Bob Marley: The Untold Story

Yet Beverley Kelso did not recall such a success translating into local reverence. ‘Nobody did not bow down to us. Nobody didn’t care who the Wailers was because Higgs and Wilson was already there singing. Hortense was singing, Bunny and Scully, Toots and the Maytals, Delroy Wilson, everybody was right there singing. People gathered to hear us sing but only because they were proud of us: when we would go to the studio people would just wave. The Wailers? It was just like ordinary people, you know.’

In those days, she said, none of them smoked – neither cigarettes nor herb. On the journey to Studio One, ‘me and Junior is two little short ones, so we would stay in the back, hold each other’s hand and walk and start talking our little talk. Bob would be pushing Bunny, Bunny would be pushing Bob and Peter, and they laugh and they clown and they tease each other. They would laugh at people. The little things that they talk, you just sit down and crack up. I’m telling you, you’d be around them you don’t wanna move. I used to look up on them and they look up on me. With respect. They treat me like a sister and they treat me good.’

Almost as soon as it was in the shops, ‘Simmer Down’ went to number one in the Jamaican charts. This tune’s subject of teenage crime was notice served that the Wailers were the ambassadors of the island’s rebels, the rude boys. Yet the Wailers were never able to compete with the colossal popularity enjoyed in Jamaica by another three-piece male vocal trio, the Maytals, fronted by Toots Hibbert.

The subject matter of ‘Simmer Down’ made the Wailers stand out amongst their contemporaries. Up until then no one in Jamaican music had been expressing ghetto thinking. Even the seasoned ska musicians down at Studio One were impressed. ‘The uniqueness of the sound they projected,’ said Johnny Moore, ‘was specifically local and really good. The subject matter was clean, and the lyrics were really educative. The statements might be a bit serious, but the way they projected it you could absorb what they were saying. There were some good lessons, we had to admit that.’

However, Beverley Kelso was surprised at the version of the song that was released. In fact, on it there was a vocal error by Peter Tosh, which seemed to appeal to Coxsone. ‘We had a better cut than the release. We was singing when the musicians come in, but Peter comes in at the wrong point and says “simmer”, and Coxsone said that’s it, that was the one that he wanted. So, it was a mistake, but it was made into something that wasn’t a mistake.’

New to the line-up, Beverley kept very much to herself at the session: ‘They said I was shy. I don’t think I was shy to sing, but after singing I wouldn’t say a word. If you say something to me I would answer you. I would sing and Bob and Peter and Bunny would be one place with all the rest of the guys and I would be just by myself. I was an observer.’ Unlike Leonard Dillon, Beverley confirmed that Bob appeared to be the acknowledged leader of the group. And that rigour was the middle name of their work ethic.

‘It was like every day or every other day we would be in the studio. If we’re not recording for ourselves, we were backing up other people because we have other people coming and singing. Like, for instance, if Tony Gregory or anybody in the studio want back-up we would just come in and harmonise. Everybody would just back-up, either you back sing, clap, whatever you wanna do over there to back-up everybody. So we was in the studio most of the time. We were like a family. And there were times when we didn’t go home. We would be in the studio like two, three days.

‘When Junior was leaving to go to America they were doing an album and for like, two, three days we would be in the studio. We didn’t have place to sleep. We didn’t even have no time to sleep. It was just fun in the studio. We would eat and would sit down and get a little nap. Sometimes I would run home and come right back. We have the privilege to go into that studio that most people they couldn’t come in.’

Bob was also learning some good lessons himself. A number of the musicians he now began playing with at Studio One – Johnny Moore himself, for example – were dedicated and devout Rastafarians. For years, Bob’s Bible had rarely been out of his sight. Now he began to be offered new, apocalyptic interpretations that would make his jaw drop with disbelief. Sometimes he would wander away from Studio One after a day’s sessions in a mystified haze, as he struggled to process the biblical information and interpolations to which he had been made privy.

Bob’s soul was being nourished. In addition, he now had sufficient funds to pay for the nutrition of his body: as well as having ordered gold lamé collarless suits – a kind of Beatle jacket version of the famous ensemble worn by Elvis Presley on the sleeve of Elvis Gold Discs Volume 2 – for the three men in the group, Coxsone had also put them each on a weekly wage of £3.

‘We all used to go to church to search, and knowing that we found reality and righteousness we relaxed,’ recalled Peter Tosh. ‘So when you saw us in the slick suits and things, we were just in the thing that was looked on as the thing at the time. So we just adjusted ourselves materially.’

