Tag: Music

Chapter Four: How A Band Works

In case it hasn’t been clear in this narrative so far:  I had a dream and an ambition, but not a single clue how to make that happen. To call me “clueless” would imply that I had even the faintest idea of where I could find a clue, or any inkling of a clue’s existence.

But when I discovered Shalima, the Palm Grove’s resident band that year, I started to get the picture.

Let me first, however, list the dramatis personae who comprised Shalima, because almost all of them would be important to me (pics courtesy of Max):

Pete The Drummer

A rock-solid drummer who kept perfect tempo, and put down a lovely beat.

Richard The Bassist

Richard was a wonderful bass player. Good grief, looking at the ease with which he played his Fender  Jazz  Precision bass, sometimes so inebriated that he could barely stand (to be explained later), I nearly quit on the spot.

Jeff The Lead Guitarist

Jeff was just as good on lead guitar. It seemed like there was no guitar part he couldn’t play, note-perfect. If he had a fault, Jeff was shy and self-effacing, so much so that I think he would occasionally hold back a little with his lead solos – but when he did cut loose, it was an awesome experience.

Tommy Sean The Vocalist

Tommy Sean (whose surname I include because it’ll be important later) had a powerful and very distinctive voice, but which he seemed to lose as the evening went on. Clearly, he hadn’t been vocally trained at all, because he’d wear his voice out fairly quickly. The immense quantities of beer he’d consume during the evening couldn’t have helped much, either.

Rory (“Max”) on keyboards

Finally, there was Max. If ever I’m asked, as I have often been, who most influenced my musical career, it would be Max — not so much for his considerable musical ability, but through the way he managed the band and the different personalities to keep them on track.  Max had started out as Shalima’s bass player, but when Richard arrived on the scene he moved to keyboards.

 Sheila (the pregnant book-reader, and Max’s wife) featured occasionally on keyboards and vocals.

Now, their music; and man, this bunch of Rhodesians could play. Of course, as with all club bands in South Africa at the time, their repertoire consisted of covers of hit records, and only hit records. They didn’t play any of their own stuff (if indeed they had any), but what struck me the most was that every song sounded precisely like the original artist’s recording, with only the occasional variance being of course the vocal sound.

Incidentally, one of the first songs I heard them play was the 3 Degrees hit When Will I see You Again? and the (very) pregnant Sheila had a voice of lovely clarity, absolutely the equivalent of the song’s original lead singer. That was impressive by itself; but what stunned me was that Shalima’s backing harmony vocals mimicked the soprano voices of the 3 Degrees perfectly.

I told you earlier that I had no idea, and in this case I had no idea that male singers could sing female voices, in a rock context. Of course I knew about falsetto – I could sing pretty much any female vocal part myself that way – but I’d never known it could be used in performance, and especially in rock music. Like I said: no clue.

Anyway, the band played the first set, each song impressing me more than the previous one, and then they took a break, going over to sit at a table clearly reserved for their use on the side of the dance floor. And then they each proceeded to drink three beers during the next fifteen minutes.

Back on stage, they continued on with the performance, and more drinks during the breaks, and so on.

I wanted to talk to them, but I felt somewhat intimidated because, let’s be honest, I wasn’t musician enough to walk on stage with them let alone play what they did. Finally, though, as the evening started to wind down at about midnight and I’d had a couple beers myself, I plucked up some courage and walked over to Richard, having prepared a question about his amp and guitar as a conversation-starter.

He was polite but a little diffident, but when he asked me what had brought me to Margate and I told him, his attitude changed completely. “You’re in Mike du Preez’s band up in the hotel? Wow!” Clearly, I wasn’t just some fan-boy or drunkard off the street; I was a musician. “Come and meet the rest of the guys,” he said, and pulled me over to the band’s table.

And thus started a relationship which was to last years, and which helped me get into professional rock music more than just about anything else.

I learned so much just from watching these guys. From a playing perspective, they were consummate professionals: never late to get on stage, always playing the music most guaranteed to fill the dance floor, no messing around between songs, in fact they had none of the bad habits that bedevil “garage bands”, and I was extremely impressed.

Also, Max was the band’s leader and driving force: no arguments on stage, no nonsense of any kind: his decisions were policy, and the band had to fit in. As a keyboards player, he was more than competent, but considering that keyboards were essentially his second instrument, it should be known that he never held the band back, musically speaking. (That’s not always the case, by the way, as you will see later in this narrative.)  Unsurprisingly, he ended up being a piano teacher many years later.

