Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright (26 page)

For me and other ex-hippie press junketeers, thoroughgoing secularists all, sent to Kingston’s scruffy version of paradise to check out this new Big Thing, it was the defiance of Marley’s reply, and its unimpeachable sincerity, that was so thrilling. To Bob, it didn’t matter what the denizens of Babylon (the Rasta term for all that is not ital in the sight of Jah) said. Let them bring their dried-up rationalism, let them slice God’s flesh with their sharp autopsy blades, claim to throw his so-called body in an unmarked grave, it didn’t matter. The wicked cabal of back-stabbing communists, Vatican hypocrites, and corporate sons of pirate, slave-master fathers were all wrong. And Bob, along with his marijuana-smoking, wild-haired, Bible-quoting, prophecy-believing, guitar-playing crew were right: Jah live.

After all, given the steadfast free association requisite for a small bunch of people on an isolated Caribbean island to come to the fervent conclusion that the diminutive Haile Selassie—the inept and petty autocrat described in Ryszard Kapuscinski’s scathing book
The
Emperor
—was the living God on earth, the denial of the monarch’s death was no big leap.

To gain a degree of insight into the brilliantly off-the-wall, modernist synthesis that is Rastafarianism, it is useful to know that, as recounted in any number of reggae songs, the cornerstone of the creed rests on a prophecy supposedly spoken by Marcus Garvey, the formidable Jamaican-born Pan-Africanist of the early twentieth century.

“Look to Africa for the crowning of a black king; he shall be the redeemer,” Garvey is held to have said, thereby playing the John the Baptist role in Rasta cosmology by alerting the brethren to the subsequent crowning of Selassie as the emperor of Ethiopia in 1930. But as detailed in Timothy White’s definitive Marley biography,
Catch a
Fire
, Marcus Garvey not only never made such a prophecy, he was actually publicly critical of Haile Selassie.

Not that this historical discrepancy would have mattered much to those Jamaicans for whom the beautiful island of the tourist ads was a Kafkaesque limbo-with-banana-trees from which they craved an exit and a solution. To them the entire slavery experience of their forebears was tantamount to a terrible nightmare from which they had awakened in “a strange land” as tragically misplaced, debased squatters. The prophecy led them to believe that they would be repatriated to a purified and glorious Africa. (Whether this millenarian vision was to come about through divine intervention or practical efforts was up for interpretation.)

Taking Selassie’s princely name, Ras Tafari, for their own, the Rastafarians went on to find biblical justification for not cutting their hair, never eating processed food, and smoking “the herb of the land.” Herb (which should never be called dope, because “no plant can be a dope”) facilitated for the Rastas the proper state for much subsequent “reasoning.” It didn’t matter if the British-tutored, nose-to-the-grindstone Jamaican middle class berated the Rastas as skylarking layabouts whose philosophies made no sense. It certainly didn’t matter if accoutrements like dread-locks scared people out of their wits.

That was the thing about Bob Marley: he was a true believer. In 1975, no less so than today, that really was a Big Thing. Plus, the music was unbeatable. The first Wailers’ albums to be released worldwide,
Catch a Fire
,
Burnin’
, and the subsequent
Natty Dread
(made after the breakup of the original trio—Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Livingston), each lyrically seething with revolution, remain in the canon of the greatest pop records ever.

Best of all, from the down-home music fan’s point of view, was that the Wailers didn’t belch forth from the corporate vacuum. As anyone who saw the vigorous film
The Harder They Come
suspected, Jamaica was filled with Bob Marleys and Wailers and would-be Wailers. There was an entire hothouse music industry run by producers, players, and singers—seat-of-the-pants capitalists all, outfitted with healthy stacks of scratchy 45s that were peddled from shoe boxes. The special brand of “roots” reggae played by Bob Marley was only the most recent mutation of Jamaican pop, which began with the Louis Jordan/Fats Domino-influenced “blue beat” in the early 1950s. Blue beat became the miraculous “ska” (as pioneered by the invincible Skatalites), which then became the love-man, vocal-dominated “rock steady” of Ken Boothe and Alton Ellis, followed by the angelic early reggae harmonies of the magnificent Heptones, Desmond Dekker, and a hundred more.

