Category: Music

Chapter 7:  Changing Pussyfoot

One of the better things that happened to me that year was that I discovered that Shalima had left their favorite coastal venues and were now playing at the OK Corral, a well-known club just to the east of Pretoria.  So I drove up there (about forty miles), met up with the guys, and the result of that reunion was that they came over to my parents’ house on their off night (Monday) for a massive braai  (barbecue), during which time vocalist Tommy distinguished himself on two occasions by saying of my mother, “Oh hell, I’d do her,” followed by referring to my father as a “Dutchie” (derogatory term for Afrikaner);  one of the other guys bonked a groupie (don’t ask, I don’t know how she got there either) in the downstairs bathroom, and Max had a long and very interesting discussion with my dad.  Of course, some of Pussyfoot were also there — Knob, Kevin, Donat, as I recall, although Mike might also have come over.  (Clifford hadn’t been invited.)  There was much carousing, eating and drunkenness, as any band party worthy of the name would include, and I was really glad to introduce my guys to the band which had so influenced me.  Tommy also regaled the Pussyfoot guys with the story of how they’d surprised me that night back in the dining room at the Margate Hotel (“I swear, I thought it would just be the usual nightclub shit, but they played some serious jazz, and I’ll never forget trying to put Kim off reading his music, and failing” ).  I went back up to “Okies” a couple more times to hang out with Shalima, then their contract ended and they went back off to the Natal South Coast once more, and I got back into getting Pussyfoot “gig-ready”.

As I’ve said before, there wasn’t much “show” in the Pussyfoot Show Band.  Knob and Mike were trapped behind the drums and keyboards respectively, and Kevin and Donat were not showmen, being mostly concerned with playing the music perfectly — thank goodness.  Which left the whole thing up to the bassist and vocalist.  Unfortunately, while the bassist had no problem temperamentally with leaping insanely around on stage, he was often kept in check by a.) having to concentrate on playing his instrument — still very much a problem — and b.) singing harmonies in songs which required them, i.e. most.

Which left the vocalist.  Sadly, not only was the vocalist not interested in performing on stage, he was not (to be honest) of the physique and appearance which could enable him to do same without looking like some kind of performing elephant.

Clearly, though, something had to be done about this problem (the “show” part, not the vocalist — yet), and so I set about designing a light system to help things along.

Some words of explanation are necessary at this point.  Unlike in the U.S., most South African venues did not have a house P.A. system, and only actual theaters had any form of stage lighting — not that this would have helped, because that would have involved getting stage hands involved and we couldn’t afford to pay them.  We’d sort-of addressed the P.A. issue, but there was no question about getting lighting:  it was up to us.  So I set about building a light system, trying to copy what other bands were doing at their gigs.

It was obvious, though, that whatever system we designed would have to be both portable and easy to set up/break down, by every member of the band.  This meant no overhead lights (all those tall stands? not going to happen), and therefore floor mounts were the only solution.  So I built wedge-shaped floor stands — one for each of us — with each stand containing two light sockets.  For the actual lights, I used 100w Par-38 floods in various colors.  (The Par-38s were fantastic:  while very expensive, they were long-lasting, very robust and survived being kicked by Clumsy Kevin on more than one occasion.  They also gave off incredible heat, so by the end of only the first set we were generally drenched with sweat.)

The problem was that I wanted to control the power so that I could manipulate which lights were on at any given time:  two lights for the lead singer, one each for everyone else, or else two for everyone, or just one for everyone, or just a couple at random (for quieter songs).  I’d also found a strobe light, which required all other lights to be off, for maximum effect.  And of course, the power had to be controlled by a series of foot switches because I wasn’t going to be able to play bass and manually flip switches on and off — hell, it was hard enough for me just to play the bass semi-competently, let alone do all that other stuff simultaneously.

Where were we going to find a switching board that could do all that?  Well, there was no such thing on the market.  So I told Donat to build one and wire it together.  (You will recall that said rhythm guitarist was studying electrical engineering, so duh.)  And he did.  I even managed to find foot switches that had a little light to indicate whether it was on or off, although they weren’t very robust.

We were to use this lighting system for the next eight years.

The next thing we had to do was be more showmanlike, which was problematic for the reasons I’ve noted earlier.  So I decided to start including more comedic material in our repertoire.

