“The Legendary Film of Bob Marley on the Donkey.” Bob coming out of the fog on a donkey in Prickly Pole, right up there near to Nine Mile. He actually suggested it there that night, because they had a bit of land, he told me, and they would just take the opportunity to go there and see how the yams that they had planted were coming on. Because before we actually went into Prickly Pole, we stopped at the land and Rita and himself went down and dug up some yams and things. And we decided to take some pictures of them digging up the yams, so we incorporated that in the film. It was the days of telecine, where you got negative film and it was transferred to positive on air. At the time I didn’t realize that I should have kept the film.
This is when Bob had kind of retired from the business for a while, he was getting out of the business and going back to Nine Mile to live. In a way he was retired in Nine Mile. There was something that had bothered him, I don’t know what it was. I don’t know why he was so suspicious of people. But once Bob went to Prickly Pole, himself, Peter and Rita, and we shot that film, then I [was able to bring them] in the studio and we talked live. They showed a five- or six-minute film and then we talked in the studio. That was back there when you didn’t have any tape business, everything was live, even the commercials are live. You had to learn them by heart. I have hunted that film down at the Institute of Jamaica, nobody seems to know what happened. Because JBC destroyed quite a lot of stuff in their libraries one time.
ROGER STEFFENS: Time passed slowly in the rolling hills as a visibly pregnant Rita toiled in the fields planting yams, potatoes and cabbages. Then, a sundering in the group caused a major realignment of the Wailers’ sound. Bunny was busted for herb.
CHAPTER 9
The JAD Years
R
OGER STEFFENS: From July 1967 until September 1968, Bunny was sent to prison on trumped-up ganja charges. He spent the first portion in General Penitentiary. Then he endured a year of hard labor at a work farm in Richmond. There, on the radio on Friday nights, when the prisoners would listen to the program Wail’n Soul’m Time, featuring songs from the Wailers’ label, he heard tracks recorded in his absence: “Pound Get A Blow,” “Hurting Inside,” “Don’t Rock My Boat,” “Hammer,” and “Play Play Play.” Not one of the songs, Bunny insists, became a hit.
BUNNY WAILER: The Wailers came like they were dead now. In fact, at one stage Bob got in a frustration, just fling down his guitar and said, “Awhoah, Wailers there in prison to blood-claat. The Wailers aren’t there anymore, we can’t get it right.”
NEVILLE WILLOUGHBY: After that was when Johnny Nash and Danny Sims came in, probably ’67.
ROGER STEFFENS: Danny Sims was a controversial publisher and label owner. He would play a pivotal role in Bob Marley’s emergence as a professional recording artist and songwriter. Danny and I last spoke in April 2012 at the home of his sister Donnice in Los Angeles, while he was visiting from his base in the Dominican Republic. He died a few months later.
DANNY SIMS: Cayman Music is a publishing company that I started in the mid-sixties. A lawyer friend of mine took me to the Cayman Islands to set up my company, and I named the company after the Cayman Islands. I started working with Johnny Nash around 1962, and we formed a company, Cayman Music, JAD Records, about 1965–66. We signed Bob Marley and Peter Tosh as writers and recording artists, Rita Marley with a recording and publishing contract. Bunny was signed as a writer when he got out of prison [Bunny denies this].
ROGER STEFFENS: For years Sims maintained that he met Marley on Ethiopian Christmas in early January 1967. I now believe that to be incorrect. Because Bunny was in prison at the time Sims claims he met Bob, Peter and Rita, it had to be January 1968. In later years Sims moved the date back one or two more years. Here is Sims’s version of the night he encountered the young singer.
DANNY SIMS: I had a very good friend in Jamaica named Neville Willoughby. [Willoughby’s father was the lawyer who helped set up JAD Records.] I was good friends with his family, and when he came back to Jamaica from England from school he started to work at the radio station. And one day he came up and asked us to come down to a Rastafarian festival in Trench Town. Johnny Nash went, and that night Johnny came home raving about this guy he had met named Bob Marley. He said every song he heard him sing was an absolute smash and that we should sign him immediately to our label.
