On our first tour of The Life of Bob Marley in the Middle East, a thousand-mile journey through some of Israel's hottest spots preaching the Marley gospel, the ever-increasing popularity of the Reggae Prophet became more apparent than ever. Take, for instance, this one experience.

Driving north through the lush Jordan River Valley, through the tense turf of the Palestinian Authority, we came upon a bleak fortified area that looked like the DMZ(special area separating the two Koreas): parched land, row after row of barbed wire and tank traps, high guard posts with menacing machine guns pointing at approaching cars on a zig-zaggy single lane lined with cement barricades.

Gilad 'Dread at the Controls' Tel Aviv air traffic controller (left), and Israel's chief reggae promoter, Guil Bonstein (right), welcome Marley lecturer Roger Steffens at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. (Photo: Mary Steffens)

A gate blocked the road, manned by a young Israeli border guard with his M-16 at the ready. Sternly approaching us, he did a double-take as he spotted the numerous red, gold and green stickers affixed to our van.

His expression softened with a smile, and he cried out, "Rastafari!" Rolling down my passenger-side window, I asked, "Do you like Bob Marley?" He looked at me as if I were from another planet.
"Of course!" he said, "Who doesn't?"

Guil Bonstein, our promoter/guide/translator, laughed in appreciation. "Israelis love Bob Marley. He's a rebel, and so are we, fighting for survival every day of our lives." Guil is the Father of Israeli Reggae, whose influence is felt from one end of this beleagured
country of seven million to the other.

He ran the world-renowned Soweto Reggae Club in Tel Aviv for fifteen years, until his local audiences devolved into immigrant Ethiopian hordes fond of drink and punch-ups, changing the vibes radically and forcing him to close.

MC Hudi [hoo-di], operator of the Beher Club sound system, tests the mic at the Kibbutz Ze'elim, an area under sporadic attack from the Gaza Strip. (Photo: Roger Steffens)

Over the past two decades, Bonstein has brought the likes of Aswad, the Wailers Band, Burning Spear and Ziggy Marley & the Melody Makers to Israel, continuing on into the new century, with more than 30 sound system promotions featuring Saxon Sound from England, Jah Shaka, Jamaica's Stone Love and others. He is particularly proud of the video he created of Israel Vibration in Israel for Doctor Dread's RAS Records. A rail-thin body and prominent Gallic nose give Guil the air of a character actor in the Comedie Francaise.

With six dates scattered from theaters and cinematheques to outback kibbutzim (the plural of the Hebrew word for "communes"), our Marley tour was the longest he had ever attempted.

And the reactions to Bob's Rasta-inspired message of peace and love, in such martial surroundings, were immediate, and at times, overwhelming.

Our first surprise came at 2 a.m. as we arrived at the palatial Ben-Gurion Airport on January 11. Several people had warned us in advance to expect a whole heap o' hassles going through customs and immigration.

Instead, as we exited the jet's door, we encountered a handsome dreadlocked Israeli man, who called us by name, identifying himself as a friend of Guil's. "Welcome to Israel. Come with me. I just landed your plane." Our quizzical looks brought an explanation. "Yeah mon, I'm an air traffic controller, and I landed your plane just now."

Less than five minutes later, we had literally been breezed through all the formalities and out to the parking garage where Guil was waiting for us. "Dread at the Controls!" Mary exclaimed with glee.

That evening, Guil took us in a torrential downpour to a Tel Aviv College of Communications, whose radio station, 106 FM, is perhaps the most popular in the city, due in no small part to its commercial-free nature. Egal and Roy are its eager mid-week purveyors of reggae music, and we played a bunch of super-rare tracks by Bob, plus Ky-mani, Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffiths performing live at the opening of my World of Reggae exhibition at the Queen Mary back in 2001, to great response from the listeners.

Our first show was at the prestigious Tel Aviv Museum, in a gleaming 500-seat theater, which was filled to capacity on the night of January 12. The ambassadorial staff of the Embassy of Ghana was in attendance, as well as major media and music stars, and more than a few dreadlocks.

In one of those eerie Marley synchronicities that continue to reveal themselves at the absolutely perfect time, just days before I left for the Israel tour, my friend Marco Virgona, who runs the interesting Italian Marley website[bobmarleymagazine.com] sent me a copy of his latest interview. It was with a very attractive young Texas woman named Heather Marley, granddaughter of Noel Marley, brother of Bob's father, Norval. She had traced her family's history and discovered that the Marleys were descended from Syrian Jews, who then moved to England before taking up residence in Jamaica.

This news brought an audible gasp from the audience at the Museum. And at the end of the presentation, the audience rose in a prolonged standing ovation that brought me to tears, as the applause turned into a loud rhythmic barrage.

Backstage, Guil told me that Israel's toughest critic was in the audience, a man who rarely likes anything, but Guil told me that he would write a great review and it would be headlined, "He's One of Ours." A week later, when the review appeared, it was an unqualified rave, and its headline, as predicted, read, "He's One of Ours"!

