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

GS: A microcosm of post-colonialism.

JM: Yep. With Cuba and Castro on the one hand, with the American pressures on the other, with the British colonial heritage…and all this incredible culture coming out of it. And I thought, well there’s an interesting theme. Chris Blackwell called and I mentioned this idea to Chris and he said ‘well, it’s a possibility, why don’t you write to the Marley family.’ I thought, well the Marley family turned almost everything down that they haven’t proposed. They also were going to do a feature film at that time about Bob’s life, with Lauryn Hill playing Rita Marley. So I sent it to [the family] and they said, in principle, yes. So, that was a good start, and we had to raise quite a lot of money; and we went to British television who said, ‘we don’t want anything to do with this’. And we tried American television, and PBS showed more interest than anybody. I think they thought it was time to put a major artist on who was not American, in the American Masters slot. They’d only done Pavarotti, I believe, before as a non-American. They got behind it, and we got some French television interest, and then we just chugged away at Channel four, which used to be a very progressive and innovative channel. Eventually they said yes, a completely different department from the one that said no.

GS: Can you tell me a bit more about the genesis and development of this idea of Bob as a child of his times? Because the timing was certainly serendipitous with all the honors that have been heaped upon Bob’s head: "One Love" as BBC’s Song of the Millennium, named by the BBC; and Time Magazine, naming Exodus as its Album of the Century. So your timing was perfect to get a broader perspective on Bob’s life beyond just ‘Bob the Artist,’ which strikes me as what is new, in some ways, about your documentary.

JM: Yeah, the timing was good, but that was fortuitous of course, we couldn’t know. But really, the people we were approaching in terms of funding had no knowledge of any of these things. They live in another kind of media world, and it’s blinkered to some extend. And I did notice that when we got to Jamaica to do the research trip, there was such a focus on Bob’s achievements —you mentioned, Album of the Century; but I don’t think anyone here was even aware of that, really. See, people don’t really read Time Magazine in the UK. In the end, we didn’t shoot until Jan-Feb. 2000, and [there were] a lot of delays. There was a lot of research to be done. A huge amount of reading, a huge amount of listening, a lot of talking to people, and getting the money together proved incredibly difficult.

GS: We were talking earlier about some of the fights you got over this, which struck me as appropriate in some way, if you look at Bob’s life and the amount of fight he had to go through to get his music out to an international public. Some of the fights were just getting rights to footage, and that type of thing.

JM: It was very difficult. There were certain tensions, also, between Chris Blackwell (who owns the publishing for Bob), Island Universal (who owns a lot of the footage and the records) and the family (who owns Bob’s appearance). Without any one of those three, you couldn’t proceed. But the three of them were not always on the best of terms, and we were in the middle. And there were some quite aggressive lawyers in between as well. It sort of began to spiral out of control from time to time. Apart from getting the money together, there was getting the concept right, from my point of view. Because it needed to be different, and it needed to have focus. And the focus was really, in the broader sense a political one. It was the politics of Bob’s life. The politics of his songs, the politics of the music business, the politics of being a Jamaican in that Colonial and post-colonial era, the pressures on the island, and the ways that those followed him all through his life, right to the end.

It is, to some extent, an extension of what I was doing in Roots Rock Reggae. But I was also trying to reveal, quite intimately, what made Bob tick as a human being, against that [political] backdrop. What I wanted was a big emotional close-up of the man from those who knew him best, set against the broader political backdrop of this island tossed in the currents of the Cold War. So the next difficulty was to find people in Jamaica who had not participated in other films, and get them to talk openly and honestly about their relationship with Bob; and that was terribly difficult.

GS: Can you tell us some stories involving getting those people to participate, and getting the footage…

JM: It’s a bit like asking a gumshoe or a private eye how did you find someone?’ Actually the process of persuading them, was the process of ‘finding them’; getting their telephone numbers, finding them time and time again, faxing them, speaking to them, going over there, knocking on their door.

GS: How did you find the footage of Esther Anderson with Bob, when he was around twenty-seven?

JM: I had found that footage during the shooting of the Classic Albums film in Toronto. I had that brought over to England by a stewardess on American Airlines, because it was on these early, crumbly and quite inflammable tapes, which no one was willing to transport. She brought them in a shopping basket on the plane for us. We then had to bake them, which was quite a dangerous process, because all the tape was falling apart; and it had to be baked solid, and we then transferred it onto tape.

