Sydney enjoyed a place in the sun around the turn of the decade, but that momentum dissipated just as quickly. Everybody just seemed to skip town. As the American presence decreased with the winding down of the Vietnam War, the disco circuit degenerated and became the province of showbands. Melbourne regained the initiative again and played host to 1971’s extraordinary surge of creativity.
The act that epitomized the era was Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs. After Thorpe was declared bankrupt in 1967, he repaired to Melbourne to start over. By 1969 he had assembled a new incarnation of the Aztecs, featuring guitar hero Lobby Loyde, and had gained an ambitious manager in Michael Browning. Thus commenced an ascent which would see Thorpe reign unassailable as the king of Oz rock in the early seventies, and the Aztecs become a band which would change the face of Australian rock’n’roll.
Chain (now in its classic form with erstwhile Bay City Union singer Matt Taylor out front) and Leo de Castro set up shop in Melbourne. Ross Wilson also exerted his patriarchy—the break-up in 1969 of his Party Machine spawned not only Daddy Cool but also Spectrum.
The other legacy of the repressed late sixties was that there were not only musicians, but also entrepreneurs who were all the more determined to break through. The power structures were then being built that formed the basis of those which still exist today. Future Mushroom Records mogul Michael Gudinski emerged during this period. After serving an apprenticeship at Bill Joseph’s AMBO agency, he corralled Joseph and fellow former AMBO agent Michael Browning to form Consolidated Rock when AMBO folded in 1970.
The generic guidelines for Australian rock were being set. Bands like Spectrum, Daddy Cool and Company Caine might have taken individualistic tangents, but together bands like the Aztecs, Chain, and Carson constituted a unified push. These bands were trying to connect with the roots of rock—the blues, basically—in which Australian music had so little tradition and for which reason it had always lacked body, not to mention soul. And even if the Aztecs’ recordings have not stood the test of time—today they sound sludgy and bloated—their grinding, guttural base established the foundations for a monstrous mutation of the blues which was unique to Australia.
Billy Thorpe’s sole ambition at that time, as many have testified, was simply to be the loudest band in the world, and with his trademark massive stacks of Strauss amplifiers, designed by Lobby Loyde (who had by then left the band), he came pretty close. Former Valentine Wyn Milson was then serving as Thorpe’s sound mixer: “It was a rougher, boozier sort of thing. The start of headbanging. The audience didn’t so much want to listen to the music as be flattened by it.”
Fraternity had more than a little in common with both the blues and arty strains, but they were in no position to capitalize on it, stuck away in Adelaide, apparently reluctant to get out on the road, and tied to a record company whose reach was severely limited.
After playing Myponga, the band went into the studio to put down “Seasons of Change,” the first single featuring Bon. On April 8, they played a support spot on the Adelaide leg of the Deep Purple/Free/Manfred Mann tour. At the end of April, as the single was released, they moved en masse to the farm up in the hills.
It was perhaps the first sign of things to come when “Seasons of Change” was beaten to the punch nationally by the version released by Blackfeather, whose John Robinson was, after all, the song’s author. But their idyll in the Adelaide hills lulled Fraternity into a false sense of superiority, and as their version of “Seasons of Change” climbed the South Australian charts, they chose to ignore the signs.
7. UP IN THE HILLS TOO LONG
“Fraternity live like no other band in Australia,” Vince Lovegrove wrote in Go-Set, “in a house in the hills 17 miles from Adelaide. Surrounded by seven acres of bushland, they’re secluded from everything but nature. What a buzz!”
Fraternity had noted the Band’s example—they had set up a communal base on a Woodstock farm called Big Pink—and Hemming’s Farm, as Fraternity’s Aldgate property was known, became their own Big Pink.
In May, “Uncle” John Ayers came to town with Copperwine and stayed behind. Bruce Howe asked him to join Fraternity and he moved straight onto Aldgate.
“Fraternity are into a trip of their own,” Vince went on. “Sure they know they’re good. Why else are they playing music professionally? But they’ve passed the ego scene years ago. They don’t need ego trips, because they see too many good things in life, and they don’t want to lose them.”
