The years sailed past so quickly, like a very warm dream. One day my father gestured to our family and our house. And he said, ‘I wish things could just stay like this forever.’ But things never do Dad, and so the story moves on; eventually it leaves everybody behind.
IN 1971 A lot of the idiots were gone from our school because it wasn’t compulsory to stay past Fourth Form, which is now called Year Ten. This meant the violence was much diminished and a lot of the bullies went off to jobs as labourers, and I heard some were even already doing time. Do not pass Go! Eliminate the middleman and go straight to jail instead!
Anyway, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know I was plugging away on my bass night and day. And I had fallen in love with Marc Bolan from T. Rex, who was my first real idol. Man, I lay on my bed and I listened to the album T. Rex and the album A Beard of Stars over and over and over. I guess I was formulating my songwriting plans and Bolan could certainly show me how to do it. He was reconciling all these contradictions in his rock’n’roll. He was a walking contradiction. A fey stud! A sexy classicist! On the album covers Bolan looks like a Greek tragedian with his white make-up and his absurd Pre-Raphaelite looks. My addiction to Bolan has been amply documented elsewhere and so it bores me a little to go on about it too much now. But suffice to say Bolan slew me more than The Beatles and the Stones and Dylan all put together. He just turned me on. But not sexually, even though my mother had her doubts about the huge poster of his face that hung over my bed. ‘I could understand it if it was a naked girl, Son … but another man’s face … I don’t understand it!’ My father’s opinion was disdainful – after I protested to him that I thought Bolan was a genius my father retorted, ‘The only clever thing about that bastard is he can spell tyrannosaurus!’
It was around this time I also got quite involved with debating. I’d already been doing it for a few years and eventually got picked to represent the school along with two friends, Bronwyn and Joanna. Bronwyn and I are still friends to this day; she’s a professor at some university in Queensland. We made a good team. Joanna was very good looking and had a forthright manner and she was our first speaker. She also had a big pair of breasts, usually uncaged; I felt this somehow gave her authority. I was the second speaker: the long-haired kid with the smart mouth. Bronwyn was third, and she waded in with devastating precision. Eventually the three of us became the ACT team and we went to a big debating playoff. We were representing our state, only our state was a territory … oh never mind! We went to Adelaide and Sydney and stayed in hotels and everything. At night I’d roam through the halls changing all the orders people had left on their doors, ordering ten plates of eggs and fifteen bowls of Corn Flakes and things like that. What an anarchist!
Doing the debating thing gave me a taste for being on tour and staying in hotels; it was really exciting. The second year we did pretty well and knocked our first two opponents out of the ring. But for the final we came up against New South Wales who had this geezer who was already a legend in high-school debating circles: one Malcolm Turnbull. Malcolm was third speaker for NSW and he demolished our flimsy arguments, and us, as if we never existed. And put paid to our chance of being the Australian champions. He wasn’t like a teenager; he was already like some young lawyer. It was as though the 60s had never happened for Malcolm – no long hair, no swearing and no hint of a fashionable item of clothing. He meant business. He had a sneering, arrogant, know-it-all manner that was dynamite on the debating scene. Even as he sat there watching me speak I could feel him shaking his head and writing a thousand notes to himself on how he could rip apart our case. He was the Muhammad Ali of high-school debating. The total heavyweight champ. It almost wasn’t fair! He was like some big kid of fourteen playing football with the Under 7s. He had more intellectual firepower than any other kid I’d ever seen debate, and I’d seen a few intimidating speakers. I love to come upon freak excellence of this kind; it fascinated me, although Malcolm himself was so fucking square.
As luck would have it Malcolm and the rest of the NSW team came down to Canberra to give us another thrashing, and Malcolm got billeted to stay at my humble abode in sunny, treeless Lyneham. Well NSW gave us another good hiding: it was like a bunch of knights in chainmail going up against a bazooka! Afterwards we went to a pub in Kingston and Malcolm tried to chat up Joanna. You remember she was very forthright and that night she was quite to the point. Malcolm chatted and chatted. Joanna wasn’t interested. I wonder if she would’ve been had she foreseen his future? But she rejected him rather rudely and colourfully with something like ‘fuck off ’, I imagine, though her exact words have flown from my mind over the intervening years.
Soon we were in my little Mazda driving back to Lyneham. Malcolm stamped so hard on the floor – he was that pissed off with Joanna – that I feared for my rusty chariot’s wellbeing. He was muttering something like ‘Who the fuck does she think she is rejecting a big cheese like moi?!’ Of course those weren’t his exact words because he didn’t ever swear.
Now strangely enough back then Malcolm was a huge, huge Labor man. I mean he was a staunch lefty. So we were driving along and I thought I’d get his attention because he was pretty much totally ignoring me; like an adult might ignore some kid he’d been forced to spend time with. And both he and the kid thought the other was a total turkey! So I said something provocative and somewhat silly and boastful and untrue – the stupidest thing I could think of.
‘Oh, Malcolm, I’ve been, um, asked to join the Country Party,’ I said.
I looked over at him slumped in my tiny tinny bomby car, wondering if I’d impressed him. His look was withering. He snorted in derision and then chuckled to himself in a very off-putting way.
‘As what?’ he asked. And I didn’t have an answer. We didn’t speak for the rest of the trip.
The next morning Malcolm was hanging around in the kitchen dressed in a kind of expensive smoking jacket and – was it a cravat? He and my mother were talking about grown-up matters (she in her Queen Elizabeth II accent). Malcolm was telling her all about the bad scene between his mother and father.
Then they discussed the politics of the day, and of course Malcolm was a know-it-all and a mum-charmer at the same time. When he’d gone my mother declared that one day he’d be the prime minister of Australia. And my mother was always right and she’s still waiting to see her prediction fulfilled – strange to see a problem as banal as ‘ute-gate’ bring a complex and together guy like our Malcolm undone. But you never know what fate will roll into your life, and politics is just like rock’n’roll, I guess, with its winning and losing streaks.
As my seventeenth birthday loomed things got better at school. We used the senior common room at breaks and it was rather like being in a club. I really dug it. People smoked cigarettes and there was coffee too. There was a record player and guess who seemed to dominate the other kids in that department? We played records all the time and smoked ciggies and drank coffee. All the kids would bring in their records but I usually managed to adjudicate what actually got played and what didn’t. We all liked the band Free in those days, so there was a lot of Free. The Moody Blues got a lot of play and the various Beatles solo albums of course. King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King was another much played.
Towards the end of high school I saw an ad in a paper looking for a bass guitarist to join a 50/50 band called Saga. (A 50/50 band meant you played half Top 40 and half standard numbers, so you were a good all-round band to have at a function.) They auditioned me at the Methodist Hall in Lyneham and lo, I was pretty bloody shaky! But they gave me all these songs to learn and I went away and learnt them diligently. The next week I came back and played and I got the job.
By the end of my stint in Saga we could play nearly a thousand songs, some of which we might read from chord charts, but we could play them nevertheless. ‘Little Old Wine Drinker Me’, ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘Morning Dew’, ‘Hold On, I’m Comin’, ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’, ‘Running Bear’, ‘A Little Ray of Sunshine’, ‘Kansas City’, ‘Imagine’, ‘Delilah’, ‘Amarillo’ and ‘Black Magic Woman’. Even today I can still remember them … and in a way am still churning them over in my mind.
Saga was made up of Ron on lead vocals, who was actually quite a good singer; then there was Howard on the organ, who really wasn’t too bad; and Dave, a Scottish guy, on the drums. He hated me immediately and grumbled and complained about everything I ever did or said. These three guys were all about 23 and seemed such old seasoned pros of the Canberra cabaret circuit to me when I joined at the tender age of seventeen. They all had jobs and wives and even kids. They’d traded in any dream of playing their own music long ago, and were just happy to be part of the 50/50 world. For one thing it paid very nicely! The bookings poured in – mainly because of Ron’s silky-smooth voice. He could really sing, and was quite a joker and all round jack-the-lad. By day he was an insurance sales clerk, I think. His wife Wendy was very nice – sometimes we went to their house in a new part of Canberra and picked out new songs for our act.
The first gig we ever played was at the university, in a bar. I was so incredibly nervous – not in a bad way but in an anticipatory way. I didn’t make too many mistakes and I got through OK, though the others probably disagreed. Dave the drummer thought I was the worst bass player and stupidest little fuck-knuckle he’d ever met. That I was a totally inexperienced and naive ninny who shot his big mouth off often. It’s true: I must’ve been quite insufferable to these serious big-time pros! I wonder why they let me in at all; Dave made it quite clear that he’d never voted for me in their selection process. I think Ron wanted me because I was very young and quite good looking. Oh yes, there was a guy called Hugh too; he played guitar and was about the same age as me. But he was a very Canberra sort of guy: kind of straight and prissy and prim. Ron was the only one who really liked me – he could sense that within me I had some good music. I guess the others put up with me because of him.
I must’ve been in Saga for about eighteen months: we played and we played and we played. I got to see some weird and wonderful places, and I got to glean something about music and songs and bass playing. We played restaurants, pubs, clubs, bars, weddings, birthdays, staff Christmas dos, and even in barns. We had a residency at Wests Rugby Club every Sunday night for ages – the place erupted as we played our amazing finale of ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ and the drunken footy crowd would conga round the room egged on by Ron’s antics. The crowd would be cheering and laughing and Ron appeared to be enjoying himself, but sometimes he’d turn around and look at me briefly and roll his eyes and look at his watch to indicate this was all just a load of palaver. Finish the gig, pack up the PA, get paid and go home, that was the agenda; the turkeys in the audience were just part of the job. He had no ambitions beyond that.
Well we were making 200 bucks a week out of this caper – I was almost making as much as my father! It was a lot back then, believe me. My mum asked me to pay board and I happily did. (When I left home in 1974 she gave it all back to me. What a top lady my mother is!)
Sometimes we had a real adventure. Once on our way to a gig on the south coast we got caught up in a tropical storm erupting on Clyde Mountain. We were driving in Hugh’s tiny Ford Anglia and its one windscreen wiper stopped working. But Hugh was across this possible malfunction and he came armed with a potato cut in half. So he and I would simply jump out and rub the potato all over the windscreen, which would repel the water for about a minute of driving before we’d stop and do it all over again.
Hugh always sternly reminded me how much money we were earning as teenagers and advising that I should behave myself more and not be a nuisance to the older guys in the band. The band had big plans to make the jump from being a mere cabaret band to being a show band, which was like the difference between a Ford Falcon and a Ford Fairmont. We’d be a superior cabaret band on a slightly more deluxe level … and would be paid a fair bit more to do it.
But what did Saga need to do first? Well we needed a uniform for a start. So we all trucked on down to Garema Place in Civic, where Ron knew a guy in the suit trade. There we got fitted out in five identical lavender safari suits with white skin-tight body shirts and crimson velvet ties and a hanky for the top pocket. We would wear this fine outfit to every gig, this would be our look, and we’d learn even more songs and work harder by having routines and dance moves and stuff like that. There was a band on the scene from Sydney called Chalice; Saga envied the safaried pants off ’em. What with their gags, and the way the guitarists walked forward and kicked to the side together … Saga wanted some of that action! Every guy in Chalice had his part: the shy one, the stupid one, the handsome one, the funny one. Their show was a fucking show not five oiks dressed in different clothes playing some songs.
But at the same time that Saga was trying to evolve into a show band I was evolving into a serious Pink Floyd and Hawkwind devotee, and boy was it hard to reconcile the difference between mincing around to ‘Crocodile Rock’ and the wild space frontier that was out there calling my name.
Oh yeah, I also had a girlfriend during this period. It’s that same damn girl from the other chapter – the one who brushed me off at the drycleaners. Not one to learn my lesson easily, I’d been picked up and dropped by her three times by now. And I’d eventually even return for a brief fourth time in the future! I’m not so sure what it was about her; she didn’t particularly care for me. I was just someone she drifted back to when other things fell through. What did we do together? Well, we drove around in my car, and sometimes we parked and engaged in what might be called heavy petting. But my girlfriend was always slightly reluctant in these matters, which I realise now was because she didn’t really like me that much. I was certainly good looking but my erratic, idiosyncratic behaviour turned ordinary people off.
