The Unique Oral History of Bob Marley Part 3

Let me this week delay by a week winding up the review of the 2017 book called So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley by Roger Steffens which we have been talking about the past two weeks.

I will start by trying to clear the misconception that suggests that Peter Tosh and Bob Marley never saw each other eye to eye soon after the breakup of the Wailers Band which they co-founded with Bunny Wailer.

This unique book that tells Bob Marley tales known and unrevealed, clearly indicates that in the mind of Tosh, the disintegration of the group, was the rebirth of three better musical entities which was for the benefit of music lovers.

The book quotes Tosh in verbatim: “Well, was not a breakup, you know, is just going three different ways and sending the music in three different directions. Was just that my inspiration was growing and my cup filled and runneth over. . .. One man grow mango, another grow pear.”

About the reasons that informed him to leave, Tosh says ‘it was a ras-claat and pure fuckery… the company wasn’t living up to their side of the agreement, the respect and everything that was due, was pushed aside. And we couldn’t take them fuckery there, because after having twelve years of experience of what reggae music is, the first thing Chris Whitewell (Blackwell) told us was that it would take him five years to build us. That was after we knew all that we know, it was going to take us another five years of twelve to build us again. I want to know what else he was going to put on us.’

When it was clear that the three personalities that had transformed the World Reggae face will never again operating on the same wavelength, Bunny Wailer decided to create labels that later became his and Tosh’s, these are the Solomonic and Intel-Diplo.

“I brought the two of them to Peter and just say pick one and he picked Intel-Diplo.” Wailer states in the book that the Solomonic Production was therefore destined to be his label. He gloats that he designed the two labels and that Intel-Diplo is very deep.

Basically, it came from the same base of reasoning where he says the Biblical King Solomon was an intelligent diplomat. “…I only shorted it. Either one of them would mean just the same, because King Selassie I say we have to live as intelligent diplomats among men, so you have to be wiser than the serpent and more harmless than the dove’.

Another book’s highlight is where Roger Steffens also talks about one of Bob’s albums called Burnin’. He washes his hands by writing: “Let the final word on the eternality of Burnin’ rest with Jon Pareles, the eloquent chief pop critic of the New York Times.”

This is the case because he says in 1996, the Times’s Sunday magazine celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary of publication, and asked each of its critics to choose one work of art in their field that they believed would survive a hundred years into the future.

Pareles chose Burnin’, immortalizing it with these eloquent words quoted in the book: “Bob Marley became the voice of third world pain and resistance, the sufferer in the concrete jungle who would not be denied forever. Outsiders everywhere heard Marley as their own champion; if he could make himself heard, so could they, without compromises. In 2096, when the former third world has overrun and colonized the former superpowers, Marley will be commemorated as a saint.”