Cream

 

In May 2005 Cream played a series of reunion concerts in the Royal Albert Hall, the setting for their farewell concert in November 1968. These concerts by the Cream of 39 years on were held whilst I was in Europe on my first overseas holiday ever and yet I did not learn of these momentous events until well after the fact. At the end of the year I bought the double CD set of the concerts and received the double DVD set as a requested Christmas present. These purchases were perhaps as highly anticipated by me as the concerts were at the time, but left me more than somewhat disappointed because the Cream of 2005 were sure as hell not the Cream of 1968.

Somewhere on the DVD Ginger Baker, I think, says something about the band playing their repertoire as the musicians they are in 2005, a very different version of the group that stormed the world in the late 60's, but that this current version was good because it represented a different perspective on their abilities and vision. Something like that. On the evidence of the CD and DVD set, the musicians no longer had the energy and power they had as young men, which is obvious, yet age and experience did not seem to being anything new to the table, except to present Cream as a kind of pub rock covers band; a bunch of 60-somethings who have been around forever and really know the Cream repertoire backwards yet seem to go through the motions for an adoring audience who were simply seeking to relive a vague memory of the barnstorming Cream of old, who defined the lengthy hard blues jam session and made some of the most compelling psychedelic rock of their time.

My position on Cream is, alongside Jefferson Airplane, and the Rolling Stones, they are one of my favourite bands from the Sixties, and along with Dr Feelgood, they are perhaps my two top personal favourites of all time especially since Cream and the Feelgoods were the first two rock bands I discovered on my own and outside of any influences from any peer group.

Back in about 1974 my father book me book called The Story of Pop for my birthday. The book was compiled from a series of part works dealing with the history of rock from the Fifties to the early Seventies. I learnt the histories of the icons of rock, pop and R & B, from Elvis Presley to the Beach Boys, the Stones, the Beatles, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, to the early Seventies superstars such as Bowie, Bolan, Led Zeppelin and David Cassidy. Amidst all of these acts, I found an article about Cream, which was a true revelation about a band I had never heard of before.

At that time Eric Clapton was riding high with his 461 Ocean Boulevard album and I Shot the Sheriff single, with his slightly scruffy image of plaid shirt, jeans and beard, and it was fascinating to read about his prehistory with the Yardbirds, John Mayall and Cream where in particular he was a bit of a dandy, and of course a very flash guitar player. One of the things I noted was that Clapton played a Gibson Les Paul with Cream where he was currently playing a Fender Telecaster.

I read the article over and over, and pored over the photographs, one of which showed the early, almost pre-psychedelic band looking very serious and bluesman-like at a BBC TV shoot, and then later in all their psychedelic peacock finery and Clapton with his "enormous puffball hairdo allegedly grown with the aid of hair restorers." The music sounded astonishing and otherworldly and I became deeply obsessed.

I have no idea when I first heard any Cream music on the radio; but somehow I was familiar with Sunshine of Your Love even if it was not a staple of the kind of pop shows I listened to at the time.

In 1974 Sigma Records was the only record bar in Stellenbosch and it was my habit of a Friday afternoon to hang out at Sigma, flipping through the album covers in the racks, longingly making mental notes of the records I would buy if I had the money. My record collection was minute: two Neil Diamond albums, the Beatles "red" album of greatest hits, and the soundtrack to the British rock 'n' roll movie That'll Be The Day. I just did not have the money to start a serious record collection. Sigma Records represented a world I could gaze at but never be part of and it ate me up, yet I continued with the stupid pastime week after week, compiling my wish lists of desirable vinyl.

Amongst the LP covers on show was the double albums Cream's Cream Live and Heavy
Cream. The first was priced at R6,25 and the latter, perhaps because it was imported or newer stock, was priced at over R7,00. In this day and age it almost seems ridiculous but even those prices were beyond me. Both albums were compilations of hits, but Heavy Cream seemed to be simply studio recordings while Cream's Cream contained live versions of the hits, including the famous version of Crossroads that allegedly had two of the most perfect guitar solos ever. For a long time I could do nothing but long and feast my eyes. I was even too shy to ask the guys behind the counter if I could listen to any of those albums, as one could do in those days.

My friend Natie Greeff had more money than me and was into buying records, such as Deep Purple's live album Made in Japan, which was in itself an object of desire at the time in the aftershock of the monster hit Smoke On The Water, and I listened to it a couple of times at his house. For some unknown reason he wanted to sell the album – it might have been because he wanted to buy a live double album by Uriah Heep – and offered it to me for R4,00. I managed to scrape together the money somehow and took the record home with me and listened to it enough times to realise that it did not appeal to me all that much. I've owned a few Deep Purple albums over the years, but have never quite loved them as much as theoretically I should have, given my predilections for hard rock.

Somewhere towards the middle of 1974 and after I had almost memorised the article about Cream, and had ogled the cover of Cream's Cream Live often enough so that I dreamt about it, I concluded that I wanted Cream and that the only way I would be able to fund the purchase would be to sell Made In Japan back to Natie Greeff who was kind of nonplussed about my offer but generously agreed to take back Made In Japan for the amount I had paid for it, namely R4,00.

I was flush with cash yet R2,25 short of the amount of R6,25 the album sold for at Sigma and as my birthday was long gone, and Christmas a long way away, and I needed to own the record straightaway, I knew desperate measures would be called for to help me achieve my goal. My parents did not give me any pocket money, I had no job, there was no prospect of any cash gifts and I had nothing more to sell. Thievery was the only option as I saw it.

My father had the habit of leaving small change lying around on a bookcase in the passage of the house we then lived in and I made a calculated guess that he would not know or remember how much there was from time to time, so that I could safely take small amounts that would not be missed. This is what I did over a period of weeks, cautious enough not to be too greedy and to take so much at any given time that the deficit would be noticeable. My dad never noticed anything or at least never let on that he noticed anything, and I soon had the extra R2,25 I needed, all the while praying that on-one else would suddenly feel the burning need to buy the album that had been skulking in the Sigma Records' racks for so long, just because I wanted it.

It was with a fast beating heart and clammy palms that I went to Sigma that particular Friday afternoon anxiously hoping and trusting that the album would still be there and that the price would not have suddenly risen since my last visit. The anxiety was superfluous: the album was right where it had been and the price was still right. I paid my money and I took the album home with me. The pleasure and relief were almost orgasmic.

At home I hid the album in my wardrobe, underneath some clothes as I could obviously not show anyone my new acquisition without explaining where I'd found the money to pay for it. Our house hi-fi was in the lounge and I had some time before managed to buy a pair of cheap earphones that I used when I listened to the few records I had, and to music on the radio, and it was with the earphones that I could camouflage my listening habits and hide that I was listening to something new. When I wanted to listen to Cream I sneaked the record into the lounge when no-one was about and hid it beneath the small pile of LP's there and simply pulled the records out of the sleeves without revealing the cover, when I listened to them. In this way no one knew for a long time that I owned Cream's Cream Live, until a year or two later when I had larger collection anyway and no longer cared whether my ownership of this album was public knowledge.

Cream was the first hard rock, as I saw it at the time, I listened to that was not Deep Purple or Uriah Heep, who I despised anyway, and who seemed to be an unknown quantity to my peer group who followed those two bands, or Led Zeppelin, or Jethro Tull and some progressive prog rock groups like Yes or Audience and Pavlov's Dog, all of whom were popular amongst the teenage boys I knew. Cream did not feature, perhaps because the band was already ancient history by then, and Cream became my secret vice, surpassed only by my discovery of Dr Feelgood who was a contemporary band but beyond the ken of my mates at school.

Cream's Cream is a combination of the two earlier official live albums released by Cream, live Cream and Live Cream Volume II. The first two sides contained songs such as NSU, Sleepy Time Time, and a very long version of Sweet Wine, and the second record had shorter, more concise versions of Deserted Cities of the Heart, White Room, Sunshine of your Love and Tales of Brave Ulysses, as well as a very long version of Steppin' Out (Hideaway.)

My favourite side was the side of four relatively short versions of Deserted Cities of the Heart, White Room, Sunshine of your Love, Politician and Tales of Brave Ulysses, because the versions were concise and energetic. The biggest revelation of the album, though, was Sleepy Time Time, with a long melodic solo of a sustained intensity that almost boggled my mind. The solo was so tuneful I could, and did, sing along to it; the inventiveness was amazing, and I just could not believe that anyone could play the guitar like that. Now I could understand the "Clapton is God" cult.

I also listened to Steppin' Out (Hideaway) quite bit, mostly because it was just so interesting in a weird kind of way to listen to a piece of improvisation that was just about 15 minutes long. In the Story of Pop article the writer narrates the tale of a gig where one member of the band got so lost in his virtuosity that the other two left the stage without the soloist noticing. There is a long passage in Steppin' Out (Hideaway) where Clapton solos on completely solo, and I believed that it was this example the Story of Pop writer had referred to. Many years later, when I bought a DVD documentary on Cream, made after the historic Royal Albert Hall concerts of May 2005, this fond belief was punctured when Ginger Baker told the story, and Clapton confirmed it, that it was Jack Bruce who was so lost in his playing that he carried on even when the other two had stopped and were watching him. Baker tells this story, not to illuminate the incredible virtuosity of the three musicians, but to illustrate his moan about the manner in which Bruce turned up his bass amplifier to such a level that he could not even hear anyone else, and nor could they comfortably hear their own playing.

I do not quite know why any version of this tale is told to illustrate the alleged overbearing egocentricity in the band as the conventional wisdom, especially at the time, was that Cream was a rock band built on the principles of a jazz band with three awesomely talented and able musicians whose forte was to play with rock ferocity and with great technical facility so that in most instances on stage the band consisted of three soloists improvising at the same time, and feeding off each other. This kind of superior ability was the unique selling proposition of the band. Ultimately it became the albatross when Clapton, in particular it seems, grew tired of the excesses and wanted to return to simpler song structures. The thing is, apart from the elaborate arrangements and extra instrumentation, that is what Cream did with its studio tracks. Cream did not construct elaborate prog-rock suites but stuck to the 4-minute rule.

The side I listened to least of all was the one with the 15 minute Sweet Wine, partly because I just did not get into this version of the song and partly because of the quality of the pressing of the LP that rather too quickly allowed the vinyl on this side to deteriorate into the kind of snaps and crackles that made listening to anything a trial.

On the whole, then, I really grooved to the shorter, energised versions of the hits, and had a kind of hit and miss relationship with the extended improvisations but I truly and utterly adored Cream just from the evidence of this record. In early 1976 we moved to a new house and for a few summers after that I used to tan on the lawn outside the lounge where the hi-fi was, and I used to position one speaker in the window so it could blast out over the garden and invariably I lay in the sunning soaking up rays to the pounding, boisterous blues rock of Cream. I have no ideas what our neighbours thought of my taste in music. They never complained, though.

