So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley

by Roger Steffens

  GEORGE BARRETT: How it go in Kingston back in the olden days, if I’m a PNP and you’re a Labour, if your Labourite Party’s in power and they build a community for you with your house, the house is not yours. It’s for the politicians and the politics people. So if you lose, the PNP come and take the house from you. So this is why you have a fight; always have that fight with West Kingston against East Kingston. So if your party’s out, pack up your baggage, man, this house is ours now.

  At that time the bell [symbol] was the Labourites and the fist was the PNP. When they ring the bell we used to say the bell ringing is slavery business. It’s like flashing gang signs. You can’t ring a bell and you can’t wear red!

  When Michael Manley won the election in 1972 there was a procession from Dunkirk to Tivoli Garden. They give us three or four bus full and ride a coffin, to come bury Seaga! We make the coffin and a doll of Seaga. And we made a procession straight down Spanish Town Road; we’re going to Maypen Cemetery. So that’s where the war always started because you’re entering into their turf. And we never reach Maypen, because it’s like a test! If any of you can penetrate them, then we conquer. But we never reach there, man, because rock haffe drop and man haffe run and fight and stick and stone and bottle—bus mash up!

  ROGER STEFFENS: While Jamaica was revamping its political stance, worrying the Nixon administration, which feared that the island would go the way of Cuba, the Wailers were refocusing their outlook internationally, hoping that under Danny Sims’s direction, JAD would help them become big sellers in the U.S. and Britain. A contract with CBS in the UK seemed to be the big break they had been hoping for, but like all the promises that had been made to them by Coxson, Kong and Perry, it would prove to be another false hope.

  * http://www.uncarved.org/dub/scratch.html.

  CHAPTER 12

  Cold Cold Winters in Sweden and London

  R

  OGER STEFFENS: As the seventies dawned, Marley was being promoted in several directions by the Sims-Nash team. He would be brought to Sweden and England for several months at a time, scoring a film, touring with Nash and ultimately eclipsing him, signing with not one but two major labels and making the link that would bring him to world fame and cause the breakup of the Wailers, with much attendant tribulation along the way.

  ALLAN “SKILL” COLE: The relationship of Bob with Johnny Nash and Danny Sims was interesting. I remember when Bob used to talk about them, he would refer to Danny as his manager and publisher and Johnny was his good bredren. The first time we went to meet with Danny and Johnny in New York was in 1969. Bob was always telling me how Johnny Nash’s voice was like a bird, but I don’t think Bob ever talk it and let Johnny Nash hear. Bob said, “I want you to meet this big baldhead don, my manager.” He used to tell me, “Allan, when Danny Sims take me anywhere and he’s finished talking about me, my head grow. He is something else when he is carrying me out.” So it was interesting when I met Johnny Nash, very quiet guy, lotta smile. And when I met Danny, Danny was the talker, every time Danny was talking Bob was always looking at me and giving me the signal and saying, “See what I was telling you.” They went to the health food store near Cayman Music. We ended up there that day, in the health food store. Danny Sims was a health freak and we were strictly vegetarian at that time and he was introducing us to all these new meals. We were there enjoying and listening to him and Johnny and the type of things they start talking and teasing us, we didn’t do as Rasta, you know, so it was interesting the first day, things that I won’t talk about!

  NEVILLE WILLOUGHBY: See, Bob was never a person who was chatty. When he came to do work, he came to do work. It was for Bob to write the hit for John. He definitely thought reggae was the next thing. When you were with them they were always working at music.

  ALLAN “SKILL” COLE: With Johnny and Bob now, there was always a deep respect, from both sides. I know Bob had a lot of respect for him and the same thing, knowing Johnny and hearing how he talked and how he felt for Bob, I know that he loved Bob very much.

  ROGER STEFFENS: During this period Bob was called to Sweden to help Johnny Nash write songs for a movie he was starring in. Lars Fyledal, a Swedish reggae writer and collector, did extensive research about Bob’s experience in Scandinavia for The Beat magazine. The following is an edited version.

