As for the big pop band tour, it reached a colourful crescendo on the fifteenth floor of the Crest Hotel in Brisbane. I’d been hanging around the fringes of their legion of groupies, but never really wanted to join in the fun. In Brisbane I returned to my room to find a rather pretty young girl camped on my doorstep. For some reason, I decided to let her into my room, and she smoked a joint—which I found rather off-putting. I suppose the memory of the drug bust in London a couple of years before still made me paranoid about the police.
‘Okay,’ I told her, ‘time to go,’ but to no avail. She stripped stark naked and jumped into my bed.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she insisted.
The band, who were staying on the same floor, returned around midnight and were raising hell. Now I was getting extra paranoid about a drug bust. I peeked out my door and looked down the hall in the direction of all the noise. The band had their doors wide open and I could see that there were a number of girls in various states of undress—I could also see a range of drugs being handed out.
I freaked. I had a pot-smoking hippie girl in my bed and the party down the hall just got louder and louder, way out of control. In the early hours of the morning, from behind my locked door, I heard an entourage of uniformed police heading towards the band’s rooms. Muffled arguments were conducted behind the closed doors, and I was sure the local coppers would discover the details of my altercation with the British drug squad and off to jail I would go.
The muffled voices ceased; silence returned to the fifteenth floor. I had my ear to the door, but heard nothing more and went to bed for what remained of a night of restless sleep with my pot-smoking groupie. I was up reasonably early, kissed her bye bye and headed downstairs for my free breakfast. A short time later, a member of the band’s entourage joined me at my table.
‘What the fuck happened last night?’ I asked with great trepidation.
‘Whaddya mean, what happened last night?’ he asked me.
I shut up and ate my breakfast.
During the first half of the 1970s I wrote prolifically; I really had the ‘hunger’. Much of my time was spent in a very decrepit flat overlooking William Street, Kings Cross, the perfect spot for an angst-ridden young songwriter. ‘I Wanna Be a Survivor’ was written there, and the song still carries the musty odour of that old flat.
I played everything onto a cheap cassette player, and was still enough of a vampire to sit up until dawn every night, writing songs, then sleep until 2 p.m. The first song of mine to be regarded as having any commercial potential was ‘Last Train to Marseilles’, about my Austrian princess. It was also written in this dingy flat.
Richard Batchens and I commenced pre-production on the song and he enlisted the legendary ‘Red’ McKelvie as a creative partner on the production. I was absolutely in awe of Red. He’d led a famous Australian country-rock band called Flying Circus, who’d had hit singles in Australia (including the song ‘Hayride’) and achieved great success in Australia and Canada. Red was as colourful a character as I’d met.
Not only was Red red-headed but he also sported a red Colonel Custer moustache. He’d get really drunk with beer foam all over his moustache, and wax lyrical about interstate truckers, or certain chapters of the Hell’s Angels who were good buddies of his. When I discovered he’d been having an interesting sexual liaison with the secretary of one of Festival Records chief execs, I had an anxiety attack, believing that, were he found out, it could spell a very premature end to my recording career. However, I was soon to learn that the entire Australian record industry was rife with rampant lasciviousness.
Red was a hard taskmaster in the studio, whose philosophy was ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s dollar’. He was always at loggerheads with the corporate types at Festival, but was revered as much as he was feared. There had simply never been a better guitar player in Australia, even if his contribution to the local industry has been largely overlooked.
Red had all the dexterity, craftmanship and technique necessary for transforming my songs into good records. He took control of ‘Last Train to Marseilles’ and crafted it into a country-pop masterwork. Over the next few years, Red and I got better and better together—my first hit, 1975’s ‘Girls on the Avenue’, was probably our finest achievement.
We tried to fight the good fight, but the industry in the 1970s was awash with boozing and long lunches; it’s a miracle any great art was able to surface at all. I was always concerned for Red’s welfare; one minute he’d simply be agitated and then he’d explode into a rage. After tough days in Festival’s studios, Red would coerce me to walk all the way home from Pyrmont to Bondi, where I had moved after Kings Cross, a distance of about 15 kilometres, at 4 a.m.
‘Otherwise,’ Red told me, ‘I’ll never get to sleep.’
The recording of my Prussian Blue album was a necessary exercise in producer fascism. I had had not one iota of studio experience and needed a pedantic taskmaster like Richard Batchens; he put me through a crash course in studio discipline. Session musos were hired in a rather haphazard fashion, which regrettably scarred some of my old songs for life.
Each day was a constant tussle between Richard and myself. I’d be lobbying for the hip rock musicians like Kevin Borich and the La De Das or Country Radio (and later, the Dingoes). Batchens, however, would usually win out and I’d be stuck with staid session musicians who earned their living from TV tonight shows and music jingles.
