Rebel folk star Roger Foley's long walk to musical freedom

29 November 2015 - 02:00 By Chris Marais

Roger Lucey has navigated a surreal maze of a life - rebel folk stardom, persecution by apartheid cops, Hillbrow drug hell, war reporting in the Caucasus. Now it's love, forgiveness and a new record, 'Now is the Time'. Chris Marais slurped some rainwater with him It's a helluva ride from the old Le Chaim Club in Kotze Street to the Karoo Lamb restaurant in Nieu-Bethesda, deep in the Sneeuberg. To be precise, there are 804.7km of tar and dust from here to that club in Hillbrow. And 37 hard years since Roger Lucey tore up the night with his songs at Le Chaim.I was a late-shift reporter on the old Rand Daily Mail in 1978. We staffers clutched our foamy beer mugs, ordered up whisky sidecars and lustily went along for the ride.story_article_left1We were noisy, young, hairy. High apartheid reigned, and Lucey at his peak was at the vanguard of South African protest folk music. His lyrics cut straight to the bone. No dilly-dallying with cute metaphor and allegory.And we, despite draconian media laws, were trying to do the same in print at the Mail. Passions ran very high over at Le Chaim for a while, and you can bet that fellow in the corner with the snor was taking names for his masters over at John Vorster Square.It wasn't long before Lucey fell out of our lives. He made a kick-ass protest album, The Road is Much Longer, and some of us were lucky enough to score a vinyl copy. If any of you baby boomers out there still have it, know that you own a treasure.But that was it. We heard he'd gone off the rails for a few years. Then he appeared in silk and satins with a band called the Zub Zub Marauders, reinvented himself as Tighthead Fourie (complete with cowboy shirt in ANC colours), dropped away again and suddenly Lucey was in our midst, as a television sound and cameraman - covering conflict zones from here to hell and gone (or Chechnya, to be more precise).And so here he is, circa 2015, in the Karoo, preparing for a Saturday night show.We meet on the restaurant stoep about 20 paces from the Owl House. The village is rife with creamy pear blossoms.Manly hugs are exchanged. Wives (Lucey's Karen, my Julie) are introduced. We stand back and look at each other in wonder. We're old ballies now. No big hair. But shit, we've survived. Obviously with more than a little help from said wives.The story of Lucey (so far) is the stuff of true legend. No substance could induce you to make it up.A rough childhood. Some musical stardom, followed by then-unexplained infamy. An opiate addiction, a bit of reconciliation, an unusual passage to manhood. Then war, war, war.It's also a tale about finding your place in the world. And about love, love, love. Jules and Karen wander off down the road to admire a collection of ancient sewing machines displayed in a local resident's garden.Instead of our ale-and-whisky flood of old, Roger and I order a jug of Nieu-Bethesda rainwater. Tastes better than beer.A couple of years ago, Lucey wrote a no-holds-barred autobiography, Back In from the Anger. It captures the Hillbrow days with lucid style. The Moriarty in his life was Paul Erasmus, a young security cop whose job was to shatter Lucey's musical career, without his knowing a thing about it.Imagine this: you're hot stuff, booked to play in clubs and festivals all over the show. Your record company loves you like a first-born son. The media are taking notice and your angry, political songs are getting good ink. Your debut album is in all the stores.Then the lights in your musical life start winking out, one by one, and you don't know why. No one's returning your phone calls, your gigs dry up and your record company doesn't want to know you.The Road is Much Longer disappears from the racks, and is banned by the regime. Life as you know it has been arrested in its tracks.More than 17 years later, at the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, a bespectacled, bearish security cop admits to having personally bombed your career, on orders from his superiors.Erasmus really went to work with his bag of dirty tricks. He teargassed Lucey's regular Braamfontein gig spot, Mangles, via the air-con duct. He did the rounds of the record shops and confiscated all copies of The Road he could find. He threatened club owners with drastic police action if they booked Lucey.While living in Crown Mines, a village populated by lefty artists at the time, Lucey started getting unwelcome visitations. "I woke to find my bedroom full of armed policemen one night," he writes. "I thought I was dreaming. They moved silently around the house, as if they didn't notice me, whispering as they emptied cupboards and rummaged through drawers."Then there was a growing addiction to Wellconal (street name "Pinks"), a cancer pain drug that was decimating hundreds of young Hillbrow junkies. One should get some kind of medal for getting beyond an encounter with Pinks, which addicts were injecting into all corners of their bodies. Lucey finally beat the drug."I ended up being the doorman at the Chelsea in Hillbrow, where I'd once been the star performer" says Lucey. "And then I became the barman at Le Chaim."full_story_image_hleft1He segued into the media in 1983. But he didn't just "work in the media", our Roger. No Rhodes University journo course for him. His first press job was doing sound