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Remembering Bob Marley

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TONY: So how Donovan first come in the band?

FULLY: Long after. Remember Maxie Rose played with the band too. And after Maxie it was Horsemouth.

FRANCES: Wait a minute. So Max Edwards left the band?:

FULLY and TONY: Him go to jail! Every minute Max Edwards get himself in trouble.

TONY: One night we supposed to have a show in a bad place called Triple Moulan -- a street dance show. And Max Edwards was in jail. So we didn't' have a drummer.

FULLY: I don't remember exactly how it happened, but somewhere I had met Horsemouth and had mentioned to him that I'd like him to come play drums for us sometime. So we got Horsemouth to come play on the street-dance thing because Max had gone to jail.

TONY: Yeah, Max was in jail.

FULLY: Then some bad boy call us to come do a show at Gold Coast.

TONY: On Gold Coast where nobody would play.

FULLY: A gunman place that people get killed all the while. They called it DANCE HALL THING. And this place, everytime they have something there, somebody dead.

TONY: So every band refused to go.

FULLY: Yeah, no band want to go and play there. So he come to my house and say that the Ken Booth band didn't want to play. So we say, "Yeah, mon, we come and play." My father used to be the manager. So the man come to my father and say, "Mr. B, we'd like the band to come play.” We were young and didn't care, we'd go anywhere. So, that's how Horsemouth come on now. We rehearsed and then . . .

FRANCES: Wait a minute, what happened to the show?

FULLY: The show don't come on yet. This guy named Bob Eye, him have two guns in his waist; he came to the rehearsal at my gate. We had a big lime tree that we used to rehearse under. Stranger Cole, Ken Boothe, Leroy Wilson, every artist you can think about, probably about 10 artists come and we rehearse them. And each artist do about 6, 7, 8, 9 songs. We rehearsed the whole night there, and the yard was packed with all the kids from around the neighborhood. So after we were done rehearsing (it was a Saturday night) we were to go play at this place. The place was packed; it was a big dance-hall thing. And this guy, King Stitch was playing too. He was a very popular DJ at that time. Anyway, the people love we; they love the band. Afterward, in the night when we were coming home, we had the truck back all packed up with the instruments and things and people. My father was there too. Some of the bad boy sit down on the instruments.

TONY: Down in Jamaica we didn't have buses late at night. It was about 2 o'clock in the morning and people needed a ride to go home, so they jumped in the back of the truck. Some of them sat on the drum set. Horsemouth started to quarrel and tell them they couldn't sit on the drum set. So they pulled him off the truck and beat him up -- kicked him through a wire fence and things.

FULLY: So he got back on the truck; but Horsemouth was a bad boy too. So here's what happened: When he got back on the truck, his clothes were torn up but he sat down and kept quiet. The truck made a mistake and stopped in a place that was Hoursemouth’s area, where he had his gang. So he jumped off the truck and go call for his gang men. They came running after the truck with machetes. So the bad boys that had beat up Horsemouth started to cry and yell to the driver "Drive! Drive!" The truck drive about 20 miles an hour top speed. So Horsemouth's people tried to run down the truck, but couldn't catch it. If they'd caught it, there would have been blood. From there, Horsemouth was a member of the band. He would sleep at my house. My father liked him very much.

FRANCES: How'd he get the name Horsemouth?

FULLY: Because he looked like a horse. His mouth long.

TONY: His real name is Leroy Wallace. But the bad boys called him Horsemouth.

TONY: Horsemouth later left the band when he got a real good offer to play with a very important band called the Vikings.

FULLY: Donavon was our singer then. He was a book boy. His mother had 13 boys. They were bookworm people. Toby, who played keyboards with us sometimes, told us Donavan could sing. So one day he came in and started singing some songs. And we say, “Yeah he can sing!” So Donavon became our main singer and Cleon Douglas left the band. Then Chinna came in. He used to come by with a brother named Don't Rush It. Someone said, "That brother can sing," talking about Chinna. So we said, "Come sing some songs." He sang real good, so we told him to come sing with us sometimes. He was just learning to play guitar at that time. My father told him to come practice at the house whenever he wanted to. So he used to be at the house practicing day and night.

FULLY: We did some shows around the place where we got 25 cents each for. A guy named Reggie, a guitar player who used to jam with us, formed up a band called the Hippie Boys with Family Man. That was about the time Horsemouth left to go play with the Vikings. He brought down Santa. Santa couldn't play at that time, but Horsemouth taught him to play then. Santa had been playing in the drum corp before that -- a marching drum core. But we had known Santa before that because his family was friends of my family. His mother was one of my mother's good friends.

TONY: We started recording then.

