ROGER STEFFENS: Hits began to flow from the raw, bass-heavy productions helmed by Scratch, songs like “Duppy Conqueror,” “Kaya,” and the novelty “Who Is Mr. Brown.” Now it was time to start dividing up the money. Scratch had gone to England and sold enough tracks to Trojan Records for them to release two albums, Soul Rebels and Soul Revolution. It would be the beginning of the end of their work together.
BUNNY WAILER: Everything was happening for the Wailers at that time. The radio stations was playing the Wailers, the records was selling. We were playing on stage shows, we were doing all kinds of stuff at that time. But one thing was left to be done and that’s money. So we meet Scratch at the Sombrero club one night and say, “Scratch, we think it’s about time we get ready now to get money. Because everything’s looking good and we have been holding out long enough. We’re excited. We want to see what the money’s like now.” So Scratch said to Bob, “What kind of money you talking about?” Bob say, “ The money, record sales.” Scratch say, “Oh that. Record sales and thing. How you see we a go do this money thing here now?” So Bob say, “What you mean, the basic agreement what we did have previously, about fifty-fifty split.” Scratch said, “No that can’t work. Fifty-fifty business can’t work.” So Bob said to him, “What you mean, fifty-fifty business can’t work? So what will work?” Him say, “I can only pay a royalty.”
So Bob weak, but I still stay to one side and I listen to the conversation biting my lip, control myself. Because this look like is death now and murder, because this no sound good. I mean, me don’t even want to believe what me a hear. Say it’s another trick. Again!! Another trick! Another trip! Me didn’t want to contend with it, believe me. Me did all just go hide. Go in a corner and get some herb and burn it and just go hide and know say, well, boy, this must be Wailers’ tribulation. This must be our road. So there’s no use even crying ’cause nobody want hear that. Because we never had a written agreement with Scratch first, people would a say we deserve this shit. All them things that me a go through just go through phase by phase by phase by phase, just now flash, everything a flash through my head! And Bob weak, him ask, “How much is the royalty, ’cause something have to happen now?” And him say, “Ten cents off of every record. Ten cents.” So that make me really mad now. So me go up to him and say, “Scratch, how you mean ten cents after every record? After all of this, after everything that has been said and done, you a come now and say this?” Hear the guy say to me now, “Bunny Wailer I wasn’t speaking to you, now, I was talking to Bob.” Well, me lash out, me couldn’t hold that now. Me just lash out and one lick me lick. He becomes nothing now in front of me, where me don’t even see him. Me no respect him no more, me no see him no more. Got mad at the guy and me just go crush him. Me lick him, lick him, lick where the whole place, like about three-quarters of the chairs and everything—for the club floor smooth, well-shined and polished and it’s very slippery. So when I lick him he fell on some chairs and hit some tables and lick all them chairs, the chairs a lick chairs go down the line, the whole of that section of the place clean out with chairs, everything tumble down, all people’s drinks and people and everything turn over. This is humiliation now ’pon everybody’s part. Place a go mash-up now. [Ghetto dons like] Claudie Massop and all the rebels them in there. And them man is Wailers people. So they say to we, “Play it cool and see if you can work out a thing.”
Bob couldn’t deal with it, because Bob come like him shock out of him wits. Him couldn’t even understand it. We were at war now, because everybody feel bad about what Scratch was keeping up, Bob, Peter, we weren’t as much into Scratch as we used to be. But we still had to deal with the guy because he had our rights. So I set up a meeting by his office around the back of his place on Charles Street. Myself, him, Peter. All receipts piled high there on the table. We were going to check what was happening with Wailers and what was happening with distribution and all that record stuff.
