>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington DC. >> Anne McLean: Good evening. Welcome. I'm Anne McLean from
the Library's music division. Tonight's book talk is part
of the Concerts in the Library of Congress series and we
have a wonderful lineup for you this season. And I wanted to say that I
know there are patrons here from New York, New
Jersey, San Francisco and several other
places that, and I wanted to especially welcome them. I'm so grateful that
you guys have come for such a long way,
from such a long way. The people who are new tonight, please take a look
at our brochure. We have some wonderful offerings
coming up including a concert with McCoy Tyner and
Joe Lovano in December. This evening it's a
great pleasure for us to present reggae historian
Roger Steffens talking about his book "So
Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley". We're delighted to
be able to present such an authoritative speaker. He's devoted a lifetime's
passionate interest in research to this iconic figure
in the musical and cultural history
of our time. One of several of
Steffens's volumes on Marley and on the history of reggae, this remarkable book
chronicles a 40-year witness to Marley's life and music. It's informed by
impeccable scholarship. Critics have described
it as revelatory, myth shattering and magisterial. Some of you may know that
Mr Steffens is a collector as well as a noted scholar. He has amassed a monumental
archive of Marley recordings, artifacts, and memorabilia,
the world's largest. So, we feel we have a
unique resource here. Roger Steffens's bio includes
expertise in an impressive list of wide-ranging careers -
author, actor, lecturer, radio host of the long-running
Reggae Beat Show, journalist, photographer, and producer. He was not only an eyewitness
to performances by the Wailers but a tour participant
in the 1970s. Bruno Bloom has commented that
"So Much Things to Say" is about quote, "Identity,
culture, pride, spirituality," and he says that, like
Marley's music, quote, "It helps us understand
who we really are. This is the power of
a great musician." And I wanted to say
in introducing Roger that the Wailers's pivotal
1973 album "Burnin'" was named to the Library of Congress
National Recording registry in 2007, a distinguished gesture
marking recordings of cultural, historic, and artistic
importance to American society. And now please join me in
welcoming Roger Steffens. [ Applause ] >> Roger Steffens: Thank
you very much, Anne. I'm just so thrilled to be here. Marley in the Library
of Congress, who would have thought. So, the format for this
evening is I'm going to explain a little bit
about how this white guy from Brooklyn got so involved
in the culture and history of Jamaica and the life
of the prophet of reggae. And talk about how this book was
born and the reason behind it, and trace some of the myth-busting
portions of the book. And after that, we will
have questions and answers, so be thinking about what
you might like to know that I might be able to answer. I first heard reggae in 1973. I discovered it because
of an article in Rolling Stone magazine by an Australian gonzo
journalist named Michael Thomas who wrote, "Reggae music
crawls into your bloodstream like some vampire amoeba
from the psychic rapids of Upper Niger consciousness." [Laughter] I said, I
don't know what that means but I've got to find
it right now. And I went out immediately. I was living in Berkeley
and I found a used copy of Bob's first international
album Catch A Fire, the one that opened up in the
middle like a Zippo lighter, and my life changed forever. And the next night I saw
"The Harder They Come", the great Jamaican reggae
movie by Perry Hensel, and bought the soundtrack
on the way home. And for the past 44 years my
life has gone in that direction. I was fortunate enough to be
able to meet Bob originally in '78 in Santa Cruz and in
'79 I just started a radio show with Hank Holmes on the
NPR station in LA, KCRW, called The Reggae Beat. And we were on the air
for about six weeks when Island Records called us
up and said would you mind going on the road with Bob Marley for
a couple of weeks [laughter]. So, these pictures, in fact, that one is my most
famous picture, it's been bootlegged
all over the world. It was the cover of the Soul
Almighty album and this series of pictures were shot
on November 24th, 1979 in the San Diego
sports arena dressing room when I was on the road with Bob. And, and the happiest guy for those two weeks
was the bus driver. Because at the end of each
evening, he got to sweep up all the roaches [laughter]. He said one night even know
him with almost half a pound. Well, you got a busload
of Wailers, come on. In, in 1980, Bob did his
final tour of America and that was the same year that
I started a television show with the Trinidadian
compatriot named Chili Charles. And that television
show ran for 23 years. It was called LA Reggae. And Peter Tosh and Jimmy
Cliff were the first guests on that show. In 1981, a woman named CC
Smith and I started a magazine that eventually was called
simply The Beat, a reggae and world beat magazine. And that was the same year
that the show became syndicated to 130 stations all
over the world. And in 1984, I was asked to found the reggae
Grammy Committee and I was the chairman
of that for 27 years. And that was the same year
I began doing a one-man show called simply The
Life of Bob Marley, in which I showed a couple
of hours of unreleased films and told his life story
in between the clips. And we've done that
all over the world. We did it at the bottom
of the Grand Canyon for the Havasupai
Indians who believe that Bob Marley is
the reincarnation of Chief Crazy Horse returned
to Earth as a black man to lead the red man forward
to his freedom again. And we've done it for the
Maori people in New Zealand. It's not Maori, it's Maori. It's like Marley without the L
and they called him the Redeemer when he played there in 1979. We've done it in the outback
for the Aboriginal people who practically worship Bob. In the Himalayas in
Katmandu, there is a belief that Bob Marley is
a reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. It is a remarkable impact
that Bob has had on the world, and he is recognized
worldwide as a prophet. The head of Amnesty
International says everywhere he goes in the world today, Bob
Marley is the symbol of freedom. And I'd like to trace his
life for you now in a very, very brief fashion and, and tell
you some of the high points. And, and the reason I wanted to
do this book, it's my ninth - it's my seventh book
about Bob and reggae, but this is the most
important book. The book has interviews with
75 people who were important in Bob's life and I didn't
want to be the white guy making up conversations and telling you
why you should love Bob Marley. I wanted to tell his story
in the words of the people who knew him, who lived with
him, who experienced him as an artist and as a
philosopher and as a leader. And Kwame Dawes, the great
Ghanaian Jamaican poet, has said that this
book is a tribute to the storytelling virtuosity
of the Jamaican people, and that's what I
hope to do here. And, and dispel some of the
consistent myths about Bob. In fact, Bob was, was born
on February 6th, 1945. His father was a white Jamaican
from a very wealthy family that built a lot of the
