JUDY MOWATT: The night of the Smile Jamaica concert, it was powerful, as if when you give your life as a sacrifice, and you never cared what would happen, because you know that’s where and when we prove the power of the Almighty. Because we know if Bob was to die then, Bob could have gone, it was the hands of the Almighty kept him.
JEFF WALKER: At the beginning of the concert he said, “When I agreed to do this it was for the people, and there were no politics.” He made that clear at the beginning of this concert. At the end of it, eighty thousand people were there. It was one of the most deafening and intense crowds I’ve ever witnessed. Bob first of all rolls up the sleeve of the arm that the bullet penetrated, and points to the bandage. Then he opens up his shirt and points to the wound on his chest. Then he basically pulled out make-believe six-guns, went bang-bang-bang, like the cover of The Harder They Come, and then went “I’m OK” with his thumbs up and he was hurried off the stage and into self-exile for almost fifteen months.
CARL COLBY: I felt that he was absolutely just in touch with another—with like the righteousness of it all. It was sort of in the presence of somebody really extraordinary and the other thing about it is that a lot of people don’t understand. They think that charismatic people are full of energy and have a sort of energy sparking off them. In a way, it’s not. He was bringing in, he was a very enveloping person, to me, you could almost feel that there was a rhythm about him. He would take you in. He was a good friend. He had no fear. He wasn’t fear-driven. But I thought it was interesting that he was so interested in fate. “Things will be.” It’s like there was a weariness about him, there was a mortality about him that I almost didn’t want to see.
PABLOVE BLACK: When the show end and Bob leave, a me and him haffe go back inna de car, go up back. A me travel as him decoy, when the door open and me come out as Bob Marley! ’Cause them time there him scared, you know. Him tremble and say, “Suppose a man take a next shot offa me?” And me haffe go up front and hold it. Hear what happen now. Before the show when them was coming down them turn on the siren and it was attracting attention and we haffe tell them no, don’t do that. All when he go up back too, them want to turn on the siren fe go through fast, but that only attracting attention to we, and we haffe make them lock off that.
JEFF WALKER: The intrigue of the next few hours, as we then realized that one of our walkie-talkies was missing and we had arranged for a jet to come back for Bob. We were worried that someone over the walkie-talkie would hear what his plans were, when the plane was coming. We didn’t want to communicate over that anymore. So that night after the concert, I went back up to Strawberry Hill in the middle of the night to tell him that the jet was going to be waiting for him at 6:30 in the morning. And I went down ahead of him, in a car with three or four members of his entourage essentially as decoys to make sure that no one had known of the plans. We got down to an airstrip, down at the back of the airport. There were soldiers on the outskirts and a few jeeps with armed guards in them that we looked at through binoculars, so they knew something was going on. Bob arrived with Neville Garrick about forty-five minutes after we arrived and had communicated back up that all was clear. Bob came down and took off. The plane came back a couple of days later for Rita and the kids.
STEPHEN DAVIS: Neville Garrick said when they arrived in the Bahamas they were only given the most conditional of visas and they had to go back to customs every day and renew the visas. When Bob arrived in the Bahamas, they apparently asked if he was applying for political asylum, and he said no, he was just a tourist.
TYRONE DOWNIE: I didn’t go to the Bahamas with Bob. I didn’t know where they were. I didn’t know they left or nothing; I was on my way to either Canada or the U.S., because my girlfriend was living in Montreal. But I didn’t have any Canadian visa or U.S. visa. And I just wanted to leave, and the only place to go to was the Bahamas. So we went there and the night we got there, we were having dinner in the hotel restaurant. And the waiter comes up and hears me, my accent, and he says, “You’re from Jamaica, yeah?” I said, “Yeah.” He says, “Do you know there is a studio here, this white guy has, that he produces a lotta reggae.” And I say, “Oh yeah? What’s the name of the studio?” He said, “It’s Compass Point.” Then I had never heard about Compass Point or that Blackwell has a studio there or even lived there. He never brought it up. So I go, “OK, I’m gonna check this out.” And I say, “It must be Chris.” So I look in the phone book for Chris Blackwell. There was the number! And I called, this same night. I called and who answers the phone! Bob Marley! “You can run, but you can’t hide.” Right? And he said, “Where are you?” I said, “I am here!” And he say, “Well, come on over!” And we just checked out of the hotel and went over to Chris’s house and started working on “Time Will Tell.” When I got there, they were drumming and playing that. That was the first time I heard, “You think you’re in heaven, but you’re living in hell.” Yeah, I felt it strong too!
