(Previous: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11)
Chapter 12 – Side Gigs & Cabaret
Back when we first started Pussyfoot, I was contacted by an acquaintance who was playing in his own band, but they had a problem with an upcoming gig: their bassist wasn’t available for some reason or other, and could I help them out? Well, of course I could: the gig was for a Friday night, and Pussyfoot wasn’t yet up to the point where people knew who we were, let alone beating down our door to hire us, so we weren’t booked for that date.
So I did the gig, which went down well – the band ‘s playlist was pretty much like that of the Mike Du Preez Trio, with a couple of popular songs (by the Hollies, Credence, and so on) so I could pretty much handle all the songs they threw at me. They were grateful that I’d been able to help them out and that, I thought, was that.
Not really. I casually mentioned the side gig to the Pussyfoot guys at our next practice, and the following week Donat told me that they’d talked about it, and didn’t want me to play with other bands. In vain did I tell them that side gigs did not in any way mean that I was going to leave Pussyfoot or anything like that – they were just fill-ins, after all – and I couldn’t see why this would be a problem. Nevertheless, it appeared that it was a problem for the others, so in the interests of keeping everyone happy, I just shrugged and said okay…
…and kept doing side gigs, because I liked getting the extra money, and more than anything else, I loved playing music. I just kept my mouth shut about it.
Over the years to come, I would play literally dozens upon dozens of them, learning the craft, sharpening up my busking skills, and even learning which songs were really popular with the public – at that time, songs that Pussyfoot didn’t already play – and on more than one occasion, I suggested that we learn a couple of them, and surprise surprise they went down pretty well with audiences.
Here’s the story of one such side gig.
I once got a call from Eds Boyle. Apparently, a dance band needed a bassist for a one-night gig, so he’d given them my name. As it happened, this came right after the Black Ice breakup, so I was free.
This gig was priceless. It was a seniors’ mixer, one of those things that were a feature in the pre-Internet days when older widows, widowers and divorcees joined a club and got together for an evening’s dancing and meeting. They were universally known rather cruelly as “Grab-A-Granny” gigs, but it was all in good fun and even the participants referred to them as such. What was nice was that given the ages of the members, the popular music was going to be Mike du Preez Trio material: jazz- and dance standards from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, which suited me down to the ground and I couldn’t wait to get to the gig.
The band I met for this particular gig was led by an older guy on saxophone, accompanied by a pianist, bassist and drummer. I don’t remember any of their names except that of the pianist, a weathered veteran named Dougie Sachs. The reason I remember him is that when we arrived at the gig (which was in some rather old and rundown hotel in downtown Johannesburg), we discovered that the house piano was absolutely knackered, with cigarette burns all over it and, more alarmingly, with lots of keys that made no sound when struck. Dougie was beside himself because there was no chance for us to get another piano, and when I called Mike to see if he could lend us his Fender Rhodes, I discovered that he and his girlfriend had gone out for the night. So no help there.
In desperation, I said to Dougie: “Is there any key signature that can play all the notes?” Well, upon going through all the keys, we discovered that A flat was the only one which yielded a full complement of notes in that key. So for that entire gig, whenever it came time for a piano solo, Dougie and I would swing into A flat, then revert to the song’s original key signature once done. Of course, for a sax player, A flat is almost unplayable – or at least, it was for our saxophonist – so it must have sounded truly strange to anyone who knew anything about music. But everybody in the audience seemed oblivious to what we were doing, so everything went down well.
At the end of the whole thing, Dougie came up to me and said, “I’m never going to play another song in A flat ever again,” and together we howled with laughter. A good time, that, and I did a couple more gigs with Dougie as a result of that Grab-A-Granny near-disaster.
And all those side gigs came into play when it came time to back cabaret artists.
The whole concept of cabaret singers is a strange one to Americans, I think. Mostly, people regard “cabaret” as an act one might see in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, as part of the casino marketing campaigns. In South Africa, there were only few such venues, so solo acts had very few opportunities to perform. Here’s one example.
There was a singer / actor named Richard Loring, originally from the U.K. but now a full-time resident in South Africa. He’d starred in a couple of musical movies, but his real claim to fame was having starred in Andrew Lloyd-Webber/Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which ran for years all over the country. Loring was about as well-known as, say, Tony Bennett in the U.S.
