Category: Music

(Previous: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5,  Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11)

Chapter 12 – Side Gigs & Cabaret

Back when we first started Pussyfoot, I was contacted by an acquaintance who was playing in his own band, but they had a problem with an upcoming gig:  their bassist wasn’t available for some reason or other, and could I help them out?  Well, of course I could:  the gig was for a Friday night, and Pussyfoot wasn’t yet up to the point where people knew who we were, let alone beating down our door to hire us, so we weren’t booked for that date.

So I did the gig, which went down well – the band ‘s playlist was pretty much like that of the Mike Du Preez Trio, with a couple of popular songs (by the Hollies, Credence, and so on) so I could pretty much handle all the songs they threw at me.  They were grateful that I’d been able to help them out and that, I thought, was that.

Not really.  I casually mentioned the side gig to the Pussyfoot guys at our next practice, and the following week Donat told me that they’d talked about it, and didn’t want me to play with other bands.  In vain did I tell them that side gigs did not in any way mean that I was going to leave Pussyfoot or anything like that – they were just fill-ins, after all – and I couldn’t see why this would be a problem.  Nevertheless, it appeared that it was a problem for the others, so in the interests of keeping everyone happy, I just shrugged and said okay…

…and kept doing side gigs, because I liked getting the extra money, and more than anything else, I loved playing music.  I just kept my mouth shut about it.

Over the years to come, I would play literally dozens upon dozens of them, learning the craft, sharpening up my busking skills, and even learning which songs were really popular with the public – at that time, songs that Pussyfoot didn’t already play – and on more than one occasion, I suggested that we learn a couple of them, and surprise surprise they went down pretty well with audiences.

Here’s the story of one such side gig.

I once got a call from Eds Boyle. Apparently, a dance band needed a bassist for a one-night gig, so he’d given them my name. As it happened, this came right after the Black Ice breakup, so I was free.

This gig was priceless. It was a seniors’ mixer, one of those things that were a feature in the pre-Internet days when older widows, widowers and divorcees joined a club and got together for an evening’s dancing and meeting.  They were universally known rather cruelly as “Grab-A-Granny” gigs, but it was all in good fun and even the participants referred to them as such.  What was nice was that given the ages of the members, the popular music was going to be Mike du Preez Trio material:  jazz- and dance standards from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, which suited me down to the ground and I couldn’t wait to get to the gig.

The band I met for this particular gig was led by an older guy on saxophone, accompanied by a pianist, bassist and drummer.  I don’t remember any of their names except that of the pianist, a weathered veteran named Dougie Sachs.  The reason I remember him is that when we arrived at the gig (which was in some rather old and rundown hotel in downtown Johannesburg), we discovered that the house piano was absolutely knackered, with cigarette burns all over it and, more alarmingly, with lots of keys that made no sound when struck. Dougie was beside himself because there was no chance for us to get another piano, and when I called Mike to see if he could lend us his Fender Rhodes, I discovered that he and his girlfriend had gone out for the night. So no help there.

In desperation, I said to Dougie: “Is there any key signature that can play all the notes?”  Well, upon going through all the keys, we discovered that A flat was the only one which yielded a full complement of notes in that key.  So for that entire gig, whenever it came time for a piano solo, Dougie and I would swing into A flat, then revert to the song’s original key signature once done.  Of course, for a sax player, A flat is almost unplayable – or at least, it was for our saxophonist – so it must have sounded truly strange to anyone who knew anything about music.  But everybody in the audience seemed oblivious to what we were doing, so everything went down well.

At the end of the whole thing, Dougie came up to me and said, “I’m never going to play another song in A flat ever again,” and together we howled with laughter.  A good time, that, and I did a couple more gigs with Dougie as a result of that Grab-A-Granny near-disaster.

And all those side gigs came into play when it came time to back cabaret artists.

The whole concept of cabaret singers is a strange one to Americans, I think. Mostly, people regard “cabaret” as an act one might see in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, as part of the casino marketing campaigns. In South Africa, there were only few such venues, so solo acts had very few opportunities to perform. Here’s one example.

There was a singer / actor named Richard Loring, originally from the U.K. but now a full-time resident in South Africa. He’d starred in a couple of musical movies, but his real claim to fame was having starred in Andrew Lloyd-Webber/Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which ran for years all over the country.  Loring was about as well-known as, say, Tony Bennett in the U.S.

I first ran into him in the Entertainment Group, when he needed a band to back him on one of his tours to the “Border”, and Hogwash was suggested to him – he wanted a rock ‘n roll band to back him, and not one of the Afrikaans bands.  (I suspect that him being an Englishman, the Afrikaners didn’t much care for him anyway, so I’m pretty sure that they all turned him down, leaving him with… Hogwash.)

