Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ playing. ‘Who taught you to play like that?’ asked the bushman. ‘You did,’ replied Peter. It was the older boy’s skill on the instrument that inspired Nesta to pay serious attention to mastering the guitar. After a while he was thwarted in any further progress. Peter’s battered instrument simply fell to pieces.

      Another older friend of Nesta’s in Trench Town was Vincent Ford, also known as Jack Tartar or, more usually, simply Tartar, which may also be spelled ‘Tata’. Tartar had first come across the Marley boy when he was around 13 and Tartar was 17. A close bond had developed between the two: Tartar had worked as a chef at the Boys Town school, and then started up a little kitchen in his yard on First Street, which he and Nesta would refer to as ‘the casbah’. As well as the ganja that fulfilled a crucial gap in the desperate economy of Trench Town, Tartar would sell dishes like calaloo and dumplings – at times when Nesta was entirely impoverished it would be at Tartar’s that he would find free food. When Nesta made the decision to apply himself to the guitar, it was Tartar who would stay up all night with him, turning the ‘leaves’ of the Teach Yourself Guitar book Nesta had bought as he strummed the chords, peering at the diagrams of where to put his fingers in the light of a flickering oil lamp. In the mornings, their nostrils would be black from the lamp’s fumes.

      One day in her bar, Cedella found herself talking to a customer who told her of a welding business on South Camp Road that regularly took in apprentices. The next day Nesta secured himself a position there as an apprentice welder – when he started work as a trainee at the South Camp Road premises he discovered that his friend Desmond Dekker was already employed there: having already passed all his exams, Dekker now was beginning to learn underwater welding.

      ‘I knew men who were doing welding for a livin’, and I suggested that he go down to the shop and make himself an apprentice,’ remembered Cedella. ‘He hated it. One day he was welding some steel and a piece of metal flew off and got stuck right in the white of his eye, and he had to go to the hospital to have it taken out. It caused him terrible pain; it even hurt for him to cry.’ Peter Tosh was similarly employed, having been pushed into learning welding by his uncle; he was working at another firm, but Bob’s accident gave Peter the excuse to back out of the trade.

      That rogue sliver of metal that caused such agony to Nesta’s eye had a greater significance. From now on, he told Tartar, there would be no more welding: only the guitar. Bob convinced his mother he could make a better living singing. By now, Bunny also had made a ghetto guitar, similar to the ones Nesta constructed, from a bamboo staff, electric cable wire, and a large sardine can. Then Peter Tosh, as the McIntosh boy was more readily known, brought along his battered acoustic guitar to play with them. ‘1961,’ remembered Peter Tosh, ‘the group came together.’

      At the urging of Joe Higgs, they formed into a musical unit, coached by Higgs: the Teenagers contained the three youths, as well as a strong local singer called Junior Braithwaite. ‘It was kinda difficult,’ said Joe Higgs later, ‘to get the group precise – and their sound – and to get the harmony structures. It took a couple years to get that perfect. I wanted each person to be a leader in his own right. I wanted them to be able to wail in their own rights.’

      Nesta Marley, Bunny Livingston, and Peter Tosh were the only singers that Joe Higgs rehearsed in that manner. Although they would be beaten to this by the Maytals, who began performing in 1962, they were one of the first groups in Jamaica who were more than a duo; previously the island’s charts had been dominated by pairs of singers – the Blues Busters, Alton and Eddie, Bunny and Scully, and – of course – Higgs and Wilson.

      A close brethren of Joe Higgs, Alvin ‘Franseeco’ Patterson, later known simply as Seeco, instructed the Wailers, as the Teenagers would become known, in the philosophy of rhythm. Originally from St Ann, Seeco was another professional musician now living in Trench Town. An accomplished hand drummer, he had worked with various of Jamaica’s calypso groups, as well as having had involvement with the Jamaican musical form of mento. The burru style of drumming he played was an African rhythm of liberation welcoming the return of released prisoners of war; it had been co-opted into Rastafari’s Nyabinghi style of inspirational chanting and drum rhythms. And it was this blend of devotion and rebellious fervour that formed the basis of the Wailers’ understanding of rhythm.

      Endeavouring to understand and master music was something which Nesta Marley never stopped doing. As soon as he rose in the morning he picked up his guitar, and would rarely be without it for the rest of the day and night, practising immensely hard. With Joe Higgs, the harmony master, Nesta, Bunny, and Peter would often practise and rehearse until five in the morning. Taking a break around 2.30 a.m., they would head over to Ma ChiChi, who sold oily fried-corn dumplings and what was said to be Jamaica’s best soursop juice, so thick you had to tap the bottom of the bottle to get it out; Ma ChiChi only lit her pan at 2.30 a.m., when the dancehalls were closing down.

      Other times in the early hours of the morning, the three youths would wander with Joe Higgs down to Back-a-Wall, then to Maypen Cemetery, then over to Hot and Cold. Singing all the time they walked, they would check out the responses to such songs they favoured as Little Antony and the Imperials’ ‘Tears on my Pillow’, the Platters’ ‘My Prayer’, Frankie Lymon’s ‘I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent’, and Gene Chandler’s ‘Duke of Earl’, with Peter on the vocal bass part. At other times, they would stand on corners or in parks trying out material, or call on such revered local figures as Brother Gifford, One Sam, or Sonny Flight to air their musical wares for them, wondering whether they could detect the trio’s development.

      Finally, they even acquired their first conventionally constructed and manufactured guitar. Around the corner of Ebenezer Street and Darling Lane, just off Spanish Town Road, in what is now Tivoli Gardens, was the Ebenezer Boys’ Club, a local youth club. Discovering that the institution possessed its own badly mistreated guitar, hardly larger than a child’s instrument, Bob appropriated it for the group.

      It was Peter who could play guitar, and organ and piano, who worked with the instrument more than his two musical partners. One evening, they had been invited over to play in Greenwich Farm at the cold-supper shop of a man called Sheriff Brown, one of the area’s main herbsmen. Late for their show, the three youths were running there, racing each other. Then Peter’s foot collided with Bob’s, and he tumbled. He was carrying the Ebenezer guitar and it was smashed beyond repair.

      Almost immediately they acquired a far more satisfactory replacement. It was sold to them by a local man named Deacon, an intellectual, highly literate Rasta who was a cultural historian and had stored and recorded the history of Marcus Garvey. Noticing the guitar hanging on Deacon’s wall, they made him an offer for it.

      This guitar was full-sized and in good condition. Nicknaming the instrument ‘Betsy’, as Bo Diddley had christened his guitar, they added an electrical pick-up, and would use it either unamplified or with electricity. Five years later, in 1967, they were still using it on recordings.

      It was now public knowledge in Trench Town that Nesta Marley, who was beginning to be known more as Bob, or Bobby or Robbie, was a musician of some sort. At that time, Pauline Morrison lived in the area and was a pupil at Kingston Senior School. Every afternoon she would make her way home from her lessons, usually with a large group of children from the same neighbourhood; they would walk from West Road to Thirteenth Street, to Ninth Street and the Gully Bank and then across a bridge. At the end of a lane, she invariably would see Bob sitting under a broad, tall tree, accompanying himself on a homemade guitar as he sang songs of his own composition. Fifteen or twenty schoolchildren would be gathered all around. It was a regular fixture. ‘We’d come from school and see this guy singing, singing, and we’d always sit around and watch and listen to him. After him finish we clap him, and after we’d go home.’

      Bob seemed like a bird, remembered Pauline, ‘like a young hatchling just coming up’. Later, as success started to make his songs familiar, she would recognise some of the tunes СКАЧАТЬ