Detours

by Tim Rogers

I remember these moments when I introduce Davey to the Gallagher brothers, or Dave Gilmour, or Anita Pallenberg; he reciprocates by calling me when he’s in a limo with Richard Thompson, or rehearsing with Robyn Hitchcock, or having a late night in London with Julian Barratt. He never does this boastfully, there’s always an undercurrent of joy there, though he did seem a little nervous when one night a few years back I called him to ask him out for a drink and he replied that he couldn’t meet me at the Tote because he was in Copenhagen, playing guitar for Crowded House. Clearly I had not been paying close enough attention to just how in-demand he was becoming. Of course I was proud, but I’m pretty sure I was fearful too.

  We room together on tour because we have compatible temperaments – goofiness or cogitation taking the lead without any prompting – and a similar approach to entertainment. We don’t need a lot of it. Records, a book, a few beers and maybe a walk around a new town. I don’t believe we’ve ever uttered the word bored. There’s always something to natter over. Past, present, future or pot-boiling fabrication. When I stopped, thankfully, treating him like an apprentice, we were free to gallivant like musketeers.

  Meth wasn’t great for our friendship, when three days of intense brotherhood gave over to three days ostracised from each other as a mental and emotional audit was in process. At the end of one particular adventure, Davey lifted me above his head and dropped me on my face in my tiny little East St Kilda one-room apartment. He’s sixty kilograms wet-through. We agreed the drug wasn’t perhaps in our best interests. Similarly, synthetic opiates were kept under lock and key after we burned our throats from vomiting and buggered up shows. We have been chastised for squeezing sachets of mustard and tomato sauce onto an otherwise empty plate – the only ‘solids’ that had been seen to pass our lips in days. My defence to this was that we were ‘excitable and distracted’ and, I guess, probably high. The truth is that Davey’s and my partnership exists on affection and absurdity.

  At a fallow stretch of yesterday, between sound check and show, when there was no opportunity to leave the backstage area, we spent an hour concocting names for uncomfortable human moments in the style of Robert Crumbs’s Keep on Truckin’ animated icons. If Truckin’ was a way of jus’ gettin’ along, I suggested that just gettin’ along when one had defecated in one’s trousers should bear the nomenclature Stoolin’, and that when continuing to walk with an erection, Toolin’ would be the appropriate term. Keep on Spoolin’ was the finale, of which I can’t politely elucidate, but there is an expellation.

  After the show, during which a two-year-old child was banging on the small outdoor stage with a pipe that was louder than our guitars, and only charming for about the first four bars, we drank our fill and ended up in our hotel room listening to ELO records. Suddenly I became aware of not having eaten all day. And from his suitcase Davey pulled out a white roll from Bakers Delight and a little tin of tuna, put them on a plate and poured me a large Ardbeg whisky. I could have cried at his thoughtfulness. My man.

  I was still dozily appraising his morning form as his mouth dropped open beneath his sleeping eyeshades, of which he must have quite a collection. I thought of a tour, his first with You Am I, in which we drove in a draughty splitter van over the length and breadth of England, the town names a litany of music-nerd trivia answers. It was his first exposure to the film Withnail and I, a perennial favourite of the band. His enjoyment of the film and the tour was almost the final stage of some ridiculous apprenticeship, the climax coming at Heathrow airport after a day of celebrating in London. Checking in for our flights back to Australia, Davey excused himself in a panic and ran off. When he returned to the check-in queue he was ashen and looked in shock. Quite apart from the throwing up that occurred, he told me that in his haste to get to a toilet bowl in time he’d violently knocked into someone. When he’d looked up to apologise, a very polite and elegant gentleman said not to worry and offered his hand in help. It was Richard E. Grant, who played the titular lead role in Withnail and I. True.

  Like a bunch of stories about my relationship with Davey, I always tell Goose about them. He’s not here any more, but he’s always around. He listens to them all and smiles knowingly. Befitting for a man who once fronted a band called The Messiah Complex, if Goose hadn’t existed, we would have had to make him up. God, I wish Davey could’ve met him. I wish you could have too.