infrastructure of Jamaica, and has often been
misdescribed in numerous reports to the current day, in
fact, as being a captain and a naval officer
and a British man, all of which is absolute
nonsense. And on the very first
page of the book, I interview Christopher
Marley from the Marley family. Marley's father was the brother
of Christopher's grandfather. And Marley's father was named
Norville Sinclair Marley, and when Bob was born
he was 64 years of age. Bob's mother, who was a black
woman from the northern part of Jamaica in a little remote
village called Nine Mile, was 18 years old. So, basically he was a dirty
old man and he was disowned by, by his own family - they
wanted nothing to do with him. So, this is how the book starts. Christopher Marley says, "Bob Marley's father was
Norville Sinclair Marley, born to a British father
and a colored mother. Norville was not a sea captain,
nor was he a quartermaster, or captain, or officer
in the British Army. He was a ferro-cement engineer." He poured cement. "His British army discharge
papers show that he worked in various labour corps in the
UK during the First World War and was discharged as a private. He did not see active
service on the battlefield. Norville Marley's family was not
Syrian, as has been suggested. He was a restless wandering man. He traveled and worked all
over the world at a time when travel was not the
simple thing that it is today, to Cuba, the UK, Nigeria. And one night he went
out for cigarettes and came back six months later
and said he'd been in Cape Town. He was supervising this
subdivision of some rural land in St. Anne Parish for
war veteran housing when he married 18-year-old
Cedella Malcolm whom he had gotten pregnant. He provided little
financial support and seldom if ever saw her and their son. He died of a heart attack
in 1955, stone broke and living off an 8
shilling a week army pension, about a dollar and
twenty US a week. Norville was seriously
unstable, to put it mildly. The rejection of Bob by the Marley family was
a rejection of Norville." So, that's who Bob
Marley's father really was, and when Bob was about three
and a half years of age, he began evidencing
psychic powers. He read the hand of a woman
in the village named Aunt Zen and the hand of the
local police constable and they both went
to Bob's mother. And she told me about that
and, and she said they told her that everything Bob told them
about their life was true. So, keep an eye on this kid because something's
going on here. I heard so many stories
of his psychic abilities as I compiled the
interviews for this book. One of the most profound was from a very intellectual
Jamaican author named Gregory Phillip, who met Bob
Marley at the University of the West Indies in 1976. And Bob called him over
and sat next to him and began telling him intimate
details about his life, things he said that even
his mother didn't know. And those kinds of stories
were repeated over and over as I did the research. My initial idea for this book
when I signed the contract in 2002 with Norton was to have
110 interviews that I had done over the years with people
involved in Bob's life and publish the entire
transcript of each of those interviews so that
it would be the raw material for historians. After three years of work on it, my computer died
and ate everything. And I had to start
all over again, doing all the transcriptions
and my notes were lost and it set me back for
years and, and in 2007, my editor Jim Marrs said
where's the book and I had to tell him what happened and he
said all right, start it again. And I got about four
years into it and thought it was pretty well
finished when I sent him most of the manuscript and he
said well, we've been talking about it and this is not
the book we really want. We'd like you to shorten it
considerably and put the book in chronological order and
take all the different voices about each of the main events in
Bob's life and mix them together in that format known
popularly as oral history. So, I had to dismantle the whole
thing and start all over again, and then my editor died. So, in the world of
unintentional consequences, something very good happened. The book was turned
over to a young editor at Norton named Tom Mayer. Now, I had been a disc jockey
on KCRW in Los Angeles. He had been a reggae disc jockey
on WKCR at Columbia University, and I used to promote
records to him when I was the national
promotions director of Island Records. And he told me that this was
the book he was born to edit. And he did a complete
restructuring of it. I had sent him 700 pages in nine
long chapters and he turned it into 400 pages and 35
digestible, readable chapters. So, I owe whatever success this
book will have to Tom Maher and I want to make a
public declaration of that. So, we follow Bob's life
through the words of people who knew him best and in
the early part of his life, he met at the age of 11 a
young fellow and his father who had come to Nine
Mile from Kingston, Toddy Livingston
and his son, Bunny. And Toddy fell in love with
Bob's mother and moved him - Bob - and his mother to Kingston
and Bob lived in Toddy's house for a long time he was treated
poorly as an outside kid. In fact, he slept underneath
the house on the ground. And at 14, he quit school. He said I don't need
any more schooling, I've learned everything they
can teach me and from now on I'm going to be a singer. Well, his mother said you know
get yourself a trade first and then you can be a singer. So, she sent him to
work in a welding shop and he had an accident almost
lost his eye and spent a couple of weeks in the hospital
recovering from that and she said okay,
you can be a singer. One of the real heroes
in the book and one of my dearest friends
was Joe Higgs, known as the father
of reggae music. And Joe Higgs was paid by an East Indian man named
Erol to tutor Bob Marley. And for years he studied with
Joe and learned the basics of vocal technique,
stagecraft, composition. He played a lot of jazz
for Bob and readied him for a professional career. And in 1963, Bob decided
he was ready to record, even though Joe didn't feel that
way, and he went to the studio of man named Leslie Kong. Leslie Kong was a fellow
who owned a candy store and had a studio up in the
attic, and Bob auditioned for him with a song had
written called Judge Not, which was a very mature
lyric for a teenager. "The road of life is rocky
and you may stumble too, and while you point the finger
someone else is judging you. So, judge not before
you judge yourself." And that's typical of what
Bob did throughout his life because that lyric got recycled
sixteen years later as part of Could You be Loved,
only now it was the i3, the women singing behind him. And the, the record flopped. He followed it with a country-and-western
cover called One Cup of Coffee. That flopped, and he went
back and he began to sing with several other people
including Bunny who was raised as his brother and a new
fellow who had just shown up in Kingston named Peter Tosh. And they also had a man in
the group who was very young but had an incredible voice,
named Junior Braithwaite, and everybody agreed that he
had the best voice in the group. And there were two women who
rehearsed with the Wailers, especially Cherry Green, but
she had a child and a job and couldn't come to the
