Category: Friends and Family

(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, Chapter 13)

Chapter 14:  The Last Gig

As time went on, it became clear that Marty was really holding the band back, in a musical sense.  He was uninterested in learning any new material (unless it featured him on lead vocals) and when we dragged him into playing anything else, he was totally disinterested.  And yes, he had a great voice, but we were moving on from playing mostly older classics (his favorite and perhaps only interest), and just as importantly, his indifferent guitar playing was not helping the band grow, either.  I was perhaps the least enthusiastic about it because I loved Marty’s voice, and loved singing with him.  But when your audiences want to hear Shout and all you can give them is Let It Be Me, it’s not a good thing.

We were also a little apprehensive about the decision because it was Marty who’d been driving Gilly all the way from their homes in Springs to band practices in Johannesburg, and indeed to wherever we’d been booked to play gigs.  Would she want to stay in the band, and drive herself around, all by herself?  (She had just got old enough to get her driver’s license, by the way.)  When Gilly had joined the band, we’d decided to pay her a set amount per gig because she didn’t have to hump gear around, just perform on stage, and nor had we asked her to contribute towards the cost of the gear we’d purchased.  Knob suggested that we start giving her an equal share of the money, in no small part because if she were to stay in the band, she’d have to pay a fairly considerable amount for fuel — and fuel in South Africa was always expensive (still is).  That was a no-brainer, so we called her to tell her what we were thinking, and whether or not she’d want to stay.  To our surprise and delight, she agreed to stay in the band.

So after a long and gloomy discussion between the original four (Mike, Knob, Kevin and myself) we finally decided to can him.  Of course, because I was kinda-sorta the leader of the band (and unlike any of the others, I’d actually had experience in firing people) it fell to me to drop the axe on him.  I had to do it personally, because a lot of water had passed under the bridge we’d all been standing on, and it would be grossly disrespectful to do it over the phone.  So I did it, and it was terrible, not least because I was actually very fond of Marty — we all were — but from an artistic and business perspective it just had to happen.  And there it was.

So we were back almost to where we’d ended with Pussyfoot, plus Gilly.  However, as I’d feared, while Atlantic was still a powerhouse band, our vocal sound had changed without Martin, with the result that we all had to work just a little harder.  What had become easier was practice and rehearsal.  No longer did we have to set up most of the gear in a practice room;  now we just sat around with our instruments and microphones plugged into the mixing desk, and instead of speakers we used headphones.  We didn’t even need a practice room — anyone’s living room would do.  Knob used a drum pad and wonderfully, his voice to mimic the drum sound (using a microphone, you just have to say “DISH!” to sound like a cymbal, for example, and “Dubba-dubba-dubba-DISH!”  served as a drum roll).  Once we stopped laughing, we just got on with it.

For me, though, it was starting to get less fun, for an unrelated reason.

I mentioned earlier that I’d got married (back in late 1982):  a business lunch that had turned into breakfast, and things went on from there.  For our honeymoon, we decided to go and spend a month touring the Eastern United States, a decision that was to prove pivotal to me:  I instantly fell in love with the United States, and more gradually fell out of love with my wife.  We got divorced in early 1985, and I decided to go back over to the U.S., ostensibly on a month’s vacation, but really to scope out the place and see where I’d like to live.  At some art gallery opening one night, I happened to bump into my old buddy Trevor, with whom I’d worked at a small ad agency (he as a copywriter, me as the marketing / new business manager).  We’d always got on well together, and in chatting with him that night, I learned that he too was planning on going back to America — the only difference being was that he’d had several job offers from agencies over there, by dint of his winning a CLIO award for one of his ad campaigns, and so he was going over to a.) get his CLIO and b.) talk to a couple of agencies who were interested in his work.  So we coordinated our schedules, and flew over together.  For me, the only difference in this trip compared to my first was that instead of Florida, we went west to Texas where he had some family friends living.  So we did that, and at some party or other I met a guy who owned a food brokerage business, and who became very interested in my Nielsen-grounded data analysis abilities.  So he offered me a job, and said he’d take care of all the visa issues (it was a lot easier back in he early 1980s than it is today).  I just had to show up, collect my visa after the Immigration interviews, and start work.  I went back to South Africa in a daze:  my dream of starting a new life in the States was going to happen.

Except that when I got back, my largest client — at the time, the largest retail organization in the Southern Hemisphere — offered me a job as Group Marketing Manager.  It was a huge job, and I’d have been a fool not to take it.  I called my putative boss in Texas and told him the news.  To his credit, while disappointed, he said he understood and agreed with my decision.  So I started my new job:  and cocked the thing up horribly.

There’s no need to go into details, but at 31, I was the youngest executive at my pay scale by some twenty years, I made all sorts of stupid corporate mistakes and therefore a lot of enemies in the executive offices, and I was miserable.

What made things worse was that Atlantic wasn’t going as well as I’d expected it would.  Gilly ended up leaving after only a few more months with us, and the whole thing looked like falling apart.

Then Donat (Mr. Filthy Perfectionist from the Pussyfoot days) decided he’d like to rejoin the band.

Well, that was a shot in the arm for the rest of us.  (To his surprise, though, Donat soon discovered that instead of being the only Filthy Perfectionist in the band, he was now just one of five.  Playing professionally will do that for ya.)  Our sound immediately improved, not the least because Donat’s guitar skills were exponentially higher than his predecessor’s, and we became in essence a tighter and far more competent Pussyfoot, able to play pretty much any song we wanted, no matter how difficult and complex.  So while our vocal sound had arguably worsened a bit, our musical sound was fantastic and made up exponentially for the change

It was great.  Now we could do songs like Careless Whisper (sax solo courtesy of one of Mike’s new synthesizers), Money For Nothing, Easy Lover, The Heat Is On, Run To You and so on;  the list was endless, and we delivered them with gusto.

After hours, things were also great.  There was a dance club in Johannesburg called “Plumb Crazy” that was a mecca for musicians.  Basically, while the “club” part was typical — a giant dance floor, a bar and dozens of tables and booths scattered around — there was also a little bar in an annex or side room called “Prompt Corner”.  This had been started as a place where actors and other theater people could “come down” after their shows had ended, and that facility was soon opened to musicians as well.  It was a members-only affair, and you had to be a professional musician or actor to be allowed in.  As the club was open until 5am, therefore, Prompt Corner was usually full to the brim by about 2am.  It was a place for musicians to hang out, chat with other musicians, find out (in those pre-Internet days) which band was looking for a new member, which clubs were looking for a new band, and so on.  All very cozy and collegial.  Basically, when the DJ was playing dance music, the Corner was full;  but when the band started to play, the bar emptied because all the musos wanted to catch the show.

One night I went to Plumb Crazy after a gig.  It turned out that Ballyhoo — the most popular club band in the country, by far — had left their usual Cape Town haunt and taken up residence at Plumb Crazy.  Now, I knew all the guys thanks to my time at Bothners with Eddie Boyle, so that night I went straight into the Corner to get a beer and see who else was there.  Scarcely had I walked in, though, when Ballyhoo started their next set.  Of course, the room emptied quickly, and I joined the crowd.  From where I came into the dance area, I couldn’t see the whole band.  Then I heard a virtuoso drum roll, and craned my neck to see… none other than Franco, my former bandmate from Hogwash.  Of course, I thought, there was no way that Ballyhoo were going to let Franco escape:  he was probably the best rock drummer in South Africa at that point.  Anyway, when they finished their set, we all trooped back into the bar and started chatting away.  Then Franco came into the room and when I made the secret Hogwash greeting noise, he started, saw me, shouted “KIM!” and raced over to our table.  After we’d finished punching each other on the arm — another old Hogwash custom — he sat down and we chatted away about this and that.  Danny, it turned out, had joined the reformed Circus — the band we’d followed at the O.K Corral all that time ago — and Boze the keyboards player had emigrated to the U.K. after marrying his high school sweetheart.

Not for the first time, I marveled at how small a world it was that we professional musos lived in.

About three weeks later I got fired from my job.  (Actually, it was more of a mutual agreement that I wasn’t happy doing the job and my boss wasn’t happy with me either, so I got three months’ severance and use of my company car for the same period, while I looked for a job.)

Of course I had no job to go to… except perhaps that one in Texas?  I called the company’s owner, who sounded really excited when I told him I was free.  “When can you get here?” he asked.  I looked at my calendar.  Atlantic had two more gigs to play in the next couple of weeks, and then it looked like there was a period of about two months that were inexplicably open.  So I gave the guy a date when I could get there, and went off to tell the band the news.

Even though I was as excited as all hell at my upcoming emigration, I felt terrible when I sprang the news on them.  We had played together, off and on, since 1974.  Worse yet, we were not just bandmates but friends, the very best of friends.  Mike had taught me how to fly and ultralight aircraft.  I’d been Kevin’s best man at his wedding, and he’d returned the favor at mine.  I’d been the photographer at Mike’s wedding, and Knob and I had slept with at least two of the same women (that I knew of) — not simultaneously, of course, but sequentially.  I’d borrowed Donat’s apartment to deflower a high school girl several years ago (and you just don’t forget favors like that), not to mention the fact that Donat had dated my own sister for about three years.

I loved these guys more than I loved most of my actual family, in other words.

Nevertheless, there it was:  two more gigs, and then good-bye.  The second-last gig went off okay:  just a simple party at one of the country clubs, which we handled easily.  Then came the dreaded last one, which was to take place on my last night in South Africa (the next afternoon:  Big Silver Bird Time.)

Of course, after a decade of planning for equipment failure and never having had a problem, my ever-reliable Roland bass amp chose that night to die on me, right as we were doing out pre-gig sound check.  Disaster.  I tried calling Eddie Boyle to see if he had a spare amp to lend me, but no answer.  There was really only one thing we could do, and that was play the bass guitar through the P.A. system.  Now this would have been impossible in the old days with our teeny Dynacord amp;  but our new amp handled the job easily (although Knob did say that he missed the sound and feel of my speaker behind him, its customary location on the stage).

What I also didn’t know was that one of the guys had set up a tape recorder, and taped the entire gig.  (This will be discussed later.)

Well, the gig came to an end and we just stood around like tailor’s dummies.  I mean, it was over, really over.  Our ten-year joyride, with its many ups and so few downs, had come to an end.  We packed up in total silence — I gave the Rickenbacker to Knob or Kevin, I don’t remember, left all my other gear (amps, pedals, lighting system, microphone and stand) with them, and for the first time ever, drove home after a gig with an empty car.

The next day I got a lift to Johannesburg’s Jan Smuts Airport, and was standing disconsolately at the Departures area when Donat and Kevin showed up.  “We just couldn’t let you go without saying goodbye,” Kevin said, and explained that Mike was flying in some ultralight cross-country competition, while Knob had to be at a business function somewhere else.  We shook hands, hugged each other, and I left.

Some months after emigrating to the U.S., I went with a friend to a club on Sixth Street in Austin.  She had a friend who was married to the guitarist in a band, so we went to listen to them.  While chatting during one of their breaks, my lady friend told this guy that I’d played professionally for a band in South Africa — so of course he invited me to jam with them, and of course I said yes.

And of course we played one of my oldest companions and go-to songs, Johnny B. Goode, the song I’d performed countless times before, not the least as the audition song for George Hayden at the Army’s Entertainment Group.  Afterwards, the guitarist said to me, “Are you looking for a band?  I think I know at least a couple where you’d fit in pretty well.”  Beat.  “They’re both country bands.”

I thought about it for only a few seconds.  Did I want to join another band, get to know the guys, get to like them, see if our tastes coincided, see if our respective skill levels would make for a good fit?  Those are a lot of criteria, and some musicians can go an entire career with only two or three of them together, and hardly ever when all of them were.  You see, I’d been spoiled by having played with two bands — but especially with Atlantic — where all those criteria had been met, tested and enjoyed over years of playing together.