Side note:  When I say “I decided”, it was absolutely not a case of me coming up with a decision and the band following it obediently.  We were no Shalima, and I was certainly no Max.  Every single idea that came up — whether mine or someone else’s — had to be supported by all if not almost all of us before we adopted it.  The lighting was an easy one;  choice of songs and such:  unbelievably difficult.  In the end, we didn’t succumb to “minority veto” issues unless one or more of us absolutely hated the song.  (We had discovered that if someone felt that strongly about it, the song always sounded like crap.)  All our material had to be “blessed by the Pope” in that a.) we had to like it and enjoy playing it or b.) we decided jointly that while we might not especially care for it, if inclusion of that material was important for the performance, we’d go ahead and learn it, and commit to playing it well.  Because that was the professional attitude, after all.  Which is how we came to play utter crap like the Pina Colada  song and anything by Wings.  (Okay, I’m being flippant:  we actually enjoyed playing Jet.)

We had expanded our repertoire to include many “soft” popular ballads — Engelbert Humperdinck’s Last Waltz, Spanish Eyes, and Tom Jones’s Green Green Grass of Home and Delilah, for example — but the problem was that over time, we got heartily sick of playing them.  (It’s the curse of playing in a band:  as much as audiences may enjoy hearing a song, they’re probably hearing it only once — as performed by the band — whereas the band may have been playing it for years.  And it’s not just the ballads like the above;  even popular rockers like Proud Mary  can get old over time, and get dropped from the playlist.)

Anyway, we started messing with the lyrics because to be quite honest, most people on the dance floor either don’t know or aren’t listening to the lyrics anyway, and it gave us an inside joke to chortle over.  Paul McCartney’s Silly Love Songs, for example, became Sticky Love Songs, and “Sometimes it comes within a minute / Sometimes it doesn’t come at all” was transformed into “Sometimes I come within a minute / Sometimes she doesn’t come at all”, and so on.  Occasionally we got carried away, such as when we changed the old rock ‘n roll refrain from “Awop-doowop, awop-pop-doowop” into “cock-sucker / mother-motherfucker” but in all the many times we played that particular little lyrical game over the years, I think we were only ever caught out once, which goes to show).

I’ll give a couple more examples of this as the story unfolds.

As I recall, we did a couple of small gigs — wedding receptions — and then we got our Big Break (or so we thought).

I think it was Knob who learned that a Portuguese dinner/dance club was looking for a band — he vaguely remembers it as coming from The Don Hughes people — and arranged an audition.  By this time, we’d left my parents’ house — my dad had passed away, and my mom was in the process of selling it — and had rented space in an unoccupied office building in downtown Johannesburg.  This was great because while the central business district (CBD) was busy during weekdays, it emptied out at night and was almost deserted over the weekends, so we could practice as loudly as we wanted, unlike back at my parents’ house where we had to be careful of complaining neighbors.

Anyway, came the day of the audition, and we met Silvinho Pereira, the owner of Una Casa Portuguesa.  Of course, he preferred that we played Portuguese music, of which we knew not a note, but we somewhat mollified him by playing all sorts of “Latin” stuff (thank you, Carlos Santana!) and of course standards like Girl From Ipanema and Quando Quando Quando.  He seemed satisfied, and agreed to sign us to a three-month contract for Fridays and Saturday nights — the proviso for extension being that we learned some Portuguese songs (which we never did).  Our only proviso was that we could practice on Monday nights, when the restaurant was closed, which was fine by him.  Oh, and he wanted to pay us by having us take the door covers as salary, but Knob nixed that idea (thank gawd) and insisted on us being paid a salary — we agreed to a reduced per-night fee compared to our standard gig charge (about R400), because with all the gear permanently set up in the room, it was a huge relief for us not to have to do the gig thing by packing it into Fred, setting it up at the venue, then taking it all apart, repacking it in Fred and then driving it back to the practice room and setting it up all over again for the next practice.  The lack of hassle more than made up for the lowered income.

So after signing the contract, Knob and I went to the club one night to check it out.  It was in an upstairs location on the seedier side of Johannesburg’s CBD, but the restaurant itself was small and intimate, and we could see to our dismay that our repertoire was going to have to be  nightclub music only.  We decided to try the menu out and ordered dinner, and while we were eating the current house band arrived and started to play, and we discovered that they played loud club music almost exclusively.  Oh, that looked good for us;  and when I chatted to the band’s leader during a break, he told me that the usual format was soft stuff during the first two hours during the dining period, and then the band could cut loose for the remaining two sets.  When I asked him why his band was leaving, he just grinned and said, “You’ll find out”, which made both Knob and me very nervous.  Still, we’d signed the contract, so that was that.  And so began our very first club gig at Vasco Da Gama:  Una Casa Portuguesa.

