Why Bob Marley's Smile Jamaica Concert Still Matters

On December 5, 1976, Bob Marley played a free show in Kingston's National Heroes Park two days after gunmen shot him in his own house. That's most of why people still bring it up. Smile Jamaica is the clearest case I know of a concert whose meaning came from the performer turning up at all, not from anything he played.

It also gets retold as bigger than it was. The show had been pulled into an election campaign before anyone fired a shot, and on the record it calmed nothing that month. Marley left the island three days later and stayed away for about sixteen months. Both of those things are true, and the second doesn't cancel the first.

He couldn't even hold the guitar

On the night of December 3, gunmen came into the Hope Road house where the band was rehearsing. Marley, his wife Rita, his manager Don Taylor and a fourth man were all hit, and the accounts don't agree on where: the Jamaica Observer has Marley shot in the chest and arm, the Gleaner says the shoulder. Nobody was ever arrested.

The nearest thing to being there is Cameron Crowe's Rolling Stone report from January 1977. Crowe put the crowd at 85,000 by the time Marley came on. Later accounts settle on 80,000, and neither is a count. Marley couldn't play guitar because of the wounds, and Rita sang backup with her head bandaged. They played for an hour and a half, and at the end he opened his shirt to show the crowd the chest wound, rolled up a sleeve for the arm, mimed pulling two guns from holsters, laughed and walked off.

The songs barely figure in how this night gets told. That last minute does. You don't need to know reggae, or anything about Jamaica in 1976, to follow a man who's just been shot walking out to play a free show he'd promised and then showing you the hole. Most concerts are about what you heard. This one was about who was standing there, and according to the keyboard player Pablove Black, talking to the oral historian Roger Steffens years later, up to the night before nobody knew whether Marley would do the show.

That's the version of a concert a lot of fans half believe in: the artist owes the crowd the night and pays whatever it costs. At Smile Jamaica you could see what it cost.

Nobody kept the politics out

From the stage, Crowe reported, Marley said that when he decided on the concert two and a half months earlier, "there were no politics involved." By December that wasn't the situation, whatever it had been. Who started the show depends on whom you read. Crowe says it was cosponsored by Marley and the Jamaican Cultural Ministry, the Marley estate says he conceived it in spring 1976 with the prime minister's office helping, and the Gleaner, looking back in 2015, says Prime Minister Michael Manley called it.

Then a general election was set for December 15, ten days after the show. Two of the people Steffens interviewed say the election was announced after the concert was already set. I couldn't find a dated record of when the call came, so that's their memory, not a document. Pablove Black also said Marley refused to hold the show at Jamaica House, the prime minister's office, because he didn't want it tied to the party. Manley came anyway, and Crowe has him hugging Marley onstage.

So calling it a free concert pulled into a campaign isn't a cynical reading. It's what the record shows, whichever side you think did the pulling. The Gleaner says many took the shooting as political because Marley was seen as close to Manley's PNP, though he'd repeatedly distanced himself from politics, and the Observer says fingers were pointed at enforcers for the opposition JLP. Who did it has never been established.

What the night didn't do

This is where the retelling runs ahead of the record. Smile Jamaica gets talked about as if it did something to the country, and it's hard to find what. On December 13, eight days after the show, a PNP candidate named Ferdinand Neita was shot while putting up a platform for a campaign meeting, and public meetings and marches were banned across the island, according to the Gleaner's record of that week. The election went ahead two days later and the PNP won 47 of the 60 seats. Marley had already gone: Crowe reported he left on December 8, and the Observer has him in the Bahamas and then the UK, not coming back until April 1978.

When he did come back it was for the One Love Peace Concert at the National Stadium on April 22, 1978, and that's where he got Manley and the opposition leader Edward Seaga to join hands onstage. That's the picture a lot of people carry around as Smile Jamaica. It's a different night, sixteen months later.

So the strongest case against all this is simple. The nerve is real and the effect isn't on the record. The violence went on, the election went ahead in the same climate, and the man at the center of it left the country. On that reading Smile Jamaica is a story about one man's nerve and nothing more, and the reconciliation people hand it belongs to April 1978, or to nobody.