Chapter 5: Putting It All Together
As I’d managed to fail my first two freshman years at Wits University, utterly and completely without a single credit to my name, my long-suffering father decided (with some justification) that he was done paying for my tuition, and if I wanted to stay on and try again, I’d have to pay my own way. That, or subject myself to my military conscription, which I’d thus far escaped with a student exemption. The South African Army? No frigging way. So I launched myself into a series of dead-end minimum-wage jobs, ending up working at three or four simultaneously. These, while earning me quite a substantial income, would leave me absolutely no time to devote to my studies, even if I wanted to study anything (which I didn’t). So instead of beating my unwilling head against the wall of university, I took the low road instead and enrolled myself at the Johannesburg Teachers’ Training College. My First from St. John’s College was an easy qualification to the TTC, but I had no intention of becoming a teacher, so I attended only as many courses and seminars to keep me from being expelled. Most days, when I wasn’t working, I used to go back onto the Wits campus and hang out with my buddies.
If not there, I’d lock myself in my bedroom and practice on the bass. I didn’t bother with scales or anything like that. Instead, I set out to learn songs — i.e. to be able to play as many rock songs of the day that I could with some confidence — by listening to music over and over, identifying the bass part and getting it down, note-perfect. (It’s not as easy as it sounds; even though I was quite accustomed to close listening from a classical music perspective, rock music was another story altogether — especially when a guitar and bass were playing the riffs together.) But I stuck to it, starting with the simplest ones (50s rock ‘n roll) and rolling upwards into music like that of Credence Clearwater Revival and Status Quo, just as I had when learning to play guitar back at the College. By the middle of the year I’d managed to put together a playlist of about fifty songs. None of them were current hits, by the way, because who knew if I’d ever play any of them?
Then one day on campus I happened to meet a guy named Robbie Kallenbach; a quiet, very gentle man of immense musical talent, he was doing a business degree while doing what he really loved: composing movie scores. A few weeks later, he asked me to give him a lift back to his apartment because his car had broken down, and I had a chance to listen to his latest work, which had been accepted for some movie (since forgotten). Then as I was leaving, he said, “I forgot. Are you still interested in putting a band together? Yes? Well, there’s a guy in one of my classes who wants to do the same. He’s a drummer, and his buddy is a guitarist. Let’s meet up soon and I’ll make the introductions.” And thus I was introduced to Rob (or “Knob”, as we nicknamed him).
At the time, I was still living at home in my parents’ large house in Johannesburg’s eastern suburbs. One feature of the house was that there was a thatched cottage beside the pool — actually designed as a party room, there was a bar counter inside, and lots of room for dancing. My mom was using it for her yoga classes, so it was the matter of a moment for me to commandeer the place for band practices, provided that at the end, all the gear would be packed away and the dozen or so mats restored to their original places.
So that fateful Sunday arrived for our first practice. Knob arrived with his guitarist buddy Don (“Donat”, spoken as though with a cleft palate) and their gear: a set of British Premier drums for Knob, and a Gibson Les Paul guitar and some strange Yamaha amp for Donat. And then there was a surprise guest: a chubby redheaded American named Kevin, together with his ’63 Fender Stratocaster and a Fender Twin Reverb amp.
“I just brought Kevin along for the jam,” Donat explained. “He’s already playing with another band, but I thought it might be fun.”
We’re going to be spending a lot of time with these maniacs, so they each deserve a few words.
Donat was a student at the Tech, en route to his electrical engineering degree. At the time , he bore an uncanny resemblance to Steve Howe from Yes (and still does, by the way). He was, I soon discovered, a filthy perfectionist when it came to putting songs together, and any mistake, no matter how small, resulted in him stopping playing and raising his hand up in the air. It pissed us all off — me most of all — but in fact, it was Don’s insistence on perfection that made the band better than any garage band. He was not a good lead guitarist, but an excellent rhythm guitarist and his chops were both incisive and wonderfully clear.
Knob was not one of those powerhouse drummers, because he’d learned and practiced drums in his parents’ townhouse and thus never played loudly lest he irritated the neighbors. But what he lacked in volume he made up for in technique: he was one of the most competent drummers around, playing literally any kind of music whether rock, jazz or ballads. He also had an excellent baritone voice, along with an astonishing falsetto which reached higher even than mine.
