Admittedly, this is not his best work, but the song Night Shift [video | lyrics] off the Rastaman Vibration (1976) album give some interesting insight into a little known portion of his life. In the second verse he sings:
"Working on a forklift
In the night shift,
Working on a night shift,
With the forklift,
from A.M. (Did you say that? Why did you say that?)
to P.M. (Working all night!)"
In 1966 at 21 and having just married Rita Marley, Bob traveled to the United States for the first time. He moved to Wilmington, Delaware and lived with his mother who had left Jamaica in 1962 to avoid the violence that surrounded that year's election. It's unclear if he actually drove a forklift per his job description, but did work the night shift on an assembly line at the Chrysler factory, which as you can see, is still around, and as a DuPont Co. lab assistant to help support his mother. You know he was tooling around in one of those forklifts bored late night though and having a blast :)
Sadly while working in the U.S., he was exposed to the tremendous racial inequality that existed in the states witnessing the exploits of the Ku Klux Klan on television and furthering his distrust for governments he was forced to support. After losing his job with Chrysler, and realizing his eligibility for the rapidly approaching Vietnam draft, Bob left the U.S., and returned to Hope Road.
Though brief and rather out of character for him, he even used an alias while at Chrysler, his jaunt into the U.S. certainly allowed him another perspective on the state of global race relations, and may have inspired him to focus on his message and ultimately deliver it to a wider audience.
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