Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer

by Justin Sheedy

  My, but what a scintillating affair this is… But lo! Behold that young man yonder, yes, the one in polite intercourse with Mister Darcy — they say he is late of Sydney Town. Indeed, darling daughter, the nude one framed in but a bonnet! Other than peacock feather fan so as to shield from you his thrusting ardour he is said to conceal always upon his person a Smith and Wesson 44 Magnum — Why yes, daughter, the most powerful handgun on Earth which could blow ya bonnet clean orff, so be nice to him; he is worth five-hundred pounds a year!

  I tried, God, how I tried. Only to arrive at one conclusion…

  Though the work of Jane Austen was now considered ‘classic literature’, it had once been considered ‘popular culture’. And the job of popular culture is to grab Me, not the other way round. And this, at age 16, was not grabbing me.

  Particularly not when an eight-armed monster of the deep was currently grabbing me with a great big wicked smile on its face…

  Rock and Roll

  * * *

  Tony Basara. Think a slightly bug-eyed French-Lebanese Marlon Brando in The Wild One except at an exclusive private school. He had a black leather jacket, a real one with buckles just like Brando. His aptitude for a place like Riverview was zilch. Yet his talent for playing guitar and for being himself was out of this world. And he was Bad; instantly identifying and cruelly imitating my slight stutter in the presence of his greatness, but he mocked me at our first meeting only, perhaps as he instantly identified in me the only other boy in the school who would ever truly appreciate his greatness. Or the only other boy who would ever truly adore what he adored…

  He’d brought it into school and one lunchtime in the Art Block showed me his guitar, an electric guitar, and no less than a 1960 Gibson Les Paul Custom. His ‘Black Beauty’, he called it. And a beauty it was with its highly polished black wood, all in gold its metal bridge, electric pick-ups and tuning keys, its fret board neck pearl-inlaid, as was the Gibson brand logo and four-pointed Les Paul Custom emblem on the tuning head. He was 16 and could play it like a 30-year-old. It cost a few thousand dollars — Tony’s family were loaded.

  He had disinterest in schoolwork down to a fine art; he ruled his world, had not a care in it, his threat a slightly greasy one; that wasn’t 1980s gel in his ‘rocker quiff’ hair, it was 1950s-surplus ‘Spruce-O’. He smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes and, though only on his ‘P-plates’, drove a 1959 Chevrolet Impala. A car with wings. From its four-headlight front it was a symphony in chrome and went on forever to the back, from where its twin tail lights made it look like an evil squinting creature from War of the Worlds. Though I swear you could fit a double bed in the boot, Tony used it to transport mighty guitar amplifiers…

  There was a Saturday night concert coming up at the school, he said. To be held in Riverview’s ‘Great Hall’, I well knew this was the kind of event where the college’s piano prodigies would perform Chopin and Liszt. Tony well knew the event was open to any and all willing to perform and wanted to know if I was interested.

  ‘J-Jesus! What’ll we play?’ I grimaced.

  ‘You Really Got Me. Van Halen’s version.’

  I knew the original version of this song, a mid-60s bar-chord stomper by ‘Swinging London’ modsters, ‘The Kinks’. I knew, too, the recent cover version of it by ‘Van Halen’, a contemporary L.A. heavy rock band led by the hilariously swaggering David Lee Roth on vocals and the out-of-this-world-talented Eddie Van Halen on guitar.

  ‘Why not the 60s version?’ I put to Tony.

  ‘Because, dip-shit, Van Halen’s the version that’ll blow them AWAY.’

  We rehearsed it the next few lunchtimes in the Riverview’s ‘Woods’ music rooms. To date I had sung in church every Sunday since tiny, also with Marist Brothers Eastwood’s ‘Marist Singers’ as well as in eisteddfods and had recently been in a school musical. But this was my first ever rock and roll attempt. Steve was learning classical guitar and so was roped in to play an electric bass guitar from Tony’s collection: no less than a Fender Precision. We had no drummer yet — that role, Tony assured, would be filled on the night by Riverview’s multi-instrumentalist genius, Joe Wong. But even without percussion in rehearsal, the noise blasting out of Tony’s lead and bass guitar amplifiers could be heard from The Moon, and drew a respectable crowd each lunchtime, the word spreading about our upcoming performance.

