Ray Phiri probably couldn’t even count the number of times in his life that dying in bed at the age of 70 seemed like the least likely outcome for him to expect. Nevertheless, that is the sad news out of South Africa this week.
I first met Ray when Paul Simon was putting the live band together to tour after the release of Rhythm of the Saints. The album had been recorded in bits and pieces in the studio but obviously the music had to be played live on stage by a real band. I don’t believe there had ever been a 17-piece band with 4 Brazilian percussionists, 3 African guitarists, oh yeah! and Steve Gadd, Richard Tee and a bunch of New York’s most murderous studio assassins. Hearing these immensely accomplished and broadly divergent musicians get to know one another in rehearsals was one of the most thrilling musical experiences of my life. Before they started working on the stagecraft of supporting Paul Simon’s songs, they were PLAYING (and you should interpret that word in its every sense). It was wild and sprawling, a jam session of literally global proportions and every face in the room was plastered with childlike, toothy smiles.
Inevitably, Ray’s guitar work became part of the glue holding it all together. After all, he had been the bandleader for Paul’s previous tour, Graceland. And Ray played everything: rhythm, lead, harmony, detail, commentary… all at once, still leaving room for everyone else to add their part. He seemed to do it all without effort although I don’t know anyone else who could have done this as he did. Also— very important— like many of my favorite people, Ray was a storyteller.
And Ray Phiri could convey a certain kind of centripetal moral force in the things he said and the things he did. How to explain this? Not that he couldn’t have a light touch; he had a quick, sincere grin and a dancer’s grace but he also had this hard focus in his eyes and a kind of descending cadence in his speech sometimes that told you that what he was saying had already been tested in a raging fire and emerged intact; it came from a very deep place, a place of sacrifice, a place with no room for doubt.
Here’s one odd example that comes to mind: Ray was telling us about this feral cat in his neighborhood. He never fed the cat, he never encouraged the cat, but the cat would show up at his house, sit on his porch, rub against his leg. Ray would chase the cat off but the cat would just keep coming back. So one day, Ray is nice to the cat, he pets the cat, he picks it up, he comforts the cat in his lap, and as the cat settles in, Ray takes a plug of tobacco and shoves it up the cat’s ass. The cat howls and goes tearing off into the wilderness, yowling and dragging its butt on the ground. The point was that it was Ray’s house, not the cat’s, and Ray would decide if the cat had a place there or not. (Okay, that’s a lousy example but it’s the one that popped into my head).
Ray and I had the type of casual friendship that everyone who has lived on the road knows. When we saw each other, we hung out, grabbed a meal, enjoyed each other’s company and didn’t worry much about when the road would throw us together again.
Fall of 1992, I had been in France for a month with Ladysmith Black Mambazo when we flew to Johannesburg during a break in the tour. After being in Europe for a while, Jo’burg felt strangely like New York. The energy and grit and multi kulti were familiar in a way. I immediately felt at home in a way that I hadn’t in Europe. Although the more time I spent there, the odder it seemed. Cosmpolitan, yes, but not my NYC cultural grab bag; Zulu and Xhosa, English and Afrikaner replacing the familiar ethnic flow of my home town.
And while Johannesburg had a familiar energy, it didn’t pulse like New York. It was jittery and on edge. New York was violent and filthy but we had a commonly shared understanding; I did not feel that here at all. Violence and rage felt close but where were they? “One Settler, One Bullet,” spray-painted on the wall: did that mean what I thought it meant? Did that mean me? And which of these people would have painted that?
One night (after seeing Kanda Bongo Man do a tremendous show at a club called Thunderdome), I felt the night closing in on me and realized that I was in a place where I didn’t know the rules. I felt danger but I didn’t know how to slip away from it as I did in NYC or Paris. Do I look these guys in the eye? Not look? Cross the street? Walk straight at them? My obvious cultural alienation (I didn’t look like anyone else on these streets in the middle of the night) might have been what protected me. I made my way back to the hotel and promised myself I would play it smarter the next time.
And these were times of rapid transition in South Africa; Mandela had been released from prison but apartheid was technically still in place. Also, South Africa was very sophisticated in certain ways but clearly less developed than anywhere I had been in the US or in Europe in others. A jabbering mix of old world and new, It was like a Twilight Zone version of “What would have become of the United States if…?”