  Of all the bands I saw with Jaimme and Nik back in the late eighties, there was one that would grab me by the lapels of the jackets and blouses that could pass as vaguely psychedelic, routinely stolen from my mother, and expose me to a wonderland. They weren’t playing the music we would normally hunt down. They were, to me, like any other ‘rock’ band in the way that Grand Guignol was to Gilbert & Sullivan. Box the Jesuit: an explosion of noise and colour that could be shocking and garish, but always delivered with humour. The band drew a lot of goodwill and affection, due primarily to the enormous charm of its lead singer, Goose.

  The first time I saw him play was at Selina’s, in Coogee Bay, supporting The Bad Seeds. An explosion of white hair, teased upward and everywhere, crowned a licorice-thin apparition who moved like an aggrieved arachnid. Accompanying such a vision was his unexpected inclusiveness – he smiled warmly at the audience and it brought us in with the band, a generosity not otherwise much on display that night. The music had crunch but also droning violin and guitars that slunk around Goose’s baritone like the snakes of the caduceus. And the five members of the band dressed in velvets and satins, lamés and leather. It was like Willy Wonka leading The Spiders from Mars. I didn’t understand what was going on. It wasn’t the four-and-a-half chord rock’n’roll I knew and loved. It was glamour from the gutter. And if it was even half as dangerous and fun as it looked, I wanted to be a part of it.

  It scared the hell out of me, the bag of leaves that I was. But I knew I’d follow that guy up there anywhere.

  Goose and his partner, Susie, took me in under their satin and velvet wings sometime around 1990 in the method employed by religious zealots – by selling me the promise of an infinitely brighter future. And their version was in no way chaste. They saw me – and must have recognised that I had nothing really going on in my life at twenty apart from a rabid enthusiasm for rock’n’roll and a willingness to get ensnared in its trappings.

  Their apartment was reached by descending a staircase in an alleyway adjacent to Crown Street, Surry Hills. An inner-city suburb whose pavements were laced with characters that to me looked ravaged and Dickensian, the lurch and thrust of a desperate hand never felt more than a few steps away. Goose and Suzie eschewed hard drugs, but there was heroin use around the band. This fascinated me but I knew at the time I was very far from being ‘in’ with the members who used. I was at best a source of amusement for everybody with my puppy-like enthusiasm and naive attempts at participation in any group activity. My constitution was whittled down by years of high anxiety, so while drugs fascinated me, I knew I was mentally fragile. And to lose face among these people I adored was far worse than any accusations of being a wowser or a prig.

  Younger than them all by a decade, I clung to Goose’s affection for me, kept my mouth shut, drank the allotted beer and tried to push my guitar sound out of the meat-and-potato style honed in our suburban garage and into a realm that would tease and prod Susie’s electric violin, letting the rhythms pulse rather than drag at the mercy of thick, toneless power chords.

  Goose had sensual, long hands, and his deep, rich voice would resonate up through a body so thin that his thoughts were like the slow, elegant rise of mercury through a temperature gauge. He was graceful, but enthusiastic. A master storyteller who would always choose passion over sangfroid. The prurient over the prosaic. He had a lot to be bitter about, namely his health, but he never let it taint his communication.

  I listened to his voice but I also watched it, as I’d sit on the white shagpile of the apartment he shared with Susie, the walls embroidered with portraiture and poster art and the shel
ves bedecked with objets d’art both gaudy and glamorous. He’d hold court but still listen intently, hand stroking his chin. The shape of his face was constructed for attention and thought. His thin, feminine nose was straight and prominent, though accentuated by the way his chin receded back into his throat, in permanent inquisition. And his lips were always pursed. Onstage this man contorted and twisted his body like a satyr, but in the quiet of his apartment he had the repose of a scholar. Susie sat at his side when not darting to a bookshelf, urging me to read Bataille’s Story of the Eye or enthusing over a new collection of Bettie Page soft pornography. The two of them in 1991 were like Gomez and Morticia, or Dali and Gala – they could seem adrift in the corporeal world, but then in an instant be very much of it, offering toast and Vegemite while talking art or spinning tales of band misadventures. Their apartment smelled always of perfumes and potions. In my memories, there are always wisps of smoke curling through the rococo assortments of velvet and satin draped over store dummies and other stage props. There was even a spiral staircase leading to the street. Their cats slunk between chimneys of records, thickets of books and musical equipment. All of it was poetry.