Anyway, he showed up at the EG with a few cassette tapes of his songs – no sheet music, thank goodness – and asked us to play them.  Well, Craig knew all those songs (of course), so we put our heads down and played each of them a few times.  As it turned out, Loring was not very impressed with us (and said so), but as the first show was scheduled for the following week, he didn’t have much choice.  So he sighed and left, saying, “Please just practice the songs, and do your best.”

Well, that didn’t go down very well with us at all.  Of course we could play those easy songs, we just needed to learn them.  So we got stuck in, and three days later they were all polished like diamonds.  We’d also come up with harmony arrangements to match the ones on the tape – actually, we were better than the backing singers in a couple of cases – so when the curtain went up on Richard Loring’s first show in, as I recall, Windhoek (the capital of then-Southwest Africa), we launched into his set with gusto.  By the end of the gig, Loring was actually laughing with joy as we performed his songs, and at the end of the gig he came over to us and, to his credit, congratulated us on our performance, saying, “I was really wrong about you boys – you’re really good.”

For the ensuing year, Hogwash became his regular backing band.

There was, however, one occasion which completed a circle for me, so to speak.  Loring had booked us to back him at the Johannesburg Country Club – a very distinguished club – and when we showed up for the gig, who was the main band but the Mike du Preez Trio (now a quartet, incidentally, with his son Mike Jr. – “Mikey” — on bass).  Of course, Mike and I had a great reunion, and when Hogwash finished the Loring set, I went over to him and said, “Not quite the fumbling kid anymore, am I?” and he just laughed his ass off.

And not long afterwards, Mike called me.  “Mikey’s broken his hand, and can’t play this weekend.  Are you free to help me out?”
I checked my gig calendar. “No problem.  Do you want to have a quick rehearsal beforehand?”
He laughed. “I don’t think that will be necessary. I think you either know or can play anything I throw at you by now.”

It was a most enjoyable gig, and the guitarist, Ollie Rees, was an excellent musician with a truly wicked sense of humor, so we got on like old buddies.  And Mike’s drummer Kenny was likewise a seasoned pro, so all went well.

During the EG years, Hogwash ended up backing a huge number of cabaret stars, mostly on tours to the Border, and it got to the point where if George Hayden got a call for a cabaret backing band, he’d just dump the gig on us.  I think we backed maybe a dozen different cabaret acts after that, maybe more, and most of them more than once.  The cabaret stars even booked us outside the Army for the much-sought-after “private” shows, which meant we got paid for them (instead of Army gigs, which didn’t ever pay anything, of course).

Anyway, it was now January 1980, Hogwash was long gone and Black Ice recently so, and one Saturday morning I slouched into Bothners to hang out with Eds Boyle.  He was chatting to another guy, so I waited;  but then he beckoned me over to join them.

“Kims!  I’m so glad you’re here!  This is Tom, he’s a drummer and his band needs a bassist for a few weeks.  Toms, this is Kim;  he did two years at the Entertainment Group, and he’s just left Black Ice.  He can handle your gig, I promise you.”
I shook Tom’s hand.  “Where’s the gig?”
“At the Krugersdorp Hotel.”
I shuddered, because the town of Krugersdorp lay about forty miles west of Johannesburg, and there was no freeway to get there:  suburban and small-town roads only.  Tom must have seen my expression because he looked worried.
“It’s just Friday and Saturday nights, and we each get our own room for both nights so we don’t have to drive back to Joburg all the time.  The gig is in the restaurant, dinner-dance stuff plus a few pop songs.  Oh, and the pay is excellent.”  When he mentioned the number, it was indeed good pay.
“Tell me about the band.”
“Well, me on drums, a really good keyboards player and a brilliant guy on vocals.”
“When do you want me?”
“Can you start tonight?”

Here we go again.

When I arrived at the Krugersdorp Hotel, though, I got a huge and very pleasant surprise:  the “brilliant pro vocalist” was none other than Tommy Sean from Shalima/Margate days.  After we’d had our warm welcome and shared a beer or two, Tommy turned to Tom and the keyboards player (Jim? John? I don’t remember) and said, “Don’t worry about a thing;  this fucking guy’s a serious pro, so you guys had better get your shit together.”

Despite that somewhat alarming (and unearned) endorsement, the gig turned out to be a delight — so much so that I was a little sorry when it came to an end after those two weeks — but when their regular bassist came back (from an Army camp, as it turned out), I had to go.  Both Tommy and I lamented because we’d spent a whole lot of time together, playing Putt-Putt and darts (and hanging out with some lovely women) just like the old Margate days.

Then something happened which closed yet another circle.  On my last Sunday in Krugersdorp, Mike du Preez called me up to offer me another fill-in gig (which I couldn’t take because I’d been booked by another band — sheesh).  I mentioned that I’d been playing at the Krugersdorp Hotel, whereupon Mike got all excited and said, “You know, Dick –remember our Margate drummer? — well, he lives just down the road from there.  Why don’t you swing by his place on your way home tonight?  I’ll give him a call and tell him you’re coming.”

