Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright

by Hank Bordowitz

  Older Rastas from the neighborhood came wandering up to the house, some of them ragged, and I looked at them and then at Tom Hayes, who was wearing a pair of pants that probably cost $50, a Billy Preston T-shirt (I was in my Grand Funk) and a razor cut, and the irony turned to an absurdity so extreme it became a kind of obscenity. It was, at the very least, embarrassing, for me and for these people, and I seriously doubt if for all the talk of brotherhood of Rastafari there is anything beyond that embarrassment which they and I will ever be able to share. What I mean to say is I’ve been on lots of press junkets before, but this was the first one into Darkest Africa. What I meant to say is that a whole bunch of people were flown, all expenses paid, to Jamaica, so that we could look at these people, and go back and write stories which would help sell albums to white middle-class American kids who think it’s romantic to be black and dirt-poor and hungry and illiterate and sick with things you can’t name because you’ve never been to a doctor and sit around all day smoking ganja and beating on bongo drums because you have no other options in life. I know, because I am one of those kids, caught in the contradiction—hell, man, my current favorite group is Burning Spear. But I wouldn’t want to organize a press party in that village they come from in those hills they sing about. And not because I don’t want to pollute the “purity” of their culture with Babylon, either—because there is something intrinsically insulting about it.

  At length we were able to leave. Gonzo had been edgily hunching around the doorway of the house, prodding Wooly and Tom Hayes, who as an upright drinking Englishman was much more amenable, to “get the fuck back to the hotel before the bar closes, man!” We trooped out into the street, and some of the Rastas followed us. A curious thing happened then: they had smoked only herb inside, but as soon as we hit the lane where the cars were parked they started asking for cigarettes, which we of course gave them. As Gonzo put it later: “I felt like we should have had Hershey Bars to distribute.” They told us that in the middle of the band’s performance (which was not in fact a Grounation at all but rather a religious concert for children—they would never let us come to the adults’ affair) the police and soldiers had driven up to the place, looked in the door, and then split. I told them that the same thing happened when a rock ‘n’ roll band tried to practice in my neighborhood, but somehow it didn’t ring quite the same. (Kingston police, I have been told, are not averse to such practices as walking into a house unannounced and for no reason in the middle of the night, interrupting a couple while they are fucking, pulling the man out of bed and hauling him in for interrogation and other sports that can be easily imagined.) I looked up and saw, at the top of a pole on the corner, two strips of black, battered metal, upon which had been crudely written in white paint instructions to go to certain addresses in the neighborhood for the mending of clothes, or to buy fish. “Look,” I said to Gonzo and Tom Hayes, “advertisements.” The three of us stared up, just stared, and said nothing.

  The Rastas stood around or sat on the back bumper of Killy’s Volks, polite and friendly conversation was made; they invited us to come back and see them sometime. Right. Eventually, without any true goodbyes, there was kind of a mutual semi-embarrassed separation, as they went back inside and we prepared to get in our cars. It was at this point that we discovered one of our party was missing. Peter Simon was still in the house. Nobody seemed particularly inclined to go in after him, so we just sort of stood around until some of them brought him out, stoned and beaming and holding hands with them like a brother to the world. Killy then told us that he had to take some members of the band home in his car, and we would all have to ride back in Stephen Davis’ Toyota, plus we could drive home Chinna, the lead guitarist. Killy also said that he needed gas, produced a hose, and siphoned an indeterminate quantity out of the Toyota and into the Volks. He left us with instructions on how to get out of this neighborhood, said that in any case we had Chinna to guide us, and drove off. Now we had to squeeze seven people into the Toyota—Gonzo, Hayes, Wooly, and myself, three of whom are around six feet tall and in other respects large, into the backseat; in the front seat Stephen Davis driving, Peter Simon straddling the two front seats with his arm around the back of the seat where Chinna rode shotgun. No one spoke to Chinna; in fact, once out on a main road several of us began laughing like maniacs, and I still wonder what he must have been thinking. But some sort of pressure was off, and also the only way four of us could fit in the backseat was for one of Wooly’s legs to hang out the window. Stephen Davis almost ran off the road the first time he saw a human foot bobbing up by his window. We drove for miles, followed Chinna’s instructions until we arrived at what looked like a suburban 1950s American tract home, except that there were fields around it. It wasn’t bad for Jamaica. As Chinna took his guitar through the front door, Gonzo cracked: “I’ll bet he’s saying, ‘Hi, honey, I’m home!’” We wondered if Ras Michael and the rest had left in Killy’s Volks for equally middle-class abodes, and Gonzo also revealed that Killy had burned him for the four dollars worth of dope he’d copped for him on the way to the Grounation. He had rolled part of it up into about four joints which he’d passed to us while the band was playing, but when Gonzo asked him for the rest of it at the end he said that we (I and I, Ethiopians and ofays) had smoked it all up. Proving, declared Gonzo, that the Rastas were not Righteous, after all.

  Back at the hotel, Tom Hayes, Gonzo and I closed the bar. I had Courvoisier with Heineken chasers. Gonzo said, “Yes, tonight we have been where few white men have dared venture!” Hayes remarked that Peter Simon did not know how lucky he was to be alive.

