Читать книгу The Dingoes' Lament - John Bois - Страница 7

Barefoot, hungover and vacant, I sat on Sandy Beach and looked out across the Indian Ocean toward Africa. Seagulls patrolled the slate-grey troughs of the trade-wind swell just before it spent itself on the coast of Western Australia. A squall was whipping up whitecaps and driving a powerful onshore breeze right in my face. It was laced with sand.

I put my head between my knees and strained the sand with my fingers and toes. I had just had a breakfast of milk, tea and tomato juice. I was ministering to my hangover. You see, last night we agreed that this was to be our last tour, and that when we got back to Melbourne, The Dingoes, my band, would be no more. And so we spent the night drinking in a post-mortem sort of way.

Back in Melbourne I didn’t drink so much. I had things to do there. But what was I going to do after Perth? The Dingoes had a good shot, but we had gone as far as we were going. I thought for an instant what it would take hours to tell: I was glad we were finished — I was ready for something new.

Kerryn, our main songwriter, called me from our beachfront hotel. He was shouldering the glass door to hold it open against the heavy westerly. He was beckoning me to come over.

Buffeted by the almost-cold wind, I picked up my shoes and scuffed across the street and into the protective stillness of the hotel lobby. Kerryn held a piece of note paper; Stockley, Brod, and J.L. looked on expectantly.

I walked over to them.

‘What’s up?’

‘How do you like this for a message?’ Kerryn said, as he handed me the note with the Sandy Beach Hotel letterhead.

I read it aloud, ‘Ring Paul McCartney at the Rolling Stones’ office.’

‘What do you say to that?’ asked Kerryn.

‘Poor sort of joke,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ said Brod. ‘That’s what we thought. But the receptionist swore it was America calling.’

I could hear the muted percussion of the wind against the plate glass of the motel front.

‘But we can’t ring ’till six tonight,’ said Kerryn. ‘It seems it’s still yesterday in America.’

We looked stupidly at each other until Stockley shrugged and said, ‘Well, there’s nothing else for it. Who wants a beer and who’s a poofter?’

We walked briskly to the bar of the Sandy Beach Hotel.

The bar, which had just opened, consisted of three areas: a dingy little lounge with a cranky old bartender elbow deep in dishwater; a beer garden; and off to one side of the bar, a pool table on a parquet floor. The bartender was too intent on his work to notice us.

Stockley tried to get his attention, ‘Excuse me. Could we have five pots, please?’

Without acknowledging him, the bartender wiped his sudsy hands on his apron and poured our beers.

As we sipped, we quickly exhausted all the possibilities of the phone call. It was a hoax.

It wasn’t a hoax. It could be either Paul McCartney or the Rolling Stones. Or, it could be Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones teamed up especially for a joint project: The Dingoes.

‘They’re all impissabolities,’ slurred Stockley, staring into his glass and impersonating his favourite Melbourne drunk, Maury.

‘Anyone for pool?’ I asked.

‘Rack ’em up, John,’ said Stockley as he slotted money into the table. The balls dropped with a resounding thud. I searched for the triangular pool rack.

‘Where’s the thing?’

‘Here it is,’ offered Brod as he came over to watch.

As soon as I finished racking up the balls, Stockley propelled the white ball into the pack with a shattering force. Only two balls broke free.

‘Christ, what’s a bloke gotta do?’

‘It’s all finesse in this game, mate,’ I said. ‘That’s why you’re pist’ry!’

I dropped a low ball and left myself without a shot.

Stockley stood with a beer in his left hand and the pool cue in the crook of his left elbow. His shirt was open, as usual, to reveal his scars — he was stroking them. Only a year ago, he was the victim of a weekend shooting spree by two prison escapees. They fired two bullets into a crowd just for fun. One of them got Stockley in the back and the operation to remove it left three huge, vivid, purplish scars. He stroked them constantly: he was very proud of them.

‘Would you mind not stroking your scars so loudly?’ I said, walking around the table, trying in vain to find a shot. I fired into a pack and left him with good position.

Stockley smiled, ‘Thanks for the po, John.’

I sat down as he made a great show of not being able to decide which easy shot to drop first. Brod gave me a look of pity as Stockley sunk his first ball and winked at me. Kerryn and J.L. sat talking at the bar.

I thought about the message. It was probably a horrendous mistake, a fabulous garbling of syllables by the receptionist.

Six months before I would not have been so sceptical. Then, at the Station Hotel, in Melbourne, we were a five-piece dynamo. Derelicts and dole dependents normally peopled the Station, as well as besotted bon vivants who claimed it was a haven of mateship, a place where men could be men out of earshot of nagging women. But to the untrained eye it looked more like a place of banishment.

Nevertheless, on Saturday it was transformed into a subcultural temple. The gods of that subculture were … The Dingoes. The Station was licensed to seat eighty persons, but when we played there the only crowd restriction was the amount of discomfort people were willing to bear. However, the only intolerable discomfort was inability to get to the bar.

At two in the afternoon, three hundred people and five gods converged on the bar. At six, three hundred drunks and five drunk gods waded across the beer-soaked carpet and out into a world strangely untouched by the four hours of sweat, inebriation and rocking music.

We were not stars. We satirised stardom. The Station audience loved us because we refused to take anything, including ourselves, seriously. We disdained the slick professionalism of nightclub bands; and as we argued and clowned around between songs, we happily exempted ourselves from superstar status as well.

But this overt anti-professionalism, while it was one cause of our celebrity at the Station, drastically limited our appeal. When we played anywhere else, people stared at us as if they were watching a foreign-language film without subtitles. And our manner and dress were so un-star-like that often, when we arrived at a new place, people would ask us what time the band was coming — they thought we were the road crew!

On stage we had no light show, no props, no choreographed moves, no staging of any kind. We didn’t vomit blood, or leer like trolls while rolling our tongues lasciviously at the audience. Our strengths were our personalities and our music. And at the Station, the room was intimate enough for both to count. On a good day, we believed, our characters and our music formed an irresistible winning combination.

The central element of this winning combination, our lead singer Broderick Smith, sat next to me as Stockley dropped his second gift-ball. Brod’s hand shook as he lifted his glass to his lips. He had a very complex and puzzling personality. As fantastic as he was onstage, offstage, and particularly behind the wheel of his vintage Land Rover, he was stodgy and anxious. Maybe, I thought, he was trying to keep his zany side at bay, as if it were a strange beast — a mercurial, abnormal thing, which could only be released safely at showtime when outrageousness is customary. He must keep it in check lest his veneer of sanity cracked. If I had his gift, I thought, I would revel in it twenty-four hours a day.

Stockley dropped his third cinch shot.

Brod had a complexion that was prone to ashenness. He had grey-blue eyes and a large, expressive jaw that jutted out heroically. He had a dimple in his chin. Brod resembled the Germanic ideal, but he had an endearing scruffy quality — like an Aryan the cat dragged in.

The contents of his flat affirmed his zany side. His formal need to cling to sanity was apparently abandoned amid the eccentric clutter of his collection of bric-a-brac. A Remington statuette of a cowboy on a rearing horse stood in as a heroic paperweight. It was on a large glass museum display case, which, supported by antique filing cabinets, was used as a desk. Inside the glass case, hundreds of lead military miniatures were lined up in chronological order from Roman Centurions to Patton’s Eighth Army. The desk was an island in a sea of dolls, exotic hub caps, rolled-up maps, old cameras, wood and metal puzzles, and antique scientific instruments. He was a voracious reader: comics, individually wrapped in clear plastic, were stacked in hallowed corners; a huge bookshelf sagged under the weight of science fiction paperbacks, which were crammed into it at the rate of one every two Earth days. And, with his collection of books on the history, customs and conquest of the North and South American native peoples, he sought the fantastic in the real world too.