NEVILLE WILLOUGHBY: Danny was a good businessman. And Danny was a family friend. He’s my niece’s godfather, so he was always at the house. He had his own label, JAD. And the third person on the label—Johnny, Arthur and Danny—was the producer Arthur Jenkins. He was so good, a fabulous musician!
Danny’s very smart, he signed just about everybody you could think of in Jamaica, just in case anybody made a record and then broke! I was signed by JAD too. And Derrick Harriott, Byron Lee, you name it. Danny signed everybody. Because Danny told everybody they’re going to make a big hit. Now he was waiting for somebody to make a hit, and then he happened to hear about Bob Marley.
The night they met I took them to a grounation. Oh, it’s like a dream now. It was like a solemn Rastafarian service. It wasn’t Planno’s yard. We ended up in this place, which was way, way down in Kingston and when we went inside we saw all these Rastafarians; the elders were there. It was like a church service. It was quite fascinating. It smelled of herb. I imagine forty to fifty people were there, most all of them Rastas of all ages, even including children. And Rita was there with Peter and Bob. They were singing as a trio. Everything had the akete drum and the sort of hypnotic sound of Rasta drumming.
DANNY SIMS: The following morning Bob came to our house with his wife Rita and Peter Tosh, along with Mortimo Planno. Bob played guitar and sang about thirty songs for us. I [had] invited Bob to my house for breakfast. But my servants refused to serve him and walked out: they would not serve a Rastafarian. The servants I had after that also refused to serve him, and they quit too. So Mortimo put a Rasta dreadlock named Jeff in our house to cook and work for us. He was a hit man [in a Mafia sense].
NEVILLE WILLOUGHBY: Did Danny bring him up to his house in Russell Heights the next day? I don’t know if that’s exactly what happened. But I know that after that, Bob, Peter and Rita and John and Danny, Arthur, myself and quite a number of other people were constantly at that house, rehearsing things, every day, and then we’d go down to the studio. The main thing, though, Bob was recording his songs upstairs at [producer] Randy Chin’s Studio 17.
DANNY SIMS: Mortimo was his manager and Bob said he wanted Mortimo to work out a deal with us to handle his records. And we started talking; we started to hang around in Trench Town. Bob came up and stayed at our house and took over our house when we were away. Some nights I stayed so late that I slept there, so did Johnny Nash. We became friends. It was at 43 Russell Heights. He was there about two or three years. This is in the middle sixties, this is when being a Rastafarian in Jamaica was considered a cardinal sin. But coming out of the ghetto in America [it didn’t bother me]. I hung around in Trench Town, I stayed down there.
ROGER STEFFENS: Jamaica’s right-wing government’s fear of American-style radicalism at the time led to the acute repression of Rasta, and even extended to those from abroad whose militancy was deemed a threat.
DANNY SIMS: We were looked on in Jamaica as Americans who came there to cause trouble, working with Rastas, going to Trench Town. Once Muhammad Ali came down to visit us and the Jamaican government turned him away at the airport, they wouldn’t let him in the country!
NEVILLE WILLOUGHBY: I must confess at the time, certainly in ’67 when I had Ras Daniel Hartman [the dreadlocked star of the groundbreaking Jamaican film The Harder They Come] on television, and I held up my hand and said, “Tell me something. How do you get your hair like this?” and touched it, everybody in the studio looked in horror because at the time nobody had ever touched a Rastafarian hair on television. As a matter of fact a policeman came from Halfway Tree police station and said, “The man say him smoke herb. Why you di
dn’t hold him for us?” Can you imagine! That is the sort of ridiculous situation that obtained then, but by the time ’70 came, it was a different matter, because Bob was getting famous and lots of Rastas were becoming famous and people start to sit back and say, “Hey, wait a minute. They’re not all bad.”
ROGER STEFFENS: Soon the Wailers began to work for Danny Sims, writing songs for Johnny Nash and other artists.
