08/10/2025
THE REGGAE BLUES
Miami Herald, The (FL)
November 15, 1987
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer
Peter Tosh was shot in the back of the head as he lay face down on the floor of his house in Kingston. The killers were later seen laughing and drinking down at Half Way Tree, in the heart of the music district, the very crucible of reggae.
Half Way Tree is named for a huge cottonwood tree from which runaway slaves were hanged. Now it's just a crossroads where the singers and DJs and would-be reggae stars hang out in the parking lot of a roller rink. Even Tosh used to come by, before he became bitter and reclusive. Perhaps the killers went to Half Way Tree to gloat. Or perhaps they were not really there at all that Friday night. Facts about Tosh's death are a precious commodity, only rumors are bountiful; the genuine and the real must compete against those evil spirits summoned by the grieving.
The day after the shooting the body lay on a gurney in the morgue. Witnesses say the attendant on duty let strangers enter to look at the famous cadaver. He charged for this privilege; he said he wanted just a little drink money. Two Jamaican dollars would be fine. One fan, a woman, cut two dreadlocks off the head. They could fetch a nice price.
Peter Tosh once said of money: "It has damaged the minds of many people. It has killed many people and it could kill me."
And so it happened, on Sept. 11. Three men visited the house. They pulled guns and demanded money. Tosh's girlfriend argued vehemently with them. The gunmen told everyone to lie down on the floor and then began to fire wildly, killing three people, including Tosh, and injuring four others. The gunmen took a little cash and some jewelry and left. A few days later police announced that they were looking for Dennis "Leppo" Lobban, a paroled felon. Lobban turned himself in but did not confess. Police continued to look for the other suspects.
"On the face of it, to us, it is robbery. Secondly, it seems that during this entry a feud developed. A feud because there was some agitation," was the entire explanation from Commissioner Herman Ricketts of the Jamaican Constabulary.
It is an unsatisfactory story and, naturally, hardly anyone in Jamaica believes it. How could the murder of the last international reggae superstar be the result of a random robbery? Robbers don't kill heroes. Conspirators do.
The government did it because Tosh was an agitator. Or it was a gang aligned with one of the political parties. Or Tosh's record company, which wanted to end a marathon court battle over royalties. Or the South African white regime, out to avenge Tosh's attacks on apartheid.
Or perhaps there was a general plot against musicians. There had been a string of robberies and beatings of musicians in recent months. Carleton Barrett, like Tosh one of the five original members of the great band The Wailers, had been murdered in April. Another original Wailer, the legendary Bob Marley, died of a brain tumor in 1981. The group seemed cursed.
And so naturally there were bad vibes going around Half Way Tree, confusion and fear mixed with profound sadness.
"It's like a plot to eliminate all The Wailers," said singer Garfield Smith.
"Them kill my bredrin Peter Tosh," said Donavan Green, another singer. "It grieve me. I still cannot come to myself. To kill a Rasta, it shake every individual heart in the world."
Boots Harris, editor of the magazine Reggae Vibrations, said darkly, "There's a serious trend in society to eliminate certain artists who are trying to bring about social and political change. What we want to know is, who are these people taking their orders from?"
Probably nobody.
The evidence, though limited as this story goes to press, is that Peter Tosh did in fact die at the age of 42 in a panicky robbery that went out of control.
But if the motive for Tosh's murder was mundane, his death is no less significant, for it is coincident with a broader and equally mysterious decline in reggae music. The "roots" sound that became an international phenomenon is fading, and with it a philosophy of black liberation, personal dignity and revolution. The new music in Jamaica is largely mindless and vulgar, improvident for those who would escape poverty.
At Half Way Tree, singer Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace figured out what it all meant: "Babylon, the society, they wanted to kill Peter Tosh -- not by shooting, but by slowly making the people watch his culture die out."
Reggae is to Kingston what jazz is to New Orleans. The music emerged from the ghetto in the late 1960s to rival sugar, rum, bauxite and g***a as Jamaica's most important export. The reggae rhythm has been appropriated by such pop stars as Paul Simon, Eric Clapton, Men at Work and The Police, and the infectious beat has made it popular even on Madison Avenue, where reggae provides the TV commercial sound track for Miller Genuine Draft. But it is the message of reggae -- a cry for black awareness -- that has been its most important characteristic. The lyrics are simple, but direct -- a powerful combination to people mired in seemingly hopeless poverty. (Get up, stand up/ Stand up for your rights).