Before discussion he called to his girl Pauline, “Pauline, bring that bottle you see in my car with the yellow-looking liquid in the car there.” She brings it. He takes it and he puts it down on the table where all the papers are. We don’t know what the fuck that is anyway, but he sends for it, so it must have something to do with whatever is going to be done. So we were there discussing the business, he’s checking up how many records have been sold and Peter takes up the bottle as Mr. Touch [he has to touch something]. Takes up the bottle curiously, looking on the bottle. So Scratch gets uptight immediately and says, “Put down the bottle there, man!” So we just say, “So what’s so much about this bottle? Why you send for this bottle anyway? What is in this bottle? Is paste? Gum? What is it? What it have to do with what we do here?” So Scratch say, “Put down the bottle, put down the bottle!” So Peter say, “What about this bottle?” and start to pull the cork out of the bottle. Scratch say to him, “Is acid in the bottle!” So Peter say, “Acid in the bottle! What kind of acid?” The guy say, “The acid what them use to cut the metal stampers down at Dynamic Sounds.” Hear the kind of acid the guy have—the acid that cut stampers, it cuts metal, they just pour it on the stamper and it cuts the metal, that silver-tough steel-like stuff.
So Peter said, “What you send this for?” Scratch can’t talk. So me realize through me and him already in conflict twice, that could only be meant for me, because Peter and him never have nothing, Bob never have nothing in the context of what me and him have. I know that bottle was for me. But Peter took it up and pulled it, got mad and was hanging onto Scratch to pour it on him, because Peter wanted to know what the fuck Scratch meant to do. But Peter wasn’t going to pour it on him, he just wanted to make sure that what he said was in the bottle was really in the bottle. Shit! The guy tumbled over about four times trying to run out of the place and can’t move because there’s not enough space for him to move and he’s panicked now and he’s mad. So Peter allowed this guy to run out and make nothing happen to him now, because this guy turn idiot. Is really acid in the bottle. So Peter just take a lick, smash it on the board, ras-claat! It smoke that! Smoke! Smoke!! Smoke!!! Like it a welding torch, it psssshhh on the wood, it drop on the wood. It smoke.
The meeting broke up.
ROGER STEFFENS: Scratch told historian David Katz, author of the Perry biography People Funny Boy, “There was no acid there, that come out of his thoughts. They always think me have something to do them something, but it was only in their thoughts because they know I wasn’t a chicken.”
BUNNY WAILER: Somehow later him and Bob sit down and he show Bob some statements and figures where Rita take records from him without our knowledge that would be due us based on record sales. We consign records from him which we sold in our shops which we pay him the money. Rita at that time was taking records—thousands of records!—which she was distributing equally with Scratch in a wholesale market without myself, Bob and Peter knowing, selling them even cheaper than Scratch was. And he knew all this and he didn’t say anything to us until we were actually going to check money. He showed us all these bills that came from Rita taking records from him and by the time we deducted 10 percent or whatever percentage he had decided to give us from the sales of the records, the amount of money that she had owed him for records that she took and sold covered the amount of royalties that we would have got.
Bob just turn fool. Bob just turn idiot. Bob just walk out dazed. Dazed. And me talk to him and him say, “Rasta, just forget that. Because this is madness, believe me. Disregard that. Please! Don’t bother go follow up that. At least she take it and spend it upon the youth them.” Me personally feel no way. ’Cause them time there me no have no children and me understand what a reach Bob right there so, and me see the position where he’s in, he might get himself in pure trouble now, this could be murder. Peter just went away, didn’t talk, didn’t say nothing. Just went away frustrated. Peter blamed the problem on Bob. That caused us to let go of Scratch. We just left him with everything and he just started to sell and sell and we got no mon
ey, no nothing.
ROGER STEFFENS: Scratch denies the charges. In a 1984 interview, he claimed that he and the Wailers “worked like brothers ’til Chris Blackwell saw it was something great and came like a big hawk and grab Bob Marley up.”* Rita Marley has never said anything on the subject in our conversations, but based on her own published version of her life with Marley, it seems likely that she would deny these allegations now.
Following this period Glen Adams moved to the U.S. and Reggie Lewis was superseded by Tyrone Downie who, along with Earl “Wya” Lindo, became one of Bob Marley’s two keyboardists for much of his phenomenal solo career. He was also the youngest Wailer, deeply intimidated by the other members of the group at first.
