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| LitNet is ’n onafhanklike joernaal op die Internet, en word as gesamentlike onderneming deur Ligitprops 3042 BK en Media24 bedryf. |
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Dror Eyal
has been a music journalist for longer than he cares to think about. He has played various instruments in a variety of bands, including one memorable night when he played a typewriter for avant garde legends Live Jimmi Presley. This story is an adaptation of a chapter from his unpublished novel.
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A is for accident
A is for Accident
Of course no one really believes it was an accident, at least not in the way that you and I would use accident, you know, like he made a mistake and the whole thing was out of his control. It’s just convenient that way. For the families, no one wants to think that it was all their son’s fault. That he was responsible, so we all talk about it as an accident. It gets easier after a while, pretending it was an act of God.
B is for Beetle
It was the world’s smelliest beetle, rattled all over, but somehow he kept it going. I mean everything in this car was either breaking down, loose or rotting. It got so bad that you had to watch where you put your feet ‘cause there were holes all over the floor. That summer he tried to cover them with mats, but that only made things worse ‘cause then you couldn’t see where to put your feet. I fucking hated that damn car, it was a death trap, if you didn’t fall through the floor you would probably get something nasty from the smells, but it was the only transport we had. So I spent hundreds of hours in the back of that thing, going from one gig to the next, my guitar case digging into various bits of my body that I didn’t know existed until they started to hurt. Wasn’t so bad on the way back, the after gig adrenaline, endorphins, alcohol and joints made everything okay. I have my own car now, a 1988 Ford Cortina, light green, leather seats only slightly faded and no rust. Plenty of space in the back for a guitar case.
C is for Cops
I’d just finished rolling my lead and putting it into my guitar case, getting ready to take our stuff down to the pub, ‘cause we had to play a gig there that night. We’d just opened the box that we’d passed around the crowd, and it was full of Rizla’s and joints and cigarettes and all other stuff that the audience had on them, so we started sharing them. Then this cop comes in and he asks me if there is this guy in the band with curly hair and I just looked at him. Ag, I knew something was wrong from the look on his face, something bad, you know the look someone has when they are about to tell you something that’s going to change everything. So I just zone out, staring at this guy, his mouth is opening and closing, but I’m not hearing anything. And all I can think is you’re not telling me this, you’re not telling me this, no I don’t want to come to the fucking morgue.
D is for Destiny
Sometimes I have a few too many drinks after a gig and I wonder whether I would have had the guts to do what he did.
E is for Exhausted
They tried to put the blame on the band you know. Like it was somehow our fault that he was goofed, or that he wore bellbottoms, or was an escapee from the tyrant-math-teacher-father-syndrome, or it was our fault that he was in that beetle. Shit man he was our friend, it wasn’t easy watching him do that to himself. What were we supposed to do?
F is for Fired
We had to fire him, the band wouldn’t have survived otherwise. He kept on missing rehearsals, arriving late for gigs mumbling something about forgetting to score, forgetting the songs, just forgetting shit. When he did arrive he was usually so goofed that it was impossible to practice. He would just sit there, eyes wide, vacant, little bits of drool drying on his lips. Always forgetting his snare drum in S’bosch and only realising it when he tried to put his drum kit together onstage. That look of confusion on his face whenever he realised he was onstage and he wasn’t too sure what he was doing there. Like those recurring nightmares I used to get when I was a kid, I would suddenly find myself singing in front of a whole bunch of people and I didn’t know the words. Yeah, sure I wish we hadn’t fired him that day. Shoo, I wish that he was together enough at that stage to play the lunch-hour gig on campus, but he was a button head you know. End of story.
G is for goofed
For a while back there it seemed like the whole Stellenbosch scene was goofed on buttons. It was a weird scene, nobody seemed to want to go out anymore, they’d just kap a button and zone out. You’d feel like you were stuck in Jello or something like that, you know heavy, sticky … the kind of stuff that left your thoughts unable to move, you’d be totally focused on this single thing, trying to remember a word, hours you know. There was no reason why it started, everyone was doing it and it was always there. Wherever you were there would always be someone making a pipe or breaking a bottleneck. Stuff it with dope sprinkle some buttons on top. Instant entertainment.
H is for Heaven
In a way I blame the song. You know that song, that song has elevated him to cult status. I know the song was meant to be ironic and all that stuff, but you should check the kids singing along to it at the gigs. It’s like a hymn to fuck-uppedness, they just don’t get it, I mean they’re not really interested in the song, or who he was, shit half of them don’t even know it’s about him, they’re just into there being buttons in heaven.
I is for me
I’ve been goofed a few times in my life, and I’ve had a couple of drinks, so I guess I shouldn’t be preaching. Not that I’m preaching or saying that you shouldn’t take drugs or anything. I just think that he was a lot more than just another Sid Vicious. Did I mention that he was studying law?
J is for Julia
She’s everything in my world right now, she has always stood by me and never said anything like when are you going to get a real job or anything like that. She never met him, so she can’t really help, but I tell her about the things I always wanted to tell him. You know, how I wish he could see how far we’ve gotten with the band, or about the thousands of people chanting his name at Oppikoppi.
K is for Kill
Would you have had the strength to realise that it was over?
L is Luck
The band has always had really bad luck. About two weeks ago our new drummer was stabbed at his house in Vredehoek. He’d just bought this house, it’s like his first night there and he’s lying in the bath, just soaking you know, having a cold beer and a hot bath, when he hears this noise. So he wraps a towel around himself and goes to check it out. Then these three huge thugs, okay he’s pretty big himself, but there are like three of them and they attack him with knives. They stab him a couple of times and throw him off the balcony. He drops two stories and loses a couple of buckets of blood, but he’s tough, so he survives, and for a while we have to use a replacement drummer.
