| Reggae musicians -- Jamaica -- Biography. |
| Reggae musicians -- Jamaica -- Interviews. |
| Oral histories. |
| Marley, Bob |
| Marley, Bob -- Friends and associates -- Interviews. |
| Marley, Robert Nesta |
| Marley, Nesta Robert |
| Marli, Bob |
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Summary
Summary
A revelatory, myth-shattering history of one of the most influential musicians of all time, told in the words of those who knew him best.
Roger Steffens is one of the world's leading Bob Marley experts. He toured with the Wailers in the 1970s and was closely acquainted with Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh and the rest of the band members. Over several decades he has interviewed more than seventy-five friends, business managers, relatives and confidants--many speaking publicly for the first time. Forty years in the making, So Much Things to Say weaves this rich testimony into a definitive telling of the life of the reggae king--the full, inside account of how a boy from the slums of Kingston, Jamaica, became a cultural icon and inspiration to millions around the world.
The intimacy of the voices and the frankness of their revelations will astonish even longtime Marley fans. Readers see the intense bonds of teenage friendship among Peter, Bunny and Bob, the vibrant early sessions with the original Wailers (as witnessed by members Junior Braithwaite, Beverley Kelso and Cherry Green) and the tumultuous relationships with Rita Marley and Cindy Breakspeare.
With unprecedented candor, these interviews tell dramatic, little-known stories, from the writing of some of Marley's most beloved songs to the Wailers' violent confrontation involving producer Lee "Scratch" Perry, Bob's intensive musical training with star singer Johnny Nash and the harrowing assassination attempt at 56 Hope Road in Kingston, which led to Marley's defiant performance two nights later with a bullet lodged in his arm.
Readers witness Marley's rise to international fame in London, his triumphant visit to Zimbabwe to sing for freedom fighters inspired by his anthems and the devastating moment of his collapse while jogging in New York's Central Park. Steffens masterfully conducts the story of Marley's last months, as Marley poignantly sings "Another One Bites the Dust" during the sound check before his final concert in Pittsburgh, followed by his tragic death at the age of thirty-six.
So Much Things to Say explores major controversies, examining who actually ordered the shooting attack on Hope Road, scrutinizing claims of CIA involvement and investigating why Marley's fatal cancer wasn't diagnosed sooner. Featuring Steffens's own candid photographs of Marley and his circle, this magisterial work preserves an invaluable, transformative slice of music history: the life of the legendary performer who brought reggae to the international stage.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In his page-turning oral history of Bob Marley (1945-1981), Steffens, a reggae historian and producer of a one-man show about Marley's life, brings the singer to life through conversations with his bandmates, lovers, family members, and musical associates. Through this thoroughly engaging history, readers learn about the sometimes uneasy working relationships at Coxson Dodd's Studio One in Kingston, Jamaica, during the early days of the Wailers; Rita Marley's revelatory encounter with Haile Selassie, the Rasta god, on Apr. 21, 1966; and the responses of Carl Colby Jr. (son of former CIA director William Colby) to accusations that Carl tried to have Marley killed. In one conversation, Bunny Wailer (Neville O'Riley Livingston) recalls with joyous insight Marley's songwriting process-"Bob writes bits of songs, as the inspiration come him write, and then him just put them bits there together." Two of Marley's band members, Gilly Gilbert and Danny Sims, recall the nights in 1980 when they opened for the Commodores at Madison Square Garden and more than half the audience left when the Wailers finished their set. In this highly entertaining and informative history, Steffens also includes dozens of photos from his own archive. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An oral history that presents a well-rounded portrait of the music legend, allowing for multiple, sometimes-conflicting, points of view. Robert Nesta Marley (1945-1981) left a legacy of beautiful music, helping to push reggae from its Jamaican roots out into the world at large. Mindful of the many books about Marley already available, reggae historian Steffens (The Family Acid, 2015, etc.) worked to make a complete narrative covering the musician's entire life and filling in the cracks left by previous books. The author goes into great detail about Marley's early recordings, the inner workings of the Wailers, and the cancer that eventually took Marley's life. Steffens has interviewed dozens of major and minor players in Marley's life, including Wailers Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, Island Records' Chris Blackwell, Marley's mother, Cedella Booker, and various friends, musicians, and associates. There is a fullness to the collective weight of all these observations that is well-suited to the oral history format. What emerges is a not a clear picture of Marley the man but rather a true sense of how complicated his life was. His legend and impact, his work ethic, his abilities as a musician and leaderthese are beyond questionbut there are a lot of contrasting voices. On the question of who wrote "I Shot the Sheriff," for example, Marley's then-girlfriend Esther Anderson and his friend Lee Jaffe both think the story starts with them. There are disagreements over how people met, who paid royalty payments, who deserves credit for music and lyrics, etc. Steffens inserts himself as a voice like any of the others, offering structure and sometimes serving as a referee. If someone has told what has proven to be a lie, the author steps in and clarifies. But mostly, he lets his subjects speak for themselves. The author's approach allows him to tell more of the story, and even without presenting Marley's voice directly, this is an illuminating portrait of an extraordinary life. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In compiling an oral history of a music legend, or, in Bob Marley's case, a global icon, a decision must be made: How much editing should be done? Historian and archivist Steffens, the reigning Marley expert, provides the definitive primary source in this gathering of recorded and written interviews with individuals from the various circles that surrounded Marley. With so much already written about the music and the man, Steffens presents these remembrances of the reggae star verbatim, forming a grand anecdotal conversation covering the whole of Marley's life, even as personal accounts conflict. This clash of memories is most evident in the coverage of the Wailers' breakthrough album, Burnin'. All involved are represented, from Bunny Wailer to Peter Tosh, Chris Blackwell, Esther Anderson, and more, even as their accounts are wildly different. Also of special note are the interviews recounting the lead-up to the assassination attempt against Marley in 1976 and the landmark Smile Jamaica Concert that immediately followed. Devoted fans and all readers interested in reggae, Marley, and his era will find this many-voiced, richly subjective chronicle dramatic and compelling.--Ruzicka, Michael Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Most singers are products. They're cogs in the gears of the music industrial complex, singing so the manufacturer can have things to press, the label can have records to sell, the radio can have songs to play, the promoters can have tickets to move, and the kids can have stuff to stream. So most singers are molded by record companies the same way food companies calibrate the amount of salt in a frozen dinner. But every once in a while a special artist comes along. Someone who appears to speak for the people, ft's in his music, his life story, his worldview and the way he carries himself - he seems like an extension of the people and their leader. His music does not come across as a commercial gesture because it's as if he's on the public stage to speak for his constituents and give voice to their feelings and their needs. He seems like a sort of Cultural Senator, a man who represents his people - who vote for him with their dollars and their love. No music star in the Western world has ever been a more powerful Cultural Senator on the global stage than Nesta Robert Marley. As the New York Times pop music critic Jon Páreles once wrote: "Bob Marley became the voice of third-world pain and resistance, the sufferer in the concrete jungle who would not be denied forever. Outsiders everywhere heard Marley as their own champion." When fans see you as their champion, you become an important part of their lives. Marley introduced reggae and Rastafarianism to much of the globe, making him a crucial ambassador for those subcultures, and he is the face of Jamaica, by far its most famous son. If he is a Cultural Senator, then that's part of his delivering for his constituents - he spread an image of Jamaica around the world, and now everyone has a soft spot in his or her heart for that magical island. But at the same time Marley's politics were revolutionary. In "War" Marley declares war on racism, and you get the sense that he does not mean war in a purely symbolic way. In "Redemption Song" he challenges us to respond to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X - "How long shall they kill our prophets, while we stand aside and look?" In "Them Belly Full (but We Hungry)" he criticizes the class system in Jamaica. In "Zimbabwe" he calls for liberating Africa's nations. In "Burnin' and Lootin'" he refers to violent resistance. Marley was speaking for the downtrodden and urging oppressed people throughout the African diaspora to revolt by any means necessary. You can tell a lot about an artist by what song he does last at his shows. In Marley's later years, his most popular period, he usually closed with "Get Up, Stand Up," a call to action, to arms, to revolution. He sent concertgoers home with the sound of him urging "stand up for your rights" ringing in their ears. Marley was that rarity - a black revolutionary who didn't scare white people. A rich new oral biography called "So Much Things to Say," by the reggae scholar Roger Steffens, narrates the life of Marley from cradle to grave through interviews Steffens has collected over the years from Marley, his mother, his wife, his last girlfriend, several of his children, his musical partners Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, and many more. Steffens has been on the Marley case for decades, and he's a crucial voice in this epic chorus. Many in this group paint Marley as a Christlike figure: a boy born with nothing who becomes a deeply spiritual person, a natural leader and, they say, a prophet who can see the future. Steffens reports that when Marley was at his height, "his live shows began to resemble gospel gatherings with a preacher and his (all-female) choir." But long before that, when he was just 3 years old, they say he showed psychic powers, reading palms with shocking