Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ for example, ‘when Bob go on stage he was dancin’ more than he was singin’ … An’ ’im tired when ’im come back to the vocal, so me beg ’im and seh: “No, youth: when ya sing two verse you dance, an’ then you go back to your other verse.”’

      At the Montego Bay venue, Bob performed as Morgan had suggested. But during ‘One Cup of Coffee’, his first song, he didn’t receive the audience response either of them had expected. In fact, the typically volatile and expressive Jamaican crowd started to boo. ‘The next song, ’im just get up and seh: “Judge not, before you judge yourself!” So the audience think a him mek that song immediately offa dem! And ’im tear dung the whole place with that tune: Judge not, before you judge yourself. When ’im reach a part there the audience ‘ray and seh: Wait, this boy a bad, ’im a jus’ mek a sound offa we, same time, yeah man, an’ deh so ’im hit. That was the last time I see Bob fe a long while.’

      Kingstonians, however, were able to see ‘Bobby Martell’ most weeks, at the Queen’s Theatre, as part of the weekly Opportunity Knocks talent shows. These stage shows run by Vere Johns, before an audience of some 600 people, were broadcast on RJR, one of the island’s two radio stations, and featured such guest artists as Higgs and Wilson, and Alton and Eddy. The best contending singer would win a guinea (21 shillings, or £1.10), through the simple test of being brought back for the most encores – if the crowd took against you, you’d be booed off. Bob would steal these shows every time, hurrying away from the venue with his prize before other less successful contenders could beg some of it away from him. He would sing ‘Judge Not’, and another song he had written, ‘Fancy Curls’ (‘Last night your best friend was sick/ Goodness gracious, another of your trick/ Hey little girl with those fancy curls’). For a time Bob was even awarded the nickname ‘Fancy Curls’.

      The fact that the records released by Beverley’s hadn’t sold was, after the initial disappointment, irrelevant. Only 16 years old, Bob had been given the sign that he was perfectly justified in imagining that there could be some kind of musical future for him. To make the next step forward, he decided to make a serious go of it with his spars from Trench Town. Accordingly, the Teenagers became first the Wailing Rudeboys, and then the Wailing Wailers, before finally mutating into simply the Wailers.

      One of the maxims of a man called Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry who worked for Coxsone Dodd’s sound system, was that every man has a name for a purpose. So it also was and is with groups. And the name ‘The Wailers’ didn’t merely reflect some alleycat screech made by the trio. Whether consciously or unconsciously chosen, it spoke volumes about the deep miasma of anguish and lonely hurt all three, especially Nesta and Peter, had felt within their souls as youths coming up. Bob Marley’s vocals sound sometimes as if he is literally crying. ‘The world “wail” means to cry or to moan,’ said Peter Tosh later. ‘We were living in this so-called ghetto. No one to help them. We felt we were the only ones who could express the people’s feelings through music, and because of that the people loved it. So we did it.’

      Definitively ghetto sufferahs, the trio responded to music made by their American equivalents – Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and the flawless harmonising of the Impressions, led by Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler. When the Impressions came to Jamaica in the early 1960s to play warm-up dates before a US tour (the reason so many American acts played in Jamaica), all three Wailers went together to see them at the Carib Theatre, fighting to get up to the front row. The group’s ‘One Love’ utilised sections of the Impressions’ ‘People Get Ready’. The Wailers also recorded versions of the Impressions’ ‘Another Dance’, for Studio One, and ‘Keep On Movin’’, for Scratch Perry.

      Looking at it with a clear vision, the future seemed to contain a myriad musical possibilities. But without that hope, the reality of Bob’s then existence only could have been seen as bitterly grim. He had no real source of income, and literally would have starved on occasions if it had not been for Tartar’s kitchen.

      A further set of complications was on its way. Bob’s mother Cedella had become pregnant by Toddy, Bunny’s father, giving birth to Pearl Livingston early in 1962; Bob and Bunny were thereby linked even closer by their new half-sister. Bob, meanwhile, had had a passionate affair himself with a local girl, two years younger than he was. Her older brother, though, forbade the girl to carry on the relationship because of Bob’s white blood, a recurring and consistent problem for him. The shock of being the victim of such racism, combined with Pearl taking much of the unstinting attention that Cedella had previously given her son, caused tensions within Bob and in the yard at 19 Second Street. But did her brother have another reason for objecting to his sister associating with Bob Marley? For on 22 May 1963, Cheryl Murray, a local girl, gave birth to Bob Marley’s first child, Imani Carole, conceived when he was sixteen and about whom little is known.

      It had taken the birth of Pearl to make Cedella realise precisely how hopeless her relationship was with the baby girl’s father. To escape from this unprofitable union and to advance her life, she decided to move to the north-eastern United States, to Wilmington in Delaware, where there was yet another branch of the Malcolm family. She agonised over what to do with her son. But then it was decided that he would stay behind and wait for her to send for him and for Pearl.

      Cedella’s sister Enid moved into the home on Second Street to care for her nephew and niece. When Enid moved back to St Ann, however, Toddy Livingston took over the apartment. Although the residence theoretically remained as Bob’s home, he was unhappy when Toddy moved in Ceciline, another of his baby-mothers. Bob turned up at 19 Second Street less and less frequently. Effectively, he found himself homeless, living for a time in west Kingston’s various squatter camps. It was as though, yet again, he had been abandoned. To all intents and purposes, he was destitute. But then Tartar took him in and gave him a corner of the kitchen, in which he also slept. Bob’s bed was the gambling table that Tartar would set up for reasons that were both social and financial: Bob would have to wait until the games had finished to reclaim his bed.

      These were very hard times indeed. But in that strange way in which adversity can be turned to advantage, they also served to focus and hone Bob’s art. There was no choice, no other way out. Bunny would come round, and – to a lesser extent – Peter and Junior Braithwaite, and they would sit around practising harmonies until they fell asleep. ‘Me and Bunny used to be the harmony of the group, and we sang harmony like birds,’ said Peter Tosh. ‘We two sing harmony, sound like five. Bob Marley never sing harmony, no time.’

      Junior Braithwaite had been born on 4 April 1949 on Third Street and West Road, in what became known as Rema, immediately to the east of Trench Town. Also living on Third Street was Joe Higgs; Roy Wilson, Higgs’s partner in Higgs and Wilson, had been raised by Junior Braithwaite’s grandmother. ‘They used to rehearse in the back of our yard,’ Junior Braithwaite said. ‘So we as kids hang out around them.’ The early Wailers, comprised of Bob, Bunny, Peter, Junior Braithwaite, and a girl they would soon meet called Beverley Kelso was, according to Junior, ‘just a singing group, a harmonising group. We had nothing to do with instruments.’ In the early days of the group, other potential members had been briefly tried out: a couple of tenors, Barrington Sayles and Ricardo Porter, decided for themselves that their voices weren’t really strong enough; meanwhile, ‘P’, the sister of Joe Brown, a rude boy from Second Street, would turn up at early rehearsals, but also came to the conclusion that her vocals were not sufficiently powerful.

      Falling back on himself in these endless rehearsals, Bob found his confidence and ability growing almost by the day. To provide light for their sessions, another ghetto-dweller by the name of George Headley Robinson would gather brushwood from all about the area and lug it to Tartar’s yard. Some thirteen years older than Bob, ‘Georgie’, as he was more commonly known, was a devoted believer in the talents of the youth and his musical companions. Georgie, who made his living as a fisherman, would try and instruct Bob in matters of Rastafari, constantly referring to one of the copies of the Bible that are omnipresent in Jamaica. ‘But Bob,’ Georgie said, ‘was too young to reason СКАЧАТЬ