TYRONE DOWNIE: I was born in the heart of Kingston on King Street, close to the intersection of North Street, on May 20th, 1956, at home. Peter Tosh used to live behind me. Everyone was into Black Power, like soul power, James Brown, Malcolm X, those things. Peter used to make these Afro combs, carve it out of wood and stick bicycle spokes in it. I used to be so amazed by that, fascinated. And I started to copy him and tried to make them too, with little fists at the bottom. I was good too! But I didn’t realize who this guy was because I was in school, I was in the choir and I wasn’t really much into popular music. My older brother, Donald, used to always bring the popular records home and be playing them. But not until I started messing with the record player did I really get interested in popular music. And then I didn’t know this guy was a member of the Wailers! I mean, I grew up with this guy, living right there! He was always walking up and down with this guitar, and I always thought that was just a guy who loves to sing. ’Cause there were a lot of people like that in that area.
In school is when I really started to turn on to music itself, in the choir. Augustus Pablo was going to the same school, Kingston College, and he started to talk about me to people which I didn’t even know. But apparently Pablo knew all the musicians. He knew the music scene downtown: he would be hanging out. He was Augustus Pablo! He was doing “Java” and all that stuff. And he told Family Man Barrett about me. Family Man was forming this little band, he wanted a keyboard player. And apparently Pablo didn’t really want to go and play in any club on the weekends. His folks would probably kill him. But anyway, I said, “Why not?” Family Man sent this guy to school for me one day, Charlie Bass, who is a singer and DJ-type cat too. And Charlie said, “We want you to come and play in this band! Follow me up to this club and meet the musicians.” So I was excited! And he says, “And you’re gonna have an organ.” Jesus Christ! It was a Farfisa FAST 5 or something like that. With a Leslie command! Anyway, I went and there was Family Man. The first time in my life I actually laid eyes on him. Short guy—didn’t have no beard, no locks then. But he looked like a guerrilla from Zimbabwe still, you know? The first session we did together was “Black Cinderella” by Errol Dunkley.
ROGER STEFFENS: After the Wailers split from Lee Perry they continued to perform with the Barrett brothers, taking them away from Perry’s control. Some of their first live shows appeared to be political in nature. At that time, the two main parties in Jamaica were the JLP and the PNP. In a 1975 interview Marley said that self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist PNP leader Michael Manley was the best prime minister Jamaica ever had. Five years later he claimed that he had never supported Michael Manley. Yet the Wailers toured in support of Manley’s election in late 1971 and early 1972.
STEPHEN DAVIS: It was called the PNP Musical Bandwagon and they went around playing on the back of a flatbed truck for two months.
ROGER STEFFENS: Stephen Davis is the author of a fine 1983 biography titled Bob Marley. I interviewed him in February 1985 on the Reggae Beat show on L.A.’s KCRW.
STEPHEN DAVIS: The funny thing is, the area that Bob comes from, Nine Mile, and that whole part of Saint Ann, has always been a JLP area. In fact, I got to know the minister from that area, Neville Gallimore, and it’s always been a sort of JLP hotbed, and I think that Bob’s support for the PNP just reflected this incredible trend towards socialism in the early seventies. Manley was seen as a savior and a reaction to all the stultifying years of colonial rule. We have to remember that Britain’s rule of Jamaica was the longest colonial rule in history, almost four hundred years of straight colonial rule, from the middle of the 1500s to 1962.
GEORGE BARRETT: I saw one of the PNP Bandwagon shows. Michael Manley always wanted Bob Marley to come to play some of the sounds that he heard. But the reason why: the JLP politician, Edward Seaga, was in the business. He was partner with Byron Lee at Dynamic Sounds. [Manley wanted musicians] because Seaga was the opposition thing in the Labour Party that’s coming on strong. He was not running for prime minister, he was just running for office. [Seaga would go on to become the island’s prime minister in the 1980s.]
