Between Rock & a Hard Place: A Memoir

The ‘80s in South Africa was a schmangled clusterfuck of a decade. Resistance against the apartheid government was mounting while violence swamped the beleaguered land. Change was undeniably in the air. As the country heaved and hummed with resistant energy, in Joburg, Cape Town and Durban, tiny pockets of anti-apartheid whiteys were using music and parties to stage a punk-driven uprising against the tyrannical government. With guitars instead of guns and an insatiable hunger for freedom, the state saw this bizarre subculture as a hive of hedonists and drugged-up nihilists. However, this anarchic collection of guitar-wielding, pill-munching, dope smoking musicians and their followers were in fact a second front in the struggle against apartheid.

This is history like you’ve never read it. In brilliantly tragic and hilarious detail, Between Rock & a Hard Place is an epic memoir by musician, promoter and enthusiastic participant Carsten Rasch. Rasch is a gifted storyteller as he paints an untold history, detailing those tumultuous and giddy times with heartfelt irreverence. Veering between lucid moments of desperate innovation and psychotic adventures on the rim of sanity, all the time riding roughshod at delirious speeds over the potholes of ‘culture’, the reader is introduced to half-forgotten heroes, now fast disappearing into the fog of time, and the band of misfits who attempted to disrupt the system. Between Rock & a Hard Place is simultaneously a blow-for-blow rock ’n roll story told from the dubious vantage point of being below the underbelly; an aberrant coming-of-age tale set in a time of political madness and mad debauchery; and, finally, a lesson on horses.