Late, Late at Night

by Springfield, Rick

  Photos of me from that time show a thin, haunted-looking young man. On the ride home from the airport my mum tells me that I seem jittery. I can’t imagine why—doesn’t everyone duck for cover at loud traffic noises? I move back into my parents’ house for a few months to recover. The drug thing is no big deal to kick, and I never think about trying to score any once I get back home. Or hookers, for that matter. I do continue to write songs and play guitar in my upstairs bedroom, but there’s a curious and familiar darkness returning to settle over me.

  Regrettably, I’ve left my only electric guitar in Vietnam with the lying son-of-a-bitch promoter, who has sworn on his life to send it to me in Oz the first chance he gets. Maybe he gets shot or drives over a mine or something, because it never shows. I loved that guitar, an Australian-built Maton, and I still feel melancholy when I see an old photo of myself playing it. Did it end up hanging in some Vietnamese pawnshop, or in the young hands of a future member of the People’s Republic of China?

  Adding insult to injury, we soon find out that Pete, our fearless leader, has contracted a fatal lung disease in Vietnam and has been given only a year to live. I run to the doctor, as we all do, and have a chest X-ray. It turns out that Pete is the only member of the band who has been stricken. I think about our days off, in the field, when we’d often split up to hang out with different groups of GIs we’d befriended, and I wonder where Pete went on those days off that the rest of us did not go. A year and six months later, the guy who delivered me from the horrors of a terminal scholastic career, saved me from a shrapnel-riddled death, named me “Rick Springfield,” and introduced me to the musician’s life, is dead at the age of twenty-six. No good deed goes unpunished.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BACK THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  LIVING IN OZ

  1969

  The Beatles’ White Album (The Beatles) will always remind me of those few surrealistic months I spent at home after my Vietnam experience, decompressing and trying to process the previous year’s chaotic events. Because the music I am drawn to is so healing, as I think it is for everyone, I play the new album nonstop. The Darkness has fully descended upon me again now that I am on my own and have time to think and reflect, but the music helps to keep a light shining through the gloom. “Dear Prudence” is a song I particularly love, and I teach myself the finger-picking guitar part note for note. Which is quite helpful when my old Vietnam bandmates, Paul (my cat-stalking accomplice) and Danny (our non-Canadian drummer) come calling, looking for a guitar player now that Pete is terminally ill and we are officially disbanded. They’ve hooked up with the biggest music promoter/band manager in Brisbane (that’s in Queensland … it’s up north of Sydney … never mind, it doesn’t matter). His name is Ivan Damen, and he’s looking for a hot new band.

  Post-Vietnam, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do next. Paul and Danny say they already have a guitar player in mind, but if I can play “Dear Prudence,” then I’m in and he’s out. I am incensed that they are asking me to audition, but I’m also practical enough to know a potential good thing when I hear it. I whip out a version of “Dear Prudence” for the judgmental bastards and get the gig, and soon we’re in a smoky, held-together-with-pieces-of-tape, crap heap of a station wagon that’s stuffed to the ceiling with suitcases and guitars, headed toward Brisbane, almost a thousand miles away. I’m also headed toward my nineteenth birthday.

  We arrive in Brisbane and find an apartment just north of Surfer’s Paradise on one of the longest, most perfect beaches I’ve ever seen—and there are a lot of outstanding beaches in Australia. Surfer’s Paradise looks like Miami now, with giant skyscrapers and casinos on the waterfront, but back then it’s a sleepy little surf town of single-story shacks. We hire a keyboard player I’ll call Jay. I’m never really sure of his actual surname, because we keep changing it later on, every time we do any interviews. Jay Daytime, Jay Fury, Jay Cheesecloth, Jay Farmer …

  The “Farmer” name comes from the rather disturbing fact that Jay, who once worked on a sheep farm, confides to us that he’s actually had sex with a sheep! He was forced to do it, he tells us, by the rough-and-tumble group of unhinged hired hands that usually make up the crew of a lonely sheep ranch out in the middle of nowhere, with no access to any female company and nothing else to do but drink liberal amounts of beer. Being Aussies, Paul, Danny, and I have all heard of this type of fairly deviant behavior before, but we’ve never actually met anyone who’s done it, let alone freely admitted to it! My unasked question, of course, is, “I understand they forced you to do it, as an initiation into the group or whatever, but looking at the ugly ass end of a sheep, what possessed you to get sexually aroused enough that you could actually, well, consummate the act?” I later share an apartment with Jay, and I’m careful not to wear any of my woollier sweaters around him, just in case he gets ideas.

