up the deserted streets to the nature reserve beyond Irwin Road, and hunt insects or catch gilgees and tadpoles in the muddy waters of Mahogany Creek. In the rain, the dirt roads would flood and transform into misshapen canals of gushing, sludgy water. The boys made boats out of sheets of rusty corrugated iron and rowed down the tracks using broom sticks as oars.
On infrequent incursions to Bunbury, Kim and his cousin David would manufacture tin can bombs, hang out amongst the mechanical relics in the railway yards, and swim at the rugged back beach. On occasions he would accompany his grandmother Sammy to her job cleaning doctors’ surgeries where Kim was entranced by the gleaming tangles of laboratory test tubes and science equipment.
To a young Kim Salmon, it was all his very own sci-fi drama or jungle adventure.
•••
When Kim was 7, his sister Megan appeared, and the Salmon family was complete. Good at drawing and music, Megan’s artistic temperament was aligned to Kim’s, and she adored her older brother. Brad, meanwhile, was gorgeous, with movie star looks and a beguiling twinkle in his eye. But he was larger than life, and just didn’t fit into the normal picture. The swamps of Embleton held enough cruel kids to make life uncomfortable for him. Observing the unwanted attention drawn by Brad’s antics, Kim learned to be invisible. ‘As a child I wanted to be left alone and left to do my own thing. I saw attention as a danger and hoped people wouldn’t notice me; stick your head up and you’ll get it sliced off …’
The conclusions drawn from watching his errant younger brother confirmed Kim’s inherent independent streak. He refused to go to Sunday school, scouts, play team sports or join clubs. ‘I wasn’t a joiner. I didn’t want to join things.’
At primary school, Kim alternated between successful invisibility and revealing the first sparks of his talent. ‘In primary school, I found that the odd years were good, and the even years were crap. Every second year I hated, and the teachers hated me. I didn’t fit in, I was colouring outside the lines.’ Kim’s grade five teacher recognised him as not only a thinker, but an artist. She introduced him to De Vinci and Picasso, and under her tutorage he excelled. ‘Then the next year, with another teacher, I was invisible again.’
With this on again, off again trajectory, Kim exited primary school having gravitated to science, art and free-thinking. His principle accomplishments outside of school revolved around making bombs, conducting chemistry set experiments, devouring Science Weekly magazines, and returning frozen mosquitos to thawed life. ‘Like Frankenstein,’ recalls Owen. Or perhaps, like a scientist.
•••
Kim’s teenage years and the start of high school coincided with the end of the 60s. Music — while always present in the Salmon house through Joy’s piano playing, Megan’s singing or Owen’s classical tapes — did not impact Kim as a child. He didn’t respond to the sounds of the 60s. For Kim, the decade was kind of like wallpaper, a backdrop of which he was aware, but which didn’t make an impression. ‘I was a science nerd. Hippy stuff didn’t wash with me. But in 1970, at age 13, I heard pop music. I went into the 70s and became a teenager. It was the beginning.’
The first thing that made an impression was Spirit in the Sky. ‘To my primitive mind, it sounded like electronic, space age music it was a combo of pop hooks and sci-fi, taking the piss out of the afterlife.’
Wandering around his new high school, Kim saw a group of girls dancing to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Up Around the Bend, their dresses hitching up as they moved. It was an inviting association. He later saw the band play at Perth’s Subiaco Oval and the spell was cast.
He watched The Kinks play Lola on TV, and was enamoured of Ray Davies’ flouncy hair, leather coat and lace up boots. He loved the humour and sharp intellect in Daddy Cool’s Eagle Rock, and the Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want shepherded him into the next era — ‘the last of the innocent before all the cool stuff happened’.
With these discoveries came the need for cash. Kim took on chores and odd jobs, doing the dishes, shoving leaflets into letter boxes, working in factories and salvage yards and enduring pathetic rates of pay. But eventually, there it was in his possession, his first LP: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Cosmos Factory’. At $5.50, it was a major investment, roughly the same price as the concert ticket. Another few weeks of hard labour and Hawkwind’s ‘In Search of Space’ joined the fledgling vinyl collection.
Music had arrived with force for the 13-year-old Kim Salmon, and out of the blue, he came home from school and announced that he wanted to learn the guitar. Soon, he had selected a $14 Audition acoustic guitar from Kmart. Joy remembers it as ‘a cheap old thing; it was dreadful’.
Despite his early lack of interest, Kim had inherited an innate musical sensibility from his maternal grandmother, Jessie, who could play anything. Banjo, piano, mandolin, and guitar — she could play them all. Kim’s great grandfather had been a travelling musician and Jessie had collected his tricks of the trade and adopted the spirit. When told that Kim was learning guitar she said, ‘Oh I do hope it’s an electric guitar!’
Unsure of how to tune the Audition, Kim adopted some esoteric tuning patterns, and as he really wanted a whammy bar (absent from the acoustic) he used the tuning keys for that purpose instead, turning the keys dramatically to bend the notes up and down. It took a sprinkling of lessons from his tobacco-stained, jazz-infused guitar teacher to eventually correct his unorthodox tuning habits.
The Audition made way for an electric Coronet. ‘I didn’t have an amp, and in the end I couldn’t get it together. It had a whammy bar, which is what I wanted, but all I could do was break strings.’ The Coronet found its way to Kim’s friend Gary who loaned Kim his Yamaha G60 nylon string in return. ‘We ended up doing a swap, and I got the Yamaha. That was where I explored music really, and where I experimented on some of my identity with the paint jobs!’ Bowie-inspired sci-fi paintings adorned the guitar only to be replaced the next week with Cat Stevens themed art work and so on. The Yamaha, witness to the early formation of Kim Salmon’s creative impulse, waits patiently at his parent’s house still, stripped back to plain wood, ready to be called into action if needed.
•••
Kim’s wit and sharp mind were quickly evident in high school. He was very good academically and by fourth year he’d progressed to the advanced work stream. It came easily and he succeeded without a stretch. The school was impressed, but inadvertently engineered the competition against which academic work had no chance. School sponsored music was drawing Kim away from his studies.
I grew up with J’taime blaring around the speakers in my high school. They used to have it going at recess. Whether it was the radio or some senior kid in there being a DJ, I was never quite sure. They played a lot of Philly soul and Motown. I remember hearing the Delfonics doing Didn’t I Blow Your Mind this Time. Eddie Holman’s Hey There Lonely Girl. Old Elvis songs. I Can’t Stop Loving You, but the Ray Charles version … J’taime just stuck in my mind. The B3 organ, that incredible melody, with the sound effects … it was a wonderful thing. Things like that had seeped through into my consciousness and stayed there.
In fourth year, Joy got a call from the concerned headmaster. Kim had declared that he was changing from the top academic stream to go into the Arts course. The attraction of sketching, painting and playing music had overtaken his other school work. Joy says, ‘Of course we knew that he’d always been able to draw and it was no great shock that he was good, but he’d never said anything. The school was concerned because they thought he was such a good student, but they didn’t understand just how good he was with his art.’
Music, too, was becoming serious. Increasingly, Kim would be holed up in his
