Book takes you on a journey

A review: John Roett’s Backstage Pass

By Ralph Thorne, QC, MP

“The notes resonated throughout the room as the beauty of the music cast its spell over me and firmly planted its seeds of magic deep within my spirit.”

From the opening lines of this warm haven, the author of Backstage Pass moves from the beautifully intimate to the unapologetically political.

Marking the coincidence of his date of birth with Nelson Mandela’s early struggles, John Roett prepares us for a literary expedition that would reveal the shaping of his consciousness, when he writes, “there is nothing in life that angers me more than injustice.”

The reader immediately encounters a mind-scape of contrasting emotions across the expanse of this musician’s journey.

I write this review feeling that this book could not have been written differently and that it had to be constructed with stark honesty, to reflect the authentic experience of a man of John Roett’s generation.

This is no portrait of superficial glamour.

The writer confronts happy and unhappy truths with the equal force of his intellectual honesty and the bonus is in the beauty of his language.

With his philosophical declaration of anger at injustice, here is the shaping of a radical mind watching ‘Woodstock’ at the cinema in his early teens.

Simultaneously, he is in the crucible of a new nation forging its identity in the aftermath of political Independence.

The artist would become the unacknowledged central figure in this national struggle and John Roett would locate himself within that movement, while also acknowledging the greatest of them, Jackie Opel.

He introduces his Aunt Dorothy as the source of his love for music and then he introduces the rest of his family.

His father’s solicitous caution about “having something to fall back on” would symbolise that frictional relationship between the artist and the society.

Art is not seen as work and it is financially hazardous.

The book, not only navigates this hazardous terrain, but also gives the reader a “pass” into the exclusive zones “backstage”.

For all of his triumphs and failures, pleasures and pains and joys and tragedies, the writer speaks with unvarnished honesty of his society, of his experience and of himself.

There is his palpable delight at the opportunity to perform with the internationally acclaimed Merrymen and with Maxi Priest.

He also takes us into his most melancholy moments, in the loss of his friend, Adrian “Boo” Husbands, when he writes, “I’d become intimate with death, but it was difficult coming to terms with him leaving so suddenly.”

Let the reader be warned that there are other moments of deep sadness and despair, for that is the nature of reality. And whenever the darkness seems to be closing in with doom, the telephone and its voice on the other end become restorative and redemptive.

The book is a serious engagement, but the writer also reveals a charming and sometimes self-effacing wit, especially in his recall of losing the exhaust pipe from his car during the afternoon rush-hour traffic on Broad Street.

There are other hilarious recollections and anecdotes to take the reader through with a smile amidst the tears.

In a society characterised by its stratifications, John does not deny his privilege and still he makes his radical political statements against the grain of safety.

There is the emptying of a beautiful soul that speaks unselfishly of the virtues and talents of other musicians, all of whose authentic higher common ground is the love of music, pure and true.

He re-introduces his reader to bands that are probably forgotten and to names that should never be forgotten.

Music brought the writer into contact with most of them and he marvels at his own good memory. For this book’s encyclopaedic virtue, the reader also marvels at the author’s good memory.

There is that poignant moment when he resigns himself to the status of senior citizen, among a group of young musicians, who are at that callow stage of consciousness, disjoined from the experience of past struggle.

When you read the book, you will discover which work of art impelled him to opine that, “of all the countless recordings I’ve done in my career, this song is the only one ever to have been played flawlessly from top to bottom.”

Somehow, I don’t believe that John Roett’s phone will remain silent and somehow, I believe that it is his beloved keyboard that he “will fall back on”, “unafraid of the future, surrounded by love.”

Thanks for the expedition, John.