I woke up on Thursday morning feeling quite ill. Whilst part of me would like to have thought
that this may have been caused by the thought that Australia was going to, of
its own free will, elect a new Government led by, of all people Tony Abbott, I
knew that I had merely caught “M”’s malady.
As “M” herself was still ill, we ended up spending the next
five days in bed, although we did venture out to get some groceries and vote
(fortunately our polling booth is about 100 metres away en route to the
supermarket). It also meant that I played no music whatsoever and could not get
around to playing more music related DVDs.
We did see a number of DVDs we’d recently bought or had loaned to us
including the sensational Iranian film A Separation and Hitchcock’s Rebecca and
Notorious so it wasn’t a dead loss. Plus
we watched all four matches in the first week of the AFL Finals which were all
magnificent contests. Port Adelaide’s
shock win over the hated Collingwood provided the only warmth during Saturday
night’s dismal election night when long held fears turned to a predictable and uncomfortable
reality.
And so this is as good a time as any to look at the next
stage of my musical development:
The Miseducation of
otis.youth Part 3
My years as a student at the University of Melbourne proved
to be very productive. I managed to
obtain a degree with honours, training in my future career, a prize, an early
introduction to my current employer, more friends, mastery in the art of
playing pinball, a record collecting habit and a thirst for music that has
never left me.
The early 80’s were a great period for Melbourne in terms of
live music. By the start of the decade,
Melbourne’s great range of mostly inner suburban pub and club venues had become
established and flourished throughout the decade. These included small pub venues such as the
Tote, The Punters Club and The Club in Fitzroy and Collingwood; larger ones
including the Corner Hotel and Central Club Hotel in Richmond, The Seaview
Ballroom, The Prince Of Wales Hotel and The Esplanade Hotel in St. Kilda and
the neighbouring Middle Park Hotel and larger beer barns in outer suburbs such
as Tarmac Hotel in Laverton, Bombay Rock in Preston, The Croxton Park Hotel in
Thornbury, The Village Green Hotel in Mulgrave, the Mentone Hotel in Mentone
and one in Mordialloc whose name escapes me.
The largest venues short of concert venues would have been The Venue on
The Upper Esplanade St. Kilda until its closure whereupon the slack was taken
up by The Palace on the Lower Esplanade.
To this was added all three of the Melbourne’s Universities at the time
– LaTrobe University, Monash University and the University of Melbourne. Each of these had student unions that would
put on union nights during the year, effectively pub gigs. Occasionally, they would land a major
overseas act although today the only ones I can remember were Gary Glitter (!)
and Snakefinger. The unions would also
put on bands during lunchtimes, some good, other not so and many I’ve
forgotten.
It was also at Uni that I met one of my longstanding
collaborators in musical archaeology who I shall call BJ. Initially we shared
tutorials in a couple of subjects we studied in common, but we bonded over our
love of music. It is another friendship
that exists to this very day but these days our ability to influence each other
has been greatly diminished owing to his moving a considerable distance away
from Melbourne. (Hence, the lack of
references to date in this blog.) Indeed, throughout the 80s and 90s and indeed
right up until my relationship with “M” began, BJ was my musical consigliere and the person most likely to have accompanied me to a
gig.
It was at Uni that my collection
began to really grow. BJ was one
influence as we swapped tapes of albums from our respective collections. The campus record shop also was a source
although their range of stock wasn’t a great one. But Uni played an indirect role in my
collecting activities. In the latter years of my study, I took to taking the
train to Flinders Street Station into town and then walking the 2-3 kms it took
down and around Swanston Street to get to the campus. I mean “down and around”
as I’d devised a walking route that took me past most of the key record shops
in Melbourne at the time, including Missing Link Records (then at the start of
the Port Phillip Arcade in Flinders Lane), the Allans record shop in Collins
Street, the Brashs store around the corner in Elizabeth Street, the record bar
at the Myer flagship store in Bourke Street, the Batman Record Library in
Elizabeth Street and Collector’s Corner, a second hand shop that at varying
times operated out of at least three
different locations in Swanston Street. (There also was Au Go Go records but,
for the life of me, I cannot remember where it was located.) I didn’t necessarily visit all of these shops
on the one walk; I divide them up in my mind and would ensure that I popped
into each at least twice a week during my trips to and from the train
station. There were two reasons for
doing this. First a number of these
shops were either second hand shops or contained a reasonable amount of second
hand stock that was forever changing.