  LARS FYLEDAL: Johnny Nash and his associates came to Sweden in November 1970 to begin filming a movie called Vill Sa Garna Tro (Want So Much to Believe). Nash had had some acting success in Hollywood in the early sixties with Take a Giant Step.

  Now Nash was set to costar with Christina Schollin, a Swedish actress who later became world-famous for her part in Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander in the eighties. The movie’s storyline had a Swedish stewardess (Schollin) falling in love with her jazz-ballet teacher, a black American played by Nash. The relationship was filled with various complications, mostly due to the black–white situation and Nash’s character’s problem with the U.S. military.

  Nash rented a house on Sigurdsvagen Street in Nockeby, which was located about ten kilometers from the center of Stockholm. The writer–producer had decided to let Nash make the film’s music, in order to take advantage of the singer’s name in the export of the movie and therefore add some extra interest.

  Accompanying Nash were Fred Jordan, who was his manager and arranger, and a young white Texan keyboard player named Johnny “Rabbit” Bundrick, whose main function was to supply the songs but also to play the keyboards and arrange the music. They were joined by African percussionists and local Swedish musicians, including a young guitarist named Jan Schaffer.

  Late in March 1971, Nash asked Schaffer to come to the house in Nockeby. He took him into a room and turned on a tape player. “I want you to listen to this,” Nash said. The sound of roughly recorded music filled the room. “The singer and writer of these songs is called Bob Marley and he’s very big in Jamaica and has had many hits there. What do you think? Isn’t he great? Well, this man is coming to Sweden in a couple of days to start work with you.”

  Marley arrived, dressed in a suit, and was shown a small room to live in at the Nockeby house. Bundrick remembers: “This was the first time I met Bob Marley and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this will never work! He can’t even tune his guitar and I can’t understand a word he says.’ ”

  “Bob Marley was very shy and silent and strictly dedicated to his music,” recalls Schaffer. “He talked only to Rabbit and seemed to communicate through his music. I especially remember one time when one of the Swedish musicians tried to loosen him up a bit and said, ‘Say something Jamaican,’ but Marley went even more sour and withdrawn.”

  Lars Rossin, who was the engineer at Studio 3 of Europafilm, where the soundtrack recording took place, says: “Bob Marley was silent and quiet and didn’t like the style of living. And there was a special incident at the house in Nockeby. It really was an open collective typical of its time, and there were lots of persons that simply hung out around the place. It happened at a time when Bob was in the shower and was joined by a girl and he went really mad and started yelling and shouting at her. He was absolutely furious. Someone asked him why he became that terribly upset but Bob didn’t give an answer.”

  Bundrick met a Swedish girl named Marlene Lingard during that stay and they lived together for nine years after that. She was hanging around the house and the studio. “I remember Bob well in Stockholm,” she recalls. “He was sort of pushed away and wasn’t taking much part in the work. He was, for example, living in the basement in the house for some time, just to be alone and stay away from the others. He was sulking a lot and playing his guitar, but it didn’t sound like anything special. When he was in his better moods, he cooked for us and introduced us to fish tea and other exotic foods. He was very fascinated by the snow and Stockholm. Also, there were two girls living in the house that took care of him, taking him into Stockholm and buying him some new clothes, as neither Rabbit nor Bob got any payment.”

  “Bob tau
ght us all how to play reggae,” said Bundrick. “He would show us how the different instrumental parts should feel and be played and give examples. He was wonderful. At the house in Nockeby, I had a room, Bob had one and Nash had one. It was like a factory of music. If you walked through the house, you would hear reggae from Bob, ballads from Nash and rock ballads from me, all at the same time. Then we would huddle together and see what we all had that would fit together and then go into the studio.”

  Marley’s main contributions to the soundtrack were in two instrumental tracks. The first, “Fifteen Minutes,” is a relatively fast reggae shuffle dominated by Bundrick’s organ; the sound is fairly loose. The second song, “Masquerade Dance,” is more interesting. Bob’s reggae guitar cuts much more effectively against another guitar, jazz drums and bass, and it weaves and plays against Rabbit’s almost pastoral piano. The sound is very unusual and creates a rather surrealistic feeling.

