me anyway, the Heidelberg had two great attractions. The first was the Heidelberg Town Hall Big Band. What a thrill it was to hear that twenty-piece orchestra, with its full brass and reed section, keys, guitar, bass, percussion and drums in full roar. The second was The Charlie Gauld Trio (oh, and the gorgeously sophisticated office girls that seductively shimmied around the town hall all night long, but I was 15, they were unattainable, we move on).
My friends and I, along with a couple thousand others, would make our way to the Town Hall on Upper Heidelberg Road on a Wednesday or Saturday night. We would go to see Jill Glenn, Colin Cook, and Olivia Newton-John; I remember seeing her sing solo and with her old Go Show/Bandstand partner Pat Carroll. These artists, among others, would sing the hits of the day, backed by that mighty twenty-plus-piece band. When Jill Glenn did her ‘Little Egypt’ routine or swung her hips and did the hoochie-koo while singing ‘Big Spender’ from Sweet Charity, man I nearly popped my cork. Colin Cook also did a pretty good Joe Cocker impersonation when he performed the Mad Dogs and Englishmen version of ‘The Letter’ with the band. After an hour or so, the singers and band would take a break, everyone shuffling outside to smoke a gasper or talk bullshit or try to chat up one of the office girls or whatever.
After a half-hour or so, we were back inside and ready for — in my case — the main event. For me, the real highlight of the night was when the Charlie Gauld Trio took the stage to play the progressive rock hits of the time. Charlie was arguably one of the greatest guitar players in the country and a legend of the local music scene, having come out of Melbourne’s ’50s go-to house band the Thunderbirds, which had also included Harold Frith on drums and Peter Robinson on bass, who went on to co-form with Laurie Arthur the Strangers. The Thunderbirds had backed Betty McQuaid on her hit recording of the John D Loudermilk song ‘Midnight Bus’ as well as Johnny Chester on his version of the Johnny Kidd and the Pirates hit ‘Shakin’ All Over’. Listen to Johnny’s version of the song on YouTube; that’s Charlie Gauld wangin’ that surf guitar, and what a cold blast of icy reverb that sound is!
Charlie could play anything; funk, flamboyance or invention. The first time I heard Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Foxy Lady’, as well as Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ they were being played by Charlie at The Heidelberg. He stood expressionless and resolute behind his aviator sunglasses and extracted, it seemed to me, the same fire and fluidity from his Burns guitar that Hendrix and Clapton had managed to pull out of their Stratocasters. It was psychedelic, it was funk, it was blues, it was rock — Charlie Gauld played them all.
Many years later, Jeff Burstin and myself were playing a little acoustic gig on a Sunday afternoon at the Palace Hotel on Burke Road in Camberwell. Suddenly, a little old man wearing enormous sunglasses shuffled into the room, pulling with him a shopping trolley full of old newspapers. He sat down at a table and ordered a beer, pulling out a handful of yellowed newsprint and flicking through them, stopping occasionally to drink from his glass. He intermittently looked up and smiled at us, or swivelled around the room as though looking for someone. He’d drain his beer, read his newspaper, order another pot and repeat. I’d recognised who he was at once.
‘I reckon that’s Charlie Gauld there,’ I said to Jeff between songs. ‘I’d know him anywhere.’
When we took a break I approached Charlie and asked if he was who I thought he was. Of course I was right. I told him what an inspiration he was to me, that he was, in my young teenage eyes, the greatest guitar player I had ever seen. I told him he was a legend, I said it was an honour to meet him, and then I saw, through his dark glasses, his eyes moisten, so I shut the fuck up.
‘Thanks …’ was all he whispered. I bought him a beer and asked if he would like to sit in with Jeff and me.
‘Please play my guitar, it would be such a thrill if you did …’ I gushed.
‘No, no, I don’t play anymore, sorry. I was hoping Wayne [Duncan, our then bass player and an old friend of Charlie’s] would be here today?’
‘No sorry Charlie, it’s just the little duo today.’
‘Oh right! I was hoping to see Wayne, maybe next time … you were great by the way, I just wanted to see Wayne.’
With that he repacked his trolley, drank his beer and shuffled out the pub’s front door. Charlie Gauld died soon after and with him went a little piece of Melbourne’s rock’n’roll soul.
The Eureka Youth League, Communism and all that Jazz
Throughout the ’40s and ’50s, and into the ’60s decade of rebellion, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) developed significant relationships with cultural and artistic movements. The youth wing of the CPA, The Eureka Youth League (EYL), played a particularly important role in the attempt to forge an alliance between musicians and communism. First through jazz, and then through two folk music revivals, the EYL sought to use music to recruit members and to foster its ideological and political struggles. In the end, the EYL’s and CPA’s relationship with both jazz and folk was tenuous. Yet along the way, the music itself flourished. This, then, is a story of tensions between and paradoxes surrounding the Party and musicians sympathetic to it. Yet it is also a story about how the cultural life of Australia was greatly enriched by the EYL’s attempt to use music as a political tool …7
Back in 1942, newlywed Graeme Bell was hangin’ with the Reed push, playing hot jazz and pissing-on at the Fawkner Hotel in Toorak Road, or spending time at his flat in South Yarra. Drinkin’ at the flat was de rigueur with the hip bohemian crowd and everyone who was anyone was there — jazz musicians, music critics, Michael Keon. It was at the Bells’ Adams Street flat that Sid Nolan turned out monochromes of nudes painted on blotting paper with the aide of a dipped finger in a jar of red pigment. Groovy baby.
But then the planets aligned, and Graeme and Roger Bell’s life would change forever when Harry Stein of the Eureka Youth League, the youth arm of the Communist Party of Australia invited the Bells to play at Stein’s Eureka Hot Jazz Society at 104 Queensberry Street North Melbourne. What was going on here? Why would a card-carrying communist support and promote a bunch of avant-garde jazz heads like Bell and their modernist artist mates?
Maybe Stein and fellow members were true Bolsheviks, in the pre-Stalinist sense. Like Harry’s Eureka Youth League, the pre-Stalinist Russian Bolsheviks encouraged a national cultural pluralism, a kind of democratisation of art where progressive artistic movements would become a dynamic force in society, hopefully resulting in modernity becoming accessible to everyone. In the immediate aftermath of the 1917 revolution, Lenin’s Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky turned over the Russian art schools to modernist artists such as Marc Chagall, whose staff included Malevich and El Lissitzky. According to Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New:
‘Lunacharky, who was determined to see the birth of “an art of 5 kopecks” — cheap available and modern — created the Higher State Art Training Centre in Moscow … which turned into the Bauhaus of Russia, the most advanced art college anywhere in the world, and the ideological centre of Russian Collectivism … where the modernity of rivets, celluloid, aeroplane wings replaced primitivism and mysticism.’8
Maybe Harry Stein viewed things similarly to his Bolshevik comrades. Maybe he too wanted to establish Melbourne’s very own democratically available modernist jazz centre right there in Queensberry Street, a place where everyone, not just the denisens of the Trocadero or Palais de Danse, could access this dynamic music. He certainly wanted to establish a space where jazz musicians could play, swap ideas and be supported by both a sympathetic promoter and a receptive audience. If this fitted into a broader communist vision for Stein at the EYL Hall in North Melbourne then perhaps it was successful.
The
