Magic memories of a musical maestro

‘Creek opens with a bang!” Chatting to me in Plettenberg Bay this week, Silver Creek Mountain Band founding member Rod Dry recalled this newspaper headline about 40 years ago… the Monday after the bluegrass group was setting up for a weekend gig in Pretoria.

“We’d been living in Johannesburg in the early ’80s when it could sometimes be a quite dangerous place to be a band. We’d all bought firearms to protect ourselves.

“Our fiddle player went to the toilet as we were getting ready and, when he dropped his pants, his gun fell out and shot him in the bum!” The “fiddle player” was a young virtuoso from Glasgow called Lindsay Scott.

I’d met “Linn” a year or so before when Silver Creek were performing at the legendary Keg and Tankard Pub in the capital while I was on leave from the army.

Rediscovering friendship and musical ventures

Lo and behold, a couple of years later while working for the English radio service of what was then the South West African Broadcasting Corporation (SWABC), I re-encountered Lindsay, who had just signed up as announcer and deejay.

A lasting friendship was quickly established. I told this to Rod and he almost beseeched me to pass on his good wishes. In the process of trying to do so, I discovered my good friend was desperately ill in a hospital in Scotland and that his wife wanted his mates to post their memories on social media.

Not being a great Facebook warrior, I’ve chosen to put a few of my recollections in print … a media Lindsay adored. The first involves a Windhoek bluegrass band called Likkerstill, which Linn put together with a number of talented local musicians; violin, banjo, a couple of guitars, double-bass and drums.

Likkerstill did a four-hour gig every Saturday for a couple of years doing covers of songs by performers such as Ricky Skaggs, the Charlie Daniels Band’s The Devil went down to Georgia and the ilk.

After a while, the guitar player and drummer got a bit bored and started practising – in private – Mozart’s Rondo alla turca.

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Musical genius and unexpected performances

Come the big day and Lindsay was nowhere to be found when the pair sprung their surprise. They were about a minute into the Turkish March when a severely hungover Lindsay stumbled in, clutching his violin by the neck.

He listened, almost in disbelief, for a while before lifting the violin to his shoulder and picked the number perfectly in harmony with his fingernails … “I haven’t played that in more than 20 years,” he muttered afterwards.

That’s when we learned Lindsay had studied classical violin and played with the Edinburgh symphony orchestra before embarking on an often-debauched career in rock ’n roll with, among others, Mott the Hoople, King Crimson and Genesis.

The man’s musical genius was further emphasised a couple of years later when, two days before opening night of the South West Africa Performing Arts Council’s annual end-of-year concert, the bass guitarist was afflicted with some dread malaise. Lindsay stepped in and saved the show… despite never having played bass before.

On a personal note, the two of us nearly got fired from the SWABC in 1985, after putting together a mini-programme marking the 10th anniversary of the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam. The commentary (penned by myself and supplied in Lindsay’s broad Glaswegian accent) could find no fault with our bosses but the accompanying songs were virulently anti-war.

We were deep in the kakkypoo till Lindsay pointed out that each song was on the broadcaster’s “approved” list. No-one, however, had bothered to listen to them but Lindsay – with his phenomenal memory for songs and lyrics – honed in on them with what military planners today like to call “surgical precision”.

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