We watched the trio lazing about, their matted Afros just turning into dreadlocks. This was the moment of grace before the Wailers blew up—and split apart. Captured with one of the first-ever camcorders, our filmmaker’s images showed the men lying around with guitars. Playing riffs back and forth. Trading lines. The moments of creative spark that we who are interested in art making wonder at. Also, plenty of stoned conversation whose stoned profundity maybe wasn’t so profound (“Belief can live and belief can kill,” we watched Bob intone), but that we nodded along to, nonetheless. Marley’s charisma-filled cheekbones leapt from the screen: the man, as this PR flack and all his brand’s builders learned, never took a bad picture. The same, alas, couldn’t be said of the film’s maker, whose sad need to insert herself into the narrative found her ludicrously staged, in between these lovely spells of footage, by an ornate Victorian mantel in a chunky necklace, recounting how she helped her lover write “I Shot the Sheriff.” The coughs and fidgeting in the audience during these passages were loud. But for us to whom the friendships captured by the old footage were the subject of obsessive thought, the moments of filial love were thrilling. Here they were, the lanky brown-skinned Marley and the darker Tosh trying, as friends do, to make each other laugh. The looks exchanged between chords were all the more poignant for us watching from the future. Mere months later, Marley would step onto a path, at the front of a band that could have only one front man, that made him into the kind of rock star in England he and his minders envisioned. Soon enough, he won the kind of fame that made him a figure who belonged as much to the world as to his friends.
After Bob blew up, Peter and Bunny did enjoy their own fame. Each made great records. Tosh, with the help of rabble-rousing hits like his pro-ganja ode “Legalize It,” became a figure even more dearly embraced in Jamaica than Marley. Many still call him “Jamaica’s greatest music man.” It’s not hard, playing back Tosh classics like “Stop This Train” and “400 Years,” to understand why. Peter, who much more closely resembled most Jamaicans than Bob, also came much closer than his pal, during what remains Kingston’s most-famous-ever concert, to voicing most Jamaicans’ feelings on their postcolonial state. The One Love Peace Concert, convened between the bloody election seasons of 1976 and 1980, was aimed to convince members of the capital’s PNP- and JLP-affiliated gangs to stop shooting each other. The event is best recalled for Marley’s enjoining the party’s two leaders, Seaga and Manley, to join hands above his head during an extra-long rendition of “Jamming,” to “show the people that we got to unite.” That was the night’s takeaway image. But it was another moment, little recalled beyond Jamaica, that distilled the lasting distinction between two figures who have resounded since as rough equivalents of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X: one an inspired conciliator with a prophet’s smile (never mind how key the juxtaposition of “screwface” scowl and lover’s grin were to Bob’s appeal); the other an icon of black rage, glowering behind dark glasses (never mind the goofy strain central to Peter’s manner and hits). On the night Marley provided his great tableau of music’s peace-making power, Tosh capped his own set by lighting an enormous spliff onstage. He defied the “shitstem” to arrest him.
“I am not a politician,” he intoned before the bloodiest election yet, “but I suffer the consequences.”
* * *
PETER MACKINTOSH WAS BORN in a small seaside village in Westmoreland. He was reared, like most Jamaicans, by his mother. He learned to play piano and sing, like most of the country’s musicians, in her church. Peter’s father was little seen in the village of Belmont (“a bad boy, a rascal,” Tosh described him, who “just go around and have a million and one children”).3 Gainful work was scarce too. Peter left the provinces to make a life in Kingston’s slums. When he met Bob and Bunny, his fellow Wailers-to-be, he was selling sugarcane juice from a cart by Parade. When his life later ended under decidedly “violent/ tragic circumstances” (he was shot in his home at the age of forty-one), his body was brought back to the sleepy town where he was born. Belmont is a teeny village by the turquoise sea, not far from the old Spanish slave port of Savanna-la-Mar, whose most notable site is its favorite son’s tomb. Tosh’s mausoleum is a cement box painted red, gold, and green. It sits by the water, on the road that hugs Jamaica’s sleepy south coast, in a shaded yard by the tidy little house that Peter bought his mother in the 1970s. It’s a quiet tourist trap, most days, where the young men who work the rum shop by the yard’s gate rouse themselves from their dominoes, when the few Tosh-obsessed Germans and Japanese who make it here turn up, to demand ten dollars apiece from visitors. Marley’s tomb, across the island in St. Ann Parish, is patronized not only by scores of such pilgrims daily but also by busloads of casual vacationers who sign up, in plush north coast resorts nearby, to visit the reggae king’s home. Belmont, by contrast, remains outside the tourist circuit. But as perhaps befits its great son’s contrasting place in Jamaica’s memory, it does serve, as I saw visiting one Peter Tosh Day, as a pilgrimage site for Jamaicans. More especially, for believers of the born-in-Jamaica faith that island boosters claim is “the only major world religion born in the twentieth century”—in whose pantheon Peter resides, ever blacker and just a touch badder than Bob, too—it is the resting place of an enduring saint.
Rolling into Belmont, I turned my rental car’s radio to 107.1, Irie FM. The deejay said that Jamaica’s “roots radio” had been broadcasting live from Peter’s gravesite since 6 a.m. “Tha sisdren and bredren,” he said, had been arriving since dawn. He introduced a snippet of recorded speech from Tosh’s Red X Tapes, a posthumously released spoken-word album whose digressions Peter’s admirers know by heart. “I don’t smoke marijuana.” His baritone filled the car. “Marijuana is a girl from Cuba. I smoke HERB.” Tosh pronounced the last word with a hard H, emphasizing the sacrament it was. “Lawmakers make every name illegal, to incriminate the underprivileged. . . . But herb, and music, is the healing of the nation. Key to the doors of inspiration. Without herb, any other thing cause distortion, and confusion. Seen?”
Seen. Into Peter’s yard and through its gates, the sisdren and bredren streamed. Elder Rastas in army fatigues and colorful headwraps. A tattooed young woman wearing a gold necklace whose shape spelled “BAD.” A young man, shirtless and resting a flagpole on his shoulder, carrying a great banner in Rasta’s colors of red, gold, and green. On a fence outside, someone had painted a big marijuana leaf, captioned with Tosh’s most famous lyric. “Legalize It.” Right in front of it, a uniformed policewoman and policeman stood in their colonial-looking black caps. Jamaica’s anti-cannabis laws are far stricter than most spring breakers here think. But this pair seemed little interested in enforcing them. I stepped into the yard to see a striking woman, six feet tall and wearing burlap robes accented with Rasta-colored trim. In her arm she cradled an immense bundle, like a baby, of pungent green herb. On a dais nearby, Mutabaruka, the deejay from Irie FM, wore his own robes to describe how in the 1760s the veterans of Jamaica’s Maroons journeyed to Haiti and played crucial roles there in fomenting history’s only slave revolution. Here, in their thousands, was a great convention of the Rastafari of Jamaica. Actual followers of this faith still amount to only a fraction of the number of Jamaica’s Adventists or Baptists. But the Rastas’ particular riff on Christian scripture, and the charismatic reggae-star apostles who’ve embraced it, has played an outsized role in shaping Jamaica’s external image and internal culture.