And that was only half of it.  At the moment I was in Austin, but I’d recently had a job offer from — you guessed it — A.C. Nielsen in Chicago (their head office) and was flying out in a few days’ time to hammer out the details.

So no, I didn’t want to play in an Austin country band.  Would I be prepared to go looking for a band to play in, and go through that whole rigmarole in Chicago?

Which led to a more serious question:  did I want to play bass anymore at all?

“No,” I said firmly.

My rock band days were over, and I’d never play again.

There’s only one more thing to say about all this.

I had developed a theory about the role of the bassist in a band.  I actually loathed listening to a song where the bassist played up a storm, because to my classically-trained ears it sounded like noise, a musical expression akin to a Jackson Pollock painting:  undisciplined, messy and unpredictable (like in this song, which turns into a total morass soon after it begins).  That might work well in modern jazz, which is pretty much a thing where everyone plays at the same time, but not necessarily together;  but I don’t think it’s ever worked for rock music.  In fact, my own bass playing tended more to the basic kind, and not just because I felt technically limited, either.  I genuinely didn’t want to “get busy”, especially in a song that didn’t need such embellishment, and I wanted to give the other musicians a chance to play in the space that I provided.  In other words, I regarded the bass guitar as part of the rhythm unit, and not as a lead instrument.  I know that this attitude probably cost me a chance to play pro with the Hogwash guys;  but even though I was hurt at the time, after a while I realized that it didn’t matter.  So I just concentrated on providing a solid platform for the band’s sound — and I made sure that every time the drummer hit the bass drum with his pedal, there would be a strong and punchy bass note to accompany it.

Many years later I met up again with Kevin, this time in New York where he’d settled after leaving South Africa.  We were chatting about this and that, playing catchup and all that good stuff, when suddenly he reached into his pocket and pulled out a tape.  “It’s the one I made when we played our last gig together,” he said, and popped it into a Sony Walkman for us to listen to together.

I listened, amazed.  Because I’d played my bass through the P.A. instead of that damn busted Roland amp, it came through far more prominently than it would have otherwise.  When we got to Billy Ocean’s When The Going Gets Tough, with its rolling, complicated bass line, I shook my head.

“Did I really play that?”
My old friend and bandmate Kevin smiled and said, not unsympathetically, “You were always a better bass player than you thought you were.”

(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)

Chapter 13:  That Hotel Band

One of the areas where both the old Pussyfoot and Atlantic bands did well was at hotels. We showed up on time, set up quickly with minimum fuss, didn’t play too loudly, behaved ourselves (more or less) by not getting wasted and whoever was throwing the party — wedding reception, office Christmas party, special function, you name it, we played it — went away having had a good time because we played all the popular songs people wanted to hear and dance to;  and most importantly, we weren’t too expensive.  As one hotel manager put it, we were very good value for the money.

We’ve seen how well we got on with the managers at the Boulevard in Pretoria, but there were two others that require special mention because both were responsible for a large percentage of our band’s income.

The first was the Rosebank Hotel in Johannesburg.  It was a very classy hotel, located in a toney neighborhood in the northern suburbs.  Once the managers got to know us, they acted almost as our agents.  Typically, when they were working with nervous brides-to-be and were asked if they could recommend a band, Paddy Donnelly or Chris Najbicz (“Nebbish” to us) would recommend us without hesitation or reservation, saying things like “Atlantic plays more wedding receptions here at the Rosebank than all the other bands put together.”   The party thus reassured, Paddy or Chris would call Knob and book us, usually right then and there.  (Needless to say that when Chris himself got married, we played his reception and comped the gig.  Oh and by the way, when I myself got married in 1982, they comped me a function room for the reception — and the first three rounds of drinks — as well as the bridal suite for the night.  We were friends, not just business associates.)  I think that over five years, we played New Year’s Eve at the Rosebank three times, each year charging more for the gig at their suggestion because more than a few guests came back two or three years in a row because they liked the band.  In addition, we got to play several companies’ Christmas parties again and again — the CEO of one commenting that he knew us better than he knew a lot of his employees — and another saying, “You know, sometimes when we’re planning these things, someone will suggest we try another band, but we always come back to you — and you guys just get better and better every year.”  Very gratifying.

Then there was the Hunter’s Rest Hotel northwest of Johannesburg, near the huge Sun City Casino & Resort.  Hunter’s was a lovely place, very much a regular destination of choice for families looking for a long weekend or week away from their daily routine, and mostly because instead of hotel rooms, there were a number of large cottages scattered around the 300-acre grounds which gave plenty of privacy if needed.  The hotel also offered childcare and kids’ activities during the day so that the parents could kick back and play bridge, or lie by the pool and get wasted;  and there was always something going on every night, most especially on weekends, which is where we came in.

I don’t know how we first got booked to play there, but once owner Dave Varney got the full Atlantic treatment, he took a serious shine to us (and in fact, Dave and I became very good friends on a personal level).  As a result, we played there innumerable times, and even a couple of New Year’s Eve gigs as well (before the Rosebank got in on the act and monopolized us).  Sometimes it was a two-nighter (Friday and Saturday), other times just the Saturday night, but always with a large cottage for the band to share so we didn’t have to drive back to Joburg at three in the morning.  (We always seemed to play overtime at Hunter’s, and on at least two occasions until dawn, I forget why.)

One year Dave and I were sitting in his Italian restaurant in Rosebank — yes, he owned more than just Hunter’s Rest — and coincidentally, my post-divorce apartment was literally across the road from his establishment — when he asked, “Do you know somebody, a guitarist and singer, who could play in the Hunter’s cocktail bar for the last two weeks of this December?”

I have absolutely no idea what came over me, but I said, “Well, I could do it.”  And after a quick check on my work- and band calendar for that December, I got the gig.  As it happened, I had accumulated two weeks of paid vacation from my job which had to be taken that calendar year or else I’d just forfeit it, and by pure coincidence Atlantic was indeed booked for one night late in December — at Hunter’s Rest.  It was, as they say, written in the stars.

What wasn’t written in the stars was that there was no way I was going to be able to play the gig, because I hadn’t touched a six-string guitar since before my Army days — you may remember the circumstances — and I wasn’t that good a guitarist to start off with.  But I’d agreed to the gig (made with a friend withal), and so I was just going to have to find a way to do it.  At first, I thought I could just resort to the copy of Ricky Hammond-Tooke’s songbook, but it had been nearly a decade and I’d lost the blessed thing.  So off I went to Tradelius, a music shop in downtown Johannesburg to see what I could find there.  At first, I got no joy.  Buying the sheet music (we called them “charts” or “dots”) for quite a few songs — the number I’d need to do the gig properly, anyway — was going to be hellishly expensive.  But then I found a compendium of sheet music, all nicely bound in a spring-back book called “101 Hits For Buskers”.  Wonderfully, it contained one song per page — the melody line, all the lyrics and (yes!!!!) the guitar chord charts as well.  I was off to the races…

…except that I had to learn about forty songs — especially the chords, most of which I’d never played before and had to learn the proper fingering on the fretboard — in the three or so weeks before I had to report to the Hunter’s Rest.

Nothing for it but to get stuck in.  Fortunately, I had a lovely Ibanez acoustic guitar, a very good copy of a Gibson Hummingbird Jumbo like this one:

…which I’d bought years before despite my lack of skill because Musicians Are Idiots As Well As Scum.  All I had to do was affix an electronic pickup to the bridge, and I was good to go.  The songs, however, were another story altogether;  in the end, I could only play about thirty of the “101” with any degree of proficiency, but then lightning struck and I found Hammond-Tooke’s songbook (!) so I could add a dozen or so songs to the 30/101.  Also, for no reason at all, I included a couple of songs by Bread in the playlist.  Now ordinarily I hate and despise David Gates’s beta-male whining, but there are a couple songs that don’t have dire lyrics like Diary and Everything I Own — namely, Mother Freedom and Guitar Man (with some careful rearranging) — and to my surprise, they went down really well.  Better still, my voice suited those songs better than Gates’s plaintive near-contralto.

So I showed up at Hunter’s with the utmost trepidation and set up my gear (I’d borrowed the band’s P.A. system which was way more than I needed for the cocktail bar, but it was going to have to find its way to Hunter’s anyway for the coming band gig.  Some effects pedals to disguise my terrible 6-string guitar playing:

 …and off I went.

What saved me, I think, was that I wasn’t putting on a performance, as such:  I was, essentially, background music in a quiet cocktail lounge, so nobody seemed to notice my fumblings — I was even complimented a few times — which just proves that you can fool some of the people some of the time.  Certainly, Dave Varney was well pleased with my efforts.

But it was a lovely time.  I played every night, and drank all through the day by the side of the pool, flirting with the wives whose husbands were playing bridge in the hotel, or with the off-duty receptionists matching me drink for drink.  (Don’t even ask how that ended up.)  Then I’d take a quick nap in the late afternoon to help me sober up, and start playing in the bar at 7pm till closing time at 1am.

It was also good to have a break for one night when the other guys from Atlantic showed up for the party, and I could go back to playing with a band — to the consternation of many of the guests, who only knew me as “the guy playing guitar in the cocktail lounge”.

At the end of the two-week gig, therefore, my pay didn’t come even close to covering my bar bill;  but Dave forgave the balance because on one occasion I played Santa for all the kiddies, to his great amusement and to the astonishment of kids’ parents, and on another, I hosted a golf game at Sun City with three of the guests, one of whom was former Wimbledon doubles’ champion Frew MacMillan.  Neither of these activities was part of my contract, to be sure, but I did it because Dave and I were friends and I wanted to help him out.

At the end of it all, I had to pack up the gear and race to Johannesburg because Atlantic had been booked to play a New Year’s Eve party, not at the Rosebank this time — which would have been fine — but at another resort hotel in a town some two hundred miles south of the city.  And the party was, of course, an all-nighter.  Trust me when I say that I shambled back into the office on January 2 a shattered shell of a human being.

There was another place we played at more than once, but not a hotel.  There was a club in Hillbrow called “Geordies International”, a home-from-home for homesick Brits mostly hailing from the northeast of England, as well as the usual crowd of scum from Manchester, Liverpool and so on.  Kevin and I had actually played the gig with Black Ice, but later on he got contacted by the club owners for a booking, and so Atlantic took their place.  Of course, I made sure that we expanded our repertoire to include several popular Geordie songs like Fog On The Tyne and the like — which is why we got rebooked after that.  (The club was interesting because in true Brit fashion, the guys all sat around drinking and talking football with their mates, while their wives and girlfriends danced with each other.  Brits are weird.)  What I remember most about the first weekend we played there was that the club had no ventilation or air conditioning, so the Friday night was played in an atmosphere which actually threatened us with heat exhaustion by the end of the evening;  and thus that Saturday morning we raced out and bought some serious office fans, which helped some.  Thereafter, those fans became an integral part of our stage gear, and most especially when we went back to Geordies.

Something else happened during this time which gave me enormous pleasure, and it came in the pint-sized form of Gilly Lloyd.  Martin had discovered her in the little town of Springs (I don’t remember the circumstances), and he got us to agree to an audition.  So this little twelfth-grader blonde English girl showed up, and blew us away with her fabulous voice.  Of course we added her to the lineup, and she became part of the band quite effortlessly.

Apart from the legs, what Gilly brought to the band was her consummate professionalism:  when we decided on a song, she would learn the lyrics perfectly, no cheat sheets (unlike Marty, who, being too lazy to memorize lyrics sang from a songbook all the time), and her lovely voice added a dimension to the band which we’d never had before.

