Between Rock and a Hard Place features trips to places such as Krugersdorp and Trichardt. In the former, the bands and promoters got locked out of the city hall they’d booked. In the latter, they got a slot in a run-down bar eager for entertainment.
Carsten Rasch, known generally as Cas, has written a rambunctious memoir of the late 1970s and early 1980s in South Africa’s nascent “alternative” music scene. It wasn’t yet called alternative, and it was largely white, with some crossover into a black musical world — mostly Rastas, with a bit of Amampondo and the Malopoets.
Behind punk, of course, and equally influential, though perhaps in a vaguer way, was the hippie revolution that began in the United States in the 1960s. Rasch describes himself in those years as a “hippie punk”, and that’s about right, if you include in “hippie” the influence of the Rasta sensibility.
There’s a hilarious episode in which Rasch and his friend Hoffie, the latter with his face bandaged like a mummy because of a camping accident, try to convince the Bantustan government of the then Transkei that having a music fest in Port St Johns would be a good idea. They thought they could get money from the Transkei government to get the festival going, but the relevant minister wanted money from them to give it the go-ahead.
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