Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ Robert Marley would rise in the cool of first daylight, but long after sunset he could still be found, with or without his spar, Bunny, strumming his sardine-can guitar and trying out melodies and harmonies. Apart from football, it was his only solace, the only space where he could feel comfortable within his head. Later in life he would say, ‘Sleep is for fools.’

      Often he would feel alienated and ostracised in the city. With his mixed-race origins clearly visible in his facial skin, he was considered a white boy and was taunted for this; his complexion could bring out the worst in people: after all, why was this boy from ‘country’ living down in the ghetto and not uptown with all the other lightskin people? Being so consistently and miserably tested can bring the worst out in someone, destroying them; or it can assiduously and resolutely build their character. Such daily bullying ultimately created in Nesta his iron will, his overpowering self-confidence and self-esteem.

      ‘Sometimes he’d come across the resistance of being half-caste,’ said Rita Marley. ‘There was a problem with his counterparts: having come through this white father caused such difficulties that he’s want to kill himself and thinking, “Why am I this person? Why is my father white and not black like everybody else? What did I do wrong?”

      ‘He was lost in that: not being able to have anyone to say, “It’s not your fault, or that there’s nothing wrong in being like you are.” But that was the atmosphere he came up in that Trench Town environment where everybody is rough. He had to show them that although he didn’t know his father, at least he knew there was a God and he knew what he was feeling.

      ‘Bob had to put up with a lot of resistance. If he wasn’t that strong in himself he wouldn’t be what he became. He would be downtrodden and seen as another half-caste who would never make it.’

      The still air of Trench Town was barely ever disturbed by traffic noise; from those rare yards that had a tenant sufficiently fortunate to possess a radio would sail the favourite new songs from the United States, fading in and out as they drifted down the Caribbean from New Orleans or Miami, or Nashville, the home of the enormously powerful Radio WALC. Especially popular was the ten-to-midnight show sponsored by White Rose Petroleum Jelly whose DJ was Hugh Jarrett, a vocalist with Elvis Presley’s Jordanaires backing group, who were in need of employment in 1958 when Elvis went into the army. Enormously powerful, WALC could easily be tuned into throughout the US eastern seaboard and far further south into the Caribbean than Jamaica.

      Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine, Fats Domino, Brook Benton, Larry Williams, Louis Jordan and white iconoclasts such as Elvis Presley and the milder Ricky Nelson all made a strong impression on Nesta; he also absorbed the omnipresent Trinidadian calypso and steel-band music that had been adopted by Jamaica almost as its own.

      It was in Trench Town that Nesta Robert Marley was exposed for the first time to bebop and modern jazz – at first, however, ‘mi couldn’t understand it,’ Bob later admitted. But in 1960, he began to take part in the evening music sessions held in his Third Street yard by Joe Higgs – and Joe Higgs loved jazz, especially hornsmen. He was one of the area’s most famous residents, due to his role as one of Jamaica’s first indigenous recording artists, as part of the Higgs and Wilson duo.

      Joe Higgs, who had been born in 1940, had begun ‘foolin’ around on a guitar’ in 1956, when he was 16. Perhaps pertinently, the guitar had belonged to a Rastaman. ‘He used to allow me to play and I used to pick. I tried to combine notes in a freak manner ’cause I was just aware of harmony structure. I couldn’t tell whether this was G or F or whatever on the guitar. I know that I was just forming and building songs. Then I’d take my time and make songs around those chords. That’s the way I made most of my music.’

      Another singer, Roy Wilson, lived on the same Trench Town street; they each used the rehearsal studio at Bim and Bam. Due to simple expediency, they ended up singing together as a duo at a talent contest, in which they came second. Higgs and Wilson, as they had become, were signed up by Edward Seaga, who later became Prime Minister, his only act at the time. Their first release in 1960 on his West Indies Records label (WIRL) was ‘Oh Manny Oh’; this jumping boogie raced up the Jamaican charts from 43 to 3 before hitting the top spot for two weeks. ‘Sold a lot!’ said Joe Higgs. Their biggest record, however, was ‘There’s a Reward’, recorded for Coxsone Dodd on his Wincox label. But when Higgs went to see Coxsone and asked for royalties, the sound-system boss took out a gun and beat his artist with it.