DANNY SIMS: I put Peter and Bob and Rita on a regular salary of a hundred dollars a week. Bunny was in jail. My contract with Bob Marley said that anything that Bob Marley records during his contract with me would be owned by Johnny Nash and Danny Sims. There is a verbal contract and letter agreement between Mortimo Planno, Bob Marley and Johnny Nash and Danny Sims, made up by Neville Willoughby’s father, stating that any songs that Bob Marley recorded would eventually be put into a broader contract later on, which we wanted to sign in the U.S., because we doubted the validity of a contract signed in Jamaica which was primarily a bootleg market at the time, because they didn’t have copyright laws. So we wanted a signed contract in the jurisdiction where we were from.
In the original contract, Mortimo Planno was to receive 1 percent of all the product we put out, then and in the future. Rita was to receive a royalty in place of Bunny Wailer while he was in jail. Rita was due a royalty on all of the product that we did on her and Bob in those days, either as background singer or lead. Bunny Wailer came out of jail and threw her out of the group, didn’t want her to get a percentage. Bunny did not agree with the agreement to give her a piece.
ROGER STEFFENS: At the time of this book’s writing, Bunny Wailer’s attitude toward Sims has hardened to the point of contempt and fury. Sims maintains that their relationship was not always so contentious.
DANNY SIMS: I’m very fond of Bunny, we always got along good. I always understood his point of view. Peter Tosh was working with me when he died, on a daily basis. Both those artists came back with me later on in their lives. Because Jamaicans are very suspicious people, and they think all foreigners are thieves. They first start to work with you as a thief. The word was “He t’ief me.” So I got accustomed to that. But I had so much respect for Bob and Bunny and Johnny, I worked mainly with Bob and Peter at the start. They were at my house every day. That’s where he met Cindy Breakspeare, at my house.
NEVILLE WILLOUGHBY: One of the first songs of theirs that Johnny recorded was Peter Tosh’s song “Love.” I was actually in the room when Peter Tosh was writing that song. We were sitting down in one of the rooms in Russell Heights, waiting on Danny. And Peter was there, and it was sort of late in the evening, and Peter started strumming this thing, and strumming, strumming, and he started singing one line and do another thing, and do with love, and more strumming, strumming. Then he started adding something, and adding something else. And I actually said to him, I said, “Hey, wait a minute. Are you writing a song?” And he said yes. So I just sat there and listened while this man wrote this song. And when I tell people about it, they say, “What Peter Tosh that, ‘do every little thing you do with love?’ That don’t sound like Peter Tosh.” You know, they think of Peter Tosh as Stepping Razor, the rebel all the time. But he had a spot in him that could write beautiful love songs. ’Cause that’s a beautiful song, “every little thing you do with love.”
ROGER STEFFENS: Unsatisfied with the poorly equipped Kingston studios and lack of formal training among Jamaica’s musicians, the JAD team experimented in North America with some of the finest players of the 1960s, adapting the island’s rhythms for a more sophisticated audience.
DANNY SIMS: Let me explain to you our formula for recording in those days. We went to Jamaica in a time when Jamaican musicians wouldn’t get to the studios really on time and they really didn’t play in key. So dealing with Arthur Jenkins and Johnny Nash, it was at a time that we just didn’t feel the vibe. So what we did, we did [Johnny Nash’s] Hold Me Tight album with Lynn Taitt out of Toronto [a major hit for Nash]. We did a lot of these sessions with [keyboardist–arranger] Jackie Mittoo. We found that the Jamaicans that lived in Toronto were equal musicians with anybody in America or Canada. So we did a lot of work with the Jackie Mittoos and those guys. We brought Eric Gale there, he played guitar. We brought Hugh Masekela there, he played trumpet on a lot of the sessions we had. Bernard Purdie, Chuck Rainey, Richard Tee, guys who played for Aretha Franklin.
We wanted to get the authentic rhythm instruments, but for the sweeteners we always went to America or England to finish the product. We never had the facilities or the additional tracks, we only had three tracks or two tracks in Jamaica. Three tracks was the biggest thing on the island at that time and we brought that in to Randy Chin. The next step from two tracks was three tracks and Randy Chin had a three-track. We financed it for him and we recorded there every day. But when we transferred in America, the next step would be eight-track, and then next step would be twelve-track. So we developed the record a lot different than the average person would because we cut our record in stages and we finished it in stages. But we cut a lot of tracks.
