Читать книгу Nine Parts Water, One Part Sand - Douglas Galbraith - Страница 13

Kim’s earliest recollection of childhood is walking down the front steps of his parent’s Bunbury home and becoming aware of his knee joints, his skin and bones. ‘God this is really hopeless, how flimsy is this? I became aware of my body, I had this idea of flesh and bones and it seemed disappointing. It felt very squishy and frail. I had to accept my mortality. I guess I was expecting to be some kind of metallic alien, but I was just a plain old human.’

His first few years were spent alone with Owen and Joy, embarking on long walking expeditions around Bunbury. Exploring the wasted spaces along the railway line, nosing around the rusting wheat silos, scarpering along the jetties, and messing about in the estuarine mud. An observant and interested Kim quietly accompanied his parents, listening but not talking much as the world was introduced to him.

His brother Brad arrived when Kim was 3 years old, breaking the quiet. ‘Brad was a pretty good baby for about a fortnight. And then he started to scream’, says Joy. As Joy tried to soothe the crying Brad, Kim would disappear into drawing, blocks, or Meccano constructions and generally keep a safe distance from this noisy new thing. ‘It was like the party was over when Brad came. We moved to Perth, and Bunbury seemed like a lost haven, green and full of adventure with ships, lighthouses — the whole thing’.

Transplanted to Embleton in North Perth, Kim adapted to his new surrounds. It was semi-industrial wasteland; part rural, part sandpit, part swamp. The Salmons landed in a state housing district: ‘lots of housing blocks with nothing on them, lots of T junctions and L shaped streets going nowhere.’ Embleton’s local mythologies were soon woven into Kim’s psyche — missing children crushed in the sandpits, swallowed by the ravening grit, never to be seen again. He trod carefully.

As the empty streets gradually filled with houses, a gang of kids emerged for Kim to consort with. They’d ride up the deserted streets to the nature reserve beyond Irwin Road, and hunt insects or catch gilgees and tadpoles in the muddy waters of Mahogany Creek. In the rain, the dirt roads would flood and transform into misshapen canals of gushing, sludgy water. The boys made boats out of sheets of rusty corrugated iron and rowed down the tracks using broom sticks as oars.

On infrequent incursions to Bunbury, Kim and his cousin David would manufacture tin can bombs, hang out amongst the mechanical relics in the railway yards, and swim at the rugged back beach. On occasions he would accompany his grandmother Sammy to her job cleaning doctors’ surgeries where Kim was entranced by the gleaming tangles of laboratory test tubes and science equipment.

To a young Kim Salmon, it was all his very own sci-fi drama or jungle adventure.

•••

When Kim was 7, his sister Megan appeared, and the Salmon family was complete. Good at drawing and music, Megan’s artistic temperament was aligned to Kim’s, and she adored her older brother. Brad, meanwhile, was gorgeous, with movie star looks and a beguiling twinkle in his eye. But he was larger than life, and just didn’t fit into the normal picture. The swamps of Embleton held enough cruel kids to make life uncomfortable for him. Observing the unwanted attention drawn by Brad’s antics, Kim learned to be invisible. ‘As a child I wanted to be left alone and left to do my own thing. I saw attention as a danger and hoped people wouldn’t notice me; stick your head up and you’ll get it sliced off …’

The conclusions drawn from watching his errant younger brother confirmed Kim’s inherent independent streak. He refused to go to Sunday school, scouts, play team sports or join clubs. ‘I wasn’t a joiner. I didn’t want to join things.’

At primary school, Kim alternated between successful invisibility and revealing the first sparks of his talent. ‘In primary school, I found that the odd years were good, and the even years were crap. Every second year I hated, and the teachers hated me. I didn’t fit in, I was colouring outside the lines.’ Kim’s grade five teacher recognised him as not only a thinker, but an artist. She introduced him to De Vinci and Picasso, and under her tutorage he excelled. ‘Then the next year, with another teacher, I was invisible again.’

With this on again, off again trajectory, Kim exited primary school having gravitated to science, art and free-thinking. His principle accomplishments outside of school revolved around making bombs, conducting chemistry set experiments, devouring Science Weekly magazines, and returning frozen mosquitos to thawed life. ‘Like Frankenstein,’ recalls Owen. Or perhaps, like a scientist.

•••

Kim’s teenage years and the start of high school coincided with the end of the 60s. Music — while always present in the Salmon house through Joy’s piano playing, Megan’s singing or Owen’s classical tapes — did not impact Kim as a child. He didn’t respond to the sounds of the 60s. For Kim, the decade was kind of like wallpaper, a backdrop of which he was aware, but which didn’t make an impression. ‘I was a science nerd. Hippy stuff didn’t wash with me. But in 1970, at age 13, I heard pop music. I went into the 70s and became a teenager. It was the beginning.’

