Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

That’s the way I made most of my music.’

      Another singer, Roy Wilson, lived on the same Trench Town street; they each used the rehearsal studio at Bim and Bam. Due to simple expediency, they ended up singing together as a duo at a talent contest, in which they came second. Higgs and Wilson, as they had become, were signed up by Edward Seaga, who later became Prime Minister, his only act at the time. Their first release in 1960 on his West Indies Records label (WIRL) was ‘Oh Manny Oh’; this jumping boogie raced up the Jamaican charts from 43 to 3 before hitting the top spot for two weeks. ‘Sold a lot!’ said Joe Higgs. Their biggest record, however, was ‘There’s a Reward’, recorded for Coxsone Dodd on his Wincox label. But when Higgs went to see Coxsone and asked for royalties, the sound-system boss took out a gun and beat his artist with it.

      Joe Higgs was as conscious in his actions as in his lyrics; these included the unmentionable, radical subject of Rastafari – for publicly espousing the faith, which grew by quantum leaps amongst the ghetto sufferahs, he had been beaten up by the police and imprisoned during political riots in Trench Town in May 1959. This only strengthened him in his resolve. Higgs had himself learned music from his mother, who sang in a church choir; recalling how fortified he had been by the spiritual aspect of her teaching, Joe Higgs henceforth paid great attention to playing the part of both musical and moral tutor to those youth of the area with the ears to hear. The musical seminars he conducted could be rigorous affairs: especial attention would be paid to breath control and melody, and as well as guitar lessons in which he would instruct his students in the art of writing lyrics that would carry clear ideas to the people. It was not all work: sometimes entire classes would voyage together the short distance to the end of Marcus Garvey Drive to swim at the beach known as Hot and Cold, an effect created on the water by an electrical power generator.

      It was in Higgs’s yard that Nesta had his first encounter with something that stilled his thoughts sufficiently for him to empathise with the lateral processes of jazz: the Jamaican natural resource with which he was later to become inextricably associated in the public mind. ‘After a while I smoke some ganja, some herb, and get to understand it. Mi try to get into de mood whar de moon is blue and see de feelin’ expressed. Joe Higgs ’elped me understands that music. ’E taught mi many t’ings.’

      Another of the male role models who appeared consistently through the course of the fatherless Nesta’s life, Joe Higgs assiduously coached the 15-year-old and his spar Bunny in the art of harmonising and he advised Bob to sing all the time, to strengthen his voice. At one of these sessions Bob and Bunny met Peter McIntosh, another youth wanting to try out as a vocalist, who lived in nearby West Road.

      Unlike the more humble Bunny, this tall, gangly and arrogant youth was older than Bob. He had been born Winston Hubert McIntosh on 19 October 1944 in the west of Jamaica, in the coastal hamlet of Bluefields, Westmoreland, to Alvera Coke and James McIntosh. His father had left his mother soon after the child was born. Taken into the care of an aunt, the first sixteen years of his life had been spent first in the pleasant coastal town of Savanna-la-Mar and then the rough section of west Kingston called Denham Town. In 1956, after his aunt died, he moved in with an uncle who lived in Trench Town. Lonely and isolated, the boy was consumed with an urgent need to make it as a musician. Unlike Bob and Bunny, however, whose guitar-playing had only developed perfunctorily as they concentrated on their vocal skills, Peter McIntosh was a competent guitarist, owning his own cheap acoustic model. As a boy he had piano lessons for two years, until his mother could no longer afford them.

