Played a wicked game of ping-pong, too.ġ9.
Why am i gay in the future tosh.o professional#
Bob was a professional level soccer player. For a long time Bob drove a BMW-which, as far as he was concerned, stood for Bob Marley and the Wailers.ġ8. After four shows, Sylvester Stone fired them for being too good and hogging all the adoration.ġ7. Later that year, they joined a 17-city tour of Sly and the Family Stone’s. In July 1973, Bob and the Wailers opened a week of gigs for Bruce Springsteen. When Bob discovered that the reason he was still poor after being so famous for so long was that his long-time manager and friend Don Taylor had been robbing him blind, Bob beat Don to within an inch of his life. He played his record so often that finally the owner of the place yanked the record out of the jukebox and demanded that Bob leave, and never come back.ġ5. The first record Bob cut was called “Judge Not.” On its label his name was misspelled as “Bob Morley.” Working at the time in a tin shack as a master welder, Bob, 17, spent most of his pay in a rum-joint jukebox up the street in which his song was a selection. (Tosh was a guitarist in The Wailers, and a very important reggae singer/songwriter in his own right.)ġ4. “The Toughest,” as Tosh was known, was murdered in his home on Friday, September 11, 1987, by a 32-year-old hoodlum acquaintance of his named Leppo. Peter Tosh’s given name was Winston Hubert McIntosh. (One of the original members of Bob Marley and the Wailers, Bunny was Bob’s brilliant percussionist, and a splendid back-up and lead singer.)ġ3. Bunny Wailer)’s given name is Neville O’Riley Livingston. Bob’s mother had a child by Bunny Wailer’s dad when they were all living together in Trenchtown. The way he could tell his children, he said, was by the way each spoke out of the side of his or her mouth, the way he did.ġ1. The general estimate puts the number of Marley’s progeny at around twenty. Bob, who at twenty-one married a beautiful Trenchtown Sunday school teacher named Rita (and stayed married to her until his death did they part), fathered an untold number of kids by an untold number of women. He was famous for making his band rehearse hours and hours after any normal person would have dropped exhausted to the floor.ġ0.
When he was a kid, one of Bob’s regular chores was to hike five miles through rugged country to fetch firewood. During that time he worked the night shift at a Chrysler plant (about which he wrote in his song, “Night Shift”), drove a forklift in a factory, and worked as a lab assistant for DuPont Chemical (!). When Bob was twenty-one, he lived in Delaware for seven months. Nobody really knows what the word “reggae” means, or how it originated.ĩ. ” Their hairstyle comes from Leviticus 21:5: “They shall not make baldness upon their head.”Ĩ. Old Testament devotees, the Rastas smoke because Psalm 104:14 says: “He causeth. The one thing everybody does get is that Rastafarians smoke dope and wear dreadlocks (which put dread in the heart of the oppressors, see). (Although true believers hold that all people are welcomed into the arms of Jehovah-whom Rastas call “Jah.”) Though doctrinally a legitimate sect of Orthodox Christianity, Rastafari can be difficult for non-Jamaicans to grasp. Rastafarians thought this “Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah” was the messiah, come to redeem the black man. With that crown came the honorific name Haile Selassie. Ras Tafari is the name of a man who was crowned King of Ethiopia in 1930. “Tuff Gong,” the name of Bob’s recording label, was a nickname Bob earned for himself in the Kingston ghetto of Trenchtown (so named because it was built over an old drainage trench) for being exactly the wrong guy to screw with. So they switched his name to Robert Nesta Marley.Ħ. A Jamaican immigration official suggested to Bob’s mom that “Nesta” sounded too much like a girl’s name. For the rest of his life, whenever someone who knew him back when asked him to read their palms, he resolutely refused.ĥ. His new destiny, he said, was to become a singer. At seven, having just returned to his rural village after a year spent living in the ghettos of Kingston (Jamaica’s capital), he declared that from then on he would cease to read palms. As a little kid, Bob had a knack for deeply spooking people by successfully predicting their futures by reading their palms. Whatever its significance, it was important enough for Norval to make sure that Cedella spelled it right before he moved away.Ĥ. Nobody knows to whom or what “Nesta” referred. “Robert” was the name of Norval’s brother.ģ. Norval instructed Cedella to name the baby boy that was hers (and, he made clear, hers alone) Nesta Robert.