Elvis and John Lennon have monuments, museums and disciples, but Bob Marley’s legacy is less clear. John Aizlewood travels to Kingston to ask his friends and collaborators: what does Marley mean now, 20 years after his death?
Native Jamaicans call the administrative district of St Ann, north-west of King-ston, the “Garden parish”. They have a point. Expansively verdant, St Ann is one lush green valley after another, pockmarked by rural hamlets and roadside shack shops selling condensed milk, tinned mackerel, “protein conditioning gel”, wire wool and rum. There are more churches here per head Apostolic, Seventh Day Adventist, Roman Catholic, Baptist, Anabaptist, Reformed Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal than in South Armagh. There are food stalls around every corner, offering ackee, the pear-shaped national fruit that is mixed with swordfish and spices; naseberries; raw sugar cane; rice ‘n’ peas (rice and beans, in truth); breadfruit; and that Jamaican staple, curried goat. Uncurried goats wander everywhere. It’s picture-book territory, but Jamaica’s roads are so badly maintained that even the most scenery-struck driver must concentrate on the task at hand.
The mountaintop hamlet of Nine Miles, in the heart of St Ann, is almost unsignposted and accessible only by four-wheel drive. There is a tiny drinking shack, or shebeen how the Red Stripe is delivered is a mystery but little else save the birthplace and tomb of Bob Marley.
Growing up between Nine Miles and west Kingston, Marley turned what he saw and heard into music with a depth and compassion that the smallest child and the oldest musicologist could appreciate. Walk a few miles in Marley’s shoes and everything becomes a little clearer. At one end of Nine Miles is 10m of paved road and a walled compound adorned with the red, gold and green flags of Rastafarianism, the million-strong religion occasionally feared but more typically ignored by the Jamaican state.
In the early hours of February 6 1945, in a shack now within the compound, and with a roof that looks suspiciously like it has been renovated, Cedella “Ciddy” Marley, the young wife of Norvel, a white army captain from Liverpool old enough to be her father, gave birth to her first child, Robert Nesta Marley. Cedella still lives here (and in Miami), but the house at Nine Miles is now maintained by Richard Booker, Bob’s Miami-based half-brother. It is a strange, desultory place, populated by ganja-smoking Rastafarians who repeatedly ask, “You got anything for me?” and where the toilets are labelled “kings” and “queens”.
Alongside the memorabilia on sale is alcohol though Marley was a teetotaller and trips to nearby marijuana fields, although ganja, like homosexuality, is illegal in Jamaica.
We are the only visitors and it is raining. Our tour guide is Doctor Fuzzy, who claims to have been Marley’s first singing collaborator alongside Neville “Bunny Wailer” O’Riley Livingston, who was born across the road. “Doctor, Nesta and Bunny, that was us,” cackles Fuzzy. “To me, Bob don’t die. To me, he is here now.” Shoes removed, we visit the small bedroom that Marley shared with any number of siblings.
There is a well-thumbed Bible on the table true Rastafarians study the Old Testament deeply next to the “single bed” of Is This Love? fame. Outside is the stone where Marley meditated, smoked and slept during his post-fame returns to his clan seat. So far, so mundane. Then we come to the tomb. Despite the incongruous Australian gold disc on the wall and the overpowering smell of incense, this is a temple of quiet contemplation.
After Marley’s state funeral in Kingston 20 years ago to the day before our visit, although no one seems aware of this his body was brought to this mausoleum. The corpse is above ground, entombed behind Ethiopian marble. According to Fuzzy, Cedella has insisted that her son be neither buried nor displayed until she receives a sign that the world is a better place.
Beneath Marley’s head, a Bible is opened on the 71st to 74th psalms. He faces west towards a stained-glass window featuring the Star of David and, ultimately, Ethiopia. “Stop,” commands Fuzzy as I walk past, the shadow of my head inside the shadow of the Star. “Bob. He look at you now.” It is, in this fairly profane place, a sacred, stomach-tightening moment. “You felt it,” says Fuzzy quietly. “Good. We must go now.”
In 1952 Cedella began stepping out with Thaddius “Toddy” Livingston, Bunny’s father, and the pair moved to the urban sprawl of Kingston. Several months later Bob took the bus south-east to join them.
The young Marley’s solo journey took days. Although just 120km from home, Kingston was a world away from Nine Miles. After the hurricane of 1951 devastated Kingston, the tide of rural migrants continued unabated and, fearful of the street population spiralling out of control, the administration built a number of low-grade accommodation blocks called “government yards”.
Cedella and Toddy moved into one such yard in Trench Town, named after the trench that carries sewage through the heart of west Kingston. Today there are few more fearsome places than west Kingston, a sprawling network of shanties where most locals fear to tread and where the downtown Burger King closes at 5pm so that its workers can be bused out safely. Ganja, knives and machetes have been replaced by crack, sub-machine guns and deepening poverty. But what appears on the surface to be a place of anarchy in fact has a sophisticated code of social control.
Jamaica’s two political parties, the ruling, nominally leftwing People’s National Party (PNP) and the nominally rightwing Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), control a series of “dons” (part community leaders, part drug barons reporting to the drug overlords on the eastern slopes of the Blue Mountains, part goon squad commandants), who in turn control the gunmen, the drugs and the funds. Whole communities are PNP or JLP.
Our escort converses with the locals and explains that the situation is too volatile to venture further. Two days later, the police, army and other gunmen have killed some of the ringleaders and a brittle peace reigns. We try to reach Trench Town once more.
The barricades remain, but they no longer smoulder and the streets are quieter. Young men play basketball, middle-aged men play dominoes and nobody pays us a moment’s notice. The Culture Yard, the “government yard in Kingston” of No Woman No Cry, is, like Nine Miles, controlled by Rastafarians, but these are a different breed.
They are delighted that we have managed to get in unaccompanied, keen to exchange email addresses, neither offering ganja nor demanding cash. Our guide goes by the name of Madness. “Bob Marley was angry, powerful and significant,” he declares. “He could have chosen crime, but instead he chose music. He told us crime does not pay.” In the yard are the battered Volkswagen van that the Wailers drove to island gigs in, the guitar Marley wrote No Woman No Cry on, and another “single bed” “where he made love”, adds Madness lasciviously.
There is the former communal kitchen that Marley lived in with Alpharita “Rita” Anderson, whom he married in 1966; the steps where he observed the Three Little Birds of that song; the back alleys where he ran from police raids, and the stool where he sat at the feet of his musical guru, Vincent “Tata” Ford, to whom Marley gave the No Woman No Cry songwriting credit.
This is where Marley’s spirit truly lies. It is not Lennon’s Liverpool, or Presley’s Memphis, cities where anything felt and still feels possible, no matter how ingrained the poverty. West Kingston is a deeper circle of hell: the scarcity of older people suggests that merely surviving is a signifi-cant achievement.
In 1973, as the money began to roll in, the pressures of ghetto living became too much for Marley. He moved five miles, to Island House on Hope Road, 200m from the prime minister’s residence. It was as much a world away from Trench Town as Trench Town was from Nine Miles.
Still canny and streetwise, Marley took his downtown lifestyle uptown. Island House had its own yard and, according to Madness, the Trench Town posse vetted it before Marley “asked” owners Island Records to give it him. Essentially, he carried on as he always had, cooking ital food (the “natural, total” Rastafarian diet) outdoors, strumming on the porch, giving money to those who came begging, and playing football all day every day.
Today, as the temperature soars to 35C in this land without seasons, Island House has become the Bob Marley Museum. Outside stands Marley’s battered 1975 Jeep, a rather bedraggled statue and a herb garden “where he used to smoke, drink herbal tea and meditate”, says our guide.
