 Two
new books about Bob Marley and the Wailers follow the template established
by Bob Marley: Reggae King of the World, first published in 1984. Like
that book, both Lee Jaffe’s One Love: Life With Bob Marley
and the Wailers, and Fikisha Cumbo’s Get Up! Stand Up!
(Diary of a Reggaeophile) are oversized, coffee table-style books that rely heavily
on visuals. These books are collages, cobbling together material  from
various sources, and present a series of impressions, rather than a
unified biographical narrative. And like Bob Marley: Songs of Freedom (Adrian Boot and Chris Salewicz, Viking, 1995), another book in this
genre, both Cumbo and Jaffe offer some new perspectives about Marley
and his scene.
At first glance Jaffe’s book might look like the best of the two. Jaffe
was, after all, Bob “best new friend” from early 1973 to mid-1974.
His book has a big publisher (Norton) and is beautifully designed by Geoff Gans.
Cumbo’s book is self-published, and the production value is less than stellar.
In truth they have different strengths and weaknesses. Jaffe’s main draw
will be his gorgeous color photos of Bob & Co. Yet although Cumbo has much
less direct access to the Wailers’ scene, her book in many ways offers
a more personal view of Bob and the Wailers. The strengths of her book are the
interviews in which Marley, Tosh, the I-Threes, and others speak at leisure.
Jaffe’s photos are often arresting and sometimes beautiful. Take the first
photo of Bob, on page 11, with Nesta in a burgundy tank top, shoulder-length
dreads, and a drop-dead handsome smile. This could become a new iconic photo
of Bob. Later in the book, on page 79, you can see that this is a blow-up of
Bob posing with the Jackson Five on their visit to Hope Road in 1974. The all-hours
access Jaffe had during about 18 months provides many priceless images. Many
people have seen Jaffe’s shot of a muscular Bob, clad only in striped underwear,
standing under the waterfalls at Cane River. In his book Jaffe preceeds that
picture with a photo taken a few minutes earlier in which Bob is covering his
body with shampoo. His dreads are white, the soap making them stand upright,
matching the snowy foam of the water behind him. Bob looks both otherworldly,
and the Rastaman at home in his natural element.
One Love is really a co-creation with Roger Steffens, Marley archivist and hagiographer
extraordinaire. It is the text of Jaffe’s interviews with Steffens that
fills most of the space beside his photos. Steffens also edited in segments of
Jaffe’s own “notes,” written at Steffens’ request, “paintings
in grammar that frequently introduced new words to this lifelong writer.”
Jaffe met Bob in January 1973, in a motel room where Jaffe was visiting Jim Capaldi,
the drummer for Marley’s label-mate on Island Records, Traffic. Jaffe was
then just 22, a former Penn State student who had already made a good deal of
money selling herb, and was then making films with some top-flight stars such
as Esther Anderson. Jaffe was well-connected in New York’s art and rock-and-roll
scene. Like many people, he was primed for Marley’s Catch a Fire by watching
the film Harder They Fall. As Bob’s music spread like wildfire among New
York’s artistic elite, he could only compare their reaction to the reception
of Jimi Hendrix’s first album in 1967.
The title of Jaffe’s book is unfortunate—“One Love” is
already so over-used it often becomes a cliché. Jaffe’s book actually
conveys little of the “One Love” ethic Bob popularized. The side
of Bob that does come through in these photos and words is something more prosaic
than the spiritual legend. Jaffe’s first “painting in grammar” is
of Lee and Bob walking through a frozen night along Central Park West until they
come to the house of Lee’s friend Brew, whose cavernous apartment is filled
with bales of various sorts of marijuana. Jaffe informs us that he had already
taken “hundreds” of acid trips, peyote, etc., but that his jaw dropped
as he watched Bob light a snowcone Cheeba. “I knew…I was entering
a new world. The world of The Most High.”
Much of Jaffe’s value to the Marley posse seems in fact to have been his
ability to help them hustle herb. According to Jaffe, he and Bob drove constantly
in the first years of Bob’s Island career, in an “interminable, relentless,
intractable…search for the better herb.” They would also drive many
miles out of the way to find a particular sort of mango that could only be found
at a particular moment on a remote tree. Jaffe says that Bob was an excellent,
conscious driver, in contrast to Peter Tosh.