first recording session when the Wailers auditioned for
Coxsone Dodd at his Studio One in Jamaica and so, the night
before the first recording session they got a woman
who had been singing in a local talent contest
named Beverly Kelso and she became a Wailer. And the next morning,
according to several people, they went to Studio One
and recorded Simmer Down, the Wailers' first record. There are several conflicting
reports in the book from people who were in the same room at the
same time, saying it was the, the night of the audition,
it was the next morning, it was two weeks later. So, as I say this is the raw
material of history and it's up to the historians
to try to make sense of some of these things. Regardless, the song came out,
sold a remarkable 80,000 copies and became a number-one hit. And from that point forward, for the next two years the
Wailers were never off the charts in Jamaica. They had at one point five of
the ten songs and they began to be called the
Jamaican Beatles. In early 1966, Bob married a
woman whose group he'd been coaching, the Soulettes, a
woman named Rita Anderson. And depending on who you
talk to, the next day or several months later,
Bob moved to America to join his mother
who had married a man in Delaware in 1962. And while in Delaware, he swept
floors at the DuPont hotel and worked on the
assembly line on a forklift in the Chrysler plant
up in Delaware. And the army came calling for
him, asking him to register for the draft and he decided
he didn't want to do that and returned immediately
to Jamaica. In the aftermath of his
departure, Haile Selassie, the god of the Rastafarian
faith, came to Jamaica and Rita and her cousin Vision Walker,
who had replaced Bob briefly and the Wailers after he had
come to Delaware, saw him and as he passed by, he,
Selassie waved at them and they both swear they saw the
stigmata of Christ in his palm. And they told Bob about this
and Bob began to as they say in Jamaica, sight Rastafari. And to him, his entire life was
a livication, not a dedication because Rasta does not deal
with death in any form. So, no dedication,
it's livication, to spreading the
message of the one true and living God incarnate
as a man in our lifetimes. And everything else took
second place to that. This was his purpose on earth. The Wailers were an incredibly
successful group and one of the most interesting passages
in the book comes from a man who was also working at
Studio One in the mid '60s with the Wailers named Bob Andy. And on his website, he
had a beautiful story that he allowed me to
include in the book and I want to read that to you now. Bob Andy said, "There
was a room at Studio one where we used to
listen to records. Coxsone would give artists music
to listen to on this turntable and speakers, but
there was another room between Coxsone's inner
office and the music room where you could go
and lock yourself in and no one else could enter. The Wailers had access
to that and I did too. One particular day
I was the witness to a very special performance. It was like being
let into a secret. I was very high from smoking
and they were always high too. It was the first time I had
seen each of the Wailers with a guitar, and each
time I remember this it's like remembering a dream. I sat there and they
were just messing around with various songs for a
while but finally had climaxed with a song called Ten-to
One, which I later found out was a Curtis Mayfield song. Bob sang the first line, then
Bunny came in on the second, and all three came
in on the next line. Peter sang a line, and then
all three sang in harmony. Then Bob and Bunny
sang solo again. When they started that song,
I saw a side of the Wailers that I felt no one
else had ever seen. It was like my own
personal revelation. I've never heard music so
beautiful and I've never seen such love and camaraderie
in all my life. I knew then that the
Wailers were special people, but they were special by
being The Wailers, as a unit. When I reflect on that
occasion, it was divine. It was like being on
a spaceship listening to the music of the spheres. I was spellbound. And that memory will
stay with me forever." So, not only were normal
people moved by the Wailers, but their fellow
professionals were too. And one of the people
who discovered Bob on an international
basis was Johnny Nash. Remember "I Can See
Clearly Now"? And he and his business
partner, a man named Danny Sims, discovered Bob on an Ethiopian
Christmas Day in ninth, early January 1968
at a ground nation, Rastafarian gathering
in Kingston. And they signed Bob and Peter
and Rita - Bunny was in prison at the time for ganja
- to a contract with their label, JAD Records. And for the next four years, Bob
was tutored especially by Johnny and brought to a true
international status as an artist. They tried to get hits with
the Wailers' own recordings of the songs, but they
couldn't get airplay in America or Britain for those songs. They sounded too strange to the
years of American disc jockeys, but Johnny Nash had several hits
with Bob Marley's compositions and that was the first time
Bob made any serious money. In fact, when the Wailers
recorded for Coxsone Dodd, they never made more
than three pounds a week, about five bucks a week. And so when Bob came back from
the States at the end of '66, the Wailers started their own
label called Wail 'N Soul 'M, a combination of the
Wailers and the Soulettes. And they tried very, very
hard to make enough money to follow their dream. The Wailers' dream was to
have a house of their own which they could live
in with their families and have their own recording
studios so that whatever time of the day or night,
the inspiration struck, they could go right
into the studio and that was what they
were working toward. But they could never
make enough money with their own singles
to, to have that happen. And finally in early 1970, they
made an album for Leslie Kong. Leslie Kong was the man who
had made Judge Not with Bob as a solo artist at that point
he'd had tremendous success with My Boy Lollipop and the
first international reggae hit the Israelites, by Desmond
Dekker and the Aces. Sold four million copies. So, they figured
Leslie Kong knew how to have an international
success and they went with him for one album. And it was a unique
album in Jamaican history because it wasn't just
a collection of singles. It was done intact
as an album inspired by the Beatles' Sergeant
Pepper and the Rolling Stones. And they wanted to give
themselves a pep talk to get back full-time
into the business. So, there were songs like
Go Tell it on the Mountain, and Do it Twice, and
Soul Shakedown Party with that great James
Brown cop Janey's in the Backyard Doing
the Outside Dance. And they were about
to release it and Leslie Kong told
The Wailers he was going to call the album the
best of The Wailers, and they got very
upset, especially Bunny. And here's where one of the
myths turns out to be true. Bunny said look,
we're young people. We have long lives and
careers in front of us. So, if this is the
best of the Wailers to you it must mean you're not
going to be around much longer. So, don't do it. Well, Kong put the album
out, called it The Best of The Wailers, and a few
weeks later dropped dead in his studio. So, from that point on, the word of Bunny Wailer had a
