Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

Clement Dodd would let Bob Marley live at the studio, and sleep in a back room they’d use for auditions or rehearsals. Bob was unable to put his head down, however, until the sessions had ended, often late-late in the night. And when he did, he often found his sleep was strangely disturbed, as though perhaps there was someone else in the room with him.

      The Wailing Wailers had become the roughneck archetype of the three-piece harmony group, a specifically Jamaican form of high popular art that was more usually burnished to a shining gloss. By such members of their peer group as the estimable Alton Ellis, the group was considered to be very strong indeed. ‘They have a different sense of music than us, and we all love it. It wasn’t so much dancehall. Bob’s sound was always different: it mesmerised me from those times. His music always have a roots sense of direction. Not even just the words – I’m talking about the sound, the melody that him sing, the feel of the rhythm. Always a bit different.’

      This sense was complemented in live performances. ‘Bob was always this ragamuffin onstage. We – myself, people like John Holt in the Paragons – were more polished and act like the Americans. Him was a rebel: jump up and throw himself about onstage. The Wailers them just mad and free: just threw themselves in and out of the music, carefree and careless.’

      Miming to their records, the Wailers would appear all over Jamaica at dances at which the Downbeat sound system would play. This was a regular Coxsone strategy. ‘That’s how we got them launched. With several other of my artists, we used to tour the country parts.’ The Wailing Wailers made more hits: ‘I Need You’; ‘Dance With Me’, a rewrite of the Drifters’ ‘On Broadway’; ‘Another Dance’; and the ‘Ten Commandments of Love’, an extraordinary interpretation of the Aaron Neville song. And there were more tunes that seemed like messages direct from Rude Boy Central: ‘Rude Boy’ itself, late in 1965; ‘Rule Dem Rudie’; ‘Jailhouse’, another paean to rude boys, containing the lines ‘Can’t fight against the youth now/ ’Cause it’s wrong.’ Small wonder that such tunes took off with Jamaica’s teenagers, of whatever social origins.

      Shortly before Christmas of 1964 the Wailers were at Studio One, recording a version of the standard ‘White Christmas’, using a two-track recorder. It was Peter Tosh’s idea to change the lyrics so that they contained greater authenticity for citizens of the tropical Caribbean: ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, not like the ones I used to know.’ At the same session they recorded ‘I Left My Sins’ and ‘Sound the Trumpet’ – on which Johnny Moore took the solo on the instrument.

      Religious holidays, specifically Christmas and Easter, were always counter-balanced in Jamaica by temporal celebrations, with top acts playing several morning shows, and literally running between the various venues, as they could not risk relying on the tardy bus service: from the Ward Theatre show, the Wailers would hurry up Orange Street, and along Slipe Road, to the State Theatre; further up Slipe Road they would reach the Regal on Old Hope Road; and then they would rush to the Carib, at the top of Slipe Road in Crossroads Square.

      Enormous sartorial efforts would be made by the audiences, many clad in top hats and white gloves, wearing pleated and frilled shirts and carrying walking canes – as though they were attending an evening at London’s Café de Paris, rubbing shoulders with royalty.

      The Wailers’ first exposure to such shows came on Christmas Day of that year. Their first significant live performances since enjoying chart success – ‘Simmer Down’ alone had sold 80,000 copies – the group was determined to wipe the floor with any opposition. Accordingly, they had assiduously rehearsed for over six weeks; warming up on the local beach with a game of football, they would practise until their act was an explosion of choreographed gymnastics, each member adept at splits and snap-falls. Bob, for example, would take Bunny and throw him in the air, fall to the floor as Bunny performed a perfect pair of splits above him, then rise into a kneeling position as Bunny jumped over his back; tall Peter, meanwhile, would balance and bounce Bob and Bunny like rubber balls. And, onstage, all this would take place as they assumed their customary vocal positions at the microphones. Beverley Kelso, meanwhile, was left to dance on her own, off to one side of the stage.

