Steve Louw plays De Waal Park on 3 February 2013

At his concert in De Waal Park on Sunday 3 February 2013, Steve Louw reminded us that he (and Rob Nagel and the late Nico Burger) started All Night Radio 30 years ago. That was food for thought. The audience in the park was mostly middle-aged with only a smattering of youngsters who must have been there purely for the entertainments given that Louw, whether solo or under the Big Sky banner, has not been much of a presence in the South African musical industry over the past 10 years. Presumably, like me, the audience consisted of a representative cross-section of local music lovers who took note of Steve Louw when he started out in the business and are still kind of interested.

I followed All Night Radio obsessively over the all too brief period of the band’s active existence, mostly because of Burger’s excellent guitar playing. Back then the stage sound was so bad that the vocals were generally inaudible and I could hardly make out the lyrics except for the choruses and it was not apparent that Steve Louw did not have a strong set of pipes or anything like passion in his voice and that the lyrics were pretty banal. It was only when I bought the All Night Radio debut album, The Heart's The Best Part, that these weaknesses became apparent. Louw's lyrics were mundane if not crap; his voice was weak, he had no tunes to speak of and the guitars were buried in the mix at the expense of the very clear, flat vocals. The same went for the last album, The Killing Floor, although the lyrics became more ambitious and improved and the mix was marginally better.

After the breakup of All Night Radio Louw formed Big Sky, which was more of a studio project than a living band.  Big Sky attempted wide screen, big anthem rock with an emphasis on clever arrangements and Louw gathered the best possible session musicians to play his music. The sad thing was that his voice still let the side down and the playing was so professionally slick that any rock and roll guts got left behind.

Needless to say, though Big Sky sounded like my kind of band on paper, the records once again let me down and I never played them more than a couple of times. In any event I only bought two albums.  Neither of them encouraged me to seek out the whole set.

I currently live in lower Oranjezicht, about 5 minutes’ walk away from De Waal Park, the largest city bowl community park and a gathering place for dog walkers and people with young kids. Recently there has been steady progress with upgrading the park and its facilities. Since late 2011 The Friends of De Waal Park have organised a series of free summer concerts every second Sunday. For one reason or another I never attended any of them, sometimes because I wasn’t in Cape Town or because I did not fancy the act. When I heard that Steve Louw would be performing, I was quite keen on checking him out. I had not been at any of his gigs since the demise of All Night Radio.

Sunday 3 February 2013 was a very windy day in the City Bowl and unfortunately this meant that it was unpleasant in De Waal Park. Nonetheless, Louw drew good few hundred brave souls. I have no idea of telling whether this crowd was pretty standard for these shows or whether it might have been smaller than the expected numbers on a warmer, wind free day.  My overall impression was that it was an older crowd and not really a young, hip audience. There were many very young kids and some late teens or early twentysomethings but they were more or less the exception. Louw himself is in his mid-Fifties, as is the band I suspect, and his style of American roots inflected rock is not particularly hip around here.

The set opened with two bluesy grooves (“The Wind Blows” and “Black Sun”) featuring the astonishingly able and driving blues harp of Rob Nagel, one of the old gang, and this boded well for the rest of the 90 minute set. During these opening songs Big Sky reminded me of the Muddy Waters band of the late Seventies and that was a good thing. Nagel stepped aside from tune number three and remained on the side lines for most of the set.

Tedium set in when Louw got down to performing a series of well-known songs from both All Night Radio and Big Sky. Most of the songs were at mid-tempo, tastefully arranged and played with professional ability by a band consisting of Willem Möller on guitar,  Doug Steyn on bass, Tim Rankin on drums and Simon Orange on keyboards. Louw played rhythm guitar throughout. He still has the Rickenbacker he started playing with All Night Radio.   

Unhappily the same old, same old tempos on the various songs resulted in a lack of drive or excitement. For the most part the driving rock and roll element was lacking. None of it made one want to get up and dance, at least not until the last four or five songs of the set.  During mid-set a couple of songs, like “Kathleen” were elevated by Simon Orange’s surging Hammond B3 style jams that for a minute or two made one believe that soul rock was alive and well in De Waal Park.

“Bernadette” from the second All Night Radio album, The Killing Floor, was the first up-tempo highlight of the set, mostly because it is based around the Bo Diddley riff that can hardly fail to excite. The absence of Rob Nagel from most of the material, given that he was probably never a Big Sky member, also diluted the excitement.

Nagel stepped back into the spotlight for “Seaside Love”, the first All Night Radio song to receive airplay on Radio 5 and to become a minor hit. As was the case back in 1986, the live rendition of this very slight song made it sound far better than it did on vinyl.  From here on in, anyway, and with Nagel remaining on stage, the tempo increased and the band started rocking. “Prisoners of Rock and Roll”, a cliché if I've ever heard one, really kicked out the jams. When Louw just had to shout in tune, as with “Prisoners of Rock and Roll,” the performance gained power.

At the end of the main set the band left the stage and was then rather artificially called back for another couple of tunes. Mark Haze, South African Idols winner of a couple years back, and who had performed in a De Waal Park concert late last year, came on stage and sang on “Pink Cadillac” and “Working on the Highway,” two Bruce Springsteen songs that had been staples of the All Night Radio set.  Both are hugely enjoyable songs and were performed with the relish and gusto they deserve.

When I first heard All Night Radio play “Pink Cadillac” I did not know that it was a Springsteen composition and I was mightily impressed with Louw's song writing ability if he could come up with this kind of roots rocker.  Sadly, these tunes really just show up Louw's po faced songs that are often serious yet lack the verve and brio of the Springsteen lyrics and music. 

The final song of the day was a rendition of “John the Revelator” and once again it was a veritable highlight of storming blues based rock. When Steve Louw does not try to sing sensitively and with deep meaning, and basically just shouts out the words, he does have more of a presence and more power as presenter of the tune. There is a fervour and power that is lacking in the songs that are supposedly more tuneful because Louw has a colourless voice that can carry a tune but does not convey emotion.