little more weight to it. So, finally in desperation, they turned to the diminutive
genius Lee Scratch Perry, whose goal is to
hijack the earth, a producer who also had
a great deal of success in the late '60s,
especially in England. And I asked him why he called
himself Scratch, and he said, "Because all things
start from scratch. So, check it out. Who am I." They had a 50/50
handshake agreement, that every penny they would make from their music would be
divided equally between them. And Perry after they had
recorded about 28 tracks, took them to England, sold
them to Trojan Records and came back with $18,000. And told the Wailers he wasn't
going to give them anything, that they would eventually
get some royalties. And Bunny almost
killed him on the spot and they had a meeting a
week later and in the book, Bunny describes in great
detail what happened when Bunny and Peter went to a private
meeting with Lee Perry. And Lee Perry put a big bottle
of yellow liquid on the desk in between them and
Peter reached for it. And Scratch said hey, hey, don't
touch that, don't touch that. And they began to be suspicious. Turned out it was a bottle
of the acid that they used to cut metal stampers from
which records were pressed. So, that was the end
of their relationship with Lee Scratch Perry
and it wasn't until 1996 that they began to
make any money at all from those seminal recordings, which many critics
consider the greatest work of The Wailers as a trio. There are so many things
I want to say and there's such a short time to do it. So, you have to read the book to
get all the rest of the details about things like
that, but there's, there's fascinating stuff around
all of these, these facts. In '70 and '71, Johnny Nash took
Bob Marley to Sweden in the dead of winter to help him write the
soundtrack for a motion picture that he was going to star in. And Bob was very, very
unhappy during that period and he came back and lived
in London for a while and eventually the Wailers' band
joined him there and they began to tour colleges with Johnny
Nash, who was being billed at the time as the
king of reggae. Not Bob - Johnny Nash. And they brought
the big bass drum, the Nyahbinghi drum with them. And there is an incredible
story in here that Bunny tells of them being in the north of
England in a theatre opening for Johnny, and they come
out with the big bass drum and they sing Rasta Man Chant,
and the audience is mesmerized and they do their and they
have this snake line going all through the theater, dancing. And they demand an encore and
they get the encore and they run through their entire repertoire
and the audience wants more and Johnny is backstage stewing. And they, they finish their
scent may they go outside. And the audience
follows them out. Most of the audience leaves. And Johnny comes out
and starts singing, and half the audience
that's left leaves and then he sings
the second song, and there's about 10
people left and finally, as he starts the third
song they leave too. And after that, the Wailers
discovered Johnny Nash in the back alley beating his
fists against the brick wall. And according to Bunny,
he never appeared again, which is not true. But that was the end of their
relationship with, with Johnny. And finally they get
introduced to Chris Blackwell, who has been repressing
their records in England for many years. And when they are assured into
his office in August of 1972 in London, they are
told by Chris Blackwell that he has paid hundreds
of thousands of pounds to Coxsone Dodd to
license their recordings and he said what did you
do with all that money? And they were just
utterly taken aback. Remember, they were
getting three pounds a week at the height. And so they, they utilized
that in their music, because Bob's music is
basically his diary. They were always told, you know,
you can never talk to the boss, to big, to Mr Blackwell,
he's too big, you know. And there are the
lines in Bob's song, "How many rivers do we have to cross before we
can talk to the boss? It seems that all that
we got we have lost. We must have really
paid the cost." So, you see the first 10 years of the Wailers history is
a story of great promise, with all these successful
producers promising the world to them, and then having those,
all those promises dashed. So, this is the situation they
are in when they sign a contract with Chris Blackwell
for two albums. And the first album is
called Catch a Fire. They recorded it in three weeks. Blackwell gave them 8,000 pounds which in those days was
the weekly cocaine budget for Eric Clapton. And they produced an
eternal masterpiece. The album flopped at first. It only sold 15,000 copies
although it got great reviews. And then they came back to
England in the winter of 1973, '72, '73, to record the
second album, Burnin'. And when they weren't in the studio they were
doing one-night stands all over the coldest
parts of Britain. And blackwell told them that
he would absorb all the costs of the tour. At the end of the tour when
they delivered the album, Blackwell gave them a
bill for 42,000 pounds which he said they owed
him, and a check each for a hundred pounds expenses. Bunny quit the group
on the spot. He said I'm no longer
going to trade one part of white man's Babylon
for another. Peter lasted about
six more months. They did a fall tour in which
Joe Higgs, their teacher, replaced Bunny Wailer. Joe was not paid for that tour. He talks about it in the book. He had to pretend to
be a madman to get Bob to even listen to him. It's one of the sadder
stories in here. So, at the end of 1973,
Peter Tosh quit the group too and Bob didn't know what to do. So, he began auditioning some
women to sing back up to him and three of the
finest female vocalists in Jamaica came together
- Marcia Griffiths, Judy Mowatt, and
Bob's wife Rita. And they were going to
call themselves We Three, but Judy said wait, I and I and
Rasta, it must be the I-Three, not the I-Threes, although some
of their records say I-Threes, but the real name
is the I-Three. And they gave Bob a whole
different sound and Bob went on that year, '74, to record a
magnificent militant masterpiece called Natty Dread
in which he sang, "I feel like bombing
a church now that I know the preacher is
lying, who's going to stay at home when the freedom
fighters are fighting?" And it became a breakthrough
hit in England. And Bob in 1975 came to
America as a solo artist, played a succession of
rapturously received shows at the Roxy in Los Angeles. And all the big stars came out. And in fact, last month I emceed
The Wailers Band show recreating the 1976 concert that
was released as an album on the same stage where they
had performed 41 years earlier. And before they show in
1975, Bob called the band to the dressing room
and said Bob Dylan's in the audience tonight,
anybody strikes a wrong note, you're fired. And that picture you
saw earlier of Bob with, with George Harrison was taken
that night and when Bob met him in the dressing room, he
called him Ross Beatle. So, that was a breakthrough
tour, especially for the Lyceum
concert in England that year which was released
as a live album and produced a million-selling
single of No Woman No Cry. So, by that point in England
at least, Bob was a huge star. In 1976 he had his
only top-ten album ever in America called
Rastaman Vibration. And by the end of 1976, he wanted to give