ROGER STEFFENS: One of JAD’s favorite engineers to work with was a New York native named Joe Venneri, who refined tracks there by Nash and the Wailers.
JOE VENNERI: After the tracks were laid in Jamaica they were brought to me here in New York to a studio I had called Incredible Sounds. Richard Alderson, who was the chief engineer at Harry Belafonte’s studio, also worked here and in Jamaica, back and forth, for months at a time. They’d bring the tapes up from Jamaica and we’d fix them up. Our musicians were the main guys in the Atlantic Records stable, they were absolutely the best people of the time. We were like a clique, we did all the same sessions.
DANNY SIMS: Our intention was to fit the U.S. and British radio formats. We weren’t at all concerned about selling records in the Caribbean. We wouldn’t get paid anyway! Johnny was the creative guy. If he wanted it to happen, I made it happen. If it weren’t for Johnny Nash, reggae would never have been a worldwide, international music.
ROGER STEFFENS: Johnny Nash would go on to record a number of Wailers songs like “Comma Comma,” “Stir It Up,” “Guava Jelly,” “Nice Time,” “Mellow Mood,” “Reggae On Broadway” and “Rock It Baby.” These songs were often Americans’ first exposure to rocksteady and reggae sounds, albeit “cleansed” for foreign ears with much fuller arrangements. Of course ska had had its biggest hit around the world a few years earlier with Little Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop,” although it was treated as a novelty record. “Israelites” by Desmond Dekker and the Aces hit hugely in 1968–69, but it was not publicly identified as reggae.
Against this background, JAD has great hopes for mainstreaming the Wailers, and Marley in particular, as the group’s principal songwriter. The company wanted to groom them to international standards.
DANNY SIMS: I was thinking about recording Bob. I saw him as a big record-selling artist. With Arthur Jenkins and Johnny Nash and Jimmy Norman we put the Wailers into the studio.
NEVILLE WILLOUGHBY: Arthur Jenkins was a very good arranger, he was a real pro. I admire him a great deal, what a good musician he was. He could jump on any instrument and show you what to do.
DANNY SIMS: Neville was around those sessions because he was a big radio personality. His family and me were like household friends. So he knew everything that was being recorded. We used Randy Chin’s studios and sometimes we used Byron Lee’s studios, but Randy Chin’s most of the time. A lot of our stuff was done at Federal. Byron Lee distributed “Mellow Mood” for us. The label read Bob Marley plus two. At that time Bunny was in jail, so it’s Rita and Peter.
ROGER STEFFENS: This first exposure to international pop music professionals necessitated new training for Marley and his partners.
DANNY SIMS: We brought Jimmy Norman down to coach Bob. He’s the guy who wrote most of the Coasters’ biggest hits. We got about twenty-three songs that Jimmy wrote that Bob sang. Those are surprises. And Johnny Nash wrote some songs for Bo
b like “You Got Soul.” Jimmy Norman worked so hard with us in that time that I gave him two songs on the first album.
JIMMY NORMAN: My first meeting with Marley, I was impressed by how spiritual he was. He didn’t have dreadlocks at the time, but he was all about music, just singing all the time. That’s what drew me to him, because I couldn’t understand anything that he and Peter said for the first three or four months, it was all patois. We’d sit on the lawn and write, then we’d go into Danny’s guesthouse that we had converted into a rehearsal studio and record it right away. We had a little Nagra tape recorder set up in there. I remember Bob always saying music would teach them a lesson. I was impressed by how they could stagger their harmonies each time, like the Impressions, just a little bit behind. It gave them something special. If it was about his music, he slept it, he lived it, very serious. I seldom saw him without his guitar. I remember taking him home. Shearer was prime minister at the time. Bob saw his residence and said, “Bwoi, I’d like to live in a place like that someday.”
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Page 11