Big Blue Sky Read online

  4

  SCHOOL OF ROCK

  IT WAS EIGHTEEN months after Dad’s funeral when I heard a whisper that a band had formed in a college up the road. They had equipment, they could play—allegedly—and they were on the lookout for a singer.

  I didn’t tell a soul I was interested. I just walked across the lawns to listen in and see what they were up to.

  It couldn’t be that hard, I said to myself. I’d sung plenty of times before, even if it was only to captive audiences at school and church. I had chimed in at a few folk nights before leaving home and I was always joining in with whatever was spinning on the turntable.

  A couple of months earlier I’d gone up to Sydney to see Rod Stewart and his band, the Faces, play a big open-air concert at Randwick Racecourse. Success had clearly gone to Rod’s head as they arrived by helicopter an hour late, strutted onto the stage, fell over a few times, played a stop-start set, and then disappeared into the night. The audience didn’t seem to notice, or, if they did, they didn’t seem to care. But I knew then that, given a chance, I could do better than this shambolic outfit. At the very least I’d try harder. All I needed was a band.

  There wasn’t much going on when I fronted up to hear the students play. Bits of musical gear were strewn around a small room, and a few young blokes sat chatting and toying with their guitars—it seemed pretty haphazard and a bit aimless. Someone would play a few bars, stop, and then someone else would start another song, only for it grind to a halt midstream when no one could remember how it finished.

  This was Devil’s Breakfast. On bass, Damian Street, a trainee accountant with a big black moustache, bell-bottomed jeans and a cheeky grin. The guitarist, Trevor Thomas, was like most guitarists I’ve ever known: fixated on his equipment and making the six-string beast sound off as loud as possible. Nigel, the drummer, sat melancholy and out of scale behind an enormous drum kit, with cymbal stands that looked like transplanted traffic signs.

  It turned out the only song everyone knew from start to finish was Deep Purple’s heavy-metal chestnut ‘Smoke on the Water’. On the strength of getting through it a couple of times we were ready to go.

  We played our first show, a selection of cover songs, in a small hall in Burgmann. A handful of friends showed up and endured a barrage of guitar and wailed indistinguishable vocals echoing around the empty room.

  A few months later Nigel moved on, to be replaced on the kit by another Barker College refugee, Richard Geeves, a curly-haired honours history student and lover of Brit pop.

  Devil’s Breakfast quickly turned into Rock Island, a name taken from a Lead Belly song, ‘Rock Island Line’, that UK skiffle artist Lonnie Donegan had had a hit with in the mid-1950s. Armed with a more credible moniker—painted on the bass drum skin for maximum effect, naturally, just like the bands on TV—the new group was primed to sail forth and take Canberra by storm.

  We needed to rehearse, get a lot more songs under our belt, and then get work. But synchronising these tasks was tricky, and by the end of the year we’d only played a handful of times to the ever-tolerant students on campus, and we weren’t getting any better.

  We also needed our own PA, a set of large speakers that would amplify the voice and drums. It signified that you were a real band, and meant you didn’t have to rely on borrowing or renting a rig, which took time and blew the budget.

  I went home over the Christmas break and mentioned to Mum that without a PA we were stuck and my new career stalled before it started. Out of the blue a few days later she offered to lend me some money to buy a decent sound system.

  I returned to Canberra the proud owner of two big white speaker boxes we christened ‘the fridges’, along with a tangle of leads, a set of amplifiers and a couple of microphones. Later on I added a gizmo called an Echoplex that put various echoes and reverbs on the voice and was frantically operated by foot—a precursor, maybe, to my stomping movements. Damian sold his motorbike and bought an old post office van to cart the gear around. We were now a viable touring outfit.