‘Simmer Down’ was followed up by an official release for ‘It Hurts to be Alone’, another hit; curiously, even though the song had been written and sung by Junior Braithwaite, the title could definitively sum up Bob’s feelings about substantial chunks of his life. For the rest of 1964, the Wailing Wailers were rarely out of the Jamaican charts, with a string of tunes recorded at 13 Brentford Road: ‘Lonesome Feeling’, ‘Mr Talkative’, ‘I Don’t Need Your Love’, ‘Donna’ and ‘Wings of a Dove’. ‘Mr Dodd’ was not unhappy.

Coxsone became another father figure to Bob, and to a lesser extent, to Bunny and Peter. When he learned that Bob didn’t have a home of his own, he did a deal with the youth. He would turn new artists over to Bob to find songs for them; Bob could then sit down with his guitar with them – with Delroy Wilson or Hortense Ellis, for example – and rehearse the tune. In return, Clement Dodd would let Bob Marley live at the studio, and sleep in a back room they’d use for auditions or rehearsals. Bob was unable to put his head down, however, until the sessions had ended, often late-late in the night. And when he did, he often found his sleep was strangely disturbed, as though perhaps there was someone else in the room with him.

The Wailing Wailers had become the roughneck archetype of the three-piece harmony group, a specifically Jamaican form of high popular art that was more usually burnished to a shining gloss. By such members of their peer group as the estimable Alton Ellis, the group was considered to be very strong indeed. ‘They have a different sense of music than us, and we all love it. It wasn’t so much dancehall. Bob’s sound was always different: it mesmerised me from those times. His music always have a roots sense of direction. Not even just the words – I’m talking about the sound, the melody that him sing, the feel of the rhythm. Always a bit different.’

This sense was complemented in live performances. ‘Bob was always this ragamuffin onstage. We – myself, people like John Holt in the Paragons – were more polished and act like the Americans. Him was a rebel: jump up and throw himself about onstage. The Wailers them just mad and free: just threw themselves in and out of the music, carefree and careless.’

Miming to their records, the Wailers would appear all over Jamaica at dances at which the Downbeat sound system would play. This was a regular Coxsone strategy. ‘That’s how we got them launched. With several other of my artists, we used to tour the country parts.’ The Wailing Wailers made more hits: ‘I Need You’; ‘Dance With Me’, a rewrite of the Drifters’ ‘On Broadway’; ‘Another Dance’; and the ‘Ten Commandments of Love’, an extraordinary interpretation of the Aaron Neville song. And there were more tunes that seemed like messages direct from Rude Boy Central: ‘Rude Boy’ itself, late in 1965; ‘Rule Dem Rudie’; ‘Jailhouse’, another paean to rude boys, containing the lines ‘Can’t fight against the youth now/ ’Cause it’s wrong.’ Small wonder that such tunes took off with Jamaica’s teenagers, of whatever social origins.

Shortly before Christmas of 1964 the Wailers were at Studio One, recording a version of the standard ‘White Christmas’, using a two-track recorder. It was Peter Tosh’s idea to change the lyrics so that they contained greater authenticity for citizens of the tropical Caribbean: ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, not like the ones I used to know.’ At the same session they recorded ‘I Left My Sins’ and ‘Sound the Trumpet’ – on which Johnny Moore took the solo on the instrument.

Religious holidays, specifically Christmas and Easter, were always counter-balanced in Jamaica by temporal celebrations, with top acts playing several morning shows, and literally running between the various venues, as they could not risk relying on the tardy bus service: from the Ward Theatre show, the Wailers would hurry up Orange Street, and along Slipe Road, to the State Theatre; further up Slipe Road they would reach the Regal on Old Hope Road; and then they would rush to the Carib, at the top of Slipe Road in Crossroads Square.

Enormous sartorial efforts would be made by the audiences, many clad in top hats and white gloves, wearing pleated and frilled shirts and carrying walking canes – as though they were attending an evening at London’s Café de Paris, rubbing shoulders with royalty.