These locations also tendered to specialise in the sort of underground
or non commercial music in which I’d been developing an interest. The chain stores (i.e Allans, Brashs and
Myer) essentially stocked only Top 40 stuff and tendered to be quite ruthless
in discounting stock when demand for the items ceased. In this pre internet era, you were never
quite sure when a Brashs or Allan’s record sale was going to start. It was
imperative to get in on the opening day – indeed the opening hour – as single
item discounted stock as well as the biggest bargains tendered to be snapped up
then and usually this included the sort of stuff in which I’d developed an
interest. Even better, some of the
cheapest items were for really obscure stuff that I could purchase for, say, a
dollar and thus explore practically for free.
So what was fuelling my musical
explorations? At decade’s start I’d
continued to watch or listen to Nightmoves and Billy Pinnell’s Album Show. Countdown too but this was more out of habit
than anything else. BJ joined this elite
group but his taste was groping in the same direction as mine so all we could
do was encourage each other with the discoveries we’d made on our own. But a couple of other sources came to the
party and it was University which played a major role.
Among the things our student
union fees paid for was a “leisure library” (The Rowden White Library to give
it its proper name). On the whole, this
library holds (it still exists today) material that is largely unconnected to
the subjects taught at the Uni though although the quantity of political tracts
held there would naturally apply to political science or international
relations students. Indeed, signs
throughout the library area proclaimed that it did not exist for the purpose of
study. For the most part, or at least
what I remember today, it held material relating to politics, socially aware
stuff that uni students are mostly likely to protest about and popular
culture. This translated into
newspapers, books, magazines, and records.
I’ve described the music library in a previous listing so won’t repeat
it. But it’s significance lay in that
its catalogue eschewed top 40 material in favour largely of underground music
(I don’t think the term “alternative” had been invented at this stage), punk,
new wave, blues, jazz and classical. I
never bothered with requesting the classical albums for listening as I’ve never
had an affinity for it, but for the most part, I was willing to the play the
role of a musical explorer, prepared to go in and give just about anything else
a listen. It was here that I first
seriously listened to jazz, succumbing to Miles Davis, John Coltrane,
Thelonious Monk and the strange world that was Sun Ra. (Most of my other jazz discoveries at the
time came from studying the music credits to Woody Allen films.) I also started to distinguish between the
blues, essentially understanding the difference between the electrified Chicago
blues (and developing a love of Muddy Waters) and the acoustic delta blues of
the deep South.
But what I really obtained there
was the detailed knowledge of the key rock texts from the era, more or less as
they were released or only a few years old.
This meant, in no particular order, the New York and Cleveland punk
scenes of the late 70s - it was here that I heard the bulk of Patti Smith’s
early albums for the first time, the first two Talking Heads albums and Remain
In Light, anything by The Ramones, Television, Per Ubu, etc; the British punk scene from the same time and
the post punks that followed – The Clash, The Sex Pistols, Wire, Buzzcocks,
Magazine, Siousixee And The Banshees,
XTC, The Slits, Joy Division, The Au Pairs, early Simple Minds, as well as the
more interesting mainstream rock acts that started to emerge such as The
Pretenders and Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers.
Once I heard something I really liked, and the opportunity presented
itself, I would ask to hear these albums unless, of course, something else was
playing that took my interest.
I always took reading matter into
the listening room for these sessions and it was from this that I supplemented
my growing knowledge. If I could get my
hands on them I would read the latest copies of NME or The Face to arrive in
Australia or Rolling Stone from the United States. (I don’t think the library had a subscription
to Creem.) I didn’t get much out of The
Face given that I’ve never thought that there is or should be a conscious
connection between music, style and fashion, but NME and American Rolling Stone
were almost like bibles. Indeed the
library had bound annual volume of Rolling Stone going all the way back to the
first edition as well as the then current copy of The Rolling Stone Record
Guide and I would note what they thought was good, see if the library held
items, and then sample them. It was via
this method that my love of iconic American artists such as The Velvet Underground, Modern Lovers/Jonathon Richman, Big Star/Alex Chilton, Randy Newman, Ry
Cooder, Dr. John and many others originated.
This reading habit has never
really left me since although I moved on from the NME after I left Uni and
Rolling Stone once they started an Australian edition. For the most part, I’ve always preferred the
US edition, especially for the investigative and feature articles that were
invariably dropped from the Australian Edition.
