Читать книгу Nine Parts Water, One Part Sand - Douglas Galbraith - Страница 15

Free from art school, Kim attempted to enter conventional society by getting miserable, ill-fitting jobs in hospitals and banks. It was an uncomfortable accord. ‘I just thought fuck this, I’m going to get into a band. I don’t care what band it is, even if it’s playing music I hate, at least I’ll be playing music. If I’m going to make a living from music, that’s what I should be doing.’

So he auditioned. For anything. But a mountain of cold calls to prospective cover bands didn’t land him a gig. ‘I just didn’t have the right sound.’ It wasn’t until Joy answered the phone to a Fremantle bandleader John Farley that things looked up. John was singer, bass player and band leader of Troubled Waters, a covers outfit that played ‘50/50’ — a repertoire of half hits, half ‘oldies’ — and on Joy’s recommendation he invited Kim for an audition.

At the first jam, Kim was taken through Walking the Dog, Honky Tonk Woman, Your Cheatin Heart and a Decker song called The Israelites, songs he’d heard once or twice at best, but played well straight away. John said, ‘Okay, we have a gig tonight, you’re in. We play three sets a night from 11pm to 3am, six nights a week. And we don’t play any heavy music, so no Smoke on the Water or Black Magic Woman.’ Kim was in Troubled Waters.

That night he arrived at the venue, the Tarantella Tavern in Fremantle. Prickly with pre-gig nerves, Kim swiftly collided with the drinks menu and kept a safe distance from his new band mates. At show time, he stepped gingerly onto the sweaty, slightly too small stage of the Tarantella Tavern with John’s advice fresh in his ears — ‘If you don’t know the song just turn your amp down.’ Amid the darkness, smoke haze and low, shady murmuring of the Tavern’s interior, Kim plugged his guitar into the small amp leaning against the dirty wall. Years later, he would capture his time at the Tarantella Tavern in the song Shine:

I look out across to the bar, as I hide behind my guitar

Given up on all that lies in between

Anyone who’s worked this kinda shit pit is gonna know what I mean

The band got underway, punching out a sharp version of the Beatles Birthday, which, it turned out, bookended every single Troubled Waters set. The set list of curiously combined hits and oddities washed out onto the Tavern’s only vaguely interested audience. As Kim and the other guitarist traded guitar duties, John sang raspy tenor with a cockney accent.

And the singer is crooning at some age-old song

Its meaning obliterated in time, but his voice is still strong

Though somewhat off key it kind of falls on deaf ears

This is the kinda place that could rise to anyone’s fears

A refugee from the London Beat scene, John regaled the band with tall tales of his encounters with Charlie Watts and Mick Jagger and unveiled the old tricks of early 60s R&B music. John respected the grimy atmosphere and dangerous potential of the Tavern. His ethos was simple: work hard, always take requests and keep out of trouble.

But I’ve grown used to it and its denizens of the night

Learned how to keep my trap shut and stay out of fights

Only two songs til the end of the set

Johnny B Goode can sound a good deal better yet

The Tarantella Tavern was a strip club and hookup joint for prostitutes and drunken sailors; an underground haven for the crooked, transgendered and otherwise excluded. Patrons would compare the merits of local penitentiaries and make deals while hunkering shadily around the bar tables, watching the strippers out of the corner of their eyes. Each night, one of the prostitutes would climb to the highest point and sing House of the Rising Sun, the performance often descending into an all-in-brawl, with the singer and her sister — both big ladies and tough as — taking on all comers.

Then it’s time for the stripper, and her dance of the seven veils

Here’s John the Baptist and he’s looking kind of pale

I look hopefully out as I see you walk in

Whoever you are, you don’t belong in this stinking rotten bin

It was gruelling work. John drove the band hard, playing long sets with new songs each night from a repertoire that stretched to well over two hundred. It was a quick education for Kim. ‘I saw a lot and I played a lot and we played new songs I’d hardly heard. I learned to make something up and play what suited the song, the beginning of the salvage operation.’ The seedy environment and nefarious characters of the Tavern were always entertaining, but the grime was starting to rub off on Kim and before too long he was looking for the fire escape.