  The big night arrived and saw us waiting in the stage wings of the Great Hall in line to go on after a prodigy pianist or two, a solo cellist and a string quartet. We were even in the official program: It went Liszt, Chopin, You Really Got Me (Van Halen). The Great Hall was about half full: a hundred or so boys and parents and the Headmaster.

  The string quartet did their stuff to polite applause and we, gear ready and plugged in behind a drawn curtain, heard the voice of the boy announcing us over the Great Hall’s loudspeaker system, also the resultant murmur of voices in the hall at the prospect of such an unusual item on the bill. And then the curtain drew back and Tony Basara launched into the heavy rock electric guitar chord intro of You Really Got Me. By Van Halen…

  But even a 16-year-old guitar hero can go on nervous and Tony ripped out the song’s blitzkrieg opening attack at fairly twice the normal tempo. It didn’t matter a jot to drummer Joe Wong; he’d never heard let alone played the song before and thrashed into his drum kit in slick rocking time with Tony. Steve, a bass guitar novice, was simply sucked into their vacuum. As for me, my voice now blaring via the stage microphone over the Great Hall’s loudspeakers, I think it might suffice to say I was singing You Really Got Me by Van Halen for dear life. Joe really bashed those drums, in fact so hard the whole drum kit began to creep its way forward towards the front edge of the stage, Tony dropping to his knees to do a rock-god Eddie Van Halen-style guitar solo, our double-time fury fortunately bringing the song to its rock-majestic finale before Joe and his drum kit went stage diving.

  The applause was full-on, the curtain closed, and we exited stage-right through the wings and out onto a raised landing looking down the long cloisters of Riverview’s classical sandstone main building, in the cloisters’ sepia lamplight a stream of boys pouring out of the Great Hall’s side doors and streaming up the cloisters directly towards us, cheering. Max Van Cleef, whose uncle had been the very father of Australian rock and roll was at the head of the stream. ‘Juz, that was AWESOME!’ he beamed at me, and warmly shook my hand, then Tony’s.

  Francis Phelan, the toughest boy in the school, was serious-faced as ever: ‘Good stuff, Juz,’ he winked. ‘ Bloody good.’ The toughest boy in the school then nodded to the richest 1950s-rebellious boy in the school. I’d never seen them speak before, nor did they now but in that sepia light I saw a stoney kind of respect between them, just there, yet it was there.

  I smiled at Steve by my side. ‘Love-ya, man,’ he smiled back, and slapped my shoulder, our drummer still somewhere off in the wings.

  If what I have just written conjures for you a shining moment in the Annals of Teenage Rock then that’s because it was. A moment perfectly glorious. Also perfectly fleeting. But it happened. Thanks to Riverview’s 16-year-old guitar hero, Tony Basara. Who uttered the fateful words as he drove me home in the car with wings: ‘I think we should form a band.’

  ‘I heard the Headmaster walked out,’ I replied.

  ‘Rock — and — Roll,’ said Tony.

  A long way to the top

  * * *

  And so began the short but well-received reign of ‘The Voodoo Rockets’. I’d wanted ‘Voodoo Ragers’, Tony, ‘The Pocket Rockets’, Steve suggesting the compromise. Joe Wong, our drummer, never said much; a serious Chinese boy, though a very fine musician he was on his way towards Dentistry and kept the whole thing a dark secret from his parents.

  My brother had lined up our first ever gig for us to play: the 21st birthday party of one of his uni friends. This meant ripping out not just one knock-em dead song but 25 of them. Two whole sets for a party. But I knew Pat’s crowd by now as a cro
wd who took their fun seriously, partying as they did with a fervour that teetered on the religious. The delightful thing about this crowd was that they really liked me and I really liked them, feeling at one with them despite my being still at school while they were at uni already. In any case, now that she had initiated me to the delights of dancing, I was hoping the gorgeous Eleanor Tripp might just have a list of things to tick off. In any event I knew quite confidently that Pat’s friends would go ape for what I had in mind…

  Tony, Steve, Joe and I spent six intensive weeks of Friday night rehearsals in the down-the-spiral-staircase basement of Tony’s Warrawee family mansion. This was a strange place inside: musty, as if long ago unfinished, other family members a ghostly rumour, but as it was a walled castle you could make all the noise you wanted.