I first ran into him in the Entertainment Group, when he needed a band to back him on one of his tours to the “Border”, and Hogwash was suggested to him – he wanted a rock ‘n roll band to back him, and not one of the Afrikaans bands. (I suspect that him being an Englishman, the Afrikaners didn’t much care for him anyway, so I’m pretty sure that they all turned him down, leaving him with… Hogwash.)
Anyway, he showed up at the EG with a few cassette tapes of his songs – no sheet music, thank goodness – and asked us to play them. Well, Craig knew all those songs (of course), so we put our heads down and played each of them a few times. As it turned out, Loring was not very impressed with us (and said so), but as the first show was scheduled for the following week, he didn’t have much choice. So he sighed and left, saying, “Please just practice the songs, and do your best.”
Well, that didn’t go down very well with us at all. Of course we could play those easy songs, we just needed to learn them. So we got stuck in, and three days later they were all polished like diamonds. We’d also come up with harmony arrangements to match the ones on the tape – actually, we were better than the backing singers in a couple of cases – so when the curtain went up on Richard Loring’s first show in, as I recall, Windhoek (the capital of then-Southwest Africa), we launched into his set with gusto. By the end of the gig, Loring was actually laughing with joy as we performed his songs, and at the end of the gig he came over to us and, to his credit, congratulated us on our performance, saying, “I was really wrong about you boys – you’re really good.”
For the ensuing year, Hogwash became his regular backing band.
There was, however, one occasion which completed a circle for me, so to speak. Loring had booked us to back him at the Johannesburg Country Club – a very distinguished club – and when we showed up for the gig, who was the main band but the Mike du Preez Trio (now a quartet, incidentally, with his son Mike Jr. – “Mikey” — on bass). Of course, Mike and I had a great reunion, and when Hogwash finished the Loring set, I went over to him and said, “Not quite the fumbling kid anymore, am I?” and he just laughed his ass off.
And not long afterwards, Mike called me. “Mikey’s broken his hand, and can’t play this weekend. Are you free to help me out?”
I checked my gig calendar. “No problem. Do you want to have a quick rehearsal beforehand?”
He laughed. “I don’t think that will be necessary. I think you either know or can play anything I throw at you by now.”
It was a most enjoyable gig, and the guitarist, Ollie Rees, was an excellent musician with a truly wicked sense of humor, so we got on like old buddies. And Mike’s drummer Kenny was likewise a seasoned pro, so all went well.
During the EG years, Hogwash ended up backing a huge number of cabaret stars, mostly on tours to the Border, and it got to the point where if George Hayden got a call for a cabaret backing band, he’d just dump the gig on us. I think we backed maybe a dozen different cabaret acts after that, maybe more, and most of them more than once. The cabaret stars even booked us outside the Army for the much-sought-after “private” shows, which meant we got paid for them (instead of Army gigs, which didn’t ever pay anything, of course).
Anyway, it was now January 1980, Hogwash was long gone and Black Ice recently so, and one Saturday morning I slouched into Bothners to hang out with Eds Boyle. He was chatting to another guy, so I waited; but then he beckoned me over to join them.
“Kims! I’m so glad you’re here! This is Tom, he’s a drummer and his band needs a bassist for a few weeks. Toms, this is Kim; he did two years at the Entertainment Group, and he’s just left Black Ice. He can handle your gig, I promise you.”
I shook Tom’s hand. “Where’s the gig?”
“At the Krugersdorp Hotel.”
I shuddered, because the town of Krugersdorp lay about forty miles west of Johannesburg, and there was no freeway to get there: suburban and small-town roads only. Tom must have seen my expression because he looked worried.
“It’s just Friday and Saturday nights, and we each get our own room for both nights so we don’t have to drive back to Joburg all the time. The gig is in the restaurant, dinner-dance stuff plus a few pop songs. Oh, and the pay is excellent.” When he mentioned the number, it was indeed good pay.
“Tell me about the band.”
“Well, me on drums, a really good keyboards player and a brilliant guy on vocals.”
“When do you want me?”
“Can you start tonight?”
Here we go again.