One could buy Big Sky CDs at the concert.  Neither memories or today's performance induced me to buy more product.  Kudos to Steve Louw for his rock vision and the ambition and drive to realise it. As is the case with Valiant Swart, Louw's career in rock proves the point that one does not need brilliance or specifically great talent to achieve one's goals. One simply needs to do the work, to grind out the necessary moves and to make it happen rather than dreaming about making it happen.

All Night Radio was probably more of a band than a project Louw could control and therefore not the most useful vehicle for his idea of success.  With Big Sky he could call all the shots and could direct the music and the band the way he saw the vision realised. The vision encompassed high production values for his recorded songs and unfortunately this high standard of studio professionalism and audio perfection also killed the spirit of the songs and the performances. Technical ability does not signify or guarantee passion.  High production values and tastefulness signifies a higher degree of achievement to some people. Sophistication has its place, but give me primitive passion and exuberance every time. Primitivism does not equate to “bad” in the same way that technical ability does not equate to “viscerally exciting.”

Steve Louw is a journeyman, a craftsman. He writes workmanlike songs and performs them in a workmanlike fashion. There is no spark of genius here. Just hard graft and attention to detail. I guess that means success in music. It just does not mean that I can have an emotional bond with his music.

   

Skanking at the Pink Hall 1986/87

Think of a pale pink church hall at the bottom end of Vredehoek where a cloud of incense and dope hit you as soon as you entered the room full of some truly alternative Capetonians. It was a mixture of Black and White, many very thin, dreadlocked males and women in long dresses and with ethnic headdresses. Some of those present were actual Rastafarians, most were trendy White people.  Everyone stood around chatting in the hall, or went outside for a smoke break, while the band was taking a break or danced meditatively when the band played.

Apart from the ganja, as we used to call it back in the day, the other predominant aroma was of the organic vegetarian food being cooked on trestle tables at the back of the hall. It was, as the cliché has it, a heady brew. It was a lot of fun, even for non-Rasta, non-alternative me and I never missed a reggae night for the couple of years they were held at the Pink Hall. I did not eat their food or smoke their dope but I danced all night to their music.

Reggae spoke to me because of the deep bottom heavy yet nimble bass sound and that insistent “chicken scratch” guitar rhythm on the off-beat, with sweet melodies and infectious chanting over the top. It is groove music per excellence and great to dance to, even if I got the beat or skanking moves wrong.

In the period 1985 to 1989 there was always at least one reggae act, who appeared alongside the alternative rock acts at the anti-conscription events I attended (just for the music; I'd already completed my 2-year National Service stint) but the best reggae music was at the Pink Hall.  This venue was a church hall, perhaps no longer used for the original purpose, on the lower fringe of Vredehoek, close to where De Waal Drive becomes Roeland Street. From 1986 through to 1989 and about once a quarter the Pink Hall hosted a reggae event, most often featuring 3 bands a night, mostly Sons of Selassie, The Spears and another band.

The audience was a mixture of the seriously alternative right on Cape Town crowd.  Even the white people, male and female, had dreadlocks, everyone seemed to wear tie dye clothes with the de rigueur funky African theme, were stick thin and very deeply committed to a vegan lifestyle and politically correctness that eschewed racism, chauvinism, sexism, anti- Semitism, and espoused radical feminism and gay rights and freedom from the oppression of apartheid and freedom from conscription, and so on.

The bands wrote their own material, or so I thought, not recognising any of the songs they played, and liked long, hypnotic, mid-paced, grooving jams that were perfect for relaxed skanking. I\m rhythmically challenged and my attempts at skanking, as I understood the dance move, were o doubt piss poor and ridiculous but probably not more so than the rest of the White audience, and I enjoyed myself.

At the end of each song the vocalist praised Jah to the extent that I was wondering whether he was taking the piss or whether the church hall was in fact simply hosting a different kind of religious experience as alternative to the Christianity otherwise practised in the hall. Haile Selassie, apparently a god0like figure received his fair share of sanctified praise as well. It was rather odd for a non-religious White guy like me.

I really only cared for the deep reggae grooves and dancing the night away. I did not buy their food, smoke their dope or take their propaganda pamphlets. I did not mix with anyone or try to pick up weird looking, mixed up chicks.

The aroma of marijuana hung in the air and the band members openly smoked it on stage. I was always astonished that the police were nowhere to be seen. My belief was that the powers that be considered these reggae nights to be some kind of safe outlet for White radicalism, as the politics was pretty ineffectual and harmless and posed absolutely no threat to the status quo. It was all right to let the White  liberals have their infrequent nights of solidarity with the oppressed. On the other hand, perhaps the police just did not know and nobody ever  tipped them off about what was happening at the  Pink Hall.

The reggae bands got a bit of exposure in the Cape Town press and it seemed to me that there was a significant Rastafarian movement on the Cape Flats and Black townships.

I do not know why the Pink Hall gigs came to an end. Perhaps the police eventually wised up; perhaps the owners of the hall got to know of the free dope smoking and did not want to have anything to do with it; perhaps the  gigs were no longer  commercially viable. Whatever the reason, the reggae scene at the Pink Hall in Vredehoek did not survive the Eighties. There may well have been a continuing reggae scene in the townships but as a cautious Whitey I had no intention of going there simply because I happened to like reggae.

The Pink Hall reggae gigs were as fringe as it got in the Cape Town CBD at the time and represented some of the best times I had at live gigs because I felt like a member of an underground society, albeit that one guy who’s always there but never speaks to anyone, and because the music, however basic it might have been in the cold light of day, always felt superior to the standard alternative rock one heard elsewhere in the city.   

Clean, Athletic & Talented play Stellenbosch, 1980

When the guys in Clean, Athletic & Talented looked out over the interior of the Stellenbosch Town Hall they would have seen perhaps 11 people (including me), most of whom drove out from Cape Town to see them and were mostly supporters of the support band The Boulaines, and they must’ve wondered why, in a university town like Stellenbosch, the room wasn’t buzzing with excited students. It was a school night but, even so, the paltry attendance was shocking.