  The movie was eventually released on September 4, 1971, and was a flop, rejected by both the critics and the public.

  DANNY SIMS: We had put a record out of Bob Marley called “Bend Down Low” and “Mellow Mood,” and we just couldn’t get play on it. I guess that was a little disappointing for Bob. The problem we had with Johnny Nash and Bob Marley was that Johnny was a pop act and because he was on the Arthur Godfrey show the white people knew him. He did all the big shows that the white artists did. So when we broke Johnny’s “Hold Me Tight,” the producer out of Sweden was doing a movie and he wanted Johnny to star in the movie and do the soundtrack. We brought Bob Marley with us ’cause we wanted to keep him close to us to work on him and get his songs down and keep recording him. Bob played on the soundtrack and worked on the film from start to finish.

  So after we got there in September there was a snowstorm. Even coming out of Chicago I never saw that much snow in all of my life. So we couldn’t work on the movie and the filming had to stop. So we waited three months. And we were on a per diem. Everybody there was getting paid and we had a mansion in the city called Nockeby right outside of Stockholm. And it gave us plenty of time. Now we got a little demo studio setup, we’re recording, we’re doing the soundtrack. The film company paid for it. So the film took a year instead of three months.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Meanwhile, back home in Jamaica, the Wailers’ new Tuff Gong records were making significant inroads on the Jamaican charts.

  BUNNY WAILER: “Lively Up Yourself,” “ Screw Face,” “Redder Than Red,” we had a nice little history in there. Nice run of songs. All these records were selling then. This Wailers business was making money at the time. We had thousands of dollars in the bank! Thousands! The first time we ever really had thousands of dollars. It was the first time where we ever saw we were going to have this house that we had been dreaming about. And Skill Cole fucked it up. Right after this we left Skill Cole in charge and went to Britain to deal with Johnny Nash and Danny Sims.

  I knew Skill Cole as Allan from maybe the age of eleven because of football. He’s just a bit younger than us. Before we go to England now we sit down with him and discuss the possibility of him managing the Wailers’ business. Not managing the Wailers, but the Wailers’ business. We were going to split it four ways. So Alan was now like one of the Wailers because we had to be trusting him with all our money, so we knew that he would be totally involved. And he had ideas of getting records played, and he had his methods of getting records played. We didn’t want to deal with the radio station people, we just couldn’t deal with them. They took our money, they took whatever we gave them, we tried to be nice to them, but they just didn’t want to play Wailers records. I don’t know if it was some plot or whatever. But Allan knew how to get to them and made them play the record.

  We had this banking system where three people had to sign for any kind of moneys to come out of the bank. But Allan had some kind of power of attorney that we gave him when we were leaving to go to England the first time with Carly and Family Man, when Johnny Nash was doing his King of Reggae tour, and we were to have been opening act for him. So we left Allan in charge. We left Allan with about fourteen thousand dollars in the bank and we took a couple of thousand dollars in our pockets too, maybe three thousand to make sure we wouldn’t get stranded with no airfare back.

  When we come home Allan tell us we only have four thousand dollars in our account. He can’t explain, he can’t say nothing, he’s dumb, dumb. Nothing not coming out of his mouth. Later we found out it was gambling that was where the money went, poker and horse racing. ’Cause he’s addicting to gambling. So I had to talk to Bob and show him, well, don’t get involved with Allan. For some reason Bob kind of fancied Allan. But at least we had some money to go in the studios, eight thousand pounds [as we’ll see, this was the advance from Chris Blackwell for the Catch A Fire album]. Allan was now becoming a dreadlock and we didn’t want nobody to hear us as Rasta quarreling over money, so we just dismissed it.