Once I started my Varsity career I had a job with the Sports Department, working at the box office of the Coetzenburg and Danie Craven Stadiums of the University of Stellenbosch and I suddenly had a lot of cash, compared to my high school years, which could be applied solely to luxuries because I lived at home and my parents paid my Varsity tuition fees and supported me. The cash enable me to expand my record collection at a rapid rate, especially through the bulk purchase or sale records but every now and then I did buy new product as well, including most of my Cream albums. The second impetus to the record collecting spree, was that at the end of my Matric year I won a competition where the first prize was a small hi-fi set with amplifier/tuner, turntable and speakers. Up to that point the only record player in the house was my parents' one, which stood in the lounge. I had my dad's very old medium and short wave valve radio in my room but once I had the new hi-fi, the valve radio went straight to shelf in the garage and I could listen to glorious FM radio and, better still, I could listen to my records in the privacy of my bedroom.

The initial focus of my record buying was blues records, in particular the budget priced albums I found in various Cape Town record shops, and at Stellenbosch record shops when they had sales. The cheap records were less than R2,00 a copy and new, contemporary albums costs either about R6,00 if locally pressed or R8,48 if imported. My sense of value for money made me prefer 5 albums for R10,00 rather than just one or two.

It was therefore a couple of years before I bought my next Cream product, even if I had the money, and this was the Best of Cream single album, that contains the very best of the studio albums, plus the legendary live version of Crossroad. The compilers had decided to give the punter the heavy blues Cream and the heavy Cream, the greatest bits, and omitted the more interesting and poppy songs that I discovered only when I bought the original albums. There was no Wrapping Paper, or Anyone for Tennis?, or even NSU, but there was I feel Free, I'm So Glad, White Room, Badge (the only tune off Goodbye) and the other usual suspects. The Best of Cream quickly became a favourite that was heavily rotated on my turntable.

The third album acquired in my exploration of the Cream oeuvre was their second album, Disraeli Gears, with a most fascinating psychedelic cover, almost light years away from the fairly sedate cover of Fresh Cream. I believe my copy of Disraeli Gears also came form Sigma Records. This album was even more of a revelation than Cream's Cream because is excellently showcased the different aspects of the band's musical vocabulary, from heavy riffs, to psychedelic pop songs to blues and a weird little Cockney joke song at the end. The best part was that the production was so clear that listening to the album on headphones was a true ear-opener. Here, for the first time I could clearly distinguish between the contributions of the three musicians to the extent that I could simply concentrate on one at a time, and still have a marvellous experience. Disraeli Gears specially illustrated Ginger Baker's busy, intricate and compelling drum technique. Never before had I ever just listened to a drummer on a record, filtering out anybody else. Baker's drumming was so spectacular that one could dot that.

The initial attraction of the album lay in the heavy numbers such as Strange Brew, Sunshine of Your Love, SWLABR, and familiar tunes such as Tales of Brave Ulysses, but after a while I really got into the heavily psychedelic World of Pain, Dancing the Night Away, and, most of all, We're Going Wrong, that starts out as a quiet, broody rumination that slowly builds up to an explosive guitar solo. After Jefferson Airplane, this music is my favourite Sixties psychedelic creations. Power and grace; energy and beauty. These guys were the cream of the crop.

To this day I have never seen a vinyl copy of Fresh Cream, and had to wait until the early Nineties and the CD boom, and the generosity of my cousin Minnette, an air hostess, before experiencing the full delights of the debut album but in the early Eighties I got kind of lucky in finding in a record shop in Cape Town a German label record called I Feel Free, which was a version of Fresh Cream, but with the omission of some significant tunes, such as Sweet Wine and Cat's Squirrel, and the addition of Sunshine of Your Love and Strange Brew. I could now hear for the first time the studio version of NSU (quite astounding) and Sleepy Time Time (a bit twee in the face of the awesome live version on Cream's Cream), and also the weirdness of the atypical Wrapping Paper and The Coffee Song. This album highlighted the weird dichotomy of Cream as being on the one hand a serious blues and heavy group, and on the other hand a typical mid-Sixties pop group with ambitions to have hit singles that could compete in the same market as Herman's Hermits. Clapton allegedly left The Yardbirds because they were becoming too commercial, yet something like Wrapping Paper could have fitted right in with the commercial Yardbirds. Maybe the idea of psychedelia informing the music mitigated this strain of twee pop for Clapton.

I had seen the Wheels of Fire double album in a couple of record shops but was reluctant to pay a double album price for a record that had a number of tunes I already had versions of on the Cream albums I did own, and a number of studio tracks that were unknown quantities. I could not quite see that Wheels of Fire would be value for money. Then I came across the live part of the double album on sale as a single album at Silverstone's record shop in Cape Town. The live set consisted of the very excellent Crossroads and a lengthy version of Spoonful, but unfortunately also a seriously long version of Toad, which did not exactly thrill me, but at the price I would pay for the record, I was prepared to overlook the endless drum solo. As it turned out, I really only listened to the one side of the album. Toad was too tedious and Traintime also did not fire me up. I did not play this album all that much.

The last Cream vinyl I bought was, aptly, Goodbye, the final album in the studio canon, though half of it consisted of live tracks. If memory serves, I bought it on sale when the Stellenbosch branch of Ragtime records closed down and sold off its stock. The live cuts were the most interesting tracks, apart from Badge, the single from the album that I already knew from the Best of ... set, and then there were the baroque, psychedelic studio tunes that sounded like outtakes from Wheels of Fire, and did not advance the Cream cause all that much.

And that was where I left off with Cream until I started buying CD's and duplicated a portion of my record collection.

The first Cream album I duplicated was Disraeli Gears, bought at the independent record shop Outlaw Records in Hout Street, Cape Town. The digital version of a well-beloved LP was a revelation all over again. The remastering gave a much improved stereo effect with cleaner sound, devoid of the crackles and pops of the vinyl, and allowed me to luxuriate even more than previously in the amazing playing of the three principals. Even better: each time I played the album the quality was the same as on the previous occasion; there was no deterioration. I fell in love with Disraeli Gears all over again.

My cousin Minnette is an air hostess for the South African Airways and about 1992 she started flying overseas and later that year, or perhaps early in 1993 she asked me to give her a list of CD's I wanted but could not find in South Africa. My list included Going Blank Again, the then latest album by the contemporary "shoegazing" style band Ride, Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti, and Fresh Cream. The other albums I could probably have found locally but Fresh Cream was elusive, being neither contemporary nor particularly legendary. Led Zeppelin's back catalogue is probably a perennial money-spinner but the debut album from Cream would nowadays be a relative obscurity.

Anyhow, Minnette brought back the three albums I've mentioned, of which Fresh Cream was the most welcome and ultimately the most played. I knew most of the tracks already, but the exciting newbies were the studio versions of Sweet Wine and Cat's Squirrel. Sweet Wine I knew from the lengthy live version on Cream's Cream but I had never heard Cat's Squirrel before. The nice thing about the CD is that it included Wrapping Paper and The Coffee Song, which weren't on the original record.

In about May 1993 there was a burglary at my flat and the thieves stole my amplifier, CD player and half of my CD collection, including the Disraeli Gears CD and fortunately left behind Fresh Cream. At the time my CD collection was so small, perhaps 100 albums, that I could keep the whole lot of them in two shoeboxes. For some unexplained reason the thieves took only the one shoebox. My collection was decimated and my heart ripped out to the extent where I had nightmares about the loss for years and years afterwards.

Fortunately it was not too difficult to rebuild the core of the lost collection, included buying another copy of Disraeli Gears. In quick succession I bought a budget album called Sunshine of Your Love, which is was just the second half of Cream's Cream and on the Internet CD track database the album was fortuitously listed as Live Cream II, and Live Cream, and Goodbye. In short order I rebuilt my Cream collection in the digital medium.

In around 2002 I came across The Best of Cream CD in a Cash Converters shop in Wynberg. This CD was more or less the equivalent of The Best of .. vinyl album I'd bought so many years before, and was a tad superfluous since I owned most of the albums from which the tracks had been drawn. I bought the CD because the completist urge collectors have.

Around that time I read about a new double CD compilation called Cream at the BBC, part of an extended series of similar named releases by a number of famous Sixties and Seventies bands. The review said that the album consisted of nothing more spectacular than versions of Cream favourites recorded for various BBC sessions during the band's heyday in accordance with accepted BBC practice at the time and that the versions were not particularly different or more interesting than the studio versions as these songs were not in the form of the extended "blows" for which Cream had become famous. If you owned the studio albums, you pretty much had similar but better versions of the BBC tracks.

So, when I saw the Cream at the BBC album in HMV in Oxford Street, London, in 2005 I passed it by as not being good enough value for money for a South African shopping in England at a time when a British Pound cost a cool ten South African Rand. These days I regret my failure to splurge out. After all, if one is truly a fanatic, such an album must be in the collection.

However, during the same overseas trip I finally again came across the CD version of Wheels of Fire, for a more competitive price than the BBC session, and I promptly bought it. Now I owned CD versions of the entire official Cream catalogue, latter day compilations excluded, and could die in peace. The previously unheard studio tracks were a bit of a mixed bag for me. Of course White Room and Born Under a Bad Sign were well-known, but Politician and especially Deserted Cities of the Heart were revelations, more so because they were much more subtle and intricate ( Politician had such incredible overdubbed guitar parts) than the hard charging live versions I loved so well. The other psychedelic pop type songs were improved variants on the Disraeli Gears' blueprint, with the added extra of Felix Pappalardi, but on the whole were less satisfying than the earlier album, perhaps because so much of it sounded too much like trickery for its own sake, without depth or even anything particularly interesting in the lyrics, tunes or playing and I guess it is telling that these tunes have never become Cream standards.

In 2005 I ventured into a different media for another fix for my Cream addiction. I bought the DVD version of the November 1968 Cream farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall, something I'd always thought would be beyond my experience. Yet not only did this DVD contain the original 59 minutes long version broadcast by the BBC, it has an extended version of the concert footage, with extremely plummy and pukka voice over and archive interview footage with the three band members. This was exciting stuff indeed but also quite flawed in that the Tony Palmer documentary is shot in the typical experimental and avant garde style of the time, where the viewer is forced to watch Ginger Baker flailing away while Eric Clapton is playing a blistering solo. We see lots of Jack Bruce's face in close-up, or Ginger Baker bashing away, and lots of shots of the back of Clapton's shirt, but very little of him playing. This makes for very frustrating viewing, and after maybe two screenings, I resorted to treating the DVD as a live album playing in the background when I do other things. Watching the damn thing was just too frustrating.

The interview snippets are probably the best visual material on the DVD as they give a bit of insight into the workings of the musicians' minds and a good glimpse into what was fashionable to wear in about 1967 when the interview inserts were filmed, if the hairstyles are anything to go by. Clapton tells and demonstrates how achieves his celebrated "woman tone" and demonstrates licks. Baker informs us quite nonchalantly that he no longer practices his drumming technique and shows us a few of his tricks. Bruce simply gets mystical and ethereal about what he does without demonstrating too much bass guitar technique.