Over the next few weeks, I learned from these guys how to play in a band — and more importantly, how a band worked:  not just the playing, but the management and attitudes.

In the first place, I was only nineteen, but all the others were in their thirties (except Jeff, who was a little younger), and they’d already been playing either professionally or semi-pro for over a decade.  I had no idea that one could do this.  I mean, I knew about other famous South African bands who’d been around for a while (the Staccatos, the Rising Sons, the Blue Jeans, Four Jacks and a Jill… the list was long);  but while they’d been around for years, they’d all had top 10 records on the South African hit parade, which to me justified their longevity.  Yet here was Shalima, of whom I knew nothing, and they’d been playing music as a full-time job in club after club, year after year.

You could have a career in rock music without having a record contract or hit record.

This made all the difference to me, because I’d always thought that a career in rock music required a hit record — and I also knew that the number of hit records (and the bands that played them) were only the top 2% of the bands.  (As with all things, whether sports, music or any activity, only a very few end up being truly successful.)

So one didn’t have to be a rock star to make a living.  You only had to be as good as, well, Shalima.  And all you had to do was get good enough to play on the club circuit.  Once again, as a teenager I’d been woefully ignorant of the club scene — thank you, boarding school — but listening to the Shalima guys talk, I realized that there were lots of opportunities around, far more than I’d ever imagined.

Then, a brief splash of cold water.

I mentioned to the others in the Trio how much I liked Shalima, how impressed I was with their musicianship, why I’d never heard of them before, and why they hadn’t played in Johannesburg.  Dick the dick scoffed.  “They’re what I’d call a good gig band,” he said.  “Maybe high school dances, weddings, that kind of thing.  But in a Joburg club?  No way.”  And to my amazement, Mike du Preez nodded in agreement.

I didn’t believe them.  So the next time I was down in the Grove, I asked Max why they hadn’t played in Johannesburg.  “We’re not good enough to play Joburg,” he said bluntly.

Bloody hell.  Clearly, there was more work to be done if I was going to make a go of being a pro. 

At this point, some two weeks after I’d started playing in the Trio, I started to get better on the bass.  No longer did I have to play “find the note” or search my memory for what song it was;  it all started to become a little easier, I stopped approaching each night with something akin to dread, and I actually started to enjoy myself.  Paradoxically, as I relaxed the whole thing came more easily.

But that “not good enough to play in Johannesburg” warning had stuck;  so I started to practice, really practice on the old Hofner Beatle bass.  One day I decided to teach myself how to play what’s known as a “walking” bass line, whereby the notes are played four to a bar, but “walking” up and down the scale.  (Ah, so this was why we had to practice scales:  now it all made sense.)  It took me more than a few days, because of course you have to learn the scales for each of the keys in the key signature (A, A-flat, A-sharp, B, B-flat etc. all the way up to G.  And then of course the minor keys thereof.)  But I stuck to it, concentrating especially on the more common keys the Trio was playing, and eventually I could play the runs with some confidence.  Then I taught myself the classic rock ‘n roll bass riffs — the Chuck Berry / Albert King / Bo Diddley standards — and with my newfound fluency, they came quite easily.

Then, kismet.  One of the songs the Trio played was the old Art Blakey song Moanin’.  (I invite y’all to listen to it now, as background for this part of the story.)  I’d struggled mightily with this one in the beginning, because Jazz.  But once I figured out the scales and walking thing, it became relatively easy to play.  So one night I asked Mike, ever so casually, “How about Moanin’?”  He nodded, and played the opening riff — then stared at me open-mouthed as I walked my way around the complex melody.  Even Dick was impressed when I managed to scratch out a rudimentary bass solo — the first I’d ever played.  For the first time since we’d opened, the Trio really hit a groove.

Unfortunately, this meant that Mike started to play ever-more difficult jazz standards, but to my amazement they weren’t all that difficult.  I’d figured it out.  That’s not to say I was any good at it, of course;  but I was well on the way to becoming somewhat competent.

