No Woman No Cry Read Online Free PDF Page B

gave him that respect and went over to do the sound for him. It worked out just fine and everybody got excited and hey! Scratch’s recording came out and it went on the sound systems! Everyone was hyped! Go Perry!
    Soon a big stage show was planned at the Ward Theatre and Scratch was to be on it, and he was walking on his head—he couldn’t believe that this was happening to him, that his dream, which he’d kept quiet, was happening! The Wailers, the Soulettes, Delroy Wilson, the Paragons—all of Studio One’s best-known artists—were performing, and Scratch was to be the opening act.
    And so he went onstage first, and as backup we followed him. Scratch started his song, “Me say me wan roast duck,” and there we were, on the side, echoing, “We wan roast duck, we wan roast duck.” And it was like … a comedy! Scratch was that kind of a person anyway, a real comedy, he wore a lot of glass and things on himself, and as he went on singing the audience started to throw things—not stones, luckily—but paper cups! Paper cups rained onto the stage, and then bottles! And I’m saying to myself, now why did we get ourselves into this?
    But to us it was fun—fun to see him running off the stage and realizing that it was not his time, just not his time, though he had tried. (His time would come much later, when in 2003 his album Jamaica E.T . won a Grammy Award in the Reggae category.) Back then, though, I respected Coxsone for giving Lee Perry that opportunity, to say to the man, “If you feel you can do it, go do it!” But you also have to see that it takes more than doing it in the studio, that when you go out there and face five hundred or five thousand people you have to deliver—or else they’re going to deliver paper cups and bottles! And that was the first—and only—time I’ve been stoned off the stage.
    Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd played a great role in Bob’s life. It was he who offered that initial encouragement so important to any young musician. Bob told me Coxsone had said to him, “Now, young man, be strong. Think. You can make music. Write. Sing.” So even though little or no money was coming in, Bob was getting that crucial support from someone he respected, someone who had the power to help him.
    The situation was different where he was living. One day he said to me, “Rita, I can’t take this.”
    I looked at him; he seemed especially tired and very sad. I asked, “Take what?”
    He said, “When Mr. Taddy come home in the nights, he wake me up to have his dinner. He don’t wake his son up. No matter what time of the morning he comes in, it’s ‘Nesta, Nesta, wake up, hot up me food.’ And I have to serve him his dinner. Be the houseboy the next morning.” Taddy’s woman had been mistreating him too—“like a little slave boy,” Bob said. Because she was still carrying a feud over his mother having had a baby for Taddy.
    That night, after we talked about it a while, he decided to leave Taddy’s house. He went to Coxsone, whose first response was, “If you feel it’s right, Robbie.” But then he must have seen how miserable Bob was and how Bob relied on him, because Bob told me Coxsone just smiled then and said, “Well, Robbie, there’s the audition room at the back of the studio, you can use it in the night.”
    So that’s how our life together started—from nowhere, from nothing. From the days when Bob was sleeping at Coxsone’s, alone, on the floor or on a door. When I thought of him, it was still as nice boy , and Coxsone probably saw how much Bob was hanging on to me, too, saying nice girl as well. But I think Bob was ahead of me and Coxsone both; I think he was thinking way ahead, he wasn’t just thinking for a girlfriend, he was thinking for a woman, for a wife, what a woman should be. Maybe like his