Dragging mattresses up against the wall to block out the noise from the neighbours, and scattering cushions everywhere to dampen the acoustics, the bedroom morphed into a band room. What did it sound like when he was practicing in his bedroom? Says Joy, ‘It was just very loud’.
•••
I get a tram to St Kilda, early 1990’s, and the Prince of Wales chalkboard announces Kim Salmon and the Surrealists are playing. It’s summer, and so hot the palm trees are drooping in the thick, still night.
Fitzroy Street is alive. Twelve-foot transvestite hookers, midget pimps, dealers in parachute tracksuits, girls in impossibly short skirts, rockers, punks and pre-grungers stagger, swagger and carousel up the street and down the laneways.
It’s already midnight and there’s no sign of the Surrealists. The Prince Piano Bar is heaving, sweating and cacophonous. It’s friendly, but dangerous and menacing all at once. The hookers are holding court at the crowded bar, and on the squashed stage Fred Negro is riding a toy horse, wearing a cowboy hat, but no pants.
I take refuge in the band room. It looks like a cathedral: lights dim, sticky carpet scattered with plastic pots and the stage lying in wait at the front of the room. It’s close to 1am when three of the coolest looking cats saunter onto stage. Kim Salmon and the Surrealists. Long hair, satin shirts wide open, pointy boots and tight black pants. Kim Salmon looks like a video clip, hair and smoke and shirt billowing around him, as he extracts shards of broken noise from nowhere. Twenty years away from the bedroom in Perth, it’s still very loud.
•••
The quiet self-reliance and impulse for invisibility of Kim’s childhood incurred debts that would become due as isolation and disconnection in adolescence. At 16, he was adrift without identity and with no place to fit.
Adolescence is like being a chrysalis stuck in a cocoon. I didn’t have a single friend, I’d kind of ostracised myself. I remember before I even liked music, I saw David Bowie perform on a Grammy Awards on TV. I knew Space Odyssey the film, and when they announced ‘David Bowie’, in my mind I thought the guy from Space Odyssey had decided to write a song and start singing, because his name was David Bowman … And there’s this curly haired guy strumming a guitar saying ‘ground control to Major Tom’ … and I remember that making a mark. And then later, when adolescence happened, sure enough, there I was in my bedroom, floating in my tin can.
16 was miserable. Estranged from friends, nursing a broken heart, and dodging the school toughs, Kim retreated to his bedroom.
The post-war periods saw an influx of European immigration to Perth, and Hampton Senior High School in the early 70s hosted some pretty tough kids. There were the ‘Rock Outs’, dressed in satin purple shirts, black hipster jeans, black tee shirts and black tractor tread desert boots. Long hair was a pre-requisite, which they were forever flicking out of their eyes. Then there were the ‘Surfs’, with hair parted in the middle and more mundane clothes, thongs and drab looking jeans. They rarely surfed, but got the girls. These two main groups were rounded out by studious but tough Yugoslavians, razor sharp Italians, and embryonic British skinheads. ‘Kids who had been mild in primary school seemed to have transformed over the holidays and were suddenly stealing cars.’ It was a scary amalgam of cultures, which made for a menacing social environment. And anyone who didn’t fit one of these cliques was singled out for derision.
The best way not to fit in was to look different. Kim successfully achieved this by happenstance. Owen was nuts about motorbikes and gifted one to Kim for his 16th birthday. Joy insisted he wear protective clothing and took Kim to the Army Disposals to buy a black leather jacket, foreshadowing the ones that would adorn the first Ramones album three years later. Kim would ride the bike to school each day wearing the jacket, often accompanied by large Sunaroid aviator shades to protect his light sensitive eyes from sun glare. And to combat persistent hay fever, Kim was taking polaramin tablets causing him to frequently doze off in class. ‘So I looked like a pilled out cat in a leather jacket and sunnies doing badly at school.’ Without trying, Kim had affected full punk rock regalia years before it arrived on Australian shores. He stood out. ’I got shit for it but I didn’t care.’
If he had grown not to care about fitting in with other people, fitting in with himself was more troubling. ‘It’s almost like you’re not really anybody, just a series of little scripts … It’s not that I didn’t fit in ‘cos I was such a freak, although that would be a great thing to say. I just think I didn’t know what I wanted.’
There were possibilities, but nothing was happening. He sensed potential and direction and went deeper into himself to find it. Like his earliest memory of his alien expectations needing stronger skin, Kim was reaching for the right identity to bind together the simmering concepts in his head. He was looking for the formula.
The conventional was not going to work. Kim was cultivating a framework for interpreting the world that was at once primitive and sophisticated; or sophisticated because it was primitive. Incapable of adopting the popular paradigms, Kim identified the more rudimentary angles, creating space for the concepts that would shape his music to grow.
The decision to pursue the arts against the school’s guidance spoke of his determination not to be constrained by other’s expectations. His refusal to join the pack or fit in had sharpened his independence, while his adventures in the Embleton everglades and Fremantle docks had instilled a freedom and wildness of heart. He was stripped back, self-reliant and resolute.
The final ingredient was music. The guitar became a refuge. Although isolated in his room, through the guitar and the vinyl records accumulating on his floor, Kim connected his interior existence with the world beyond the sandpits of Northern Perth. He knew that sometime, something would happen.
•••
As the end of school loomed, Kim had found some kind of social foothold, falling in with a group of older kids. Relative sophisticates, they were Kim’s ticket into parties where he was able to encounter some of the hedonism he’d been reading about. A friend who worked at a record shop told Kim about a party, promising hash and live music. Kim went along to jam with his harmonica, smoked pot and killed it on the harp. His first performance was a success.
In the end, he got through high school and scraped in with his leaving certificate. The day before his art exam, Kim and a friend stumbled across a bottle of vodka and a case of Fosters and got smashed. After throwing up all over his parent’s front yard, Kim fronted for his final exam in dusty shape, but made it through. Walking home, he paused at one of the L shaped streets that led to nowhere. He didn’t know exactly what was next, but he wouldn’t find it there.
1975 arrived for Kim with career plans undetermined and an identity still in formation. The Whitlam Government’s fast-moving agenda of social reform and political miscalculations paraded towards the Dismissal. But while the social landscape in the Eastern States was twisting and shouting, Perth was still slow dancing to a more conservative tune.
Perth was really just a big country town and, like many country towns, reflected a white bread, mainstream culture with little diversity. The counter culture was corralled into an out of the way cinema, and music was dominated by ‘Top 40’ cover bands playing in suburban beer barns like the Scarborough Beach Hotel.
It was from this claustrophobic atmosphere that Kim escaped to the Art Faculty of the Western Australian Institute of Technology. ‘I was thinking that by the time I get to art school it’s all going to happen;
