Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ such a success translating into local reverence. ‘Nobody did not bow down to us. Nobody didn’t care who the Wailers was because Higgs and Wilson was already there singing. Hortense was singing, Bunny and Scully, Toots and the Maytals, Delroy Wilson, everybody was right there singing. People gathered to hear us sing but only because they were proud of us: when we would go to the studio people would just wave. The Wailers? It was just like ordinary people, you know.’

      In those days, she said, none of them smoked – neither cigarettes nor herb. On the journey to Studio One, ‘me and Junior is two little short ones, so we would stay in the back, hold each other’s hand and walk and start talking our little talk. Bob would be pushing Bunny, Bunny would be pushing Bob and Peter, and they laugh and they clown and they tease each other. They would laugh at people. The little things that they talk, you just sit down and crack up. I’m telling you, you’d be around them you don’t wanna move. I used to look up on them and they look up on me. With respect. They treat me like a sister and they treat me good.’

      Almost as soon as it was in the shops, ‘Simmer Down’ went to number one in the Jamaican charts. This tune’s subject of teenage crime was notice served that the Wailers were the ambassadors of the island’s rebels, the rude boys. Yet the Wailers were never able to compete with the colossal popularity enjoyed in Jamaica by another three-piece male vocal trio, the Maytals, fronted by Toots Hibbert.

      The subject matter of ‘Simmer Down’ made the Wailers stand out amongst their contemporaries. Up until then no one in Jamaican music had been expressing ghetto thinking. Even the seasoned ska musicians down at Studio One were impressed. ‘The uniqueness of the sound they projected,’ said Johnny Moore, ‘was specifically local and really good. The subject matter was clean, and the lyrics were really educative. The statements might be a bit serious, but the way they projected it you could absorb what they were saying. There were some good lessons, we had to admit that.’

      However, Beverley Kelso was surprised at the version of the song that was released. In fact, on it there was a vocal error by Peter Tosh, which seemed to appeal to Coxsone. ‘We had a better cut than the release. We was singing when the musicians come in, but Peter comes in at the wrong point and says “simmer”, and Coxsone said that’s it, that was the one that he wanted. So, it was a mistake, but it was made into something that wasn’t a mistake.’

      New to the line-up, Beverley kept very much to herself at the session: ‘They said I was shy. I don’t think I was shy to sing, but after singing I wouldn’t say a word. If you say something to me I would answer you. I would sing and Bob and Peter and Bunny would be one place with all the rest of the guys and I would be just by myself. I was an observer.’ Unlike Leonard Dillon, Beverley confirmed that Bob appeared to be the acknowledged leader of the group. And that rigour was the middle name of their work ethic.

      ‘It was like every day or every other day we would be in the studio. If we’re not recording for ourselves, we were backing up other people because we have other people coming and singing. Like, for instance, if Tony Gregory or anybody in the studio want back-up we would just come in and harmonise. Everybody would just back-up, either you back sing, clap, whatever you wanna do over there to back-up everybody. So we was in the studio most of the time. We were like a family. And there were times when we didn’t go home. We would be in the studio like two, three days.

      ‘When Junior was leaving to go to America they were doing an album and for like, two, three days we would be in the studio. We didn’t have place to sleep. We didn’t even have no time to sleep. It was just fun in the studio. We would eat and would sit down and get a little nap. Sometimes I would run home and come right back. We have the privilege to go into that studio that most people they couldn’t come in.’

      Bob was also learning some good lessons himself. A number of the musicians he now began playing with at Studio One – Johnny Moore himself, for example – were dedicated and devout Rastafarians. For years, Bob’s Bible had rarely been out of his sight. Now he began to be offered new, apocalyptic interpretations that would make his jaw drop with disbelief. Sometimes he would wander away from Studio One after a day’s sessions in a mystified haze, as he struggled to process the biblical information and interpolations to which he had been made privy.

      Bob’s soul was being nourished. In addition, he now had sufficient funds to pay for the nutrition of his body: as well as having ordered gold lamé collarless suits – a kind of Beatle jacket version of the famous ensemble worn by Elvis Presley on the sleeve of Elvis Gold Discs Volume 2 – for the three men in the group, Coxsone had also put them each on a weekly wage of £3.

      ‘We all used to go to church to search, and knowing that we found reality and righteousness we relaxed,’ recalled Peter Tosh. ‘So when you saw us in the slick suits and things, we were just in the thing that was looked on as the thing at the time. So we just adjusted ourselves materially.’

      ‘Simmer Down’ was followed up by an official release for ‘It Hurts to be Alone’, another hit; curiously, even though the song had been written and sung by Junior Braithwaite, the title could definitively sum up Bob’s feelings about substantial chunks of his life. For the rest of 1964, the Wailing Wailers were rarely out of the Jamaican charts, with a string of tunes recorded at 13 Brentford Road: ‘Lonesome Feeling’, ‘Mr Talkative’, ‘I Don’t Need Your Love’, ‘Donna’ and ‘Wings of a Dove’. ‘Mr Dodd’ was not unhappy.

      Coxsone became another father figure to Bob, and to a lesser extent, to Bunny and Peter. When he learned that Bob didn’t have a home of his own, he did a deal with the youth. He would turn new artists over to Bob to find songs for them; Bob could then sit down with his guitar with them – with Delroy Wilson or Hortense Ellis, for example – and rehearse the tune. In return, Clement Dodd would let Bob Marley live at the studio, and sleep in a back room they’d use for auditions or rehearsals. Bob was unable to put his head down, however, until the sessions had ended, often late-late in the night. And when he did, he often found his sleep was strangely disturbed, as though perhaps there was someone else in the room with him.

      The Wailing Wailers had become the roughneck archetype of the three-piece harmony group, a specifically Jamaican form of high popular art that was more usually burnished to a shining gloss. By such members of their peer group as the estimable Alton Ellis, the group was considered to be very strong indeed. ‘They have a different sense of music than us, and we all love it. It wasn’t so much dancehall. Bob’s sound was always different: it mesmerised me from those times. His music always have a roots sense of direction. Not even just the words – I’m talking about the sound, the melody that him sing, the feel of the rhythm. Always a bit different.’

      This sense was complemented in live performances. ‘Bob was always this ragamuffin onstage. We – myself, people like John Holt in the Paragons – were more polished and act like the Americans. Him was a rebel: jump up and throw himself about onstage. The Wailers them just mad and free: just threw themselves in and out of the music, carefree and careless.’

      Miming to their records, the Wailers would appear all over Jamaica at dances at which the Downbeat sound system would play. This was a regular Coxsone strategy. ‘That’s how we got them launched. With several other of my artists, we used to tour the country parts.’ The Wailing Wailers made more hits: ‘I Need You’; ‘Dance With Me’, a rewrite of the Drifters’ ‘On Broadway’; ‘Another Dance’; and the ‘Ten Commandments of Love’, an extraordinary interpretation of the Aaron Neville song. And there were more tunes that seemed like messages direct from Rude Boy Central: ‘Rude Boy’ itself, late in 1965; ‘Rule Dem Rudie’; ‘Jailhouse’, another paean to rude boys, containing the lines ‘Can’t fight against the youth now/ ’Cause it’s wrong.’ Small wonder that such tunes took off with Jamaica’s teenagers, of whatever social origins.

      Shortly before Christmas of 1964 the Wailers were at Studio One, recording a version of the СКАЧАТЬ