Eventually, I lost interest in the US edition, especially when they
started writing reviews of new albums without actually mentioning important information
such as track names and whether it was any view.
But I digress. Supplementing these new sources were two
radio developments. The first was the
introduction of commercial FM radio into Australia when EON-FM commenced
operation in Melbourne in the middle of 1980.
This station no longer exists, having changed identity into the
conservative commercial rock station MMM, but EON-FM in its early years was an
absolute revelation. It paid no
attention to the basic rules of commercial radio; Top 40 tracks were barely
played and there were no limitations as to the length of songs played. More often than not, if a major act released
a new album that the station liked, it would be the key album tracks that were
played in preference to the single (for example, Comfortably Numb instead of
Another Brick In The World Part 2). The
only times I’ve ever heard, the full live version of Lynyrd Skynrd’s Freebird
on commercial radio, for example, was on EON. The same applies to iconic epic
tracks such as Kashmir, Down By The River and Cowgirl In The Sand among many
others. It also championed new Australian acts such as Mark Gillespie who
couldn’t get airplay even on the public access FM stations. But
none of this surprised me. In fact I
expected it given that Billy Pinnell was its first program manager and Lee
Simon, the host of Nightmoves, was one of their DJ’s. Sadly, and dare I say it inevitably, this
programming approach wasn’t commercially successful forcing their eventual
mutation into MMM.
And it was also whilst I was a
student at Uni that I became aware of community access radio and Melbourne rock
radio’s true beating heart, 3RRR. It
started broadcasting in 1976 as an educational station out of RMIT (the Royal
Melbourne Institute Of Technology, located just a few blocks shy of the
University of Melbourne) but gradually the students gained control over the
station and its playlist. The link with
RMIT was severed and the station continues largely on the basis of subscribers;
today it claims to have the largest per capita listener supporter broadcaster
in the world. It’s hold over the
Melbourne audience was such that it took a long time before the Government run “youth”
station JJJ debuted here and even today its influence effectively neutralises
any major impact the Sydney based JJJ manages over the tastes of this city.
This is because 3RRR became, and
remains today, Melbourne’s greatest supporter of music on the fringes be that
underground/alternative, metal, Americana, etc and young Australian
talent. In fact, if any of the music it
actively promoted started to gain popularity and garner airplay on commercial
radio, it would be swiftly dropped from the playlist so that other acts could
get a go. A number of their DJs proved
to be influential in guiding me towards this new music, none more so than Bohdan
X who had the plumb Friday evening gig.
Probably the closest anyone in Australia came in expressing extreme opinions
on new music along the lines of British journalists Tony Parsons and Julie
Burchill (Bohdan himself is also British), he like the station played the best
of the new material released each week until well into the 1990s. To listen to his show was to become informed
about what was bubbling under the surface. It was largely through 3RRR that I starting discovering the Australian independent scene and the connections between early punk bands such as The Saints, Radio Birdman and The Celibate Rifles with the great Detroit bands such as The Stooges and The MC5.
And it was largely through 3RRR that the penny finally
dropped with me regarding the music industry and its workings. Prior to starting at Uni, I’d had
unconsciously linked Top 40 music, radio airplay and television exposure. It was a chicken and egg reasoning; only the
best quality music got played on the radio and TV and the music charted because
people heard the songs on the radio and saw them performed on TV which reinforced
its status as the best music available.
I’d already experienced the mystery of why I didn’t hear something as
inspirational as The Saints (I’m) Stranded on the radio. I was to go through another similar
experience in 1979 when I heard Midnight Oil’s Back On The Borderline and Cold
Cold Change and couldn’t figure out why these hadn’t charted, Peter Garrett’s
voice notwithstanding. But it was the
sheer volume of stuff I heard on 3RRR and at Uni that never charted and was never mentioned on Countdown that made me
realise that the best stuff wasn’t necessarily that which was being promoted on
radio, TV and in record stores such as Brashs.
By the time I left Uni, I finally understood what was meant
by hype and realised that the “best music” was effectively a matter of individual
taste and to rely on commercial entities such as commercial radio, TV, media
and record companies for guidance was not the way to go. I had to learn how to judge music on its merits
and according to my developing tastes.
The next few decades were to see me expanding my knowledge and finding
what I liked in the face of a record/media industry that was attempting not
only to divert my interest and money into "music" they didn’t necessarily like or
understand but thought I'd like or understand whilst simultaneously trying to change how I was going to consume
it.