To be honest, I had little desire to see Dick The Prick again, but Mike seemed really insistent that I visit him, and who knew? maybe there’d be a side gig out of it.

So I went to visit Dick The Prick and his wife Moira The Headmistress.  At the time I had a casual girlfriend who had spent the weekend with me, so I took her along.

Amazingly, Dick seemed very glad to see me, and ditto his wife.  In the latter case, she must have been very pleased to see me because on the way home afterwards, my girlfriend said, “Have you ever had a chance to have an affair with an older married woman?”
“No;  why?”
“Because if you ever wanted to, Moira would be so available.”

Of course, I had no idea what she was talking about because Dense Kim;  but several weeks later I phoned Moira just for the hell of it, and the result of that call was that I put quite a few miles on Fred over the following few months, sneaking around to meet Moira at the Krugersdorp Hotel whenever her husband wasn’t around to spoil the fun.  (Yeah, I deflowered Dick The Prick’s daughter and had an affair with his wife.  Oh well:  as I’ve said before, Musicians Are Scum.  And she divorced him a short time later anyway.)

Between Eds Boyle acting as my unpaid agent and my growing list of contacts in the music business, I was getting a number of side gigs — not regularly, of course, but at least one or two every couple of months.  Mostly, they all went off without a hitch — the only bad one, I remember, was with a rather lousy band playing a steady gig at some restaurant outside Johannesburg.  Because they were bad, I couldn’t get into the swing of it, so something that should have lasted a couple of weeks only lasted a single night, and ended on a very sour note.  When I told Eds about it, he laughed himself sick.  “Kims, they can’t get anyone to play with them because they’re so shit.  Don’t worry about it.”

But while this was all very well, I missed playing in a full-time band.  So I called Knob, and asked him what he was doing.

Kismet.

As it happened, Mike and Marty had just quit the band they’d been playing with over the past year.  So round about the middle of 1980, we restarted The Atlantic Show Band (minus Kevin, whom we all referred to as “the traitor” for not quitting his pro band to an uncertain future with us, the bastard).

What fun.  We had no gigs booked, nor did we really want any — at least, not right away — because we had to relearn how to play together again, and more importantly, to learn new material.  Mike had found us a decent practice room in (of all places) his Army unit’s building nearby the Wits University campus, so we could leave all the gear set up.  This made practice really simple, but of course because we all had good day jobs, we couldn’t really do weeknights, and it was too much to ask Farty Marty to drive all the way from Springs just for a practice.  But weekends?  No problem.

What was a problem was the lack of a lead guitarist.  As I’ve said earlier, Martin was a terrible guitarist, sloppy and pretty much uninterested in playing anything but the most basic chords;  so the search began for a Kevin-type player.

Which was when we discovered how thin on the ground good lead guitarists actually were.  Our problem was an old one:  the really good guitarists weren’t interested in playing with an unknown band, especially a band with no gigs booked ergo  no money coming in, and the guitarists who were good but not great were reasonably plentiful but, as we discovered, unreliable.  Here are two such stories to illustrate both.

I was the first to come up with a guitarist, because I knew him from the Entertainment Group:  Buddy Slater had played for a rock band named Snow in the late Sixties ad early Seventies, but when the rock music scene could no longer sustain his family, he’d done what so many others had done and joined the EG.  I hadn’t had a chance to play with him, but I knew he was very good.  So I called him up and invited him to come and jam with us, to see if there was a fit.

There was a fit, and a very good one we thought;  only Buddy (“Bloody Buddy” as Knob nicknamed him) didn’t seem to think so, and quit after only a month or so of practice and jamming (also because we had no gigs booked, and he needed the money).  So no luck there.

Mike knew a guitarist named John who seemed to fill all the slots we needed:  technically excellent, a good voice, a large repertoire of good songs — some of which we played already — and a very sexy wife.  (Okay, that wasn’t really relevant, but we liked looking at her anyway.)  So we practiced and practiced and put together about two dozen songs because… we’d been booked to play an outdoors gig — our first as the reconstituted Atlantic — at the Rand Showgrounds (think:  the equivalent of say, the Texas State Fair).  It was a short set, only half a dozen or so songs, and we were confident we could handle the gig easily.

Towards the end of the set on that fateful night, I called for Foreigner’s Double Vision, which we’d nailed in practice and were especially fond of because it featured John on lead vocals, and in which he’d proved to have a very good voice — in this song, quite the match of Lou Gramm’s — but when I called it, John pulled back on me.

“I can’t play that.”
“What?”
“I’m not going to play it.”
“Fucking hell, John, I just called it over the P.A. — we have to play it.”
“No.”
I blew up.  “Play it, or get the fuck off the stage.”  And to the shock of the whole band, he did just that.

