Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

he would not let his personal opinion interfere with an opportunity to make another record.

      Coxsone Dodd signed the Wailers as both performers and songwriters. They were offered his standard deal: a five-year contract for exclusive recording rights and management, and a guarantee of twenty pounds between them for every side.

      The money on offer was so small that it hardly improved the group’s financial position one iota. Accordingly, for the entire time they would record with Coxsone Dodd, the Wailers would get by with that same routine of hustle-hustle-scrape employed by much of the local youth merely to keep existing. Going down to the beach and fishing with a rod and line, they would take what they caught to the market, exchanging the fish for other food; off the local trees they would pick mangoes, ackee, guinips, tambrines, and June-plums and sell them; they would also gather up any scrap metal or bottles, and regularly would voyage over to the nearby dairy farm to pick up all the lead that came off the milk tins. Sponsored when necessary by his father, Bunny was more likely to have a few pence in his pockets. Peter was the only one with any sort of job, pressing clothes at a local dry-cleaner’s run by a friend; he would care for the Wailers’ stage outfits, and also their day-to-day clothes – they each had two pairs of pants and two shirts. Bob, meanwhile, would simply try to somehow get by.

      When, within days, the first session took place, the sides chosen were not ‘Simmer Down’ but ‘I’m Still Waiting’ and ‘It Hurts to be Alone’, engineered by Sid ‘Siddie’ Bucknor, Coxsone Dodd’s cousin, who performed the same function on most of their Studio One work. Although Coxsone had marked out ‘Simmer Down’ for release as a single, he first wanted to establish interest in the Wailers by pushing another song to be promoted by his several sound system sets. ‘They had songs that was all do-over material, early doo-wop stuff, so I instructed them to try and do some writing.’ Out of an evening’s work at Studio One, overseen by Coxsone and Ernest Ranglin, had come ‘I’m Still Waiting’ and ‘It Hurts to Be Alone’. The first song was a beautiful Bob Marley original, even though the preamble of the vocal harmonies owed much to the Impressions. But when Bob delivered his breathtakingly sweet vocal solo, it bled from a tearful heart; suspended in a void of echoing pain, his voice felt as though it was recorded at a different, slowed-down speed from the rest of the track. ‘It Hurts to be Alone’ was a Junior Braithwaite number, on which he sang lead. As Coxsone’s house arranger, Ernest Ranglin oversaw the production of the pair of sides.

      The instrumentation was basic: Lloyd Knibbs on drums, Lloyd Brevett on bass, and Jah Jerry Haines on guitar. Bob, noted Jah Jerry, was ‘a nice boy, a nice young feller: not a rough guy, a polite guy’.

      For once Ranglin didn’t have to spice up the song with guitar overdubs. ‘You could see they had something in them. They were all very nice guys, but they seemed very young. And little too.’ Braithwaite, in particular, was very short, whilst both Bob and Bunny stood not much more than five foot four inches in height; by comparison, Peter Tosh, at six feet four, seemed to tower over the rest of the group. After Coxsone had pressed up three hundred copies of the two tunes, they were distributed to sound systems; the word came back that ‘It Hurts to be Alone’ was going down well.

      As soon as Coxsone heard this, he called the group back to the studio. But there had been changes of which no one had notified him. Junior Braithwaite wasn’t with them: to Coxsone’s surprise and initial chagrin he learned that Braithwaite was in the final stages of preparing to leave Jamaica for Chicago with his family. ‘I only lead sung on “It Hurts to be Alone”,’ said Junior. ‘And that was the day, 28 August 1964, just before I flew out of Jamaica. Because they had to have me do a solo just before I left, and so it only took a few hours to learn this new tune, and one take. We were that tough, man.’

      If Coxsone were to continue working with the group, the producer insisted, the Wailers required a clearly defined lead vocalist. After some discussion, it was decided that the task should fall to Bob Marley; Bunny and Peter were promised they would also get their share of lead vocals. Coxsone was encouraged in this decision by ‘Simmer Down’, the contract-winning song Bob had sung at the audition which served a dual purpose: a warning to the newly emergent rude boys – that tribal grouping of cool, disaffected, and desperate youth – not to bring down the wrath of the law upon themselves; and a frustrated response to a letter from Bob’s mother in the United States, fearful that her only son was becoming involved with bad company.

