Clayton Frick founded The Smokehouse Blues Club which
operated on Friday nights at the premises of the Master Mariner’s Club on the
top floor of a building on the corner of Shortmarket and Loop Streets (long
since demolished) for a couple of years and it soon became the go to live music
venue in the CBD in very early Nineties.
The concept of the Smokehouse was that it would be the
closest thing to a Chicago juke joint that we could have in Cape Town and the
bands who played there would be in thrall to the blues. The first bands, such
as the one led by Clayton Frick and the Blues Broers in which his younger
brother John played guitar and sang, were blues oriented but soon the
Smokehouse became such a popular gig that all manner of other bands, with only
a loose connection to blues, also played here.
The space lent itself ideally to the concept of a
large juke joint with four separate areas arranged around a central air shaft
that provided the only ventilation and fresh air for a club that was suffused
with cigarette smoked. The four areas
were divided into the performance room, a bar area, a section of pool tables
and fourth area I don’t recall, perhaps it was the entrance lobby. There was a
single, cramped lift that gave access from the ground floor and on popular
nights there was inevitably a queue of eager, impatient and irritable punters
waiting downstairs.
I was at the Smokehouse for almost all of its nights,
partly because at the time I attended every live gig in and around Cape Town
that I could get to and partly because I was deeply interested in the blues.
In the late Eighties the blues torch in Cape Town had
been carried by The Flaming Firestones, Clayton Frick’s first band, in which
Rob Nagel, one of the mainstays of the blues rock scene in the Western Cape
from the early Eighties, had played blues harp and saxophone and usually had
one featured vocal number.
After the demise of The Flaming Firestones, Nagel and
John Frick went on to found the Blues Broers and Clayton Frick led his own
band. The Blues Broers often featured a horn section and even backing vocalists
and the Clayton Frick band shows featured an acoustic blues section with tea
chest bass, to broaden the limited electric blues band sound and to emphasise
their mission to be as authentic as possible.
Most, if not all of the bands, that played the
Smokehouse did not leave any proof of their existence in the shape of
recordings, whether albums released by corporate record labels or released by
the bands themselves, unlike the situation that arose after 1994 where almost
more bands or acts released their albums themselves. The Blues Broers
eventually, in another incarnation and from about 1996, put out several CD
albums, but the only record of the John Frick led band is the Shake Like
That album on cassette, but there’s nothing like this, as far a I know, of
the Clayton Frick band, The Mavericks, or any ot the other Smokehouse bands.
Well, now there is the Blue Stones Smokehouse bootleg
cassette that’s available on YouTube, featuring the Clayton Frick band playing
a selection of blues standards and a handful of Frick originals in traditional
style. There’s no acoustic segment.
The band consists of Clayton Frick (gtr, vcls), Dave
Ferguson (The Mavericks) (blues harp), Rufus Wainstein (bass), Alistair Musson
(gtr) and Russell Weston (drums.)
Apparently, the performance was recorded on a Walkman
and if this is so, it’s astonishing how good the sound is, even digitally
cleaned up and enhanced. The second impression is how good the standard of the
musicianship is and how well the guys play the blues. To make the clichéd
point, one can’t tell, from just listening to the music, where this band is
playing and it might just as well be a blues club in the USA or anywhere else
in the world.
The band is full of energy, the music swings
sufficiently (Russell Weston is the USP drummer for so many bands) and the
performances are engaging though not spectacular. The overall impression is of
a journeyman blues band going to work
and doing what it does best, but with no
spark of genius, because they play only hoary standards and because the
original compositions follow the old school templates so slavishly. It was
obviously a entertaining gig and a great night out but it’s music that should
be experienced In the euphoric state of drunkenness if you want the full
visceral effect. Listening to the tape at home, sober, doesn’t generate much
excitement. It’s a nostalgic
investigation of the past rather than a celebration of a historical
achievement.
The real value of this bootleg cassette is that it
emphasises how good local musicians could be and that it’s a wonderful record
of a time and a place when the Cape Town music scene that shone brightly for a
year or two.
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