      Nesta and Bunny first encountered Peter when they literally walked into him as he rounded a Trench Town corner while he was playing his guitar and singing. Peter was especially fond of Stan Jones’s much covered country-cowboy song ‘(Ghost) Riders in the Sky’, with its ‘yippey yi-yay’ chorus, a simultaneous hit in 1949 for three separate artists, Burl Ives, Bing Crosby, and Vaughn Monroe – apocryphally, it was ‘(Ghost) Riders in the Sky’ he was singing when he bumped into Nesta and Bunny. Falling into conversation with this relative newcomer to the area, they learned that Peter already had plenty of songs he had written: he had decided much earlier that his course of life would be as a singer. Peter had learned to play the guitar by observing a bushman in Savanna-la-Mar, who would play his instrument by the roadside or on the seashore. Every day, Peter would study the man’s hands and watch where he placed them. After some time, he asked the bushman to hand him the guitar. He proceeded to perform a perfect rendition of a song the man had himself been playing. ‘Who taught you to play like that?’ asked the bushman. ‘You did,’ replied Peter. It was the older boy’s skill on the instrument that inspired Nesta to pay serious attention to mastering the guitar. After a while he was thwarted in any further progress. Peter’s battered instrument simply fell to pieces.

      Another older friend of Nesta’s in Trench Town was Vincent Ford, also known as Jack Tartar or, more usually, simply Tartar, which may also be spelled ‘Tata’. Tartar had first come across the Marley boy when he was around 13 and Tartar was 17. A close bond had developed between the two: Tartar had worked as a chef at the Boys Town school, and then started up a little kitchen in his yard on First Street, which he and Nesta would refer to as ‘the casbah’. As well as the ganja that fulfilled a crucial gap in the desperate economy of Trench Town, Tartar would sell dishes like calaloo and dumplings – at times when Nesta was entirely impoverished it would be at Tartar’s that he would find free food. When Nesta made the decision to apply himself to the guitar, it was Tartar who would stay up all night with him, turning the ‘leaves’ of the Teach Yourself Guitar book Nesta had bought as he strummed the chords, peering at the diagrams of where to put his fingers in the light of a flickering oil lamp. In the mornings, their nostrils would be black from the lamp’s fumes.

      One day in her bar, Cedella found herself talking to a customer who told her of a welding business on South Camp Road that regularly took in apprentices. The next day Nesta secured himself a position there as an apprentice welder – when he started work as a trainee at the South Camp Road premises he discovered that his friend Desmond Dekker was already employed there: having already passed all his exams, Dekker now was beginning to learn underwater welding.

      ‘I knew men who were doing welding for a livin’, and I suggested that he go down to the shop and make himself an apprentice,’ remembered Cedella. ‘He hated it. One day he was welding some steel and a piece of metal flew off and got stuck right in the white of his eye, and he had to go to the hospital to have it taken out. It caused him terrible pain; it even hurt for him to cry.’ Peter Tosh was similarly employed, having been pushed into learning welding by his uncle; he was working at another firm, but Bob’s accident gave Peter the excuse to back out of the trade.

      That rogue sliver of metal that caused such agony to Nesta’s eye had a greater significance. From now on, he told Tartar, there would be no more welding: only the guitar. Bob convinced his mother he could make a better living singing. By now, Bunny also had made a ghetto guitar, similar to the ones Nesta constructed, from a bamboo staff, electric cable wire, and a large sardine can. Then Peter Tosh, as the McIntosh boy was more readily known, brought along his battered acoustic guitar to play with them. ‘1961,’ remembered Peter Tosh, ‘the group came together.’

      At the urging of Joe Higgs, they formed into a musical unit, coached by Higgs: the Teenagers contained the three youths, as well as a strong local singer called Junior Braithwaite. ‘It was kinda difficult,’ said Joe Higgs later, ‘to get the group precise – and their sound – and to get the harmony structures. It took a couple years to get that perfect. I wanted each person to be a leader in his own right. I wanted them to be able to wail in their own rights.’

      Nesta Marley, Bunny Livingston, and Peter Tosh were the only singers that Joe Higgs rehearsed in that manner. Although they would be beaten to this by the Maytals, who began performing in 1962, they were one of the first groups in Jamaica who were more than a duo; previously the island’s charts had been dominated by pairs of singers – the Blues Busters, Alton and Eddie, Bunny and Scully, and – of course – Higgs and Wilson.

      A close brethren of Joe Higgs, Alvin ‘Franseeco’ Patterson, later known simply as Seeco, instructed the Wailers, as the Teenagers would become known, in the philosophy of rhythm. Originally from St Ann, Seeco was another professional musician now living in Trench