  Their exoticness was matched with a practicality that caught admirers out, expecting them to be unconcerned with day-to-day matters. We once spent a weekend making popcorn before a Jesuit show at the Annandale, Goose reasoning that salt encouraged deep thirst, and seeing as they were getting a slice of the bar takings . . .

  And they were kind. They came out west to my twenty-first birthday, and had no airs or graces among the suburban plenary. I’d thought they offered me their friendship because I appealed to their sense of humour, a pimply kid from the north-west who was agog about rock’n’roll and couldn’t give a stuff about hiding it. But I began to see it had more substance. They made friends and admirers easily because they were generous and attentive. As well as being subversive and salacious.

  Fortnightly, I’d receive cassette tapes full of music past and present interspersed with snatches of lectures or poetry by Burroughs or Dylan Thomas. My unsentimental education. The tapes’ covers would be collages of hard-core pornography. And I couldn’t even try to be cool, or their equal. I was as naive as I was enthusiastic. They knew I wasn’t sturdy. When Goose told me he went to high school in the same part of Sydney, I was knocked out. I didn’t know where I imagined him growing up, I just didn’t expect it to be on the same planet as me.

  By 1993 my own version of a band had just recorded a song called ‘Berlin Chair’ in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. I was summoned to the phone to speak to Tracy, my girlfriend at the time, who was also very close to Goose and Susie. She told me Goose had died. Though he was very frail when I left Australia, I never thought he could leave us. The day before I’d left for the US, Tracy and I had gone to Como, south of Sydney, where Goose was living with Susie’s parents. We’d listened to Leon Russell and T-Rex records, ate Jelly Belly sweets and drank some champagne, giggling at fresh stories about the people they knew from the ‘scene’ and from the underbelly of rock’n’roll history. When I said, ‘See ya in three weeks!’ and kissed him, he looked at me in a way I’ll never forget, over the glasses he needed to wear by then, nothing like his regular flamboyant garb, but sober and functional. His smile was weaker than normal, and his eyes moistened rather than glistened.

  When I got off the phone to Tracy, I called Susie in tears and told her I was coming home, fuck the recording session. She urged me to stay in Minnesota. She confided the only wish Goose would have had in this situation was that we made the best record we could. ‘If he can’t make it, he wants you to.’

  He was maybe thirty at the time we met, and he was dead from cancer at thirty-three. Thirty-three. Like Christ. Which is kinda apt. I want to spread his word. You would have had to make him up.

  We get to the airport and, after checking in, sit at a plastic white table. Davey is perched as delicately as a robin on a branch. Handsome little fucker in a gamine new haircut, messaging his magnificently juvenile partner as I plonk two cups of white wine down. As he is attentive in communication, I spy over his right shoulder at the counter of the humble café for sachets of sauce and mustard for us to share, but can only see donuts in tuck-shop toppings of pineapple flavouring and chocolate. Which would complete our avuncular visage, but would inevitably be left untouched.

  A guy in high-viz workwear sits at the table with us and doesn’t so much lean over as raise his nose accusingly before saying, ‘You guys in a band.’ I don’t bother fossicking for a pithy response. His thrust isn’t a question, but I rise as if the accused.

  ‘Fuckin’ oath. How you doing?’ And reach to shake his hand.

  He and Davey and I talk for a while, haltingly. No subject catches momentum, but it’s pleasant enough to be in company while the wine eases us into the morning. We bid a warm goodbye and board the plane. We listen to ELO and giggle most of the five hours home.

  He’s good, our Davey. I hope you get to meet him.

  Primrose Hill

  There’s a time to be lonely

  There’s a time to wear the crown

  There’s a time to be lonely

  And I guess my time is now

  The American singer Loudon Wainwright III has written, over five decades, songs that cavort most often with relationships both romantic and filial, with such a mondain humour and candour that it may seem odd a fifteen-year-old kid in north-western Sydney could have responded so strongly to them, and found such recognition. Songs about infidelity, parental antagonism and sexual politics filled my bedroom and have done for the years since. Along with walking and Weet-Bix, Loudon’s been an enduring presence in my life – and has given me succour as much as the other two. Songs that make me wince, laugh and cry. There’s at least two every album that fit so snugly with my own day-to-day that I’ve thought about obtaining a restraining order, such is the insight Loudon’s obtained into the life of a man thirty years younger than him and born on the other side of the world.

  It is a song from his 2001 Little Ship LP called ‘Primrose Hill’ that I am singing in London on a day off from playing shows as I walk through, yes, Primrose Hill. The gentle undulations of the park offer the mild challenges and reliefs to the walker that are the perfect balm to a simple beer hangover. I am feeling almost smug, having politely said no to a sack of blow proffered straight after the show the night before, and relieved that I’m only feeling groggy and wistful, rather than grim and tearful.

  Loudon’s song is written from the view of a homeless gentleman waiting out his days playing guitar and singing for spare change in the park, accompanied by his dog with a tail that ‘don’t wag’ and cans of Tennent’s Lager. The kicker for me is a rhyme about earning a little money to buy a few things, the imperatives being a bottle of vodka and some new guitar strings.

  There’s no mournfulness or bitterness, or explanations of how or why he’s on the hill. He’s just living and playing there after getting shunted out of the Underground and, with his current view of the zoo and Westminster, he can feel a tiny bit thankful he ain’t part of that scene where politicians trumpet and roar. Thankful for the sun on his hillside bed, his red face stings further with the cut on his nose from falling down unsure exactly of the time, date or circumstance.

  It’s sad and it’s sweet, and as I approach the summit on the side of the hill that lets you look onto central London like you’re a kid outside a pastry shop, all I can think is that sitting here and drinking sounds like a simple life well lived.

  It’s a generous little earworm this morning and I can only deduce that these little phrases are playing in my head like a scratched record because, although I’m sentient and not in throes of panic, I’m kind of ‘wistful’. The kind of sad where I just want to go for a walk in a park and cry and get the hell over it. I’m worried to hell about my daughter in New York, and the thought of getting on a plane and heading to Hamburg tomorrow to resume the current tour is causing me a disquiet like there�
�s a stubborn pebble stitched into the heel of my size 12 sock. Sitting on a hill and hoping for a little relief from the cold and a few bucks for some drinks sounds like a worthwhile ambition. Of course, observations like that are the words of an ingrate. The last time I spent a few nights without a roof was at the Peanut Farm park in St Kilda after I had been asked to leave the family home at thirty-four. It was spring, and I was doubly lucky enough to have OxyContin to numb myself and some beer money. At the time I was just glad not to be arguing any more. I knew that the next day I could call on someone with a couch. But for a few nights I just had a desire to feel as physically grubby as I could and, pathetically, show how much, or how little, I cared.

  Yesterday before the gig I went to see Macbeth at the Globe Theatre and was overwhelmed by the performances and the aesthetics of the production. So glad was I to be doing a show of my own that night, that in the last scenes I felt I was swimming within a surging river of the performing arts community, prepared to leap out of billowing waters like a mermaid and spread words of warning and consequence, all in iambic pentameter but with a backbeat. The language was dazzling and difficult. I grabbed at some scenes, then felt adrift in others. As I rested my head much later that night, all I could recall were Lady Macbeth’s words after she has returned the daggers to Duncan’s guards, smearing her hands with the King’s blood in the process: ‘My hands are of your colour / But I shame to wear a heart so white’. I turned the phrase over on my tongue like a lozenge, and wondered why it was just this one that stayed with me.

  There’s a phrase that Davey and I share when on tour: ‘Thank fuck there’s a gig’ – meaning a gig can absolve us of any ailment or distress. I think I knew exactly why Lady Macbeth’s line was on my tongue.

  The sun is not warm, but it’s hanging in the sky like a kindly neighbour looking over the back fence and commenting on your vegie patch. The hill isn’t busy yet, it’s only 11 am and among those with maps and the eagerness of tourists are also young families crisply but casually attired in polo shirts and long skirts. They’re hatless, and I guess them to be locals of the kind who have offices in the attics of townhouses and who are in between publishing deals. Bloody hell, they have clear skin. A man and a woman pass me at quite a clip, talking to their six- or seven-year-old boy, chopping between English, French and German. Three languages within the time it takes them to overtake me.