When I arrived at the Krugersdorp Hotel, though, I got a huge and very pleasant surprise: the “brilliant pro vocalist” was none other than Tommy Sean from Shalima/Margate days. After we’d had our warm welcome and shared a beer or two, Tommy turned to Tom and the keyboards player (Jim? John? I don’t remember) and said, “Don’t worry about a thing; this fucking guy’s a serious pro, so you guys had better get your shit together.”
Despite that somewhat alarming (and unearned) endorsement, the gig turned out to be a delight — so much so that I was a little sorry when it came to an end after those two weeks — but when their regular bassist came back (from an Army camp, as it turned out), I had to go. Both Tommy and I lamented because we’d spent a whole lot of time together, playing Putt-Putt and darts (and hanging out with some lovely women) just like the old Margate days.
Then something happened which closed yet another circle. On my last Sunday in Krugersdorp, Mike du Preez called me up to offer me another fill-in gig (which I couldn’t take because I’d been booked by another band — sheesh). I mentioned that I’d been playing at the Krugersdorp Hotel, whereupon Mike got all excited and said, “You know, Dick –remember our Margate drummer? — well, he lives just down the road from there. Why don’t you swing by his place on your way home tonight? I’ll give him a call and tell him you’re coming.”
To be honest, I had little desire to see Dick The Prick again, but Mike seemed really insistent that I visit him, and who knew? maybe there’d be a side gig out of it.
So I went to visit Dick The Prick and his wife Moira The Headmistress. At the time I had a casual girlfriend who had spent the weekend with me, so I took her along.
Amazingly, Dick seemed very glad to see me, and ditto his wife. In the latter case, she must have been very pleased to see me because on the way home afterwards, my girlfriend said, “Have you ever had a chance to have an affair with an older married woman?”
“No; why?”
“Because if you ever wanted to, Moira would be so available.”
Of course, I had no idea what she was talking about because Dense Kim; but several weeks later I phoned Moira just for the hell of it, and the result of that call was that I put quite a few miles on Fred over the following few months, sneaking around to meet Moira at the Krugersdorp Hotel whenever her husband wasn’t around to spoil the fun. (Yeah, I deflowered Dick The Prick’s daughter and had an affair with his wife. Oh well: as I’ve said before, Musicians Are Scum. And she divorced him a short time later anyway.)
Between Eds Boyle acting as my unpaid agent and my growing list of contacts in the music business, I was getting a number of side gigs — not regularly, of course, but at least one or two every couple of months. Mostly, they all went off without a hitch — the only bad one, I remember, was with a rather lousy band playing a steady gig at some restaurant outside Johannesburg. Because they were bad, I couldn’t get into the swing of it, so something that should have lasted a couple of weeks only lasted a single night, and ended on a very sour note. When I told Eds about it, he laughed himself sick. “Kims, they can’t get anyone to play with them because they’re so shit. Don’t worry about it.”
But while this was all very well, I missed playing in a full-time band. So I called Knob, and asked him what he was doing.
Kismet.
As it happened, Mike and Marty had just quit the band they’d been playing with over the past year. So round about the middle of 1980, we restarted The Atlantic Show Band (minus Kevin, whom we all referred to as “the traitor” for not quitting his pro band to an uncertain future with us, the bastard).
What fun. We had no gigs booked, nor did we really want any — at least, not right away — because we had to relearn how to play together again, and more importantly, to learn new material. Mike had found us a decent practice room in (of all places) his Army unit’s building nearby the Wits University campus, so we could leave all the gear set up. This made practice really simple, but of course because we all had good day jobs, we couldn’t really do weeknights, and it was too much to ask Farty Marty to drive all the way from Springs just for a practice. But weekends? No problem.
What was a problem was the lack of a lead guitarist. As I’ve said earlier, Martin was a terrible guitarist, sloppy and pretty much uninterested in playing anything but the most basic chords; so the search began for a Kevin-type player.
Which was when we discovered how thin on the ground good lead guitarists actually were. Our problem was an old one: the really good guitarists weren’t interested in playing with an unknown band, especially a band with no gigs booked ergo no money coming in, and the guitarists who were good but not great were reasonably plentiful but, as we discovered, unreliable. Here are two such stories to illustrate both.
I was the first to come up with a guitarist, because I knew him from the Entertainment Group: Buddy Slater had played for a rock band named Snow in the late Sixties ad early Seventies, but when the rock music scene could no longer sustain his family, he’d done what so many others had done and joined the EG. I hadn’t had a chance to play with him, but I knew he was very good. So I called him up and invited him to come and jam with us, to see if there was a fit.
