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Music can be a powerful motivator, not just for individuals either. If the message is strong and people are searching for truth, music can transform entire communities and countries around the planet. And its effects can long outlive its creator, inspiring people to action for decades. Bob Marley was one of those creators. Not only can his music be heard virtually in every country, but his image is everywhere too.
I was once in a rural village in Poland, and while I was looking for somewhere to eat, I came across a building with a huge mural of Bob Marley on the side. The same thing happened when I was touring through the jungles of Indonesia. There was one shop in this particularly off-the-beaten-path settlement, and it was all decked out in Bob Marley everything. I was in a cab heading north out of Beijing, and what CD did the driver have on? Bob Marley's Legends.
And although the guy could speak no English, he knew every word to every song and sang along. Maybe you've had some of the same travel experiences. Go anywhere in the world and there's almost a 100% chance that you will hear the music of Bob Marley. It's universal. These messages of love and positivity and togetherness and righteousness. Plus, there's just something about a reggae beat that amplifies the sentiment of the lyrics.
Bob Marley remains one of the most beloved musicians of the past 100 years. So, why would anyone want him dead? There were more than a few people who wished that. They considered him dangerous, a threat, someone who needed to be dealt with before he interfered with their interests. The story involves social movements, local politics, and even players in the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR.
The consensus was Bob Marley must die. Have I got a story for you. Get up, stand up, written by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh and recorded with the Wailers for their 1973 album, Burnin'.
The lyrics came to Marley when he was touring through Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world, and a nation ruled by a never-ending series of corrupt politicians. It is one of Marley's greatest songs. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross, and welcome to another edition of Uncharted, Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. This is the story of when dangerous political forces determined that Bob Marley just had to die. The first group of assassins didn't succeed.
But there are some conspiracy theories that a second attempt did. And again, why would anyone order a hit on a reggae singer from Jamaica? The story starts on August 6th, 1962, when Jamaica became an independent nation, ending 300 years of British colonial rule. And like a lot of newly independent countries, Jamaica had growing pains.
By the 1970s, there were serious political and social tensions across the island. Deep historical grievances dating back to slavery, major socio-economic disparity, poverty, high unemployment, access to basic services like clean water was a problem, and there was violence in the streets. There were loud demands for social and economic justice.
Meanwhile, at the top of the pyramid was a small group of elites who were determined to protect their long-held positions of power, prestige, and privilege. Two major political parties emerged: the Jamaican Labour Party, the JLP, and the People's National Party, or PNP. The JLP, the conservative leading party, was led by Edward Seega. His supporters were business owners and many middle-class Jamaicans. The PNP was headed by Michael Manley, another white politician.
He and the PNP tended to lean more left, embracing socialist policies that included redistribution of wealth and social justice. In fact, the party slogan was "Socialism is lovely." Manley made no secret of his admiration for what Fidel Castro was doing in Cuba.
Manley was first elected Prime Minister in 1972, putting the PNP in charge, and his government began implementing some progressive social programs. On the whole, these were good things: free education, free healthcare, and land reform. But it also included the nationalization of key industries, a very Soviet sort of thing. This position was very concerning to business owners, foreign investors, landowners, and merchants.
Workers began to call out for more nationalization of foreign holdings, including the country's bauxite industry. Bauxite is the raw stuff of aluminum, and Jamaica has a lot of it. It supplied 60% of America's needs. The sugar industry saw acres and acres of sugarcane fields and factories nationalized. That was actually one of the more popular moves because all employees received a 100% pay increase.
Meanwhile though, groups of young militants were organizing what they called "captures" of private land without waiting for government approval. Land taxes kept going up. So did import duties, making it increasingly difficult for Jamaicans to afford, say, a car. There were new restrictions on money,
All Jamaicans with more than 1,000 Jamaican dollars stashed abroad were required to bring it home. And at the time, 1,000 Jamaican dollars was worth about 110 American. And political violence of all sorts was increasing. It got so bad that a new law had to be enacted. If you were caught with an illegal firearm, you faced an indefinite jail term.
People started to leave. They moved to Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand. A lot of those people were elites. So while there was a lot to worry about on the local level, the United States was also very concerned about Manley and his socialism. What if Manley took Jamaica closer to true socialist or even communist countries like Cuba? If that's the case, the Soviet contagion would spread to another island in the Caribbean.
Now, remember, this is the era of the Cold War, and the U.S. was still very freaked out by the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet influence in the Caribbean and Central America, as well as in South America. Meanwhile, in Jamaica, the political violence, the killings, and assassinations continued. Armed gangs loyal to either the PNP or the JLP, known as garrisons, were not only fighting each other, but they battled for control of specific territories, like the ghettos of Kingston.
