ROGER STEFFENS: The forebodings came true in the midst of rehearsals around 8:30 in the evening. Two white Datsun compacts drove through the gates of Tuff Gong, from which the longtime guards had mysteriously disappeared. The exact number of gunmen who came leaping out, guns blazing, is a subject of controversy. There could have been as many as seven or eight, armed with machine guns and pistols, some reportedly containing homemade bullets. They went room to room, often firing wildly.
TYRONE DOWNIE: At the moment when the gunmen broke in, we were rehearsing “I Shot The Sheriff.” Bob had stepped out, ’cause the horns weren’t on that record and the horn players wanted to play on it. So we were working all the horn parts, and Bob got bored from hearing the “da-da-da.” He came out of the rehearsal room and went into the kitchen to get a grapefruit or something. Don Taylor had just arrived and went round there to talk to him. Thank God they both went round there! Because right after that was just pure shot you hear start fire outside. And all of a sudden you see a hand come through the door like, around the door, and start firing this .38.
At first it was blindly. I mean, when I saw it happening I couldn’t believe I was actually witnessing this. And then when we really realize that that was a gun, and someone was firing, we all hit the ground. And just headed—the only way we could go was toward the bathroom. And we all went in there, and we were waiting for them to come in and finish us off, me, Family Man, Carly, the horn players Glen DaCosta and Dave Madden. Donald Kinsey came out of the rehearsal room too. Carly was just sitting around the drum. Family Man was standing with the bass. It was a small room, so everybody wasn’t in there at the same time. And were waiting and then Bob runs in, and then I said, “Oh, shit! This is it! They gonna come in here and just finish us off!” And what was going through my mind was, what’s going on! Who did this? Maybe they followed Don Taylor here, ’cause he was a gambler. There were so many things running through my head. Skill Cole was in some problem with horse racing, and we were just waiting. And then we heard a car driving out, which was Rita, and then a shot fired. And then after a while the shots stopped. And then they left, and Rita started asking, “Is Bob OK?” At that time she had a bullet in her head. So I was saying, “Has anybody seen Stephanie [Rita’s daughter]? Is she OK?” And Bob said, “Shhh!” And he had blood on his shirt. We were all in the bathtub, like four or five of us in the bathtub! When I came out of the bathroom and I saw Don on the ground, he was covered with blood, his eyes were wide open and I say, “Shit. Don is dead!” I just say, “I’m going home, fellas.” I walked to Half Way Tree. I wanted to get out of there! I just wanted to leave that place because I just did not know what had happened and why.
STEPHEN DAVIS: The Wailers’ guitarist, Don Kinsey, who was in the room with Bob when he was shot, said that it was just the three of them in the room. It was Don Kinsey, Bob Marley and Don Taylor. And Don Kinsey says that the gunman came in with this automatic weapon, looked at Bob, and obviously could have killed him, because Bob was just standing there in a corner. And that instead of aiming the weapon and shooting Bob, he aimed in a sort of vague, general direction, very lightly grazing Bob across the chest. The bullet then lodged in his left arm. Obviously, Don Kinsey insists, if this man had wanted to kill Bob, he would have. Instead, Don Taylor got five bullets.
JEFF WALKER: I have to agree with that in the sense that the firepower these guys apparently brought with them was immense. There were bullet holes everywhere. In the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, floors, ceilings, doorways and outside. I was there a half hour after the shooting, before all the blood had been cleaned up. And there’s just no question that if there was going to be carnage, there could have been carnage.
ROGER STEFFENS: As threats against Bob’s life had become frequent following the announcement of the concert, protection had been arranged with a loose confederation of gang members and others, known as the Echo Squad. They disappeared from Hope Road shortly before the attack occurred.
STEPHEN DAVIS: This whole Echo Squad business, supposedly surrounding the house. I’ve heard that this was actually a couple of cops in a white Toyota out front, and that this was the extent of the so-called Echo Squad.
