Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  But by May 1969 Howe was back in the fold as the wild and sometimes outrageous McAskill assembled an all-new incarnation of what was now called the Levi Smith Clefs. The old one had left en masse to form Tully, one of the very first Australian “head” bands. This new version of the Clefs met with the greatest success. Its line-up was completed by guitarist Mick Jurd, keyboardist John Bisset, and drummer Tony Buettel. Jurd was a few years older than Bruce, a Sydneysider who had played since the early days of rock’n’roll; Bisset was a New Zealander who had come to Australia with a band called the Action; Buettel had been in Brisbane’s seminal blues crusaders, the Bay City Union.

  The Levi Smith Clefs were a disco band without peer, except perhaps for Max Merritt and the Meteors. They learnt their chops playing four sets a night, six nights a week, at the Whiskey. “They constantly draw huge crowds,” read one newspaper report. “Many American negro R&R men who come to Sydney on leave speak highly of the Clefs’ gutsy sound.” It was a measure, however, of the lack of initiative of major Australian record companies that the Clefs’ success as a live band didn’t translate onto record. It took maverick new Adelaide-based independent label Sweet Peach to try to achieve that.

  Sweet Peach was a forerunner of Australian indies like Havoc, Sparmac and Mushroom, which sprang up with a new wave of music in the early seventies. It was the result of a partnership between American emigrée Pam Coleman, who wanted to buy into the thriving music scene she saw in Australia, and expatriate English producer Jimmy Stewart, who had set Australia on its ear when he created the huge 1968 hit “Love Machine” out of an anonymous studio band called Pastoral Symphony. Sweet Peach’s first album release was 1969’s In the Quiet Corners of My Mind by Kevin Johnson, who is today best remembered for his redoubtable 1973 hit, “Rock’n’roll (I Gave You the Best Years of My Life).”

  The Levi Smith Clefs visited Adelaide in June 1969 to play a season at the 20 Plus Club. Sweet Peach put them into the studio at that time; in a matter of mere hours they emerged with a finished album. At around the same time, Doug Ashdown, a folkie who had recorded for CBS during the sixties, was back in hometown Adelaide at a loose end. Joining forces with Jimmy Stewart, he set to work on an album for Sweet Peach, for which, taking a leaf out of Dylan’s book, the Clefs were recruited “to provide some rhythm.”

  The Clefs’ album, Empty Monkey, was released in March 1970, following a single, a lackluster reworking of Junior Walker’s “Shotgun.” Complete with a laminated, stiff-card gatefold sleeve and esoteric artwork, it looked for all the world like an American record. Appropriately, it was greeted with unbridled zeal. Go-Set’s review opened with the line, “THIS IS THE BEST ROCK ALBUM EVER PRODUCED IN AUSTRALIA.”

  In retrospect, Empty Monkey is ponderous and overwrought, but at the time it was ground-breaking simply because it was an album, when so few Australian bands had actually cut albums. Even so, it wouldn’t sell.

  Meantime, MCA America had heard the Doug Ashdown album—a double-set no less (Australia’s first) called Age Of Mouse—and expressed interest in releasing it. All this went to the Clefs’ heads. Didn’t backing Australia’s answer to Dylan on a double-album make them the Australian equivalent of the Band? The Clefs became convinced they were leading Australian rock’s charge into a new age of seriousness. So, like Tully before them, they split from Barrie McAskill (with Bruce Howe leading the mutiny), leaving him high and dry on the road in Melbourne. Christening themselves Fraternity, the new band returned to Sydney and set up house in a two-storey terrace in Jersey Road, Paddington, near Centennial Park. Sweet Peach put them straight into the studio to cut a single to capitalize on the radio ban.

  With two tracks in the can—a Doug Ashdown original “Why Did It Have to Be Me?” and a cover of a Moody Blues album track, “Questions”—Fraternity signed on with the dominant Nova agency to look for work.

  The Valentines’ decision to break up had been announced by then, and so Bruce got in touch with Bon. Even before Bon could make it up to Sydney, Fraternity scored the resident spot at Jonathans, a disco on Broadway in south central Sydney (junior partner in the residency was a young band from the Sydney suburbs called Sherbet).

