Sunday afternoon I wandered down to BAM to see “Marley,” a new documentary of the reggae music icon (directed by Kevin Macdonald). The film features interview footage with Marley’s Wailer co-founder Neville Livingston (known as Bunny Wailer), wife Rita Marley, Cindy Breakspeare (a former Miss World with whom he had an on-going relationship and fathered a child), children Ziggy Marley and Cedella Marley (both musicians in their own right), and a host of former band members, family and friends. Essentially following Marley’s life chronologically, we move from the tiny tin roofed shack at St. Ann Parish in north-central Jamaica to the Bavarian clinic where he lived out his last months being treated for cancer, returning to Miami only days before he died in May 1981. Between, we hear about Marley’s first ventures into a musical career— Bunny tells how as teens he, Bob, and several others sang at night in cemeteries to perfect their harmonies and summon their nerve. At 16,Marley released his first single (“Judge Not), and the next year he, Livingston, and Peter Tosh formed the core of a group “The Teenagers” that eventually evolved into The Wailers. Reggae was just beginning, an organic form arising out of a cocktail of rock steady, calypso, and ska, achieved by a shift of emphasis on the beat. The Wailers found their way to producer Coxsone Dodd, and began to develop their trademark sound.
But, almost before any success could materialize, Bob was off: In 1966, the 21 year old Marley relocated to Wilmington, Delaware to live near his mother. He worked as a lab assistant at DuPont, then as a welder at the local Chrysler factory, before returning to Jamaica two years later, where he resumed recording and performing with The Wailers. He also converted to Rastafarianism, and grew the dreadlocks that would become part of his iconic look. Maybe it was his Samson moment: The small quiet lad who had been teased and felt the outsider, owing to his mixed racial identity, now found his voice and his strength.
The Wailers traveled to London, got £4,000 and a record deal with Island Records (who had just lost the label’s top artist, Jimmy Cliff), went home to Kingston and recorded the album “Catch a Fire.” “Concrete Jungle.” “Slave Driver.” “No More Trouble.” “Stir It Up.” It was a solid beginning, full of tracks that gave hints of the powerful creative force that was still to come. “Burnin’” followed later in 1973— with “Get Up, Stand Up” and “I Shot the Sheriff.” Now, instead of Jamaican acts garnering notariety at home by recording covers of American radio hits, it was their sound that was being imitated and copied. Less enamored with the touring necessary to promote their records, first Livingston, then Tosh withdrew from The Wailers, returning home to Jamaica. Perhaps it was as it was meant to be.
Continuing on, but now as the clear front man, Marley scored his first US breakthrough in 1975 with “No Woman, No Cry,” a deceptively simple song, utterly singable, carried forward by Marley’s haunting soulful storytelling, bluesy guitar accents, and punctuated by organ chord progressions and I-Threes harmonies that carry the wallop of great gospel music. Such was his influence at home that he was asked by Prime Minister Michael Manley in 1976 to headline a concert aimed at halting gang violence in Jamaica. (Two days before the event, Marley survived a gun attack in his home. He performed nonetheless.) Two years later, he did it again, headlining the “One Love Peace Concert,” intended to promote tolerance and conciliation between Jamaica’s two primary political factions. The film features footage of Marley, sprite-like and whirling like a dervish, coaxing and cajoling Manley and his opponent Edward Seaga onto the stage for a ceremonial handshake. Never have two men looked more uncomfortable, their oversized political egos rendered human-scale by the singer.
But, “Marley” is no thoughtless piece of hagiography, much as we may even secretly want it to be. The film presents a nuanced view of the singer— showing, for example, his complex relationships with women (he fathered eleven children by seven women) and his sometime emotional distance as a father. There are uncomfortable moments of Marley traveling to Gabon, initially unaware that it was a dictatorship. Later, he plays a concert for Zimbabwe’s Independence Day celebrations, a hopeful moment of the late 1970s during which, with the hindsight all these years later, we see installed another dictator, Robert Mugabe.
I had not heard Marley’s music when I arrived at Ohio State in fall 1980, where Marley was scheduled to play a concert at Mershon Auditorium that Halloween. Reggae had not yet come to southern Ohio (where I was from), nor had MTV arrived. But, my roommates had a clutch of Marley’s records— “Exodus,” “Survival,” “Rastaman Vibration”— and I quickly and enthusiastically latched on. The music appealed as a combination of opposites— simultaneously strange and familiar, exuberant and melancholy. There were good time, upbeat rhythms that represented the first flush of adult freedom I was feeling, accented by plaintive lyrics filled with human struggles and allusions to the larger wrongs— racism, social injustice, economic inequality— I wanted to right. I laughed a little uncomfortably Sunday, seeing images of sunburnt and drunken white college students singing along earnestly to Marley’s music— in some ways, I was one of them. But, in other ways (I hope), I was not. I look back now and speculate that some the attraction was the universality Bob Marley created in his music. In my case that was a connection to country music and gospel— both of which I detested, because they were my parent’s musics but which I had spent a lifetime listening to around the breakfast and dinner table, had sung in church on Sundays, had absorbed into my DNA. When Marley sang dolefully (in “Johnny Was”) about a woman crying over the death of her son, it had the ring of Hank Williams or Loretta Lynn. When that woman struggles with how to ever go on in the face of such a loss, the song bore hints of “Amazing Grace.”
Marley never played that concert at Ohio State. Having been diagnosed previously with cancer, a month before it was scheduled to happen he collapsed in NYC, and doctors told him the worst— that the cancer had spread throughout his body and that he had very little time to live. He played one last show in Pittsburgh in late September. His band members spoke heartbreakingly of a two-hour sound check during which Marley sang on and on, and of him summoning every ounce of strength to get through two sets of encores. I confess that I shed a tear near the end of “Marley” on Sunday, watching this energetic warrior made vulnerable, losing his dreadlocks to chemotherapy before finally succumbing to disease. It seemed such a loss that Bob Marley was only with us for 36 short years. But perhaps I was also sad at the impossibility that more than 30 years have further passed, that the youthful enthusiasm and idealism I first encountered Bob Marley with have been tempered by experiences over the many intervening years. I went home and put on an hour’s playlist of some of my favorites. The songs were all familiar, it was only the 50 year old me that was strange. But, it’s hard to linger in sadness listening to Bob Marley. There are powerful rays of sunshine sprinkled amidst the sobering words. It wasn’t long until I found myself feeling it was time to get up, stand up, and lively up myself. There’s still a lot to do.
"Marley," dir. by Kevin Macdonald, 145 mins. A soundtrack features 24 tracks by Bob Marley and the Wailers. The film is available for rent on iTunes.