The best use of the Cream Farewell Concert DVD is to contrast the performances on it with that of the reunited band's Royal Albert Hall gigs in May 2005. Of course the band members were in their 20's back in the later Sixties, full of energy and attack, and the performances crackle with the vigour of a band at the top of its game, a group that is breaking up only because the individuals not longer see eye to eye on various matters, are tired of incessant touring and would rather go out at the top than keep on milking it for it's worth for as long as they can.

In 2005 the three guys are older, more staid, less adventurous and obviously no longer have the strength or stamina to stretch out for as long as they did back in 1967 or 1968. this is understandable from a Jack Bruce who had been sickly for a long time, or Ginger Baker who was already in his mid-sixties, but Eric Clapton is the major disappointment for me. The main problem is that his playing style has changed so radically over the years, from the blazing, hard-charging, sustaining and feedback inflected Les Paul style to the Seventies laid-back Fender Stratocaster style where every solo is a blues solo, and even if it almost hurts me to say so, the solos on the CD or DVD of the 2005 concerts are invariably technically excellent but not very interesting. The solos actually detract form the tunes, they are unnecessary breaks in the action that do little to enhance the tune or the performance. I did not expect Cream 2005 to sound exactly like Cream 1968, or that they should soullessly replicate the old live versions of their best loved tunes, but I did expect more fire and brio, more life. The three guys clearly enjoyed themselves on stage in 2005, and made a ton of money for such a keenly anticipated reunion, but bring nothing of value to their back catalogue. Cream sounds different but different is not necessarily good. They do play tunes that were never or seldom performed live back in the day, but this is almost little more than novelty for its own sake when you can't bring those songs to life.

I was very keen on acquiring the CD and DVD of the 2005 Royal Albert Hall concerts but quickly realised that I would not be watching or listening to them all that much. In fact, the last time I truly listened to the tunes was on a walk on a West Coast trail. I'd downloaded the tracks on first CD of the double set onto my cellphone and tried to mitigate the tediousness of a section of the trail by listening to Cream while I trudged along on the soft beach sand in the heat of the day, wondering how soon I would be able to down an ice cold Windhoek Lager. The music helped some but I could not help but wishing I were listening to Disraeli Gears or Fresh Cream instead.

Sometimes one's heroes should remain the faded old archived legends they were when you first heard of them and investigated them. The Cream of 1967 was well nigh perfect. By 2005 the Cream had gone sour.

 

 

 

 

 

Rodriguez Just Won’t Die

A 55 year old Hispanic man in sleeveless tank top and dark glasses has an exchange with some Black labourers holding spades, in what seems to be the grounds of an institutional building; in an attempt to find some common ground he tells them that he too works with a spade back home. They stare at him with incomprehension because they have no clue who this man is and why a video crew are filming this silly scene. The Hispanic man is one Sixto Rodriguez, a former musician who gave up trying to make a living from his music way back in the Seventies when his native country more or less ignored him and the few albums he'd released there. Rodriguez (he is known just by his surname) is being filmed for a TV documentary of his first ever concert tour of South Africa in March 1998. In the Southern Hemisphere he is a cult figure of truly mythical proportions and his Seventies albums Cold Fact and After The Fact remain in print here and are easily found in almost any record store while elsewhere in the world his name means nothing.

 

There were two spin-offs from the tour. Firstly there was a concert recording souvenir of the tour, a CD ingeniously titled Live Fact, probably the first Rodriguez release anywhere in the world since the mid-Seventies. Secondly there was a made for TV documentary called 'Dead Men Don't Tour' that was shown on SABC3 on Thursday 5 July 2001

 

There were other township scenes in the documentary. Rodriguez was obviously given the standard tour of the real South Africa, the people on whose side he would have been back in the Seventies. All good and well, but it comes across as the cliché of the well-meaning foreigner coming into the country for a brief visit and insisting on seeing the squalor with which he identifies so that he can go back home feeling a great solidarity with the people whereas the people feel no solidarity with this man at all.

 

Fair enough, Rodriguez is entitled to see the conditions of the people whose struggle for freedom from oppression he probably fervently supported in his younger days when he had a brief music career in the early Seventies as a post-hippie, Dylanesque singer-songwriter with a couple of albums to his credit, none of which made a dent in the consciousness or wallets of the great American rock audience. Rodriguez lost his recording contract and as a conscientious man with a wife and chidden to support he packed away his rock star dreams along with his guitar and took up a blue collar job where he languished in obscurity for the next twenty five years or so, not even an entry in Rock Encyclopedias of the time much less current ones. He was just another talented musician who found that mere talent was not enough to give him the career success so many of his contemporaries enjoyed.

 

In the late Nineties in South Africa there was Craig Bartholomew a chubby, balding journalist and obsessive Rodriguez fan who made it his Herculean mission to track down an obscure, local cult musician of whom most rumours suggest that he was long dead. He managed to make contact with the cult object through the local record company who were still paying royalties to one of their perennial good little earners and eventually he obtained a phone number and phoned the very much alive cult figure who, not unnaturally, was totally incredulous that there was someone out there, for that matter a whole bunch of white rock fans in Africa, who was still interested in him and his music. One thing led seamlessly to another and a South African tour was set up for the legend who apparently was so far removed from the music business that he no longer owned a guitar. The promoter of the tour bought Rodriguez a new ax as a gesture of good faith and also brought his wife and two daughters to South Africa to keep him company.

 

The tour took in the major urban centres and everywhere Rodriguez played he was welcomed like a god returned to his people after a long absence. He filled 4000 seater venues (self-deprecatingly he tells us that he expected to play to audiences of about 800 or so; maybe that was the size of the largest audience he ever played to in his professional career) and received tumultuous, joyous ovations from rapturous audiences, a great many of whom are shown happily singing along to the famous tunes that are, to be sure, his greatest hits.

 

The documentary is full of little camera tricks probably informed by the digital age but mostly it is in the standard format of concert footage at various shows interspersed with interview clips, soundbites of musicians and other people involved in the project and soundbites of (mostly) young fans at the gigs telling us what a groovy legend old Rodriguez is.

 

The legendary thing is that he is a major cult figure in South Africa and his only other markets were Rhodesia (as it then was), Australia and New Zealand. In these countries he sold a fair wack of records back in the Seventies, and presumably still does, seeing as how both his albums are still in print here (there is this semi-apocryphal story of the CD pressing factory somewhere in Europe that only presses Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon and one might almost think that there is a CD pressing plant in South Africa that does nothing but press Rodriguez CD's for the market in the Southern Hemisphere) but in his native country he meant and means zip, diddley squat.

 

Why this is so is obviously a mystery. Cold Fact, the major player of the two albums, is a small gem of post-psychedelic folk rock with interesting lyrics and great tunes, tunes that one can easily sing along to or hum in the shower. A great pop album. My theory to explain the success over here has to do with the forbidden nature of the two most popular tracks, "Sugar Man" and "I Wonder." The first is unambiguously a drug song and the second asks "how many times have
you had sex?" They have great tunes and in a just parallel universe ought to have received a lot of air play but back in the Seventies South Africa was a very repressed society and the airwaves was controlled by the SABC which in turn was controlled by men who saw themselves as solemn guardians of the nation's morals and politics and they would rather have died than allow songs as these two songs to be played on the airwaves. One can easily understand how such a "ban" (rather typical of the way the SABC music programmers operated) could have led to the album achieving underground notoriety and hence popular success: the SABC could not stop you from playing the album on your hi-fi.

 

It is one of the glaring omissions in the TV documentary that we are never told how many copies Cold Fact have sold in South Africa to date or indeed how many copies it is still selling annually. Indeed, there is very little biographical material; his wife tells us what a wonderful guy he is and there are glowing testimonials from local fans and musicians alike but we are not told when he started his career, how many albums he released and when he actually gave it up and why. Possibly the makers of the documentary were determined to preserve of the mystery and obscurity; the myth grew despite the lack of biographical detail, so they may have conspired not to diminish it with petty facts.

 

Rodriguez is strictly a white South African secret delight. He means absolutely nothing in the local Black market (then or now) and it was white people who attended the concerts. By all accounts Rodriguez is a man with a social and political conscience -- the songs tell us this, he tells us and his wife tells us – and this is why he would never have toured South Africa in support of a newly released Cold Fact. At the time this country was firmly and seemingly forever in the grip of apartheid and a paranoid government that would barely have allowed him in much less allowed him to play to racially mixed audiences as he would have demanded even though his local fan base has always been exclusively White.

 

From the video footage it seems that the concert tour was a financial and emotional success, although probably not on a Rolling Stones kind of scale. The venues seem to have been filled to the brim with hugely enthusiastic, substantially young audiences who thoroughly enjoyed themselves, sang along to the well-known tunes and gave Rodriguez tumultuous welcomes wherever he appeared. He must truly have felt like a long lost hero making a triumphant return to the scenes of old success; there was a lot of love in the rooms he played.

 

Unfortunately, if the video clips are evidence of the general and overall nature of his performances, Rodriguez had lost whatever passion and fire as a performer he might once have had. One can understand that he was forced to rely on lyric sheets for songs he had not played for more than two decades but even so he could have put more passion into his singing. In all the clips the vocal performances lack power, for all the world he sings like someo9ne who has been singing the same old hits so often that he has completely lost interest in them, he is trotting them out one more time to fulfill a contract. I would have expected him to be more joyful in his singing, happy and enthusiastic to be singing long lost songs that he probably thought he would again have the opportunity of singing for any kind of audience much less a large and adoring one. Before the TV show I was considering buying the Live Fact album but now I'll stick with the studio albums; what is the use of putting out a live album that will do nothing but tarnish the image? It is perhaps a nice souvenir if you were there but if not, stick with the tried and tested studio versions and the bubble will never burst.

Revisionism In Afrikaans Rock History

ANTON GOOSEN, DAVID KRAMER, JOHANNES KERKORREL

& KOOS KOMBUIS

On Saturday 13 April 2002 Die Burger published a letter from Johannes Kerkorrel in which he complains about being written out of the "new" history of Afrikaans rock by the likes of Dirk Uys (the notorious Dagga-Dirk of the Voëlvry days) who apparently dares to suggest, in a kind of revisionist orthodoxy, that the likes of Anton Goosen (whose music Kerkorrel condescendingly describes as a combination of boeremusiek and folk,) is the father of Afrikaans rock. Kerkorrel self-deprecatingly says he does not want to claim that he is the Father of Afrikaans Rock but takes exception to the Gereformeerde Blues Band (GBB) being written out of this history.

