Right before that '77 swing through Europe on the "Exodus" tour, Marley received some devastating news. He'd been playing soccer with some French journalists and was accidentally kicked in the foot by a player on the other team. After some tests, a doctor determined that the game bruise was the least of his worries. There was cancer in a toe on his right foot and it was already spreading. It doesn't sound like the sort of location for the disease that could necessarily kill a person, but according to Steffens, the reggae archivist, doctors couldn't assure Marley that amputating his foot would save his life, and he was not exactly a vigilant patient.
"After they removed part of his toe, he probably thought that he was cured," Steffens says. "He didn't go back for checkups."
"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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Aside from the bandage on Marley's foot as he and the band played the capitals of Europe, Simon had no idea that the star's health was in jeopardy at the time. And she had no sense of the grim poignancy of the photos she took of Marley studying a bunch of prosthetic limbs in a warehouse in Heidelberg. Marley, unbeknown to her, had just been advised by a doctor to have his foot amputated.
The gravity of all this escaped Simon, and virtually everyone else, until she learned in 1981 that Marley's cancer had metastasized to his lungs and brain and killed him.
Life After Death
She'd planned to photograph Marley the rest of her life. Instead, she wound up shooting his funeral, a pageant of grief, music and circumstance unlike anything she'd ever seen. The service was conducted in Kingston's National Arena by priests in purple robes. About 150,000 people, lined up in a single file, passed by Marley's body as he lay in state, one hand wrapped around a King James Bible, the other resting on a Fender Stratocaster. When Simon approached the casket, her knees gave way and she nearly fell.
"It was just so astounding to me, to see this guy who'd been so vital," she says. "I mean every night he'd sing 'Lively Up Yourself' and the audience was his. To see this person in a casket, it just got to me."
At the time, Marley's albums had earned $190 million, according to Island Records, a figure that then equaled about 10 percent of Jamaica's gross domestic product.
In the years since that funeral, Simon has broadened her portfolio beyond rock and into portraits of artists and authors. She shot a few book covers for William Burroughs and her photos have run in Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q and in books chronicling the punk age, including "England's Dreaming" and "Please Kill Me."
For the moment, she has a proselytizer's zeal about "Rebel Music," but with the Govinda opening around the corner she's starting to plan her next undertaking. The concept is simple. For years, pop stars, artists and writers have been visiting the apartment/studio where she's lived since 1977 and to nearly every one she's said the same thing -- let's go to the roof.
"I've got shots of Madonna on my roof, Debbie Harry on my roof, the Clash on my roof. You name them, they've been on my roof. So I think that's my next book. 'People I've Shot on My Roof.' "
