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BEFORE THE
Legend
THE RISE OF
BOB MARLEY
CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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CONTENTS
STIR IT UP 1
STOP THAT TRAIN 15
CONCRETE JUNGLE 35
SLAVE DRIVER 65
BABY WE’VE GOT A DATE (ROCK IT BABY) 93
KINKY REGGAE 115
MIDNIGHT RAVERs 145
400 YEARS 171
NO MORE TROUBLE 183
Acknowledgments 205
Bibliography 207
About the Author 217
Credits 218
Copyright 219
About the Publisher 220
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STIR IT UP
I
n the summer of 2005, I traveled to the town in which Bob
Marley was born in order to see the place where he was bur-
ied. Marley’s hometown is Nine Miles, Jamaica, a small village in
the parish of St. Ann that is a t hree- hour car ride from the capital
city of Kingston. Getting there is a hilly, winding drive, and the
road, at times, is about one and a half lanes across, forcing drivers
to play periodic games of chicken with various vehicles—cars,
buses, trucks laden with day laborers—speeding down the slopes
in the opposite direction. I was born in Kingston, but I left the
island when I was young and I can’t do many basic Jamaican- y
things. I can’t, for example, tell you a single thing about the rules
of cricket. I don’t speak with a Jamaican accent and I can’t fake
one convincingly. I can’t drive on the left on hilly twisty roads. I
pressed on anyway. I had arranged a meeting in Nine Miles with
Cedella Marley Booker, Bob’s mother. She had grown reclusive in
recent years and gave very few interviews. But Chris Blackwell,
one of Marley’s producers and the founder of Island Records, in-
1
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2 CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY
terceded on my behalf, and Mother Booker agreed to grant me an
audience. At this point, I had been working on a book about
Marley’s life for several years. I had interviewed Marley’s family
members, friends, and fellow musicians. I had unearthed crum-
bling old print interviews of Marley and listened to scratchy home
recordings he had made but never released. I had visited his old
haunts in Trench Town and throughout Kingston. I had been
given unreleased recordings of the Wailers conversing in the stu-
dio so I could get insight into how they created their music. Now
I wanted to fi nish my book where it had all started, and where it
had all ended as well.
This is a book about beginnings. The period before fame arrives
is the time when most artists collect the raw life stuff that will
form the core of their work. Once a musician starts writing about
how hard life is on the road, and the predation of the paparazzi,
it’s generally over. He has lost touch with the real experiences
that connect ordinary listeners to his music. In many if not most
cases, an artist’s initial years of struggle represent the most inter-
esting period of his or her career. Music legends often end their
lives in strikingly similar circumstances—burdened by celebrity,
hooked on drugs, haunted by the inability to live up to the great-
ness of earlier work. Fame can homogenize an artist, blurring
parts of his identity so critics can slot him into pop cultural trends
or the public can use him to fi ll national psychic needs. Or fame
can caricature a star, exaggerating his original characteristics into
something cartoony, grotesque, and sometimes unrecognizable as
human. Bob Marley died young, but he managed to avoid many
of the most common pitfalls and pratfalls of rock martyrdom.
Marley once opined: “If something can corrupt you, you’re cor-
rupted already.” He was not a drug addict (unless you count
ganja). He did not die broke (though his money was poorly man-
aged during his lifetime). And he was not all that confl icted about
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Legend
BEFORE THE 3
success (he used to joke to journalists that he drove a BMW be-
cause it stood for Bob Marley and the Wailers). He lived and died
for music, but in the end it was not music that killed him.
Marley’s struggle started early. His bandmate Peter Tosh made
secret autobiographical recordings called the “Red X” tapes. I was
given access to parts of those tapes that have never been pub-
lished. On them, Tosh discusses the obstacles that stood in his
way, and in Bob’s way, when they were young. “I began to realize
that I was coming in close confrontation with devils daily in the
fl esh,” Tosh says. “I realized that hell is not down yonder, but right
here among men. . . . But I never fear the devil.”
Bob’s early, dry seasons forced him to put down deep roots.
“Yeah, mon, let me tell you something ’bout me,” Marley said
during a visit to Philadelphia in 1979. “You see me—Negro in a
sufferin’ environment. I don’t know how to live good. I only know
how to suffer. You unnerstan? So anywhere you see me, I’m suf-
ferin’ all the while. Me don’t really change . . . What is big life to
some people, that is not what I call life. What I call life is I wake
up and drink a likkle fi sh tea. Me don’t know about the big life.”
Blackwell recalls stopping by an upscale store in St. Martin
with Marley during a world tour in 1980. It was one of the few
times he ever saw Marley become furious. Inside the store, the
proprietors questioned whether Marley had the money to buy
their goods. When he promptly produced a wad of cash, he was
interrogated about whether he had stolen it. Meanwhile, in the
street, a crowd of fans had gathered to catch a glimpse of the reg-
gae star. “Inside the store he was a thief,” says Blackwell. “Outside,
he was a hero.”
Marley’s mother is black, his father accepted as white. Very
little had been known about the “white” side of Marley’s family
when I started this biography. The “white” part of Marley’s family
tree had been dismissed as fallen leaves—tattered remnants of
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