Brod’s wife was a seamstress. Pieces of material, quilts and cloth-filled cane hampers added plushness, a buffer to Brod’s clutter that was appreciated by the third denizen, Ronald, a lithe Persian cat. Ronald, if he wasn’t asleep in some dark, cushioned nook, could be seen bouncing from object to object in search of one or another of the infinite possibilities of its Broderickian universe.

But, as used to the wacky world of Broderick as Ronald was, I think he would have gone stark raving mad if he just once saw his master in action at the Station. At the end of Sydney Ladies, a song Brod wrote about American GIs on R&R from Vietnam, he would blow a ten-minute harp solo into his refurbished taxi-driver’s microphone. As he walked out onto the audience’s tables, people cleared their glasses to make way for his tattered tennis shoes. Girls mockingly clutched at his crumpled jeans. His hair stuck to the sweat on his cheeks and forehead as his frenzy increased. At the climax of his solo, the audience cheered as if someone had scored a go-ahead goal in the final second. Brod would affect smug appreciation for the applause and saluted the crowd like Hitler at the Nuremburg rally. Then he would introduce the next song:

‘Die fumph zong nicht einer kraftwerk von Chris Stockley, Achtung! Mein Kamerades die tempo: ein, zwei, drei …’

Stockley would play a lightning-fast introduction while Brod slid across the stage on his knees, prostrating himself before the guitar hero.

After this song, as I was tuning my bass, Brod would whisper into the microphone in the voice of a golf announcer, ‘John is moving onto his D string … no. Wait just a minute … I’m sorry. He’s changed his mind. He’s on the A string. He’s pulling it up … up … up … until it’s just right. Ooh, that was nicely done.’

On it went from a seemingly bottomless well of comic patter. And Brod never repeated himself — that was anathema to him.

What theory of personality could accommodate the contradictions in this man, this man who sat next to me with his elbows on his knees, wringing his hands in anxiety over life in general, and the phone call in particular?

He wasn’t sweating over the pool game, though. He stood up, ‘I’m going for a walk along the beach. I’ll see you back here about six.’

‘Okay, mate.’

‘See ya, Brod,’ said the others.

And he disappeared, worrying out the door.

Stockley looked at his fifth giveaway shot. It required him to put the cue behind his back with just one foot touching the floor. He grunted. ‘A little … tricky, this one, mate.’

He pocketed the ball with a motion that said: Take that! But he left himself in poor position for the next shot. He made a gallant shot off the cushion but just missed.

Then, to reach the white ball, I had to use the extension stick to rest my cue on.

‘Need the poofter stick, John?’ He stood leaning against the wall with his cue, his beer and his scars.

‘Would you mind buttoning up your shirt,’ I said. ‘It’s like trying to play next to the bloody Aurora Borealis.’

‘No way, mate.’

My ball went down but I had a long shot for the next one and I missed by a mile.

‘Too bad, mate.’

I left him in good position for his last two balls. He had not beaten me in quite a while so he took his time deciding which ball should go into which hole. He made his first shot and was nicely in line for the next, but, in trying to hit it too hard so the white ball would carry back up the table to the eight ball, his last ball bounced from side to side of the pocket and dribbled out impotently. ‘I was fucking robbed.’

‘Bit too much english, mate.’

By this time J.L. and Kerryn were watching. ‘Another round of beers?’ asked Kerryn.

‘Thanks, mate,’ we all said.

Stockley went to the bathroom and I punched in three balls while he was away. When he came back he looked at the table and said, ‘Was anybody watching this bastard?’

Next, instead of trying to make a difficult shot, I put the white ball behind my ball snookering Stockley. He was genuinely miffed.

Kerryn laughed. ‘I’m next,’ he said as he slapped some coins on the table.

Stockley couldn’t recover and I sank my last ball and then sent down the eight ball with a feather-touch side shot. It was a fluke.

