Night Beat Post 166 - Bob Marley Part I: Kingston

It had been a while since I’d written for Rolling Stone when an editor called me in 2005 and asked if I’d be willing to look at Bob Marley for a commemoration of his 60th birthday. How could I not be grateful for such an invitation?

BOB MARLEY WAS ALREADY DYING when he stood onstage before the audience in Pittsburgh that night, in September 1980. The world’s leading reggae star had developed a malignant form of melanoma – an incurable cancer by this time – that he had let progress unchecked, for reasons that he probably could not fathom at this hour. He was a man with no time, with a mission that nobody in popular music had ever attempted before. In the last few years, he had managed to popularize reggae – a music that had once sounded strange and foreign to many ears – and he had managed to convey the truths of his troubled homeland, Jamaica, for a mass a…