  Stephen Davis, Peter Simon, Wooly and I are driving to Harry J.’s studio. Harry (Johnson) is another prolific island (and Island) pro-ducer; Marley has recorded at his studio a lot, and in fact when we get there Wooly sees a car that looks like Marley’s BMW and for some reason gets nervous. It seems implicit that if Bob is there visiting Harry J. for any reason, we will have to turn around and go back to the hotel, and it occurs to me that it’s a wonder Marley keeps any perspective at all with everybody treating him like this. But it’s not his car, after all; we go inside.

  In the car all morning Wooly has been saying “Jah Rastafari” and singing Ras Michael’s “None a Jah Jah Children No Cry”; the night before, as we stood beside the door, I had asked him if Island was thinking of signing Ras Michael, and he had said no, but that after what we had just seen it might be a good idea. Now he has offered to make me a copy (a dub!) of his tape of Ras Michael’s performance, and I tell him I’ve gotta have a cassette, and that if he can’t make one easily not to go through the hassle, because I feel that Ras Michael’s show is one of those things where you just would have had to have been there, and I probably won’t play it much, especially if it’s on reel-to-reel which I don’t have equipment for. He insists, though: “Don’t you want a tape to play for your friends and turn ’em on?”

  It seems to me that the next logical step is home movies. Why didn’t somebody give Peter Simon a Portapak?

  Inside Harry J.’s studio, Wooly gives him the English edition, on the Island label, of his Jamaican hit with the Heptones, “Mama Say.” Harry explodes. “What kinda crap is this? I produced this fucking record, and on this label it credit Danny Holloway [an English producer]. All he did was mix it! This’s a fucking bummaclot.” I ask him if this kind of thing happens often. “Never before with Chris Blackwell. Always I’ve trusted him.” Something else occurs to me, very belatedly in fact, something so basic I had missed it all through my stay on the island: I ask him if very many Jamaican artists have managers. He looks at me as if I were the most pathetic ignoramus alive. “Not many,” he says.

  When we get back to the hotel, who do we run into in the lobby but Chris Blackwell himself. He has been in England over the weekend, and is just returning. Wooly is very agitated about Harry’s complaint, and tells Blackwell the story. Chris is not perturbed at all. “It’s a very simple problem, really. Harry J. has a big ego an
d so does Danny Holloway.” He smiles. “And between the two of them, the Heptones haven’t got a chance.”

  Two hours later. I’ve checked out of the Sheraton, and am in a cab on my way to the airport. I ask the driver to go by way of the Gun Court, an island attraction I’d heard about and wanted to see before I ever got here, a legend that preceded my tourism. The Gun Court was set up by the Manley regime as a way of dealing with all the berserk pistoleros and violent political agitators. What it means is that anybody caught by the police with even a bullet, even a shell casing, or any type of explosives in his possession, is whisked before a tribunal which asks him why he has these illegal and dangerous items. If he doesn’t have the right answer, he is thrown in the stockade behind the Gun Court for life. Sic. 99.9% of Jamaicans who appear before the Gun Court have the wrong answer. And now here it is: high fences with enormous rolls of barbed wire at the top, guard towers, a yard where you can see young blacks milling around. The front of the place painted a garish red. It looks like a concentration camp, and that’s what it is. I ask the cab driver what he thinks of it.

  “I don’ mind Gun Court so much,” he says. “Other things bother me much more. On this island there is little real freedom, and now Manley is dealing with the Cubans, and we fear Jamaica will become like Cuba, where there is no freedom. No freedom under Communism, and al-ready I don’t feel free here anymore.” He pointed to a pile of giant rocks left at some roadside excavation site. “You see those rocks, that’s how we feel in Jamaica, like being crushed down by all those, underneath them. Manley is a dictator, of course. Under him today, the people are unhappy, and sometimes driving in the cab I don’t say what I think if the rider asks me a question about politics, because I don’t know who he is. He might go and tell the police, and I might not be here later. The Ras-tas are something else—they don’ matter at all. I want to always live in Jamaica, but now I am not so sure. All I want now is my freedom.”

  3

  Top Rankin’: The First Great “Third World” Star, 1976–1981

  For a brief time, Marley became the major star of the developing world, especially after the original Wailers broke up. The loss of Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer could have been devastating, but Mar-ley proved to be very resilient.

  He reorganized the band into Bob Marley and the Wailers. In place of the sweet and sour harmonies that characterized the Wailers as a trio (their voices were far too idiosyncratic to ever really “blend” in the traditional vocal group manner, and it was one of their greatest strengths) he brought on his wife Rita and two of the most talented vocalists in Jamaica, Judy Mowatt and Marcia Grif-fiths. (On an ironic note, Griffiths and Bunny Wailer would later have a hit with a song that gets played at every wedding and bar mitzvah in the western world, the “Electric Boogie,” aka the “Electric Slide.”)

