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

GS: Although a contested hero…if you follow the debate about Bob as a national hero. Can you tell me how you came to interview Cindy Breakspeare?

JM: Roger Steffens put me in touch with Cindy. I told her what I was doing and she said that, if the program was an intelligent and sensible look at Bob’s life and her part in it, then she would be happy to take part.

GS: …a beautiful interview.

JM: She’s a wonderful person. She was so accommodating, so articulate, so helpful; really. When I asked her later for some pictures of her and Bob, they were put in the post immediately. She was really kind and generous. I was nervous about that interview, because I knew that the film would not work without certain elements: it needed Bunny, with his memories; it needed Cindy; and it needed Rita. And there was a problem. A big problem, because I had been led to understand that Rita would not want other women in the film. When I finally caught up with her, she was very difficult. She didn’t want to be in the program.

GS: I’ve heard this song before, too!

JM: It was not because of the other women, she didn’t know about the other women, it was to do with the overall deal and the role the Marley family were going to play in the program, and how Bob was being depicted, and everything under the sun. We did hang around for two or three days, and we wasted a lot of time. Rita never appeared. So we left and I went to film Mrs. Booker, that wasn’t a very positive experience either; because she was surrounded by some fairly antagonistic people. So I came back and I didn’t have a decent interview with Mrs. Booker, although I was able to use a little bit of it, and I had no interview with Rita. Then there was an imbalance in the editing. Because Cindy was brilliantly articulate, striking, and her memories were great. Esther Anderson was pretty good, too, strong. But there was no Rita Marley. So we didn’t know what to do. Eventually Rita said, I’m going to do it if you’ll come up and film me on Monday, and that was on Friday night. And I said, where are you, Rita; well I’m in Jamaica. [laughing] And I said, ‘well, can’t you wait?’ and she said, ‘no, I’m going to Brazil on Tuesday.’ So I flew up there with a little mini handheld TV camera because I had to take it past customs, I’d no visa. So I flew in there like tourist, met up with a cameraman friend of mine who flew in as a tourist from America, and Rita was there, thank God, and she did a really good interview. And, out of the blue, she suddenly started talking about her feelings toward Cindy and the other women.

GS: Like not wanting to sing background on "Turn Your Lights Down Low," for instance?

JM: Well, yes, and all kinds of stuff which she’d never talked about before. And, in a way ultimately, Rita kind of holds the program together because Rita is one of those continuing people. She’s there at the beginning, all the way through to the end; she’s a thread throughout the program.

GS: Let me follow up with two questions. One is to get you to comment on why you felt those three figures, Cindy, Rita and Bunny, are so central in telling the human side of Bob as a part of these political currents of his time. And, second, why you feel that there is so much negativity around many people who were close to Bob that you tried to interview.

JM: Well, in the first case, Bunny because he’s the last surviving Wailer. He grew up with Bob as a child, Bunny knew Bob better than anybody in the early days, and Bunny could tell us things that other people really couldn’t say, about his childhood about the young Bob. Cindy because Cindy was a major force in Bob’s life. Channel four had very much wanted her to be a part of the program.

GS: Is that partly because of the press that was aroused over their relationship?

JM: Yes, entirely. But Cindy, I knew, would have a lot of intimate input. And I knew that I could get the story of what Bob was going through when he was in England —when he’d had to leave after the attempted assassination, which is part of the political story; why he went back to Jamaica.

GS: The piece of her interview about him saying that he’s gonna have to be militant, because [of] the accusations of ‘going soft’ was really priceless.

JM: Uh-huh; and let me tell you, for every sentence that’s in the program, there are two dozen that aren’t in the program that are equally good. It was a real struggle to decide what to use of Cindy’s [interview] —it could have been the Cindy Breakespeare Show. And then Rita, well, because Rita was his wife; and because Rita was the person who was there from age 17 through to the day he died (on and off).

GS: In some ways the only person that really saw the whole Bob…

JM: Those three people are the people who really hold the program together.