You don't hear reggae anymore in Kingston.
At least there is rarely a note to be heard of the original roots sound that devotees in London or Tokyo or New York could identify. Of the top 10 singles in Jamaica the week after Tosh was killed, only one was roots-rock reggae. Most of the rest were "Dance Hall" tunes, which as a general rule are little more than gibberish and vulgarity (what Jamaicans call "slackness") set to a repetitive and often recycled computer track.
Long before he died, Tosh had vanished from the music scene. Convinced he was being robbed of royalties, he demanded several years ago that record store owners remove his albums
from the racks.
In 1983 he retreated to a mustard-colored two-story house in a middle-class neighborhood called Barbican, and for the next four years he rarely ventured into public places. He did not perform. He sued his record company. He lost contact with his old friends and became an enigma, a forgotten man, a metaphor for something sad that had happened to the music.
Peter McIntosh was born in the country, in Westmoreland. His father left when Peter was 3 months old. When he was a small child, Peter's mother sent him to the care of an aunt in Kingston. After the aunt died he moved in with an uncle in the slum known as Trenchtown.
Trenchtown was, and is, an asphalt and concrete grid with barracks-like buildings, built by the government. There the young McIntosh befriended two other boys, Robert Nesta Marley and Neville "Bunny" Livingston.
There were few avenues of escape from the life of poverty. Crime was one; music another. Marley, McIntosh and Livingston chose music, and in 1963 they formed a band called The Wailers. They began to refine the Jamaican pop sound, then known as "ska," later as "rock steady." By 1969, under the tutelage of a producer named Lee Perry, The Wailers had become the biggest act in Jamaica. Peter McIntosh became Peter Tosh, Bunny Livingston became Bunny Wailer.
Now people were talking about a sound called "reggae," a word that may have come from a 1968 T***s and the Maytals song called Do the Reggay, though other origins have been debated. It was a simple music in 4/4 time with a playful lilt on the off beat. The music was light and airy, characterized by a scratchy, almost quacking rhythm guitar, rim shots on the drum, carnival keyboards and, above all, beautiful singing. Reggae was folk music, and every lyric counted.
In the 1960s Tosh, and seemingly every other reggae musician, embraced Rastafarianism, an apocalyptic religious cult that dated to the 1930 coronation of Ras Tafari Makonnen as Emperor of Ethiopia. This regal black man made no pretensions to divinity, but he took the formal title Haile Selassie, meaning "Power of the Holy Trinity." He claimed to be a descendant of King Solomon. In the 1930s, a period of messianic mysticism in Jamaica, Selassie was seen to fulfill prophecies that a great Redeemer, a King of Kings, would arise in Africa.
The Rastafarians preached that Ethiopia was Zion, and that tropical, steamy Jamaica was hell on Earth. Christianity represented devil-worship and paganism. The Rastafarians outlawed the cutting of hair and grew ropy "dreadlocks." They ate no meat and drank no alcohol. They smoked g***a -- the potent ma*****na of Jamaica -- as a sacrament.
In Tosh's heyday the use of "herb" contributed to the international mystique of reggae stars; they were rebels, they were cool. Tosh smoked huge spliffs -- large g***a-stuffed joints -- on stage, and it became his trademark. He was almost always stoned. Eventually the charm of this would wear off. But Tosh would still be stoned.
Notwithstanding the g***a and some sexual licentiousness, the Rastafarians were ultimately moralists, promoters of individual integrity and self-worth. They taught ghetto kids not to loathe the color of their skin, to reject the prejudice that white is better than brown and brown better than black.
The Rastas echoed the teachings of Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican national hero who had founded the back-to-Africa repatriation movement earlier in the century. The essential message of the religion -- and thus, of reggae -- was that the African people, having suffered a forced diaspora, remained in a form of Babylonian captivity, of mental and economic slavery. But Babylon, as the Rastas called Western society, would soon crumble; Judgment Day was nigh. After Armageddon the black man would rule all Creation.
