The Best Years of Our Lives

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The Best Years of Our Lives Page 8

by Richard Clapton


  ‘There’s no chorus,’ he was told. ‘It’s not strong enough.’

  Colin exploded and put his fist right through one of the plywood panels in the boardroom.

  ‘I fucking quit!’ he yelled.

  A week or two later, Colin took the Double J job. I wasn’t receiving much airplay on ‘Travelling Down the Castlereagh’, but heard a few upbeat comments about ‘Girls on the Avenue’. Because Colin had been given carte blanche by his new bosses, he took it upon himself to play ‘Girls on the Avenue’ relentlessly. In those first weeks of transmission, everybody was listening to the new radio station—suddenly established pop stations such as 2SM in Sydney and Melbourne’s 3XY started to play ‘Girls’, putting it into ‘high rotation’.

  Everything happened so fast, as it does in pop music. Much to Festival’s chagrin, ‘Girls on the Avenue’ zoomed to the top of the singles charts in early 1975—not bad for a B-side! (The album of the same name followed in April and stayed on the charts for several months.) I needed to get a band together and assembled the rhythm section from the ‘Girls’ recording sessions—Dave Ovenden on drums and Brian Bethell on bass—and my guru, Red, on guitar. I went from unknown hippie folk singer to pop star overnight; I flew in planes for the first time in my life, and stayed in all the nice hotels.

  Soon after, the band and I were playing at the notorious Station Hotel in Melbourne’s Prahran, ground zero for AC/DC. We were hot—as was the weather—and the place was packed. A couple of the guys from the Dingoes got up on stage with us, and the crowd went troppo. A few inebriated girls jumped up on stage and the dudes in the audience (a peculiar mix of hippies and ockers) were chanting, ‘Show us your tits!’ Some of the more intrepid girls did just that and, of course, brought the house down. (I met one of these girls years later, when she was a successful TV producer. She told me that the heat and the booze drove her a little crazy that night at the Station.)

  Despite my early struggles, I was fortunate that I came on the Australian scene when I did. This was the era of Digger and Go-Set magazines and the fledgling Australian Rolling Stone. Local music was being taken more seriously. There were great venues, including the T.F. Much Ballroom in Melbourne and the Bondi Lifesaver in Sydney, Brisbane’s Cloudland Ballroom, the Marryatville in Adelaide and the Sandgroper in Perth. The bills were filled by such greats as Country Radio and Blackfeather, Spectrum and Chain.

  I began developing personal relationships with some of the music writers. Colin Talbot was a fine author in his own right; Gary Hutchison was a great (published) poet; Dave Dawson was the larrikin. It was a rich time. Further down the track, this great Australian heritage was kept alive and well by the likes of Ed St John, Toby Creswell, Glenn A. Baker and Stuart Coupe, plus photographers and artists like Graeme Webber and Ian McCausland who lived with us musicians, indulged in all our excesses and truly understood the life and the music. Graphic artists were also an integral part of the local music scene.

  David N. Pepperell, a true Beat writer and simply the most flamboyant character I’ve ever befriended, was probably best known as ‘Doctor Pepper’. He had borrowed $2000 with his mate Keith Glass and together they started a record store in Melbourne called Archie and Jugheads. David was well on his way to becoming a millionaire before he was thirty, and he was a little like Dudley Moore’s character in the film Arthur (although some people have likened me to Arthur, too). He would work in his shop all day, then dine in expensive restaurants with an array of beautiful women, drink copious amounts of fine red wine, ingest a smorgasbord of substances and go looking for the best bands in town. Writing as Doctor Pepper, he was the most feared and loathed critic in all Australia, and a great writer, to boot. Luckily, we became good friends.

  Mostly, Dr Pepper and I hung out with Mark Barnes and his wife Morag, who ran the Station Hotel. These people were real-life Kerouac characters, who’d imbibe vast quantities of substances and stay up for days, raving manifestos and opinions. Passion dripped from the walls, and insanity ran in the family. We would rant about Anaïs Nin, Bob Dylan, Pharoah Sanders, Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath.

