(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 in 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 hear, 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 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 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 noisy.
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’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. Al 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 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 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 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?
