Book Description

This book is the direct result of a chance meeting in a New York City hotel room in 1973 between the just-about-to-be reggae icon Bob Marley and Lee Jaffe -- a precocious twenty three year old artist and filmmaker with a keenly tuned instinct for history. Within hours these two unlikely collaborators would begin a friendship that would see Jaffe becoming a "Wailer" right down to his dreadlocks, while Bob Marley became a musical legend. At the time of their meeting, Marley was well known in Jamaica, but little known in the rest of the world. Jaffe witnessed Marley's life and increasing fame during the frenzied early years of reggae's development from 1973 to 1976. He was a part of it too, helping organize Marley's first American tour, playing harmonica with the Wailers, and learning Rastafarian ways. And he took wonderful, candid photographs of Bob Marley and the many colorful characters moving through Marley's world. Jaffe's intimate recollections of those exciting years are little diminished by time. Indeed, his words are as vivid as the photographs, and as revealing. One Love is a playful combination of unpublished photographs in various formats, transcripts of interviews between Lee Jaffe and reggae expert Roger Steffens, and Jaffe's meticulously observed recollections, each element illuminating the others. Here at last is the deepest insider's account of those tumultuous days that catapulted Marley into international fame -- words and pictures that further cement his reputation as what Time magazine would call "Artist of the Century." Book jacket.