Read Online Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright by Hank Bordowitz - Free Book Online

music. Marley says he never heard of Eric Clapton until he heard Clapton’s “Sheriff.”
    His uncle and granduncle, “all dose type o’ people,” played blues, but not American blues—more like gospel, more funky, more a country kind of music. Then Clyde McPhatter’s “What Am I Living For?” was a big song with Marley, and there was Otis Redding and Sam Cooke and James Brown later in life. Now he’ll go to parties in Jamaica and dance all night to “every’tin, every’tin at all.” There’s a man in Jamaica who plays a bamboo saxophone that is “aaaah dangerous!” Marley’s manager, a man who seems to suffer from that peculiar kind of hyperthyroid condition of the mind common to his trade loosens up here to confirm Bob’s assessment of the man with the bamboo saxophone.
    And then maybe—yes, definitely maybe—the Wailers will play a “Midnight Special.”
    The conference ends with Marley, laid back in his chair, vastly amused. As we depart, he is dancing a soccer ball on his toes.
    It is now Saturday night, and the Wailers are waiting in the wings of Manhattan Center while your standard Caribbean dirty comic throws a little schtick to the winds. “Take my wife, man,” says Marley’s press man by way of comment. This Manhattan Center is very odd: It looks like it’s filled with Black accountants, really clean. When Marley begins his act—second exposure confirms that it is an act in the accepted showbiz variety of the term, and not quite a spontaneous burst of Rastafarian exuberance—there is in fact an active degree of boredom at large, as if this is something cooked up by the Tourist Board. There is definitely something wrong. The sound is totally screwed. Klieg lights bathe the multitude in brilliant white light at the most inappropriate moments.
    Applause follows each number, nice and sedate. It’s like everyone has a cold. Marley gives up and leaves the stage without so much as a war cry. You remember that he is an outlaw in Jamaica, not exactly your Mantovani of the Island-Paradise. Not polite, not harmless, not even entertaining.
    But then, after he’s gone, something else begins to happen. There is, to begin with, a rapid exodus of well-clothed human turkeys, slowly followed by a huge rumble of shouts for more from what is left of the audience: dreadfolk. All of a sudden they’re there, and Marley, vindicated, comes back again for a three-song encore. The joint commences to jump and it’s strange: It’s almost a private party here now, almost like the old Stones or the New York Dolls or a damn good high school dance. It’s a question of a thousand people swaying in unison, far away from home and even further away from talkin’ to the boss. It’s kinky reggae, and it’s hypnotic once again. Marley stretches out his arms and hovers in the flat white light like a crucified bird, feeling the bass notes buzz up through his legs and moving softly to their rhythm as the music thunders on and on.

Musicmakers:
Bob Marley and the Wailers
by Vernon Gibbs
( Source : Essence, January 1976 )

    W ITHIN the past year Bob Marley has led his band, the Wailers, from relative obscurity to international acclaim. Marley’s volatile personal image and the ragged lope of the Wailers’ music have made them the most exciting exponents of the Jamaican popular music known as reggae. It seemed only logical that they be chosen as the Jamaican headliners for the first international “dream” concert held recently in Kingston, Jamaica.
    The concert, which featured Stevie Wonder, came to a tumultuous conclusion as Wonder and Marley joined each other in performing their respective hits, “Superstition” and “I Shot the Sheriff.” And long after Marley had left the stage, people shouted his name.
    To many Jamaicans Marley’s Rastafarian involvement makes him far more than just another entertainer. Rastafarian “philosophy” and imagery have in the last five years gained more than a toehold among the