And after all this time, I must admit with the deepest chagrin that we didn’t use Gilly enough.

You see, I’d seen what happens to bands when a vocalist leaves — and vocalists are notorious for quitting bands to find the Next Best Thing — and I think we’d all been bitten by Cliff’s departure during the Pussyfoot days.  So we were always terrified that if we gave Gilly (say) two-thirds of the new songs we learned and she decided to quit, we’d be in deep trouble.  In addition, Marty — who had become the primary vocalist in the band — was, I think, jealous of the effect she had on the rest of us, even though he’d been the one to introduce her to the band.  So whenever I (or any of the others) came up with a new song for her to sing, Marty would often find a way to get a different song that (surprise, surprise) featured his voice instead of hers.

And her voice was terrific.  Amazingly, she would tackle tough male vocal parts (like Loverboy’s Turn Me Loose) and absolutely kill them.  Her duets with any of us guys were amazing (e.g. Stop Dragging My Heart Around  with Kevin), and her rendering of ballads (Juice Newton’s Angel Of The Morning) were spectacular.

Side note:  It should come as no surprise that she would eventually end up as a star in her own right, with TV appearances and a cabaret act which featured her uncanny ability to mimic other singers’ voices — and often, her cover would be better, a lot better than the original artist’s rendition.

I adored Gilly — we all dd — and now in retrospect I (and all the other guys) deeply regret not making her a feature of the band instead of just another member.   Nostra maxima culpa.

I’ve talked a little bit about how a band goes about selecting which songs to add to the repertoire, and by this stage in Atlantic’s history we had it down to a fine art.  I’d learned from the Black Ice time the best way to do this, so we adopted that for ourselves.  The only difference was that unlike Black Ice, where Adrian decided on the new songs’ inclusion unilaterally, ours was very much a democratic business. Anyone could suggest a new song — bring a cassette tape to the next practice session, and we’d listen to it, trying to see if there were any reasons why we couldn’t play it — for example, most early Chicago songs would have been beyond our reach because of the brass sections, and the synthesizers of the time weren’t complex enough to recreate the sound.  Then once we decided to learn the new one, I’d take the cassette home with me, and aided by a double-cassette player I’d bought which enabled me to do a tape-to-tape recording, make individual copies for each of the guys.  Then I’d hand them out, the guys would take a week to learn their parts, and then we’d put the whole thing together at the next meeting, rehearse it for a couple of weeks thereafter to get the sound really tight and professional, and then perform it.  It sounds complicated, but it wasn’t because only the most complex songs caused us time to perfect their rendition;  Dire Straits’s Sultans Of Swing, for example, took us only fifteen minutes to master the first time we played it, and it went onto the playlist that very next weekend, whereas Police’s Message In A Bottle took us two full practices before we played it live.  (I have to admit that the latter song’s delayed performance was caused by the bassist’s problems in mastering the vocal part while simultaneously playing Sting’s fearsome bass line.  I should have just let Gilly sing the damn thing.  She probably would have sounded better than I did, too.)

On another occasion, we noted that we’d had more than a few requests for Golden Earring’s Radar Love – the song which had given us so much trouble to master back in the Pussyfoot days.  So someone unearthed a tape of the piece, we listened to it just once;  and then proceeded to play it all the way through without pause or mistake.  Clearly, we had come a long way since Pussyfoot — and Radar Love became a popular fixture on the playlist from then on (but only when playing to an older or rougher audience, and never at wedding receptions).

Another song we played which never failed to draw a reaction from the audience was the dire D-I-S-C-O (by Ottowan), which we performed as follows:  we’d play it through the P.A. as the last song of our break, then gradually fade out the recorded audio while fading in our instruments until we were playing it at full volume.  It was easy enough to play (like most disco songs), but the audience would generally burst out in loud applause at the end, amazed that we could replicate an actual hit parade song.  Little did they know how easy it was.  Another such song was Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, which Gilly nailed (as she did all her songs, anyway), and which likewise drew cries of admiration afterwards.

And just to underline our professionalism at that stage:  we absolutely loathed playing disco music.  But we played it anyway, because that’s what people wanted to dance to back then, we’d been hired to get people on the dance floor, and we owed them a good performance.

Of course, it wasn’t all plain sailing for us.  Rob’s business interests were pulling him away from a full-time commitment, which sometimes meant he couldn’t make a gig or two.  Fortunately, I happened to know a very good, solid drummer named Neil Fox:

…a dour Scot who had a dry, wicked sense of humor – so of course he got on famously with us, and thus the only thing we missed was Rob’s vocal part.  (Rob was no mean mimic himself, by the way:  his rendition of Spandau Ballet’s Only When You Leave sounded exactly like Tony Hadley.)

Fortunately, by then Mike no longer had his Army reserve problem (and could finally grow his hair).

I think the two-year change in the draft which had ensnared me had had the happy result of freeing him up from his reserve commitment, so we never had to get a replacement for him.

The same was not true of Kevin, unfortunately, because his wife (acquired back when he was still playing professionally) was turning out to be a real stone in the band’s shoe because it seemed she could always find a good reason for him not to show up for a gig.  Had this not been Kevin, our friend, founding bandmember and brilliant lead guitarist, we would have fired him eventually.  But he was all that, so we didn’t.  And as I indicated earlier, decent lead guitarists were thin on the ground.

Then I learned through the grapevine that Danny, our old lead guitarist from Hogwash, happened to be free, so of course I contacted him to see if he could help us out.  (I knew he’d never be a full-time choice for us because he’d set his mind towards playing professionally.  But his band plans with Franco and Dion had fallen through, hence his availability.)  Anyway, he showed up for a rehearsal, and it was a breeze:  he knew most of the songs, had played several of them with me in Hogwash, and just to make things interesting I suggested that we learn a new song then and there, so we could feature him at our next gig.  So we did that, whereupon Danny uttered the line that became immortal:  “Okay, Marty;  you’ve got all the chords right — now we just have to get you to play them in the right order.”  Which summed Marty up perfectly.

Anyway, the gig came up and we played it, and all went well right up until we had to play the new song we’d worked out with Danny.  He nearly pulled a “John” on us, confessing to me that he was unbelievably nervous about playing it, and from the way his hands were shaking, I could see that he wasn’t exaggerating.  But I reassured him, we played the song and he powered through without a single mistake.

What all this did, though, was make me realize how professional we’d become and how intimidating this must have been to anyone wanting to play with us.  Understand this, though:  it wasn’t that we were a great band — not by any measure — but we were relentless.  (Neil Fox later told me that playing with us was like riding a giant wave:  it was at once easy and also rather frightening.)

Before I talk about the other guitarist we used, I need to step back a little.

We landed an actual club gig in Johannesburg.  It was called Just For Kicks, and the room was a renovated movie theater which had a maximum capacity of 900 people.  The band before us had taken it to 1,100;  but two weeks after our first appearance, we played to 1,500 people, and by the end of the contract to 1,700 a night.  We took half the door receipts (from memory, the cover was two bucks per head or three bucks a couple), so on average we were clearing about R1,500 a night, split six ways.

(rehearsal pic — no way we ever played a gig looking like that)

The only problem was that the contract was for three months, Thursday through Saturday nights from 9pm to 2am — and by then we all (except Gilly) had serious day jobs, executive-level stuff.  The result was that by the time Sunday came round, we were exhausted — but still had to rehearse new material on Sunday afternoons.

But we were finally doing what we would have killed to be doing back when we first got together:  playing full-time in a Johannesburg club.  And whoa, was it fun.  Of course, we did it like pros:   absolutely no pauses between songs while we decided what to play next (before starting, and during each break, I would write out the playlist for each set on a large Post-It notepad, then pass it around to the others to write one out for themselves), and we played only the most current hit songs (such as Genesis’s Abacab) so that we had at least four hundred people on the (two-hundred capacity) dance floor at any given time.

We’d also joined the big boys, gear-wise:  the old 80-watt Dynacord P.A. had been replaced by a 12-channel desk and 2,000-watt monster amp.  (We used the Dynacord to power just the monitor speakers, and it was barely up to the job.)  We rocked the place, put on a show, and not just with music.  Remembering how back in the Margate days that Shalima had staged talent competitions, I decided to do it at Just For Kicks as well, and it became a Saturday night regular feature.  And herein lies not one, but two stories.

There was a Hell’s Angels-type band (I think they called themselves the “Devils”) who used to come in most Saturday nights, always with their wives and girlfriends (because, as Eric the gangleader told me, the JfK owner refused to let them in without the girls because they caused too much trouble).  Even though they were a rough-‘n-tough crowd, they always behaved themselves in the club during their weekly visit, dancing with their ladies and drinking up a storm (which is why the management allowed them in — their bar bill was the equivalent of the GDP of a small country). They were actually a lovely bunch of guys, despite their fearsome appearance, and of course they became staunch fans of Atlantic because we played very hard rock music for them:  Steppenwolf’s Born To Be Wild would cause a near-riot, and the aforementioned Radar Love ditto.

Anyway, one night I became aware of a guy wearing a red shirt who was intent on reaching up to the stage and getting his hand up Gilly’s skirt while she was singing.  I growled at him once and he went away, but came back after a while and tried again.  Gilly managed to avoid his groping, and unfortunately for him, he chose the last song of the set to play his little game.

During our break, I went over to the Devils’ tables and sat down next to Eric.

“Hey Eric,” I said, “do you see that guy over there in the red shirt?”
“Yeah.”
“Man, that bastard’s been trying to finger Gilly, right there on the stage while we’re playing.  I can’t deal with it because we’re employees here and I don’t want us to get fired.  Can you do something to help her out?”

He scowled, beckoned to two of his guys and whispered something to them.  They stood up, pulled on their gang colors, walked over to Mr. Redshirt Groper and dragged him out of the club.

I have no idea what they said (or did) to him, but I never saw him again.  When I asked Eric what had happened — I mean, these were serious biker tough guys, and they might easily have killed him — he just grinned and muttered something about “teaching him a lesson”.

We sometimes invited someone in the gang to perform a song with us, and Long John — a tall, skinny guy with long, greasy black hair and the worst teeth in the Western Hemisphere — would enthrall the audience with his version of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick In The Wall  (“We don’t need no sex education!” delivered in a hoarse bellow) which always brought the house down, and earned John a bottle of rum for the first talent competition.  It became a weekly fixture for him, our “guest vocalist”, only without the bottle of rum.

Another feature of Just For Kicks was that Thursday was Ladies Night, literally:  from 7.30 till 11.30pm, only women were allowed in the club;  and at a rough guess, we would get close to six hundred unaccompanied women in the place.  And oh boy, did they ever cut loose.  Talk about wild ‘n crazy guys?  This lot would dance, scream and shout, flash their boobs at each other (and sometimes at the band, which nearly caused Farty to have a heart attack), and drink as heartily as any guy.  Then at 11.30, the doors would be open to the men (all looking to score with drunken chicks), whereupon at least three quarters or more of the girls would head for the exit.

Anyway, I told you all that about Just For Kicks so I could tell you this.  In the last chapter, I told you how we’d invited the Entertainment Group’s Buddy Slater to join us on guitar, but he’d turned us down.  One night at the club, who should I see in the audience but Bluddy Buddy himself, staring at us like he’d seen a ghost.  When I caught up with him afterwards, he said, “You know, I had no idea you guys were this good.  I shouldn’t have walked out on you.”

So when Kevin’s wife gave us trouble later, I called Buddy up and offered him the chance to stand in with us, and he jumped at the chance.  He ended up doing more than one gig with us, too.

So thereafter, whenever Kevin’s wife threw a hissy fit, in would come Mr. Slater.  (Although he wasn’t a singer, there were a couple of songs he could sing, and sing well.  ZZ Top’s La Grange, featuring Bluddy Buddy on lead vocals — and of course lead guitar — remains a treasured memory.)

