Thirty Years After His Death,
Bob Marley Lives
By Colin Channer
- Photoshot/Everett Collection / Bob Marley in Amsterdam in 1976.
Bob Marley died of cancer on May 11, 1981, at the age of 36. To mark the 30th anniversary of the death of the reggae legend, the Wall Street Journal asked Jamaican-born novelist Colin Channer to share his thoughts.
The first time I saw Bob Marley perform I was eight years old. It was 1971. A Saturday afternoon. I was sitting in a Danish couch with beige cushions and maple arms in a new development of pre-fab homes in Kingston. He was a glowing presence on a 13-inch black and white Sanyo.
His bandmates Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh were on either side of him, I guess. They must have been; but memory hasn’t saved their bodies, only their sound–their falsettos whinnying as Bob cantered through “Duppy Conqueror,” voice rearing wildly at the end of some lines.
I knew the song. Had heard it in trickling from the doors of rum shops; had heard the postman hum it as he sat on his red bicycle by the wrought-iron gate, half hidden by the crotons, waiting for the helper to come outside for a slack-mouth chat up. I’d also heard it chuffing from the wooden Grundig stereogram owned by my mother’s friends Owen and Alma Dixon, the party couple. They lived in a modest home with a shingled roof and wooden floors on Mountain View Avenue, about two miles away from Harry J’s recording studio, where Bob would go on to record “Natty Dread,” his first album without Peter and Bunny. Island Records released “Natty Dread” in 1974.
So, yes, I knew the song. In fact, I knew it very well. But before this moment in 1971, I’d never thought about who sung it. I wasn’t into music yet. Music was something that washed over me. And in those days in Jamaica one couldn’t depend on the island’s two radio stations for much information about local singers. Like the media in many former colonies, the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Jamaica Redifusion Limited rationed how much local music they played. Standards, man. Standards. Standards must be maintained. When the JBC and RJR did play local music, well, they played it down the middle. Girl, I love you. Boy, I love you. Girl, I miss you. Boy, you’re gonna miss me. Off brand Motown. A genre called rock steady. Good kids singing clean music.
In 1971, reggae the fat-bottomed outside child of rock steady and Rastafarianism, was already three years old, It was race music. Bass music. The music of the common people whose feet traced deep lines into the dirt lanes that flowed into the dark heart of the shanty clumps in West Kingston. Reggae was not clean music. It was dutty (dirty) people music. The very essence of funk.
So imagine my surprise then, on this Saturday evening. Life was going along as I’d known it. I was watching Top Ten Tunes on JBC TV. There was a bowl of beef soup in my lap, the enamel warm on my thighs, the broth orange-red from melted pumpkins. I took my eyes off the set to forage for meat under chunks of yam; found mostly bone and gristle; looked up again and saw three dutty people boasting in a song about death and prison, that “their bars could not hold me.”
It was a simple set. Three men in their twenties fronting a cyclorama. No mikes. No band. That the set was unexciting didn’t strike me. I didn’t expect much in the way of excitement from the JBC. What struck me was Bob Marley’s style.
He was wearing a leather motorcycle jacket as if he’d been an extra in “Blackboard Jungle” or “The Wild One.” His hair was worn in a style I found curious … a bit unsettling. I found it unsettling because I was at an age where my sense of what it meant to be intelligent was defining itself in terms of my ability to name things. For didn’t everything have a name?
Marley had an afro. Certainly. But he also did not. His hair was an afro in approximate scale and shape. It was voluminous and round,But the edges were frayed and fringed. Was it an afro, this black halo? Or was it something else?
From where I sit today at my desk in a Boston suburb, a 47 year-old novelist, professor and occasional critic, I can describe Bob’s hair as looking like something mysterious had reached from somewhere unseen to grab and twist the ends. I can say that his hair in its raggedness reminded me of what happened to the edges of neat colonial towns when slums appear on their rims, that I was unsettled by what unsettles most of us-being in a present that portends a future of fundamental change, being unsure if that feeling of excitement coupled in our hearts with fear has given fear its full consent.
Yes, I felt afraid that day. Yes, I felt afraid. I felt afraid because I knew I was looking at something I didn’t understand, and wanted to understand, but which I knew by instinct, and rough deduction, would not be considered worthy of consideration by decent people.