JEFF WALKER: I heard about the shooting with Blackwell when he got a phone call in the Sheraton. We were in Jamaica with a film crew, and I’ll just preface this by saying this was a period of time when music on television was just beginning to have some sort of impact on the marketplace in America. And I felt very strongly, because Bob toured so rarely, that we needed to get him on film. And the Smile Jamaica concert was an ideal way to do that. But we weren’t going to film it ourselves. It was a conglomeration of filmmakers from New York, along with Perry Henzell, under the supervision of Peter Frank, who was responsible for that Wailers appearance on The Manhattan Transfer Show the previous summer. It was essentially Peter Frank’s film crew. I went down and joined Peter Frank’s film crew and Perry met us once we were in Jamaica. At any rate, we were discussing the plans to film some events around Jamaica the day before the concert when we heard that Bob had been shot.
ROGER STEFFENS: Those who came to kill Marley met a variety of fates. There are continuing allegations of their alliance with American intelligence agencies, spurred by an unlikely coincidence regarding a key figure in the crew that came to film the “Smile Jamaica” concert.
CHAPTER 21
The CIA and the Assassination Attempt
R
OGER STEFFENS: Carl Colby, filmmaker and son of a former director of the CIA, has been the object of rumor and speculation ever since it was revealed that he was one of the cameramen who shot the Smile Jamaica concert, held in Kingston two nights after Bob Marley and his colleagues were shot. Surprisingly, Colby, a documentarian living in Los Angeles, was unaware of these allegations; no one had ever interviewed him on the subject. It wouldn’t have been hard to track him down. In fact, I found him in the Beverly Hills phone book, and a few days later he came to the Reggae Archives for an interview, conducted on the twenty-fifth anniversary of those troubling events, in December 2001. To give these words their proper emotional context, note should be made that no discussion of specific questions was held before the interview began. Colby’s rapid-fire speech and instant responses characterized 99 percent of the conversation, which was also filmed. On a side note, as a Vietnam veteran, I found it fascinating to compare notes and hear of his childhood in Saigon. I began by asking if he had ever been a member of the CIA.
CARL COLBY: I was never recruited by the CIA. No, I would be the worst possible person to be. I’m the son of the CIA director, they already know, they’d think that I was anyway. I wouldn’t be a good agent. I wasn’t interested in that. I studied philosophy, I was a filmmaker, I’d started making documentary films when I was at Georgetown. I was also very interested in art and all of the interest that I had in politics was sort of dissipated and I became very interested in journalism and particularly documentary filmmaking. So I started making films about artists. I had a good friend at the time who was the sister of Peter Frank, a Harvard-educated wild man in New York who had started a company called the Video Lab with two other characters, and I joined forces with them, probably in October ’76, and I moved up to New York. I met Chris Blackwell and we’d all go roller-blading out in Brooklyn at this roller emporium, which was really crazy. Yeah, Blackwell was out there with his girlfriend at the time. Anyway, he was a great guy, very relaxed, and we all went to this Ray Barretto concert at the Village Gate and I remember that very well because I met Perry Henzell for the first time and I’d always loved his movie The Harder They Come, because obviously I loved filmmaking. I’d probably seen it five or six times. Anyway, I liked Perry right away. You could see he was of the same ilk as Chris Blackwell, they’re both white Jamaicans and sort of landed gentry, but at the same time incredibly aware of what the culture was like there. And they started talking about reggae and about this reggae concert coming up, Smile Jamaica, with this Bob Marley pers
on. I thought well, this is the most incredible thing of all, I’ve got to be involved in this. And so Peter said, “We’ve got a really low budget and Perry’s going to direct this, but it’s mostly about the concert, so we’ll all go down there, you and Fred Brocetti. I don’t really know why we ended up going instead of other guys, but we were all part of a little team, we’d just built this company together and I think we all just felt, let’s go, we’ll hire a few cameramen and we’ll just go, we’ll just wing it. I remember taking all this equipment and the soundboard—Peter had everything and we flew down on Air Jamaica. We were all drinking rum drinks on the way down, thinking this is going to be fun. It’s gonna be Bob Marley, we’re going to a concert and we’re going to Kingston.
