Boy On Fire
Page 14
Nick Cave in his bedroom at his family home in Caulfield North, c. 1974 (Ashley Mackevicius / Collection: National Portrait Gallery)
Phill Calvert says, ‘Tracy was the only kid in our school era who came from a broken home. It’s hard to understand now what a big deal that was. These days it’s The Brady Bunch on fire out there, but back then it was not something widely accepted. You tried not to let people know. People didn’t talk about it openly.’ Tracy’s mother, Nancy, admits it was not easy. Her husband, Richard, a businessman, moved out when Tracy was just fourteen and his sister, Fiona, was nine. Tracy was in the process of shifting to Caulfield Grammar after a difficult history at less salubrious schools. It seems Nancy, who worked as a financial adviser and would go on to study philosophy and sociology at Monash University once she retired, was unique among the disapproving parents of Caulfield Grammar in making Nick feel immediately at home in the Pew residence. Nick describes Nancy as ‘a wonderfully bawdy, witty woman’. In his graphically inclined paintings, Tracy would depict his mother as a vamp wearing green eye shadow, something that still amuses her. Nancy and her husband were ill-matched, and a series of tragedies had only deepened the distance between them. ‘Tracy did some very sensitive things sometimes,’ Nancy says. During a particularly unpleasant and penultimate argument with Richard Pew over her serving of divorce papers in 1975, Nancy remembers, ‘Tracy took Fiona away and told her to come and watch television with him.’26
Nancy considers how the boys have changed. ‘Mick is a very serious fellow now he’s a grown man, but when he was young he was a real giggler. I’d always be hearing him and Tracy giggling away over something,’ she says. ‘Mick, though, when he meets you, will shake your hand. That’s just him. Nick’s a hugger, very affectionate. You could have conversations with Nick more easily than you could with Mick. I didn’t see as much of Phill, but he was always very polite, absolutely charming. I just love teenagers. They were all such lovely young men, really. And I will keep saying that about them till I am sixty!’ says the woman riding a lively eighty-plus years.27
You can detect the quick humour her son Tracy inherited in such statements – and the pain that can suddenly emerge. Nancy gestures across her lounge room. She tells a story that explains a lot about what might have made Tracy the person he was. Episodes and glimpses that flow on to how she feels about his death.
‘The little boy we lost, Gary, fell from that bench over there,’ she says. ‘Tracy was next to him washing his hands. Richard had turned around. Tracy was only three. Gary was only a baby. I was in the garden, just outside those glass doors. It was the loudest sound I had ever heard, as if he’d been thrown across the room. Gary had never had a seizure that we know of. But we don’t really know what happened. Tracy saw it happen. He said to me, “Gary just closed his eyes and fell, Mum.” Richard and I had another little boy later, stillborn. We hadn’t named him but we didn’t want to forget him when we buried him. Fiona said, “I’d like to call him Christopher, Mum.” So that’s what we called him. Gary and Christopher, we lost them. The sad thing is you don’t think about them as much because you don’t have the memories. I had twenty-one years of memories of Tracy, not counting the years he was overseas with the band, before he died. I always remember Tracy watching The World According to Garp on video when he first moved back home after The Birthday Party broke up. Tracy would get teary when he watched it. I always thought he was connecting it to Gary in some way.’28
Nick would call The Stooges’ Raw Power ‘the album that changed my life’, claiming he bought it on the basis of seeing its cover image alone sometime during 1975. It is more likely he heard it at the house of Tracy’s friend Chris Walsh, after Pew began singing its praises. A somewhat brooding figure, Walsh was a fan of underground comics and way ahead of the curve in collecting what was then obscure and imported vinyl by the likes of the New York Dolls, the Ramones and The Stooges. It was Walsh who had taught his Mount Waverley buddy Tracy Pew how to play bass by listening to those albums. Walsh would also initiate Nick into outlaw country music by the likes of Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard, reawakening an old Wangaratta passion for Johnny Cash into the bargain.