  As Bob Marley and the Wailers, Bob continued to write and record songs of protest and earned the respect of conscious thinkers throughout the world. Then they recorded Kaya, an album predominantly composed of love songs. This only expanded his audience.

  The Rasta Prophet of Reggae Music Speaks

  by Tom Terrell

  (Source: MCY.com, January 2001)

  This interview was conducted on Monday, October 29, 1979, after Bob Marley and the Wailers’ triumphant four-night SRO stand at the legendary Apollo Theater. Young journalist Tom Terrell sat with Bob Marley for a Washington DC Newspaper that has since folded. MCY.com made this exclusive interview available for the first time in over 20 years.

  TOM TERRELL: During the early Sixties, what were you into?

  MARLEY: School and trade. Welding . . . I went to private school down the road (laughs). You know I was kinda musical. We stand ’pon a street corner at night and sing and beat pan. We had on Spanish Town Road and Ebeneezar Lane . . . a club named Operation Friendship where a man bring a guitar. That’s how I get my first guitar—see? This is where it start from. I’m not a good guitarist in one sense; but musically that’s how the music start. I got more interested in the singing part, y’know.

  TERRELL: American R&B was, and is, popular in Jamaica. Did it have any influences on your vocal style?

  MARLEY: Yes. Chuck Jackson, Ben E. King, Wilson Pickett . . . I go back some days and mention “Jim Dandy To The Rescue”—you know them guy there? You know Little Richard? Little Anthony . . . the next one named the Drifters, the Platters. A brother sing a tune say “Don’t break your promise.” Johnny Ace, too.

  TERRELL: Joe Higgs was said to have taken you under his wing. Who was he to you?

  MARLEY: Joe Higgs was a teacher, y’know. Joe Higgs the man who teach—Bunny, Peter and I; Junior, Cherry and Beverly. Six in all.

  TERRELL: On the cover of an early album, you and the other Wailers are dressed in suits, sunglasses . . .

  MARLEY: During that time now we were working with a record company, see? And when you work for people you have to make up yourself. But we are rebels, we rebellious—them the singing we do. You see we never really know anything that much about Rasta. The words them a come out but still no know really what goin’ on. We just know that something a come out. That the people a say something and it mean something ’bout where we is we never know that reason yet, seen? ’Till them we start to get ourselves independent so start doing what we want do.

  TERRELL: Two people that figure prominently in the development of Wailers’ music are Lee Perry and Chris Blackwell. What were their roles in shaping your career?

  MARLEY: Yeah, Lee Perry. Lee Perry used to work same place. When we leave, him leave too. Him do one business, we do a next one ’til we link up again and do same work. Chris Blackwell come in the music when the music really need someone to get some exposure. Through him now was the one that knew about it more as one in Jamaica can a get. You know Millie Small?

  TERRELL: She sang “My Boy Lollipop”?

  MARLEY: Good, good. From them time there. It Jimmy Cliff even to the end of The Harder They Come, that’s when Jimmy Cliff left Island. So him was the man—’cause nobody never know. People used to curse the music because the studio never that up to date like them studio a clear, y’know. Ha’ plenty this and that ’pon that, tracks them.

  TERRELL: Originally, the Wailers were a vocal group. When did the band take shape?

  MARLEY: ’Round 1970, now. Family Man (AKA Aston Barrett; bass) and them was upset at an Island thing and link up with Lee Perry them and thing. In 1968 we start come together y’know. Tyrone (Downie; keyboards) used to go to school . . . used to come record shop when him leave school. We tell him (laughs), “Go home.” Now him big, a long time up there.

  TERRELL: Bunny and Peter branched out in their own directions. Any comments on the musical paths they’ve taken?

  MARLEY: Well, whatever a man do that pleases him, that is for him right, y’know? This is what our blessing . . . This is how it deal with them.

  TERRELL: Are all your songs your sole inspiration or do you co-write with the band?

  MARLEY: Well, to me anybody can help me write a song. If not the melody a go and you can almost hear the words them too. Say you hear the words and a man help you put them together. So it happen that way with me plenty times. ’Cause you might hear me. I try say something but you hear what me supposed to say, you know what I mean? Most of my tunes I was writing with my brethren, man. Them all got tell me what to say.

  TERRELL: What are you saying to American audiences in your music, and do you think it will translate well to them?

  MARLEY: My message is Rastafari, God Almighty, man. The same message to the people. I don’t find a man can’t understand y’know. What I find out [is] that America is more control. The people is under every control here. Everything is organized. If you come here to do a concert, you have to go through the organization; so it’s really organized. You ask why go to Harlem and play reggae music, and the people have a certain amount of pressure ’pon them. So you know them can’t even get to listen. The more them hear it, this is a truth here—must
come true, dread.

  TERRELL: So they can’t stop reggae—

  MARLEY: They can’t stop it; ’cause if they stop it I wouldn’t start because there would be no need for me start; be in vain. Me do it because of a cause and until it happen before I feel pleased because that the only thing make feel pleased . . . people them come together in a unity and defend the right. Cause all of them defend capitalism; so what if them conscious them a deal with it. So if the government was Rasta, all of them woulda been Rasta, seen?