The fact that she was always slightly removed also made her more desirable, I see that now. In between my bouts with her I’d see other girls and they were all jumping my bones and it would turn me off a bit. Never really being able to get this girl just kept me hanging on and hanging in there, I suppose. So my life was centring on the girl and the band but I was too blind to see that it was all going awry: I was completely out of step with Saga by this stage. I guess they all hated me and my negativity towards the show band concept but I just didn’t feel my future was being the opening band for female impersonators or playing stupid medleys at rugby clubs. Although, by fuck, it paid well!
Then one night the girl dropped me, and couple of hours later so did the band!
The next morning I walked into my parents’ room stifling a tear and announced, ‘You’re gonna be seeing a lot more of me round here from now on.’ At nineteen I’d been cast away and used up by everyone I hung out with.
By this time I’d left high school and had a job in the public service. I never got into university because I completely failed maths – I bet I didn’t even get one question right on the whole paper! But the public service took me in, although I was unemployable really. They soon found that out and I made myself a nuisance I was so unhappy there. I was assigned to a computing division with the Department of Agriculture, processing forms and putting data in columns. After about three weeks it quickly got old, and I’d determined that the work and all the other ‘shiny bums’ (a Canberran nickname for public servants) were a thorough waste of my time. I felt so thwarted … so I became a nasty little lazy public so-and-so doing absolutely nothing with the most vicious contempt for my fellow public servants.
Actually a lot of things were happening in my life at this time. It was at this point I became a vegetarian because a voice in my head said, ‘You must become a vegetarian.’ It was the same voice that’d told me to play bass and would later guide me and still, in fact, does. So all the meat was gone from my diet – usually replaced by my mother with two eggs, fried. Bless her. I don’t eat eggs now though, vile little things.
I really don’t know what actually made me become a vegetarian: I didn’t know one vegetarian, had never even met one. There were no vegetarian restaurants in Canberra, or even vegetarian options. Being a vegetarian was a hard austere slog in 1973! You couldn’t go anywhere without some kind of fuss being made. But I was looking at everyone around me turning into blobs, and I wondered why that was. I began to realise that meat and alcohol were ruining people’s looks: you see it wasn’t health or animal rights, it was because I perceived meat as bad for your appearance. I looked at the geezers around me wolfing down steak and booze and they were all characteristically stuffed. Bloated, red-faced, big-bellied oafs.
So I became a vegetarian. I did collapse a few times, but I haven’t eaten the disgusting stuff for 30-odd years now. And am feeling much better for it! And still looking like the me I used to know, albeit with more wrinkles. But I haven’t disappeared into a puddle of splodge cheering on a footy game on TV – I was desperate to avoid that scene and being a vegetarian was a step in that direction. It also allowed me to be holier than thou, which is an opportunity I never walk away from. It must be my Virgo nature.
Meanwhile I was meeting a couple of interesting musical types; sadly both of them have now exited this world. The first was Paul Culnane. Paul was a strikingly handsome bloke a year older than me. I met him one day at the record shop in David Jones – I was looking for a Hawkwind record and he overheard me. Next thing I know, there’s Paul in my face rabbiting on about every band that I knew and loved. And Marc Bolan … Paul loved Marc Bolan. We became fast friends.
Being a rather naive kind of boy I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was about Paul, though, that was so different: it was like we were in love. We’d spend hours dissecting records and haircuts and anything to do with pop. Paul knew more than I did about everything I was interested in. Hell, Paul knew more than anyone I’d ever met! The guy dripped facts and quotes and opinions about rock. And he introduced me properly to David Bowie: I said I could never accept Bowie over Bolan, but Paul assured me I soon would. He was right. Bowie became absolutely everything to me and Paul for a while. We wanted to do this for ourselves. For the first time I started writing proper songs: I wrote ’em on the bass guitar. I wrote my first wave of glam rock songs like ‘Jetfin Rock’, ‘You’re Starting to Make Me Ill’, ‘Zsa Zsa’s Place’, ‘Igloo Blues’ and ‘Mascara O’Hara’. I could hear if the chords needed to be minor or major so I just wrote on the bass.
It was at roughly the same time that I bumped into a kid called Dave Young. He was a year younger than me and a great guitarist. We got together and started writing songs like ‘Twenty Buck Passion’. We decided to form a band with me on bass, Dave on guitar, Paul as singer, and a very pretty boy called Peter Hansen on drums. At first we were called Ramp Speed 25 but we changed our name to Beyond Beavers in some ridiculous failed attempt to cash in on the burgeoning Bowie bisexuality thing.
Here portrayed bisexuality rears its head for the first and last time in my life – I was dyeing my hair and wearing blouses and stuff onstage. When I say ‘onstage’ I mean at school socials and parties and things. I was so into Bowie I wished I could be bisexual just like him … just like I wished I could take all of Keith Richards’ drugs. But bisexuality was not forthcoming for me. I wasn’t remotely curious about other men: I was fixated on girls even while I mimicked a lot of the androgynous hoo-ha of the times. Paul told me all these things about queens and bitches – the entire lingo – which I didn’t think was so strange because, after all, our great idol across the waters was bisexual himself. It was like a sacrament in the house of Ziggy to be bisexual.
Of course I never realised that Paul was actually bisexual and struggled with his feelings. My girlfriend didn’t like him one bit; neither did my dad, who was always uncharacteristically rude to him. Paul and I were certainly raising some questions as to where our true loyalties lay and I’m almost certain now that he was sort of in love with me. He’d ring me up just to chat about Marc Bolan’s garden or something and we would talk for hours. He was the best friend I had never really had …
But when it came to the crunch and our band was going to do our first gig, Paul crumbled. I was scared to play at the O’Donnell Youth Centre in Braddon too, but damn it I was going to do it! When the night came we turned up at the gig and it was packed. We were one of about five or six bands on and when Paul went and looked around the curtains he spied some bullies from his schooldays and refused to go on. I went and looked and saw four bullies from Lyneham High, who I was sure would’ve loved to thump me upside my dyed-red Bowie do. ‘Fuck it Paul, I’m scared too. Can’t we both go on and be scared?’ But Paul still refused. And he walked out the back way and into the night.
Dave and Peter said, ‘You sing!’ So I went out there and I played bass and I sang all those (mostly stupid) glam songs I’d written. We got through it with no disgrace, a real power trio, ha ha! And from that moment on I played bass and I sang and I wrote the songs.
And while all this was going on, I had a bizarre other life on the side. I was playing bass for the Stirling Primmer Trio. Stirling was a marvellous old-school electric piano player, with a drummer called Dave who went on to be a famous author who wrote a prizewinning book called The Glade within the Grove, or is it the other way around?
Reading from chord charts meant I had to be quick. Playing golf clubs and weddings and the like with Stirling was great practice – we even played the music for You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, at the Canberra Theatre. I sat in the pit and played bass. And when one of the characters did something unusual I had a little selection of whistles and pipes, and I made noises to illustrate it. Like balls being hit in games and people flying a kite. But glam rock was beckoning and just when I was getting good at walking bass lines and ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ I quit.
Soon I was to meet a very pivotal character in my life. Remember the Methodist Church Hall where I auditioned for Saga? Well the now Paul-less three-piece Beyond Beavers was practising there as much as we could. Dave and I were churning out songs together and alone. One Saturday afternoon we turned up to find there’d been a double booking. Another group called Timelord were there unloading their gear. They were a fairly ordinary rock band playing covers. So they set up at one end and we set up down the other and when one band played the other watched.
When Timelord started to play the main guy immediately caught my attention. He was tall and slim and had ultra-long hair. He was very good looking too, in a European kind of way. Yes it was Peter Koppes. Born in Australia to a Dutch–Portuguese dad and a German mum he was a year younger than me but was already a consummate guitarist. He reeled off Santana licks like I’d never heard. I couldn’t understand Peter’s deep careful craft in music then and I still can’t now.
So imagine, there’s Peter down one end of the Methodist Church Hall playing these clichéd cover songs … only his calibre of musicianship shines like a beacon above the rest of the band. As they go through boring old rock numbers, me and Dave Young snigger and whisper to each other. Dave and I thought Bowie and glam was the be-all and end-all of music. Full stop! It was an intolerance that punk was to cultivate a few years later to great effect: to automatically disdain everything, unless it was of your genre and time. So fully justified and glutted with our own glam we perceived them as no threat. Yeah Santana and Deep Purple or whatever it was they were playing … but it was so yesterday. Still I couldn’t help but gawk at the tall guy’s guitar prowess. He had flair, style and individuality!
Then we started up. And they sat and watched us, probably full of contempt. I’m sure it was an awful racket. But strange as it was, at least we played our own songs. I had that audacity. I remember saying to the Saga boys ‘I’m gonna write songs!’ They just laughed and said, ‘better learn to play other people’s properly first.’ But a songwriter doesn’t dwell on other people’s songs too long because what use is that? Jump in and go for it. It’s like painting: a lot of people are so intimidated by a blank canvas that they can’t even make the first move. Their progress is doomed if they can’t muster that mojo to have a go. So we were probably a rotten band but everyone who came across us was amazed that we were churning out our own glam anthems. In truth, we were more like The Sweet than David Bowie but that was more than almost any Canberra band had ever done. The Canberra music scene had sentenced itself to eternal covers long before, but I wasn’t having any of it.
Then Peter’s band had another bash and Peter dismissed the drummer for one song to show him some drum part. And proceeded to play one of the best drum solos I’ve ever heard in my life. Totally out of the blue. Wow! He was equally as proficient on the drums as guitar. So afterwards Peter and I started talking and I guess we were impressed by each other. With all his prowess, had he written one song? Nope. With all my songs did I have any prowess? Not a shred. But even in these early days we sensed that we could definitely use what the other could bring to the table. And even though he was skeptical of glam rock we stayed in touch from then on.
Peter was unsure of this glam rock bullshit and he had every right to be. Apart from Bowie almost anything else that was glam rock was just shallow pop with a sissy wardrobe. Bands full of formerly masculine beefy guys were putting on eyeliner and eye shadow, and coming on with the forced ‘bi’ bit. I think he was willing to overlook the musical shortcomings and see how this ‘original’ song thing was done. I think maybe he was impressed with my ultra-confident bravado about my own abilities.
Soon enough Peter joined us as a second drummer and then Peter Hansen left and Ken Wylie joined. And we had two drummers … just like Gary Glitter! We did some gigs but not many. For the two drummers I did two Roy Lichtenstein–like cartoons of a girl’s face on round cardboard to go over their bass drums. The first caption said ‘I couldn’t believe it when he told me he was …’ and the section caption read ‘Beyond Beavers’ under a picture of the girl with tears in her eyes. Jesus, imagine the awful muffling effect of that cardboard on the drums?!
Eventually Beyond Beavers split up. And from the ashes rose Baby Grande. Peter switched to guitar – it was a bit of a waste having him on drums, and the two-drummer thing hadn’t worked all that well; they were both just going for it and it was cluttering and obfuscating the beat rather than strengthening it. So Ken became the sole drummer.
About this time Peter and I saw a newish Australian band at the Canberra Theatre called Hush. Hush had two Chinese guys in the band, and Peter and I were both very impressed by their flashy attitude and looks. Peter knew a Chinese guy who played bass called Joe Lee. So hoping to get some of Hush’s glam clout I relinquished the bass guitar and Joe joined. He was a year younger than me, and the son of a diplomat. He was the first oriental guy I’d ever known, a nice bloke and a proficient bass player.
The final member of Baby Grande was a guy called Dave Scotland. He was good looking and could play guitar as well as Peter. But he had a beard. Envoys were sent and it was mentioned to him that he could join our band if he’d shave the beard. You couldn’t have a fucking beard if you wanted to be a glam rocker – that was obvious. So after a while Dave joined but he was always the most reticent member. Not that any of the others really ‘understood’ glam rock. I was the ideas man and I foisted (or tried to foist) all my ideas on them. We sort of mutated a bit – taking in influences from the New York Dolls and Iggy Pop and all of that scene. A writer at the time described us as ‘screaming gutter rock’.
And I hooked up with my first real manager about then too. She was a woman of about 40 called Barbara Kimmins who’d been around the biz doing this and that. For the first time ever someone looked at me and could see I was gonna make it someday. I almost lived at her place day and night tossing ideas about and planning our assault on the scene.
Baby Grande stayed together for two years or so. Peter left to go overseas and we became a four piece, with me playing rhythm guitar, but nothing ever worked out for us. The crowd never liked us. No one in Canberra wanted to see a Canberra band playing original music. To a city as unhip as Canberra in 1974–75, the New York Dolls and Iggy Pop were still completely unknown. No one played music like that. It was all still Free and Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. And so it’s probably more surprising that we got signed by EMI than that they dropped us after the first recording when they heard the lacklustre rubbish we had come up with!
We made other recordings too but there was something awful about all of them. I just couldn’t get the sound I had in my head onto tape. My recording ambitions were way beyond my skills. The idiot engineers at the time had really bad attitudes too, especially if you were some unknown kid who didn’t understand recording studios and were very ambitious. So I always fought a fruitless war against technical boffins telling me that what I wanted to do was not gonna happen for a list of incomprehensible reasons that stymied me.
Peter was overseas when I started hanging around with a former girlfriend of his, Michele Parker. She was three years younger than me. She was small, skinny and angular and looked like David Bowie with long blonde hair. She had a big mouth just like me and could piss people off real easy. We got on like a house on fire … for a while. My dad thought she was the loveliest girl he’d ever seen and was very perked up when we came around to visit. He’d always wanted a daughter called Michele and now it seemed his dream had sort of come true.
Meanwhile Baby Grande got a PA and roadies even. Stefan Strom – my old mate from high school – was one of them, and he added to the general mayhem. We played loads of gigs opening for AC/DC and Andy Gibb, and anyone else visiting Canberra. We even played in Sydney a few times. There was just one small snag: nobody liked us.
One night in December 1976 we were playing a gig at the Deakin Inn, and I looked up and saw my parents’ neighbour, Rudy Kohlhaze, in the audience. He beckoned to me and I got a very sick feeling in my stomach as I took off my guitar and announced we would be having a short break.
‘Your father has had a heart attack and has died,’ he said. My heart broke. Dad had been down the coast at a little house he’d bought a few months earlier. He’d already been diagnosed with angina and I’d seen him have some nasty turns a few times when his face would go grey and he’d clutch his shoulder. Anyway, apparently he’d eaten a big lunch and climbed up a ladder to do some ceiling painting. He’d had a massive coronary and was dead by the time my mother and the others there got down the stairs. Which all makes me very sad … so I won’t dwell on it any longer. My dad was one of the nicest, kindest and most generous and tolerant blokes you could ever meet. I was blessed to have a father like that. It’s a pity he never got to see me crack the music biz! I still miss him almost 40 years later.
It wasn’t that long after that that Dave, Joe and Ken kicked me out of Baby Grande and tried to shaft me on a PA we’d bought together – for which my father had gone guarantor on the loan. They tried to take the PA and leave me paying the bills for it! We got lawyers and everything. Joe kept saying, ‘I have no respect for this person!’ (meaning me), as if that would get them out of giving me the PA back. Well I got it back and I sold it. I was done with bands. I’d spent so much time and money on this damn rock’n’roll thing for no perceptible rewards whatsoever. Here I was getting kicked out of my own band! And no one had ever seemed to like the stuff I was coming up with; hell, I didn’t even like the stupid songs I was writing. They were a hodgepodge of all my influences and Baby Grande was a ham-fisted plodding racket. If you don’t believe me have a listen to the Baby Grande tracks I stuck on Addendatwo. There they are in all their badly recorded ordinariness. There had to be a better way.