Documentary filmmaker Carl Colby with a copy of The Beat’s cover story “The Night They Shot Bob Marley,” Los Angeles, December 2001.
We must have gone down on the Friday—I remember we arrived in the afternoon, because we were unloading all the equipment and for some reason I’d been given the responsibility of the carnet, which is the customs documents. It’s about $250,000 worth of equipment, the soundboard, all the cameras, etc. You’ve said it is mine to begin with, you didn’t buy it there, so you don’t have to pay duty on the way back, so I had the responsibility for that.
So we arrived and we’re unpacking everything, unloading, about ready to go to the Holiday Inn in Kingston and we’re just getting into the car and someone said Bob Marley had been shot. And so everybody just panicked. My God, what do you mean, shot? First of all, what happened to him, is he okay, is he dead, how could he have been shot? Also then, is there gonna be a concert? I mean, is it all called off? What’s gonna happen? Should we leave, should we stay? We had just gotten there and I thought well, we’re here to make a movie and if he’s been shot maybe there will still be a concert, but maybe not, but we’re here. At least let’s stay for a few days and see what’s gonna happen, what’s going on. So there was a little of a debate about that. And I thought, shot for what? That was really my question: he’s a musician, why would he be shot?
At the same time, Peter Frank, I can say at that point, was pretty nervous and he had all this equipment, so he basically arranged to ship it all back, immediately. Almost all the equipment he was gonna ship back because he was panicked about the value of the equipment. A lot of the equipment was not there when we needed it the next day. The soundboard I think was shipped back, which was critical to the concert. They must have found another one for the actual concert. But our cameras were taken.
PABLOVE BLACK: I was riding on the back of a bike, going down Shortwood Road, when I heard Bob was shot. Police pull me over. Me and Stereo, who have Mix Dat Studio in Atlanta, riding fe go to Elliston Road fe pay dues, ’cause the Twelve Tribes have dues every Friday. Friday night the shooting happen. Me no forgot nothin’. And we halfway on a red light, and police pull we over and when he look at me he say, “I think they just shoot you.” ’Cause the police take me for Bob Marley. And is a police tell me that they just shoot Bob Marley up a Hope Road.
JEFF WALKER: Chris, Dickie and I went straight over to Hope Road. On the way to Hope Road we heard the first reports of the shooting over the radio. In terms of who could have done it, whether it was related to the concert, and what we were going to do now, that did not come up until later. We were shocked, and it was like, what else could we do? We went over to Hope Road, and the extent of the barrage—it was just amazing! The gates of the iron fence were crashed in. That was the only evidence of any kind of forced entry, so it obviously had been closed. I don’t think it was locked, but they just went right through it. I was not there during the shooting, so I don’t know how many cars, how many people. But the people who were still there described it as just one car and maybe seven guys, all armed, and thought that the oldest of them looked seventeen and were as frightened as the people who were being shot. They seemed to be firing wildly, and came in and did their number, and left very quickly. So in terms of the event, we only saw the aftermath. Tyrone and Family Man were still there. I don’t think there was any imminent sense of danger. The police were there at that point. We made arrangements with Family to come back because we wanted to see them the next day.
We went to the hospital at that point. Manley and many other VIPs were down there. Don Taylor was still in critical condition. After Marley had been checked, he basically came out and sat with all of us. There was a throng of people: Manley, Blackwell, Jobson among them. Bob was sitting in a corner; there are pictures of him holding up his arm with the blood on it. We were waiting to see what Rita’s condition was. She certainly came the closest, you would think, aside from Taylor, to being fatally, mortally wounded. But it was a graze. And this was apparently a near point-blank gunshot.
STEPHEN DAVIS: There was another guy named Louis Simpson, who was very badly wounded and apparently hasn’t recovered to this day. He had some nickname, he wasn’t known by that name.
JEFF WALKER: After he was released from the hospital Bob went up to Strawberry Hill, which was Chris Blackwell’s hideaway in the Blue Mountains. Only a handful of people knew where Bob was.
