A Search For Jamaica With Bob Marley, 144,000Rastafarians, Burning Spear, Marcus Garvey, Haile Selassie, Christopher Columbus, Michael Manley, Perry Henzell, Swank and Time Magazines, Island Records, Chris Blackwell, Lee Perry, King Tubby, I Roy, U Roy, CBS, Peter Tosh, Country Man, Jack Ruby, Canadian Tourists, Bachelor Father, Big Youth, Burt Bacharach, Max Romeo, Ras Michael, Harry J. and LESTER BANGS.

The first thing that should be established is that I was only in Jamaica for a week, and there is no way to compress Jamaica or its incredibly rich music scene into one week, or one article. So what you are about to get is just the surface, the shell. But I hope that if you look beneath this surface you may begin, as I am, to figure out a lot of what is going on in Jamaican music, and a little of the turmoil currently besetting Jamaican society.

I can't say that this piece is really representative of that society, even from an outsider's viewpoint, because I never got out of Kingston, a bulletpocked industrial metropolis not dis-

similar to Detroit. Even though Jamaica is a country where 2% of the population has 80% of the money and the rest suffer some of the worst poverty in the world, it's also true that in Jamaica at its least urban the poor can live more comfortably than most other places in the world: build a simple house in the country, start a garden, grow food and herb, pick fruit off the trees or go to the ocean and catch fish. The trouble begins when country people come into Kingston, lured by promises of a better

You might as well enjoy yourself, rubberneck, and try not to get killed.

life in the big city. They end up in slums like Trenchtown and Jones Town, living in shacks and incredible squalor. The result, of course, is crime, and violence both "random" and "political."

Out of all this, however, like oppressed black people in other places before them, they have created a vital indigenous musical form called reggae. I'm not going to argue the merits of reggae here; it's still an acquired taste for the vast majority of U.S. listeners, white or black, so if you respond to it at all you will probably love it and if not you may find it an intolerably boring form of protracted ricky-ticky rhythm. Reggae has been intimately linked with the growing awareness on the part of Western Caucasians of Rastafarianism, a primitive mystical-religious sect which has been around Jamaica for several decades now. The Rastafarians believe that Marcus Garvey, father of the Back To Africa movement, was a prophet who foresaw the coming of Jah, the Savior also promised in the Bible, a Savior who would lead all oppressed black people to their Promised Land. Garvey said the Savior was coming in 1927, and in 1930 Haile Selassie was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia, ber coming the first black head of an

JAMAICA PART I

African state. Ergo, the Rastas believe that Selassie, who was born Ras Tafari and ruled Ethiopia till his death in the Seventies, was (is) Jah; and that soon he will return to bring the Rastas, who believe themselves to be the lost tribe of Israel, home to Ethiopia a.k.a. Zion. In the meantime, they'll have nothing to do with Babylon, the present system of things, as they await Armageddon as prophesied in the Bibles they read daily — they do not vote, instead espousing pacifism, anti-materialism, growing their hair out in long, wild, bushy patches called dreadlocks, and the smoking of lots of herb a.k.a.

This is Aquarius Records, a shop where the clerks are artists, platters are hot but not cheap, and your tympanic membrane waves goodbye.

ganja a.k.a. weed/tokes/dope to us which they believe to be a mystical sacrament of Jah and consume in great quantities. Soon, through the combined forces of Jah and higher herb consciousness, Armageddon will come in the form of a mystical revolution which will topple Babylon and set all Jah's children free to return to Para-, dise.

In other words, kind of a Third World cross between John Sinclair and Jehovah's Witnesses.

Out of all this has risen one major musical figure, who represents to Jamaicans approximately what Bob Dylan represented to white American college students ten years ago: Bob Marley. Marley and his group the Wailers have made four albums (plus two earlier ones in England and several more in Jamaica) which have made him a star among white youth in England, but is just beginning to break through in America, where reggae is still regarded as a bit of a curiosity by most white listeners and outright disdained by blacks. Which is how I, along with a raft of other white journalists and photographers, was flown down by Island records for a sort of Cook's Tour of Jamaican music and somewhat obligatory interview with Bob Marley.

