“I would have been there,” Blackwell is telling me now, still dumbfounded more than four decades later. “If Lee Perry would have been on time, I would have been there—and I’d be an easy target.”
Marley and Rita (who sang backup in her husband’s band) were adamant about the show going on as planned. Two evenings later—with Rita still wearing the gown from the hospital she’d just checked herself out of and Marley rolling up his sleeve to show the crowd his injured arm (“Bang bang, I’m okay,” was all he said about it to the crowd)—the concert went off without a hitch, galvanizing a nation.
A few years later, though, Marley collapsed while out for a run in Manhattan’s Central Park while in the U.S. for some tour dates; when he was examined by doctors the next day, he was informed that he had a terminal brain tumor.
“I had an apartment in New York at Essex House, and Bob rang me and said he’d like to come over and see me,” Blackwell says. “I’d heard he’d collapsed in Central Park, but I didn’t know his condition. But we chatted for a bit, and he told me that he was only going to live for six months. And then he said, ‘Let’s take a picture.’ I’d told Bob years earlier that we’d never have a picture of just the two of us taken together. I felt like a photograph of Bob and me—you know, the bigwig record label guy—might get in the way of some of the ideas that he was trying to get across in his music. But Bob, for the first time, insisted: “Let’s take a picture.” So we went and sat near the window and had a picture taken—the only picture that exists of just me and Bob.”
Finally, I ask Blackwell whether he could have ever imagined—at a time when he was working with Marley, struggling to break him out of a niche that was still being marketed and sold as a Black thing, or a Jamaican thing—whether he could have ever imagined a world in which people of all ages, all over the planet know his work and his songs and his life.
Blackwell became very still and very quiet; he looked out over the waves on Oracabessa Bay for a long while, and then his eyes welled up with tears, and he answered, in almost a whisper.