Bob Marley’s Last Crusade: “Rasta don’t go left, Rasta don’t go right, Rasta go straight ahead…”

Survival, Uprising, Confrontation. They were intended as Bob Marley’s final statement to the world: a musical trinity that promoted unity and strength in the face of worldwide political oppression. But ill omens, waning health, “politricks” and pressures of Babylon were massed against him. On what would have been Marley’s 80th birthday, MOJO’s David Hutcheon speaks to friends and family about the reggae legend’s final message to the world....

On July 21, 1978, a boy named Damian was born to Cindy Breakspeare in Kingston, Jamaica, the last of Bob Marley’s children to arrive in his lifetime. The Tuff Gong himself was in California, playing the 42nd show of his Kaya tour, an exhausting trek that had begun in Michigan, two months before and still had another fortnight to go. Such had been the peripatetic lifestyle of the world’s most iconic reggae star since gunmen attacked him at his home in December 1976, putting bullets in Bob, his wife, Rita, and manager, Don Taylor, prior to the Smile Jamaica concert that had been hijacked by “politricks”.

“I definitely think the assassination was political,” says Neville Garrick, his designer and close confidant. “But Bob had said, ‘Rasta don’t go left, Rasta don’t go right, Rasta go straight ahead.’ He didn’t pick sides. When Bob decided to do that concert it was no political show.” A few days later, Marley and Garrick left for the Bahamas and then moved to London, where his inner circle and band would spend the winter and spring of 1977.

“We lived in Bull Bay,” remembers Cedella Marley, then nine, “and I can remember Auntie, who helped raise us because Mummy and Daddy were always gone, waking us up. She just said, ‘Your parents have been shot.’ The next morning we saw Daddy, and he’s smiling at us like nothing happened. And then he was gone. I think he probably felt the further he was away from us the safer we were going to be. We didn’t see him much for a long time, but he was good at leaving messages and we spoke to him once or twice a week by phone.”

“I think that’s what gave him the idea of calling an album Survival,” says Rita down the line from the Marley Resort on Cable Beach in the Bahamas, a space the couple discovered while recuperating from the attack, and that Rita and daughter Stephanie developed after Bob’s death. “That was the kind of writer he was, he wrote about the world around him. He wanted to take that danger and turn it into something strong and artistic.”

There was more to it than that. Once again, Marley was aware of being exiled in Babylon. Just like when he had left his childhood home in Saint Ann Parish to live with his father in Kingston, only to be rescued by his mother, who spirited the sickly six-year-old back to the rural north coast; or his miserable time in Delaware in the 1960s, working on the Chrysler assembly line; or those cold, impoverished early European tours that tore the heart out of the original Wailers. All around him, he saw signs of the Natural Mystic he had warned about in 1977 – “Many more will have to suffer/Many more will have to die” – and he was determined to turn that into the definitive trilogy of Rasta militancy, of surviving, resisting and conquering Babylon. What he didn’t know was that his time on Earth was drawing to a close.

Britain was no island paradise in 1977. In the year of punk rock, the television series Roots and the Queen’s silver jubilee, winter floods and snow wreaked havoc, the Labour government entered into coalition with the Liberal party and a strike by East African workers in north London put race, class and industrial conflict on the daily news.

“They could shoot at you again,” Bob was reminded by an interviewer on Radio 1’s Newsbeat. “Yeeeeeaaaaaah,” he replied, laughing slowly. “What is to be, must be.” The 14 months in Europe were fruitful, however. “We were all in it together,” says Garrick. “Bob liked that. In Jamaica, everybody had their own agenda, it was difficult to round up the band. But in England, we were all staying in the same place. We could concentrate on the music without distraction. We rehearsed at the Island Studio, recorded at the Fallout Shelter and mixed in Basing Street.”

The first music released from the London sessions was Exodus, which reached the British Top 10 in June ’77. Ten months later, Kaya, recorded at the same time but mixed in America to give it a different feel, had surpassed that, reaching Number 4. Yet it also brought Marley critical barbs from reviewers who thought he’d quit the barricades. What happened to Burnin’ And Lootin’? To Catch A Fire?

“The fire hasn’t gone out,” said Wayne Robins in Creem, “but it is on a low flame and being used more for warmth than for arson.” Kaya found Marley not raging at Babylon’s attempt to kill him but relaxing in the warmth of his extended family. Is This Love was a Top 10 hit. “I’m not so in love with it that I don’t realise that Marley’s pretty well entered the bland Eagles/F. Mac/Abba acceptability stakes,” noted Sounds’ Vivien Goldman. The concerts fared no better and the double live LP Babylon By Bus, released in November 1978, got a kicking.