  Early Fraternity days: Bon and Bruce Howe at Jersey Road, Paddington, August 1970. (Philip Morris)

  With Bruce and John Bisset sharing singing duties as they had on the single, the band played Doug Ashdown songs, songs by the Band, a few songs left over from the Clefs, and occasional standards like “Little Queenie.” Other musicians would sit in, among them Maori vocalist extraordinaire Leo de Castro; “Uncle” John Ayers, a harmonica player who regularly sat in with Copperwine; and a singer by the name of Dennis Laughlin, who himself had recently left Sherbet and was then working for Nova. All the while Fraternity was promising the arrival of a great new singer.

  Meantime, in Melbourne, as Barrie McAskill assembled yet another Clefs lineup, Bon played the last few Valentines shows. By the time he arrived in Sydney, he had sprouted a goblin-like beard. He slotted straight in. “The last time we saw Bon Scott was at a teenybopper concert in Melbourne, with the Valentines,” wrote one Sydney paper. “We thought he was wasting his voice then. We know he was now. A distinctive, heavy voice . . . and the group is very, very professional.”

  Fraternity was hot. The band boasted that MCA in America, after hearing the single, now wanted an album from them. Sweet Peach started hustling studio time. The Sydney Sunday Mirror ran a full page pin-up of them, proclaiming them as “rapidly on the way to becoming Australia’s greatest hard rock group.”

  Bon wrote to Maria on July 15:Well, everything up here is peaches and cream. If the writing is worse than usual it’s because I’m sloshed. I’ve been sitting out on the patio in the beautiful warm sun writing for about two hours drinking brandy and coke. I’ve managed to become quite an alcoholic in two weeks. The disco we play in is licensed + we get spirits real cheap so . . . The group is gas. I’d go so far as to say world class. We’d shit over anything in Australia as overall sound goes. We’ve had offers to go to Adelaide and Perth already but we’re not going on the road until our LP is released. We start recording next week. It will be all original, most of the stuff written by Doug Ashdown who you may have heard of. We signed overseas contracts yesterday for America and we should be going in about three or four months. I’d love to go to the States and make it without ever appearing anywhere in Australia except Sydney and without any bullshit.

  Sydney, with its licensed disco circuit, was booming, so much so that it momentarily overshadowed Melbourne. Copperwine had had a hit album. The Flying Circus was in line to win the Battle of the Sounds. Fraternity led a pack of newer bands, which included Chain (with Wendy Saddington on vocals), Blackfeather and Leo de Castro’s King Harvest.

  Woodstock’s effect had been felt. The musical naiveté of the sixties had been outgrown. As far back as 1968, Australian musicians had begun searching for something—a sense of where the music had come from, so as to know where it might now go. When the radio ban was lifted after six months in October 1970, a new mood dawned. “It was an explosion of creativity, not all of it for the best, but everyone was having a go, trying to forge a new path,” said Sam See, a founding member of Sherbet, who would go on to join the Flying Circus, and then later Fraternity, and then later still, rejoin the Circus.

  SAM SEE: “I got to know Fraternity by being a late-night drinker at the Whiskey. The thing I really liked about them was that they were trying to approach an Australian sound. Later on it happened. They weren’t really popular, but musicians, the hip cognoscenti liked them. We would have heated arguments at Jersey Road—Bruce and I used to argue at great length and great volume—where I’d say, Well, we blew you guys off stage tonight, in terms of the audience, and he’d say, Yeah, but we’re doing something of our own.”

  “There were a lot of folk singers around then too, and so we all got into songs, words that meant something,” said Peter Head, who had much in common with Fraternity as a membe
r of Adelaide allies, Headband. “It was the first time anyone used Australian place names in songs. I remember having arguments with people who said you can’t use Australian names in a song, they sound daggy, they’ve got to be American.”

  When Barrie McAskill and a new Levi Smith Clefs arrived back in Sydney to resume their Whiskey gig, Bruce Howe immediately swooped on them and poached drummer John Freeman, another old Adelaide boy, to replace Tony Buettel.