I am on the phone with an L.A. rep for Island, who shall henceforth be referred to as Wooly, because of the cap this white lad wore, in imitation of the Rastas, throughout his stay in Jamaica. I tell him that, even though I love reggae with a passion that is threatening to cost me some friends, I have always considered Bob Marley's records rather cold and he is in fact my least favorite reggae artist.

He laughs. "Shhhh — you're not supposed to say things like that!"

"Okay, then, where's this guy Marley at?"

"Well, Bob's philosophy can be summed up in one word: "righteous.""

"Do you mean like righteous weed, or the righteous wrath of Jehovah, or righteous brothers and sisters living off the land...?"

"Well, kind of a combination of all three.

"I see — he's a hippie."

"Right."

Jamaica is still undergoing what might be termed a colonial hangover. It has no real indigenous population, not even a few scattered enclaves like the American Indians, because the original Jamaicans, the Arawaks, were all slaughtered by Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards. The island was for centuries but one protectorate in the British Empire, and in fact only declared its independence in 1962. Since then it has made very little progress towards autonomy, and there is a lack of motivation among most of the people that can be ascribed to more than the tropical climate. All the most negative connotations of "laid back" can be found in Kingston — people are slow, lackadaisical, facts get lost in the haze of ganja and time barely exists. "I'll be b&ck in 45 minutes" can mean three to six hours, "We'll get it together this afternoon" may mean tomorrow night or never at all. One writer on this trip claimed that every horoscope in the Daily Gleaner counselled "patience," and there is an expression that you hear .constantly which perfectly sums up the lazy, whenever - we - get - around - to -it tempo of Jamaican life: "Soon come." I think the discernible lack of motivation on the part of many Jamaicans can be ascribed to a rather complex combination of ganja, lack of education and having little to no idea what to do with themselves as a people in the absence of colonialism. A lot of people (especially Americans) feel that legalization of herb would be the answer to the island's economic problems; I think that the situation in Jamaica is the most persuasive argument I've ever seen for its non-legalization, and that the fact that everybody smokes it anyway does nothing to contradict that. Of course, the argument could be raised that the people resort so extensively to this dope, which is not nearly as strong as legend would have it and has the most trariquilizing effect of any I've ever smoked, to blot out their feeling of helplessness in the face of such facts as that Michael Manley, the current Prime Minister who came in on a liberal reform ticket, is now taking on some of the earmarks of a dictator. As for the Rastas, it makes sense that they should dream of a pilgrimage back to the cradle of Ethiopia since all black people in Jamaica are descended from people originally brought here as slaves, except for one hitch: the current government of Ethiopia is almost virulently anti-Selassie, and would i hardly welcome an influx of Jah knows how many thousand dreadlocked dopers with almost no skills or education. I highly doubt most of the Rastas know this, just as I doubt that most Jamaicans would know or care that their "freedom" has made the island perhaps more wide-open than ever for colonialist carpetbaggers.

This is Bob Marley. He be plenty hot live, not so much on wax, and an altogether amiable chap for being the Lion of Judah.

The Rastafarians may yet prove to be the first people in history to collaborate in their own exploitation by the music industry.

What all this has to do with reggae is that for most reggae connoisseurs the old-time Jamaican music scene is rabble-rousingly epitomized in The Harder They Come, the Perry Henzell film about a youth who records a song he wrote himself for an unscrupulous

(and archetypal) producer who pays him twenty bucks and tells him to scram. He is forced to resort to selling herb for money, the producer rips him off for all royalties, his dealings lead him to a shoot-out, and the great twist Upon which this intentionally amateurish film hangs is that the kid is Public Enemy Number One and has the Number One hit single at the same time; a Bob Dylan wet dream.