  And it was damn exciting playing rock and roll for the first time, damn exciting, even just in rehearsal, but it was here I learnt that being a singer in a rock and roll rehearsal room can be an insanely frustrating job for one basic reason: The volume of sound produced by an electric guitar amp, a bass amp and heavy-hitting drummer all together in an enclosed space is PHENOMENAL. Especially when it just happens to be a Golden Rule of Rock and Roll that guitar players cannot turn their volume dials down. (Apparently it would kill them stone dead if they did so they don’t.) And Joe Wong couldn’t turn his drums down as it was impossible for him to play them any way but powerfully — and fair enough. So to lower his volume we had to move him down the far end of the shadowy basement with me, guitar and bass playing together up the other end. So already things were getting weird just to keep things sane and practical.

  So why this crucial need to lower the volume when all you want to do is rock and roll? Because at this ‘garage band’ level, even though a singer’s voice is coming out of his own amplifier speaker you can bank on that speaker not being powerful enough in a case of three against one: singer versus guitar, bass and drums. As a result you’re constantly having to sing as powerfully as you can in order to hear yourself. Because only when you can hear yourself can you stay in tune. But you can only keep up such a monumental effort for an hour or so until your voice goes. Which is painful and demoralising, particularly when, by contrast, a guitar player’s instrument doesn’t ‘get tired’ after an hour and go out of tune. (A guitar player stays in tune by tuning his instrument in advance then hitting the right notes visually.) Nor does his guitar simply stop working after a few hours like a human voice does.

  Plus, even while a singer’s voice stays alive in rehearsal, it’s never the guitarist or bassplayer or drummer who between songs goes, ‘Okay, guys, that was good. Next song for us to rehearse is…’ No. It is the singer who does this job. And you can count on your necessary words being blown out of the room mid-sentence by either the guitar, bass or drums blasting at high volume mid-sentence for some reason. So you have to repeat your words, more often than not having to yell them just to be heard. And guitar players don’t like this when you have to do it ten times a session, six sessions in a row.

  Rock And Roll…

  Still, after six weeks we were ready. I was tired of Tony calling me Dip-shit all the time but we were ready. In fact we were better than ready; for a bunch of 16-year-old rock and roll first-timers we were good. And when the Big Night arrived, just standing there on the footpath outside that 21st birthday houseful of young people waiting for us to make their night magic, Tony, Steve, Joe and I shared another shining moment in the Annals of Teenage Rock…

  WE were Shit-Scared.

  Even call-you-a-dip-shit Tony Basara had the shakes and that spooked us.

  Yet the moment came for us to go on and I led us in quick single file up the steps of that house, through the open door, down the entrance hall and into a room packed with happy, smiling faces ready to rock. Making our way to our places, I saw the wicked ‘beatnik’-style letters I’d painted in black on the white outer skin of Joe’s bass drum proclaiming The Voodoo Rockets. We were a band: Joe settling behind his drum kit, Tony and Steve switching on their amps with that audible ‘doomph’, red power lights on, and strapping on their guitars. I turned to the mass of excited faces so close I could have touched them, my microphone feedback-squealing slightly as I flicked its switch to ON.

  Tony didn’t count us in, he simply ripped out the immortal ‘barrhp-barrhp’ intro guitar notes of Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones and living proof we became of the ancient claim that stage-fright nerves give your performance a special edge as our pent-up nervous energy now burst. And the room went ape.

  We played Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock, The Beatles’ Twist and Shout and Bad Boy, Billy Thorpe’s Poison Ivy, classic Oz-Rock screamers like Good Times and Sorry by The Easybeats, even modern ‘retro’ gems like Stray Cat Strut and Rock This Town by the Stray Cats, What I Like About You by The Romantics and Crazy Little Thing Called Love by Queen. No James Brown though; I’d suggested I Feel Good in rehearsal but Steve reckoned it was too ‘funky’ for the likes of us; we were three-chord-wonder rhythm and blues. Still, the crowd demanded encores; we had rocked the house.

