(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.
