Free People's Concert

BY HEATHER DUGMORE

It has been 46 years since the first Free People’s Concert was held at Wits in 1971. Back then, as always, music was a way for everyone to imagine and be part of a different South Africa – starting on campus.

It was South Africa’s Monterey, Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock; a platform for counterculture with music as the vanguard. For a few special hours, it was another country where the great heart of music enveloped the crowd.

“It was a song that made it all possible,” says the founder of the Free People’s Concert, David Marks, a Durban-based musician, music producer and archivist of 3rd Ear Music. The song was Marks’ ‘Master Jack’, which hit the American charts in 1968, rising to number 18 on the Billboard Top 100.

“What struck me was how lucky I’d been with ‘Master Jack’ when there were so many musicians in South Africa who weren’t being recognised. So when I got my first royalties in 1971 I used them to begin promoting, recording and presenting South African singer/songwriters and township jazz musicians. A concert sound system from my friends at Hanley Sound in the United States was sent over to me at no charge. Parts of this sound system were from the iconic 1969 Woodstock Festival. My goal was to organise a free concert and offer our great musicians a platform.

“In the same breath it was an act of defiance against Connie Mulder, the Minister of Information (incongruously a Wits PhD), who was clamping down on the few existing mixed hotspots for music. It was a case of ‘no blacks; no women; no dogs’,” says Marks.

And so it was that Marks launched the first Free People’s Concert on a beach in Durban 1970. The following year it moved to Wits. The lineup included Wits first-year student Johnny Clegg and his new music partner Sipho Mchunu, the Mamelodi group Malombo and Ahmed Mukhtar. It was free to all and any donations from the audience went to the educational NGO, Teach Every African Child (TEACH).

“Wits University was one of the very few venues in the country where we could present mixed bands and audiences; it was a place where township and suburb could meet,” says Marks.

To organise the concert, the 3rd Ear team worked with student leaders from the SRC and NUSAS’s cultural wing, Aquarius. “Many of these student leaders went on to become latter-day luminaries in government and the media; some were chased into exile. One or two, like Craig Williamson, were state spies, but him we’d rather forget.”

Over the years the Free People’s Concert grew into a major national happening, attracting a crowd of 28 000 in 1985. The focus was unreserved freedom with an anti-apartheid undertone. South Africa was at war; the townships were in flames and many South Africans, including Wits students and academics, were in jail or underground or in exile. Anyone who opposed the status quo was sjambokked, shot at and dragged into police vans, even if they were doing nothing more dangerous than dancing.

The Free People’s Concert offered respite. It opened its doors to people from every race and sector of South African society and explored the nation’s shattered psyche and unclaimed future through the music of the times. All the while, apartheid was tightening the chokechain on the nation, with PW Botha wagging his presidential finger and warning about the swart gevaar.

The concert used a loophole in the law: if the event was a private function, entrance was free and the musicians played for free, there could be no restriction on who attended. This worked for a number of years until permits were required.

The venue also had to be changed to accommodate the swelling crowds and administrative opposition. From the swimming pool at Wits in 1971, it spilled over to the library lawns, then off campus to Milpark and finally to Kelvin. Every year there were stumbling blocks in its path. In 1976 the National Education Board issued a state edict that “non-whites” might not attend “this Woodstock-type open air festival on the campus” without the necessary permission. The Department added that “according to government policy, mixed gatherings of any kind are not encouraged as a rule” and that it contravened the Group Areas Act.

“I came along to feel free,” said Wendall Pietersen, described as “a Coloured man” in an article in the Rand Daily Mail on Thursday 1 June 1972. Pietersen, a social work student at the University of the Western Cape, was helping to organise the collection of clothing and blankets for Operation Snowball at the concert. He left South Africa in 1978 because his involvement in community projects was seen as political incitement, and he has been living in Italy since 1980.

On the same page of the newspaper, a large headline read: ‘Nationwide campus unrest escalates’. The article reflected on Wits Student’s coverage of the Republic Day celebrations, with a front cover picture of sheep being herded down a narrow street and a caption which read: “A nation celebrates”. The article challenged South Africa “to look at itself, at all the deaths in detention, malnutrition, poverty, break-up of families, detention without trial” and asked the following question: “How willing are we to make the most elementary personal sacrifice for the sake of humanity we shout so loudly about?”

