Some ancient history

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   My uncle Bill gave me my first guitar at age ten. I learned five chords and four songs from him, but then I put it aside for a time. About two years later I really started learning to play - I wanted to be Hank Marvin! I bugged my folks until they got me my first electric guitar, a red vinyl-covered Hofner six-string, and a thirty-watt amp. I was set to take on the world!

   In high school I put together a band called The System (It was the mid-sixties okay?) that consisted of two guitarists and a drummer. I had the treble cranked up full and the bass turned off and Dave had his guitar set the opposite way to compensate for the lack of a bass player. The music was a mix of sixties pop and the rougher-edged stuff like the Stones, the Animals, and the early Kinks. Then one Saturday morning I turned on the radio to listen to the hit parade and the opening notes of Mr. Tambourine Man transfixed me. From then on, the Byrds ruled. I fell totally in love with the twelve-string sound, but I didn’t have one and couldn’t afford one, so I figured out how to play pairs of notes that would give me the same jangly effect in the solos. We played a bunch of high school dances and even one paid gig for the local cops! At one school we had the plug pulled on us because we’d kept the last song of the night going for seven minutes already. Real rock ’n’ roll rebels!

   I spent a year at Teachers College (don’t ask) and teamed up with a guy named Rich. He could play and sing well, and he seemed to have more or less the same world view as me. We were going to be Southern Africa’s answer to Simon and Garfunkel, and we started writing our own songs and performing them anywhere and everywhere we got the chance, but somewhere along the way the partnership just kind of fizzled out.

   The next band was called Beyond Autumn, and this time we had a bass player as well as two guitars and drums. Rob, the drummer, had been in The System, but the other guys were new recruits. The repertoire had evolved a bit, but it was still mostly the same mix of sources. I was playing a Stella Harmony twelve-string (the property of rhythm guitarist Colin) in this band. We played anywhere they’d let us in. There weren’t any real clubs like in these more enlightened times, but wherever there was a hall to rent, someone would organize a multi-band gig most weekends. We once played The Great Texan Rock Band Contest, but one of our P.A. speakers blew up half-way through our first number so the judges only heard half the mix. We wouldn’t have won anyway. 

   After that band broke up, twelve years went by before I played electric music again. 

   I moved to Johannesburg with a wife and a baby, and kind of alternated between working a straight job and trying to be the next Bob Dylan or whatever. I attempted doing both at the same time for a while, but on four hours sleep a night, by week three I was a zombie. Since I had to shelter and feed aforesaid wife and baby, inevitably it was the music that lost out. I did end up playing the bar circuit full-time for a year and a half but then I got distracted by a divorce. No further comment.

   I went back to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for a while, found another wife (I’m a slow learner), and moved to Cape Town. This time I was determined I was going to be a professional musician. For several weeks we collected refundable bottles out of the trash cans just so we could eat, but I did get a gig finally. It was a hotel bar thirty miles out of town … and I had a motorcycle. Riding thirty miles on a bike with an acoustic guitar case wedged between your thighs in a thirty knot crosswind is not a fun experience, trust me. The gig lasted three months and then I had to get a real job again. Stuff happens. 

   A few years later, I hooked up with an “avant garde” composer and all round crazy person named Robin and hung out with him for several years, playing lead guitar in Duck For Cover and then later on, Artvark, both large groups with assorted drums, percussion, brass, keyboards and vocalists as well as guitar and bass. We played all the lunatic fringe gigs as well as the more mainstream clubs, but usually to a somewhat mixed response. Robin’s music was complex stuff, with weird timings, frequent tempo changes, and off-the-wall vocal performances. When we got it right it sounded really … umm … interesting, but most of the time we didn’t get it right and then it sounded like sh…

   When marriage #2 went down the tubes I went to England, spent four months in London, learned to play bass, and went back to Cape Town, having failed to “adjust” to the cold, wet, grey, claustrophobic lifestyle of my ancestral home. Almost immediately I put together a band named Empty Vessels. We were very badly grungy way before grunge was invented. My singing and bass playing totally sucked, the guitarist totally sucked, and the drummer wasn’t anywhere near good enough to compensate for the pair of us. We lasted six months.

   The next band, The Long Street Virgins, was the best band so far. Another trio, but this time one with a whole lot more talent. Adrian was the drummer, but he also played flute, keyboards, guitar, bass, and pretty much anything else that happened to be lying around. He was also a prolific songwriter and we shared the vocals. Steve (still my good buddy) was the guitarist – a quirky genius who had all the aspiring axe players watching him with awe from the front of the stage. We started out as a blues band, simply because a new blues club had just opened and was auditioning for bands. Adrian and I whipped out a few of our pre-existing blues compositions and we threw in a couple of Jimi covers and got the gig. The Long Street Virgins lasted three and a half creative and music-filled years. We played every gig there was to play in and around Cape Town and built up quite a reasonable following, even being adopted by the local bikers as “their” band (at one outdoor gig I recall, that got more than a little scary!). As always seems to happen though, there were some internal tensions and some “differences of vision” that slowly eroded the band from within. We had a whole lot of really good times though, and we did produce four cassettes worth of original compositions recorded on Adrian’s four-track.

   Steve left for Italy, and Adrian and I played over the Christmas season in a cover band named Duncan and the Doughnuts which, despite the name, was pretty good. We made more money in four weeks than LSV had made in its lifetime! Then I left for America with Wife #3 (we’re still together).

   The next venture was a family affair. Son Aeryn came into the world courtesy of Wife #2. As a kid he had a beautiful voice, really angelic, and he could sing Stairway to Heaven note for note like a pro. Life came and went and he and I got separated for a while, but when he came to join us in Atlanta we started a new chapter. Smudge Virus was born in the stark, bare basement of a house in Woodstock, Georgia. Folk-metal is how we laughingly thought of it at first, but the merging of our ideas turned into something else altogether. On the day Aeryn’s wife Spin picked up the sticks, Smudge Virus became a band. The ideas blossomed, and we started to get tighter with regular rehearsals. We bought a lot more gear and then … oh well … those “musical differences” struck again. No more Smudge Virus.

   Screw it. At that point I took a long hard look at who I really am and what I’m really about and decided it was time to go solo again. Permanently.

   And so here we are …