Kevin

Kim

Knob

Donat

(at practice — his Vasco’s pic has been lost in the mists of time)

Mike

(with his post-Army hairstyle, see below)

There are so many things to be said about Vasco’s.  Chief among them was that we could eat anything on the menu, provided that we paid for it — and the food was not cheap.  The “staff meal”, though, was a free option.  In Silvinho’s words: “It’s a kind of a… a Portuguese casserole, made with pork and a creamy sauce.”  (Translated:  tripe stew, and pretty much inedible.)  We tried it once, and thereafter either ate at home beforehand (which was most of the time), or else the cheapest item on the menu (fish soup and Portuguese bread, which was actually quite delicious, but far from filling).

Another noteworthy thing about Una Casa Portuguesa:  no customers.  Silvinho seemed to think that a monthly classified ad in the local Porro weekly newspaper (circulation:  dozens) sufficed as “advertising”, and when we complained, he upped the ad to a weekly event (what he called, “Going heavy into advertising”).  It was a rare night when the customer count ran over two dozen, and most often it was less than that.  I have no idea how he stayed in business — probably by laundering cash for the local Portuguese criminal gangs, it wouldn’t surprise me.

At first we didn’t care too much, because we were getting paid regardless.  But it was a little soul-destroying to play a new song (that we’d spent three whole practices getting right) to an audience of three couples.  Most of the time, though, all the diners left right after dinner, and we were thus free to play the stuff we really wanted to play, which was not Spanish Eyes.

What we did, though, was sharpen up our playing, and our act.  I worked out a lighting “set” for every song on the playlist, and it changed the ambience of the stage completely — once I got it to work, it made playing much more pleasurable for everyone.  And while it may seem that playing a show only twice a week wouldn’t make the band tighter and more disciplined, it did;  that, and the weekly practice (and sometimes two weekly practices) made us better:  a lot better.

A fat lot of good that was, however, when we played to an empty room.  And the consequence of that situation was, as we discovered, getting Silvinho to pay us was like pulling teeth.  The terms of the agreement were that we were to be paid weekly, at the end of the Saturday night set;  but somehow Silvinho always found some excuse not to do so, with the result that we were getting paid a week and sometimes even two weeks in arrears.  (When I bumped into the previous band’s leader one day at Bothner’s and complained, he just laughed and, “Now you know why we quit the gig.”)

But we soldiered on, because that was the professional thing to do and all told, it wasn’t all that bad — as it turned out, we were not offered a single one-night gig during our residency at Vasco’s, so it’s not like we were passing up anything.

Then:  calamity.  With three weeks to go on the contract, Mike informed us that he’d been called up for an Army Reserve commitment (known colloquially as “camps”).  Oh how nice:  four nights without a keyboards player.  But there was help on the horizon, and it appeared in the form of my old high school buddy and bandmate, Gibby.

At this point, I need to talk a little bit about Gibby, because he warrants it.

(about the groupie:  I have no idea, and nor does his wife)

Gibby came from a very musical family, and could play pretty much any instrument you care to name:  piano, organ, guitar, bass guitar, bugle (from the school cadet band days)… put in his hands, and he could play it, often with incredible skill.  Of course, having been like me a Leading Chorister in the College choir, he could read music like he was reading the newspaper, and his vocal skills… well, unlike me, he was still singing in the Old Boys’ choir, so no more need be said.

As it happened, he was living just outside Johannesburg at the time, and so I asked him to come and help us out on keyboards.  When I broached the substitution to the band, they were of course very apprehensive.  Fortunately, Mike hadn’t yet left for his camp so he coached Gibby on our playlist for a couple of practices, which was all the rehearsal my talented friend needed, so we continued to perform without a hiccup and barely any difference in our sound.

The one night we became a true show band.  We’d learned the wonderful Sweet Transvestite song from Rocky Horror Picture Show, and it was really popular (to the few Vasco’s patrons who ever heard it, that is).  Then we heard that Gibby’s older brother Martin had rounded up six of his buddies and their wives, and was coming for dinner to see what his Kid Brother was doing with his “little band”.  Unfortunately, he happened to say the latter in my presence… so we changed it up a little.