something back to Jamaica. He hadn't played live
there in a long time. There was a tremendous
upheaval politically. In 1972, Michael
Manley, a socialist, was elected prime minister. A lot of people left
the country. There was a tremendous
brain drain in Jamaica and there were going to
be elections sometime around the end of
'76, early '77. But Bob eschewed politics. He wrote never make a
politician grant you a favor, they will only want
to control you forever and he really felt that way. Although he did appear in
campaign rallies in 1971 and '72 for Michael Manley. And Bunny said it was only
because they paid us more money than anybody's ever paid
us before, $150 a night and we had nothing
to do with politics. I think he's being ingenuous but that's what Bunny
said about that. So, by the end of 1976 Bob
wanted to give something back to Jamaica, and he wanted
to do a free concert but before he had a
chance to plan it, signs that started appearing
in Jamaica, in Kingston saying that Bob was going
to do a free concert on the prime minister's grounds. And so Bob went to Michael
Manley and said you know, that's nothing I ever agreed to. And they talked about it and finally the prime
minister said well, you can have Heroes Park
Circle by the National Stadium and it won't be a
political event. And right after they
announced that concert, Manley declared national
elections to be held shortly after. So, he co-opted Bob and by
appearing on the same stage as Marley that night,
it would look as if Bob was endorsing
his reelection. So, Bob became the object of death threats almost
immediately, particularly from the right-wing
Jamaican Labor Party. So, he was placed under a
guard called the Echo Squad day and night. The concert was scheduled
for Sunday December 5th and on the night of
Friday December 3rd, 7 or 8 gunmen drove through
the gate in the front of Bob's compound at 56
Hope Road down the road from the Prime Minister's
residence. The guards who had been with him
day and night for weeks prior to that had all disappeared. Rita was driving out of
the compound at that point and was shot in the head. The gunman raced through
Bob Marley's yard, shooting everybody in sight. Bob was in the kitchen peeling a
breadfruit, and the his manager, Don Taylor, was on the left
and Bob was on the right, and a gunman came in and fired
five bullets into Don Taylor and turned around and shot Bob. The bullet came across his
chest and lodged in his arm. If he'd been inhaling
instead of exhaling, he might have been dead. It came that close
to killing him. Nobody was ever caught. There are several rumors
and one of the persons who has been accused falsely
for years of being involved in the assassination
attempt was Karl Colby, whose father had been
the head of the CIA. If any of you have read the
Booker-winning novel Seven Killings, it takes
all the rumors as if they were fact
and tells the story. In fact the, the, the character, the Colby character
is seen arriving five or six weeks before the concert
and putting together a posse of people to come and kill Bob, which I think is a
tremendous disservice. And nobody ever interviewed
Karl Colby about that, even though he's been
accused in numerous books and magazine articles
of being involved in this assassination attempt. Well, I found him in the
Beverly Hills phonebook, gave him a ring and
he came over. And it was the anniversary
of the shooting, in fact, the day he came. And I showed him one of
the news magazine articles and he was appalled. You know, he arrived in
Jamaica the night Bob was shot. I think he was on the way
to the hotel that night. And what I wanted to
do with this book is to put that rumor to death. And there are four chapters about the entire Smile Jamaica
assassination attempt in there, including an eloquent
statement from Mr Colby about what really
went on at that time. And he loved Bob
Marley, and it just seems to me a terrible
disservice that this, this stupid rumor continues. And I'm no fan of the CIA and I
would love to find solid proof that somehow the
CIA was involved in that assassination attempt
but I've never been able to, to nail anything
of the sort down. And it's, it's too long
to go into now but that's where I stand on that. I think ultimately it was
a gang of young gunmen from the Jamaican Labor Party
who had heard that Edward Seaga, the head of the party, didn't
want the concert to go on and they took it upon themselves
led by a gunman named Jim Brown, one of the chief
gunmen for the JLP. And that's what happened
that night. Following the assassination
attempt, Bob went into exile in England. And he was living there with a
woman named Cindy Breakspeare, with whom he had fallen in love. She was Miss World at the time. She's Damian Marley's
mother, Junior Gong. And they spent just about all of 1977 together,
mostly in England. And Bob was recovering from his
wounds and making two albums at once, Exodus, Time Magazine's
Album of the Century, and Kaya. And in June of 19, I'm
jumping ahead, '77, he makes those two albums
and he begins what was going to be the biggest
reggae tour in history. And at the beginning
of the tour, he was in France playing
soccer against a team of French music journalists and
one of them had steel spikes on his shoes and accidentally
stepped on Bob's big toe on his right foot,
pierced the shoe. And eventually tests were
done and they discovered that Bob Marley had
melanoma cancer which had already
reached the third stage when it was discovered. Now, you can't give
someone melanoma. There's not a doctor on earth that would tell you you
can give someone melanoma but that rumor persists
to the, this day. Some people say that the
CIA paid the journalist to put poison on his
spike and step on Bob. People really believe that. So, Bob had to cancel
the rest of the tour after the European
leg and spent the rest of that year recovering. In 1978, well, go back
now to the elections that were held right
after the Smile Jamaica assassination attempt. Michael Manley won
overwhelmingly and for some reason,
he decided to put two of the chief opposing
gunmen in prison, Bucky Marshall and
Claudie Massa. And he put them in
the same cell. Maybe he thought
they'd beat each other to death, I don't know. But they began comparing
notes and they realized that they were being played for
suckers by the powers that be, and they declared a
truce between themselves, and another man and the cell
went back to Western Kingston and spread the word that
they had arranged this truce and a spontaneous peace
movement broke out. And at the end of the year, they
were both released from prison and they went to England
to beg Bob Marley to return to headline a concert cementing
the troops named after one of Bob's most famous
songs, One Love. Bob was very suspicious
because he knew at least one of the people had been involved
in the assassination attempt. But eventually he agreed to
come back at the end of February and prepared for the concert
to be held on April 21st, which was the 12th anniversary
of Haile Selassie's visit to Jamaica and the
night of a full moon. And at the end of
that 8-hour concert, Bob called the two leading
figures of his land, Edward Seaga and Michael Manley,
to come on stage and shake hands in front of 40,000
people, show the people that you love him right,