‘See, mate? Finesse. You gotta have class in this game.’

‘You’re a ratbag, John,’ he said. And he guzzled down his beer. ‘I’m going upstairs. I’ll see you in the lobby at six.’

‘They’re dropping like flies, Kerryn.’

He collected the balls and looked for the rack. ‘Where’s the thing?’ he said.

I passed him the rack. ‘A thing by any other name is still a thing.’

Kerryn’s smile, like my sense of humour that day, was notable for its economy — only the corners of his mouth needed to turn up to indicate amusement. He positioned himself to break and pumped the cue vigorously. He thrashed the white ball and sent it ricocheting off the pack and bouncing off the table.

‘Okay, you blokes,’ whined the bartender as the ball bounced across the linoleum and smashed into the bar. ‘What do you think this is, cricket?’

‘Mind your own business,’ retorted Kerryn angrily. Then, instantly composed, ‘Sorry, mate. Can I try that again?’

‘Have at it,’ I said.

I had never seen Kerryn hit anyone, but I have often thought that he would be a good friend to have if things got rough. Perhaps his badly chipped front tooth gave that impression, or maybe it was his cocky stance and attitude. His posture and clothing bore a striking resemblance to the male dancer in Renoir’s Dance at Bougival. But Kerryn’s hair would not have fit under that gentleman’s hat. Kerryn, like the dancer, wore a beard, but his hair was long and frizzy and naturally assumed the shape of a toadstool. Apart from his hair, there was no extravagant sign of his driven creativity. For that you had to hear his songs.

No single reason for our success stood out. But Kerryn’s songs provided the intellectual justification for that success. We were praised in the rock press for charting new territory for Australian bands — we actually sang about Australia. To understand why this was so important you have to appreciate the unique history of Australia’s popular culture. Australian/European culture was only about a hundred years old before it was inundated by radio and, later, TV. The fully developed American and English popular cultures tended to wash aside any nascent local varieties. As a generation, we felt a keen sense of embarrassment at our lack of homegrown art forms. This embarrassment even had a name: the cultural cringe. Our songwriters avoided all mention of Australia in our popular songs.

But Kerryn found a voice. Though his music was heavily derivative of American blues, country and rock, his lyrics used Australian place names, situations, characters and language. This, in a serious tone, was new. Certainly, plenty of songs had been written about the outback, but they were novelty songs like the great The Pub with No Beer, and the not so great Red Back (spider) on the Toilet Seat. Now Kerryn had written a serious song about a man who went oil drilling in the western desert. It made the charts towards the end of 1973. In a later song, about people stuck in limbo, Waitin’ for the Tide to Turn, Kerryn put a woman’s plight in an Australian setting:

I know a girl livin’ way out west,

Havin’ trouble just keepin’ her head.

Home on the range in the kitchen — bitchin’

Cursin’ the day she was wed.

’Cos her man don’t seem to understand

That you can’t get nothin’ from a sunburnt land

Day after day, you know it’s gettin’ her down.

She knows she won’t even make it the long way around

Kerryn’s songs had wit, and for our fans — who gave us fierce loyalty in return — they validated a tentative nationalistic pride. The Dingoes’ songs could be seen as harbingers of a growing cultural confidence, among the first sedimentary islands to settle after the denuding cultural flood that emanated from wood, Bakelite and plastic boxes sitting in the corner of every Australian living room.

Kerryn had absolutely no airs or pretensions of greatness. He was strictly one of us. Nor did we feel he was superior in any way. Although he had the most to gain from any success we might have had, we would allow no leader to rise above the rest. I felt that Stockley, Kerryn and, to a lesser extent, Brod each thought they should exert more control over the band’s decisions. Whenever one of them complained about our lack of leadership it was tinged with regret that they had not taken charge themselves. Since I had come to the band last, and I was not the lead songwriter, the lead guitarist, the lead singer … the lead anything, I was not a contestant. But my judgment was well respected and I could have handed power to either of them had I wished. But I felt none of them had natural leadership qualities around which we could gather in admiration and respect.