Show me the way, outa here with its strippers and hookers and drunken old sailors

And over-dressed pimps in purple suits who could use a better tailor

And all the has beens and never were all destined to loseStill trying to hang onto their dreams by feeding them with too much booze

After a few months, Kim left Troubled Waters with a glowing reference from John, which, alongside the reputation Kim had built on stage, ensured a solid year’s well-paid work as a gun for hire on the cabaret circuit. ‘I had learned a trade and I could do it, so why not? I was like a carpenter — it was fun, but work. I was adaptable and played different styles; I was the casual relief guitarist. It was like session playing. No one ever asked me to play sessions thereafter, except years later I got $200 for playing Jews Harp on a Tex Don and Charlie record.’

The countless hours on the Tarantella Tavern stage had given Kim a super charged education in negotiating the darker laneways of the music business. It had elevated his playing, sharpened his eye for detail, and implanted a shrewd song-writing nous. And Shine, the song the Tavern produced, remains one of the finest moments of Kim’s live solo shows.

You shine like a torch

You’re so outta place

I bet you’re just a dream

In fact, I suspect your appearance here

Has got a reason for being

You’re here to shine.

•••

Punk. It discovered Kim through the New Musical Express. Still contemplating his unformed identity, Kim read an article in NME titled Are you alive to the jive of 75?, Charles Shaar Murray’s grubby portrayal of the gloomy underworld of New York’s CBGBs. Kim was electrified. ‘That was the world that I belonged in. When I read that, I knew! I was looking for somewhere to land from my spaceship and it was CBGBs. I’d made connection with Ground Control; I wasn’t floating in my tin can any more.’

Gulping in as much punk music as he could, Kim scoured Perth’s record shops for anything that sounded right. ‘The common factor was that people had exotic names — Blondie, Johnny Thunders, Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine. It was just like an enchanted world. It was all black, black and white and dark. It wasn’t coloured. It was dingy. Pretty much then, my mind was made up that that was the direction I was going.’ By hitching himself to the punk wagon so early, Kim was ahead of most and at the forefront of a new force in Australian music. Isolated in Perth, he didn’t have any sense of who was doing what elsewhere in the country, but renowned musicologist Ian McFarlane recognised that Kim was one of the first Australians to ‘embrace wholeheartedly the emergent punk phenomenon of the mid-to-late 70s.’1

Kim’s friend Brian shared a copy of the Stooge’s ‘Raw Power’, telling him it was ‘the heaviest and worst thing I’ve ever heard’. Kim loved its extremity. He read fervently about the Clash and the Buzzcocks and discovered the Modern Lovers. ‘I thought this has to be punk rock. If it isn’t, I’m calling it! The first Modern Lovers album became my universe for a few weeks. Jonathan Richman’s stance on the world was so unique, but something you could relate to. If you were having trouble finding your niche in the world, Jonathon Richman was a revelation.’ And then ‘there was the call from 78 Records (Perth’s best record shop) to tell me the Ramones LP was finally in! Bringing it home and putting the needle in the groove and hearing that mix of bubble gum, buzzsaw guitar, tribal drums and Joey Ramone’s Hey Ho Let’s Go was one of the perfect moments of my life.’2

While Kim was playing cabaret and discovering punk, Dave Faulkner had been playing blues with the Beagle Boys or with Neil Fernandes in a duo called ‘Dave & I’. The rest of the cast — assembled from the remnants of Moulin Rouge, the art faculty or Kim’s high school — had yet to commit to a musical direction when Kim rushed in and announced that punk was where it was at! Dave wasn’t going to be convinced, intoning loftily that he ‘needed some evidence’. But Neil Fernandes was intrigued, and Ken Seymour (aka Dan Dare) and Mark Betts — another lost soul from Embleton High school — were attracted to the ‘do it yourself’ ethos. Ken and Neil fell into the Stooges’ sound whole heartedly, and the Ramones laid a road map that the less accomplished players felt they could follow. Perth’s inaugural punk band, the Cheap Nasties, were set in motion.