No wonder Marley seemed exhausted during that interminable tour. A close reader of his press, he knew what people were saying – there were plenty around him letting him know he had gone soft. His relationship with his wife was at a low point – she’d told him their daughter Stephanie wasn’t his. Rita also refused to sing on Exodus’s Turn Your Lights Down Low, a song about Breakspeare.

And then there was his toe. Bob’s right foot had taken a battering over the years and a football injury in September 1975 had been slow to heal, yet he had ignored the pain and continued performing, wearing blood-filled boots. A further football injury while in Paris on the Exodus tour had been more serious. “I was sleeping late into the afternoon when I was jolted awake by a rather hysterical Rita,” writes Don Taylor in his memoirs, Marley And Me. “Bob was sitting with his foot propped up. Rita went over to Bob and, pointing to his toe, cried, ‘Look ya Don, look ya, look how Bob toe a rotten off.’”

Marley was advised to have the toe removed, which would have contravened his religious principles. Another doctor assured him there was another option. “Foot get better ’n’ everything,” he told a journalist later, unaware a melanoma meant he was living on borrowed time. “Doctor clean ’em toe nail. That t’ing about amputation was just rumour.” Nevertheless, the North American leg of the Exodus tour was cancelled, causing the album to stall in the US charts.

Unknown to those who had criticised Bob for giving up the fight on Kaya, he had put himself back on the front line before that album was released. “He was a fisherman baiting his hook with Kaya to reel in an audience,” says Garrick. “He knew that when he had them hooked he could give them Survival, which was his most political, for want of a better word, and militant album. It was time to deliver the message.”

“He felt betrayed,” says Cedella. “He didn’t know who to trust. His lyrics became more like his own reality. This is what he was living with. I read his words sometimes: ‘Im is not a war man, but if im have to pick up im arms, he will pick up his arms because he has to defend himself.’ He felt betrayed, maybe even sometimes by what he believed in.”

“I don’t think he had any fear at that time,” says Garrick. “People begged him to come back to Jamaica. The only bigger welcome there was when Haile Selassie came in 1966. The Rastas had a nyabinghi ceremony to celebrate Bob’s return and in the middle of the drumming there was an earthquake. That was a sign for him that he was a positive force and though there were negative elements out there, I don’t think he concentrated on that. He really never had any fear.”

 At the end of February 1978, Marley returned to the island to plan a peace concert and build the Tuff Gong studio at his home at 56 Hope Road. A month later, Kaya was released, and on April 22, he stood on-stage at the One Love show in Kingston, under a sky of thunder, lightning and full moon, holding the hands of opposing political leaders Edward Seaga and Michael Manley above his head. If only for a few moments, Marley’s songs of love had conquered the forces of Babylon.

In her autobiography, No Woman, No Cry, Rita Marley claims the atmosphere around Bob had started to shift, however. “All of Jamaica had changed after the shooting,” says Cedella. “He was always surrounded by tough guys. The guy who used to ride with us to school was called Tek Life. I was talking to my brother Rohan earlier this year, I had to think about it. ‘Are you shittin’ me? Was his name Take Life?’ But when we saw them they weren’t gangsters. What was weird was hearing people say it was our father’s friends who had tried to kill him.”

“I don’t have an army behind me,” Bob told an American journalist. “If I did, I wouldn’t care, I’d just get more militant… I talk from strength… Maybe if I’d tried to make a heavier tune than Kaya, they would have tried to assassinate me because I would have come too hard.”

Despite his international status, his popularity, and prime-minister Michael Manley’s promises to bring Rastafari in from the cold, Bob’s faith was still held against him and his family, as Cedella testifies. “We were kids of a Rasta man. I would go to school and say, Daddy, please don’t come and pick me up. At that time you had the stigma. ‘Them nasty, them dirty, them don’ brush them hair, them don’ bathe.’ It wasn’t cool to be a Marley. I’m not sure if it is even today.” The most famous Jamaican alive was still a sufferah.

The Kaya tour meant The Wailers left Jamaica again in May 1978, and would not get back home until August. Bob, however, travelled on to Ethiopia on his first visit to Africa. His old friend and former manager Alan ‘Skills’ Cole was living there and Marley wanted to visit the Rastafari community at Shashamane. But he stayed in Ethiopia only a few days, and Garrick says Bob returned to Jamaica disillusioned after seeing the way the communist government had dispensed with both tradition and the Ethiopian royal family.