None of this was really new. Jamaica had always been sort of a rough place. And this is the environment in which Bob Marley grew up. He was born in 1945, meaning that he was 17 when Jamaica achieved independence in 1962.
That was also the year Marley started recording music. This is a song called One Cup of Coffee that was released under the pseudonym Bobby Martell. I brought the money.
Within a year, Marley was in a group that eventually morphed into the Whalers. More records followed before he married Rita Anderson. By this time, Marley's mother had remarried following the death of Bob's father and was living in Wilmington, Delaware. So Bob and Rita moved there. And while living in the States, Bob worked as a lab assistant for DuPont and for a little while as an autoworker on the line for Chrysler. This time away from Jamaica was important because it was while in America that he became acquainted with Rastafarianism.
These religious beliefs were born in Jamaica in the 1930s. They have no center, no formal head, and adheres to a very specific interpretation of the Bible and believes that God, Jah, lives in every person. Rastafarianism is Afrocentric. It taught that black people were being oppressed by Western society and should resettle back in Africa, which was also referred to as Babylon and Zion. Rastas grew their hair into dreadlocks and marijuana was regarded as a sacrament.
Rastafari ideology was very popular among the impoverished people of Jamaica. When musicians embraced Rastafarianism, it became more popular and gained more power. This, unfortunately, resulted in many violent clashes with law enforcement.
When Marley returned to Jamaica in the late 1960s, he formally became a Rasta. And as his popularity grew between 1968 and 1972, so did the Rasta message of Babylon, social justice, and, well, weed. And when he signed to Chris Blackwell's Island Records in 1972, his brand of reggae was marketed worldwide to a rock audience. Rather different.
The spark was an April 1973 album called Catch a Fire, which contained this hit. It didn't take long for Marley and the Wailers to become the most popular musical outfit in all of Jamaica. And when they were fired from a tour opening for Sly and the Family Stone because they were going down better than the headliner, things really started to get interesting.
The original Whalers broke up with three members going solo, including Bob, of course. And his star just kept getting brighter and brighter. This brings us back to the social and political tensions in Jamaica in the 1970s. A general election was due to be held in January 1977, pitting Edward Seager's JLP against the incumbent PNP with Michael Manley. It was Manley's socialist agenda versus Seager's far more conservative approach.
This was an ugly campaign with lots of political violence. The violence became so bad that a state of emergency was declared on June 19th, 1976, putting all of Jamaica under martial law. Each side understood Bob Marley's value too. An endorsement by him for one party or the other could have massive implications when it came to swaying the electorate. Every politician across the spectrum wanted Marley on their side.
Marley, however, knew that if he showed any favoritism, there would be trouble. He tried to walk a very fine line of neutrality. But because his music incorporated so many themes of social justice, it was just assumed by many that he was on the side of Michael Manley and the PNP, even though his government had banned some of Marley's earlier songs for being too subversive. This did not go down well with one of the Garrisons, one of those violent gangs, allied to the JLP.
The JLP was trailing badly in the polls to the incumbent PNP, and to them, the bigger Marley got, the more support went to the PNP. It was very clear at what needed to be done. Bob Marley must die. Before we go any further, we need to remember an old Jamaican folk saying, there are no facts in Jamaica, only versions.
Sometime in the fall of 1976, the order was given. Bob Marley needed to be assassinated. We don't know who gave the word, but we have some of the details. As I said, Marley was perceived to be on the side of Michael Manley and the PNP, although he never publicly endorsed anyone. All he did was continue with his message of peace, unity, and hope. And yes, Bob was from Trenchtown, which originally had been turf for the PNP.
Those perceptions were enough for the people inside the JLP to act. Bob Marley needed to be punished. Better yet, he needed to be eliminated. In October 1976, a group of representatives went to Marley's home, ostensibly looking for his help to quell the political violence in the country. It appears they were sent by Michael Manley's Ministry of Culture, specifically by an official named Charles Campbell.
The question was, would Bob be willing to perform at a concert before the election? Bob agreed. He remembered a 1975 gig by Stevie Wonder when he played Kingston to aid the blind children of Jamaica. Maybe he could help things after all. A non-partisan free concert called Smile Jamaica was scheduled for Sunday, December 5, 1976. On the surface, its goal was to counter all the political violence leading up to the election and bring everyone together.
But attendance was expected to be about 80,000. Something that big could only be achieved with government help. The Prime Minister's sign-off was required. What was Marley doing performing at a concert organized by the incumbent government? The JLP saw Marley's participation not as something to bring people together, but as a tacit endorsement for the incumbent government. It looked like a PNP rally. They saw this concert as a battle for the soul of the nation.
