Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

such as Chocomo on Wellington Street and Jubilee on King Street. Setting up in 1950, Tom the Great Sebastian was the first significant sound-system operator. He would ‘toast’ as a DJ on the microphone, also using Duke Vin (who in 1956 began the first ‘system’ in the United Kingdom) and Count Machuki, another legendary figure from the days of sound systems. Many believe Tom the Great Sebastian was the all-time giant of sound systems. ‘He is the man,’ said Prince Buster, who later ran his own system and became one of Jamaica’s most innovative musicians. Goodies, Count Smith the Blues Blaster, Count Joe, and Sir Nick the Champ, among the leading contenders, never triumphed over Tom the Great Sebastian, as would be apparent at the dances billed as sound-system battles in which two or more systems would compete, each playing a record in turn. Tom would mash up the opposition with the uniqueness of his tunes, straight off the plane from the USA, and with the originality of his DJing and the sheer power of his equipment.

      Although there was a clear ironical purpose in the taking up of aristocratic titles, it was also the only way non-white Jamaicans could possibly hope to aspire to such dizzy heights. Duke Reid the Trojan was also named after the Bedford Trojan truck he used to transport his equipment – the money for it came from the liquor stores owned by his family, an empire that began when his wife won the national lottery.

      Reid, who had formerly been a policeman, was a contentious figure. Sporting a pair of revolvers in his belt, from which he would indiscriminately loose off shots, he was more inclined to destroy the opposition through violence than talent. To Duke Reid, who began operating a couple of years after Tom the Great Sebastian, may be attributed the genesis of much of the gangland-like behaviour that became a later feature of the Jamaican music business. Instead of mashing up the sound-system opposition by playing the heaviest, loudest tunes, he would simply charge into opposition dances with his gang, beating up people or stabbing them and destroying their equipment. And if that didn’t work, Reid was always partial to resorting to a spot of obeah. Undoubtedly a colourful character, at dances Reid would even have gangs of tough, sexy women, controlled by a female lieutenant called Duddah, all dressed in the same uniforms. But he also had tons of boxes, tons of house of joy, as sound-system speakers were sometimes known.

      Soon, however, there came a contender for Duke Reid’s crown: the Sir Coxsone Downbeat sound system, which took its name from the Yorkshire cricketer Coxsone and was run by one Clement Seymour Dodd. Dodd had first earned his spurs as one of Reid’s myriad helpers and his family was also in the liquor-store business. King Stitt and Machuki, two of Dodd’s principal DJs, built the set; ‘Brand-new – dig, daddy’ was one of their great catchphrases. Another of the leading disc jockeys employed by Coxsone, as he became known, was Prince Buster, whose former occupation of boxer also ensured he was a sizable deterrent to the thugs run by Reid.

      Although not always. By 1958, Prince Buster was running his open sound system; Reid and fifteen of his thugs went to a dance at the Chocomo Lawn on Wellington Street looking for him. Buster wasn’t there: he was playing dice down on Charles Street. Hearing that Reid and his gang were up at Chocomo, Prince Buster hurried up there, and a man immediately pulled a knife on him. In the mêlée that followed, another of Reid’s hoods split the back of Buster’s skull open with a rock. Later, he and Reid became good friends: ‘He became a nice man: he was just possessed by what was going on.’

      Soon both Coxsone and Duke Reid began recording songs by local artists specifically for use on their respective systems. The law of supply and demand showed itself to be inescapable, and out of this – as well as Coxsone’s realisation that American record companies such as Imperial and Modern didn’t seem to notice when he blatantly pirated their material – was born the Jamaican recording industry.

      The first two dances at which the Sir Coxsone Downbeat sound system played were in Trench Town; and the first of these was an event put on by Jimmy Tucker, a leading Jamaican vocalist.

