Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: So Much Things to Say
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 6/17/1942
WEBSITE: http://www.thefamilyacid.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-bob-marley-steffens-20170713-htmlstory.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 82110739
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n82110739
HEADING: Steffens, Roger
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670 __ |a St. Petersburg, c1996: |b credits (Roger Stephens; narrator)
670 __ |a So much things to say, 2017: |b t.p. (Roger Steffens) ecip data (one of the world’s leading reggae historians and a former cohost of the award-winning radio program Reggae Beat)
670 __ |a Wikipedia, March 20, 2017 |b (Roger Steffens; b. June 17, 1942; is a Brooklyn, New York-born American actor, author, lecturer, editor, reggae archivist, photographer and, producer. He may be best known for his reggae archives, in particular his archives of Bob Marley)
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PERSONAL
Born June 17, 1942, in Brooklyn, NY.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Actor, author, lecturer, editor, reggae archivist, photographer and producer. Former cohost, Reggae Beat; founding editor, The Beat.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Kim Gottieb-Walker, Bob Marley and the Golden Age of Reggae, Titan Books.
SIDELIGHTS
Roger Steffens is known as the world’s foremost authority on reggae music and the life of its best-known musician, Bob Marley. Steffens’ works include the text of Bruce W. Talamon’ss Bob Marley: Spirit Dancer, the book (coauthored with Leroy Jodie Pierson) Bob Marley and the Wailers: The Definitive Discography, The Family Acid Jamaica, and The Reggae Scrapbook–“an excellent addition,” wrote Bill Walker in Library Journal, “to any reggae history collection as well as a prize for fans.” “While paying homage to `reggae royalty’ icons such as Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Jimmy Cliff, the authors go to great lengths to explore lesser-known musicians in glossy photographs, essays, copies of advertisements and detachable postcards,” stated a Publishers Weekly reviewer. “The editors successfully use the reggae aesthetic in a burst of bright primary colors and a flurry of marijuana leaves (with accompanying clouds of thick smoke).” Steffens also maintains a reggae archive from which much of the information and illustrations for these works is drawn.
Steffen’s reggae archive provides the material behind the creation of So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley. “Marley is reggae: he remains an international celebrity, honoured with a waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s,” declared Ian Thomson in the Spectator, “and, as Roger Steffens reminds us, listed in Forbes magazine at Number Five among the ‘highest-earning dead celebrities’ for 2014. Steffens, a US-based music critic and longtime Marley fan, has spent years interviewing friends, associates and admirers of the Jamaican superstar. So Much Things to Say, an ‘oral’ account of Marley’s life and times, amounts to an absorbing alternative biography.” Steffans, wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “brings the singer to life through conversations with his bandmates, lovers, family members, and musical associates.”
Even today, decades after his death from cancer, Marley remains an iconic figure in international music. “Marley introduced reggae and Rastafarianism to much of the globe, making him a crucial ambassador for those subcultures,” declared New York Times Book Review contributor Touré, “and he is the face of Jamaica, by far its most famous son.” “Steffens … offers a more grounded approach in this sprawling but absorbing `oral history,’ drawing on interviews with seventy-five assorted relatives, band members, fellow travellers and lovers; a lifetime’s research,” wrote Neil Spencer in the London Guardian. “Their accounts, not infrequently contradictory, are effectively marshalled by Steffens, who acts as a reliable narrator. Among the revelations is the extent of Marley’s deprivation in his early years. Abandoned by his elderly white father, an itinerant government overseer who had gotten a local teenage girl pregnant, Marley grew up first in the rural parish of St Ann, later moving to … west Kingston.” Steffens’s book, critics agree, gives a clearer sense of how complicated Marley and his legacy are. “If he is a cultural senator, then that’s part of his delivering for his constituents–he spread an image of Jamaica around the world, and now everyone has a soft spot in his or her heart for that magical island,” Touré continued. “But at the same time Marley’s politics were revolutionary…. He sent concertgoers home with the sound of him urging `stand up for your rights’ ringing in their ears. Marley was that rarity–a black revolutionary who didn’t scare white people.” “What emerges is a not a clear picture of Marley the man,” explained a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “but rather a true sense of how complicated his life was.”
Critics recognized the importance of Steffens’ work. “Composed from interviews with more than seventy-five friends, family and confidants of Marley and amassed over several decades,” declared Agatha French in the Los Angeles Times, “So Much Things to Say is the biographical equivalent of a statistical mean: a way to compile a complete portrait of the musical legend from the sum experiences of the people who knew him best.” Steffens’ book, said Paste Magazine reviewer Jason Rhode, “reveals a Marley of flesh and blood who passed too young in a world that was never too old to learn. `In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty,’ the singer said, and there is water aplenty here. Drink and be satisfied.” “Devoted fans and all readers,” concluded Michael Ruzicka in Booklist, “… will find this many-voiced, richly subjective chronicle dramatic and compelling.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June, 2017, Michael Ruzicka, review of So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley, p. 34.
California Bookwatch, February, 2011, “Bob Marley and the Golden Age of Reggae.”
Guardian (London, England), August 14, 2017, Neil Spencer, review of So Much Things to Say.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2017, review of So Much Things to Say.
Library Journal, January 1, 2008, Bill Walker, review of The Reggae Scrapbook, p. 103.
Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2017, Agatha French, “Going behind the Scenes with Bob Marley in the New Book So Much Things to Say.“
New York Times Book Review, July 30, 2017, Touré, “Bob Marley Comes Alive in This Collection of Interviews With the People Who Knew Him Best,” p. 10.
Publishers Weekly, October 6, 2008, “Music Books Rock,” p. 47; May 8, 2017, review of So Much Things to Say, p. 51.
Spectator, September 23, 2017, Ian Thomson, “The Cult of Holy Bob,” p. 32.
ONLINE
Paste Magazine, https://www.pastemagazine.com/ (July 13, 2017), Jason Rhode, review of So Much Things to Say.
Print Marked Items
The cult of Holy Bob
Ian Thomson
Spectator.
335.9865 (Sept. 23, 2017): p32+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley
Text and photographs by Roger Steffens
W.W. Norton, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 434
The Harder They Come, Jamaica's first (and still finest) home-grown film, was released in 1972 with the
local singer Jimmy Cliff as the country boy Ivan Martin, who becomes a Robin Hood-like criminal outlaw
amid the ganja-yards and urban alleys of the Jamaican capital of Kingston. The film's director Perry Henzell,
a ganja-smoking white Jamaican who had been sent to board at Sherborne school, was influenced by the
gritty 'newsreel' school of Italian neo-realism (Bicycle Thieves, Obsession), which aimed for a documentary
immediacy off the street. The soundtrack, assembled by Henzell in under a week, effectively introduced
reggae to white British audiences.
Without the soundtrack album, it is fair to say, reggae would not have taken hold in Britain in the way it did.
Fashionable dinner parties in early 1970s Britain often enjoyed a musical accompaniment of the Maytals'
gospel-hot 'Pressure Drop' or Desmond Dekker's '007 (Shanty Town)'. Earlier, in the 1960s, scooter-riding
Mods had adopted Jamaican ska as a supplement to their diet of imported American soul, but reggae was a
ganja-heavy newcomer, whose strangely hymnal, incantatory quality insinuated itself happily into the
middle-class hippie culture which Mods (and indeed skinheads) professed to despise.
Prior to Henzell's film, reggae had been given only minimal airplay on BBC radio, and the British press was
hardly enthusiastic. It was 'black music being prostituted', Melody Maker reported Deep Purple and the
Edgar Broughton Band as saying. In 1985, going one better, Morrissey of the Smiths announced: 'Reggae is
vile.' (Bizarrely, in October 2007, British Conservatives adopted Jimmy Cliff's rousing 'The Harder They
Come' as a Tory anthem, the party of law and order thus endorsing, if unwittingly, the crime habits of a
Kingston rude bwoy.)
The Harder They Come, a favourite, oddly, with George Melly, was part-financed by the Island Records
founder-boss Chris Blackwell, who saw in Jimmy Cliff's rebel film image a means to promote his latest
signing, Bob Marley. In many ways the groundwork for Marley's eventual success was laid by Henzell. The
first Bob Marley and the Wailers album, produced by Blackwell, Catch a Fire (1973), was a JamaicanAmerican
hybrid, whose hard-driving Kingston rhythms had been overlaid in a London studio with rock
guitar solos. It was Blackwell's, not Marley's, idea to aim the music at a 'rebel' white college audience.
Unsurprisingly, Catch a Fire was ignored by Britain's black reggae crowd (to whom the Harrow-educated
Chris Blackwell was 'Chris Whiteworst').
To date, more than 500 books have been published on the 'Reggae King' Bob Marley, who died of cancer in
1981, aged 36. For many non-Jamaicans, Marley is reggae: he remains an international celebrity, honoured
with a waxwork at Madame Tussaud's and, as Roger Steffens reminds us, listed in Forbes magazine at
Number 5 among the 'highest-earning dead celebrities' for 2014.
Steffens, a US-based music critic and longtime Marley fan, has spent years interviewing friends, associates
and admirers of the Jamaican superstar. So Much Things to Say, an 'oral' account of Marley's life and times,
amounts to an absorbing alternative biography. Among the author's many interviewees are Blackwell (whose
mother Blanche Blackwell, incidentally, died last month at the age of 104), Carlton 'Carly' Barrett, Junior
Braithwaite and Peter Tosh of the Wailers (all three of whom would eventually be murdered by Kingston
gunmen), as well as the reggae singer-songwriters Bob Andy and Joe Higgs.
According to Higgs, the word reggae, originally spelled 'reggay', first appeared in 1968 with a Leslie Kongproduced
hit called 'Do the Reggay' by Toots & the Maytals. It was a black music imaginatively rooted in
the soul of ancestral slave Africa. Marley himself was not, however, black. With a Caucasian father (Captain
Norval Marley of the British West Indian Regiment), he found it easier to deal with the world at large--that
is, with white people. Although Marley was brought up in Kingston's impoverished Trench Town ghetto, his
mixed race complexion and handsome aquiline features lent him an acceptable 'uptown' look.