he sang, show the people that you're going to unite. And he held their hands aloft
in a benediction to Rastafari, a moment that his art director
Neville Garrick compared to Christ on the cross
between the two thieves. And two months later, the
United Nations honored that move with the United Nations
Medal for Peace on behalf of 500 million Africans. It was arranged by
Mamadou Johnny Secka who was the youth ambassador
from Senegal to the UN who himself would also die at
36 from melanoma, just as Bob. And it was a major moment
in Bob's life and kind of surprising to me
that in the Marley film, they never even included that
or even told people about it. Bob went back to Jamaica. He had built a studio at 56
Hope Road called Tuff Gong, and whenever Bob was in Jamaica,
lines of people would come from the entrance to the house
all the way out through the yard into the street, begging money
from Bob for various reasons. And according to Colin
Leslie who is another witness in my book and had to sign the
checks or they weren't valid. So, this guy more than anyone
knows where Bob's money went. Colin says Bob Marley
supported 6,000 people a month. 6,000 people a month dependent on Bob Marley's charity
for their very lives. He never had a house of his own. He bought dozens of houses for
other people, baby mothers, band members, relatives. He didn't even have a real bed until about eighteen months
before he died when some of the women in his life got
together and bought him a bed. He was just as happy
sleeping on the ground with that rock stone
for his pillow. And if you asked Bob right to
the end of his life what he was, he would say I'm a farmer. I'm a farmer. So, native peoples,
indigenous peoples all over the world relate to Bob
in ways that a lot of us can't, because Bob was in tune
with the rhythms of nature. He understood that
and it was something that was crucially
important for him to tell the rest
of the world about. He loved Africa. He wrote a song in '79 on the
Survival album called Zimbabwe. Actually, he didn't
write the song. It was written by a
man who was living, an expatriate Jamaican
named Flipins who had moved to Shashamani to
an area of Ethiopia that his Majesty had given
to repatriating Rasta. And he recorded that
on his Survival album which is the other
militant masterpiece along with Natty Dread, only now
Bob's philosophy had matured. It was no longer
the eye for the eye because that just
makes everybody blind. He understood that if you're
going to change the world, you must change yourself and you
must change yourself according to the one love philosophy. And that was what he took to the
grave with him and he was able to visit Ethiopia in '78,
terribly disappointed by what he saw after the
Derg had overthrown Selassie. In the beginning of
1980, he went to Gabon and shortly after to Zimbabwe. And I, I toured with him for
two weeks at the end of '79 on that Survival tour and
I recently was approached by some people involved
with his horn player, a man named Glen daCosta
who toured as part of the horn section in
'79 and '80 with Bob. And there's something that
hadn't been known earlier that I'd like to share with you. This is about when Bob
was touring in late '79 and he played the Apollo. Glen daCosta said, "And
then there was the matter of Bob's special jug which remains mysterious
to me to this day. Dave Madden and myself as hornsmen were
always close buddies and we'd share whatever we
could whenever, food, whatever. And we got in late
for a show and decided to raid the Wailers fridge. So, I had some orange
juice but David went for the more shall we
say exciting drink. It was Bob's jug
of whatever it was. I don't know, something
he took to get on stage, a blended drink especially
prepared for Bob. David had a glass
full of Bob's drink and immediately realized it had
a very negative effect on him. On stage, David is always
the most responsible and focused musician all
the time and he's a big, big guy, big muscular guy. He's very thorough and
he does a good job. So, when he was feeling
the effects of the drink and told me, 'Glen, I, if
I'm making any mistakes, tell me', I was truly shocked. I couldn't believe
what was happening. Then as we were playing
I realized that he was leaning on me. Apparently he couldn't
stand on his own feet then. And then I had to
switch parts right there because he was playing
very mildly instead. The boldness had gone
out from his instrument. After the show, that was
that one of the early shows at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem we had
two shows that day. As we would normally take a
half-hour break and come back to do the next show, that day we
had to stay for over two hours because we had to lift David
off the stage and we had to revive him with some
very sweet sugar water. He laid flat on his
back like a boxer that had just been knocked out. I'll never forget it. It's always a laugh
when we remember it. David learned his lesson and
never touched Bob's juice again. For Bob it was okay. He could take it. I don't know what was
in that jug but I'm sure that some powerful
ganja was there or maybe some other
mixture of some other drugs. I'm not into drugs. so, I wouldn't know but for
it to have that kind of effect on David, it must have been
some really special stuff." Beginning of 1980, Bob
is invited by the family of the president of
Gabon, Bongo, to come there to play a concert for
his daughter's birthday. And among the many stories, the halves that have
never been told is a tale of what happened really
on the Gabon trip, because the Wailers were thrown out of the country
unceremoniously, and that is an amazing story. The next trip was to
Zimbabwe and I wasn't there but an extraordinary woman
named Dera Tompkins was. She's a, an activist and
a philosopher and one of, one of the, the really
important people in Bob's life. And she told me the inside story
of what happened in Zimbabwe and she's here with us tonight. Would you stand up and
let people say hello to you, Dera, please? [ Applause ] It is an amazing tale of what
went on, and after Bob played that night, nobody knew
what to do with him. He didn't have any formal host. They jumped in a truck driven
by a guy who didn't know how to drive a stick-shift truck. They went up and down the
streets trying to figure out where they were staying and
when they finally got together and the I-Three saw
Bob, Bob looked at them and said now we know who are
the real revolutionaries, which is a line from
the Zimbabwe song. So, if you want to know what
really went on in Zimbabwe, Dera's testimony
in here is crucial. The end of 1980 is a sad story. Bob played all over the world in
'79 and '80 and his dearest wish in life was for, one of
the dearest wishes was for the black American
audience to accept him. And there was virtually
no black press on him. Many black stations
never played a note of Bob Marley's music
till the day he died. And he, he wanted to tour
in the end of '80 with, with Stevie Wonder and in
fact, he did a couple of shows with the Commodores and those
were at Madison Square Garden, the third and second shows
from the end of his career. And he collapsed
the following day after the two Madison Square
Garden shows when he was jogging in Central Park and he
decided, well, they took him to the hospital and found out
that he probably had three or four weeks left to live
