During all his years as a sound engineer and owner of the 3rd Ear Music Company, Marks always pressed the record button whenever he was at the mixer (Marks, 2006). He notes: “I would just let the tape run, in those days it was only a desk feed, and then you just let the tape run. So I used to record blind as they say” (Marks, DM 23/02/2012). Some of the events and concerts Marks recorded were good recordings, but “others were not so great, and some of the musicians we recorded back then aren’t keen for those early recordings to be released now” (Marks in Sinkins, 2011). Even though many of these recordings are not “good” recordings, Marks believes “the quality of the recordings is not the point, it’s about the context of when it was recorded ... the context of the music being played at folk clubs, jazz restaurants and free concerts.” (Ibid.)
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Richard Haslop (2010) describes Marks’s approach to recording as a simple one:
an ardent advocate of live music, which he has always preferred to studio versions, he’ll record or film anything that ‘murmurs or moves’, always provided that he considers it worth recording or filming – and what he considers worth recording has almost invariably been at odds with what the local industry has recorded or, with very few exceptions, what the draconian, separatist local radio has deemed worth playing.
Marks’s obsessive collecting and subsequent recording technique led to the HYMAP archive containing material referring to the South African folk musical landscape that, as Richard Haslop (2010) has noted, would “not have been preserved, or perhaps even noticed” had it not been for David Marks. For Marks, the most important aspect of music was the live event, which he feverishly recorded. During an interview with Muff Anderson (2001:8) he noted:
A record isn’t art, it’s a memento. The contact is important. *…+ If Jethro Butow played his guitar too loudly, or too softly, that‘s the way he played. The live thing breaks down all barriers. Rock ‘n Roll – and I use the term to mean all popular music – is a big party. How do you get it across to people who aren’t at the party? The live gig is where we the writers always made do during the folk era. And this is where a lot of what has come out of the guys who are writing has been missed commercially, or has been dismissed as cliquey, specialist, avant garde and communist by the record companies.
Due to Marks’s recording approach of recording almost everything that he was involved in, his collection includes rare recordings of the early performances of Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu (who later formed the group Juluka together); folk singer Phil Ochs; the Malombo group; the Zulu maskandi guitarist Shiyani Ngcobo; the Xhosa composer and mouth-bow player Madosini; and the hard rock group of Piet Botha called Raven.22 Also in the archive are studio recordings of Mchunu’s first solo album after Juluka split up; Carlo Mombelli’s first recording and published song (by 3rd Ear Music); recordings with Roger Lucey and
22
Some of these recordings, such as Madosini’s songs, were sampled by artists such as Manfred Mann (South Africa) as well as New Zealand pop rockers Crowded House on their single “Weather With You”. Madosini did receive royalties for this use of her material (Haslop, 2010).
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Johnny Clegg playing the mouth bow and live recordings of Hugh Masekela playing in Lesotho (Marks, DM 24/02/2012; Haslop, 2010). Accordingly, the collection contains music that was never commercially recorded but only performed live (Marks, 2002). Such material poses an immediate challenge to the archivist, because the 3rd Ear Music Company does not own the rights to most of these recordings (Marks, 2001). Thus, although most of the material would be available for researchers and scholars, any creative project, performance or concert based on the use of material from the archive that is not owned by Marks, would incur great trouble on the part of the archivist who would have to find the rightful owners, obtain permission for its use and pay the necessary royalties.23 Similarly, the spliced tapes used by Marks to record most of his material, suggest various preservation issues for the archivist, and “is one of the biggest problems associated with audio tape preservation (National Recording and Preservation Board, 2006:24).
