A caribbean motif tonite (see prior post).
I got wind of this book when an excerpt was published in – of all places – the Wall Street Journal. It turns out the author, Christopher John Farley, is an editor at the Journal, which probably explains how it ended up being excerpted there.
If you don’t know, Bob Marley is really the great popularizer of Reggae in Europe and the U.S., going back to the late 70’s and early 80’s. He was the rage when I lived in Jamaica from 1977 to 1979. His album Exodus was a hit at the time.
Marley died in 1982 of brain cancer, at the age of 37. The cancer may have been induced by the vast volume of ganja (that’s marijuana) he ingested in the form of giant spliffs in the prior 15 or 20 years.
Since his death, his fame has absolutely grown and grown. The album Legend, kind of a "Bob Marley and the Wailers" greatest hits album is one of the all time bestsellers worldwide. And Exodus was named the "album of the century" by Time Magazine.
Brigid and I are fans of Marley. In fact in April 2005, while visiting Jamaica, we stopped in the tiny village of Nine Miles to see where Marley was born. We were on our way from Runaway Bay on the north coast to the town of Mandeville where we had met and been married in 1979.
There’s a museum and a kind of shrine there, where he is buried. We didn’t go in but simply had a look in the gift shop and chatted to the museum "guides."
Here are a couple of pictures:
So now you have the background as to why on June 23rd I gave Brigid this book for our 27th anniversary . And one of my motivations for giving it was to read it myself.
In fact, the book is very good, very enjoyable. It takes you from Marley’s birth in 1945, discusses his family, the fact that his mother was black but his father was mostly white, his life as a poor boy in Kingston, and his musical aspirations. The author Farley was born in Kingston himself but raised in upstate NY and attended Harvard. He interviewed all the major people who are still living and knew Marley well. And there is an extensive bibliography.
There’s a whole heap of stuff about Jamaican culture, about the influence of slavery on the culture, and the author paints a nuanced picture of life in Jamaica in the 50’s and 60’s.
Marley was very much a man of his culture. A sincere Rastafarian, married at 21, at least seven children by four different women. Able to survive by his wits in a culture where many of the artists and producers carried guns as a matter of course.
Marley spent a good deal of time in the U.S. In fact he was a member of the UAW! He worked for several years in Delaware in a car parts factory. This all before the big breakthrough in 1972, when he produced through Island Records (through Chris Blackwell. Island Records was a British label.) his first big album, Catch a Fire.
So the book is a fine looking glass into Jamaica, it’s culture, and the group, Bob Marley and the Wailers. By the way, there were a number of people who moved in and out of the Wailers, but the two who were there the whole time were Peter Tosh (shot dead in his own house in 1987) and Bunny Wailer who is still making music in Jamaica.
The book inspired me to get an early album of the Wailers. A collection of ten of their early songs, the Millenium Edition. Good, but a rough album, in the sense that the songs were all produced in Jamaica, without exactly "state of the art" production facilities. And they lack the rock influence, which was probably crucial to driving their popularity overseas.
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