Whoever had the bright idea to book the Town Hall and not, for example, De Akker, must’ve been highly optimistic, not to mention deluded. Perhaps the students would’ve come out to the cosy atmosphere of De Akker where they could drink rahter to the cold (literally), sterile atmosphere of the larger venue.

Frankly, until this gig, I’d never heard of Clean, Athletic & Talented and my guess is that this ignorance applied to all the students at the university of Stellenbosch.

Clean, Athletic & Talented was never a world conquering rock juggernaut and probably ceased existence within 5 years after playing Stellenbosch but this band has the distinction of being the first international rock band I ever saw live.

This gig took place in 1980 (I think; because I was still riding my Sparta Buddy moped then) when I was in my second last year of a 5-year course at the University of Stellenbosch, and a lonely lad in a student town I felt no part of. Reading the NME was my weekly escapism, a window on the world of punk, New Wave and post New Wave music elsewhere in the world than in my home town. My horizons were very narrow and did not expand beyond Stellenbosch as I only learned to drive after my father died in May 1980 and I only drove around in the town itself.

I knew nothing of the rock scene in Cape Town not to mention Stellenbosch. I did not frequent the local watering holes, such as De Akker, where there was a live scene at least form the mid-Eighties, though it might have existed in 1980 too, and therefore had no idea what was happening regarding live music.

In the Seventies there had been a regular annual rock concert in support of the university rag celebrations. By 1977, when I started my BA degree course, there was no longer a rock concert at rag. I think it had something to do with either the people who ran the university or the city fathers, or both, who had decided that tock concerts are just dens of iniquity where drink, drugs and sex were the order of the day and that young innocent students had to be protected against such terrible things.

Somewhere between 1979 and 1981 there was a kind of folk concert on the Hofmeyr Square behind the Carnegie Library and the main admin building. The opening act was a kind of blues jam by a duo (a guitarist and a conga player), the second act was singer / songwriter and pianist Lesley Rae Dowling and David Kramer was the headliner. I left after Dowling finished her set and before Kramer performed, because it was getting cold and I was bored, and always regretted not experiencing the Kramer vibe before he got famous. In contrast to his later folksy image, Kramer wore a sharp suit and black T-shirt, with slicked back hair, very Miami Vice.

Anyhow, as far as live rock shows went, Stellenbosch was in the stone age.

Therefore, I was incredibly astonished and gobsmacked to read the announcement in a local paper that the American band Clean, Athletic & Talented were coming to my hometown to play an actual rock concert in the Town Hall. I’d never heard of this band. This was way before the internet or Google and if the NME didn’t cover a band, I didn’t know about it.

Apparently, CAT (as they referred to themselves) was touring the country to promote their current album Women & Sports and they even managed to get a review of the record in Scope magazine. The reviewer identified the music as belonging to the skinny tie post New Wave pop that was then kind of sweeping the US of A.  

CAT was from California and the name came from their proud boast that they were healthy outdoors types, who took no drugs and obviously had oodles of talent.

One must understand the context. I cannot remember whether the so-called cultural boycott had kicked in yet, but it was certainly true that not many hip and happening international tock acts toured South Africa. The ones who did touch down on our shores were generally deemed to be somewhat past their sell by date and came here only because there was a big pay day from an audience who would not really care if the international artist was a has been back home. These bands also tended to play at Sun City in the then Bophutatswana “homeland” or other large venues, rather than at local dives in small towns like Stellenbosch.

 

Why on earth CAT elected to come to South Africa to promote their album was beyond me, unless it was just a holiday they hoped to pay for by gigging. I understood even less why they would come to Stellenbosch, which was repressed, dull and absolutely nothing like the college towns CAT must’ve had experience of in the States. My guess was that they booked the gig in Stellenbosch because they reasoned that a student audience was their target market and that the students of Stellenbosch would be just like all students in the USA.

It was also weird that they elected to play the Town Hall, which was by no means a small venue. Perhaps the university authorities would not allow CAT to perform anywhere on the campus itself (unlike UCT where there were regular gigs at the Student Union) though one of the function rooms at the Langenhoven Student Centre would have been ideal and perhaps there were no bar live music venues yet, or they thought a huge hall would be just the ticket to contain the multitudes who’d throng to the gig.

I was quite excited by the prospect of a rock event in Stellenbosch and was determined to go to it. If memory serves it was a Thursday night, which was also peculiar, as one would Havre thought they could expect a larger audience over the weekend. However, even a school night would usually not put off any students from going out.

It was cold enough that I wore my anorak when I rode into town on my moped. Underneath the anorak I wore my standard sloppy outfit of grey shirt and brown pants. I was never Mr Hip or Mr Cool & Stylish at varsity and I deliberately wore scruffy, non-fashionable clothes. I also had a beard to hide my bad skin.  I fondly thought of myself as looking freakier than the actual freaks around me who were dressed in their best studiedly hip gear.

I think the gig was advertised to start at 20h00 with the doors opening at 19h00. I was there at 19h00, just in case there was a huge crowd. There was no sign of activity and no queue at the door. The event looked kind of non-happening. I walked around town for a bit, wondering whether I should not blow it off. I had this feat of being the only person in the audience, or one of only a few, and I didn’t like this idea. It would be so embarrassing for the band and if they focussed on the small audience, I may attract more attention than I wanted to.

By 20h00 I made up my mind to return to the Town Hall. A young woman seated at a trestle table at the door took my money (I don’t recall what the entrance fee was) and stamped my wrist. When I stepped into the main hall my worst fears were realised. The spacious room was lined with chairs.

Someone must’ve spent a couple of hours removing the chairs form the wings of the building where they were normally stored, carrying them into the all and setting them up in neat rows to prepare for an anticipated substantial audience, I’ve no idea how many people the hall can accommodate but it must be vastly more than those present on this night.

The only people in the hall were maybe 10 young men and women right in front of the stage. They all looked like the cool rock groupies and entourage from Cape Town, dressed in the way I would’ve imagined rock 'n roll people would dress. They were very young, very skinny and the boys wore in jeans and leather and the girls, satin and tat.  It was almost comically outrageous.