Wherever and whenever Nick first heard Raw Power, there’s no denying the impact of just seeing the album. Its cover depicted a lean, shirtless and golden-bodied Iggy Pop, with heavy mascara and black lipstick, clasping a microphone stand with full phallic intent. At a time when denim-clad, West Coast, easy-listening rock bands such as the Eagles were the dominant force on radio, an unplayed but nonetheless notorious Iggy Pop appeared as if he had surfed in on an alternate American wave of sulphur and electricity. The fact Bowie had mixed Raw Power did not escape young Nick’s attention, nor did the extravagant rock magazine back-stories of Iggy Pop as the untameable wild child of the 1970s, caught in a spiral of heroin addiction and dumped in a lunatic asylum before Bowie rescued him after writing ‘The Jean Genie’ in his honour. Though his original Raw Power mix would be tampered with and supposedly improved later for its CD re-release, Bowie would maintain it had ‘more wound-up ferocity and chaos and, in my humble opinion, is a hallmark roots sound for what was later to become punk’.29 The fact that everybody from the Sex Pistols to Nirvana tuned in to that record in its vinyl format only justifies his point of view. The young band that would soon be known as The Boys Next Door, before finally evolving into The Birthday Party, were no different in following the Raw Power trajectory into legend.
Nick was cultivating what he would joke was an ‘idiot savant’ aspect to his personality. On the heels of Patti Smith’s Horses, the Ramones had arrived in 1976 with their self-titled debut and a comic-book delinquent look that was all sneakers, torn stovepipe denim jeans, T-shirts and leather jackets. Their wraparound sunglasses masked eyes that peered moronically from beneath dark fringes while they slouched in front of a brick wall on the cover. Both Horses and Ramones signalled the rebirth of a New York music scene formerly symbolised by the underground taboos of The Velvet Underground. But if Patti Smith had come on like a rock ’n’ roll Baudelaire, the Ramones – purporting to all be ‘bruders’ – promoted themselves as dumber than dumb. Their wall-of-noise approach was matched by a deceptively melodic and concise set of bent pop songs, including ‘Beat on the Brat’ and ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, both of which The Boys Next Door would play. Drenched in high-speed musicianship and streetwise American humour, the Ramones album would echo in a thousand punk bands to come, not to mention a twisted animation series titled Beavis and Butt-Head. It was the smartest ‘stoopid’ music you could hear, a glorious marriage of sonics and image that suggested a 1970s version of The Monkees high on ‘sniffin’ glue’.30
It is hard to explain the significance of such releases in today’s information age, when youth culture is so obviously saturated with imagery and choice. It takes a great leap of the imagination to envision a world in which there was no internet, no mobile phones, no Spotify, no easily accessible alternative media and no alternative radio – let alone options such as gaming, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook. Youth culture was music culture and the choices within it were highly restricted. Records outside the Top 40 could only be understood on the basis of having been read about in relatively hard-to-get and erratically available magazines before they were ever actually heard. These singles and albums were only available in Australia via the post, ordered through record clubs where aberrant and eccentric offerings would be randomly, and briefly, advertised alongside standard fare like Boz Scaggs’ Silk Degrees and Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night.31 It could take up to six weeks to receive a package, and the arrival of a record by what would seem like horseback delivery today would often prompt a devotional round of listening among those finally able to hear it. Everything was studied, from the album art and production credits to the record label and the lyrics. There was a sense of receiving news from what Nick calls ‘some invisible front line where the real dramas of life and art were taking place’.
Not f
ar away, another young group of people were responding to the same arcane signals and moving through the same subset of influences – and discovering The Stooges’ catalogue at the same time. Among them was The Boys Next Door’s future guitarist, Rowland S Howard, who was still attending Swinburne Community School.32 Among his fellow pupils were the ‘music geek’ and future Au Go Go Records founder Bruce Milne and his younger, opinionated brother, Peter Milne, who was toying with what would become a significant interest in photography. A flame-haired girl with a nervy, poetic disposition called Bronwyn Adams had become part of their peer group. Adams would later join Crime and the City Solution and marry singer Simon Bonney, becoming better known as the violinist Bronwyn Bonney. She would also help Nick to edit his first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, in Hamburg in the mid-1980s.33
Rowland S Howard and friend Gina Riley, later of Kath & Kim fame, aged sixteen, 1976 (Peter Milne)
The liberal and artistic teaching philosophies behind the Swinburne educational institution added up to what was loosely called ‘a free school’. It had a very different culture from the history-conscious and traditional Caulfield Grammar. Even so, Bruce Milne hastens to point out that Swinburne Community School ‘was an odd mix’ of children from stereotypically bohemian and ‘leftie’ families and what he calls ‘the sons and daughters of sharpies and skinheads that none of the other schools could tolerate’.34 It was in this environment that the Milne brothers, Bronwyn Adams and Rowland S Howard would bloom like hothouse flowers. Each would have a lasting impact on Nick. Most immediately, they were all zealous music fans, part of the inner core of a scene that would gather around The Boys Next Door and fuel them artistically.