according to the doctors. Instead of checking into the
hospital, he flew to Pittsburgh to do one last show and
that's been released as a live recording and you
would not know anything was wrong with Bob if you
listen to that recording. He ended up being treated
for his cancer by a man who is often referred to as a
Nazi doctor, named Josef Issels. Well you'll learn about
that in the book too, because his wife
tells the true story. Yes, he was a Nazi. When he became a doctor
around 1933, he went to work for a Catholic hospital
in Germany and the heads of the Catholic hospital told
him that he should join the SS for career advancement. So, he did and in 1938, the SS told him he could no
longer treat Jewish patients. So, he quit. And they drafted him and they
put him in the frontlines of World War II and he
eventually got captured and spent the remainder
of the war in a Russian prisoner
of war camp. So, that's a little
different story from what's been told out there. He was able to keep
Bob alive until May of 1981, when Bob passed away. He got back home as far as Miami
and he died in the hospital in Miami on the morning
of May 11th. At that point, at the same time
in Kingston, Judy Mowatt told me that bolt of lightning came
through her living room window and lodged on the metal frame
of a picture of Bob Marley, a signal, she said, that one of the Earth's great
spirits had transcended to the celestial plane. His funeral was the biggest in
the history of the Caribbean. It seemed most of the country
showed up for the cortege from Kingston back through
the center of the country up to Nine Mile where
he was laid to rest. I think a lot of people
felt that that was the end of Bob Marley, especially
the politicians. The irony is Edward Seaga was
now the Prime Minister and ended up delivering the eulogy
at Bob Marley's funeral, the man whose people
came to kill Bob Marley. I think they thought
they were rid of him. Bob said reggae music will just
get bigger and bigger and bigger until it reaches all
its rightful people. He might as well have
been talking about himself because today, he is recognized as the most important musical
artist of the 20th century. In fact, it's not just
me who feels that way but the New York Times. In the Millennium, the
New York Times said that Bob Marley was the
most influential musician of the second half
of the 20th century. The first half they said
was Louis Armstrong. Both of them daily herb
smokers, go figure [laughter]. In 1994 Bob Marley was inducted
as the first third world member of the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame. There's only one other since
then - that's Jimmy Cliff. In 2001, Bob was awarded the
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and got a star
on Hollywood Boulevard. At the Millennium,
the BBC did 24 hours around the world coverage
as each timezone came into the new century and at the
beginning of each of those hours in each of these different
countries, people began by singing One Love, which became the anthem
of the millennium. The New York Times built a
time capsule at the millennium and they wanted to put one
work of musical art in there to signify the most
significant musical moment of the 20th century to be
opened a thousand years from now if there's anything left. And what they decided to put in
there was the film of Bob Marley at The Rainbow in
London in 1977, which I think is
really remarkable. Amnesty International, I, I
mentioned earlier that the head of it says that Bob
Marley is the symbol of freedom throughout the world. The charity we've talked about. At one point, a man came to
Bob Marley one day with an idea to start a company
dealing with coconut oil and Bob wrote him a big
check right on the spot. And his business manager
Colin Leslie, he said Bob, what did they do that for? And Bob said oh, I've
always wanted to be in the oil business [laughter]. Hazrat Inayat Khan
was introduced to me by my friend Sharon Jarboe in a book called The
Mysticism of Sound and Music. And Hazrat said, "Music raises
the soul of man even higher than the so-called
external form of religion. That is why in ancient times
the greatest prophets were great musicians." He also said, "There will
come a day when music and its philosophy will become
the religion of humanity. If there remains any
magic, it is music. The music, the use of music for
spiritual attainment and healing of the soul which was prevalent
in ancient times is not found to the same extent now. Music has been made a pastime, the means of forgetting God
instead of realizing God. It is the use one
makes of things which constitutes their
fault or their virtue. Music," he wrote,
"is man's nature. It has come from vibrations
and he himself is vibration. There is nothing in this world that can help one
spiritually more than music." And Bob Marley was the
greatest musician of our time, and it's been my honor tonight
to share his story with you. In 1996, The New York Times
Sunday magazine celebrated its 20th, or its 100th
anniversary of publication. And they asked each of their
critics to choose one work of art from the 20th century
that they felt sure would last at least 100 years
into the future. And John Pirellis, the
eloquent chief pop critic of the New York Times wrote,
"Bob Marley became the voice of third-world pain and
resistance, the sufferer in the concrete jungle who
would not be denied forever. Outsiders everywhere heard
his voice as their own. If he could make himself heard, so could they, without
compromise. In 2096, when the former third
world has overcome, overrun, and colonized the
former superpowers, Bob Marley will be
commemorated as a saint." Thank you. [ Applause ] And now it's time for
questions and answers and Miss McLean has
the microphone for anybody who'd like to ask. >> Anne McLean: We'll go around. We have maybe just time
for a few questions and a book signing too
before you guys slip away. So, maybe three or
four questions. Questions. [ Inaudible audience question ] >> Roger Steffens: No, the
time in Delaware was strictly to earn money so he could
start his own record label. So, he never did any
performing there at all. He basically lived in the
basement of his mother's house, grew some herb in her backyard and he actually made
jewelry to sell at Woodstock. He had two friends and oh,
here's another important point. He had two friends, Ibis
Pitts and Dion Wilson and I've interviewed
both of them. And Ibis had a little kind of
African arts and crafts store across from Mrs. Booker's
house, Bob's mother's house. And Bob, the night
before Woodstock started, stayed up all night making
hippie jewelry out of rocks and little precious
stones and beaded wires. And that was taken
by Ibis to Woodstock who sold everything out. But Bob and Ibis and Dion
were speaking one day in '69 and Ibis said oh, you know,
you're going to be a big star, you're going to have a
long life, you're going to have all these kids and everybody's going
to know your work. And Bob said no, when
I'm 36 I'm going to die. He was 24 at the
time he said that. And of course that came
all too sadly true. So, that explains I think the
intensity of those final years of his life once he
knew he had the cancer, why he never stopped never
let him slow, slow him down. He knew, somewhere he knew. Any other questions? Yes, sir. [ Inaudible audience question ] >> Audience member: Can you talk
