Product Description

Bob Marley was a reggae superstar, a musical prophet who brought the sound of the Third World to the entire globe. Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley goes beyond the myth of Marley to bring you the private side of a man few people ever really knew. Drawing from original interviews with the people closest to Marleyincluding his widow, Rita, his mother, Cedella, his bandmate and childhood friend, Bunny Wailer, his producer Chris Blackwell, and many others—Legend paints an entirely fresh picture of one of the most enduring musical artists of our times.

This is a portrait of an artist as a young man, from his birth in the tiny town of Nine Miles in the hills of Jamaica, to the making of his debut international record, "Catch a Fire." We see Marley on the tough streets of Trench Town before he found stardom, struggling to find his way in music, in love and in life, and we take the wild ride with him to worldwide acceptance and adoration. From the acclaimed journalist, Christopher John Farely, the author of the bestselling AALIYAH and the reporter who broke the story on Dave Chappelle's retreat to South Africa, Legend is bursting with fresh insights into Marley and Jamaica, and is the definitive story of Marley's early days.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #261200 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-01
• Released on: 2006-05-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From The Washington Post
In the proverbial mega-bookstore stocked with multiple biographies of John F. Kennedy and the Beatles, there's more than enough room for Before the Legend. At the end of the millennium, Time magazine voted reggae pioneer Bob Marley's "Exodus" (1977) the most important album of the 20th century, and similarly the BBC designated his humanist anthem "One Love" as song of the century. Yet precious little literature exists charting Marley's ascendancy in worldwide pop culture. Armed with new revelations (both personal and musical) about Marley's past, author Christopher John Farley attacks his subject precisely, with the best of intentions.

The subject provides Farley with a lot to unwrap. Musically, Bob Marley popularized reggae, performing concerts across the globe as a guitar-wielding cultural ambassador from the Caribbean; spiritually, he introduced the Rastafarian religion and its sacraments of marijuana smoking and dreadlocks into world consciousness; and politically, he voiced the plight of the Third World -- although Marley himself remarked, "I don't think of Third World. To me, I am of the First World." Rather than a complete life history of the singer, Before the Legend examines the period from his birth (Feb. 6, 1945) in the Jamaican parish of St. Ann to the release of his breakthrough 1973 album, "Catch a Fire."

Along with entertainers such as Alicia Keys, Lenny Kravitz and Halle Berry, Marley has long been included on a list of African Americans who have one black parent and one white one. But Before the Legend rebuts the long-held belief that the singer's father, Norval St. Claire Marley, was white. A "wedding certificate for the marriage of Robert Marley [Bob's paternal grandfather] and Ellen Bloomfield [his paternal grandmother] lists him as 'white' and her as 'colored,' " Farley writes, revealing a discovery destined to wipe Marley from the above-mentioned list. "Later generations of the Marley family were unaware of Bloomfield's racial designation. She may have passed for white. Bob Marley would face grief all his life for being the offspring of black and white. . . . The truth was, the 'white' side of his family was racially mixed all along."

Marley's parentage is no small matter. His enduring belief in his biracial background created much of his inclusive outlook on life and influenced the lyrical content of tunes like "One Love" and "Buffalo Soldier." Farley -- a former reporter at Time magazine currently working for the Wall Street Journal -- brings his investigative skills to bear here, digging deeper than former Marley biographers to unearth this crucial detail. This information, gleaned from Chris Marley, a great-nephew of Bob Marley's father, is extremely significant to the singer's legacy.

Farley delivers one other notable achievement in Before the Legend: scoring previously forbidden access to the so-called Red X tapes, clandestine autobiographical recordings made by the late Peter Tosh, Marley's former band mate in the Wailers. In addition, Bunny Wailer (the other founding member of the original Wailers trio) made available to Farley more than seven hours of similar audio recordings. The problem is these tapes don't seem to reveal all that much about the early days of Marley, Tosh and Wailer that isn't available elsewhere.

