Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

rum shop, Morgan complimented the boy’s mother on her son’s abilities. ‘You have a son who’s very talented,’ he told her. ‘He has a lot of potential.’

      Jimmy Cliff, who lived by the bridge near Queen’s Theatre, recalled a slightly different version of the genesis of the first recording by Bob Marley: ‘Desmond came to me and I introduced him to Leslie Kong, and he got his song recorded. He then went and told Bob, “I know this youth called Jimmy Cliff, and he helped me to get my song recorded.” He then brought Bob to me, and I introduced him to Leslie Kong. And Bob had his song recorded. So that was the first recordings, so it meant a lot. Your first song, it really means a lot.’

      Leslie Kong was willing to take a chance. ‘Alright,’ he decreed, ‘mi could try it now.’ The next Saturday morning, Kong drove down to Trench Town and turned up on the doorstep at 19 Second Street, looking for Nesta. His mother told him her son had gone out. Leslie Kong was disappointed: he wanted to offer him a recording contract, he said. But when Nesta came home in the early evening, he had managed to run into Kong, signed the contract, and been paid the five pounds it specified. Generously, a precursor of his later attitude towards finances, the youth gave two pounds to his mother, ten shillings to his aunt Enid, and five shillings to a woman who was visiting from the country.

      ‘Judge Not’ was recorded at Federal Studios the same month. Bob took Bunny along with him for moral support. ‘Judge Not’ was the joyous gallop of ska, a music at the time as fresh and unique as the nation of Jamaica itself, which the shrill, youthful voice of Bob Marley had as the backbeat to his first recorded work. But the celebratory sound of ‘Judge Not’ could not conceal the biblical tone that was significantly present in his first release: chiding those who passed judgement on himself and his kind, he warns that ‘While you talk about me/ Someone else is judging you.’ The song hardly sold at all and radio play was nonexistent; this was in contrast to the experience of Desmond Dekker, whose first song, ‘Honour Your Father and Your Mother’, was a hit.

      At that same session Bob recorded two other ska numbers, ‘Terror’ (‘He who rules by terror do aggrievous wrongs/ In hell I’ll count his error/ Let them hear my song’) and ‘One Cup of Coffee’, which were both put out as 45s, to little avail. ‘One Cup of Coffee’, a strange saga of separation and financial settlement, was a signpost to the sharply observed, visual realism that would become a key feature of Bob Marley’s lyrics in years to come. For now, however, the few listeners that ‘Judge Not’ garnered assumed it was the work of one ‘Bobby Martell’, the name listed on the label: Kong had renamed him with this kitsch moniker in much the same way as he had changed James Chambers’ name to Jimmy Cliff. (Released in England on the new Island Records label, ‘Judge Not’ was credited to ‘Robert Morley’.)

      Leslie Kong was largely preoccupied with his new, big-selling vocal act, Jackie Opel, a Barbadian. And when the producer refused to give any more money to ‘Bobby Martell’ the relationship ended. It was said that, after an argument over Kong swindling him, Bob prophesied to the label owner, frightening him, that one day he would make plenty of money out of Bob but would never have the luxury of enjoying it. ‘So Robert said to me,’ said Desmond Dekker, ‘“Look, I’lla dig up.” I said, “Where you goin’?” Him say, “Watch out. I’ll leggo dis Chinaman y’unno. I’ll go up a Coxsone. Yuh a come?” I said, “Well, I gotta wait and see before I make my move.”’

      Morgan, however, continued his association and friendship with Bob. The next year he emigrated to the United Kingdom. Kong promoted a pair of farewell shows for him, one at the Capri Theatre in May Penn in the middle of the island, and another in Montego Bay, and Derrick Morgan ensured that Bob was on each bill. Again, Morgan noted that Bob, perhaps through nervousness, had not balanced the energies of his performance especially well. At the Capri Theatre show, for example, ‘when Bob go on stage he was dancin’ more than he was singin’ … An’ ’im tired when ’im come back to the vocal, so me beg ’im and seh: “No, youth: when ya sing two verse you dance, an’ then you go back to your other verse.”’