This idea was farcical, of course. Fraternity was a strictly hierarchical and very volatile band. Bruce Howe was the boss—there were no two ways about that—and Mick Jurd was his senior partner. John Bisset, who wrote more material than any other member of the band, was a brilliant but troubled man; he and Mick Jurd did not get on. Both Bon and Uncle simply managed to go with the flow. Uncle was “upstairs” (Fraternity-speak for out of it), even by the standards of the day.
HAMISH HENRY: “Bon was just a gregarious, very nice guy. I used to swim with him; he was a very good swimmer. To Bruce and Mick and John Bisset, a singer was probably something of a necessary evil, and so Bon revolved around them, rather than vice versa. Bon was always late, for rehearsals or gigs or whatever, and Bruce and Mick probably did discuss sacking him, but they couldn’t have done it. I think the band was appropriately named, because it was very much like a family, and Bon belonged to the family.”
“Fraternity was a shitter for Bon, because all those other guys were educated, and he started to feel he was inferior,” said Pat Pickett, who became friends with Bon after encountering Fraternity in Melbourne around this time. “They wouldn’t let him write any lyrics. A lot of the early AC/DC stuff was written during those days.”
JOHN FREEMAN: “Bon joined Fraternity to learn about music really, I think. Whatever else, he could sing, and he had what most singers would give their eyeteeth for—a distinctive voice. He joined Fraternity so he could learn about music, so he could go off and be a rock’n’roll star.”
Bon and Bruce were like chalk and cheese, but they shared a bond, and Bon readily deferred to Bruce. With his portly stature and prematurely thinning hair, Bruce looked almost Buddha-like, and indeed, he had a sort of an aura about him, and a hold over the entire band. Bon and Bruce remained close even after Bon effectively deserted Fraternity. Bruce was perhaps the only man Bon ever really confided in, whose advice Bon always sought out and respected.
If Bon’s own musical input was less than it might have been, he nevertheless felt privileged just to be working with musicians he held in awe. But they were by no means a band who worked hard. Fraternity played a couple of gigs a week at most, and in their three-year, two-album career produced barely a dozen original songs.
PETER HEAD: “Fraternity spent most of their time on magic mushrooms. Everybody smoked dope, everybody. Everybody took mushrooms. Plus, Fraternity were all heavy drinkers as well.”
The days and nights at Aldgate passed in one long, slow, lazy, hazy stoned-immaculate flow. There was no call to do anything especially. If food was required, a big, brown, sloppy pseudomacro stew was concocted. “Hamburgers hurt,” muttered Uncle. Every weekend, tribes of beautiful people from Adelaide would descend upon the place, tripping out, soaking up the good vibes generally, and fucking each other silly.
Bon was almost 25. He hadn’t a care in the world. He acquired the nickname Ronnie Roadtest due to his willingness to try anything. Vince described him as “constantly in a dream world of his own . . . but he’s having a ball.”
In late May 1971 Fraternity went out on the road, first to Perth, then Queensland. The response in Perth was ecstatic—the band up--staged Chain, then riding high on the back of “Black and Blue”—but in Queensland it was mixed. A Go-Set review of a Brisbane gig described them as “loud, too loud sometimes.” Sheer volume was part of Fraternity’s arrogance.
“They wanted to be the Band” (Vince Lovegrove). Fraternity as a six-piece, winter 1971:
Mick Jurd,
John Freeman, “Uncle” John Ayers, Bruce Howe, Bon, John Bissett.
(courtesy John Freeman)
At this time Queensland’s infamous hillbilly dictator Joh Bjelke-Petersen was at the height of his powers, and Fraternity ran afoul of the law. Playing on the Gold Coast, the cops showed up and told them to turn down. Which they did, but with qualifications.
BRUCE HOWE: “Bon made this speech, on stage, about the Queensland cops, you know, and the promoter was standing there, just shaking his head. Bon was quite naive about political things. He was very street smart, he had this ability to assess people on the spot, their character, and generally his gut feelings were pretty good. But when it came to politics, that sort of knowledge, he was absolutely fucking hopeless. Of course, it went over really well with the crowd, because he’d stood up.