Before the Legend is meant as an informative portrait of Marley prior to superstardom, and here Farley does succeed. The narrative explores all the points expected of a biography of its scope. Its subject, born Nesta Robert Marley, was raised in the Jamaican village of Nine Miles with no electricity or running water, a pile of stones for a stove, and an outhouse in the back of his mother's one-room stone hut. By the time the guitar-playing Marley was a teen, the invention of sound systems ("crude, rickety contraptions, usually made up of belt-driven turntables perched on homemade amplifiers") led circuitously to the creation of ska music ("We figured we would try the downbeat on the second beat," explains record arranger Ernest Ranglin), which in turn led to reggae. Enter Bob Marley and the Wailing Wailers, the requisite record-industry shadiness and an eventual savior in Island Records' Chris Blackwell.

Farley's dry writing style ultimately reduces the impact of his book. A typical passage: Marley "did not break-dance, and he wasn't known for spraying graffiti tags on Kingston buildings. But his music was composed of songs from the streets. He was born, as an artist, in the same cultural mix that gave birth to hip-hop." Farley's point is accurate, but its obviousness is made all the more banal by his colorless presentation. He would have benefited from dipping into the creative well he used for Kingston by Starlight, his novel published last year.

In 2003, the cultural critic Greg Tate's Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience examined the lack of appreciation for the heavily scrutinized Hendrix among blacks. Farley could certainly have profited from a similarly unique take on Marley, perhaps by offering a biography with a pointed perspective instead of another rote life history. As it stands, Before the Legend -- though instructive -- fails to significantly improve on existing books such as the late Timothy White's seminal Catch A Fire: The Life of Bob Marley.

Reviewed by Miles Marshall Lewis
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About the Author

Christopher John Farley was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in Brockport, New York. He is a graduate of Harvard University and a former editor of the Harvard Lampoon. He is the author of the bestselling biography Aaliyah: More Than a Woman and the novels My Favorite War and Kingston by Starlight. He is also the coauthor of Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues. He has worked as an editor and pop-music critic at Time magazine and is currently an editor at the Wall Street Journal.

Customer Reviews

BIG TINGS A GWAN FOR YOUNG BOB!
Well-written, entertaining, illuminating, engrossing and intelligent, this is a must-have book for anyone who loves reggae music, and for anyone who wants to find out more about the formative years of the man behind the myth.

This book will doubtless enter into the pantheon of great music biographies. Farley brings to his subject a deftness of touch and a fluid, anecdotal style, not to mention a gargantuan knowledge of the socio-political context of the music, together with a razor-sharp clarity of vision.

Farley is clearly in awe of his subject, but does not genuflect before him, retaining the correct critical and aesthetic distance. He also feels every lilting rhythm and harmonious melody of the music which he writes about, and manages to convey that passion with aplomb.

Farley's grasp of the material is exemplary, and the narrative he gives us is concise yet powerful. We are left at the end wanting him to write the subsequent chapters in the Marley life, a chapter we are far more familiar with.

Out of deference to the memory of a true musical genius and a towering social and racial luminary, and also Farley's consummate skill as a biographer, big tings deserve to gwan for this book!

Marley Magic
The legend of Bob Marley comes to life in this thoroughly researched, vivid account. The author seems to have trucked all over Jamaica finding people close to Marley to interview for this book...like Marley's mom and wife.
I learned a lot about what Marley's long, slow struggle to stardom was like and was surprised at how many setbacks he had to endure. The author includes a lot of interesting tidbits, like the kinds of jobs Marley had to take while working on his music. This is an excellent book for young and old fans alike because it delivers fresh information while also going over the basics if you don't know much about Marley. It will help you to appreciate and enjoy Marley's music even more. I highly recommend reading it.

A 'must' for any Marley fan
BEFORE THE LEGEND: THE RISE OF BOB MARLEY goes before most Marley biographies in covering his early years, from his birth in a poor Jamaican town to his early days as a struggling artist before his debut album Catch a Fire caught fire. New interviews with band mate Bunny, material from the secret autobiographical recordings made by Peter Tosh, interviews with close family members and more form a very different set of images in the first major coverage of Marley in over 20 years. A 'must' for any Marley fan.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch