Ah, a quiet dreamy moment … I wonder where the old rocker doth roam in his head’s heart? You’d imagine the concerts, the travel, the greasepaint and crowds. No, it’s not so. In my mind today I relive a summer holiday. That’s where my errant thoughts wander; back to those days of my most callow youth and a series of many first times for me and the things that influence my life to this very day.
IN NOVEMBER 1970 I was under many spells. The spell of music was taking hold of me for a start – I needed to become a rock musician the way other blokes needed to be priests and missionaries (I imagine). And as well as being infatuated with my new bass and my urgent desire for rock stardom, I was in love with love itself. Oh yes, there was a girl attached to this love of love and she was the enabler of my dependence upon love, which began about then. You see, I fancied myself a lover, a player and a romantic; I wanted ‘the real thing’, which I’d glimpsed in rock’n’roll clips and foreign films and books I’d borrowed from the Dickson library. When I fell in love with love itself, via this girl, I was swept up in a powerful haze of chemical bliss that must’ve been the equivalent of shooting a speedball every half-hour.
At sixteen, I’d never felt this before. Just kissing the girl gave me almost out-of-body sensations. I guess she was more experienced than me – when she let her fingers roam randomly over my back or kissed my neck I indeed heard music. Songs by Bread, actually: ‘Make It with You’, ‘Baby I’m-a Want You’, ‘It Don’t Matter to Me’, are now inextricably bound up with one night when we sat outside the assembly hall at Lyneham High School and kissed. She talked about how often she shampooed her long black hair and I listened and each word vibrated in the air, transformed by love’s incredible power – more powerful to me at sixteen than any drug I’ve taken since. No drug could’ve improved that warm, dry Canberra night, smelling of the pine trees that grew all around. She said her hair looked better on the third day after a shampoo. Did she realise her words would echo forever in my head, along with all the other stuff that’s whirling around in there? A tornado, flinging out random memories that sometimes land in my songs? That’s a good reason why it’s pointless me analysing all my lyrics. They’re not about anything; they’re an abstract canvas. My songs are a portal to your own mind where I give you a guided meditation. Chaos just blew through the junkyard of my memories and reassembled all those songs!
Of course extreme youth itself is a formidable drug, according to various newfangled takes on adolescence that argue teenagers aren’t quite like the rest of us. That they’re temporarily but seriously out of it on some weird teenage hormone that drives even the best of them loony. Well, I reckon I had it in spades: I was tripping on youth itself, if you like. I was a skinny, sulky, pretty boy with a Prince Valiant hairdo, carefully dressed in whatever the very latest mode was – according to the kids at school who were in the know, or had big brothers or sisters who knew a ‘zigger’ jacket from a pair of ‘Anti-lopes’. Pictures of me at the time reveal a poncy, slightly girly-looking type, posing languidly on our settee for my dad’s new Polaroid camera. Love, music and youth all had me by the balls, and one night a few weeks later they collided spectacularly at my first real party.
My new girlfriend had many brothers and sisters, who all had boyfriends and girlfriends, and they threw a party one night when their parents were out. I was wearing a double-breasted suit that’d been bought for me to wear at my Uncle Ken’s wedding: it was powder blue and I was wearing the kind of see-through turquoise blousy-looking shirt that was fashionable in London in the summer of 1970 (my mother had brought me one back from a holiday). As I walked along the alleyways between houses that Saturday night I felt rather pleased with myself; I was no longer that awkward gawky kid I’d been only the day before. There I was quietly padding through the backstreets of Lyneham to my first real party.
And that party was about as good as it could possibly get for sixteen-year-old me. A hot night … the kids (all aged between fifteen and twenty) laughed good-naturedly at my suit. It didn’t faze me; they were all dressed in T-shirts, jeans and thongs. My suit represented my ardent ardour. I was in love with love and it all seemed like a scene from an incredible movie. I liked her brothers and sisters; they were slightly amused by me. They were all catholics and moved in different circles from me – I didn’t know any of them at all. My girlfriend’s sister, who was one year younger, had a boyfriend called Claudio. Boy, he really seemed to know his music! We stood outside on the porch and listened to what was playing; he scoffed at my lack of knowledge about ‘album’ music as opposed to ‘singles’ music. Claudio went in and commandeered the record player and stuck on a record he’d brought to the party himself: Chicago Transit Authority. As the record played Claudio raved to me about the music I was hearing. He explained how cool this and that was, and we opened up the double-album package and looked at all the pictures of the band. I found myself loving Claudio’s take on all this stuff – even though he was a year younger than me, I listened to him as though he was an oracle. In a flash I knew I had to get into album music myself.
Claudio played me much of his collection that night, including Flaming Youth, featuring Phil Collins before he was in Genesis. I particularly remember him endorsing a really bombastic, hopelessly romantic song called ‘Guide Me, Orion’: I still think of that song and Claudio whenever I hear anything about Orion. But it’s Chicago Transit Authority that I most associate with that halcyon night; it was their music that set me free from the immature pursuit of singles. From there on in it was only the odd single for me – the ones that weren’t available on an album.
Meanwhile, the party was a blast. I went to the bedroom my girlfriend shared with about four sisters and we kissed. We smoked cigarettes and we talked. And other kids came in and kissed and we giggled as we watched. People all over the house were kissing and smoking cigarettes and listening to the latest selections from Claudio’s collection.
When I eventually went home I was elated. This was the adult world I was in, and there was much grooviness to be had! It was certainly abundant in Goodwin Street, Lyneham, that warm November night in 1970.
That Christmas, Dad decided our whole extended family should have a get-together up on Queensland’s Gold Coast. A proper family holiday, involving lots of driving and staying in motels. I loved staying in motels and in Surfers Paradise we’d be staying in the best, most-famous joint – Ten, The Esplanade. At ten storeys it was the highest building on the Gold Coast at the time. Dad had a brochure and it made my heart skip a beat just looking at that place and imagining staying there.
In the meantime I’d been getting into Chicago Transit Authority, and their second album, more-succinctly entitled Chicago II. Over and over and over I took those records in. There were three singers, as far as I could tell: Terry Kath with the deeper gruff voice, Robert Lamm with the smoother mid voice and Peter Cetera (who years later I saw lying on a beach in Malibu) with the high voice that sounded like a male Supreme or something. I kept on playing that bass riff from ‘25 or 6 to 4’ for hours on end till one or other of my parents told me to pack it in again. I stood in front of the mirror and mimed along to Chicago on my bass – all their love songs became my love songs. Those Chicago songs instantly transported me back to that perfect party night where there were no children or adults, just teenagers, an abundance of music and passionate kisses in noisy, smoky, dark rooms.
I felt like the band was singing for me and my girl, and my love of being in love. I was walking on air … but it was becoming obvious that she didn’t feel that way about me. Perhaps my idiot savant ways didn’t please a sixteen-year-old girl from a catholic school: I was just another boy she’d gone out with. And I guess after me she tried another one – and good luck to her, I can now comfortably say with cozy hindsight … But back then, as I sensed her slip away ever so slightly, it felt like life and death to me. I loved her and I loved being in love and I tried to project every great female lover of all time onto a very unwilling and plain sixteen-year-old from 1970 who really wasn’t looking for anything like Romeo and Juliet. Just someone to play Housie Housie with at the O’Connor church hall on Thursday nights. Someone to walk to the Dickson library with, and maybe hold hands.
After the party the slow slipping away began as she went through a boyfriend-cooling-off period. So Chicago’s music represented the whole history of my love and all of love itself with their various songs about the ups and downs of romantic life. And then my dad brought home Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and when I was occasionally sick of Chicago I’d play Joe Cocker. There were some great love songs there too, particularly the gorgeous ‘Superstar’ by Leon Russell. So that’s really all I was listening to: those three double albums. And I knew ’em all off by heart.
Naturally it wasn’t easy to be apart from my girlfriend for three weeks, however much I was looking forward to our motel holiday, but I optimistically imagined my absence would make her heart grow fonder … Though she received the little black and white Mary Quant make-up bag I bought her for an early Christmas present in a neutral way. Her parting kiss was vapid, tepid and insipid. Still, I was under love’s first spell; I dismissed her distant demeanour as a temporary thing. My oh my, I just couldn’t read those signs!
My dad had bought a new car not long before the much-vaunted summer holiday – a Holden Premier – but it blew up outside a town called Gosford on our way to the Gold Coast. About five hours into the journey something gave out and the car stopped dead. We waited out the days it took to be fixed at a motel with a swimming pool; it seemed like no one else was staying there and my brothers (brother John arrived in 1967) and I had the blue pool to ourselves. I’d dive in even after dark on long hot evenings. Coming from dry old inland Canberra, Gosford seemed subtropical with its ferns and palms and what have you. Deep in the quiet pool, the lights above dazzling through the lens of water, I contemplated love, music and youth.
At the motel, isolated and frustrated by the breakdown, for the first time I became the only other English bloke my dad had around to confide in. We walked around Gosford smoking these mini-cigars with white plastic tips that had a sweet winey taste (he was trying to give up cigarettes, or ‘fags’ as he called them). My dad spoke frankly in his jokey, cockney-slang way about women and music and bloody bastard Australian cars. He liked a good chinwag, and he often approached philosophical questions with a healthy English disregard for toffee-nosed pretentious types. (Ironically, kind of what I am now!)
One day there was a radio show on playing all the hits in England at the time. Two songs I heard then for the first time were ‘My Sweet Lord’ and ‘Ride a White Swan’ by T. Rex. These were portentous times indeed – the music seemed broadcast from another sphere entirely. The implications of these songs gave me much to think about. They implied endless new possibilities I had never even dreamed of before. I still love both of those songs to this very day.
Eventually our car was fixed and we continued northwards toward Christmas and Ten, The Esplanade. I was experiencing sweet separation from the object of my fevered affections: everything I saw or heard made me think of her, and in her absence I began to imagine we had an incredible deep love affair going on and that this girl was ‘the one’ for me. She lived straight across from my high school … It was meant to be! I wrote her some letters and sent postcards too. I wonder now what they said (how did I forget that?) – something extremely corny and awkward for sure, quoting somebody else’s line and pretending it was my own no doubt … well that’s sixteen and love, isn’t it?
Eventually we arrived at Ten, The frickin’ Esplanade, Surfers Paradise … albeit a few days late. And there to greet us was my Aunty Lou Lou. Now some of you readers will know that my eldest twin daughters have a very successful band called Say Lou Lou, named after this legendary power-wielding matriarch of our family, but they never really met her. Here was the lady in question: my dad’s big sister – she was ten years older than him. And she was the bane of my existence. She didn’t like me much and she never had. (I heard that after I got vaguely famous she decided she’d liked me all along, but I never saw her then so I wouldn’t know. It would’ve been pitiful if my celebrity had changed her opinion of me: we were diametrically opposed.) Lou Lou thought my dad should discipline me more. She didn’t dig my groovy trip one bit!
I’d spent a bit of time with Aunty Lou Lou as a kid and she could be quite disparaging. She was good at coming out with random dismaying comments accompanied by a monosyllabic snort or mirthless laugh. She was so unlike my kind-hearted and generous dad I wondered how they could possibly be related. She was a woman of extremes. To the few people she liked she was a fountain of syrupy goodwill, but to a proto-fop like me – and her children’s partners – she could be blunt and demanding. My collection of girly magazines confirmed her opinion of me as a complete ne’er-do-well (thanks for sharing, Russell!). ‘That’s disgusting!’ She thought a good spell in the military would ‘smarten up my footwork’. She figured I was a lazy, effeminate, rude and ungrateful so-and-so, who’d never amount to anything, and she told me so at any opportunity … Though you have to admit now she was kind of right! Then, I thought she was a nasty, smelly old lady who I wished would bugger off and leave me alone. So I was hardly thrilled to see her waiting for us with her dour husband Uncle Ern; she’d recently retired up there and was living just up the road in Mermaid Beach. We were going to spend Christmas Day there: Oh Jesus, that didn’t sound like a fun time at all! There’d be no youth or music or love at Aunty Lou Lou’s …
Ten, The Esplanade, sure was the swankiest hotel I’d ever stayed in. I think we were on the eighth floor. The sea was directly opposite, but I spent most of my time in the pool; I just loved swimming pools that much. That whole holiday I didn’t go on the beach once in daylight hours. I just hung around – and in – the pool. It seemed as glamorous as one could possibly ask for. And I never liked to ask for too much. Surfers Paradise in 1970 was impossibly groovy: it was sleazy, quaint, cheesy, tropical and fantastically bohemian. It had Meter Maids dressed in bikinis putting money in the meters to encourage people to go shopping there. Most buildings were only two storeys high, and there was lots of foliage. Lots of chlorine. Lots of darkened doorways leading to … I wondered where.
