In my recollection, “Work” was the final song [actually performed in a medley with “Get Up Stand Up”]. And if that was the last song, then it’s perfect, because we got a lotta work to do. And you know, the work continues.
DENNIS THOMPSON: After the show I got the call, go to the hotel immediately. I was packing up all the stuff and I had to go now. So I go directly to the hotel. Bob was in his room, everybody is long-faced. I say, “What’s going on?” Tell me the results came. I said, “What results?” Say Bob collapse in the park, Sunday. Result came and he got cancer. You could just tip me with a feather. Then the whole thing came to me about “Another One Bites The Dust.” Some people say he also sang “Keep On Moving,” but I never remember that.
ERROL BROWN: It was the first time I heard Bob Marley crack on a high note. Dennis Thompson and I switch position for that show, Dennis was mixing the front of the house, I was doing the stage monitors. And the first time when I look upon Bob’s face he never look happy. Performance was normal, but I could see something was bothering him. There was meeting after the show, then I heard that the tour was canceled. It was either at the hotel or in the dressing room. Rita said Bob’s sick, he collapsed in Central Park, then I realized that’s what was bothering him.
Then we got on a bus and drove to Florida. We were in a hotel for a week while Bob went into a hospital. When Bob came out he looked so fresh I actually said to him, “Bob, you look fitter than any of us right now, probably it’s just rest you wanted.” He said, “Yeah, don’t feel sick. But I still want to check out what they are saying.” So that was it. And next time I see Bob he was in a casket. No turning back.
DESSIE SMITH: After Pittsburgh we decided to leave the next morning for Miami. Couldn’t catch a flight to Miami, so we had to take one to West Palm Beach and then drive by limo, ’cause him want to get back to Miami fast. Because after what this doctor tell him, he had to get a second opinion from this doctor in Miami. And then the doctor gave him the same kind of report. On the plane all the way back I was all tears, I can’t believe that he was right there on the other side of the aisle of the passenger plane. Was just me and Rita, Danny Sims, Skill Cole, like five of us. We left the band there, they came later. I was just crying. Tears, tears, tears. Right beside him too. I don’t really believe in all them things people said about “them poison him, them kill him” and all of that. I don’t believe that. Just nature. It’s a reality. I don’t know why. Probably God feel he done enough already, although Bob might not have felt so. I figure he was probably bearing too much burden, ’cause when he died, he really know how much thing he was dragging around. See what happened? Everything collapsed. And he might not have shown it but he felt it.
ERROL BROWN: Bob had a load, too much load on him. But he never complained, never said no. Bob left back a great legacy. His music, up to today any Bob Marley music you put on and play now, it’s like today’s lyrics and music.
BUNNY WAILER: Bob Marley’s only flaw, in my opinion, was that he could never say no to anyone.
GILLY GILBERT: The final meeting was in Miami with the whole band. He told us that the doctors said he had cancer and one doctor said he had three months to live and another say he had six months, nine months. Then everybody went their separate ways. I went back to Jamaica. Then I was there in New York cooking for him. I was so cut up about it. I was in Miami when I heard they decided to go to the Alps in Germany in winter. New York was the last I saw of Bob.
CHAPTER 34
Dr. Issels and the Final Days
R
OGER STEFFENS: Bob underwent medical tests in Miami and New York. They quickly confirmed that he was fatally ill, the cancer that had first been detected in his big toe having spread to his lungs and brain. Chemo began in Miami and continued at Sloan Kettering in New York, and his locks were shorn. He was about to separate from Chris Blackwell and Island Records, saying all they could do was to bring white college kids to him. Blackwell was losing his biggest money-maker.
Rita Marley has said that throughout their touring years she was more like Bob’s mother, taking care of him while having love affairs of her own. She had her own agenda, especially because Bob refused to make a will. Still legally his wife, she stood to inherit the estate. (This would lead to more than a dozen years of lawsuits.) Don Taylor knew where all the bank accounts were, so he was still kept around on the periphery of things, though under heavy manners [i.e., under strict discipline]. Each had their own pecuniary interests.
Ironically, Danny Sims regained a primary role in Bob’s last days. He was negotiating a new label deal for Marley with two major companies and huge advances. Now, with that an obvious impossibility, an irredeemable sadness set in.
DANNY SIMS: When Bob collapsed in New York in 1980 the doctors told him he had six weeks left to live and he might as well go back out on the road and die there. After Bob got this news I never saw him smile again. His smile dropped and he went silent and became so sad.
GILLY GILBERT: Bob had a complete physical just before the fall 1980 U.S. leg of the Uprising tour. He passed it. To this day I just can’t understand. Bob played soccer in Australia, Zimbabwe, everywhere we go. And he was playing like a champion. Even before we went on the U.S. tour in ’80 we had a send-off game in southwest Miami here against a Haitian team with my team, America Jamaica United. He was running well, like anybody else. He was kicking the ball like a bullet. If Bob was feeling pain I would have seen it while he was playing.