Instead of doing the piece just as a straight song, we got Gibby to don a Tim Curry-type outfit and sing the main vocals.  Then, as Big Brother was sitting at the stable amidst his group of friends, Gibby strutted across the dance floor, plonked himself in Martin’s lap, and sang the whole song in that position.  Of course, the whole restaurant got in on the joke, and I will never forget Martin’s clenched jaw and fixed smile as Gibby draped himself all over him and hammed it up in true Frank-N-Furter style.

And here’s where the whole thing got a little messy.

You see, Gibby had essentially played Cliff off the stage with his performance — and most especially his voice.  Frankly, he could have taken Cliff’s job right then, and we’d have had not only an excellent singer but another instrumentalist to boot.

So one day when Knob and I were alone together, we got to talking about just that.  Unfortunately, Gibby had just been offered a job in Durban — he was an architect — so he wouldn’t be able to take the gig (and playing professional rock music had never been in his plans anyway).  But as I said to Knob, it was clear that at this point Cliff was more of a burden on the band than a valuable member.  And playing for as little money as we were, the already-paltry weekly salary was being split six ways, which meant that we were in essence playing for almost nothing.

I was really nervous about saying all this, because Cliff was his good friend.  But to my surprise, Knob didn’t argue the point but said simply:  “Let’s discuss it with the other guys.”

So a few days later we took a clandestine vote, and Cliff lost.  We fired him at the next practice.  He was not pleased about the firing, and made it a lot more unpleasant than it needed to be — in fact, he and I nearly came to blows, but luckily (for him) he backed off, because I detested him so much I might have killed him.

In the ordinary scheme of things, we’d have been left with a gaping hole in our repertoire;  but after Cliff’s departure it was almost as though he’d never been in the band.  Between Knob, Kevin and I we picked up the vocals for all but a couple of Cliff’s songs, and in fact a number of songs were actually improved by the substitution.  (Here’s one example:  Cliff had always hated doing the Spanish Eyes-type songs, and so he had always just gone through the motions in singing them.  But when Knob picked up the vocals for Spanish Eyes, the song actually became excellent:  his warm tone was far more melodious than Cliff’s tortured tobacco rasp, and the ballad became a permanent early-night fixture on our playlist.)

When the Vasco’s contract came to an end, Silvinho told us he wasn’t going to extend it, and he was actually aghast when I snarled at him that we wouldn’t have accepted the extension because we were sick of begging him to pay our salary all the time, and we were sick of playing to an empty room anyway.  We still had one weekend to play, and either Knob or I made it very plain to Silvinho that we expected to get paid the full amount owed immediately after the last set ended on the Saturday night.  (I think I said, “And if you don’t pay us, we’re going to fuck your restaurant up.”  Sometimes, you just gotta.)

And on that final night at Vasco’s we got a surprise.  I’d told Eds Boyle at Bothners about our gig there, and he’d told a few other pro musicians about us:  with the result that on that night at about 11, the normally-somnolent Portuguese restaurant was invaded by over a dozen loud and raucous musicians, who proceeded to drink all the beer in the bar as they listened to us play not only our final set but an extra one thereafter — and believe me, we really cut loose.

The other musicians refused to let Silvinho close the place afterwards, so we all sat around and got shitfaced drunk until about 3am (and yes, Silvinho paid us out in full — helped undoubtedly by his enormous bar take for the evening).  We then packed up all the gear — “we” being Pussyfoot;  no way were the other musicians going to help us, oh no perish the thought — and thus ended our first club gig.  It was also our last club gig… as Pussyfoot.

However, one lovely surprise was that playing at Vasco’s gave us a chance to get booked for later gigs.

Because Pussyfoot was an unknown (and salacious) name on the Johannesburg gig circuit, people were usually reluctant to book an unknown quantity for their Big Day (wedding reception, office party and so on), so when we did get an inquiry, it was always coupled with a request for an audition.  We had nowhere for people to come and listen to us, so often we’d ask them to come to a gig to hear us, or else to our practice room where we’d play just about anything they asked us to play.  But at Vasco’s, there was an excellent venue for prospective customers to come and listen to us, and I don’t remember the exact number of gigs we landed as a result of that, but it was at least a dozen.  So we were going to be busy for the foreseeable future — and I’m pretty sure that this was no small factor in our decision to fire Cliff.  Money talks, and to an impoverished semi-professional band, it spoke extremely loudly.