The band (Kim and Neil on guitars, Ken on bass and Mark on drums) hung out and dissected punk. They set to writing songs and honing their sound, with an early and short-lived incarnation featuring Dave Faulkner as singer. He co-wrote two songs with Kim, including the band’s theme song Cheap and Nasty. ‘Dave wrote the words that I put it to an AC/DC sounding riff. Dave hates the words, but I still play it to this day.’ Gradually, a collection of granular, snotty and poppy songs emerged, complemented by songs from the New York Dolls, Stooges, Modern Lovers, Stones and the Kinks.

A minor scene was developing around this miscreant collective and their new sound. Blues or cover bands still dominated, but pockets of the new aesthetic were springing up elsewhere in Perth. Future Scientist Tony Thewlis recalls that around this time ‘you had a few people dressed as punks who hung around the Hay Street Mall, trying to sound English and wearing leather jackets in the 40 degree heat.’ In a bedroom over in East Perth, another group of would-be punks were forming under the moniker of The Geeks (or The Hitler Youth). Featuring Ross Buncle, Rudolph V (Dave Cardwell), ‘Lloyd’ and James Baker, the Geeks never made it out of the bedroom, but created their own brand of punk and would later contest the Cheap Nasties’ title as Perth’s first punk band. The Geeks incubated one of the towering figures of Perth music in James Baker, another lifelong Kim Salmon collaborator and friend.

The Rivervale Hotel, mid 1977 saw the Cheap Nasties, the world’s most remote punk band, debut in public. They opened for the blues band The Beagle Boys who were, to the Nasties’ surprise, very supportive of this abrasive new music. Suddenly a tiny, grubby piece of Perth culture exploded open to let the light in. The punk scene had operated covertly, with its various factions operating in total ignorance of each other, but with the Nasties’ first gig the veil of secrecy was lifted. The band played in front of a huge portrait of Nana Mouskouri that Kim had painted for a ‘Nana Night’ party. As they whirled through their songs, Kim tore into the painting, slashing it with a knife and defacing it with tomato sauce before turning the sauce bottle on the punters gathered at the front of the stage. The punks in Perth were few, but most of them were there that night, and they liked what they saw.

Two such punks, Roddy Radalj and Boris Sujdovic, didn’t take long to sense the change in atmosphere. Roddy and Boris were hung up on music. They had had their heads snapped round by the Stooges and were looking for more in the same vein. Both would feature in Kim Salmon bands, with Boris in particular standing beside Kim on stage for the next forty years.

Me and my mate Roddy were just bored teenagers in Fremantle. We started getting into jazz, we dabbled with that for about a month. There used to be this jazz venue and we could get port and lemonade for 30 cents, so we thought, fuck this is pretty good! Then all of a sudden we heard punk rock … there was a fledging Perth punk scene of two bands and fifteen to twenty fans. We went to a hotel in the city on a Tuesday night and saw the Cheap Nasties and that’s when I first met Kim. And that’s when it all started (Boris Sujdovic).

They first encountered the Cheap Nasties at Steve’s, a blues pub in Perth. Kim recalls stepping off the stage to see ‘a pile of smashed glasses around the bottom of my mic stand having been chucked at me, some of them by Rod and his mates!’ After picking his way through the shattered beer glasses, Kim was confronted by the imposing Boris Sujdovic demanding to know why the band wasn’t playing the Stooges. No Fun, Search and Destroy and I Wanna be your Dog obviously weren’t enough! He wanted us to do more Stooges songs!’ Kim saw Boris and Rod around a lot after that, quickly becoming friends.

On that night the fifteen people in the audience were the fifteen punks and the fifteen people we stayed friends with. The Cheap Nasties sounded great! It was the usual story, everyone in the audience started playing. Out of the blue, Roddy got this saxophone and said I’m auditioning for a band, which turned out to be the Victims. He sounded like a demented Steve McKay ’cos he couldn’t play a note and they didn’t get him in. I started playing bass and Roddy soon realised guitar might be easier (Boris Sujdovic).

James Baker was another punk that Kim had seen around but not yet met. ‘I recalled seeing an ad with a photo round ’74 stuck up in 78 Records. It had two very glammy looking dudes with fancy writing saying what looked to me like “Slink City Boys” and they were looking for members. That always struck me as unusual for Perth. Thinking back, I wondered if they were “punk”.’3 James Baker, with an authentic Johnny Ramone hair-cut and signature striped tee, was also in attendance at the early shows. On meeting Kim, James recalls the affinity of a like-minded rock ‘n’ roll devotee.

