One love, one heart, one man
In honor of the birthday of Bob Marley, The Pulse sent Music Editor Marc Michael to Jamaica to report on the observation of what is virtually a national holiday. Having to miss all the rain and snow this past week is just one of the many burdens a music writer has to bear for his chosen profession.
Day One, Feb.4th
We land in Montego Bay Airport minutes ahead of a storm that spends the next 12 hours waffling between gentle summer rain and “Hurricane Lite.” It is an unusual occurrence for this time of year when the rain generally appears daily from 3:00 to 3:15 p.m. with Swiss accuracy.
In the community of West Negril where the world’s greatest jerk chicken can be found nightly in makeshift roadside stands, it makes for a soggy supper. Rum helps.
Day Two, Feb. 5th
The rain has ended, and we are blessed with the finest picture-postcard tropical weather this side of a Corona commercial.
Our driver for the week, a wizened local with a penchant for random maniacal laughter known only as “Mister Taylor”, takes us deep in to the heart of the West End where tourists generally fear to tread (for no good reason at all) in search of information about the upcoming celebrations.
Bob Marley is something of a local hero, a favorite son of Negril, it being one of the 42 places in Jamaica he was born (in addition to Nine Mile, where he was actually born.)
Mr. Taylor suggests we stop for tea, a holdover (I assume) from the British Colonial days. When in Rome. The tea has a peculiar musty flavor, as though it has been stored in a damp basement for too long.
Later that afternoon…“I had one grunch, but the eggplant over there.” I cannot remember where I first heard this phrase, but I do know that for the last hour I’ve been hearing it in my head, over and over and over.
It feels deeply profound for reasons I cannot reasonably explain. Does it relate somehow to my assignment? Marley. Bob Marley. Bob Marley and Me. Wasn’t that a movie? It seems familiar and yet, I had one grunch, but the eggplant over there.
Later still…the TV only seems to display one program about a tubby, middle-aged man with a melty face. Clearly, this is some high-brow artsy fartsy nonsense, shifting between Dadaism and Surrealism without effort. Probably the Simpsons did it.
Day Three, Feb. 6th (Bob Marley’s birthday)
The sun rose this morning with a magnificent “florp.” May have spent too much time in the tropical heat yesterday, feeling…well, not *bad* but perhaps a bit disconnected.
The excitement today is palpable. Street vendors are displaying ten thousand images of Tuff Gong creatively plastered to a wide array of products. There is nearly as wide a variety of bongs, pipes, chillums, clips, papers, bats, vaporizers, oil rigs, and whisker biscuits as can be found on a typical two block stretch of Pigeon Forge.
Cannabis, for personal use, is legal now, and people aren’t shy about celebrating that fact. I am offered a handful of gummi bears. Safe, harmless, familiar gummi bears, a childhood favorite.
Later that afternoon…tongue fuzzy. Fuzzy tongue. Fuzzy fuzzy fuzzy tongue. Shave tongue? No, shave tongue bad. A friendly stranger, apparently a shaman of some sort, offers me a refreshing beverage. “Overproof,” he calls it.
Feeling a little cottony in the mouthal region, I throw it back. There is something familiar about it. I remember siphoning gas from mom’s car as a young man and accidentally swallowing half a mouth full. This is a lot like that, albeit not quite as mellow.
There is a TV behind the bar showing a cricket match. Five minutes pass as the Overproof and my stomach come to an accord that will hopefully pave the way to a full-blown peace treaty down the road. Time will tell, time which seems to be passing much more slowly when measured by the tense action of a cricket match.
I am starting to think I prefer the show I was watching back in the room. Heading back, I am mildly surprised to discover that our room has no TV. It does have a large mirror where I think a TV should be. Curiouser and curiouser.
It seems as if every musician on the island is playing tonight. There are stages all up and down the beach and in the few places where they aren’t, makeshift ones are being rapidly assembled. Soon I realize that the music is mainly for after dark, but today is the day for the Great Negril Donkey race. They may not be the majestic thoroughbreds of my home state, but they are stout little fellows with plenty of heart, maybe not so much brains.
There is much excitement over today’s race, the “slowest fifteen minutes” in the sporting world is somehow stretched out into an eight-hour event.
Thousands of people are flooding the area but food and drink will be no issue as the current ratio of people to roadside chicken barrels seems to be about six to one.
Red Stripe is the drink of the day, ice-cold and refreshing. I wonder if perhaps it is brewed differently here as it seems to contain virtually no alcohol at all. It couldn’t, or else the case of it I’ve had in the last two hours would be having a far more profound effect. All is well, however.
The sun shines brightly, three little birds are singing sweetly, and a gentle breeze blows in from the placid sea in which the entire island of Jamaica seems to be gently bobbing and drifting along.
Night falls and a hundred bass guitars rattle the soul with a throbbing downbeat. Fires are lit, people dance and sing and move as one amorphous sea of humanity. Locals and tourists mingle freely, no one is having a bad time, and the familiar strains of Bob Marley’s tunes fill the air along with more contemporary island music and, surprisingly, a fair number of American pop tunes performed in Reggae style.
There comes a moment under the full moon, on the snowy beaches of the West End, when a few thousand people are simultaneously chanting “One love, one heart, let’s get together and feel all right,” and it feels as though, just for tonight, there is one love, and one heart.
Far from the 24-hour news cycles and vicious politricks back home, in this tiny oasis in the Caribbean, it feels like every little ting gonna be all right.
Away from the gaudy trinkets, cheap tourist crap, and the stereotypes perpetuated back home by bro-culture, there is love at the heart of the island and its music. A genuine love and appreciation for love and living that transcends all boundaries, real or imagined.
I hope that feeling is still there when the sun comes up. I hope I can bring some of it home with me, because lord knows it’s something we could all use right about now.
“My music will go on forever. Maybe it’s a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.” —Bob Marley