The godfather of ganja, Marley is closely associated with cannabis. The most enduring image of the reggae star in pop culture is with a spliff in hand, smoke billowing, and his face has been slapped on everything from T-shirts and hats to ashtrays and rolling papers. But his advocacy of herb was more serious than those university room posters would suggest.
As a Rastafarian, smoking weed was a religious ritual for Marley, who believed wholeheartedly in its spiritual and medicinal properties. Herb is good for everything. An offshoot of christianity, Rastafarianism is a political and religious movement inspired by Ethiopianism and Pan-Africanism, which emerged in Jamaica in the s.
While Marley was raised a Catholic, he became interested in Rastafariansm when he moved to Kingston as a teenager, before converting during the s his wife Rita was also a devout Rasta. He was — and still is — by far the most famous Rastafarian of all time, taking its message of peace, unity and love to the world through his music. In the s, he made Jamaican international footballer Allan "Skill" Cole his tour manager, and was regularly spotted playing with his team in parks, fields, car parks and even in recording studios.
Held at the Waldorf Astoria, it was presented by African delegates in recognition of Marley's efforts on behalf of millions of disenfranchised black people around the world. In July , doctors found a malignant melanoma in his toe, which was discovered because of a football injury contrary to urban legend, the injury did not cause the cancer, and was merely a symptom of.
The doctors recommended he have the toe amputated, but he refused because of religious reasons, and by the cancer had spread throughout his body. Sadly, Marley never made the full journey from Germany to Jamaica, and died on route in Miami in May 11, Marley was buried in his homeland along with a football, his Gibson Les Paul Guitar and a bud of marijuana.
Chris Walter. Williams is former senior international affairs writer for the Los Angeles Times. A foreign correspondent for 25 years, she has won five Overseas Press Club awards, two Sigma Delta Chi citations and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. She left The Times in All Sections. About Us.
B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. The recent deluxe version of Catch a Fire includes the original "Jamaican mix" of the album, before Island's Chris Blackwell dressed it up with studio overdubs and a fresh remix to make it more palatable to Western ears. Released in , at a time when box sets were reserved largely for the Bob Dylans and Eric Claptons of the world, it covered Marley's career in in-depth detail, from his earliest recordings through to his posthumous releases.
With fantastic liner notes from Salewicz and loads of previously unheard tracks, it set a high bar for the box sets that continue to flow from record companies' vaults.
But when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, on the independence night, Bob Marley and the Wailers top the bill at a huge concert, because his songs are those that inspired the guerrillas fighting out in the bush," Chris Salewicz says of Marley's remarkable performance.
For Marley it was a spiritual homecoming of sorts. It was a powerful time in his life to be part of something that he spoke about and sung about. It's Bob Marley. That's because he spoke—he speaks—to the oppressed and the downtrodden. In other words, he spoke to 90 percent of the planet. He doesn't really like politics, but on the other hand he's appalled by the level of oppression that he sees people suffer.
That's what so many of the songs are about, and this is one of the best. For me, it was the closest I've ever been to what I guess you'd call a religious experience. Nothing has touched me like that since.
So I followed him back to his hotel, and that's how I struck up a friendship with him. According to Bunny Wailer, in an interview for the film Marley, to cure stage fright Bob Marley used to take Wailer and Peter Tosh to a local Kingston graveyard at 2 a.
This performance of the classic "Lively Up Yourself," from Marley's tour to support his Exodus album, features the latter-day version of the Wailers, along with superb backing vocals from the I Threes, in peak form.
I thought Catch a Fire was a phenomenally great record so I went to see him play at the Speakeasy in London in of May It was the Wailers then, not just Bob Marley. I thought that was absolutely sensational. It was very otherworldly. It was like nothing I've experienced before.
And 'Concrete Jungle' was a real highlight. So that was really impactful to me. It's albums," Ziggy Marley says. Just the fact that it wasn't that well-received by critics, who thought that the album was like a sellout and not reggae or roots enough, well, I like that, because Bob does what he wants to do. Bob's music is Bob's music.
You can't really nail it down to roots reggae or something. It's Bob's reggae. But I'll tell you something, it's easier to pick the rebellious songs, but what I liked about Bob was that he was like a double-edged sword. On one side, he was the kind of rebel, rude boy, but on the other side, he was kind of a spiritual lover.
They weren't one-dimensional, these people. They weren't caricatures. They embraced the range of human emotions. Sometimes you had to fight, but you also had to sometimes know when to stop fighting and make love. From a s MTV video, to an equally suspect Jamaican tourism commercial, Bob Marley's best-known, and most commercialized, song is still one of his greatest.
They perform a lot of it. There's also this great interrelationship between him and his audience. It was a sort of breakout moment for Bob. Again, it's the interactions with the audience and the excitement, the way that people just rushed down to the front of the venue onto the stage as soon as they come on. It was kind of breathtaking. Late-period Bob Marley and the Wailers at their finest. Bob came into my life at the perfect time to kind of show me how I could be all I could be without compromise.
There it is. Bob didn't anglicize or Americanize himself. He did his thing and people either dug it or they didn't. Luckily for Bob, for the most part, they dug it. This excellent dub instrumental album of Marley classics was released on vinyl and CD in , and is one of the better dips into the vaults by the Marley estate. If you're not familiar with Jamaican dub, it's an art form in and of itself. But the Marley classics stripped back here are so familiar, this album is accessible and enjoyable for even the casual fan.
During Marley's lifetime he recorded nine studio albums for Island Records including one that was released after his death. They're all excellent, and worth a spin, especially if you're overwhelmed by the many live and compilation releases that have hit the racks since Marley's death in But probably the first to pick up after his must-have Catch a Fire is Burnin' from And the deluxe version includes a superb live set from Leeds University from the Wailers' first UK tour.
There is a commercial side of Bob that is there for people to explore, but there's also a revolutionary side of Bob and that's the side I love. People think of him as a peace-and-love guy, but there's much more to him than that and the later songs [featured] are exciting and different.
Now, this is , and Bob was living in London and had been reading the tabloid press, who had kind of picked up on all the negative, nihilism part. It was never about that. Punk was about empowerment, individuality, and freedom. Anyway, Bob sees me in my punk trousers, my bondage trousers, and he says, 'Don Letts, you look like one of them nasty punk rockers. You've got it wrong! These are my friends.
They're not crazy. They've got something to say. Three months later, when he became more informed about the punk rock movement, he was moved to write the song 'Punky Reggae Party. He releases his emotion and it's not a performance anymore. It's not a show anymore. It's something else that's going on there. In Jamaica, when the school term was beginning, hundreds of women would queue up for handouts for school uniforms and book money, which he was quite happy to cough up.
He knew that was part of his gig. The great poverty of Jamaica can't be overlooked in the context of Bob Marley. It was really pretty rough.
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