Perhaps this conviction was affected by my own repressed hunger for power and envy of those who held it. I had had a miserable experience as a sixth-grader.

In a meteoric rise to power I was voted captain of the Chatham School football team. But immediately after my ascension, the team of eleven-year-olds refused to submit to my overambitious regimen of push-ups, jumping jacks and fifty-yard sprints. In any case, we were half the size of all our opponents and we went on to a completely scoreless season — in a game where a low score is thirty points.

The next year, I returned to brag to my teacher about my success in high school mathematics. He invited me into his classroom and said, ‘John Bois is going to show us how a mathematical wizard solves a problem.’

With that, he wrote one of his most convoluted word problems on the board. I choked. He asked one of the sixth-graders to solve the problem and she did it easily.

I must have looked crestfallen as I walked down the corridor. Another teacher stopped me and asked what had happened. After I told him, he explained that Mr Evans didn’t like me because he blamed me for our losing season last year. He said that he felt this was wrong because, while Mr Evans didn’t come to a single game, he had. And he thought I was a good captain.

This is a previously unexamined memory. And it’s only now that I realise how absurd it was to blame one person, me, for the performance of our hopelessly mismatched team. Yet it was Mr Evans’s judgment that I accepted. And until now it has stood there like a hazard sign whose simple message reached my subconscious: Remember the disaster that befell you the last time you went down this road — turn back!

Leadership was a recurring problem with The Dingoes. Stockley, Kerryn and Brod each had a valid claim to it, but they couldn’t step forward for certain knowledge that they would be knocked down again. And, since none could claim it, all denied it. This was often embarrassing. When an interviewer asked us who our leader was, we all froze for a revealing second. Then we blurted out that we were democratic. The interviewer looked at us as if to say, ‘I don’t care who the big chief is — I just want to know who to ask the question. Geez, guys! Get your act together.’

And so, when six o’clock came around, when we met in the lobby of the Sandy Beach Hotel, I was wincing from apprehension of the delicate tussle about to take place — who should make the call to America?

‘Well, then. Let’s do it,’ said Kerryn, as we stood around the lobby.

‘Who should ring?’ asked Stockley.

‘I don’t mind. Do you want to do it?’ said Kerryn.

‘No, mate,’ said Stockley. ‘You do it. You know Paul better than I do.’

Kerryn snatched the phone message from his own hand as if to say, Come on. Let’s not play one of these ridiculous games.

‘Come on,’ he said.

‘He’s a ratbag,’ said Stockley.

The issue was in the open but it was never addressed. I sometimes wondered what would have happened if one of us had said, ‘Look. We know power in this band is shared. No one of us is going to run off with all of the goods. Let’s just say that one of us, say me, is the leader. No leader gets everything his way. It’s usually no more than a formality — just like we agree to drive on the left side of the road. There’s nothing inferior about the right side. We just drive on the same side to avoid accidents. Having a leader would do the same thing — it would make the path to a common goal easier.’

Then we could have gone outside and done push-ups, jumping jacks and fifty-yard sprints.

Even if we had had such a leader there could be no inspirational element — we were far too equal for that. And where would such a leader take us — our common goal wasn’t formulated beyond wanting to make lots of money doing what we wanted to do. Besides, at the Station, the obvious power vacuum within the group was endearing, perhaps even the cornerstone of our highly prized anti-professionalism.

The leadership question was a conflict that remained with us. Though we felt we needed leadership, we rationalised our democratic dynamic with an attitude that said authority was for children and right-wing governments — we were gentlemen and boon companions; we needed no conch shell.

We tramped upstairs to the room Kerryn and I shared. I reached the door first and knocked on it. They stood still for a Pavlovian second.