A tape of what I thought must be contemporary tock was playing over the PA. I hardly recognised any of it. Here and there I recognised the words in   a chorus that suggested a band of which I'd read in the NME but hadn’t heard om local radio. The paltry audience was dancing a little, some at their seats, some in the aisle.

I sat down on an aisle chair, about ten rows from the stage, well behind the little group of supporters. It seemed to me that I may well be the only paying attendee and the only local one. The young woman at the door must’ve have been quite surprised to see me.

A small person with black, shoulder length, ratty hair and in very tight jeans with a big biker leather jacket kept walking up and down the aisle, from the front to the rear and back. Obviously agitated. At first, I thought it was a very small, thin guy, then I thought it was a girl, because of the very long hair, then quite unfashionable if you were a hip young man, and slight facial features. Then I thought, no, it must be a guy; oh no, I’m mistaken, it’s a 14-year lesbian because she sure looked like a very small guy; and so on. I just couldn’t make up my mind.

At about 20h30 a couple of people shuffled into sight on the stage where the band instruments had already been set up.  I guessed they’d been waiting to see whether an audience would turn up and had run out of patience, or realised they’d be waiting a long time if they wanted a full house.  

First there was a buxom young woman, with long, straight hair and an ankle length dress, very much the hippie chick. She was followed by a young guy with what’s called an unruly mop of blonde curls, quite a pretty boy, and lastly, the small person with the biker jacket and long black hair.

The trio started a close harmony, acapella version of a reggae tune called “96˚ In the Shade,” by, I think, Third World, yet another song I’d read of in NME and hadn’t heard before. This rendition was, for me, over long, and eventually tedious and seemed to be a time-wasting exercise while waiting for more audience to arrive.

After about 10 minutes of this unaccompanied singing, the three were joined by a guy who settled in behind the drum kit. The blonde guy picked up a bass, the small, dark haired person strapped on a Fender Stratocaster and the girl handled a tambourine.

The group started up a power pop type of song and played it energetically. The small person and the girl were pretty much stationery and the bassist bounced around.

It seemed that the blond guy was the leader of the band, or at least the spokesperson, as the others hardly spoke. He had a lot to say and kept making deprecating references to Bishop's Court, as if one could not have real punk credentials if you were from the upper middle class (and my guess was that all them, and him in particular, were nice, well brought middle class kids from the southern suburbs of Cape Town) and eventually told the audience, most of whom probably knew this already, that they were The Boulaines from Cape Town. I had never heard of them before this evening and never heard of them again.  If memory serves, he also introduced the band and called the guitarist Kevin Shirley, which resolved the gender mystery for me.

I have always wondered if I’d heard correctly and whether this guy was indeed the same Keven “Caveman” Shirley who later led a hard rock band called The Council and left for Australia in the mid-Eighties to pursue a career as record producer.

I don't remember much of the set The Boulaines played, except that they did another version of “96˚ In the Shade,” with instruments, and played mostly covers interspersed with their own compositions. The style of music was, as I’ve mentioned, what I thought of as power pop, with a smidgen   of reggae. I didn’t make notes when I went home, and no song stood out above the others. As I knew absolutely nothing about The Boulaines I had no idea of their status in Cape Town music circles and of what happened to them subsequently.

The Boulaines played for about 40 minutes, followed by a long break while the stage was being set up for the main attraction.  The Boulaines’ equipment was removed in its entirety. A huge keyboard stack was positioned front and centre and a large drum kit was assembled at the rear of the stage.

Almost 30 minutes after The Boulaines had played their last note, the guys from Clean, Athletic & Talented ambled onto the stage. I don’t recall what the other three looked like, but I do remember that the leader, vocalist and keyboard player was very blonde, tanned and had a neatly trimmed, short   beard.  He could’ve taken his facial hair cue from the contemporary look of  Mike Love from the Beach Boys, without the hats Love regularly sported.

These guys did not look like punks, or even New Wave. They looked like a soft rock band from the mid-Seventies, with currently fashionable haircuts and currently trendy clothes, instead of the long hair and satin and tat of the glam rock period.

The second thing that was very noticeable, in contrast to The Boulaines, was that the sound was a lot louder and stronger. CAT obviously had a much better sound system and sound guy. Where The Boulaines had sounded a tad amateurish and quite local, CAT definitely sounded like an international touring band.  It was a great pity they were playing to a virtually empty hall.

The frontman was very cheerful, very vocal and with a very American gung ho attitude, so pleased to be in our happy land and in this beautiful town. If he was experiencing a deep disappointment at the lack of audience, he wasn’t going to let it get him down. He played to the audience as if he were at an overcrowded Shea Stadium.

The sound was pretty much a keyboard heavy muscular rock of a type that became the norm a few years later, and the songs were forgettable. In fact, the only song I remember, was their version of The Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You” (if memory serves), which they performed twice.  It was probably the best song in their set that relied on power and arrangements, and technical proficiency, rather than tunes and decent hooks.

The best thing one could say about the CAT set was that it was loud, had a solid beat and that the group at least pretended to have a great deal of fun. It was a prime example of that rock cliché, or adage, that you play any room, regardless of the size of the audience, as if you were playing to a large, adoring audience.

I left when CAT started up the second rendition of “Tired of Waiting for You,” as I wasn’t keen on hearing their rendition again, had had enough and wasn’t expecting the gig to improve radically. I’d enjoyed The Boulaines more, for all their ramshackle local stomp, and thought that CAT was far too slick and contrived.

With hindsight, I suppose that CAT was simply professional in a way all American bands of a certain standard were expected to be if they wanted to get ahead and to impress an audience. The thing that pissed me off was that the group sounded so loud and impressive, were obviously very professional, yet couldn’t write songs that stuck in the mind. The set list consisted of songs off the Women & Sports album, and we were encouraged to buy a copy from the young woman at the entrance when we left the hall.  I didn’t bother.

The whole experience left me quite unimpressed. I thought it was quite stupid of whoever promoted the gig to have it on a week night and to have booked such an inappropriate venue. Even so, I was almost shocked that, so few locals bothered to attend. After all, there were lots of students in Stellenbosch and it shouldn’t have been difficult to attract at least a hundred, if not more, who were into this kind of rock.