The following morning, our quartet of intrepid characters took off southward into the arid deserts, where generations of pioneering returnees had taken barren sand and created giant oases of palms, ranches, and farms of fruits and vegetables out of nothing.

Our merry band included Guil, my wife Mary, who is the technician for our shows, and our old friend Amy "the Night Nurse" Wachtel, noted reggae DJ and publicist from New York City. Amy is most noted for founding America's first national reggae chart back in the early '80s for the College Music Journal(CMJ), and she also worked for the living legend, Burning Spear for several years.

She gave us keen insights along the way into the Jewish faith, filled with warm and easy laughter, and was our unofficial 'merchandise director.'

Our first stop was on a kibbutz called Ze'elim (zay-leem), a sprawling mid-desert home to a couple of hundred hardy souls who operate a dairy farm and fruit plantation, adjoining a hilly preserve filled with bounding ostriches, prized for their meat. As we pulled through the heavy metal gate, we drove past a Pub festooned with red, gold and green designs and hung with large posters of Marley and Lee 'Scratch' Perry and the Mad Professor.

It's called the Beher Club, and its manager-owner is a sandy-bearded dread named Hudi, who also runs the fine in-house sound system. That night the club was rammed with an audience that included several foreign volunteers from Scandanavia, Australia and North America, singing along with Bob's songs word for word. The dance party following it brought the sounds of roots reggae to a jam-packed crowd all the way to dawn.

Next show was about 45 minutes to the west, in one of the poorest towns in the country called Sederot, home to many of Israel's Ethiopian newcomers.

It is also a highly dangerous place that has been under siege from the adjacent Gaza Strip for more than four years. In fact, the day before our planned performance, five missiles had hit the outskirts of the town, and the manager of the cinematheque called to ask if we wanted to cancel our performance.

Having survived the Tet Offensive in Saigon and the last 26 months of the '60s in Vietnam at the height of that war, I told him I wasn't scared, but that we probably wouldn't stay overnight there, but rather return to our quarters in Ze'elim after the show. Noam, the manager, said he understood, but that we shouldn't worry too much "because our theater is also the bomb shelter, with concrete walls that are a meter thick, and a steel roof."

The full house that night, spiced with Ethiopians who didn't comprehend a thing I said between the Marley video clips (which they clapped for rapturously), made us glad we didn't cancel.
The following day we left Ze'elim, and learned later that the entrance road over which we had driven several times during our two day stay, had been shelled a few hours after our departure.

Our next destination was deep into the southern part of the country, where the Negev spills into the Arava Desert down to the northern tip of the Red Sea at the very bottom of Israel. Kibbutz Eli Faz is in the mountainous neighborhood of Timna Park, the picturesque, wind-swept site of King Solomon's Mines.

There is an anthropomorphic feel to this landscape of ancient rocky upthrusts, with many of them bearing the appearance of an emerging sphinx or lion. Bedouin people move freely about, and we had lunch in one of their giant tents, lined in red, gold and green carpeting, as we learned the history of this pre-Christian place.

From the southernmost point in Israel, we began a long drive straight north through the Jordan Valley, with the imposing peaks of that country flowing for hundreds of miles on our right, their muted colors changing dramatically as the sun struck them in its steady descent into evening.

The fragility of Israel's safety is illustrated by the fact that from these ominous heights, munitions of all types can be launched with impugnity on the remote settlements below, and, in fact, often are. That day's International Herald-Tribune had carried a story about Sederot, saying that almost 20% of the town's inhabitants were suffering from Post Traumatic Stress due to the constant shelling, just as Nam and Iraq vets do. Hard to imagine bringing children up in such a fear-filled atmosphere.

We stopped for a moment back in Eli Faz at a large, modern school to see an exhibition of Bob Marley paintings that the art teacher had assigned her classes. She had taught them a bit of Marley's history, hooked to the commemoration this year of the 25th anniversary of Bob's passing, and the students produced some highly colourful work. By late afternoon we had reached the lowest place on earth, the Dead Sea, where the waters'saline content is so huge that one could not drown even if one wanted to, 1,300 feet below sea level, and folks float effortlessly, bobbing like bloated corks in its stinging waters.

The following morning we returned to the highway, passing the historic fortification of Massada, the remains of Sodom, then forward on to the reported site of Jesus' baptism in the Jordan River, and up into the lovely mountain town of Tiberias, above the Sea of Galilee. It reminded me strongly of Mill Valley and Mount Tamalpais, just north of San Francisco, with the same verdant hillsides and foliage, and spectacular views of the sea far below, which provides nearly all of the country's fresh water.

We were headed toward an old artists' enclave called Rosh Pinna, with cobblestone streets and a cinematheque that looked like a Roman warehouse with walls of huge rough rocks. Another full house of Marley fans, mostly an older crowd, who especially enjoyed watching Marley receiving the United Nations Medal of Peace from the ebullient Youth Ambassador of Senegal to the UN, Mamadou Johnny Seka. much laughter abounding.

