by Tim Rogers
There are still remnants of my old habits and obsessions, but these ones – like washing hands often, carrying my own sweet-smelling microphone and disappearing for long hours – can now be passed off as little eccentricities. This is one of the lovely benefits of middle age, another of which is giving very little of a goddamn what others think of you.
Last week I left my office on Swanston Street around two in the afternoon, bought myself a baguette and a half bottle of beaujolais and went to sit on the banks of the Yarra. I felt no need to inspect the baguette, didn’t strain the wine, and the floating bits of cork that swam around the rim of my glass bothered me not one bit. I just enjoyed the tastes. And I just enjoyed the view – looking around me and nowhere in particular, happy to be obsessing about not very much at all, least of all phantom poisoners.
It wasn’t very rock’n’roll, but it felt very much like freedom indeed.
Bagatelles I
Don Walker leans across the aisle of the plane from his seat one row in front of mine, up the pointy end, and, in his unhurried drawl that could or should be the voice of a deity, asks if I am a Paul Keating fan.
After my reply in the affirmative, Don looks at me and leans closer. ‘Let me tell you one thing about Paul Keating.’
I can feel every passenger’s neck, all hundred of them, craning at uncomfortable angles to eavesdrop. Don Walker, ‘The Don’, one of the greatest songwriters to ever draw breath, is about to tell a personal story about Paul Keating.
Rusty and I excuse ourselves from the table at an Olive Garden restaurant somewhere in Pennsylvania. We have blown off a show in New Jersey because only on arrival had it become apparent that we were booked on an all-metal bill, and as much as a night of metal would’ve been super-unreal, we’ve been on tour for weeks and having cans thrown at us for being wussy pop-rockers isn’t as tempting as some drinks and a day off in Philadelphia before our own show tomorrow night.
Each needing a cubicle to perform the more dramatic of toilet duties, we go to our separate stalls, too giddily happy from wine and a free night to be self-conscious. Within seconds we must both become aware of the music filtering through the restaurant and bathrooms. As ‘Strangers in the Night’ by Sinatra oozes into the chorus, we concurrently abort the mission. Unable to perform any ablutions, we leave arm-in-arm, crying with laughter.
Doo-bee-doo-bee-doo.
Around 12.45 pm, in a Port Macquarie shopping mall, contemplating a haircut, I start getting nervous because I haven’t heard from her. And though she worked last night and will be having a well-deserved sleep-in, I worry I’ve made another stupid late-night call and misunderstood something she’s said. As I fumble my phone out of my back pocket to check the last call, it vibrates with a little trill, and I see the preview of a new message on the screen. It’s from her, and the first word is ‘SWEETHEART!’ The day can proceed.
Davey and I are playing at a benefit for the family of a man who has committed suicide. The aim is to raise awareness for mental health issues, and also some money for the family. There are hundreds of people in attendance. The deceased man’s kids are beautiful and his wife is so graceful it’s difficult to meet her eye. We’re down to play after some speeches – as we begin, the previously hushed crowd erupts into loud and jovial talk and laughter. We play regardless, and only two or three listen to our half-hour set. As I’m packing up my guitar, keen to leave, a drunk lady accosts me demanding to know why we didn’t play ‘Heavy Heart’.
‘We just did, ma’am, last song.’
On the walk back to my place, Davey and I tabulate the photos we were asked to take with people after the show, and arrive at forty-eight between us. The maths of that bewilders me.
The van is hurtling along the Pacific Highway after a gig in Newcastle. Leesa, our tour manager, has bought a slab for the two-hour drive, bless her. Rusty takes command of the stereo and educates us on his fresh compilation of doo-wop singles. His knowledge and passion for music on the margins is irresistible. After an hour and many beers, I crave hearing Queen’s much-maligned disco record, Hot Space, as does Davey. Before the first verse of opening track ‘Staying Power’ is finished, Russ puts headphones on and I can’t help feeling a little hurt. I still hunt for his approval. Maybe Hot Space was a bad choice.
