Neither of us have much interest in Reggae or Bob Marley, but the tour of his house/museum that we took this morning was fascinating. A must-do thing while in Jamaica.
For the even-less-uninitiated than us, Marley died in 1981 of a brain tumour and is easily the famous most Jamaican of all time. And possibly the richest, although he’s worth more dead because his albums keep selling, so really his kids are doing the best out of his work!
Son of a white English army captain and a woman from the Kingston suburb of Trench Town, but there wasn’t much more about his parentage. Apparently he didn’t grow up knowing his Dad yet his mother had Marley in her name so maybe they were briefly married, not sure.
His house here in Kingston has been turned into a shrine and we took the hour-long tour of it, seeing all his awards, rooms wallpapered with newspaper clippings, his favourite clothes, his bedroom, his kitchen etc etc
And in the audio/visual part of the tour they showed parts of his various concerts and interviews with him in the later years of his life.
Being spring chickens that Simon and I are, we didn’t realise that one of the last concerts he did was at Western Springs in Auckland in 1980 – the footage of it is hilarious with the clothes/hairstyles of the hip young Kiwis smoking huge joints in the crowd.
The other thing we knew nothing about was the assassination attempt on Marley’s life, at his house while he and Wailers were jammin. We stood in the room where it happened and put our fingers in the bullet holes left in the wall.
Marley went into exile in London for 18 months after that. The tour guide said the masked gunmen were thought to have mistaken Marley’s Rastafarian message for political statements, when Marley was supposedly just a spiritual believer.
He got grazed by the bullets on his chest and one bullet lodged in his left arm. He didn’t get it removed because the doctors said it might paralyse his arm which he kinda needed for the guitar!
So sad that he died so young, aged 36. He got this nasty brain tumour despite living a relatively healthy life, he never touched alcohol, ate no meat, no dairy. Strict vegetarian plus a large consumption of ganga.
His influence and success seems to be something most Jamaicans are proud of. Especially the tour guide that we had. She peppered her talk by singing snippets of Marley songs and explained the meaning to them.
“Three little birds, sitting my the doorstep, singing sweet songs …. Saying, this is my message to you you you. Don’t worry, bout a thing, cos every little thing is gonna be alright…”
This is reference to the three backing vocalists Marley had, one of which was his wife. Apparently they used to sit on the doorstep at this house we were at and all tell him not to worry about anything cos every little thing was going to be ok. Reverse nagging by the sounds of it.
There is a famous photo that I’ve seen of him sitting on this doorstep so they obviously spent a lot of time there, telling him “sweet songs”.
In the little documentary we saw, it ends with Marley speaking and he said the world should not care about skin colour – “Black, white or shiny, colour doesn’t matter. We should live in peace together.”
Hear hear!
One Love.
