East London

Oranjeland

We watched helplessly from our supper table, through the huge windows of the Kennaway dining room, as the vessel Oranjeland—only five years old at the time—ran aground on a reef just offshore from the Esplanade. The whole dining room was agog. A high gale had been blowing all day and was still buffeting the windows of the dining room, so all of us diners were in a state of disbelief at seeing the lights of this vessel gliding past the breakwaters for the open sea in such weather. As it cleared the breakwater, it appeared to lift, and grew bigger as it approached us sideways rather than making way out to sea. Within minutes, we felt through our feet a grinding crunch as it grounded and settled, seemingly on the beach. It felt that close.

By this date, 13th August 1974, “Down To Earth”, the Chris Roering band, had worked six weeks at the Kennaway Hotel. Playing Tuesday through Saturday was a new experience—quite breathtakingly novel and enjoyable at first. Getting to East London was not. The drive from Pietermaritzburg was deadly difficult, although it was supposedly covered in mid-winter. I don’t remember any cars having aircon in SA in the ’70s.

Frances was heavily pregnant with Nicola and not yet taking all the life changes in her stride. She really did not enjoy change at all, apart from anything else, so for her it all felt like a rough deal. My Fiat 124 was jammed packed to the roof, with a small space between things for two-year-old daughter Tamara in the back seat. She hated her car seat! In the end, we gave her the freedom to come and go from it. Of course, she wanted only to sit with mom in the front—very uncomfortable for Frances (and Nicola). We knew it was dangerous, but what was one to do? She even sat on my lap for a while. That Fiat interior was surprisingly spacious, and she managed quite easily to sit between my belly and the steering wheel for a while. Eventually, she realised it was not comfortable in the front, mostly because there was much more sun there, and eventually slept some hours in the back.

The drive was a challenge as always, through the huge river valleys in the Transkei—though it was a doddle back then compared to dealing with today’s traffic, especially the many taxi combis. Taxis were scarce back then. Chrysler Valiants were in demand for them and went quite well, even uphill and with nine people aboard. There were few trucks, but they reduced us to a crawl on those river valley hills, which are towering, huge, and steep. My mind, usually full of music, was on the road non-stop, and just as well, because on that route the tarmac was always shared with livestock. Goats are not a worry—they usually get out of the way—but cattle have to be moved. Many times we were reduced to a crawl. It’s really hard for herders, too, because cattle have their own minds about which direction to move in. The luckier cattle drivers were on horseback, but others were on foot, toiling miles in the heat. We and animals work hard for one another.

We were put up in hotel rooms on arrival—lucky after a long day’s drive—and it was a few days before we were relocated to our flat in the Quigney, a steep but short walk uphill from the hotel. Meals were at the hotel. The early weeks were a fairly easy routine: breakfast, then rehearsal, then lunch, then back to the flat for some rest before supper and the evening gig. Frances did not drive, so I was up and down that hill a lot, ferrying her and Tamara to and fro.

I had learnt the rudiments of electric bass and flute during a few weeks of rehearsal prior to leaving Pietermaritzburg, the idea being to play bass when John Bentley moved on to guitar and vocals for the rock ‘n roll numbers. I also had with me a valve trombone. It was easy, being really a trumpet but an octave lower: same fingering for the same notes. I used those for only one or two numbers per night—just as well, because after a few weeks, fatigue set in and I did not put in any practice on any instrument. Mercifully, playing seemed to hone my chops enough. It at least gave me iron chops on trumpet, and I got through the stints on flugel and flute okay.

Bass was another question. John was visibly frustrated at how loose my timing was: I just had not had enough time to practice my way to a steady, metronomic beat. I had enough rhythm in me to get by, but I felt for John, for whom getting into a groove was the most important achievement. Rightly so: not enough practice results in faltering timing. However slight this was, of course I agreed about that, and there was nothing to enjoy about being a weak link. It was a compromise, working out well for the band in the sense that it allowed a bigger and more varied repertoire and a chance for John to sing. But a compromise is still a compromise. He, however, rather angelically never actually complained to my face.

I never ever had any real desire to play guitar. I tried. John lent me an electric guitar, the plan being that I should practice up the ability to play rhythm in some numbers when I wasn’t playing a wind instrument. The one he lent me was undeniably beautiful, especially to the son of a fine craft woodworker. The body was mahogany, the fingerboard rosewood. It was a Gibson SG. Back in the day, everyone wanted either a Gibson Les Paul or a Fender Stratocaster, but those did duty more commonly for lead guitar. In my opinion, the Gibson SG should have been unbeatable as a rhythm guitar, but what do I know? I loved the wood, the craftsmanship, and its sound as a rhythm guitar, but I never really developed a passion for it, just because I was obsessed with wind instruments.

Tome of Tones

It was a pity in a way, because as a result of playing melody instruments and being self-taught, I was depressingly (and remain so) ignorant about harmony. Or perhaps this is not so depressing, because self-taught guys find knowledge in their own way. While at UNP studying Fine Arts, a book I found in the library there totally fascinated me. It was entitled The Schillinger System of Musical Composition by Joseph Schillinger. I would draw the book from the library, keep it for the allowed lending period, return it, and then do the same throughout the year. According to the library record stuck to the inner cover of the book (and confirmed by one of the librarians), I was the only person ever to take this book—at least in the 30-odd months I spent on that campus.