Understandably, this film is banned in Jamaica. But conventional wisdom has it that the music-biz situation depicted in it has been rendered a thing of the past, principally by the founderpresident of Island records, Chris Blackwell. When reggae first became a popular export, in England in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the big English reggae label was Trojan, where boxes of tapes with nothing but artists" names and song-titles printed by hand used to arrive, be waxed and sold with the artists in most cases receiving no royalties at all. It must be remembered that most of the people making this music come from poverty and illiteracy so extreme that they can have little to no idea of the amounts of money to be made from it; undoubtedly many have been satisfied merely to have a record released with their name on the label and voice in the grooves. In such a situation many vital performers and groups, such as the Pioneers and even Desmond Dekker (who had a U.S. hit in "69 with "Israelites") were allowed to die on the vine, and Chris Blackwell is the first exception to this — the first person to try to build the careers of individual reggae artists and a market for them.

Many people, however, feel that conditions for Jamaican musicians are much the same today as in The Harder They Come, even if most don't actually resort to picking up the gun. The content of the records being released has become increasingly geared to visions of Rasta revolution of the mind and heart, although it is difficult to see how Babylon could fall and leave the record companies standing, a paradox that your average Rasta musician is cosmically adroit at skirting. With all their talk of "Jah will provide," the Rastafarians may yet prove the first people in history to actively (if innocently) collaborate in their own exploitation by the music industry. Robert Johnson got ripped off too, but 1 doubt that it was a tenet of his religion. Then again, it may be that the Rastas are merely the logical extension of the sad lethargy, punctuated by random blasts of berserk gunfire, which permeates Jamaica like the smog steadily building over Kingston.

"Hey Marcus, you wan' drop in on the neighbors?" Two locals roll spliffs; in background, the Playboy Club.

Then again, that lethargy may be as illusory as many other things in Jamaica. The rude boys (Jamaican street punks of the early Sixties) were not lethargic, Marley has sung that "a hungry mob is an angry mob," and there is certainly no lethargy in a white person going to a black country, or shouldn't be if he values his skin. There is something almost obscenely ironic in the need to find exotic strokes in folks so far removed from you, who are not, at all, exotic to themselves; in the way white longs to lose itself in black.

Monday. Flying over Cuba, I first realized that I was heading for the celebrated Third World. All that means for us is poor people, poorer than you or I could probably ever conceive. There's no way they're not gonna hate our guts, there's no way you're not gonna be slumming no matter who you are — I had been told that they hate black Americans as well as white (a certain odd comfort in that), and when I got there I was to discover that the hatred you feel emanating from many Jamaicans has far more to do with class and economic status than race, and that many of them would display a genuine warmth that had nothing to do with fawning with seething guts for bwana's silver. So you /might as well enjoy yourself, rubberneck, and try not to get killed. It ain't no exotic tropical paradise to the natives; seem to remember a guy singing a song about tables turning, begin to see what it means.

Flying from Montego Bay to Kingston, impressions of Calitornia; green

hillsides dotted with elegant swimming pool split-levels below, but the music reverberating in my head bespoke only Trenchtown and was at such variance with what I saw down there that I could only wonder how long till they tear this place apart, burning and looting non-

"This is the only place I know where the rooster crows while I'm eating lunch."

metaphorically with no metaphysical ganja above-it-all possible. You wonder if you'll be able to visit this country at all in a few years, and your wonder increases during your stay as you read in the daily papers how Manley is chumming up with Castro, supposedly all because of a cane thresher developed by the Cubans whose blueprints could revolutionize the sugarcane business in Jamaica (where it's still cut by hand) and thereby perhaps save the economy. Meanwhile, the only people more violently anti-Communist than Cuban refugees are seemingly the people of Jamaica on all class levels; you wonder at times who they must hate more — the mindlessly patronizing American and Canadian tourists, or the Communists. In any case, there's something in the air that you can breathe and taste like emotional cinders, and it isn't love. When you get off the plane in Montego Bay and walk in to get your health card stamped, Disney World calypso natives in straw hats serenade you with backdrop of Holiday Inn sign, poster advertising the beaches of Negril (where all the white hippies go), and latrine-green plaque warning in two languages that smoking, possession or sale of ganja ("'marijuana," they add in parentheses for naive hiplets) is a crime punishable by imprisonment. From the

plane window, I look down and see a red lake, which I will later discover has been turned that hue and into a quicksand bog by bauxite mining on the part of the Alcoa corporation.

The first sound I heard on arriving in the Kingston airport was the muzak blasting a Jamaican imitation Otis Redding version of "Hey Jude," which I thought was funny enough until I discovered that Jamaican AM radio almost never plays reggae. After a week of very little beyond Helen Reddy and Neil Diamond, I would be anxious to get the hell out of this place and back home just so I could hear some Toots and the Maytals.

One of the interesting things about Kingston is that it is very 1'ttle more than a vast slum surrounding the ominous towers of babel in an enormous plasticpalm Sheraton hotel, from which tourists seldom venture and around the swimming pool of which a great deal of Island Records" business is conducted. This place has a Marcus Garvey Room (I peeked in the door; it looked like one of the places where I used to give speeches to Rotarian banquets in high school), but that is no reason why, upon arriving or anytime else, you should buy dope, "gold" bracelets or anything from the guys hanging around the parking lot. My colleague from Rolling Stone, arriving a virtual rube with no one to warn him, = purchased a rather small quantity of not | very good herb from one of these | characters for the outrageous sum of o $25. I have since decided that it is a truth, if not a right, that in Kingston you are going to get burned, regardless of race, creed or color, even if you never go out in the sun at all.

Tuesday. Another writer, the man from Swank, comes to my room and turns me on to the legendary herb. It's

good^ all right, but nowhere near the rep. It didn't move my attention to unexpected places, inflate trivial ideas into fascinating discursions, or even get me deeper into the music like American dope. It did, however, get me stoned.

Later we went with Wooly on a ride through Kingston. It reminded me of a drab melding of California and Detroit, with slums so bad they made the latter's look like the Sheraton. Wooly takes us to the studio of Lee "Scratch" Perry, one of the most prolific Jamaican producers. True to form, Perry is not home. The man from Time, who had stayed up all night when he got here finishing his last story and is on a tight schedule, is visible hassled, and in the car Mr. Swank begins to complain about the fact that everybody is waiting around for Marley to be ready to be interviewed. This writer had apparently been promised an audience with Bob yesterday, and is annoyed to learn that he will not be getting one today either.

Wooly patiently explains that no one can get a really good story on Jamaica without getting into the tempo of Jamaican life, and that everybody will take back from Jamaica whatever they bring there. Wooly is, obviously, very much taken with the tempo and lifestyle himself, even if he is staying in the Sheraton.

We go shopping at Aquarius Records, where I first experience the peculiar Jamaican syndrome of walking into one record store after another and asking for top hit singles or albums like Best of the Maytals, and being told again and again that they don't have them. I had a long list of records I wanted to buy, and was only able to obtain a few during my stay on the island. I discovered eventually that this was because the music business here (cf. The Harder They Come) was almost totally controlled by the producers, most of whom had their own record stores, where you pretty much had to go to obtain the records they had produced. And the records are not cheap, either — most albums are $6.00, one dub album was quoted at ten bucks to Wooly by a guy in Aquarius, and singles are a dollar. I wondered how a country as poor as Jamaica could support the highest per capita singles issue (30 released a week) in the world, and was told that Jamaicans almost never bought albums — apparently pressed mainly for export and reggaeloving American tourists — but would at times actually go hungry to have money for a single they wanted.

I was also impressed to learn that Jamaica is the only place I've been where people actually like to play music louder than I do. When you go in the record shops it blares at a volume perilously close to the pain threshold, as the clerk plays deejay, switching off between two turntables and two speakers, one in the shop and one on the street. So your head gets rattled back and forth like a pinball between two raucous tracks and one speaker in the distance and another right on top of you. It's jarring, and emphasizes the violence underlying the laid-back, "gentle" character of reggae. Many of these records may be little more than a rhythm with a guitar chopping out two or three chords, no solos except a guy hollering things you can barely understand over the whole thing; but that rhythm is rock steady, the guitars chop to kill, and the singer is, often as not, describing class oppression or streetwar. There is also a sense of listener-asartist that is one of the most beautifully developed I have ever encountered. In the first place, all the singles have an in-