So we finished the gig with, mercifully, a couple more songs which I made sure didn’t require a lead guitarist — Kris Kristofferson’s Sunday Morning Coming Down comes to mind, and Marty sang it better than Kris anyway — and we finished with something from our O.K. Corral playlist, our piano-only accompanied version of the Bachelor’s I Believe, which we’d all loved performing.  Of course, we hadn’t played it in over two years, and had never ended a set with the thing before, so I was a little apprehensive, but I needn’t have been.  We remembered our parts, it sounded terrific and was a huge smash with the audience.  A couple of people came up to us afterwards and told us they’d been moved to tears during the ballad’s performance.  So that ended well.

What didn’t end well was the firing of John, which was pretty brutal, because for the first time ever in my musical career, I was furious, steaming-hot angry, and there was no way to talk me out of it.  The little shit knew he’d screwed up badly, and he tried to soften the blow by bringing his wife to the next practice.  Unfortunately for him, that didn’t work because I let him have it in no uncertain terms, and he was fired on the spot, with all the venom I could muster (which was quite substantial — even Mike was quite appalled).

But now we were still without a lead guitarist… until one day I got a phone call from Kevin.

“The band’s broken up, and I’m moving back to Johannesburg.”
“What happened?”
“Ummm the other guys got sick of Adrian, which you’d know all about of course.  But because he turned out to be not that good on keyboards, they wanted to get someone else in, so Adrian just broke up the band like he did with Black Ice.  And because it was his name on all the contracts, we had nowhere to go.”
“Shit, man, I’m sorry.”  No, I wasn’t.  “Have you got anything else lined up?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, we’ve got Atlantic back together… do you want to come round to the practice room and jam a little with us?”
“Sure.”

The very first song we played at that fateful “jam” was Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond, which we’d practiced with John but which Kevin had never played before, but claimed he’d worked it out as a practice exercise.  So there was no warmup, no testing of the song, we just launched into it.  (I urge you to take a few minutes and listen to it now, because it’ll help you appreciate what follows.)

Unbelievably, Kevin absolutely nailed both Dave Gilmour’s intro and solos, playing them almost to perfection;  and then to make matters worse, he added his own improv solo towards the end, substituting his lead guitar for the sax solo which ends the song, and the thing lasted twice as long as the original quarter-hour runtime.  Good grief, the boy had always been good, but he’d come a long, long way since we last played together.  At some point I happened to catch Mike’s eye, and was met with the broadest grin in Christendom.  Knob played the song with his eyes closed all the way through, just revelling in what turned out to be a wonderful musical experience, maybe the best any of us had ever had before in this band.

Kevin didn’t know it yet;  but just as I’d more or less talked him into it back when Pussyfoot had held its first-ever practice, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let him slip away now, either.  And we had more than a few gigs booked over the next few months.

And so began the next, and most fun chapter of my musical career.

(Previous: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5,  Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10)

Chapter 11:  Full-time Gigging

Despite my fears, it turned out that the first six months of 1979 (the final months of my draft commitment) and indeed the rest of the year in total would turn out to be great, both in terms of playing music and to a certain degree, financial as well.

The first thing that happened was that I was promoted to corporal — the highest rank a draftee could achieve without going to OTS and getting commissioned — and that made me the senior NSM NCO in the Entertainment Group.  This meant that I had to do admin stuff like take morning roll call, drill the rest of the NSMs and handle all the crap details of typical Army life, such as manage the parade ground cleanup, keeping the main building clean and tidy and vehicle maintenance (we had two Bedford trucks, a Greyhound-size bus (for the Big Band), two large pickup trucks (think:  Ford F-150, with caps), some trailers and two VW passenger vans.  All this meant that I didn’t have to do any of the actual shit work myself (like washing windows or sweeping floors), but simply order the others around.

And I did as little with the guys as I could possibly get away with.  A lot of the time, I’d take the platoon out for a “route march”, which involved marching them out of the camp and down the road until the EG was out of sight, then taking the guys away from the road where we’d lie in the shade in a grove of trees for about half an hour, smoking and buggering around.  Then I’d march everyone back until just before the EG camp came into view, whereupon I’d get everyone to double-time it back the last quarter-mile or so.  Because the climate in Voortrekker was sub-tropical — that is to say, blisteringly hot — it didn’t take long for everyone to break a sweat, which meant we’d arrive back in camp looking as though we’d finished a twenty-mile forced march.  Whereupon I’d give everyone half an hour to “recover”, and then detail the duties for the day.

As the officers and senior NCOs (the PF personnel) left camp around midday, that meant that the guys only had to do the shit work for about two hours instead of the four or so.  And neither the Major nor his EO (Captain Bornman) ever caught on.

However, I wasn’t in the EG to bugger around with Army nonsense, I was there to play music.    So I started to hang around the Permanent Force (PF) bands, trying to cadge a gig here or there and sometimes succeeding.  In fact, of the four such bands, the only one I didn’t get to play with was Neil Herbert’s band — the one with whom I’d given my first audition before call-up — but I played at least half a dozen gigs with the others, collectively.  I even got to go on a Border tour with one of them.