  When Bon moved into Jersey Road, the first thing he did was paint his room fire-engine red again. The house was a regular meeting place. Sam See lived just around the corner. Virtuoso Blackfeather guitarist John Robinson often slept on the couch. Robinson had almost completed a song called “Seasons of Change” which Fraternity helped him finish, and so he gave it to them.

  The turntable hit in the house was In the Court of the Crimson King, the recently-released debut album from English art-rock outfit King Crimson. Bon would sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the stereo, stoned, soaking it up. Other favorites included Deep Purple, Procol Harum, (“A Whiter Shade of Pale” had been a hugely influential record), Poco, the Band, Rod Stewart, and Van Morrison. Mick Jurd was the band’s resident musicologist, and he named artists like Wes Montgomery, Barney Kessel and B.B. King as his heroes. The mood of the times was such that the more esoteric your taste, the more “progressive” you must be.

  Fraternity were trying to get a start on recording the album the Americans apparently wanted. Bon wrote to Maria in September.

  Being Saturday it’s our last night for the week. We will be leaving Jonathans soon and going to greener pastures for more money. It’s been gas working there because it helped the group improve over three months what would have normally taken six. We’re doing about 70 per cent original songs now and by the time you see us we’ll be doing about 150 per cent or something.

  Wendy Saddington and Jeff St John (name dropping again) came down to hear us on Thursday night and sat in with us on a couple of songs. They reckon we would probably be the best in Australia. Coming from them it’s a real compliment.

  Our record called “Why Did It Have to Be Me,” is released this week. Unfortunately it was recorded before I made it up here and I’m not singing on it. But it don’t matter as long as it gets airplay for the group. It will be released in the States next week and with a lot of luck, well, who knows. We start the LP again soon as we have to have it out for Christmas and this time all the songs on it will be our own. I haven’t contributed anything worthwhile yet but once again it don’t matter. The only thing that counts is the group.

  The single failed to do any business. By then though, the band was able to fob it off as a premature and already redundant artifact. They were only thinking about the album. But the single was never released in America, and the album they would eventually finish, after a few false starts, would be shelved even in Australia.

  Livestock, as the album was called when Sweet Peach finally released it over a year later, was a mishmash. Often featuring Bon on recorder, songs like “Jupiter’s Landscape,” “Raglan’s Folly,” “You Have a God” and “It” were pompous, ponderous art rock; “Grand Canyon Suite” was would-be Aaron Copeland; only “Sommerville,” “Cool Spot,” and the title track still stand up as tight, sharp exercises in sophisticated songwriting and arrangement.

  Even without this new vinyl the hype kept running hot. Fraternity appeared live on super-groovy new TV show GTK. New national magazine Sound Blast put Bon on the cover, wearing war-paint and an expression to match.

  After playing a few shows late in September on the belated Australian tour by the 1910 Fruitgum Company, the band played the support spot on a tour by Jerry Lee Lewis. They “did some nice instrumental things,” Greg Quill reported in Go-Set, “and Bon, all painted and cheeky, managed to make people laugh a little.”

  The Killer tour took Fraternity to Adelaide, where they supported Lewis at the Apollo Stadium and played a couple of gigs of their own at a disco called Headquarters. It was this visit which would alter the course of their career.

  Anticipation surrounding Fraternity naturally ran high in Adelaide. It was further pumped up because Vince Lovegrove, ironically, had also landed in Adelaide, and was in a position to hype his old mate’s new band vigorously.

  In addition to his gig as Go-Set’s Adelaide correspondent, Vince was writing a music column for the News, and had managed to get a local TV show up and running on Channel 9. The show, which like his newspaper column was called Move, was essentially an expanded, weekly variation on GTK. Its premiere episode on October 17 featured Fraternity, “Australia’s only group with a completely original repertoire.”

  “They came—they played—they CONQUERED!” Vince wrote in Go-Set of the Headquarters gig. Never had prodigal sons been made to feel more welcome. But if the band was progressing quite nicely, the course of its career was about to alter with the intervention of one Hamish Henry. Henry was the man behind the Grape Organization, a booking agency that promoted Headquarters, among other Adelaide gigs. But Hamish Henry was much, much more than the average rock entrepreneur.