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strumental version of the hit on the B side, so the deejays can flip them over and improvise their own spaced-out harangues over the rhythm tracks. Since Jamaican radio plays so little reggae, most of these deejays come off the streets, where until recently you could find, periodically, roots discos set up. Out of these emerged deejaystars like Big Youth and I Roy, and along with producers like Lee Perry and Augustus "King Tubby" Pablo they have pioneered a fascinating form of techologized folk art called dub. An album by I Roy can thank six different producers on the back "for the use of their rhythms." Don't ask me where the publishing rights go. Don't ask anybody, in fact. And don't ask how musicians might feel who play on one session for a flat rate, only to find it turn up on one or more other hit records. The key with dub is spontaneity, the enormously creative sculpting and grafting of whole new counterpoints on records already in. existence. And this sense of the guy who plays the record as performer extends down into the record shops, where the clerks shift speakers, tracks and volume levels with deft magicianly fingers as part of a highly intricate dance, creating sonic riot in the store and new productions of their own in their minds: I control the dials.

Wednesday. Waiting around the Sheraton pool for Marley. There is a mood, of exasperation with the celebrated Jamaican tempo, which many business-minded visitors seem to view with disgust so extreme it turns to amusement. An English musician, here to do sessions, laughed when I asked him if the state of the Jamaican music industry had undergone any significant alteration since The Harder They Come. "Things haven't really changed that much. Before Chris Blackwell set up Island, musicians got six dollars a session. Blackwell revolutionized things by doubling it and giving them twelve dollars a session, and I think by now it's up to fifteen. But I'll say this Blackwell may be the only person I've ever met in the music business, especially in Jamaica, with any integrity at all. I mean, all these guys like I Roy, making these hits — do you think any of them have any money?" He laughs again. "Maybe got nice car, mon." Of course we're all still involved in fucking colonialism and exploitation of the people here, with all these record companies. It's inevitable, there's no way around it. But I suppose there's a certain price we pay too, you see. I hate this fucking place, and can't wait to get out, because I can barely get a session started, much less done, becaiuse everybody's so fucking laid back you can't depend on anyone to be at a certain place at a certain time or get any work done. Drives me fuckin" crazy. It's all "Soon come, mon. Soon come.""

I also have an interesting conversation with a New York music biz veteran, who used to manage Mountain. Now he manages one of the top reggae acts in the world, one with records out in the USA, and he is down here trying to sign Peter Tosh, one of Bob Marley's ex-Wailers and writersinger of the currently big, banned Jamaican hit "Legalize It (And I'll Advertise It)." My New York vet laughs and says: "This is the only fuckin" place I know where the rooster crows while I!m eating lunch. It's the only place I've been where you can buy a 14 carat gold bracelet for ten bucks off a guy in the hotel parking lot, and when you look inside "carat" is misspelled. I've been here a fuckin" week, waitin" for one tape from Petdr Tosh."

"Why didn't you just go get it from him?"

"He never got around to making a copy yet."

"You mean he has it? Then why don't you borrow it from him and make a copy yourself?"

"Well, you see, when you go to the studios, the engineers may or may not be there, and if they are there they may or may not get around to doing this or that...Also Tosh wouldn't talk to the guy from Time magazine who wanted to interview him. Too establishment." He laughs again. (I later found out that Tosh did, eventually, speak to the Time writer.) As the subject turns to the reggae artist my friend already manages, he says that his charge "can't write very well. When he has to sign his name, he does it so slowly that it's embarrassing."

"Why don't you just tell him to get a rubber stamp?"

"I thought of that. He just tries to avoid having to sign autographs. As far as all the business stuff, of course, it's left totally to me."

"That must be quite a responsibility."

"You're npt kidding. He can't sign a contract, but I imagine he gets around to signing the royalty checks when they come."

I believe I just saw, in the tropics yet, the tip of an iceberg.