Musical interlude:  One day I was sitting by myself at a cafe somewhere in “downtown” Margate (there was one main drag) drinking a cup of coffee when I happened to glance out the window and saw a familiar car being parked right next to the cafe.  I knew the car, a Mini, because it belonged to my old schoolfriend and GROBS bandmate Gibby.  So of course I raced outside, grabbed him and pulled him in for a cuppa.  His family owned a seaside cottage in a little town south of Margate, and he had come up to do some grocery shopping, I think.  Anyway, we spent the rest of the day together, and then I remembered that Sunday night at the Grove featured “talent” competitions — dancing on Sundays being streng verboten  in ultra-Christian South Africa back then — and so I dragged Andy off to participate.  I don’t think either of us cared about the competition, though:  it was just a chance to play on stage together.
Anyway, I introduced him to the Shalima guys, but Max didn’t want to let us enter the competition — “Kim, you’re a pro and pros aren’t allowed” — but I prevailed upon him by saying that I didn’t want to compete;  I just wanted to back Gibby and play on stage with him.  So Max relented, and we played, I think, Santana’s Evil Ways with Gibby improvising the whole thing on Max’s Hammond organ, and doing an excellent job of it, too.
As it happened, he didn’t win the competition;  it was won by a tiny, pint-sized girl named Ingrid (“Ingi”) who played a thunderous, virtuoso number on Pete’s drum kit, accompanied by the other Shalima guys.  (We’ll hear more of Ingi later.)

Then one Saturday afternoon the Trio was playing an “extra” set in the dining room — I think it was a wedding reception, booked earlier in the year — when the good stuff happened.

The Shalima guys had never heard the Trio play because our bands’ set times always coincided.  On this occasion, however, they had the afternoon off, they heard the music coming from the dining room and set out to investigate.

I’ve mentioned that our “stage” was really just an area between the small dance floor and kitchen entrance, separated from the latter by an indoor lattice covered with plastic ivy.  So it was behind this screen where Max, Tommy Sean and Richard hid, to listen to us play.

As it happened, Mike had just dropped a piece of sheet music in front of me and asked, ever so casually, “Think you can busk your way through this?”  (If memory serves, I think it was a pared-down version of Deep Purple.)  So seeing that it was a really slow ballad, I just nodded and made sure that I had the key established and off we went.  About halfway through the song I became aware of some half-whispered comments coming from behind the screen, and realized that the Shalima guys were there.  Of course, this made me sweat, but somehow I made it through the piece.

Then Mike winked at me, and launched into the intro to Moanin’.  (He has a special place in my heart for that little act of kindness.)

As it happened, that was the last song of the set, so I put the bass down and went to chat to my friends.  The first to speak was Tommy.

“You can read music?”  I nodded.  Then came Richard.
“Kim, you’re a fucking lying liar.”
“Why?”
“You told us you couldn’t play the bass, you asshole.”
“Eh, you caught me on a good night.” 
Then Max:  “Was that the first time you’d ever played that slow song?”
“Yup.  Mike likes to throw different stuff at me sometimes.”
“Cool.”

So my meager stock rose, at least with the guys I wanted to impress, and along with it, some small degree of self-esteem.  I was still very conscious of my shortcomings, even though I’d come quite a long way in the past weeks.

I’d settled into the life of a professional musician very easily, especially so in the company of the Shalima guys.  During the day we had nothing to do, so we screwed around, constantly:  darts matches in pubs, putt-putt competitions, girls, and always, beer in monumental quantities.  This was how we spent our lives together in Margate.  As the wedding reception had been a “side gig”, the Trio had been paid separately from our hotel gig, and to my astonishment I ended up with about 200 Rands as my share. This was more money at one time than I’d seen in the past two years, so of course I blew it all on the aforesaid beer with the guys, not to mention ill-advised bets on the darts matches (Tommy was an absolute wizard, I discovered to my chagrin, and I only managed to get a little back playing putt-putt because I was if not the best, then at least close to being the best player of all of us).

Then one night, after the Trio and Shalima had finished for the night, Max and I went out for a drive in my Fiat, just to chat away about this and that.  Then at about 3am I asked him, “Do you want to listen to some new music?”  His response was immediate.  “Of course I want to listen to new music.  This is my job.”  (Lesson learned:  if you’re going to be a pro, you have to immerse yourself in music and treat it as part of your job.)

I played him a tape of Bad Company’s first album.  Max listened to it without comment, then said, “Play that first song again.”  Then:  “Can I borrow this tape?”

The next night I went down to the Grove, and at the end of the song they were playing, Max said over the PA, “This next one’s for Kim,” and Shalima launched into a note-perfect cover of Can’t Get Enough.  They’d learned it already.  (Another lesson learned:  you’ve gotta stay current, and be good enough to learn a new song quickly.)

One side note:  just before Christmas, the Trio had a very brief hiatus.  Dick the dick went back up to Johannesburg to get married (!), and returned the very next day with his new bride, a pleasant, mid-forties auburn-haired woman named Moira, and his freshly-high-school-graduated daughter.  I took to Moira immediately — I had no idea what she saw in Dick — and as all four of us were now sharing that tiny cottage, I also took the opportunity to deflower his daughter one afternoon, because Musicians Are Scum.  (Moira will feature briefly later on, hence my mention of her here.)  Fortunately, I was able to keep away from the now-besotted daughter because the Trio was really busy, and when not playing I was always racing off to hang out with Shalima.