CHAPTER 23
Who Shot Bob Marley?
R
OGER STEFFENS: Rumors began circulating immediately as to the motive for the shooting. Bob’s manager, Don Taylor, had a bad gambling habit, and was said to be deeply in debt to some very unpleasant people. Bob’s closest friend, Skill Cole, was reported to have been involved in fixing a horse race, and was eventually barred from the local racetrack. Some claimed that Bob was daily paying off the claims against Cole, or even Taylor. But perhaps the most prevalent thinking was that it was a political hit based on a rumor that “the big boss” had said that “this concert must not be allowed to take place.” Fingers pointed toward Edward Seaga of the JLP. To bear witness to any of these theories even now, more than four decades later, could lead to serious repercussions, even death, from forces aligned with the successors of those who came to kill Marley. Several people were unwilling to speak on the record. Tyrone Downie, Wailers keyboardist, spoke to the questions on my seventh and final annual Bob Marley special in May 1997 on Reggae Beat.
TYRONE DOWNIE: Who shot the Wailers? Well, so many things have been said. They say it’s racehorse, they say it’s Skill Cole. They say it’s JLP. It’s hard to say. I heard that all those guys have died and I heard that some of them have been hanging out with us on tours afterward, which is kind of scary. They confessed to Bob!
ROGER STEFFENS: In one of the first of the interviews Bob did after the attack, he said, “Ah, I don’t know who did it.” In 1977, an English journalist asked the same question and Bob replied, “Yeah, I know who did it. The Devil.” And then, just before his final illness, he revealed, “Yeah, I know who did it. But top secret that.”
TYRONE DOWNIE: Of course he knew! He didn’t look like he didn’t know. So after the concert two nights later, I said, “Well, I still don’t know what is going on. I don’t know who it is or what it is.” I just felt like our lives were still in danger.
I think in any prolific leader, any spiritual teacher, poet, whenever they die, it’s fishy. Not to say that they were dead before their time, because their time was when they were alive or they wouldn’t have been recognized before their time. But I just think that’s why Bob didn’t want to be no big star or no prophet because it’s like asking for trouble.
JEFF WALKER: To this day I don’t know for sure who shot Bob Marley. The day that it happened we heard a lot of people accused of it. And I think subsequently over the years that the most credible story involved people after Skill Cole, as opposed to any nefarious political goings-on.
STEPHEN DAVIS: I don’t know either. I do not trust any of the accounts that have been published, to tell you the truth. What I heard from the beginning was that there was a racetrack scam involving Skill Cole. And that the attack on 56 Hope Road was aimed primarily at Skill Cole and Bob, who according to these sources had financially backed the scam that so offended whoever took these shots at him. It’s significant, of course, to notice that Skill Cole had disappeared from Jamaica shortly before the shooting, and did not appear ag
ain in Jamaica till 1980. That’s almost four years. But, you know, everybody was accused of it. Seaga was accused. Even Michael Manley was accused, as an attempt to get sympathy. Jamaicans at the time pointed out very significantly that no one had been killed and that may have been very purposeful.
ROGER STEFFENS: It was said that almost every day people from the Jamaican mafia would come by Tuff Gong and Bob would give them money to pay off Skill’s debts. At the time of the shooting, Skill had gone to Africa for a brief visit, and circumstances there led him to coaching an Ethiopian soccer team and staying for more than three years in that country. He was among those who were in Shashamane, Ethiopia, during Bob’s visit there in 1978, and he remained in almost weekly contact with Marley throughout this entire period.
STEPHEN DAVIS: Since the only one who was really terribly wounded was Don Taylor, it was also reported and theorized that there was some problem with Don Taylor’s gambling debts, and that Don Taylor may indeed have been the target.
