David Marks was there. He was there when South Africans grooved to their own home-grown beat of the hippie movement and he was there when music became weaponised and joined the fight against apartheid.
Marks has watched South African music bop its way through a half-century of change and that is why one historian is currently picking his brain.
“We are recording his whole life,” says curator Lizabé Lambrechts. “So far we are at 1976 and already have 30 hours of recordings. We are taking him through year-by-year, asking him what he was involved in, what happened and what he can remember about it.”
In his career, Marks has been a miner, songwriter, singer, producer, and of what is of great interest to historians, a collector.
He even had a taste of fame in the late 1960s when his song, Master Jack, hit the international charts.
Those years of collecting began when he was still on the mines and he would smuggle out a tape recorder. “The white boys would have nothing of that. I used to borrow a tape recorder and take it to Springs to the Troubadour Club. Then I would bring it back and play it to them.
“At first they would have nothing to do with that, but then they got involved and began going to the Troubadour,” he recalls.
Later he travelled to the US where he worked for the Bill Hanley sound company that did the sound for the famous Woodstock concert in 1969.
When he returned to South Africa, he started festivals and folk clubs and everywhere he went he collected and recorded. This collection includes 4000 reel-to-reel tapes and over 10000 images and now forms the spine of the Hidden Years Music Archive Project based at the African Open Institute for Music Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University.
Marks donated his collection when he realised it had become too big and he was worried that the damp of Durban would ultimately damage the archive.
The Hidden Years Music Archive Project documents South Africa’s music scene from 1960 to 2005.
For Lambrechts, who is the curator of the archive, this provides a glimpse into the forgotten history of every South African.
“For me, this archive gives a sense of what people’s aspirations and dreams were at this time. It opens up a different narrative into how we can understand the 1970s and 1980s in South Africa,” says Lambrechts.
The archive also allows historians to look at the flipside of even more famous South African musicians.
One of these is Jeremy Taylor who was famous for his hit song Ag Pleez Deddy that tells the story of a child from the southern suburbs Joburg pleading with father to take him to the drive-in.
“That is the song that got so famous. But he was very politically active and nothing has been really written about him. And it is just sitting there,” says Lambrechts.
There are other stories that help tell of the wrongs apartheid did to artists such as Roger Lucey, whose promising musical career was cut short when he became the focus of a security police dirty tricks campaign.
His concerts were tear-gassed, he was harassed and rumours spread about him. Later, the man who was behind this campaign, Paul Erasmus, testified at the TRC about what he had done. Surprisingly, the two men later became friends.
But what is of special interest to Lambrechts are the Free People’s concerts, often described as South Africa’s version of Woodstock. The first of these was held at Wits in 1971 and they continued for two decades.
“You have this history of 20 years that no one really knows about until recently, and you have 20 years of fantastic music history. From these concerts we can see how student politics changed,” says Lambrechts.
The concerts attracted multiracial audiences at the height of apartheid by using a loophole in the law which stated that there was no restriction on who could attend as long as the event was a private function, entrance was free and the bands weren’t paid. Of course, security police were on hand, keeping a close eye on the mixed crowd.
It was Marks who started the concerts and it was during these events, says Lambrechts, that many political initiatives were launched.
There was the million-signature campaign to get Nelson Mandela released, and the End Conscription Campaign had its roots in the concerts. “You must also remember that it was also about students getting high and drunk,” laughs Lambrechts.
She wants to learn more about these concerts and appeals to people who were there to come forward. A few have, but she wants to find more.
In the meantime, a lot of her work is about digitalising the archive, finding out what they have and making it accessible for those who want to use it.
“Every now and again Pakama Ncume, who is responsible for digitalising the recordings, will rush in and say ‘you’ve got to listen to this’,” says Lambrechts.
Marks is 74 and is still involved in the local music scene. His influence on South African music, he believes, comes from his hit Master Jack, which was recorded by the South African group Four Jacks and Jill.
He didn’t make much in the way of royalties as he should have from the song, but it did open up his world. “I wouldn’t have been able to straddle two segregated worlds. It was a key to opening the door. I had Zulus singing the song and Afrikaners,” he recalls.
“I was able to make friends in the townships. But back then it wasn’t about being black or white, we simply wanted to make music.”