I do not know what made Kerkorrel write this letter but presumably it must be a retort to something Dirk Uys had said or written, and perhaps due to lack of any GBB tracks on the Vloek Van Die Kitaar (Trippy Grape, 2002) album compiled by Uys as a definitive history of Afrikaans rock, and this smacks of old friends (or comrades in arms) falling out, seeing as how Kerkorrel and Uys were both part, and prime movers, of the same "alternative Afrikaner" movement of the late Eighties and early Nineties, before the big political change-over of 1994. Dirk Uys takes pride in having been asked to compile the Voëlvry album released ahead of the GBB's tour of the same name in 1989, and was then likewise instrumental in conceptualising and compiling Die Vloek Van Die Kitaar.
Voëlvry was meant to be the evidence, such as it was, of an emergent, new, alternative Afrikaans rock sound whereas Vloek Van die Kitaar is meant to serve as a more historical overview of Afrikaans rock. In each case Dirk Uys is the man who is responsible for the decision of what fits the definitions of "alternative" and "Afrikaans rock" and he therefore gets to write the official history.

The GBB had two tracks on Voëlvry; they have none on Vloek Van die
Kitaar and this could be what annoys Kerkorrel. Anton Goosen did not feature on Voëlvry at all because he was at that time definitely not alternative (and not on Shifty Records), but there could have been licensing problems too.

At the time there was a big buzz around the GBB as the first truly Afrikaans rock band and there was big talk of a new movement of "alternative" or "new" Afrikaners that were coming out of the woodwork and standing up to be counted, as adversaries of the old political regime and closer in spirit and cultural inclinations to their English-speaking compatriots than to the old guard Nationalists. The awakening was both political and cultural. On the cultural side the alternative Afrikaners were proud to be Afrikaners but were determined to prove that not all Afrikaners were hide-bound, backward, reactionary, racist, Dutch reformed Church-going Nationalists. Somehow Afrikaans was back as a hip language of political and cultural dissent; these young people were determined to obliterate the stigma Afrikaans carried as "the language of the oppressor" and to show that they not only identified with the oppressed but that in a strange way they themselves were also being oppressed by the very same reactionary forces that were oppressing their Black countrymen.

Thus the Voëlvry tour of 1989 was somehow seen as something more than the simple promotional and marketing exercise such enterprises usually are, particularly once the various university and Technikon authorities on whose campuses concerts were scheduled had banned these concerts from their campuses. The concerts were simply rescheduled for venues outside the campuses and although the tour was apparently financially disastrous until the two sell-out concerts in Stellenbosch and Cape Town, the bannings did nothing to halt the tour and, as is almost always the case, the resultant publicity gave the whole enterprise more publicity than it could have bought and was responsible for turning Voëlvry from a fairly commonplace promotional event into a crusade of "us versus them" proportions to give the alternative Afrikaners an opportunity to flip the bird to the Afrikaner establishment that was slowly but surely losing its grip on the reins of this country.

The Voëlvry album was released in 1988 ahead of the whole Voëlvry phenomenon of the next year and was ostensibly a record of alternative Afrikaans music current at the time. I guess there could have been that kind of hype at the time and maybe this hype has achieved semi-authentic status 14 years later but if one considers the case more carefully, there are a number of transparent flaws to that version of events. Simply put: Voëlvry is just a big put-on, little more than a cashing-in exercise by Shifty Records who must have known they were sitting on the biggest commercial success of their years in the business of putting out "alternative music" in South Africa. It was only with the whole GBB thing that commercial appeal entered the Shifty catalogue, up to then full of worthy acts of strictly limited appeal. With GBB Shifty could tap a huge commercial base of potential customers and Voëlvry was intended as the perfect taster of that forthcoming commercial event and as a handy sampler of some Shifty acts who had otherwise been buried.

It is surely no coincidence that all the featured acts were Shifty recording artists anyway. One cannot imagine that any other Afrikaans musicians would have been deemed fitting anyway but the omission of Anton Goosen and David Kramer left some gaps even if they were more mainstream than the other acts.

The biggest shuck of the enterprise is to present it as somehow representative of an Afrikaans rock movement. Only the GBB and Randy Rambo ever released completely Afrikaans albums. Khaki Monitor, The Kêrels, and The Genuines were represented by about the sole Afrikaans song each had recorded. The guys in The Kêrels might have been Afrikaans-speaking (and its guitarist became the bass player for GBB) but their Ek Se album from which "Slang" their Voëlvry track was lifted, contains only that one Afrikaans song and as such they could hardly be called an Afrikaans rock act. The same applies to Khaki Monitor, and how on earth The Genuines could ever have been included in a sampler "alternative Afrikaans" music is beyond me and I'm sure beyond them. This alone shows the cynical nature of the compilation: take a bunch of atypical Afrikaans songs from a motley collection of Shifty artists, put them together out of context and voila! you have perpetrated the fraud of creating a spurious "alternative Afrikaans music" movement.

Andre Le Toit (as he then was) also has two tracks from his fully Afrikaans cassette tape album but this is hardly rock, being simply Le Toit strumming his accoustic guitar and singing his indubitably well-crafted lyrics in a throw-away manner befitting the demo recordings the album allegedly contains.

I guess it's not only true that the victors write history but also that the people who write history actually determine history by what they choose to include, how they slant the reference and by what they choose to leave out. Everything one says can be true while the overall truth, the complete picture, is distorted because unpalatable or unsuitable truths have been ignored.

So, Dirk Uys was responsible for putting us all on with the Voëlvry compilation and now he possibly seeks to do the same by presenting to us his view of how things were, and are, through Die Vloek Van Die Kitaar. Between then and now he apparently decided that he should have a more respectable sounding name and no longer wants to be known as "Dagga-Dirk." He was heavily involved with the now-defunct Trippy Grape label based in Stellenbosch and currently runs Boereplaas Plate, a label that (for now) seems to concentrate on Afrikaans rock music where Trippy Grape did not have a language policy but was mostly a base for rock bands from Stellenbosch. I guess "Boereplaas" is somehow ironic unless Uys truly identifies with the Afrikaner's rural heritage, somewhat like Andre Le Toit's "Boer In Beton."

If I understand Uys correctly he wants to have a wider definition of Afrikaans rock than the single signifier of language and he is happy to include acts that contain only or predominantly Afrikaans-speaking musicians. By this definition the Springbok Nude Girls would qualify; the band formed in Stellenbosch, the members are Afrikaans and they've recorded at least one Afrikaans song ("Pappa Ek Wil 'n Popster Word" on the Wingerd Rock 1 compilation on Trippy Grape, compiled by Dirk Uys, natch.) That the band's oeuvre is 99% English is neither here nor there if Uys can make the facts fit his theory and version of Afrikaans rock history.

Now Kerkorrel feels he has been written out of that history. If he has no longer been given any place in it, then he has a right to complain because he deserves a place as much as does Anton Goosen or Andre Le Toit/Koos Kombuis or David Kramer, or even a number of earlier Afrikaans singers who presently do not really seem to feature all that much, either because they were not "rock" acts and/or because their music fitted in the standard middle-of-the-road AOR pop sounds prevalent in Afrikaans music.

The thing is that Kerkorrel is not truly a rock artist unless one stretches the definition to the degree where many presently excluded Afrikaans artistes from an earlier era would also fall within that ambit, but maybe a major reason for his inclusion is that he was supposedly an alternative act in the late Eighties, part of the hip, young Afrikaans-speaking crowd who were challenging the Old Guard of Afrikaner orthodoxy. That is: Kerkorrel is seen as part of the Afrikaans rock movement not purely because he played rock'n'roll but because he belonged with the rock'n'roll crowd, or derived his initial popular boost from it, though not actually subscribing to all its tenets.

One genesis of the alternative Afrikaans movement, or at least the moment when it stuck its head above ground and found not only that its head wasn't summarily blown off but that there was actually a huge groundswell of interest and support, was the "Piekniek By Dingaan" stage show that was such a hit that it toured the country to great popular acclaim as the harbinger of a brand new day in Afrikaner culture. The show was a collaboration between Kerkorrel, Andre Le Toit and, if I'm not mistaken, Dagga-Dirk Uys, and took the form of a revue with sketches, speeches and songs with backing provided by a rock band of sorts. Kerkorrel' songs from the revue came part of his repertoire with GBB and Le Toit's songs likewise became part of his repertoire. So, Kerkorrel subsequently put together the Gereformeerde Blues Band and adopted the role of frontman of a rock'n'roll group.

This renaissance in Afrikaner culture had its origin the multi-cultural melting pot that was, and is, Johannesburg and in particular Hillbrow which had always been a haven for weird bohemians, whereas the more "trendy" middle class Afrikaners with cultural pretensions who were dictating the agenda through their positions on semi-State Afrikaner cultural organisations and the media, lived elsewhere either in suburbia or amongst others of their kind in newly gentrified inner city residential areas just outside the CBD. Hillbrow, on the other hand, was there the down-and-outs and the hanging-on-by-the-skin-of-their-teeth came together. It was a place of cheap rents and cheap thrills and mythically regarded as the Sodom-and-Gomorra of South Africa. Andre Le Toit lived here while he was still immersed in his literary career - poet and novelist - and it was during this sojourn that he became acquainted with the Shifty Records crowd, as well as with the young Afrikaans journalist Ralph Rabie. I believe Le Toit and Dagga-Dirk and/or Rabie shared a flat in Hillbrow. Le Toit was a fairly well established bohemian presence on the alternative Afrikaans scene whereas Rabie was the aspiring young pretender and had respectable employment on the staff of Beeld, the Afrikaans daily in the Transvaal area. Beeld was seen as a liberal newspaper, in the Afrikaner context of course, slowly but surely shifting the Afrikaner political and cultural goalposts. Even so, when Rabie embarked on his show-biz career he thought it wiser and more intriguing to adopt a nom de stage and named himself after a church pipe organ manufacturer, ergo Johannes Kerkorrel.

The GBB became popular in Pretoria and the Witwatersrand, among trendy young Afrikaners and then more generally, with a mixture of rock'n'roll songs and cabaret-styled "serious" songs, and eventually landed up with the Shifty Records album Eet Kreef, the second Afrikaans release on the label after the Andre Le Toit Daar Ver Van Die Ou Kalahari tape, but the first full-on vinyl release, mentioned above.
Eet Kreef was Shifty's first serious chance of making serious money off a record release, hence the Voëlvry album and tour.

My very first GBB experience was exhilarating and it was in no small part due to the heady expectations that had been built up in the press, through the Voëlvry album and the news of all the campus bannings, and the exuberant crowd at the Drie Geuwels Hotel venue where the Stellenbosch concert, the first of the two Cape concerts and the penultimate show of the tour, was to take place after the authorities at Stellenbosch University, in line with their Northern counterparts, refused permission for the concert to proceed in a campus venue. The result, as it could have been expected, was the opposite of shutting out the movement or dampening its spirits; the feeling of being part of an anti-Establishment gesture (or possibly crusade, if one was optimistic enough) was empowering and heady. Andre Le Toit played an excellent accoustic set accompanied by a beatbox and the GBB came on stage to a great roar of approval and proceeded to take over Stellenbosch for the night. My critical senses were dulled and objective judgement held in abeyance.

