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

by Roger Steffens

  JEFF WALKER: We listened as Cat and Third World went on and played. We listened to the crowd through the walkie-talkie, the reactions and so forth, and Bob began nodding. I think now we were really rolling towards him going down. When we couldn’t find Family Man, after Third World had played, Cat got on the walkie-talkie and offered to play bass.

  CAT COORE: What we had decided to do was use one backline. We’d use Third World’s bass and guitar amps. In other words, we wouldn’t have a set change or anything like that to go down. So while we were down there playing, the walkie-talkie was on. Somebody came up and said, “Bob is on the radio and he wants to talk to you.” So I took the radio and say, “What’s going on?” And he say, “How it stay down there?” I said, “Sweet, mon. The place a rock, and them a wait fe you, star.” And him just kind of laugh and him say, “Oonoo play already?” So I say, “Yeah, we played already.” “So who gonna play now?” I say, “Well, there’s nobody here to play now. So is either you’re coming or you’re not coming.” So him say, “All right. Mek me talk to such and such about it.” I don’t know who he was talking to, but they spoke on the radio awhile, and then they started asking about if the police commissioner was there, and that’s when they send the police guys to pick him up. That was involved with Tony Spaulding and some people who were instrumental too. ’Cause Tony Spaulding went up to Strawberry Hill and started from that angle, saying, “Bwoi, you have to go do the show.” Eventually, Bob came.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Back up at Strawberry Hill, momentum started to build to a fever pitch. In 1991 backstage at a show in Ventura, California, Rita Marley revealed to me that when she was brought to the hospital with a bullet in her skull, she was told it was inoperable and that she had to remain in bed. By Sunday afternoon, she said, she couldn’t stand her inactivity any longer, and she fled the hospital and stole a car from the parking lot to drive to Bob’s hiding place. This has not been confirmed; others say she was discharged normally, and others recall Judy Mowatt escorting her to Strawberry Hill.

  JUDY MOWATT: I went to the hospital on Sunday evening when Rita was discharged. We decided to do the show with Bob. Rita appeared in her hospital duster and her head was bandaged.

  JEFF WALKER: Rita only turned up there a short while before he went down to play. Bob had decided to go, and Spaulding came up with an escort to get from there to the site directly without running into any problems along the way. As far as that goes, he came up with two other cars as an escort for Bob down to the concert site. Rita, in the meantime, had returned. Her head was in a bandage, she was still in a dressing gown, and not having been there for the whole proceedings of the day, or exposed to any of the events, was absolutely appalled at the thought of him going down to perform, and was against it.

  ROGER STEFFENS: This led to a moment of disagreement between Bob and Spaulding.

  JEFF WALKER: If there was any discussion, or disagreement, between Marley and Spaulding at that point, I think it was because Bob had just encountered Rita and her desire that he not go down.

  CARL COLBY: At some point we went outside and there was this incredible view of Kingston from there and the sun was setting and there were these four or five friends of his, maybe band members and whatever, Rasta, dreadlocks and all—it was just an incredible shot. He was holding, in a sense, the whole weight of their legend on his shoulders and around him and you could almost feel that he wanted a more light environment, he wanted something a little happier, a little lighter, not so everything was heavy. He spoke about that. He spoke kind of about fate and how things are in the world—not pessimistic, but rueful—he reminded me of Bob Dylan. A lot of sense and a lot of world—lots of experience, like a wise man way beyond his years, far older than his age. At some point he was outside and then this car shows up and we were talking also about how you gonna do the concert and everything, and he goes, “Oh, you know, whatever.” And that was when Rita was like, “You want him to do the concert, he’s not gonna do the concert. He got hurt and everything.” I remember he was sort of cradling his arm a little bit, he didn’t seem particularly injured to me, it’s not like he was in bed with wounds and all, and he just seemed haggard and tired.

  But something started creeping over me which was kind of interesting and that was that he, I got this sense of that this is a performance, that this is all part of this incredible build. It just sort of hit me that this, wait a minute, he’s thinking, he’s feeling, he’s building. Because when we were all gathered at the edge of the lawn, he was standing out on the lawn and you could look down with the other guys and you could see this whirling dust. It was late afternoon, you could see this dust now just whirling out there and that was Heroes Park. You could see down the mountain, and you’re high up, a couple of thousand feet up at least and you could see down there this teeming mob, huge clouds of dust coming up, there must have been tens of thousands of people down there. So we were like, “Look at all those people there, mon, they’re there and they’re waiting for us.” Bob was like, I don’t know. He didn’t really really want to do it and it was, is he fearing for his life? Is it the last concert he’ll ever give? Because if he shows himself publicly, he’s gonna be a target again, and yet you could almost feel it was like the ultimate kind of dream. It’s a strange feeling to have this group, you could actually see them begging for him to come.

