Running Away: Songs of Crisis, Love and Exile "
"You getting a three in one music. You getting a happy rhythm with a sad sound with a good vibration. it's roots music." -Bob Marley, 1975.

On Saturday, December 4, 1976, Marley had finally managed a few hours sleep. Awake now, he realized that he would have to decide whether he was going to perform at the Smile Jamaica concert in National heroes Park in Jamaica. He could not forget the night before--after all, his wounds were fresh--a homemade bullet had grazed his chest bone just above his heart, and had cut into his right bicep. He was alive. Down in Kingston, Don Taylor, his manager was still wrestling for his life. Marley would tell interviewers that he had dreamt of the assassination attempt a night before it happened, but nothing could have prepared him for the tough decision he had to make. He was getting a lot of pressure from Michael Manley's representative, Anthony Spaulding who continued to reassure Marley that it would be safe and that he had to do the concert. Rita Marley and many of Marley's close friends were pleading with him to call it off. Things were chaotic.

Down in Kingston the police were searching for the scattered Wailers. Most were in hiding. The would-be assassins had not been found and it was not certain whether they would strike again. No one could say confidently why this attempt on Marley's life had been carried out. Jamaica was an island in terrible chaos. Michael Manley had announced, in the midst of a State of Emergency, that the elections would take place two weeks after the Smile Jamaica concert. Manley knew what he was doing. There was little chance that anyone would mistake the Marley concert as a tacit or even de facto endorsement of the PNP. Marley was angry at the thought, but he had already committed to the show and he decided he would do it anyway. Now, with the members of the Manley government around him--the security service guarding the plantation estate mansion, Strawberry Hills that was now the hiding place for Marley--it was silly to even try to argue that this was not an event that was going to be used by the PNP to gain more votes.

Marley's thoughts during those few hours before he finally decided to join a small crew of the Wailers band on stage in the heart of Kingston and in front of a crowd of almost fifty thousand Jamaicans, were likely jumbled, confused and full of fear and anger. The heart of these emotions would stay with Marley for the five years that he had left to live. In those years, virtually every major recording session would generate yet another song about those traumatic days. Marley's greatest emotion was probably one of disbelief. If Marley was angry it was because he could not believe that anyone would have had the temerity to attempt to kill him. But what he could not believe was that any Jamaican would have allowed himself to be bribed into agreeing to come to the home of Bob Marley and attempt to kill him and those close to him.

Marley would do the show. Rita Marley would follow him down the hill in her dressing gown and her hospital robes. She would stand on stage and perform the ninety minutes of electric reggae that marked that show. But the next day, Marley was on a private jet with Neville Garrick, leaving in secret the island he loved so much for what would turn out to be a year of exile. During that year, Marley would explain to reporters that, yes, he was angry and, yes, for a while he desired revenge. But eventually that anger was tempered by a realization that vengeance was a futile thing to harbour. He would explain that he needed to stay away because there was no point in aggravating a bad situation. He would explain that he did not want to put at risk his friends and his family. But during the first few months of 1977, while the rootsy Jamaican trio Culture sang about the apocalyptic happenings that were bound to come to Jamaica "when the two sevens clash", Marley would write more than thirty songs. He would then record twenty of them--these songs, offered from a place of exile in a studio in London, would be arranged into two albums, the anthemic Exodus and the controversial Kaya . A number of the songs that did not make it into those two albums would later appear on the three final Island-produced Marley albums. Kaya and Exodus , therefore, emerged out of the same complex emotional space.

It is not hard to imagine what Marley was going through at the time. On the one hand he was clearly in love. During a brief period just after the shooting, Marley stayed in Nassau Bahamas and then was joined by Cindy Breakspeare who had recently been crowned Miss. World in London. They escaped to a resort area called Paradise Island and for a few weeks lived the bucolic life of lovers. Breakspeare was not Marley's only lover, but the combination of circumstances, the pressure of the near death experience, the disillusionment with Jamaica and Jamaican politics, and Marley's feeling of alienation in the UK made him seek refuge in songs that he felt would be comforting. He returned to love songs with a vengeance. On Kaya and Exodus , Marley would write more love songs than he would have on all his Island records combined. Many of the songs were clearly about Breakspeare, yet all of them were complex songs that did not function on formulaic lines.

Marley got a great deal of flak for turning to the love song during that time. He would defend himself in many interviews. His most compelling reasoning amounted to this: He was the ruler of his own life. He knew his people, he knew his world and he knew that the songs he produced and released spoke to people and gave them a sense of what he was thinking. He felt it was important to cool down the rhetoric, help people to see the beauty of life, and take them away from ideas of war and strife. He was doing this to protect his friends, to protect those he cared about. What he did not say was that he was doing this to protect himself. Marley came to this recording in a state of emotional and psychological flux. He needed to affirm his faith in Jah, and he needed to remind himself of what he called the "beauties".