It was a few days before Christmas and people were already celebrating. For the first time I wandered through a strange city on my own, half boy and half man. No one was keeping a watch on me. I had a little money and could come and go as I pleased. I went into the shopping strip and bought a green grandpa T-shirt with buttons. (I still had it years and years later.) I went into an arcade below street level, and there was a jukebox. It had ‘Make Me Smile’ by Chicago and the B-side too, a ballad called ‘Colour My World’ with a classic piano line. I stuck ten cents in and played those two songs. A kid playing pool asked me why I’d picked them and said it was a good choice. I played them again and we both enjoyed them even more the second time. We started playing pool. He was really good and much better than me at first, but some strange luck came into play and for absolutely no reason I started to beat him a bit. I also saw that if you put twenty cents in the machine you got six plays so I played those two Chicago songs over and over. No one in the arcade seemed to mind; they all seemed to like my choice of music.
There I was, playing pool with some real cool kid my own age, listening to my favourite band, and then I started to win. It was my first-ever winning streak – I mean I could not put a cue wrong. We argued over the rules a bit: I said if you hit one of my balls first I get two shots. The kid said it wasn’t so. No penalties said the kid, that’s real pool. There was an older guy behind the counter in his 40s who was watching us play with interest. Commenting on the good shots, commiserating with the kid on his near misses. The kid seemed to be the older guy’s pool protégé. Real pool doesn’t have penalty shots, the older guy agreed. Nonetheless, just by willing it and being completely detached, I manage to sink a load of tricky shots.
Eventually I ran out of money for the jukebox and went back to our apartment at Ten, The Esplanade. My mum was making toasted baked-bean sandwiches because my parents were going out to dinner. My brothers had returned from the beach and the pool and had had a bath and were wearing their pyjamas. The smell of chlorine lingered in their blond hair … We were on holidays!
The next day I again walked around Surfers Paradise on my own. Man, I was sixteen, and I had a bass guitar and a girlfriend waiting for me at home. I was dressed in cool threads. I mean people checked me out when I slunk along with my bad posture and my white skin! (The next day it was bad posture and red skin because I always got sunburnt.) I went down to the arcade and, as I’d hoped, there was the kid and there was the older guy. Fifty-cent coins got you a whole heap of jukebox plays and I just kept playing ‘Make Me Smile’ and ‘Colour My World’.
Now the kid and me began playing in earnest; and the loser paid for the table. The kid was humiliated to be beaten at his table, in his arcade, in front of his pool mentor – who told me he had high hopes for the kid. High on love, music and youth – fuelled by the endless mantra of Chicago on the jukebox – I beat that local kid over and over. As if by magic, you might’ve thought. After dark the thought of another toasted baked-bean sandwich pulled me home and I made to leave that green felted den of leisure and wasted youth.
‘Will you be back tomorrow?’ asked the kid.
‘But tomorrow’s Christmas,’ I said.
‘We’ll be open though,’ said the guy behind the counter, where you could buy a cold bottle of Fanta or a packet of Smith’s crisps or get the blue square chalk to use on the cues.
‘I’ll be here then I s’pose,’ I said.
The next day my mum and dad tried to get me to go to Aunty Lou Lou’s, whom Dad called Zulu. They warned me she’d be furious, but I was too old now for them to be able to make me go.
‘You’ll be in trouble Steven John,’ my mother said with a shrug. My dad just shook his head. Eventually they drove off without me.