ROGER STEFFENS: In later years, Taylor claimed he had thrown himself in front of Marley to prevent him from being shot. In 1978, in a New Zealand documentary, he told a completely opposite story: that he’d had no time the think when the gunman came through the back kitchen door at Tuff Gong and immediately shot him five times in the groin.
JEFF WALKER: Don Taylor was not shot while trying to prevent Bob from being shot. No. That was a moment when Don literally happened to walk in front of a spray of bullets. No one was expecting an attack at that point. It literally came out of nowhere.
ROGER STEFFENS: Because most of the gunmen have been identified as members of gangs controlled by the JLP, others claim that Edward Seaga, head of the JLP, had to have known of the attack in advance. One of the shooters identified by several eyewitnesses was a notorious JLP enforcer named Jim Brown.
PABLOVE BLACK: See Jim Brown now, Jim Brown is a longtime bad man, that man there wicked! Jim Brown a Labourite fe true. But I cannot say they were Seaga people who came to kill Bob. I can’t say that. ’Cause the political climate in Jamaica, a man will be for Seaga this election and the next election him switch and gone over the next side. Basically a politician is a traitor, at odds, so he will swing anywhere the money is. Anywhere!
ROGER STEFFENS: The deeper one gets into the political story, the more complicated things become.
PABLOVE BLACK: You see, the same man what shoot Bob, Bob used to give them money too, fe protect him. The same set of man them, ’cause Bob did give money to the two side, PNP and JLP bad men get money. Them only want hear Bob Marley come, and have a little bag over him shoulder, man ride from all part of the ghetto, come look for Bob Marley. In no time, is thirty thousand dollars that him give way. That a nothin’ to him.
AL ANDERSON: Every day!
PABLOVE BLACK: Yeah, nothin’ to him to just give away money so.
ROGER STEFFENS: Today, the preponderance of evidence seems to indict the Seaga forces, although doubts remain about the other main theory.
STEPHEN DAVIS: Not if it was a racetrack thing. Not if it was a problem with fixed races at Caymanas Park. Seaga wouldn’t be involved with that necessarily. I asked Michael Manley. I said, “Who shot Bob Marley?” just as you’re asking us, and he said that the police spent the next week trying to trace the car that the gunmen had used, back to Tivoli Gardens, which was Seaga’s constituency down in West Kingston. And they couldn’t. And that it was, in Michael Manley’s words, “an extremely professional and well-organized job, and perhaps to the fact that no one was killed.”
CAT COORE: Bob got on stage, he did a great show. Very, very meaningful show. And in a way, that really helped to bury the opposition to Michael [Manley] for that election totally. Because when people thought to themselves that if Bob was doing a show for the PNP, as they were accusing him of, the PNP wouldn’t go and shoot him at that time. So the obvious thing to think [was that the shooters were from] the JLP, ’cause we don’t have more than the two parties. So whatever took place, whatever personal things, vendetta, was taken out on Bob, I don’t really want to speculate about, but it reflected badly on the political system at the time. ’Cause it made it seem as if one party was fighting very hard against the next one, to the point where they would attack Bob Marley. That is how it looked at the time. And it was a very sad time for Jamaica. And when the One Love concert came sixteen months later and both Michael and Eddie [JLP leader Edward Seaga] came onstage and were reunited with Bob, the country sort of felt really good about it. It’s unfortunate, because Eddie is a man who also care for and love Bob very much. I really feel that way because there’s no Jamaican who don’t love Bob Marley to the ground. I’m talking about the most uptown Topper Norris Syrian woman or white Jamaican woman—they love Bob Marley. Because anywhere they go in this world, they have to deal with Bob Marley.
ROGER STEFFENS: Don Taylor alleges in his autobiography that he and Bob were taken to Trench Town at an unspecified date afterwards and watched as two of the supposed gunmen were hung. There has never been any independent verification of this, and knowing Bob’s tendency toward mercy, it is highly doubtful. Several of his closest associates have told me off the record that the hanging rumor is nonsense.
