to the Cricketers Bar of the Windsor Hotel to suck back half a dozen darts and drink as many pots of beer as humanly possible in the allotted forty-five minute break. After lunch the office mood changed from one of grudging activity to one of raucous mayhem, defined by loud, teasing banter punctuated with the sound of transistor radios pumping out the droning call of the mid-week races, or in summer, the slow thwump of cricket commentary. Phones rang, bets were placed on TAB accounts, cigarettes were chain-smoked, and the clank of franking machines and the clatter and ding of typewriters became white noise underpinning the general muck-up of the office.
So what could a nineteen-year-old Protestant do? I couldn’t find solace in female company; the only women who worked in the Victorian Public Sector in 1972 were typists and machinists who were generally my mother’s age. Back then the public sector was a man’s world; women were precluded from working in the hallowed administrative stream of the public service — something to do with women making way for returning World War Two servicemen. But the war had finished twenty-seven years before and no one had thought to change that particular recruitment policy, not the non-tertiary educated, male, job for life Departmental Secretaries and certainly not the rough as guts Premier. So what to do?
What I did was find Thomas’ Music Store, then located in the Southern Cross Hotel on the corner of Bourke and Exhibition Streets. It was there I met my saviour and music educator, Alan Lee, a record salesman, vibraphone playing guitarist and pianist, and bandleader who developed deep associations with John Sangster and Jeannie Lewis. Alan Lee — an emotional and extraordinarily generous man.
I don’t know why Alan took a shine to me, but he did. Maybe it was my obvious desperation to talk to a human being that wasn’t an embittered, brain-damaged, middle-aged career alcoholic or an ex-serviceman suffering from what we would now understand as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the types of people who together made up the personnel within Accounts Records and Reports, my PWD workplace. I told Alan I was a singer in a rock-and-roll band and that I was desperate to expand my musical horizon. He asked me what I listened to and I reeled off the names: Daddy Cool, Elvis, Stones, Beatles, Kinks, Dylan, Cream, Neil Young, Doors, Janis, Joni, the usual early ’70s fare. Alan smiled, nodded his head and said, ‘I get it …’ and then he proceeded to take me back to the musical origins of my favoured bands, back to Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Blind Willie McTell as well as the Jimmies, Read and Witherspoon. He played me Dave Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, Janis Ian, Odetta, The Band, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Dizzy, Bird, you name it.
I sat most afternoons in a Thomas’ sound booth, headphones on, my sandwiches by my side, discovering a whole new world of music revealed to me by Alan Lee, music that was not known to me — blues and roots (I found country and western swing a little later). In 1972 I spent half of my meagre salary on records and blew the rest on gigs like Creedence Clearwater Revival at Festival Hall, John Mayall, Led Zeppelin at Kooyong, and the shambolic Joe Cocker show, just to name a few.
On a particular lunchtime in late November 1972 Alan suggested I might like to come to The American Blues Festival gig at The Town Hall.
‘You must hear Buddy Guy and Junior Wells and Arthur Crudup who of course wrote Elvis’s “That’s All Right Mama”. Oh, and I’ll be playing with Jeannie Lewis by the way.’
He explained that he played vibes and general percussion on a couple of tracks that would form the basis of the Sydney-based jazz vocalist’s award-winning 1973 album Free Fall Through Featherless Flight.
‘Sure, why not, I’d love to hear you perform!’
Arriving at the front of the Melbourne Town Hall I pushed through the crowd gathered at the entrance, walked through the foyer and took my place, third row and center stage of that great auditorium. I looked around the room: there was the magnificent organ dominating the back of the stage, the balconies, the ornate walls and ceilings. It was exactly as I remembered it from the Daddy Cool gig in May of the previous year. But there was a major difference … the audience. Sure, there were the freaky young men with beards and long hair, and the girls wearing cheesecloth, feathers and beads. But this was overall an older audience; there was the odd clean-shaven face, even one or two tailored jackets, and a smattering of the women wore more conservative couture compared to their younger sisters. I did notice, however, the ubiquitous joint being shared along rows of concertgoers from all age groups — apparently the desire to get stoned transcended age and class within the jazz and blues fraternity.