"These are the last days," Tosh said in 1981. "We are now living in the closure of the dispensation of time."
Reggae's big break came in the early 1970s when a young, wealthy Jamaican named Chris Blackwell formed Island Records and signed The Wailers. The band's first two albums, Catch a Fire in 1973 and Burnin' in 1974, made reggae an international phenomenon.
The golden era of reggae coincided with the socialist government of Michael Manley, leader of the People's National Party. Manley, elected in 1972, was hostile to the foreign corporations that exploited the island's natural resources, and tried to steer the nation on a course of nonalignment with the superpowers. Wealthy Jamaicans feared Manley was turning the island into another Cuba. They fled. The economy collapsed, political violence erupted in the ghettos; tourists were scared away. Twice during this period Tosh was stomped by the police. Marley survived an assassination attempt by mysterious gunmen.
All the while, the sons of Trenchtown were making their greatest music.
Tosh wrote the anthem Get Up, Stand Up and many other songs for the band. But Marley was the better singer, and with his good looks he became the superstar. A resentful Tosh quit the band in 1974 and went solo. His first albums, Legalize It and Equal Rights, were critical and commercial successes, and by 1978, when he toured as the warm-up act for The Rolling Stones, he was the second most prominent reggae artist in the world.
Offstage he had a joyful side. He would ride his unicycle through airports and entertain children. He liked skateboards, roller skates, slingshots, all the toys he never had as a kid.
He was eloquent in his own peculiar way. He would invent words. He called politics "politricks." Sometimes he would speak fervently about vampires and killer ghosts ("duppies"), or about the supernatural power of Haile Selassie, who by Tosh's account could bounce bullets off his chest like Superman and kill his enemies just by glaring at them.
Onstage Tosh was a fantastic if sometimes bizarre performer. Tall and rangy, he dressed in strange sheik outfits or loaded himself down with gold jewelry.
In concert, he would stop singing and deliver rambling sermons. His most notorious moment came at the One Love concert in Kingston in 1978, with Prime Minister Manley and opposition leader Edward Seaga in the audience. Tosh, a massive spliff in hand, went on for more than half an hour, berating Manley and Seaga for not legalizing g***a.
In 1981, Bob Marley died of cancer. Reggae never recovered from that loss.
Tosh chafed when critics crowned him the new king of reggae. "I am not new!" he protested. He made bitter comments about Marley, shocking old friends. He seemed increasingly paranoid, deluded.
He complained that people were trying to make him look like a g***a smuggler, and that his record company, as part of a plot to prevent reggae from reaching the masses, wouldn't give him money to promote his new album. He liberally sprinkled his language with his favorite expletives, "bloodclaat" and "boombabloodclaat."
"They give bloodclaat David Bowie money for promotion, it's a bloodclaat one-half million dollar," he complained in a 1983 interview with reggae DJ Roger Steffens. "Boombabloodclaat! . . . It is a paid conspiracy by the ministers of propaganda and public mischief. And the ministers of defamation of character. Seen? And the minister of propaganda is trying to show you that the Emperor Haile Selassie, who is our king of kings, is dead. Seen? And this is the first biggest propaganda in the dispensation of time."
He thought people wanted to kill him.
"The future for me is in Africa, because I can't take the discrimination," he told the interviewer. ". . . I am sick of being abused . . . condemned, humiliated, brutalized. And the plots on my life daily continue."
When Peter Tosh died, many of his old friends hadn't seen him in years. They blame the estrangement on Tosh's girlfriend, Marlene Brown. They say she convinced Peter that everyone was out to get him, to rip him off, even kill him.
Marlene Brown says that's right -- they were out to get him. Of Peter's friends, she says, "Of course they don't like me. I'm not the average woman. I'm young and I'm very beautiful and I'm very extremely intelligent and I have four professions. People don't like me because of that."
She says, "Most of Peter's friends are evil and nasty . . . and because of that, of me being so strict, people hate me. Peter Tosh loves me and that boggles everyone's mind."
It does indeed.
Few of Tosh's friends had anything positive to say about Brown. The most favorable comment came from George Fullwood, a bassist with Tosh's backup band: "She's a very nice person, if you know how to talk to her."