Inside, beyond the God Bless This House welcome mat, are rooms of yellowing newspaper clippings (“Reggae King Marley Hits at Birth Control”, thundered the Irish Times in 1980); Bob’s juice blender; Bob’s pipe; Bob’s slippers; Bob’s CIA file; Bob’s seatless, pedal-less, flat-tyred bicycle; a reconstruction of Bob’s Trench Town Wail’n Soul’m record shack; more stained glass (here featuring the sleeve of the post-humously released Confrontation); Bob’s denim stage shirt; the stage clothes of Bob’s backing singers, the I-Threes; the backdrop to Bob’s self-financed gig in the city then known as Salisbury during Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations; Bob’s hammock, “in which he would meditate and smoke his ganja spliff”, and a tusk.
We learn that brown and beige were his favourite colours after red, gold and green, of course. Surprisingly, there is no “single bed”. At the rear of the house is the kitchen where Marley was shot in the chest and arm by a PNP or was it JLP? hit squad one December evening in 1976.
The bullet holes are huge, wide enough to ram your thumb and forefinger into. Marley would never again reside in his homeland for an extended period. The murals, painted after Marley’s death, give the place the air of a community centre, rather than the base from where the most famous Jamaican gave his country recognition, dignity and a fleeting suggestion that it was possible for a boy from the backwaters of a Third World country to change the world of music. Both gift shops would easily fit into the porch of one of Graceland’s.
The Marley legacy is complicated by labyrinthine legal disputes. Wailers Carlton “Carly” Barrett, Junior Braithwaite and Winston “Peter Tosh” McIntosh were gunned down, the first by an assassin hired by his wife. The bulk of the estate fell to Rita and some of Marley’s acknowledged offspring by a variety of women. A plethora of Marley-related cases are still pending.
This extraordinary legal backdrop helps explain why there is no Graceland-style machine, why Marley’s life and death have been of such little benefit to the Jamaican economy.
The dispersed sites at Nine Miles, Trench Town and Hope Road hardly complement each other. Nine Miles is inaccessible and venal, but it has the body. Trench Town strikes fear into the hearts of visitors, but it has Marley’s soul. Hope Road feels a little pointless without the body, but it has the location.
If Marley’s body were to be removed to the easily accessible Kingston, everything would change; not just for the Marley clan, but for Jamaica. When 75-year-old Cedella dies, the situation may be reviewed, but not if the mountain Rastafarians, a lost section of an increasingly lost tribe, have a say in the matter.
On a wider level, Jamaica is not an especially iconic place. Even the graffiti is thoughtful “I would rather be a patriotic terrorist than a sovereign tyrant” while the deterrent signs on houses say No Idlers or Beware Mad Dogs. Yet Marley is still a more visible presence in both city and countryside than Prime Minister Percival James “PJ” Patterson.
His music is heard in tourist hotels and at the Marley shrines, but not on the streets. The reggae beat is omnipresent, but tends to drive the newer, rawer local music of Elephant Man, Sanchez, Sizzla and Beenie Man.
While Lennon and Presley’s music spawned obvious successors, nobody from the Third World or black America has ever repeated Marley’s unique alignment of pop, blues, reggae, rock, gravitas, spirituality, lovesickness, militancy or those haunting, unnerving eyes.
“I’m not sure those conditions that Bob benefited from, plus his own extremely ambitious personality, can ever be recreated,” says White. “He was in the right place at the right time, and he linked the fate of the poor to the fate of the music; that would be hard, impossible almost, for anyone else now. The people I really envy are those who haven’t heard a Marley album: all that great music to discover.”
That music has stood its ground and has been reasonably sensitively stewarded. Legend, the proper best of, sold nine-million copies, and the thrilling Songs of Freedom boxed set managed a million, while only rarely have offcuts and rejects been shoved out for the sake of it. One Love is the first release of an extensive reissue programme which will be completed next year.
Back in the government yard at Kingston, Madness is in reverent mood. “Bob was spiritually in touch,” he says. “He was kind, he was courageous and he was not afraid to express his feelings.
“Most of all, though, he hated to see his people suffer. That’s why he was great.”