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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 most lunch times when half the office disappeared up the hill to sit on the pews of St Patrick’s Cathedral and the other half walked across Spring Street 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 been straight out of the Chess Records house band and probably were. What a performance — Guy’s spearing Gibson tone and zigzag attack, Wells’s growling vocal and honking harp. ‘Snatch it Back’ got the Town Hall moving, followed by the bass-driven ‘Honeydripper’ (soon to be a staple of Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons’ set list). ‘Bad Bad Whiskey’ was in there somewhere, as were ‘The T-Bone Shuffle’, ‘Messin’ With The Kid’ and ‘A Man of Many Words’ with its New Orleans feel; and the band took it down with ‘Ships on the Ocean’. The whole thing concluded with the meat cutter groove of ‘Hoodoo Man Blues’ and ‘Little By Little’. The audience was on their feet, they’d been set free, and they called for more — but there was no more. That low-down, dirty, voodoo blues was over, for now. And so the audience politely filed out of the door and disappeared into the black Melbourne night.

As I left through the foyer I thought about what a contrast the night had been to the Daddy Cool gig eighteen months prior. There was no house wrecking, no dancing in the aisles, just mature appreciation of two stunning blues performers in their prime: a robust, magical encounter with history. It was also a glimpse into the direction Melbourne’s emerging blues and roots scene would take, dominated initially by two bands — Chain, and Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons — and supported by Broderick Smith’s duo of outfits, Adderley Smith Blues Band and Carson.

I often reflect how fortunate I was to be at the Melbourne Town Hall that night, a night that had a huge influence on the multitude of Melbourne performers and musicians who were in the audience. In my case, it planted a seed, I was too new to the art form to immediately run to a bar and start playing Robert Johnson’s ‘Crossroad Blues’, but I knew something had moved. Like Sam Cooke said, ‘Change is Gonna Come,’ and I knew that it was gonna happen fast. A door had been unlocked, and I was about to explore what was on the other side. Meantime I’d work in the public service — not a bad option, given that Bolte had been replaced in August by the reformist Rupert Hamer, who was about to introduce wide-ranging reforms to the public sector that would greatly favour young people of potential. I’d also keep rehearsing and hope that one day I too would feel the visceral, stark emotion that was, and is, at the heart of this most spirited of musical forms, a form on full display that December night at the Melbourne Town Hall. Thanks Alan Lee.