  ALLAN “SKILL” COLE: You know why this couldn’t be true? I was in Brazil the whole of 1972. The Wailers were in England with Chris Blackwell. When I got back in ’73, the money I had made for the Wailers, Bob shared it all with Bunny and Peter. I never took a cent from them, ever! One signature on the account withdrawals was not enough. We never had an argument about the money on the face of this earth.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Lee “Scratch” Perry added to the Wailers’ woes. He had gone to England where he sold many of the tracks he had made with the Wailers to Trojan Records. Bunny claims it wasn’t until Sims released the multi-album series The Complete Bob Marley and the Wailers 1967–1972, beginning in 1996, that he saw the first money from those sessions cut twenty-five years earlier. Sims also paid regular royalties to the estates of Bob and Peter from then on.

  DANNY SIMS: Once Bob started to record for us, when we put that original product out, Bob came to us and asked that he could record product so that he could make a living and to release it in the Caribbean. That’s how Trojan and all these companies got hold of that product. You see once that product was released in the Caribbean they bootlegged that product, those other places. As Don Taylor [Bob’s manager from the mid-seventies forward] said when they went to England, they were pissed. They weren’t happy that Trojan had their product, they were pissed that it happened. And I think that the guy who sold it to them or made the deal with them was Lee “Scratch” Perry. And I think they nearly beat him to death.

  ALLAN “SKILL” COLE: The problem was that all the records that we release in those era, Trojan one month after they release in Jamaica they release in London.

  DANNY SIMS: And Trojan never to this day pay the royalties. In those days it was this guy, Lee Gopthal, who was head of Trojan. We learn after that he was a figurehead.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Eventually Trojan and all its holdings were broken up, after discovering that their various subsidiary labels were bidding for the same artists and forcing unnecessary price wars. All this piracy that Marley was experiencing caused him and Sims to be more careful about his publishing rights from then on. Bob reunited with Bunny and Peter in London.

  DANNY SIMS: In Sweden after we got done with the soundtrack for Johnny Nash’s film, I had a boy working with Bob, putting all of his songs down for publishing by Cayman Music. He worked every day ’cause Bob had so many songs. We did lots of tracks for the publishing company’s lead sheets.

  After the film I went to London [1972] and I brought everybody from Stockholm to London, the guy doing the lead sheets, everybody. And Sony rented a huge house for the band, so we had a group out of Texas. Johnny brought some boys, Rabbit Bundrick and that crew. So they lived in one house and Johnny Nash and I lived in another house.

  BUNNY WAILER: We were sharing a house with Danny and Johnny. There was a lot of girls and that prostitution kind of living that we couldn’t deal with, so we tell them to rent a place for us, we want a place for ourselves. We were in Neasden off the North Circular, I think it was called the D Circular. We stayed there and we rehearsed in a
place called Kingston that was in North London. Johnny rehearsed at the same place.

  DANNY SIMS: In 1972 Dick Asher was president of Sony UK [known as both Columbia and CBS Records in America, names that Sims uses interchageably]. Dick Asher happened to have been Johnny Nash’s lawyer when I met him in the sixties, so he was a Johnny Nash fan. And being that Johnny was popular he went right into CBS and they signed him. I tried to get Bob Marley signed at that time but they weren’t interested because they didn’t know Bob. So Johnny got signed and the album was I Can See Clearly Now.

  When Bob came to London then in ’72 Dick Asher signed him and we put out “Reggae On Broadway” backed with “I’m Gonna Get You.” Bob’s record flopped, Johnny’s took straight off. That year he had three or four hits when we were independent, and now we’re with a major. I Can See Clearly took off like a flash. Bob then was a little bit unhappy that his record didn’t hit. But then he was trying to do rhythm and blues type reggae. “Reggae On Broadway” wasn’t the best song we had, but it was more soul. We still didn’t know how to record him, but that was just a single that we thought was more commercial. And the A & R people thought the same thing. But they were following Johnny and me because we were record people and Dick Asher let us have our way.

  Sony was very generous with money and per diem, because we had probably twelve people on per diems, and the house, at Sony. And then we recorded at Sony Studios with Bob. So when I Can See Clearly Now came out we had to tour to support the record. We did over a hundred concerts, mostly for free and at Sony’s expense.