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Reading these latest additions to the burgeoning library about Bob Marley, a line from Bob’s song “Crisis” kept running through my head: “So much has been said, so little been done They still killing the people, and they having lots of fun” So what’s the market for more words about Bob Marley? With all the killing going on in the world today, words are cheap. Sometimes I wonder about Bob’s skeptical assessment from the late song “Real Situation”: “Nation war against nation. Where did it all begin? Where will it end? “Sometimes it seems like total destruction’s the only solution.” But people need hope. A lot of us still find hope in Marley’s s songs of freedom. But then words can get in the way of the myth that animates those songs. Given my own complicity in the rivers of words still being written about Bob, sometimes I get the weary feeling: “We’ll be forever milking Bob.” Ziggy’s dad surely would have shared his take, from the song “Works to Do,” off the Life and Debt soundtrack: “How much blood have to be shed before we rebel?… Looking for words to say Bob Marley done said them already Now I just works to do ” Words vs. works: listen to Bob Marley’s anthemic “new psalms” long enough, and eventually you want something more. Maybe you just want to give it a rest, or hear someone else carry the torch for awhile. Maybe you’d like to see those words put into practice for a change. Or perhaps you’d like to know more about the man who sang them. This business of milking myths, or separating man from myth, is a tricky one. But it’s a business, nevertheless, that is aimed at a market. I imagine that the market for Rita Marley’s No Woman No Cry, and a Bob Marley Reader published by Da Capo press-- is divided between those fans whose thirst for new product by or about their hero can never be quenched, and a more skeptical group who wonder if anything new can really be said, at this point, about the Marley clan. The answer to that question, in the case of Rita Marley’s book, is quite a bit. Contemporary Jamaica is awash in rhetorical gender wars. Calls for the assassination of homosexuals. Or the latest craze, condemning men who engage in oral sex with women. Given this “culture of intolerance,” it should be no surprise that Rita Marley’s book burst into public awareness via some controversial statements she made about her late husband’s notorious womanizing. More specifically, there was an interview with Rita in the Mirror, right on the eve of the book’s UK publication, that screamed: “ Bob Marley Raped Me.” After one of Bob’s many extended absences, when he returned to Jamaica around 1974, Rita refused to have sex with him. Bob forced himself on her, Rita says. Now this claim shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows much about Jamaican men in general, or Bob Marley’s private life in particular. But it set off a firestorm in Jamaica that soon had Rita backtracking. Indeed, this is a muted, very brief incident in the book, in which Rita merely says that “I was almost raped.” And in her public interviews, as well as in the book, Rita has gone out of her way to testify as to what a great provider Marley was, in a material sense, no matter how absent or unfaithful he was, in a physical sense. There were some voices of support, such as Jamaica Observer columnist Mark Wignall, who had talked to enough Jamaican women who had been raped by men they know to take Rita’s claim seriously. But the outrage was acute among many whose livelihood in one way or another depends on them being custodians of a rather messianic variant of the Bob Marley culture hero myth. Rita’s accusations were “below the belt,” said Bunny Wailer, the last surviving member of Bob’s original group, the Wailers. “Why would she want (to taint) him at a time when he is being treated as a saint - this individual who the world is now seeing as an icon, a prophet and a spiritual leader,” said Bob’s boyhood friend. Bunny’s reaction dramatizes why discussion of these issues is long overdue: precisely because Marley is being treated as a saint, while new generations imitate his promiscuity. This tempest will remind some of the uproar after revelations about Martin Luther King Jr.’s womanizing. In both cases, custodians of the legacies of these freedom fighters fear that awareness of their humanity, and indeed their vices, will prevent people from continuing to honor them, or putting their words into practice. But once we confine our heroes to statues, and ignore their clay feet, then we cannot “forward in this generation,” as Marley sang. Or learn from their mistakes. Marley’s last years were a tragedy, a largely unlearned lesson about the extremes of co-dependency. Rita sees much of this clearly in retrospect: Bob was living completely for other people. He was surrounded by “'yes’ people.” His admirable ethic of self-sacrifice was corrupted, until “other people had taken over his life completely.” Things only got uglier after he died. Peter Tosh and Bunny came to a meeting