Roger Steffens

“Reggae’s chief eyewitness, dropping testimony on reggae’s chief prophet with truth, blood, and fire.” —Marlon James, Man Booker Prize–winning author Renowned reggae historian Roger Steffens’s riveting oral history of Bob Marley’s life draws on four decades of intimate interviews with band members, family, lovers, and confidants—many speaking publicly for the first time. Hailed by the New York Times Book Review as a “crucial voice” in the documentation of Marley’s legacy, Steffens spent years traveling with the Wailers and taking iconic photographs. Through eyewitness accounts of vivid scenes—the future star auditioning for Coxson Dodd; the violent confrontation between the Wailers and producer Lee Perry; the attempted assassination (and conspiracy theories that followed); the artist’s tragic death from cancer—So Much Things to Say tells Marley’s story like never before. What emerges is a legendary figure “who feels a bit more human” (The New Yorker).

So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley

Stefano Zorzi

“So I remember Bob saying that he used to think that Cuba was really a great place, and that they had eliminated capitalism and blah blah blah, but they clearly were doing the devil's work now because they had this role in Ethiopia. And thus a kind of struggle began between Bob and me, with me trying to tell him the positive things of socialism, and him being more and more convinced of the negative, and also the fact that he saw communism as godless, and that it was an ism. You know, his whole thing about Rasta don't deal with ism. So that whole thing of Marxism and socialism, he was very against.”

So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley quotes

Join the club