The bill featured Third World, Rass Michael, Kid Us, and Bunny Ruggs. Marley was the headliner. The original venue for the gig was around Jamaica House, the seat of government. Marley didn't like that because he felt it showed partisanship. He demanded that it be moved to the National Heroes Park. That didn't matter to the JLP. Marley was still playing a government-organized gig, in their eyes, and he'd written a theme for Smile Jamaica.
That sounds like a happy song, but others interpreted it differently. They heard smile or else. They perceived the song as a threat.
To the JLP, it appeared that despite anything Marley did or did not say or do, he was aligned with Michael Manley and needed to be stopped. Things intensified when Manley moved up the date of the general election from its original date in 1977 to December 15th, 1976, which would have been just 10 days after the Smile Jamaica gig. This was seen as a naked ploy to capitalize on any support the concert may generate for the PNP.
Marley, for the record, was quite upset about this because it further cemented the appearance that he might be in the pocket of the government and the PNP. But he agreed to carry on nevertheless. Elements associated with the JLP had other ideas. Word got back to Marley. It wasn't the first time he'd received death threats. Still, a loose confederation of gang members calling themselves the Echo Squad offered to provide Marley with security.
On Friday, December 3rd, Marley was at his home, an old tropical mansion at 56 Hope Road, which, by the way, was in a nice part of uptown Kingston, just a few doors down from the Prime Minister's official residence. Again, you can live wherever you want, but this was not a good look as far as the GLP was concerned. While there was a big block wall around the place, it was rather easy for people to come and go.
Around 8:30 that night, this is December 3rd, 1976, just as Marley and the Wailers were rehearsing for the concert, two white Datsun compact cars crashed through the iron gates outside the house. There had been guards at the gate, members of that Echo Squad, but they had mysteriously disappeared. Seven, maybe eight men, one maybe as young as 16, armed with pistols, rifles, and machine guns piled out of those cars.
Two ran into the house, two covered the front door, and the four others covered the outside, the perimeter of the house. The gunmen who entered the house went from room to room. They found the band playing, and I'm not making this up, they were rehearsing "I Shot the Sheriff". Marley was in the kitchen, helping himself to some grapefruit. Manager Don Taylor and band employee Lewis Griffin were with him. They were shot with a .38. Taylor took five slugs, one at the base of his spine and four in the backs of both legs.
Griffith was shot in the torso. As for Marley, he was grazed just below the breastbone with the bullet lodging in his left arm. Bob's wife, Rita, ran outside with the five Marley children, trying to escape. She was shot, but it was a non-fatal bullet wound to the head. In total, eight shots were fired. Considering the firepower available, remember these guys had machine guns, it was a miracle that the carnage wasn't greater.
The gunman fled, apparently back to the Tivoli Gardens area of Jamaica, which was JLP territory, and home to a gang known as the Shower Posse, which dealt in the smuggling of drugs and guns, and who had a reputation of showering its enemies with bullets. To be honest, no one in the house should have lived. There were bullet holes and casings everywhere, the floors, the walls, the ceiling. The gunman just shot indiscriminately.
Had they been more disciplined, everybody would have been dead. Yet everyone survived. A passing police car was flagged down and emergency crews were called. Everyone was transported to University College Hospital. Taylor and Griffith were declared critical. Rita was rushed into surgery to remove the bullet that had miraculously stopped in her head between her skull and scalp. Bob was the luckiest. He was treated for a bullet wound and released.
As everyone else recovered, Bob was hidden away at Strawberry Hill, the home of Island Records founder Chris Blackwell. This place was very well guarded. Guards with guns and rastas hiding in the trees with machetes. Rita Marley and Don Taylor would recover from their injuries. Lewis Griffith, who may have gone by the name Lewis Simpson, was never the same again. The next question became, what do we do about the Smile Jamaica show? Should Marley cancel, citing fears for his life?
Or should he defiantly go ahead to prove that he could not be intimidated? The conservatives in Bob's entourage, which included many Rasta elders, thought he would be insane to perform. After listening to everybody's opinions, Bob made his decision. He would play the Smile concert, but only one song. Besides, with his left arm out of commission because of that bullet wound, he couldn't play guitar. Meanwhile, Jamaica held its breath. Would Marley show?
On Sunday the 5th, 80,000 people gathered at the National Heroes Park. Suddenly, there he was. And instead of singing just one song, he performed a 90-minute set. And there is a record of that gig. Get up, stand up. Stand up for your right. Get up, stand up. Don't give up the fight. Get up, stand up.