As far as I know, nobody else was dumb enough to rent the Town Hall for a rock concert ever again. The scene, such as it was, remained at places like Die Akker. the Langenhoven Student Centre, the Drie Gewels Hotel outside Stellenbosch and at various with liquor licenses on farms around the town.

The next two rock gigs I attended in Stellenbosch, in respectively 1982 and 1983, were at De Akker, which became my local band venue from January 1984 when I returned home after my 2-year stint of National Service.  The next international band I ever saw, was Crowded House at the Good Hope Centre in Cape Town in 1993.

CAT appeared in Stellenbosch like aliens from outer space and returned to their home planet, causing no ripple in the local musical pond.  They’d have caused more excitement if they’d really been aliens; as it was, their gig was no more than a weird anomaly in the dead-as-disco university town that  Stellenbosch was in 1980 and I doubt that anyone, but me, who was a student at the time ever heard of the gig or, if they’d heard, will recall it. It does seem like a dream.

Rodriguez plays Grand West on 21 February 2013

Sixto Rodriguez is one of the last lost legends of the past forty years, a truly legendary rock and roll story of creative passion stifled and almost killed by commercial disinterest, yet with a tiny flickering flame in a continent far  away from the man's homeland and also a country where this man would have been a second class citizen had he lived here, and then the miraculous rediscovery about 27 years after the release of his last album when a couple of fans from South Africa set out on the investigative journey chronicled in the Oscar winning documentary Searching for Sugarman and not only found the man but also brought him to South Africa to tour and to demonstrate that rumours of his death were greatly exaggerated. that first series of concerts in 1998 must have been spectacular, awe inspiring and downright unbelievable for the true believers who'd kept the faith when no-one else in the world even knew of Rodriguez the musician.

Of course, as the biography shows, Rodriguez was also known and appreciated in Australia and New Zealand, perhaps because of South African exiles, perhaps simply because the Southern Hemisphere was different and could make its own heroes.

Rodriguez arrived in South Africa as a legend and played his concerts like a messiah, then returned to obscurity in the USA. He returned for more shows in 2003, still under appreciated in his homeland. At the time in insightful documentary was shown on local television, at least partly telling the same tale as immortalised in Searching for Sugarman and this was the first time I took note of the story behind his return to the limited limelight provided by South African interest in his music. I owned a CD re-release of the Cold Fact album, as a memento of the kind of musical memory Searching for Sugarman celebrates, of an obscure American artist who somehow struck a chord in my country. I really liked the music on Cold Fact. it was not so much of a call to subversive arms as it seems to have been to the people who idolised the record back in the  Seventies.

I cannot even recall whether I took note of the Rodriguez shows in Cape Town in 1998. Not that I could have attended them out in the Northern Suburbs, as I had no transport. similarly I had little interest in attending any of the 2003 shows. In the first instance I still had no transport and in the second instance I was wary of a living legend returning to bless us with his favour. My cynicism convinced me that it would not be any good. I had also read press reports about his alleged drunkenness onstage and off and the general air of decrepitude around him, given that he was quite old and not in the best of health.

By  2012 my attitude had changed somewhat and when I heard that Rodriguez would be playing a couple of shows in Cape Town at the Grand West Arena in Good wood, I decided to go. The first Cape Town show sold out in record  time and I could get tickets only for what was then the second and last show of the 2013 tour. Subsequently  2 more Grand West performances were added and they became the first two shows of the tour.  I guess the unprecedented interest was piqued by the success of the Searching For Sugarman documentary as well as the belief that this tour might well be the last time any of us would have the privilege of seeing the man perform on stage.

During  2012 I had the benefit of finding a double CD pack release of Cold Fact and Coming From Reality, the two studio albums that form the canon.

The big hits are from Cold Fact and Coming From Reality is almost a different artist altogether. The record was recorded in England and has much more folk pop approach than the militant tunes of the first album and to a degree these tunes were kind of off putting. The sweetness and light of the love  songs did not really do it for me. The overdubbing on some tunes, like the strident, the out of place lead guitar on "Climb Up On My Music"  were disturbing. over time and with repeated listening even these second wave tunes have revealed their attraction but my guess is that Cold Fact will always be the iconic album.

 Bought the Searching for Sugarman DVD and must admit that while the story moved me and I was quite taken by the many views of Cape Town, that made it seem as if the Rodriguez legend and spirit was kept alive only here, but on the whole the story was the best thing. the documentary was limited. One still knew very little about Rodriguez even of the film makers managed to unearth a number of ghosts from the past, with a hilariously belligerent insert from Rodriguez's old label boss. of course the story is about the search and the triumphant concerts of 1998 but one would have liked to know what happened to the guy after that, when he returned to the States and obscurity.

As part of my psychological and emotional preparation for the Rodriguez concert on 21 February 2013 listened to the 2003 album Live Fact, culled from concert tour. My worst fears were realised. he band was accomplished and mostly got it right though it was not a note perfect replication of the stuff on the records. The downer was the very weak and colourless Rodriguez voice. He sounded ancient, decrepit and also disinterested. if this was how he was going to sound on the 2013 tour , I may well have wasted the price of two tickets.

Von-Mari and I were at Grand West about 90 minutes before show time and could have a relaxing meal beforehand. Grand West was buzzing. many concert goers and the usual crowd of attendees who come to eat and to play. This is not a place I frequent. in fact I think I've been there a total of maybe four times and he crowd thee aren't exactly my type of people.

Just before the show started I had the opportunity of watching concert goers strolling towards the Arena and was amazed at the age profile. it seemed that the average  age was well beyond 50, possibly the generation who cherished Rodriguez in the first place, and then a smattering of a younger crowd. The hipster element was missing. Rodriguez must not be a legend to them.

The auditorium was packed. Our  seats were on an upper tier, just above one of the entrances to the room, facing the stage. I had an excellent view of one of the large video screens, always a bonus when the figures on the stage are so small to me that I cannot distinguish them. The seats and the sound quality were far better than at the recent Red Hot Chili Peppers show at the Cape Town Stadium.

