They replied over their shoulders: “Coffin.”
There’s a saying here: “Inna yard, dead everywhere.” But in neighborhoods with few weddings and lots of funerals to dress up for, street dances still remain, sixty years after the sound system’s birth, the thumping core of Jamaican culture. Most nights of the week, deejays from leading systems like Stone Love and Kilimanjaro erect their speaker towers by side streets or parking lots to boom dancehall hits at volumes evidently designed to test Marley’s adage, from “Trench Town Rock,” that when “music hits, you feel no pain.” Since Bob’s day, the cadences have quickened. The sounds have grown rougher. So, too, has the dance style known as “daggering,” through which Jamaica’s young, pantomiming rough sex in clothes, further the old process of transforming the body from an instrument of pain into one of pleasure, in this ex-slave society, amid an air of barely suppressed violence. In the early sound system era, the dances weren’t guarded, as one of the first I attended was, by glowering sixteen-year-olds holding Uzis in the dark. But if this culture’s sounds and settings have grown more extreme, its guiding tensions, I thought as I approached the old Ward Theatre on Parade, have remained the same. This was where, back in 1964, an eighteen-year-old Bob Marley, with the group he’d formed with his friends Peter and Bunny, had their first big gig. The Wailing Wailers had won an audition with Clement “Sir Coxson” Dodd, a leading sound system man, and signed for Dodd’s label, Studio One. The first Wailers record Dodd released, “Simmer Down,” had shot to the top of Kingston’s charts, and stayed. Addressing themselves to the “rude boys” with whom they passed their teens on Parade, the Wailers called for calm amid the heady days of their nation’s newfound freedom. “Simmer down,” they sang on that first hit. “Oh control your temper.”
Simmer down, for the battle will be hotter
Simmer down, and you won’t get no supper
Simmer down, and you know you bound to suffer
Simmer down, simmer, simmer, simmer right down
Here in the Ward in 1964, when the young Wailers performed “Simmer Down” in public for the first time, they affected shiny suits and shinier dance moves. Loud claps and yelps filled the hall. The raining applause was joined, Peter Tosh would recall, by a shower of coins. “Me look at some two and six-pence piece lick me head,” he said years later. “So I stop sing and just go and pick them up . . . two pockets full!” For young singers being paid a pittance, if they were lucky, by their label, this was a lot of coin. Sadly for them, they didn’t get to keep it. “Before I come offstage,” Tosh said, “it was begged out. Every man in the audience come beg it back.”2
Five decades on, the Ward’s white-and-blue facade was crumbling; dirty paint peeled from the walls. I asked a large woman out front, squatting by a rack of plastic sunglasses with too-large Ray-Ban logos stenciled on their sides, what had befallen the Ward. “Hurricane!” she said, looking up briefly before returning to her wares.
“Which?” I asked. “When?”
“Gustav,” she said to my shins. That storm had blown up the Caribbean in 2008, and taken care of the Ward’s roof and once-shining marquee. Lord knew when it would be fixed. I handed her a bill for JA$500 (“Continued devaluation of JA’s currency,” said the IMF, “is good for the economy”), and slid a pair of eyeshades—they’d cost US$5—over my nose before continuing across Parade, in the afternoon’s fading glare. I walked down King before pausing, outside the courthouse, by a large monument. The statue included a big obsidian head, ten feet tall. Onto its cheeks were welded two brass tears. Its base was engraved, like Maya Lin’s wall in Washington, with rows of names and numbers—Joshua Hill, 6; Shanna-Kay Robinson, 1; Tia Murray, 15. The numbers were ages. The statue’s larger title, engraved on its base, explained its meaning in this town whose tabloids are filled, every day, with stories about the bad things that happen among destitution-damaged people trying to rear kids in an “afflicted yard.” The memorial said this: “In Memory of Children Killed Under Violent/Tragic Circumstances.”
The phrase and its punctuation (what was up with the slash?) were striking, for its conflation of two concepts—violence and tragedy—sometimes linked in life, but often not. The monument was also striking, though, for what it said about this movie-mad town whose young have had a shortage of neither experience with violence nor the narrative conventions of tragedy. The theaters where Kingston’s ska stars shone, back in the ’60s, were also the movie houses where “rudies” flocked to shoot-’em-up Westerns and joined the action by shooting their pistols at the screen. Perhaps the second most memorable of early Wailers gigs, after their debut at the Ward, was at the Palace Theater, now vanished but long near where I stood. A few months after “Simmer Down” hit, they headlined a packed Christmas concert. Again, coins pummeled the stage. But just as they kicked off “Simmer Down,” the house lights went dark. The blackout was citywide. The crowd, though, didn’t know. A notorious rudie called Big Junior, his head swollen from a cameo appearance in the film version of sometime-Jamaican Ian Fleming’s novel Dr. No, smashed his wooden chair on the floor. The Wailers escaped the ensuing riot only by barricading themselves in a backstage toilet. In a young country where the rule of law was as inchoate as its electrical grid, a song urging self-control may have made street-tough youths into singing stars. But it was their town’s outlaws, like Big Junior, who remained its favorite folk heroes.
* * *
“BADNESS! AND BAD MEN.” They’re still around, in this weary, wary city where plastic shopping sacks are called “scandal bags” and where the only sure way to have regular electricity is to live in the precinct of a big enough bad man that he extorts or pays for “yuh current,” and your fealty, himself. But downtown, by now, is not the sort of place where people can flock to old-style bijous or shoot their pistols at their screens: there are no cinemas, and few businesses targeting anyone with real disposable income farther down than Half Way Tree. When I went to a film one night, it wasn’t being screened in a cinema, but in a more homey venue on downtown’s western edge. Earlier that year, the long-awaited documentary Marley had reached cinemas here and worldwide. The film I headed downtown to see was related, but different. Marley had been the result of a decade-long saga that began as a project helmed by Martin Scorsese, and then, once he’d wearied of dealing with Rita and the gang, chewed up another fancy director—Jonathan Demme. Finally the film was completed by a young Scotsman called Kevin Macdonald. Macdonald was previously best known for The Last King of Scotland, a drama about the mad Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. His achievement with Marley was to allow all the living principals in the great man’s story to share their refractive memories of his life and end. It included such nuggets as Rita, sitting poolside in regal Asante robes, informing us that Bob’s cancer “came from his white blood.” Macdonald had his pick, with the family’s full support, of a great array of archival footage of Bob in concert and repose. There was one key bit of old tape, though, that he hadn’t been able to use. And it was to see this tape, edited together in a new film called The Making of a Legend, that I went all the way downtown, to an abandoned old building by the water that someone had converted into a kind of extra-rootsy art space for events like this.
I parked by the building and headed up to the second floor, arriving to find the film’s maker, a onetime paramour of Marley’s, standing at the front of the room. She was now a tired-looking sixtysomething woman, dressed in made-in-China Rasta regalia. She explained the story of her film. Forty years before, she’d been a young model enjoying a fling with a hot young star. She had lugged a primitive Super 8 camcorder into their briefly overlapping lives. For thirty-odd years, the resulting footage was mislaid in a friend’s Toronto garage. When it was found, she had refused to part with it or license it to anyone else. Instead, she had made the film we were about to screen in this space that a white woman from foreign had turned into a wood-working studio for local youths and, rumor said, a place for seducing them. Who knew if it was true. But Kingston is like that: leave no good turn unpunished. The space, in any case, was cool. And though the tech, with dodgy wires hooked up to tinny-sounding laptop speakers,