M is for Moderation
I lost about five kilo’s with this new guy. Fuck he was just fast, you know, just Ggggggggrrrrr all over the place. Shoo, I felt like I was in the Ramones, just rock ’n roll energy kicking the jams. You’d walk off sweating buckets, he was so fast. Then he left, and we got our old drummer back. We’ve had five drummers in the last four years, they just wear out fast, it’s stressful being in a band.
N is for Narration
I’ve been wanting to write a song about him for a long time now. I’m just not sure if that would be the right thing to do.
O is for Obsolete
I guess the town was in shock when it happened, you don’t lose three people in such a small town without a lot of people being affected. It didn’t really change much after that, people didn’t say his name or anything. I once saw a picture of him on someone’s res wall and nearly started to cry.
P is for Paul
Yesterday I saw Anthony for the first time in ages. Paul’s brother you know. He always used to come to our gigs and shit. I always saw him dancing in front. Shaking his body and always, always checking out who was looking at him. These long-ass side glances wondering if any of the chicks were looking his way. But it’s kind of weird you know, ‘cause I’m standing there looking at him, and I can see the basics. The blonde hair, the slightly off-centre nose, and that little half-smile when he’s goofed, but then I start thinking to myself … do I really remember how he was, and I struggle. I mean, I remember the blonde hair and the confusion, but …
Q is for Questions
Somehow he had ended up on the tracks. Drove his car there with Mandy and Paul in the back and just waited. They just sat there and waited. I sometimes wonder what went through their heads, sitting there waiting, was the radio on? Did they talk to each other, did any of them chicken out or did they just sit. I mean I thought I knew Paul, and Mandy … well I didn’t know Mandy that well. We had all been infatuated with her at some point or another. She was fucking gorgeous, had that whole Morticia Adams thing going for her. A ‘boys don’t cry’ poster above her bed and ‘Black Magic Woman’ always playing or near her hi-fi. She was always with him, always running around, scoring, smoking, sitting in her room, lit by candles, smoking a million cigarettes.
I know what they were saying about them after it happened, and I’m not being naïve or anything, I know that they were probably too goofed to realise what was happening. But sometimes I have this fantasy that they did it on purpose. That they had had enough and had made the choice to be there on the tracks. That they had driven over to the tracks, stopped the car, and sat staring ahead, their hearts beating a little faster when they could hear the train, their eyes closed, holding hands. Checking out together. The driver of the train had apparently tried to stop but trains can’t just stop. They need space. So the train plowed into the beetle.
R is for Recognition
Did I mention that I didn’t go to the morgue to identify the body? I didn’t want to, I wanted to remember him onstage, sitting behind his kit searching the crowd, trying to make contact with someone’s eyes. Check out who was checking him out you know. But like I said before, it’s getting harder and harder. I remember the metalhead, skyfkop, the swastika on the drumkit, soft-spoken, half-confused look, but … anyway, his parents eventually came and identified the body.
S is for Stellenbosch
Besides that whole drug thing that they had going for a bit, the Stellenbosch scene has always been a fucking example of the whole alternative Afrikaaner thing. Since I was last there, two new bands have sprung up. It cooks the whole time, and the cool thing about it is that it’s not just the guys from the big cities that are really doing it, it’s popsterre van die klein dorpies, you know Afrikaans ou’s. Not just the guys that have read too many NME’s and now think that they are pop stars. It’s people who can actually carry a tune and write proper choruses. It seems to be all over now, but every year a new group of students arrive and they start new bands, new venues open. It’s a cycle.
T is for Tired
We’ve always been called a Stellenbosch band, and aside from the Nude Girls, I think we’re the most well known. But I’ve been in this band for over eight years. That’s a long time to be lugging my amp around the country you know, living in shitty rooms, sleeping in vans. Shit, that’s a long time to still be playing the same songs. They always scream for the old songs, occasionally they’ll pick up on one of the new one’s but generally they’ll still be screaming for the same song they screamed for four years ago.
U is for Up
Sometimes I just want to give up. I guess I just need space. Maybe write a book or something.
V is for Valiant
Sometimes I just want to give up. Maybe get a job that pays at the end of the month.
W is for Worn
Just give up you know.
X is for Xenophobia
When we first started gigging, before the whole alternative Afrikaaner thing, people wouldn’t come to our gigs because we sang in Afrikaans. It seemed like everyone we knew suddenly became English. Changing their names, speaking English, pretending to have grown up in English schools. So we did some English songs, still writing about South Africa, but in English. Then this one time in Grahamstown, these two kids, shit they couldn’t have been more than fifteen, started shouting ‘play something in English’. I stripped, and started screaming something about being proud of your heritage or some crap along those lines. They laughed and drank some more, and I wanted to get off the stage. But they don’t pay you if you don’t play, so you stay on the stage and go through the gig, thinking about a cold beer and how it isn’t like the old days.
Y is for Youth
I’m doing a solo gig tonight at the Labia Theatre in Cape Town, a special showing of Paljas. An acoustic set after the flick so that the literati can feel like they’ve experienced an authentic nuwe Afrikaaner evening. But hey, a gig is a gig you know, and besides I don’t begrudge them wanting to watch a movie and catch a gig without having to sit through an evening at some smoky dive, with terrible sound and some kid in a Cannibal Corpse T-shirt ignoring them at the bar. It’ll be okay, a relaxed evening, and they’ll clap after every song. Anyway, I need the bucks, my car is broken again, and I have to take the train everywhere.
Z is for Zenith
Sitting in the bar at the Oppikoppi Rock Festival, it’s almost six years later. They are still singing along to that song. I can hear thousands of them, down in the valley, screaming that he’s not dead and I guess he got what he always wanted. Yeah, whatever, rock ’n roll.
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