to us about his first appearance at Madison Square Garden and
how he dealt with the rejection that he got the hands
of Sly Stone? >> Roger Steffens: Oh well,
that's two different eras. I think his first Madison
Square Garden show is '76, if I'm not mistaken
and he played there in '78 and '79 as well. But the Sly Stone
thing was interesting. When the Wailers first toured
America in 1973 in the fall, Joe Higgs was replacing
Bunny Wailer who had quit the group earlier. So, it was Peter
Tosh, Bob Marley and Joe Higgs as the Wailers. And, you know, Bob
never bothered with stage costumes
or anything fancy. He looked like he just walked
off an assembly line half the time. And he was opening, he was the
opening act on a national tour for Sly and the Family
Stone, which was the essence of glam rock and all of
that stuff, fur coats and jewelry and everything. And so the audience in the five
shows that Bob ended up doing with Sly was just baffled. They couldn't understand
the patois. The rhythm was something
they were not familiar with at all, and
they just bombed. All the stories that they blew
Sly off the stage were absolute false, absolutely false. They, they were let go because
they were just not connecting and they were left on the
side of the road in Las Vegas with their suitcases
and a disc jockey from San Francisco named
Tom Donohue brought them to San Francisco and got them
some local shows at a club owned by one of the Jefferson
Airplane. And they did a live concert
at a studio in Sausalito that was later broadcast
and released as an album, which is really,
really great stuff. But, yeah. I mean, the Madison Square
Garden shows were so huge and I think he made the most
of them and made an awful lot of new fans there, too. Yes, sir. Pull the cord. >> Audience member: So, I
happened to see some footage on YouTube of Dick Gregory and
Bob Marley together a mound where he was speaking on
Bob's financial mismanagement. What was their relationship
like, because I rarely see
those two together. I know he just recently passed. >> Roger Steffens: Yeah, I,
in fact I gave him a copy of the video of that
that concert years ago. I talked to him about that. Bob's manager, Don Taylor,
deserves a book of his own. He wrote a book of his own
that's largely fiction. He had, you know, in later years
he claimed he threw himself in front of the gunman to
save Bob Marley's life. Well, it was total bull. He was over here,
Bob was over there. He didn't have time to think. In fact, the following year
he did a television interview in New Zealand where he talked
about just that very fact. No I didn't have time
to think, the guy turned around shot me five times in
the groin and I fell down. Bob was over on the other side. So, the book tells a
different story and there's no, there's no truth to the story
that he thrust himself in front of Bob to do this heroic act. It's very hard to accept
most of what Don Taylor said. He set up a travel
agency with his wife. so, that they could
collect all the profits from Bob Marley's tour
tickets, airline tickets and Bob caught him red-handed
taking money in Gabon and not giving it to Bob. Yeah, so there's a lot of
stories in there, yeah. Other questions? Comments? Rude remarks? You have a comment? >> Audience member: Thank you. I'm, I'm from New Jersey and- >> Roger Steffens:
We'll forgive you. >> Audience member: And there,
yes, well, there are people from New Jersey who are even
just small-time gangsters. And I was with a
small-time gangster, Poochy. >> Roger Steffens: Poochy? >> Audience member: And his, he
had a friend that was connected with some parts of Bob's music. I, I don't know the whole- >> Roger Steffens:
San Juan Music. >> Audience member: Yes. But he didn't know
anything about Bob Marley. He says to me, he goes, "Bob
Marley, who's Bob Marley? Is he black?" I said yeah, he's black. And he goes well who is he? I said well, I can
tell you this. He outdrew the Pope in Rome. He's pretty important. And he went oh, and
that's my comment. >> Roger Steffens: Well,
he also told you didn't he that that he owned Bob Marley? >> Audience member: Yes, yeah. He was a very strange
tattooed weird person that said he lived in Sedona. Yeah. >> Roger Steffens: Well, it
is true that you see a lot of, the most bootlegged Marley
material is the Lee Perry sessions and they are
accredited to San Juan Music, which was a mafia company. And Danny Simms,
Johnny Nash's partner, actually was the first
person to ever give royalties to the Wailers for the Lee
Perry material 25 years later when he asked Bruno Bloom in
Paris and me to assemble all of the music between the end
of the Coxsone period in '66 and the beginning of the
Island period in '72. And he claimed he had the
rights and contracts for all of that stuff, the local stuff on Tuff Gong and
Wail 'N Soul 'M. And when I was putting those
series together with Bruno, I asked Danny one night if
he could get me something and he says I could get you
anything, I'm a mobster. So, one of, one of the
things that, The Daily News when they reviewed my book at a
two-page spread on the weekend that was headlined, you know,
Mafia Were Bob Marley's Security at Madison Square Garden. Well, they were. They were. There were death threats
against Bob in 1980 when he played the Garden and
all of the security for the show and allegedly for
the rest of the tour that never happened was
going to be mafia hitmen. So, but I don't think Bob
was directly involved with, with any mobsters. But look, he grew
up in Trenchtown. Half the people there
were mobsters just because they wanted to survive
and feed their children. If they knew you
were from Trenchtown, they wouldn't hire you. So, you had no recourse
in a lot of cases. So, yeah, that's true. Thanks, thanks a lot for that. I'm from Jersey too. So, funny, nobody in
Jersey says Joisey. No. One more question
or comment. Say again? >> Audience member: I was
saying I have a keepsake to show you later because
I still have my ticket stub from when I saw him in 1978
here, actually in Maryland. >> Roger Steffens:
At Landover Center? >> Audience member: Yeah,
at the capital city. >> Roger Steffens: In May. >> Anne McLean: That's
a good note to- >> Roger Steffens: I told
you I'm a freak, man. >> Anne McLean: Fantastic. Well, we want to
thank you, Roger, for another extraordinary
evening and it was wonderful to hear everything
that you had to say. I want to say that this
will eventually be online. You can find this lecture
online takes a few weeks or maybe months for us to
edit it but you can access it. So, thousands of people will
eventually hear the lecture. Thank you for coming. And if you want to check
out the book sales, please just step outside, we
have them waiting for you. >> Roger Steffens:
And before I end, I do want to acknowledge
the presence of one of the most extraordinary people in Jamaican music
history, Dermot Hussey. You'll hear him on
XM on The Joint, channel 42, the reggae channel. He is one of the
participants in the book and he's sitting there
with Dera Tompkins. And we've got Mr.
Colby with us, too. So, three of the major voices
in the book are here tonight. [ Applause ] Okay, and thank you, Miss
McLean for making this happen. So, much. >> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.