Yet I have no real regrets about this; it gave me a solid start in my professional recording career. At least these session men had excellent formal backgrounds and really knew their stuff, technically speaking. I was an ignoramus, trying his best. I used to have terrible anxiety attacks playing guitar among a group of grumpy, impatient old session musicians. Fortunately, I was able to keep up with them.
The music industry introduced me to binge drinking; it’s the one aspect of my life I’ve found singularly unappealing. The ‘powers that be’ in the music industry would hang out at a strange place on Sydney’s lower north shore called the 729 Club. It was more speakeasy than legitimate club, and it was here I learned some truths about the music industry. I best not single anyone out, because I cannot think of anyone in this business who is without sin, myself included. And many of these people became friends. I was new to the industry and unprepared for all this. My songs were like children to me; I found these drunken orgies—and the reality of the business I was entering—very off-putting.
Industry politics would come to play such a significant role in my story and impact greatly on the lives of the people I was close to. I learned very early just how distracting and obstructive these politics could be to my creative flow. I saw this in Red McKelvie, too. It seemed to me that Red had a great talent that was being suffocated, although I was determined to keep his spirit buoyant. Fortunately, I was still young enough to be able to rise above these conflicts, at least for the time being.
As Festival’s in-house producer, Richard Batchens had power, which he wielded relentlessly in the studio. Richard would attempt to dictate all Red’s guitar lines by humming them, or worse still, singing what he heard in his head. To talented musicians this was hell. The worse thing was that Richard’s musical ideas were sometimes out of date; they belonged to the bad ol’ days of Tin Pan Alley.
The release of Prussian Blue in November 1973 marked the start of my real career. This was when I first learned that glowing critical acclaim for your work doesn’t necessarily translate to commercial success. I still can’t fathom the exact reason for this, but would guess it’s probably because rock critics are often not in tune with the public. But as I said, I’m not exactly sure how the process works. All I can tell you is that Prussian Blue received rave reviews—and consequently ‘stiffed’. ‘Last Train to Marseilles’ received a little airplay, mainly in New South Wales, but that was about it.
I might have been poor, but I began to enjoy life to the full. I coerced Red into forming a band with me, and we started a residency at French’s Wine Bar on the notorious Oxford Street in Darlinghurst. It seemed to only take two or three gigs and suddenly we were flavour of the month, packing in the crowds, even though we couldn’t afford a PA.
Red and I had a fluid roster of different drummers and bass players, but Englishman Brian Bethell was probably our main bassist, Dave Ovenden our first-choice drummer.
In the summertime, the hippies would cram into French’s and spill out onto the footpath all the way down Oxford Street. By now I was a seasoned drinker and would knock back countless Black Russians (Strongbow cider with a dark mixer) as I played, and the audience would sway along to my songs. It really looked like a scene from a Toulouse-Lautrec painting.
I slept with a number of girls during this time, but unlike my ocker mates, I always fell in love. I fell hard for one of the barmaids from French’s. Predictably, I ended up moving in with her, into a lovely little bedsit in Bondi. Her brother would bring her gifts of marijuana, and we enjoyed wine, sex and music, taken in that order. My songwriting was developing nicely; I had a wealth of material and inspiration to draw from.
I worked with a New York native, a guitarist named Roy. He was married to a stunning woman from New Mexico called Linda, who looked like a mix of Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. They had moved to Australia as two hippie refugees; when I met them they were living in Annandale in Sydney’s inner west, but they needed to be out in the country, not battling the cockroaches in a grotty dump. Roy and Linda and their young son moved up to Byron Bay, searching for idyllic respite.
I wrote ‘Blue Bay Blues’ about these wonderful idealists; to this day it’s one of my most requested songs, so I guess many people can relate. (I changed Linda’s name to ‘Janie’ in the song; I felt they deserved some privacy.) I continued to keep in touch with them as they drifted in and out of my life.
After Roy left, I managed to put a great band together with a few of the best musicians in town. We mainly played a residency near Wollongong for many months; not only did it pay the rent, but we built up a staunchly loyal following on the NSW South Coast, which continues today.
We played to probably 300 to 400 people each night. The guy who owned the restaurant/wine bar was a racing car driver in his spare time and used to drive me back to Sydney at alarming speeds, at all hours. Sometimes we’d play a few nights in a row, and would stay in a nice house overlooking the ocean. It was a great escape from the pace of Sydney.
Back in Sydney, French’s had become established as the premier venue for credible rock and blues music. Every night the joint was jumping, packed to the rafters with drunken music lovers. Locals the Foreday Riders belted out the best blues this side of Chicago, and Glyn Mason’s band Home played the finest swamp rock outside of Muscle Shoals, the legendary studio in Alabama.
I was having the time of my life hanging out with the many beautiful girls who frequented the place and getting blind drunk with my mates. And it was at French’s where perhaps my best-known song came to life.
At the time my best mate was Colin Vercoe, a manager for Festival’s music publishing department. We rented a house in Rose Bay. After the poor sales on Prussian Blue, Festival had given me the classic ultimatum: ‘Come up with a hit single or be damned!’ In other words, no hit and they’d drop me from the label.