Yet the mystery remains. Further rumors abound, most especially the never-ending story (fictionalized in the recent Booker Prize–winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James) that Carl Colby was responsible not only for somehow arranging the shooting but also for giving Bob a poisoned boot that allegedly gave him cancer, a notion shot down continually by doctors who have studied the allegation. When I confronted Colby with these allegations he was astonished, as he had never heard any of them before our interview.
CARL COLBY: When I looked at what I saw—and I’ve seen military people in action and others and it did not seem like anything particularly professional—it seemed like more either like a robbery, or a thing you’d do momentarily, you know, you’re opportunistic; there’s an advantage, you try to take it, you try to shoot at so and so and then, boom, you leave. A massive act of intimidation. And the other thing I felt, there was a rumor that there was a gambling debt—that was the big rumor all that weekend. The other rumor was that maybe it was political because of what was going on. I didn’t really understand that, because why shoot at Bob? Who are you gonna hurt by killing Bob? Or shooting at the band? If you’re gonna kill somebody, you do it methodically, you don’t just come in and pam-pam-pam! Wild West like, bad shots and no follow-through! If somebody is a professional, they continue, they stay and they do the job and then they leave. Because why? Because they don’t get paid for missing.
ROGER STEFFENS: During my interview with Carl Colby, I read him a passage from a book by Alex Constantine which had been excerpted in a magazine, as I wanted to give him a chance to respond. “Only a handful of Marley’s most trusted comrades knew of the band’s whereabouts before the festival yet a member of the film crew, or so he claimed, reportedly, he didn’t have a camera, managed to talk his way past machete-bearing Rastas to enter the Hope Road encampment”—it wasn’t Hope Road, as we’ve seen—“one Carl Colby, son of the late CIA director William Colby. While the band prepared for the concert, a gift was delivered, according to a witness at the enclave, a new pair of boots for Bob Marley. He put his foot in and said, ‘Ow.’ A friend got in there and he said, ‘Let’s get in the boot,’ and he pulled a length of copper wire out. It was embedded in the boot. Had the wire been treated chemically with a carcinogenic toxin? The appearance of Colby at Marley’s compound was certainly provocative.”
CARL COLBY: Frankly, I’m outraged that anyone would accuse me of doing anything to harm, much less lead to the death of, the incomparable Bob Marley, whom I consider to be one of the greatest musicians and artists since the birth of the cool in the 1950s. First of all, the truth is that I was a professional documentary filmmaker, brought down to Jamaica from New York by Chris Blackwell and Perry Henzell. To address this false and extremely inflammatory a
ccusation directly, I was up at Chris Blackwell’s house in the mountains above Kingston as part of this filmmaking effort. I was accompanied by Island Records publicist Jeff Walker. We felt that we had been commissioned by Chris Blackwell to make a film of the Smile Jamaica concert and about Bob, so we simply wanted to follow through and do our jobs. I had plenty of experience with unusual and somewhat unstable situations as a young boy, including living for three and a half years in Saigon, so the thought of going up to talk to a famous reggae musician like Bob, whom I admired greatly, was not something to be feared. I was excited. I was going to meet Bob Marley and it was my job to shoot a film about him—so I went. And, by the way, no one there knew who my father was—and by that time, December 5, 1976, my father had resigned from the CIA. He had been fired by President Gerald Ford. So, my word to this Alex Constantine is, please check your facts first—and your sources; simply shoddy, piss-poor journalism in my opinion and an outrageous defamation of my character.
The story about a boot being delivered is pure nonsense. I never saw or heard about any boot being delivered to Bob. And anyone who was there would know that Bob was in no mood for hijinks or in any way interested in boots. He was recuperating from some serious injuries and yet he was gracious enough to talk to Jeff and me about his music, about Jamaica, about the politics, and about himself—his hopes and dreams for Jamaica and for his people. He was not that accessible when we first got there. Yes, there were a few machete-wielding guys guarding the compound when we got there, but Jeff simply said we were from Island Records and the door was opened. Again, remember Island Records was Marley’s record company—we were welcome. It took a couple of hours just hanging around to get to the point of approaching Bob and getting him to talk. Remember, he’d been shot—and he was recuperating, and he was exhausted.
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Page 27