      Joe Higgs was as conscious in his actions as in his lyrics; these included the unmentionable, radical subject of Rastafari – for publicly espousing the faith, which grew by quantum leaps amongst the ghetto sufferahs, he had been beaten up by the police and imprisoned during political riots in Trench Town in May 1959. This only strengthened him in his resolve. Higgs had himself learned music from his mother, who sang in a church choir; recalling how fortified he had been by the spiritual aspect of her teaching, Joe Higgs henceforth paid great attention to playing the part of both musical and moral tutor to those youth of the area with the ears to hear. The musical seminars he conducted could be rigorous affairs: especial attention would be paid to breath control and melody, and as well as guitar lessons in which he would instruct his students in the art of writing lyrics that would carry clear ideas to the people. It was not all work: sometimes entire classes would voyage together the short distance to the end of Marcus Garvey Drive to swim at the beach known as Hot and Cold, an effect created on the water by an electrical power generator.

      It was in Higgs’s yard that Nesta had his first encounter with something that stilled his thoughts sufficiently for him to empathise with the lateral processes of jazz: the Jamaican natural resource with which he was later to become inextricably associated in the public mind. ‘After a while I smoke some ganja, some herb, and get to understand it. Mi try to get into de mood whar de moon is blue and see de feelin’ expressed. Joe Higgs ’elped me understands that music. ’E taught mi many t’ings.’

      Another of the male role models who appeared consistently through the course of the fatherless Nesta’s life, Joe Higgs assiduously coached the 15-year-old and his spar Bunny in the art of harmonising and he advised Bob to sing all the time, to strengthen his voice. At one of these sessions Bob and Bunny met Peter McIntosh, another youth wanting to try out as a vocalist, who lived in nearby West Road.

      Unlike the more humble Bunny, this tall, gangly and arrogant youth was older than Bob. He had been born Winston Hubert McIntosh on 19 October 1944 in the west of Jamaica, in the coastal hamlet of Bluefields, Westmoreland, to Alvera Coke and James McIntosh. His father had left his mother soon after the child was born. Taken into the care of an aunt, the first sixteen years of his life had been spent first in the pleasant coastal town of Savanna-la-Mar and then the rough section of west Kingston called Denham Town. In 1956, after his aunt died, he moved in with an uncle who lived in Trench Town. Lonely and isolated, the boy was consumed with an urgent need to make it as a musician. Unlike Bob and Bunny, however, whose guitar-playing had only developed perfunctorily as they concentrated on their vocal skills, Peter McIntosh was a competent guitarist, owning his own cheap acoustic model. As a boy he had piano lessons for two years, until his mother could no longer afford them.

      Nesta and Bunny first encountered Peter when they literally walked into him as he rounded a Trench Town corner while he was playing his guitar and singing. Peter was especially fond of Stan Jones’s much covered country-cowboy song ‘(Ghost) Riders in the Sky’, with its ‘yippey yi-yay’ chorus, a simultaneous hit in 1949 for three separate artists, Burl Ives, Bing Crosby, and Vaughn Monroe – apocryphally, it was ‘(Ghost) Riders in the Sky’ he was singing when he bumped into Nesta and Bunny. Falling into conversation with this relative newcomer to the area, they learned that Peter already had plenty of songs he had written: he had decided much earlier that his course of life would be as a singer. Peter had learned to play the guitar by observing a bushman in Savanna-la-Mar, who would play his instrument by the roadside or on the seashore. Every day, Peter would study the man’s hands and watch where he placed СКАЧАТЬ