At the end of the contract period, JfK management of course wanted to extend the thing for another three months — one of the barmen told me that they’d never seen crowds this large, nor had greater bar profits — but we turned them down.

Why?

Because we had day jobs, and frankly, the sheer physical exhaustion of the gig — not to mention the fact that it was becoming increasingly difficult for both me and Rob to fit our respective day jobs into a Monday-Thursday time frame — made our refusal inevitable.  Just For Kicks even offered us all the door money, and still we refused.  It was, inevitably, because we’d all grown up, and playing music was now really just our hobby.

But very soon, it all started to wobble and eventually, fall apart.

(Previous: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5,  Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9)

Chapter 10:  Serving The Nation

So we packed up the gear at the end of our O.K. Corral contract and went our separate ways. (I was given a very warm send-off by Linda, the motel’s night-time receptionist — so warm that we repeated the exercise some time later when I got my first overnight pass.)

It was a very somber occasion — the split-up, not the send-off — because none of us knew whether we’d ever play together again.  My call-up was for a year of National Service and a year, at that stage, was a very long time for a band to be apart — and especially in our case, because of Mike’s frequent Army call-ups and Knob’s increasingly-frequent business trips overseas.

I had only a couple of weeks before the dreaded date, so I spent it responsibly: calling up every name in the little black book and using the “I’m going to the Army and who knows what could happen to me” line — and to my astonishment, it worked on just about every occasion.  All that accomplished, the last thing I did was to have a very short haircut;  I’d heard many horror stories of what Army barbers did to people who arrived with long hair, and my hair was quite long after about two years since it was last cut.

So duly shorn, I arrived at the mandated time at the gates of the Army Services School camp in Voortrekkerhoogte (the nearest English translation I can give it is “Pioneer Heights”, by the way), and this being the Army, all 2,000 inductees had to sit in a long line along the camp fence and wait, because they’d only known we were coming for about six months, and previous drafts had been occurring every six months for well over a decade.

Side note:  I should mention at this point that Services School was a training unit which put recruits through Basic Training (boot camp, as it’s known in the U.S.).  Then the newly-trained soldiers were given further training in specific areas of expertise:  clerks, cooks, basic automotive mechanics, basic electrical, carpentry, truck driving and so on.  At that point they would be sent to wherever they were needed:  mechanics, electricians and carpenters to the Technical Regiment (“Tiffies”), and drivers, clerks and cooks to any regiment or facility which needed them.  Guys with specific expertise — law- and medical school graduates, for example — were then sent to Officers Training School (OTS), because having a university degree granted you an immediate officer’s commission. After that, they too were sent off to wherever they were needed.

I don’t know why, but I’d brought a guitar with me — that battered old Hofner acoustic on which I’d learned my first chords back in College — and so, being bored out of my mind after waiting for over three hours, I serenaded the guys with a few old tunes.  At some point, I was aware of someone taking pictures of this impromptu concert, but I paid it no attention.  I should have.

Because at our very first parade the next day, at 3am, the regimental sergeant major, a terrifying individual with coal-black eyes that signaled “pure psychopathic hatred”, roared out:  “Where’s the guitarist?  Where’s that fucking guitar player?”

Yeah, that would be me.

I held up my hand shakily, and he called me over.  In that same roar (even though I was standing only a couple of feet away), he asked:  “Did you want to become famous?”  And then he opened a copy of the evening newspaper from the day before, which featured a front-page photo of Yours Truly entertaining the other draftees, and shook it angrily in my face.

One of the first things that all veterans tell you is that when you get to the Army, you keep your head down and don’t stand out from the rest, because not doing that gets you all sorts of unwanted and unpleasant attention from psychopathic NCOs — like this one.  He looked me up and down with an expression of utter disgust and shouted:  “I can see you, Roof.” [rookie].  “You look like a naughty bastard, so I’m going to be looking out for you from now on.”

Dead man walking, that was me.

How I made it through Basics is a mystery for the ages.  The only thing that kept me sane was the fact that at the end of the first week, I’d gone on Commandant’s Orders to hand in my transfer request from Major George Hayden.  The Commandant looked at it curiously, as though I’d just given him something written in Sanskrit, and handed it off without comment to a clerk for inclusion in my Army file, that mystical and mysterious thing that contained every single detail of a young man’s life (and not just in the Army, either).

Anyway, on the Friday morning after the end of Basics we were called into the RSM’s office, platoon by platoon, where the RSM held a clipboard like he was going to beat each of us to death with it.  Written on the clipboard were our various postings, which he proceeded to call out, in a normal conversational tone — the first time any of us had ever heard him speak in anything but a feral roar.

“Albrecht:  OTS (Albie was a lawyer, as was Elias Leos, my old university buddy);
“Aswegen:  cook, 3 SAI; (3rd Infantry Regiment)
“Boland:  clerk, DHQ (Defense Headquarters, like the U.S. Pentagon);
“Dirksen:  cook, 5 SAI (5th Infantry Regiment);
“Du Toit:  Entertainment Gr — DU TOIT!!!!  What the fuck is this entertainment bullshit?”
“Ummm I’m the guitar player, Sar’ Major, remember?”
He looked at me with murder in his eyes.  “Just get the fuck out of my regiment, Du Toit, and if I ever see you again, I’m going to shit your eyes closed.”

I got the fuck out of his regiment and never saw him again.

With the usual Army organizational efficiency, there was no transport laid on to take me to my posting, a single troopie probably judged as not being worthy of such special treatment.  Fortunately, the Entertainment Group (and for brevity’s sake I’m going to call it the EG from now on) was only a few miles down the road from Services School, so I hitched a ride with a corporal going in my general direction.

When I arrived at the EG in mid-afternoon, the place was almost deserted.  So I found my way to the admin office — it was across the hallway from the Major’s office, I remembered — and when I presented my transfer form to the clerk, a strange look came over his face.  “Wait here,” he said, and left the room quickly.  I waited for about fifteen minutes, whereupon he came back and said, “Captain Bridgens is waiting for you in the Big Band Room for your audition.”

Audition?  Another one?  I stammered something about that, but the clerk brushed it off.  “Major Hayden is retiring, and Captain Bridgens will be taking over command of the unit from next week.  He’s ordered that all newcomers have to give a second audition.”

Oh, shit.  All sorts of scenarios flashed through my brain.  With the man who’d heard me play and got me into the EG now out of the picture, what if I failed this audition?  Would I be transferred out of the EG and off to gawd-knows-where?  Anyway, there was nothing for it but to make my way to a now-uncertain future.

Bridgens seemed young to be a captain, but he exuded an air of tough competence.  “You’re a bass player?” he said briskly.  “There’s a bass guitar;  plug it into that amp and wait.”  Then he walked over to the door.  “Manning?  Sergeant Manning?  Get Sergeant Matheus and report here for an audition.”  He came back.  “Sergeant Manning is the best jazz drummer in the unit, and Matheus is a genius lead guitarist.”
“What will I be playing?”  I asked nervously.
“Oh, probably one of Manning’s compositions,” he said carelessly, not seeing my expression of utter terror.

While waiting, I took stock of the instruments that held my future.  The bass was of uncertain manufacture — I guessed it was some Japanese thing — and the amp was not a bass amp, but an old Farfisa organ’s amp/speaker combination.  At least I wasn’t going to be playing too loudly, I thought.

Then Manning and Matheus came in, and hell began.

The composition, such as it was, was impossible to play.  With all my experience, I couldn’t figure out the key, so I figured I’d at least get the rhythm right – except that Manning’s bass drum strikes were all over the place.  Clearly this was a very experimental piece — Matheus’s strange chords made playing with Alex Dawson in Bulawayo a cakewalk by comparison — and I was soon enveloped with a cold sweat of impending doom.

At last, the song ended (taking me completely by surprise, incidentally) and I turned my frightened eyes towards the captain.

What I saw was a private — Bridgens minus his three captain’s stars — holding out his hand to me with a broad grin.

“Hey, Kim,” he said genially, “welcome to the unit.”

It turned out that the entire audition was a complete setup, a hazing of the newcomers by the longtime National Servicemen (NSMs, as opposed to the Permanent Force — PF) .  Craig Manning (much more of him later) was actually a keyboards player who had not the slightest idea of how to play the drums, and Deon Matheus was a bass player with, like me, only a rudimentary grasp of guitar chords (which explained his astonishing “jazz” chords, none of which I’d ever seen or heard before).  And “Captain” Danny Bridgens was, like me and both the others, just an ordinary private.  All three of them had come in from different units: Craig from SSB (Armored Cars, in Bloemfontein), Deon from 2 SAI and Danny from some other infantry unit which I’ve forgotten.

Then I discovered the next thing, which was also good.  There was no weekend duty in the EG, which meant that I would get a weekend pass right away, to return only before Monday morning parade at… 8am (not 5.30am, like I was used to in Basics).  I had no way of getting home, but a phone call recruited my sister’s boyfriend for the task.  The weekend also gave me the chance to get the Rickenbacker and the Fender Bassman amp both loaded into Fred;  so I was quite ready to play that Monday morning when it was time to show up for morning parade.  I’d like to say that I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but the fact was that I’d spent the Sunday night enjoying that second energetic send-off from Linda at the O.K. Corral, and could barely see straight.

The problem, I discovered, was that there was nowhere for me to play.  All the bands seemed to have a full complement — at least as far as bass players were concerned — and there was only one “NSM” band, a four-piece whose individual players seemed pretty good, but the band’s sound (to my professional ears) was rather ragged.

So I found a corner of an empty room somewhere, and spent the next week or so practicing scales.  Understand that I was terrified of being regarded as a slacker by any of the NCOs in the place, and not having a band to play in, I was still afraid that I’d just be transferred out of the EG.  So I was determined to show one and all that a.) I wasn’t a slacker and b.) I would be ready to play anywhere, if and when needed.  On one occasion, a unknown NCO stuck his head around the door, listened to me playing my scales for a few minutes, then nodded and left, without saying a word.

Then one day I got summoned to the Major’s office.  When I got there, Hayden looked at me and said, “Du Toit, we’ve got a small problem.”  My heart sank.  Here we go, I thought.  Hayden went on:  “The problem is that the gig was originally allocated to one of the regular — Permanent Force (PF) — bands, but three of their members have come down with, of all things, measles and so they can’t do the gig.  So I’ve dropped the NSM band into the slot.”  I nodded, foolishly, wondering why he was telling me all this.  “Anyway,”  he said, and to my surprise a look of embarrassment came over his face, “The engagement is tonight , and it’s the NCOs’ dance at the Military Police camp.  But the NSM band’s bassist can’t do the gig.  Can you stand in for him?”
There was only one possible answer.  “Of course, Major.  No problem.”

I later found out that the bassist in question was a guy named Raymond Johnson, and he was a member of the well-known “Johnson Family” musical group (like the Partridge Family, only these family members could actually play their instruments).  Anyway, because they were so well known, Hayden had taken pity on Ray and given him the night off, excusing him because (I also discovered later) he knew I could take his place.

So I went off the the NSM band’s practice room, and made my acquaintance with my new bandmates.

Danny Bridgens (the “captain” at my fake audition) was on guitar.  He was a dark, Portuguese-looking guy, and this was no doubt caused by the fact that he was Portuguese.  He was also an excellent guitarist with a lovely voice.
Craig (“Boze”) Manning (the fake sergeant on the drums at the same audition) was the keyboards player, and I blessed the day I met him.  Not only was he a brilliant keyboards player, likewise with an incredible voice, but he knew just about every pop ballad ever recorded — lyrics and music — which would save our bacon on more than one occasion.
Franco Del Mei couldn’t sing.  But he was an absolute monster drummer — he reminded me of Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham.  There was no rhythm he could not pick up immediately, no part too complex to play, and all at thunderous volume.  To my amazement, he was also schooled in all the dance disciplines:  foxtrot, tango, quickstep, waltz, cha-cha, rumba and samba and all the others, and unlike many loud drummers, he could adjust his volume to the level of the music.

