Jeremy Marre’s "Rebel Music": Bob Marley In His Times

Palm Pictures released Jeremy Marre’s groundbreaking documentary of Bob Marley Rebel Music June 26, 2001 on DVD and VHS. The film had previously aired on the Public Broadcasting System’s "American Masters" series in the U.S. on February 6, 2001, and in a shorter version on Channel 4 in London in the summer of 2000. The following interview with Marre explores some of the differences between the two versions, in particular the BBC’s demand for a "British" voice as narrator, as opposed to the Caribbean narrator Marre used in North America.

For those who want to know more about the human Bob and the political and cultural currents in which he swam, this is the film to have. I would hesitate to call it the "best" film on Bob: Time Will Tell is a classic portrait of Bob from a more mythological, iconic perspective. But I was impressed with Marre’s attention to Marley as a multi-centered human being. The sources of his poetic inspiration, as well as some of his human weaknesses, are revealed through previously unreleased footage, and through exclusive interviews with numerous individuals who knew Bob intimately, and who had not previously talked about Bob on film, such as former Miss World Cindy Breakspeare, arguably the greatest love of Bob’s life, and Esther Anderson. The revelations about Bob’s attitudes towards and relations with women are alone worth the price of admission. They will be controversial to some of Bob’s fans, but this is certainly a topic about which we will hear much more.

I was pleased to see Jamaican scholar Garth White validating a point I made in my 1999 book On Racial Frontiers about the relationship between Bob’s racial "ambiguity," and Selassie as Bob’s "perfect father." This is an issue which aroused controversy among some of those accustomed to thinking of Bob as a "black culture hero," and who had read my chapter "Bob Marley’s Zion: A Transracial ‘Blackman Redemption’," or heard me presenting material from this book in public lectures and radio interviews. But White says explicitly that "HIM became a father figure for Bob in a personal sense…Bob felt a personal affinity for Selassie based on rejection by his father."

One of my few disagreements with Marre concerns the conflicts Bob experienced as a youth as a result of being "brown," or of mixed "race." Marre argues that he encountered prejudice only from light-skinned Jamaicans, while Rita Marley and numerous other witnesses make it very clear that Bob sometimes faced severe prejudice from "black" Jamaicans as a result of being the son of a "white" man. Perhaps Marre’s position is a reflection of the all-too-common "white liberal guilt complex." Many who want to be on the "right side" of the struggle for equal rights and justice are compelled (by largely unconscious forces), to understand the issue of racism in black-and-white terms. But Bob’s life dramatically illustrated the truth that racialism is a problem perpetuated by people of all colors, which is of course why Bob and most of the Rastas made the concept of "One Blood" a cornerstone of their philosophy.

Otherwise, Rebel Music greatly advances our understanding of Bob Marley in his times, with the emphasis as much on the times that produced the man and the artist, as on the artist.

The following interview took place in September 2000, when I was in London to speak on Marley at the Jamaica Blue Café, and to do an interview on BBC. The text is based on a slightly edited minidisk interview of 60 minutes, which can be heard by clicking here. Some of the best stories Marre told me (for instance, about Rita Marley’s mercenary tendencies) were off the record! But I think you’ll agree that the stories he did tell about the trials and tribulations of making this film are lively indeed.

Jeremy Marre, interviewed by Gregory Stephens

Gregory Stephens: I’m here in Jeremy Marre’s house in Camden Town, in Greater London. Jeremy’s wonderful documentary "Rebel Music" showed on Channel 4 here in London on August 5th, 2000 and [aired] on the Public Broadcasting System’s American Masters series in North America in February, 2001. Which is kind of funny….

Jeremy Marre: "American Masters," yes (both laugh)

GS: What led up to the making of this documentary?

JM: Well, in 1977 I was in Jamaica and I made a film called, "Roots Rock Reggae," which came about because I made a film called "British Reggae," about musicians and workers who’d left Jamaica in the fifties and come to live in England. It had people like Roy Shirley, a lot of the old-timers and also the British bands in it.

GS: Aswad, Steel Pulse, Cimarrons

JM: Exactly, right. And so I wanted to go to Jamaica and find out where the music came from and I couldn’t raise any money because British Television was completely uninterested in reggae music.