‘Boisy!’ said Brod, as he shoved my shoulder.

I unlocked the door and we went in. Stockley came in last, having stopped at his room to get some beer. He opened one. Pretending to be drunk and talking to Paul McCartney on the phone, he said, ‘G’day, Paul. Chris here, mate. Yeah. Chris fuckin’ Stockley. How the fuck are ya. I’m good, thanks, mate. How’s John, George and Ringo … Fuckin’, eh!’

I walked over to turn off the air conditioner in the frigid room. I listened to the wind buffeting the salt-begrimed window as Kerryn talked to America, ‘Hello? … Hello … Yes. My name is Kerryn Tolhurst. I’m ringing on behalf of The Dingoes.’ He spoke too loudly — he had never spoken to anyone that far away before. ‘We got a message to ring someone called … Paul … McCartney.’

We snickered.

‘Yes … I see … Yes … No Paul McCart … Billy McCartney … No, that’s alright. Our mistake. Is he there? Thank you.’

We knew Billy McCartney. He was a road manager who had gone overseas to crack the big time. It was nice to hear from him, but not at the expense of my destiny.

‘How dare he not be Paul McCartney,’ I said.

‘He’s a fuckin’ ratbag,’ said Stockley.

Kerryn held up a silencing finger. ‘Billy! How are you, mate? … Good, thanks. Listen — we got this message to ring the Rolling Stones’ office … Yeah … I see …’

My heart sank as Kerryn sat on the edge of his bed with a poker face, saying ‘Yeah’ and ‘I see’ for the next ten minutes.

I looked at Stockley. He had on dark sunglasses that were supposed to turn transparent indoors. But they stayed dark and he looked like a heroin addict as he sullenly sipped his beer. He stood up, walked over to the window and gave me an exasperated look. I took great pride in the personalities of The Dingoes, and as I looked at Stockley I felt sadness that the world would not, after all, it seemed, come to know him. I thought of him arriving at the Station with Jen, his girlfriend, and his guitar case. He had a slight build and was five-foot-three-and-a-half. Jenny was five-foot-nine and voluptuous. He was engulfed in her sexuality and was, in this respect, a very happy man.

Stockley had a closely manicured beard but his hair rambled down to the middle of his back. His shirt was open and he had on the leather jacket he was shot in. A hole the size of a spider bite was in its back. All this added to his legendary stature.

When we played he had a little cluster of fret watchers — The Stockley Faithful — gathered immediately in front of him. On his small frame his guitar looked immense, but he handled it with ostentatious ease. He was legendary for his lightning fingers, for being in some of Australia’s biggest groups, and for being shot in the back.

Stockley came to Australia from England when he was ten and I think he got his ambivalent attitude toward class from his hometown of Winchester. He had wedged the attitude of a working-class hero and a dandy into one contradictory personality. This showed up in big ways: he had a dogmatic socialistic philosophy, yet he adored such perquisites of the capitalist running-dogs as he could lay his hands on. And it showed up in little ways: after playing a devastatingly down-home blues lick, he shook his wrist with a motion that brought attention to his gold watch. Stockley had a fetishistic love of beer and its ancillary culture, yet he was a wine aficionado and a diligent epicurean. All of this was paradoxical. But I had to admit that his desire to be of the people, yet enjoy the privileges of the upper classes, was consistent with the idea of success in his chosen career: rock’n’roll.

I don’t know how he came upon it, but he seemed to believe in a kind of paganistic animism. He was bedevilled by what he called ‘electrickery’. An amplifier worked fine until he tried to use it. Then it would pop, crackle and hum brutally. Anything electrical conspired against him, and every time it happened he would look at me and say, ‘See, mate. It’s got it in for me. Thy electrickery.’ Then he would blow on his ring finger to ward off the evil spirits.

But, if the spirit of electrickery bedevilled him, the spirit of beer was his ally. On a Sunday, when his fridge was stocked up against the blue laws, he talked to his little friends. He shook the fridge gently until the bottles jingled against each other.