Local band Newton's 2nd Law opened for Rodriguez and started playing promptly at 20h00 and finished off without encore about 25 minutes later. The band has, on paper, an interesting sound of big guitars, fiddle and keyboards backing a guy with a soulful R & B kind of voice. The arrangements are tight and the musicians proficient and obviously well-rehearsed and the vocalist sure can croon with warmth and coolness but the overall effect is less than memorable. There is no outstanding song or hook or moment of brilliance that sticks in the mind or makes one want to own the album they've already released.

I always wonder how bands  like this get onto an international tour as support. They must have ambitious management with some connections. Perhaps it is really true that the support band has to pay to be on the tour. in this case Newton's 2nd Law was the support band on all of the Rodriguez shows and the exposure must have been nice even if the band played to a less than full house and, as is usual for support bands, to an audience who are not here to see them. Maybe the exposure has helped them win over new fans and to sell more albums. I might buy the record simply to have a closer listen to the band but not because I thought of them as the biggest thing since colossus. If they last, they might fit into the niche currently occupied by Prime Circle and Watershed and perhaps Just Jinger, with the big anthemic rock sound and smooth emotional vocals without any distinguishing characteristics.

Between the end of the opening set and the arrival of the main event we had to wait about thirty minutes while a curtain was drawn across the stage. Quite dramatic.

Just before 21h00 the MC welcomed Rodriguez to the stage and the audience erupted with loud cheers and applause. The  messiah hath landed. One of the most emotional moments in the Searching for Sugarman movie is when Rodriguez walks on stage for the first South African concert at the Bellville Velodrome, to the distinctive bass figure that opens "I Wonder" and the audience are on their feet and holler and shout and stomped  for a very long time while the band vamps and the man just stands there, dumbfounded and  silent, allowing the waves of unexpected weird adulation to wash across his head. although the adoration at Grand West is palpable, it is nothing like that moment. I did feel a tinge of a similar emotion  though, seeing as how this is probably the  first and only tie I would in real life experience this kind of truly legendary event. I could not see the man except on the video screen but there he was, in real life  and still standing.

Nobody ever introduced the band but I guessed that Willem Moller was still the guitarist and perhaps had been for all of the Rodriguez shows.

The opening song was "Climb Up On My Music" which on record is a strange amalgam of basically quiet  folk song about the joys of music, with  a strident lead guitar overdub that is so out of place as to seem a deliberate attempt to be weird. this live version  is louder than the recorded version but the lead guitar bit is subdued and in the background. the sound is typically big, with keyboards and two drummers and percussionist to fill the room unlike the relatively sparse arrangements of the first album.

The Rodriguez voice is very weak and almost non-existent. He sounds like a resurrected legend rather than a living one. my first thought was, oh God, this is going to be a  long unhappy evening if he carried son like this. He wears  floppy hat that he sometimes takes off and keeps putting it back on his head, and dark sun glasses. I later read that he does not see that well anymore and the glasses must be a protection against the glare of the spotlights.

The next couple of numbers are in the same vein as the first. The band plays strongly and competently  and the vocals are wispy and almost ephemeral. The rumours started to ring true, that he cannot do it anymore and has been wheeled out solely for a bunch of people to make money out of the deal. then the opening bass notes of "I Wonder" start rolling out and the crowd goes nuts. Rodriguez had been swigging out of a water bottle after every song and then started drinking something else from a cup. whatever this combination was,  or  perhaps it was the song, but from here  on in the voice returned with strength and purity and if one closes one's eyes one could almost be listening to the record. All of us  sang along. it was a great moment of magic coming alive at Grand West.

for the rest of the set Rodriguez is in good voice with the  years falling of like mist burning away in the mid-morning.  He performs all the best known tunes from the two albums and then threw in a couple of cover versions, from "Sea of Heartbreak" to “Fever" to a rocking "Blue Suede Shoes."  Perhaps his Fifties roots.

"I like to do songs by American songwriters," he explains.

Rodriguez has lots of onstage business. He starts off each tune by strumming his amplified acoustic guitar (quite a sexy little number) with the  volume knob turned way down, before he turns up the volume and one can hear the rhythmic playing. At first, I thought he was simply forgetting time all the time, to adjust the volume but because he was doing it or every song I started thinking that he was first making sure he was playing the correct chords and rhythm before he kicked in the volume. At the end of the song the guitar falls away from his body, hangs loose and he drinks something, perhaps says something and then he takes up the ax to start the next tune. this means that there is a break of a couple of minutes between each song which kind of breaks the flow, unlike Newton's 2nd law, whose songs segued into each other with the minimum of interruption, but this method could also be deliberate, to give the old guy a chance to have a rest and to catch his breath before launching into the next tune.

the audience is loud and vocal and there were several declarations of love for the  legend, to which he deadpanned "I love you back" much to the general delight. He tells  a risqué Micky Mouse joke, makes a somewhat unintelligible speech about how wrong violence against women is, suggests that there should now be a female pope and asked us to regard him and treat him as an "ordinary legend." the patter is broken and mumbled but the crowd loves it. In the breaks between songs there is an ongoing dialogue with the man on the stage. They are his friends. This is so unlike the extremely cool that is the usual Cape Town audience.

the big highlight of the evening is "Sugarman" where the audience loudly sings along and when the song comes to an end a section of the audience takes up the chorus and sings it back to Rodriguez and then the entire crowd, me included, sings the chorus. I do not know whether Rodriguez became emotional at this but it was pretty damn awesome from where I sat. This is true dedication and devotion and love for this guy who is revered in South African and nowhere else.

The version of "Blue Suede Shoes" was pretty great. I would not have thought Rodriguez  had this kind of rocking in him anymore but he may well have played the  in many bars before where doing the  human jukebox ting is required. The  tune also have the crack band a great opportunity to rock out with gusto.

According to Rodriguez he not only makes music to get girls, to make money or be famous, he also does it because he enjoys it. Obviously, as the rewards have been a long time coming.

