toddler. Bob’s mom then became the mistress of Bunny’s father. During different stretches, the two boys lived under one roof together. They knew each other so well that years later, Bunny could remember (and recorded a version of) a song that Bob had written as a boy, a sing-songy thing called “Fancy Curls.”

At this point, Bunny excused himself and went off for a lunch/siesta retreat of some kind. Llewis and I sat there on the patio for about an hour, talking quietly. He’d been right; his presence had put Bunny at greater ease. Whenever I expressed surprise—that exaggerated surprise it’s somehow impossible not to affect when you’re interviewing people:
“Really?!”
—Bunny would point at Llewis and say, “True, soldier?” And Llewis would say, “One hundred percent true.”

When Bunny returned, his mood was suppressed. He sat farther back. His eyelids were lowered, and his phones rang shrilly in his pockets, utterly ignored. His silence during the preceding month was much less baffling. I asked about Joe Higgs, the man who made the Wailers happen. Higgs—there’s a neglected genius of Jamaican music. His 1975
Life of Contradiction,
recently rereleased, is desert-island good. He died fairly young, of cancer. In 1959, during a wave of political uprisings by militant Rastafarians, he was beaten and jailed. (Bunny himself would be imprisoned on ganja charges eight years later.)