      At the Montego Bay venue, Bob performed as Morgan had suggested. But during ‘One Cup of Coffee’, his first song, he didn’t receive the audience response either of them had expected. In fact, the typically volatile and expressive Jamaican crowd started to boo. ‘The next song, ’im just get up and seh: “Judge not, before you judge yourself!” So the audience think a him mek that song immediately offa dem! And ’im tear dung the whole place with that tune: Judge not, before you judge yourself. When ’im reach a part there the audience ‘ray and seh: Wait, this boy a bad, ’im a jus’ mek a sound offa we, same time, yeah man, an’ deh so ’im hit. That was the last time I see Bob fe a long while.’

      Kingstonians, however, were able to see ‘Bobby Martell’ most weeks, at the Queen’s Theatre, as part of the weekly Opportunity Knocks talent shows. These stage shows run by Vere Johns, before an audience of some 600 people, were broadcast on RJR, one of the island’s two radio stations, and featured such guest artists as Higgs and Wilson, and Alton and Eddy. The best contending singer would win a guinea (21 shillings, or £1.10), through the simple test of being brought back for the most encores – if the crowd took against you, you’d be booed off. Bob would steal these shows every time, hurrying away from the venue with his prize before other less successful contenders could beg some of it away from him. He would sing ‘Judge Not’, and another song he had written, ‘Fancy Curls’ (‘Last night your best friend was sick/ Goodness gracious, another of your trick/ Hey little girl with those fancy curls’). For a time Bob was even awarded the nickname ‘Fancy Curls’.

      The fact that the records released by Beverley’s hadn’t sold was, after the initial disappointment, irrelevant. Only 16 years old, Bob had been given the sign that he was perfectly justified in imagining that there could be some kind of musical future for him. To make the next step forward, he decided to make a serious go of it with his spars from Trench Town. Accordingly, the Teenagers became first the Wailing Rudeboys, and then the Wailing Wailers, before finally mutating into simply the Wailers.

      One of the maxims of a man called Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry who worked for Coxsone Dodd’s sound system, was that every man has a name for a purpose. So it also was and is with groups. And the name ‘The Wailers’ didn’t merely reflect some alleycat screech made by the trio. Whether consciously or unconsciously chosen, it spoke volumes about the deep miasma of anguish and lonely hurt all three, especially Nesta and Peter, had felt within their souls as youths coming up. Bob Marley’s vocals sound sometimes as if he is literally crying. ‘The world “wail” means to cry or to moan,’ said Peter Tosh later. ‘We were living in this so-called ghetto. No one to help them. We felt we were the only ones who could express the people’s feelings through music, and because of that the people loved it. So we did it.’

      Definitively ghetto sufferahs, the trio responded to music made by their American equivalents – Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and the flawless harmonising of the Impressions, led by Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler. When the Impressions came to Jamaica in the early 1960s to play warm-up dates before a US tour (the reason so many American acts played in Jamaica), all three Wailers went together to see them at the Carib Theatre, fighting to get up to the front row. The group’s ‘One Love’ utilised sections of the Impressions’ ‘People Get Ready’. The Wailers also recorded versions of the Impressions’ ‘Another Dance’, for Studio One, and ‘Keep On Movin’’, for Scratch Perry.

      Looking at it with a clear vision, the future seemed to contain a myriad musical possibilities. But without that hope, the reality of Bob’s then existence only could have been seen as bitterly grim. He had no real source of income, and literally would have starved on occasions if it had not been for Tartar’s kitchen.

      A further set of complications was on its way. Bob’s mother Cedella had become pregnant by Toddy, Bunny’s father, giving birth to Pearl Livingston early in 1962; Bob and Bunny were thereby linked even closer by their new half-sister. Bob, meanwhile, had had a passionate affair himself with a local girl, two years younger than he was. Her older brother, though, forbade the girl to carry on the relationship because of Bob’s white blood, a recurring and consistent problem for him. The shock of being the victim of such racism, combined with Pearl taking