  And then this car pulls up and this guy gets out and he wasn’t wearing a uniform that I know of. It seemed he was a Jamaican police officer, I mean high up, maybe an army officer or police officer. He identified himself as a police officer and he had a couple of guys in the car with him and he came right up to Bob and the others and said, “You gotta play this concert. You have to play the concert.” And I was thinking, Jesus. And they were like, “I don’t know.” And they were like, “Now, we gotta do this, we have ten thousand people there, we got a situation,” whatever, and they were a little oblique about it, but they were like, we gotta play the concert, man. And Rita was like, “I don’t know if we want to do this.” And all of a sudden Bob just kind of looked up like that, and it’s like he had finally found a little bit of energy, like he had finally woken up that day, and it was like, “Let’s go.” And I thought it was really interesting. It was like the police saying, you perform at the concert or there’s going to be hell to pay—I don’t know what, but there’s gonna be hell to pay: we’ve got a riot on our hands. And maybe we can exert some pressure on you. Now night was falling, and it was like, let’s go. And it’s like he found energy.

  JEFF WALKER: The decision made to actually go perform seemed almost instantaneous. And Spaulding was there. Rita did not even have time to get dressed. She threw a robe on over her dressing gown and a wool hat over her bandages and jumped in the car with Bob and Spaulding.

  PABLOVE BLACK: Me haffe go in the car with him, you know, ’cause Pee Wee said this man here haffe travel with you go everywhere, you understand.

  CARL COLBY: All of a sudden he gets in the car and I get in the car with him and he’s in the backseat and Fred Brocetti’s on one side and I’m on the other side filming him—Fred’s actually driving, and a police officer gets in the car with him. Anyway, he starts loading this .357 Magnum, putting in extra clips and everything, seriously, and Bob was just sort of relaxing in the backseat, kind of like nodding a little bit. I remember with so much chaos around him, the policeman loading a weapon and the guy’s driving like 80 miles an hour and the cameraman, we’re kind of jostling like that; the car’s going down a road we came up around 30 miles an hour, the guy’s going like 70 miles an hour and you know the roads up there, sheer cliffs, and it was like honking and honking and honking, and escorted by another police car in front of us with sirens going and I don’t know who else in the back.

  JEFF WALKER: They went down as the center car in a three-car entourage. In the first car was police, Bob was in the second car and I was in the third car with the walkie-talkie. I was with the Commissioner of Police and watched him as he opened a case on
his lap and assembled the gun that was inside. I called down to the concert site and said Bob was on his way, and we heard the cheers coming out of the walkie-talkie. There was an announcement and we heard the crowd over the walkie-talkie, that incredible reaction. So we were rushed to the stage and there were just throngs and throngs of people. It wasn’t very well lighted. It was sweeping spotlights. The military and police were not evident to the point of there being an obvious force there at all. It was just fans. And I think that was evident. Bob was literally swept along shoulders onto the stage. And we, with this damned defective camera in the car behind him, tried to get through the crowds and follow Bob to the stage. This is true cinema vérité now. This is handheld cameras in the midst of a throng with two terrific and courageous cameramen.

  CAT COORE: When he came down, a mass crowd just carried him in. He was in the middle of a mass of people, and the mass was just moving. One of my friends lost his left shoe during the mass—never found it that night, walked around with one shoe.

  CARL COLBY: They plow our way through Jamaica going really fast, we plow our way into this crowd and all of a sudden I realized the concert had started. You could see the musicians were already on stage, I guess Family Man and the others were there already and they started with this rhythm and I remember following him up on stage and then turning around and it was like, “Shit!” It felt like there were forty thousand, fifty thousand people, like they were—this is not a rock concert, this is like a religious experience, like they’d seen God or something. And he stands up like that and only he, I would say, of any musician I’d ever seen, had the ability to stop time and then take it to 33, to 45, to 78 [vinyl record speeds] and then down to zero, right? And especially with the two Russell brothers acting as the rhythm section. And it was like some kind of a new gospel.

  PABLOVE BLACK: So we go down there to the site and when him look him say, “But, me no even see none of my man dem.” Third World were there, a wait fe back him. Tyrone haffe take way the bass, a bass Tyrone end up a play, from [Third World member] Richard Daley. Willie haffe jump outta him jump seat when him see Carly a dive a come! And nobody never know where Carly come from, you know. Carly must a been there somewhere and hear ’pon the radio say, “Bob Marley there a park!” And him just bolt, haffe come!

  JEFF WALKER: Everything had originally been set up to actually do a professional shoot of the concert and to this day I don’t really understand the events that took place. But when Perry Henzell left us up at Bob’s, he was convinced that Bob was not going to perform. He went down and told Peter Frank that there was no way Bob was going to perform, and he just might as well strike. And they literally took down all of the mics, all of the cameras that we had. And when I found out about that, and I was speaking to Peter via the walkie-talkie, I told him, “Bob is going to be there. I’m absolutely convinced he is going to be there.” This was about forty-five minutes before Bob actually showed up. He rushed back over there with what equipment and crew he could muster in that short time, to get hooked back up. So the concert footage is handheld guerrilla cinema vérité when it could have been state-of-the-art.