About two nights before the gig was coming to an end, I walked into the restaurant to find a stranger sitting with Mike and Dick.  “Hey, Kim, this is Barry,” was the casual intro, “He’s a bassist I know from Johannesburg.”

So I invited him to play a couple songs with the Trio, because that’s the gentlemanly thing to do, of course;  and Barry proceeded to play that old Hofner like it had never been played before.  Very humbling.

At the end of the evening, I was just getting ready to leave when I heard Dick whisper to his wife:  “If Mike had known Barry was available before we came down, he’d have fired Kim on the turn.  Hell, if we’d known he was available after the first couple of weeks we’d have replaced Kim anyway.”

Even more humbling.  Clearly, there was a cold-blooded side to professional music too.

At that point, though, it wasn’t that important, because the New Year came and with it, the end of the gig, my first gig — professional, even — as a bass player.  As I said my sad goodbyes to that ragged bunch of Rhodesians, I made them promise to look me up should they ever get a club gig in Johannesburg or Pretoria.

Somehow, I was going to have to get it together when I got back to Johannesburg, and I had no idea how I was going to do that.

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Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter Three: Learning to Play

To say that I was woefully unprepared for life after high school would be guilty of the gravest understatement.  Looking back, I’d been horrendously cossetted against the Shakespearean arrows by protective parents, then by the closed environment of an exclusive boys’ boarding school.  And I’d rebelled strongly and constantly against that protection, always being self-centered and cocksure of my ability to get through life in my own way and under my own terms.

That attitude would come to a screeching halt in 1972, when I was arrested and put on trial for my opposition to apartheid – opposition that was based on nothing but peer approval, really, because at age 17 (yes, I turned 18 long after my final first-year exams at Wits) I knew sweet F.A. about apartheid other than it was Bad, man.  And my 100% academic failure – yup, four out of four courses – was like a bucket of cold water dropped on my head.

Year Two at Wits, so to speak, wasn’t any better.  I lazed my way through the year, playing bridge in the student cafeteria instead of attending lectures, and all the time listening to the music (Cat Stevens, Jefferson Airplane, T. Rex, you name that early 70s music, they played it) that came through the tinny speakers of Wits Radio (not really radio, because it was piped, not broadcast).

Rock music had formed the background to my life in College, too, because it was the time of the Beatles, the Moody Blues, the Hollies, Traffic, the Doors, Cream and In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, baby. But I’d listened to all this stuff purely as an audience, not knowing how it was constructed.

Which, come to think of it, was strange. When listening to classical music, of course, I could pick apart all the different instruments, identifying the different tones and modalities of clarinet vs. bassoon vs. French horn vs. the cor Anglais, violins vs. violas vs. cello, and so on – what is known academically as “close listening”.  I’d had all the training in the world for that, thanks to Messrs. Barsby and Gordon’s Musical Appreciation courses and of course the choir.

But I’d never done it with modern music.  Oh sure, I could get moved by a lead solo from Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix, and of course I could sing any part of a Crosby, Stills & Nash harmony and rejoice in the artistry.  But really, I was just a spectator to the game instead of a participant.

So when I arrived in Margate (having freshly failed yet another year’s studies), I was secure in the knowledge that I’d mastered all three dozen-odd songs Mike Du Preez had given me.  I expected that the next four weeks were going to be a breeze:  play in the band at night, lie by the pool by day, and get paid for it. Living the dream, baby.

Except that I didn’t know how to play the bass guitar.  Oh sure, I could play the notes just fine;  but what I didn’t know was that in modern music, the bassist is tied to the drummer – the two are jointly called the rhythm unit, after all – and most importantly, the bass guitar is tied to the drummer’s bass pedal.  So it wasn’t just getting the notes right in whatever key we were playing;  I soon learned that whenever that bass drum was struck, there’d better be a bass guitar note striking at the same time, or else the band’s sound was as flat as a pancake.  And of course the number of times that happens depends on the key signature, or timing of the piece or even of the bar (because the tempo often changes during the song, as well as the key).