      The full panoply of his label’s finest ska musicians was summoned by Coxsone for the session. Yet again Ernest Ranglin arranged the tune, whilst Don Drummond, Jamaica’s king of the trombone, added his deeply creative jazz parts. Drummond, who had played with Ranglin in the Eric Dean Orchestra, was the virtuoso of a group of musicians who shortly were to be working together, for a little over a year, under the name of the Skatalites, an ensemble that would in time become legendary. As well as Drummond, the group included Roland Alphonso and Tommy McCook, the group’s leader, on tenor sax, Lester Sterling on alto sax, Johnny ‘Dizzy’ Moore on trumpet, Jah Jerry on guitar, Lloyd Nibbs on drums, Lloyd Brevitt on bass and Jackie Mittoo on keyboards, along with Theophilus Beckford and Clue-J Johnson.

      Being part of this elite team was far more financially remunerative than being one of the accredited artists on the record label. Coxsone paid £2 a tune per musician, and frequently they would record twenty songs in a day. One bonanza day, Jah Jerry worked on fifty songs in an epic session at Beverley’s. In 1964, this kind of money would have meant you were considered rich in the United Kingdom or even in the United States, let alone in impoverished Jamaica. Often hanging around at 13 Brentford Road was Jackie Opel, the Bajan vocal star, first pushed by Leslie Kong, and renowned for the rare six-octave range with which he would perform his soul tunes; his ‘Cry Me a River’ (aka ‘You Gotta Cry’) tune had sold a million copies in Jamaica, Britain, and the US, and it was said that Coxsone was anxious that he should not learn of this. (When in 1970 Jackie Opel was in a fatal car-crash on a highway in his native Barbados, there were some who attributed this to the effects of obeah.) Notwithstanding the financial imbalance between Studio One’s session musicians and the Wailers, Jah Jerry could not but help being struck by their extreme confidence on the ‘Simmer Down’ session. This was a mark, he was sure, of their regular, rigorous rehearsals.

      The Wailers, noted Johnny Moore, trumpet player for the Skatalites, had first come along to Studio One ‘more or less as the Impressions: they were dissuaded from going along that line, and influenced to go inside themselves, however silly or simple they feared what they found there might sound like. They were simply urged to try and cultivate their own thing. And it worked. Even at that age they knew what they wanted. From the time that they realised that trying to be the Impressions was not what they should be doing, they really checked themselves and got into it. You can hear it in the music.

      ‘At the time they were young and vibrant, and you could see they were very good friends: they were very, very close to one another. They really did care about each other. I guess that’s why they made a success of it as it was.

      ‘Bob didn’t necessarily seem like the leader. The thing was so closely knit, the sound, whatever they were trying to get at: that was the objective, the force of what they were trying to accomplish. Rather than worrying about you lead or me lead: everyone would put their shoulder and heave-ho. They seemed to realise that it’s much easier to get things done that way.’

      It was for professional reasons that Joe Higgs would accompany the group up from Trench Town to Studio One. ‘Wailers weren’t even conscious of sound when I started to deal with them. To hear that “Joe assisted with the Wailers” – this is foolishness. The Wailers weren’t singers until I taught them. It took me years to teach Bob Marley what sound consciousness was about. It took me years to teach the Wailers. For example, they will be going to make a record and I would go with them and there is somebody making constant mistakes. I would just have to take his part to get the record finished in time.’

      (Interestingly, at this time, Peter Tosh brought a potential singer called Leonard Dillon to Studio One. Although he would later form the Ethiopians with Aston Morrison and Stephen Taylor, Dillon recorded four tunes as a solo act for Coxsone Dodd, under the nom-de-disque of Jack Sparrow; he was backed on all of them by the voices of the Wailers, with the tunes arranged to an