James Baker is a revered figure in Perth (and Australian) music. He was an early pioneer having gone on a world sightseeing tour at age 16.

I lived in New York and London when all that music scene was happening, the Sex Pistols and all that … I met a lot of ’em, the Ramones, The Clash and the Damned, the Vibrators, Dictators, Blondie. My girlfriend at the time was the door girl at CBGBs and she introduced me to them all, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, and lots of people there. It was a very small scene then. I met DD, went to a party with Joey. So what I bought back was a few records yeah, but mainly the whole idea of ‘fuck em let’s make a rock ‘n’ roll band’ (James Baker).

James had already played in some bands in Perth in the early 70s including a Beatles cover band and the New York Dolls-ish Slink City Boys, and had nearly auditioned for the drummer’s job with The Clash after meeting Joe Strummer and Mick Jones on his rock ‘n’ roll world tour. He was, and remains, an affable and gregarious presence. He had the right look and his ‘powerful, furious drumming was legendary around Perth’.4 Add to this his firsthand, international experience with some of the legends of punk, he was someone to know. When James collided with Dave Faulkner at the Cheap Nasties gig, they immediately hit it off. In mid 1977, James left the Geeks (taking Randolph V with him) and formed a new band with Dave: The Victims. Armed with a bunch of songs James brought from The Geeks, the Victims set off at a fast pace, establishing themselves alongside the Cheap Nasties as the dominant forces in the Perth underground. But while the Cheap Nasties at that stage channelled the strong pop sensibility of British punk, the Victims produced to a barrage of atonal noise.

Kim, both friend and competitor of the band, watched them closely:

They all moved into a squalid fleapit of a house in East Perth. They cleaned out all the ‘hippy dirt’ from the previous residents and painted over all the bad art on the walls, dubbing the place ‘Victim Manor’. It took about a month for them to let the ‘Manor’ slide back to such a filthy state that none of them except for Rudolph could live there. There, they threw a party where they performed their first show and instantly became the darlings of ‘the scene’.

Over the next year, The Victims acted out a drama parallel to that of the Sex Pistols, being banned from various venues and the bass player cultivating a drug habit. They also managed to have a truly original interpretation of the punk sound. They left a couple of recordings, including the classic Television Addict. In time, due to having no regular venues to book them, The Victims found a jazz club called Hernando’s Hideaway and managed to secure a Wednesday night residency there. With a place to hang and for its new bands to play at (supporting The Victims), the ‘scene soon sucked up all kinds of dubious trash from the suburbs and grew.’5

During 1977 the Victims and Cheap Nasties dominated the landscape with inspired shows at the Governor Broome Hotel or Hernando’s, honing their unhinged craft, largely unaware of their place in the Australian music story. But elsewhere in Australia, the movement was unfolding rapidly.

In Sydney, Radio Birdman had released their ‘Burn My Eye’ EP and ‘Radios Appear’ album and, by April 1977, had largely departed the scene they’d spurned out of their Funhouse venue at the Oxford Tavern. By the end of the year, they had relocated, fatefully as it turned out, to the UK to record a follow up album and tour relentlessly. Numerous acts sprung up in their wake, including the Hellcats featuring Ron Peno, who would later have a unique and enduring role in Kim’s musical journey.

In Melbourne, the Boys Next Door had put together the elements of their explosive live show by the end of 1977, and were just around the corner from the arrival of the transformative Rowland S Howard. Gary Gray, who would go on to form the Sacred Cowboys, was starting to stir up his dark, maniacal cowboy punk sounds. 1977 Melbourne’s grim underground was supported by exceptional public radio 3RRR (soon to be joined by PBS) and developed by passionate entrepreneurs like Keith Glass and Bruce Milne, who would go on to run pivotal labels and record shops Missing Link and Au Go Go respectively. Bruce Milne and Au Go Go would soon collide with Kim Salmon, transforming both their destinies and catalysing the spread of Grunge’s early tentacles.