DANNY SIMS: I canceled the tour when we found out he had cancer. I also canceled the negotiation. We were getting ready to sign a record deal. We had choices of Sony and Polygram. We then were on to a five-album deal, an album a year, for ten million an album, and we could have got it with anybody. For a record company to make fifty million dollars back off of an album is nothing with a Bob Marley. Your insurance is there. How much do you have to sell? You are the record company, you are the distributor, so every sale you get all the money. You own your own pressing plant. If you’re a record company guy like me you understand that, when you talk about a big advance an artist gets. I don’t think anybody else would have known how to negotiate a deal like that. But I think that we were close to closing a deal. But I told everybody that Bob Marley had cancer.
I saw him on stage at his last show in Pittsburgh. I watched every show. And let me tell you something, it was just as dynamic. You know what the Sloan Kettering doctor said? “Bob Marley is stronger than an ox. He’s going to walk out onstage one day and he’s going to drop dead. Just like the times he collapsed, one time he’s not going to wake up. If I were you”—this is the time we were deciding whether to tell him or not tell him—“I wouldn’t tell him anything. I’d let him die happy, because he’s not going to know when he’s going to die. He is dead, he’s a dead man walking.” He thought he could die immediately, but within six months he was going to be dead. And in six months he was dead. The doctor’s prediction was right on time. What he told us to do was what we should have done.
During the Sloan Kettering treatment I had Bob live with me in a penthouse with nine rooms. It was all white in the building, and then there were Rastas up and down all day. They stole the seat out of the elevator, they were smoking everywhere. Rita served Bob and Cindy breakfast in bed together. Rita hadn’t seen Bob naked in ten years.
ROGER STEFFENS: It was around the middle of October in New York City when Bob’s locks were trimmed. Cindy Breakspeare, Rita Marley, a woman named Jennifer and Yvette Anderson were there to care for him while he lived at Danny Sims’s apartment.
CINDY BREAKSPEARE: I think Bob was trying to be strong for all of us. But I think he probably realized that it was the beginning of the end. He tried to maintain his sense of humor. I think it was really hard at that time. He didn’t rest well at night. I don’t think he was in any great amount of pain. I think it was the mental anxiety, what to do, where to go, who to turn to, what’s the road to take.
ROGER STEFFENS: Danny Sims has ve
ry strong feelings that Bob’s care was mismanaged.
DANNY SIMS: When Bob got sick in Central Park Allan Cole was staying at my house and Pee Wee Fraser was staying with friends in New York but was at my house every day. And I was very, very upset that they had kept it away from me. And people don’t realize that a publisher for an artist is very important to you. And nobody told me.
DR. PEE WEE FRASER: I think where any individual could be said to be blamed or fell short is that there was no actual follow-up. We could go into some more detail, because by the time we had reoccurrences and showed metastasis the doctor, who I think Danny Sims had recommended, a female doctor in Florida, she had obviously overlooked a coin lesion in his lung.
ROGER STEFFENS: Bob and Pee Wee were both members of the Twelve Tribes, and Bob often sought his advice and sometimes unorthodox treatments. He and Sims locked horns over Dr. Herman’s advice.
DANNY SIMS: I found out that they gave him chemotherapy in Miami a little bit. Pee Wee Fraser told Bob Marley—and when I found out I put Pee Wee Fraser out of my house, never spoke to him ever again—because how could he tell Bob Marley that cancer couldn’t live in a Rastafarian? That’s the biggest bullshit I ever heard, that’s like a Christian telling a Christian, “You’re a Christian, cancer can’t hurt you.” I said to Pee Wee Fraser, “How could you say that? You’re a medical guy, how could you say that to a person? How could you stop him from taking chemotherapy?”
DR. PEE WEE FRASER: I never said anything like that because I’m the one who explained to Bob what melanoma is. He had third-stage and the doctors at Sloan Kettering said that he would die by Christmas. I told them they couldn’t say he’s going to die at a certain time and I’m not going to tell Bob that.
DANNY SIMS: Certainly chemo is a poison, but if you got a chance you give it to a person. You don’t say stop taking chemotherapy, it’s poison. You hear that from a lot of people that they take chemo, their hair falls out. They said he’s going to lose his dreadlocks if you take chemo, because he’s an artist and all the crazy things. He can’t dance on stage. What’s better than life? The man had all these kids and grandkids coming, he had so much to live for. Even if he didn’t do another concert in his life or record another song in his life, if he was alive he could enjoy his kids and his grandchildren. So I just think that Bob was unfortunate. I was just pissed off.
It seemed to me that Chris Blackwell, who knew the difference, should have, if he was in position to send him to a doctor [should have done so]. Maybe he wasn’t, because when Bob came back to me he had nothing to do with Chris Blackwell. I think the only person who was dealing with Chris Blackwell was Don Taylor and he wasn’t there anymore.
ROGER STEFFENS: After the doctors at Sloan Kettering told Bob there was no hope for a recovery, Marley’s circle began looking for a successful alternative treatment. Roots Rasta claimed that traditional healers in the hills could cure him and urged him to return to Jamaica; the more scientifically minded among his entourage urged aggressive chemotherapy; naturopaths were consulted; Rita, Danny and Cindy were in favor of a Mexican clinic where Hollywood actor Steve McQueen was reportedly recovering from cancer.
