BIOGRAPHY:Three decades after the singer's death, Bob Marley's reggae has endured, even if his One Love vibe is no longer evident in Jamaica, writes IAN THOMSON
Bob Marley: The Untold StoryBy Chris Salewicz, HarperCollins, 420pp, £20
NOT LONG AGO in the Jamaican capital of Kingston, I visited an orphanage school founded in the 19th century for “wayward youth”. Jamaican popular music would not have flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, with magnificent hit after hit, without the Alpha Boy’s School. Its orchestra nurtured some of the island’s finest reggae singers and musicians.
The current bandmaster, Winston "Sparrow" Martin, was rehearsing when I arrived. "As you were, boys," he said, dismissing his class. Martin had played percussion on the first Bob Marley and the Wailers album, Catch a Fire. The sound of early Wailers hits was entirely due to Alpha School musicians, he said. "And I'm talking about real musicians, not the American-type rap dancehall stuff. That's not music – it's computer rhythms."
Released in 1972, Catch a Firewas an instant rock-reggae classic; its hard-driving Kingston rhythms were overlaid in London with guitar solos and even the brittle Clavinet sound made famous by Stevie Wonder on Superstition.
The end product, while it sold in quantities abroad, seemed quite detached from Kingston ghetto culture, with its paraphernalia of sound systems, selectors and DJs. (The original drum-and-bass mixes completed by the Wailers in Kingston, released for the first time in 2002, have a raw simplicity that appeals to reggae purists.)
According to Chris Salewicz, it was Chris Blackwell of Island Records who tailored the album for a white rock audience. Blackwell, a white Jamaican, is a scion of one of the island’s wealthiest families; his mother, Blanche Blackwell, had been the lover of Ian Fleming, Errol Flynn and other tropical voluptuaries.
Unsurprisingly, Catch a Firewas not much played by Britain's black reggae crowd (to whom the Harrow-educated Chris Blackwell was Chris "Whiteworst".) The album sounded too much like "reggae for people who don't really like reggae", it was reckoned. The sequel Wailers album, Burnin', released within 12 months of its predecessor in 1973, offered a less adulterated, more dread-heavy sound, says Salewicz, but still it bore the imprint of session rock musicians, and was directed mainly at the white middle classes, for whom Marley was now the King of Reggae.
For many non-Jamaicans, Bob Marley is reggae. The first superstar of the developing world, he remains an international celebrity, honoured with a waxwork at Madame Tussauds as well as a Jamaican Order of Merit – the third-highest honour in the Jamaican honours system. Each year the Bob Marley Museum, in Kingston, attracts tens of thousands of tourists, among them dreadlocked Japanese.
Marley died in 1981, aged 36, of cancer, and in some ways he has become a Christ figure, promising redemption. A kind of political correctness dictates that one should not be too unkind to him, yet much of his loping, mid-tempo music (with the exception of the early Lee “Scratch” Perry productions) sounds slightly bland to my ears.
Salewicz, a London-based journalist, is nevertheless awed by it. Bob Marley: The Untold Storyis a readable, informative biography, and in spite of its tone of wide-eyed admiration – "Jamaica is a land whose blessings are surely God-given" – it offers a good introduction to the man and his music.
Marley was born in 1945 in Jamaica’s “garden parish” of St Ann, a rural backwater with the appearance of an English parkland, whose green meadows roll towards the sea. After Jamaica’s independence, in 1962, he became interested in the back-to-Africa religion of Rastafari and the Black Power movement in the United States, which called for a recuperation of “African consciousness” in the mind of the modern African-American (a strategy that has evolved to its unsophisticated form in today’s obsession with “respect”). Marley’s music was suffused with a proto-hippy, easy-going “One Love” brotherly communitarianism, which some westerners, with their noses to the grindstone, found hard to understand.
His domestic influence was at its peak in 1973, Salewicz suggests, when he brought the rival Jamaican politicians Michael Manley and Edward Seaga together on stage during the famous One Love peace concert in Kingston on April 22nd.
It has been suggested that Marley’s international success may have been due, at least in part, to his mixed parentage. With a Caucasian father (Capt Norval Marley, a quartermaster attached to the British West Indian Regiment), he would have found it easier to deal with the world at large – that is, white people. Although Marley was brought up in Kingston’s downtown ghetto, his fair complexion and aquiline features lent him an acceptable “uptown” look.
Today, three decades after his death, Marley is the reason why so many tourists come to Jamaica in the first place. Yet tourists rarely see anything of the twisted side of island life. Several of the original Wailers died violent deaths. In 1987 Peter Tosh was murdered. Carlton “Carly” Barrett, the band’s drummer, was shot and killed that same year. Twelve years later, in 1999, another Wailer met a violent end: Junior Braithwaite was killed in Kingston by three armed men. Dreadfully, Marley’s One Love vibe has died a death in Jamaica; there is too much violence for kindly idealists who interest themselves in universal love, smoke ganja and eat Rastafari nut cutlets. Marley’s music, though, still offers an extraordinary hope and a spiritual Rastafarianism of unalloyed sincerity.
Ian Thomson's account of modern Jamaica, The Dead Yard, was published by Faber this year. His biography of Primo Levi won the Royal Society of Literature WH Heinemann Award in 2003
