Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
In early July 2010, I flew to Jamaica in hope of contacting Bunny Wailer, the last of the Wailers, Bob Marley’s original band. If you don’t know who he is—and of the people who read this, surely a goodly percentage won’t know; to the rest it will seem asinine to ID such a major figure; either way, though, this is worth doing—find a computer clip of the Wailers performing “Stir It Up” on
The Old Grey Whistle Test,
a music show that used to run on the BBC. It was 1973, their first real tour. Bunny is off to Bob’s left, singing the high part and doing a little repetitive one-two accent thing with brushes on snares. He’s wonderfully dressed in a tasseled burgundy Shriner’s fez and abstract Rastafarian sweater-vest. All three of them look like they could have been in Fat Albert’s gang. Possibly no group of musicians has ever looked flat cooler. Peter Tosh was a tall, purple sphinx with an inexplicably sweet falsetto. If Elvis had walked in, Tosh might have nodded.
It had long been a dream of mine to meet Bunny Wailer—a pipe dream, sometimes a literal one in the sense that I dreamed it while holding a pipe. I don’t know what it is about Jamaican music, but creatively it just seems to take place at a higher amperage. It may be an island effect. Isolation does seem to produce these intensities sometimes. You think of Ireland, for instance, a backwater in so many ways, and yet: Yeats, Beckett, Joyce, in one century—how does that happen? Consider that in Kingston, in one decade, you had the emergence of Bob Marley and the Wailers, Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, the Pioneers and the Paragons, the Melodians and the Ethiopians, the Heptones and the Slickers, the Gaylads, plus an index of people whose names you maybe don’t know but who, once heard, are never forgotten. A vortex of world-class talents. The majority of them came from the same housing projects and were singing in large part to get out of them. Partly it’s this yearning, a brilliant hungriness, that you hear.
There’s more to it, though. The reason the great Jamaican stuff deepens over time, over years, not with nostalgia but with meaning and nuance, is that it’s a spiritual music. That’s the anomaly underlying its power. It’s spiritual pop—not in a calculated way, like Christian rock, but in a way that comes from within. Rastafarianism, when it seized Kingston’s emerging record industry as a means for expressing its existence and point of view, made this possible. In the States, rock ’n’ roll is always on some level a move away from God into the devil’s music, but in Jamaica the cultural conditions were different. Pop grew toward Jah.
Getting in touch with Bunny turned out not surprisingly to be hard (he’s known for his reclusiveness). E-mail addresses gave back replies from other people saying to e-mail different addresses, call different numbers. Finally, at one point, I got a message. Unexpectedly it came directly from him. It said,
You may come
. Actually, the language of the e-mail was “Greetings. You may continue with your travel arrangements. One Love, Jah B.” The name that came up on the in-box was Neville Livingston, Bunny’s real name (Neville O’Reilly Livingston).
Since then there’d been absolute silence. For all I knew, the invitation had come from some stoned joker in Denmark. Also, I’d seen things saying that Bunny moves back and forth between Kingston and a farm in the mountains. What if I got there and he was somewhere in the interior, inaccessible?
* * *
Llewis (
sic
) picked me up at the airport. We’d spoken several times beforehand, via phone. Someone recommended him to me as a person who knew Kingston. For some reason, Llewis hadn’t wanted to hold a sign for me in baggage claim. Not that I requested it, but it would have been easiest. Instead, he instructed me to approach the dispatch girls, in yellow vests, and tell them I was looking for him; they’d show me where he was. I went up to them.
“There he is,” they said, pointing outside to a tall guy who seemed younger than he’d sounded. White polo shirt, shades. Getting closer, I noticed he had a sign after all. Someone else’s name was on it.
“Hi, Llewis?” I said.
“John?” he said.
“Yes.”
He put down the sign. “I was just holding that for a friend,” he said, “doing him an honor.”