  Four young, single musicians, living in one apartment on the beach, with time on their hands … and who should live upstairs but a young Scottish lass with a husband away at work in the field for months on end? I’m not exactly sure what “in the field” means, but the important thing to us is that he’s not around. So the first night in our new bachelor pad, we invite her down to have dinner with us … okay, honestly, to make us dinner. It soon becomes painfully obvious that we all have designs on her. And she bravely receives the message. Tipsy from wine, she whispers to me in her husky native brogue, “I can’t possibly take you all on tonight.” But I have to hand it to her: she does. And does it well, with a passion and an appetite that keeps us all coming back for more through the next few weeks. I start to feel that it’s more about the well-cooked free meals than the sex. What is it with young men, that they can’t get the cooking thing together? Christ almighty, are we completely useless?

  We drive into Brisbane to meet Ivan Damen, our new manager. He’s an affable older guy who looks a little mafioso around the gills and who calls everyone “Father,” although to him we’re really “his boys”—and he vows to make us stars. We need a name for our new band, and some idiot suggests Wickedy Wak. “Yes!” we all shout in unison, and a band with that unlovely name is still going strong in the pubs and showrooms of Brisbane forty years later, although the membership has changed considerably. Ivan and the four of us have some pretty high hopes for our future even though we haven’t played a single note together as a band at this point, but that’s the magic of the ’60s for you.

  Speaking of the magic of the ’60s: I don’t mean to give the impression that it’s all about sex, but at the age of nineteen, it is all about sex. I’m fortunate enough to be alive and sexually active during the only fifty-three years in modern human history when you couldn’t die from fucking: between the discovery of penicillin and the onset of AIDS. In Vietnam we all managed to sidestep the “black clap” (which in itself was a miracle), an STD that was very prevalent and widely believed to be incurable. So I am completely bummed when I walk into a men’s room in Brisbane one afternoon and start peeing razor blades. The pain sends me to my knees on the bathroom floor. Successfully navigating the sexual minefield that was Vietnam only to get “the clap” back home in Australia is like learning to skydive, then tripping over a rock on the way back to the car and breaking your fucking neck.

  Despite my mum’s threats of turning me over to the police at age five if she ever caught me humping my little pillow again, and the residual sexual hang-ups that this may have caused, she has raised a sexually accountable young man and a responsible lad. At the time I’m seeing a couple of girls, so I have to figure out which one has given it to me and who I’ve then passed it on to. The giver is obvious: the “party” girl I bang one night under the stairs of the apartment building, because I don’t want the rest of the band to know I’m seeing her. She freely admits it, “Yeah, sure. I gave you the clap.” The unfortunate receiver is a beautiful dark star named Barbara, a college girl and an absolute sweetheart. I feel like such a scumbucket when I tell her. She shrugs it off
and gets her shot, and we continue to see each other now and then—when we’re feeling the urge—for the six months that I live in Brisbane. But at that moment, while I’m trying to pass a very painful piss in a public bathroom, I’m cursing womenfolk in general.

  The appallingly named Wickedy Wak eventually begins playing shows at Ivan’s own dance hall, Cloudland, as well as assorted pubs around Brisbane. We are still just a cover band, playing everything from Tommy Roe to the Who to the latest Beatles single, but we also perform the occasional show-band number complete with our macho, sheep- serenading keyboard player dressed in drag and the rest of us in what- ever silly outfits the song requires. We make sincere spectacles of ourselves singing old Ray Stevens numbers like “Ahab the Arab” and “Guitarzan.” It seems that Pete Watson’s show-band mentality is still alive and well in those of us who have gone on. Sadly, up to this point, the only people who regularly come to see us play are the few girls we’re dating, plus the eager Scottish lass upstairs. I have more guitars stolen, too, so it’s not only the Vietnamese who have designs on my beloved instruments.

  Our “big break” arrives when we appear on a local live music TV show called Club 7 where we dutifully get the girls screaming. The national music press starts to take a little notice. To be honest here: the “national music press” at this point consists of one music paper called Go-Set, and it is to this “press” that I am referring. Australia is still, and will remain for many more years, a king-sized “small town.” The whole Australian music industry could fit into a studio apartment in West Hollywood and still have enough room to swing a large-sized cat. Still, it is the first noncriminal press I’ve ever had, and my photo appearing in the magazine does not necessitate a trip to the local lockup in handcuffs. Things are indeed looking up.

  The writer of our first “national” magazine piece is a woman who will become a crusader of sorts for me and is second only to Pete on the list of benevolent guides who help me find my way. Her name was (and still is) Michelle O’Driscoll. Michelle is a hip, cutting-edge freelance writer who, though only a few years my senior, has a tendency to mother me. Although she is obviously kind of giddy about and around me, I believe her to be of indeterminate sexual orientation, so the 600-pound gorilla in the room that is the question “Should we or shouldn’t we have sex?” is, thankfully, not an issue and we can actually get some shit accomplished. (P.S.: I was wrong; she was straight.) She writes glowing articles about me, some of which actually get published—none of which are true—and she maneuvers behind the scenes to get me to the forefront of the band.

  After she’s been to a few of our shows, it is Michelle who first whispers the words in my ear, “You should go solo.” Up to that point and for some years to come, I consider myself a member of a band, a guitar player, and maybe a songwriter. But it is Michelle who puts this “go it alone” worm in my ear, for better or for worse. She is my first experience of a “true believer.” True believers will prove to be the grist in the mill that is my career and my life.

  Of course, having left Melbourne to form the band in Brisbane, our big goal now is to go back to Melbourne, so we can “make it” nationally, Melbourne being the center, at the time, of all things Australian swinging and cool. Ivan books us a showcase at Bertie’s, one of the hippest clubs on the Melbourne music scene, and we actually pull it off and impress people. So much so that the big local hit songwriter at the time, a guy named Johnny Young, gets us in a room afterward and plays us his newest creation, a ditty called “Billy’s Bikey Boys.” He says that he wants us to record it and that Molly Meldrum, another big name in the Australian music biz, will produce the record. Molly is a man but is openly gay, hence the “Molly” tag. He’s still doing good things in the Aussie music world and is, even now, a good friend. But back then, a more outrageous queen you could not meet. Of course, he loves us—me, I think, in particular.

  I will never be more excited about a recording session than I am for this very first one. Everything is happening so fast. John and Molly both want me to sing lead vocal on the song, and I’m euphoric. Paul, the bass player—and the other singer in Wickedy Wak—is not nearly as euphoric as I am about this decision. In fact, he’s so pissed that he won’t even play on the session, so we bring in a bass-playing ringer named Beeb Birtles. Beeb is in a popular teen band called Zoot, a poofy-looking bunch of pretty-boys who dress in pink and are adored by the girls. Beeb will later go on to become one of the founding members of Little River Band, so you should always be careful about which musician you call a pansy. I will be seeing Beeb again soon, although I don’t know it at the time. The session is arranged and it all feels like magic.

  We record the song, it sounds like a “hit,” everyone loves it, the record company prints up some promotional copies, there is talk of a national tour, and the industry buzz is good. I am on cloud nine, ready for my first taste of fame, when Paul, the disgruntled bass player, pulls the plug and says he’s quitting. The band breaks up and it all turns to shit. Luckily, I’m already home in Melbourne, and since I’m pretty much wearing all the clothes I own and I don’t have any immediate prospects, I simply move back into my parents’ house.

  I learn another valuable lesson. It involves counting certain unborn poultry before they’re fully incubated.