Tosh and Brown were not always in harmony. Michael Lorne, an attorney who had represented Tosh in legal battles for several years, says he witnessed battles between Tosh and Marlene Brown so furious that knives were drawn.
Brown was not just a girlfriend -- she was also Tosh's manager. She helped engineer Tosh's legal battles during the past four years.
This year the reclusive Tosh finally decided to go on the road again. He scheduled a concert at Madison Square Garden in August. But he couldn't get any money together to pay for the tour. He rescheduled the concert and returned to Jamaica, where Brown had a court appearance for an altercation with a security guard at the Kingston airport.
The Madison Square Garden appearance was to have been Sept. 11. Instead, Tosh was at his home that night, face down on the floor.
At the weeklong Silver Jubilee music festival this summer only 6,000 people showed up on the nights that the roots-rock reggae stars were playing. On Dance Hall night a mob of 40,000 filled the stadium.
Manley "Big Yout" Buchanan, a reggae star of many years, says of the nation's young: "They're dancing their way into slavery again."
At the music festival, on live television, Dance Hall star Lloyd Lovindeer waved a pair of women's underpants on stage and sang his hit song Panty Size, which is banned from the radio but still a huge seller:
Raise your hand and tell me your panty size.
Me no wan, me no wan no big panty gal.
Lovindeer, browsing a month later at Aquarius Records at Half Way Tree, said, "I see nothing wrong with holding up a panty on TV. No one can convince me that that is slackness (vulgarity). . . . Although the emphasis of Dance Hall music is have-a-good-time, if you listen closely, there is also a lot of strong social comment. You have to read between the lines."
Jamaican music, like American, has seen its creative edge dulled by formulaic pandering to teenyboppers. In both countries the new music sounds like it was extruded by a computer. Nameless engineers dictate the beat; the stars are just celebrities.
"They're not primarily singers, they're primarily entertainers," says music historian Dermot Hussey.
With its generous use of slang and thick patois, Dance Hall is targeted at a strictly Jamaican audience, particularly the crowds that gather around the "sound systems" set up all over town. The international market is ignored, diminishing Jamaica's stature on the world music scene and lessening the chances that ghetto kids can follow in the footsteps of Marley and Tosh.
Like so much else in Jamaica, the music industry has been warped by poverty. Critics say corruption is routine; payola rules the airwaves. Two thousand dollars buys a No. 1 hit. If a singer doesn't have the cash behind him, his song doesn't have a chance.
The hustlers in the industry have scared off some of reggae's biggest allies in the United States. Earlier this year, Roger Steffens, a Los Angeles-based DJ with an international reggae radio show, quit the program and several other reggae- related enterprises because he felt that unsavory characters were taking over the industry.
"I figured I would get out while I could," Steffens said. "The whole tale of reggae has been disastrous since Bob's death. People are fighting more and more over less and less. It is killing the music, quite frankly."
One radio disc jockey in Kingston tried to restore quality reggae to glory in Jamaica. Jeff "Free-I" Dixon started a reggae show on JBC radio and quickly became a hero among those who cringed at the inanity of Dance Hall. Dixon played the music no one else would play -- such as the latest album from Peter Tosh.
The night of Sept. 11, Dixon went to Tosh's house to check on the singer. He walked through the door and saw three men with guns.
He died from his head wound three days later.
The would-be stars can sometimes be found loitering outside the Skateland rink next to the sign that says "Through these gates pass the most talented people on earth!" The sign is not without some truth: It seems as if any one of these prowlers can pick up a guitar, plunk a few notes and sing a song to break your heart. The same guy who whispers, "Can you loan me 10 Jamaican?" will tell you of his plans to tour the world, just as Marley and Tosh did. These are not the whimsical aspirations of teen-agers; these are the hardened dreams of aging men.
Jah Earl Locks, born Charles Nunes, supports himself by growing g***a in the country and selling it at music festivals. Several years ago he recorded a number of songs but never became a star. He is 37 and optimistic.
"Any man can plant g***a, but not any man can sing," he says, strumming a battered guitar. "I just need someone good to work with. I'm one man that's full of confidence. I know I'm gonna tour."