At the awards show I see an old friend and, as I approach to congratulate her on her recent wedding, she turns and notices me. Her face twists with such bitter distaste that I’m stunned. She grabs the arm of a hanger-on and turns away, while I do a rapid inventory of how I might have offended her. With my mouth hanging open, my arm is then grabbed by Jimmy Barnes, who hugs me in the way he always has. He has the energy of a sixteen-year-old in the throes of a blessed adolescence.
‘Ey there, young fella!’
He’s forgiven me for a dozen sloppy nights.
In the hotel in Margaret River, the first thing I do when I wake up is look at the bottom of the door for a slip of paper, like the ones that used to indicate phone messages. I’ve been doing that every morning for two decades even though I haven’t received a note this way for twelve years, the last one telling me to come home immediately.
On the Gold Coast doing a Stones show I meet with my sister, Gabrielle, and her husband, Peter, who was a very close friend of mine in high school. Their verbosity and theatricality blend with my nerves, building slowly but surely to give me the energy to do the show in an hour, where I will sweat so much while singing and moving that in the dressing room after the show a puddle will surround my chair as I recall the beginnings of their relationship, and a fog will surround my head as I look in the mirror.
I do a footy discussion show with North fullback Scott Thompson, one of my very favourite players, to promote a game in Hobart. As I drive home I remember too late to mention to him that we have something in common: we’ve both been in the terrifying grip of a Barry Hall headlock.
Over the rim of my book I watch two older men at the end of the bar. From where I sit I don’t have to crane my neck, just tilt it as if in contemplation, which is entirely appropriate for reading so I don’t feel as if I’m intruding. Taking a book to a pub is sometimes like asking for trouble. I once read an interview with Alex Turner, songwriter for Sheffield rock band Arctic Monkeys, who said he would write lyrics into his phone lest he got assaulted for using pen and paper in his local pubs. What a sad state of affairs.
The two men are eating what looks like Roast of the Day. Incandescent pumpkin and glistening pork crackling fight for attention like they’re the two prettiest girls at a school dance. The men are both standing, complementing the meal with red wine, in glasses as cavernous as gorges. I wonder if Saturday’s roast at the Hope and Anchor is a ritual or if they are travellers like me. Something about the newness of one gentleman’s cardigan (navy blue, collared with British racing green) suggests they’re tourists; locals wouldn’t dress so crisply for a standing Saturday roast, right?
Possibly in their mid-sixties, both are trim and handsome, one like Rex Harrison with pinched eyes and a widow’s peak and the other with a broader face as if Ernest Borgnine had a good twenty years as a district leg spinner.
Although there’s no overt affection from either, their easy manner with each other doesn’t suggest work mates or family relations. There’s no exaggerated laughter or tense silences. I think I see Ernest garnish Rex’s plate with salt and pepper with autogenetic familiarity, but that may be wish-fulfilment.
Punctuation
How do you greet someone who was, willingly or not, the cause of so much punctuation in your little story? Not only commas and full stops, but ellipses, hyphens and a lot of question marks. For a version of teenage romance, though, there weren’t many exclamation marks. The importance and significance of meeting someone when I was sixteen who created more brackets than exclamations is probably why we can write to each other now and say: ‘Hullo [sic], I’m looking up at a tree full of parakeets, wanna talk?’
Terese changed me. Although peti
te in appearance, her influence on me as a teenager was both huge and profound. For years I blamed her for the tectonic plate-shifting in my head that seemed to conclude with a dull full stop. I blamed her ambiguities and elusiveness. Her indecision, her perspicacity. I resented hearing about her movements and successes after we left school; the open-armed acceptance with which she greeted the world that had become scary to me.
When we say goodbye these days I always make sure to say ‘damn you and thank you’. I mean the thank you, the damning is just for symmetry and humour. But how should I greet her?