Some in the crowd called out for "A Most Disgusting Song" but it was not forthcoming. I  wondered whether Rodriguez would want to sing a song with  the referral to "faggot bars" and had perhaps decided that it would not be politically correct. he also did not do "Heikki's Suburbia Bus Tour" another favourite of mine off Coming From Reality.  the main set lasted about  75 minutes and with the mandatory encore the whole performance lasted 90 minutes. Had Rodriguez not played the cover versions he could have done more of his own tunes, but never mind. the finale was a sterling, striking version of "Like A Rolling Stone."  By this time the voice was strong and I could not help but contrast hoe Rodriguez sounded with how ruined and creaky  Bob Dylan's voice currently is. they are more or less the same age and in a way Rodriguez must have been influenced by Dylan, particularly on the debut album,  and tonight Rodriguez probably did Dylan's most famous song more justice than Dylan can do these days.

the last few international acts I've seen have performed at Cape town Stadium and the atmosphere and sound were quite different to the relative intimacy of Grand West Arena. The space is by no means small and intimate but compared to a stadium  it is kind  of. Rodriguez's music probably would not have done well in the large open stadium space and the other great thing is that the palpable  love  in the room and the audible shouts made the experience something more special than a tiny group of musicians in the distance of a huge stadium space with the concomitant extremely loud sound system that often kills the music because all and any subtlety is lost.

The only other gig of similar nature that I recall is Crowded House’s show in the Good Hope  Centre in 1993. The crowd was probably smaller and there was q lot more standing room in front of the stage in the days when the concept of golden circle had not yet been afforded the status, and financial reward, now accorded it. I could get close to the stage and could therefore see the guys and secondly the crows sang along to many of the songs which  were well known, particularly the hits. Not that Crowded House was of similarly legendary status as Rodriguez but it was awesome that  they wold come to South African to play when they were still going strong.

This was the first rock gig I'd attended at Grand West, which has become the second venue of choice for big acts, other than the mega shows at Cape Town Stadium.  have never been to any rock concert at the Bellville Velodrome which was once the main venue for smaller shows because the general perception was that the Good Hope Centre was a bad place for gigs though it once was the  premier indoor  venue in Cape Town,  Bad acoustics were always blamed. at the Crowded House show I could not fault the sound. at Grand West the sound was superb.

When rock was young most of its practitioners had no concept of doing it a long career. They did not expect the rock lark to last longer than 5 years and certainly did not think that it could be done once you were past 30. Today the rock generation that made the breakthrough all in or very near their seventies and yet they are still performing and recording if they can. The Stones  have taken long breaks between albums and tours but have never stopped. Bob   Dylan had kept  on touring and recording. Leonard Cohen was forced to tour again at a ripe old age  because of financial pressure. IN a way, therefore, it is not strange or Rodriguez to be  touring at his age even if he has never had a rock career. in this way he is very much like many of the old bluesmen who were rediscovered in the early Sixties, after long lives spent in some menial job or another, after an initial burst of recording activity when they were very young, because the music thing did not provide enough income to sustain a family.  Who knows how good or bad Rodriguez's life might have, working construction raising a family and the rest. Right now his career has taken off with exposure in the USA even if this is not his core audience and maybe will never be. There is talk of recording a brand new album. In a sense it is almost superfluous for him to give us more music. the legend rests on the 2 albums from the dim distant past that never had an audience larger than the few thousand people in the Southern Hemisphere.  Any new recording might be of curiosity value because it would be by Him but it could not really achieve legendary status. It will no doubt immediately be snapped up and be hyped to death. Cold Fact became known  through word of mouth and sold steadily over many  years, it was never a massive popular success and that is part of the magic and the attraction, that one was part of a movement that was not a movement and not just a member of the kind of mass hysteria that greeted albums like Thriller or Born in the USA.

The one fact that emerged from the Searching for Sugarman documentary is that Rodriguez probably saw very little of the revenue  or royalties from record sales. Creative accounting was rife and the music industry in the Seventies and for a small label and a performer who sold diddley squat in the States, his home market, the accounting would have become more creative than ever. One could imagine that Rodriguez was in effect repaying the recording  costs from every bit of record  sales income for as long as the records sold.

My expectation is that Rodriguez will not tour here again. This tour in the wake of the documentary was a  last hurrah, a last visit to the country of his legend. even if the man somehow now or posthumously becomes famous in the USA it will never have the same resonance as his fame in South Africa which grew from an organic grassroots knowledge of something special to a grand obsession.  It never happened in the States and cannot happen now. When I bought my first sets of rock encyclopaedias I looked up the name Rodriguez, because I was intrigued about this guy whose record was so popular here but of whom I did not know much. There was not a single mention of the guy in any of the books I consulted. The closest was a country singer called Johnny Rodriguez who was completely obscure and unknown toe me before I saw his name in an encyclopaedia, yet he was considered well known enough to merit inclusion where Sixto Rodriguez, though I did not know the first name then, had no such claim.

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Otis Waygood

In 2011 one of the biggest rock bands in the world, the Kings of Leon, makes music that is not that big on tunes, relies very much on groove and features a vocalist with the kind of tactile lived-in voice that makes one forget the shortcomings of the lyric or the lack of actual tune.

During the Nineties the Black Crowes, who were often a heavier proposition than the Kings of Leon, were the best purveyors of a kind of blues and soul infused heavy rock that relied on groove to make its impact. When it formula worked (for about the first 4 albums) it was awesome; when it did not (most of the songs on the subsequent albums), the Black Crowes were a drag.

Otis Waygood (having dropped the “Blues Band” half of the name) was very much a band in the mould of the Black Crowes and Kings of Leon.  As the Otis Waygood Blues Band it gave us a brilliant debut album suffused with soulful blues and exciting rock and roll.  Perhaps because they wanted to go progressive and get more “underground”, the band left the blues behind and decided to go for a funkier, groove-based and totally tune free sound, on Simply Otis Waygood.  

