Sunday, September 21, 1980, Marley and close friend “Skilly” Cole went for a run in Central Park. Bob and The Wailers opened for The Commodores at Madison Square Garden the previous two nights, and after the upcoming Tuesday night gig at the 2,800-seat Stanley, the band was set to open 60 shows for Stevie Wonder. So it was time to catch up on some exercise.
But while jogging, Marley’s neck froze, his body stiffened and he fell to the ground, temporarily paralyzed. The next day, Sloan Kettering physicians would inform Marley that through the infected, nail-less toe he was urged to amputate years before – the singer refused, insisting that his Rasta faith would carry him through – cancer had spread throughout his body. Tumors were now in his brain, and he may have as little as two weeks to live.
If the then-35-year-old Marley – who, two years before, had prophesized his death at 36, “like Christ” – saw and felt it coming, his band was shocked. Says Marvin: “Before the show, we were told, ‘The doctors have advised that Bob’s gotta take a rest. This is going to be our last show, possibly our last show ever.’ We we’re like, ‘What? You’re kidding.’ We couldn’t imagine that Bob was sick, because he looked okay.”
“It was kind of a send-off party,” says longtime Wailers bassist Aston “Family Man” Barrett. “Everyone was playing with a special soul.” Days later, after Marley’s tumor re-intensified, the band was back in New York, and Family Man would shockingly glimpse his singer without his mighty dreadlocks, gone after radiation treatment.
In less than eight months – after a brief visit to a hospital in Mexico and an extended stay at an alternative cancer therapy center in Germany – Marley would die in a Miami hospital, while en route to his home in Jamaica. Until the end, May 11, 1981, he remained strong, seemingly in denial of his impending demise – at least outwardly.
“The morning before he left Germany, he called me at 5 a.m.,” says Marcia Griffiths, one-third of the fabled I-Threes, The Wailers’ backing vocalists. “He asked me why [his manager] Don Taylor came to my house, if he was trying to break up his group or something like that. Even at that stage, he still had hope.”
“He honestly thought there’s a way for him to get out of this,” says David Hinds of Steel Pulse. “One of the last conversations I had with him, he was talking about trying to get a label together, and wanted us to be part of it. His voice was strong and sprite and he was very optimistic. I said, ‘Bob, all I’m interested in is you getting well, and for us to chant down Babylon together.’”
Producer/Island Records boss Chris Blackwell arranged Marley’s planned flight home on the Concorde. The day before takeoff – with time running out – Marley phoned Blackwell, joking, “Chris, don’t get me no propeller plane.” Despite crossing the Atlantic at supersonic speed, Marley was so ill by the time that he reached Miami that his airline refused to take him on to Kingston, Marvin says.
When news of Marley’s death broke in Kingston, Family Man went to his record shop and pressing plant and told everyone to stop working and to go home. Across town tears streamed down the face of Marvin, who, with his world moving in slow motion, sat down and wrote a song about Bob called “Some Say Have No Fear.”
So it was perhaps fitting that when Bob actually expired, his eldest son, Ziggy Marley – then 12 years old – knew before he was even told. “Something just fell over the house,” he says. “The air just got still. You could feel the vibe change.” When he left his father the day before, Bob called Ziggy to him, saying, “Young Bob, I have a song for you,” leaving him with these words: “On your way up, take me up. On your way down, don’t let me down.”