The Wailers’ first exposure to such shows came on Christmas Day of that year. Their first significant live performances since enjoying chart success – ‘Simmer Down’ alone had sold 80,000 copies – the group was determined to wipe the floor with any opposition. Accordingly, they had assiduously rehearsed for over six weeks; warming up on the local beach with a game of football, they would practise until their act was an explosion of choreographed gymnastics, each member adept at splits and snap-falls. Bob, for example, would take Bunny and throw him in the air, fall to the floor as Bunny performed a perfect pair of splits above him, then rise into a kneeling position as Bunny jumped over his back; tall Peter, meanwhile, would balance and bounce Bob and Bunny like rubber balls. And, onstage, all this would take place as they assumed their customary vocal positions at the microphones. Beverley Kelso, meanwhile, was left to dance on her own, off to one side of the stage.

Many of these shows were put on by Coxsone Dodd – the Ward Theatre event was always one of his promotions – while Victor ‘Captain Daddy Glasses’ Sampson, Tony Cobb, Ronnie Nasralla, and Clancy Eccles would also promote these morning concerts.

At the Palace Theatre event on 25 December 1964, also promoted by Coxsone Dodd, the Wailers were backed by the Skatalites. Bouncing on to the stage as though they were in the full gaze of the sun on their sandy rehearsal space, the Wailers leapt into their first number, inevitably, ‘Simmer Down’. As the choreographed performance and heartfelt vocals of these new local heroes grabbed the audience’s attention, Dodd stood at the side of the stage in awe: great secrecy had surrounded the Wailers’ rehearsals for their Christmas Day shows, and he was thrilled by the sight of their routines. ‘Simmer Down’ was followed by ‘I Don’t Need Your Love’, ‘How Many Times?’, a version of the Impressions’ ‘I’m Going Home’, and ‘Amen’, which had been the B-side of ‘Simmer Down’. During the next number, ‘It Hurts to be Alone’, in the middle of a guitar solo by the masterful Trinidadian Lynn Taitt, the electrical power for the entire building cut out, infuriating the audience.

The Palace was located in a district controlled by a don with whom Coxsone Dodd had had some bad run-ins. Known as Big Junior, his reputation had been considerably bolstered in 1962 when he had appeared as one of the Three Blind Mice, a trio of hitmen, in the opening sequence of Dr. No, the first James Bond film to be shot, set largely in Jamaica. Due to their previous history, Coxsone assumed that the power had been cut by Big Junior’s gang to sabotage his promotion: after all, during the outage, a crew had rampaged through the packed crowd, snatching chains, bracelets, and wallets.

Hardly according with the season of good will, the audience raged on, yelling abuse and showering bottles like rain on the stage. In the dark, the Wailers nervously felt their way backstage, all of them squeezing into a single toilet together and hiding for at least an hour, feeling the storm of anger coming closer.

Suddenly the lights came back on: the loss of electricity had had nothing to do with Big Junior – the power-cut had been city-wide, and the don and his men were innocent of causing the outage. Eventually, the concert resumed. ‘When the show started again,’ said Beverley Kelso, clearly impressed by the boys’ gymnastic efforts, ‘Bob coming from one side like he was flying, Peter coming from one side like he was flying, flapping their arms, because they couldn’t dance.’ (Her assessment, of course, is markedly different from Derrick Morgan’s view of Bob Marley as a superlative dancer.)

The riot, however, immediately enhanced the Wailers’ reputation and legend. When they arrived later that day at the Ward Theatre, the crowd saw Bob and lifted him up on to their shoulders.

After the riot, the Wailers wrote the song ‘Hooligans’ about Big Junior. Another song also emerged from that Christmas morning, written by Peter Tosh: ‘Jumbie Jamboree’ with its newsworthy line ‘What a jumbie jamboree take place in the Palace’ – ‘jumbie’, a word that was by then old-fashioned in Jamaica, was a synonym for ‘duppy’. Both these songs, along with ‘Diamond Baby’ and ‘Playboy’, were recorded almost immediately, this time using a two-track recorder. (By now, Joe Higgs had established himself as a regular presence at Wailers sessions, sharpening up any harmonies he felt were too blunt. It was at one of these Studio One sessions that Coxsone, disagreeing with Joe, punched him in the eye, affecting his sight; it was always said that Coxsone, who had also kicked and punched his helper, ‘Little’ Lee Perry, would wait until you turned away before he hit you.)

Although each of the Wailers had only received a fee of £7 for the Palace gig, Coxsone Dodd was so delighted with the ultimate success of this chaotic show that, immediately after they came offstage, he gave them all a bonus of £3 – and topped it up with another pound per person at the studio the next day.