I had been to a couple of Le Toit's solo performances and found them rather tedious; he strummed his guitar and sang in an off-hand way, the performance was not even interesting because of any quirks in phrasing or because he had a "bad" singing voice or anything that could have sustained interest over a whole show. The guitar playing was pretty basic and to my mind the only reason for Le Toit's success was his amazing rapport with his audience who quite clearly loved him for the eccentric hobo Casanova literary figure he aspired, or pretended, to be. Le Toit went down a storm live because he was one with the audience, not because he was as such a great performer; it was generally too folksy and homey for me. Dare I say it, too Boerevolk. Anyhow, the Drie Geuwels gig was a huge improvement mostly because of the added point of interest of the beatbox to relieve the tedium of the lackadaisical guitar playing, and Le Toit was obviously high, whether on intoxicants or the atmosphere or both, and delivered a more enthusiastic performance than usual.

The GBB motored through a slickly paced show where each song segued into the next, alternating the rock'n'roll type songs with the more reflective cabaret type tunes. "Rock'n'Roll Ossewa" was the GBB's radio hit off Eet Kreef but their show was more like a rock'n'roll Ford Escort XR3 (to fully contextualise it within South Africa) and came across as powerful and moving, especially with the big ballads where Kerkorrel delivered his social comment.

The last show of the tour was at the Three Arts Theatre in Cape Town and this crowd, many of whom, like me, had also been at the Drie Geuwels, was as large and as enthusiastic as at Stellenbosch but for me the show was an anti-climax. Firstly, a somewhat tired and emotional Le Toit gave his customary off-hand performance (sans beatbox) where he clearly counting on his reputation and "witty" banter to carry him through the half an hour he was on stage which was less of a performance than a mere diversion, the filling up of empty time until show time.

The GBB's show was worse. It was exactly the same show as at Drie Geuwels, not merely the same songs in the same order but also the same "ad libs" and exhortations from Kerkorrel and I realised that I was not truly watching a rock show, no, it was simply cabaret on a large scale with rock trappings, like a revised, tightened up version of "Piekniek By Dingaan." The whole enterprise was slick and powerful because it had been carefully scripted, staged and rehearsed and not because of any inherent strengths in the music or lyrics. It was a giant put-on in the guise of some kind of alternative, new Afrikaans cultural thing. It was in truth only alternative in the sense that it was different, and opposed to, what had gone before as the acceptable Afrikaans cultural experience but we were talking merely of a difference in degree not a complete sea change. The crowd might have believed that a totally new future was ahead but the Kerkorrel experience was going to end up as yet another orthodoxy, yet another Establishment to displace the old Establishment simply through effluxion of time. GBB returned to the Three Arts in early 1990 and this show confirmed my view of the year before. It was the same show and had by now completely lost its lustre and exciting aspects. In any event no big new movement had materialised; in the Cape there was only the Valiant Swart Band to represent an Afrikaans rock "movement."

Kerkorrel must have realised that the sell by date of his "rock'n'roll cabaret" had been reached and disbanded the GBB shortly afterwards and has since then followed a solo career more openly and honestly flying the "cabaret" banner and in general becoming part of the light popular musical scene in South Africa, releasing both Afrikaans and English material in the good, old-fashioned tradition of the all-round entertainer.

Andre Le Toit changed his stage name to Koos Kombuis, left behind his literary career and devoted himself full-time to being a more proper, alternative Afrikaans rocker, with regular album releases, alternating electric and accoustic music, Afrikaans and English songs. His Cape Town gigs in support of the Niemandsland… & Beyond album, his first vinyl release, were proper rock concerts, backed by elements of the Shifty mafia, including James Phillips on guitar, and with Koos dressing in "ethnic" garb and sporting a dreadlocks wig. The format recharged, or energised, the Kombuis stage manner and the gigs were genuinely exciting and entertaining -- the only fault I could find was that his new English songs were not nearly as good as the Afrikaans songs, they simply did not ring true.

Valiant Swart had a four piece country rock styled band with chugging rhythms and fierce lead guitar and was truly exciting for the first year or so, even though the nightly set closer of "Die Mystic Boer" quickly became tedious since the song actually promised more than it delivered, the epic approach Swart was striving for fell flat and the performance of the song was just this long, drawn-out coda that left one wishing he would stop soon, maybe ending the set with a short, sharp rocker. The Valiant Swart experience eventually became as tedious as "Die Mystic Boer" because the set list was unvarying and at gigs I started to get the impression that the musicians were just going through the motions. At first they had seemed fired up by the feeling, or assumption, that they and the audience were all part of this wonderful new breakthrough in Afrikaans popular music but by year's end they had levelled out to a cult audience, the mass breakthrough never materialised, and playing gigs became less of a joint celebration with the audience than just another job. Gigging became a grind and this sense of failure communicated itself to me to the extent that I ceased following the band. This loss of interest was perhaps to my loss entirely because Valiant Swart maintained a musical career, through the release of a number of CD albums and even most recently a retrospective compilation, and has become a senior statesman of Afrikaans rock in his own right, taking up his place on a stage where once Koos Kombuis sat alone.

All these developments show that the "alternatives" of 1990 have now become the mainstream Establishment. A recent publicity photograph of Koos Kombuis (who has been honoured not only by the release of two concurrent "best of" compilations but also a "tribute" album, probably a historic first) shows him with white hair and small beard, and it could have been a photograph of a typical Afrikaner intellectual/literary type of the Forties or Fifties. That is, Koos Kombuis has left his "boemelaar" days behind, has achieved respectability and now even resembles the very people he was supposed to have been rebelling against twelve years ago. As always, the circle comes around and the new boss is the same as the old boss.

In any kind of culture there is a perpetual cycle of renewal, degeneration, stasis, change and renewal and the Afrikaans music scene is no different. Sonja Herholdt was a fresh, new young voice and cute face in mainstream light popular music in the mid-Seventies, and became famous with the songs of Jan de Wet and Anton Goosen who himself became a recording artist in the late Seventies, hitting big with "Kruidjie-Roer-My-Nie", probably the first slice of traditional-sounding boeremusiek to reach our pop charts and in a way it was so audaciously different to the run-of-the-mill Afrikaans pop that its apparent reactionary sound was almost avant garde in the "hip to be square" vein. It has taken more than twenty years for that kind of sound to creep back into South African rock or pop. Goosen aimed at mainstream, across the board appeal and slowly but surely innovated his sound to aspire to increasing sophistication and by the Jors Troelie album had managed to create a kind of Afrikaans rock that attempted to straddle the divide between the mainstream and the cult audience.

Goosen's heyday was contemporaneous with another new "movement" based around the "Musiek & Liriek" programme on SABC TV, conceived and directed by Merwede van der Merwe and featuring a new generation of Afrikaans folk music artists with higher cultural aspirations and pretensions than the simplistic mainstream light popular music of, for example, Sonja Herholdt. The recurring visual image is of an earnest young soul, male or female, hunched over an accoustic guitar, singing the words of a poem set to music, either by themselves or by a "proper" classically trained musician. As such then "Musiek & Liriek" aimed to bring high art -- modern Afrikaner culture -- to the masses via the popular medium of television. The programme made stars, if only fleetingly, of a number of young artistes, though some of them had already made a mark before their televised appearances.

Koos du Plessis had written "Kinders Van Die Wind" which became the theme tune of a popular Afrikaans TV drama series, as sung by Laurika Rauch. The song became a huge hit for her and made her famous and gave Du Plessis the opportunity to record a couple of albums of his rather lachrymose songs. These albums were heavy going; songs to listen to alone at home in the dark but not when you were suicidally depressed because you might just end up offing yourself. Perhaps appositely, Koos du Plessis died relatively young while he was still mostly a cult success. Laurika Rauch made the most of the opportunity presented by TV stardom and made sure that she sang in a variety of styles to suit all tastes and ages. Once again mainstream success was the goal for a long term career in popular entertainment.

Musiek & Liriek became a kind of short hand reference for a time and place in Afrikaner cultural history. A movement was postulated and received a fair amount of coverage in the cultural pages of the Afrikaans newspapers where intellectuals were all a-tizz at this renewal and the assumption that Afrikaans music had at last managed to break away from the down-market light popular music dead-end that had been the major characteristic of Afrikaans popular culture. The idea was that intelligence, taste and art would replace the lowest common denominator approach favoured by commercial interests who were happy to appeal to the Afrikaner lower middle classes with white washed and painfully sentimentalised versions of Country music. As it turned out Musiek & Liriek was just a movement for the benefit of those who punted it to further their own pet agendas. The artists who rose to prominence under its umbrella had some acclaim and popular success for a brief while but very few have managed to sustain anything like a proper career out of it and as a reaction to the hype that surrounded the "movement" at the time, it is now derided as yet another attempt by the Old Guard Establishment to hi-jack Afrikaner culture for its own sinister purposes and to co-opt Afrikaner artistes to serve as window dressing for a rotting facade.

The commercial exploitation of Musiek & Liriek included at least two concerts at the Oude Libertas Amphitheatre outside Stellenbosch over successive summer seasons. Laurika Rauch played at least one of these concerts, as did Jannie du Toit, as well as Clarabelle van Niekerk who was the only Musiek & Liriek alumnus to lead a group, known as Clari, of musicians including bass, drums and cello, and was therefore the only performer who deviated from the folky accoustic "house style" with some pounding, Afrocentric rhythms that put her ahead of her fellow musicians in the eventual rush for the recognition of the African roots of White Afrikaners. The others were still firmly bound to their Eurocentric Afrikaans traditions. As a bonus Clari's music was a great deal more exciting than the others.

Somehow Anton Goosen, playing a National steel (resonator) guitar and backed by a pianist ("my band"), also played a show under a Musiek & Liriek banner though he had not been part of the TV programme. I guess this was simply an astute commercial decision on the part of the promoter of the concerts since Goosen was at the height of his general popular success and would draw a crowd. Indeed, unlike his more serious counterparts, Goosen delivered a tuneful, entertaining show with little regard for the high art pretensions of the original Musiek & Liriek "movement."

For a while there seemed to be more Afrikaans troubadours on TV (I never listened to Afrikaans radio so I would not know whether these people also got lots of airplay but I guess they might well have, seeing as how they were approved by the Establishment who decided these things) and it almost seemed feasible that a new generation of Afrikaans musicians were about to take over from the mainstream light popular music types but nothing like that ever happened. The leading lights of the "movement" were able to fashion careers out of the initial hype but the lesser figures soon faded into obscurity and middle-brow Afrikaans light popular music maintained its hold with the arrival of a new wave of Afrikaans country music artists like Cora Marie and Cupido who reached out to the Afrikaner heartland and appealed to the family audiences that had always been the mainstay of the Afrikaans popular entertainer.