Driving south once again, we headed across vast swaths of Arab lands, their stern and ugly cement block buildings surrounding the occasional red-roofed Jewish enclave. Our route was a superhighway that, the following day, was besieged by rock-throwing Muslims, causing accidents and precipitating riots, which caused the Israeli Army to be called out, another narrow miss for us, thank Jah.

Our final show was a 400-seat sell-out in the Jerusalem Cinematheque, and as with most shows, there were many people crowding around afterwards to ask questions. One young woman from South Africa was keen to determine whether the rumor she had been reading on the internet was true. Had doctors discovered 52 kinds of lice in Bob Marley's dreadlocks after he passed away?

Eager to disabuse her of this preposterous calumny, I explained that Bob's locks had, in fact, been removed seven months before his death and that he had always kept them scrupulously clean. More shocking was the question posed by one of Ghana's diplomats following the Tel Aviv Museum presentation.

"A lot of people in my country," he said, "believe that Peter Tosh was killed by associates of Bob Marley, because they were angry at things he had said about Marley after his death." I was stunned, and urged him not to even repeat such nonsense, and reminded him that, even in the years after the Wailers broke up, whenever Peter encountered some spectacular new strain of herb, the first thing he often did was to drive to Tuff Gong and share it with his former partner. And, of course, people always ask if I believe the C.I.A. killed Bob, or if he died from smoking herb. Those groundless charges never die, no matter how much evidence to the contrary.

The formal part of our visit now concluded, we had 48 hours to ourselves to explore the tortured city. We were ensconced inside the ancient walls of the Old City at the Jaffa Gate, facing the slim minaret of King David's Tower and Palace. Every inch of the place reeks of history - and struggle. Its shifting borders have piled civilization upon civilization, and one walks downward a long distance to reach the craggy floors of churches from the dawn of Christianity, holding the putative tombs of Christ and Mary.

In the Garden of Gethsemene, near the 3,500 year old tomb of Absalom (looking like a silhouette of Oz's Tin Man), we met an archeologist who gave us a tiny Roman coin from 200 BCE, bearing a Latin inscription and a female image.

On Friday, Sabbath to both Muslims and Jews, the cheery chimes of church bells from the Armenian and Russian and Catholic cathedrals vied with the spooky over-amplified cries of the Muslim muezzins calling the faithful to prayer. I had the overwhelming feeling that the battles of the Bible are still being fought over the same issues, with the same competing claims, only in different costumes, and that the chronic problems of this battered land will never truly be solved. It was a profoundly depressing conclusion.

Back in Tel Aviv for our final weekend, we wandered the souks and Melrose Avenue-like hip section of town, discovering Bob Marley handbags, tons of Marley posters, and, most intriguingly, an empty storefront, whose sign announced it as "Babylon." Its large front window was completely bare, save for a full color poster of Bob. Pure cognitive dissonance.

Guil brought us to the studios of Piloni, Israel's most famous reggae producer, just before we left for the airport. Piloni's name means "The Elephant," and he and Yossi Fine,(along with Guil, the guiding lights of decades of reggae promotions and productions in Israel), have been "going gold" with their Israeli reggae records. Piloni produced Jah Mason's Never Give Up album two years ago, which France's Ragga Magazine chose as one of the best releases of 2003. But it is his latest accomplishment of which the amiable, bear-like producer is most proud.

To be released by V.P. in March, Piloni helmed Turbulence's Nafasamulu album, the first "Jamaican" record ever recorded in Israel with all Israeli musicians. Its spectacular opening track, Bongo Congo"features lyrics about Jerusalem, and an amusing reference to "heathen and she-then," sounding as if it could have been recorded in Back o' Wall, full up with natural vibes.

En route to the airport, Guil filled us in some more on the local reggae runnings. "There's lots of Israeli bands and singers. And we've also got some good local sound systems too, especially A-Mar Sound.
They're noted for the wide variety of dub plates and specials done for them by Jamaican artists, including two plates exclusively created by Damian Marley for this year's giant New Year's Dance at the Barbi Club.

Their MC is called Reality I. Then there's Rude Boy Sound; Unity Sound with the number one MC in Isreal, Fishie, who specialises in Hebrew dancehall; Twelve Tribes Sound with their heavy roots; and My Lord Sound featuring Ron on the mic with a broad selection of oldies, and Helen, his beautiful girl friend, as selector.

Iyam, KenGuru, Ras Daniel Band and Tony Ray Band are the most prominent bands. Ras Daniel has a record in English recorded in Tuff Gong and produced by Clive Hunt. Our first live reggae album recorded here is by Hatikva 6, just released, with conscious dancehall in Hebrew and English."

Roger Steffens is the co-author, with Leroy Jodie Pierson, of the newly released Bob Marley and the Wailers: The Definitive Discography (LMH Books). Upcoming tours include Canada, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, South Africa, New Zealand, and a return to Australia this year.

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