In his brief introduction, the British-Jamaican poet Linton Kwesi Johnson speaks admiringly of Marley's
'iconic status' and (in another cliche) his 'consummate professionalism'. Through all the 'trials and
tribulations' (another cliche) of his fame the Trench Town rocker continued to embrace universal love,
smoke ganja (he was 'no joker-smoker', says a friend), and eat nut cutlets. Unfortunately, Marley's protohippy
'One Love' vibe died a death in Jamaica long ago: there is too much violence for kindly, dreadlocked
Rastafari idealists who grow cannabis plants and hope to save the planet by smoking them. So Much Things
to Say (the title is taken from a song on Marley's Exodus album) offers lots of new information on the Jesuslike
cult of Holy Bob.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Thomson, Ian. "The cult of Holy Bob." Spectator, 23 Sept. 2017, p. 32+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A524611557/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d03d3757.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A524611557
Steffens, Roger: SO MUCH THINGS TO
SAY
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Steffens, Roger SO MUCH THINGS TO SAY Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 7, 11 ISBN: 978-0-393-
05845-1
An oral history that presents a well-rounded portrait of the music legend, allowing for multiple, sometimesconflicting,
points of view. Robert Nesta Marley (1945-1981) left a legacy of beautiful music, helping to
push reggae from its Jamaican roots out into the world at large. Mindful of the many books about Marley
already available, reggae historian Steffens (The Family Acid, 2015, etc.) worked to make a complete
narrative covering the musician's entire life and filling in the cracks left by previous books. The author goes
into great detail about Marley's early recordings, the inner workings of the Wailers, and the cancer that
eventually took Marley's life. Steffens has interviewed dozens of major and minor players in Marley's life,
including Wailers Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, Island Records' Chris Blackwell, Marley's mother, Cedella
Booker, and various friends, musicians, and associates. There is a fullness to the collective weight of all
these observations that is well-suited to the oral history format. What emerges is a not a clear picture of
Marley the man but rather a true sense of how complicated his life was. His legend and impact, his work
ethic, his abilities as a musician and leader--these are beyond question--but there are a lot of contrasting
voices. On the question of who wrote "I Shot the Sheriff," for example, Marley's then-girlfriend Esther
Anderson and his friend Lee Jaffe both think the story starts with them. There are disagreements over how
people met, who paid royalty payments, who deserves credit for music and lyrics, etc. Steffens inserts
himself as a voice like any of the others, offering structure and sometimes serving as a referee. If someone
has told what has proven to be a lie, the author steps in and clarifies. But mostly, he lets his subjects speak
for themselves. The author's approach allows him to tell more of the story, and even without presenting
Marley's voice directly, this is an illuminating portrait of an extraordinary life.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Steffens, Roger: SO MUCH THINGS TO SAY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329097/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1dd3adba.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329097
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of
Bob Marley
Michael Ruzicka
Booklist.
113.19-20 (June 2017): p34.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley. By Roger Steffens. July 2017.480p. illus. Norton,
$29.95 (9780393058451). 782.42164.
In compiling an oral history of a music legend, or, in Bob Marley's case, a global icon, a decision must be
made: How much editing should be done? Historian and archivist Steffens, the reigning Marley expert,
provides the definitive primary source in this gathering of recorded and written interviews with individuals
from the various circles that surrounded Marley. With so much already written about the music and the man,
Steffens presents these remembrances of the reggae star verbatim, forming a grand anecdotal conversation
covering the whole of Marley's life, even as personal accounts conflict. This clash of memories is most
evident in the coverage of the Wailers' breakthrough album, Burnin'. All involved are represented, from
Bunny Wailer to Peter Tosh, Chris Blackwell, Esther Anderson, and more, even as their accounts are wildly
different. Also of special note are the interviews recounting the lead-up to the assassination attempt against
Marley in 1976 and the landmark Smile Jamaica Concert that immediately followed. Devoted fans and all
readers interested in reggae, Marley, and his era will find this many-voiced, richly subjective chronicle
dramatic and compelling.--Michael Ruzicka
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Ruzicka, Michael. "So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley." Booklist, June 2017, p. 34.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498582632/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=856af367. Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498582632
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of
Bob Marley
Publishers Weekly.
264.19 (May 8, 2017): p51.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley
Roger Steffens. Norton, $29.95 (480p)
ISBN 978-0-393-05845-1
In his page-turning oral history of Bob Marley (1945-1981), Steffens, a reggae historian and producer of a
one-man show about Marley's life, brings the singer to life through conversations with his bandmates,
lovers, family members, and musical associates. Through this thoroughly engaging history, readers learn
about the sometimes uneasy working relationships at Coxson Dodd's Studio One in Kingston, Jamaica,
during the early days of the Wailers; Rita Marley's revelatory encounter with Haile Selassie, the Rasta god,
on Apr. 21, 1966; and the responses of Carl Colby Jr. (son of former CIA director William Colby) to
accusations that Carl tried to have Marley killed. In one conversation, Bunny Wailer (Neville O'Riley
Livingston) recalls with joyous insight Marley's songwriting process--"Bob writes bits of songs, as the
inspiration come him write, and then him just put them bits there together." Two of Marley's band members,
Gilly Gilbert and Danny Sims, recall the nights in 1980 when they opened for the Commodores at Madison
Square Garden and more than half the audience left when the Wailers finished their set. In this highly
entertaining and informative history, Steffens also includes dozens of photos from his own archive. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley." Publishers Weekly, 8 May 2017, p. 51. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491949118/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2f41e248. Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491949118
Steffens, Roger & Peter Simon. The Reggae
Scrapbook
Bill Walker
Library Journal.