The first thing that made an impression was Spirit in the Sky. ‘To my primitive mind, it sounded like electronic, space age music it was a combo of pop hooks and sci-fi, taking the piss out of the afterlife.’

Wandering around his new high school, Kim saw a group of girls dancing to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Up Around the Bend, their dresses hitching up as they moved. It was an inviting association. He later saw the band play at Perth’s Subiaco Oval and the spell was cast.

He watched The Kinks play Lola on TV, and was enamoured of Ray Davies’ flouncy hair, leather coat and lace up boots. He loved the humour and sharp intellect in Daddy Cool’s Eagle Rock, and the Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want shepherded him into the next era — ‘the last of the innocent before all the cool stuff happened’.

With these discoveries came the need for cash. Kim took on chores and odd jobs, doing the dishes, shoving leaflets into letter boxes, working in factories and salvage yards and enduring pathetic rates of pay. But eventually, there it was in his possession, his first LP: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Cosmos Factory’. At $5.50, it was a major investment, roughly the same price as the concert ticket. Another few weeks of hard labour and Hawkwind’s ‘In Search of Space’ joined the fledgling vinyl collection.

Music had arrived with force for the 13-year-old Kim Salmon, and out of the blue, he came home from school and announced that he wanted to learn the guitar. Soon, he had selected a $14 Audition acoustic guitar from Kmart. Joy remembers it as ‘a cheap old thing; it was dreadful’.

Despite his early lack of interest, Kim had inherited an innate musical sensibility from his maternal grandmother, Jessie, who could play anything. Banjo, piano, mandolin, and guitar — she could play them all. Kim’s great grandfather had been a travelling musician and Jessie had collected his tricks of the trade and adopted the spirit. When told that Kim was learning guitar she said, ‘Oh I do hope it’s an electric guitar!’

Unsure of how to tune the Audition, Kim adopted some esoteric tuning patterns, and as he really wanted a whammy bar (absent from the acoustic) he used the tuning keys for that purpose instead, turning the keys dramatically to bend the notes up and down. It took a sprinkling of lessons from his tobacco-stained, jazz-infused guitar teacher to eventually correct his unorthodox tuning habits.

The Audition made way for an electric Coronet. ‘I didn’t have an amp, and in the end I couldn’t get it together. It had a whammy bar, which is what I wanted, but all I could do was break strings.’ The Coronet found its way to Kim’s friend Gary who loaned Kim his Yamaha G60 nylon string in return. ‘We ended up doing a swap, and I got the Yamaha. That was where I explored music really, and where I experimented on some of my identity with the paint jobs!’ Bowie-inspired sci-fi paintings adorned the guitar only to be replaced the next week with Cat Stevens themed art work and so on. The Yamaha, witness to the early formation of Kim Salmon’s creative impulse, waits patiently at his parent’s house still, stripped back to plain wood, ready to be called into action if needed.

•••

Kim’s wit and sharp mind were quickly evident in high school. He was very good academically and by fourth year he’d progressed to the advanced work stream. It came easily and he succeeded without a stretch. The school was impressed, but inadvertently engineered the competition against which academic work had no chance. School sponsored music was drawing Kim away from his studies.

I grew up with J’taime blaring around the speakers in my high school. They used to have it going at recess. Whether it was the radio or some senior kid in there being a DJ, I was never quite sure. They played a lot of Philly soul and Motown. I remember hearing the Delfonics doing Didn’t I Blow Your Mind this Time. Eddie Holman’s Hey There Lonely Girl. Old Elvis songs. I Can’t Stop Loving You, but the Ray Charles version … J’taime just stuck in my mind. The B3 organ, that incredible melody, with the sound effects … it was a wonderful thing. Things like that had seeped through into my consciousness and stayed there.

In fourth year, Joy got a call from the concerned headmaster. Kim had declared that he was changing from the top academic stream to go into the Arts course. The attraction of sketching, painting and playing music had overtaken his other school work. Joy says, ‘Of course we knew that he’d always been able to draw and it was no great shock that he was good, but he’d never said anything. The school was concerned because they thought he was such a good student, but they didn’t understand just how good he was with his art.’

Music, too, was becoming serious. Increasingly, Kim would be holed up in his room with the guitar, picking over riffs from the radio. Or when his musical friends dropped in it became full blown band rehearsal. 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.