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So Much For Privacy

Big Brother, Government Thugs, Technology

Here’s one guaranteed to make us all feel better:

Dubai police snooped on a private WhatsApp group to snare an airline worker who shared images of a building damaged in the Middle East crisis.

Authorities accessed a closed chat between colleagues, downloaded evidence and then lured the man to a meeting and arrested him.

He is in custody facing charges including publishing information deemed harmful to state interests which carries a maximum sentence of two years.

Radha Stirling, chief executive of Detained in Dubai, said: ‘Dubai Police have now explicitly confirmed they are conducting electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages.

‘Individuals are being tracked, identified, and arrested not for public statements, but for private exchanges between colleagues.

‘Companies like WhatsApp must answer urgent questions about user privacy.

‘If private communications can be detected and used as the basis for arrest by overreaching or hypersensitive states, users worldwide need clarity on how their data is being accessed.’

According to the police report, authorities stated the clip was detected ‘through electronic monitoring operations’.

So much for “privacy” and “end-to-end encryption.  The question — now that the cat’s out of the bag — is quite simple:  did the Dubai feds hack into WhatsApp, or did WhatsApp just hand the encryption key over to them?

We all know that in Arab nations, personal freedoms have about as much permanence (and relevance) as an ice cube in the desert when it comes to their governments.

But lest we get all smug and complacent, I’m willing to bet that a similar situation is in place pretty much everywhere — and the United States is no exception.

Market Garden Final Thoughts

Wars & Other Fun Games

From Longtime Friend & Reader Sage Grouch comes this response to last week’s Market Garden post:

Thanks for the flattering request for my opinion.

Montgomery, for whom I have a mixed opinion because of his terrific performance in the African desert versus his lackluster performance on mainland Europe (Caen, anyone?), famously said that Market-Garden was “90% successful;” sadly for the Allies that means it was in fact a strategic failure. No question, as you say, it saw some stunning victories at Eindhoven, Vegel, Grave, and Groesbeek;  and Frost’s paras, and the Poles, were nothing short of magnificent. But I think it would be fair to say that British airborne forces were gutted for the rest of the war after Market-Garden, particularly the 1st Abn Div, which suffered 75-80% casualties and never fully recovered, playing no more combat role (as opposed to the US 82nd and 101st Abn Divs who went on to even more glory in the Bulge and beyond). The 6th AbnD, their other para division, was still refitting after Normandy and played only a minor backup role in the Bulge.

In the larger context of Market-Garden’s strategic failure, this loss was compounded by the operational cost: elite troops, including very valuable officers who could have been husbanded for future opportunities (or used more conservatively) were instead expended in a high-risk gamble that yielded only a vulnerable salient.

There were certainly some wins for the Allies as a result of Market-Garden. As has been said, the US 82nd and 101st performed brilliantly and largely achieved their objectives, not least of which was holding “Hell’s Highway” against fierce German counterattacks. The offensive freed a big swath of south and central Netherlands, including some V-2 launch sites and, of course, liberating a large number of Dutch civilians, who were thus spared the worst effects of the “Hunger Winter” yet to come. It inflicted large losses on the two German SS Panzer divisions that were refitting in the area, which affected Hitler’s ability to use them as he would have liked in the Bulge in December. And to be sure, the area captured was a useful jumping-off salient for operations in 1945, even though that wasn’t one of the stated objectives of the operation.

Having said that…

As we’ve said, seizure of the Arnhem bridge and establishment of a firm bridgehead over the Lower Rhine was the stated goal of the whole exercise, and that failed; with it failed the plan to outflank the Westwall and end the war 7-8 months earlier than it ultimately did, with all the casualties and physical damage to Europe caused during that period. (And no seizure of Berlin by the Western Allies, which could have shaped the Cold War in Europe differently for half a century. I like to think Eisenhower would not have stopped at the Elbe had his forces gotten that far by, say, November or December 1944, when the Russians were still ~300 miles and several months away, on the Vistula, but I could well be optimistic about that.)

The resulting salient after the operation was a vulnerable “bulge” that had to be defended by a large number of Allied troops who could have been used elsewhere, instead of acting as a springboard for further offensive operations. And I’ve already talked about the damage to British airborne capability and the high overall cost in elite troops and equipment.

So I maintain that Market-Garden was a strategic and operational failure, which featured many brilliant tactical performances.

