Tag: Music

Memoirs Of A Busker — Chapter 11

Music

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

Chapter 11:  Full-time Gigging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One day in April 1979 Kevin contacted me and said:

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

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

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

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

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

This was Black Ice:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memoirs Of A Busker — Chapter 10

Friends and Family, Music

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

Chapter 10:  Serving The Nation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, that would be me.

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

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

Dead man walking, that was me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Manning and Matheus came in, and hell began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


(Kim, Franco, Danny, Stan and Boze)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What now?