2023-04-19 11:03:26
As soon as it was born, the Jamaican music genre reggae became a global phenomenon 50 years ago. At the center was a charismatic young musician named Bob Marley. It was to his band’s advantage to be stranded in London with no money.
Many of the great reggae pioneers are gone. In the past three years alone, luminaries like Toots Hibbert, Lee “Scratch” Perry and Bunny Wailer have died. Bob Marley died of cancer in 1981 and his bandmate Peter Tosh was murdered in 1987. Both took center stage 50 years ago as the Jamaican music genre began to take over the world.
The singer Rita Marley, Bob’s widow, is disabled after a stroke but strong, says Herman Davis, aka Bongo Herman. The 79-year-old percussionist sits in a booth on the grounds of the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston. Photos hang around him, for example of him playing soccer with Marley and drumming with Prince Charles, newspaper clippings – one headline calls him a “percussion maestro” – and records and souvenirs that he sells.
A stop at Herman’s is part of the museum tour. He gives tourists a crash course in playing instruments with names like the cabasa, vibraslap, and shaker. In patois-heavy English, he talks about his appearance as a breakdancer in the 1978 film “Rockers”.
Herman has played with many reggae greats – including Marley. His group The Wailers – which basically consisted of him, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer – was known in their native Jamaica, even before reggae emerged as a music genre around 1968. But on the Caribbean island, which has been independent of Great Britain since 1962, it was not possible to make a living from music at the time, as Herman explains: “We were never really paid – only one pound per song.”
London, 1972: In the right place at the right time
Stuck in London with no money in late 1972, the Wailers went to Island Records founder and boss Chris Blackwell. They didn’t know him personally, but the largely Jamaican-raised Brit had distributed some of their early ska records in the UK. “Bunny got it in his head that I owed them money,” Blackwell wrote in his memoir The Islander, published last year.
He didn’t see it that way, but the Wailers were in the right place with Blackwell. The three, especially Marley, made an impression on him with their strong charisma, as he describes. “As I looked at her, I thought, shit, that’s the real thing. And her timing was good. Jimmy Cliff had just left me a week before.”
78-year-old Cliff is one of the most successful reggae musicians. Similar to the Wailers, the singer had gained notoriety in Jamaica at the time, but hardly earned any money and had not yet made his international breakthrough. David Katz, the US author of “Solid Foundation”, an oral history of reggae, as well as a Jimmy Cliff biography, tells the German Press Agency.
Blackwell brought Cliff to England to make him a star – but first as a soul singer, as Katz emphasizes, which didn’t work out. Blackwell promised Cliff by his own account to help him break through within two years. He got him the lead role in the 1972 Jamaican feature film The Harder They Come. “And then the film was delayed and delayed, and when it came out, it took years to make the money,” says Katz.
Today the film – starring Cliff as a young country man who comes to Kingston to be a singer but ends up in the underworld – is a classic. Cliff’s film music is credited with playing a major role in spreading reggae outside of Jamaica. But that took a few years. Running out of patience and money, Cliff left Island Records. “Maybe it was fate, I thought. Just as Jimmy stormed out, Bob, Pete, and Bunny walked in,” Blackwell, 85, recalls.
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He signed her immediately, and in April 1973 the album “Catch a Fire” was released – including the song “Stir It Up”. Blackwell had US rock guitarist Wayne Perkins play on the album to make the sound a bit more mainstream overseas. “It had the best of both worlds,” says Katz. “It was raw Jamaican with enough rock elements to make it accessible.”
“Catch a Fire” didn’t sell particularly well right away, but it did consistently over the years, Blackwell reports. According to Katz, the album was the launch pad for international recognition that would follow for Bob Marley and the Wailers – as the group was later known.
In 1973 the band toured the United States and released their next album, Burnin’, featuring the songs “Get Up, Stand Up” and “I Shot the Sheriff.” Shortly thereafter, Bunny and Tosh left the band. Marley became a global icon as a soft-voiced rebel.
The Show must go on
The Bob Marley Museum, in an upscale neighborhood in the capital Kingston, was formerly the Jamaican headquarters of Island Records before Blackwell gave the property to Marley. A “Marley Natural” brand shop has recently opened up there as well. Marijuana can be bought there and smoked in a side room. Smoking weed is part of the rites of the Rastafari movement, to which Marley belonged. The cover of “Catch a Fire” is a picture of him with a big joint in his mouth.
Marley was a God-sent musical prophet, says Bongo Herman, who grew up around the same time as Marley in Trench Town – a violent and poverty-stricken area of Kingston. “Reggae can’t die, reggae lives forever,” he says, pointing out how many people outside of Jamaica love the music – in Germany he has performed at major festivals. However, some of today’s reggae musicians have lost their way and drifted too much into hip hop, he says. For the right music you need the right musicians. “Many of us are still alive.” (dpa)
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