This commemoration of Robert Nesta Marley, who passed on to Zion 25 years ago come March 11, 2006, is from a guided tour I designed via Google Earth’s satellite images.

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Roll over Beethoven and show Bob Marley the views!

Marley once said, “Facts an’ facts, an’ t’ings an t’ings: dem’s all a lotta fockin’ bullshit!” But I really don’t think he’ll object too strenuously if his fans enjoy a guided GE pilgrimage to locations that played pivotal roles during his 36 years with us here in Satellite Babylon.

“His image has taken on a religious level,” Chris Blackwell, Marley’s longtime producer and Island Records founder, told the Washington Times in late 2004. “He has become more important to people than a pop star.”

Photographer Kate Simon, who knew him well in the ’70s, was a little bolder, but not unreasonably so: “Someday, he will be as big as Beethoven.”

“Don´t forget your history, nor your destiny.”

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NINE MILES, JAMAICA:
Marley’s birthplace and gravesite

“In this great future you can`t forget your past.”

After his funeral in Kingston on May 21, 1981, Marley’s coffin was driven across the island accompanied by a tremendous convoy of admirers for entombment in Nine Miles. Bob was born Robert Nesta Marley there on February 6, 1945. It’s a hamlet so tiny it’s not on the maps, let alone on Google Earth, and Marley’s specific birthplace was an even tinier spot called Rhoden Hall.

Now a place of pilgrimage for reggae fans from around the world, Nine Miles is in St Ann Parish south of the touristy city of Ocho Rios. St Ann is also the birthplace of reggae prophet Burning Spear and civil-rights crusader Marcus Garvey, one of Jamaica’s seven National Heroes (a distinction not yet bestowed on Marley).

Bob spent his childhood in Nine Miles, in a two-room shack that’s now open to view, filled with memorabilia, alongside the mausoleum. “Authentic Rastafarian guides” like “Uncle Lloyd” will show you the “Mt Zion Rock”, Bob’s meditation spot — the “rock pillow” he sang about in “Talking Blues”.

The site also has a vegetarian restaurant and small gift shop (clocks for US$50, beach towels for $20, aromatherapy candles for $10, etc). Reggae concerts are held at Nine Miles each year on February 6, Marley’s birthday. Open daily 9.30am to 6.30pm, with guided tours available. Admission is about US$15.

In late December 2004, controversy erupted over a comment by Marley’s widow Rita that the time had come to move his body to his spiritual homeland of Ethiopia. Media outlets reported that Rita was planning to exhume his body and take it to Africa in time for his 60th birthday celebrations on February 6. The Bob Marley Foundation quickly denounced the report as untrue, but the rumour persisted, and as late as February 8, 2005, the Jamaican government was insisting it would challenge any request for the body to be moved.

A travel article in the Toronto Star describes the site thus:
“Up a steep slope, nestled in beautifully landscaped grounds surrounded by pink roses and ferns, is a trio of unremarkable low-rise buildings where Marley spent his first dozen years. It’s here, on some eight hectares of land, that Marley’s maternal grandfather, Omeriah Malcolm, had his home and was considered the most prosperous farmer in the area, says guide Wilbert Brown.

“The property now belongs to Marley’s mother, Cedella Booker, and Marley’s half-brother Richard Booker. When the 79-year-old matriarch, affectionately known as Mother B, isn’t in Florida where most of Marley’s relatives and 11 offspring now live, she stays at the main house and often will greet visitors.

“The high point of the tour is the mausoleum where Marley’s remains are encased, next to that of another half-brother, Anthony Booker, who was killed by Miami police in 1992. Shoes must be removed before entering the chapel-like building with its stained-glass windows. Photos aren’t allowed inside.

“Brown takes off his knitted tam and raps softly on the wooden door ‘to let Bob know we’re coming’. Incense and candles burn. Inside the marble tomb, covered with African fabric, is a brass coffin containing Marley’s remains, as well as a guitar, a soccer ball, a Bible - and a big joint. On the walls of the tomb are pictures of Marley’s widow, Rita, activist Marcus Garvey and Rasta messiah Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia.

“There’s a rug where some guests kneel and pray and a shrine where others have left assorted items: buttons, stones, shells, a replica of the Eiffel Tower, a Che Guevera T-shirt.
“The mood is reverent, but informal. Some visitors lean against the tomb, others sit on the tiled floor and a discussion unfolds about music, religion and politics.”

