Hell, We’re Rocking the Blues.
Hey, hey, hey lay down that rocking beat
Find a riff hit it all down the street (blow)
Hey, hey, hey, what the hell we’re rocking the blues
Oh yeah, grab her, grab that moll (that doll)
Rock her, rock her, hell we’re rocking the blues
Hey, hey, hey what are we doing, oh yeah
We’re rocking, hell, we’re rocking the blues
Grab your frail, watch her wag her tail (yeah)
Oh yeah, rock that moll, let’s rock that doll.
Balga stopped entranced by the beautiful guitar in the Window of John Clements Music Shop. It was a six string but with a metal pie plate in the middle of the body. He needed a guitar, but had never seen one like this. The lad pushed open the door and picked up the instrument. He struck a chord and was mesmerized by the sizzling crisp ring. It was a real blues guitar he needed and he wanted it.
‘It’s a resonator guitar,’ John Clements, a tall man with sandy hair and sort of yellow eyes and a rat trap mouth that only loosened when he saw a good musical instrument, commented. He took the instrument from the lad’s hands and played a blues riff and explained: ‘Resonator guitars are the bright shiny objects of the six-string world. Once you’ve heard and seen one, you want it don’t you? It’s hard not to be mesmerized by the sizzling, crisp ring of its tone. Look, see that metal pie plate in the middle of the body that’s where all the sound comes from.’
‘A what?,’ Balga asked.
John Clements knew his musical instruments and replied: ‘A resonator guitar. The distinctive sound of a resonator guitar, sometimes called a resophonic guitar, is derived from the spun metal cone or cones under the instruments’ round faceplate, which serve both a protective and decorative function. The wooden or all-metal body of the guitar itself certainly plays a role in generating that tone and in sustaining notes, but not anywhere near as significantly as in conventional acoustic guitars, where the top of the body is the instrument’s essential tone-generating component.’
‘Oh, it’s nice,’ Balga replied taking the instrument back and striking and listening to a chord progression. ‘Yeah, it almost plays the blues by itself.’
‘That’s what it was invented for. No pickups in the old days for the guitar and so it was drowned out in noisy juke joints or house parties. This was well before plugging in was an option, in the mid-1920s and it was the National Company in The States that first began making these singing beauties. They take particularly well to the slide playing of such Delta Blues greats as Son House and Bukka White.’
‘Hey, yeah, I want it, no I need it. Yeah, but how much is it?’
‘It’s an original Gibson Hound Dog Deluxe wood bodied and necked, to produce a warmer tone. They also make an all steel one except for the neck which cuts through rooms with the authority of a switchblade. You play them just like conventional acoustic guitars too; and as for the blues, this is your instrument; but cheap, no!’
After some dickering Clements knocked off twenty and sold it to Balga for a down payment of fifty and a fiver a week for any number of years. To clinch the deal he threw in a book on how to play the blues, by the authentic and superlative guitar player, Josh White.
Learn to play like him. Get a few songs together, play one for me, and if you’re any good I’ll put you on upstairs,’ he told Balga.
Clements used the large room above the shop as a folk club and Balga knew he wasn’t kidding. He immediately rushed home to practice on his instrument. He played blues riffs until his new mate came bounding into his loft with his big booming but cheaper rocker guitar.
Bodgies were aging dead meat left behind in the fifties, if they hadn’t changed as Balga had; but well there still were Rockers, kids that were sent by the rock’n’roll of Eddie Cochran and other white boys that had taken over what Balga now called rhythm and blues. Rock and roll music wouldn’t die. And there was his young mate, Andy Campbell who had thrust his friendship upon him and even invaded his space. He was a slight kid of seventeen or so with yellow straw hair, pale blue eyes and a skin that verged on the albino. Indeed he looked a bit like the one in the film, God’s Little Acre; but he was city through and through and no hick. Andy admired the shininess of the resounder guitar, but he liked to use a plectrum for a heavy rocking beat. He decided that the metal plate would interfere with his playing and left it alone. Balga watched him assume a rocker stance over his own axe pressed against his groin. He bent over it, struck an E-major chord with a plectrum and was away into Twenty Flight Rock. Balga may have forsaken the rock for the blues; but it was still within him. He began riffing with his fancy guitar rocking the blues. He felt that he was getting somewhere as he whined notes about the four-four time with a back beat that couldn’t be lost.
The duo pounded through Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Honey Don’t”; the great Gene Vincent’s, “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, “Woman Love”; Jerry Lee Lewis’s, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” or better yet, “High School Confidential”; Buddy Holly and The Crickets, “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue”. They really enjoyed themselves and did Buddy Knox with the Rhythm Orchids’ so very corny “Party Doll. Andy Campbell’s idol was Eddie Cochran and he began singing his great Summertime Blues. It may have been a rock classic; but there was little space for any fancy lead guitar sound playing so Balga just went with the beat which wasn’t really a blues eat at all, but who cared, it rocked.
As they finished off there was a banging down at the back gate and a harsh woman’s voice screamed: ‘Andrew!’
Andy’s mother was a domineering woman that Balga liked to avoid. ‘Better go or she’ll be up here,’ he told the kid.
Andy didn’t reply, but taking his guitar he went down the stairs. Balga opened half of the loft door looking out over the lane and glared at the large back of Mrs. Campbell who was leading her son back to their house the third one along the block.
The lad watched her disappear through her back gate. She was a dark heavy woman in her forties and once had been attractive, but she had aged into a termagant with a vicious temper and a dictatorial nature akin to Joe Stalin’s for she was a dedicated communist not a so-called fellow traveler as Leo was. There was a Mr. Campbell whom she absolutely dominated so that he was a pale figure silent without a voice of his own. Leo had known her for a long time and they had been in the New Theatre movement together and perhaps even had been lovers, for no one in that movement accepted such a thing as conventional bourgeois couple arrangements. Free love was the aspiration and the practice when it could be practised, though Leo had been married and she had been for a long long time. The result of her union was the son, Andrew, the small thin albino neurotic completely dominated by his mother and resenting her as much as he could without starting a quarrel.
Balga felt he had his reasons to dislike her. A while ago the Communist Party organization had put on a fair in the North Melbourne Town Hall and Andy and he went there to see what they could find and maybe buy. To Andy’s delight though not Balga’s there were quite a few volumes of The Left Book Club of Britain as well as bound volumes of the American New Republic journal. Andy didn’t have any money and as the bound journals were only a few shilling each Balga lent him the money to buy the lot. Andy left the journals in his loft and then his mother came up for some reason, saw the bound copies of The New Republic and wanted them. She looked at Balga, but he only shrugged and looked away.
‘Can I borrow them,’ she asked the lad.
Balga shrugged again.
‘I want them,’ she demanded.
‘Oh mom,’ protested her son. ‘They are mine! I was going to bring them home.’
So she took them and Balga felt pity for the boy and let him come up whenever he wanted to and even pound out the rock whenever he wanted to even in the middle of the night. Indeed he began to welcome the sessions now that he had his own guitar. It was a little later that Andy suggested that they hold a party. Balga leapt at the idea.