I’m also doing really poorly at school. I no longer care about anything my sadistic teachers are trying to teach me. I have trouble retaining the information, and my grades slide from dreadful to abysmal. The social gauntlet of school has become so agonizing, and my insecurities are growing so fast, that I literally cannot force myself out the door each morning to attend Ashwood High, and I’ve pretty much given up trying. Our home receives regular calls from the principal, Mr. Potter, asking why “Richard” has been absent for the past few weeks.
Unrecognized for what it really is, my new lifelong companion—depression—starts to really dig his sharp and shiny hooks into me. Looking back, I think what gave birth to it was a unique and potent combination of being rootless for so long with no real place to hang my little peaked cap; having just lost my most important human connection, my best friend John, to the academic life of private school; hormonal teenage angst; and most definitely something already in my genetic coding. Also the damn dog thing. And girls. I have no name for what’s happening, but I’m starting to feel not at all well in my own skin. My Darkness is glad to be home.
Most mornings my mother and I run the same drama starting at 7:00 a.m. She wakes me for school again, I tell her I’m not going again, she freaks out again, we yell and argue back and forth again. Eventually she has to leave for work, and I roll over and go back to sleep feeling bad about myself but relieved that I can stay safely at home for one more day. My dad, always the peacemaker, calls later in the morning to see how I’m doing. I start the day with a shower and a healthy (though still guilt-ridden) wank and pull out one of the horror novels I’ve stolen from the downtown bookstores I frequent. I read for a few hours, play guitar, and then read some more. My parents have correctly guessed that I am stealing all of these books. I have no spending money at all, yet I come home periodically from the city with fourteen new books under my arm. I think now, though, we’re all pretty glad that I wasn’t breaking into the neighbors’ houses to steal their TV sets so I could hock them to support an amphetamine or coke habit.
This schedule leaves plenty of time in the afternoons to stare at my face in the bathroom mirror and begin the dark journey of really disliking what I’m seeing, which causes me, in my woeful state, to literally bang my head against the wall in frustration ’til it aches and throbs. I eventually find my way into my room. I take refuge in music—specifically writing songs, all of them some variation on the theme of “She doesn’t want me,” “Why doesn’t she want me?” “What the hell’s wrong with me anyway?” Playing my guitar and spending time with our dog Cleo are the only moments that bring any peace to my soul.
Meanwhile, all the other kids appear to be happily in the high school flow—going out to clubs at night, eating lunch with their circle of friends, dating, breaking up, and getting back together in the eternal ballet of adolescence—while I remain perpetually on the outside; ugly, distant, and untouchable. With John gone I have no close male friends and feel sure that none of the girls will ever give me a chance. I increasingly come to see myself as an outsider. I hate my large-pore-dotted red nose, the zits, the hairdo that has a mind of its own, my shamefully underdeveloped (for my age) sexual organs, and the acute discomfort I feel in my own body, which, much to my dismay, still has not a wisp of hair on it. I am overwhelmed with self-loathing. I know, absolutely, that deep down inside I am not enough. I will never be enough.
My mum finds some of the drawings I’ve been making of people being tortured and getting their heads chopped off like so many backyard chickens, complete with blood splattering the pages. She takes them to a psychiatrist one of her friends has recommended, to see what he thinks of her now quite depressed young son. He is sufficiently concerned to ask to see me in person. I visit him for a couple of sessions, then stop going. It seems pointless; our “therapy” is going nowhere. He keeps asking me to draw myself in relation to sex. (What sex? I haven’t had any yet!) I figure he’s just graduated from shrink school. It is pretty pedestrian stuff he’s handing me, and even in my tormented state I know it.
In my economics, history, and math exams, I write long poems explaining why I’m unable to answer any of the questions. “Dear Mr. Emery, please do not despair because you see no answers written anywhere.” Very shortly afterward, Mr. Potter again calls our house, this time to inform my parents that “Richard needn’t come back to school next year, thank you very much.” And this is a public school! Where they take anyone! Though I couldn’t care less about school, I feel like I’ve failed to successfully navigate one of life’s major milestones; my parents are devastated, wondering what will become of their black sheep of a son. Everyone else—neighbors, friends, parents of friends—is looking at me like I’ve just bitten the head off their pet parakeet and stuck it on the end of my dick.
