The following year, despite the fact Marley and the Wailers were about to be honored as “Band of the Year” by Rolling Stone magazine (in those days the arbiter of what was hot in pop music), Marley was still playing modest-sized venues in most cities. His second visit to Toronto was to the U of T’s Convocation Hall, where he did two shows on the evening of May 5, 1976, early in his Rastaman Vibration tour. The tour was memorable for many reasons, not the least of them being that it brought together one of the most dynamic incarnations of the Wailers’ oft-changing lineups, with Earl “Chinna” Smith and Donald Kinsey on guitar, Earl “Wya” Lindo and Tyrone Downie on keyboards, Aston “Family Man” Barrett on bass and Carlton “Carly” Barrett on drums.

There would be some eventful turns in Bob Marley’s life before he returned to Toronto in June of 1978 — and not all of them were positive.

When Marley flew back to Jamaica in the early fall of 1976 after winding up the Rastaman Vibration tour, he found his island under a state of emergency, which had been declared in the wake of a deadly outbreak of political violence among supporters of the then-prime minister Michael Manley and his bitter rival Edward Seaga, leader of the opposition. Marley decided to organize a huge outdoor concert in the cause of unity, and it was scheduled for December 5. But two days before the Smile Jamaica concert, as it was called, a gang of gunmen found their way into Marley’s Kingston home and headquarters at 56 Hope Road and started shooting at the terrified musicians and friends during a break in rehearsals for the big show.

Astonishingly, no one was killed, but four people, including Marley, were hit by bullets. The concert went on, with Marley defiantly brandishing a wounded arm in front of a huge crowd in Kingston’s National Heroes Park, but after it he decided Jamaica was just too dangerous. To this day, no one knows the identities of the men who carried out the attack, and the fear at the time was that they would try again. Marley and the Wailers went into a lengthy exile in London, where they recorded the historic Exodus album in 1977 — and where the cancer that would eventually kill him was first diagnosed.

Marley was told he had melanoma, a potentially deadly form of skin cancer, in the big toe of his right foot, which had stubbornly refused to heal after being injured during a soccer match. In accordance with his Rastafarian beliefs, he refused to have the foot amputated and instead had a skin-graft operation in Miami, with the big toenail being removed along with the cancerous tissue next to it, which was replaced by skin from his thigh area. The operation appeared to be a success, and Marley, after recuperating in London for several months, was persuaded to return to Jamaica to appear at what would be the most momentous of his many epic performances: The One Love Concert for Peace in Kingston’s National Stadium on April 22 of 1978.

This time, despite considerable tension and a massive presence of armed soldiers and police, there were no violent incidents, and Marley, headlining a remarkable array of the stars of reggae’s great roots era, brought Manley and Seaga on stage to clasp hands with him during an electric rendition of “Jammin’.”

A few weeks later, Marley was back on tour, this time in support of Kaya, and on June 9 he returned to Toronto — but this time it wasn’t to a small, cosy venue. The Wailers were now one of the world’s biggest live attractions, and despite the suspicion that may still have existed among the more conservative elements of Toronto society, their concert had to be at Maple Leaf Gardens. They returned to the Gardens on November 1 of 1979, this time in support of the Survival album — and no one, perhaps least of all Marley, had any inkling that this would be his last visit to Toronto.

A talented athlete and a fitness fanatic, Marley had started to appear a little gaunt, and was complaining of terrible headaches. Pictures of the Wailers taken in London in 1980 show him looking almost haggard, and in the early autumn of that year, soon after the Uprising tour had taken him to the US after setting attendance records that still stand in Europe, he collapsed while jogging in New York’s Central Park. A New York neurologist delivered a harsh diagnosis: Marley’s cancer, which he thought had been cured, had spread through his body to his brain, and he had only a few weeks to live. All but one of the remaining tour dates (he had been due to play in Toronto in October) were cancelled, and Marley’s final concert, on September 23, was in Pittsburgh. After it, he broke the news to the Wailers that he was dying.

Perhaps driven by his ghetto toughness, Bob Marley survived for many months longer than the New York brain specialist had predicted. He was taken to the Bavarian Alps, where he was treated by a controversial cancer specialist, Josef Issels, but became gradually frailer until it was decided, in early May of 1981, that he would go home to Jamaica to die. He made it as far as Miami, where doctors said he was too weak to survive another flight, and he died in his sleep in the Cedars of Lebanon hospital on the morning of May 11, 1981, a few minutes after drinking some carrot juice given to him by his mother, Cedella, and telling her “I’m going to take a rest now.” He was 36.

Judy Mowatt, who as a member of the I-Three backup vocal trio had toured the world with Marley for years, was in Jamaica that morning, and says she knew the exact moment that the man she thought of as a brother had left her:

“It was broad daylight, and there was this great, huge thunder in the heavens. And a flash of lightning came through the house. It came through a window and lodged for about a second on Bob’s picture. We didn’t know at the time, the radio stations hadn’t gotten the news officially to announce it, but people could know that something had happened and that the heavens were really responding to a great force being taken away from the physical place of the earth.”