‘Raw Power was a very big deal for us,’ says Bruce Milne. ‘We were also into Bowie, Roxy Music, Sparks . . . Then we discovered the New York Dolls and The Modern Lovers. Our gang of four or five thought we were the only ones in all of Australia who knew who these people were. We were friends largely because of music. I’d have the first Velvets album; Rowland would have White Light/White Heat. We’d make cassettes for each other and swap them. That was how things worked for everyone.
‘Anyway, there was this Bad Film Festival at the Palais in late 1976. I think they had a screening of John Waters’ Pink Flamingos. I went with Rowland. And we saw other people there who were like us. Other people who didn’t have long hair, who were wearing ill-fitting suits and skinny ties. That was Nick, Mick and their gang. And there was Chris Walsh and his gang. It seemed like these three suburban groups in Melbourne all connected on that night.’35
Rowland S Howard cut a distinct figure, even amid all these strong personalities. There was a feeling, Nick says, ‘that Rowland had somehow arrived fully formed on the scene’. At age sixteen he wore suits and presented himself as if he were a nineteenth-century poet in the iconoclastic vein of Arthur Rimbaud. Precociously, Rowland made an armband with the words ‘Model of Youth’ written across it. Another badge said ‘OCT’, celebrating the month of his birthday.36 Though his parents were folkies, his own tastes were distinctly modern, including a passion for sci-fi literature. Nik Cohn’s idiosyncratic take on the history of popular music, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, would inspire him to start dabbling in rock journalism. With a set of rOtring pens perpetually poking from his jacket pocket, he was interested in the possibility of becoming a graphic artist. Rowland – or ‘Rowlie’, as his friends liked to call him – loved comics such as The Spirit and The Shadow.
For Rowland, the latest thing was always the most exciting thing, technologically and creatively. He learned saxophone largely because he liked the way Andy Mackay looked on the inside sleeve photo of Roxy Music’s first album. ‘When you look at film of them,’ Rowland would remark, ‘it was like they came from another planet, which is a pretty good criteria for a rock band.’ Rowland then started to learn guitar, playing along obsessively to Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera and King Crimson’s Robert Fripp. There was something about a guitar not sounding like a guitar that especially appealed to him. Syd Barrett’s solo albums were another source of inspiration, surreal testaments from an artist falling apart at the end of the psychedelic era.
Rowland prepares for his first show with his band TATROC (Tootho & The Ring of Confidence), Prahran, 1976. (Peter Milne)
Bronwyn Bonney describes the young Rowland S Howard as ‘very romantic. And he stayed a romantic all his life. And absolutely emotional. He was very unusual in that most people who are like Rowland – people who are clever and witty and cutting – are also a bit cold around the heart. Rowland was never like that. That is why he found it so hard to cope later. Even back then, it was a tough time to grow up in Melbourne because it was a very brutish culture in the suburbs. People who were ugly or different were left in no doubt about their failings as people, their failure to be normal.’37
Nick had begun developing a philosophy of the world in which ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ people conflicted. It was a notion he had lifted from Crime and Punishment, and a delirious speech by Raskolnikov that captures his rollercoaster of ecstasies and guilt in the wake of committing murder. Though Dostoyevsky’s novel actually satirises the notion of extraordinary people being given any licence to do as they please over and above the so-called ordinary, Raskolnikov’s delusional insights excited Nick no end. A part of that excitement lay in the dreamlike force of Dostoyevsky’s writing, and the feverish penetration of reality that Raskolnikov’s speech invited. Combining this with his love affair with The Stooges’ LSD-flavoured brutishness and singer Iggy Pop’s heroin-coated crooning, Nick was leaving behind relatively innocent glam-rock ideas about being an ‘alien’ and confirming a much darker Romantic vision: the artist as criminal outsider. His raucous friendship with Tracy Pew was another hedonistic spur to this worldview. He and Tracy were not just going on joyrides now, they were crashing the stolen cars for fun.