A week or so after the headmaster’s call, and on a particularly bleak afternoon—my mum has stormed out once again—I’m sitting on the floor in the hallway with a deck of playing cards in my hand. I flip them over one by one. Every time a red card (hearts or diamonds) comes up, I smash it into my ugly red nose in anger and frustration. When I’m done, my nose is bleeding profusely, my eyes are watering, and my head is throbbing. I literally feel I can no longer fight the crap that’s going on inside me. It’s as though the decision literally descends on me. My parents are both at work, my brother is away somewhere, and it’s another bad day in which I have accomplished nothing and can only see more of the same ahead. I hit a wall. The Darkness finds his way in. And in a violent blossoming of my first brutal bout with depression, I run outside to our backyard shed, hate-filled, broken, and determined to finally do something to strike back at all that is hurting me. I cannot stand another minute of suffering and uncertainty; I just want the pain to end.
I am quite adept at making hangman’s nooses by this time, due to my execution obsession, so I hastily fashion one out of rope, throw it over a ceiling beam and tie it off, stand on a small chair, slip the noose over my head, and kick the chair away without a moment’s hesitation. The image of the pogoing kid comes to me in a sudden flash; it seems another lifetime ago. I hang suspended for fifteen or twenty seconds and am just sliding into unconsciousness when the knot tying the rope to the beam somehow unravels. I’m slammed hard to the concrete floor, rather the worse for wear. I lie there bruised, sore, and disoriented as a fiery red-purple rope burn blossoms across my throat. Eventually I get up, groggy, and return to the house, more stunned than anything else, but the anger and frustration have definitely taken a backseat for the moment.
My failed hanging attempt gives me a measure of relief. I have the strange sense that maybe I’ve been saved for something. I know how to tie knots; I am amazed, not to mention relieved, that I am still alive. I’ve felt different from others for years, but now I feel different in a new way: I have gone down into the abyss and survived. It’s perfectly clear that school isn’t going to work out for me. From this point on, music will become my salvation and save me from most serious, self-inflicted harm. I start resolutely directing myself toward music. I choose my path for the love of it, but I’m also driven by my feelings of inadequacy and doubt. I’m desperate to prove to myself (and all those girls at school I hunger after) that I can become much more than what I am now—the ugliest kid in the world.
CHAPTER FIVE
NOT YOUR REGULATION USO TOUR
VIETNAM
1968
I don’t tell anyone about my near-miss in the shed. I hide the angry violet rope burn on my neck from my parents until it heals. (I’m sure they wonder about the dark woolen turtleneck their son is wearing when it’s 150 degrees outside.) I’m still somewhat lost, and my misery is far from over, but I do see a window beginning to open in my life: music.
I start going to as many concerts as I can. The performers are all British. Among the first ones I see is, believe it or not, Dusty Springfield. A friend of the family who is in radio, takes my program to a party, and Dusty’s is the first real a
utograph I ever get (not counting the soul-destroying Hayley Mills deception, of course). I see the Who one night and bump into a young, black-haired Pete Townshend the next morning while I’m making the rounds of Melbourne’s few guitar stores. That’s how small and interwoven the music scene in Australia was back then.
And as an impressionable sixteen-year-old, I’m not exactly hanging with the best crowd, still spending most of my time with the ex-convict and his friends in the Moppa Blues. I see John occasionally on weekends. His move to private school is obviously not helping his JD tendencies very much. The two of us steal an expensive guitar from a music store in town and sell it to a kid at John’s new private school. With the money, we buy a car from a dealer who sells us a junker because he knows we’re underage. I hop a curb and almost drive it into a neighbor’s living room the first time I get behind the wheel. I almost kill us both the few times I drive it (my driving skills haven’t improved much since then, either), and John parks the badly dinged-up vehicle on a side street near his house. Someone steals it from us two weeks later, and we can’t report it to the cops because we aren’t supposed to have it in the first place. Kind of like being a drug dealer when someone steals your stash.