Of course, I only learned of this new thing after we’d arrived, set up our gear and launched into a little practice session.  Also of course, that little practice session turned into an all-day practice session so that the Idiot Ignorant Bassist could learn the differences in beats between (deep breath) regular ballads (2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 6/8, 12/8), up-tempo (4/4), waltzes (3/4), (polka (2/4), all the Latin tempos (cha-cha, samba, rhumba, tango etc.) and of course which one to play for the various ballroom dances such as the foxtrot, quick-step, Charleston, West Coast Swing, Dixieland jazz… I think you get the picture. Worse still, a supposedly-simple song like When The Saints Go Marching In would start off in 2/4, shift to 4/4 for the solo and then revert to 2/4 for the rest of the song – unless the pianist/band leader decided that the song needed another solo, of course – in which case Our Newbie Bassist would get into a sweat trying to play catch-up with the bass pedal, and usually failing.

What a nightmare. And we had not yet played our first night in the dining room.

To my everlasting relief, the only guests in the dining room that first night were not there for the dancing, only the dining, so they were out of the room by 9pm. And so two members of the Mike Du Preez Trio used the remaining three hours trying to teach their Accidental Bassist how to play his instrument.  Then the whole thing began again the next morning at 10am till 1pm, break for lunch till 2, then again practice until 5pm, break to get showered and dressed in uniform (red-and-white striped or white and black-striped shirts on alternate nights, black trousers and -dress shoes – my old school shoes for added humiliation, because I didn’t have anything else), dinner at 7.30pm and then back on stage at 8 for the next four hours of torture.

And the same thing happened the next day and night, and the next day and night, and the next… five days in all till midnight on Sunday, then practice again on Monday, but! we had Monday nights off!  So Mike gave us the night off from practice, too, the first since our  arrival.

By the end of the third night the Mike du Preez Trio’s members were heartily sick of each other – okay, the other two were just heartily sick of me – so at this point I guess that I should spend just a little time talking about them.

Mike du Preez was justly well-regarded on the gig circuit (except by me apparently), and his knowledge of 1930s, 40-s and 50s “standards” was I think unparalleled.  And when I say “knowledge”, I mean he knew the music and the lyrics to all those songs (maybe about three hundred?) and could play them, faultlessly and without any sheet music on the piano, organ, guitar and (to my utter humiliation) bass guitar.  He was endlessly patient with me, but not in a good-tempered manner.  This meant that he’d yell at me whenever I made a mistake or forgot something we’d practiced earlier – which only happened about every half-minute or so – until my nerves ran ragged.  On one such occasion he must have seen that I was about to chuck it all in and leave, which made him even angrier.  “You cannot fucking quit, sonny-boy!” he raged. “You’re supposed to be a professional musician and by God you’re going to act like one even if you’re nowhere close to being one!”  Pause.  “Now let’s do Desifinado again – yeah, I know we just did it yesterday, but you’ve probably forgotten everything about it.” (Which of course I had.)

A side note: I had discovered that if I stuck to playing the bass guitar softly with the treble turned almost completely off at both the guitar and the amp, the sound was quite muddy and indistinct: a bass tone but not necessarily noticeable as being out of tune. It was a trick I was to use many, many times in the future.

In my perpetual state of confusion, the only way I could even remember what key the songs were in was by watching Mike’s left-hand pinkie on the piano. If that finger played E-flat for the song’s opening, the key most likely was E-flat, and any key changes would be indicated by his playing a different note outside the E-flat scale.  So I had to keep looking at Mike’s left hand on the keyboard and hinting for that note’s place on the fretboard while simultaneously trying to watch the drummer’s bass pedal to tell me when to play (a wrong note, usually).

The drummer was an old pal of Mike’s, Dick by name and a dick by nature.  Outwardly a jovial sort, he was in fact mean-spirited and cruel, not just to me but to everyone, and with my residual private-school good manners, I was often appalled by his blatant rudeness.  While Mike had his own room in the hotel, the hotel management had (in a moment of what I can only call cosmic bloody-mindedness) booked a tiny one-bedroom cottage up the road for Dick and me to share:  him in the bedroom and me on a small uncomfortable cot in the living room. (Oh how nice, but as I’d slept on a horsehair mattress for two years in the Prep, this didn’t bother me too much.)  So it was bad enough that I had to put up with his cutting remarks during the day’s practice and evening performances:  I had to endure them in the lousy cottage as well, sleep being the only refuge.  Apparently, Dick had a parallel career as a stand-up comedian, but I’d never heard of him.  I learned that he specialized in a broad, Jerry-Lewis type of comedy, which I’d always hated anyway, and still do.  (When I was a small boy, Lewis had once toured South Africa and my parents had taken me to see him in concert.  Even as a child, I thought he was the unfunniest man I’d ever seen.  So you can imagine my reaction to Dick’s description of his own act.)  There were several times I wanted to punch him in the mouth, especially on one occasion when he said something unpardonably nasty about our employer, Rick the hotel manager.