133.1 (Jan. 1, 2008): p103.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Steffens, Roger & Peter Simon. The Reggae Scrapbook. Insight Editions: Palace Press International. 2007.
154p. illus. ISBN 978-1-933784-23-6. $45 with CD. MUSIC
This beautiful coffee-table book for reggae music fans features text by Steffens (founding editor, The Beat
magazine) and a lavish layout from photo editor Simon (coauthor, Reggae Bloodlines). As colorful as the
almost 50-year history of reggae music, it is filled with fun little pockets of poster facsimiles, recording
memorabilia, a music CD, postcards, stickers, and other odds and ends from Steffens's extensive and
renowned archive. There is not a great deal of text in the eight chapters, but what's there hits a lot of the high
points, covering major artists through the twists and turns that reggae music and Jamaican popular culture
have taken over the years. Because of the format and included items (removable pieces that can be easily
lost or stolen), this book is probably too fragile for general circulation. If it could be included in protected,
noncirculating library settings, it would be an excellent addition to any reggae history collection as well as a
prize for fans of the music.--Bill Walker, Stockton-San Joaquin Cry. P.L., Manteca, CA
Walker, Bill
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Walker, Bill. "Steffens, Roger & Peter Simon. The Reggae Scrapbook." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2008, p.
103. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A175064196/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3c512ab0. Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A175064196
Bob Marley and the Golden Age of Reggae
California Bookwatch.
(Feb. 2011):
COPYRIGHT 2011 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Bob Marley and the Golden Age of Reggae
Kim Gottlieb-Walker
Titan Books
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 OUP, UK
9781848566972, $29.95, www.titanbooks.com
Bob Marley and the Golden Age of Reggae profiles the outstanding Marley photos of author photographer
Kim Gottieb-Walker, taken between 1975-1976, adds commentary by Cameron Crowe, Roger Steffens and
Jeff Walker, and packs in full-page black and white images offering rare, previously unpublished photos any
Marley fan will appreciate. Her concurrent description of the rise of reggae in Jamaica and Southern
California makes for an outstanding tribute to Marley in particular and the genre as a whole.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Bob Marley and the Golden Age of Reggae." California Bookwatch, Feb. 2011. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A249137663/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=55980dd5.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A249137663
Music books rock
Publishers Weekly.
255.40 (Oct. 6, 2008): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2008 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Fans can load up their coffee tables this fall with music-themed books.
The Encyclopedia of Punk Brian Cogan, intro, by Penelope Spheeris. Sterling, $24.95 (400p) ISBN 978-1-
4027-5960-4
While a "punk encyclopedia" seems like an oxymoron, music writer and musician Cogan nicely succeeds in
producing a "useful resource" illustrating "the urgency and importance of punk rock" from its mid-1970s
start to "the movement's vitality in the present day." A plethora of great photos--from the Clash and the Sex
Pistols to newcomers Groucho Marxists and the Shemps--accompany knowledgeable, fascinating and fastpaced
entries that illuminate punk bands' struggle to survive (the Ramones were paid only $5,000 for their
starring role in Rock 'n' Roll High School in 1979) while avoiding being co-opted by the mainstream music
biz. (Nov.)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
* The Elvis Encyclopedia Adam Victor. Overlook, $65 (600p) ISBN 978-1-58567-598-2
This obsessively detailed and completely entertaining chronicle by Victor (The Marilyn Encyclopedia) of
every possible aspect of Elvis Presley's life is mesmerizing and deserves a wide audience. Elvis fans will
delight in the many famous and rare photos illustrating entries on the King's every song, album and movie
as well as his complete last will and testament. But nonfans will marvel at such meticulously researched
entries as "Religion" (a vision of "Stalin and Jesus in a high bank of cloud" made Elvis consider "joining a
monastery"), as well as a comprehensive state-by-state list of "Hotels Where Elvis Stayed." (Oct.)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Whole Lotta Led Zeppelin: The Illustrated History of the Heaviest Band of All Time Jon Bream. Voyageur,
$40 (288p) ISBN 978-0-7603-3507-9
In this extensive collection of interviews, band memorabilia and photographs, longtime Minneapolis Star
Tribune music critic Bream assembles the ultimate guide to the infamous rock group Led Zeppelin. Veteran
performers Joe Perry, Peter Frampton, Ray Davies and Steve Earle, among many others, contribute
commentary about Zeppelin and its tremendous impact on popular music. The book is a treasure trove of
information, featuring tour dates, copies of limited-edition concert posters, delightfully fluorescent foreign
advertisements and a wide variety of photographs from live performances. This is the ideal resource for
obsessive fans yearning to absorb every bit of minutiae related to Led Zeppelin. (Oct.)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Reggae Scrapbook Roger Steffens and Peter Simon. Insight Editions, $45 (124p) ISBN 978-1-933784-23-6
Steffens, founding editor of The Beat, and Simon, photographer and coauthor of Reggae Bloodlines, fuse
their talents to create this vibrant and all-encompassing history of the Jamaican music phenomenon that
swept through the U.S. in the mid-1970s. While paying homage to "reggae royalty" icons such as Bob
Marley, Peter Tosh and Jimmy Cliff, the authors go to great lengths to explore lesser-known musicians in
glossy photographs, essays, copies of advertisements and detachable postcards. The editors successfully use
the reggae aesthetic in a burst of bright primary colors and a flurry of marijuana leaves (with accompanying
clouds of thick smoke). The result is a thoroughly enjoyable scrapbook with equally captivating design and
content. (Oct.)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Woodstock: A New Look Gregory Walter and Lisa Grant. Writers' Collective (Midpoint, dist.), $34.95
(144p) ISBN 978-1-59411-134-1
This early entry in the flood of books that will be celebrating the 40th anniversary next summer of the 1969
Woodstock music festival has the virtue of being straightforward. At age 18, Walker took many photos
featured here while he worked as one of Woodstock's building crew, and his brief accompanying text too
often displays a teenage simplicity ("Saturday was a lot of fun"). But Walker's basic "point and shoot" style-probably
similar to photos taken by many in the festival's half-million audience--captures (perhaps
unintentionally) the wet, slightly dazed look on teens and young adults awash in a sea of mud and garbage.
