“Hey, Skip,” he said, and patted an empty spot on the couch where he sat. Then came the smile that audiences often saw, as wide and beneficent as any I had ever seen. He looked back, forehead knitted in that severely thoughtful way of his for a moment. I recall looking at the man himself with what must have been a forlorn expression. I stood uncertainly peering through a haze of blue smoke at a collection of dreadlocked and, it seemed to me at the time, hostile or sardonically amused band mates and camp followers. On the April day of that interview, I’d turned up in the doorway of the suite he often borrowed from Island Records’ Chris Blackwell.
I had interviewed him for Circus magazine in 1976 (coincident with a pair of dates at Manhattan’s Beacon Theater), resulting in a story not reprinted here but available to all where the sole copy I know of sits lacquered onto the wall of the Bob Marley Museum in his former home at 56 Hope Road in Kingston. I knew little enough about the man, somewhat more about his music. He’d also visit Brazil that spring, hoping to tour later with Jacob Miller and Inner Circle-until Miller’s untimely death in March that year, which left Bob alone (not to dismiss the rapturous and soulful work of Toots and The Maytals), at the summit of reggae music. In fact, with the Uprising album having been recorded between early January concert dates in Gabon and two legendary mid-April dates in Zimbabwe, it looked to be a propitious moment in an epochal career as Bob brought his political message to an increasingly-involved and enthusiastically-widening public. But that June, when my editor at Rolling Stone assigned me to join the band on a leg of their European tour, all seemed well. Or unevocative Pittsburgh would seem were it not now recognizable as the last venue where Bob Marley ever took the stage. In the early summer of 1980, Bob Marley and The Wailers were almost midway through an extensive world tour that would take them from Libreville, Gabon to, unevocatively enough, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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