Oakhill College is a Jesuit school in Castle Hill, thirty kilometres north-west of Sydney. Our family had moved from Adelaide when I was fourteen due to Dad’s work in the road-paving industry, but for a few years I silently believed it was because I’d been busted drinking wine and smoking pot during football practice at my Adelaide school, and that the shame I’d brought on the family had banished us from the state. I resolved to keep my head down and out of trouble.
Castle Hill these days is a sprawling upper-middle-class suburb with low-density, free-standing housing that covers a huge area of softly sloping hills. For three decades it has been blessed with the presence of the Hillsong Church and its enterprises on the outskirts of the suburb, looming over an expanse of housing like the palace of the Wizard of Oz, and with, to the uninitiated like myself, a similar benign mystery.
We moved there in 1983. The streets were quiet and it wasn’t possible to view any goings-on inside houses, as they were all set far back from the road and secured behind trees and foliage. My bedroom had a window through which I could escape to dense bushland that came up to our back gate. I’d get to know my way around the suburb in time, but, because there were so few footy ovals, my focus was on a bedroom to play guitar in, and a window to jump through if I got busted again.
My parents had very different ways of reacting to my transgressions. Mum would get ragingly angry to a point just shy of physical violence but with enough verbal fury to flambé my eyebrows, whereas Dad, who customarily returned home a day or more after any indiscretion so I had plenty of time to worry, would knock on my bedroom door and gently say, ‘Reckon it’s about time for a haircut, Timmo.’ He’d set up a high stool in the middle of our driveway and, in full view of any passing neighbours, snip a few lengths from my nape, then pause with the scissors near my ear. ‘So what’s all this shit about, huh?’
They really had the good cop–bad cop thing down and were so successful that by the time I was sixteen I took a break from adolescent rebellion to be left alone for a while. But only for a while. Not having the seditious spirit of my brother or close friends, who were already efficient petty criminals and enthusiastic drinkers and drug takers, I was looking for something to make my own, but hedging my bets until something won out.
The mix tapes I’d been given by my friend Sherman Lee when I left Adelaide made more sense than anything. His parents owned a successful restaurant and his access to records and blank tapes matched his oracular way of delivering exactly the right combination of songs at the perfect time. His Buddha-like smile belied a street wisdom that may have all been for effect, but those tapes were runic to me. He made cassette covers out of cereal boxes, gluing pictures of the rock bands that were filling my ears and my imagination to the grey cardboard insides. Not having access to anything visual apart from these few magazine snippets from Sherman’s tapes and two copies of Creem, my visions of what this music could do was limitless. Sex, violence, weeping openly in vast psychedelic deserts, careening on a winged dragon, sex with dragons in deserts – I was on fire.
One afternoon after repeated listenings to The Stones and The Clash and Stiff Little Fingers, I snuck into a party a few blocks from home to celebrate the start of Year Eleven and gulped from a bottle of Southern Comfort. The confluence of my already febrile mien with a house full of combustible teenage energy was too much and the party ended quickly for me when I threatened to slice a male classmate’s throat with a shard from a freshly broken bottle. He had failed to share my enthusiasm for the tapes I wanted to play and was a rugby player with a cute smile. John. We became friends after a while, in the way that a calamitous experience can be a conduit to understanding, and we shared some confidences after I apologised, but that smile of his always got to me. I was covetous of features I was trying to convince myself were not worth coveting. The music was supposed to be where I sublimated all that envious bullshit. My imagination was engorging like a kaleidoscopic balloon but it could still be popped by one prick, and I was possessed of an unrighteous anger and the thumb-curling belief that others were getting through easier than me. Soon after threatening him and being ‘asked’ to leave the party, word got around and I was ‘asked’ to consider options outside of academia and ‘asked’ not to return to Oakhill.
After only a few days, the realities of a working life beyond part-time pizza delivery became stark and I pleaded with the principal, a bantam woman with a sedate demeanour far more intimidating than any saturnine Jesuit Brother, that I be allowed to return under strict probation. It wasn’t solely the fear of being unskilled and unemployed that urged me to try and take study seriously – a more imposing presence had tethered me to the desk.