Dusk. Mr. Swank and Stephen Davis, a journalist who is doing a book on Jamaica, are finally getting their interview with Marley, and have asked me to come along. I would just as soon get it out of the way. There is very much the feel that it is an audience, and everyone is anticipating a difficult time with some cat who might well figure himself the Lion of Judah. Wooly

drives us there, and we wait by the car as he goes in Bob's house to check out the vibes. The house itself is a rambling ramshackle affair, a sturdy and capacious abode particularly by Jamaican standards yet looking curiously as if someone began a remodeling job three years ago and never got around to finishing it: pieces of the roof are literally falling out, and there are stacks of wood in back that serve nQ discernible purpose.

When Bob finally does appear, there is a sense of immediate relief: a slim, barefoot, medium-short, intensecounterranced man, he nevertheless projects an amiability that contradicts his reputation. As well he should: this guy is being billed, implicitly, as some sort of Noble Savage, a Jamaican cosmic revolutionary, and yet the truth is that while he was born in Jamaica he spent two years of his life in Wilmington, Delaware, where his mother still lives, and his father was a white lieutenant in the British arpied services. Even though it is getting dark now, there is some feeling in the'air that it would be uncool to do the interview (s) inside Bob's house, so first he leads us out to a corner of his front yard by the fence. I explain to him that this is no good, because the fence is by the street, and the noise of the passing cars will obscure our voices on the tapes. Which will be complicated already by the fact that like most Jamaicans and all Rastas, Bob talks in the indigenous patois that is so thick that The Harder They Come may well have been the first English-language movie in history to require subtitles in the United States. Of course, he could moderate the sometimes nigh-impenetrable patois enough to facilitate greater understanding, as many other Jamaicans that I met during my stay, from record producers to cab drivers, did — but then he would not be so apparently the most prominent media front-man for the Rasta Revolution. So what he does instead is speak more slowly than your average Rasta, and pause occasionally to ask us if we understand. I don't remember any of us ever saying no, even though we all agreed later that there were parts of Bob's spiel that went right by us.

We took a short trek across the lawn into Bob's back yard, where he perched on the hood of his blue BMW, leaned back against the windscreen spliff in hand, and answered all our questions between laying down the gospel of Rastafari. Often there would be spaces between his statements, .grand cumulous cannabinol ellipses, but all was cool. We three journalists massed our tape recorders together on the hood in front of Bob, and stood in a semicircle by the bumper, there being no place for us to sit, all of which helped to emphasize the sensation of gently ironic ethnocollision. Bob laughed often, dodged sticky questions like an old media hand, and in general maintained himself admirably for somebody who was probably stoned out of his fucking mind, as various other Rastas wandered out to lean on the car and listen in the gathering dark.

Stephen Davis began on mildly shaky ground, asking Bob if he felt any pressure since a lot of Jamaican musicians were waiting for his success to pave the way for reggae to make it big in the outside world. Bob laughed. "I never feel the pressure that much. Buttheah dat, is dat the reason for?. ..I never knoow..." He laughed again, and began to expound upon what he did know most intimately: "I have a message and I wan" to get it across...tha" message is...to live...y'know:. like evrabody believe in life an" death... anyone can live..,as a ffasta-man...so ...dat is all...I come as a Rasta-man now...so my message call da worP Rastafari..."

"Would you like to see white kids in the U.S. with dreadlocks?" I asked.

"Yeahmon!" He laughed. "Sure!... y'see...righteousness shall cover d'earth like da water cover d'sea... y'unnarstan...so...as far as we can go.. .we gonna live right.. .we're all jus" children on d'earth...but all mind — wiggy-woggy..."

"What do the Rastas think is going to happen in Jamaica?"

"Yehmon...yehmon, whoever over here has come, Rasta man mus" go over to Africa..."

"Will Rasta man settle for making Jamaica more like Africa and staying here?"

"No, no one settle for Jamaica...we like Jamaica, y'know, but — Jamaica spoiled...in a sense a Rasta man is concerned a history of Jamaica it has prophesy you know is someting no one can change. Jus" like if you have an egg an" break, no one can put it together again — Jamaica is like dat. Something, a must happen in creation, dat we from da wes", go back to da eas"...Jamaica canna fix for I & I, Rasta man. The only way Jamaica can be fix is we bow to the colonial type a thing what dem "bout..."