Still moving at a rate of knots, Marley spent a day in the Black Ark studio with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, recording the single Blackman Redemption/Rastaman Live Up!, two new songs that signalled the more militant road upon which he was embarking. “Keep your culture, don’t be afraid of the vulture,” he sang on the latter, “Grow your dreadlocks, don’t be afraid of the wolf pack.”

With the Tuff Gong studio complete, the first two months of 1979 were spent recording. In addition to bassist Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett and his brother Carly on drums, who’d both been with Bob since 1969, The Wailers now consisted of Earl ‘Wya’ Lindo and Tyrone Downie on keyboards, Alvin ‘Seeco’ Patterson on percussion and guitarists Al Anderson, who had just rejoined after leaving prior to Exodus, and Junior Marvin, who had replaced Anderson in 1977 and had, curiously, adopted his stage name in tribute to The Shadows’ Hank.

A month-long tour of the Pacific kicked off with eight shows in Japan at the start of April, dates that opened the musicians’ eyes to what they had already achieved across the planet. “We were really well received on that tour,” says Garrick, “especially in Japan, where the only English the audiences knew was Bob Marley lyrics. He told me that’s why he always wanted the lyrics on the album sleeves. He wanted people to know what he was saying.”

Back in Jamaica, Garrick was told the title of the next LP would be ‘Black Survival’. He objected on two grounds. “I always believed one-word titles were easier to promote. I also said it could eliminate some of his fans, who might think it was only for black people. I wanted to say Black Survival without using the word “black”, so I came up with the idea of using the flags of all the independent countries in Africa. After that I wanted to identify with the blacks in the diaspora in America, Jamaica, Trinidad, England, so I added the plan of a slave ship.”

As a time capsule, it’s ingenious. There are two flags for Zimbabwe, representing separate guerrilla groups fighting the white minority government; Cape Verde and Comoros – both recently independent – and Libya are missing; Namibia, Eritrea, Western Sahara – either colonies or disputed territories – and South Africa are excluded; and Papua New Guinea is far from Africa, though the gesture expressed solidarity with indigenous people everywhere.

Unlike other Marley albums, Survival has no romantic subplot and its Rasta militancy appeared as Jamaica’s economy hit rock bottom. Anybody who could leave the country did so. “So you think you have found the solution,” Bob sang on So Much Trouble In The World, “but it’s just another illusion.” Song after song – Babylon System (“We refuse to be what you wanted us to be”), Top Rankin’ (“All they want us to do is keep on killing one another”) preached unity and strength against oppression.

The summer of 1979 also saw Marley mania at its apogee in his homeland. In addition to recording a single by The Melody Makers – children Sharon, Cedella, Ziggy and Stephen – The Wailers were booked to play the closing night of the second Reggae Sunsplash in Montego Bay. A day of rain meant the venue had turned into a mudbath. In Stefan Paul’s concert documentary, Marley is caught singing, “That’s what it boils down to, I’ve got mud in my shoes,” during Lively Up Yourself. He also unveiled Ambush In The Night to his Jamaican audience: “All guns aiming at me… They opened fire on me…” were lines that made the personal political.

Survival was released in the first week of October. Its tougher edge and pan-Africanism were noted, as well as the reduced contribution of The I-Threes, replaced in parts by male backing vocalists. “A surprising but welcome return to the frontline of political entertainment,” said Chris Bohn in Melody Maker, “with a passion strengthened by reasoned analysis and the most beautiful singing I’ve heard in a long time.” As British musicians came to terms with their responsibilities as a medium of dissent against the recently elected Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, they were being given a lead from Trench Town. The Specials’ debut LP would be released the same month.

Marley’s eyes were now focused on a far bigger prize than the West Indians of Ladbroke Grove or the white men in Hammersmith Palais. Observers had noted that he had been spending time reading on the 1978 tour and that his choice of literature had expanded from the Bible and Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X and Angela Davis. “I don’t think it changed what he thought,” says Garrick, “more like reinforced. We always made an effort to reach out to the black community, but Bob got major disturbed when they didn’t respond as much as we had hoped.”

To that end, Marley’s North American and Caribbean tour of 1979 – 43 shows in 51 days – began with six dates at the Apollo in Harlem. Yet even there, the crowd was predominantly white. “We couldn’t get a lot of airplay on the black radio stations,” rues the man who designed the Selassie and Garvey backdrops for these shows. “Black publications really didn’t promote us that well and when the black audience turned up to buy their tickets on the night, the shows were already sold out.”