  The time and energy I’d expended on Rock Island inevitably had a detrimental effect on my education in the study of the law, and 1974 was shaping up as a year of reckoning in more ways than one. As the door was opening on the music front, so was it in danger of closing shut on my studies. Up to now, I’d rarely attended lectures, instead relying on friends’ notes to scrape by, submitting assignments the minute before midnight, just squeezing over the pass mark in exams. Then came the inevitable first fail, in administrative law, along with a sterner than usual talking-to from my lecturer, an eminent legal scholar. I’d been warned.

  A choice now had to be made. I was flat broke again. Rock Island was on the cusp of great things—of that we were certain. We now had more than twenty songs under our belt that we could get through without stuffing up. My studies would have to wait. So law was deferred for a year as I resolved to push the band as far as possible and at the same time pay off my debts, including the latest and largest owed to my dear mum.

  I took a series of driving jobs. The first and best was delivering Arnott’s biscuits around Canberra in a bright red truck with a giant illustration of a rosella on the side. Arnott’s was quintessentially Australian then, their products a part of my life for as long as I could remember—and, encouragingly, they were still going strong, if the hectic delivery schedule was anything to go by.

  I slept on Damian’s floor in college and lived on surplus shredded wheatmeal biscuits until I had enough money to share a rented house—I’ve never been able to face that variety of biscuit since. Once solvent, I then moved into a plain brick house close to the university in the suburb of Ainslie with our drummer Richard and another law student and computer buff, Karl May.

  We stored the band’s gear in the lounge room and began to rehearse in earnest. Armed with a grab bag of top-forty faves and rock classics, equipment that worked and reliable transport—the basic necessities of a working band—we took whatever gigs were thrown our way. We went all over Canberra and to outlying country towns, even as far as Young! Loading and unloading the gear, wiring up the PA, writing the song list, hacking through thirty or so songs a night, hustling for a feed and then heading home, turning the engine off to save fuel as we coasted silently downhill, four of us crammed into the front of the van with a heater that didn’t work.

  It’s a scenario as old as the hills. It was our school of rock. Whenever we were due to play the day would drag like the last school period on a Friday. I could visualise a great night coming up, anticipating the moment when the lights went down and we took the stage. Even if we played to a handful of bystanders in a freezing hall, as happened on more than one occasion, I never felt the cold, just the thrill of fitting the pieces of music and tentative movement together. A flesh- and-blood rockin’ band is in town, and no, we don’t do requests.

  Most times we were incidental music, the live backing tape for people to hang out to. It was only towards the end of the night, when the audience had a few drinks under their belt and started to loosen up a little, that we then rolled out the tried and true standards, like ‘Johnny B. Goode’ or ‘Roadhouse Blues’, turning it up a notch so the dancing could start in earnest.

  In terms of pecking order, Rock Island sat on the lowest rung, yet we were getting plenty of work. Having a band play at your event had become the in thing to do. So apart from the usual round of pubs, we found ourselves at all kinds of strange locations: school fetes, college balls, and even in windblown paddocks, playing for farmers and their wives as they celebrated the end of the shearing season.

  One Saturday evening, we were booked to play at the local speedway to entertain the crowd between races. We set up on the back of a truck (not the last time I’d find myself playing on one of these) in the middle of the racetrack, cranked it up, and were midway through the third song only to be drowned out by the roar of engines as the starter’s flag came down and the gaggle of cars, with massive fibreglass quiff-shaped ailerons ove
r their chassis, emblazoned with decals and sponsor names, roared off in a blaze of noise and smoke. Our tough rock routine morphed into limp pantomime as the song petered out and the stampede of hot rods continued to tear around us, while the crowd cheered and the icy evening turned mauve, then deep purple and finally black.

  We were working hard but our sound was bog standard, and unlikely to create a sensation. Even when our housemate Karl joined the band with the stage name of Dr Technical and we lifted our sights by meshing standard twelve-bar rock and blues with weird sound effects courtesy of his primitive synthesisers, no one took much notice.

  There were a few exceptions to this general disinterest, however. Towards the end of the year we were booked to play a mid-week show at the Croatia Deakin Soccer Club, one of Canberra’s leading venues, supporting what was billed as ‘Australia’s Craziest, Zaniest, Bizarre Group (Neat casual dress—No jeans, no cords)’.