‘My little jumblies,’ he said. ‘Yes, it won’t be long now, my babies.’

Then he shook the fridge to make them answer him.

‘All right. But just one of you now.’

He took out a bottle and stroked it, smiling at the others like a proud father. Stockley’s house at that time was called Rat Manor. It was the home of one in a long line of Stockley’s assumed comic personas, Maury. Stockley’s inspiration for Maury was an old drunk who lived in an abandoned house opposite the Station with some other derelicts. We knew, via Stockley, only a few things about Maury: he believed that the only nutrition one needed was beer; he routinely urinated in the corner of his living room; and he either loved or hated people. Maury cast his judgment on others in this way: ‘He’s number one in my book, Mr Murray. Number one in my book!’ To express disapproval it was: ‘He’s a ratbag,’ or, the even more expressive: ‘He’s a fuckin’ ratbag, Mr Murray.’ As far as Stockley could tell, Mr Murray was a figment of Maury’s alcoholic dementia.

Stockley took these characteristics and invented his own Maury, a kind of derelict anti-sage. Whether at Rat Manor, the Station or on the road, Maury became a constant companion. We begged Stockley to be Maury, or we planted lines for him to respond to.

So, as we listened to Kerryn grunting to America, I whispered to Stockley, ‘Geez, mate. You didn’t have a meal before that beer, did you? You should take better care of yourself, mate.’

Stockley replied in the high, whiny voice of Maury, ‘No worries, mate. There’s a steak in every glass.’

‘I see … Mmmm … Yes,’ said Kerryn to America.

J.L., our drummer, impatiently picked up a rock magazine. The day before, he was reading the same magazine, when Stockley, in his Maury character, said, ‘Here, what are ya? Ya don’t wanna read a bloody book, mate. You’re gonna turn into a bloody poofter. Yer don’t need books. All you need is beer, footy and mates … and beer for ya mates, o’ course. Did yer want people to think you’re an ineffectual or somethin’. Don’t be a smarty pants, mate.’

J.L. didn’t read. Not that J.L. was anti-books — rather, he was possessed by music. From waking up, until after he was asleep, J.L. played tapes of Al Green and reggae music. He grew up in a West Indian suburb in London. He said he learned to play drums by banging sticks on the sidewalk in time to the strange and wonderful rhythms of the Caribbean.

His natural shyness offstage left you unprepared for his onstage presence. Onstage he shone. He was possessed by the groove and he exuded an open pride that was catching. He played with his nose tilted slightly above the horizontal, and his head rocked back and forward making his hair swish below his ear. The motion of his head and hair reminded me of an Irish setter trotting out its victory lap at a dog show. J.L.’s confidence was so infectious that, whenever I felt my attention drifting off the groove or felt a mild paranoia that it simply wasn’t there (oh, will-o’-the-wisp), I just had to watch him and it solidified once again. Together we made the moment live. When we were playing on a good night I wasn’t thinking about yesterday or tomorrow — I was in the groove, in the moment. Winston Churchill said he felt that way as he rode into battle with the bullets whizzing by his ears. Playing with The Dingoes was not quite as heroic, but, at the Station, with a glass of beer on my amplifier, a girl or two in the audience catching my eye, and a rock-solid bass-and-drums combination thumping out the beat, I was deep inside the moment.

At twenty-three, those bacchanalian good times were reason enough for self-satisfaction. But even then, self-doubt, and doubts about the worth of The Dingoes, had begun to eat away at my contentedness. We had released an album, The Dingoes, and it had charted and peaked at number seventeen. We had given it everything we had, and now it was off the charts. So where did we stand in the overall scheme of things? At the Station we still felt like we were at the top — but what hierarchical structure were we at the top of? Could our success at the Station be trusted? No, I thought. We were merely the beneficiaries of the arrival of large numbers of people of our generation at an age when their innate need of culture made them latch onto anything that resembled it. As a mere cultural enzyme I couldn’t claim too much credit for The Dingoes — yet, seen in this light, we had as much right as Mozart to success, if not longevity.

