Inside Bob Marley’s Final Tour, 45 Years Later

I
n the late spring of 1980, when Bob Marley embarked on a tour to promote his Uprising album with the Wailers, the stage was set for the reggae trailblazer to reach a new level in the culture. The Uprising cover featured an illustration of a brawny Marley, arms extended to the sky, and the pulsating “Could You Be Loved” was making headway in American dance clubs (a rarity for Marley) as well as in Europe. For his first performance in Italy, Marley was booked into a stadium that held over 100,000. And to introduce his music to a larger Black audience in the States, Marley and the Wailers would be co-headlining two nights at New York’s Madison Square Garden with the Commodores, who still counted Lionel Richie among their members.

The Wailers themselves were primed, starting with a lineup of some of its mightiest players, including guitarists Al Anderson and Junior Marvin, keyboardists Tyrone Downie and Earl “Wya” Lindo, bassist Aston “Family Man” Barrett, and drummer (and Family Man brother) Carlton Barrett, along with the I-Threes, the female trio (Rita Marley, Marcia Griffiths, and Judy Mowatt) who bathed Marley’s songs in hypnotic harmonies. As always, Marley was prepping physically. “He was always training and had a lot of apparatus, like weights,” Anderson recalls to Rolling Stone. “We would train before tours and run and get our cardio up to speed, because we were moving like every single day somewhere. When he got on stage, he never stopped moving.”

But what was intended as a confirmation of Marley’s stature would prove to be his swan song: The Uprising trek would be his final set of concerts. “He worked so hard to keep it all together,” Anderson says. “He was responsible for everything, financially and spiritually, and he put his heart into that tour. The band was firing on all cylinders. Everything was working fine, up until a point.”

Once the tour launched, in Zurich, Switzerland, in late May, before moving through Europe until late July, Marley’s impact was continually clear to any who bought a ticket. The show in Italy would end up pulling in more than 120,000 people, with some in the crowd holding a “Thank You, Bob Marley” banner aloft. When the tour moved to the States in mid-September, the first show, in Boston, was delayed over an hour, the result of an overflow crowd and security concerns. As Marley would sometimes tell the crowds, “Take it easy — take it good.”

Starting with an opening set by the I-Threes, the 90-minute concerts could easily stretch out to two hours. After Downie led the crowd in a Marley chant, Marley himself would appear, sometimes decked out in a shirt decorated with the colors of the Jamaican flag. The epic sets that followed amounted to a tour of Marley’s body of work, from instantly recognizable anthems like “I Shot the Sheriff” and “No Woman, No Cry” through earlier songs like “Burnin’ and Lootin’” and “Zimbabwe” from his previous album, Survival.

Marley gave his usual intense, committed performances, constantly in motion and sometimes jogging in place — but with one noticeable pause. The tour would be the first time audiences would hear him perform one of his most enduring creations, “Redemption Song,” where Marley, in a break from his usual stage configuration, played acoustic guitar himself with minimal band accompaniment. “Sometimes the band would accompany him, but then he would do it on acoustic, by himself,” Anderson says. “But it always went over really well with the crowd. He wasn’t really known for just sitting down and playing acoustic guitar by himself and singing, but it was widely accepted. People dug it.”

Meanwhile, Anderson and Marvin’s guitars continually juiced the music, and Downie and Lindo’s dual keyboards lent the music a bedrock syncopation, particularly highlighted on “Exodus” and “Zion Train.” (The six-card master cases in the Rolling Stone: Bob Marley Premiere Collection trading-card set include souvenir pieces of that very piano. Played by Lindo during that 1980 tour, it was then used by the musician for later Wailers shows without Marley before being placed in storage for a period of time.)

But one moment in the show — when Marley would sing, “You running, you running/But you can’t run from yourself,” from “Running Away” — would prove eerily prophetic. Three years earlier, he’d been diagnosed with acral lentiginous melanoma (ALM), a rare and aggressive form of skin cancer. By the time of the Uprising tour, the impact of the disease was beginning to make itself known, especially once he and the Wailers started the American shows after the strenuous European run. During his stay in New York for the Commodores concerts, Marley froze up and fell while jogging in Central Park, which was attributed to a brain tumor. “He should have hydrated himself and gotten plenty of rest,” says Anderson. “But he was so physical and wanted to train.”

In spite of that grim news, Marley insisted on playing at least one more show. According to reports, he arrived at the Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh on Sept. 23 looking thin and frail, a noticeable change from a few months before. But once more, Marley rallied, somehow making it through an entire show (later commemorated on Live Forever, a posthumous concert album) that felt like a culmination of his life and legacy. “There were moments when he was tired and needed a break,” Anderson says. “We had been touring back to back. But Pittsburgh was on fire. You couldn’t even tell something was wrong with him.”

According to Timothy White’s essential Marley biography, Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley, Rita Marley had not been informed of her husband’s collapse in New York and insisted that the rest of the tour be shut down. With Marley’s publicist citing exhaustion as the reason (his cancer battle was not mentioned), the remaining shows — which had scheduled stops in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Vancouver, among other cities — were canceled. Marley was quietly admitted to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where tests confirmed the worst: His cancer had spread to his liver, lungs, and brain. But adhering to his Rastafarian beliefs, Marley refused any operations to remove any of it. Instead, he began treatments that took him from New York to Mexico to Miami to Bavaria, Germany. “He made the decision that it was about his health and then he would come back to singing, songwriting, and tour,” says Anderson. “He was a wounded lion. But he never gave up.”

According to the guitarist, who was with Marley at the time and is one of the few surviving members of the band, Marley insisted he be flown from Germany to Jamaica when his doctor informed him that the end was near. Marley died in Miami on May 11, 1981, on his way back to his home country. He was only 36. During his stay in New York, before he was rushed to a hospital, Marley mused about his legacy and the rise of reggae in culture, almost as if he knew the music would live on without him. “As time goes on,” he said, “people find out that this is for real.”