"Want you to know, I'm a Rainbow too"

The manifestation of this concept in Bob's extraordinary life are many. First, and most important, is the idea of Bob as the future-person, the man of both light and dark races, embracing each, but becoming something new in the process. Marley's father was a middle-aged white Jamaican plantation overseer, his mother a teenage woman from the north country. He was often the object of better rejection by black Jamaicans, who called him "the little white boy." Lighter Jamaicans eschewed him as well.

His youth was solitary and courageously self-reliant. But he defeated bitterness and his heart reached out to many thousands of people throughout his life, for he understood what is was like to be impoverished and prejudiced against, through no fault of one's own.

Bob Marley wanted the world to be blind to color, and often quoted the words of his God, Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, as he spoke to the United Nations in 1963: " Until the philosophy that holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war...until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes, everywhere is war."

Like a rainbow, Bob's compelling vision was that all the races will be united in one radiant and shimmering bridge to the center of the Universe, loving, and alive in light.

Bob was a saint, and that's not just this fan of a quarter-century talking, it's Jon Pareles of the New York Times in September of the 100th anniversary of that paper's Sunday Magazine. Each of its writers have ben asked to choose one work of art from the 20th Century that would survive a hundred years into the future. Significantly, Pareles chose the final album by the original Wailers (Bob, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer) called " Burnin". He wrote:

" Bob Marley became the voice of third world pain and resistance, the sufferer in the concrete jungle who would not be denied forever. Outsiders everywhere heard Marley as their own champion; if he could make himself heard, so could they, without compromises. In 2096, when the former third world has overrun and colonized the former superpowers, Marley will be commemorated as a saint."

And just how was he a saint? One has only to observe the generosity with which he handled his vast wealth. Coming from virtually nothing, he was said to have a worth to have more than $30 million when he died in 1981 at the age of 36 from Melanoma Cancer. Since then, his earnings of his catalog have multiplied that figure several times. Yet he never owned a house, although he bought dozens for friends, relatives, bandsmen and baby-mothers. He didn't even sleep on a bed until about 18 months before he passed preferring either the floor, or a simple cot in the attic.

Bob Marley was responsible for the direct support of well over 4,000 people, and he rarely turned down any of the constant requests for help that were directed his way daily. That is why a gathering such as this (Rainbow Gathering) is so inspired by Bob's philosophy. He realized that he was the product of the sum total of that rainbow environment in which he grew, and took something good from all its different elements. Thus, he had to give back, because it was not him alone that created this art; indeed it was everyone, and everything, around him.

Listen to the tapes he made in private, his aural diary, and you hear him summoning ethereal melodies direct from the Source of Inspiration to go with the lines that people toss to him, words that go on to be sung by millions of people, even when they don't understand the language. Sharing, caring, unhungup by material madness, Bob became a timeless exemplar of what is good in the human soul. He is with us here today in each of us.

Bob Marley Lives! by ROGER STEFFENS, co-author of Bob Marley: Spirit Dancer ( W.W. Norton),and editor of The BEAT Magazine's annual Bob Marley collectors edition. Steffens maintains the world's largest archive of Bob Marley and reggae material at his headquarters in Los Angeles. Photo above of Bob Marley was taken by Roger Steffens and used with his permission, as was this article, Marley's Rainbow.

Thanks Roger!