In short order, Jaffe had dropped plans for a film in Chile (a casualty of the
CIA coup against Salvador Allende) and was headed with Bob, Island chief Chris
Blackwell and his entourage for island-hopping in the Caribbean, living the life
of rock and roll royalty.
Jaffe abandoned his prior life and moved into Bob’s new digs at 56 Hope
Road. In fact, in the early days, it was only Bob, his lover Esther Anderson
(to whom Jaffe had introduced him), and Jaffe living at Island House. Yet despite
this intimate access, the long hours jamming on harmonica, the many trips around
the island, Bob himself remains curiously out-of-focus in this book.. One gets
little sense of Bob’s or Peter’s personalities, as come across so
vividly in Cumbo’s interviews.
What we do get with Jaffe is some further details that can be added to prior
portraits. We get further evidence of the collective manner in which Bob wrote
songs. Jaffe claims to have co-written “I Shot the Sheriff,” and
claims that the song was in part a humorous commentary about Bob hanging out
with a “white man,” his “new best friend,” Lee Jaffe.
We also get some sense of the communal atmosphere at Hope Road. Jaffe says he
lived without money for his two years with Bob. But Bob always made sure he ate,
part of a dependency that would grow into the thousands by his death.
We also get some views of how Bob was “in but not of” the world of
rock and roll glamour, and yet learned to savour its fruits, in his own way,
as much as the next rock star. For a short time Jaffe ran Island’s shoestring
American office, and was responsible for smuggling the Wailers into the U.S.,
through Toronto, so that they could play their famous gig with Bruce Springsteen
at Max’s. Jaffe was responsible for scoring the band’s herb, and
for booking them at the Chelsea Hotel, the only place near Max’s in which
this band that “looked like we were going to overthrow the government” could
move around unmolested, like any other freak in this famous hangout. Jaffe introduced
Bob to “a fair Danish princess” named Mooskie who was Bob’s
inseparable lover for that week in New York, putting a visible glow on his face.
Jaffe clears up some misconceptions. He says that the legend of Marley “blowing
Sly Stone off the stage” in 1973, as Steffens has said often, was “very
far from the truth.” He sheds light on new manager Don Taylor’s habit
of standing in front of band members—this was not about hiding Jaffe’s “whiteness,” as
some have said, but part of Taylor efforts to freeze out those who previously
had intimate access to the Gong. Jaffe does provide an insider’s view at
a few moments, mostly when he is involved directly in the band’s runnings.
He is extremely proud when Bunny Wailer, who had a reputation as anti-white,
announced to the crowd at Hope Rode one day that “Lee a Wailer now.” And
his membership is confirmed when he plays his harmonica on stage with the band
for the first time on “Roadblock,” when the Wailers open in Kingston
for Marvin Gaye.
Soon after Taylor came on board, tensions grew between Marley and Jaffe. The
two finally came to blows in a Los Angeles motel room. Jaffe says this conflict
centered on his dismay that Bob had allowed “Knotty Dread” to be
retitled “Natty Dread,” and that Bob had not given Jaffe any credit
on the album, while crediting others who had nothing to do with the album’s
composition. Jaffe played a last concert at Central Park in 1975—the same
concert where Cumbo saw Bob for the first time—and then left to manage
Peter Tosh. (Bob later proved that some brotherly love had survived the fight
when he arranged, from abroad, to bail Jaffe out of a Kingston jail).
Jaffe’s access to Marley’s circle ends just about the same time that
Cumbo’s begins. “Bob was on a new, and what seemed to me less idealistic,
path,” he writes, in an assessment that coincides with what Tosh told Cumbo
after the 1975 concert with Stevie Wonder.
Picture this: On June 20, 1975, Fikisha Cumbo chats with Bob Marley
on the 24th floor of a Barbizon Plaza hotel room. Ms. Cumbo has only
discovered reggae a couple of weeks earlier, but has already caught Marley
and the Wailers in concert at Central Park, and now has scored an interview
with Natty Dread himself.
Marley is in an expansive and humorous mood. At one point point Cumbo asks
Bob about politics and he responds: “Politics! See, I am a man of God
and me come to do God’s work.” Bob hands Cumbo his spliff, and
she takes a long draw on it before giving it back.