Colin was girl crazy and had the largest collection of Penthouse magazines I had ever seen. All he could think about was girls and music (in that order). One balmy summer evening in 1975, Colin and I were sitting in the front window of French’s, gazing wistfully at the many pretty girls strolling down Oxford Street.
Our conversation was adolescent and chauvinistic; we could think of nothing else than trying to get laid. But Colin was the A&R man for Festival’s publishing company, and he laid on me the most impassioned rave about making this one important compromise with the bosses at Festival Records.
‘You can write a hit,’ he told me.
We made our drunken way home to Rose Bay, first stocking up at a liquor store. Colin retired to his room, and I sat up all night with my guitar and tape deck. I had music in my head and I was determined to get this song out. I continued drinking quite heavily. We lived in the next street along from The Avenue, Rose Bay, and I had been having carnal thoughts about the ‘girls on the avenue’.
Colin and I lived on Chaleyer Street in Rose Bay, and the next street along was called—you guessed it—The Avenue. Just around the corner, about halfway up The Avenue, a number of very pretty girls shared a house together. Colin and I were always plotting how we could chat them up one day. As corny as it sounds, that is exactly what the song is about. ‘Girls on The Avenue’ (Rose Bay). Get it?
Abuse of any drug, especially alcohol, creates this chaos in your head, and if you read the lyrics to ‘Girls on the Avenue’ you’ll notice that my train of thought gets derailed, but the poetic metaphors were coming thick and fast. (I was horrified a year or so later when a lobby group of hookers came to my gig in Adelaide and treated me like some revolutionary poet. It took me a while to understand how anybody could read allusions to prostitutes in my song. However precious I may have been, I was eventually converted when I started receiving handsome royalties for ‘Girls on the Avenue’.)
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Colin woke up in the morning to the strains of me playing ‘Girls on the Avenue’. He was so enthralled that he started driving me nuts. That day Colin went to work and started his ‘Girls’ campaign. Unfortunately, his wild enthusiasm worked against us in a perverse sort of way.
You see, some record company people have a phobia about anything that may have eluded them; they need a sense of ownership. Festival seemed determined to hate my song and with each A&R meeting they vetoed ‘Girls’ on the grounds that the arrangement was haphazard and the song didn’t make sense. Colin grew increasingly agitated. I have to mention, too, that Festival had just passed up the chance to grab the catalogue of up-and-comer Bruce Springsteen, soon to be a major star, for all of $200, so their radar was way off.
Richard Batchens stood by me and agreed to record the song on Festival’s brand new, cutting-edge 24-track console. We recorded no fewer than seventeen guitar tracks on ‘Girls on the Avenue’, way more than the standard. We went a little crazy.
Richard set out to become Australia’s answer to Phil Spector, the master of ‘The Wall of Sound’, and he was not mucking around. We had embarked on what I think was perhaps the most arduous recording exercise undertaken by anyone in this country. Every note, every beat on that recording is as close to perfect as we could hope without using any studio tricks. Richard would keep me in the studio for sixteen, seventeen hours a day, ‘do
ubling’ guitar tracks mercilessly. I would sometimes have to tune my guitar for hours before he would even consent to hitting ‘record’.
The recording sessions never seemed to end; after the seventeen guitar tracks, Richard had me doing vocal backings ad nauseam, stacking harmony upon harmony until he had a wall of my voices to play with when he came to ‘mix’ the record. Tony Ansell, who played on all my early records, was a godsend; he was like a human keyboard sampler. I’d sing abstract ideas at Tony and he would interpret exactly what I wanted, much of it inspired by Al Kooper’s keyboard work on early Bob Dylan recordings, including ‘Like a Rolling Stone’.
I must admit that while I thought I might lose my mind making ‘Girls’, its quality is proof that we could make records the equal of anyone in the world. Forty years later, if you’re a lover of analogue recordings and long for that ‘seventies sound’, it’s better than many records made today.
Unfortunately, Festival’s A&R committee still couldn’t hear it. Dismayed, Richard, Colin and I went on some shocking drinking binges. To make matters worse, I had set a Banjo Paterson poem to music, and had approached a couple of the Dingoes, a great local country-rock band, and some members of Country Radio to record it with me. It was nice enough, and the Dingoes were great players; I figured it would have been a solid album track. But the A&R committee, in all their wisdom, decided that this was going to be a huge hit. They scheduled my next release: ‘Travelling Down the Castlereagh’ as the single, with ‘Girls on the Avenue’ as the B-side.
Colin had had enough. He’d been offered a job at the new Sydney radio station 2JJ, as their first music programmer, which he was agonising over. Now, however, he had his mind made up for him. He ambushed an A&R meeting in Festival’s boardroom, demanding to know why they continued to reject ‘Girls on the Avenue’.
The Best Years of Our Lives Page 7