NEW YORK
Adozen metal file cabinets line a living room wall in Kate Simon's midtown apartment, each filled with a few hundred photo negatives stacked in moisture-proof boxes. It looks like a typical home office, except that every time you open a box a riot seems to break out. There's Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, leering while the band's manager punches a fan. Here's Mick Jones of the Clash, baring his teeth and strumming in a sweat-soaked shirt. There's David Bowie recording his 1974 album, "Diamond Dogs," preening a little for the camera.
For the past three decades, Simon has shot scores of musicians, onstage and off. But ask about the most indelible moment of her photographic career and she answers in an instant. That would be the night in 1975 when Bob Marley played at a club in London called the Lyceum.
"He was a deeply serious person," Simon says of Bob Marley, whom she photographed at the Lyceum in London in 1975, left. "The guy inspired me to be as serious about my work as he was about his." Her new book, "Rebel Music: Bob Marley and Roots Reggae," features about 400 shots of Marley and other Jamaican legends.
(Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)
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"I was used to shooting Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, all the usual suspects," says Simon, who is sitting in an armchair. "Then I saw Bob and it was just, you know, mesmerizing. His singing voice was striking to me, it was so effortless. And he was singing about faith. And we all could use a little faith."
Marley, and reggae, were central to Simon's life from that evening on. She flew to Jamaica on assignments from labels and magazines, shot every major reggae star of the genre's "golden age" in the 1970s and wound up photographing the European leg of Marley's 1977 "Exodus" tour. One of her photos was chosen for the cover of Marley's "Kaya" album, and many turned up in magazines and newspapers. But most of Simon's reggae images have been stashed in those metal filing cabinets, seen only by her.
A local exhibit and a hefty new book, "Rebel Music: Bob Marley and Roots Reggae," will change that. On Friday, the Govinda Gallery in Georgetown will hoist about 50 of Simon's reggae photos on its walls. The show will represent just a fraction of the trove in "Rebel Music," a 10-pound tome that includes pages made entirely of cannabis -- no, you cannot smoke the book -- with about 400 shots of Marley and other Jamaican legends, including Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh and Lee "Scratch" Perry.
At $395, it's not for casual fans and with just 2,000 copies in production, it isn't pitched to the masses. But a more vivid and colorful portrait of this seismic era in pop history isn't likely anytime soon. The photos weave around first-person testimonials by eyewitnesses including Aston "Family Man" Barrett, who was in Marley's band, and American rock stars who were inspired by Marley, like Bruce Springsteen. And Simon wasn't just around for the concerts. She caught Marley in downtown moments between shows and during breaks from touring. It was a level of access that was rare for an artist who often kept a skeptical distance from journalists.
"Bob was very rough on a lot of correspondents and photographers," says Roger Steffens, a reggae archivist who once worked for Island Records, Marley's label. "You had to prove to him that you were worthy of his time, and a lot of people would come to Jamaica and give themselves 24 hours to get their work done. And Marley would make them wait and a lot of them went home empty-handed. Kate was privy to intimate moments in Marley's life, and she wouldn't have been there if he didn't totally trust her."
Capturing the Man
If it does nothing else, "Rebel Music" could restore some human dimensions to a performer who now seems as much myth as man. Marley was a star when he died of cancer, at the age of 36, in 1981, but it would have been hard to predict the scale of his appeal nearly a quarter-century later. He is one of the most universally beloved pop musicians in history -- you'll find his photograph in the remotest corners of Africa and in dorm rooms across the United States. His greatest hits album, "Legend," spent hundreds of weeks on the Billboard Top Pop Catalog chart, and has now sold more than 10 million copies. Time magazine chose "Exodus" as the best album of the 20th century.
To fans, Marley is a prophet, a social critic and the patron saint of bong parties. Through Simon's lens, he's again a person: slightly aloof, often playful and frequently pensive.
"He was a deeply serious person," she says. "I have pictures of him reading the Bible in the airport. He did that sort of thing. The guy inspired me to be as serious about my work as he was about his."
Simon speaks in a monotone and gazes toward a wall when she discusses Marley, as if she's reading a cue card that nobody else can see. "Rebel Music" took years of on-again, off-again work to pull together, and you get the sense that she regards the book as a posthumous gift.
Marley is the only subject that switches Simon into serious mode. That, and the specter of discussing her private life, which she won't do, aside from sharing some bare-bones facts and divulging the breed of the adorable pooch that patrols her apartment (Tibetan terrier). She was raised in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and dropped out of George Washington University after a couple of years to work in London, which she'd visited during a sophomore year abroad in Paris.
It seemed like the place to be, she says, and hanging around England's leading photographers convinced her that she'd found her calling.