I was to get on famously with Rick, a tall, slender dark-haired man in his, I guess, mid-thirties, a man who had (I was to discover) endless patience with his staff and a sense of humor to match.  Having no one else to speak to, I bumped into him that Monday off in Reception, my ears still burning and my pride in tatters after yet another fearsome practice session.  Clearly, he saw my distress, took me into his office, sat me down and started chatting with me, asking about my background and so on.  He then told me the most appalling lie: he’d heard us practicing and was truly impressed by our dedication, and especially by my contribution (!) to the band’s sound.  Apparently, after firing me at that first disastrous audition back in Johannesburg, Mike had called Rick and told him he would be doing the gig solo – but Rick wasn’t having any of it. “I booked a trio, not a pianist” he told me he’d said to Mike.

Which is why Mike had called me back for the gig, then.

Anyway, Rick said, “Why don’t you relax tonight? You’ve got the night off, so go down to the Grove and listen to the band, have some drinks and just sign for everything . I’ll tell the barman to comp you for the length of your stay here – but just for you, not for anyone else, okay?”

Margate was the largest of dozens of resort towns strung out along Natal Province’s South Coast, and was justly famous for its beach:

…which changed quite a bit during the holiday season.

The Margate Hotel’s Palm Grove Club deserves an entire book, let alone a few words in a work like this.  Suffice it to say that it was probably the most famous of all the resort clubs on the Natal South Coast, having opened (I think) shortly after WWII, and just about every name band and orchestra in South Africa had played there at least once or twice.  If you’d played the Grove, you’d pretty much made it.

I’d never heard of the place.

It was by then a vast, rather ugly structure (see below), but very much the place to go to when it was open – November through mid-January, and maybe over the June-July period, and only then. 

(pics found SOTI)

So as instructed, I went down to the Grove, to be greeted by two young and very pregnant girls at the entrance. “The cover is one Rand,” the one said (about 25 cents in today’s US$, or the cost of a bottle of beer back then).

I didn’t have any money. I mean, I really Had. No. Money. I’d been surviving on hotel food and water since I’d got there, having used the last of my meager funds to pay for the gas needed for the four-hundred-mile trip down from Johannesburg. (I must have lost 10lbs in weight during that first week alone.)

So I shrugged miserably and turned away, when the other girl said, “Wait; aren’t you in the band in the hotel dining room?  You are?  Well then there’s no cover. Go on in.”

So I walked into the Grove that Monday night, and it was at that point that my life changed forever.

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Chapter 2

Chapter 1

Chapter Two: Getting The Gig

At the age of sixteen, long after the age when most people start playing a musical instrument, I decided to learn how to play guitar.

I don’t honestly know why I decided this;  perhaps I’d been at a party or picnic when someone played a guitar, or maybe it was hanging out with Gibby, who played both piano and guitar, I don’t recall.  I’d had piano lessons for two years in the Prep, which had helped my musical theory proficiency, but I’d been put off by the drudgery of practice necessary to become keyboard-proficient – a dislike that was to curse me for the rest of my musical life – and plugging away at the ascending- and descending scales became absolute torture.  When I got to the College, I told my parents that I wasn’t going to continue piano lessons, to their great disappointment.

But guitar was a different story.  My fumbling and painful learning on the fretboard became less of a chore, because unlike scales, the mastery of chords meant the ability to actually play a tune.  To his everlasting credit, Gibby lent me his guitar, a battered old Hofner nylon-stringed thing, and it was on this that I tortured my dormitory companions for the next year or so, painstakingly trying to place my fingers on the fretboard as demonstrated in the “Teach Yourself Guitar” pages of chord charts that were published in some magazine or other each week.  As I recall, the very first song I learned was Creedence Clearwater’s Bad Moon Rising, followed soon thereafter by Proud Mary, and then more and more followed as I got a little (but not much) better;  although I was able to play bar chords after only a couple months and, it should be said, some coaching from Gibby.

One of the guys in my Physics class (Richard Hammond-Tooke) had a book of songs with not only the chords but the lyrics handwritten therein, and he lent it to me to copy.  To my horror, some of the songs (e.g. Blood Sweat & Tears’s Spinning Wheel) used chords that I hadn’t seen anywhere on the rudimentary chord charts (E-flat minor 7th, WTF?), which set off a mad scramble to find them printed somewhere.  Even worse was when I tried to use actual published sheet music;  while I could of course read the musical notation with as much ease as reading English (thank you Messrs. Barsby and Gordon!), translating each note into its position on the guitar’s fretboard was another thing altogether;  but I persevered because I wanted to become a guitar player, damn it.