To say there was panic in the air would be a huge understatement, because while all three of them were accomplished musicians, they were not experienced gig players, and the situation they now found themselves in was terrifying — to them.  None was older than nineteen, and all had come to the Army straight out of high school.  (By comparison, I at twenty-two was a grizzled old veteran.)

Even worse, there was no time for even a rudimentary rehearsal.  A frantic scramble followed for the others to get some band equipment together  — only I had brought my own gear into camp, so everyone else had to content themselves with equipment that none of the other unit bands wanted.  At least it all functioned, more or less, when we tested it.

We had to pack the gear into the Army truck and leave within the hour if we were going to make the gig on time.  In typical Army fashion, we’d found out at 3.30pm that we would be playing at 8pm, and it was a two-hour drive to the venue, way on the far side of Pretoria.

As we were setting up, I saw that the guys looked both stunned and nervous.  The only way we were going to make the gig work was if I took control on the stage, so I said, “Guys:  leave everything to me.  I’ve done this a hundred times.  Here’s how it’ll work.  If you know a song well enough to play and sing it, tell me and the key it’s written in, and I’ll call it out to the audience.”  When I saw their dubious expressions, I added, “I promise you, it’ll be fine.”

This situation was not unfamiliar to me, nor to anyone who’d ever played in a “pick-up” band.  So that’s what we did;  I would announce the songs, joke with the audience (all Afrikaners, and I was the only one in the band who spoke Afrikaans fluently), and count the music in… and the evening went like velvet.

We were saved by the fact that we were all good musicians — the others, to be frank, quite a lot better than I — and as Boze knew the lyrics and music to a jillion popular songs, the rest of us just followed him along.  (“How about Leaving On A Jet Plane ?”  he’d ask, to which my only question was:  “What key?”)  Of course, I also knew a bunch more, of the Credence Clearwater type and early rock ‘n roll genres — at some point in the past, I’d familiarized myself with practically all the songs on the American Graffiti  movie soundtrack — so we busked our way through five hours of music.  Along the way, the others started to relax, whereupon the anxiety level dropped, we started to enjoy ourselves and the music began to improve.  It’s actually one of my fondest band memories (and I have a ton of them).

We got a loud ovation from the audience after we finished our last song — and we in the band had enjoyed the experience so much that then and there we decided to make the band a permanent one (or at least for the remaining time of our draft).  When we told Ray that he was out, he was a little disappointed, but then he said, “The Family is pretty much booked up for the rest of the year, so at least I won’t have to go and beg Hayden to excuse me all the time.”  So everything was settled.

We found an empty practice room, set up the gear, and started putting together a repertoire that ended up being astonishing in its variety.  And because our whole job was to play music, we played all day and every day, five days a week — sometimes taking two or more days to master a complex song.

Then only a couple of weeks later, a new guy came to the EG.  Stan Greenberg was a passable singer and he’d been to the same high school as Boze.  He also wouldn’t stop pestering us to join the band, so in the end we gave in — who can say no to an extra voice? — and we were to discover that Stan, unlike so many vocalists, was not content just to sing:  he became completely professional about the whole thing, learning his parts and the lyrics to perfection.

The interesting thing was that while the others could sing, they couldn’t arrange the vocals — allocating parts to each individual according to their vocal range and sound.  Ha! but I could, and did, all that remembered training from the College choir, musical theater and countless band practices coming to the fore.

We would go on to play gigs at military bases all over South Africa.  And we rocked.  We were better than a lot of professional club house bands, all but Franco could sing, and harmonies became our stock-in-trade:  nobody  could sing with us, not even the pros.  As we already had a good list of oldies and party songs, we could concentrate on playing stuff that we wanted to play, which made us all better musicians.

(Kim, Franco, Danny, Stan and Boze)

Of course, as our repertoire expanded from the simple to the complex (from Bad Moon Rising  to Who Loves You, and from John Denver to Steely Dan) the one who struggled most was, of course, the bass player.  And I could see that often the other guys got frustrated when I just couldn’t pick up the part as written, but had to adapt it to something I could play.  What I did do was work on those bass parts on my own when no one was around, late at night or over weekends, and then play the original part the next time we performed the song, getting surprised looks from Danny especially.

Then Stan came up with a name for the “NSM band”:  Hogwash.  It was tongue-in-cheek, especially as our music was anything but and, as Boze cheekily pointed out, it was ironic that our “Token Jew” had come up with a non-kosher name.

We even had it painted on the side of Fred, replacing the old “Pussyfoot” designation.

The Hogwash experience was quite honestly one of the happiest times of my life.  We had no responsibilities and nothing else to do but play, and play, and play — and when we weren’t playing music, it was like being in Monty Python, with wicked humor, outrageous behavior and general mischief in abundance.  Boze especially had a dark, abstract sense of absurd humor which never failed to render me bent over with laughter.

But it was all going to come to an end soon, because our National Service commitment was for only one year, and Boze, Danny and Franco had come in on the draft six months prior to Stan’s and mine — which meant that Hogwash would cease to exist only a few months after its foundation.  We’d got together in early August 1977, and the three guys’ demob (in Afrikaans, uitklaring ) in December 1977 was looming.

Then fate struck.  Remember I said earlier that I’d explain my Army number?  Here it is.

The “BG” designation was a strange one.  We knew that some guys’ numbers ended with “BA” or BC” (nobody knew what had happened to “BB”, if it ever existed), but everyone in the band had the “BG” designation.  What we discovered was that the embedded meaning in “BG” meant to the Army that “If we need more men, we’ll just extend their commitment to two years instead of one.”

Which the Army did, issuing the order a scant three weeks before the demob date of December 17, 1977.  Which meant that Boze, Danny and Franco would now be leaving in December 1978, and therefore Hogwash had been given an extended stay of execution.  Of course, they were thunderstruck by the news — I think that Boze had actually landed a job to begin in January ’78, which he now had to call off — but after the shock wore off, we carried on.

The only good thing about this extended service was that, to our great joy, we were going to be booked to play at forward combat bases in the “Operational Area” of South West Africa (later Namibia), where South African troops had been deployed to prevent incursions of terrorist cadres into the country.

(underlined are the bases we played at, most more than once)

These tours were like the Bob Hope shows in Vietnam:  a band (Hogwash) and a headline act of some singer or another (to be explained later) would set up on a makeshift stage in the camp, and perform for the troops.  Not always the troops, however;  sometimes we’d play for an audience consisting mostly of the local (White) families and officers’ wives.  We hated those shows;  we wanted to play for the guys doing the actual fighting, not a bunch of REMFs.  But we gritted our teeth and played our best because, as I explained to the others, we were professionals and had to.  The guys took it to heart, and I can truthfully say that we never once mailed in a performance.  I don’t remember exactly how many tours we did, but I think it was five or six over the course of 1978.  I think our favorite gig was at Ruacana (extreme left) because it was (in U.S. terms) a forward fire base, a scant couple of miles from the Angolan border and subject to rocket- or mortar fire at any given moment.  I’m pretty sure that the bad guys on the other side of the border could hear us, because that night we played as loudly as I’ve ever heard us play, and the reception from the troops was equally raucous.

Something else happened:  Stan’s father, who was in the hotel business, bought a well-known hotel called Taylor’s Travelodge just south of Johannesburg, and needed a restaurant band for weekend nights.  Of course we got the job;  and so for the first time, the other guys in Hogwash got to experience what it was like to play a steady gig.  Like most restaurant setups, it was soft dance music for the first two sets until 10pm, and then came time to cut loose, which we did with gusto.  Two songs from that period come to mind:  Earth Wind & Fire’s Fantasy  (in which Stan found — to his own surprise — that he could sing a very creditable falsetto;  and in Steely Dan’s Don’t Take Me Alive,  where I managed to play  Leland Sklar  Chuck Rainey’s fiendish bass line and sing the lead vocal, to my utter surprise.  (Danny, of course, absolutely killed Larry Carlton’s lead solos, because genius.)

So we passed the rest of the year, gig after gig, tour after tour, weekend after weekend at the Travelodge, and the question came as to whether we should go professional after the Army.  There was no question that we were good enough.  There was also no question but that I’d be able to get us a gig;  with my contacts among the various club owners and managers, I was confident that I could get us a contract somewhere.

Now we knew that if we did that, Stan would be unlikely to stay with the band:  he was already working in sundry jobs at his father’s various hotels at night, and would never be able to join us if we landed a gig in, say, Durban or even Pretoria.  But we made it very clear to him that if and when we landed a club contract in Johannesburg or thereabouts, he would always be welcome to come back and do the gig with us.  All the band had to do was wait those few months until my draft ended, in July 1979 — and even if we did land a gig in Johannesburg or Pretoria before then, I was confident that I’d be able to get away at nights to play.  So we started making plans for “civvie street”:  a fresh, updated repertoire, ditching songs that weren’t good enough or current enough to play in clubs, finding places where we could get uniforms (if needed), talking to various electrical establishments to build a decent light show (guess whose idea that was), and drawing up a list of equipment that we’d need to play a large club (as opposed to a small room).

Then, about a month before the three guys were due to leave the Army, Boze announced that he didn’t want to go professional.  He was quite positive about his decision, and no amount of discussion or pleading could sway him to do otherwise.

Immediately, all our plans and dreams were dashed, because) Hogwash was a unit (and I hate to even make the comparison), a band like The Beatles.  Each of us brought something specific to the party, and because of that, the whole was infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.  So losing Boze didn’t just mean we lost a lovely voice and an excellent keyboards player:  part of the soul of the band vanished as well.  Danny was especially angry.  “We turned Boze from a casual living room piano player into a keyboards player who could do any gig anywhere, with any band… and he’s just turning his back on us?”  It took a while for that feeling of betrayal to die down.

It had a huge impact on me, too. When Hogwash (as was) ceased to exist, Danny and Franco decided that if they were going to start afresh, they could do it with a more accomplished bassist (actually, Dion Matheus, the “guitarist” from my fake audition, who was admittedly an excellent bassist, far better than I was).

So I was out, too, and Hogwash essentially ceased to exist.

The only good thing was that during those last few weeks together in the EG, we didn’t have to play a single gig.  So Boze, Danny and Franco left the EG in December 1978, and Stan and I were on our own for the last six months of our commitment.

What now?

(Previous: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5,  Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8)

Chapter 9:  Club Work 

Here’s the thing about Pussyfoot.  Yeah, we were a band, and a fairly competent one.  Certainly, when the opportunity came, we were often re-booked to play again for the same crowd for the next year (office parties and so on).  But our principle opportunities had always been wedding receptions and some school dances, and there’s very little “repeat” business there, of course.

So why did we stay together all that time, while we were struggling to make it work?  Most other bands would have called it quits, or broken up to join other bands, as so many did.