The usual scheme of booking a “name” band was as follows:  contact said bands, and see who was free, and who was affordable.  The number of gig bands was actually quite small:  from memory, the main ones were The Rising Sons (Eds Boyle’s band), the Bats, Four Jacks And A Jill, the Staccatos, Black Ice (more on them later), Hudson Show Band, The Bassmen and one or two others whose names escape me.  All those bands were unbelievably busy, playing every single weekend night of the year as well as a couple of other days on special occasions.  Some (the Sons, Four Jacks, the Bats and the Staccatos especially) had actually had Top Ten hit parade songs, so everyone knew their names.  If none of those bands were available, then people would have to cast around and look for someone else — and this was not an easy task.

What started to happen, though, was that as more musicians came to know Pussyfoot and the fact that we were a serious band, we would get referrals from those bigger bands, from Eds and The Rising Sons especially.  Why Eds, especially?

My sister’s senior prom night (known back then as the “Matric Dance”) was coming up, and as it happened, Kevin had been invited as my sister’s partner and Donat as her best friend’s.  My sister knew a girl in her class who was an “international” student — her parents were living in Italy, as I recall, because her father’s job had taken them there — and of course, being a recent arrival at the school, she had no date.  So my sister set the poor girl up with me:  and when we arrived at the dance, who was playing the gig but The Rising Sons?

Of course, the three girls got huge boosts to their social standing by their dates knowing the famous Rising Sons, and the boost was raised still higher when the three of us were invited to  play a couple of songs with the band’s drummer and keyboards player.  By now, we were seasoned veterans at this kind of thing so we blew the doors off the place — Dave Campbell the drummer being the most impressed — and when it came time for the after-dance party (held at our house because it was only about a half-mile from the school), the Sons came along, and a fabulous time was had by all.

Thereafter, whenever the Sons got a request for a gig but were already booked, Eds passed the gig off to us.  I lost count of how many there were, but it was a considerable number.

Then one day Eds came to me and offered me a job at the Bothners music shop, where he was the manager of the musical instrument department.  The job carried a basic salary plus a commission on sales I’d make.  Wait… work with musical instruments and musicians all day and every day, for only a tad less money than I was making as a lousy computer operator at an insurance company?  Was there even a question what I’d do?

And it was then that I got to know all the professional musicians in the whole country — the whole country because every pro band ended up playing in Johannesburg at some time or another, and they’d come to Bothners for their instruments and accessories — and Eds knew all of them because he’d been part of that scene since the late 1960s.

The job also required going to all the clubs in Johannesburg, Pretoria and the surrounding area known as the Witwatersrand:  hanging out with the bands, talking music to them and of course telling them about the cool new gear we had in stock or were about to get from the warehouse (hint, hint).  As much fun as that sounded (and it was), there was of course serious business involved — but as Eds advised me:  “These guys have pretty much got all the gear they need, so don’t try to sell them anything.  That’ll just piss them off.  Treat it as a PR thing:  keep our name out there, make them your friends, and of course they’ll come to us if they need to.”

On one occasion, Alan Hanekom from Hudson Show Band ran into the shop on a Saturday morning right as we were opening and told us breathlessly that all three of their guitars had been stolen after their gig the previous night, they needed new ones for their gig that same night, and could we help them?  Well, of course we could, except that we didn’t have two of the three — a Fender Telecaster and a Gibson Les Paul Custom Deluxe — in stock at that particular moment.  But Eds made a quick call to the warehouse, and they did have them on hand.  So I jumped in Fred and raced over to pick the things up while Eds took care of the paperwork.  Alan was truly astonished that we would help him out so quickly and with such an effort, but Eds just laughed and said, “Both Kims and I play gigs, Al — we know what’s important here.”  And another longtime and loyal customer was born.

And so the next six months or so passed pleasantly by, marred only by the fact that Donat announced that he was leaving the band.

---

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

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

Chapter 6:  Building Pussyfoot

Along the way, we’d decided on a name for the band:  Pussyfoot Show Band, which was a triumph of 70s attitude over sound marketing principles.  I have to admit that I don’t remember who came up with the name, but I do remember being its most ardent supporter.  Knob was the first to voice an objection:  “Who in their right mind,” he asked, “is going to book a band with a dirty-sounding name?”  (Not many, as we were to find out.)  Still, there we were.

Of course, we also didn’t have a “show” of any description, unless you counted the bassist leaping all over the stage like some demented animal while the other front three stood like statues, intent on getting their parts right.