DANNY SIMS: I told Bob that I was going to put him down in Mexico at the hospital where Steve McQueen was. I paid the money out of Bob’s royalties from Cayman Music. Then Bob said he didn’t want to go to Mexico because Steve McQueen had died and that was his favorite movie star. Bob wanted to go where he thought he had a fighting chance. His hair was gone because of the chemo. The pain was really starting to come.
Then he chose to go with my second choice, Dr. Issels. So Allan and them decided to have me call Dr. Issels and set him up to go there. I knew of him through his interest in alternative medicine.
ROGER STEFFENS: Dr. Josef Issels was an ex-Nazi doctor who had a clinic in the German Alps, using alternative treatments.
CINDY BREAKSPEARE: Rita and I personally felt that Mexico would have been a better place, because we felt the climate and the culture, he just would have been more comfortable there. I mean, in Germany you couldn’t even walk outside without boots up to your knees. Snow and cold, and you know we are tropical people. All those things affect you. They affect your whole headspace. So we really would have preferred that. And if it was left to me and me alone, I would have said Saint Ann in Jamaica. With lots of organically grown vegetables, tea, a good rest, and just deal with a different way. I wouldn’t really have added to the stress by placing him in a strange place in a climate he hated, surrounded by people he didn’t know. I never agreed with that decision and I know Rita didn’t either.
I don’t know who forced him to do that because we didn’t have much say. We were merely women. And the brethren seemed to think that that was the best place. There was a doctor in the camp, Pee Wee, who I guess weighed up the various track records of the two clinics that were being considered and decided that Dr. Issels was the better place go. I don’t know how he really arrived at his decision, but I always felt that it was a very miserable time for Bob, those seven months he spent in Germany. It just broke my heart to see him like that. I was there for three weeks with him.
DR. PEE WEE FRASER: Consultation in Germany was quite by accident. We were in Bob’s hospital room after Dr. Rittenhouse of the department of neurology at Sloan Kettering had told me that Bob’s chances of surviving beyond Christmas ’80 were very unlikely and I should inform Bob. I had told him no one knows when anyone would die—we lived by faith. I wouldn’t tell Bob he would die by Christmas but I would re-emphasize how much we would have to fight to overcome his illness.
After this conversation, I had returned to Bob’s room. We had just prayed with the Ethiopian priest. Allan “Skill” Cole, Bob and myself were in the room. The priest and his assistant had left. It was almost as if the last rites had been accomplished—the doctors sounding the death knell and the priest giving the familiar final entreaty. Everyone seemed preoccupied with their own thoughts. Then I noticed this newsletter on the ground that was partially dried out after covering some water that had spilled. The newsletter announced the Omega Conference at the American Institute of Science. The guest speaker: Dr. Josef Issels.
We didn’t meet Issels until we had clandestinely entered his hotel. Myself and Allan spoke first with his wife while Issels was at the conference. And we interviewed the doctor in charge of the clinic in Mexico, the same clinic Steve McQueen attended. The consensus was that Dr. Issels was not only the best holistic/alternative practitioner of the time, but he had the highest cure rate of terminal illnesses, viz. cancers, and he had a documented cure of a previous case of melanoma. Probably not as serious as Bob’s, but his track record was genuine since everything had clinical documentation to support his claims, viz. radiographs, all the usual clinical investigations, serum studies, etc. Thus we went to Rottach-Egern, Munich, in what was then West Germany, where they had the program. This was done despite the threats from personnel at Sloan saying not to go.
ROGER STEFFENS: As Dr. Fraser attests, Archbishop Abuna Yesehaq of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church baptized Bob in the presence of his wife, Rita, and other members of his family before he left for Germany. In an interview with Barbara Blake Hannah in the Jamaica Sunday Gleaner, he recalled the events of that day.
ARCHBISHOP ABUNA YESEHAQ: Bob was really a good brother, a child of God, regardless of how people look at him. He had a desire to be baptized long ago, but there were people close to him who controlled him and who were aligned to a different aspect of Rastafari. But he came to church regularly. I remember once while I was conducting the Mass, I looked at Bob and tears were streaming down his face.
When he toured Los Angeles and New York and England, he preached the Orthodox faith, and many members in those cities came to the church because of Bob. Many people think he was baptized because he knew he was dying, but that is not so. He did it when there was no longer any pressure on him, and when he was baptized he hugged his family and wept, they all wept together for about half
an hour.
ROGER STEFFENS: Much controversy remains because of this. Did Bob in fact accept Jesus as his personal savior and reject Rastafari? In December of 2013 I posed this question to Neville Garrick.
NEVILLE GARRICK: No, I’ve never seen it that way. I couldn’t say that Bob embraced Jesus Christ at the end of his life.
ROGER STEFFENS: The choice of Dr. Issels to treat Bob was highly controversial. He only took patients who had been given up as hopeless by other doctors. He had been called a quack, and rumors abounded of his unorthodox treatments and his rate of actual cures. It was also alleged that he had been in the SS during World War II.
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Page 40