“The cops stopped the show; we had to get off. I said to Bon, you dickhead. Because I used to be like that with him, when he’d do things like that, when he’d be at his most naive. I said, I told you what it was like up here. We started to talk about politics. Bon didn’t understand the technicalities. Like, listening to politicians talk on the TV, or reading about it in the paper, used to bore the shit out of him, but we might be just sitting on the bus, out of it, nobody else around, and Bon would say, Well, why is it? Why is that allowed to happen in Queensland, and yet if I said that in Adelaide nobody would give a fuck?”
UNCLE: “Bon was really perceptive in some ways. Blind in others. In some ways he had his feet firmly on the ground. He was so down to earth, there were some areas where Bon could see the wood for the trees where others couldn’t. Yet there was that other side that was out to lunch.”
Back in Adelaide, the band resumed its comfortable lifestyle around the winter fires. Talk around the rest of the country was that Fraternity had become complacent and spoiled in their private domain. They countered that they were preparing to go to America.
JOHN FREEMAN: “Hamish should have made us work a lot harder, we should have done much more work on the east coast. But we always thought we were above that.”
At home, Fraternity could do no wrong. Routinely playing at least once a week at the Largs Pier Hotel, they established themselves as an Adelaide legend.
Melbourne is usually cited as the birthplace of pub rock, but while it may have been the cradle, it was in Adelaide that Australia’s first real regular pub gigs sprang up—and the first of those was the Largs Pier. At the height of Melbourne’s renaissance in 1971, its live circuit still consisted largely of dances and discos. Pubs wouldn’t open up to rock’n’roll for a few years yet. Adelaide pubs, however, embraced this new trade.
The Largs was down by the beach at Semaphore, opposite the pier of the same name. After all the taboo-breaking of the sixties, kids were growing up a lot quicker, and nothing made them feel more grown-up than going into pubs. This meant that the crowds at the Largs ranged from 15-year-olds, who were able to get away with getting in, to sixties survivors—all determined to write themselves off to the tune of roaring rock’n’roll.
Bands that regularly went over to Adelaide—the Aztecs, Daddy Cool, Max Merritt and the Meteors, the La De Das—loved playing there. But Fraternity were the hometown heroes who had baptized the place, and they were the house band.
Fraternity changed with its audience. The Largs was as rough as guts and Bon felt right at home there. He would prop up the bar, a hard-up hero wallowing in Scotch and adulation. Occasionally he would catch some flak. After all, as a tall poppy he was asking to be cut down. Besides, he would flirt with all the wrong girls. Bad girls. Who had bad boyfriends. Brawling was commonplace. Regular audience members included future Cold Chisel singer Jimmy Barnes and his half-brother John Swann.
JIMMY BARNES: “We used to go into Adelaide, and we’d go in a gang to fight, you know. It was, hey, let’s go into Adelaide—and wreck it!”
JOHN FREEMAN: “At that stage, because it was the only gig of its type, it used to draw a much wider audience than just the locals, and I think there might have been an element of the locals versus everybody else. The thing was, it was just so crowded—we used to play on this tiny stage in the corner—and so how 700 people could possibly spend four hours in an environment designed for four, without some sort of aggravation, well, it just couldn’t happen.”
SAM SEE: “Bon was always into a bit of a scrap. I was never partial to it. But he’d go out to the bar, have a drink with this guy, fight that guy . . .”
UNCLE: “I remember Bon and JB [John Bisset] at the Largs Pier once, both totally blind drunk, trying to find the biggest Maori in the room to fight him. He had to be at least nine foot six! I saw Bon jump off the stage a couple of times, because he saw it actually happening in the crowd. But I never saw him set on anybody, or set them up.”
The Largs crowd had no truck with anything “poofy” or cerebral. As a result Fraternity’s art-rock tendencies rapidly disappeared, replaced by a harder, rockier edge. Fraternity’s claim that they single-handedly spawned pub rock is an overstatement, but given their evolving style and the seminal influence they exerted on Cold Chisel (the highpoint of the genre), there’s more than a grain of truth in it.
BRUCE: “You had this young audience that would come and see you, and the more quad boxes and horns you stuck up, the louder you were, the more they liked it. They could tell what you were trying to do.”
In August, Fraternity took out the national Battle of the Sounds. Sherbet were the only group to come near them, as Go-Set reported. But again, this only had the adverse effect of reinforcing Fraternity’s belief that all was well.