By the time they came to play their second big-production live show, in Montego Bay, ‘Mr Dodd’ had decided to give Beverley Kelso £2 for a new dress; when Peter and Joe Higgs learned of this, they tried to get her to share the money with them. It is this dress she wears on the cover of the Wailers’ Studio One records on the distinguished American reggae reissue label, Heartbeat Records. After driving all day to Montego Bay on the north coast for the show, they discovered that the venue had no sound system and no lights. Bob Marley attempted to calm the furious crowd, saying they would somehow perform all the same, but to no avail – they drove back to Kingston, exhausted. A further performance, again at Kingston’s Sombrero Club, turned out to be a big success, however. ‘That was great,’ said Beverley Kelso.

Smaller-scale shows were played most Monday nights at the Jamaica Success Club on Wildman Street, about a quarter mile to the east of East Parade; this was a weekly residency for the Coxsone Sound. An indoor, roofed venue, which held at least three thousand people, the Success had a small stage and the three frontline Wailers would huddle around a single microphone. Mind you, they would only be playing a couple of songs, generally the two sides of their latest release. And there would be half as many people dancing outside in the street as inside the venue. In fact, the ranking dancers, such as Persian the Cat and Harry T, would only dance outside, where they were certain of a large, dedicated audience. (Persian the Cat was a skinny, dark-brown Rastaman who would integrate his walking-stick, hat, and handkerchief into the moves he would ‘originate’ – the Tommy McCook instrumental ‘Persian Cat’ was written about him.) Another regular Saturday-night date for Dodd’s sound system was at the Forester Hall.

Although their sound made them aural celebrities in any part of Jamaica with access to a radio or jukebox, in downtown Kingston the Wailers went largely unrecognised, passers-by refusing to marry the down-to-earth appearances of these youths with any concept of stardom. Those familiar with them, however, would hail them on the street, receiving a personal Wailers vocal performance in exchange for a beer and some small change. Sometimes they would sing in the evenings for Sanghu, a drinksman who ran a small gambling house in the neighbourhood. Babu Man, a local gangster with a fearsome reputation, would often ask them to sing for him. The Wailers were not unnerved by his reputation: Bunny’s father enjoyed an even worse one, and the Wailers therefore always had a certain understood protection.

In 1965, the Wailers – as they simply had become known by now – delivered the spiritual counter-balance to such rude-boy militancy. ‘One Love’ was a distillation of the Rastafarian sentiments Bob had absorbed in his years in Trench Town; it contained the anthem-like essence of the message and philosophy of Rastafari: ‘Let’s join together and feel alright.’ Later in the year, the group recorded ‘Put It On’, another anthem to self-determination. According to the Jamaican music critic Garth White, ‘Put It On’ was a pivotal recording: ‘The religious, the romantic, and the sexual are all one – and yet nothing is overstated, one of the keys to Marley’s music.’ On 10 February 1966, ‘Put It On’ was played non-stop for over half an hour at the wedding of Bob Marley and Rita Anderson.

Alvarita Constantia Anderson had lived for most of her life at 18a Greenwich Park Road, off Lyndhurst Road in Trench Town. She was born in Cuba on 25 July 1946 to a Jamaican father and a Cuban mother, but whilst she was still a babe-in-arms her parents moved to Kingston. After her musician father and then her mother moved to England, she remained in the Jamaican capital with her aunt Viola and an uncle. She became a Sunday-school teacher in the Presbyterian church, but three evenings a week she also went to the more fundamentalist Church of God. Singing and getting the spirit like this was more than enjoyable to her. ‘I thought it was amazing. The first time I went there I watched and thought, “This is sanctifying, this is holy.” It came over me and I realised it was something for real that can take you away.’

Sometimes when she was out and about, she would see some of the local Rastafarians and feel very wary. She had been taught to be scared of them. But something about these wild men touched her heart. ‘I would also feel sympathy for them. I’d think, “Oh poor people. I don’t believe they are as bad as they say.” Because you’d see them and they’d say, “One Love”, and you would wonder how people saying that could deal with hate. Even though I was living in Trench Town, I was exposed to certain things above the normal living: I felt that these people were innocent, because of their innocency.’

Rita, to which her full name of Alvarita inevitably became abbreviated, had had a good high-school education. She had been training to be a nurse until a teenage love affair led to the birth of her daughter Sharon on 23 November 1964 – the child’s father, Rita’s boyfriend, had been sent to live in England by his parents to save all concerned from the shame of this illegitimate birth. ‘Auntie’, as Viola was largely known, contributed a great deal to the child’s care. Rita, meanwhile, was wondering whether she should become a teacher. And then she met Bob Marley.