And what kind of trouble was going to be caused now, I could hear them thinking, that indecent, dutty hair was on gov’ment TV, getting exposure? Lord, what a calamity and crosses! Since independence, Jamaica gone to the dogs.
In later years, I would come to understand Bob Marley as an artist of substance, however, what made him iconic to me at first sighting was his sense of style.
Icons project. That is what they do. They radiate the capacities we’d like to have inside ourselves. Better yet, they reflect what we radiate in their direction, allowing us to envision the supernatural in ourselves.
There was no sense that Bob had been styled, that someone had chosen that jacket for him, or that he was any kind of copy cat, or in Jamaican parlance a “follow-fashion monkey.” Yes, there was the grammar of American fashion in his look, but he’d disrupted that language, reshaped it, creating a sty-ialect.
Bob was natural. Super natural. Natural to the extreme. Thirty years after his death he lives. It’s as if in singing “Duppy Conqueror” he’d bragged his way into a cosmic truth, had in fact conquered the duppy, that shape-shifter from the afterlife otherwise known as Death, who captured him as he tried to catch his breath in a cancer ward in Florida on May 11, 1981.
The first time I saw Bob Marley perform I was eight years old. But the last time I see him will always be tomorrow.
Jamaican-born novelist Colin Channer is the father of Addis and Makonnen. He’s also a professor of English, the founder and artistic director of a literary trust, and the author of such books as “Waiting in Vain” and “The Girl with the Golden Shoes.”
Bob Marley:
Rastaman Vibration
Thirty years after his death, Bob Marley's legend lives on.
But no other artist has matched his enduring influence
on music and culture. Why? By Ian Burrell
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
KIM GOTTLIEB-WALKER
'A lyrical message of rare power'; Kim Gottlieb-Walker photographed Bob Marley at his home in Kingston at the height of his career. Thirty years after his death, her images are being shown at a new exhibition in London
IN PICTURES: MARLEY
Neasden, north London. 1971. The man who would become the first musical superstar to emerge from the developing world is cooped up in a freezing house in one of the capital's greyest and least fashionable suburbs. He has no money, no passport and no work permit. This was Bob Marley at 26, standing on the verge of greatness. His drab, monochrome surroundings belied the fact that he would soon be painting the planet red, gold and green, electrifying audiences on all continents with an original sound that carried a lyrical message of rare power. But less than a decade after Marley left that house in Neasden to make the journey to the Island Records office in Basing Street where he would secure a career-defining deal for the Wailers – the band he formed with childhood friends Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh – he would be dead.
It is 30 years since we lost Bob Marley. You can't believe it? Just a moment's consideration of music culture now should be enough to tell you how long he has been gone. The flame that, for most of his international audience, began with the albums Catch A Fire and Burnin', shining a new light on injustices and inequalities that had previously been widely ignored, blazed intensely but only briefly. Now it feels like the candle lit in his memory is all but extinguished.
It's not just that the current charts are almost bereft of serious thought or spiritual feeling. Pop music flourished when Marley was alive – when he was in that house in Neasden the British No 1 was "Ernie", a ditty about a milkman by Benny Hill (and still an all-time favourite track of the current Prime Minister). The sad thing is that, in an era when the tourist stalls have replaced the once ubiquitous T-shirts of Bob or John Lennon with football tops branded with Rooney or Ronaldo, there's almost no one singing about anything of importance. When aspiring artists are encouraged by reality television shows merely to replicate the hits of the past, it's tough being a singer-songwriter, let alone one that wants to change the world.
Marley encouraged musicians to think differently. He was an inspiration to British punk bands in the late 1970s and acknowledged their spirit in his own song "Punky Reggae Party". His success encouraged the explosion of World Music in the 1980s with South Africa's Lucky Dube and Ivory Coast's Alpha Blondy among the artists who sought to emulate his songs of protest.
His influence extended well beyond the parameters of music. The message in songs such as "Get Up, Stand Up", "So Much Trouble in the World" and "War" would surely resonate with demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square and Libyan rebels in Benghazi. "Bob Marley lives on as an icon – not just in the world of music, but in the social sphere, at the political grassroots, and in the field of human rights," noted the British photographer Dennis Morris, a friend of the musician. Since Morris wrote those words, in 1998, Marley's influence seems to have waned, especially in career-conscious 21st-century Britain.