  CARL COLBY: And all of a sudden Bob says a few things. Maybe I got the chronology wrong but I seem to remember that he didn’t just start playing right away, maybe I’m wrong, but I think he said a few things to the crowd. Because I do remember explicitly where he actually said, it may have come later, but I thought it was at the beginning where he actually said to everyone, “Greetings,” or something like that, and they were all aaaaahhhh, unbelievable crowd, and it was like he had them in the palm of his hand and all this energy now, this guy who’s been like this all afternoon, all of a sudden this unbelievable energy. And then he ripped his shirt off and he said, “They tried to do this to me; they shot me here and they shot me here and they grazed me here,” with his shirt off, and it’s like you’re seeing Jesus Christ on the cross or whatever, and, “They did this and they did this, but they can’t stop me.” And he starts dancing like that and he went on for like an hour, he just started dancing and dancing and went into some song. I remember at one point I’m filming like five feet away from him, shooting, but then I realized I think I better sit down.

  I had this NPR camera now; I switched off with this other camera and I had this guy loading the camera for me so I think we started shooting as soon as we got up on stage and I’m not sure whether or not we got all of what he said to the crowd or not, but I remember swapping out at least three or four loads and unfortunately because of the nature of the equipment, they would jam sometimes. Fred did a really good job of shooting right here on him most of the time and I was on the other side to get coverage. Somebody else shot too. We were on stage for the whole time he was singing. I do remember looking around one time and thinking maybe it’s not so smart to be standing right in front of him. Last time he was anywhere, he got shot at. Especially me wearing a white shirt and white pants. It was like a rally of some sort. I don’t even remember Manley being there.

  ROGER STEFFENS: That night at the Smile Jamaica concert, on film it looks as if there must be two hundred people on the stage. Manley was sitting on the roof of a Volkswagen bus with his wife and their little child in plain view of everyone in the crowd about ten yards away. Over the years I’ve talked to around twenty people who surrounded Bob that night, such as Elaine Wint, the emcee, and every one of them has said that they were up there primarily to put their bodies on the line, just as Bob was about to, so that if anybody tried to shoot Bob, they were going to have to take a lot of other people out with him.

  CAT COORE: Everyone felt that way on the stage! That night I played bass on a couple of tunes because I was so into his music at the time that I knew every lick. I used to sit down in my house and just listen to Catch A Fire over and over again. So then I played lead guitar for half the set with Marley, because by the time Donald Kinsey came l just gave him the guitar ’cause I didn’t know any of the tunes he was playing. I was playing bass on the first two tunes, then Tyrone Downie came, and I gave Tyrone the bass. Tyrone knew the bass lines. And Fams didn’t come till late. But Fams did eventually come, and Carly Barrett. Everybody just started coming in one by one when they heard Bob was there, they just started. Kinsey was really scared, mon. I think that moment in his life was one he’ll never forget.

  JEFF WALKER: [Bob] couldn’t pick up a guitar since he was very heavily bandaged around his chest and his arm. The band was part Wailers, part Third World, there were Sons of Negus there; the Cimarons’ trumpet player was there on stage, Don Kinsey on guitar. Actually Cat Coore played lead guitar for a while until Don showed up and then took over bass.

  PABLOVE BLACK: Him all a sing, “Never let a politician grant you a favor.” Want to see the man dem, everbody dem a frown up! The drummers were Greg and Compton Russell, them two brothers who were employed to Blackwell. Them is Blackwell man and them come ease ’way Seeco. Them ease ’way Seeco! With them two red, gold and green with the colors upside down! Me never forgot them, mon, them play the congas! Yeah, that a joke!

  ROGER STEFFENS: Black was appalled that the tennis-playing non-musician Russell brothers had pushed out Bob’s old friend, percussionist Seeco Patterson.

  PABLOVE BLACK: That show, there, now Carly come. Me never see Fams. The whole night me never see Fams, ’cause when me look at Tyrone, me see him play bass. And Ibo a play keyboard, ’cause was Third World. Cat Coore on the lead guitar.

  JEFF WALKER: There were so many people on stage that Bob had hardly any room to perform; he was in a very tight circle. Manley was sitting on the top of a VW van not ten yards away. Totally exposed. Everybody there was completely exposed. There were some military people onstage, unarmed, with walkie-talkies, and the spotlights were sweeping the crowd, and so forth. But I don’t think there was any fear in anybody’s heart. This was obviously the event that things were sweeping towards over the last three or four days. And Bob, even at the point when he decided to perform, said he’d “just d
o a song or two for the people.” Then he went on to perform for an hour and a half, and it was the most intense performance of my experience with him. Never once picked up the guitar. Sang. Just sang. He was like a dervish that night.

  ROGER STEFFENS: Every song had nuances pertaining to the shooting, whether you realized it or not at the time, with lines like “One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain,” right up until the final number of “So Jah Seh,” which he had rarely sung live before, in which he wails, “If puss and dog can get together, . . . why can't we love one another?” as he shows his wounds to the audience. It was, in my opinion, the most unprecedented and incredible moment in twentieth-century popular music history: Bob standing there with the bullet in his arm singing a cappella in front of eighty thousand people, just days before a pivotal national election, beside his wife who has a bullet lodged in her skull. What can you possibly compare that to?