In Brisbane, the Saints had released their Stranded album at the start of 1977 and had a large profile on the East Coast and overseas. The acclaim they attracted early in their career did nothing to prevent unwanted attention from the notoriously leathery Brisbane police. Locked out of established venues, the Saints turned their dwelling at Petrie Terrace into their own venue, the 76 Club, but by mid-year were en route to the UK to commence their own battle with record labels and internal division.

Despite this remarkable surge of activity, very little trickled all the way over to the Australian west coast. Ross Buncle recalls:

No one in Perth had heard of Radio Birdman at that time, and we didn’t know of any other punk-style bands on the East Coast until way later. It seems incredible now, but without electronic communication networks shrinking the continent — or the world — to the easily manageable size it is today, we had no way of knowing what was going on over the Nullarbor until the first records were released, apart from actually going there. The first wave of the punk movement was over in Perth before anyone had heard of any Eastern States punk-style bands other than The Saints.6

Kim bluntly agrees with this view:

We were on the other side of the country and didn’t give a shit about Radio Birdman, the Saints, or the Boys Next Door. As far as we were concerned, we’d been doing punk as long on our own and didn’t need their input.7

Perth music was shaped by geographical and cultural forces that were quite distinct from the Eastern states, accentuated by its isolation. Thousands of kilometres and a two-hour time difference away, Perth music was largely insulated from the movement in the Eastern States and was taking its cues from sporadically available US or UK punk singles or magazine articles rather than from membership of a broader Australian punk scene. This isolation was an important factor in the evolution of Kim’s sound — a factor which former Black Flag singer and longtime fan Henry Rollins recognised.

It was listening to the Scientists decades ago that made me wonder if the sheer geographic placement of Australia had anything to do with how Kim makes music. I always had this romantic notion that albums would wash up on the shores of Australia and people like Kim would find them, source the one record player for hundreds of miles, and dig the sounds at their most pure and potent form, free of commercial sensibility and corporate compromise (Henry Rollins).

The sunlit lifestyle and slow politics also left a mark. If the Saints were responding to political oppression and police brutality in Brisbane, the motivation for the Perth based Cheap Nasties came from a more straightforward source. ‘There wasn’t a political dimension, a social fabric that we were rebelling against. It was just that we were drawn to the music rather than rebelling against something’ (Neil Fernandes). The Perth scene was musically active and socially comfortable, not hung up on politics or social conditions. Ross Buncle from The Geeks recalls, ‘We had no such issues. Even if you were unemployed, life wasn’t too bad in the dumb sun of the lucky country way out west. We loved to complain, of course, but our dissatisfaction didn’t really amount to much. I think it is a fair call that we were generally pretty hedonistic, and self-focused.’8

The song writing in the Cheap Nasties and Victims reflected this. James Baker, the Victim’s primary lyric writer, was concerned mainly with girls and TV, and even if their most effective song Television Addict held a dark message, it was still after all about spending time ‘in front of the window of the world’. The Cheap Nasties too steered clear of disaffection and the simplicity of punk rock coalesced successfully into Kim and Neil Fernandes’ early songs.

Neil’s aspirations were never to have complexity in his music. I learned a bit from Neil and we quickly got into competition with each other. I learned to push his buttons and shit stir him until he was never calm around me! Our song writing process was one of us would bring an idea and the other would disparage it … and then add bits to it. And they all benefited from that, they were water tight by the end. We wrote together, and left no shit bits in. I thought he was a fantastic guy, a sweet even tempered laid-back guy, generous nice bloke to this day.

Neil remembers the collaboration on one of his songs, Hit and Run, which was written in a warm major key but embellished with an edgy Kim Salmon lead break — played in a minor key! ‘It was magical that he could have thought of that, distorting this song’ (Neil Fernandes).

The first phase of the Cheap Nasties was, according to Neil, ‘unquestionably Kim’s band’, with Kim as the driving force, singer and main song writer. To Neil, it was clear that Kim was absolutely single minded that music would be his life’s calling. Gradually, Neil exerted more influence as his song writing developed. Kim and Neil shared vocal duties and the Nasties gigs were fast, fun and shambolic.