GS: And a stewardess literally carried it, so you’re doing international contraband to tell Bob’s story!

JM: [laughing] That’s right! So I had, physically, the material, but I did not have the copyright on it, because obviously I didn’t own it. So we traced that back to the guy who shot it, Lee Jaffe. He played harmonica on Natty Dread, "Roadblock" and he toured with Bob in the states in ’75, I think. There is actually some footage of that which we didn’t use in our film because the sound quality was very bad. But there’s a whole show that’s been filmed by a guy in NY, and it’s amazingly good footage.

GS: There are stories about Don Taylor standing in front of Lee to ‘hide his whiteness.’ Is that actually true, do you know?

JM: It doesn’t show on the footage, but it could be the case. I think Lee was a bit of an embarrassment for them. There’s a very funny interview with Bob where he talks about Lee’s harmonica playing, and none too sympathetically, but it’s all in good humour. In any case we understood from Lee that Lee owned the copyright, and he was duly paid the correct amount. But when it came to this program, there was a major conflict between him and Esther Anderson. Esther was a girlfriend of Bob’s, who had worked for Island Records. Her boyfriend after Bob was actually Marlon Brando, and before was Chris Blackwell. She went out there with a camera and would tape; according to her, Lee Jaffe was the camera operator. So going back to finding the artists and finding the footage, this was a whole process of exploration and of cajoling people, and talking to them over months and months. I started in August of 1999 and I filmed in February of 2000. So all that time I was trying to persuade people to take part and some of them wouldn’t. Or other people I met just would not give an objective assessment of Bob. There were some really interesting contemporary characters, of the older generation who are out there, that I would have loved to have included but…

GS: …they were sort of following the mythological narrative?

JM: Exactly right, and that’s what they wish to perpetuate. So that didn’t work out. But I did, in the end, persuade Bunny Wailer. My God, it was hard work; and Bunny’s a difficult man, but he gave a great interview in the end. Then Cindy Breakespeare was willing to take part, Esther Anderson gave her first ever interview [about Bob] and quite a few other people, Coxsone Dodd among them, the Great Coxsone Dodd!

He was difficult. We chased him and we faxed him and we talked to him…and then he was in NY when I was JA and then he was in JA when I was in NY…then I met him, and I talked to him, and he said, ‘no.’ Under no circumstances would he give an interview, because he was planning his own life story. And I said, well it could only be good publicity, and we only want to do two minutes. Well, if you only want to do two minutes, then there’s no point in doing it. So there was no way to persuade him. Then, when I was actually there for the shoot, I went to see him again; and he didn’t want to see me and I hung around the gate. But Carl Bradshaw was incredibly helpful. And we waylayed him on one occasion, and we talked to him, we went in and hung around; and finally he agreed to do it. He did an interview which lasted, I suppose, an hour. We just used a little in the program, because in the early days we had to move through quite quickly. The main problem in the early days was that, while you could write a fascinating book about it or make a fascinating radio program, because the stories are fantastic, there’s no footage. So we were really limited in what we could do.

GS: I was wondering if, speaking of Bunny and Coxsone and people like that, you could make any generalizations about the reasons for which people have had a lot of reluctance to talk about their story?

JM: I think the reasons are very many in Jamaica. The people feel they’ve been ripped off a lot, not simply by people from outside or people with white skin, but everybody. They don’t want to be ripped off again; they’ve been ripped off by their own people worse than by outsiders on occasion. I think they have the misconception, in Jamaica, that any program being made about Marley is being made with Hollywood-style budgets. Many times I’ve had people say to me, ‘I want a million dollars,’ because that’s the fee that Clint Eastwood would expect. The perception of documentary films is very distorted. You know, we make them fast and on quite small budgets, and that’s not comprehended. Some people feel they’re giving away something that is, ultimately, incredibly valuable and that will keep them in their old age. Everybody in Jamaica is writing a book, everybody in Jamaica is about to make a film of their lives…every single body! Prince Buster through to Coxsone Dodd through to Bunny, everybody.

GS: They are giving you something very valuable, but they don’t have an accurate sense of what it’s really worth. Is that fear that their words will be distorted widespread?

JM: I think in many cases, they’re anxious that we don’t present a negative image of them or Bob, because Bob is a hero in Jamaica…