But we were more than just a group of musicians.  We were friends, and so we did what friends did — we hung out together, all the time.  It helped that we shared so many interests and hobbies outside music, of course;  Kev, Knob and I all played golf, so Saturdays and Sundays often saw us at Huddle Park, the local municipal course, struggling away at our game.  (Knob was the best of us, Kevin the worst, and I was sometimes the best, and sometimes the worst.  No wonder I gave up the stupid game later.)  Mike was Mr. Hobby Man, only he did it seriously.  I had a giant Scalextric slot car racing set which featured a 15-foot straight, powered by two transformers (one per lane), and many was the evening we spent together, racing furiously, teasing each other and trying hard to crash the other guy’s car off the track.  Mike, however, although he raced with us, used to race Pix cars, which was almost semi-professional, so fanatical were its players.  He also got his private pilot’s license and built an ultralight aircraft — and taught me how to fly it.  Knob was (and still is) more into boats, so we’d sometimes join him in that activity at Vaal Dam, the enormous reservoir south of Johannesburg.  And those were just some of the shared fun times;  we’d go on double- or triple dates together with the Girl Of The Month / Week / Weekend, sometimes with all the band members and a bevy of hapless girlfriends who were pretty much sidelined while we messed around and behaved like stupid boys.  We were good friends, close friends.

So when I got back from the horrible Kelly Green gig in Bulawayo, only to find that I’d been replaced, there was no way I was going to let that be permanent.  I went up to “visit” the guys at the Boulevard Hotel in Pretoria, to see what was going on and how I could undo it.

The Boulevard Hotel was quite a swanky hotel, and their second-floor restaurant was a nice room.  While the first two musical sets were generally quiet affairs, the management were quite happy to let the band cut loose after the dinner hour.  It was a fairly popular place, and blessedly free from the low-class scum that were so destructive a feature of Pretoria crowds.

But I wanted to see the new Pussyfoot — or “Atlantic” as they were now called — and most especially keen to see the new members of the band.

The new guitarist, Martin (“Farty Marty”) had been a member of Gate Show Band, one of the most popular club bands in South Africa.  The reason he left them was because he’d tired of the professional music life:  the constant uprooting and travel, the uncertainty that followed the end of each contract, and most especially, he’d been married (and since divorced) and he didn’t want to spend maybe months away from his baby son.  So he’d got a day job, and looked around for another band, a part-time band this time, and he ended up with the guys.  (I think he’d actually landed the Boulevard gig, and needed a band to play it with him.  It was a fortunate confluence of opportunity, there.)

Farty Marty, looking sexy

Marty was an indifferent guitarist — just barely competent — but he made up for it by having a tremendous voice.  Truly, it was golden, and he quickly became the principal vocalist in the band — the first among equals, so to speak, because Knob and Kevin had pretty decent voices themselves.

The same was not true of my replacement, Phil.  He was an okay bassist, but his voice was terrible — not that this stopped him from singing out-of-tune harmonies, by the way — and he was also one of those dorky musicians with zero stage presence.  Amazingly, he had rather a pretty wife (they lived in Pretoria) who used to work the door to collect the cover charges.  Well, she worked the door some of the time, anyway.

Side note:  We dealt with two managers at the Boulevard, a young blond Brit named Simon Totnes (whom we nicknamed “Simon Toothbrush” because of his spiky hairstyle) who was the assistant general manager, and the restaurant manager, an Irishman named Jerry Joyce (whose nickname was “Jerry Juice” because of his love of Teh Booze).  Well, Jerry took a shine to Phil’s wife Celia, and she to him.  And with Phil guaranteed to be on stage for forty-five minutes of every hour, that meant that Jerry and Celia could sneak off for a little quiet adultery in an empty hotel room, four times a night — Jerry having arranged for a hotel staff member to take Celia’s place at the door while she was otherwise occupied.  Their little fling turned out to be not so quiet in that he confided the affair to Knob (because he didn’t know better), and the next time he came into the restaurant looking all flushed, the band broke into that popular Sutherland Brothers song, Lying In The Arms Of Mary — only the lyrics had changed to “Lying ‘tween the legs of Celia”, with “Mary” changed to “Celia” all the way through the song.  Jerry nearly died of embarrassment.  But he was saved by the fact that Phil The Retard was completely oblivious of the change to the lyrics, and of the affair… for a while.  And just to mess with Jerry, we didn’t always sing the Celia version — only when he was in the room.

Phil’s other problem, although he didn’t know it yet, was that he wasn’t working the lights;  in fact, nobody was, and the light “show” consisted of a couple of the lights shining permanently, without any change all the way through the evening.

Anyway, I watched this new Atlantic Show Band, and then at the end of the evening, after Phil and his thoroughly-shagged wife had gone home, I went over to be introduced to Marty, and we all sat around and talked music for an hour or so.  When I was asked for my opinion of the band, I said bluntly, “You need a new bassist.”  Howls of laughter from Kevin, Knob and Mike, with Knob saying to the others, “I told you he’d say that.”  Marty, however, wasn’t clear on the concept, even though they’d told him I was the ex-bassist, and asked me why I’d said that.

“I’m a better bassist than Phil is, and I’m the fucking founding member of this band,” I told him.  “And I have a better voice than he does, and can sing better harmonies.”
“You think?” he asked.
“When’s your next rehearsal?”
“Tomorrow afternoon.”
“Call Phil and tell him the practice is canceled,” I said.  “If I can’t play every single song on the playlist (and sing better harmonies too) by the end of the practice, you can tell me to fuck off.”

So they did that, and I did just as I said I would — discovering along the way that Marty’s and my voice blended wonderfully, to his great joy;  and just like that, I was back in the band.

Phil didn’t take his firing well, of course, and took the news of his wife’s bonking the restaurant manager even less well, some weeks later when she blurted it out to him.  Needless to say, her job ended because her husband had no sense of humor.  So we lost a door collector, but nobody cared.

Of course, I wasn’t just boasting about being able to play the band’s entire repertoire:  most of the songs were from the old Pussyfoot playlist anyway, and Marty had only had a chance to add maybe half a dozen songs of his own to the list during his brief stay with the band;  and I knew all but one of those.  Of course, there were more than a dozen or so of “my” old songs (like this one) that the band could now play again, so the playlist was expanded considerably.

So the band was able to carry on seamlessly, the light show reappeared, and even Jerry Juice was impressed by how much the show had improved.  (Not bragging;  that’s what he told us after my first night back.)  We settled into the routine, playing comfortably together again, and the only hassle was that because all the others (apart from me) had day jobs, we had to schlep from Johannesburg to Pretoria — about sixty miles — every weekend, playing Friday and Saturday nights only, and therefore for not much in the way of compensation.  (I don’t remember how much we made at the Boulevard, but I think it was a combination of the door and a make-up amount, similar to the arrangement that Knob had negotiated with Vasco’s.  It ended up being more than that, but not by much.  Once again, though, we accepted it because we didn’t have to pack the gear up every night.)  Simon Toothbrush was kind enough to give us each a room for the Friday and Saturday night, and as the restaurant was closed on Sundays (blue laws, in ultra-Christian Pretoria), we could rehearse on Sunday before heading back to Johannesburg (and Marty all the way back to his home in Springs, a little town about sixty miles east of Joburg;  but his job included a company car, so he didn’t care much about the miles, and he was a traveling salesman for a tire company, so he spent all his time on the road anyway).

The way the club scene worked in South Africa back then was actually pretty good for bands, if you could break into the circuit.  House bands signed a three-month contract, and if management (and the crowd) liked the band, the contract might be extended for another three-month stint;  and if the band was really popular, it could be extended almost indefinitely.  (One of the top club bands was called Ballyhoo, and they were so popular that they seldom played any club for less than a year, and often longer than that.  Most bands, however, did the three-month contract and maybe one extension, mostly because they wanted to play somewhere else or management decided it was time for a change.  The contracts were therefore quarterly:  January through March, April through June, and so on.

Atlantic had been signed for the Boulevard gig in about mid-January 1977, so the contract was due to expire at the end of March.  I would have been quite happy to stay there for another stint through June, because:

My National Service in the Army was due to start in July.

But fate had other plans in store for us.  Halfway through March, Marty told us that a gig had opened up:  a band named Circus (another well-known club band) was breaking up, and so their April-June contract was going begging.  The venue:  the O.K. Corral outside Pretoria — the place where I’d seen Shalima play all those months earlier.

Holy hell:  this was not some sleepy hotel restaurant gig;  this was a proper, well-known and respected club, with salaries and accommodation included.  (“Okies” was actually connected to a motel poetically called the “Silverton Motel”, thus named because the town was named Silverton.)

Originally, we’d expected to be paid the same as Circus’s contract had stipulated, but management decided that they weren’t going to pay us like Circus because, well, we weren’t Circus.  Whereupon we told them that if they were going to pay us less, then we were going to play less — Friday and Saturday nights only, to be precise.  To our amazement, instead of telling us to take a hike, they agreed to our terms — largely, I think, because they weren’t going to be able to find another band at such short notice, especially as the booking cycle was now closed.  Sure, they might have been able to find another band — just none of the “name” bands because they’d already been booked.  So they were stuck with us, and to their great surprise we were pretty damn good:  maybe not quite as good as Circus, but not far off either.  The proof was in the size of the crowds, which over the weekends were not far below those that Circus had attracted.

There was only one small problem.  Our keyboards player Mike told us that he’d suddenly been called up for a fucking Army camp for the months of April through August.  So we’d either have to play the gig as a guitar band — not a pleasant prospect because so much of our material now had a keyboard foundation — or else we’d need to find a replacement keyboards player, and right quickly because we’d need to rehearse intensively for him to learn the playlist.

Bloody hell.

For about a week we all wandered around in a daze.  I think that had we not become serious professional musicians, we might just have walked away from the thing, contract or not.  But we were never going to do that, not only because it would have been unprofessional and a shitty thing to do to the club, we didn’t want to become known as a band who would do such a thing:  the pro music world in South Africa was small, all the club owners knew each other, and all the bands knew each other too.  Nope:  we had no choice.

One day I went off to my old stomping ground, Bothners Music Store, to see if perhaps Eds Boyle knew a keyboards player who could help us out.  He didn’t — which was amazing because he knew everybody in the business — so we settled in to chat for a while.  I moaned that I was going to go off to the Army, and didn’t fancy the thought of running around parade grounds and going off to fight South Africa’s shitty war against terrorists.  Eds looked at me quizzically.

“Why don’t you join the Entertainment Group?”
“The what?”
“The Army has a unit called the Entertainment Group.”
“You mean the Army Band?  Eds, I can’t play Army band instruments!”
“No, it’s separate from the Army Band.  It’s a bunch of pro musos, some PF [Permanent Force a.k.a. Regular Army in the U.S.] and some national servicemen.  You could go there.”
“Eds,” thinking that this was another of his well-known pranks, “I’ve never heard of them.”
“Kims… Trevor Rabin was there just a few years ago.”
“Seriously?  Wow… but how do I get in?”
Eds smiled.  “Relax, my son.  I know the Group’s commanding officer — George Hayden.”   (George Hayden was a well-known leader of a big band — I mean, TV appearances, records played on the radio, government functions, the full deal.  At the time, he could truthfully have been called the South African equivalent of Artie Shaw or Glenn Miller.)
“George Hayden’s in the Army?”
“Yup.  Here:  let me write you a letter of introduction, and organize an audition.  You’ll walk it, I know you will.”

And there and then, Eds wrote a letter for me, on the company letterhead. (I used to have the original, but it’s been lost in the mists of time so this is the gist of it.)

“Dear George:
This is to introduce you to Kim du Toit, who is a professional bass guitarist and whom I’ve known for years.  He is due to be called up in the July draft of this year, and I have no doubt he would be an excellent asset to your Entertainment Group.  Please give him an audition. — Eddy Boyle.”

Of course, I had no idea how to go about getting an appointment with someone in the Army;  but I decided just to show up and see what happened.  So I found out where the unit was stationed (a huge military complex known as Voortrekkerhoogte, don’t bother trying to pronounce it), and one morning I set off to see what the future might bring me.

Major George Hayden was (to say the least) somewhat taken aback at my unannounced appearance at his office door, but he read the letter and said, “Well, you come well recommended.  Let’s see if this is all true, and Eddy’s not pulling one of his terrible jokes on me.”  (Clearly, he knew Eds very well.)