with Rita at 56 Hope Road, and Peter began ripping Bob’s photos off the wall. Bunny told Rita that Bob’s death had been “the wages of his sin and corruption.” Rita admits candidly that she has “been waiting twenty years for these words to be in print”—that after insulting her and Bob, Bunny told her that she should shut down Bob’s headquarters and “come and work for them.” Better to pass over most these later years discreetly, and focus on what is clearly the strength of Rita’s book, the years before Bob became an international superstar. Ms. Marley begins with a scene at Bob’s deathbed which both prefigures what would come after, and points back towards what had led her to that fateful day. In a Miami hospital, Rita began crying and said “Bob, please, don’t leave me.” “Forget crying, Rita! Just keep singing. Sing! Sing!” Bob said. And so she did—she kept singing, and she learned to understand the part her voice played in this story. So that now, when like many of us, she hears Bob “everywhere,” she also hears her story. “Because I’m on almost all of the songs. So I also hear my voice.” The future Rita Marley was born in Cuba as Alfarita Constantia Anderson. She grew up, like Bob, essentially without her parents. Bob had his mother for a few years, and Rita had her father for a few years, but they were both the product of broken homes. Rita’s father Leroy Anderson was a musician and a carpenter. When Rita was five, her mother Cynthia Jarrett left Rita and her brother Wesley to start a new family. Her father took the children to live with his sister Vida, known as Aunty to Rita. Aunty is an unsung hero of this story. She eventually divorced from a Mr. Britton, who had two sons outside the marriage, and dedicated most of the rest of her life to raising Rita, and later taking care of the children of Rita and Bob while they went through the long, seemingly endless struggle to make a career in music. For both Rita and Bob, their parents were a “present absence” in formative ways. When Rita was nine, her mother remarried and didn’t invite her daughter to the wedding. A couple of years later, her Aunty bought her father Leroy tickets to England and told him: “go find a life.” Rita did not see him for another 10 years. Rita trained to become a nurse. But like many teens in similar circumstances, she became pregnant at age 17. It was really through her daughter Sharon that Rita began to see Bob, then known as Robbie, as a partner. The young Marley was serious and stand-offish. But he had a very generous side. When he found out that Rita had a baby, he began taking on a parental role. When he had spare change, he would bring the baby food. The ultra-suspicious Aunty “began to give in to his nice ways and manners.” “And this is where my love came in,” Rita remembers. She looked at him and thought, “oh, such a nice guy.” This is the impression many people had of Bob Marley in those years. Serious, self-disciplined, well-mannered, good with children. “We both became parents for Sharon,” Rita notes. Yet even as romance blossomed, “at first, and maybe always, I cared for Robbie Marley from a sisterly point of view.” The young couple’s conflicts were exacerbated by a lack of money that kept them under Aunty’s roof for a decade, and later by Bob’s immersion in his musical ambition and the extracurricular activities it entailed. The young couple had physical fights. Bob went off to live in Delaware with his mother a day after they got married. Later Rita went to live in Delaware with young Ziggy, while Bob tried to make it as a songwriter for Johnny Nash. When Rita voiced her desire to come home, just before Stephen was born, Bob discouraged her. “I realized we’re separating, we’re growing apart,” Rita recalls. When she did return to Jamaica, still under Aunty’s roof, now with four children, some nights Bob didn’t come home. Divorce crossed her mind. But she decided that “even if I’m angry as hell at Bob, I have to be strong for him.” The pattern was set. Bob and Rita had a relationship that was often more like brother and sister than lovers. And Rita was increasingly left alone, often angry at her husband, but determined to be the pillar in their unstable lives. As soon as Marley signed a deal with Island Records and gained access to the uptown property at 56 Hope Road, the philandering began in earnest. “I tried to train myself to think of Bob as a good loving brother more so than a real husband,” Rita observed. But Marley’s sense of entitlement to have “many queens” became ever more brazen. A breaking point for Rita was when the film star Esther Anderson, “on loan” from Island Records head Chris Blackwell, publicly scolded Rita, telling her to “stop breeding and let [Bob] find a life.” Finding a life is the theme of the second half of Rita’s memoir. While Bob found fame, Rita established a semblance of stability for their children. With the help of a Rasta elder named Gabby, and with Bob’s money, Rita bought a government block house at Bull Bay, 12 miles outside of Kingston. It had no water or