“I’d rather be a free man in my grave, than alive but a puppet and a slave.” — Jimmy Cliff

KINGSTON, JAMAICA

TRENCHTOWN – Marley’s formative years

“Truth have to bust out of man like a river.” – Bob Marley

Trenchtown was a housing scheme that got its name because it was built over drainage ditches after the 1951 hurricane destroyed squatter camps that had grown around a refuse dump that sprawled across a former sugar plantation. (Or was the garbage piled into the harbour in a government reclamation project, as another biographer has said?)

In 1957 (or was it 1959?), Bob’s mother Cedella, “in search of work and excitement”, moved him from Nine Miles to live in Kingston. Trenchtown’s “government yards” had solidly constructed one- and two-storey concrete units built around central courtyards that contained communal cooking facilities and a stand-pipe for water. There was no sewage system.

In 1964 Marley formed a singing group with Bunny Livingstone (later Bunny Wailer), Peter McIntosh (later Peter Tosh) and Junior Braithwaite, who sang lead. They called themselves the Wailing Rudeboys, then the Wailing Wailers, then Wailing Soul, but when Junior’s parents took him off to Chicago, the three remaining, plus backup singers Rita Marley (Bob’s future wife) and Beverly Kelso, were simply the Wailers, with Bob on lead vocals.

This was the band until Bunny and Peter balked at a world tour in 1974, so the backup band became the Wailers and the touring act was called Bob Marley and the Wailers, with backup vocals by the I-Threes (Rita, Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffiths).

NATIONAL STADIUM

Marley lay in state here on May 21, 1981. His dreadlocks had fallen out due to his radiation treatment, but Rita had them woven into a wig that was placed on his head. In his coffin beside him were his Bible and a favourite guitar, some say a red Gibson Les Paul, some a red Fender Stratocaster. The National Stadium, which seats 40,000, is known locally as “The Office” and is home to the Reggae Boyz national football team.

This was also the scene of the legendary “One Love” concert on April 22, 1978, at which Marley persuaded rival political leaders Michael Manley and Edward Seaga to join him onstage and join hands in a gesture of peace among perennially rampant poll-oriented violence.

The stadium also has the distinction of having hosted the October 4, 1975, “Wonder Dream Concert”, at which Bob, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh reunited for their last performance together as the Wailers. The show was headlined by Stevie Wonder, in a benefit for the Jamaican Institute for the Blind. For Wonder’s encore, Bob joined him for “I Shot the Sheriff” and “Superstition”.

The original Wailers had memorably performed here on August 29, 1975.

NATIONAL HEROES PARK

Marley’s funeral was held here on May 21, 1981. Combining elements of Ethiopian Orthodoxy and Rastafarianism, it featured readings from the Bible by the opposition leader, former premier Michael Manley, while Prime Minister Edward Seaga gave the eulogy. There was music by the Wailers, the I-Threes and the Melody Makers, a group consisting of four of Bob and Rita’s children, led by eldest son Ziggy. Bob’s mother Cedella Booker sang “Coming in from the Cold”.

This was also the site of the December 5, 1976, “Smile Jamaica” concert. In the absence of no-shows Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh and Burning Spear, Third World warmed up the crowd of 80,000 while the wounded Marley wavered over the wisdom of appearing. He did of course perform: one song – a 90-minute version of “War”.

“Until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is finally discredited and abandoned … WAR! So that is prophecy, and everyone know that is truth. And it came out of the mouth of Rastafari.”

Bob Marley and the Wailers had also performed here on March 8, 1975, (warming up for the Jackson Five!) as they kicked off their Natty Dread Tour, their first with the I-Threes – Rita Marley, Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffiths. On 1978’s Kaya tour, they were here for a February 26 show, and they played here for the last time on September 24, 1979.

56 HOPE ROAD – The Marley home, now a museum

Marley’s Kingston home and former site of his Tuff Gong Studio (which moved to 220 Marcus Garvey Drive). Since 1986 this has been the Bob Marley Museum, with an office for the Bob Marley Foundation. The property was given to Bob by Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, who’d given the Wailers their big break and who had based his Jamaican operation here. The main house is called Island House.

On December 3, 1976, gunmen who may or may not have been politically motivated shot Bob, Rita and their manager Don Taylor here. He and his wife escaped serious injury, and all three soon recovered.