Kevin was a shy, self-effacing man of extraordinary talent. An American by birth, he spoke with a soft Detroit accent, even having lived in South Africa for over a dozen years. I was to learn that there was absolutely no guitar part he couldn’t play — Clapton, Beck, Page, Hendrix… it didn’t matter, Kevin nailed everything thrown his way with ease, on a ’62 Fender Strat. And he had a very pleasant tenor voice, much suited to ballads and softer rock songs, and he could harmonize any part. Alone among us, he had an actual job as a lab technician at a hematology business.
Of the four of us, I was by far the worst musician. Fuck. Still, I managed to keep it together by using my playlist as a basis for the jam, when we weren’t doing slow blues or Chuck Berry. So I didn’t sound as bad as I really was.
What happened, by the end of this practice, was that we discovered that we simply grooved. In some songs, it sounded as thought we’d been playing as a band for a long time, so well did we mesh together.
And when we finally decided to end, I did the first thing I could to stamp some kind of authority over the band.
“Kevin, you’re going to have to quit that other band,” I said firmly. There was a stunned silence from the others, and then Kevin said, “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “This band is going to sound better than the other one ever will, and it’s going to get there quickly.” Considering that I’d never before heard Kevin’s band play, it was something of a leap. Kevin looked around at the other two, and to my surprise, both nodded in agreement.
At our next practice the following week, I waited nervously for the others to show up, and to my everlasting relief, Kevin came in with a sheepish grin. “I told them I was quitting,” he said, and blushed. So we jammed again, this time playing a few songs that we didn’t know all that well, or that only one or two of us knew, and I soon realized that I had a lot to do just to keep up with these guys.
Here we go again, Kim.
But to my surprise, the others didn’t treat me like Mike du Preez and Dick the dick had. Rather, when I tried and failed to master a bass line, I’d say simply, “Sorry, guys; I’m going to have to work on that one by myself. Can we try it again at the next practice?” To my amazement, they’d all agree, and we’d move on. At some point, we ran dry of songs to play, so I decided to grab the bull by the horns.
Treating the lack of material as a fait accompli, I said, “We need a repertoire, because we’ll never get work playing the stuff we’ve just been jamming.” And then I played my “I’ve played a pro gig before and you guys haven’t” card: “When I was in Margate, we drew from a list of over a hundred songs. We’re going to need at least that many if we’re going to cut it as a gig band that people will want to hire.”
So we sat around a notepad, and each of us took turns in suggesting songs we’d like to play. I of course drew extensively from my old playlist, which was fine because while the songs were “old”, we were still in the early 70s so they weren’t that old: Rolling Stones, Credence, Kinks, and other guitar bands of that ilk. Those songs were also proven crowd-pleasers (e.g. Honky Tonk Woman etc.), so there was no problem there.
Then the others started in on the songs they’d like to play. Whoa. Curved Air? Wishbone Ash? Genesis? Yes? Led Zeppelin? Doobie Brothers? Lynyrd Skynyrd?
I was dead meat.
A lot of these songs, though, could not be played by our fledgling band because we didn’t have a keyboards player. This shortcoming, it turned out, would soon be solved, albeit at a price.
Knob and Donat both suggested that we get a lead vocalist. I was a little against this, because I thought that between the four of us, we had enough to carry most songs, especially those requiring lots of harmonies. But they were insistent: they knew a guy who had a fantastic voice, and they were going to invite him to join us at our next practice regardless of what I said. Kevin, of course, went along with their idea, so I begrudgingly agreed.
Enter Clifford (Cliff).
Oh dear. My problem was that I took an immediate dislike to Cliff — I don’t know why, but his whole attitude rubbed me the wrong way. But there was no argument: he did have a good voice, and it did improve the band’s sound. So we started to put a repertoire together, and it was pretty good. (See below for examples).
One song, by the way, caused us endless problems: Zeppelin’s What Is And What Should Never Be (off LZ II; use it as background to what follows). Fortunately, John Paul Jones’s bass guitar part wasn’t too difficult (unlike almost all his others), so I managed to battle my way through this. Of course, Kevin nailed the lead guitar solos (as he did every lead solo, regardless of whose), and Knob ditto with Bonham’s thunderous drum part. Cliff sort-of managed Plant’s vocals, but after we’d gone to all the trouble of learning the thing and eventually being able to play it to Don’s satisfaction, I brought it all to a screaming halt by saying: “I love the song and it sounds great. But let’s face it: it’s not a song we could ever play at a gig.” (And we never did.)
But we all agreed, though, that just because there were songs that we might never play, we should play them anyway because learning and playing them would make us better musicians.
