There are performances that exist in two dimensions simultaneously — the one the audience experiences in the moment, which is a concert, and the one that becomes visible only afterward, which is something else entirely. The audience at the Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh on September 23, 1980 attended a Bob Marley and the Wailers concert. What they attended, though they did not know it, was one of the last performances Bob Marley would ever give. What the people in that building experienced as an extraordinary night of music was, from Marley’s perspective, something considerably more weighted than an extraordinary night of music.
Marley had been diagnosed with the melanoma beneath his toenail in 1977 — the diagnosis that he declined to treat with amputation on religious grounds, a decision whose consequences had been progressing through his body for three years by the time of the Pittsburgh concert. The cancer had spread to his brain, his lungs, and his liver. He was 35 years old. The people who were closest to him knew the medical facts. The public did not.
The Uprising Tour of 1980 — named for the album released that year, which contained Redemption Song and Could You Be Loved — was Marley’s most ambitious North American tour and, by the evidence of the performances captured on bootleg recordings from the period, some of his finest live work.
He performed with the specific intensity that people who knew him have described as characteristic of the period — not the desperate energy of someone performing against time, but something calmer and more complete, as though the medical facts had produced in him a clarity about what the music was for that the preceding years of commercial success and touring had sometimes obscured.
The Pittsburgh concert has been cited by people who attended it as the finest concert they ever saw — this is reported consistently across multiple sources and predates the knowledge of what was happening medically, meaning the assessment was made on purely musical grounds. Marley performed for nearly two hours. The encore lasted forty minutes. Members of the Wailers who were on stage that night have described the performance as Marley playing with a completeness that exceeded even his previous peak shows.
The following morning, jogging in Central Park in New York, Marley collapsed. He was diagnosed at the hospital and told the cancer had spread further than previously known. He flew to Germany to seek treatment with the controversial physician Josef Issels, who specialized in alternative cancer treatments. He died at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami on May 11, 1981, on the way back from Germany when it became clear the treatment had not worked.
The Pittsburgh concert is the one musicians and fans who know Marley’s work return to most consistently when they want to hear him at his most complete. It has been released in various bootleg forms and has not received an official release — a fact that the people who have heard it find increasingly difficult to understand. The recording is extraordinary. It is a man playing music with the fullness of someone who has understood something about what music is for that most people spend their lives approaching without fully arriving at.
He was 35 years old. He had been told the timeline. He performed anyway with everything he had, for two hours and forty minutes, in a theatre in Pittsburgh where nobody in the audience knew what was happening.