for UPI-TV, posted to Matabeleland, where the Fifth Brigade was burning up the place, knocking over Zipra and civilians.For him, the body count had begun. It would continue well into the 1980s, as he covered South Africa in turmoil. "And if things quietened down at home, Angola, Mozambique or Zimbabwe were always good for a war story." He became a fully-fledged TV cameraman.When the "Southern African story" quietened down in the 1990s, Lucey found himself in the Bosnian and Chechnyan nightmares. He worked behind the lines, with the rebels. "This is not a war of neat holes in the head or handsome soldiers tended by syrupy Florence Nightingales," he recounts. "This is legs torn off, gaping holes in flesh, whole shattered body parts disappearing without trace. It's jets appearing from nowhere, evil in their anonymity, arbitrary in their violence."How do you come back from Chechnya? "You build a house in the mountains" says Lucey, an old glint of humour in his eye. I top up his rainwater glass."I found a piece of land on a nature reserve, overlooking the Breede River in Bain's Kloof. Now remember, I had never lifted a hammer - I just wasn't raised like that. But something told me that if I built a house here, mostly by myself, it would fix me up."He was taken with the concept of sandbag houses in timber frames. He set himself up in an old Gypsy caravan and worked on the house during the week. "On Fridays I would drive to Cape Town and shop for supplies. I had a gig shooting a game show, which had to be filmed really early on Mondays. By that afternoon I would be back in the mountains, building my house."Lucey completed the construction within eight months. "It's been 18 years and that house is still standing," he says with pride. "It's stood up to all kinds of extreme Cape weather and is dedicated to my beloved daughter, Amanda. I needed to build that house. It was a great transition for me, a turnaround in my life."Lucey found himself back in TV, this time producing for the brand-new e.tv station. "Then after a while, I suggested to programme director Jimi Matthews that an arts slot should be worked into the hour-long news bulletin."A week later, he calls me in, hands me a cardboard box and says: 'Here, you have your arts show.' Inside the box is a little handcam, like the tourists use. Jimi says, 'You've got 10 days to produce the show'."Lucey would source the material, shoot it himself, edit it and present it. He was to be the all-in-one TV unit."I bought a powder-blue second-hand ladies' vanity case, cut spaces out for my little camera, fitted it into the pannier of my Moto Guzzi 1000 California bike and would go racing off to film an insert."Lucey had mastered yet another art. But the universe was not done educating him . "I was 53 by now, and one day I bumped into my old friend, the photographer Paul Weinberg. Paul had just completed a degree over at Duke University in North Carolina. I was envious. He said, 'Why don't you apply for a bursary?' I said: 'Me, with my Standard 8 education? Ha!' He said give it a shot, and so I did. Just more than 18 months later, Duke University informed me I had a million-rand two-year study bursary.And here's where true love appears, stage left. Through Weinberg, Lucey met Karen Glynn, a photo archivist at Duke. She'd heard about his mountain house and needed a handyman to repair her old house. Lucey was offered a rent-free abode for his labour. "They say a man with a toolbox is good to find" he says. That old devil-grin. "Two years later, we were married."Part of his Master's degree involved penning Back In From the Anger. Duke sent Lucey off to Oxford for a course in biographies and memoirs called Writing Lives. They liked the rough-hewn Lucey so much at Duke that they made him valedictorian when he graduated, and gave him a two-year gig as a lecturer.story_article_right2In 2012 Roger and Karen returned to South Africa. They took his book on the road, in a long series of launches that became gigs. "We toured the whole of SA three times," he says. "We would stay in national parks during the week and stage launch concerts on weekends. The book helped to bring the music back to me."Last year, when Lucey turned 60, he convened a birthday concert with 20 of his musician friends.Good fortune came his way again, in the form of Nino Rivera, an old friend who had started a record label called Rootspring and made Lucey the first artist. In May this year he released Now Is the Time (check out rogerlucey.co.za), a fabulous folk album.That night at the Karoo Lamb, Roger dedicates one of his latest songs, You Are the One, to Karen."Oh, he's such a ham!" she says, with a smile, as tears glisten on her cheeks.And the irony of it all? Well, the word is that Karen Glynn-Lucey is probably not her husband's biggest fan. That spot may belong to former security cop Paul Erasmus, the source of so much pain and bewilderment in Lucey's youth.In 2002, Danish filmmakers made a documentary, Stopping the Music, starring Lucey and Erasmus. The two men were, amazingly, reconciled.In fact, Lucey performed a concert-for-one (Erasmus) at the Market Theatre as part of the film.Said Lucey on camera: "I can't find any anger in my heart for that man."Marais is the author of 'The Journey Man - A South African Reporter's Stories', available on order from karoospace.co.za..

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