STEPHEN DAVIS: This was a house up on top of a mountain in the jungle really. I remember there’s something on the first Third World album that was recorded up there, just jungle sounds. It’s just a really remote, beautiful place.
ROGER STEFFENS: With almost all the cameras brought to Jamaica to film the concert having been sent back to the U.S. by producer Peter Frank, Colby and others of his crew left the airport for their lodgings in Kingston.
CARL COLBY: [However, Peter] didn’t want to take certain cameras. And then we ended up with a few of our things and then we went to the hotel and woke up the next morning with Countryman dancing in my room! And all these other characters were in my room. I was in a room with Fred Brocetti. The whole room was like full of smoke and everything. It was a pretty wild atmosphere in there.
Then Perry Henzell shows up, and he says, all right, I’ve got a plan—we’re gonna do this, this, and this. At that point we didn’t know where Bob was, we didn’t know anything. So this was the Saturday and I could see already that there was a little bit of friction between Island Records and Perry Henzell. It appeared to me that Perry Henzell, having made The Harder They Come and being Jamaican, was very caught up in the Michael Manley vs. Edward Seaga political campaign, which was at fever pitch at the time. Anyway, that day was a bit confusing because we didn’t know what we were supposed to do and I saw that there was a conflict between, let’s say, Island Records and Jeff Walker being their representative and Perry Henzell and his vision of what the movie was gonna be. And I think what happened is that, in my mind, it was pretty clear because I was getting conflicting orders—I mean, literal orders: one would say let’s go and shoot this and the other would say let’s go and shoot that, so suddenly it came down that I think Perry Henzell wanted to make a film about the political scene in Jamaica, and I think Island did not want anything to do with the political story. My sense was that they wanted to shy away completely from any politics because Blackwell is Jamaican; he’s doing business with England, he’s doing business in Jamaica, he doesn’t need to be making a film or any of that sort of thing that’s critical of the government or that even mentions the government or needs to be about those political issues.
So Saturday morning I remember we go down to have some breakfast. I remember this battle was going on, because Perry Henzell said, “Let’s go out today and start shooting the film.” And he’s the director. And he’s also somebody I’ve heard of and respect, so at the same time Jeff was saying, “Well, let’s not do too much of this political stuff.” He said, “No, I’m gonna make a film using this as a metaphor and it’s Bob and his hopes and dreams for Jamaica and my hopes and dreams for Jamaica and this battle, really, for the hearts of Jamaicans and Manley and Seaga and how these are the two forces that are conflicting and it’s got great tension, and the island is this beautiful, b
ucolic island in the backdrop, and so this is the story. And it’ll be a political story with Bob kind of giving it energy. Otherwise, it’s just a rock star, just a concert, I’m not interested.” And I thought, this is not just an act he’s putting on, he really fervently believes this, but then I thought, well, how come you don’t jive this with Chris Blackwell, isn’t he the guy that hired you?
PABLOVE BLACK: After the shooting we go to Twelve Tribe headquarters and we sit down and we take conference, and Dr. Pee Wee Fraser go check him, Mikey Dan go see what gwan. Them say, well, them can’t find no man, all of the man them wha’ Bob used to pay fe protect him, every man scatter! That man called Frowser, everybody, the whole of them man and Tek Life.
Bob is a member of Twelve Tribes of Israel. Any man touch him, touch the Twelve Tribes of Israel, ’cause you touch Joseph [Bob’s name in the Tribes’ monthly system of identifications]. So is twelve people vex with you, twelve people who are born twelve different month. That mean, if we did want to know who, we just keep a conference and make the twelve man from twelve different month check it out and we find out all of who do it. We become directly responsible fe him now, ’cause him say all of them he pay fe guard him, run gone. So me now find myself ’mongst Binghi Roy who is the sergeant of arms. And Gad [leader of Twelve Tribes] say fe go guard it. Plus Pee Wee and couple of more man. A next youth named Little D, who went into Ethiopia. About eight of we go a Strawberry Hill [Blackwell’s home above Kingston, where Bob took refuge].
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Page 24