GS: I agree. And about the degree of negativity that one encounters, and the fight over control…all the infighting that goes on to this day….

JM: Money. [long pause] Power and Money. Mostly money. That’s all.

GS: Do you feel that the money has caused people close to Bob to lose sight of Bob as political and a spiritual figure, on the level that people around the world tend to think of him?

JM: Well, it’s not really for me to say…possibly. One day I’d like to do a program about the way people are reinvented. Because when you get Bob being taken over by Disney, and you get Bob Burgers and Bob Ice-Cream…where you have a pavilion where there must be nothing political…

GS: …this is Orlando you’re referring to?

JM: Yeah…nor must there be anything that relates to drugs; [then] you’ve reinvented the man, so that you’ve taken just about everything that was meaningful to him away. And I think this reinventing people by corporations, which we see happening so much today, is a bit frightening. Because what they’re basically doing, is they’re reducing these people to commodities.

GS: Sure. Now we’ll find out "who are the real revolutionaries!"

JM: Yes! [both laughing]

GS: What have you learned about Bob as a human being and as a sort of a mythological figure through the process of doing this work?

JM: At the beginning I had one major problem over all the practical problems that I’ve been talking to you about. And that was that I didn’t understand Bob as a human being. And it’s very difficult to make a feature-length program, about a man you don’t understand. Because if you don’t understand him, then who the hell’s going to understand him? Even in Catch A Fire, I thought ‘well who is this guy?’ Who is this guy who makes this incredible music? He’s so obtuse, he’s deliberately uncommunicative in so many situations …where does he get the poetry from? How did his music really evolve, and he evolve as a person? What were his racial attitudes really -about black and white? I don’t understand this man.

GS: You learned a lot about him, I’m sure.

JM: I learned a lot about him as I was making [the film]. Something I mentioned to you earlier, when we were going through a lot of problems in the cutting room, things always sorted themselves out. And we developed a confidence there in the making of the film. And whether they were contractual problems, or editorial problems, or creative problems we just said, ‘Bob’s on our side,’ and things always panned out. Or if there was a real problem in cutting a sequence, it always sorted itself out for us. And I think that, to some extent in the post-production process, watching Bob, listening to him, listening to what people had to say about him…I began to understand him much better.

GS: So where do you think his poetry came from? The amazing power of his vision.

JM: Well, I think there are a lot of answers to that. One is that he was a street poet and he listened to the wisdom and the poetry in the language around him. Jamaican is a very beautiful and a very living language, which evolves all the time: it’s still evolving. It’s not like the English we speak in London. I remember Carl Bradshaw leaning out the window and saying something extraordinary to someone once, and I asked ‘why did you say that, it didn’t make any sense?’ and he said, "Man, we’ve got to keep the language moving!"

GS: Right, it’s a living culture.

JM: Yeah, so I think there’s that element. There’s the Biblical element; and the Proverbs, which I’ve encountered in many different societies. For example, I made a film about proverbs in Madagascar, where the literal is not as important as the proverbial, where you suggest all kinds of things. All this is part of the richness of your language and heritage, and I think Bob was able to use that and incorporate that. Tie to that the independence and political awareness that was coming through, and he must have been a highly intelligent person. He went into the Rastafarian camps and he listened. He listened to the wisdom and he listened to the readings. He may not have said a whole lot, but he was listening and absorbing. And I think, to some extent his songwriting was a collective thing.

GS: His vision was deeply personal and yet entirely collective, at the same time.

JM: Yes, yes. There was input from all the people around him. And as Esther Anderson says, you know they read the newspapers and listened to the radio; they read the Bible. And out of that they created their own wisdom. It’s a kind of a prophetic role that he played.

GS: The Rastas have been described as a community of prophets. Which I think is very true.

JM: Yes, yes. And then, of course, he listened to a lot of music. He listened to a lot of American music; he was influenced, to some extent, by American politics. So he was absorbing all of that and it was a very creative and a very turbulent period.