Special and Extraordinary Award winner Trevor Rabin, the only South African to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, accepted the Absa Jewish Achiever Special and Extraordinary Award this year because he felt it was the right way to stand up against injustice in the world today. “It feels like now is the time to accept this as we watch antisemitism rear its ugly head,” he says. “I agreed to accept this award on the day that six Israeli hostages in Gaza were brutally assassinated after almost a year of surviving in the tunnels. I was so revolted and angry,” says Rabin. “I wanted to stand up against this in some way, and this seemed like the right way. “When the 7 October massacre took place, it had an impact on the whole world. And antisemitism, which is often hidden, was then given an excuse to be exposed.” Rabin, who now lives in Los Angeles in the United States, is best known in South Africa as the lead guitarist and singer of what was a world-class rock band that ruled the local music scene in the 1970s. The band was known for its thousands of adoring teenybopper fans. Today, though, Rabin composes soundtracks for mega-budget movies and television shows. To date, he has composed at least 50 movie soundtracks and music for 50 television shows. He is also in the process of composing a symphony and does digital artwork for fun. His musical career started when he and two friends, Neil Cloud and Ronnie Friedman – alias Robot, started making music together in their early teens. “I met Neil because his older sister was going out with my brother, Derek, and Ronnie lived two houses up from him in Houghton. We became friends.” After jamming together, these young teens took to playing at Barmitzvahs, weddings, and parties in and around Johannesburg. They became a band, called Conglomeration, which Rabin said, “is a horrible name”. “At one Barmitzvah, we earned the princely sum of R10, which was great because I really needed to get a microphone to improve our vocal sound. It would cost a bit more than that,” he recalled. “We learnt Hava Nagila and several other songs popular at Jewish events, and our popularity grew from there. Soon we were headlining at pop festivals”. The three of them, still best friends today, performed with Julian Laxton and other top musicians at the time, but hadn’t recorded anything as a group. They then got their conscription papers, and spent their time in the army travelling around performing for troops. “My captain who was behind this, called us the Rabinites, also a bad name that I had no chance of changing at the time,” said Rabin, with a wry chuckle. “We played loads of music, from Led Zeppelin to the Beatles.” While still in the army, they were approached by acclaimed music producer Patric van Blerk, who had them “AWOL-ing” (sneaking out) to play in dodgy clubs. Rabin cannot remember how they got to be called Rabbitt, but it stuck, and Van Blerk brought in a young musician from Pretoria, called Duncan Faure, to join them. Once their army service was done, their group solidified as Rabbitt once they recorded Boys Will Be Boys. They finished recording the album in seven or eight days, and then realised that they hadn’t included Faure, so they gave him a song to add. Rabbitt then became a household name, particularly among girls and young women. They were regularly featured on the early television pop music show Pop Shop. “I wrote the song Charlie, which was a chart topper, with Patric. It was about his husband, which wasn’t so acceptable in those days. So, when newspapers asked me who the song was about, I thought it best to tell them it was about my dog,” Rabin says. Rabbitt became the equivalent in South Africa to the Beatles in the United Kingdom, and to date, there has never been a band quite as popular in this country that caused such a stir. “The crazy thing is it was our life, so it didn’t feel bizarre to live like that, not being able to go anywhere without being recognised,” he said. He recalled having teenage girls hanging outside the home he lived in with his parents, just waiting to see him. Comparatively, among rock bands, Rabbitt was fairly clean cut. “We were quite responsible, but still had lots of fun,” Rabin says. “I was exhausted at the time as I did session music all day, and then played six or seven sets of music every night except Monday and Sunday.” Rabin grew up surrounded by a clear understanding about how unpleasant apartheid was. “My father was a sought-after attorney, and my uncle was Sydney Kentridge, Nelson Mandela’s lawyer and one of the world’s finest barristers.” But music was a central theme in the Rabin household, with his father playing violin in the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra, his mother being a “great pianist”, and her mother a well-known piano teacher. His brother was also an award-winning violinist, and his sister an acclaimed dancer. “I virtually grew up reading music before I could read words and singing before I could talk,” he says. Rabin went solo in 1977, which led to the group’s demise soon afterwards. “The record company we were working with was in trouble and on the verge of closing down,” he says. “We were working on signing with another label, but the businesspeople concerned with us worried that they would be written out of the deal, which caused them to react badly. I got angry and left.” Rabin soon got over his anger, but by then, he had already moved on to starting a record label in England and doing solo albums. “Truth was, as Rabbitt, we had overachieved in the territory we were in and needed to expand or we wouldn’t have survived anyway,” he says. Rabin ultimately moved to Los Angeles with his wife, Shelley, and joined the rock band, Yes, with whom he stayed for 15 years. Soon after he joined, his song Owner of a Lonely Heart went to number one in almost every country. Rabin produced the band’s last album, Talk, which he says he is proud of because “it was the first album we recorded digitally”, and he was getting more and more comfortable with digital music. After they toured Japan, Rabin decided he wanted to do something different and left Yes. It wasn’t easy to get his foot in the door of producing music for film, being told by many he would face a brick wall because they saw him as a rock star not a composer. He eventually used a connection with Steven Seagal to help him get his first opportunity, and the rest is history. To date, among the film scores he has composed, are: The Glimmer Man; Enemy of the State; Gone in 60 Seconds; The Misfits; Jack Frost; Armageddon; and American Outlaws. In 2017, with the fellow members of Yes, Rabin was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame when the remaining musicians performed together again. It was shortly before then that the Yes drummer died, and the band’s remaining musicians, Jon Anderson, Rick Wakeman, and Rabin toured, doing 200 concerts together. “That was the last time I performed,” Rabin said. His ties to South Africa remain, with his brother living here and both his wife, Shelley, and his son, Ryan, also a musician, feeling very connected. “My son got married at Londolozi Game Reserve not long ago, and Shelley often talks about us retiring back there,” he said. But, he says, who knows what the future brings? 16 From Rabbitt to rocking the world Trevor Rabin Photo: Screenshot
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