The tracks on the second album sound like studio jams to me. The band did not want to record any blues numbers and had no great facility with writing proper songs, or perhaps did not want to, and had only a limited budget for recording a follow up album. The best solution was to book a weekend’s worth of studio time, go in there, jam and then release the most promising jams as the new album.

I could be wrong on this. The tracks on Simply Otis Waygood could have been carefully structured and rehearsed before they were recorded but it sure does not sound like that to me.  Even the song titles (like “Feeling The Good”. “Feel It In Me”, “Have Some Fun”, “No Time People” and “In Alan Car”) sound like they were made up on the spot.

The gap between Otis Waygood Blues Band and Simply Otis Waygood is so vast and unfathomable that it almost does not seem to be the same band. The difference is like the proverbial night and day. The debut is one of the great South African albums of all time. The follow up is one of the worst. Maybe it helps to listen to the album only if one is excessively stoned. Unfocussed jamming is good only if you are rehearsing or are playing a five hour set at some hippie rock festival to a bunch of potheads who simply want to experience the vibe, man.

“The Messenger” sounds like a tune that required some thought and planning. It has lyrics and an extended (and quite captivating) flute solo.

The mostly acoustic last track, “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child”, is the sole blues number on the album and a reminder of how powerful the band could have been if it had stuck to music that was closer to where they began than the groovy bass driven sound of the rest of the album. This version is atmospheric, deep and affecting.

By the third album, Ten Light Claps and A Scream, it seems that the band realised that they needed actual songs and songs that need to be more varied than loose jams tend to be.

When RetroFresh compiled and released Otis Waygood Blues Band and Simply Otis Waygood, they included a number of tracks from Ten Light Claps and A Scream on each of those albums, possibly because they did not believe they would ever get around to releasing the last album. This means that I have in fact paid twice for the songs on the Ten Light Claps And A Scream CD.  They really aren’t worth that kind of money.

Third time around the production is more expansive. On Simply Otis Waygood, the bare drum and bass grooves plod along without adornment. On Ten Light Claps And A Scream, there is a much bigger sound and arrangements that give a fuller sound to what still sound like tracks pieced together from studio jams.

Once they left the blues game behind on record Otis Waygood sound like no other UK or American band of the period that I know and my guess is, as with Freedoms Children, that the freak rock and jazzy elements come as much from an European perception, sensibility and art insight into rock music as it might come from what was happening in the English speaking countries that spawned rock in the first place.

The groove and saxophone numbers, with some melodic guitar interpolations, would not doubt have sounded most excellent at festivals or big dance halls. This is by no means intellectual music that you needed a lot of headroom to be able to absorb. Ten Light Claps is quite visceral.

“The Higher I Go” may be a drug reference, as it is somewhat psychedelic, but it is also the best tune on the album. Harmonies abound and it is light and airy.

Final track “S.H.A.K.” has elements of mbaqanga with guitar and sax interplay that foreshadows the township pop sound of Bright Blue in the late Eighties. This is the most overtly African the music gets. Great tune too.

Otis Waygood released 3 albums in the 1970 and 1971 and then disappeared from sight. It was a legendary name of my very early teens. I was respectively 11 and 12 when their records came out. I never saw them perform live and possibly never even heard them on the radio either but I knew the name from somewhere and for many years this band haunted me. For a long time, until I read about the RetroFresh re-issues, I even came to the conclusion that Otis Waygood had just been a fantasy and not a real band at all. I never saw any of their records anywhere, not even at Sygma Records where I spent many hours flipping through album covers, and I never read about them in the local press, at least not that I remember. The band came down from Zimbabwe, had a good run in South Africa, presumably while the members were students, and then had to be discarded as a non-vital interest when the individuals went their separate ways and not only left South Africa but abandoned the continent as well.

It seems that South Africa has quite a long history of recorded rock and roll and there are many legendary bands from the Sixties and early Seventies, partly because relatively few of them recorded. In the late Eighties, in Cape Town at least, hardly any of the alternative rock bands released records. Since 1994 there are probably too many local rock albums. The legendary figures from the past stand out because they were solitary fighters in the struggle for rock and roll freedom. Who is legendary nowadays? Every bunch of musicians with some cash to spare can record their tunes; with compute software what it is, they do not even really need a commercial studio or a recording contract. If everybody is famous, who is really famous?

Otis Waygood was a legend to me. I was extremely chuffed and impressed to be able to listen to the debut album after all the years of obscurity. Not many local blues acts have made good; Otis Waygood is one, Deltablue is  another one and presently Pretty Blue Guns is a third example. There are lots of blues duffers around and the difference is that these three bands have managed, each in its own way, to make something new of an old genre that trades in cliché and over familiar forms. Otis Waygood was the first of them and deserves all the kudos they can get.

This is why the last two albums are so shocking in contrast. The freshness, verve and brio are no longer there. Now the music becomes an effort, the effort not to be restricted to a blues “bag” and yet it is the effort that exhausts terminally, as it does not redeem and it does not exalt.

Ten Light Claps is a more palatable proposition than Simply Otis Waygood and one can argue that the band went out on a high. Perhaps the band members went out high. The art might have been designed as primitive. Unfortunately the ostensible simplicity and the lack of artifice drained the lifeblood from the living and breathing entity that made the debut album. Going “underground” more or less suffocated the musicians. They no longer had clear air to breathe; they could not see where they were going; they were tunnelling deeper into oblivion not toward a seam of gold.

It is good that RetroFresh conducts this re-issue programme. Their catalogue represents an essential record, no pun intended, of South African rock history. The return of The Helicopters and even The Spectres is not all that necessary but the resurrection of Abstract Truth, Freedoms Children, Hawk, Suck and Otis Waygood meets a need we may never have known to exist until it did. Release it and they will buy.  The older guys like Brian Currin may be replacing worn out vinyl; I am acquiring for the first time. This stuff could easily have been a secret history of our times and could have remained secret if it had not been for digital technology, seeing as how most of the master tapes of the recordings of so many local acts went up in flames just under forty years ago.

I’ll be playing the tracks from Otis Waygood Blues Band for a long time to come. They are part of the permanent IPod collection, up there with Cream, Dr Feelgood and Jefferson Airplane.