This bit about Marley sharing his spliff is one of many details that were cut
from the version of Cumbo’s interview published in Reggae King of
the World. This interview is the best reasoning with Marley I have ever read. It
was on this occasion that Bob volunteered his famous prophecy: “My music
will go on forever.” It is on this day when Bob responds to a question
about his career success by describing Selassie (indirectly) as “the
perfect father for me” who “grow me just the way how a son supposed
to be grown.” And it was during this same interview when Bob reacted
to Cumbo’s comments about the Age of Aquarius by declaring: “Ya
can’t tell me about white and black…We fly a color which is red,
gold and green. Now we’re not prejudice, because we leave our judgement
unto JAH.”
Ever since reading this interview, I’ve wanted to know more about how
it came about. What led Bob, at this moment, to these particular heights of
consciousness? It was because I had read and cited this interview many times
that I knew Fikisha Cumbo’s name. And it was this interview that made
me want to read her book Get Up! Stand Up!, about her time with Marley and
Peter Tosh.
As a woman, as an African American, and as a grad student, Cumbo provides some
points of view that were rare in 1975. Like Jah knows how many people, Cumbo
was turned onto reggae music through Bob Marley’s album Natty Dread.
Less than a week after hearing reggae for the first time, she scored press
tickets to the Wailers’ performance at the Schaffer Festival in Central
Park. Her first impression was that the place was “packed to the rafters
with mostly White people.” There were “only a handful of Black
people here and most of [them] come from the Caribbean.” [In an interview
Cumbo conducted with the I-Threes in the spring of 1976, Rita Marley and Judy
Mowatt theorize that “White folks are quick” and “more receptive,” while
Marcia Griffiths believes that “Black people take it for granted.”]
Like countless women after her, Cumbo celebrated her new enthusiasm for reggae
by having extensions put into her hair. After the Central Park concert, she
is led by Ozzie Brown, Taj Mahal’s manager, back to Marley’s tiny “sauna-hot
trailer” where Bob, typically, is completely surrounded by fans. Cumbo
kneels beside Bob, “my long hair extensions falling slightly across his
thigh,” tells him she is doing a master’s thesis on Musicians of
the African Diaspora, and asks for an interview.
Cumbo arrives at her interview, some days later, “wearing three-inch
green sling pump heels,” which make her six feet one inch tall, she observes,
towering over the diminutive Bob. Just how many six-feet female African American
academics do you think were interviewing Bob Marley and Peter Tosh in 1975?
She put these men at ease, as few journalists did, with fascinating results.
Cumbo comes into their lives with a new fan’s enthusiam, but also with
some perspectives that today we would call “Afrocentric.” And they
respond with more of their full selves than what they normally revealed. This
means we get the warts as well as the wisdom. In this 24th floor interview
with Marley, for instance, in several sections edited out of the Reggae
King of the World version, Bob clearly signals his homophobia and sexism, in sometimes
crude ways, while in the same breath talking about “cutting the negative
t’ing out entirely.”
Cumbo next encounters Marley in Kingston in August of 1975. Marley encourages
her incipient career as a photographer, saying “You take some different
kind’a picture.” On this and a return trip in October, Cumbo begins
to experience the sexism and machismo of Jamaican culture. But she is also
drawn to the Rastas, and begins to remodel herself according to their norms,
trading in tights pants or short skirts for long skirts. We get a fan’s
eye view of rehearsals in a home-made, unfinished, dirt floor room at Island
House. Cumbo realizes that her affinity lies not with American R&B and
its reigning superstar, Stevie Wonder, who has come to Jamaica for “The
Dream Concert” with Marley, but with the Wailers’ spiritual vibes.
Through music, Marley and everyone around him is “transformed into ecstasies
of positive vibrations…beyond time, beyond space.”
Cumbo’s first interview with Tosh was on October 7, 1975, after the “Dream
Concert.” Cumbo has experienced the Wailers’ scene as a “spiritual
gathering of souls,” but Tosh expresses his discontent with Marley’s
scene “from a spiritual point of view.” As their interview ends,
Tosh declares with finality that “me not getting back with Bob again.”
From this point on, Cumbo develops a friendly relationship with Tosh, while
her interactions with Marley are limited to brief exchanges, and just being
part of his retinue as he holds court on visits to New York. Her personal and
professional relationship with Tosh in fact is the cornerstone of Get Up!
Stand Up!—aptly titled after the anthem co-written by Peter and Bob.