To my mind, the most important part of how Market Garden turned out is what I missed, i.e. “It inflicted large losses on the two German SS Panzer divisions that were refitting in the area, which affected Hitler’s ability to use them as he would have liked in the Bulge in December.”  The effect of that attrition on the Bulge attack was incalculable.

So we’re all clear on the matter:  I respect Mr. Grouch’s opinion on the WWII Western Front as I do few others.  (He’s actually a twice-published author on the Battle Of The Bulge, so his expertise in these matters is beyond question.)  And fortunately for me, our views on the above are so similar as to be pretty much identical.

Thanks, buddy.

Shared Concerns

Technology, Watermelons

For once, there’s an article worth reading at National Review, and for once, I find myself somewhat in agreement with the rabid Leftoids (albeit for different reasons).

[T]here’s a consistent and surprisingly effective effort to convince you that the biggest threat to your community is the plans for a new AI data center on the other side of town. Read on.
Democrats’ Data Center Obsession

Back in 2024, I observed that when some of America’s biggest tech companies realized that they needed significantly more electrical power to run their data centers in the decades to come, they decided that restarting decommissioned nuclear plants was the best, most cost-effective, and most reliable option. And with the seeming snap of their fingers, a slew of those closed nuclear plants were scheduled to start operating again in the coming years.

And it wasn’t just Republican governors like Glenn Youngkin of Virginia eager to re-embrace nuclear power; Democrats like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Virginia Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine all jumped on board. It was a case of the right policy finally being enacted after decades of foot-dragging and fearmongering, but more than a little frustrating that years of conservatives winning the policy argument and being right on the facts didn’t move the needle on the issue; it was Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and other big companies simply saying, “We want this.”

We should have known that eventually the progressive wing of the Democratic Party would wake up and galvanize opposition; now an increasingly loud swath of Americans, mostly on the left, seem to hate data centers the way they used to hate your SUV, your Big Mac, and, well, you.

Of course, the reason the Watermelons are being stirred to violence is because electricity is eeeevil, as is nuuuuclear powerrrr etc. etc.

I don’t care about any of that.

What concerns me about A.I. is more of a philosophical nature because while I can see many benefits of having computing power save humans a lot of grunt work and so on, I am profoundly disturbed by the implications of letting A.I. run things — and more especially, run the activities and affairs of humans.  As long as it’s a tool, therefore, I think I can get behind it;  but as a management system, I remain deeply skeptical.

And my skepticism stems from two sources.

Firstly, I think it’s all too easy (through laziness or indifference) to hand over the reins to outside control — we just have to see how cars are being thus transformed as an example — and as far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out (way far out) on whether this is a good, bad or evil thing.

My second concern stems from the basic premise of A.I., as I’ve said before, in that the collective [sic] wisdom can form a secure foundation for intelligence.  As someone who has often used and manipulated data myself, I am intimately familiar with how this process can be affected by, let’s call it malevolent forces.  And whereas in the past one could rely on some kind of human element to be a firewall on this issue, we are now faced with the prospect of A.I.-driven bots to not only speed up the process massively, but also to conceal what’s actually going on.

I’m not going to do anything stupid like bomb some data center, of course, nor would I ever support the assholes that do this kind of thing.  If they do something vile like this, or even plan to do something like this and get caught, then by all means hang them, bury them under a prison or stick them in some deep dark jail cell forever.

I do think that we aren’t being careful enough with the drive to A.I., because the guys who are building it are obsessed with performance / generation.  As with all science, though, we need to continuously ask ourselves the question:  “Just because we can, are we sure that we should?”

And I see very few people asking that question of A.I. — which means that the field of resistance is being left open for the loony Leftoids.

Classic Beauty: Olive Ann Alcorn

Classic Beauty

From Wikipedia:  “Olive Ann Alcorn was Olive an American dancer, model, and silent film actress of the 1910s and 1920s. She is better remembered today for the numerous nude photographs of her from the era than for her film work.”

Oh.

Okay, then…

…and that’s it.  Of course, we all know that Wikipedia often lies;  and this would appear to be one of those times.

That, or her Mafia boyfriend* had them all destroyed.

Sorry about that.

*I have no idea if she had a Mafia boyfriend.

Memoirs Of A Busker — Chapter 12

Music

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

Chapter 12 – Side Gigs & Cabaret

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the story of one such side gig.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here we go again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kismet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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