      The cauldron of Trench Town epitomised one of the great cultural truths about Jamaica – and other impoverished countries in the Third World, come to that: how those who have nothing – and therefore nothing to lose – have no fear of expressing their God-given talents. People whose earning potential sometimes seems to be literally nil have a pride and confidence in their innate abilities in arts and crafts – a pride and confidence that western educational and employment systems appear to conspire to kick out of those who pass through them. The pace of life in Jamaica, moreover, often seems to accord with the God-given rhythms of nature: rising with the sun, people are active early in the day until the sun goes down. Such a harnessing of man’s soul to the day’s natural process seems to allow free rein and progress to the creative forces that dance out from both the personal and collective unconscious.

      Nesta Robert Marley would rise in the cool of first daylight, but long after sunset he could still be found, with or without his spar, Bunny, strumming his sardine-can guitar and trying out melodies and harmonies. Apart from football, it was his only solace, the only space where he could feel comfortable within his head. Later in life he would say, ‘Sleep is for fools.’

      Often he would feel alienated and ostracised in the city. With his mixed-race origins clearly visible in his facial skin, he was considered a white boy and was taunted for this; his complexion could bring out the worst in people: after all, why was this boy from ‘country’ living down in the ghetto and not uptown with all the other lightskin people? Being so consistently and miserably tested can bring the worst out in someone, destroying them; or it can assiduously and resolutely build their character. Such daily bullying ultimately created in Nesta his iron will, his overpowering self-confidence and self-esteem.

      ‘Sometimes he’d come across the resistance of being half-caste,’ said Rita Marley. ‘There was a problem with his counterparts: having come through this white father caused such difficulties that he’s want to kill himself and thinking, “Why am I this person? Why is my father white and not black like everybody else? What did I do wrong?”

      ‘He was lost in that: not being able to have anyone to say, “It’s not your fault, or that there’s nothing wrong in being like you are.” But that was the atmosphere he came up in that Trench Town environment where everybody is rough. He had to show them that although he didn’t know his father, at least he knew there was a God and he knew what he was feeling.

      ‘Bob had to put up with a lot of resistance. If he wasn’t that strong in himself he wouldn’t be what he became. He would be downtrodden and seen as another half-caste who would never make it.’

      The still air of Trench Town was barely ever disturbed by traffic noise; from those rare yards that had a tenant sufficiently fortunate to possess a radio would sail the favourite new songs from the United States, fading in and out as they drifted down the Caribbean from New Orleans or Miami, or Nashville, the home of the enormously powerful Radio WALC. Especially popular was the ten-to-midnight show sponsored by White Rose Petroleum Jelly whose DJ was Hugh Jarrett, a vocalist with Elvis Presley’s Jordanaires backing group, who were in need of employment in 1958 when Elvis went into the army. Enormously powerful, WALC could easily be tuned into throughout the US eastern seaboard and far further south into the Caribbean than Jamaica.

      Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine, Fats Domino, Brook Benton, Larry Williams, Louis Jordan and white iconoclasts such as Elvis Presley and the milder Ricky Nelson all made a strong impression on Nesta; he also absorbed the omnipresent Trinidadian calypso and steel-band music that had been adopted by Jamaica almost as its own.

      It was in Trench Town that Nesta Robert Marley was exposed for the first time to bebop and modern jazz – at first, however, ‘mi couldn’t understand it,’ Bob later admitted. But in 1960, he began to take part in the evening music sessions held in his Third Street yard by Joe Higgs – and Joe Higgs loved jazz, especially hornsmen. He was one of the area’s most famous residents, due to his role as one of Jamaica’s first indigenous recording artists, as part of the Higgs and Wilson duo.

      Joe Higgs, who had been born in 1940, had begun ‘foolin’ around on a guitar’ in 1956, when he was 16. Perhaps pertinently, the guitar had belonged to a Rastaman. ‘He used to allow me to play and I used to pick. I tried to combine notes in a freak manner ’cause I was just aware of harmony structure. I couldn’t tell whether this was G