GS: This was in the seventies?

JM: This was in 1977.

GS: The year of Bob’s releasing "Exodus" and blowing up all over England.

JM: It’s incredible, isn’t it?

GS: Yeah (laughs)

JM: So I went up there and I made "Roots Rock Reggae." We made it in two and a half weeks; it was very fast. It was a moment in time, really, looking at music in the month that we were there. And we came across some incredible musicians and some incredible music. It was very turbulent; there was a lot of violence on the streets and a lot of that was reflected in the music.

An interesting story is that I needed some footage of Bob Marley because Bob was in London. He was recording with Island and they didn’t want to interrupt any sessions and they didn’t want to do any filming, so they gave me some footage of Bob. I incorporated it in the film. Then we showed the finished program to Don Taylor (Bob Marley’s manager) and Don said, ‘ah, you can’t show it.’ ‘I want a million dollars for Bob’s appearance in your program,’ and we said, ‘Bob didn’t appear in the program, you gave us footage.’ And he said, ‘I want a million dollars.’

GS: I think I’ve heard this song before….

JM: Yes, I was to hear it many times, subsequently! And, I didn’t know what to do, basically. It was the first real film that I had taken a risk on. We showed it to the BBC and the BBC said, ‘it’s so boring.’ ‘Reggae music is so boring, it all sounds the same.’ So, Bob Marley sounded to them like Ethiopian Chant which sounded to them like Jimmy Cliff which sounded to them like… it was absurd to say that it was all the same! So we had no sale and we couldn’t show the film anywhere. And then I wrote to Chris Blackwell and I said, 'we’re in a real mess, you’ve got to help us out with Don Taylor.' And then I got a call saying someone’s coming around to look at your film at five o’clock. So I said ok and we sat up a projector and [in] walked Bob Marley. He sat down with three or four people, and they watched the film and they danced, and afterwards he just shook me by the hand and left.

GS: Didn’t say a word?

JM: He didn’t say a word, just shook my hand and left. The next day I got a phone call saying there are no problems. [laughs] Don Taylor has with drawn his injunction! It’s fine to go ahead.

GS: [laughing] That’s beautiful.

JM: Eventually what happened was we found a French distributor called Audiovisual . They showed the film in Milan; it won a Grand Prix in Milan; and then the BBC suddenly announced that their film on Reggae Music had won a major award in Milan…

GS: Their film?

JM: Their film and they were going to show it. They then showed it at nine o’clock in the evening as the BBC award-winning film; my name was omitted in all the publicity.

I then completed a long series on world music called, "Beats of the Heart," where we traveled to many different countries looking at the relationship of music to politics, to peoples’ aspirations. Then I was making a series called Classic Albums, and I’d done one with Paul Simon on Graceland —which was interesting because that went full-circle. It turned out that a film that had sent Paul Simon to South Africa to find Ladysmith Black Mambazo, was one of the films I’d made for Beats of the Heart. In fact, the film directly after Roots, Rock, Reggae, which was Rhythms of Resistance!

And I was asked to do a Classic Albums film on Catch A Fire. So I went to Jamaica, maybe three years ago, and met up with some of the people I’d known before, found an excellent line producer. A local guy called Carl Bradshaw, who has acted in many films from The Harder They Come right through to Third World Cop. And set about making a film about Catch a Fire. I met and started to talk to Bunny Wailer, Rita, Familyman, Wire Lindo; I met all kinds of people who’d been working on that record at that time. And slowly there kind of formed in my mind the idea of making a different sort of film about Bob, as a possibility, but I didn’t go any further than that. And about a year later I was approached to make a film about Bob Marley, at which point I said, ‘no, I don’t think there’s any point;’ because Island had already two, and the BBC had already done two, and really what’s the point? What [more] could one do? And then I was kind of thinking about it, and talking to Danny Simms. And we talked about Bob as kind of a child of his times, and Bob in a more political context, and the problems that JA was going through in the sixties and seventies, in the post-colonial era, as a kind of microcosm of what was going on the Cold War at that time. A tiny little island, with pressures from the left and pressures from the right…