So imagine me wandering through this beach-shack town on Christmas Day on my own. Man, the implications of just about everything were astounding! At the pool parlour the usual crew was waiting around. I stuck in my money and Chicago started up. ‘Make me smile!’ exhorted the singer in some hoarse ecstasy. The song bounced along so marvellously loud, seeming much louder than the other songs on the jukebox. It was so cool to be down there playing pool on Christmas Day and not at my Aunty Lou’s – across town in Mermaid Beach I knew she’d be chucking a serious wobbler about my absence.
Eventually me and the local kid decided to have a best of three to see who qualified as the true champ. When I won the first two he asked for best of five. When I won the next one he asked for best out of seven. It was just like in that famous comedy sketch, except this was 1970 and that sketch hadn’t been written yet. I said it was ridiculous: I said I should be declared the champ now. The older guy said if I was a fair bloke I’d play the kid again or I should get the fuck out. Everyone watching agreed. I didn’t like to keep asking too much from my luck so I left my pool hall haven dejectedly amid whispers and some under-the-breath jeering. It’d be the last time I was ever that good at pool again.
The next day was marred not only by my being told off by Uncle Ern and Aunty Lou, but by my father making a rare and unintentional comic slip. He was a real jack-the-lad cockney geezer and had a standard line of patter: a bunch of jokes that got applied to different situations, which usually made all the punters laugh. Real Benny Hill stuff involving all the usual tits and bums – I’d heard most of his gags before but was always amazed by his timing and how he’d modify a joke on the fly to suit a particular occasion. But that day he got it wrong, which I guess is the risk you take out there in the no-man’s-land between cheeky and offensive. My mother’s brother’s wife’s sister had come out from England with her new man to meet everyone. It was a bright, warm, clear Boxing Day on the eighth floor of Ten, The Esplanade. My telling-off still hung in the air but we were all trying to just get on with it. There were relatives galore plus loads of kids running round when my mother’s brother’s wife’s sister turned up. Boy, she was a good-looking type too. Kind of buxom and curvy and really pretty. Her husband was a quiet, clipped, muscly little type – looking like you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. They were introduced around the room and I guess my dad was trying to break the tension and also get a laugh when he said, ‘Didn’t I see your show at Last Card Louie’s?’
Well instead of laughing the woman started to blush and look nervous. Her husband said something like ‘What the fuck?!’ and stormed off into that good day. It turned out his wife had once been a bit of a stripper in England and that rankled with her new hubby. It was a very sore point, in fact. Nice work, Dad!
I needed to get away from these angry bickering adults with all their baggage, and all the bloody kids running around just tempting me to trip one up or something. No longer welcome at my pool hall I drifted round Surfers disconsolately; I would’ve taken anyone as a friend. Then somehow I was talking to these two guys – a little fat geeky type and a tall skinny geeky type, who immediately didn’t like me one bit. He kept trying to get his mate to move on but the short guy had found out I had Chicago and Joe Cocker records and told me to go with them to a block of holiday flats where someone was having a party.
We walked along, me and the short guy bragging about ourselves I suppose. He said he had a beautiful girlfriend in Melbourne whom he was ‘on’ with. I lied I was on with my girlfriend in Canberra. (It was a pitiful fib and sadly not the last time I said such things, but I think the rottenness I felt when I said it was ample punishment for the stupid lie itself … or maybe not.) This guy talked fast and big: his dad was a millionaire in the rag trade; his dad drove a Mercedes-Benz, which was rare in Australia in those days; his brother rode a Harley. I was quickly impressed.
There was something different about these two kids that I couldn’t put my finger on. I hadn’t met many exotic people in my short life, but when we got to the party at the flat the tall guy told me to wait outside until they said it was all right for me to come in.
‘OK,’ I said – but why wouldn’t it be all right?
‘Because you’re a gentile,’ he said. Jesus! Suddenly I hated being a gentile even though I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. Something biblical, something wicked, something unclean and outcast.
‘OK,’ the short guy came out. ‘You can come in.’