Most nights, I sneak out of our house after everyone’s asleep and meet up with my bandmates in Moppa Blues, now called Group X. They pick me up in their Holden FJ (the quintessential Aussie tough-guy car) on a street corner. We stay out all night, drinking and eating cheeseburgers from Greek hamburger joints (the only ones still open at this time of the morning) and occasionally holding up convenience stores. Incredibly, I remain blissfully unaware of this part of the routine for a while, until we pull up outside a liquor store late one night and all the other band members get out and tell me to stay in the idling car. The next thing I know, I hear a shot and a scream. They all tumble back into their seats, laughing hysterically and screaming “GO, GO, GO!!!!!” I find out that they’ve just robbed the store and as a parting gift, Snowy (the singer) has fired his starting pistol at the clerk to scare her. Thank God all the cops are sleeping back then, or my next move would’ve been to Juvie or worse.
The write-up in the paper about the robbery is my first press! I proudly keep the local newspaper article in my bedside drawer for months, along with a second one headlined THE THINGS SOME PEOPLE WILL DO. The story is about a car full of “hoodlums” (that would be us) who climb up a city streetlight on Christmas night, cut down a six-foot inflatable Santa that the city has erected with funds for underprivileged kids, stuff it into their car, and race away. The cops give chase. Fortunately, we get away. I am so desperate to “belong” that I’m willing to achieve it on any terms—even these larcenous ones. Sure, my band may be leading me toward a fairly lengthy prison term, but I get none of the head games I have to endure at school. It seems like a pretty fair trade-off to me. Being older “men,” my bandmates don’t have all the familiar hang-ups the kids at school do. I’m temporarily lifted out of my black moods. And they do turn me on to some amazing music.
But even I can see that this isn’t the path to “girls, guitars, and glory.” In fact, I’m beginning to think I may soon wind up sharing a cell with Snowy. I think he gets arrested again, because before I know it we have a new vocalist and the band name changes yet again, this time to the Daniel Jones Ensemble. We’re now playing Hendrix and Cream songs and getting more regular and better gigs—with hotter girls in attendance. I’m actually playing a real Fender Strat, although it belongs to Danny, the new singer.
Praise Jesus, in the early hours of my seventeenth year, I finally get laid. The DJE is playing a beach gig over Christmas in the Aussie town of Mallacutta, and we’re living on the beach in tents, as befits our low-rung status. Another Heather enters the frame. (What is it with the name Heather, Christmas, and my formative experiences with girls?) She sees us play at the local club, and that’s all the foreplay we need. We have sex on the dark beach; I think it lasts all of three minutes. I remember thinking, “Wow, I’m no longer a virgin—but that wasn’t as much fun as wanking.” Though there is less guilt. Needless to say, my bandmates are merciless in the shit they give me onstage the next night. Of course I told them! That’s the first thing you do as a young male!
Pete Watson is an Aussie rock star of the ’60s. The first time I see him he’s wearing a searingly hideous electric-blue suit, playing bass in a band named the Phantoms, and opening for the Beatles during their one and only Australian tour. By the time he next emerges, Pete’s apparently learned quite a lot from his tour with the Fab Four. Having shed the aforementioned repellent electric-blue suit, he is now in a successful Melbourne band called MPD Ltd. which is enjoying a string of hit singles on the local charts. While I’m enduring the torment that is high school, MPD Ltd. decides to head for England and a shot at worldwide fame. Like so many bands before and after them—until the Bee Gees’ big breakthrough—they come back home with their collective tails between their legs, telling everyone who’ll listen how tough the English music scene is.
Pete is now playing regularly at dance halls and clubs around the country, headlining a popular show band called Pete Watson’s Rock-house. The “show band” is an Australian anomaly: a weird amalgamation of cabaret, rock and roll, and vaudeville. Pete has chosen ’50’s-style rock as his band’s theme. Dressed in gaudy, matching ’50s-style shirts (hang on, maybe Peter didn’t learn that much after all), his Rockhouse covers Chuck Berry and Big Bopper songs with a mix of purposely goofy Elvis and Buddy Holly impersonations thrown in for good measure.
Pete has been a fixture in the Australian pop scene for a number of years by this point. So it comes as quite a shock one afternoon while I’m playing guitar in my bedroom at 13 Subiaco Court, Syndal, and my mum interrupts me long enough to say that Pete Watson is in our living room, waiting to see me.