  Skyhooks were already making waves. I’d only just heard their first album, and it had hit me like a gale blown straight up from the Antarctic it was so fresh. This was the kind of music I wanted to make. The songs were snappy and inventive, all about their hometown Melbourne, with lots of pithy reflections from a young person’s perspective; they sounded real. And in a long overdue departure, there were none of the faux American accents or maudlin rock clichés about being an outlaw or finding true love (again) that served as the staple formula for many Australian bands at the time.

  They went on before us, a smart thing to do at that time of the year in Canberra; at least the audience was still awake. And their set list was a killer. They played their debut album, Living in the 70’s, back to back. And they looked the part too: dressed in bizarre costumes, wearing make-up, but with smart, cheeky chitchat from lead singer Shirley Strachan, whose voice soared like an eagle. The guitarists were ever in sync, the rhythm section locked in tandem. I was transfixed.

  Even more surprising was that after they finished their set they stayed on to watch the local yokels do their best.

  More surprising still was guitarist Red Symons walking through the crowd and up onto the stage carrying a replacement amplifier after Damian’s bass amp died mid-song. We’d recently supported teen idols Sherbet at a picture theatre in a town outside Canberra and their road crew had refused to allow us onto the stage at all. Instead we had to balance the drum kit and amps on the steps leading up to the stage. It was a clumsy performance, literally, and there was no court of appeal.

  The final Hooks gesture set a new template. As we were packing up they came backstage and showed some interest in the novel marriage of mainstream rock and blues with strange signals from homemade sound generators we were trying to pull off.

  ‘Keep at it, there’s something good happening up there,’ said Greg Macainsh, the bass player and main songwriter.

  These few words of encouragement were all the fuel I needed to stoke up the fire in the belly.

  …

  The year settled into something approaching a predictable pattern when I got a permanent full-time job delivering heating oil for Linfox Transport to the ever-spreading suburbs of Canberra.

  Other than the early starts—when if you didn’t have gloves, your hand would freeze and stick to the metal nozzle as you pumped oil—I enjoyed shunting my truck around Canberra with no one looking over my shoulder. Most of my workmates had left school early and were no-nonsense types, who worked to live and lived to play. The atmosphere was down to earth, with lots of poking fun and talk about the horses and the greyhounds. I felt at home except I couldn’t get anyone interested in the rollercoaster ride of the Whitlam government, which I was avidly following.

  As my mechanical skills were limited, I took to buying a slab of beer—two dozen cans—and propping it up on the bonnet of my truck on Friday mornings when we were due to do a basic service of our vehicles. Other drivers would wander across to see what was going on and lend a hand. The job was done and the beer gone in super-quick time. I never did work out how to replace a fanbelt on one of those behemoths.

  Besides a much-needed income, my new job had another practical benefit. Our share house in Limestone Avenue—a squat three-bedroom white-brick structure—was always Canberra-cold in winter and autumn. We played out our own version of the tragedy of the commons by using the paling fence as fuel for the fireplace in the living room during an early frosty spell not long after I moved in. Other than that, there was no heating. Then we bought an old oil heater and I was able to keep it filled for the rest of the year.

  It was a congenial place to live. We would squeeze into the tiny kitchen and sit around jive talking. Often there’d be a cacophony of different sounds filtering through the bedroom doors and down the hall as each of us fired up our record players and tape machines: Hawkwind and Roxy Music from Karl’s room, the Kinks from Richard’s, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Johnny Winter from mine.