For the continuity-minded, that was another neat thing about Bob Marley and the Wailers: they’d grown up on the indigenous Jamaican industry, played every style (check out Bob’s teenage ska vocal on “One Cup of Coffee,” circa 1962), scuffled and suffered like dem artists must in de ghetto. When, infused by the brimstone idiosyncrasies of Rasta, they broke “wide,” they were wholly themselves. A real Big Thing.

What no one could have guessed was how big it would become. By 1981, when Marley succumbed to cancer (supposedly the result of a soccer injury to his toe, which he refused to have amputated because “Rasta don’t amputate”), the Wailers were unthinkably huge, with 100,000 people in attendance at a single show in Milan. One of the most eloquent artists of social unrest in the second half of the twentieth century, Marley became an icon in what used to be called the Third World through his exhortation to “Get Up, Stand Up” and his across-the-board condemnation of “de downpressers.”

These days it is impossible to walk through any major city—from Bangkok to Bamako—without seeing teenagers wearing Bob Marley T-shirts.
Legend
, Bob’s eternally selling “greatest hits” album, sells on. Tales of the Wailers’ epic concert in newly independent Zimbabwe routinely include spurious details of prisoners breaking down the jail doors just to see Bob. With the passing years, the reputed number of escapees grows.

A few years ago, as we sat in a café in Lamu, on Kenya’s coast, a dreaded-up Swahili guy in a Bob shirt laughed pityingly when I questioned his assertion that Marley was murdered, his cancer injected by the ruthless Mason-controlled assassins who have ruled the Vatican in the name of Satan for more than a thousand years. As it turned out, this wasn’t just a lone nut spiel; a friend of mine heard a nearly identical saga in Indonesia a couple of years later. Needless to say, many in Jamaica believe the story. Marley iconography will only grow as a result of the recent publication by Marvel Comics of a graphic account of Bob’s life and times (it is contained in three issues:
Iron, Lion,
and
Zion
).

More tangibly, there’s little doubt that without the precedent of Bob Marley, the entire genre of “world beat” (contemporary music of the non-Western world) would have been far slower to succeed internationally, at least commercially. “For me, Bob Marley is very important,” says Paul-Bert Rahasimanana, a.k.a. Rossy, the dreadlocked master of accordion,
valiha
, and
kabosy
, who is currently the biggest thing in the vibrant pop scene in Madagascar, home of a local industry not unlike Jamaica’s in its nascent days. “When I heard Bob Mar-ley, I understood people around the world might like my music.”

This sentiment is echoed time and again by musicians coming out of local pop-oriented industries. Baaba Maal, the noted singer from Senegal, and numerous Zairian “soukous” stars have all paid tribute to Marley, the enabler. Beyond this is the explosion of Jamaican-style reggae itself in Africa. Actively modeling themselves after Marley and other Jamaican stars, people like Alpha Blondy from Ivory Coast and Lucky Dube of South Africa have made international careers playing social-activist reggae. “African reggae, it’s like some 360 thing, mon,” says Neville Garrick, the artist who drew several of Marley’s album covers and now, with Bob’s widow, Rita, administers the Bob Marley Foundation, which runs the museum.

He notes the transcontinental cross-pollination of Latin rumba, mambo, and so on, which had their beginnings in African rhythms and then returned to the Mother Continent, becoming elemental to the development of soukous and Ghanaian “high-life,” among others. “The music come from there, Jamaicans mix it up, it go back,” Garrick says. Then he watches another busload of tourists drive through the gate at 56 Hope Road. “You know, mon,” he sighs, “if I have known all this would happen with Bob, I would have been a prophet myself.”

Garrick’s assessment is borne out by a series of huge murals painted on the stone fence inside the museum grounds: Bob in Trench Town with Rita and the children; Bob with fellow Wailers Peter and Bunny as young “baldhead” ska musicians dressed in Vegas garb, their true shaggy-headed Rasta personas looming overhead; Bob at the famous 1978 One Love concert, where he shamed warring political leaders Michael Manley and Edward Seaga into shaking hands; Bob in Africa—this beside a gigantic picture of a rainbow with the words “give thanks for the birth of Bob . . . February 6, 1945.” All in all, there must be several hundred photographs and paintings of Marley on the museum grounds: the happy Bob, the sad Bob, the triumphant Bob, the brimstone Bob, the sensitive Bob, and the sick, soon-to-die Bob.