There were two NSM bands, but I didn’t care for the guys in one, and the others were absolutely terrible.  Frankly, I just wasn’t up to the hard work in building a new band, and especially so since my Army days were numbered.  There were however three younger guys in that draft who were not just good, but incredibly good:  Joe Runde, a tall blonde German kid who played an amazing blues lead guitar;  Selwyn Shandel, a shy Jewish kid who was a wonderful pianist (more on him later), and a skinny redhead kid named Freddy Crooks, a lead guitarist who would have been an asset to any band, anywhere.  (There’s one interesting factoid here:  Freddy, Hogwash’s Danny and Atlantic’s Kevin all shared a birth date, and all three were brilliant guitarists.)  Freddy had actually heard me play with Atlantic at the O.K. Corral, and his opinion was that we rocked as hard as any band he’d ever heard play at Okies, which was rather gratifying to hear.

But mostly, I hung around with the PF guys;  and this proved to be a life-changing event for me.

I played several fill-in gigs with a couple of the EG’s Permanent Force bands, all headed by musicians who were well known to the Afrikaans public – some had appeared on TV, others had record contracts, most played as studio session musicians and all played those “private gigs” pretty much every weekend. Names like Flippie van Vuuren (who played about seven instruments, all very well indeed), Gerrit Viljoen and Ollie Viljoen (no relation) were as well known to Afrikaners as country stars like Garth Brooks and Waylon Jennings would have been in the U.S.

Side note:  Ollie Viljoen forced me to brush up on my musical theory, big time. He would call a song, and when I asked him the key, he would just gesture to me with his fingers: two fingers pointing upward meant two sharps (i.e. the key of D major or B minor), three fingers down meant three flats (E-flat major or  C minor), etc. Fortunately, his favorite keys were E flat and B flat so after a while I could settle down and enjoy myself, even adding a vocal harmony or two occasionally.

It had been literally years since I’d read key signatures, but somehow I managed to dredge them up from the Stygian blackness of my memory. So after the first few fumbles, I started to get them right. It didn’t help that, almost to a man, all the Permanent Force musicians were insanely good sight readers – far better than I was, for sure – but as with all things, practice made perfect.  And with the constant daily rehearsals with Hogwash, I discovered that I’d reacquired my perfect pitch from College choir days, so it all got progressively easier.

Gradually over time, though, I came to realize a couple of really important things.  The first, and the most important, was that I was not talented enough a bass player to be a full-time professional.  I could probably get better through some assiduous practice, but not better enough to earn a respectable (and consistent) living.  I was a good musician, as a sum of my parts:  I could sing well, both lead and in the chorus;  I was very disciplined;  I could read music — perfectly when it came to vocals, and reasonably well on bass — and I was at least competent on the bass guitar, but no more than that.  I could probably have played with most club bands, as long as the other members were about on my level, but there was no way I would ever be good enough to earn a living as a session musician (the only other avenue to earning a living as a professional musician).

What I could have done was join the Army’s Permanent Force in the Entertainment Group, something that more than a couple of the established PF bandleaders told me.  (The above-mentioned Flippie van Vuuren, who was one of the best-known Afrikaans musicians in the country, actually leaned on me quite hard to do just that, telling me that I’d probably be promoted to sergeant immediately, getting a big bump in take-home pay, and hinting broadly that I’d become the bassist in his band.)  It was a career option, and for a lazy man like me it was not an unattractive option;  but my rebellious nature quailed at the thought of submitting to Army authority.

Because there was another side to the equation.  One of the trombonists in George Hayden’s Big Band was a sergeant-major named Vic Wilkinson, an enormously fat and unpleasant individual who disliked me intensely (for no reason I could ever ascertain);  and he could (and did) fuck with me harshly and endlessly for no reason other than I couldn’t retaliate or fight back just because he outranked me.  It’s one of the sad downsides to any rigid hierarchical entity, and the Army still more so:  bullies of a higher rank are to a large degree invulnerable to the lower ranks and the bad ones are prone to abuse their position.

So no;  that second thing was that I was not going to join the Permanent Force.  But what was I going to do, if professional music was not going to be my future career?  At that point, I didn’t know;  but what I did know was that whatever I did, I was going to be really good at it.  And I wasn’t going to stop playing in a band, either.

Then I got lucky.  Atlantic had more or less folded after I left for the Army.  The guys had either hooked up with other bands, or just recruited others to play with.  Drummer Knob, by the way, had started to become a really successful businessman:  his pattern was to work for a big company, identify what their weaknesses were, then leave them and set up a business which addressed those weaknesses, calling on their clients to sell them his services.  Then his company would get bought out (often by the same corporation he’d worked for previously), and he’d join another big company and repeat the exercise.  He did that twice or three times, I don’t remember.  Much later on he set up a company which imported personal computers, made a huge success of it, and when that company was bought out he went into property development and started to make serious money.  But that would come later.  More importantly for me, though, was that I knew he was never going to drop all that to become a professional musician, even if by some miracle we could get the band back together.