And speaking of parts:  one of the benefits of having Mr. Filthy Perfectionist in the band was that we were — considering we were a band who’d only been playing together for a few months —  a tight sound, and quite well-rehearsed.  It helped the others overcome their stage fright somewhat;  I, on the other hand, was brimming with confidence — confidence being that feeling you have before you know any better, of course.

Anyway, we arrived at Rob’s (and Cliff’s) old high school a full hour and a half before we were due to start Because Kim Insisted We Did.  (I had, and never lost, a dread of us arriving at a gig only to find out that we’d left something behind, or a car carrying gear broke down en route, or some piece of equipment didn’t work:  I feared all the many things that would prevent us from starting at the time we’d agreed.  And in my mind, not starting on time was the infallible mark of an unprofessional band, so we would always arrive very early for a gig, even years later when we’d got the off-loading / setup thing down to a fine art and could do it all within half an hour.)

So right at 10am, the MC of the show (who looked about nine years old) opened the proceedings with a couple of announcements, then handed the thing over to Pussyfoot.  There was a massive crowd, nearly three hundred kids (with a lot more to come) and the auditorium was jam-packed.

We would go on to play countless gigs after that one;  but nothing ever topped this high school party, for all sort of reasons.  For starters, we could play anything, any song at all, even the ones we’d written off as unsuitable gig material, and whatever we played, the kids danced their asses off.  A couple of honorable mentions:  Golden Earring’s Radar Love  (which had taken us ages to learn, not because the music was difficult, but because all the tempo changes and different phrases were complex, confusing and difficult to remember in sequence), Santana’s Soul Sacrifice — the Woodstock version, sans Hammond organ(!), but complete with drum solo from Rob — and of course songs like the Doobie Brothers’ Long Train Running and Listen To The Music, Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross  and Man Of The World, and Sweet’s Fox On The Run  (which nearly caused a riot, and which we performed exactly like the original, complete with castrati  harmonies).

Of course, you can have too much of a good thing, and we soon learned why.  After the third hour, my fingertips were so painful that every note was torture:  I half-expected to see blood running out from under my fingernails.  Donat and Kevin were likewise stricken, because we had not prepared for this kind of thing and we were, to put it mildly, taken aback by the strain of prolonged playing (fifty minutes on, ten minutes off, according to the rules of the dance marathon).

And here, the aforementioned Soul Sacrifice  deserves a line or two.  We’d learned it so that we could feature Rob’s fine drumming, even though drum solos, in a gig context, are generally death to any dance floor activity.  However, on this occasion, I figured that the kids wouldn’t mind too much, so I called the song (to the utter consternation of the others), and off we went.  However, the version we played that day was a little different from Woodstock in that during the drum solo, I motioned Ken and Donat off the stage and setting down our guitars we went off for a pee break, leaving Knob and Cliff on stage (the latter beating the hell out of a pair of congas) for what seemed like ages.  Then we finally sauntered back on stage, picked up our guitars and at the appropriate time launched into the finale of the song.  Fortunately, its extended length ran right up to the fifty-minute mark, so we took a break.

I had never seen the normally-cool, unflappable Knob sweat like that.  Nor had I ever heard him cuss us out so profusely.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing, of course.  Cliff’s voice gave out completely early during the third hour, which meant that the three of us had to carry the vocal load together for the rest of the performance.  This was not something we’d rehearsed, and it put a level of mental strain onto us that persisted for years, and not to our benefit either, as you will see later.  For my part, I was absolutely furious at Cliff, as much for his attitude as for his failure at his only job.  He seemed to just shrug it off with a “What can I do about it?” expression.  Not for the first (or last) time, I wanted to punch him in the face.  But the band couldn’t quit;  that would have been the height of unprofessionalism, so we soldiered on.  From that day on, however, Cliff’s days in the band were numbered, although I was the only one who knew it at the time.

The final hour of the gig saw five exhausted musicians pretty much going through the motions — we were more tired than the dancers — and indeed the last set list was just a rerun of all the songs I judged had been the biggest crowd-pleasers so far.  Anyway, we played the last song, whereupon the 9-year-old MC bounded back on stage and said simply, “We’d like to thank Pussyfoot — ” and his voice disappeared into an earsplitting storm of screams from the three hundred-odd girls in the audience.  Good grief, it sounded like the Beatles had just finished a concert.  On and on it went, and when I glanced over at the other guys I saw just the same reaction from all of them:  astonishment, and embarrassment.  Kevin was blushing so deeply that his skin was the same color as his hair, and Donat was looking at the ground, shuffling his feet.  Even Knob just sat behind his drums, his mouth open.

