Groovin' with Green Pastures (c1971)

Perhaps one of my favorite records is this rather obscure album by the Green Pastures issued on Durban's Raj label. The musicians are not necessarily "proficient" but their approach has a simplicity that is just hypnotic. Sitting somewhere between the soul sounds of the late 1960s and a kind of informal, stripped-down, quasi-surf-rock, the music only gets better when that elastic mbaqanga baseline occasionally enters. Don't Cry Baby is an excellent example of this rock-mbaqanga crossover, and was featured on my flatinternational mix posted at Matsuli in 2008. But the album has a number of other interesting and even strange gems like the final two tracks where the vocals are, at times, barely legible. These closing tracks almost sound like an amateur church band surfing a bit of Durban Poison!

I purchased the record from a seller in Durban in 2007 and I have only seen it come up on eBay one other time. There is next to zero information on the group and its members but judging from the cover photograph these guys appear to be serious mods or hipsters. I love the way the bassist is holding his instrument!

Another interesting detail is that the record used to be owned by Nanaboy Govender of Palmiet Road,  who carefully scrawled his name and phone number across both sides of the cover. Palmiet Road is located in Reservoir Hills an historically Indian suburb of Durban in apartheid South Africa. The Raj Record Company was located on Prince Edward Street in downtown Durban near the Raj Cinema and began pressing local recordings in 1967. The label included some of the best Indian rock groups of the day including The Raiders and The Vampires both featured here at Electric Jive. (For more information on Raj check out Chris and Matt's excellent posts). Green Pastures, as a black African group in this context, may have been somewhat unusual. But their music certainly gives a flavor of what the vibrant Durban scene must have sounded like 45 years ago.

Grooving' with Green Pastures is the 22nd Raj LP release and issued just before Vampires Undergound (RMC SLP 023), The Vampires second album and maybe Raj's last pressing. That record has, since Chris' posting, been restored and reissued on Pharaway Sounds and is now available on vinyl and CD. For more detailed images of the Green Pastures cover check out flatinternational.

THE GREEN PASTURES
Grooving with "Green Pastures"
c1971
RAJ
RMC-SLP 022
MF

Enjoy!

The Raiders Go Latin: Guitars A Go-Go (1967)

While we are on a roll, here is another for the archive, and for fans of Durban's 60s and 70s dance bands to come back to enjoy in their own time. In response to the many comments on a previous posting of The Raiders, as well as e-mail requests for more,  here is their first LP. This 1967 record was the first to be released by the Raj label.

From comments to the previous post it seems that key members of the Raiders are still alive and there are fans out there who are asking for a reunion gig. Sebastian reports that his Dad, who was the Raiders' drummer. still plays regularly. 

The track Chez Gaye Special is described as a kwela, and is credited to The El Ricas, another legendary Durban dance band who went on to record on the Troubadour label. Enjoy!

Mediafire here

Rapidshare here

The Vampires: Underground (c1971)

 

The mere existence of Durban’s Raj Recording Company in the 1960s and 1970s is testament to a viable market with a unique and eclectic mix of influences among musicians and fans who were classified as “Indian” and “Coloured” at the time. I remember the time and place well, buying my "underground" vinyl at Record King in the bustling Ajmeri Arcade off Grey Street. At that time in Durban "underground music" referred to the likes of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Pink Floyd.

I am struck by the comments on an earlier posting of “TheRaiders”, and also the follow-up e-mails I keep getting from people looking for more recordings of this clearly enduring and popular band who also recorded on the Raj label.  More of the Raiders in another post soon.

Raj Recording Company was located in Durban's CBD "Indian Quarter" at 48 Prince Edward Street, next to the Raj Cinema. They issued their first LP in 1967. Within three or four years Raj had already pressed 23 albums performed by local Dance Bands bearing names such as: Los Pepitos, Conquerors, Gay Cavaliers, El Ricas, Cyclones, Helmets, Soul Crusaders, Red Roosters, and the Green Pastures.

The LP featured in this post gives some perspective on the popularity of the likes of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Rare Earth, Wilson Pickett and even Trini Lopez. This second album by The Vampires is full of fuzz guitars, flute, and even some vocals that pass for a credible Robert Plant in Whole Lot of Love.  Motown arrives in the form of the 1970 Rare Earth hit "Get Ready", with R&B and jazz getting the nod with Herbie Mann's 1969 success, Memphis Underground. Trini Lopez toured South Africa in 1968 and was hugely popular with Unchain My Heart. Arguably the first "funk" chart topper (by Wilson Pickett in 1967) also features in the form of Funky Broadway.

Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed are vivid in their description of growing up in the Indian Quarter around that time.

“We grew up in the Indian quarter during the 1960s and 1970s, Vahed in Pine Street and Desai in Prince Edward Street. Our histories are folded into the labyrinth of this area. Writing these words is to write our boyhoods. It was a time of street football (illegal of course), the electric atmosphere on Saturday nights as thousands thronged Victoria Street, dressed to the nines, to watch English and Hindi movies at Shah Jehan, Avalon and Naaz cinemas, the adolescent male street corner society with its petty chauvinisms and repressed sexualities, and the gangsters whom we both feared and respected.

“We were witness too to the emptying out of the quarter. The movie houses closing, neighbours across generations disappearing into the designated Group Areas on the outskirts of the city, the Quarter locking-down every night as shop owners pull down their steel shutters. It is a sign of the times that even the mosques have to shut shop. Those who survived the Group Areas were relocated when the Western Freeway was built in the 1970s. It comes into the city at the very point where “Red Square” stands. In the name of “development” even the dead were not spared. Part of the cemetery was lost and several hundred graves were dug up, much to the chagrin of locals. All this took place behind our backs as we watched ‘Enter the Dragon’ at the Raj Cinema, one more time.” Taken from Indians In Africa.

Raj Recording Company was one of multiple business initiatives of Rajadhaysing who, it seems, was born in the Indian Quarter in 1895. In addition to owning sugar, timber and cattle farms, Rajadhaysing established the Atlas Brick Company, National Fuel Supply (Umgeni Road) and the Raj Cinema in Prince Edward Street and the Raj Mahal Cinema in Stanger. He also owned properties in India and Scotland.

Rajadhaysing’s first two wives died in childbirth. With his fourth wife Lilawathy, they had five children. (Inside Indian Indenture. www.hsrcpress.ac.za).

I would be very interested to hear from anyone who has more information on the Raj dynasty in Durban – and particularly, the Raj Recording Company.

Mediafire here
Rapidshare here