Even in Jamaica, where Bob led the way in breaking the stigmatisation of Rastafarian culture and making dreadlocks acceptable, there is diminishing evidence of his influence in popular music, with lewd and violent lyrics often holding sway in modern dancehalls. "If Bob Marley was to hear the songs of certain individuals in Jamaica right now he would be horrified," says the reggae DJ David Rodigan.
Perhaps, 30 years after his death, it's a good time to reconsider what Bob Marley left us. His relevance should be particularly strong in Britain, and not just because his father was an English army officer, Captain Norval Marley. He signed that crucial Island Records deal with the label's Anglo-Jamaican founder Chris Blackwell, after coming to Europe with the America singer Johnny Nash and getting stuck in Britain. For a time he lived in London, playing his beloved football with the locals. He made his most famous live recording at the Lyceum Theatre in London in July 1975, filmed the video for "Is This Love" in a north London community centre and helped to inspire the British reggae scene, opening doors for bands such as Steel Pulse and Aswad.
The quality of Marley's work is rooted in the depth of his early life experiences and his long musical education. Separated from his father, he departed the rural parish of St Ann's to live with his mother in the Kingston slums. "After battering around from this dwelling to that one, we finally ended up in a government house in Trench Town," recalled his mother, Cedella Booker, in her biography of her son. He soon began associating with local musicians. "Sometimes Desmond Dekker would come over and the two of them would start jamming together in the bedroom."
In Trench Town he learnt about racial prejudice. "Bob was different from everybody else because he was racially mixed," said Morris in his pictorial biography Bob Marley: A Rebel Life. "He never really saw himself as a black man or a white man: he was Bob Marley. He always said that he had a hard time when he was growing up in Jamaica, coming from a mixed culture. Everybody in Trench Town was very definitely black, so he was an outcast in some ways."
By the time, Bob, Bunny and Peter reached England in 1971, they had been working for eight years. Their earliest recordings for the great Jamaican producer Coxsone Dodd were inspired by the vocal harmonies of American soul groups such as the Impressions and powered by the new rhythms of ska. Songs such as "Simmer Down" and "Jailhouse" reflected the inner city tensions that Marley had experienced and were imbued with the rebel spirit that became his trademark. In 1969, the Wailers joined up with the eccentric Lee Perry, who produced some of the finest compositions of Bob's career, including "Small Axe" and "Duppy Conqueror".
Everyone who met Bob Marley seems to have been touched by his sheer presence, his lion-like visage, majestic air and disarming smile. "He was extremely charismatic and visually, a beautiful man," says Kim Gottlieb-Walker, who photographed Marley at his home in Kingston at the height of his career. She also pictured several of his famously energetic live performances. "He was very dedicated to his music and his message, very serious and conscientious and he demanded the same discipline of his band members. But there was no denying the pure joy and intensity of the performances."
Gottlieb-Walker is exhibiting some of her pictures at a London gallery to mark the 30th anniversary of Bob's death. "He was most comfortable while enjoying the company of friends, family and children, playing football or ping-pong or making music," she says. "At one point I taped some cardboards to the wall of his house at 56 Hope Road in the colours of the Ethiopian flag and asked him to stand in front of them. The first frame was serious and contained...so I stuck my head out from behind the camera and said, 'You know, a lot of people who see these photos will be people who already love you' and that produced the smiles in the next two frames."
According to the reggae author Lloyd Bradley, writers have always struggled to capture the "essential purity" of Marley, which is more easily defined in photographs than in print. "Bob's face was always as expressive as his words, whether he was laughing, thinking, singing, composing or hopping mad." Women found him irresistible. As well as his three children with wife Rita he had up to eight more with other women, including the former Miss World Cindy Breakspeare. Politicians were also drawn by his aura, in spite of his reluctance to get involved, because of his Rastafarian beliefs. At the One Love Peace Concert in 1978, he brought together the leaders of Jamaica's warring political parties and forced them to join hands during a performance of his party anthem "Jammin'".
Two years later in Harare, at the Zimbabwe Independence Celebrations he performed a set that included the song he had written for that new nation, with its reminder that "Every man got a right to his decide his own destiny" and his advice to Robert Mugabe and colleagues that "Soon we'll find out who is the real revolutionary". Thirty years later, and with the Zimbabwean people suffering under Mugabe's rule, the words are as pertinent as ever.