The only thing missing is the smell. (Oct.)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Music books rock." Publishers Weekly, 6 Oct. 2008, p. 47. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A186822206/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c339b3cc.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A186822206
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley review – revelatory
Roger Steffens’s sprawling but compelling biography is a fitting tribute to Jamaica’s favourite son
Neil Spencer
Mon 14 Aug 2017 02.00 EDT
Last modified on Sat 2 Dec 2017 09.21 EST
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‘Righteous rebellion’: Bob Marley performing with the Wailers at Rainbow theatre, London, June 1977
‘Righteous rebellion’: Bob Marley performing with the Wailers at Rainbow theatre, London, June 1977. Photograph: Graham Wiltshire/Redferns
Among biblical quotations favoured by Rastafarians comes psalm 118: “The stone that the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner”, a teaching put to song by Bob Marley on 1970’s Corner Stone, and one that neatly frames a life that began in poverty and ended in global superstardom, a rags to riches tale unparalleled in pop. Some 36 years after his death, Marley remains a planetary icon, his image as likely to turn up at a Native American protest as on a Camden Town T-shirt. For millions, he represents an irresistible mix of righteous rebellion, physical and spiritual joy (livity in Rasta speak) and, of course, musical genius.
Marley’s story has been told many times, most notably by the late Timothy White, whose Catch a Fire, as much imaginative construct as conventional biography, best captures the mystique that swirled round the singer. Marley’s mythos owed much to the fevered atmosphere of Jamaica in the late 1970s, when millenarian Rasta prophecy became entangled with a political feud that saw Kingston’s ghettos in near civil war amid allegations of CIA destabilisation. Marlon James’s Booker winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings, centred on the attempted assassination of Marley in 1976, crystallises the era masterfully.
At his HQ in Kingston, where he had “moved the ghetto uptown”, Marley regularly gave away thousands of dollars
Roger Steffens, an LA reggae historian and archivist, offers a more grounded approach in this sprawling but absorbing “oral history”, drawing on interviews with 75 assorted relatives, band members, fellow travellers and lovers; a lifetime’s research. Their accounts, not infrequently contradictory, are effectively marshalled by Steffens, who acts as a reliable narrator.
Among the revelations is the extent of Marley’s deprivation in his early years. Abandoned by his elderly white father, an itinerant government overseer who had gotten a local teenage girl pregnant, Marley grew up first in the rural parish of St Ann, later moving to the newly built “government yards” of Trenchtown, west Kingston.
In both places he found himself pilloried as a mixed blood “red bwoi”. Joe Higgs, a gifted singer who mentored the fledgling Wailers in the arts of harmony vocals, recalls Marley being an “outcast in the house” his mother shared with her partner, the father of Bob’s fellow Wailer, Bunny Livingston. Marley, says Higgs, was marginalised even by his mother and “slept beneath the bottom of the house”. His father’s family, the so-called “white Marleys”, were even more dismissive. In the blunt assessment of Gayle McGarrity, an academic and one of Bob’s confidantes: “They treated him like shit.”
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Later to become the hard-nosed triumvirate of Bob, Bunny and Peter Tosh that conquered Jamaica, the Wailers were originally a loose group of teenagers whose female members, Beverley Kelso and Cherry Green, describe the innocence of the group’s earliest incarnation in an optimistic, post-independence Jamaica, an innocence soon burned away by a piratical music business. The group’s first producer, Coxsone Dodd, gave them chump change for their hits. An association with Lee Perry, with whom they cut some of their best work, ended in a violent showdown over unpaid royalties.
Much later, after he had become an international star, Marley would hand out a beating to his manager, Don Taylor, after discovering embezzlement. Violence and corruption, endemic in ghetto life, were never far away. Another manager, Danny Sims, who teamed Bob with soul singer Johnny Nash in the late 1960s, bragged of his mafia connections.
Yet Marley himself remained unfazed by the riches that flowed his way. At his headquarters in Hope Road, Kingston, where he had “moved the ghetto uptown”, he regularly gave away thousands of dollars – his business manager, Colin Leslie, recalls handing out cash and cheques into the small hours. Many of Steffens’s interviewees mention Marley’s generosity, along with his shyness and perfectionist attitude to music making. He was not one for the high life; his preoccupations were music, football, the Bible and beautiful women. His affair with Cindy Breakspeare, a Miss World, put him on the tabloid front pages; his visit to Gabon arose from an affair with the president’s daughter. His 1966 marriage to Rita (who was in his band) became an odd, sibling-like arrangement.