There were a couple of issues, though, that still had to be resolved. Firstly, Don was playing on a borrowed amp which had been lent to him by a couple of his buddies — twin brothers, actually — who’d lent it to him without reservation except for one: his band would have to perform at their twenty-first birthday party, which was due to take place in a scant couple of months’ time. So if we weren’t to make complete fools of ourselves, we’d need to be able to play at least thirty songs — and I was insisting on forty — because we had to treat this gig as though it was a paying gig. On that issue I was absolutely adamant, but fortunately everyone fell in with this so we set about doing that — I think we ended up with over two dozen songs, which sucked, but when we did the gig I lied like a maniac and announced over the PA: “I know we’ve already played this one, but we’ve been asked to do it again.” (I think we did the Doobie Brothers’ Listen To The Music about four times, come to think of it.) One song which went down really well, by the way, was Hendrix’s Fire, in which Donat did a very creditable rendition of Jimi’s voice — and his Mick Jagger’s Honky Tonk Woman went down equally well.
There was a second issue which we needed to address really quickly. In the previous paragraph I made mention of a “PA” system, which is not strictly true because we had no PA system, and had to plug our microphones into the guitar amps. This proved hopelessly inadequate and we ended up screaming the vocals. We were only saved by the fact that the 21st party took place at the twins’ parents’ house and we couldn’t play that loudly anyway. But the screaming took its toll on us: we were all completely hoarse by the end of the gig; but to my horror, the worst casualty of all was Cliff’s voice, which had completely vanished by the end of the second set (of the five we ended up playing).
Side note: the old Hofner Beatle bass was turning out to be a real problem.
Its neck had become bowed to the point where it was completely unplayable above the sixth fret, and I was in constant fear of it breaking completely. I needed to get a new bass guitar, and quickly.
In the interim, I should mention that I’d finally found a decent full-time job as a computer operator at a Great Big Insurance Company, a job which not only paid well but which included many, many hours of overtime — so much so that at one point I was actually earning as much as my father — and this money was now going to help the band out, big time.
Anyway, I went to one of the few music stores that catered to professional musicians, Bothners Music in the downtown Carlton Center mall, and there I met Eddie (“Eds”) Boyle, who was not only a superb salesman but also the bassist for The Rising Sons, one of the country’s biggest name bands. (Keep Eds in mind, because he will feature a great deal, further on in this tale.)
I ended up with a new bass — a Fender Mustang:
Like the Beatle bass, the Mustang didn’t have a full-size bass fretboard, but a ¾-scale one. (I was under the — mistaken — impression that my fingers were too short to handle a full-size bass, hence that choice. Also, it was the only one I could afford at the time.)
As a result of that trip to Bothner’s, the band also ended up with a PA system, or at least a PA amplifier, an 80-watt Dynacord Eminent II:
Like all German amps of the time, the Dynacord sounded wonderful: warm tones, with a splendid frequency response. Unfortunately, that 80-watt power amplifier would prove to be woefully inadequate for any large gig, as we were soon to find out. But we kept it for years, only finally replacing it many years later with a 2,000-watt amp (but that’s a story for a later date).
We couldn’t afford proper PA speakers, so we ended up buying eight cheap 50-watt speakers and building our own cabinets. (Actually, my father built the cabinets for us, but to our specifications.) For speaker cloth, we used some ghastly curtains from a thrift store.
Anyway, we carried on rehearsing, twice or three times a week, building up that repertoire, but we kept banging our heads against a wall — that wall being that we didn’t have a keyboards player, which not only restricted the kind of songs we could play, but also the type of gig we could play as well: you can’t play a wedding reception with a repertoire that includes Sweet Home Alabama but doesn’t include waltz tunes and songs of the kind I played with the Trio in Margate.
That didn’t matter all that much for our next gig, which was arranged by Knob. His old high school was putting on a fundraiser in the form of a dance marathon — the kind where the kids are “sponsored” by the number of hours that they can dance. This was to be our first actual paying gig, so we approached it with great anticipation; also with great trepidation because we learned that the actual marathon would last at least eight hours and we had, at best, enough material for three. This gave us all the incentive we needed to practice still harder: I think that by then we were doing three practices a week for the next three months. We ended up with over fifty songs, a number which would have been a lot greater, except did I mention? Donat was a filthy perfectionist and his attitude had spread to Knob and Kevin as well.
Well, it would all have to do; so on the appointed Saturday morning, off we went to that high school’s auditorium.
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