electricity, but it was a grand adventure for Rita and her children. Friends trucked in water; the children enrolled in local schools. Rita planted a garden, and later, moved into farming. “Whatever I plant grows,” she says proudly. Eventually she got water and electricity. Not long after moving to Bull Bay, Bob disappeared for two months. No one knew for sure where he was. One day he drove up in his Jeep, unannounced. “Where have you been?” Rita asked. “I don’t know,” responded Bob. Despite his “I don’t know program,” Bob thought of this as “the family house.” Coming by after a tour was “coming home” for him. It was only through the private life Rita established that Bob ever experienced any sense of normality. Rita had a basement room dug for Bob, a private getaway, and a little studio. At night, after putting the kids to bed, they’d go down to this basement, “sometimes to make out… but more often just to rehearse and compose.” Her descriptions of life at Bull Bay are, for me, the most endearing part of the book. There were talent shows with the kids--dress rehearsals for the Melody Makers, sometimes with Bob in attendance. But he was still essentially a visitor. Sometimes he brought a girl in his car. More than once he flew into jealous rages over Rita’s imagined infidelities with a male friend named Tacky. Once Bob’s lover Cindy Breakspeare came in the room and called him “darling” while Bob was discussing his suspicions with Tacky, who then called him on his hypocrisy. Rita was still financially dependent, but charting her own path. She opened the Queen of Sheba restaurant, with Bob’s blessing and support, and supplied this from her own farm. But Bob’s career had proceeded without her contribution, except as mother. So it was after years of de facto professional separation that Bob asked her to record and then tour with him as part of the I-Threes. “One thing about working for Mr. Marley—he pays you,” Rita says emphatically. It was a professional relationship, primarily, that brought Rita back into Bob’s career. The more that Bob became “corrupted by show business,” the more that Rita’s relative immunity to his glamorous fantasy life seemed to bother him. She could always “bring him up to reality,” because Rita “was there from the beginning, from one [pair of] underpants, and those were my hands, every night, washing them out.” Reading Rita’s story, especially her unwanted burden of the legal battles over Bob’s estate, one senses that the whole of her relationship with Bob after around 1971 was a long detour. This detour chewed up a couple more decades, as she fended off the sharks that swarmed over his iconic remains, and struggled with the long shadow Bob cast over her life. One could understand if Rita came away from this experience embittered, or mercenary. And on the latter count, I’ve heard my share of horror stories. But Rita Marley comes across as a very sympathetic personality in this book. One cannot but respect her for being strong for her children during so much upheaval. Now that her children are self-sufficient, Rita has relocated to Ghana. Her work in a mountain village there appears to combine roles as social worker and entrepreneur. And in some ways, she had learned from Bob’s mistakes. While Bob handed out money freely to thousands, a horde that arguably ate him alive, Rita has taken a different approach. Rather than just passing out money to people who become accustomed to handouts, Rita’s stance has been more like that old saying: “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach him how to fish and he’ll eat forever.” * * * Rita Marley’s No Woman No Cry is on the inside looking out. There is little about Marley the myth, and maybe more than we want to know about Bob’s all-too-human limitations. By contrast, Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright: The Bob Marley Reader is on the outside looking in. It tells much more about Bob’s mythic or iconic dimensions. The tone is set by the editor, Hank Bordowitz, author of the bio Bad Moon Rising. On the very first page of text, a mini-intro titled “Marley: Cultural Icon,” Bordowitz informs us that Marley is a “cultural martyr who suffered for the sins of his audience.” Ouch. That reminds me of a red-headed singer at a Ft. Worth Bob Marley Festival in 2002 who shrilly declared: "Bob Marley died for your sins!" One could grin and bear such lunacies from enthusiastic fans, but in a book whose editor and writers surely want to be taken seriously, it does more than set one’s teeth on edge. It’s enough to make me want to point out the element of truth in assertions made by Bunny Wailer or Peter Tosh that Bob Marley may have died early because of his own “sins.” About the foreword by Roger Steffens. I know Roger personally and admire his long decades of work promoting reggae in Los Angeles, and spreading the gospel of Bob Marley internationally. But Steffens too has a tendency to wander into hyperbole and even hagiography. What does it mean to claim that Marley is “without question one of the most transcendent