Roger Steffens

Roger Steffens is an American actor, author, lecturer, editor, reggae archivist, photographer and, producer. Six rooms of his home in Los Angeles house reggae archives, which include the world's largest collection of Bob Marley material. Based on these archives Steffens lectures internationally with a multi-media presentation called The Life of Bob Marley. His radio career began in New York City in 1961, and he co-hosted Reggae Beat on KCRW in Los Angeles and was syndicated on 130 stations worldwide in the 1980s.

In October of 1989, Leroy Jodie Pierson and I spent three weeks locked in an uptown Kingston hotel room listening to Jah B, Bunny Wailer, recount his life story to us. It took another decade to transcribe the 64 hours of resulting interviews after which we sent three potential chapters to Bunny to confirm that this is how he would like his tale to be told. He never read them. Feeling pressure form the Marley family, he abandoned the project, but never had the courtesy to inform me and Leroy. Later we heard from his band leader and from Family Man that the project had been cancelled. Today 1,800 pages of transcriptions sit under my desk in L.A. Other enormous disappointments from Bunny have made it impossible for me to undertake the work it would require to stitch everything into a book. Perhaps decades from now, some graduate student at UWI will take over the task, but I cannot waste whatever days I have left on it. I turn 81 in June and I have a museum to build with Joe Bogdanovich in MoBay that takes precedence over everything else. In the meantime, enjoy this intimate peak into the Wailers' attempt to gain control over their own work. - Roger Steffens

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