The Entertainment Group was an interesting place.  It consisted of an old farm house, which held the admin offices and Hayden’s own office, as well as a large practice room for the Big Band and some other smaller rooms.  Then there was a row of corrugated-iron sheds (like Quonset huts), each of which was the permanent practice room for the four or five full-time PF bands.

Hayden took me to the first practice room, and introduced me to the band leader, Neil Herbert.

Oh, hell.  Neil Herbert was a pop musician and recording star:  he’d had several Top 20 hits over the years, and was very highly regarded as a musician.  So this was the guy I’d have to play with, and his band?

Anyway, I was introduced to him, and after I’d plugged the Rickenbacker (which got some admiring looks from the band) into an amp, he asked me:  “What do you want to play?”

I actually didn’t know what to say, so I just blurted out, “Can you play Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode?”

He chuckled, “Of course”, and just like that, the drummer counted us in and off we went.

Now I’d played and sung Johnny B. Goode  at least a hundred times before, and when it came time for the vocals to begin, Neil looked at me quizzically (“You going to sing the song?”) and I launched into it.

The nice thing about that Chuck Berry ditty is that it has a wonderful running bass line, and because I knew the song so well I didn’t have to look down at the fretboard at any point.  That, plus my vocals, must have made quite an impression because when the song ended, the guys in the band actually applauded me.

“That was fun.  Can we do one more?”  asked Neil.  This time, I had no idea what to suggest, so I asked to see his playlist.  And then some damn mischievous imp made me say, “How about this one?”
“Do you know it?”
“I know it, but I’ve never played it before, and I’ve always wanted to.  Just tell me what key you play it in.”

So once again, the drummer counted us in, and off we went into ELO’s Living Thing.  And yes, I sang it, too, because the bass part isn’t that difficult and I knew the lyrics.  When the song finished, Hayden said to me,  “You’ve never played that before?  Are you serious?”
“Scout’s Honor, Major,” I said, and crossed my heart.
He looked at Neil Herbert, who nodded.  “Well, that’s enough.  Let’s go back to my office.”

He scribbled a note, and gave it to his clerk to type up on the Unit’s letterhead.

“To the O.C.*, Services School Regiment (my designated unit):
I have provided NSM* Private Kim du Toit (704-164-144-BG) with this letter to give to you.  I have auditioned him, and it is quite clear that he is an accomplished professional musician.  I have no doubt that he would be an asset to the Entertainment Group, and I therefore request that you transfer him to my unit as soon as you are able. — George Hayden (Maj)

*O.C.: Officer Commanding and NSM: National Serviceman.  I’ll explain the “BG” later.

So that looked promising;  although this was the South African Army, so there was still a good chance that the transfer letter might result in me ending up as a cook in some foul artillery regiment.  (All veterans will understand this circumstance completely.)

But Atlantic still didn’t have a keyboards player, and the gig date was drawing ever nearer.  Then suddenly, I had a flash of inspiration:

GIBBY !!!!!

Yes, my old school buddy and Mike’s previous substitute had finished his post-grad degree and was now working for a firm of architects in Johannesburg.  Could this work?  I called him up — or maybe I went to his house, I don’t remember — and put the proposition to him.  I was by no means sure that he’d be able or even want to help us out because by now, of course, he was married with a baby son.  And the Okies gig was not a case of messing around on stage like we had at Vasco’s either:  this was serious shit.

I had no reservations about whether Gibby could manage the gig, of course;  some intensive rehearsals and he’d be good to go.  But would family life allow him to take on the gig for three whole months, even if only on weekends?

Side note:  Gibby had married his high school sweetheart Sue, whom I adored (and still do:  they’ve been happily married for over forty-five years as I write this).  But she was very definitely the boss when it came to this kind of thing, because… well, the talented and artistic Gibby was and still is extraordinarily prone to making impulsive decisions, so from the beginning he’d designated her as the gatekeeper to all his plans and ideas.  So no matter how much he might like the idea of a pro gig, there was no doubt who would have the final say.

Of course, I ended up pitching the whole thing to Sue as well as her husband;  and to my indescribable relief she just smiled and said, “That sounds like  good time.”

Needless to say, the rest of the band was ecstatic at the news.  Now all we had to do was bring Gibby up to speed with the playlist, which had indeed changed considerably since he’d last seen it.  But times had changed, and we not only had a playlist, but we’d committed it all to a series of cassette tapes, which we presented to our new keyboards player (and guitarist — Gibby insisted on playing guitar if a song didn’t contain piano, organ or synthesizer).  As I knew he would, Gibby learned to play all the songs in just over a week, and we therefore needed only a couple of rehearsals before the opening night.

So here we were:  at last, a club band gig as I’d always dreamed.

…and the new guy:

We blew the doors off the place, for three months.  Along the way, we tightened not just our sound, but our whole act.  When you open up the evening with Billy Cobham’s Stratus and then straight away launch into ELO’s Do Ya?, followed shortly thereafter by Bloomfield-Kooper-Stills’s You Don’t Love Me… and then at some point, I put on a girl’s pale blue nightie (to perform Sticky Love Songs), Knob became Far Ting, our Chinese drummer complete with Fu Manchu mask and three-foot-long drumsticks as we hurtled through a heavy metal version of the venerable Pipeline, and Kevin played not like some humble gig guitarist, but like a Guitar God when we blasted out Jumpin’ Jack Flash — no, not that one, this one — and Black Magic Woman — no, not that one, this one.  Then Marty slowed everything down with a slowed-down soul-drenched version of Dave Mason’s Feeling Alright?  and then we filled the dance floor with Listen To The Music.)

Yeah, we were definitely not Pussyfoot anymore;  we were The Atlantic Show Band.

(pic taken by Gibby)

Now all I had to do was deal with the fucking Army, in a few months’ time.

(Previous: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5,  Chapter 6, Chapter 7)

Chapter 8:  The End Of Pussyfoot

I think that one of the definitions of a band is that it’s an association of people who are loosely attracted to each other by a love of music, bound together by affection and respect for each other’s musical ability, and driven by a common goal.

Now let’s parse those terms a little.

“Love of music” — What kind of music, exactly?  Classical musicians don’t form bands with rock musicians unless they’re called ELO, Jethro Tull or Genesis, etc.  Jazz musicians tend to group together with other jazz musicians and not blues- or rock musicians unless they’re called Blood, Sweat & Tears or Chicago.  Or if they do, they don’t last too long.  Country musicians… well, if you ain’t authentic, you ain’t country.  Rock musicians prefer to play with other rock musicians, but they’re all mostly scum, morons and psychopaths.  (Serious boffins like guitar virtuoso Brian May and his astrophysics doctorate are so far off the musical universe bell curve that they’re more scarce on the ground than unicorns.  The typical rock musician is going to be someone like Axl Rose, to be honest.)

“Affection and respect” — You can play with other folks whom you don’t like, but respect their capabilities;  and you can like the other guys despite the fact that they aren’t as good as you are.  But to find a group of guys whom you both like and respect — i.e. you’re more or less at the same level musically and you don’t want to punch them in the face every time you get together on stage or in the practice room — trust me, it’s a rare mixture indeed.

“Common goal” — Do you want to play together just as a hobby, jamming in someone’s basement or garage?  Or do you want to play one-night gigs, and if so, are you confined to a specific area by other life issues like jobs, family and so on?  Or do you want to play semi-professional, playing club gigs with lengthy contracts, but keeping your day jobs for the steady (or more remunerative) income?  Or do you want to become full-time musicians and dedicate your lives to playing music and looking for fame, success and wealth?

When you look at all the above — and there are probably a lot more combinations and permutations, by the way — it’s an absolute wonder that any band can stay together for any longer than a few weeks.  Even the Beatles went through a drummer (Pete Best) and a bass player (Stu Sutcliffe) before they settled on George, Paul, Ringo and John.  And even all that musical talent, artistic development, fame, success and wealth that the Beatles thing provided weren’t enough, at the end, to keep the band together for more than a decade.

In the case of Pussyfoot, I was the one driven to become a full-time professional musician, to play clubs all over the country, as was Kevin, I think (and future events would prove me right).  I think Mike would have come along with us, had the opportunity been enough to offset his day job’s income.  Knob might have gone along with the plan, provided that we only played in and around Johannesburg;  but he was driven by business success and not much else, so he wasn’t ever going to go along with that, long term.  Pro music in a small market like South Africa was never going to make anyone rich, unless the band was extremely talented and lucky enough to get the break they needed.

As it turned out, Donat didn’t want to do any of the above.  He wasn’t interested in turning pro (of any description) or playing gigs as often as we planned on doing, and I think with the routine of practice and time that the band was eating up, he had other plans.

So he quit.  But unlike with Cliff’s departure, there was genuine regret from the rest of us, because we’d all become friends at that point, and who wants to lose a friend?  (Just in the band sense, of course.  Sure, we were going to miss that lovely sound of his Gibson Les Paul and his excellent rhythm guitar, but that was just part of it.)  Now, of course, we had to rejigger the band a little, to replace his contribution.

We briefly discussed finding another rhythm guitarist, but ultimately decided against it because we’d earn more money individually, but not replacing Donat’s contribution just meant that Kevin and Mike had to play more comprehensively:  which they did, although our choice of new songs was necessarily more limited.  What helped was that Mike bought more equipment, notably a strings keyboard and later a massive synthesizer, which filled out our sound very well indeed.

And the gigs started increasing, too:  we were playing at country clubs, wedding receptions and towards the end of the year, even a couple of office parties, and our first New Year’s Eve gig.  The great thing about NYE was that there weren’t enough bands in town to fill the need:  everyone threw a bang-up New Year’s Eve party, and it seemed that every hotel was looking for a band for the occasion.  I don’t remember where we played, but it lasted until the wee hours, which meant a substantial overtime bonus.

Side note:  I forgot to mention that very early on I’d drawn up our contract so that we had some kind of legal protection in case the client stiffed us.  It took me an hour or two, and when I’d finished I showed it to my buddy Leosh, who was just wrapping up his law degree.  He read it, went pale and said:
“I wouldn’t sign this.”
“Why not?”
“Well, basically it says that you can play whatever the hell you want.  And the client has no say over anything you might not want to do.”
“Yeah, but it does guarantee that we’ll play 45 minutes of the hour, for four hours.”
“Yeah, and past four hours he has to pay through the nose.”
“That’s because if the gig ends at midnight we only get home well after 3, what with packing up and unpacking.  Truthfully, we don’t want to play after midnight;  so if they want us to play for longer, it’s got to be worth our while.”
“Uh huh.  Basically, if I read this right, when you play two extra hours, you double your take for the night.”
“That’s right.”

Most New Year’s Eve gigs, we played two and sometimes three extra hours.  And with Don quitting, that bonus was going to be split four ways instead of five.

And at long last, we were each starting to make money from the band — at least to the point where the income more than covered the monthly cost of the equipment payments to Bothners.  And speaking of Bothners, there were a couple of clouds coming over the horizon.

The manager at Bothners was a weaselly little shit named Rob Cameron.  Over the past year or so, Eds Boyle and I had become good friends, and he’d persuaded the manager that he needed an assistant in the department, but I suspected he’d kind of oversold me so that I could get the job — and the proof of that was soon forthcoming.  My take on my role was that I’d be the guy who would take care of all the one-time customers and small transactions that would free Eds up to take care of the professional musos.  But after only a few months at Bothners I was called into The Weasel’s office and basically told off for my poor performance in sales.  When I pointed out that my sales numbers were pretty much the same as Eddy’s, only made up with much more transactions, Cameron yelled that I hadn’t brought in any of the “new, young bands”.  I was of course surprised, because this had never been part of my hiring — but it was, because that was how Eds had pitched me to Cameron;  he’d just forgotten to tell me about it.