Bob Marley from December 5th, 1976. 11 days later, Michael Manley and the PNP won the election in a landslide. So who ordered the hit? Again, there were versions. Some pointed to Edward Sega, the head of the JLP. He allegedly gave the nod to his bodyguard, a guy named Lester Jim Brown Coke. He was the leader of that shower posse, which, by the way, had several international outposts, including one in Toronto.
It is said that the shower posse got its gun and training from the CIA. Another person who may have been involved was Carl Bea Mitchell. He was also at Hope Road that night. It's claimed that he was contacted by the CIA to organize the shooting in exchange for cocaine and guns. Another name that came up was Skill Cole, one of Bob's closest friends. He'd been compromised over fixing a horse race, and perhaps the hit was actually in retaliation for that.
Don Taylor had a lot of gambling debts and it was said that Marley was slowly paying them off. Too slowly perhaps? Was that the motive behind the shooting? And what happened to the gunman? Don Taylor wrote in an autobiography entitled Marley and Me, in which he claims that two of the alleged gunmen were caught. He and Bob went to Trenchtown and watched them get lynched. That story has never been corroborated. In fact, to this day, the identities of the gunmen have never been determined with any degree of certainty.
but a number of people linked to the shooting started showing up dead. A character named Tech Life was found murdered. Another named Frouser was tracked down in New York City and shot in the head. A few unidentified men were found in the Jamaican hills with their throats slit. Another was found hanging from a tree in an area called Raytown. But we cannot say for certain who tried to assassinate Bob Marley and what happened to them.
In the absence of the facts, the vacuum was filled with versions, rumors, speculation, and conspiracy theories. And many people kept coming back to the CIA. Follow me on this. When the CIA-supported JLP operatives botched the hit, the agency dispatched a cleanup man to finish the job.
Jamaica's march to socialism and perhaps full-blown communism had to be stopped at all costs. But instead of a crude shooting, the new methods would be much more subtle and untraceable. An agent named Bill Oxley was allegedly given the job. He was a veteran of at least 17 other CIA assassinations.
To get to Marley and his Blue Mountain hideaway, he claimed to be a photographer for the New York Times. And he came bearing a gift: a pair of size 10 Converse All-Star high tops. Marley was very touched and immediately tried them on. But when he stuck his foot into the right shoe, he screamed in pain. His big toe had been pierced by a small copper wire. This conspiracy theory, and it is just a theory,
alleges that this nail was either a radioactive or b treated with some kind of carcinogenic compound this led marley to coming down with a rare form of cancer called acryl lentiginous melanoma this is the disease that would eventually kill him now let's talk about this for a second after the assassination attempt bob moved to the uk to let things simmer down and to make more music
Just as a 1977 tour was to begin, Bob was playing pick-up soccer, something that he loved to do. He was in Paris. And during this particular game, a French journalist wearing spikes stepped on his right foot. And that hurt. The worst of the injury was the big toe of the right foot, the same toe that had allegedly been poked by this fictional deadly copper wire.
Now, truth be told, Marley had been having trouble with that toe and its bloodshot toenail for at least a couple of years, actually probably even more. We know about something in September 1975 when he gashed the toe on a rusty nail. And when that failed to heal, it was diagnosed as a fungal infection. Whatever the case, it just did not want to heal. Stepping on it aggravated it. Bob hobbled through the rest of the tour with it. But once it was over, he hurt the toe one more time, again playing soccer.
There's also a story that he heard it when he was a kid. So all these injuries were to the same toe, and they all happened while he was playing soccer. And each time, all any doctor did was bandage it up, give Bob some ointment or antibiotics, and told him to take it easy. In retrospect, someone should have taken a biopsy of the lesions around the toe. But acro-litiginous melanoma
was very rare. A very, very, very rare form of cancer that barely showed up in the medical literature. And even if it had been discovered and diagnosed properly, the medicine of the late 1970s and early 80s might not have been enough. Eventually though, Bob received the diagnosis. It was cancer. The best course of action was to amputate the toe.
But Bob was a Rasta. His beliefs held that the body must remain whole, so he opted for an operation in Miami in early 1978 that removed the lesions and repaired the damage with a skin graft. And for a while, it looked like it had healed. So much so that Bob went back to playing soccer. On September 21, 1980, Bob and Skilly Cole went for a jog in New York's Central Park to get energized for that night's show at Madison Square Garden.
Bob had awakened that morning not feeling particularly well. Maybe the fresh air and exercise would do him good. As they made their way around the pond, Bob turned to Skilly and said, I don't feel well. His body froze up and he couldn't speak. And then he fell forward. The initial guess was a stroke. But then at the hospital, a brain tumor was discovered. In fact, his body was riddled with cancer, metastasized from the melanoma that started in his big toe. Bob insisted on continuing the tour.