The Battle no longer carried the prestige it once had—and the crowd at Melbourne’s Festival Hall, where the final was held, was quite thin—but still it meant that Fraternity went home with much booty under their arms, including air fares overseas, and free studio time at Armstrong’s.
“They won the Battle,” remembered John Brewster, a friend of Bon’s who was a roadie, “and there was all these prizes, so they divvied them up among everybody, and there was this stereo left over, after everyone had got their equal share. So they decided what they’d do was, whoever did the grossest deed, got it. So they’re on their way back to Adelaide and Gus—they used to have this bus driver called Gus—all of a sudden, he pulls up the bus on the side of the road, and jumps out. He leaps the fence, grabs a sheep, humps it, and he goes, Howzat! He got the stereo. Bon told me that.”
Sam See, home from Canada with the Flying Circus, was at the Battle of the Sounds show. Bruce asked him to join Fraternity. He leapt at the chance.
After the Battle victory, Adelaide’s Channel Nine produced a special on Fraternity. The show portrayed the band at work and play up on the farm. Of course, there’s no show without Punch, and so Bon had to put on a performance. Attempting a party trick riding one of the company trail bikes, he left the dirt road and came off into a briar patch. He emerged wearing a sheepish grin and many cuts and bruises.
Bon’s trail bike stunts were legendary. He is variously said to have taken off on one from a party in the nude, and rode one up a flight of stairs into a crowded gig. On another occasion he impulsively rode over to Melbourne from Adelaide one weekend for a birthday party. Ill-prepared, wearing only a T-shirt, he got sun- and wind-burned by day; while by night he froze, sleeping in a ditch by the side of the road.
In September, Go-Set ran a cover story which proclaimed, “Fraternity: The Next Big Band?” The band journeyed to Sydney to play a short season at Chequers. A backstage scuffle ensured the season was even shorter—the band was sacked as a result. Fraternity’s petulance had a way of turning on them. The question mark with which Go-Set had qualified its headline was prophetic.
Back in Adelaide, Bon moved off the farm and back down to town. Along with Bruce and John Bisset—and Bisset’s wife Cheryl and son Brent, not to mention dog Clutch—they found a place on Norwood Parade, within spitting distance of the city.
BRUCE: “Me and Bon and John didn’t t
ake too kindly to the house in the hills. All these people would go up on the weekends, and just sit around and look at the trees and say how lovely everything was. Me and Bon, if there was a prospective fuck or a wild time in the offing, we’d go back down to town. The problem was getting from the hills down to town. So we shifted back down.”
Bruce was running amok because his girlfriend Anne was in England. Bon was raging as ever. At first Bon took up with a girl called Fi who was one of the Valentines’ foremost Adelaide fans. She’d returned to Adelaide after Bon saw her in Melbourne, where she was working for, of all people, Mary Wasylyk (now Walton), who had opened a boutique on trendy Chapel Street in Prahran. Bon hadn’t seen much of his old friend Mary since she got married, until he walked into the In Shop to see Fi. He was surprised and delighted to encounter Mary there too, and their friendship was renewed.
The relationship with Fi was short-lived; she was looking for a man who was husband material. Bon was many things, but he wasn’t that. On the rebound, he met a woman called Clarissa, a dancer with the Adelaide Festival Theatre, but that too was a brief fling. Before long, he was having an affair with a married woman called Margaret Smith. With her doctor husband, the petite, attractive dark-haired Margaret was a regular visitor to the farm. Her marriage was crumbling, and though her relationship with Bon was doomed in the short term, she would reappear later in his life.
PETER HEAD: “She was a rock’n’roll groupie made good. As soon as I saw her, I thought, She belongs with Bon. She was that same sort of wild woman.”
BRUCE: “Bon loved his girls, but he didn’t give them a lot. Sex. And things. Like, he’d come home with a bunch of flowers, or he’d cook a meal. But he wouldn’t talk intimately to them, or share secrets, about his past life, whatever. He could commit to the boys, because boys are boys, and so when you have to go off and fight another war, everyone pats you on the back. But when it came to women, a family, that was very scary to Bon.”
Highway to Hell Page 10