Inside were a bunch of crazy rich kids aged between sixteen and eighteen drinking booze. They all stared at me in my green grandpa shirt and cut-off white Leisuremasters as if I were a curiosity in an exhibit. I was feeling very, well … gentile. And it was weird, suddenly being this outsider in this place and feeling a bit ungodly or something. I was totally confused. Eventually a dark-haired dusky-skinned girl started to look at me and roll her eyes around a bit. She was definitely making it clear she didn’t mind my gentile-ness up to a point!
After kissing me for a while in a bedroom she put her hand down into my Leisuremasters, then withdrew it as though she’d been bitten by a snake – very Benny Hill-esque! I realise now there was (ahem!) more to me than she’d perhaps been used to handling. As I sat there looking at this girl, who was looking back at me in shock, I felt so incredibly gentile that I took my leave of the lot of them and slunk back to Ten, The Esplanade, where Mum was cooking egg’n’chips for dinner.
‘How was your day?’ she asked.
‘Mum, are we gentiles?’ I asked.
‘Of course we are, you silly devil!’ she said.
I spent a few more days just hanging around the pool at Ten, The Esplanade. Trying to drown my brothers and cousins, you know: all the things bored, lonely, lovesick sixteen-year-olds do. Then fate rolled a really cool new person into the equation in the form of a blond-haired surfer kid whose mother worked at the motel. He was raving on about Johnny Winter and Led Zeppelin III and Jimi Hendrix. We went next door, where he lived with his mother, and he had an actual Farfisa organ with the different coloured bass notes! He could play the riff from Vanilla Fudge’s ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’ and everything.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I got something for you now.’
And he started up his record player and queued a strange song that took up one whole side! It was ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ by Iron Butterfly, complete with bass solo and all. And the lead guitarist was only sixteen. Sixteen! I was sixteen and would’ve given everything to be in an amazing group like Iron Butterfly. We hung around a bit and I probably told all the usual fibs about being ‘on’ with beautiful girls. He knew a lot about music and surfing. And then it was New Years Eve and I was going out with him and his friends. Little did I know I was about to go to a proto-Schooliestype bash, a precursor for the herds of wild teenagers who’d later create drunken havoc in the very same place … Always ahead of my time.
At about eight o’clock we congregated with a whole bunch of mostly blond-haired surfer kids outside a bottle shop where the boys managed to talk someone into buying a king-size bottle of tequila. Then we headed down to the beach, where we all took gigantic swigs of it. Except me; I only pretended to – it tasted vile! Soon enough kids were throwing up and staggering around disoriented and clutching at each other. A third of our original company elected to see in 1971 facedown in sand and vomit. I just couldn’t see the appeal. We lurched wildly around the streets. I had a total contact high: not one drop of booze had gone down my gullet. It was the lights, the strangers and the insanity of the times. We tried to get into nightclubs and got thrown out and the boys got in fights with bouncers. We gatecrashed parties and got kissed and thumped for our troubles.
Eventually there was no one left but me, and I went home to bed as the first rays crept over the beach at a very dishevelled Surfers Paradise.
Of course I couldn’t wait to get back to see my girlfriend and the journey home seemed to take forever. When we got back to Canberra I went straight around to her house. I remember it was a very hot, dry day; I wore my new green grandpa T-shirt – would she like it? Her sister told me she was working in the drycleaners in Dickson, and gave me a look that probably should have warned me something was badly amiss. I rushed to the Dickson shops and found the drycleaners, and there she was standing behind the counter looking so lovely.
But my love fix was about to be badly disrupted: she wasn’t pleased to see me at all! In fact, she hardly said a word. When she did, it was in a high-pitched weak voice as though I were a stranger on a bus. Accompanied by a sad smile such as a vet might give before putting down a guinea pig. A vacancy in her eyes where I was sure love had been … just three weeks ago! I was trying to talk to her while people were coming in to pick up their dry-cleaning. But I didn’t know what to say. So I said, ‘Do you want me to go?’ Another sad smile and a half shrug.
Miserably, I left. I wandered home with that punched-in-the-guts feeling. An ache began to grow in my young heart, replacing all the feel-good pheromones with feel-bad ones. I was already jonesing for love by the time I got home. The world seemed hot and desolate and empty. It took me a long time to fall out of love with that girl – but she’d be a granny now!