He managed one more show, September 23, 1980, in Pittsburgh at the Stanley Theater. Bob barely made it through the show, but he did, and that would be it. What the assassins failed to do, the cancer would complete. Back with that part of the story in just a second.
After Bob Marley finished that final show in Pittsburgh on July 23, 1980, he was admitted to Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York City for aggressive radiation therapy. When the mythical CIA agent Oxley heard about the cancer diagnosis, he must have been pleased with his handiwork. He then, the conspiracy goes, steered Manley to a clinic in Switzerland run by a guy named Dr. Joseph Eisels.
Eisels was rumored to have worked under Joseph Mengele at Auschwitz. So yes, says this conspiracy theory, Bob was tricked into seeing a Nazi doctor by a CIA operative. In truth, it was a Jamaican doctor well-known to Marley and not anyone named Bob Oxley who recommended the clinic in Switzerland with Joseph Eisels. But never mind. Eisels' approach was controversial. He believed that cancer cannot develop in a healthy body.
If the metabolism of the entire body can be treated and set right, well, then the cancer will disappear. With nothing to lose, Bob went to Switzerland. Isles provided Marley with all sorts of alternative medical treatment. And to be honest, he lived about six months longer than he otherwise might have. But in the end, nothing worked. The cancer metastasized throughout his body and into his brain, and Bob was sent home to die. And he didn't make it. He was so ill that
that he couldn't make the final leg of his flight from Switzerland to Jamaica. He died at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami on May 11th, 1982. He was only 36. So where did all the details of this conspiracy nonsense come from? It is said that Bob Oxley made a deathbed confession in 2018. He was the one behind Marley's death and he wanted to unburden his conscience before he died. But hang on, did this Oxley guy actually exist?
No investigation of these claims has ever found a CIA agent with that name. So maybe it wasn't Oxlip. If not him, who? Conspiracy theorists have an answer for that. There was a film crew on hand to film the Smile Jamaica concert commissioned by Chris Blackwell and Island Records. The guy behind the film was director Carl Colby, the son of former CIA director William Colby.
The senior Colby had been involved in all kinds of skullduggery foreign activities in Vietnam, Cuba, China, and beyond before being fired by President Gerald Ford more than a year before the Smile concert. His replacement in the CIA was some guy named George H.W. Bush. It was Colby, say the conspiracists, who presented Marley with the boots or sneakers or whatever featuring the poisoned wire.
Now, to be clear, Carl Colby says he was never, ever recruited by the CIA and was nothing more than a serious documentary filmmaker. But his involvement was alleged in a book by Alex Constantine that was excerpted in a magazine article called "Chanting Down Babylon: The CIA and the Death of Bob Marley."
One of Constantine's sources was a Los Angeles cinematographer and former Black Panther named Lee Lou Lee, a close friend with some of the Whalers. And he claims that it was Colby who gave Marley the boots with the infected copper wire. To add to this, we have to go back to Don Taylor's autobiography, Marley and Me. He alleges that a senior CIA agent was planted within Colby's film crew. This agent, whatever his name, brought the boots and, well, there you go.
Again, all this is smoke and fiction. There is no evidence to back up any of these stories. And anyone who knows anything about melanomas will tell you that it cannot be introduced into a body via a needle injection. Acral litiginous melanoma is first and foremost a genetic disease, not something that you catch from an infected wire. In fact, this melanoma can be found in other parts of Bob's family, including some cousins.
Bob was just unlucky. No CIA involvement was necessary, but that has not stopped people from wanting to believe it. The assassination attempt, though, was very, very real. Had it been a successful hit, the world would have been denied the talents of a great songwriter much, much sooner. The attempted assassination of Bob Marley on December 3rd, 1976 is one of those events with plenty of loose ends. Who gave the word? Who were the gunmen? What happened to them?
It remains one of those true crime stories from the world of music with no satisfactory answers. But whatever you do, please don't believe the stories about Marley being poisoned by the CIA. There just is no credible evidence at all. But in a world where everything bad that happens is said to be the result of a conspiracy, you're bound to find people who just won't let it go.
If you have questions or comments, shoot me an email at alan at alancross.ca. We can also meet up on all the social media sites along with my website, ajournalofmusicalthings.com. And it's updated with music news and recommendations every day. There's also the free daily newsletter that you should get. Join me for more stories of crime and mayhem from the world of music next time. Technical Productions by Rob Johnston. I'm Alan Cross.