      Many of these shows were put on by Coxsone Dodd – the Ward Theatre event was always one of his promotions – while Victor ‘Captain Daddy Glasses’ Sampson, Tony Cobb, Ronnie Nasralla, and Clancy Eccles would also promote these morning concerts.

      At the Palace Theatre event on 25 December 1964, also promoted by Coxsone Dodd, the Wailers were backed by the Skatalites. Bouncing on to the stage as though they were in the full gaze of the sun on their sandy rehearsal space, the Wailers leapt into their first number, inevitably, ‘Simmer Down’. As the choreographed performance and heartfelt vocals of these new local heroes grabbed the audience’s attention, Dodd stood at the side of the stage in awe: great secrecy had surrounded the Wailers’ rehearsals for their Christmas Day shows, and he was thrilled by the sight of their routines. ‘Simmer Down’ was followed by ‘I Don’t Need Your Love’, ‘How Many Times?’, a version of the Impressions’ ‘I’m Going Home’, and ‘Amen’, which had been the B-side of ‘Simmer Down’. During the next number, ‘It Hurts to be Alone’, in the middle of a guitar solo by the masterful Trinidadian Lynn Taitt, the electrical power for the entire building cut out, infuriating the audience.

      The Palace was located in a district controlled by a don with whom Coxsone Dodd had had some bad run-ins. Known as Big Junior, his reputation had been considerably bolstered in 1962 when he had appeared as one of the Three Blind Mice, a trio of hitmen, in the opening sequence of Dr. No, the first James Bond film to be shot, set largely in Jamaica. Due to their previous history, Coxsone assumed that the power had been cut by Big Junior’s gang to sabotage his promotion: after all, during the outage, a crew had rampaged through the packed crowd, snatching chains, bracelets, and wallets.

      Hardly according with the season of good will, the audience raged on, yelling abuse and showering bottles like rain on the stage. In the dark, the Wailers nervously felt their way backstage, all of them squeezing into a single toilet together and hiding for at least an hour, feeling the storm of anger coming closer.

      Suddenly the lights came back on: the loss of electricity had had nothing to do with Big Junior – the power-cut had been city-wide, and the don and his men were innocent of causing the outage. Eventually, the concert resumed. ‘When the show started again,’ said Beverley Kelso, clearly impressed by the boys’ gymnastic efforts, ‘Bob coming from one side like he was flying, Peter coming from one side like he was flying, flapping their arms, because they couldn’t dance.’ (Her assessment, of course, is markedly different from Derrick Morgan’s view of Bob Marley as a superlative dancer.)

      The riot, however, immediately enhanced the Wailers’ reputation and legend. When they arrived later that day at the Ward Theatre, the crowd saw Bob and lifted him up on to their shoulders.

      After the riot, the Wailers wrote the song ‘Hooligans’ about Big Junior. Another song also emerged from that Christmas morning, written by Peter Tosh: ‘Jumbie Jamboree’ with its newsworthy line ‘What a jumbie jamboree take place in the Palace’ – ‘jumbie’, a word that was by then old-fashioned in Jamaica, was a synonym for ‘duppy’. Both these songs, along with ‘Diamond Baby’ and ‘Playboy’, were recorded almost immediately, this time using a two-track recorder. (By now, Joe Higgs had established himself as a regular presence at Wailers sessions, sharpening up any harmonies he felt were too blunt. It was at one of these Studio One sessions that Coxsone, disagreeing with Joe, punched him in the eye, affecting his sight; it was always said that Coxsone, who had also kicked and punched his helper, ‘Little’ Lee Perry, would wait until you turned away before he hit you.)

      Although each of the Wailers had only received a fee of £7 for the Palace gig, Coxsone Dodd was so delighted with the ultimate success of this chaotic show that, immediately after they came offstage, he gave them all a bonus of £3 – and topped it up with another pound per person at the studio the next day.

      By the time they came to play their second big-production live show, in Montego Bay, ‘Mr Dodd’ had decided to give Beverley Kelso £2 for a new dress; when Peter and Joe Higgs learned of this, they tried to get her to share the money with them.