But the pressure of self-doubt was nothing compared to the growing problems surrounding The Dingoes. Though our pre-eminence remained at the Station, we began to get bogged down in unfriendly bars, 600-mile road trips and empty concert halls. And each time we came back to the Station, a little of our shine had worn off. By degrees we came to see ourselves as victims of a small and saturated market. We had played the same songs to too many of the same audiences. We had to admit we were going nowhere. We had decided to split up after our Western Australian trip. And then came the call.

Kerryn hung up the phone. ‘Well. That’s that, then.’

‘What’s what?’ I said.

‘Nothing. Who wants to go down and get a beer?’

He was toying with a very big and delicious piece of information. Understanding the need for an organised presentation of big news, we followed him downstairs. We went out into the empty beer garden.

This garden was surrounded by white trelliswork. Grapevines had threaded their tendrils into every available space. The beer garden was roofed over with green corrugated plastic, and when the patchy cloudiness occasionally gave way to the sun, everyone turned a deep shade of green.

I volunteered to get the beers. ‘It’s my shout. But you’re not to say a word about the call until I get back.’

‘Okay, mate.’

When I came back, Kerryn was saying: ‘And then I hung up.’

I scowled and put the beers down on the white wrought-iron table.

‘You’re number one in my book, Mr Murray,’ said Stockley, grateful as ever for a beer.

Kerryn began to spin out the phone conversation, ‘It seems that young Billy McCartney got a job working for Elvis Presley’s road crew — that’s what got him overseas, anyway. After that, he got a job with this band called Lynyrd Skynyrd. They’re apparently big in the South.’

He took a long draught of his beer and cleaned the foam off his top lip leisurely with his bottom lip. ‘He took our album with him and he used to play it over the PA before Lynyrd how’s-your-father played. Well, their manager, a guy called Peter Rudge, heard it and thought it wasn’t bad. It seems he also manages …’ he took another sip, cleaned his top lip and went on, ‘… The Rolling Stones.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. And apparently Peter Rudge played it for Mick. Mick thought it was alright, too.’

‘No kidding,’ said Stockley. We were all flabbergasted. No-one else had touched their beer.

‘And so … so?’ I said.

‘Well, Rudge wants to cut a deal with A&M Records in Los Angeles. Billy wants us to set up a lawyer. He says contracts are on their way over.’

‘Doesn’t this Rudge guy even want to see us?’ I asked.

‘No. Our man in New York has sold us to him. Remember, about six months ago, when Billy used to hang at the Station?’

I could remember Billy leaning, beerless, against the back wall of the bar, with a grin a mile wide.

‘My mate, Billy,’ said Brod.

Just as intimates yawn together, we all sipped our beers at the same time. The clouds moved away for a minute and completely exposed the trellis to the sun, the beer garden became infused with green.

I looked at green Kerryn and said, ‘Come on. You were on the phone much longer than that. What else?’

‘That’s not enough?’ he said.

‘When do we leave?’ asked J.L.

‘As soon as the lawyers take care of the contracts, I suppose.’

‘Christ, this is unbelievable,’ said Stockley, and he blew on his ring finger five times. ‘I’m off to ring Jen.’

‘Good idea.’

One by one the green Dingoes left to telephone the good news back to Melbourne. Presently I was alone in the beer garden. The squall had disappeared as quickly as it had come, and now the unobstructed sun’s rays flooded me with still, green warmth. As I drained my glass, I was filled with an almost tangible sense of wellbeing. As soon as I put it on the table it was replaced, by Kerryn, with a full one.

‘I think this is called for, don’t you?’ he said.

‘Capital.’

‘I suppose we shouldn’t break up just yet, mate?’

‘I suppose not, mate.’