Yet he carried the sign to the parking lot. Llewis never explained the no-sign/wrong-sign muddle in a way that made any sense, nor how he’d come to have two
l’
s at the front of his name, a question to which he simply refused to speak. I left Jamaica still curious about those things. They were the only two enigmas of that sort, however. At all other times he made conspicuous efforts at straightforwardness. I recommend his services to anyone visiting Kingston. (P.S. He later sent me a message saying his mother had seen it spelled that way in a book, though other people told him it was an error; “LOL, I love it even if it’s an error,” he wrote.)
We climbed into a white box-van, for which he apologized, saying his good car had been in the shop but would be out tomorrow. I didn’t mind the van, though; it gave a clear vantage point from which to see Kingston, passing through jerking freeze-frames of brightly colored intersections. Llewis had been doing research and knew the locations of certain places that dealt in secondhand vinyl records. He introduced me to some stuff from the early eighties I’d never heard. We listened to Papa Michigan and General Smiley’s “Diseases” from 1982. It was lyrically disturbing and musically thrilling. It warned all those who would “worship vanities” that “these things unto Jah Jah not pleases.” If you’re intent on pursuing them anyway,
Mind Jah lick you with diseases!
I said the most dangerous diseases.
I talkin’ like the elephantitis.
The other one is the poliomyelitis.
It was summer. The gas-and-garbage smell of the city, the starkness of Kingston’s industrial shoreline, made you alert. The humidity was so high it made the atmosphere sag, like the clouds were on your shoulders. The way General Smiley said “poliomyelitis” was beautiful somehow; he pronounced it like
polya,
polyamyelitis.
Llewis hadn’t seemed fazed at all by the idea that a person would come to Jamaica looking for Bunny Wailer with no concept of where he lived and only the vaguest intimation of interest or consent on Bunny’s part. For all Llewis reacted, it was as if I’d told him I was there to look into import/export opportunities. He’d seen Bunny perform at a festival in the city two years before and found him still electrifying. Bunny looks more and more like a desert father onstage, with his robes and white beard. Llewis quoted a talk-poem he had delivered to the crowd, something about those who want to take the
fruit
of reggae but don’t want to water the
root
of reggae.
If you had been to Kingston, it would have seemed changed. “I’ve never seen it like this,” Llewis said. “It was never like this.” People had their heads down; you could see that the city’s psychic burden had been increased by the violence of what they already called “Bloody May.”
What happened is this: A wave of violent gun battles overtook inner-city Kingston, creating a state of internal siege. The U.S. Department of Justice had filed an extradition request asking Jamaica’s prime minister, Bruce Golding, to hand over the island’s biggest and most powerful drug boss, Christopher Coke (real name). They call him Dudus, which I’d been hearing on the news as Dude-us, but Llewis informed me it’s pronounced Dud-us. “Dude-us would be the fancy version,” he said. “Too fancy.”
A short, thick, somewhat pan-faced man who keeps a low profile and always seems to be smiling at an inward joke, Dudus is loved by thousands for his Santa Claus qualities when it comes to helping cover the rent or making sure soccer teams get jerseys. According to the FBI, his gang, the Shower Posse, has fourteen hundred (known) murders attached to it.
The Jamaicans felt no great desire to go after Dudus. Jamaican politics is fantastically corrupt, and plenty of ministers had ties to him. Golding tried wishing it away, even hiring an American law firm to lobby against the request, but eventually Washington applied pressure.
Coke gathered his forces, calling in fighters from all over Jamaica, small-time mercenaries from the country who were good with guns. Finally the police and security forces went in to extract him. He had snipers on the rooftops. He had CCTV cameras everywhere, spies among the police and in the ministry. The battle lasted a month. Scores of people were killed, including many civilians—we don’t know how many, since the government in all likelihood significantly downplayed the total, desperately trying to save the shreds of the year’s all-important tourist economy.