 By 1979, the year Barack Obama first went to college, African-Americans had been through the civil rights wars, seen the blaxploitation and superfly eras and indulged in Afrocentricity by wearing dashikis and watching documentaries such as Soul To Soul, wherein Ike And Tina Turner and Wilson Pickett visited Ghana. Hip hop culture was picking up speed in the Bronx thanks to Afrika Bambaataa, but the aspirations of the new American dreamers did not include a man in dreadlocks encouraging repatriation to the continent whose name the DJ had appropriated.

The Apollo shows were a mixed bag. It was the first tour with a two-man horn section, and it’s a sax solo that dominates Wake Up And Live, a trumpet that fills out Runnin’ Away. With Junior Marvin adding pyrotechnics to The Heathen, it might be argued that the singer was already using three soloists to ease the strain on a body that was feeling the sapping effects of an undiagnosed illness.

In December, The Wailers’ visit to Trinidad was disastrous. In his unreliable memoirs, Don Taylor recalled hundreds of ticketless fans charging the event at Queens Park and rioting. The police responded with tear gas. Another tense gig followed in the Bahamas. It was a black mark against Taylor, who had been Marley’s manager since 1973.

A month earlier, Marley had met the president of Gabon’s daughter, who suggested taking The Wailers to Libreville in January. As Taylor recounted it, he negotiated one show for Bob and one for Jimmy Cliff, another of his clients, but when they got to Gabon, the government demanded two Wailers shows. Other members of Marley’s inner circle recall the money the government paid being significantly more than Bob received, and that was even after taking into account the existence of a travel agency Taylor had set up so he could pay himself to organise tours. The first show turned out to be a dignatories-only gig for the president’s birthday; even if he had expected to play only one date, Marley would probably have insisted on a second for ordinary fans. When they returned to Jamaica, Taylor was relieved of his duties – at gunpoint, he claimed – and replaced by Skills Cole and Danny Sims, the manager who took Marley to Europe almost a decade before.

In March, Bob and Jacob Miller travelled to Brazil to discuss arrangements for concerts in South America at the end of the year. Miller was a relatively new addition to Marley’s entourage, but the pair were, in Garrick’s words, “bredren”, and his band, Inner Circle, were a likely support act on the tour. They returned to Jamaica in high spirits, but two days later, Miller crashed his car and died. It should have been time for a break, but Marley’s work ethic took him back to the studio and sessions for the 10th album of his Island contract.

The call to play at the independence ceremony in Zimbabwe came only a few days before the flag was scheduled to be raised on April 18, 1980. Bob couldn’t refuse: Zimbabwe, the stand-out track on Survival, had been adopted as an anthem by the guerrilla forces. “He paid for that entire trip,” says Garrick. “I think he spent $90,000. It was his gift to Zimbabwe, because when they invited him they only sent two tickets. And I remember they said, ‘Come Red Bob Marley’ – that’s him aligned with communist terms again. And he said: ‘I come red, gold and green.’”

A 707 was hired to fly The Wailers from London; a bag of T-shirts greased their passage through immigration in Salisbury. Again, the devil was in the details. The wooden stage was rotten, there was no power, the capital’s hotels were full. The ceremony was invitation-only for the state’s new leaders, their supporters and representatives of friendly states, including India’s Indira Gandhi and the Prince of Wales. The moment the Rhodesian flag came down and the Zimbabwean flag was raised, The Wailers were introduced on-stage. They weren’t ready…

Contemporary reports describe a full-scale riot, as militiamen from excluded guerrilla groups muscled their way in and the police responded with force. Garrick remembers it differently. “Where the stadium in Harare is located, it’s almost in the ghetto. And there were a lot of people outside wanting to come in. When the soldiers marched in one gate, the people ran in with them, and that’s when they fired the tear gas. The wind blew it right into the royal box where Prince Charles and Robert Mugabe were sitting. And that interrupted the show for maybe half an hour, but we came back and finished the show.” A free second gig was set up for 24 hours later.

When Marley presented his new album to Chris Blackwell in May, the label boss – no doubt aware Marley might be thinking of leaving Island – handed it back, saying something was missing. With the militancy of Bad Card and Coming In From The Cold leavened by Could You Be Loved, its disco skank worked up to get airplay on black radio stations, Uprising felt like a hit to the singer. The man who called the shots, however, felt The Wailers hadn’t got the best out of one song. Perhaps, suggested Blackwell, Redemption Song might be better as a solo acoustic number…

With Marley due to tour Europe before the album’s release, Garrick had little time to design a sleeve but had a few ideas based on the title, such as the singer waking up and stretching as the sun rose. “I never liked the picture,” says a candid Rita, “with Bob coming up out of the ground. What did it mean? Was it a grave? Was he dead?”