Oh, shit.

Whenever I’m blindsided by events, my normal attitude is to respond aggressively;  and so it was in this case.  I snarled back at Cameron that I was doing the job I’d been hired for, my sales figures were good — the profits from all those “small” sales were far greater than my salary, for one thing — and the way I was going, I expected to make even more over the next couple of months, “And I’m going to beat Eddy’s sales figures for the first time.”

The result was that I was put on notice — basically, The Weasel told me that if I didn’t do what I said I would, he’d fire me on the turn.  My prospects, then, were looking bleak and I left his office steaming.

Three days later some young guys came into Bothners with an older man.  Eds pointed to them and said, “Some customers for you, Kims,” and scuttled off to “do a stock check” (our shorthand for “These idiots will be a waste of time — you deal with them”).  Well, it turned out that these four kids had started a band, and had worked so hard that their respective fathers had agreed to sponsor them and buy them all the gear they needed to put the band together, because they’d been booked to play at a small rock concert in a town to the west of Johannesburg and couldn’t do the gig with the paltry equipment they had on hand.

I told the father that they’d come to the right place, because my band had suffered through the same problems — only we hadn’t lucked out with a sponsor so we’d had to buy the whole band’s gear ourselves, pretty much from scratch.  And because we’d had to pay for it, we’d bought cheap equipment, then later finding out that we had to to replace it with better gear — in essence, buying everything twice.  (I was only exaggerating a little, but the crux of the story was quite true.)  The older man seemed impressed by my analysis, and said, “Well, I and the other dads aren’t going to pay twice.  What do you recommend?”

So I took the guys through the whole setup I thought they’d need, member by member:  bass guitar, amp, lead guitar, amp, keyboards, amp, and the PA system to bring the whole thing together — all top-of-the-range equipment.  (The drummer had a decent kit, so I told him not to replace it but just add to it with better cymbals and a quality snare drum.)  The father’s eyes widened when he saw the total, but I reminded him of buying everything twice;  and after showing Eds the total, he approved a five percent discount on the spot.

The total of this single transaction was greater than the department’s total sales had been for the past two months.

Even better, after the kids played their concert, a couple of other young bands came to me for help in improving their gear, with the result that my sales for the following month were equally impressive.

So after the dust had settled and the numbers added to the balance sheet, Cameron called me into his office to congratulate me on my success, and was stunned when I handed in my resignation.  Why?

I don’t respond too well to an ultimatum at the best of times, so when I’d been told to sell more or I’d be fired, I’d started sniffing around at the other music stores in town for an alternative job.  And the manager of one such store — much smaller than Bothners, but wanting to grow — was extremely interested in having Bothners’ “top” salesman come to work at his little shop (yeah, I showed my sales results over the past two months, skipping over the earlier ones and making out that this was my normal performance:  remember I was a salesman).  I told him that I would have to work out my notice through the month of January 1977, but I could start in February.

What I didn’t tell him was that I’d just received my call-up papers for my National Service commitment — yes, the Army had caught up with me at last, and I’d been informed that I would get no more deferments:  “We’ll see you in July, and that’s that!” was the gist of it.  So I’d only be working for the small store for a few months until mid-year.

Anyway, when I presented my resignation to Cameron, he took it kinda badly.  In fact, he let me go on the spot.  So I’d miss the Christmas sales boom and the commission thereof.  Even though that was a shitty thing to do, I didn’t care too much;  my bonus for the past two very successful months would be more than sufficient to tide me over until I started my new job.

I’d heard through the grapevine that Shalima were once more playing at the Palm Grove in Margate, so as Pussyfoot was going through a bleak period with only two office parties booked for early December, and then no gigs until New Year’s Eve, mid-December found yours truly setting out for Natal’s South Coast in Fred — so my accommodation needs therefore quite adequate.  (I’d slept in the back on several occasions in the past, when visiting my girlfriend, over long weekends camping, and so on.)

I met up with the Shalima guys, Max and I renewed our acquaintance with great joy, and a vast quantity of beer was consumed.  As it happened, I’d been misinformed:  the band playing at the Palm Grove was an Irish band called Kelly Green, who played mostly R&B songs.  They were brilliant, and I was most impressed by their vocalist — who had a voice that sounded like Dave Ruffin of the Temptations — and the lead guitarist, a Scottish guy named Alex Dawson who played like jazz great Larry Carlton.  Anyway, I spent a week down there, listening to Kelly Green and drinking with Max.  It was my first actual holiday in close to four years.

After that little trip, I went back up to Johannesburg for the New Year’s Eve gig with Pussyfoot — a great success in every sense because not only did our performance go down well, but we played until dawn, swelling that night’s fee almost indecently.  It’s a good thing too, because our bookings for the first part of 1977 were… let’s just say unimpressive — okay, pretty much nonexistent.

Anyway, flushed with all that earlier success, money and the fun and games of the South Coast, I went to see my new employers in early January to tell them I could start work before the agreed date in February — and was told they’d declared bankruptcy and were about to close the shop.

Oh shit, again.

For the first time since my student days, I was unemployed, with no prospects for another job — no one was going to hire me with a looming call-up in my future — and I had very little chance of earning enough to pay my bills with Pussyfoot gigs because as I’ve said, we hadn’t any bookings for at least the first three months of 1977.  Also for the first time in my life, I was on my own, with no prospects whatsoever.

I panicked.

The only thing I could think of doing was finding a pro band to play with — at this point, playing bass was pretty much my only marketable skill — and so I called Morris Fresco (remember him?) at The Don Hughes Organization.  I told him everything that had happened to me with absolute candor, and ended up by saying, “Morris, you’ve heard me play and sing before, so you know I can handle myself on stage.  I’ll take any gig, anywhere in the country, with any band, as long as the money’s okay.”

Morris thought for a moment and said:
“Actually, I do have something for you, if you want the gig.  Ever hear of a band called Kelly Green?”
“Yes — I’ve just seen them at the Palm Grove.  They’re great.”
“Well, their bassist had to leave the band — something about his work permit no longer being valid.  Think you could fill his position?”

Fuck, no.

“Of course I can.  Are they still in Margate?”
“Actually, not.  They’re in Rhodesia — Bulawayo, at the Las Vegas nightclub.”
“Ummmm… okay.  What about a work permit for me?”
“Don’t need one seeing as it’s a short-term gig, only until the end of their contract.  Longer than three months, we’d have a problem, but not for this.  So… can I book you?”

I called Knob to tell him I was taking leave of absence from Pussyfoot, and two days later I found myself at the Las Vegas nightclub in Bulawayo, playing with Kelly Green.

Except that it wasn’t Kelly Green, at least, not as I knew them.  Apparently, the work permit problem had affected not just the bassist, but also the lead vocalist and keyboards player.  What was left was the drummer (Ivan), who for some reason no longer wanted to play drums, but be the lead vocalist, and the Larry Carlton-like Alex Dawson.

Who, I soon found out, was even worse than Dick The Prick from the Mike du Preez Trio.

Okay, this was the situation I found myself in.  Not only was the band essentially a three-piece affair — Ivan had found a drummer to replace him, except that the new guy was nowhere near Ivan’s ability — but I had to learn (again) a whole new repertoire of utterly unfamiliar songs.  It was Margate 1974 all over again, only this time I wasn’t going to play to an empty room in a sleepy little hotel restaurant in a remote vacation spot;  Bulawayo was a city, and the Las Vegas a serious nightclub that was open for business six nights a week from 9pm until 3am.

It was, in short, the worst experience of my life.  My bass playing was totally inadequate for the sophisticated R&B and modern jazz music — I was moving from playing Credence Clearwater Revival and Uriah Heep to Stevie Wonder, Mahavishnu Orchestra and Tower of Power, for gawd’s sake — and I had to learn it all in a tearing hurry, and fucking Alex was being an absolute shit about it all.

He was a dour, unpleasant asshole, who regarded every other musician in southern Africa as “crap” (even those musicians I knew were anything but), and he was very much unimpressed by me.  Worse yet, he had the ear of the nightclub’s owner, another unpleasant piece of work named Bobby Fraser, who not only owned the club but who thought of himself as a Frank Sinatra-type singing star (he wasn’t), and on top of everything else I had to learn his material because he did a set every night at the club.

So all my efforts at playing bass at the Las Vegas club were not only being subjected to constant ridicule and scorn from Alex, but that opprobrium was being relayed to the club’s owner, constantly.

Still, I was under contract for at least a month so everyone had to put up with it.  I was in a strange country on my own, no way to contact any friends or family (no Internet, of course, and the phone service was appallingly expensive and unreliable), and for the first time in my life I was lonely.  I couldn’t just mail in my performances at the club every night:  pride, and that stubborn credo of professionalism just made that impossible.  But when I wasn’t playing, there was nothing to do, nobody to hang out with and nobody to share in my misery.

Then, to my great joy, South Africa’s superstar rock band came to town on their tour of Rhodesia.  I knew all the guys from Rabbitt, of course, especially their (genuine) superstar lead guitarist Trevor Rabin (later of Yes and composer of Owner Of A Lonely Heart).  They played two nights over three days in Bulawayo, playing two concerts a night:  an early one from 6pm to 8pm, and a second one from 10pm to midnight.  I wangled a ticket from their manager Simon Fuller (whom I also knew quite well, thank you Bothners) for an early show, and went off to see them.  I’d seen them long before that when they were still the house band at the Take It Easy nightclub in Johannesburg, and they were good back then.  I remember having a jam with Trevor and a couple of other guys some time later at the club, and was blown over by their musicianship;  but now, some three years later, the band was an absolute powerhouse.

Of course, after their second show the guys had to “come down” and drink a few (okay a lot of) beers somewhere, and as the Las Vegas was literally across the road from their hotel, my place of torture and hell was a natural stop.

Aaaargh.  So that one night I stumbled through a set, and then went and sat with Trevor at a table.  Thanks to the booze, I was completely uninhibited, and I poured out all my troubles to Rabbitt’s virtuoso lead guitarist, telling him that I was total shit, and that this was probably going to be my last gig.

Trevor listened patiently, then said something that would change everything.

“Kims, listen to me.  You’re a bloody good bass player — I’ve seen you play, and I’m not lying now.  And I know you hate this shit music you have to play here — you’re a rock musician, not some R&B guy.  And you’re being an absolute pro:  let me tell you, I wouldn’t want to do what you’re doing, filling in with these other guys, playing music that you hate.  But you’re doing it, and you’re doing a damn good job of it.”

Here’s the thing.  Trevor didn’t have to say that.  He was a big rock star, and ten times the musician I was (and would ever be).  He could have just fobbed me off with some polite bullshit;  but he didn’t.  He sympathized with my situation, made me feel better about myself and my playing, and restored my badly-damaged self-confidence.  In retrospect, he gave me a second life and added eight years onto my musical career, and for that he will always be a special human being to me.  He has probably (and understandably) forgotten who I am, but I will never forget him.

All that didn’t matter, though.  The very next day Kelly Green (in its last iteration) was replaced by a new band called, I think, Tricycle;  Alex joined them — doubtless with the assistance of Bobby Fraser — and everyone else was canned.  The only good thing to come out of that was that I was paid in full for the duration of the contract.  (Thanks, Morris.)

So I flew back to Johannesburg, filled with excitement to be going home and rejoining my band…

…only to find that in my absence they had changed the name of the band to Atlantic Show Band, added a new guitarist from a well-known club band, replaced me with some other bassist, and were now playing a club gig at the prestigious Boulevard Hotel in Pretoria.

Now what?