Roger Steffens

Brooklyn-born Roger Steffens wears many hats: actor, author, lecturer, editor, photographer, reggae archivist, director and producer. His professional radio career began in N.Y. in 1961, and was highlighted by a ten-year stint on NPR's L.A. outlet, KCRW, where he hosted five shows including the award-winning "Reggae Beat," which was eventually syndicated to over 130 stations worldwide during the 1980s. He has been acting in films, television and theater since 1965, and narrated an Oscar-winning documentary, "The Flight of the Gossamer Condor," in 1978. His voice has been prominently featured in "Wag the Dog," "Forrest Gump," "Ghosts of Mississippi," "The American President," as "The Loooove Jock" in "Can't Hardly Wait," and "Liberty Heights." He is also one of the main voices for the Museum of Tolerance in L.A.; the corporate voice for Time-Warner's Audio Books (for which he received a recent Audio Book Publishers' Audie Award nomination for reading Bill Gates' best selling book "Business @ The Speed of Thought"); and has narrated documentaries for the Getty Center and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington. But it is in his capacity as one of reggae music's biggest North American cheer leaders that he is perhaps best known. His Reggae Archives fill six rooms of his home, and contain the world's largest collection of Bob Marley material. From January to September of 2001 he curated a critically acclaimed 6,000 piece exhibition of his Reggae Archives at the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA. He lectures internationally on "The Life of Bob Marley," at venues ranging from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (where he is the first, and most frequent speaker) to Amsterdam's Milky Way and the Hopi and Havasupai Indian reservations. He is co-author of Bob Marley: Spirit Dancer (W.W.Norton 1994), and is the founding editor of The Beat magazine, the premiere reggae and world beat magazine, for which he edits an annual Bob Marley collectors' edition. He is also currently co-writing Bunny Wailer's autobiography "Old Fire Sticks" and "Bob Marley and the Wailers: The Definitive Discography." He has been interviewed on hundreds of programs, including several VH1 "Behind the Music" episodes: Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Alan Freed, and "1970." One of his own most recent interview subjects is Robert Moog, for the Recording Academy's "Living Legends" oral history project. He likes the words that Moog chose for a possible epitaph: "Work like the money doesn't matter. Love as if you've never been hurt. And dance like nobody's watching."