This was a lesson soon learned by David Kramer who had the benefit of having feet in both camps having grown up as an English-speaking person in the predominantly Afrikaans-speaking Worcester. Kramer became bilingual and was then able to write songs in either language. According to him it was while touring overseas that he came to the realisation that if he were to be true to himself as artist he should forget about the "overseas influence" in his song writing, looking to American or European role models, and to accept that he is a South African who should write about what he knows, that is, his homeland, its people and its peculiar and tragic situations. Kramer then wrote his first "South African" songs while he was still overseas. He developed a big reputation in the Cape Town area as a highly talented folk-based singer-songwriter and released the Bakgat! album on Mountain Records in 1980 as a mixture of Afrikaans and English songs, some backed by a small combo, telling stories of the Cape people, whether in Bellville, Worcester or Namakwaland. The tales are by turns funny and harrowing and although the album was quickly suppressed by the SABC's mainstream radio services it deservedly became a cult item and was in its way closer to the truths of the country than anything Anton Goosen had ever written.

In the way these things happen David Kramer's career path was at the bottom end of its sharply rising curve while Goosen was at the top of his but on the cusp of a decline. Kramer was obviously an accoustic guitar playing folkie where Goosen was a popular entertainer who could play solo concerts accompanying himself on guitar, possibly as a moneysaving device, but recorded with a complete studio group. Bakgat! was a folk album where Goosen's records were pop-rock (as Kerkorrel states: a mixture of boeremusiek and folk) although both were straightforward tunesmiths who are storytellers rather than confessional songwriters.

A number of Goosen's early songs, particularly the ones first (or only) recorded by Sonja Herholdt dealt with a mythical Cape of Good Hope that existed in Goosen's imagination, or the imagination of the writers he might have used as source material, the romanticised Cape of popular Afrikaans fiction. Later on he also wrote of the country closer to his home, the Northern parts of South Africa and of the lower middle classes of the Witwatersrand. Goosen created characters and situations and wrote songs about them, mostly funny but some quite serious although it was obvious that he did not write from biographical experience, not even the ostensibly sensitive, personal love songs. He is an out and out storyteller in the best Herman Charles Bosman tradition. The first time that one has the impression that he was expressing his own feelings are in a few tracks on the Liedjieboer (his own nickname) and Jors Troelie albums.

David Kramer is no more a confessional songwriter than Goosen but he adopted that particular type of storytelling somewhat later, when he started aiming more squarely art the Afrikaans market. The songs on Bakgat! are written and sung with more personal identification than as is usually the case with Goosen; to employ the theatrical differentiation one might say that Goosen merely sings about his characters, that is he acts them, whereas Kramer sings as if he is the characters, he appears to be them. Kramer then somehow comes across as being more authentic or serious than Goosen although, to be fair, even on Bakgat! there are songs that would fit on a Goosen album and during Kramer's populist phase he moved into Goosen territory wholesale but, having said that, one cannot conceive of anything like "Biscuits En Biltong" or, more specifically "Botteltjie Blou" on a Goosen album.

David Kramer is a more versatile songwriter than Anton Goosen for the simple reason that he writes in English and Afrikaans and can therefore appeal to almost two different audiences where Goosen has only the Afrikaans audience and this might also have something to with the way each got to the mainstream. Goosen aimed straight for it, the mass Afrikaans audience, and limited himself to that group, while Kramer started out as a folk-artist with bilingual appeal but as an "alternative" musician with virtually no appeal to the Afrikaans mass market or family audience. Once he'd pandered to his core audience Goosen slowly moved away by trying to broaden his musical palette and his show-biz ambitions to include starring in a movie, and then moved beyond his audience's expectations of and then lost the mass support. David Kramer stumbled onto that mass market through the fortuitous linking of his "Blokkies Joubert" song with the Springboks disastrous tour in New Zealand in 1981, and by writing a modern drinking song in "Die Royal Hotel" that resulted in his adoption by Afrikaners as a kind of mascot, the insanely grinning David Kramer with his trademark "rooi velskoene" chasing a Volksie Bus down Tierkloof Pass on his bicycle. David Kramer became an entertainment phenomenon the likes of which must have made Goosen turn green with envy.

It became so ridiculous that Goosen actually tried, or threatened to, take legal action against Kramer on the issue of exactly who owned the "trademark" to those "rooi velskoene." Kramer wore them and endorsed a line of shoes that were commercially available. Goosen claimed that the velskoene were his idea, had been part of his image long before Kramer came onto the scene and accused the latter of "stealing" his image. This whole episode had more than a whiff of sour grapes about it. As meteorically as Kramer's star was ascending, Goosen's was plummeting but in any event Goosen had never come close to the same kind of rapturous, universal acceptance by the "volk" nor had he made anything like the same amount of money. Goosen was never asked to advertise anything on TV, much less become an ubiquitous media presence.

Then again, where Goosen assuredly has a prominent place in the evolution of Afrikaans rock, Kramer's position in that evolution, if he has a place, is more contentious. If rock is an attitude as much as it is a musical style, then Bakgat! can be filed under rock but what of the Afrikaans popular songs that he write and recorded in his mid-Eighties heyday? The songs might have been more cleverly written than, say, anything by Cupido or Francois Hayes or, for that matter, Worsie Visser, but if they admit Kramer to the Afrikaans rock world, then so should all those other Afrikaans popular entertainers who would otherwise not have been considered as being rock acts, nor would they have seen themselves as such.

Kramer started out as a folkie but must have had ambitions beyond that limited musical playground. The mission was to make a proper career out of being an entertainer and when the opportunity arose he grasped it with both hands and exploited it to the hilt. This ruthless exploitation of his commercial success enabled Kramer to step off that treadmill, to move off that highway, onto the comparatively narrow, perilous path of collaborating in writing a stage musical. As it turned out "District 6: The Musical" was a runaway success, critically and financially, and Kramer then forged ahead on the new career path of stage musicals, thereby forsaking the comic "David Kramer" persona loved by the masses. Kramer is now a respected figure in the local entertainment industry, not merely a folk or pop singer; in fact, if e once were a rocker, he no longer is and in this he has followed the traditional old-fashioned show-biz career path where one starts out as a scuffling entertainer appealing to a cult audience and ends up as an entertainer-entrepreneur who has across the board popular appeal or has ceased to appear on stage altogether to concentrate on promoting or managing other artistes on their way up. From exploited to exploiter -- though I do not wish to imply that David Kramer has ever prejudicially exploited anyone.

One should see David Kramer as a song and dance man made good. Anton Goosen should be seen as a talented songwriter whose hubris led to his downsizing. David Kramer no longer releases records (discounting the projects he guides) and Anton Goosen has recently released his first album in many years. Maybe one day soon Kramer will record more new songs and resume his career as recording and performing artist. In the meantime Goosen will keep on rocking after his own fashion. Both are "senior statesmen" of the local music world and have played major roles in the development of an Afrikaans popular music, even if it is not truly rock, that made a decisive break with the kind of Schlager Musik derived pop or pseudo folk-country that were, and astonishingly still are, the staple of local Afrikaans artists' repertoire. The curse of the Afrikaans performer will probably always be that they will have to make the lowest common denominator type of music to be able to sustain a commercially viable career and the point of Goosen and Kramer is that they showed us, especially Goosen, that an Afrikaner could play rock and not simply pander to the lower middle class tastes of the average Afrikaans household.

Jimi Hendrix Lives Today

JIMI HENDRIX LIVES TODAY


Jimi Hendrix first came to my attention when the I Don't Live Today greatest hits double album was being promoted on radio, probably an early variant of Radio 5. There was a rude blast of an breakout excerpt from the title track and then the most ominous record title I'd ever heard. If one were to judge purely by the advertisement Jimi Hendrix was a mysterious, wild noisemaker of great power and intensity. Of course this stuff was never actually played on South African music radio at the, or at least not on the stations I listened to, and I had no older siblings or friends who owned the records and so the full impact of the Jimi Hendrix sonic experience eluded me for a long time.

It is now impossible for me to tell which Hendrix tune I heard first, either Hey Joe or Purple Haze, but my guess is Hey Joe, because my abiding memory of hearing it for the first time, is how simple and tuneful and yet powerful it was in a very understated fashion, completely unlike the weird sounds I’d imagined Hendrix made when he touched a guitar. Hey Joe was no psychedelic freak out but an almost folky, bluesy song with the age-old blues theme of betrayal and revenge. Not exactly the radical breakthrough I’d understood Hendrix’s music to have been in the late Sixties.

In stark contrast to Hey Joe, Purple Haze does sound like the acid freak out, the antithesis to Beatle-esque pop or Stones-ish loping blues infected rock. This was where the line was drawn in the sand. Of course, I loved both tunes.

Back in the day in the mid-Seventies I was an uncool, loner school kid with no money, no clue, no money and no music collection. It was my habit to hang out at least once a week at the Sigma record bar (at one point it kind of shared premises with a “jeans bar”) in Andringa Street, Stellenbosch, where I spent hours longingly flipping through record covers with no prospect at all of buying anything. I spent so much time there; I probably had a better idea of the inventory in the store, than the sales clerks did.

Anyhow, it was at Sigma Records that I first saw the covers of I Don’t Live Today, Electric Ladyland, Crash Landing and Cry for Love though I never got up enough courage to ask the shop assistants to play me a track or two.

An aside: when I was that lonely alienated kid, I thought it would be the coolest job ever to work at a record store and to be able to listen to all those records all the time. A bit later I realized that working in a record store may be kind of groovy if you really liked music but that the pay sucked. Then my focus turned to being a DJ on the radio. They earned more than shop assistants and they were in the powerful position of nationwide influence in respect of the music they played; not only could you play the stuff you thought of as cool, you could expose that music to a big audience who might go out and support the musicians. Then I read that in most cases the DJ does not choose the music he or she plays, the choice is made by a programming director who cares very little for the DJ’s personal likes or dislikes but who chooses music according to a demographic determinant. So much for being a DJ – just a voice on the radio. Finally, and once I started reading the New Musical Express (this some years before it simply became the NME) I came to the conclusion that the best job of all would be to write about music and musicians. You could listen to a lot of records, disseminate your opinions, influence people. You could have actual power in this sphere of human endeavour. The salary was not so important because you got loads of free records and did not pay to go to gigs – hey, I was still a naïve teenager at the time.

My first full and material exposure to the music of J Hendrix came about when I bought the double album soundtrack of the Jimi Hendrix movie documentary at Adrian & Don's Record Bar in the Trust Bank Centre in Stellenbosch, where I also started hanging out flipping through covers of albums I’d never buy. They were the serious opposition to Sigma Records and lasted a year or two but then sadly faded away with a large “everything must go” sale. The double album cost R6,25, which was cheap for double album in those days -- ordinarily single records cost

something like R4,50 in those days. I have a memory of Adrian warning me that he would have to charge the full R6,25 cover price because he was not allowed to give me a discount. I was vaguely annoyed at this patronising attitude since I had more than enough cash to buy the record. By this time I was at Varsity and had a casual job with the University’s sports office, working at the box office of various sports events, and earned cash to enable me to build up a nice little record collection.