The larger reggae scene is not entirely desperate. There are plenty of reggae survivors such as Jimmy Cliff, Bunny Wailer, Dennis Brown, Sly & Robbie, Freddie McGregor and Judy Mowatt, and new talent on the scene such as Half Pint, Ini Kamose and Morris Gardner. They all make great music. Maybe some day there will be a reggae renaissance.
But for now reggae is in a strange groove. The black consciousness at the heart of the music has been dashed by a tide of conservative politics and Americanization. Some younger Jamaicans wear dreadlocks but more likely they use Jeri-Curl, like American blacks. They read American magazines and watch American TV shows and listen to American pop music. The week after Tosh died the most popular song on Jamaican radio was Bad by Michael Jackson.
Rastafarians, like the Baby Boomers in the United States, are appalled that a new generation has come along that rejects the precepts formed during the 1960s. Rastafarians preach against the rising decadence, against the growing scourge of co***ne and gang violence. The kids, by and large, have tuned them out.
"People don't want to hear about revolution anymore, about equal rights and justice," says Ansel Cridland, a solo artist formerly with The Meditations.
Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace says, "Money is now more important than the human mentality we had back in the '70s."
Neville Garrick, one of Tosh's friends: "I find it very hard to relate to the young people today."
The Rastas have changed, too. Some are now lawyers, or accountants, or self-employed sellers of trinkets down at Half Way Tree. They have mellowed. As Jamaican sociologist Rex Nettleford puts it, "They've come to terms with Babylon."
Tosh wrote a catchy song called Maga Dog, the chorus taken from a famous Jamaican proverb about what happens when you try to feed the strays that roam the island.
Feel sorry for maga dog
He'll turn around and bite you.
Dennis "Leppo" Lobban, 33, is a maga dog of sorts, a paroled felon who has parasitically preyed on the musicians of Kingston. Like many of the singers, Lobban grew up in Trenchtown. Eight times he was arrested for violent crimes, police said, and after shooting a policeman in 1973 was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was paroled in October 1986. He had no means of support except to follow his younger brother, a would-be musician, to the homes of established reggae stars, and ask for money.
Bunny Wailer said he gave Lobban money. Everyone did, Wailer said.
"The people you are struggling for, the people you put your life on the block for, these are the same people who waste you," he said.
Tosh's former attorney, Michael Lorne, offered the other side of the story.
"Some of them (the reggae singers) no longer live what they preach. They have alienated themselves from the roots. They want to keep up with the Joneses, and they no longer see themselves as part of the evolving process of the ghetto situation. The youths now, having looked to them for leadership and guidance, will be quick to pounce."
This one have a gun
That one have a gun
and when it pop
another one drop.
-- Peter Tosh, Peace Treaty
In Jamaica, you can die for voting the wrong way. During the 1980 election campaign 700 people were slain in political violence, most in the Kingston area. Some fear that a new standard for bloodshed will be set in the next election, which Prime Minister Seaga must call no later than 1989. The rival political parties reportedly supply guns to their supporters in the ghettos, and when elections approach, the party wars begin.
Jamaica has emerged as a major trafficking center for co***ne on the way to the United States. Drugs go to Miami and guns return. There is talk that the gangs now have military- style artillery. During the last election violence, people relied on g***a to mellow their spirits; no one knows what an election will be like with the ghettos buzzing on coke.
A new crime wave began in July. Peter Tosh returned to Jamaica in the middle of it.
A week after the shooting, Marlene Brown remained encamped at Tosh's house. Behind the gate and the barbed wire a private security guard roamed the front lawn with a shotgun. A dozen dogs patrolled the driveway.
Brown, sitting on the upstairs veranda, smoked a spliff and talked rapidly of conspiracies and treachery. She wanted her boyfriend buried in Kingston, but Tosh's mother, Alvira Coke, wanted to take him back to Westmoreland, his birthplace. Meanwhile, the body remained on ice at the morgue, under guard. There were fears that someone might try to sn**ch it.
"They're saying that I am not married to Peter Tosh, which is true, I am not Peter's wife, I am Peter's queen! Peter kept me above a wife, and they do not recognize queenship in Jamaica," Brown said. "Peter's mom gave him away. I think it's fair for me to do what I want with the body."