Kevin had ended up joining one of Johannesburg’s premier gig bands, Black Ice, who’d been together for well over a decade and were pretty much always in the top five groups that came to mind when people were looking to book a band for a function. I mean, they even ran daily ads in all the big Johannesburg and Pretoria newspapers.  They made me ashamed of our marketing incompetence.

One day in April 1979 Kevin contacted me and said:

“What do you think about playing for Black Ice?”
I was taken aback.  “What about Traz?” (their current bassist and founding member)
“He’s had enough of gigging, and he’s quit the band.  We need a bass player right away.”
“Wow.  Well, yes I’d love to play with you guys, then.  Does Adrian [the band leader and keyboards player] want me to audition?”
Kevin snorted.  “Are you kidding?  You’re three times better than Traz ever was, and Adrian knows it.  But he wants to know:  will you be able to get away from the Army to play gigs?”
I thought furiously ahead to remember if I’d been booked for any tours with a PF band, and I hadn’t.
“It won’t be a problem.  I can always get away, especially if it’s going to be over weekends.  When do you want me to start?”  (It was now Monday.)
“This weekend.”
“Fucking hell, Kev, that’s a little tight.  Can we at least have a couple rehearsals before then?”
“That was going to be my next question.  Can you come over to my place tonight?  Adrian made a tape of our whole playlist, and wants me to give it to you.  Then he wants to rehearse on Wednesday and Thursday so we can be more or less ready to play on Friday night.”
“Bloody hell:  two days to learn a band’s entire playlist.  Okay, I’ll see you tonight.”

So I took the Rickenbacker and went over to Kevin’s.  We stayed up till well after midnight listening to the music, giving me a chance to listen to the songs and with Kevin’s help, work out at least a rudimentary understanding of how Black Ice played them.  Then I took the tape (actually, tapes:  there were five of them, about seven or eight hours’ worth of music) back to camp and spent the entire Tuesday and Wednesday (day and night) listening to, working out and playing along with every song.  Freddy Crooks — with whom I shared sleeping quarters during the week, in one of those huge Army tents — helped me work out some of the more complex bass parts, which helped immensely.

Fortunately, the songs were mostly current hit parade stuff, and were pretty easy.  The ones that weren’t pop songs comprised a slew of ELO material, which was no real problem for me because I loved ELO (still do) and knew pretty much all those songs already.  I hadn’t actually played any of them before, but that wasn’t much of a issue;  just as if you know a song you can sing along with it quite easily, the same is true if you’re able to busk along with an instrument, once you know the key it’s written in.  Which I figured out for all the songs on the tapes, and duly wrote down on an index card which I taped to the back of the Rickenbacker, something I’d learned to do when playing with the PF bands.  And of course there were a number of songs — about a third of the total — which I had played before anyway, so I knew both the bass and the vocal harmony parts.

Rehearsal time came, and I arrived at the Black Ice rehearsal room with amp and Rickenbacker.  (The huge Fender Bassman stack had been replaced with a Roland Studio Bass amp — same power output, much smaller and a better sound.)  We set up, and Adrian said, “What do you want to start off with?”  I just shrugged nonchalantly (although I was feeling anything but nonchalant) and replied, “You pick it.”

I don’t remember which song he chose, but it happened to be one Hogwash had played, so of course I knew it well, and nailed it like a two-by-four.  I even did a vocal harmony.  The end of the first practice, Brian said, “Well done,” but Adrian was non-committal.  When I asked Kevin what he thought, he just grinned.  Then at the end of the second practice/audition, Adrian just said:  “See you tomorrow night.  Kevin knows where the gig is.”

This was Black Ice:

Adrian was the founding member, bandleader and keyboards player.  He was a decent enough player, but he could only play what he’d rehearsed:  he could not improvise at all.  He was also somewhat unpleasant, with a mean streak often resulting in cruelty.

On drums was another founding member, Brian.   He was a Brit from the northeast of England with an absolutely impenetrable Geordie accent.  He also had an incapacitating stammer, which I only discovered after a month or so.  He was a lovely man, but a terrible drummer.  (After having played with many drummers, mostly with the creative and capable Knob in Atlantic, the fiery and dynamic Franco in Hogwash, and not to mention the masterful drummers in the PF bands, I was somewhat spoiled.)

Our vocalist was a Brit kid of about nineteen also named Adrian, whom I’d seen play before with a minor band named Sheriff. He had a lovely voice, and we got over the “two Adrians” thing by nicknaming him “Little Adrian” (which he hated, but had no choice in the matter).

And of course on lead guitar was Kevin, who had, if anything, improved since the Pussyfoot / Atlantic days, which made him even more of a monster guitarist.

