Bands that changed my life part 6 (in no particular order): King Crimson. If Durban gave us a taste of freedom, then my years at Wits were like having a 4lt Beer Stein of it poured over my head. Between being tear-gassed and getting an education, there was so much exposure to music over the next four years: new people with bands I’d never heard of before, actively seeking out live music, being groupies for Larry Amos, the Free People’s concert, seeing Ella Mental and the Cherry Faced Lurchers at Jameson’s maybe? and the very early legendary Rustler’s with Syd Kitchen, Busi Mhlongo, Urban Creep, Steve Fataar, Squeal, Wendy Oldfield.

The weekend would usually start at the Boz. I always figured that they’d put it right at the bottom of University Hill because gravity tended to pull everyone down, by the end of a long hard week it had slurped everybody to the base of the slope, and a couple of pints were required to get the strength up to move anywhere else. It really worked, because every Friday the field around the pub would fill up from midday onwards, by three ‘o clock there would be hundreds of students, music blasting and beer enough to possibly even slightly impact the vision of Keith Richards. That’s how the weekend would start, and then we’d find more music in Rocky Street : Ba Pita, Tandoors, Dylan’s, The Talking Heads, or at the downtown and Melville clubs: The Doors, Wings Beat Bar, Jamesons, The Bassline.

Rocky Street and the Doors night club was where I spent my early twenties, with the occasional foray into Hillbrow for New Years.

And the music – going further and further out there with the extreme psychedelia of early Floyd and King Crimson and the brilliant Beatles. Jethro Tull, Van Morrison, David Bowie, Muddy Waters, Rory Gallagher and George Thorogood, Bob Marley, Dead Can Dance, Santana, 10 Years After, The Doors, Crosby Stills and Nash, The Who, Deep Purple, Janis, Juluka, Tananas. Who could ever forget The Funk Green Mesmeric Toadstool? I still have bootlegged Funk Green from Wings to sell off in my twilight years.

Hunter S Thompson: “It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. Wits in the early nineties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.” 

King Crimson forever defines that era for me.

But I'll quote Bowie:

We scanned the skies with rainbow eyes and saw machines of every shape and size
We talked with tall Venusians passing through
And Peter tried to climb aboard but the Captain shook his head
And away they soared
Climbing through
The ivory vibrant cloud
Someone passed some bliss among the crowd
And We walked back to the road, unchained