Roger Steffens: Some people thought it was a simple tourist song. The elections were announced after the concert was already set and there was no way Bob at that point could say, “I’m gonna cancel the concert,” because then it would be interpreted politically. And I believe that the political forces, more or less, were behind the scenes and manipulating that event into something that might, they thought, be helpful in the long run. It was a lineup of the top bands of the time. But he did not want to be swept into something where he was going to be used. I think there was a certain amount of that he was willing to go along with. Bob was conscious that it could be interpreted politically. Jeff Walker: Although there were efforts made on the Wailers’ part to divorce it from politics, it was specifically announced as cosponsored by the Ministry of Culture. I devoted an entire four-hour Reggae Beat broadcast to the Smile Jamaica events in 1985, and interviewed both Stephen Davis and Jeff Walker on it. He and his wife, photographer Kim Gottlieb-Walker, spent a great deal of time in Jamaica in 19. Roger Steffens: Jeff Walker was the West Coast director of publicity for Island Records, based in the label’s Hollywood headquarters and responsible for all publicity for Bob as well as all of the Wailers and Island’s other reggae artists. So for all intents and purposes, and indeed appearances, it looked like this was a benefit for the People’s National Party, which was Michael Manley’s party. So there was politics involved from the beginning. To do a large concert like Bob wanted to do, it all had to be done almost directly through the prime minister’s office. Because even to mount a small concert in Kingston, you had to have approval of the government. Now obviously, to do a concert like that, it might be a bit naive to say that there was no politics involved in this in the beginning. Then Manley called for elections right after the concert was announced, so it would look like, at the height of the battle for Jamaica, that Bob Marley and the Wailers would appear to support the PNP. It had no political overtones, except, of course, the fact that there was a huge battle for the soul of the nation it was an election year. It was set up for the National Heroes Park. Bob wanted to do something like that, a benefit concert. Stephen Davis: Stevie Wonder had done a concert the previous year in aid of blind children in Jamaica. Others have claimed that it was Bob himself who approached the government for permission to do such an event.Īuthor Stephen Davis wrote one of the first, and best, biographies of Marley and studied the shooting extensively. He wanted Bob and others to perform in a free public event. The Smile Jamaica concert, headlined by Marley, was to take place two nights later, and the atmosphere in the city was tense and filled with violence.Ĭharles Campbell, a PNP government official in 1976, told me at the Reggae Sun Ska Festival in France in 2011 that it was he who had come up with the idea six months earlier, in June of that year, for a kind of concert of national unity. Roger Steffens: Bob’s life came within inches of ending on December 3, 1976, when a carload of assassins drove into a suddenly unguarded Tuff Gong at 56 Hope Road and opened fire on everyone in sight. This exclusive advance excerpt focuses on the 1976 assassination attempt that almost took Marley’s life. Reggae historian and archivist Roger Steffens’ new book So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley tells the legendary musician’s life story through 40 years’ worth of interviews with bandmates, family members and Bob Marley himself.
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