Bob Marley at 70: legend and legacy
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The attempt on Marley’s life, days before he was due to play a Smile Jamaica concert, makes for one of the most compelling chapters here. Of the half-dozen gunmen who attacked Marley’s compound, several were likely known to Bob – such are ghetto runnings – but who paid them remains uncertain. Were they acting for Edward Seaga’s rightwing JLP party or for gangsters calling in the gambling debts of Marley’s close friend, Skill Cole? Or was it (as Marlon James suggests) the CIA? The episode remains blurred. Marley claimed to know, but said only: “Is top secret, dat!”
It was cancer, not bullets, that ended Marley’s life. Again, there are assorted ideas about what induced the cancer that began in a big toe; that it was a childhood accident or a football injury is refuted by Dr Lowell Taubman (“Malignant melanoma does not arise from injuries”), while Christopher Marley, Bob’s cousin, informs Steffens: “Our family has a long history of skin cancer and at least one prior case of melanoma.”
Marley’s passing in May 1981 coincided with a shift in Jamaica’s cultural and political firmament. A few months previously, Edward Seaga had triumphed in a general election that cost 800 lives. The age of computerised reggae, gangster lyricism and ghetto cocaine was dawning. So Much Things to Say (the title of a Marley song) is a fitting tribute to the tumultuous life and complex character of the country’s favourite son.
• So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley by Roger Steffens is published by W W Norton & Co (£20). To order a copy go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Bob Marley Comes Alive in This Collection of Interviews With the People Who Knew Him Best
By TOURÉJULY 11, 2017
Redemption songs: Bob Marley performing in the Netherlands, May 1977. Credit Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns, via Getty Images
SO MUCH THINGS TO SAY
The Oral History of Bob Marley
By Roger Steffens
Photographs by the author
434 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $29.95.
Most singers are products. They’re cogs in the gears of the music industrial complex, singing so the manufacturer can have things to press, the label can have records to sell, the radio can have songs to play, the promoters can have tickets to move, and the kids can have stuff to stream. So most singers are molded by record companies the same way food companies calibrate the amount of salt in a frozen dinner. But every once in a while a special artist comes along. Someone who appears to speak for the people. It’s in his music, his life story, his worldview and the way he carries himself — he seems like an extension of the people and their leader. His music does not come across as a commercial gesture because it’s as if he’s on the public stage to speak for his constituents and give voice to their feelings and their needs. He seems like a sort of Cultural Senator, a man who represents his people — who vote for him with their dollars and their love. No music star in the Western world has ever been a more powerful Cultural Senator on the global stage than Nesta Robert Marley.
As the New York Times pop music critic Jon Pareles once wrote: “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.” When fans see you as their champion, you become an important part of their lives.
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Marley introduced reggae and Rastafarianism to much of the globe, making him a crucial ambassador for those subcultures, and he is the face of Jamaica, by far its most famous son. If he is a Cultural Senator, then that’s part of his delivering for his constituents — he spread an image of Jamaica around the world, and now everyone has a soft spot in his or her heart for that magical island. But at the same time Marley’s politics were revolutionary.
In “War” Marley declares war on racism, and you get the sense that he does not mean war in a purely symbolic way. In “Redemption Song” he challenges us to respond to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X — “How long shall they kill our prophets, while we stand aside and look?” In “Them Belly Full (but We Hungry)” he criticizes the class system in Jamaica. In “Zimbabwe” he calls for liberating Africa’s nations. In “Burnin’ and Lootin’” he refers to violent resistance. Marley was speaking for the downtrodden and urging oppressed people throughout the African diaspora to revolt by any means necessary.
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So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Roger Steffens
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You can tell a lot about an artist by what song he does last at his shows. In Marley’s later years, his most popular period, he usually closed with “Get Up, Stand Up,” a call to action, to arms, to revolution. He sent concertgoers home with the sound of him urging “stand up for your rights” ringing in their ears. Marley was that rarity — a black revolutionary who didn’t scare white people.
A rich new oral biography called “So Much Things to Say,” by the reggae scholar Roger Steffens, narrates the life of Marley from cradle to grave through interviews Steffens has collected over the years from Marley, his mother, his wife, his last girlfriend, several of his children, his musical partners Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, and many more. Steffens has been on the Marley case for decades, and he’s a crucial voice in this epic chorus.
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Many in this group paint Marley as a Christlike figure: a boy born with nothing who becomes a deeply spiritual person, a natural leader and, they say, a prophet who can see the future. Steffens reports that when Marley was at his height, “his live shows began to resemble gospel gatherings with a preacher and his (all-female) choir.” But long before that, when he was just 3 years old, they say he showed psychic powers, reading palms with shocking accuracy. Still, young Marley was neglected. “He was like the ugly duckling,” Bunny Wailer remembers. “There were many nights of cold ground for his bed and rock stone for his pillow.” He was also a social outcast. “Whites thought of him as a black child; blacks, critical of mixed-race children, taunted him as ‘the little yellow boy,’” Steffens says. “For Bob, his color seemed to be an impediment wherever he turned, causing him to turn inward, a solitary soul relying on his own inner strengths.” His early strengths, however, did not include the musical. “Bob never really was a person who had any kind of excellent voice per se,” according to Segree Wesley, a childhood friend of Marley’s and a singer. “In my opinion Bob had the worst voice of all.”
Yet Marley became a star through years of painstaking work, and when he got money he was exceedingly generous, a one-man welfare department. “There were people who would be on a regular thing,” says his former business manager Colin Leslie. “They come every month, in the understanding they were getting the money. … I had to make sure there was a float of funds to make sure that people would be fed. There were those who depended on hot meals from Bob.” Some say Marley supported 4,000 people, but Leslie thinks it was more.
The book digresses at times into trivia for the superfans — we learn that Marley’s favorite meal was Irish moss, a form of seaweed — but there’s a lot that’s illuminating. One of Marley’s many girlfriends, Esther Anderson, says the root of “I Shot the Sheriff” lay in their relationship: “It’s about birth control. Bob was always after me to ‘breed’ and have a baby with him. He kept asking me why after I’d been with him for a month already I hadn’t got pregnant yet. I told him I was on the pill and this led to the line ‘Every time I plant a seed he said kill it before it grow’ — you see, the sheriff is the doctor.” Marley wrote the song while sitting alongside his friend Lee Jaffe, who says Marley began with the line “I shot the sheriff,” to which Jaffe added, “But you didn’t get the deputy.” Together, Jaffe says, the lines signified the impossibility of defeating the system, because even if you kill the lawman, there’s another one right behind him. For Jaffe, the message is: “This is going to be a long tragic struggle that’s going to need a lot of everyday heroes.”
In his final days Marley battled cancer that had spread from his toe and invaded his entire body. Danny Sims, one of his producers, recalls a doctor saying, “Bob Marley has more cancer in him than I’ve seen with a live human being.” He continued to fight, traveling to hospitals around the globe while surrounded by family, leading to a scene in which Rita, his wife of decades, serves breakfast in bed to Marley and his girlfriend Cindy Breakspeare. At least it was a mutually open situation: Steffens tells us, “Rita Marley has said that throughout their touring years she was more like Bob’s mother, taking care of him while having love affairs of her own.”
Marley died in 1981 at the age of 36, a number that his older friends found significant because he had predicted it. Ibis Pitts, a friend who met Marley in Delaware long before his career took off, says, “Nesta told us about him not being on this earth many more years than Jesus Christ was.” One of Pitts’s friends “remembered the details”: “Nesta said he was going to be leaving at 36.” He may have correctly foreseen the age of his death, but he did not leave us. More than three decades after his death, Marley is still with us because there are still millions of people voting for him with their dollars and their hearts.
Touré is the author of several books, including “I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon.”
A version of this review appears in print on July 30, 2017, on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Stir It Up. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Going behind the scenes with Bob Marley in the new book 'So Much Things to Say'
Agatha French
By Agatha French
Jul 13, 2017 | 8:00 AM
Going behind the scenes with Bob Marley in the new book 'So Much Things to Say'
Family Man Barrett and Bob Marley backstage at the San Diego Sports Arena in 1979. (Roger Steffens)
“There are no facts in Jamaica,” the folk saying goes, “only versions.” That’s the fitting epigraph to Roger Steffens’ “So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley,” published this week by W.W. Norton. Steffens reads from the book Saturday at Skylight Books at 5 p.m.
Composed from interviews with more than 75 friends, family and confidants of Marley and amassed over several decades, “So Much Things to Say” is the biographical equivalent of a statistical mean: a way to compile a complete portrait of the musical legend from the sum experiences of the people who knew him best.
There is a chorus of voices here — including Steffens’ own. An archivist, historian and Bob Marley expert, Steffens “does not present a portrait of the artist through his own lens,” as dub-poet Linton Kwesi Johnson says in the book’s introduction, “but instead presents us with a collage of impressions seen through the eyes of others.” In other words, “So Much Things to Say” calls on many voices to recall the one iconic voice — Marley’s. “I have set out to illuminate with first-person depth the parts of his life that have been only partially explored,” Steffens writes — including Marley’s pre-recording years in Kingston, his visits to Africa, the attempted assassination of him in 1976 — and also the intimacies of his friendships.
The co-host of KCRW-FM’s “Reggae Beat” in the late ’70s, a decade when he also toured with the Wailers, Steffens is now known for his photography, which has recently garnered attention through the sun-soaked and nostalgic Instagram account run by his daughter, the Family Acid. (“The Family Acid: Jamaica” a book of “40+ years of photography from Roger Steffens' trips to the island” was released in February 2017.)
Steffens’ frank and candid photos punctuate “So Much Things to Say” too, putting faces to the many names that speak across its pages.
Here are a few of those names, and glimpses of what they had to say:
Junior Marvin, Wailer
“We jammed for three hours straight before we said anything to each other. Then we looked at each other and laughed, slapped five and Bob said, ‘Man wan’ come play with I?’ And I said, ‘I’d love to!’ And I was a Wailer.”
Junior Marvin, Wailers lead guitarist, in Maryland 2000.
Junior Marvin, Wailers lead guitarist, in Maryland 2000. (Roger Steffens)
Kate Simon, photographer
“I was down in Kingston in ‘76 shooting Bunny for his album ‘Blackheart Man’… I got out of the pool and there was Bob Marley sitting at one of those tables with tin umbrellas. And that’s when I took the ‘Kaya’ portrait. It wasn’t a formal photo session or anything. I was wearing a swimsuit, that’s how informal it was… Bob’s face is so open, his smile so big, his gaze is so sharp, that the photograph seems to give off light.”
Photographer Kate Simon double-exposed with her cover photo for "Kaya," 2002.
Photographer Kate Simon double-exposed with her cover photo for "Kaya," 2002. (Roger Steffens)
Coxson Dodd, founder of Studio One
“When the Wailers came for audition, all they had was songs done earlier by groups, American Groups… I told them I love the sound of the group, but they need to come with their own material. Well, I played a couple of American recordings, so as to give them the theme, or lyrics, Garnett Mimms and the Enchanters, “Cry Baby,” stuff like that. I’m the one who selected all this stuff for Bob.”
Clement "Coxson" Dodd, founder of Studio One, the Wailers' first label, at his studio in Brooklyn in 1993.
Clement "Coxson" Dodd, founder of Studio One, the Wailers' first label, at his studio in Brooklyn in 1993. (Roger Steffens)
Peter Tosh, Wailer
“The first instrument I ever played was a guitar. I made it out of a piece of board, sardine can, and some plastic line, the plastic you use for fishing. Get good sound too. When I left for Kingston all I took was my little grip, and some food to eat on the way, and meself, and Jah in my heart.”
Wailers co-founder Peter Tosh, wearing a hat with the words to "Legalize It" in Hollywood in 1979.
Wailers co-founder Peter Tosh, wearing a hat with the words to "Legalize It" in Hollywood in 1979. (Roger Steffens)
Cindy Breakspeare, Marley’s companion
“I knew from the first time that I ever spoke with him at length, that a deep relationship would change my life permanently… He would offer mango as a gift, or simple little things like that, which I thought were very charming.”
Bob Marley's companion and Miss World Cindy Breakspeare in Jamaica in 2003.
Bob Marley's companion and Miss World Cindy Breakspeare in Jamaica in 2003. (Roger Steffens)
Neville Willoughby, Jamaican broadcaster
“One day I was in one of the studios at JBC and in walks this man… He’s nobody in fancy clothes or anything, and he has the guitar case, almost battered one would say. But he walked like he was somebody, regally, that’s the way to put it, I think. And so I asked, ‘Who is that man?’ And she said, ‘Bob Marley.’”
Jamaican Broadcaster Neville Willoughby in the hills above Kingston in 2003.
Jamaican Broadcaster Neville Willoughby in the hills above Kingston in 2003. (Roger Steffens)
"So Much Things to Say" by Roger Steffens
"So Much Things to Say" by Roger Steffens (W.W. Norton)
agatha.french@latimes.com
Roger Steffens Weaves the Oral History of Bob Marley in So Much Things to Say
By Jason Rhode | July 13, 2017 | 5:02pm
Photo of Bob Marley by Express Newspapers / Getty
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Roger Steffens Weaves the Oral History of Bob Marley in So Much Things to Say
We lead double lives. We think in abstractions like Love and Freedom and Nation, but we dwell in the world of physical specificity: this time, this place, this location. Michelangelo’s David sculpture, for example, floats weightless in the collective mind. How far are you, right now, from its image? Probably less than 20 feet, if you count looking it up on the Internet. But I have seen David, and it sits in a specific room in a specific building at a specific address. Music is just as much a hostage of a particular set of contingencies as the humblest sculpture. A musician is born in this place, her sound is associated with this studio, her music is understood in this context.
Oral history ties the general icon to the specificity of the world. It does this by taking the abstract giant, a creature of an agreed-upon narrative that everyone knows, and sourcing that figure to many voices speaking from multiple perspectives. It’s history from the grassroots, and the grass knows everything.
1bobmarleycover.jpgRoger Steffens’ new book, So Much Things to Say, ties Bob Marley, the Jesus of Reggae, to the slums of Kingston, Jamaica. Steffens’ text reminds us of an icon’s embedded nature, enmeshed in tentacles of circumstance. In history, some figures stand out like tall trees. Popular wisdom usually has no explanation, except to say, “Isn’t it funny that happened?” But oral history shows the rootedness of such titans. If you know where one originated, you can trade belief in a single, miraculous figure for the certain knowledge that whatever conditions produced the miracle must have been miraculous as well.
Steffens’ book reveals the blast radius that great detonations make. It’s all here in the text—the words that have long been known but little spoken. Steffens got people to talk, all of them…except Marley himself.
There is an immediacy to related experience that casts rumor and exaggeration into distorted shadows. How many words have been written about “No Woman, No Cry,” and how pale do those stories look when the actual circumstances of its composition are related? The outlines of Marley’s well-known life history are present in this book. But here, like in a historical novel, we discover new details. Marley is not a demigod here, but an unwanted boy who fell upon the gift of brightening the world.
Here is Marley in his Pittsburgh finale. Here he is visiting Zimbabwe. Here is his troubled relationship with his family. Here is the mentorship with Nash, the bullet lodged in his foot, the feud with Perry.
So Much Things to Say reveals a Marley of flesh and blood who passed too young in a world that was never too old to learn. “In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty,” the singer said, and there is water aplenty here. Drink and be satisfied.