a century, and the story of how it became an internationally recognised live music capital is amazing.
It is remarkable that a little city, thousands and thousands of kilometres away from the musical motherland has been able to establish a culture that has been magnified by music where — according to the Music Victoria census — around 3500 musicians and tens of thousands of patrons on any given weekend night engage in a kind of magical exchange, which for generations, has sustained the crystal ju ju that is the music we love. All this in the face of hostile planning law, the dead hand of rotting corporatism, booze, sexism, drugs, the nihilism of changing fashion and technology. What has been the process that has allowed our musicians to create a sound so vital it gives you chills, a sound often overpowering, a sound so recognisably Melbourne? That’s what I hope to answer in the pages of this book.
The story of live music in Melbourne is very much linked to the story of jazz. Jazz was played in the grand dance palaces, community spaces and town halls of the southern capital from the ’20s up to the ’50s. It was then that purveyors of roots music — which is defined as incorporating blues, country, folk, rhythm and blues, and rock influences — joined their jazz colleagues in the halls, clubs and coffee lounges, and later, bars and pubs of Melbourne. It’s a big story. It’s a story that has a political and social subplot, a story tied to the history and culture of Melbourne. Every story has heroes and ours has thousands of them — the musicians of Melbourne. Those men and women who were born in Melbourne or made the city their home, whose skill has allowed them to play across genres and styles, and who will, for a hundred bucks a gig, lump their basses, tenors, trumpets, trombones, keyboards, guitars, drum kits and amps through ice-chopping Melbourne winter days and nights to play like the confident masters they are. They go to root of things: a jazzy waltz, a full-on country jamboree. They never let the singer stand naked. With everyone sitting in with everyone else there is an inevitable cross-fertilisation: licks are incorporated, phrases are borrowed and a sound emerges, a Melbourne sound that is at once rakish and debonair.
Some might say the Melbourne sound goes to the very soul of the form that’s being played. That’s because Melbourne musicians are enthusiasts and not academics, which means they play from the heart and not the head. Some may find this approach a little eccentric at times, ragged even, but it’s a sound that’s unique. It’s a sound I’ve heard up close from the barroom floor and from the ringside table of the stage, and I have seen first-hand how these Melbourne masters blow the fog away.
One thing this book isn’t is a list. It is not a comprehensive, exhaustive examination of every jazz band or all the roots artists that have played and made a name for themselves both in Melbourne and beyond. What it will examine — and hopefully explain — is the altered consciousness, the reality or the ‘invisible republic’ (to paraphrase the music historian Greil Marcus in his book Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes)3 of the Melbourne jazz and roots scenes.
Chapter 1
‘Change is Gonna Come’
A warm north-easterly breeze sailed me down Collins Street in Melbourne on the eve of Australia’s 1972 Federal Election. I was both nervous and excited; nervous that the Gough Whitlam-led Labor Opposition would fail in its attempt to win government and sweep away twenty-five years of conservative rule, and excited at the prospect that it would succeed. I wanted to take my mind off politics, so I was on my way to the Melbourne Town Hall to buy a ticket to The American Blues Concert, an event promoted by Kym Bonython and featuring Buddy Guy with Junior Wells, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup and Australia’s Jeannie Lewis.
It had been an eventful two years since I had first sat on the Lord Mayor’s seats at the Melbourne Town Hall back in May 1971. That night I had an epiphany when I saw Daddy Cool, a band I had only half heard of, play a show that’s now etched in folklore, an event that turned an audience into a shrieking, bounding asylum of loonies. It resulted in DC signing a record deal and producing ‘Eagle Rock’, an unofficial Australian anthem that sent the band to the top of the charts and me to the rehearsal room. That Melbourne Town Hall show would see Daddy Cool go to America, and would set me on a musical path I’d follow for the rest of my life. But that was only half of it.
In 1971 I left school, enrolled in a business course, hated it, dropped out, learned ‘Born to Be Wild’, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘Carol’ and The Animals’ version of ‘House of the Rising Sun’, played the odd gig, rehearsed some more and got a job with a trucking company. That lasted all of nine months before I ran screaming from the company’s Footscray Road Freight Terminal pursued by a tattooed, six-foot-four predatory contractor who wanted me to be his boy!! I certainly didn’t want him to be my man!!! I ran hard down Footscray Road and — panting and shaking — I fell into the musty, comforting and protective arms of the Victorian Public Service.
That was April 1972 and the monolith of Victorian politics — the arch conservative Henry Bolte — was Premier. He had been there forever, well since 1955 at least, but would not be for much longer: the electorate had turned on him. Henry was a rough-hewn autocrat: he smoked, he drank, he swore and he gambled, often all at once and often before lunch. Henry was a farmer, a bully and a builder. Bolte used debt — up to fifty-eight percent of the state’s economy — to build things like the Tullamarine International Airport, the State Electricity Commission, the Gas and Fuel Corporation, Latrobe and Monash Universities, schools, hospitals, roads and the underground rail loop.
But by 1972 Bolte was a man out of his time and the public had had enough of him — especially young people, we hated him. We hated him because he’d pulled down half the inner city and built ugly high-rise towers on the denuded land. We hated him because he had no sympathy for environmental issues, and for his contempt for the cause célébre of the day, opposition to the Vietnam War. We hated him because he hanged Ronald Ryan in the ’60s, civil libertarians were an anathema to him and he loathed trade unions — and trade unionists. We hated him worst of all because he was a buffoon; he had no time for artists, musicians, academics or the glories of Melbourne’s Victorian architectural heritage, and he wanted to jail women who aborted their babies together with their abortionists. He had to go, the public and his party wanted him to retire, even Henry understood that his days were numbered, but he wouldn’t go just yet, not until he was good and ready, and he was finally ready in August 1972.
In April of the same year I found myself walking through the heavy oak-hung doors the Public Works Department at Number 2 Treasury Place East Melbourne. The Public Works Department (PWD) was one of the original Victorian public sector departments and to my nineteen-year-old eye its public servants seemed to be of a similar vintage. Old, bald, badly-dressed men sat smoking and coughing behind heavy timber and leather-inlaid desks, banging stamps onto bits of paper then filing them into ‘Out’ trays where they were collected by pimple-faced, disaffected youths pushing shaky trolleys over worn linoleum-covered floors. The nicotine-stained walls peeled paint and mice squabbled in the wall cavities. In 1972 PWD was, to paraphrase LP Hartley, a foreign country; they did things differently there.
‘Catholic, are you Catholic?’ I was asked more than once, especially when I rubbed the ash streak off the forehead of a colleague …
‘What the fuck are doin’?’ asked the middle-aged man reeling from my touch.
‘Sorry, you had this smudge.’ I stuttered in reply.
‘Of course I have a smudge you fuckwit, it’s Ash Wednesday, aren’t you Catholic?’
‘Well, no … I’m nothing really … maybe notionally Church of England!’
‘That explains a lot, what the fuck is a Protestant doin’ in the Public Works Department, this is a Catholic Department, why aren’t workin’ in Education or Treasury?’
I suddenly realised why I was left alone