“Really? The Pete Watson? Here?”
“Yes,” she says, in answer to all three questions.
I have, at this point, to my great horror, been talked into repeating the eleventh grade that I so badly blew the year before, by my mum’s pragmatic advice: “Richard, you need a trade behind you.” She means I need to learn to be an electrician or pick up some vocation I can count on when the music thing blows up in my face. “You can’t make a living playing the guitar, son,” she adds, as so many worried mums have done before. School starts up again in a month, and I’m wavering. Suddenly here, in our suburban living room, fidgeting with his brand-new wedding ring, sits my salvation.
Pete says that he’s seen me playing at a local bar and asks if I’d be interested in joining his band, which is working regularly and actually getting pretty good money. To their everlasting credit, when I ask my parents what they think I should do, both say, “What do you want to do?” It’s an easy choice. Pete Watson has himself a new guitar player, and school, that giant monkey on my back, can kiss my hairless ball sack and take a permanent hike. The only downside is that when I tell the Daniel Jones Ensemble and their accompanying bunch of misfits of my impending departure, they threaten to break both my legs. And they really mean it.
After a tension-filled gig the next week with the DJE, I’m sitting in the band’s van trying to figure out how I could play the guitar from a wheelchair when the van door is suddenly yanked open and in steps the toughest guy of them all, another ex-con/roadie named Hamish. He slams the door shut (but honestly, you have to do that or it won’t close) and sits there wordlessly looking out into the darkness for a few minutes. “Shit, this is it,” I think as I anxiously study his heavily pockmarked face and thick, calloused hands. Hamish takes a deep breath and, still looking out the window, says to me, “You go do what you need to do. I’ll take care of these guys. Good luck, mate.” I could kiss him. I don’t, but I could. I thank him and have never forgotten him.
Once I’m completely free of school and making a little money doing what I love, the dark cloud vanishes from inside my head. All thoughts of bloody guillotine victims and teenage suicide dissi
pate—for the time being, anyway. Pete Watson’s Rockhouse has a Canadian drummer named Joe whose accent sounds American to us, so we are supercool. Pete introduces me to his band as “Rick Springfield.”
“It’s not Spring field, it’s Spring thorpe,” I correct him.
“No one will ever understand ‘Springthorpe,’” replies Pete rather callously. And he’s actually quite right. All my life people have mistaken my brilliantly enunciated “Springthorpe” for “Springfield.” Were they all trying to tell me something? So Pete isn’t the first to call me “Springfield,” but he is the first to make it official.
“From now on, you’re Rick Springfield,” says Pete. And I am. In true Australian fashion, they soon familiarize it to “Ricky,” a name I still have to live with when I go home and visit the old crowd in Oz.
I share the innate neediness factor of all performers, and the public attention makes me feel good. I’m starting to get laid at a fairly prodigious rate. All this attention from girls in particular makes me feel even better about myself. It is a very “young” thing, this giddiness over the sudden availability of the opposite sex, but it’s understandable considering how, up until this point, that very same “opposite sex” has avoided me the way a leper avoids arm wrestling. For now it’s all heady and new.
The band plays mostly ’50s rock and roll, and while I’m not thrilled when he does it, Pete sometimes dresses up to look like Elvis, the first bad Elvis impersonator I will ever see. The first recording I make is with this band. Unfortunately it is a fruity novelty song called “Itty-Bitty Hippopotamus.” I start to get fed up with the campy side of Pete’s band, and I think he sees the writing on the wall for the future of a ’50s show band as well. He transforms us into a cabaret act, playing songs like “Please Release Me” and “It’s Not Unusual” and books us into the Whiskey A Go Go. This is definitely not the hip teen jungle that the one in Los Angeles is. This Whiskey is a nightclub by the ocean in St. Kilda, a district of Melbourne, that serves as a pickup joint for hookers. It has a huge open dance floor to give brawling, drunken sailors room to swing a decent punch. Again, not your optimum gig. Plus Pete brings in his old bandmate Danny to play drums, so we lose the coolness factor of our (almost) American drummer.
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