Not long before, Bob had reluctantly yielded to the urging of Prime Minister Manley’s People’s National Party to try and stem the country’s politically charged street violence by putting on a free concert on December 5, and this had been immediately followed by an election call for December 20. Since Bob was seen as siding with the PNP, its rival Labour Party was suspected of being behind the shootings. No one was caught or charged. Bob took refuge at Strawberry Hill, but the “Smile Jamaica” concert went ahead at National Heroes Park.

STRAWBERRY HILL – A hideaway

Now a swank resort, this site in the Blue Mountains of St Andrew Parish is where Marley holed up after his attempted assassination at 56 Hope Road on December 3, 1976. He stayed here two days, fretting until the last moment over his announced performance at the December 5 “Smile Jamaica” concert at National Heroes Park.

NORMAN MANLEY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT – A royal visit

Manley International is on the Palisadoes peninsula that sweeps off the island’s south coast toward Kingston proper, not far from historic Port Royal.

On April 21, 1966, hundreds of boisterous Jamaican Rastafarians jammed the airport rooftop and tarmac to greet Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I, who they revered as a living god (and still do, long after his mortal death in 1975). Marley was living in Wilmington, Delaware, at the time of the three-day state visit, but urged his wife Rita ina letter to catch a glimpse of the emperor if she could. Rita converted to Rastafarianism before Bob’s return home.

She took up a vantage point on Winward Road, which leads into town from the airport, and watched his limousine pass, and said the emperor instantaneously dispelled her doubts about his stature when he looked directly into her eyes and waved. “And I looked into his hand and there was the nail-print. It was a mark, and I could only identify that mark with the scriptures of history, saying, ‘When you see him, you will know him by the nail-print in his hands’.”

“So when I saw this, I said to myself that this could be true, this could be the man of whom it was said, ‘Before the year 2000 Christ will be a man walking on this earth’.”
The emperor faced another huge and enthusiastic reception three hours later at the National Stadium.

The Rastafarian sect took its name from Ras Tafari, Haile Selassie’s name as a young prince before he was crowned in 1930. Legend has it that Haile Selassie was Ethiopia’s 225th monarch in an unbroken line from Menelik I, the son of the Biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba who ruled some 3,000 years ago.

Rastafarians consider Haile Selassie, who was murdered in 1975, the son of God and believe he did not die, although neither the former emperor nor his family claimed to have any divine powers.

MONTEGO BAY – Reggae Sunsplash

Bob Marley and the Wailers performed here, at Jarrett Park, at the second Reggae Sunsplash on July 7, 1979. Two years later, Reggae Sunsplash IV paid tribute to him in death, with several of his children making their performing debut as the Melody Makers. Reggae Sunsplash remains an annual event, though it’s not always held in Montego Bay.

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CEDARS OF LEBANON HOSPITAL, MIAMI – Death with dignity

“I am in some way eternal. I will never be duplicated. The singularity of every man and woman is Jah’s gift. What we struggle to make of it is our sole gift to Jah. The process of what that struggle becomes, in time, the Truth.” – Bob Marley

Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where Marley died just before noon on May 11, 1981, just 40 hours after leaving the Ringberg Klinik in Germany. He was 36.

When the cancer treatment in Bavaria failed, Marley was flown back to Miami. “Maddah, don’ cry,” he told his mother, who lived in Miami. “I’ll be all right. I’m gwan ta prepare a place.”

Judy Mowatt of the I-Threes swears that at the moment Bob died, she was sitting on the veranda of her Kingston home when a great burst of thunder roared and a bolt of lightning hurtled through her open window and struck a framed photograph of Bob on her mantelpiece. She turned on the radio and heard the news.

It was also in Miami, on November 4, 1980, that Marley was baptised in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, converting to Christian Rastafarianism and taking the name Berhane Selassie.

Marley had 13 children, all but one of whom bear his surname, with eight women: Sharon Prendergrass (adopted), Cedella, David Ziggy, Stephen and Stephanie (adopted) with his wife Rita Marley; Damian with former Miss Jamaica and 1976 Miss World Cindy Breakspeare; Rohan with Janet Dunn; Karen with “Janet in England”; Robbie with Pat Williams; Kymani with Anita Belnavis; Julian with Lucy Pounder; and Makeda Jahnesta with Yvette Crichton. He left a $30-million estate that is still, in part, being contested.
The month after Marley died, he was posthumously awarded Jamaica’s Order of Merit.