 It is simplistic to divide Marley’s career into specific periods – rude boy, underground, classic, imperial and decline – and write off everything that came after Kaya. Yet the final months of Bob’s life saw his music attain a global status few could ever have aspired to. The European tour of 1980 was another measure of his extraordinary effect. In Paris, the Le Bourget airport hosted a show in front of 55,000; in Milan, he proved a bigger draw than the Pope when 110,000 gathered for his first Italian show, an event many on-stage described as the most awe-inspiring of their time with Marley.

With hindsight, it’s easy to say Marley sounded, looked and was frail on the 35 European dates that summer. Garrick is having none of that: “I didn’t see much wear or fatigue on him. He was the one who stressed physical fitness and proper diet.” Resting in London before heading back across the Atlantic, The Wailers played football against music journalists and record companies such as Eddy Grant’s Ice label. He looked fit and appeared to be enjoying life hugely. Deciding against returning to Jamaica, then in the early stages of a violent election that would claim the lives of more than 700, The Wailers regrouped in Miami before their American tour.

It began in Boston on September 16. Three days later, Bob played two nights at Madison Square Garden, the Commodores as supposed headliners to encourage a more diverse crowd. Something clearly wasn’t right in New York, however, and the singer was isolated from his colleagues in the Essex House hotel. Garrick remembers the situation with regret: “The people who were usually around him, like Seeco the percussionist, myself and Gilly the cook, we weren’t staying in the same hotel. I can’t really describe the scene there. I think I probably heard the same things you did.” The rumours involved a hotel suite taken over by a New York criminal strata and a never-ending party of loose women and crack cocaine. Marley, it seems, was trapped.

The singer’s collapse on an early morning run on September 21 meant a visit to a doctor, and resulted in the news that Marley had terminal cancer. The band, meanwhile, had moved on to Pittsburgh, where they were preparing for what would become Marley’s final show, at the Stanley Theatre two nights later. It’s impossible to hear the recently released Live Forever, which captures the gig, without noting a weariness in Bob’s voice that isn’t there in bootlegs of the Milan show in June. Yet it stands as a magnificent testament to Marley’s strength and the brilliance of his band.

His death, eight months later, is notable for the fierce and infamous battle that followed, as management, businessmen, family members and musicians all stepped forward to lay claim to shares in his legacy. Garrick, however, was left with a dilemma: shortly before his death, his friend had given him details of his next album. It was to be called Confrontation, the third part of the militant trilogy, and would demonstrate that good would triumph over evil.

Though Bob claimed he would soon be ready to get working on it, few around him would have been taken in. Furthermore, there was nothing in the vaults to fall back on.

Marley had gone from session to tour to session – with eight studio albums in six years – there was no stockpile of new material. Danny Sims, who had managed Bob in 1967-72, is insistent that: “After we released him and he went with Island, he did not write another 10 songs for the rest of his career.” Even if that figure is contentious, it’s a fact that almost half of Kaya had been re-recordings of old material. Confrontation would have to be the same, but without the input or inspiration of their creator.

Of the Marley canon, Uprising is occasionally overlooked, but Confrontation is usually forgotten. It’s not one of rock’s unfinished masterpieces; it wasn’t even started. Despite its striking cover, in which Bob is Saint George, slaying the Babylonian dragon – a legend that Garrick learnt about in Ethiopia, where the knight is patron saint – it’s a grab bag of uncompiled singles (Rastaman Live Up!, Blackman Redemption), outtakes (I Know, Mix Up, Mix Up) and demos (Jump Nyabinghi). Released two years after Bob’s death, it reached Number 5 in the British charts, one spot behind Kaya, and included his biggest hit, the lightweight Buffalo Soldiers.

Sitting in her office in Miami, Cedella Marley, CEO of Tuff Gong International, is working on kit designs for the Jamaican 2012 Olympic team, knowing that half the planet will be watching Usain Bolt in the 100 metres.

“Yeah, no pressure,” she laughs. There are plans to emulate Bob Dylan’s Bootleg series and to develop new reggae artists. Mention the battle over her father’s estate and she is scathing about certain people – “I go through moments thinking, Fuck you, is this how you really felt about him?” – but that’s another story. As we speak, The Original Wailers, including Marvin, Anderson and Lindo, are touring Europe, Garrick is playing golf in Los Angeles, and Rita is a hotelier in Nassau.

“You go through highs and lows,” she says, “but if I don’t go to sleep saying, You did good today for Dad, then I don’t sleep.” A Marley’s work is never done, it seems. “Yeah. Daddy’s still on tour.”

This article originally appeared in MOJO 212.