  With my confidence levels at this moment attaining heights unknown to 99.9% of adolescent males, I strode through the crowd in a direct line for Eleanor Tripp. Glowing, a glass of champagne in hand as ever, she planted on my cheek the first ‘mwah’ I had ever experienced and told me how ‘fabulous’ we had been. It was then that I saw her other hand, on its beautiful second finger her brand-new engagement ring.

  Rock And Roll.

  M.A.D.

  * * *

  In 1984 we had three likely ways of dying before our 16th birthdays.

  Being vapourized. Being burnt alive. Or slow, agonizing death from radiation sickness.

  The threat of nuclear ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ was madder than ever: The Americans and Russians could have traded in 90% of their poised nuclear arsenals and still had the capacity to reduce our planet to a flambéed skidmark. With the money saved they could have ended world hunger for the next thousand years, set up several 5-star space stations, a really first class resort on the Moon and with the loose change issued us all with the personal ‘Jet-Packs’ promised us as ‘the way of the future’ back in the 1960s yet never delivered. Instead the superpowers just kept the current system in place: a squillion intercontinental ballistic missiles aimed by everybody at everybody else.

  Though my above description may not be a literally accurate description of the global situation at the time, it does evoke how it felt to us at the time. Of course, the actual reality was…

  Far, far worse.

  The Americans, under their President, ex-B-grade actor Ronald Reagan, had just committed to a military program, seriously, called ‘Star Wars’. Which meant nuclear missiles fireable from Outer Space despite the Americans having signed a treaty with the Russians twelve years earlier guaranteeing neither side would ever, ever do such a thing. And now they were going to.

  Brilliant.

  Across the western world since the early 80s, Palm Sunday public protests against the nuclear madness had grown and grown in size every year. But in 1984 this Reagan clown inspired the biggest ever. Sydney witnessed the largest public protest in our nation’s history with 150 000 people gathering in Sydney’s grass ‘Domain’ between the city’s CBD skyscrapers and Sydney Harbour, Australia’s other capital cities turning out similarly awesome numbers to match their populations.

  The Domain is a vast area of green grass. Under a blue Sydney Sunday afternoon sky, even from the high ground at the Domain’s edges there was no green grass to be seen. Only people. A sea of people. As one with many seas of people across the planet that day saying peacefully, powerfully to the governments of the ‘Free World’ allegedly protecting them, ‘We will NOT have a gun with a hair trigger held to our heads in order to avoid being shot. This is madness. Stop it.’ How exhilarating it was to add my voice to the worldwide voice of sanity on that day: young people, old peop
le, mums and dads and their children across the planet saying as one to their elected governments, ‘We put you in power. You serve us. You owe us better than this.’

  Amongst so many saying it so loud, on that day I felt certain that, though our world leaders might not want to listen, they would simply have to now.

  On the way out of the Domain to Town Hall Station, full of hope in everything, amongst a bunch of Riverview boys and Loreto Convent girls I met and spoke briefly with one Emma St. John.

  A blonde gazelle.

  Who, on parting, turned back to me and smiled.

  The Rarest of the Rare

  * * *

  By the age of 16 my impression of Australian political leaders and politicians generally was, with a few exceptions, of a dull bunch in duller suits. Even by the mid-80s, when the new affluence and corporate excess of the ‘Me Generation’ made Italian suits required wear for the nouveau riche, Australian politicians were remarkable for wearing them and still managing to look mediocre. ‘Daggy’ in the Australian idiom — an excellent word deriving from ‘dag’, the term that gives a name to the unusable soiled wool around a sheep’s back passage. You could always tell an Australian politician on the nightly TV news; the Armani suit he wore hung rudely upon him. As if a garment of such fineness felt it beneath its dignity to be draped on such a thrusting B-grader.

  Visually, the exception was a man called Andrew Peacock, a smooth-voiced, greying-haired man of tanned complexion whose suits, ties and shirts were always immaculately coordinated, as if ever making a statement of rare good taste in the 80s: Say, a well-cut charcoal grey suit jacket over a Prussian blue business shirt with white collar and black, medium-thick silk tie. Maybe a white pocket handkerchief to finish the suit. Though one media commentator at the time stated all this man had to do was keep breathing in order to become leader of the Australian Liberal Party (our ‘conservatives’), Andrew was in due course thrown out by his own side for being too stylish.