"The music still resonates today, the people in Libya and Tunisia could be singing the Marley tunes," says Tony Sewell, a former lecturer at Leeds University who is director of Generating Genius, a British and Jamaican charity for boys' education. "You would have to look at the Beatles to see that kind of international currency. It's remarkable that the music has stayed so fresh."
Sewell is another who is depressed by the absence of musicians willing to pick up Marley's baton, particularly in reggae, for which he created a global audience before his death. After an initial explosion of Jamaican talent in the form of singers such as Dennis Brown, Gregory Isaacs, Freddie McGregor and Sugar Minott, the well has dried up. The honey-voiced Garnett Silk was seen as a pretender to the Marley throne (before his death in a gas explosion in 1994), as was Buju Banton, whose 1994 tour accompanying the release of the album 'Til Shiloh drew comparisons with Marley. But Banton's appeal was tainted by accusations of homophobia and his recent conviction for firearm and drugs offences leaves him facing up to 20 years in jail. A huge vacuum remains.
In Sewell's view, Marley's contribution was so vast that it intimidates those who have followed in his wake. "I detect that Jamaica needs to get over Bob Marley in some ways and move on," he says. "I'm wondering if his legacy has left a lot of younger Jamaicans, particularly the artists, feeling, 'Where do we take it to the next stage'. What was refreshing about [the Jamaican Olympic athlete] Usain Bolt coming along was at last we had somebody new."
Jason Hall, deputy director of tourism at the Jamaica Tourist Board, which has used Marley's "One Love" to draw visitors to the island for the past 20 years, says that whenever he travelled as a child he was afforded a special status because of the kudos that Bob's music brought to Jamaicans. "There simply hasn't been any musician like that before or since on a global scale," he says. "Nobody else speaks to freedom, positivity, upliftment and of course love."
In Australia, aboriginal people keep a memorial flame for Marley in Sydney. Among the Hopi tribe of Native Americans he is revered as the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy. But Marley's importance is perhaps felt most keenly of all in Africa. In 2005 I travelled to Ethiopia, the spiritual home of Rastafarianism, when 200,000 people thronged Meskel Square for the Africa Unite concert at which Rita Marley and several of Bob's children, including Damian, Ziggy and Julian, performed to celebrate what would have been his 60th birthday. "Bob Marley for me was a teacher, an academic," a member of the vast crowd, Abel Demsew, an 18-year-old student, told me. "He changed the world smoothly and attractively."
That resonates with Jeff Walker, Gottlieb-Walker's husband and a press officer for Island when Marley made the albums Natty Dread, Rastaman Vibration and Exodus (named by Time magazine as the greatest album of the 20th century). "Bob's primary message was peace and love," he says. "Even in the angrier songs they were talking about situations which would really be best addressed by actions of love as opposed to violence."
It's not that we have forgotten the words to those songs. Those who have grown up with iPods probably have a deeper knowledge of the history of popular music than their parents or grandparents. And Bob Marley's work, particularly his greatest hits album Legend, is on a lot of iPods. When Rodigan recently performed for a student audience in Manchester, the crowd sang along to "Is This Love". "Everyone in that house– average age 23, tops – knew every single world of that song and that speaks volumes, does it not, for the power of this man's music," he says.
"He has left such a phenomenal legacy, such an imprint upon our conscience."
A similar enthusiasm is engendered by the militant "Buffalo Soldier" and its battle-cry "Woy-oy-oy-oy", by "Sun Is Shining" the Perry-produced classic that has been remixed as a modern dance record, and the stirring "Iron Lion Zion", a track that was discovered only after Marley's death.
On one occasion at Island Records, Bob played Rodigan a recording of "Could You Be Loved" before its release, anxious to know whether it would have a wide appeal. Obviously, he need not have worried. "Bob's music is universal," says the DJ. "You can cue up and play almost any of his records and you are going to have the audience singing along, clapping hands and smiles beaming back up at you."
It might be that no one will ever again scale the musical heights reached by Bob Marley, with his influence not just on the charts but on politics, international relations and human rights. But it would be nice if more modern artists felt inspired enough to at least give it a try.
Bob Marley & The Golden Age of Reggae is on at Proud Camden and runs from 7 April until 15 May. A book of the same name is published by Titan and priced £24.99. For more information go to www.proud.co.uk
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