  One night Pepperell was in such a drunken rage that he got into his Jaguar, revved it up and drove through the walls of the Station. On another night I kicked my girlfriend’s car and hurled a brick through her window because I thought she was having an affair with someone. (I was right, by the way.) Once, while on a bender, Pepperell dropped acid, took some speed and caught a red-eye to LA. He went straight to Anaïs Nin’s house and demanded that she speak with him. According to David, he ended up staying there for days.

  Dr Pepper had no fear of the big pop acts of the day. His behaviour towards these bands and their record company people kept us in stitches. Pepperell revelled in singling out these sacred cows and ripping them to shreds. Everything that the record companies’ marketing departments hyped, Dr Pepper would unravel in a half page in Juke magazine. Ditto Dave Dawson. Pepperell and Dawson were living dangerously. They spoke out loud—nay, shouted at the top of their voices—about forbidden things that were supposed to be sacrosanct. The dangerous thing about Dr Pepper is that he never had any skeletons in his closet. He was weirder than the lot of them.

  Back in Sydney, life was pretty great, and I was having a ball. I was still playing with Red, a strict disciplinarian who would not take crap from anyone. Red sacked Brian Bethell in the middle of playing ‘Girls on the Avenue’ at an RSL club—by song’s end he was never seen again. We found a very young bass player in Canberra, Michael Hegerty, who replaced Bethell. Michael was to become my musical partner for fifteen years.

  I’d also taken up with a manager, who’d been introduced to me by Frank Stivala, my agent. When Michael first joined my band, the musicians were only scraping by on $25 to $50 a week; we were all too poor to pay rent or buy food or drinks. Thankfully we had a plethora of fiercely loyal fans.

  Michael was so naive. The manager would pay him his meagre wage, then immediately ask him to invest in the band’s future—so he’d give his wage straight back to pay off band debts. Michael fell for this time after time despite Red and me lecturing him relentlessly.

  By now, Red had gone as far as he could go with my band; he was simply too old to be dragged mercilessly around the country, playing as much as three times a day and driving from Perth to Brisbane.

  My band became increasingly unstable; Michael was the only constant. Michael and I formed one line-up with drummer Ace Follington and spent a very debauched but pleasant couple of weeks living in a beach house at Surfers Paradise, playing a residency at the Chevron Hotel.

  We had a guitarist who was moving quite large quantities of hashish, which he hid under his mother-in-law’s house. The entire band was pretty bent. The guitarist made up a punishment called ‘thirteen hits for the aunty mate’. This meant that if a player in the band made too many mistakes, or screwed up in some way, he’d have to take thirteen tokes on a hash joint. I was forced to endure this punishment one night and spent the gig asking Michael to guide me through all the chords to my own songs, while the audience looked on, laughing. I ended the night by stripping off most of my clothes and auctioning each item.

  Frankly, I was kept afloat by the unswerving critical support I received; I always seemed to be either in the press or on the radio. Sometimes both. That’s something for which I’ll be forever grateful.
r />   The Richard Clapton Band had built a very solid following in Melbourne, so in 1976 we decided to relocate there. Diane had recently joined as a backing vocalist, and Tony and drummer Iain McLennan played regularly with Ross Wilson and Mike Rudd’s Ariel, both of whom were Melbourne based. Six of us, including our roadie Graham, took over a one-bedroom flat in Darling Street, South Yarra. The place was ludicrously small, yet we could barely manage the rent, let alone buy food or beer. Someone would walk down to the local markets and buy as much food as we could afford (usually some vegies) and this would sustain the whole band, week in and week out. We scrounged enough work to help us survive, but it was tough.

  We became industry outsiders, and were ostracised for a number of reasons. My rebellious attitude towards the corporate side of the music industry probably didn’t help. We closed ranks and found solidarity with the Dingoes and Ariel and many of the other Melbourne bands.