In 1990, the Jamaican government declared his birthday, February 6, a national holiday. In 1994, Bob and the Wailers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “Exodus” was named by Time magazine as the greatest album of the 20th century, and the BBC decreed “One Love” from that album the song of the millennium.

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WILMINGTON, DELAWARE – Toiling in Babylon

Though he’d already done some recording with the Wailers, success remained elusive, so Marley moved here on February 10, 1966 – the day after his wedding to Rita (Alpharita) Anderson – to join his mother and work the nightshift at the Chrysler plant. He stayed eight months, saving up money and writing songs, before returning to Kingston, just as his first child was born, named Cedella after his mother.

One account has it that Marley’s departure was hastened by a draft notice in the mail, at a time when Vietnam was beginning to glow. You stand up for your rights, he purportedly said later – you don’t fight another guy with a gun for your rights.

NEW YORK CITY

SLOAN-KETTERING CANCER CENTER
– Encountering doom

“Rise, oh fallen fighters, rise and take your stance again, he who fight and run away, live to fight another day.”

Manhattan’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on the Upper East Side , where the extent of Marley’s cancer was discovered. Having launched his 1980 North American tour (backing up Stevie Wonder and the Commodores) in Boston days earlier, Marley was jogging in Central Park on September 21, the morning after two performances at Madison Square Garden, during which he’d had physical difficulties. In the park he collapsed and was taken back to his hotel, the Essex. Several days later doctors at Sloan-Kettering found cancer in his brain, lung and stomach and gave him less than a month to live.

Bob resisted Rita’s plea to cancel the tour and played Pittsburgh’s Stanley Theater on September 23 before calling it quits. It was his last show.

Bob was secretly admitted to Sloan-Kettering and underwent radium treatments that caused the locks around his forehead and temples to drop off. After two days, word leaked out that he was there. Although he was scheduled to be in the hospital for at least two weeks, when he learned the rumour had been broadcast on radio and in the papers, he immediately checked out, ignoring doctors’ warnings that without more treatment he might not live another 10 weeks. Tests had found cancerous tissue in his liver, lungs and brain, and there was evidence that the disease was spreading to other vital organs.

MAX’S KANSAS CITY

Max’s, at 213 Park Avenue South near Union Square in Manhattan, was where Bob Marley and the Wailers supported another rising star, Bruce Springsteen, from July 18 to 21, 1973, on their Catch A Fire tour.

It’s been reported that many of the opening-night tickets for the club’s 200 seats were given out to press, and most who attended came for the Wailers and didn’t hang around for Bruce, though Little Steven Van Zandt claimed the two acts were supposed to alternate headlining but the Wailers were always late. Singer Garland Jeffreys, who attended most of the shows that week, naturally adored Marley, but said, “The other guy was pretty good, too.”

The original Wailers had performed a largely unnoticed gig in Brooklyn in 1971, and in January 1972 played in the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Pittsburgh and Delaware. By 1975, fame firmly on their side, they performed on June 18 at the Schaeffer Music Festival in New York’s Central Park and on the 21st at the Manhattan Center.

The 1976 Rastaman Vibration tour saw them at the Beacon Theater for four shows on April 30 and May 1, and on June 17, 1978, they played Madison Square Garden, a venue they revisited in October 1979 for a gig that was overshadowed by their seven shows in four days (25th to 28th) at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. Also in New York in 1978, Bob received the United Nations Third World Medal of Peace.

The Wailers were back at the Garden on September 19 and 20, 1980, when cancer virtually halted Marley in his tracks. He managed one more performance, on September 23 in Pittsburgh. It was his final concert.

CONVOCATION HALL, TORONTO

A purely personal detour on the Bob Marley Commemorative Tour, Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto is where I had the pleasure of seeing Bob Marley and the Wailers in concert, at the “late show”, one of two on May 5, 1976.

The band had played Toronto’s also-intimate Massey Hall in June 1975, but by the time they returned to the city on June 9, 1978, they needed the 15,000 seats of Maple Leaf Gardens, and then filled it again on November 1, 1979. By this stage the band was playing cities across Canada, including Vancouver, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa and Hamilton, Ontario.

LA’s ROXY THEATER

The Wailers’ show here on the Sunset Strip in May 1976 was dubbed by Rolling Stone magazine one of the “Twenty Concerts that Changed Rock’n’ Roll”, in a 1987 survey.