I’d been in co-ed schools in Kalgoorlie, Perth and Adelaide and had treated girls with a lack of empathy and understanding because (for the most part) they didn’t love cricket and football like I did. But when I hit fourteen and discovered how rock’n’roll music could rearrange all your sensibilities and open up a lot of possibilities, I became friends with some girls in my Adelaide class – one dug the films of Gene Kelly and Bette Davis and wore a cashmere cardigan, and another had heard of the Sex Pistols and chewed gum in a way that made me believe she was the best kind of trouble.
Then we made the move to Sydney.
Years Nine and Ten at Oakhill were boys only. Any time that wasn’t dedicated to cricket team try-outs or getting an Australian Rules footy team off the ground in a very strong rugby-cultured school was spent in a music room with my two new friends Pete and Paul, who were both wildly talented drummers of conflicting styles. We’d attempt to decipher Stones, Aerosmith and Van Halen riffs while waiting for the weekend, when we would hang out in the playground at nearby Castle Hill High and drink beer and smoke bongs made from Orchy orange juice bottles until one of us threw up, or dropped his pants in a display of priapic bravura before scurrying off home to throw up.
The books I read after school were mostly music hagiographies or guitar chord guides, although I do remember taking off with one of Dad’s P.J. O’Rourke books, Republican Party Reptile, and an autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy, a President Nixon crony. These were books with smarmy looking American gentlemen on the covers and I hoped they’d provide deeper explorations of the flimsy political education I’d received from Mad and Cracked comics. No such elucidation occurred. And, for fuck’s sake, they were Republicans. I stuck to Mad and the occasional National Lampoon. No novels had touched me yet, no poetry. If only Dad had preferred Philip Roth or Kurt Vonnegut – though, just as the fury of words from those other American writers had made no lasting impression, I doubt any pennies would have dropped to me from them either. I searched far and wide for a copy of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita on the advice of Mick Jagger via the lyrics for ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, but it would have been like fertilising a carpet. Words then were purely functional. You asked for something – you hoped you got it. And I guess my heart needed to be battered and bled before anything could hope to nourish it.
Given my druthers, all significant moments should be accompanied by a soundtrack. My first dental surgery was accompanied by The Stones’ ‘Start Me Up’. My first methodical attempt at masturbation was assisted by Led Zeppelin’s ‘Custard Pie’. Leaving home for the first time was ‘Bastards of Young’ by The Replacements, and when I found out I was going to be a dad, it was ‘All Things Must Pass’ by George Harrison. An unintentionally ‘classic ro
ck’ playlist.
The night when I spoke to the girls who would drain my heart, the Violent Femmes was playing – and I wasn’t happy about it. It was a party, the first one I’d been able to run off to after returning to school somewhat contrite. Year Eleven was by that time in full swing: there had been parties and burgeoning relationships, suspensions and expulsions, all while I burrowed away at my homework without vim or fervour, just a dull persistence. The party was in a backyard and I went with Pete and Paul, whose desire to inject any social situation with a high dose of farce and tommyrot made them highly enjoyable and unpredictable company. Among the mix of awkwardness and swagger at parties like this, they could be counted on to trap that energy and twist it into something theatrical, as if making animal shapes out of balloons.
That night the air felt different. It was like the smell of school had changed from stale bread, squashed banana and flatulence to incense and clove cigarettes.
I was wearing a brown corduroy jacket nicked from my dad, which I thought resembled something Gene Clark of The Byrds would have worn, though Dad’s burly frame was such that the jacket hung off me like a burlap sack covering a hat stand. I had bought a pair of black drainpipe trousers the year before, in a similar paean to The Byrds, that took a few months of saved wages from Pizza Hut and were worth every dollar for any second they diverted attention away from my acne-splashed face. Hair was of no fixed style. No matter how I tousled it to resemble Keith Richards circa ’81, with wincing hindsight it always ended up a polite mix of Australian fast bowler Glenn McGrath and a bowl of cornflakes.