Category: Music

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 did — 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.

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The complete links:  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 and Epilogue