The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (76 page)

Tuesday 28

Steve Currie

(Grimsby, 20 May 1947)

T Rex

(The Rumble)

A former member of also-rans The Rumble, Steve Currie was the first bassist to join Marc Bolan’s expanded line-up, answering a
Melody Maker
advertisement. He – along with other band stalwarts Mickey Finn (bongos/vocals) and Bill Legend (drums) – enjoyed the most potent period as T Rex hit pop superstardom. Between 1970 and 1973, there were few to touch the band in Britain as they marched forth with ten Top Five singles (including four UK number ones) and two charttopping albums. But by the end of 1974 it had all started to unravel for T Rex, though Steve Currie remained at Marc Bolan’s side (the frontman sacked everyone else), only leaving in 1976, by which time Bolan was enjoying only occasional successes.

Currie was immersed in session work with the likes of Chris Spedding and Wreckless Eric around the time of Bolan’s car crash – but his own death a few years later was eerily similar. Just before midnight on 28 April, Steve Currie’s car left the road near his home in Val da Parra, Portugal. The bassist died at the scene.

See also
Marc Bolan (
September 1977) plus the accompanying Dead Interesting! for a full list of T Rex acolytes now dead.

MAY

Monday

Bob Marley

(Robert Nesta Marley - Nine Miles, St Ann’s, Jamaica,

6 February 1945)

Bob Marley & The Wailers

Despite the best efforts of Bono and Bob Geldof, rock musicians are unlikely ever to have the spirituality and resolve to impact on the world’s politics in the same way that Bob Marley did for Africans and Jamaican Rastafarians. That he did so while popularizing an erstwhile marginal form – and left behind such a vast, joyous reservoir of music – makes the achievement all the more remarkable.

Known mainly by his birth name of Nesta, Marley spent his childhood as something of an outcast, partly ostracized because of the lightness of his skin. His mother, Cedella, had been abandoned by her husband, a Welsh-born white quartermaster some thirty years her senior. Poverty necessitated a move to the neglected area of Trenchtown – so named for the sewage trench that ran through it from Kingston, but nonetheless significant as a spiritual home to the generation of Rastafarians who had made the area their own since the faith’s inception in the thirties. Alienated by the bigotry outside, Marley sequestered himself, picking out tunes on a homemade ‘sardine can’ guitar with his close friend Neville ‘Bunny’ Livingston (later Wailer). The pair soon met another kindred spirit in Peter Tosh (Winston McIntosh), and formed The Wailers. Marley left school at sixteen, and briefly took a job as a welder at his mother’s insistence, but quit when he almost lost an eye in an accident. He worked hard on his music, recording tunes like ‘One Cup of Coffee’ (1962) with Chinese/Jamaican producer Leslie Kong before Studio One picked up the group as a unit. Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd saw in The Wailers – in their early days the line-up also included Junior Braithwaite, Beverley Kelso and Cherry Smith – a Jamaican act that could potentially tap a similar market to that of Curtis Mayfield’s Impressions in the USA: early recordings are very smooth and soulful. But Jamaican radio refused to play The Wailers’ music, and
The Wailing Wailers
(1966) was the only album the group was to make with Dodd. Marley – with his new wife, Alpharita Anderson (Rita Marley, of Studio One vocal group The Soulettes, later of The I-Threes) – left for the States to find employment as a migrant worker.

The Wailers regrouped in England, where label boss Chris Blackwell signed them to his forward-thinking Island label. With brothers Aston and Carlton ‘Family Man’ Barrett added as a rhythm section, the first record was
Catch a Fire
(1973), an album that remains just as potent more than thirty years after its release. Blackwell’s enthusiasm in pushing Marley to the fore was detrimental to the group as a whole, however. After one further recording,
Burnin’
(1973), Tosh (who felt undersold) and Wailer (for financial reasons) left to persue solo careers: reggae purists will always question whether the Island Svengali’s encouragement of Marley to find a wider audience was truly beneficial to the integrity of the music. But Marley’s was a significant name by 1976, after ‘No Woman No Cry’ became an international hit the year before. Back in Jamaica, before a concert just ahead of the elections that year, the musician was the target of an assassination attempt, the first major political incident of his career. Assumed to be supporting progressive Prime Minister Michael Manley, Marley was shot in his home – allegedly by (paradoxically) conservative Jamaica Labour Party supporters – receiving minor injuries to his chest and arms; Rita Marley and, most seriously, manager Don Taylor were also injured, but recovered fully. (Those believed responsible were later ‘intercepted’ on the streets.) Displaying the iron constitution of the ‘Lion in Zion’ of which he sang, Marley rallied to enjoy his most commercial phase, the albums
Rastaman Vibration
(1976, a big US hit),
Exodus
(1977, perhaps his best work) and
Kaya
(1978) each outselling its predecessor. But his body was to prove weaker than his resolve: incurring what he thought was a soccer injury (Marley was a huge fan of the sport), the singer was advised in 1977 to have his big toe amputated for fear of infection. Marley refused, stating that this constituted bodily desecration – something a devout Rastafarian could never consider. Within a year the injury had turned cancerous, within three the disease had spread throughout his body.

With his melanoma kept firmly from the public, Bob Marley continued to tour throughout the next two years, the albums
Survival
(1979) and particularly
Uprising
(1980) suggesting that all was hunky dory in the singer’s camp. In Britain, he enjoyed his biggest lifetime hit with ‘Could You be Loved?’, and another trip to America was arranged in order to promote the album and single there – at least that was the official story. In fact, Marley had travelled to Miami in order to receive specialist treatment for his condition. It became painfully apparent that Marley was unwell in September 1980 when, between shows with The Commodores at Madison Square Gardens, the singer collapsed while jogging in New York’s Central Park.

Knowing his time was limited, Marley converted to Christian Rastafarianism in Kingston and changed his name to Berhane Selassie (after the movement’s father) in the process. After further treatment in Germany, Bob Marley was rushed back to Florida in May 1981; within three days he was dead – and a legend was instantly born. On learning the news it had gravely been expecting, the whole of Jamaica came to a standstill. Parliament acknowledged the passing of one the country’s greatest children by going into recess for an entire week after his death. That summer, Jamaica’s Reggae Sunsplash Festival was dedicated to the memory of the genre’s most famous exponent – and featured The Melody Makers, a group comprising four of Marley’s nine children. A statue of the singer, guitar in hand, was erected at Kingston’s National Stadium, while his home has long been converted into a museum housing the late singer’s sarcophagus. Marley himself was awarded a posthumous Order of Merit, the third highest Jamaican decoration available.

See also
Carlie Barrett (
April 1987); Peter Tosh (
September 1987); Junior Braithwaite (
June 1999); Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd (
Golden Oldies #19). Marley’s mother, singer and musician Cedella Marley Booker, passed away in April 2008.