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

by Roger Steffens

  Peter always had a bitterness about that whole breakup experience, unfortunately, and there is something really to be said about them if they had stayed together because that group would have been phenomenal but at the same time in virtue of the personalities involved, they would have had to at some time be apart.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Gilly Gilbert, Bob’s personal chef, made a key distinction between Peter and Bob.

  GILLY GILBERT: Bob and Peter were different. When Bob make his decisions he stuck with them. Bob don’t change; he makes a decision, he just do it, and that’s it man. Don’t business ’bout whether your color white, or your color black or pink or blue. No racism in Bob at all. Bob just want to deal with people. Out of many come one people. He just believe in unity for all.

  ROGER STEFFENS: With Bunny and Peter gone, Bob wanted to find backing vocalists for his solo outings. He decided to bring in his wife, Rita, and their friend Marcia Griffiths, together with Judy Mowatt. The stunning Mowatt says she was born to be a preacher. She became a pop reggae star in the 1960s and toured the world with the Wailers in the 1970s, gracefully representing the very best public face of Rasta womanhood. Our discussion took place in August 1981, three months after Bob’s passing, at the Seawind Hotel in Montego Bay, prior to her performance at that year’s Sunsplash Festival’s tribute to Marley.

  JUDY MOWATT: Marcia Griffiths and Rita and myself were good friends, but then Marcia said to me one day that she is doing a show at the House of Chen [it’s now called Caesar’s Palace in New Kingston], and she would want some background vocals because she is doing a song that Diana Ross does, “Remember Me”; I can remember clearly. And Rita and myself went to the rehearsal with her and we did it. Well the night of the show she called us on to do that song with her and everybody said we should team up because we sounded so good and from then we started doing a little background vocals for various Jamaican artists in Jamaica, and Bob heard. Bob was doing this song at the time, “Jah Live.” This was when the propaganda came to Jamaica that His Imperial Majesty was dead, and Bob was answering to it, and he called us in the studio to work with him.

  Two of the I Three, Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffiths, tour the author’s exhibition at the Queen Mary on its opening day, February 1, 2001, in Long Beach, California.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Although the three Wailers were pursuing separate paths now, they were still hanging out with one another.

  JUDY MOWATT: That was the first time we worked with Bob. It was a couple of months before Natty Dread in 1974, and then Bob started doing the album, and he said well, he wanted us to come in the studio and work with him. But then we didn’t have a name. So Bunny Wailer was there, and Bob was there, and Peter was there and we say, “Well, what are we going to call ourselves?” Somebody said, “We Three.” I say, “No, you can’t say ‘We Three’ because the I within the Three is the Almighty, so let’s say the I Three, which is the I which is Rastafari, and the three of us.” So everybody agreed to it, and from then I Threes was birthed in Harry J’s studio [and thus the confusion about the correct name, as Judy immediately uses the plural]. And we started the album with Bob and we finished it, and the album was a success. Everybody say, “Well, boy, from you people start working with Bob—he’s really gone through the door now.” Because this was when he broke away from the foundation members of the Wailers—with Peter, Bunny—and we did all the albums for seven years.

  ROGER STEFFENS: In recent years, Mowatt has renounced Rastafari, shorn her dreadlocks, and become a Christian preacher, appearing mainly on gospel shows. She regards her work with Marley, however, as divinely directed.

  JUDY MOWATT: I’ve contributed my career in working with Bob which I know it was really ordained for me to do so. Because I have neglected my own career to work with him.

  ROGER STEFFENS: From the time of the I Three’s arrival, Marley’s career took off on a constantly upward trajectory. Formerly an intensely masculine presentation, the new lineup of Bob Marley and the Wailers offered a visual and audible turn that many critics felt helped them reach a truly international level of showmanship. Three lovely young women, dressed modestly in the colors of Rastafari—red, gold and green—moved in gracefully flowing synch—the movements were choreographed by Judy Mowatt, a dancer herself—singing lilting harmonies on songs like “No Woman No Cry.” This positive exhortation’s sing-along chorus of “Everything’s gonna be all right” helped make it one of Marley’s finest and most notable compositions. His live shows began to resemble gospel gatherings with a preacher and his (all-female) choir. Segree Wesley, Marley’s childhood friend, offers further insight into the lyrics.

  SEGREE WESLEY: The music says in “No Woman No Cry”: “Georgie, he lit the firelight.” Well, this is a fact, but the fire, it wasn’t logwood, it was rubber tire. Because some of the streetlights are out, you burn the tire—you know Georgie’s up. But the porridge he used to cook, we drink and he never charge you a dime.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Chris Blackwell released Natty Dread in late 1974. Island was one of the major labels in the world at the time. The LP featured a painting of Marley with sprouting dreadlocks in a burgeoning Afro style. Concurrently Island rereleased Catch A Fire with a similar painting of Bob with a slightly menacing look as he sucked on a giant spliff, a defiant challenge to all the anti-herb factions lining up to disparage Marley’s open use of marijuana. This man was a rebel, and the lyrical content of Bob’s first solo album left no doubt where he stood. Songs like “Them Belly Full (But We Hungry),” “Rebel Music (3 O’Clock Roadblock)” and especially “Revolution” were a slap in Babylon’s face. Perhaps the most notorious line on the album revealed that “I feel like bombing a church now that you know the preacher is lying.”

  Lee Jaffe, known as “the white Wailer,” lived among the original trio of Bunny, Bob and Peter from early 1973 through 1976, during which time he played harmonica on the title song of Natty Dread, performed live at venues including New York’s Central Park, and produced Tosh’s solo debut album, Legalize It, for which he also shot the cover picture. But Jaffe had a violent falling-out with Marley over the title of Natty Dread. Jaffe collaborated with me to produce a collection of his photographs and recollections called One Love: Life with Bob Marley and the Wailers; this interview is excerpted from the book.

  LEE JAFFE: I was in a motel room with Bob, mid-1974, and it was the kind of a fight where you throw a couple of punches, but you don’t really want to punch the person, so it turns into a wrestling match. Basically it was over the album cover. Me, not only did I not get credit for playing on the record, or any songwriting contributions, but other people got credit for things they didn’t even participate in. We were in L.A. and had just seen the album cover at the Island Records office, which was a converted residential house on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. The thing that was most disturbing was that when we saw the cover, they had changed “Knotty Dread” [the title of the original Jamaican single] to Natty Dread. I protested that they had spelled the title of the album incorrectly, but Bob said nothing to back me up. I was stunned. When we got back to the hotel, l wanted to know if he was going to let the album come out like that, and he started to go off on me about how I was too concerned about my own credit, but I wasn’t buying it. I wanted to know how the album that was called Knotty Dread could be released with a title that means exactly the opposite.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Jaffe explained to me privately that “natty” is an “English twit with a top hat, while Rasta called their hair ‘knots.’ ”

  LEE JAFFE: It turned into us cursing at each other. It started with shoving, but I wasn’t going to back down. And then it turned into a fistfight. We were about the same size. Nobody really won. It just ended in exhaustion, but it wasn’t really over, because nothing had been resolved. We stopped talking to each other, and it wasn’t until half a year later, when I was in jail in Kingston Central and Bob was off the island, when he arranged for me to have money for a lawyer, that I was able to forgive him, knowing th
at his being there for me was more important than any fight we could possibly have. For me, it wasn’t the same anymore between us, because part of my desire to go play with Peter came from the fact that I had contributed so much to Knotty Dread without any credit, it kind of put me in the same boat with Peter. We both had something to prove with Legalize It.

  ROGER STEFFENS: More details of this pugilistic contretemps are contained in our book. Despite Jaffe’s protestations, the Natty Dread album received rapturous reviews. Marley was heralded as a budding superstar with a unique talent and repertoire (the polar opposite of the lightweight disco-ized pop music of that time), and a beacon for the maturing counterculture of hippies, weed smokers and political activists.

  Although they were finished recording together, the original Wailers would do a handful of final stage shows in 1974 and 1975 with stars like Marvin Gaye, the Jackson Five and Stevie Wonder. The Gaye show, in particular, was a significant breakthrough.

  DERMOT HUSSEY: After the Marvin Gaye concert in May 1974 that they did, everybody was blown away by it. I remember being there in the theater and we were so proud. Everybody jumped off their seat for Bob! Because Marvin, I mean, he got upstaged. Marvin had a huge orchestra, he had pulled out all the stops, but Bob and them just upstaged him. And then of course the fact that we were seeing a group of Jamaicans presenting a body of work that was so fresh, so new, yet so Jamaican in terms of what it addressed. Jamaicans were beside themselves that night. Including myself. I’ll never forget that experience. It was a major breakthrough for Bob in his own country that night.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Bob was settling into his new role, and a key part of his mystique was the vibe at Hope Road, his new headquarters in uptown Kingston.

  CHAPTER 17

  Hope Road Runnings

  R

  OGER STEFFENS: Years before, during their sojourn in the mountains, Bunny Wailer had said the Wailers wanted a place to live together as a family.

  BUNNY WAILER: Wailers them time [mid-sixties], we could never live inna nobody house or live in our father house. We never have a house where the Wailers could know say, well it’s our house, our land. So we a look for that, we all a work for that, when Wailers have a house where we a go live one place, with Peter and him family, and my family, and Bob family—one, so we used to think.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Bob initially seemed to be following through on that vision. When he signed with Island Records he was given access to their headquarters at 56 Hope Road in uptown Kingston, which also rented out rooms. At one point he got into a serious disagreement with Blackwell, and moved all of his music equipment out of the main building and stored it at the home he had bought for Rita in Bull Bay, along the coast. Ultimately a settlement was reached and Bob bought the house from Blackwell for a reported $125,000. Buildings behind the house became rehearsal spaces. The broad front yard was perfect for kicking ball. The main building, a modest-sized two-story colonial-style house, was gutted and a recording studio installed, and Bob and his entourage moved in. The singer had a small room upstairs where he entertained a variety of lovers, meditated and wrote his songs.

  The property was just down the road from the governor general’s residence, and his neighbors, the so-called elite or “Topper Norrises” of Kingston society, were appalled at the carryings-on day and night in the walled enclave at 56 Hope. It was the first time that the ghetto had moved uptown, and Marley’s bass-heavy speaker boxes boomed throughout the night. The sounds were indeed disturbing the neighbors, “blowing full watts tonight,” as Bob would sing in “Bad Card” on his final album.

  BEVERLEY KELSO: Everything was just happening so fast. So, when Bob went away and come back he come to me again and he sit down on my mother’s veranda and he tell me about getting the place on Hope Road. He said to me that a little white boy want to give him the place on Hope Road but he think he’s gonna give him some money for Hope Road because he want Hope Road for the Wailers. He’s buying it for the Wailers and when he said the Wailers, what he mean? He said you, Peter, Bunny, Junior and himself. The Wailers. I don’t know how much he paid for it, but he come to me and he sit right on my mother’s veranda. He called the five of us. That place was for the Wailers. So, he said to me as soon as all the paperwork come up he’s gonna call me to sign my name on whatever. He did send and call me.

  When I went there the first evening, he was playing football. He introduced me to Johnny Nash. He introduced me to this lady named Esther Anderson. And he introduced me to some other little people that was there that wasn’t Jamaican. I remember that. But at that time the place wasn’t fix-up like how it is now. They had a gate, it’s still there and it said that this white woman was living on the other side. She could walk from that gate and come right in. But they used to hang out there. I used to see all these white people sitting around the back.

  I used to go up by Hope Road but I never used to hang out up there. I didn’t like the crowd and it was mostly men then. Playing football. It wasn’t very open to women. So when he send and call me that evening he want me to sign some paper, but he was playing ball. But he would send and call me again. And I stood up there the whole afternoon and then I went home because Rita was there, you know? And that was it. From when I go up there that day I didn’t go back.

