To Sharon and Hannah. Thank you for your enthusiasm about this book, for your encouragement and for sharing the music.
People are surprised that I’m not telling this story and that I would entrust it to someone else.
‘My’ story certainly wasn’t writing itself and the couple of attempts I’d made had failed due to my ‘poverty of time’.
I had been urged by an editor to have a crack at my memoirs, not once but twice.
One attempt was to take the form of a guide to being ‘semi famous’.
How to deal with the anomalies associated with that strata of ‘celebrity’ in which I found myself. I was told by the publisher that they liked the idea but I wasn’t famous enough for them to pay me an advance. My other attempt was to be called ‘You’re Not Kim Salmon’ a phrase that, oddly perhaps, I’ve heard a lot in my time. My friend and fellow Sandgroper Rob Snarski, completely unaware of my attempt, went on to use the very similar ‘You’re Not Rob Snarski’ as the title to his book. The irony in all this is that he’s very much at the equivalent level of fame to me and he seems to have made a very good go of his book.
However, this is the writer, Doug Galbraith’s story.
A story about me, to be sure, but Doug’s story none the less.
What could I possibly say about such a thing?
Well let’s start with Douglas Galbraith.
I got to know Doug as a guitar student of mine and found him to be a quick learner and an intelligent, articulate person who enjoyed a conversation.
We indulged in many a yarn after our lessons.
The little ironies and quirks of fate that peppered my ‘rock stories’ were never lost on him. He was quick to take up the threads and dangle baits for me which would keep me guilelessly talking on.
After maybe a term or two of lessons, and more yarns, he was prompted to see if there was a biography out there. Finding a gap, he one night summoned up the chutzpah to put it to me that he might be the one to rectify this imbalance and write my story.
‘Well’ … I thought.
If he had the time and the inclination I would, based on what I knew of him, be more than happy to give his enterprise my blessing.
Doug’s account cuts a swathe through the details that I and others have provided in accounts of what we think happened to get to the narrative he presents.
It’s not just a case of ‘if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to observe it does the tree fall at all?’ It’s a matter of what colour was the tree, was it a tree, was it a concept or construct?
It’s down to the observer, or lack of, their state of mind, or lack of and a whole range of factors.
I actually don’t believe there’s any one objective truth out there.
For example, I have a memory of kicking down a hotel door following a night of indulgence after my ‘last’ Beasts Of Bourbon show in Perth 1994.
Not a malicious act, I stress.
There are several accounts of this that I’ve heard and they all differ wildly.
I definitely kicked someone’s hotel door down.
Beasts mixer Matt Crosby says it was his door but I remember he was accompanying me looking for a party when I did the deed.
But what would I know?
It was like four in the morning and my ‘intake’ had been steady since the end of the gig.
Something happened and there were indeed a few witnesses.
Every perception here was very subjective … filtered.
One of the eerie things about reading through this book has been encountering the poignant memories of close friends who have died.
Before this book they were still here and there were only our shared memories.
Now I read their stories and they tell a different story to mine.
There are overlapping details that don’t quite match up to how I remember.
Good stories, but different ones — ones that I will never again get to discuss with them. I enjoy them regardless.
Now that Doug’s book is written I’d like to acknowledge my respect to him for going to all of the bother to go out and find all of the stories. Having found them, then sifting through with a fine-tooth comb, using all of his imagination and intelligence to fashion a cohesive and compelling narrative. Finally for all the legwork of finding a suitable publisher to put that story out into the world.
I’d also like to thank everyone who gave generously of their time to provide Doug with the fuel for this story. It is them and not me that give the tale credibility.
I want to thank Doug’s daughter Hannah and his wife Sharon for giving up so much of their time with him, and for their support and encouragement in the frankly nebulous project of finding enough of the loose ends and threads shed by my random journey through time and space to fashion something that people might want to read.
Doug cared enough to do this and he wrote the story so I’m pleased to have you all read it!
The Oldsmobile drifted to the edge of Riverside Drive, Memphis Tennessee and stopped, engine running. An early morning mist was draped over the town, and the Mississippi River was dappled with rain drops. Kim Salmon held the steering wheel tightly and stared ahead, bleary from the night before. As if in a dream, he opened the car door and stood up, looking through the misty rain punctured with the first rays of sun. His eyes fixed on an enormous, unearthly pyramid of mirror and glass shimmering on the Memphis skyline.
Bewildered, it appeared to him not as a building but a vestige from outer space. An iridescent shrine to a far-flung lifeform. He took a step back and rubbed his eyes. His momentary alarm faded as the Memphis Pyramid sports arena swam into focus. But an echo of the unworldly apparition remained.
Kim Salmon doesn’t always see the world through earthly eyes.
Collecting himself, he returned to the driver’s seat and pulled back onto the still empty road. He had a record to make.