There was a fit, and a very good one we thought; only Buddy (“Bloody Buddy” as Knob nicknamed him) didn’t seem to think so, and quit after only a month or so of practice and jamming (also because we had no gigs booked, and he needed the money). So no luck there.
Mike knew a guitarist named John who seemed to fill all the slots we needed: technically excellent, a good voice, a large repertoire of good songs — some of which we played already — and a very sexy wife. (Okay, that wasn’t really relevant, but we liked looking at her anyway.) So we practiced and practiced and put together about two dozen songs because… we’d been booked to play an outdoors gig — our first as the reconstituted Atlantic — at the Rand Showgrounds (think: the equivalent of say, the Texas State Fair). It was a short set, only half a dozen or so songs, and we were confident we could handle the gig easily.
Towards the end of the set on that fateful night, I called for Foreigner’s Double Vision, which we’d nailed in practice and were especially fond of because it featured John on lead vocals, and in which he’d proved to have a very good voice — in this song, quite the match of Lou Gramm’s — but when I called it, John pulled back on me.
“I can’t play that.”
“What?”
“I’m not going to play it.”
“Fucking hell, John, I just called it over the P.A. — we have to play it.”
“No.”
I blew up. “Play it, or get the fuck off the stage.” And to the shock of the whole band, he did just that.
So we finished the gig with, mercifully, a couple more songs which I made sure didn’t require a lead guitarist — Kris Kristofferson’s Sunday Morning Coming Down comes to mind, and Marty sang it better than Kris anyway — and we finished with something from our O.K. Corral playlist, our piano-only accompanied version of the Bachelor’s I Believe, which we’d all loved performing. Of course, we hadn’t played it in over two years, and had never ended a set with the thing before, so I was a little apprehensive, but I needn’t have been. We remembered our parts, it sounded terrific and was a huge smash with the audience. A couple of people came up to us afterwards and told us they’d been moved to tears during the ballad’s performance. So that ended well.
What didn’t end well was the firing of John, which was pretty brutal, because for the first time ever in my musical career, I was furious, steaming-hot angry, and there was no way to talk me out of it. The little shit knew he’d screwed up badly, and he tried to soften the blow by bringing his wife to the next practice. Unfortunately for him, that didn’t work because I let him have it in no uncertain terms, and he was fired on the spot, with all the venom I could muster (which was quite substantial — even Mike was quite appalled).
But now we were still without a lead guitarist… until one day I got a phone call from Kevin.
“The band’s broken up, and I’m moving back to Johannesburg.”
“What happened?”
“Ummm the other guys got sick of Adrian, which you’d know all about of course. But because he turned out to be not that good on keyboards, they wanted to get someone else in, so Adrian just broke up the band like he did with Black Ice. And because it was his name on all the contracts, we had nowhere to go.”
“Shit, man, I’m sorry.” No, I wasn’t. “Have you got anything else lined up?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, we’ve got Atlantic back together… do you want to come round to the practice room and jam a little with us?”
“Sure.”
The very first song we played at that fateful “jam” was Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond, which we’d practiced with John but which Kevin had never played before, but claimed he’d worked it out as a practice exercise. So there was no warmup, no testing of the song, we just launched into it. (I urge you to take a few minutes and listen to it now, because it’ll help you appreciate what follows.)
Unbelievably, Kevin absolutely nailed both Dave Gilmour’s intro and solos, playing them almost to perfection; and then to make matters worse, he added his own improv solo towards the end, substituting his lead guitar for the sax solo which ends the song, and the thing lasted twice as long as the original quarter-hour runtime. Good grief, the boy had always been good, but he’d come a long, long way since we last played together. At some point I happened to catch Mike’s eye, and was met with the broadest grin in Christendom. Knob played the song with his eyes closed all the way through, just revelling in what turned out to be a wonderful musical experience, maybe the best any of us had ever had before in this band.
Kevin didn’t know it yet; but just as I’d more or less talked him into it back when Pussyfoot had held its first-ever practice, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let him slip away now, either. And we had more than a few gigs booked over the next few months.
And so began the next, and most fun chapter of my musical career.