  ROGER STEFFENS: As Beverley suggests, Marley’s life was changing, with a new crowd surrounding him. Life began to take on new rhythms, starting with food and exercise. Bob brought in a chef, his close friend Gilly Gilbert, a big, bearded, friendly, outgoing man whom Bob depended upon to keep him fed and fit. He began cooking for Bob in 1975 and by 1977 he was part of the entourage that accompanied Bob all over the world on his record-breaking tours. Speaking by telephone in 1994 from Gong Studios in Miami, which he operated as both a production center and record label until Rita threatened to sue him over the use of the Gong name, Gilly described Bob the man, his physical regimen, and the diet he and Gilly shared.

  GILLY GILBERT: I first met Bob through his music. I was always buying his music as a kid, he was the main man for me, until I got to meet him in the early period, Wailers, I would say like in 1969. I knew the music, then I met him on Beeston Street by his shop. I was a good soccer player in Jamaica. I played all-schools, I played for Jamaica’s Juveniles, represented the national team. I was an ardent and good soccer player. Bob liked my mannerism with the ball, they style me as the no-nonsense soccer player, because I don’t play around. I’m all for business. And I was a physical player, love to exercise, and he liked that. Soccer and music brought us together. I tried to play some bass and a little keyboard, but I never took it that serious. But I was more interested in the business of the music, always fascinated over all the aspects of the business.

  My first impressions of Bob were that he always carried himself like a star. Yes, man, I’m telling you! Him step like a king. He was ordained from he was born to be a king—in music, soccer, whatever. But God gave him music and he went and delivered. He’s just the class and the youth. He’s like a young prophet, something destined for this man. It inspired me. During this time he sighted the same Rastafari livity as me. Selassie I live! So we were on the right path. It was good for me to live with him and eat with him, drink with him, smoke with him, play ball.

  I started cooking for Bob from about ’75 at Island House at 56 Hope Road. Cindy Breakspeare was living downstairs with her brother Stephen and Esther Anderson’s sister. Esther was living there before, and then her sister took over. A big yard. In the back there was an old white lady named Miss Gough. Renny and his lady, he was the caretaker. He got the inspiration from Bob too, because when we went there he was like, he never know nothing about Rasta nor no form of livity. Bob vibe just change him fully too.

  In the morning him love him bush tea: It’s like circe tea—mint tea, all the good herbs in Jamaica—mixed into a blend of two or three. Mint or fever grass. Porridge. Drink tea first, then porridge after; drink a cup of tea first, and then eat fruit, like suck two orange.
Then we go jog, ’cause you can’t jog with full belly. Then after jogging, good Irish moss and good porridge. And then we cook down the good vegetable. We always have things stirring. The fire always keep burning with food, bowl of fish tea, big pot of Irish moss. We cook down some steam fish, or fry down some fish, or cook down the good ital stew [ital means vital, natural]. My personal ital stew recipe has the best in vegetables, red bean, coconut milk, carrots, turnips, all the good vegetables. Whatever was in season at the time. Pumpkin.

  Bob’s favorite meal was Irish moss from the bottom of the sea, it’s seaweed. Clean it first, wash it good. Sometime you just boil it, boil the fresh moss then dry it. Then, put a little water, a nice bowl or pot of water, and you boil it for a certain amount of time, then you add linseed, flax seed and stuff like gum arabic that stabilize the moss and isinglass that stabilize the moss. Then you boil it all up with all these different ingredients, down to a nice simmer, then it thick up, thick up, and your common sense says it boil and it ready. So you just strain it; and sweeten it with honey or a little milk. Then you drink it. Sometimes we boil so much that we pour it out and we let it stay there and sit, so that every so often we go there, we can scoop out some, and we make like a mixture, like a health juice, a high protein juice. The blender’s always rolling, always blending. Something always a mix and Bob did cook with me sometimes too.