Finally the lights went down and an emcee, I think it was Kym Bonython, introduced Jeannie Lewis. Her band shuffled on stage and took their places behind their instruments; drums, bass, keys — and there was Alan with his vibraphone. Jeannie smiled, said hi, and launched into ‘Motherless Child’, her vocal soaring over the shimmer and swirl of the band. Hers was a transformative show made for dreamers and lovers. Was that the Dylan Thomas poem ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Goodnight’? Wonderful. Then ‘Till Time Brings Change’, followed by ‘Feathers and Donna’; a stunning support by Jeannie, politely appreciated by the audience. Jeannie often quoted Phil Ochs: Ah, but in such an ugly time, the true protest is beauty. Well this was an ugly time; we were still fighting in Vietnam and, in attics in Melbourne’s inner city, we were still hiding young men who refused to join that government-sanctioned Asian killing machine. What Jeannie did that night was pure protest, a howl against the rank, stultifying conservatism of the Australian government and its dribbling obsequiousness to America’s Asian war. Luckily, in twenty-four short hours, that was all about to end.
Arthur Crudup followed and I couldn’t have imagined a more contrasting experience to the ethereal Jeannie Lewis. He walked on stage wearing ill-fitting trousers with a box guitar slung around his neck. He looked frail, sick; those years living in a packing crate in Chicago singing blues in the freezing streets while working as a laborer and bootlegger had taken their toll. So too had the endless fight for recognition and royalties for his songs, including ‘That’s All Right Mama’ and ‘My Baby Left Me’, both recorded by Elvis and a million other white boys. Standing on that Melbourne stage he seemed broke, humiliated and beaten. As he once said, ‘I realised I was making everybody rich and here I was poor.’1
Crudup stood motionless in front of the microphone and looked stage left. A member of the road crew came out and put his arms around Crudup and tuned his guitar, then slunk back to the dark, leaving Arthur alone and exposed. But then, as Crudup started to play and sing, a miracle happened. ‘That’s Alright’, ‘Mean Ol’ Frisco Blues’, ‘My Baby Left Me’, ‘Walking Cane’. This was deep, dark blues born in bondage, this was powerful and disruptive, this was the Devil’s music. Suddenly it was 1935 and we were truckin’ around irreligious Clarksdale in Mississippi lookin’ for freedom and the road to glory. I smiled and clapped, exultant in the sound of Crudup’s reedy-shouting vocal and boot-thumping rhythm. Crudup was the real thing and a primer for what was to follow.
Alan Lee had given me the lowdown on Louisiana-born guitarist Buddy Guy and Memphis-born harp player Junior Wells in the week before the show. He described Buddy as a killer sideman, a house guitar player at Chicago’s Chess Records who had featured on classic recordings of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters back in the mid-’60s. Junior Wells was also a Muddy Waters alumnus, a wild pioneer of amplified harp; he was also a singer songwriter who had released the classic ‘Hoodoo Man Blues’ with Buddy Guy on guitar in 1966. I bought the album on the recommendation of Alan and couldn’t get enough of it: ‘Snatch it Back and Hold It’, ‘Hoodoo Man Blues’ — classic blues. I also bought the singles ‘Messin’ with the Kid’ and ‘Little By Little’, both killer tracks and both sung and recorded by Wells. But I needed to see Buddy and Junior live; I needed to see them create that visceral, wild mercury sound — and suddenly, there they were, shuffling onto the stage at the Melbourne Town Hall. Guy was resplendent in a suit and carried a red ES 355 Gibson (not his trademark Stratocaster) and Wells wore a white shirt with checked trousers. The duo was complemented by a meaty bass player and a drummer, both of whom could have
