Forever Loving Bob Marley

One-Man Gang Roger Guenveur Smith Conjures the Jamaican Superstar at the Bootleg Theater

BY LEA LION

The first time that actor Roger Guenveur Smith went to Jamaica, he
met Bob Marley. During a trip to the capital city of Kingston, Smith stopped at Marley’s Tuff Gong studios, where the legendary reggae singer was in the process of recording his 1979 album Survival.

“I walked right into the studio and he was recording a song called ‘Africa Unite,’” Smith recalled last week. “Obviously, that was a mind-blowing experience.”

That was not the first time that Smith had crossed paths with
Marley. They had met when the singer was in exile in London in the late ‘70s. Smith saw Marley perform several times in Los Angeles, at the Apollo Theater in New York and, perhaps most notably, at the singer’s last full-length concert at Madison Square Garden. Marley died of cancer less than a year later, in 1981.

Now Smith, an acclaimed actor known for his solo performances about historical figures, stars in Who Killed Bob Marley? an hour- long, one-man show that opens April 14 at the Bootleg Theater on Beverly Boulevard, just west of Downtown. Featuring music by composer Marc Anthony Thompson (also known as Chocolate Genius) and video by cinematographer Arthur Jafa, Smith’s monologue weaves memories of his father, thoughts about Marley and footage of Jamaica into a
multimedia tapestry that is part personal memoir and part Marley tribute. The show runs through April 29.

Despite its title, Who Killed Bob Marley? is not an investigation into Marley’s still controversial demise. (It is also not related to the website whokilledbobmarley.com, which explores conspiracy theories surrounding the singer’s death.) Rather, Smith said, the title is meant to pose the philosophical question, “Who killed the spirit of Bob Marley?”

“I had the opportunity to meet Bob in several contexts and it was always a very influential encounter,” Smith said, during a recent phone conversation from Philadelphia. “I consider him to be a patron saint and his loss is a profound one.”

The seed for Who Killed Bob Marley? was planted, fittingly,
in Jamaica, where Smith and Jafa were working on an improvisational film about a suicidal poet named Albert (who turns up in the theater piece as well.) The film project was put on hold, however, when Smith had a real-life near-death experience.

“During the course of the filming, we had an experience that was life-threatening, which became more compelling than anything that I could possibly have fictionalized,” Smith said. “So I came back from Jamaica with a story of trying to make a film about a suicidal poet and almost killing myself in the process.”

Although Smith refused to divulge details about his brush with death for plot spoiler reasons, he described the experience as a rare example of life imitating art.