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ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA

Marley made his first and only visit to the spiritual homeland of the Rastafarian movement in December 1978, on a non-performing tour that also took him to Kenya and Ethiopia.
On February 6, 2005, five of Marley’s sons and his widow Rita and the other two members of her back-up singing trio the I-Threes, along with other artists including Yousou N’Door and Peter Gabriel, performed here at “Africa Unite”, a free concert commemorating what would have been Bob Marley’s 60th birthday.

An estimated 100,000 people crammed Maskal Square outside City Hall in the Ethiopian capital for the show, which began with a blessing by an Ethiopian Orthodox Church priest and the roar of Burundi’s Royal Drummers.

Some 2,000 “VIP” guests paid US$100 each to sit up front, and the country’s evangelical churches sniffed that Rastafarians shouldn’t be worshipping Emperor Hailie Selassie as a living god or promoting marijuana, but basically a good time was had by all.

Birthday celebrations were also held in Shashamane, a town in Oromia district about 150 miles from Addis Ababa. The land here had been donated to Rastafari settlers from the West Indies after World War II by Emperor Haile Selassie.

In December 2004 there were reports in the media that Marley’s remains were to be exhumed and reburied at Shashamane, but nothing more has become of the story since.

ZIMBABWE – Crucial concert

“The power of philosophy floats through my head, light like a feather, heavy as lead.” – Bob Marley

This is the National Stadium in Harare, but other sources say Marley’s historic performances On April 18 and 19, 1980, headlining Zimbabwe’s inaugural Independence Day celebrations, took place at Rufaro Stadium, in Salisbury, Zimbabwe.

The Wailers had in January that year brought their 1980 Uprising tour to Libreville, Gabon, for two shows, their first in Africa.

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RINGBERG-KLINIK, ROTTACH-EGERN, GERMANY – A stab at survival

“When the race gets hard to run. It means you just can’t take the pace.” – Bob Marley

Given a short time to live because of the extent of his cancer, Marley took the advice of Jamaican physician Dr Carl Fraser (a favourite of Twelve Tribes Rastas, who called him “Pee Wee”) and flew on November 9, 1980, to Dr Josef Issels’ controversial treatment center, the 30-year-old Ringberg-Klinik in Rottach-Egern, in the Tegernsee Valley among Bavaria’s foothills near the Austrian border.

Issels, then 72, specialised in helping “hopeless” cancer sufferers. At one point the Bavarian Medical Council charged Issels with fraud and manslaughter, but he was acquitted after a four-year legal battle. He’s pictured above with Bob’s mother Cedella. A gaunt Marley shares the couch with an unidentified friend.

Bob celebrated his 36th birthday here the following February. Junior Marvin, Seeco Patterson and Tyrone Downie of the Wailers hosted a little party in Bob’s quarters, watching a TV show about the World Cup. By the time spring arrived, Issels announced he could do no more. Marley was flown to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami.

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PARIS PAVILLION
– Injury at play, tragedy in the making

Although it hosted some of the world’s top rock acts of the late ’70s, including David Bowie, Queen and the Who, the Paris Pavillion no longer seems to exist as a concert venue.

Bob Marley and the Wailers brought their Exodus tour to the Pavillion on May 10, 1977, but more importantly, it was while in Paris on this occasion that Bob and some of his bandmates played soccer with members of a top French team and he tore off his right toenail.

It seemed minor until the lesion refused to heal, and eventually doctors in London suspected cancer and urged him to have the toe amputated. Bob refused because of his Rastafarian belief that the body must be whole, that to have an amputation would be a sin, and he felt his faith ensured that he would live forever. “Rasta no abide amputation. I don’t allow a mon ta be dismantled.” He also saw doctors as samfai – confidence men who cheat the gullible by pretending to have the power of witchcraft.

He did have surgery to try to excise the cancer cells, and later in Miami orthopaedic surgeon William Bacon performed a skin graft on the toe.

I Jabulani Tafari, writing for Rootzreggaeandkulcha.com, speculates that Marley may have been assassinated. He notes that the New York City and Houston police had long been probing the drugs and weapons trade between America and Jamaica, and that Marley and Peter Tosh espoused revolutionary thought.