figures of the past hundred years”? Transcendent in what sense? How do we square Bob’s outsized appetite for women and herb with the assertion that he “cared nothing for earthly trappings.” Aren’t addiction to sex, to ganja, and the quest for fame all earthly “trappings” that entrapped Marley in different ways? This Reader is divided into two main sections. The first is titled “Wake Up and Live: The Life and Times of Robert Nesta Marley.” Each chapter takes a Marley song to indicate its focus. “Waiting in Vain” is an oral history of the 1962-1972 period. This includes a reflection by Rita Marley published in Essence in February 1995 that is clearly a first draft for part of her book. Chapter Two, “Stir it Up,” covers the rise to international acclaim by Marley and the Wailers from 1972-1976. This includes a lengthy excerpt from Lee Jaffe’s book One Love, which I have reviewed previously. Most of the writing dates from the 1970. We listen in on jaded New Yorkers who know how obvious some of Marley’s stage mannerisms were, and yet acknowledge that they found his charisma irresistible. The best piece in this chapter, and maybe in the book, is Lester Bangs’ “Innocents in Babylon.” Bangs, writing for his Creem Magazine (immortalized in Almost Famous), freely confesses that Marley is his least favorite Jamaica artists. That critical distance, and the fact that he has no editorial restraints (this piece runs over 40 pages), leads to some typically Bangsian gems (as well as superfluous motion). It should be no surprise that Bangs felt most at home in Jamaican record shops, rather than waiting around on stars. His time in one deafening store produces this memorable line: “the guitars chop to kill.” Bangs was also present at a well-known twilight interview that Stephen Davis conducted with Marley, and at a rather bizarre quasi-“groundation” conducted by Ras Michael, Chinna Smith, and others. Chapter Three is “Top Rankin’: The First Great ‘Third World’ Star, 1976-1981.” This includes Vivien Goldman’s portrait of the Wailers in Europe. Goldman’s feature is memorable for human dimensions of the Tuff Gong it reveals. Bob justified Kaya’s love songs and muses: “How long must I sing the same song?” When Vivien drinks Irish Moss for the first time, Bob tells her that this is good for her: it “make your pom-pom wet.” In a different register, Carol Cooper’s Afrocentric feature in the Village Voice describes Marley’s ambition as “to resurrect the political ethic of Garveyism.” Chapter Four, “Blackman Redemption,” is about the “Second Coming” of Marley 1981-2002. One can see how quickly reportage turned to hagiography in those years. (It means the biography of saints, or an idolizing biography). Writing for the Village Voice in 1982, Isaac Fergusson describe’s Marley’s 1967 semi-retirement from the music biz, when he farmed at St. Ann’s, as a time in which “he made a covenant with a new God.” Ah, check with Rita for her memory of that hard-scrabble period! The much shorter second section of The Bob Marley Reader is titled “Music Gonna Teach Them a Lesson: The Meaning of Bob Marley.” An essay by the late Jamaican Prime Minister, Michael Manley, on “Reggae and the Revolutionary Faith,” is worth a read. I don’t think the Honorable Manley needed to put it in all-caps, but it’s worth repeating: in contrast to, say, soca (or R&B, etc.) “THE GREATER PART OF BOB MARLEY IS THE LANGUAGE OF REVOLUTION.” “It is this assertion of revolutionary possibility that sets reggae apart,” he adds. Does Bob’s visionary work, what Steffens rightly calls “an embarrassment of riches,” lose any of its “revolutionary possibility,” now that it has been so relentlessly commercialized, or now that we know more clearly just how flawed Marley was as a human being? I don’t think so. There’s a famous anecdote, which Ree Negwenya relates in her account of Marley’s visit to Zimbabwe, of the I-Threes fleeing to their hotel after getting hit by tear gas. Bob was coming off stage when Rita, Judy Mowatt, and Marcia Griffiths returned. Half-smiling, he said: “”Hah! Now I know who the real revolutionaries are.” We ought to know by now how many meanings that line can have. Rita Marley’s book is important because it shows who stayed at home while the freedom fighters were fighting. I hope the next Marley Reader grapples with some troubling questions Marley’s life raises, such as: is the “revolutionary impulse” best enacted abroad, or at home, and what is “the woman’s place” in such movements? And, can we or should we aspire to outgrow the messianic mindset? Idolatry was both Bob Marley’s strength (his faith in his “perfect father”), but also a form of mental slavery in both the man and his admirers. ----------------------------------- Gregory Stephens is the author of On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley. His current book project is Real Revolutionaries, including a chapter about Marley’s use of Marcus Garvey’s concept of “a second emancipation.” Contact: gstephen@email.unc.edu
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