Between Rock & a Hard Place A Memoir
, by Rasch, CarstenNote: Supplemental materials are not guaranteed with Rental or Used book purchases.
- ISBN: 9781928420361 | 1928420362
- Cover: Paperback
- Copyright: 10/24/2019
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.