So that’s what it was like to be rock stars.

After the excitement of that gig we took a week off from practice, as much out of exhaustion as to give our aching fingers a chance to recover.  (Knob, by the way, hadn’t escaped unscathed:  he had four massive blisters on his fingers courtesy of his drumsticks.)

But when we did finally get back together, we were faced with an inescapable fact:  we needed a keyboards player.  But we had no clue where to get one.

Here’s what had happened.  The guys in the band had become friends (well, except for me and Cliff), and without ever talking about it, I think we shrank subconsciously from inviting a stranger to share our little partnership in case it didn’t work out.  From my time with the Trio in Margate, I knew what it was like when nobody in the band liked the others, and I’d shared that with the guys much earlier on.  It was all very frustrating;  but in the end it was Cliff (!) who came to the rescue.  Apparently, he had a buddy who’d just finished his draft commitment in the Army, and said buddy knew a guy in his unit who was a keyboards player.  So the phone lines hummed, and at our very next practice came Mike (“Pussfaze”, a play on his surname), complete with a massive Hammond organ and Leslie speaker.

Mike was a very short, wiry guy with, we were to discover, a sharp and incisive sense of humor and a no-nonsense way of looking at the world that was something quite different from the rest of us dreamers.  While not the most creative of keyboards players, he was absolutely rock solid when it came to playing what we’d rehearsed, and in fact I do not recall a single occasion, ever, when he made a mistake during a gig — I mean, he never once played a dud note over the next decade or so that we were to play together.  And he was a brilliant organist:  there was not a single organ part, from Deep Purple’s John Lord to Uriah Heep’s Ken Hensley to Santana’s Greg Rolie that Mike couldn’t play, note-perfect.  In that regard, he was a monster.

Way back, I’d learned to play Booker T’s Time Is Tight, and so on this day, without any preamble, I launched into the bass intro.  To my delighted astonishment, Mike just started playing the organ part, perfectly, and Rob, who’d not been expecting anything like this, picked up the drum part.  Then we stopped to let Kevin figure out the lead solo — he knew the song, but he’d just never played it before — and of course within a few minutes he had it down pat.  So we played the whole song from beginning to end, then played it again, and it too became a permanent part of our repertoire.

There were a couple of songs I remembered from the Margate gig, and wonderfully, Mike knew them too.  So Gershwin’s Summertime  and Nat King Cole’s Fascination  came up and were dealt with, with almost contemptuous ease.

We knew after that very first practice that Mike was going to be a keeper, and even though I got some astonished looks from the others, at the end of the practice I said, “So Mike… do you wanna join us?”  He thought for a moment, then nodded.  And that was that.  We had a keyboards player.

Which led us to the next issue.  Up until now, we’d been able to carry all the band’s gear in each of our cars (Knob borrowed his mother’s Passat station wagon to carry his drum kit because his own car was a Daimler 250 2-seater).  But with Mike’s Hammond and Leslie speaker… he’d borrowed a small truck to get his gear over to my house for this first practice, but he wouldn’t be able to do that in the future.

Clearly, we were going to need a van… but how could we afford one?  Well, we couldn’t;  but fortunately, there would be a couple of months before we would get our next gig.  Then I saw the answer to our dreams.  Brazil had started making cheap copies of the early-1950s VW panel vans, and VW South Africa saw the success of that business and started importing them, and selling them at a ridiculously low price.  It didn’t matter because none of us could afford the deposit, and as students / low-paid workers, none of us had a credit rating that would enable us to finance the thing.

My father had been listening to us play — he could hardly have not heard us without leaving the house and going far away — so one night I was talking to him about our troubles with the gear when he said, “You boys have been working really hard, and it’s a shame that you might not be able to get around to play at parties and such.  So here’s what I’ll do:  I’ll take care of the deposit for you, if you’ll handle the monthly payments.  And after it’s paid off, you can just continue the payments until the deposit is repaid.”

Thus:  Fred joined the band.

(not the actual Fred, but the color is correct and yes, there were swing-open back doors, sliding windows and a split windscreen)

I think that it was at this time that both Donat and Kevin decided to get bigger amps, and no doubt spoiled by Fred’s capacious interior, they each got the same amp:  the huge Fender Dual Showman stack, which stood almost head-high and contained four giant 15″ speakers:

I too had splurged, and got a Fender Bassman 100 stack, which was almost as big, containing as it did four 12″ speakers in its cab:

Now we could play loud, baby.  And we did.