What amazed me was that in the course of learning all the fifty-odd songs in Hammond-Tooke’s songbook, I’d learned to play the Beatles’ mournful ballad Eleanor Rigby.  Well, of course I wasn’t going to play that syrupy nonsense, so I turned it into a bluesy/jazzy arrangement instead, complete with rasping vocals <i>à la</i> David Clayton-Thomas of BS&T.  When I played it to Richard, he listened in stunned silence, and at the end blurted out, “You should do this professionally!”

On such small seeds do plants often grow.

Next came GROBS. GROBS was a show that the pre-Matric (11th grade) class would put on each year, with comedy skits, musical numbers, magic tricks, poetry reading and other such stuff on the playlist.  What set it aside from all the other activities was that is was put together solely by the boys, and not by the teachers.  It was performed only for the school – the teachers were not going to let us loose on the public, and especially on parents – and it would take place on a Saturday night in the school hall.  (Remember, we were mostly boarders at St. John’s, so a weekend night in school was no big deal.)

In great excitement, Gibby and I decided to form a band to play a couple of songs, me on guitar and he on bass.  Of course, I didn’t have an electric guitar or amplifier, and while he had a Hofner “Beatle” bass, he likewise had no amplifier, but cobbled together something from the school’s stage PA system.  Then we got a couple of other guys:  Hamish Brebnor had a set of drums, and Paul Garwood had an acoustic guitar.  So bass, two guitars and drums – if it was good enough for the Beatles, right?  We rehearsed for a week or two beforehand, and then Garwood pulled out for no reason, two days before the show.

Panic!

Fortunately, two other guys stepped forward:  Chris Chomse and Alistair Louw, both of whom had electric guitars and amps, offered to join.  Both were already members of bands – garage bands, but hey – and they would bring not only their experience but equipment! to the gig.  Problem solved.

However, whatever songs we’d originally planned to play were tossed out as being stupid, and we ended up playing The Who’s version of Summertime Blues (with me on solo vocals, doing my best Roger Daltrey impersonation) and the Rolling Stones’ Paint it Black, Alistair doing his impersonation of Mick Jagger.  So I had to play lead guitar in the latter song, and here was my first lesson in rock music: I was okay playing chords on guitar, but lead guitar?  Total shit.

Nevertheless, the show had to go on, so I sweated it out, practicing as much as I could before the fateful night.  It didn’t help that my after-school hours activities were consumed by hockey practices and a couple of matches against other schools as well as choir practice, but came the night, came the player and I fumbled my way through the Stones classic with nary a misplayed note.  (I didn’t, and still don’t know the lyrics for Summertime Blues but I just sang any old thing in an incomprehensible fake Wolverhampton accent – something I would do again and again for the next fifteen years.)

To my astonishment, the gig was a complete success:  instead of being insulted and cat-called, our set was met with loud and sustained applause.  The only negative came when we were called out for an encore, and had to refuse because we only knew two songs.  Much booing and whistling followed.

Lesson: always have more songs to play than the occasion demands.

But that loud applause was another little seed.

I should point out that my childhood shyness had almost completely disappeared by this stage in my life, for two reasons.  Firstly, I’d grown up physically and thanks to the compulsory sport regime, I was of fairly impressive stature.  Secondly, adolescence had hit me, and along with only a minor brush with teenage acne had also come a rather impressive way with the girls.  (I’m fairly sure that a series of casual girlfriends, plus my loss of virginity at only a couple weeks after my sixteenth birthday were largely responsible.)

My nickname was “Poke”, bestowed upon me by my girlfriend of the time and quickly picked up by my leering circle of friends, the bastards.  Even my housemaster referred to this flaw in my character as “toujours chercher la femme”, which says it all.   (I was faintly surprised that the old bastard didn’t say it in Latin.)

But back to the music.  I left high school and started my first year at university, which ended up being a total failure.  From a star student at St. John’s (a First, along with a couple other academic accolades), I turned into a total failure, because nobody had thought to warn me that the amount of work required for a First at high school was the equivalent of half the amount of study required per course at university.  So my first year at the University of the Witwatersrand was a complete disaster.  (It hadn’t helped that almost an entire semester was spent in court, having been arrested for participating in an anti-apartheid demonstration on campus. But to be honest, the writing had been on the wall ever since the half-year exams, which I’d likewise failed, unanimously.)