  I stumbled across a gig at the Kingston Hotel. The manager was a huge fan of mine; he agreed to let us play there and collect money on the door; some of our girlfriends helped collect the cash from punters—at least in theory, anyway. The first gig was fantastic as a musical event and the bar filled up very fast.

  I thought I was well on my way to establishing an alternative music world—the place was really jumping. Ross Wilson, Ross Hannaford and Gary Young—all members of the legendary Daddy Cool—and guys from the Dingoes and Ariel got up and played with us. The camaraderie was fantastic.

  We were charging something like $5 entrance, and we figured that we’d collect a couple of grand at the door. Alas, there was no money; everyone in the room was a musician, a partner of a musician, some local industry personality or well-known ligger—so no one felt obliged to pay. The publican, who did a roaring trade, sympathised and served us a raging torrent of free beer.

  We persevered, playing the Kingston once a week. Such great Melbourne bands as The Sports and Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons eventually turned the room into a legendary venue.

  It was good while it lasted, a real blast—and these were some lively times. Groupies were rife, not just in Melbourne but across the entire nation, from Cairns to Fremantle. There were thousands of girls who partied very hard with well-known rock’n’roll bands out on the road 365 nights a year. Had I been more lecherous, I could have had sex with many girls. Amazing women, like the immortal Lithgow Leaper, performed astounding sexual feats with every band that came into town.

  The ‘gang bang’ was the most common sexual practice. One or two girls would allow the whole band to penetrate every orifice; the more modest girls would take on each band member one by one—the even more polite would insist on only one band member in the room at a time.

  I moved into a flat in Melbourne with a new girlfriend some days afterwards and we embarked on a wonderful voyage of sexual adventure. The weeks turned into months and she began to open up more and more; she’d even show me secret photographs. I think that this was my first foray into the Jungian ‘dark side’, at least sexually speaking. We both shared a propensity for barbiturates and beer, and invented highly erotic sexual games that would sometimes last for hours. I learnt that a powerful imagination is the key to eroticism.

  Unfortunately, the booze could turn things violent. This is the only relationship I have been in that sometimes got a little ugly. We were both guilty of smashing up the house, the furniture and each other. However, from this quagmire emerged some of my best songs to date, which appeared on my next album, Mainstreet Jive, released in August 1976. Songs like ‘Need a Visionary’, ‘Suit Yourself ’ and ‘Kickin’ the Moon Around’ eclipsed anything I’d written on the Girls on the Avenue LP. I’ll always regard Mainstreet Jive as my Melbourne album.

  While in Melbourne I became close friends with Chris Stockley from the Dingoes. He and his girlfriend Jenny lived in a large, rambling house in Kew, with various members of Ariel. The house was the scene of some of the best parties I’ve ever attended. The crème de la crème of Melbourne’s music community would show up for heavy drinking and partying sessions that could sometimes continue for days. David N. Pepperell and Dave Dawson were always there, too. We all shared a predilection for the great new songwriters, people like Danny O’Keefe (whose song ‘The Road’ was covered by Jackson Browne), Lowell George from the band Little Feat, Randy Newman, Rickie Lee Jones and Joni Mitchell. Our huge record collections became a sort of community library. We soaked it all up, but remained insatiable.

  Together we lived out this wild bohemian fantasy. The future powerbrokers of Australian music, like Michael Chugg and Frank Stivala, also lived this life to the full. Born from this hedonistic decadence was a true camaraderie, which has endured in an odd sort of way. Various artists and photographers were also in the mix.

  While on the subject of hedonism, I cannot speak about the exploits of various acts first-hand, but the stories of a certain Polaroid collection of nubile nymphets in all states of sexual debauchery are not just legend, but true.

  Then there was AC/DC. Their singer Bon Scott used to show up at a lot of our gigs. Initially I flattered myself that he was simply a fan. Well, that may have been true, but after a while I realised that it was actually Diane, my back-up singer, that he was even more interested in. Much to my chagrin, Bon fell in love with Diane, and the whole situation became uncomfortable.

  When he realised he had no shot with her, Bon started turning up to my gigs totally wasted; he’d jump up on stage and sing very badly. It was so embarrassing my band had to try and persuade him not to show up anymore. One night in a suburban Melbourne gig, Bon was so wasted he could hardly stand up, but he stubbornly insisted that he wanted to get up and sing. Recently, someone told me they’d seen Bon fall right off the stage at one of my shows—this might have been the same night. It was all a bit sad. Bon was a truly nice human being, and one of our great lyricists and rock poets, with a fragile sensitivity that others didn’t seem to notice.

  Another remarkable thing about the Melbourne scene was the amount of work. We could fill the Station Hotel in Prahran on a Saturday afternoon, play a 10 p.m. gig that night, then play a third show at Bananas on the Esplanade at St Kilda at 2 a.m. The Station Hotel shows were legendary. Mark Barnes and Morag, who ran the pub, were—and I say this with all respect and affection—hardcore drinkers who seemed to attract fellow travellers like magnets. At these Saturday afternoon sessions, band and audience would drink themselves into a stupor, then all head back to Mark and Morag’s house for an after-gig party. This would happen almost every weekend. If I was playing, the Dingoes, Ariel or other mates would get up and have a ‘blow’—and vice versa. The drinking and partying was like a merry-go-round. But it did have to end eventually.

  Festival Records, meanwhile, were asking me to record a third album. I’d patched up many of my differences with Richard Batchens, and was keen to get back into the studio. I was very excited about the songs I’d written in Melbourne. Like I said, I hear Melbourne 1976 throughout Mainstreet Jive; it still stirs up memories of that time for me. I also hear my American influences, people like Lonnie Mack, Little Feat, David Allen Coe, Danny O’Keefe, Randy Newman and some of the other great music we soaked up at the big house in Kew.

  Back north, in 1976, Michael Hegerty and I based ourselves very close to the Bondi Lifesaver, Sydney’s liveliest venue. Michael moved in with his sister and his gi
rlfriend, while I found a pokey little place a couple of blocks away. I swear, the place was so small you couldn’t even swing a cat without bashing it to death on all four walls. Michael and I became regulars at the Lifesaver, which was fast becoming known as the ‘swap’ (as in ‘wife swap’), for reasons that will become clear.

  I could never imagine another venue or a scene quite like the Lifesaver again. AC/DC ruled supreme, Dragon, Rose Tattoo, Mi-Sex and the young infant bands, Midnight Oil and Cold Chisel—fresh out of Adelaide—were on the rise. Every night a truly great band would be playing at the Lifesaver. You could see Cold Chisel on a Tuesday night, Air Supply on Friday and on Saturday, AC/ DC. Or perhaps Midnight Oil, Sherbet and Rose Tattoo. On the weekends the place was always packed way past legal limits.

  Bondi was like a village, crawling with musicians. You couldn’t walk a block without bumping into someone from a well-known band, a roadie or a rock journo. This created a fantastic camaraderie; I’d go out for coffee, or buy fish and chips down on Bondi Beach, then embark on a pub crawl that would last for ten or so hours, before ending up back at the Lifesaver just before midnight to catch the headliner. It was always scary playing the Lifesaver—not only was the room usually packed to the rafters, it was also full of my peers.

  Inside the venue was an enormous fish tank that created a border halfway up the room, dividing it into the punters’ section down in front of the stage, and the ultra cool VIP section up the back. The VIP section was raised a few feet so you could see the stage. It was always a shitfight getting in back there. On some nights it was less appealing, usually when it was patronised by some Countdown pop act, so Michael and I would hang out in the courtyard. We’d often bump into Phil Rudd, AC/DC’s drummer, or one of the Chisel guys. We knew those supercilious little pop stars in the VIP area wouldn’t be around for long.

 

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