The tracks on Jimi Hendrix are a mixture of live performances (plus one acoustic studio performance) from the movie and short extracts of interviews with girlfriends, friends and musicians who'd known Hendrix and still had fond memories of him. Apart from one acoustic song, Hear My Train A-Comin’, all the tracks were taken from live gigs such as Monterey Pop, Woodstock, Fillmore East and Isle of Wight. The songs mostly represent the “greatest hits” part of the Hendrix repertoire with some big hits like “Hey Joe” and “Purple Haze”, the Woodstock live take on the “Star Spangled Banner” and Monterey Pop’s “Like A Rolling Stone.”

Perhaps the most intriguing to me were the two versions of “Machine Gun” from Fillmore East and Isle of Wight respectively. The latter had really scary, sci fi-like interjections from the security crew's walkie talkies and it added a really ominous colouring to a hard song about death in war. It was some years before I read that the interference was an accident as the result of faulty technology. At the time I was transported straight into a land of ugly desolation with robot-like alien voices of authority stamping down on the common man.

There was also a long version of the famous Red House in which Jimi stretched out his blues chops to the max. I had not yet heard the studio version of the tune, so I was much impressed by the improvisation and dynamics of a man I had not really thought of as a bluesman. This was also a number of years before I read Charles Shaar Murray’s book Crosstown Traffic in which he places our Jimi smack dab in the middle of the great blues canon, in the tradition of Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and the rest. Jimi’s blues may have had the gonzo hue of psychedelia, but it was nonetheless as deep as any of the masters who preceded him.

Along about 1985 I got finally got to see a scratchy, jumpy version of the Monterey Pop movie at the Labia Theatre in Orange Street, Cape Town, which was then just a slightly worse for the wear but funky venue for “art” movies, rock music documentaries, and commercial moves that had just ended their runs in the upmarket movie houses in the city. Students and the alternative crowd hung out there for the ten o’clock show, which was usually the one where the best obscure stuff was shown. I was living in Somerset West then and often drove into town just to catch something esoteric and interesting at the Labia.

Anyhow, the movie and Jimi Hendrix soundtrack both feature his, uh, “hot” version of “Wild Thing” where he sets his guitar alight with lighter fluid and caused some, uh, “heated” controversy. This wild man act was my first exposure to Hendrix as a performing artist. It was all the more exotic because the print was no longer pristine and because the sound at the Labia was hardly any better than a tinny old 1950’s transistor radio. It was a land and a time far away from my reality, a time I would never experience and a type of musical experience I thought I would never have.

I played Jimi Hendrix almost into extinction. The longer tracks started to pale after a while, but I always returned to Like A Rolling Stone, and Hey Joe, Purple Haze and In From the Storm.

If memory serves, the second Hendrix album I bought was I Don't Live Today, then Electric Ladyland, and in quick succession by Hendrix in the West and Crash Landing.


I bought I Don’t Live Today at Sigma Records, at long last united with the album of the advertisement, and one of the most iconic Hendrix album covers ever. Man, I would have killed to wear that image on a T-shirt! Maybe I would not have been the only one, but I would have been a proud one. The double album is a collection of hits and well-known track from the Jimi Hendrix Experience (basically Are You Experienced?, Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland filleted), with nothing from Band of Gypsies or Cry Of Love. It was great to hear the original studio versions of Hey Joe, Purple Haze and Red House, and the funky grooves of little known songs like Remember, and the psychedelic pop of Waterfall and the Wind Cries Mary. There was also the avant garde noise songs like the title track, though I did not know at the time that the version on this album was the expurgated shortened version of the full length freak out on Axis; Bold As Love. Even so, it was an album I loved and played to death to the extent where the vinyl is now largely unplayable unless you are a fan of snap, crackle and pop.

Electric Ladyland also came from Sigma Records and I bought it after a lot of soul searching or, should I say, budgetary examination because it was sold as a full price album, and at double album price too, at a time when my main concern was with how many cheap albums I could buy at any one time in the bargain bins of Stellenbosch or Cape Town. It was a simple consideration: for the price of one current release I could buy three or for or more cut price albums that were in my estimation just as good or interesting. Quantity was quality.

All in knew of Electric Ladyland was what I had read about it and though it sounded intriguing enough, I was not sure whether I wanted to spend that much money on it. Curiosity got the better of me and I splashed out on the thing, brought it home, and started playing it to death. The first disappointment, though, was that the local pressing in South Africa did not have the same packaging as the one in the USA or Europe, the cover with the whole array of naked women. The South African cover was not bad – a cool photograph of the Experience – but it once again reinforced that we were very far away in space and time from the hub of the world; a world with different values and a different perception of what was acceptable and what was not, a seemingly less petty world. Okay, so I was a horny virgin who wanted to see naked tits on an album cover.

Electric Ladyland was the last official release under the name of the original Experience though there are many guest musicians on the album and it might as well be called a Jimi Hendrix solo album on which the members of the Experience sometimes play together. The album has a good cross section of the styles Hendrix employed, from electronic experiments to fairly straight forward rock'n'roll to weird soul and blues. All Along the Watchtower is the big hit, and the third side with its three long, languid, segueing tracks was the most experimental, “trippy” and utterly captivating. The soul rock tracks such as Long Hot Summer did not do it for me.

Some years after I’d seen the Monterey Pop movie, I was fortunate enough to see Jimi Plays Berkeley, a basic concert performance film of the type where the camera concentrates almost wholly on Hendrix as if the rest of the band were session players not worthy of any attention. The movie was also incredibly impressionistic and not completely satisfying for the likes of me who wanted to see the guy play, not some hippie’s version of a trippy time in Berkeley. Anyhow, the main thing I remembered from the film was the superfast, slick and rocking version of Johnny B Goode that highlighted to what extent Hendrix could be wildly exciting within traditional bounds. He plays this rock’n’roll staple almost straight up and tears the shit out of it. Go, Jimi, go! This version is one of the standout tracks, okay, probably the only standout track, on Hendrix In The West, a compilation of live performances from all over, from Berkeley, to Monterey Pop, to the Isle of Wight, and beyond. For completists only, as they say, since the majority of the tracks sound like second grade filler. There is a very long version of Red House which almost completely loses its way, virtually dies and then magically resuscitates itself for many more minutes than should have been allowed. This is the kind of performance one cites when stating that by the end Jimi was just going through the motions when he could not do his new thing and had to appease the fans, and no longer rehearsed with his musicians.

Crash Landing was an Alan Douglas product consisting of reworked demos that were probably never meant to be released and had just about only the guitar left of the original recordings. Apparently it was a painstaking effort to work up the tracks into a releasable state, and the fact of the work required should have put off Alan Douglas from the start, but I guess he surrendered to the pressure of putting product out there for the avid public who would buy anything Hendrix related. The tunes are plodding and tedious, and about the only interesting tracks are the couple of instrumentals.

I bought these tow albums purely and simply because they were available at large discounts in the sale bins of whatever record store I was in at the time. The best thing about Crash Landing is the cover. You can’t really say that about Hendrix In The West – on the cover photograph it looks like Jimi is wearing a freaky diaphanous blouse and bolero jacket combo. Far out!

Sometimes Sweat Ain’t Enough

 

SWEATBAND

 

More good news is that the upcoming SWEATBAND reissue will have more than a couple of bonus tracks. Guitarist John Mair has kindly agreed to include the entire unreleased second album as a bonus for fans. Expect the normal classy Retro packaging, liner notes and fab photos. Way cool, John!

(from SA Rock Digest # 110 18^th June 2001)

Sweatband is an interesting example of how great promise can come to naught and how great talent is not enough to ensure long lasting success for a rock band in South Africa.

I first came across Sweatband in mid-1984 when they started a regular gig at Die Stal in Stellenbosch. For the first three months of the year I had been a Friday and Saturday night regular at the De Akker pub where All Night Radio was the resident band and once their residency ended I was quite bereft. I was still living in Stellenbosch (although I moved to Somerset West in June 1984 just shortly after I first saw Sweatband play live) and was still following the rock column in Die Burger where the rock expert published a handy guide of upcoming gigs and when he mentioned that Sweatband was playing in Stellenbosch and called them one of the best original rock acts then playing in the Cape, I had to go check them out.

 

Die Stal had once been an old stable, annexed to the Coetzenburg Hotel, probably best know for its student watering hole -- the bar fondly known as "Tollies." Somewhere in the mid-Nineties the hotel, and De Stal with it, was gutted and a Health & Racquet Club was set up behind the historical facade. Back in the Sixties and early Seventies Die Stal had been one of the few upmarket restaurants in Stellenbosch but by 1984 it had obviously fallen on hard times and on weekends it no longer offered dining-and dancing. The venue was renamed "Monkey's" and started putting on live music and for all I know Sweatband was the first band to play there. It was not even a residency of three months such as All Night Radio had played at De Akker. When their mini residency ended they were replaced by Factory.

Back in 1984 John Mair was a tall, pretty boy with short hair (I think he was s till doing his National Service at the time) and played a red Stratocaster. Wendy Oldfield was still a teacher by profession and plump, already pulling her hair back from her face in a ponytail. She liked skin tight black jeans which might have been intended to make her look sexy but her thighs were just too plump -- it merely looked as if her clothes had shrunk in the wash and that she did not have anything better to wear.

The bassist was a small, thin dark guy with a German sounding name, he liked a denim jacket with his very tight jeans and had a very Eighties curly mullet, and a thin moustache. The drummer was almost comically the cliché of the big, fat drummer. He also sported a moustache (or beard?) and had an even more ridiculous mullet than the bassist. The two of them looked like refugees from some middle European heavy metal band.

As far as I recollect Sweatband had a thin, post New Wave, Eighties guitar pop kind of sound with Mair's guitar being the typical scratchy, semi-funky sound that was so prevalent then. He was obviously a very good instrumentalist, Wendy Oldfield had a powerful, compelling voice and they had a number of interesting songs and shared vocals, if not equally then at least Mair sang enough of the tunes to make him a co-lead vocalist.

I attended all their gigs in Stellenbosch either at Die Stal and, later, at De Akker but when the band no longer played in Stellenbosch, having returned to the Cape Town scene, I stopped following them. In 1985 the band took the plunge of turning professional and relocating to Johannesburg where they were signed up by strong management who booked them into the best, most high profile clubs where they found steady, lucrative work and a lot of acclaim; the band was even mentioned on Radio 5 as a hot ticket, perhaps the hottest rock act then in town

The biggest, credible pop/rock act of the mid-Eighties was Ellamental, formed and led by Tim Parr, late of Baxtop, and his girlfriend Heather Mac, apparently an ex-model with higher pretensions, and from the distance of Cape Town and keeping in mind my remembrances of what Sweatband had sounded like at Die Stal, my guess was that Sweatband was somebody's idea of a "new" Ella Mental

Sweatband signed a record deal with a major SA label and released the Sweatband album in 1986. The album was preceded by the 'This Boy' single that became a hit on Radio 5, as did 'Shape of Her Body.' Back in the day John Mair had sung 'This Boy,' a pseudo-biographical lyric in the Johnny B. Goode tradition but on record Wendy Oldfield was the vocalist and this was no doubt due to management or record company, or both, who wanted a hit single and decided that Oldfield's voice was stronger than Mair's and would make a far better focus point on stage than the guitarist who have plenty talent but perhaps not the star power that Oldfield had as sexy chick singer. I guess it was a commercially astute decision.