Amongst these recordings are also spoken words recorded and collected by Marks including the various plays and musicals performed at the Market Theatre, Dorkay House, 24 and at the Bantu Men’s Social Club in Eloff Street, Johannesburg. Various union meetings were also recorded at mine hostels,25 as well as some other idiosyncratic recordings including Kalahari desert farmers talking (1983) about how to find water with a gun and a coat hanger26 and recordings of animal sounds including a variety of frogs and recording of an ostrich’s roar (Marks, DM 23/02/2012). Marks has also received various donations of materials from collectors in South Africa and Zimbabwe, including some field recordings made by David
23
Some of the challenges inherent in the HYMAP collection in relation to copyright and ownership are for example illustrated in David Kramer’s biography (De Villiers & Slabbert, 2011). The authors note that during the 1970s, the folk-rock musician Roger Lucey started to perform the song Dry Wine during live concerts. The song had been written by Kramer. They explain: “Late in 1979, Lucey made a live recording of the song for inclusion on his second album Half a Live (1980), and the label [3rd Ear Music] approached David [Kramer] to acquire the rights, explaining that this would allow him to procure royalties, and offering him a R50 advance. Not realising that the label had transgressed in recording the song without his permission in the first place, and assuming he had little choice but to assign the rights, David accepted the deal, signing the contract on 8 April 1980” (Ibid., 115).
24
Some of these pieces include Godspell, Phiri, King Kong and Wait a Minim. Marks notes on his website that the recordings he made of Phiri at Dorkay House contain “songs that have become unheard hidden classics in the un-archived annuals of township theatre history” (Marks, 2003). 25
Marks recorded a few mine hostel performances and union meetings for the UKZN’s Culture and Working Life Project that are housed in the Killie Campbell Museum in Durban (Marks, 2011). 26
Marks recorded these Kalahari farmers talking while doing the sound for Katinka Heyns’s production Sonneblom (Marks, DM 23/02/2012).
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Rycroft and Dave Dargie, recordings from the white folk scene of 1960-1970 in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), as well as pre-recorded radio broadcasts from Peter Brumfield and his colleagues who worked for the SABC studios in Durban. Marks notes that these recordings were sent to him as a precaution against the SABC’s strict censorship measures that would edit anything considered as derogatory (Marks, DM 23/02/2012). A significant part of this archive also contains photographs taken by various people of music events as well as those photographs taken by Marks. Part of what makes the photographs taken by Marks from the mixing desk unique, is that they differ substantially from those taken by the media at the time because the placement of the mixing desk usually allowed Marks to photograph the audience as well as the full stage. Some of these photographs, recordings and material from Marks’s collection have been used in various international publications as well as in TV and Film documentaries, in biographies, academic works and websites.27
Apart from miscellanea such as programmes (Marks kept every programme of the events he was involved in), concert tickets, personal letters and photographic negatives, the collection also contains Marks’s diaries and journals that go as far back as 1959. His childhood diaries mostly contain sport clippings, little drawings and comments while Marks’s later diaries and journals now serve as important reference sources to find dates, names and events of the recorded material in the archive. Some of these journals are filled with longhand entries, while most contain the daily schedule of “things to do”. These diaries were not overly important to Marks at the time (Marks, DM 23/02/2012), but due to his compulsion of not throwing anything away, they now provide the details needed to connect the various materials such as recordings, programmes and photographs in the collection. From the late 1970s Marks started to make use of little notebooks in addition to A4 diaries because they were less obtrusive and could be hidden more easily. Marks felt compelled to hide his notes
27
The collection has been used by various students working on Woodstock, the Free Peoples Concerts, censorship, and the folk music movement in South Africa from the 1960s (Marks, 2012a). Some examples include a PhD thesis on Bill Hanley by Kane, (2011); books on South African music by Trewhela (1980), Anderson (2001), and Coplan (2007, [1985]); international publications on John Lennon by Kane, (2007), and on Woodstock by Littleproud, (2009); McIntosh sound systems by Kessler, (2006); and local documentaries such as Bearing witness: 30 years of the Market Theatre directed by Key (2007), The Lion’s Trail directed by Verster (2002) and The Invincibles directed by Kaplan (2009) (Marks, 2012a).
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because of fears that his diaries might endanger the musicians he was involved with. He notes (DM 23/02/2012):
I’d already had visits from the security police, and I was just afraid that somebody would take these or scrutinise them. So I started making the actual notes of what was happening in little books. I got four boxes of those.
Marks’s collection is extensive because he has built it up haphazardly around his own musical, professional and political interests. The collection is interspersed with family photographs, videos and mementoes, recordings made directly from the radio or television of musicians, concerts, films, speeches and documentaries that were important to Marks – all of which serve to illustrate the entwined nature of the collection with Marks’s personal life.