Bob Marley: "The Untold Story"

Bob Marley died 30 years ago, yet his music is becoming even more popular.


CDs, DVDs, downloads, ringtones, memorabilia, literature - in fact anything with the slightest association with Bob Marley will sell nowadays.

He fathered a child with Miss World Cindy Breakspeare; survived three assassination attempts; was accorded a state funeral; and is the best-known Jamaican yet.

Meet Bob Marley now, as you have never before, in The Untold Story.

British music writer Chris Salewicz has gone into the heart and soul of this remarkable man and his narrative is a must-read for anyone seeking a better understanding of Marley and reggae music.

This is largely because reggae music, for which Marley is widely known, is a music associated with black African people, religion, God (in this case Jah, god of Rastafarians), and other issues to do with slavery, redemption, freedom and the natural mystic.

To appreciate the magnitude of this subject, one must understand its history.

From the time Christopher Columbus "discovered" Jamaica in 1494, the island nation was the centre of piracy, giving rise to legends of buccaneers, chief among them Captain Henry Morgan, who was governor of the island in the 1600s.

Apart from the original Arawak settlers, the Caribbean island today is a mélange of European, African, Chinese, Indian and Latin American inhabitants, testimony to a tumultuous history of forced migrations, the slave trade and New World influences.

Robert "Bob" Nesta Marley was born on February 6, 1945 to an English sailor, Norval Marley, and Cedella Malcolm (later Booker), and Salewicz traces the beginnings of Marley's life right to a tiny wooden house in Nine Miles, central Jamaica, where conception allegedly took place.

He reportedly read palms as a child, was good at maths at school and was an apprentice welder as a youth.

Marley's first attempts at music and recordings meant nothing in commercial terms and, as Salewicz would tell us, Marley did not make the initial cut at King Tubby's studios, nor an impression with legendary Jamaican music producer Lee Stratch Perry.

In 1960 he joined up with Bunny Livingstone Wailer (born Neville O'Riley Livingstone), and Peter Tosh (born Winston Hubert MacIntosh) to form The Wailers.

The trio, and the band, were soon to surpass established groups such as The Maytals, The Ethiopians, The Heptones and The Skatalites as the most famous reggae band of all time.

On homemade instruments, the band played almost anything musical, with Marley so distinctive in the smoky tenor, Bunny on the deep baritone and Tosh, the master guitarist equipped with a temper and prolific lyric writing energy.

While the exploits of The Wailers would warrant a whole book in itself, as they quickly became early celebrities in reggae music, Salewicz goes on record here to say these three artists never had an easy relationship, music being about the only thing that kept them together.

But, as a solo artist, Marley is captured here in all his glory, with the superlatives coming easily for Salewicz to describe Marley's musical career. He is The Legend, the first Third World Superstar, Rasta Prophet, a visionary, the Buffalo Soldier and ultimately, the Reggae Godfather.

Such was Marley's popularity in a world dominated by rock 'n' roll. But through the music this man was undoubtedly a beacon of radicalism with lyrics heavy on black people's history.

Unashamedly he smoked dagga throughout the 419 pages of the book, loved football, had an above-average work ethic and possessed something called a "natural mystic" - so clear on page 153 when he appeared to have predicted his death at 36, as happened when he died of cancer in 1981.
For one to understand Marley's music, one must be prepared to engage his spiritual beliefs.
Jamaican history credits the Prophet Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), a preacher who gave up the idea of racial harmony and decided that black people should return to Africa from the Americas and the Caribbean.
Marley was an early convert of Garvey, but in this narrative he became reggae's superstar because of a powerful moral spiritual authority at a time when the horror of the Vietnam war was big news in the US, and Jamaica itself was on the brink of civil war and unrest.
To complete the axis, Salewicz says Marley forms part of the tryptich that completes the "sainthood" as expounded by Emperor Haile Sellasie and the most high, Marcus Garvey.
Marley's first album, Catch A Fire (1973), was a revelation, followed by Burning, which featured such legendary tracks as Get Up Stand Up and I Shot The Sheriff. Eric Clapton's US version of the latter hit was number one for months on end on the singles charts
After that came Natty Dread, which had guests at the Lyceum Ballroom in tears after the all-too-powerful No Woman No Cry was played. Then came Rastaman Vibration, Exodus, Kaya and Survival.

In short, he was, and still is, a hero figure in the classic, mythological sense. He must have been the only man whose brand of lyricism and lyrical interplay merged so easily with revolutionary rhetoric, persuasion, good sounding instrumentation and pleasant stagemanship.
Add to that, he was a man who single-handedly revolutionised an obscure Caribbean music form, then called "streggae", or "regge-regge" in the 1960s, into a worldwide phenomenon that is enjoyed today in its various forms by millions of music fans.

In Salewicz's account, one gets a rare peek into the company that Marley kept, chief among them Chris Blackwell, the legendary producer who is perhaps the single most important man to have moulded Marley's music career.

It's a great effort all round, but one gets rather lost when the writer attempts to unpack the religious side of Marley's music, especially the chapters dealing with the cult of Obeah.

On its own, Obeah is an African diasporic word, a marriage of African animist and Catholic practices, as practised by descendants of black African slaves. In Jamaica today, it is known simply as voodoo, acts of the inconcieveable or black magic.

Salewicz is at pains to unpack this phenomenon in the Marley music and the result is that the early chapters fall flat in seeking to explain the unknown.

In other words, if the writer had stuck to music, he would have written a masterpiece, but the attempt at religious connection with reggae music is inconclusive.
Be that as it may, The Untold Story is revealing about the sort of company that Marley kept, his harem of women, the Jamaican music industry, politics and what it was to be a celebrity of the 1970s.
In 1994 Marley was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 1999 Time magazine chose Bob Marley & The Wailers' Exodus as the greatest album of the 20th century.

In 2001, he was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and a feature-length documentary about his life, Rebel Music, won various awards at the Grammys.

Bob Marley: The Untold Story is published by Harper Collins at R155. More reviews and literary news on the Books pages in the Tonight entertainment supplement.

Source:Kenneth Chikanga