The next day after Thunderdome, Ray came and picked me up at the hotel in his Mercedes. It was a happy reunion and Ray took a lot of pleasure in showing me his town. We went out to his very comfortable house in the suburbs before diving deep into iGoli (as Jo’burg is known in Zulu).
But this staticky energy followed us. Ray’s lovely home in the ‘burbs had bars on the windows. Now that I looked, so did all of the houses in this cushy neighborhood. And as Ray approached a red light as we drove through town, he flipped his head left and right and gunned it through the intersection, his left hand never leaving the pistol held low by the console. Was Ray being paranoid? (Was I?) Maybe, but that didn’t mean that the possibility of someone pulling us out of this sweet ride and leaving us by the side of the road wasn’t real. Apparently it happened all the time in Johannesburg. Driving around that city with Ray Phiri was starting to make the cocaine-helicopter-paranoia scene from Goodfellas feel like Disney.
This was especially true as Ray started to show me the sites of his life in this town during the previous 25 years of tumult and triumph.
“That’s John Vorster Square, the police building where they gave our guys ‘flying lessons.’ Eight political activists were killed in that building, several of them came right out of that window on the 10th floor.”
“There’s the Market Theater which was one of the only places where blacks and whites could get together during apartheid. Mbongeni Ngema and Athol Fugard came out of there.”
“There are the mines. Those are the dormitories where the workers live. They are there 10 months a year and they let them go see their families at Christmas. They always put the dorms in the poorest neighborhoods with people from a different tribe than the workers. The keep us divided with these cheap theatrics.”
Recording studios, night clubs, secret ANC meetings.. The city came to life for me.
And the stories of life under apartheid: “I’m going to Johannesburg; I’m going to be a musician.” “No, you did well on your exams so you’re going to be an electrician. We need electricians in Bloemfontein so that’s where you’ll go.” And stories about all the great musicians who had died young, drank themselves to death or fallen prey to casual violence. Life in apartheid South Africa was shockingly cheap.
Okay, now we pick up Joseph Shabalala and his delightful wife Nellie and we go out to Soweto. Now the gloves are off. I have seen poverty in favelas in Brazil, in the Fifth Ward in Houston, by the rail yards in Bangkok, but nothing remotely like this. Anything they could have sold, eaten or burned for fuel has long since been consumed. A miasma of burning tires and excrement, the only source of fuel, hangs over this region of a million people. Ray and Joseph describe the emotional devastation which is far worse than the economic. How, if you scrape together a little vegetable garden or manage to buy a vehicle to start a little business, your neighbor will destroy it, just to make sure that you don’t have anything that they don’t have. The desperation is grim and immediate.
And yet, there is life and there is hope. We visit Barney Rachabane and his wife. Barney had raised a family playing that beautiful South African music on his alto sax and his penny whistle. And every time Barney had made a few rand on a tour or a recording, Barney bought another wheelbarrow full of bricks and added another room to his house. We visited the Morris Isaacson school where the 1976 student protests began. “Open the doors of learning and culture” said the graffiti on one of the walls that was still standing. There was even a neighborhood called Beverly Hills where the famous soccer and cricket players live. “That’s Winnie Mandela’s house.”
And everywhere we went, people approached Joseph and Ray in the most astounding ways. A man walked up to Ray as if continuing an urgent conversation they had been having, the Zulu flying far faster than I could possibly catch. “Ray, did you know that guy?” I asked. “No, but he knew me!” Ray laughed. A woman approached Joseph, bending low with her eyes averted. She held her 4-year-old son’s hand to touch the hem of Joseph’s shirt as she wept. “That is Shabalala’s shirt you touched!”, she whispered to her son as she inched away. Joseph calmly accepting the tribute, certainly not for the first time. These men were the walking embodiment of their people’s last reserve of hope that maybe some day, perhaps not in their lives but in their kids’ lifetimes, their people would walk free. Ray Phiri and Joseph Shabalala wore this mantle with an easy grace.
By the time Ray dropped us at the hotel, I had a new understanding of where that gravitational force inside of him had come from. More than that, the inherent optimism that he still must have had to turn all that rage and terror into his art and to have had the willingness to share these intimate parts of his life with this American with whom he had had such a blithe association up until then is what I believe allowed him to overcome those obstacles that had stopped so many whom he had known.
We smiled, we hugged, I thanked him for sharing his rich and savage city with me and we cast our luck with the road to throw us together again.
I see you, Ray. Sawubona, my friend.