But the greatest change came when Kevin and Don started complaining about my bass sound — not sharply, but like after practice when we were having our customary hamburger at the local steakhouse, one or the other would sigh and say things like “I just wish your bass sound was more… punchy.”  Then one day I got sick of it all, and said, “Okay, what bass, exactly, do you think would make my sound better?  I already have the right amp.”  There was a long pause, then from Donat:  “The Rickenbacker, like Chris Squire plays.”  I thought about it for a moment, then said, “Okay;  I’ll see if I can get one.  Just don’t expect me to play as well as Chris Squire.”

When I went into Bothners and asked Eds Boyle about a Rickenbacker, he just grinned.  “You’re not going to believe it, Kims… one just came in.  I haven’t even taken it out of its packing case yet.”

And thus did I get — at huge expense that I couldn’t really afford — my next (and last) bass guitar:

(Okay, Kim, you may ask:  how expensive was it?  answer:  it cost
only a couple hundred dollars less than Fred.)

But the change the Rick brought to the band’s sound was immediate and life-changing.  Finally, we were starting to get our own unique sound.

With all that taken care of, we started to expand our repertoire, big time, and were no longer constrained by the lack of a keyboard player.  First came Santana, and most of the songs off his Abraxus  album — a permanent fixture was the exquisite Samba Pa Ti — and then we taught Mike Soul Sacrifice — minus the extended drum solo — and to our amazement, he nailed the organ part after only a few repeats.  So we could finally play Soul Sacrifice  in the manner it deserved.

But without any gigs on the horizon, we concentrated on playing music that would extend us as musicians, and so along came songs like Camel’s Six Ate and Uriah Heep’s July Morning.  (We were never to play the latter at any gig because it was just not a “gig” song:  too many stops and starts, too many tempo changes — but that never stopped us from learning it, or playing it for months thereafter.)

Side note:  I don’t think that people nowadays can tell how difficult it was to gather material back then.  There was no YouTube, no Spotify, no kind of streaming music whatsoever.  Basically, what we (and I think other bands) used to do was either buy the 7″ single record or tape the song off the radio, if you could get to it in time, and then we’d pass the tape or record around the band for each member to learn their specific parts:  a long and time-consuming effort. (Remember too that back then, even cassette tapes were A New Thing — my old Fiat had had an 8-track cassette installed, for example.)

Paradoxically, I quietly started to steer the band towards gig songs that wouldn’t tax Cliff’s voice:  stuff like Hedgehoppers Anonymous’s Hey  and Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely  (suitably lowered in key, of course).

Still:  no gigs.

One day I was in Bothners — trying hard not to spend any more money that I didn’t have — and when I complained to Eds about the no-gig thing, he looked shocked.  “Have you spoken to an agent yet?  No?  Why the hell not?”  and he produced a card with “Morris Fresco (The Don Hughes Organization)” printed on it.

So the telephone wires hummed, and we arranged for Morris to come and listen to us.  For the occasion, as my parents had taken off for a long weekend’s vacation, we cleared out the living room and set up on the one side, playing towards the couch we’d left at the other for Morris to sit on.  And when he arrived, we launched into what we thought was a good sample of our repertoire.

And we blew it.

Not because of our playing, mind you:  everything we played, we played flawlessly despite our considerable nervousness.  But instead of playing the kind of songs that would get us gigs — the dance tunes, the pop songs, the ones people would recognize, we were too good for that, oh yes we were — we played all the heavy stuff, the complex songs because, you see, we wanted to impress this Great Big Important Agent and dazzle him with our musical ability.

Had we been auditioning for a club gig, mind you, this might have been a decent approach.  But none of the stuff we played would have worked at a wedding reception, or office party, or any kind of mainstream occasion.

So at the end of it all, Morris complimented us on our sound and our ability, and took his leave, saying he’d be in touch.

We ended up getting a few small gigs from the Don Hughes Organization, and one important one (to be explored in the next chapter).

But we didn’t know that at the time, of course, so we carried on rehearsing.  And now I think it’s time for everyone to see this Pussyfoot Show Band:

(from top left, clockwise:  Cliff, Knob, Donat, Kevin,
Mike and Kim)

Yeah, we didn’t look much like a rock band, but at least we sounded like one.  And our next gig was not at some party or other:  it was a residency, in a restaurant.

---

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