At Kim’s urging, the band absorbed his friend from art school, singing aspirant, Robbie Porritt (aka Robbie Art), who through sheer will and bluff assumed vocal duties. ‘He was fully formed, one of those cats who knew the score. He was so ahead of the curve he had his own jargon.’ By July 1977, Robbie was in front singing Kim and Neil’s songs, and the Cheap Nasties evolved further. Robbie was drenched in charisma and won over the small but animated audiences. The Cheap Nasties storm trooped their way through the disorganised haze of Perth’s punk vista, leaving the old establishment in a pile of dust.

In what would be their last show, the band were hired by the police department for an end-of-year party to which an uninvited biker gang showed up and raised the stakes. During a break between sets, one of the bikers gave Kim a beer that he razed in one gulp. ‘They were all round me. I think they didn’t approve of a squirt like me trying to look tough in a leather jacket. Anyway, the guy then handed me a beer glass full of tequila which I downed. He was smirking at me and then handed me a jug of beer which I then attempted to down. I don’t remember the rest …’9

‘The rest’ involved singer Robbie heading to the emergency department with a split lip and cut forehead following an errant punch from one of the bikers during the Salmon induced melee. A completely bombed Kim Salmon went to his singer’s defence but dented the biker’s brio not even a little given his state of drunkenness. The Cheap Nasties final gig ended, literally, with a bang.

Sometime in the year of 1977, the band bunkered down with a mixing desk in the dining room of 53 Third Avenue, Mount Lawley, Perth, where Ken, Mark and Neil lived. They recorded a live rehearsal, the resultant demo capturing the band’s furious energy. The band didn’t record again, and the demo remained dormant for over four decades before being released first as a digital recording and then as an LP released by Hozac Records in 2018. Hozac describes the recording as:

Ten songs of blistering teenage slime, screaming guitars screech in and out of the chorus, drums bash relentlessly, and that special Australian something you can’t ever put your finger on. It’s trashy, raw, and brutal punk slop at it’s finest … such raw phenomenal stuff. But remember, this isn’t for the weak or the elderly, and it’s definitely not for audiophiles, but it will now sit alongside … The Saints I’m Stranded, and Radio Birdman’s Radios Appear albums in OZ punk history.10

•••

Kim was by now firmly down the path to his future self, and affecting the right rock ‘n’ roll regalia to invoke this was demanding serious attention, with mixed results. ‘My experiments in style had gone awry. I had a Tony Barber hair do. I would go to op shops and buy leopard skin shirts and wear ladies’ clothes and look stupid. I got my mum to make me some vinyl pants, but they were thick and sweaty, and my shoes filled with sweat and created their own ecosystem.’ Sister Megan remembers Kim sporting a pink, yellow and red gaberdine suit with stove pipe trousers. ‘No one could fathom standing next to him at the traffic lights!’

Kim’s sartorial sensibility was emblematic of the cracks beginning to form in the Cheap Nasties, and he was dissatisfied with the band’s direction. ‘They weren’t going to be punk enough for me, the idea of new wave came along and that’s where Neil was very comfortable, the idea of a white shirt and tie and jacket … I railed against it and wanted to do my own thing.’ The band’s ideas compressed, consolidating the frenzied palette of Kim’s early song writing and performance style into a more refined but milder proposition. Kim’s internal edict of originality above all else grated against the new direction, and his natural tendency to stay on the outside built distance between him and the rest of the band.

The Cheap Nasties had emerged from a virtual void of home grown influence, succeeding in spite of the turgid local music scene and sparked by the sounds of overseas punk. They raced into the Australian punk future, playing live shows that were ragged, loud and alive. Propelled by the sometimes complementary, sometimes competing internal forces, the band were short lived but earned their place in punk history. ‘The compromise of directions no doubt stifled the band’s potential … As one might expect of a band that was pursuing something unknown, there was more than one idea of what that thing was.’11

In December 1977, the Cheap Nasties gathered for rehearsal in a studio set in the bushy hills outside Perth. Conditions were perfect, but the rehearsal broke down as the Nasties started arguing again, one fight too many. Realising they didn’t have to do this anymore, they broke up. But it was really Kim that was cut adrift. ‘Within a few weeks they reformed without me! They were looking for a name and their new identity, and I was a shag on a rock. There was a scene there that I probably brought to the town, and there I was … shut out of my own party.’