  The black-and-white television was rarely watched, with the exception of two ABC music programs that were reshaping the local music scene. One, Get to Know (GTK), was a five-minute filler featuring a range of folk, jazz and alternative groups that showed up and played live just before the country soapy Bellbird during the week. The other was Countdown on Sunday evening, and it came out of the blocks with a bang. As the music–youth culture mix was heating up, and with more bands emerging, Countdown—hosted by the perennially positive Molly Meldrum, with an hour-long time slot every Sunday night at six—became mandatory viewing. It proved a huge boon to the music industry, with Meldrum spruiking upcoming concert tours, profiling new singles, spreading gossip, introducing new bands. Countdown featured a never-ending procession of personalities, from Iggy Pop to Abba and the ubiquitous Elton John. Even Prince Charles showed up one night.

  Sure, it was a pure pop program, but never before had so many local acts had access to such a large audience. AC/DC, the Ted Mulry Gang, John Paul Young, Dragon, Hush, the Divinyls, Icehouse and INXS all became household names—along with whomever the powerful Melbourne music mafia, led by Michael Gudinski of Mushroom Records, could persuade Molly was the next big thing.

  A Countdown appearance guaranteed mass exposure as it was watched by just about everyone, but showing up regularly carried a long-term risk: being seen performing to an audience predominantly made up of teenage girls could turn off the older, more serious music fan. Then, in time, the young screamers would swivel their eyes towards the next up-and-comer thrust in front of them, the caravan would move on and the big-name act featured so heavily in the past lost both their credibility and their audience. This phenomenon contributed to the demise of my semi-idols, Skyhooks, who became frustrated playing Beatles-style to auditoriums full of prepubescent girls, while the finer points of the band’s music and between-song repartee was lost in a welter of hysteria.

  Of course, Rock Island was a universe away from the flashing Countdown logo and hyperventilating host and audience. We numbered among the legion of armchair critics dissecting bands and artists every week, and watching closely to see how they fared. Even then it was obvious that appearing on the program was no guarantee that you’d make it.

  But still we were determined. If we weren’t playing on the weekends, we’d set the gear up in the living room and practise for a couple of hours, but mostly we toured the local circuit. Everyone was dreaming of making it, getting into the glow of Sydney or Melbourne’s bright lights. But Canberra was hard to break out of, even with a bit of audience interest and positive chat on your side.

  The students’ favourites, Wally and the Wombats, styled up like a US West Coast guitar band with long hair and denims, could play Steely Dan and Eagles covers all night and not lose the current. But with the 1970s now well underway and the public always hungry for new looks and sounds, they morphed into a super group—the Ritz—got dolled up in snazzy clothes and headed up the Hume Highway with their first album fresh under their belt.

  They stiffed. Sydney was too far away, moving at its own accelerati
ng pace, and anyway, the nearest comparable act was New Zealand band Dragon, whose songs were better.

  The same thing happened to the next big thing: Baby Grande, featuring Steve Kilbey, who went on to serious music-making in The Church. Even armed with substantial financial backing and reams of attitude, new equipment and sharp haircuts, it didn’t work.

  Rock Island just kept trundling out to play. Our hair was long, our denim fading and our limitations increasingly apparent, as the stars in our eyes dimmed. Just four, occasionally five, young blokes on stage, making noise you could sway and jump around to. At least we were earning more than we would pulling beers and it was fun.

  We’d mastered the four half-hour sets, with a selection of crowd pleasers to see the night out on a high. We’d contemplated a big band format with female backing singers and Electric Light Orchestra-type arrangements but couldn’t fit the pieces together. We’d even mucked about with a few originals, including one song brought in by Trevor, the guitarist, called ‘Made in Australia’—but again there was no magic moment of uplift. We were starting to plod, and with exams pressing in on those still studying, Rock Island wound down as the year drew to a close.

  I headed up to Sydney to visit Mum and my brothers and to catch a few waves, hoping to get some holiday work before resuming my studies.

  Unbeknown to me at this time, a bunch of younger North Shore students who’d played together while at school were planning to take their band Farm out on tour. They’d decided to play the surf clubs and halls along the coast south of Sydney, which would be crammed with holidaymakers over the Christmas period. It was an ambitious undertaking. They were completely unknown, and there was one major flaw: they didn’t have a lead singer.