ROGER STEFFENS: Manley ran for office at the end of 1971 with the PNP Bandwagon and the Rod of Correction. This was an imperial staff that Haile Selassie had given him during his state visit in 1966, and it became known as “Joshua’s stick,” based on the name that Manley was being called by the Rastafarian community, who saw in his candidacy a hope that herb would be legalized and that their oppression would be ended. Manley held island-wide rallies to which several artists—Judy Mowatt, Third World, the Wailers—drew large crowds, after which he would come onstage.
GEORGE BARRETT: Seaga was representing Western Kingston. Bob lived in those areas. So Bob didn’t want any conflict. He didn’t enter the politics thing. ’Cause his music was beatin’ down this politics that was breaking up the community. [The other] reason why Bob didn’t do anything for the politician in those days, he would rather [not] get killed. For you to go on stage and sing in the sixties coming into the early seventies about any politics thing, bwoi, you have to have guards.
ROGER STEFFENS: And yet, Bob and the Wailers played the Bandwagon shows. Cat Coore, a classically trained cellist and mainstay of the band Third World, was a longtime friend of Bob Marley’s. His father was a minister in Michael Manley’s government, and he remembers the Wailers from the Bandwagon tour.
CAT COORE: First time I picked up the guitar was about 1968, and Bob first heard me play in 1971, going into ’72, with Inner Circle, ’cause we were doing the Bandwagon for the PNP then. We had all these artists that we had to back every night: Dennis Brown, Alton Ellis, the Chosen Few, Scotty, Tinga Stewart, Judy Mowatt—nuff artists.
The Bandwagon started campaign time, late ’71. The election was February ’72. So the Bandwagon started about October, ’cause I remember I was doing exams and I had to stop. We’d play two, three times during the week and once on the weekend probably.
ROGER STEFFENS: I talked with Bunny Wailer about this and he seemed quite disingenuous, claiming that they “never supported Michael Manley.” I said, “You put on a performance that drew thousands of people and you were part of the draw to get them there so that they would eventually listen to a speech by Manley. Now how do you think the public thought about you? They must have thought you were supporting him.” And he said, “No, it was just because they paid the Wailers more money than we’d ever been paid before, $150 a performance, so we did it.”
GEORGE BARRETT: I’d say the same thing to back up Bunny Wailer. They weren’t there for the politician. To me they were there to expose themselves and getting paid. The more people you can play before the better. The Jamaican attitude toward those things sometime is the gathering of people to see them. They want exposure. All over the island! Just like that.
Some people might think that they were supporting Manley so. And some people just go there not to hear Michael Manley speech at all, just to hear the music. The musician is like independents to them. These things were kept up at the crossroad, so it was a public thing. The one I saw was in Brownstown, Windward Road; that is his constituency. Right in front of Club 21. East Kingston, Dunkirk. It’s still a PNP stronghold same way. That night me and a guy name Ricky Valentine went. They no say it’s politics thin
g. They say they have a street dance and Michael Manley going to appear. But we all know lots of gunmen and lots of violence go on around these meetings. So we went and we keep far. There was a bridge, and we sit on the rail of the bridge. So we can make a quick getaway!
When they say “Wailers,” it wasn’t like Bob Marley and the Wailers, it was just Wailers, all three of them. Wailers gonna be there, whoa! Everybody come out. Just the music take over. I don’t think they come to see Michael Manley per se. Is a gathering of musicians and people hungry for the music too. And it’s free. And it’s place to sell little peanuts, sell little chewing gum, it’s a hustling ground for all these things. Gunmen, everybody come, and you don’t say nothing against that party for the whole night. You just keep your opinion to yourself, ’cause you don’t know who you’re standing next to.
CAT COORE: The Wailers were supporting Manley in a very subtle kind of way. I think that they probably felt that of any politician that had come to Jamaica for the time that Jamaica had been free and independent, Michael was the one who showed the most, during the early seventies, directive that he would be dealing with poor people. And it did really end up that way, because in the seventies Michael really did do a lot for poor people, no question about it. All poor people. See, when a politician in Jamaica becomes prime minister he gets pressure to think about the other side too. So most of the things that he does are done in the name of Eddie [Seaga] or Michael, and you know whose people they’re looking out for. But it has to transcend that boundary too.
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Page 14