Those first two gigs went off very well, and when I showed up for practice the following Wednesday, I was somewhat surprised when Adrian handed me a tape and said, “Here are the next two songs we’ll be learning at practice next week.”  There was no discussion or negotiation:  what Adrian decided, we were going to play.  I didn’t always agree with his selections, but I kept my mouth shut because I was the new guy, and I had to admit, the Black Ice way made us tremendously popular and we played as many as half a dozen gigs per month, every month.

The routine seldom varied and was a well-oiled machine:  practice on Wednesday, load up the VW van (not mine;  Brian’s) immediately after, meet up at the gig on Friday no later than a hour before the start time, set up (in half an hour) and play the gig, then strike the stage and load all the gear back into the van.  Ditto on Saturday.  Then we’d all meet at the practice room the following Wednesday, unpack and set up the gear (essentially giving us three gigs a week in terms of work).  Then Adrian would read out the latest gigs we’d been booked for, which we wrote in our calendars;  and then it was time to learn the two new songs, which had to be ready for the next gig in two days’ time.  Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum.

It was actually exhausting work, no less for the physical exertion than for the effort required to learn two new songs, each and every week. But oh man, did we make money.  Little Adrian actually had no day job and lived off his Black Ice income (easy when you’re unmarried and still living at home with your parents).  Kevin had found work as a rep for a pharmaceutical company, Brian had his own construction business making and installing saunas, and Big Adrian had my old job at Bothners, working with Eds Boyle.  How Adrian and Brian managed to have day jobs and families and learn all those new songs remained a mystery to me.  I was now less surprised that Traz (the original bassist) had quit.  Black Ice was very close to being a full-time job.

One of the songs we played was one I’d always wanted to, but never had because it had a prominent saxophone part:  Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street  (one of my all-time favorites, and certainly one of the greatest pop songs ever recorded).  To my surprise, when Adrian wanted to rehearse it — for some reason, he’d left it off my “introduction” tapes — I raised my eyebrows and said, “And the sax?”

Silly rabbit:  Adrian had a synthesizer (one of his five onstage keyboards, incidentally) which played a perfect rendition of a sax.  So I learned it — it wasn’t too difficult, especially at this stage of my musical career — and of course, Kevin nailed the song’s fantastic lead solo, as he did every lead solo. It turned out that Traz had always had a problem playing the bass part, but I didn’t:  so Baker Street  became one of our signature songs.  (This will be important later.)

Then Adrian announced that he would be taking the month of July off because he wanted to take his wife to Europe on vacation.  He’d canceled three scheduled gigs and found replacement bands, but he couldn’t find a band for the fourth, and did we know any bands who could help?

Needless to say, this pissed the rest of us off, as much for the reduced income as well as for the high-handed manner in which he’d sprung this on us.  So I said, “Never mind, we’ll do the gig” (which was on the first weekend of July).  I didn’t actually know how we were going to do it, but the hell with Adrian.

First I called the old standby, Gibby, because if anyone could do the gig, he could.  Sadly, however, he was going to be out of the country (permanently, as it turned out) setting up a new job.

Then I had a brainwave:  Zell (Selwyn Shandel, from the Entertainment Group).  He was at once astonished that I’d offer him the gig and terrified that he’d screw it up.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure either, but I also knew that he was a brilliant pianist and if I could stand next to him and offer advice all the way through the gig, he’d pull it off — at least, well enough to fool the audience.  The problem?  There was no time to rehearse, at all, so he’d have to go into the gig cold, with only Black Ice’s master tapes to help him for the couple days before the gig.  Mischievously, I told him to memorize the “sax” part in Baker Street, and I’d just signal when he was to play it.  I thought he was going to pass out.

Came the day of the gig, and everyone was nervous because keyboards was so critical to Black Ice’s playlist.

Selwyn blew the doors off the gig.  He did such a good job that Brian told me afterwards, “If Adrian ever decides to leave the band, make sure to hire this guy.”

That little thing done, I had just one more problem to take care of:  the end of my time in the Army, and how I was going to earn a living.

At the end of my National Service, therefore, I had no job, no prospects, no money and in one of my more stupid moments had rented an apartment without having more than the first month’s (Black Ice) rent money  in my bank account.  So there I was:  in an expensive (for the time) apartment right in the middle of downtown Johannesburg, a few cans of food and even fewer sticks of furniture, going to job interviews on pretty much a full-time basis — as I recall, about three a day — and all for entry-level positions that had no guarantee of a salary that could pay the next month’s rent, let alone anything else.

And I made it even worse for myself by consistently turning down job offers because they were shit clerical jobs with institutions like insurance companies.  Oh, and the gig prospects were non-existent at that moment either — no idea why, it was just in a fallow patch for the next couple of weeks.

