Live at the Belly Up: Ziggy Marley (Belly Up Productions, Peaks and Valleys Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS-TV, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that I watched a rerun of a 2017 Live at the Belly Up episode featuring Ziggy Marley, third child and first son of reggae legend Bob Marley. Bob Marley’s Wikipedia page lists 11 children, though only three – daughter Cedelia and sons David “Ziggy” and Stephen – were the offspring of both Bob Marley and his wife, Rita Anderson Marley. Their oldest child, Sharon, was actually Rita’s daughter by a previous relationship, and a later daughter, Stephanie, was fathered by a Jamaican soccer player Rita had an affair with, though Bob did a legal second-parent adoption. Bob’s other children were from extra-marital relationships: Robert “Robbie” with Pat Williams, Rohan with Janet Hunt (and since their birthdays were only three days apart in May 1972 Bob must have been a busy little bee nine months previously!), Karen with Janet Bowen, Julian with Lucy Pounder, Ky-Mani with Anita Belgravis, and his last child, Damian, with Cindy Breakspeare. (Cindy Breakspeare was the most controversial of Bob Marley’s paramours; he wrote a song to her called “Turn Your Lights Down Low,” but Rita was so jealous she refused to allow it to be used on any posthumous Bob Marley compilations, so it’s only available on the album for which Marley originally recorded it, Exodus. Lauryn Hill recorded a “ghost duet” version in 1999 with Marley’s voice from the original record, and for some reason Rita allowed that.) As Bob Marley’s oldest son and the first to record on his own, Ziggy became in essence the Bob Marley Lama, heir and successor of Marley’s musical legacy, and that was very much in evidence on the Live at the Belly Up show from 2017. I was wondering if he’d cover any of his dad’s songs, and he did: at the end of an extended jam on an original called “Justice” Ziggy quoted Bob’s “Get Up, Stand Up” and “War” (the song with which the late Sinéad O’Connor famously disrupted a 1994 tribute concert to Bob Dylan). Later on he covered Bob’s “One Love” and “Is It Love?”

When Ziggy wasn’t covering his dad he was working in similar grooves, opening with a song called “Reggae in My Head” and later doing a socially conscious song called “We Are the People” (whose message of peace and learning to live together despite one’s differences seemed very timely right now, especially given the horrors now going on in Israel – but then, when have songs about peace and tolerance not been timely? In his preface to Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote that he’d told someone he was working on an anti-war book and got the reply, “Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book?” Ironically, given the relentless march of human-caused climate change, it looks like war is going to outlast glaciers!) as well as lighter but still moving fare like “Butterflies,” “Amen,” “Look Who’s Dancing” and “Weekend’s Long.” Ziggy both looks and sounds amazingly like his dad, and he even used a similar band line-up, with two women backup singers (Bob used three, including Rita, and called them “The I-Threes”) as well as two guitarists (one of them Ziggy himself), a keyboard player, bassist and drummer. Ziggy’s songs also reflected the family’s continued interest in Rastafarianism, the peculiar Jamaican religion which hailed the late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I as the living incarnation of God on Earth. (My husband Charles wondered just how Rastafarianism has been able to survive the physical death of Haile Selassie I on August 27, 1975.) Rita Marley had adopted the Rasta faith after seeing Haile Selassie in his visit to Jamaica in 1966 (Bob missed it because he was in the U.S. working at Ford Motor Company in Detroit, but he became a Rasta later and many of his songs explicitly reference Rasta beliefs), and Ziggy obviously continues in the family tradition spiritually as well as musically. Though it wasn’t as good as the Live at the Belly Up, also from 2017, featuring Nahko and Medicine for the Soul, which KPBS re-ran two weeks previously (and I didn’t comment about it because I was in the hospital when I watched it), the Live at the Belly Up featuring Ziggy Marley was a welcome laid-back tribute to him as well as his famous father.