The Free People’s Concert gave the police and government “the jitters”, as an article in Wits Student put it. They got the jitters at the sight of black and white musicians and concert goers having a thoroughly good time together. They baulked at the sight of Sammy Brown flaunting his sultry moves at the Free People’s in ’75 when he called on the audience to do the same, as his backing band Cheyenne got right into the groove. At the same concert, activist musician Jeremy Taylor made a surprise visit home from Britain. He’s remembered for ‘Ag Pleez Deddy’ but what he should be remembered for is his 1960 anticolonial anthem, ‘Piece of Ground’.

“Despite apartheid and all its laws, there were many very good people exploring and sharing thoughts of humanity, community and freedom through music, and the Free People’s personified this,” continues Marks. “Today, the term ‘struggle icon’ is applied to so many of our top musicians when they die, but it destroys them in history because they played such an important role simply by playing jazz or South African rock or being part of the vivid cultural life of Dorkay House in Eloff Street. Here, musicians and performers of every creed and colour would come together to create new sounds and new stage productions for a different country. It needs to be emphasised that they made a difference without having to hold what has become the requisite struggle card.”

In the beginning the Free People’s Concert acts were mostly folk and soul singers, but this expanded to include the full spectrum of South African music in the 70s and 80s – from the raw South African rock of the late great Wits alumnus James Phillips, to the haunting Zulu chant of Wits alumnus Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu, to the marabi/kwela of Mango Groove with Wits alumna Claire Johnston’s arresting voice in the lead.

In every single act the Free People’s lineup showed what a vibrant, fun, non-racial, free South Africa could be like. No one can forget the Cherry Faced Lurchers intoxicating the audience with their signature ‘Do the Lurch’, followed by their anti-apartheid theme song ‘Shot Down’. Meanwhile the police circled in the streets or mingled in all-too-conspicuous civvies among the concert goers, wearing, as Marks puts it: “slightly skew wigs, army issue boots under their jeans and slightly visible revolvers”.

Wits alumnus, writer and editor Shaun de Waal wrote that songs like Phillips’ ‘Shot Down’ “evoked the terrible emergency years and spoke directly to the hearts and minds of a youth taking a cold hard look at who they were as white South Africans”. At the concert you could hear all the songs the SABC refused to play. These were the songs that inspired Lloyd Ross and Wits architecture alumnus and lecturer Ivan Kadey to start Shifty Records in the late 1970s. They recorded non-commercial South African music, the music of the Free People’s Concert, including the mixed-race punk band National Wake, of which Kadey was a member.

De Waal described the mood of the 70s and 80s as “the new South Africa in twisted embryo”. He wrote: “We detested the apartheid state, and we reviled the Calvinist morality that came with it.” In revolt, a subculture of young, mostly white, politicised South Africans threw consequence to the wind as they lost themselves in the music.

Some of the great musicians spanning those 16 years included: Des and Dawn Lindberg, the Genuines, Benny B’Funk and the Sons of Gaddafi Barmitzvah Band, Kalahari Surfers, éVoid, the Aeroplanes, Tighthead Fourie and the Loose Forwards, Richard Jon Smith, PJ Powers and Hotline, Dr C, Splash, African Jazz Pioneers, Steve Newman and Tony Cox, Afrozania, Nyanga, Mike Dickman, Via Afrika, Horn Culture, Radio Rats, Wasamata, Larry Amos, Psychoreptiles, Midnight Hour, Spectres, Believers, Bright Blue, Unhinged, Winston’s Jive Mixup, the Kêrels, the Abstractions …

In every single act the Free People’s lineup showed what a vibrant, fun, non-racial, free South Africa could be like.

In its way, the Free People’s played an underestimated role in breaking down all sorts of barriers, racial, ideological, cultural, subcultural and gender. “One of many vivid examples in my mind is of a group of Hell’s Angels dancing around a bonfire with members of the SRC after one of the concerts,” says Marks.The Hell’s Angels had roared in to see what these Wits “communists” were up to. “They landed up partying with the ‘communists’ and helping to clear up and burn the refuse from the day’s events to make sure there was no mess afterwards.”

For Marks, the Free People’s Concert was a story about living and surviving the times. And it should not be forgotten.

“It took a lot of people giving freely of their time to put on those concerts,” says Marks, who subsequently organised other major concerts like Splashy Fen. He adds that he generally withdraws from events that grow beyond what they were meant to do. For him, the Free People’s was an exception: “It did remain true and it is important to safeguard the memory of these gems in the strange, strange world we live in.” WR