accuracy. Still, young Marley was neglected. "He was like the ugly duckling," Bunny Wailer remembers. "There were many nights of cold ground for his bed and rock stone for his pillow." He was also a social outcast. "Whites thought of him as a black child; blacks, critical of mixed-race children, taunted him as 'the little yellow boy,"' Steffens says. "For Bob, his color seemed to be an impediment wherever he turned, causing him to turn inward, a solitary soul relying on his own inner strengths." His early strengths, however, did not include the musical. "Bob never really was a person who had any kind of excellent voice per se," according to Segree Wesley, a childhood friend of Marley's and a singer. "In my opinion Bob had the worst voice of all." YET MARLEY BECAME A STAR through years of painstaking work, and when he got money he was exceedingly generous, a one-man welfare department. "There were people who would be on a regular thing," says his former business manager Colin Leslie. "They come every month, in the understanding they were getting the money. ... 1 had to make sure there was a float of funds to make sure that people would be fed. There were those who depended on hot meals from Bob." Some say Marley supported 4,000 people, but Leslie thinks it was more. The book digresses at times into trivia for the superfans - we learn that Marley's favorite meal was Irish moss, a form of seaweed - but there's a lot that's illuminating. One of Marley's many girlfriends, Esther Anderson, says the root of " 1 Shot the Sheriff" lay in their relationship: "ft's about birth control. Bob was always after me to 'breed' and have a baby with him. He kept asking me why after I'd been with him for a month already 1 hadn't got pregnant yet. 1 told him 1 was on the pill and this led to the line 'Every time 1 plant a seed he said kill it before it grow' - you see, the sheriff is the doctor." Marley wrote the song while sitting alongside his friend Lee Jaffe, who says Marley began with the line "1 shot the sheriff," to which Jaffe added, "But you didn't get the deputy." Together, Jaffe says, the lines signified the impossibility of defeating the system, because even if you kill the lawman, there's another one right behind him. For Jaffe, the message is: "This is going to be a long tragic struggle that's going to need a lot of everyday heroes." In his final days Marley battled cancer that had spread from his toe and invaded his entire body. Danny Sims, one of his producers, recalls a doctor saying, "Bob Marley has more cancer in him than I've seen with a live human being." He continued to fight, traveling to hospitals around the globe while surrounded by family, leading to a scene in which Rita, his wife of decades, serves breakfast in bed to Marley and his girlfriend Cindy Breakspeare. At least it was a mutually open situation: Steffens tells us, "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." Marley died in 1981 at the age of 36, a number that his older friends found significant because he had predicted it. Ibis Pitts, a friend who met Marley in Delaware long before his career took off, says, "Nesta told us about him not being on this earth many more years than Jesus Christ was." One of Pitts's friends "remembered the details": "Nesta said he was going to be leaving at 36." He may have correctly foreseen the age of his death, but he did not leave us. More than three decades after his death, Marley is still with us because there are still millions of people voting for him with their dollars and their hearts. Marley was - is - the face of Jamaica. He wets also a revolutionary. TOURE is the author of several books, including "I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon."
Table of Contents
| Introduction: The People Speak | p. xiii |
| Preface | p. xix |
| Chapter 1 Where Is My Mother? | p. 1 |
| Chapter 2 Trench Town Rocks | p. 8 |
| Chapter 3 The Wailers at Studio One | p. 22 |
| Chapter 4 Good Good Rudies | p. 40 |
| Chapter 5 Love and Affection | p. 59 |
| Chapter 6 Rasta Shook Them Up | p. 71 |
| Chapter 7 Waiters A Go Wait | p. 80 |
| Chapter 8 Nine Mile Exile | p. 87 |
| Chapter 9 The JAD Years | p. 94 |
| Chapter 10 Leslie Kong Meets the Tuff Gang | p. 107 |
| Chapter 11 Lee Perry and Jamaican Politricks | p. 117 |
| Chapter 12 Cold Cold Winters in Sweden and London | p. 133 |
| Chapter 13 Island's Kinky Reggae | p. 149 |
| Chapter 14 Burnin' Out in London | p. 158 |
| Chapter 15 The End of the Beginning | p. 169 |
| Chapter 16 Natty Dread | p. 179 |
| Chapter 17 Hope Road Runnings | p. 189 |
| Chapter 18 Cindy Breakspeare and the 1975 Tour | p. 198 |
| Chapter 19 Rastaman Vibration and the Fatal Reissue | p. 207 |
| Chapter 20 Ambush in the Night | p. 216 |
| Chapter 21 The CIA and the Assassination Attempt | p. 227 |
| Chapter 22 Smile, You're in Jamaica | p. 235 |
| Chapter 23 Who Shot Bob Marley? | p. 255 |
| Chapter 24 Exodus to London | p. 264 |
| Chapter 25 Blackwell, Bob and Business | p. 274 |
| Chapter 26 The Bloody Toe in the Paris Match | p. 282 |
| Chapter 27 The One Love Peace Concert | p. 288 |
| Chapter 28 Babylon by Bus from the U.N. to Ethiopia | p. 305 |
| Chapter 29 Charity and Survival | p. 315 |
| Chapter 30 From the Apollo to Gabon | p. 330 |
| Chapter 31 Natty Mash It inna Zimbabwe | p. 346 |
| Chapter 32 Uprising | p. 363 |
| Chapter 33 Madison Square Garden Then Everything Crash | p. 370 |
| Chapter 34 Dr. Issels and the Final Days | p. 386 |
| Chapter 35 Marley's Legacy and the Wailers' Favorite Songs | p. 399 |
| Epilogue | p. 407 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 409 |
| List of Interviewees | p. 415 |
| Index | p. 417 |