"Are you as disappointed," wondered Stephen Davis, not quite getting the point yet, "with the current government as a lot of other Rastas seem to be in discussions I've had with them?"

"Well! The present government — past, present — only one government me love: the government of Rastafari. Ca'I know-it, we don" live in dem guys" a-things, y'know, we live outside it. Come like a bird — we gon" check out certain things, because we know what is going on, we know dat the rule don" come down from uptown, some a

those guys a kick up hell mon, a nothing a goin" on..,"

"Are you concerned with changing government here in Jamaica, if Rastas don't vote?" asked Mr. Swan/c.

"This thing'll never change, mon. Y'see da beauty "bout it, "bout Jamaica, is dat we come from Africa, and none of the leaders they want to accept dat. All "em wan" call it Jamaicans, and we not Jamaicans. They all live a thing, you mus" say an" die here." Will the last person leaving Jamaica please turn out the lights.

"How many people do you think would go back to Africa if they gave them what they wanted?" nervously pressed Mr. Swank.

"Well, watch me. Today is not the day, mon, but 144,000, plus a multitude followed."

"What vyill be the Rasta reaction if there's a lot of violence?"

"Dem guys not dealing with twelve tribes of Israel. We not talking about govanment now, govanment wrong, we talkin" "bout de twelve tribes of Israel. We wan" the unity and the only unity we can get is troo Rasta. And the only way we can get the message troo right now is troo reggae."

Mr. Swank tried to bring it down to business: "Since Chris Blackwell has come down with Island records, he seems to be someone who can communicate very well with you...and uh the rest of the people making the music. But now CBS records, the big companies in America are catching wind of reggae and starting to come down, what do you see happening in that situation, big people from Babylon coming to exploit the music?"

"It happen faster. Jus" make the people, help to realize what is happnin", quickah. Canna stop it. Because it's not for the money, yoknow, and da big company, and a money, it's soon ovah. Because if weah brothahs da money is nothing between us." Right, and all Bob Dylan started out wanting was some couches and motorcycles. Marley did, however, have some advice for fledgling reggae musicians: "You have to be careful, ca you can get tricked, out deah. People have rob me, y'know, but once you can see dat dis is what happen, I know or I see dat dis happnin", den dat trick don" go on, y'know." He laughed. "You make record an" sell it, don" get no royalties in Jamaica for long time...Lak Trojan Records rob me, mon! All Trojans robbers, mon, all dem English companies jus" take Wes" Indian music."

Stephen Davis observed that it seemed that you never heard reggae on the radio in Jamaica. "Because," testified Bob, "da music js da type o" thing would show up the situation in Jamaiica dat some people don" like to

hear the real trut", y'know. So dem not sayin" what really happnin" down heah. But when dem don" play it on da radio, man, de people "ave it in dem house. Goin" dance an" hear it. Radio is important, but once de music come out and dem don" wan" play on d'radio, den big promotion is dat once it's banned evrabody wants ta hear it!" He laughed again.

"But," insisted Swank, "didn't Manley promise that he wasn't gonna ban songs?"

Bob just smiled. "I dunno abouat, mon...Manley can" stop prophesy... prophesy well "ave its coorse..." Someone questioned him about the Rastas" reputation for nonviolence, and Bob surprised us all with "No, Rastas physical. Y'know whai mean, we don" come lak no sheep to da slaughta..."

"Like wan time," added a Rasta who had been leaning over the hood of the car, listening. It had gotten so dark that I could barely see Marley's face, and this other guys's dreadlocks looked like a tarantula crawling down his forehead.

"Like wan time," said Bob. "We don" ovalook war."

"With the situation in Kingston now, do you ever fear for your personal safety?" asked Davis.

"Nossah," said Bob. "No mon, me no fraid for them. I mean, if cart avoid dem, will avoid dem, goin" down street, see a roadblock, and dere is a street for me to turn off before I reach da roadblock, you bet I'm gon" to turn off! It's no good I ever get searched."