In his book “Marley and Me”, former Wailers manager Don Taylor notes that an unknown doctor gave Bob an unknown injection in the injured toe, the toe that was later diagnosed as cancerous. But the origin of the melanoma, he says, citing the February 2002 cover story in High Times magazine, dated to 1976, when Carl Colby, son of ex-CIA director William Colby, visited Marley’s Hope Road home in Kingston and gave him a pair of boots. Bob slipped one on and something jabbed his toe. A piece of copper wire was protruding – had it been chemically treated with a carcinogenic toxin?

Jamaica that year, High Times noted, was ruled by pro-Castro Prime Minister Michael Manley and known to be the target of CIA destabilisation. Marley and Tosh were sending out musical warnings about the CIA operation, and Carl Colby, “posing as a member of a film crew”, arrived a week after Bob and Rita Marley and Don Taylor were shot by unknown assailants.

Then, writes Tafari, Dr Josef Issels, the immuno-therapist who treated Bob at the Ringberg Klinik in Germany in late 1980, was an ex-Nazi! “This may explain the painful, starvation-diet based treatment programme inflicted on Bob.”

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LONDON

333 OLD CHURCH STREET

Bob lived in London in February and March 1972, at 34 Ridgmount Gardens and at 333 Old Church Street, nears King’s Road. From April 28 to June 8 he was at 12a Queensborough Terrace, London SW7.

Marley, completely unknown outside Jamaica, performed on June 3, 1972, at top soul venue the California Ballroom, on Whipsnade Road in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, as a guest of headliner Johnny Nash, who was his producer at the time. Admission was 80p. “The Cali” was demolished in 1979.

Marley and the original Wailers did several shows in England, including Birmingham on May 28, the Shades Club in Northampton on June 25, London’s Speakeasy, either in mid-May or late June, depending on the source, at Croydon’s Commonwealth Social Club on July 22 and in Brixton on August 27. They also appeared on BBC Radio One and on BBC TV’s “Old Grey Whistle Test”. That summer saw members of the band busted by Scotland Yard too, in Neasden, for ganja possession naturally. They were fined.

Broke and downhearted, and struggling to peddle a single recorded in London for CBS in March called “Reggae on Broadway”, they signed up in Setmber 1972 with Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, based in Basing Street. Blackwell gave them enough money to return to Jamaica and record an album, which was overdubbed in London in the late autumn. Their April 1973 debut on the label was “Catch a Fire”.

HAMMERSMITH ODEON

“People want to listen to a message, word from Jah. This could be passed through me or anybody. I am not a leader. Messenger. The words of the songs, not the person, is what attracts people.” – Bob Marley

Named Rolling Stone magazine’s band of the year in 1976, during which they played six shows in four days at the Hammersmith Odeon (now the Hammersmith Apollo), the Wailers spent nearly three months in London in early 1977 working on an album, during which time Marley and bassist Aston Barrett were again arrested and fined for possession of ganja.

That year also saw them on “Top of the Pops” at doing four nights (June 1-4) at the Rainbow Theatre.

LYCEUM THEATRE

In July 1975, Bob Marley and the Wailers recorded two classic concerts at the Lyceum (July 17 and 18) that were immortalised later that year on the album “Live!”.

1980 saw the band headline the July 7 “Summer Garden Party” at the Crystal Palace Bowl.
On November 12, 2004, Britain’s new Pop Music Hall of Fame announced its first 10 inductees at a star-studded ceremony at the Hackney Empire in East London. Marley was named, along with Elvis Presley, the Beatles, U2 and Madonna. There are plans for a permanent tourist attraction in the form of a museum where each artist is represented.
In 2006 London’s West End will see the premiere of “Bob Marley – The Musical”.

His widow Rita Marley and Chris Blackwell, who had signed Bob and the Wailers to his label, Island Records, in the early ’70s, inked a production deal with American entertainment giant Clear Channel Communications. Neville Garrick, Marley’s former collaborator who since 1993 has been involved in abortive plans for a movie biography, said the play would focus on his early years in music. Working title: “Trench Town Rock”. It’s to be hoped it fares better than the short-lived 2005 Broadway musical “Lennon”, also co-produced by a widow.

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Three excellent Bob Marley websites, from which I scalped some information and pictures:

http://www.bobmarley.com/
http://www.thirdfield.com/
http://www.bobmarleymagazine.com/

This last one has a robust chatroom, some of whose members went out of their way to help me figure out where the hell Nine Miles is. I ought to have a better idea – I was there in 1981!