The Unique Oral History of Bob Marley - 4

I intend to finish exactly in the same way that I opened the first of the four entries that dwelt on the 2017 biography called So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley by Roger Steffens by calling it a very unique narrative of who Bob Marley was in the eyes of those friends, relatives, business partners, music brothers and sisters who witnessed his life blossoming before it folded back to eternity.

Now understand this, Dennis Thompson might just be one other name you can read here but he is one of the World’s accomplished engineers. Just to mention a few, he has worked with Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Monty Alexander, Alicia Keys, Missy Elliot, Buju Banton, Marcus Miller, Dennis Brown, Steel Pulse, Burning Spear and of course, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh.

Dennis Thompson is one of the world’s best live show engineers. Steffens explains that Dennis Thompson joined the Wailers touring company in 1976. He was enlisted as an accomplished engineer as Bob recruited new members.

He first met Bob in the studios and hence also worked with him there for Bob’s productions. Thompson clearly state how Bob yearned for quality;

“Bob would do twenty tracks of “Ambush in The Night,” vocals, and he’d say, “Which one you like?” It’s all twenty, but we had to pick one. He never sang the same song same way twice. He do different moods, different feels. He was just prolific. That’s the kind of person he was.”

Bob was also a uniquely very generous human being. In Jamaica and abroad he helped hundreds and thousands of people.

This is well captured in the book through the eyes of Marley’s business manager Colin Leslie who stated that whenever Bob was in Jamaica his home would be filled up with people. It would be overflowing into the streets, down the sidewalks.

“We would go up into the late hours of the night. He would literally have people lined up and he would be interviewing them. Find out what were their particular needs. And there were all kinds of stories, all kinds of people. Women who had lost their baby father through political violence. People who wanted to set up various ventures.”

In the book Leslie also shared humour just to explain Bob’s bigheartedness. “I give you a little joke. Somebody came to him one day with an idea to set up, to produce and manufacture coconut oil. And Bob found it very funny, he would laugh and say, “I always wanted to be in the oil business.” So, he financed this guy!”

Leslie says if people wanted to buy and sell, and ‘he would interview them, literally interview them, and then he would send them to me and say, “Give them X amount of money.” And I would write the checks. This would go up till nine, ten, eleven, twelve at night. And I would just be writing checks, to give these people’.

Bob Marley did not only attract the ordinary mortals the book shows that Survival which he released in late 1979 had one of its biggest fans in John Lennon. It quotes Photographer Bob Gruen who revealed ‘that Survival was one of the only records the ex-Beatle played during his five-year house-husband exile in the Dakota building in New York’.

The book also talks of 1978, the year Bob flew to Africa for the first time. He landed in Kenya with a couple of friends in an attempt to visit Ethiopia ‘but his efforts were rebuffed until one day, as he walked down a street in Nairobi, a man recognized him and asked him what he was doing in Africa. When Bob told him, he was trying to gain entrance into Ethiopia, the man identified himself as an Ethiopian consular official and wrote him a visa’.

Steffens says the short trip opened Bob’s eyes to the reality of the situation in Ethiopia following the coup that had ousted Haile Selassie in 1974. ‘All images of His Majesty were forbidden. He was shocked that there was no evidence of the Rastafarian faith, except for the area around Shashamane in the Oromia region of the country’.