"Ever been in jail?" I wondered. It was a stock question, actually.

"Yeh, wan time.

"For what?"

He took a long toke. "Drivin" witout license." And laughed. So did we all, but then Swank took the offensive once more. "Do you feel that this car represents Babylon?"

Bob seemed genuinely surprised. "The car? System represent Babylon, system represent death, we livin" in da system —"

"I was just wondering how you could feel you could have this, while —"

"Is no have dis, mon," replied Bob simply, and knocked on the hood of the car . We had been told the day before by Wooly that Bob had said the BMW stood for Bob Marley & the Wailers, so Swank offered this out somewhat sarcastically, and Bob came back, good natured as ever, with an even worse joke: "British Made.. .Warcar..."

I tried to smooth things over, in my own bumbling liberal way. "So then this car belongs to all your brothers and sisters as well as you?"

"Belongs road, mon!"

Davis asked Bob what he thought about people coming down to ask all these questions. "Well," said Bob, "as long as dem get da right understanding of da answers and write it...because plenty time, plenty guys just write for kicks, y'know, like jus" turn in a joke ting is goin" on^, an" is serious ting..."

Marley, was riot amused by a certain recent interview in which a writer from New York asked him such questions as "Where did you get your jeans?" and "When you were in New York, did you go shopping at Bloomingdale's?"

Still, he did not seem such a solemn fellow when all was said and done, so I asked him, referring to an old Jamaican motor sport, whether he had ever rammed a goat in this car. There was much laughter all around, after which he explained "No no no, don" think dat, man, people need live good purpose man...when you see a goat, you are suppose to stop, communicate to de goat, and make de goat knows de outcome...a goat's smart, y'know... when you hit a goat, man, you sad!"

"Yes, Rasta," interjected the Rasta on the other side of the hood with the tarantula on his brow. Bob then explained that ramming a goat was considered unlucky. By now most of us were packing up our tape recorders, readying ourselves for the trek back to the Sheraton, but Mr. Swank struck for one more shot at social relevance: "This is an election year, isn't it, coming up?"

Bob took a long hit on his spliff. "Yeah? Dat so?"

The Rasta with the tarantula clarified: "You can't serve two masters wan time, y'know." Another, feistier member of the brethren behind him, decided to take Mr. Swank on: "Do you know about da twelve tribes of Israel?"

This, for Swank, was the last straw. "Of course I do — I'm Jewish!"

"Oh yah? What tribe you belong?"

"Well, uh, I'm not exactly sure —"

"Yah? Then how you know you member twelve tribes?"

"Because my father told me!" t

"Your father???!!!" The Rasta thought, apparently, that Swank was referring to his Father in Heaven.

"Yeah, my father and mother!"

"Oh, you parents!"

"Yeah!"

"You read tha Oly Bible?"

"Of course!"

"All da way troo?" This guy was obviously not going to be easily convinced; from the beginning, several of those in attendance had been observably suspicious of the motives of these white foreigners with tape recorders. Marley just sat back smoking and laughing. Mr. Swank, who in his life had been known to take amphetamines for his weight and est for his personality, was getting frazzled, finally allowing himself to get truly combative after

having to wait on Marley and suffer evasive answers. "Yeah, I read it all the way through!"

"How long it take you?" demanded the Rasta.

"Whattaya mean, how long — it was a long time ago!"

Triumph: "You read wan chapter a day, you can read da whole Bible in tree an" a half years!"

Swank backed off enough to see the discretion of not countering with a "So what?" In fact, he didn't have much of anything to say at all, just now, and the Rasta leaped into the breach, accusing him of not really being a member of the twelve tribes of Israel, since he didn't even know which one he belonged to. They argued a bit, and Swank eventually allowed as how it was quite probably that he belonged to the tribe of Levi. I think at that moment he would ha\>e practically sworn an affidavit to that effect. So now he could slip out of further wranglings, Bob could go in his house for supper, and the Second and Third Worlds could, for this one evening at least, part gracefully and with a nice buzz on.

(Part Two of this article will appear in next month's CREEM.)