This is the case throughout the country. Once hounded by the island’s police to throw away his “little herb stalk,” Bob, recipient of the Jamaican Order of Merit, is now an official national hero. They sell his T-shirts for $15 at the airport, feature him in the tourist literature. His picture is on telephone poles, inside restaurants, in every club. For sheer lionization, he’s far surpassed the Lion of Judah, Haile Selassie himself.

“Bob was someone who came along at a certain moment. What he have to say was perfect for that moment,” continues Garrick, his dreadlocks now flecked with gray. “To tell the truth, though, most of what Bob sang about, in Jamaica, things stay the same. They don’t change. That’s why Bob sells better today than ever. So it’s wrong to say time pass Bob by . . . but it wrong too to say that time don’t pass.” As one drives around Kingston these days, it seems so: some things are the same, some not. The town does appear tidier, more well-to-do. The economy, if not booming, certainly seems capable of erecting and supporting any number of shopping centers. Jamaica is not exactly mellow, but the old tension that pervaded even the smallest transaction seems to have fallen away, at least in what’s called uptown and midtown.

On the other hand, downtown—Rema, Trench Town, and the rest, the corrugated-hut “concrete jungle” where Marley was raised and which was the inspiration for many of his best songs—looks as fearsome as ever. The “posse”-dominated culture of political violence in these slums that spurred the 1976 assassination attempt at 56 Hope Road (Marley was shot in the arm—the tour guides dutifully point out bullet holes left in the back wall) continues, albeit more on a siege level.

As for the local music industry, it soldiers on, pumping out the vinyl (yes, vinyl!—at least for the “domestic” market) at an unprecedented rate. What they mostly do these days is “dance hall,” which any and every Jamaican will be more than happy to tell you is the “real” rap music, since rap was “invented” in Jamaica by such “dub-kings,” “toasters,” and “deejays” as Big Youth and U Roy. (Dem rob-bin’ American Public Enemies, Tupacs, Snoop Doggy Doggs only stole it to mek dere lowlife tribal gangsta ting.) The justification for such a claim aside, suffice it to say that dance hall covers a sociosexual terrain similar to the harder side of the United States version, except that the Jamaicans, as usual, are more in your face. The late Peter Tosh’s take on the music that has come to dominate the Jamaican market—his streetwise, Rasta take—was that it was “all slackness, talk of bumbaclaat gun play and slamming what’s ’neath lady’s dress, ’bout soiled underwear and whatnot.”

“The youth listen to what the youth listen to, can’t fight against it,” Garrick says, indicating that these days, the Rasta finds himself in a “pocket,” with “dread” nothing more than “a fashion, like everything else.” Several of the left-leaning middle-class intellectuals who were sympathetic to the Rasta ethos have left the island in disgust at the unchanging social conditions. When some dread artists were reported to have cocaine problems, Garrick tells me, it went a long way to destroying the Rasta community “as the image of the pure Nazareth.” It’s a systemic problem that won’t soon be fixed because according to Rastas around the island, it’s easier to get crack cocaine than ganja. Coke produces a different kind of “reasoning,” to be sure.

Still, Bob Marley’s shadow is long, pervasive. Gussie Clarke, owner of the Anchor Recording Company, one of Kingston’s most modern 24-track, 24-hour-a-day recording mills, gets a bit misty when Bob Marley’s name comes up. “Bob Marley is literally the single greatest example of what this industry, what Jamaica itself, can produce. Bob, he wasn’t in it for the money; it was something else to him. I don’t care what these kids say now, every Jamaican who thinks of himself as an artist wants to be Bob Marley.”

Not the Super Beagle, at least not anymore. “Yah, when I came up Bob was what I thought about,” says the Beagle (his real name is Den-zie Beagle), a sweet-looking guy in his thirties in an undershirt who wears a jewel-studded guitar charm around his exceedingly well-developed neck. “Bob can’t be nothing but a hero, you know. But he pass on. . . . I got my own things to say. Today, I’m one of the biggest names on the island.”

Tonight he’s trying out a few new “roots” tunes at the Centerpole Club, the Super Beagle reports, so maybe I should stop by and check them out. “Sure,” I say.

That night, it quickly becomes apparent that the Super Beagle is not exactly one of the biggest names of the island, and the club, rather than a straight musical venue, appears more in the go-go/barroom mode. The Beagle and his five-piece band are shoehorned into a stifling six-by-six storage room out back. “Ya, mon,” the Super Beagle says. “Just doing a little practicing, you know.”