  Henry was a rich kid with a vision, a patron of the arts who had been swept up in the euphoria of the Age of Aquarius. Born into old Adelaide money, he held down a day job with the family business, State City Motors, and ran a successful North Adelaide art gallery as well as Grape. But what Henry really wanted—like Andy Warhol and John Sinclair—was a band he could cultivate himself. When he saw Fraternity at Headquarters he knew he’d found what he was looking for. He made them an offer: he’d set them up in Adelaide, house them, equip them, manage them, pay them a wage. It was, of course, an offer Fraternity couldn’t refuse. They left Adelaide set to return there for good in January.

  The band swung through Melbourne on the way back to Sydney, to play two nights at the Thumpin’ Tum. Bon caught up with Darcy there. In Sydney at the start of December, he wrote to Maria, whom he’d missed in Melbourne.

  We went over real well at the Tum both nights although I must admit it looked like a Valentines’ Fan Club outing. I was really knocked out at the old faces who hadn’t forgotten me.

  Adelaide was too much. It was the best trip I have ever done anywhere ever. We were treated like Kings. We were given a Valiant station wagon to drive around in and a van and roadie for our gear. We didn’t carry a single item the whole time we were there. We absolutely killed the crowds at Headquarters where we played and we even had four days’ holiday at John (drummer) Freeman’s beach house. Toooo much.

  Saw my pal Vince. We did his TV show. It’s really good and when it goes national he should be on top of the world again. I don’t know if Graeme told you but we’re going to Adelaide to live on Jan 4. I’ll tell you all the reasons next time I see you as it’s too detailed to write about.

  On December 19, 1970 Vince broke the news in Go-Set that Fraternity were about to take the radical step of moving to Adelaide. The talk was still of going to America by the following June or July.

  The band played the Odyssey festival outside Sydney, between Christmas and New Year, before heading for Adelaide where it would play the Myponga festival—a virtual homecoming.

  Neither Odyssey nor Myponga was the first Australian outdoor rock festival—that distinction belongs to Ourimbah in 1969—but all three predated Sunbury, which first took place in 1972 yet is still the Oz rock festival most commonly mythologized.

  Allowing six months for the idea of Woodstock to reach Australia, Ourimbah was nevertheless premature. True, its bill boasted the cream of Australia’s progressive bands, but virtually none of them had a record out at the time. When Myponga took place a year later, it was a different story. 1971 can be considered a golden era for Australian rock’n’roll, a time when it came of age. By early 1971, with at least a couple of the major record companies now confident enough to get down among the grass roots, a new wave of credible, creative post–San Francisco Australian bands dominated the music scene. Having worked their way
up on the live circuit, bands like Billy Thorpe’s born-again Aztecs, Spectrum, Chain, Blackfeather and Daddy Cool—nearly all of them from Melbourne—populated the singles and newly-instituted albums charts alike, and filled houses all over the country.

  The timing was apposite. Australia in general was on the eve of a social revolution. After more than 20 years’ of conservative government by the Liberal Party, the Labor Party stormed to power in 1972, led by the great reformer Gough Whitlam.

  With a bill boasting an exclusive appearance by Black Sabbath as well as the cream of Australia’s progressive bands, Myponga—bankrolled, almost inevitably, by Hamish Henry—was the biggest thing to hit Adelaide since the Beatles attracted a record crowd of 300,000 to a civic reception there in 1964. “The age of historic high cultures is at an end,” said Adrian Rawlins, the Meher Baba disciple who emceed Myponga. “[It is] an age when rhythm brings a new and real spiritual uplift to the young. The kids are responding to vibrations within themselves, rather than to conventional standards imposed from without.” This sort of psychobabble went down a treat.

  Even though Myponga received them rapturously, it would ultimately prove to be more like a death knell than a homecoming for Fraternity. The revolution in Australian music would not emanate from Adelaide, and Fraternity would be too far removed from the center of that revolution to benefit at all from it.