I read a contemporaneous interview with Mair, or perhaps it was a radio snippet, where he stated that he was quite proof to have made it in Johannesburg playing only original music. This was vindication for the proposition, hitherto not quite accepted, that there was a market for good songwriters who were prepared to work at performing their own material. The audiences existed that would accept it if it were good.

In 1986 Sweatband returned to Cape Town as the Hot New Thing in local rock and put on a home coming gig on a Saturday afternoon at the Brass Bell in Kalk Bay. I took the precaution to go early and the precaution was amply justified for the cream of Cape Town's hip crowd, and some of the standard issue Kalk Bay surfer types were out in full force to meet a band who fully returned as conquering heroes with big management and money behind them. They had an professional organisation only a successful band could demand, and afford.

There was a proper sound desk manned by proper sound engineers, not just some friend of the band, and the numerous with roadies and sound technicians in black Sweatband T-shirts. The obvious intention was to make the band look like an "international" attraction.

The band was styled as Team Sweatband, in black like on the album cover. John Mair was plumper, had much longer hair and now played a very cool Gibson Flying Vee guitar. Wendy Oldfield flaunted the slimmed down version of her in a little black dress and sported a trademark short, slicked back hairstyle. There was a keyboard stack on her right on the stage and on a couple of songs Oldfield pawed at the keyboards to flesh out the sound. The bassist wore black leather pants and jacke5t and had lost the thin moustache along the way. All in all, a heavily styled look that was intended to lead the audience to believe that they were dealing with a big time act poised to take off into the stratosphere.

The gig was everything a homecoming concert should be. The sound was excellent. They had become a big, hard rock band who not only had power but also tunes, and had two front persons who were equally dynamic. Mair was a master of rock dynamics and knew when not overshadow a song with his guitar grandstanding, and how to play a dynamic, melodic guitar solo to add something special to a song. Wendy Oldfield was a proper rock diva who sang with passion and confidence and showed how important it is to have a strong voice, not merely a competent one, to improve songs that might in fact be merely workmanlike.

Sweatband daringly opened with a slow song, the ballad 'Sleep Like A Child' (to me this indicated how confident they were of themselves and of the wave they were riding; most bands would have opened with a fast rocker) and ended off with 'Johnny B. Goode' which, in its extended rave-up version was an eye-opener and a delight then, but quickly became an irritant. This is still one of the gigs I remember with most fondness. The best presented and best sounding rock concert I have ever seen a local group put on.

 

Unfortunately this was also the apex of the band's fortunes. They never made it back to Johannesburg and never got around to releasing their second album. Not very long after the Kalk Bay gig Wendy Oldfield announced that she would leave the band for a solo career and Sweatband played an extensive series of farewell gigs. Oldfield's departure hit the band hard; according to Mair, in a magazine interview, the band was deeply in debt, all that expensive staging and sound equipment hire was for their account and their management pushed for the hype, on the principle that it was important for the band to behave and look like a big time act to be a big time act. Unfortunately there was not enough money in the local rock industry, whether through gigs or record sales, to sustain the band's lifestyle or to service the debt burden.

Wendy Oldfield was replaced by two people because Mair, heavily disgusted by her undemocratic star trip, was determined not to have a single front person again so that there would not be another case of ego interfering and "solo career" beckoning. The vocalist was Kelly Hunter, at the time an internal auditor for Truworths by day and who had previously been in Raissa's Farm. Hunter had a strong voice that was at least equal to Oldfield's but she was not as attractive or sexy, being short and plump and plain of face. This probably made her more attractive as a front person to Mair who did not want another sex bomb to take up all the attention the audience. But Hunter also had to slim down somewhat to fit in.

The other new member was also a woman, conventionally sexy blonde (Tanya ?) whose name now escapes me who, up to that time, had been better known as a model-actress-whatever. She played rhythm guitar and keyboards and did some singing, mostly backing vocals. John Mair also did more lead vocals. The rationale behind the two new recruits was that the band did not want another diva like Oldfield who would generate a lot of interest in herself and obscure the fact that there is actually a band there, not merely a backing group. The band was supposed to be a democracy and an equal partnership. Oldfield apparently wanted to be the only star; she possibly felt that the band had generated interest and had became successful because of her and that she therefore deserved more accolades and probably more money.

Be that as it may, Kelly Hunter should have been given more lead vocals to do,. As it was she was only one of three vocalists. The second woman was useless and should never have been in the band. Mair had become a pretty fair vocalist and sang with greater authority than he had back in 1984. They slogged on but eventually the heavy debt burden forced them to a halt after another interminable series of farewell gigs at the Hout Bay Manor Hotel in 1989. One of the sadnesses of their demise was that the several news songs they were performing, possibly from the unreleased second album, were every bit as good as the best on the debut album.

So, on the one hand Sweatband represented a victory for the group that championed "original" compositions but on the other hand they still fell foul of the standard SA problem of bad management, over-ambitious promotion and small market. Not to mention the impossibility to expand into other markets -- such as Europe/USA or even Africa -- due to the political situation existing in the RSA at the time.

After the band's demise Mair, who bloated alarmingly like a man who was seriously drinking too much for his liver to cope with, kept going as a solo act, one man band, playing in venues like the Blue Rock in Sea Point, and other restaurant/pub gigs and he was once billed as a surprise guest with the Flaming Firestones at a Hout Bay gig where he played a couple of numbers as a guitar jam with Nico Burger. I have no idea what he did in the Nineties to make ends meet; maybe studio session guitarist, maybe he set himself up in a studio, wrote jingles, whatever.

 

Wendy Oldfield went back to Johannesburg, and she's been based in the north ever since, and positively streaked into a solo career where in the beginning she had regular gigs in the hip Johannesburg night spots and made a number of return visits to Cape Town with the Wendy Oldfield Band, had a Radio 5 hit with 'Acid Rain' (still her best known song, even being given a re-mix), then took a well publicised left turn into R & B (a sound she professed always to have loved) although it was R & B of the Sixties rather than its Nineties variant, because this "new start" and move away from unfashionable rock, was founded on a rather poor, uninspired version of the Fontella Bass chestnut 'Rescue Me.' Her performance was lacklustre and the song did not deserve to be a hit, and wasn't. She quickly abandoned the R & B direction to return to cabaret rock with Serious Meaningfulness. There was also a career move into writing soundtrack music but all in all her career, whether by design or lack of sustained public interest, seems to have faded gently into the good night; maybe she's raising children and writing songs on her farm, plotting a come back. As far as I can establish her most recent release is the album On A Small Blue Dot, with yet another version of 'Acid
Rain.'

I have no idea what happened to the rhythm section.

The only other two guitarists I rated in Cape Town in the late Eighties (other than Nico Botha) were Max Mykula of (then) The Believers, who interestingly enough also avoided playing a Fender Stratocaster by toting a Rickenbacker or a Gretsch (maybe I should conclude that I only really like guitarists who do not play Strats; maybe it has nothing to do with anything else but that!), and John Mair.

Especially after Sweatband's return from conquering Johannesburg Mair was your typical guitar hero type who liked nothing better than to play heroic, epic solos while Mykula mostly stuck to rhythm or fills, the support behind his vocalist.

Mair and Mykula both also had the good taste not to play solos on every number and both had great chops and knew how to make solos count, to add value to a performance. John Mair, in particular, seemed to have a flair for gauging the dramatic impact of a solo in a song, especially in some of the slower material Sweatband performed. Unfortunately this was counter-balanced, and somewhat spoiled by the extravaganza he put on during the Sweatband's last number, their interpretation of Jimi Hendrix's version of Johnny B. Goode. The number was stretched to fifteen or twenty minutes and included drum and bass solos, topped by extremely excessive soloing by Mair combined with great showing off of techniques and tricks -- he would walk into the audience trailing a very long guitar cord, he would play the guitar behind his head, or with his teeth -- and became the living embodiment of the phrase "guitar wank". I guess it was meant to be a show-stopper and probably impressed the hell out of people who saw the band infrequently but it bored and irritated me by about the fourth occasion. The start of 'Johnny B. Goode' was usually my cue to leave the building and to go home.

Sweatband was a big rock band: powerful instrumental work based around a virtuoso guitarist backing an equally powerful singer and p[performing excellent songs with great hooks and hummable tunes. John Mair, the principal song writer was streets ahead of Steve Louw (All Night Radio, Big Sky) and Wendy Oldfield outsang Louw hundred to one.

Kevin Shirley's production on the one and only Sweatband LP managed to capture the essence of Sweatband as a powerful, melodic rock band. If anything, the record makes them sound almost better than they sounded live. The production was clean, the mix was balanced. Every instrument had its place and all complemented the others. The Sweatband debut is a far superior record to either of the All Night Radio albums.

'This Boy' and 'Shape Of Her Body' were the two hit singles (they got enough Radio 5 air-play), both sung by Wendy Oldfield though both songs were written from a male perspective and 'This Boy' used to be one of John Mair's vocal showcases. Perhaps it was such an obvious hit single that the record company did not want to ruin its chances by leaving it to Mair's rather weak pipes and colourless singing. On the whole the songs were strong; some of the old live favourites were left off and there were some brand new songs I'd never heard before. One of these is '500 Watts,'
one of those stupid songs about playing rock'n'roll that I would never have thought Mair would be capable of writing much less include on a debut album. It is the weakest song in the set and one wonders why this one was selected in lieu of some very strong material from the old live set, like for example a song I call
'I want to Have A Little Rap With You,'
an overt rock-funk number that was another Mair vocal turn and usually a show case for not only his guitar playing but also giving the bassist an opportunity to play a bass solo (the same one night after night) and the drummer the chance for a drum solo.

 

However, an album with one weak song out of the whole lot is a worthy achievement and some of the newer songs, such as 'Sleep Like A Child' are very impressive indeed.

 

This is where one must mention one of those bitter karmic things in life. Although Mair was and is such an excellent songwriter and instrumentalist and had managed to release such a good record, he is today band-less and without record deal and has not released anything else under either his own or Sweatband's name. For this reason it is an excellent move on his part to make available the tapes of the "lost" second Sweatband album. On the other hand, Steve Louw, who is at best a mediocre talent has had the drive, ambition and good fortune to have fronted two bands and to have released four albums and it looks as if he might keep going. It would appear that talent alone is not the key to success.