It ended in farce. Dudus got stopped at a roadblock on a highway outside Kingston. The man driving was his spiritual adviser. They claimed they were on their way to the U.S. embassy so Dudus could turn himself in, but to the Americans, not the Jamaicans. Dudus had a black, curly woman’s wig on his head and a soft black Gucci cap on top of that and wore old lady’s wire-rim glasses. Some said the police dressed him up this way for the mug shot, to make him look weak and to discourage his still-loyal fighters, but it’s likely he was using the disguise to get around. One of the soldiers present said later that Dudus had seemed strangely happy when they were cuffing him. He’d been so certain they’d kill him that when he realized it would go down legit, he experienced a rush of relief. Now he was in New York, having pleaded not guilty.
One of the most cryptic things that happened during the buildup to the Dudus war was that Bunny Wailer put out a pro-Dudus dancehall record titled “Don’t Touch the President.” (President, or Pressy, is one of Dudus’s many nicknames.)
Don’t touch the president, inna di residen’.
We confident, we say him innocent.
Don’t touch the Robin Hood, up inna neighborhood
Because him take the bad, and turn it into good.
Why would an elder statesman of Jamaican culture take the side of these crowds they were showing on TV, in the streets of Kingston, screaming and putting themselves in the way of justice? (The international news cameras had zeroed in on a nuts-seeming woman with a handwritten cardboard sign comparing Dudus to Jesus Christ, and this was rebroadcast in a hundred countries for weeks as a typical expression of Caribbean chaos.)
Traffic was thick now. Llewis turned up the crappy radio in the van as we moved toward the hotel. The DJ played a song called “Slow Motion” by Vybz Kartel, probably the hottest dancehall singer in Jamaica right now. At that moment, Vybz was in jail, suspected (in the vaguest terms) of having gotten involved in Dudus-related violence. “But we’re hoping he’ll get out soon,” said Llewis as he drove. “Maybe this Friday.” This was the music Llewis loved best, not the old stuff (which he knew and respected). If the Wailers were playing now, this is what they’d be into. A young couple in a car next to us grinned and bobbed their heads to it as we rolled by. I’d never been wild about dancehall, but now I realized it was because I’d never really heard dancehall. You can’t just “listen” to dancehall. It happens; you have to be there for it. The DJ was mixing together three or four different songs. Kartel’s hypnotic voice floated over the top of beats that would suddenly vanish, leaving only spacey bass-throbs, as the words kept running. “So this is now?” I asked. “Right?” “This is right now,” Llewis said, stabbing his finger at the radio. “This is Right. Now.”
At the hotel, I downloaded “Slow Motion.” It was somewhat limp, in this version. It sounded like a karaoke mix of what we’d heard in the car. Vybz did not live on the computer. He was in the air over Kingston.
* * *
I called Bunny. “Yes,” the voice said. Not “Yes?” Yes. “Mr. Wailer?” (What else was one supposed to say? I wasn’t about to call him Jah B.) We talked for a bit. “We can do this,” he said. He gave me an address, a few blocks off one of the main boulevards, not a particularly upscale part of Kingston. We set a time. “Bless,” he said.
I passed out listening to a song that had been on a loop in my head in the weeks leading up to that trip, “Let Him Go,” a song Bunny wrote in 1966, when Bob Marley was off in Delaware working as an assistant in a DuPont laboratory and going by the name Donald. It’s a Rude Boy number, one in a series of songs and answer-songs that took over the Jamaican sound systems between 1965 and ’67. Rudies, as the growing numbers of reckless youths who terrorized and fascinated middle-class Kingston were called, had become a national menace. Half the major ska stars weighed in with a message. There were pro–Rude Boy songs, anti–Rude Boy songs, and songs that weren’t clearly one thing or another. With the whole island paying attention, a focused competitiveness (never lacking in Jamaican music) elevated the songwriting. Many classic songs resulted.
None of them is quite on a level with “Let Him Go,” the one Bunny Livingston wrote. The backing band included a few of the Skatalites, moonlighting. They laid down a buoyant, brassy rhythm that had just a little tug at the end, a little slur, a groove that, listening back, was transitional between ska and rocksteady. When I hear it start, I feel like a puck on an air-hockey table that’s been switched on.
Ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo
, the voices add to one another in layers, building a chord that becomes final right before they break into