Features

Bob Marley: The Lion’s Last Roar

Today on the 68th anniversary of Bob Marley’s birth, we revisit this feature on his final performance.

Lord, I’ve got to keep on moving
Lord, I’ve got to get on down
Lord, I’ve got to keep on grooving
Where I can’t be found
–“Keep on Moving”

On September 23, 1980, Bob Marley took the stage at The Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh, and played the longest known concert of his life—a three-encore epic that culminated with a six and a half-minute rendition of “Get Up, Stand Up.” Months earlier, tickets sold out immediately for the gig, and when Marley and the Wailers finally arrived, the capacity crowd of 3,500 got everything they wanted, and more than they even understood. Having spent that night watching from the wings, peering out at the frenzied, packed house, owner/promoter and fervent Marley fan Rich Engler remembers being spellbound. “It was spectacular. I can’t even put into words how good it was. They just lit it up.”

Yet, it’s a performance that the surviving Wailers can barely remember. To put it simply, “Pittsburgh was a blur,” notes guitarist Al Anderson. And for good reason. Unbeknownst to Engler and the Pittsburgh fans who kept calling Marley and the company back for encore after encore, the band and entourage were on pins and needles the whole time—their eyes fixed on their leader, worried that he might at any moment suffer a seizure or faint onstage.

Two days earlier in New York, Marley collapsed during a morning jog in Central Park. As his body was “freezing up” and pain was shooting through his neck, he fell into the arms of friend Alan “Skill” Cole, who carried him back to hotel they were staying at, the Essex House. Although he recovered in a few hours, a neurologist examined Marley the next day and gave him just two weeks to live. “They came in and said, ‘Bob, you’re in a lot of trouble and you need help immediately,’” says Anderson, who was there for the diagnosis, alongside Cole and manager Danny Sims. “It was like time started moving in the other direction.”

Marley ignored the prognosis, just as he had done during the past five years—ever since the steel spike of another player’s cleat during a soccer match had pierced the big toe on his right foot. In 1975, that toe became infected. By 1977, when his toenail fell off, doctors told him that he needed an amputation—that it was a matter of life or death. Again, the Rastaman ignored them, suffocating the toe in boots he wore onstage and offstage, believing Jah Rastafari would cure him. They told him that he needed to go for check-ups every three months, which he blew off. Now, the melanoma that started in his toe had infested his entire body. At just 35 years old, Bob Marley had a terminal brain tumor.

As the doctor was diagnosing Bob, the rest of the entourage—including his wife Rita—continued on to Pittsburgh, unaware of just how sick he was. Meanwhile, Marley’s booking agent phoned Engler and informed him that although the band was en route, Marley may not leave New York. That night, in her hotel room in Pittsburgh, Rita had an ominous dream in which a sickly, bald Bob spoke to her through iron bars.

Back at the Essex House, Marley paid a visit to longtime Island Records boss Chris Blackwell, who was living in a suite on the top floor of the hotel. Largely responsible for Marley’s international stardom in myriad ways, Blackwell had long avoided taking a posed photograph with Marley, worried that the circulation of such an image wasn’t in keeping with his artist’s rebel persona, and, frankly, because he deemed it kind of corny. In yet another one of the eerie moments surrounding this final week of the Uprising tour—the first and only week of the ill-fated U.S. leg of that tour—Marley reportedly suggested that they pose for a photograph before he left town.

The next morning, Rita told her fellow I-Threes backup singers, Marcia Griffiths and Judy Mowatt, about her premonition, and called Bob at the Essex House, where the phone was passed around to his remaining entourage and business people. She eventually hung up irritated, learning only that Bob was not feeling well. She didn’t learn of the severity of his condition until his arrival in Pittsburgh, hours later, when he told her about the tumor. “I felt as if my heart had left my body,” she wrote in her autobiography. Outraged, she went to Griffiths and Mowatt, then to Sims, trying desperately to cancel the show. She phoned Blackwell and Bob’s lawyer and doctors in Miami. Alan enraged her even more by telling her “the doctor said he might as well do the tour, because he’s going to die anyway.”