  There are a lot of new Aussie teen bands springing up in the wake of the British Invasion of the ’60s. One is the aforementioned, poofy-looking Zoot, and another is the (not quite as poofy-looking) Valentines. Zoot dresses in pink and the Valentines dress in red. I think the idea is to make them appear as poofy rivals. Both the Valentines and Zoot are after yours truly as their new guitar player now that I am single again.

  I met and liked the guys in Zoot when Beeb played on the not-long-for-this-world “Billy’s Bikey Boys” single, and the Valentines have two really substantial singers. The second singer, the one who stands in the back pretty much all the time, clapping his hands and doing most of the background harmonies, is a young, skinny, friendly bloke named Bon Scott who will turn everyone’s head ten years later as the lead screamer of one of our best exports, AC/DC. I finally settle on Zoot because they are only a three-piece with a singer, so I don’t have to contend with another guitar player. A little conceited of me, but I’m beginning to feel my oats. Besides, my new guru Michelle thinks this is the better move.

  I also buy myself my very first American guitar, a Gibson SG. I still have this guitar. It is a touchstone of sorts, and I use it in the studio to this day. (It’s on this same guitar that I will, years later, pluck out the tentative opening lines of “Jessie’s Girl” for the very first time.) Some old habits die hard, however, and the first thing I do is paint this beautiful instrument. I do not saw it in half, thankfully. But I cover the magnificent cherrywood finish with a couple of coats of very pink paint.

  I thought the unattractively named Wickedy Wak had a pretty good handle on the girl market, but joining Zoot takes it to a whole new level. They are cute and famous … how can you beat that? Although my new band and I have a lot of common musical interests like the Who and Led Zeppelin, Zoot—already with a couple of bubblegum hits under their pink belts—seems locked into the teen thing.

  We rehearse for a couple of minutes and then jump straight into the biggest national tour of Aussie artists Australia has ever seen. Called Operation Starlift, it features all of the top Aussie bands and singers (I told you the scene was small). I’m scrambling just to keep up, musically speaking. We fly, en masse, all over the country and bring our special brand of music and hedonism to the towns of Oz. Back then there is a general feeling among the public that a foreign band (American or British) is naturally better and more interesting than the homegrown variety. We get far less respect and, more important, far less money. Way less. As a band with two hit singles, Zoot is only making $80 for a half-hour set. That’s not $80 each; it’s $80 between the four of us. Five if you count the ever-present bloodsucking manager (sorry, Jeff). So there’s a kind of “us-against-
the-world” feeling among the musicians from Oz. And over the short course of this tour, a lot of us who aren’t already friends become so. Especially while sharing drinks and girls, which is done most nights.

  I’ve written some songs with the band in mind, and we start recording them for our one and only album. This marks the first time any song that I’ve written has actually been recorded. It encourages me to focus more on songwriting, and I think at this point my guitar playing takes a serious backseat. I don the pink outfit for a few weeks and then state the obvious: that we have to leave it behind. We’ll never be taken seriously wearing pink. It is a pretty bold step for the new kid, but I’m used to being the new kid and have learned to cut to the chase.

  The band, all talented players, agree, and I come up with the “brilliant” idea of having a photo taken of us all naked, with our twenty-year-old asses to the camera, looking over our shoulders as if to say, “kiss this.” My original idea is to give the photo a heavily overexposed, hard-to-see-the-detail, burned quality, but the national magazine (the aforementioned influential Go-Set) prints it in full and living color. My old mum almost has a coronary when she sees it. “What on earth were you thinking, Richard?” She isn’t completely against the nakedness per se, but she’s always been of the opinion that you have to leave a little bit to the imagination. “A bit of lace is much more interesting than seeing the whole doohickey,” she actually says.

  “It’s okay, Mum, it’s one photo, in one printing of one music magazine. No one will ever see it again.” Two weeks later we play at the most popular gay club in Sydney, and the whole backdrop for the stage is a gigantic blowup of the naked photo. Each of our butts is at least two feet across. And it is alarming to see them that big. This type of photo never, ever disappears, and I have had to see and sign my bright idea many times over since that day. But I have no right to complain because—by popular demand—I included it in the photo insert of this book.