‘I was bowled over in my teens by the basic premise of Crime and Punishment,’ Nick says with a trace of amusement. ‘It was really the first bit of philosophy I could get my head around, and it probably inspired me to be an extraordinary arsehole all of my life.’
Davina Davidson saw this taking form in a rather schizoid way. ‘On the one hand Nick was a rebel, completely unconventional, not the teeny tiniest bit mainstream,’ she says, ‘and yet it bothered him not a bit to go places with his parents all the time. Although I was more than happy to do things and go places with them as well, I was, for example, never interested in socialising with my own parents, and took it for granted that my attitude to my parents was normal teenage behaviour. I often wondered about it then. How Nick was so non-conformist in his thinking and yet completely comfortable in situations where he was required to “behave by the rules”.’38
This was, in fact, a duality Nick would always manage, right through his wildest days to come.39 But there was no doubting he and Davina were growing apart. She did not share in Nick’s drug taking, which he kept mostly separate from her. Nick was making new friends at art school, while his latest interests in music were being defined in drinking sessions with Tracy Pew at Chris Walsh’s house in Mount Waverley. Davina describes the circles she and Nick were moving in as having become ‘mutually exclusive’. Towards the middle of 1976 they agreed – at Nick’s behest – that they would be free to date other people. ‘I was still very much in love with him, so deep down I was uninterested, and in the beginning I was both confused and sad, though I do remember making brave attempts at going out with other guys. They were all a little dull, not much fun, definitely not as colourful.’40
While Nick’s relationship with Davina was disintegrating, the music scene reflected a parallel turbulence. Articles had begun to pop up in RAM (Rock Australia Magazine) about a band called Radio Birdman, which had won an event called the Sydney Punk Band Thriller over Christmas of 1975. Bands such as The Stooges and MC5 were freely referenced. Intrigued, Mick Harvey ordered a copy of Radio Birdman’s EP Burn My Eye through the mail. Stories of R
adio Birdman banging their heads with VB cans for percussion and hauling sheets of corrugated iron from a building site to line the interior of their studio thrilled Nick. For all the hype preceding it, Burn My Eye was sonically underwhelming, but the band, the songs and the artwork all emanated an unmistakeably aggressive call-to-arms quality that would be vindicated by Radio Birdman in the live arena.
Even more exciting was the sudden and absolute arrival of The Saints with their first single, ‘(I’m) Stranded’, in late 1976. It was a work produced, pressed and distributed by the band alone – that this was done from total isolation in Brisbane, Queensland, then Australia’s most right-wing and menacingly policed state, made The Saints’ artistic achievement all the more impressive. While even the dissident Birdman had created industry rumblings in Sydney via the press, The Saints had come out of nowhere. They were all that Nick and the others dreamed of being while listening to their Stooges and Ramones albums: an aggressively shimmering, buzzing blend of fury and intelligence that skittled everything in their path. ‘(I’m) Stranded’ snarled out with such force it was acclaimed overseas in the influential UK music magazine Sounds in its 16 October 1976 issue as ‘Single Of This Week And Every Week’ in a quarter-page review. The following issue of Sounds had The Damned’s ‘New Rose’ as its single of the week, a record widely credited these days as the first vinyl shot announcing the punk-rock revolution in the United Kingdom. Beneath praise for The Damned was a second review of (‘I’m) Stranded’, saying ‘Still Single Of The Week And Any Other Week’. A postal address to order the single from Eternal Productions in Queensland was provided.41 Other influential UK trade publications such as the NME and Melody Maker followed suit in their enthusiasm. These were unbelievable accolades for a band that had been stewing in a tiny cohort of about fifty police-harassed fans in Brisbane. ‘They were a very strange group,’ Nick said. ‘It seemed to me they had arrived at this particular sound entirely independently . . . I would say they inspired a movement.’