Then I got a call from Gerrit Viljoen in the Entertainment Group, in whose band I’d played a couple of times before during the past six months.

“Kim! Are you playing anywhere for the next two weekends?”
“Nope.”
“I have a problem.  I’ve got a private gig at a dinner dance club in Pretoria, but our bassist just learned he has a kidney problem, so he’s unavailable for the next three weeks — hospital, operations, recovery and so on.  Can you fill in?”
“Of course, Gerrit.  Where’s the gig, and what time do you start?”

So for the next two weekends I played in this Pretoria nightclub with a trio (Gerrit on keyboards and a drummer whose name I’ve forgotten), backing a female singer named Amanda, a tall brunette who was terribly sexy, but (I soon discovered) a lesbian.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

And she had a terrific voice.  Nothing wrong with that, either.

Fortunately, the music wasn’t that difficult — nightclub-type jazz standards and popular ballads:  the stuff I’d cut my professional musician’s teeth on.  I knew most of the songs, and the ones I didn’t I could easily busk my way through.

One of the songs that Amanda could really kill was Leo Sayer’s Can’t Stop Loving You.  So the first time we played it, I got to the refrain and sidled up to the mike, waiting for someone to sing a harmony so that I could add another one, but… nothing.  She had to sing it without any vocal harmonies to back her up – apparently, the other two guys couldn’t sing them.  So the second time the refrain came up, I added a harmony – the top one above the melody she was singing.

I’ll never forget the look on Amanda’s face.  She gave me this huge smile as she sang, and walked over to me so we could share her mike, turning it into a duet and staring into each others’ eyes as we sang.  It was incredibly sexy:  we must have looked like lovers to the crowd, and when we finished, there was a storm of applause.  During the break, she said:

“Can you do more harmonies?”
“Anything you want.”
“Linda Ronstadt?  Blue Bayou?”
“Whatever you want.  You sing it, honey, and I’ll back you.”

So she did, and so did I.  It turned a simple fill-in gig into a wonderful time.

Side note:  On the Friday afternoon before the second-to-last gig with Gerrit’s band, I went for a job interview and not only nailed the interview but got a start date for the very next Monday.  (Even better was that I felt as though I’d come home, and I was right:  I was to work at the A.C. Nielsen Research Company for ten years, over two continents, with only a few detours at other companies — a story to be told some other time.)

So now, like the other older guys in the band, I now had a day job and could concentrate on using the Black Ice gig income to (finally) pay off all the gear I’d bought over the past five years or so.

One of the better times we had was how much time we spent with other musicians.  Whether it was band picnics with the guys from two or more other bands, or late nights spent at all-night dance clubs (more on that later), or just after-midnight meals at some of the all-night steakhouses restaurants and coffee bars, it was a giddy time of my life. One of the bands who had become very popular was an all-girl band named Clout, who were to go on to become a huge hit in Europe, especially in Germany.  To my great joy, their drummer was none other than my old buddy, the pint-sized Ingrid Herbst (“Ingy”) who had won that talent competition at the Palm Grove as a teenage schoolgirl.  We met up, and our bands hung out together a lot during those late-night hours, they and a couple of the Black Ice guys as well as some of the other pro musicians. (I had the total hots not for Ingy, but for their bassist Lee;  but she wasn’t interested in my story.  Bummer.)

Anyway, we ground on after Adrian’s return from his European Vacation, and as I recall, we played every single Friday and Saturday night from the beginning of August through the end of December.  It worked out to over fifty gigs — we even played a couple of “double features” — a gig on Saturday afternoon followed by a different gig that same night — and a slew of weeknights (office Christmas parties) in December.  The job was so punishing that in mid-October Adrian declared an end to the Wednesday night rehearsals (“I think we have enough fucking songs to carry us through”, and he was right).

So New Year’s Eve 1979 came, and we approached it with a certain amount of exhausted relief because Adrian said there were no gigs booked for January, and I think we all wanted the time off.  The party went off with a huge bang — the crowd went wild, and we played, I think, better than we’d ever played before.

After the gig ended (at about 3am), Adrian called a band meeting.  It was short, and brutal.

“I’m shutting down Black Ice as of right now.  I’m going pro — oh, and I’m taking Kevin and Adrian with me to the new band.”

I was thunderstruck, of course, but I will never forget the look of pain and betrayal on Brian’s face.  He’d been the drummer in Black Ice from the beginning and had not missed a single gig in well over a decade.  Adrian hadn’t even had the courtesy to tell him the news beforehand — why, I don’t know — and for that matter, he could have told me too:  I wouldn’t have caused any problems because if anyone knew the itch to play professionally, it was me.

And all those non-practice Wednesdays?  Adrian had been rehearsing with the new bandmates — including Kevin, of course, having sworn one of my best friends to secrecy — and they would be starting their club gig in Durban the very next weekend.

So that was that.  Once again, I found myself without a band, and I couldn’t think of what was going to happen next.