Musically, however, it was another story. I’d enrolled in the Wits Dramatic Society and performed in the chorus of Oklahoma!, but it really bugged me that the months and months of rehearsals had ended up with only a week’s worth of performances.

Then in the second year after high school matriculation, I was invited to join the PG Players, an amateur musical group from the Johannesburg suburb of Edenvale.  The invitation came from my old school friend and choir-mate Mark Pennels, who’d met Peter Griffiths (the “PG”) and recommended me to him.  I didn’t really want to do it, but Mark prevailed on me with the plea that they were desperately short of men who could actually sing.  So I joined the group and set about rehearsing for the performance of Ralph Trewhela’s El Dorado, a story set in Gold Rush Johannesburg of the late 1890s.  This time, though, I wasn’t in the chorus but part of a comedy duo, playing the part of a hobo, and singing a duet with Danny O’Connor.

The leading man was a tenor named Mike du Preez, who (I later discovered) was actually a well-known pianist and band leader who’d appeared on TV shows and was much in demand on the cocktail- and cabaret circuit.

Towards the end of the show’s run, Mike came up to me and said, “Mark Pennels tells me you can play bass guitar.  Well, I need a bassist for a Christmas gig I’ve got in Margate” – a seaside town on the South Coast of Natal – “…so are you interested?”

Now I need to be clear on this point.  Gibby had gone off to do his military service (ending up as an armored-car driver), and had asked me to “look after” his bass guitar – that old Beatle violin bass, and I used to sit and pick at it idly while reading a book;  making a sound but not actually playing anything.  Mark had seen me doing this during his several visits to my house, hence the recommendation to Mike.

Now I could have ‘fessed up and told the truth:  that I was an absolute novice, nay worse than that, and had no idea what was involved.

But I didn’t.  Instead, I said: “Sure.  What dates are we talking about?”

So I’d landed my first proper gig, not in some garage band or anything like that.  No;  I was going to be playing professionally with a renowned band leader and (I learned) a very experienced drummer, in a trio.  And anyone who knows about this stuff will tell you that a trio is one of the most difficult gigs to play, because there’s absolutely no place to hide.  Each part has to perform perfectly, and all have to mesh together withal.

Worse still, I was completely unfamiliar with — and didn’t like — the material, which was to be largely jazz standards of the Cole Porter-Dick Rogers-Hoagy Carmichael-George Gershwin genre.

And I didn’t even have a bass amplifier.

Of course, Mike insisted on a quick rehearsal a week before we left for Margate, so I called on an old friend from university who knew about such things, and asked him if he could make me an amp in a week.  As luck would have it, John actually had one lying around in his workshop so I bought it from him on trust, promising to pay it out of my salary from the gig.  (I was lying in my teeth, of course, but times were tough and I figured I could always find a hundred bucks somewhere.)

Anyway, I arrived at Mike’s house like Louis XVII walking up the steps to the guillotine.  The amp, however, was impressive: a “head” perched atop a truly massive speaker cabinet – four 12-inch speakers, even, so Mike must have thought I was a pro.  How wrong he was.

Actually, it was even worse than I’d dreaded.  There’s no place to hide in a trio, and there was even less place to hide when it was just the pianist and me.  I couldn’t play a single song, not even the easiest of ditties.  After about twenty minutes Mike threw up his hands and fired me on the spot.  So I slunk off, tail between my legs, but with what I had to acknowledge was a profound sense of relief.

Then two days later Mike called me up.  “Well, I can’t find another bassist at this short notice, so we’ll just have to make it work somehow.”

I gulped, and said “Thanks.”  Then something clicked in my brain and I asked. “Do you perhaps have any sheet music for the stuff we’re going to play?”

“Not much, maybe thirty or so songs. Why?”

“Well, I might not be able to play the music, but I can read it,” and I told him how I’d taught myself to play guitar by doing just that, and of my choral background in the St. John’s College Choir.

There was a stunned silence on the line, and then Mike said, “Do you think you can learn thirty songs before we leave for Margate in four days’ time?”

“Absolutely.”  (Once again, lying like a Clinton at a press conference.)

But in the end I did, simply by going without sleep for four days and playing, as the story goes, until I had blood coming out from under my fingernails.  I had done some difficult things in my life so far, but nothing could compare to this.

How I made it the four hundred miles down to Margate without falling asleep at the wheel is a miracle for the ages.

And the next four weeks were to change my life.

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