Studying Schillinger’s approach, I was in good company! I afterwards learnt that he taught Tchaikovsky, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman, among others. There was actually very little music in the book, but it was importantly all about patterns. It set out a way of graphing notes on graph paper, something more easily understood if one does that with “I Got Rhythm”. The second four-note group of that song is a mirror image of the first four-note group.

The first four chords of “I Got Rhythm” became the blueprint chord sequence for most American popular music, so I am told. There was the 12-bar blues, and then there was “I Got Rhythm”: its chord sequence—I6,vi7,ii7,V7—was the most used verse sequence in popular music until the Beatles came along. I first encountered it looking at a lead sheet of “Blue Moon”. So, naturally, when my turn to delve into harmony came along on John Bentley’s Gibson SG, the first thing I did was learn, in all keys, that same I6,vi7,ii7,V7 progression. Sadly, because I lack a feel for stringed instruments, I forgot the fingerings for those chords over time. Today, if I were to pick up a guitar again, I would have to relearn everything except A7, G7, D7, and E7 fingerings—probably from playing blues songs in E.

Bass Sick Humour

My disinterest in guitar was not true of all stringed instruments. My cousin Michael ‘Effort’ Hill was a double bass player, and left his instrument for long periods (his university digs were tiny) in The Tabernacle. One day, my brother’s friend Jim McClure ¹ came over to visit. Finding Al not home, he laid the bass on Al’s bed, covered it with a quilt, placed a posy of flowers pinched into the strings close to the bridge, and put a fedora on its ‘chest’. Al got home late after a long evening of drinking and got the shock of his life to find a stiff on his bed!

Curious about the double bass, I played with that one and found it quite easy to work out a scale, but hard on the fingers. Nevertheless, that deep thumping resonance resonated in the room and got under my skin, and I was to have a chance in later years to actually play double bass—a secret, long-time wish. I could never get enough of Paul Chambers on the Miles Davis albums, nor of Ray Brown with the Oscar Peterson Trio, nor of the wonderfully leisurely long decay of Ron Carter’s walking bass, and nobody will be surprised to hear that I later became mesmerised by the playing of NHOP (Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen). When I went to see NHOP in a little club called La Vida in La Chatelet, Paris, I told him I’d waited twenty years to hear him. He said in alarm

Don’t wait another twenty years!

He was in his early fifties when I heard him life. As it turned out, he did not live another twenty years. He died aged fifty-eight.

Pro Musician

It was strange at first to think of myself as a pro. I had never intended to become a full-time musician. It was the racist Natal colonial employers in Durban who plunged me into this necessity. I have to say it did not feel bad at all. My wife did not enjoy the life, ever. She had her own inner reasons, but also at the time was heavily pregnant, and our living situation—where we lived in a flat but ate at the hotel—made her feel she didn’t have a home, which was of course technically true. We didn’t really own where we lived, and to her the whole thing could collapse at any moment.

I had no track record. What if, for example, the hotel owner decided he wanted to pay for a trio with vocalist only, and get rid of me, the sideman? These fears were well-grounded. To this day, the music business in South Africa is a miserable business from the perspective of finances and security, and it was far worse back in those apartheid days. There were no unions. There was no such thing (as my Durban job, which I had expected to hold for the rest of my life, had already shown) as job security.

Regardless of talent, one’s life in almost any sphere was courtesy of mostly nothing more than men who had not advanced beyond a sort of high school boys’ club, morphed into a business club, or “chamber of commerce” as they grandiosely preferred it.

Throughout most of the six months we spent in East London, air force and army helicopters spent some urgent and hairy time flying to and from the large vacant lot next to the Kings Hotel, fetching large wooden packing crates and liftvans off the ship. The cases were marked “Hamburg”. Clearly some intricate sanctions-busting was going on.

Cue Gavin Stewart

Gavin Stewart was yet another ‘family member’, in and out of the Cook home in Scotsville. He started journalism as cartoonist “Mudd” in Nux, the UNP student newspaper. Gavin was the first person I know who realised the coming of “no hot lead” meant “no lead time”. Now, with phones, we routinely get disasters - and the skinner - straight from “the peoples’ devices”.

As soon as his Rhodes University journalist department mocked up bromide pages for Cue, the ten-day Grahamstown Festival Newspaper, he knew that the days of “lead time” (pun intended) were over. No more hot leaden metal typesetting. Within months, that changed to Ventura Publisher and Aldus PageMaker, and copy passed digitally, straight from Atex or its PC workalike, XYWrite II.

The Daily Despatch

Gavin’s student, my niece Robin Taylor, along with a team of other hectically tired student journalists, would stand in line to deliver the page mockup to Grocotts Daily Mail. Within months, the copy & paste became fully digital. Nothing was ever the same again, and Grocotts, the oldest newspaper in SA (but for a week’s closure), became the first to digitise. Gavin went on to make Kugompo’s Daily Despatch into one of the best newspapers in the country. It has just started a website. Robin still has the style book created by Gavin for Cue.