FULLY: The first recording we did was Coxin, Coxin.

TONY: Cleon Douglas sang on it, "Dream, dream, dream, dreaming my life away."

FULLY: Bunny Lee was the one who really got us in the studio. But we would do 20 songs and only get paid for one or two.

TONY: Then Phil Phrat come to us, and we started to make big hit songs with him. Every song we recorded with him became a hit.

FULLY: But Max Edwards used to play on some of them. Now Chinna was playing lead guitar with the band, Santa on drums, Tony on rhythm guitar. But Max Edwards recorded on the album, Was, Is and Always with us ‘cause Santa got a break to go play with Jimmy Cliff. We called Santa to do a tour, but he was busy with Jimmy Cliff. So we got back Max Edwards.

FRANCES: When did Dennis Brown sing with the band?

FULLY: Dennis was a young boy. He was singing with a group call the Falcons. Horsemouth would play with them sometimes too. Horsemouth came to get me to come play with them because they needed a bass player. The Falcons consisted of Pat Sactchmouth, Dennis Brown, Cynthia Richard, and Noel Brown. They were very big in those days making a lot of hits. They were a big band, with horns too. They used to go to the country to play at the big clubs.

FRANCES: So you went over there to fill in on bass?

FULLY: Right, fill in bass. Dennis was just learning to sing at the time. It was about a year after that that he came in to be vocalist for the Soul Syndicate. Then, when Dennis Brown left, Freddie McGregor came in to sing. He came on tour with us to America -- his first American tour. Then Michael Rose came in as our singer.

FULLY: We used to do big shows every New Year's -- New Year's Ball.

TONY: A big event at the VIP Lounge. Every big artist played there.

FULLY: Our band was one of the top ghetto recording and stage bands. Ghetto, because even when we were at the V.I.P. Lounge, the manager there said we were garage players because we didn't wear uniforms. We used to dress anyhow we wanted to dress. So that's how we started to make uniforms. Glen Adams and a girl named Lana made the first uniforms. Then we went to play in Montego Bay.

TONY: For about a year. We lived down there and played at a club every night.

FULLY: We played for some big singer, Merlin Years, a jazz singer. We were backing her up.

TONY: And she carried us to Cuba.

FULLY: Yeah, she carried us to Cuba to do a show. That time we were wearing our uniforms and playing socha and all kinds of music. That time Scottie was our keyboard player. But Scottie got killed. His father was a contractor, and he didn't want Scottie in the music business because he wanted him to work with him. But Scottie loved the music, and one day he was at a house that his father was building, They were there on a Sunday looking at the house and three guys came to the house. They tied up Scottie and his father and didn't find any money. So they shot his father right beside him but didn't hurt Scottie. A year later one of them got caught, and the guys’ friends said they were going to have to kill Scottie because they were afraid he'd be a witness and testify against them. So one night Scottie was coming home in his truck from some place he was working. As he came out of his truck to open his gate at his house, the guy came out of Scottie's house and shot him straight in the head and kill him dead. That's how we get another player now.

FRANCES: Did they ever catch him, the killer?

FULLY: No, never catch him.

FULLY: That's how we bring the mad guy, Danny. The mad keyboard player Danny, a hell-of-a-good player, but crazy.

TONY: We couldn't take him.

FULLY: And we had a trumpeter gone to prison too. He had killed a little girl. We used to go to prison to play.

TONY: Yeah, we were playing at the prison with Big Youth, and we heard someone call out to us.

FULLY: "Fully! Tony! Wha’ happen?" And we say, "Isn't that our trumpeter? What'd you do?" He called back, "The boy them I a frame me." And I said, " Yeah, right -- framed you."

TONY: Framed for murder -- rape and murder.

FULLY: Rape and murder -- serving life sentence. A whole heap of friends we see there too. Stammer, and Johnny-Be-Too-Bad. Too-Bad is in prison serving triple life sentence, and it's a one life a man have. So all them are in prison. Anyway, it was fun in those days. We used to play at Victoria Pier. Sometimes we played for nobody. One time we played at a place called the Blue something.

TONY: Where the goats came up on stage.

FULLY: Yeah, we played for goats, pure goats -- nobody but goats. You should have seen us up on stage. The band played like hell, and not one soul, just some goats. And the goats enjoyed the music.

FRANCES: Well, who was paying you to play there?

FULLY: Pay? We didn't get much money, probably about 5 pounds to share amongst all of us. (laughing) But we didn't care cause we used it as a rehearsal -- we were young. The owner was a nice guy and he was trying to build up the club. But nobody ever turned up.

TONY: The Moonlight Lounge, it was called. A nice place out-of-doors.

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Remembering Bob Marley