One thing that comes across clearly in Cumbo’s description of both men
is the sexual heat they generated in the women around them. Cumbo seems to
have been attracted to Tosh almost from the beginning. In 1977, she spent several
days roaming about Jamaica with Tosh in his green Hillman Hunter, on assignment
for Head Magazine, which wanted a photo of Peter in a ganja field.
This romp through Jamaica with Tosh is perhaps the book’s best chapter.
It shows Tosh in his own element, interacting with people all over yard who
clearly love him. We begin to get a clearer sense of Tosh’s personality
than can be had by portraits of the man outside Jamaica, or on stage. “Peter
was a law unto himself,” as Cumbo’s Jamaican friend Maxine Walters
says.
It is really outdoors, away from the concert scene, where Cumbo exhibits her
photographic flair. This chapter has some memorable images. There is Tosh in
his yard, chewing off the same piece of sugar cane with his pet parrot Freddie,
so it almost looks like they’re kissing. Or Tosh in front of Music Fair,
lighting his pipe as he stands beside a Che Guevara poster, wearing the same
beret as Che but with a “Legalize It” button instead of a star.
Because Tosh is at ease with Cumbo, we rarely see the abrasive arrogance that
is often apparent with other reporters. Tosh is at times pompous with Cumbo,
but more often humorous and charming. The sexual undertone of their relationship
finally become explixcit at their last meeting, in September 1983, in Tosh’s
apartment off Central Park West. They have by now hung out dozens of times
alone in Tosh’s various motel rooms, without anything romantic happening.
But this time she is immediately tuned into Tosh’s “bulging thigh
muscles that pop out” of “very short jogging shorts.” In
their first interview, Tosh had bragged that he had around 50 children. Now
he teases his friend Fikisha: “We’ve known each other for 8 years
and you don’t have one of my sons by now?” He continues to make
indirect sexual overtures, and finally invites her to “invite me to your
yard.”
“
My yard?” she replies, dumbfounded.
“
Yeah, your yard. I want to come and spend a few days with you.”
Cumbo tells Peter that this could be hard to arrange--she has a teenage son
Malik (then 13). She remembers all the other women she has seen move in and
out of Peter’s life, and she is sure that she doesn’t want to be
one of those women. But they share a passionate kiss before she leaves. Afterwards,
Cumbo is “torn between being deliriously happy and strikingly melancholy,
for I know in my heart that I will never invite Peter McIntosh to my yard.”
From the beginning, Cumbo had witnessed a troubling “male thing” among
Jamaicans, who treated women as second class citizens. She witnessed the strict
gender segregation on Wailers tours, with a “male section” and
a “female section” which each had their own gender-appropriate
cook. While the men played the field, Bob treated the I-Threes almost like
prisoners, telling Judy Mowatt that “your lips are for singing, not kissing.” Even
the most worldly of the Rasta women seemed to have interalized this sexism.
When Cumbo interviewed the I-Threes in 1976, they reflexively endorsed their
subordinate status. “Men are first in creation,” said Mowatt, following
the Genesis model. “The man is there to teach the woman.”
So in the end, having seen all the signs, Fikisha Cumbo repressed her own desire.
She declined to cross the line from friendship and professional affiliation
into being the (temporary) lover of a Rastaman. As much as she longed for that
intimacy, she knew that she could not bring all of her self-respect into such
a relationship.
I respect Fikisha greatly for making that choice, at a time when so many women
were throwing themselves at Marley and Tosh. And I salute her for the research,
writing, and production that went into this book, a true labor of love. Cumbo’s
book, and Jaffe’s, are both valuable additions to the growing body of
works about Marley, Tosh, and the rest of the Wailers’ scene; the culture
they emerged from, and the cultures still being created out of their mighty
works.
--------------------------------------------
Gregory Stephens is the author of On Racial Frontiers:
The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley (Cambridge
UP). As a journalist Stephens has published in forums including the Los
Angeles
Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Village Voice. An interview about this book
can be read here.
His essay "The Fiya Burn Controversy: On the Uses of Fire in a
Culture of Love and Rebellion" can be read here
and the companion radio special can be heard here.
A former Lecturer
at the University of California and a Rockefeller Fellow at the University
of
North Carolina, he is currently a Bilingual Teacher in Oklahoma City Public
Schools. Stephens’ radio shows, interviews, and writing are on-line
at http://www.gregorystephens.com. Contact gstephen@email.unc.edu
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