Rita already knew of Bob as part of the Wailers. To her, when she heard them on the radio, their sound was definitively modern. And, for some reason, it seemed to have a profound effect on her. Then she realised why: ‘It sound like angels … So I say to myself, I shall be meeting these people one day.’

Studio One was north of Trench Town. Bob, Peter, and Bunny would pass through the Ghost Town area, along Greenwich Park Road where Rita lived, opposite Dovecot cemetery, on their journey to Coxsone’s recording yard. Standing at the gate, observing the world, Rita would see the trio, aware that it was these guys who were mashing up the charts with their hit tunes.

But Rita was not so impressed: to this strict ‘churchical gal’, they looked like ‘rough little guys’. As an ambitious girl, getting away from Trench Town was Rita’s principal concern; and she had a musical group of her own, the Soulettes, which she had formed with her friend Marlene ‘Precious’ Gifford, a fellow pupil at Dunrobin school, and her male cousin Constantine ‘Dream’ Walker (the son of Vesta Anderson, a sister of aunt Viola and a militantly political follower of Marcus Garvey). Dream would often also be at the gates of 18a Greenwich Park Road when the Wailers were walking past. ‘It was always an event to watch them, because it was like a gang going up the road,’ he said. ‘Like pied pipers, because they would walk, and Peter would have his guitar in his hand, and kids and people start to follow them, because of the vibes the men moved with.’ (‘Dream’ Walker, who developed a fine tenor voice and was a gifted guitarist, was born on 19 October 1951 – the same day, though not the same year, as Peter Tosh. He had acquired his sobriquet when the doctor informed his mother that she was pregnant. ‘Oh, doctor, that’s a dream,’ she had said, not believing she, a woman in her thirties, could be expecting a child; in what could be seen as something of a proprietorial gesture, as is much of the propensity for bestowing nicknames in Jamaica, a friend of the Wailers called Fowlie renamed him ‘Vision’, a term common for dreaming amongst the thinking youth – especially followers of Rastafari – in Jamaica.)

The Soulettes, a name inspired by Motown’s Marvelettes, copied hit tunes off the radio, often Motown material by the early Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, or Mary Wells, singing most evenings under the plum tree in Rita’s auntie’s yard. Like so many Jamaican acts of the time they had first displayed their talents on Vere Johns’s amateur-hour radio programme, on which they had performed ‘What’s Your Name?’, an American R’n’B classic by Don and Juan. ‘When we harmonied that,’ said Dream/Vision Walker, ‘it used to just knock people out, that sound just like the record.’

Although she initially had been unimpressed with the cut of the Wailers’ collective jib, Rita decided that she should connect with these local stars – they clearly knew the runnings as to how to get records made. Waving to the three young men as they passed her house one evening, she received a response. As the other two members leaned on the cemetery wall, strumming guitars, Peter Tosh came over and introduced himself, addressing Rita as ‘nice girl’.

Determined to grab this opportunity, the Soulettes decided to make the Wailers aware that they also were a vocal group. Rita resolved that she, Dream and Marlene should try and sing for them, a blatant effort to move the Soulettes on a stage. When the three young men passed 18a Greenwich Park Road the next day, they were serenaded by the three Soulette members performing ‘What’s Your Name?’ from behind the fence of the yard – since her pregnancy Rita had been forbidden to venture beyond it to speak to men. But Peter and then ‘Robbie’, as she came to know him, stepped across the street to speak to her. It was Peter, however, who suggested that one day Rita and her two companions might want to come up to audition at Coxsone’s studio.

Although this was precisely what she had been seeking, Rita was aware of the wiles of local men – especially those who considered themselves to be musicians – and took the offer with a pinch of salt. But she had an older male friend called Andy who was also close to Clement Dodd. When, not long after, he took Rita up to the studio on Brentford Road, all three of the main Wailers were there. But they adopted a distinctly distant air until Rita reminded Peter that she was the girl who they would see standing on Greenwich Park Road. The Soulettes’ audition impressed Coxsone; moreover, the mixed-sex group was passed on to Bob for management and to find material for them.

If anything, Rita now realised, it was shyness that had been behind the offhand manner exhibited by the Wailers, and especially by Bob, towards her: their hit records had not gone to their heads, as she had initially suspected. Now she saw that staying on top of current music and being consistent, with hits one after another, was not easy. Especially when she discovered that though the Wailers were immensely popular, they were making virtually no money.