The interior of the house was plain save for the many photographs of Tosh and a few of His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie. Friends and relatives wandered in and out, an alleged brother cooked soup in the kitchen. Bullet holes had punctured a lovely black cabinet. A rug had been pulled over the blood stain on the tile floor. This did not look like the palace of a rich man, but rather a crash pad for musicians and their flock. Tosh once lived for a few months at Mick Jagger's house near Ocho Rios but was kicked out, the story goes, when Jagger discovered goats in the living room.
Brown said Tosh died broke. But people still perceived him as wealthy, and the house, Brown said, was like a credit union, a place people came to borrow money. She says Tosh felt no guilt at having more than his brethren from the ghetto: "People know that from ancient times we Africans owned the world, all the diamonds, emeralds and pearls. Peter is used to that from ancient times. He is descended from King Solomon."
A bandanna covered Brown's hair. She said she had a head wound but showed no visible sign of injury.
"My doctor says I am the first person in history to ever get a head shot like this and live," she said in a subsequent interview. "They came over to my head and put a bullet right through my head. I am the only person in history to ever live with a bullet through my head. Blood was boiling furiously. It is just the mercy of Jah that I am sitting here today."
Brown and another survivor, Michael Robinson, said they were all watching television the night of Sept. 11 when they heard dogs barking outside. Robinson said he looked and saw Lobban at the gate. Two shadowy figures were behind him. He knew Lobban and invited him in. All three visitors went upstairs and then pulled guns.
"Peter Tosh, we come to kill you. You're dead tonight, so don't bother to say nothing, you're dead," Marlene Brown quoted one of the killers as saying.
Brown says one of the men said he was going to chop off Peter's head.
"I jump up and I told him that he cannot chop off Peter's head, I put my body over Peter's head, they picked me up off of Peter, turned the machete over to the wrong side and start beating me on the head, they put me down on the floor and shot me in the head.
"I pretended that I was dead, my head started bleeding and there was lots of blood on the ground. When they thought I was dead they shot Peter in the head, and they gave three other people on the ground head-shots."
Marlene Brown insists the murder was an assassination. But another victim, Santa Davis, who was shot through the shoulder and drove himself to the hospital, has told friends that when Marlene Brown resisted the robbery, the gunmen went into a panic and started shooting wildly.
They were sloppy. That's another argument against the hired-gun theory. Contract killers probably wouldn't have left survivors. Narcotics may have fueled the frenzy; the killers are rumored to have visited the home of a reputed co***ne dealer earlier that day.
Bunny Wailer -- the last survivor of the original three Wailers -- is certain that the gunmen were high on co***ne.
"I don't know of people doing no crimes because of g***a. But since the God damn co***ne come in, people are shooting other people for no reason at all, just for the kick of it."
Yet he believes an even more diabolical force must have been present.
"Rasta always have a spiritual warfare with the devil," Wailer said. "If the warrior find himself in any way weak or feeble or let his defenses down, then the enemy will find a way to pe*****te those defenses.
"We know that now is the time of Judgment."
In Trenchtown, Massive Dread, godfather of the ghetto and self-appointed guardian of the people's rights, sat on a stoop with his g***a chalice and an electric guitar.
"Every artist who lived in Trenchtown leave and don't come back," Massive Dread said. "One thing I am sure, if Peter Tosh were in Trenchtown, he would not have been killed."
He sang a refrain from a Marley song: Never let the children cry, or you got to tell Jah Jah why.
Massive Dread stopped singing and said, "People in Trenchtown think Peter and Bob died because they made them cry."
So in the end, it is a morality play. A ghetto child dared to rise from the mire of wretchedness that is poor Jamaica, he became prideful and covetous, he lost touch with the roots. In so doing he became an object of envy and hate. Only in tragedy did he return to Earth.
It's like the Jimmy Cliff song: The harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all.
Tosh's body, the government finally ruled, belonged to his mother. After two weeks of indecision a memorial service was hastily staged in Kingston. Then the mother took her son back across the hills of Jamaica, to her home in Westmoreland, and buried him in the front yard.
Memo: COVER STORY
Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Page: 8
Copyright (c) 1987 The Miami Herald
