Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright by Hank Bordowitz Page B

tropics yet, the tip of an iceberg.

    Dusk. 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 no discernible purpose.
    When Bob finally does appear, there is a sense of immediate relief: a slim, barefoot, medium-short, intense-countenanced man, he nev- ertheless 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 armed 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 backyard, 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. But theah dat, is dat the reason for? . . . I never know . . .” 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