I did my back on a recent Sunday, picking up a guitar speaker box to put in my car. It wasn’t an especially weighty thing, and most people wouldn’t be troubled if asked to carry it around for a few minutes. Even one handed. My legs, though, began to quiver at about the thirty-second mark, and then started to fold in and lower slowly, like a hydraulic car compressor. You win, gravity.
Having reached the car, I leaned over momentarily, but with poor posture, to put the thing in the back, which was when something went twang.
Were the rock gods trying to tell me something? I haven’t had any active involvement in music for a decade now. An encroaching middle-aged decrepitude, coupled with a general laziness, has pretty much done the trick. I don’t really have anything to say as a songwriter these days, and the theft of my bass guitar was a crushing and terminal blow.
The last band I was in, Jacuzzi Suit – and there are two other bands also called Jacuzzi Suit, I shit you not – required a serious commitment of which I was growing weary even back in 2001. We spent week after week honing songs we’d written, and wanted to eventually record. We had all made records in other bands, with varying levels of success. ‘Success’ being not very successful at all. Not compared with, say, Spiderbait. But listing our previous bands made for a reasonably strong CV, if judged on the venues and the other cities we played. The band I was in in 1991, The Fish John West Reject, was on tour quite often. Several trips to Perth; many, many drives to Sydney. A lot of gigs in Tasmania. The money dried up. The band’s second album sold less than its predecessor and, oh, baby, that’s a bad sign.
Long and arduous tours are just what you do in indie music land. Most often it’s a recipe for fiscal disaster. It costs thousands of dollars, either yours or the record company’s, and you might not sell enough CDs to in any way cover the costs.
Having a hit – like, let’s say, Frente – can make it worse. The follow-up release stiffs, and the costs accrued and owed to record companies are multiplied due to the choice of a far more expensive studio, and expensive, hyperbolic ad campaigns. That’s what you’re looking at, and what you expect. It’s the most cost ineffective of all artistic pursuits. But the impulse to create and make permanent will almost certainly override caution when you have a bunch of songs you like.
Jacuzzi Suit played half a dozen shows, then our drummer moved to France. His name was Frank. It was only later that I found out his name was Francois. He was a lovely guy, though sporadically violent if aggrieved. We auditioned a few other drummers but they were rubbish, and couldn’t punch out a bouncer either, so we gave up. And I retired.
I missed playing from the moment I stopped doing it. But it was never enough of an itch to require scratching. I’m playing now, though, due to exceptional circumstances. Exceptionally exceptional.
My friend Murray has been messing about with guitars and stuff over the last few years, and is a member of a cow-punk outfit that may never play a gig. He asked if I wanted to jam with him. I’d had this vague idea for a covers band that would do bubblegum tunes of the sixties, like ‘Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)’, ‘1, 2, 3 Red Light’, ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, ‘Five O’Clock World’, etc.
But I had no guitar, no amp, no microphones; no money to pay for the beer-drenched mouldy, smoked practice rooms that you have no choice but to hire; and no inclination to be lugging various heavy objects to and fro.
A visit to Murray’s warehouse – he’s a surveyor – changed everything. It’s a band’s wet-dream chocolate-flavoured heaven. One large office has been transformed into a practice room and studio. Luxurious drapes soak up the noise, and there are so many leads and microphone stands hither and thither that you can easily trip over them. The walls are lined with amplifiers and guitars. Murray also has computer recording software, so we can multi-track every practice, to be examined when we debrief.
Murray has an expensive Ibanez bass guitar, which looks a bit like a purchase from Cashies but makes a beautiful noise. It’s mine to use when I wish. Mine to take home if I want. And the place is a five-minute walk away. All I need to take from home are some sheets with chords on them and a plectrum. Well, I don’t even need a plectrum, actually.
You’ll find a beer fridge offering several choices of brew but also replete with fruit juices. There are scattered bean bags for loafing, an Italian coffee machine, and central heating. The various indulgences that I would have demanded before I even thought about falling back into music can all be ticked off. And then some. Murray is plugged in to the electricity grid for the whole of the warehouse precinct, and he doesn’t even have to contribute to electricity costs. His only outlays are on guitars. The whole thing is just completely brilliant. Presented with this, it was more or less impossible to find a reason not to do it, other than just not wanting to do it.
And so it began. Soon enough I coaxed a couple of proper musician friends of mine to join in and the four of us began to learn very fiddly songs: things like ‘Telephone Line’ by ELO. Initially, the idea was to get on top of tunes like that and, through hard work, add them one by one to our set, leaving audiences stunned by our talents. But as the weeks passed, the less inclined we were to try to polish this stuff, so even songs we’d sweated over for a month or more were jettisoned, to everyone’s relief, and replaced by thrashier stuff: glam, seventies new wave, as per The Undertones, Buzzcocks and Cheap Trick. One by one we built up a set. A smattering of Big Star, the MC5, and our one concession to ‘the Fitzroy sound’, Neil Young’s ‘Cinnamon Girl’.
(The Fitzroy sound – and the Brunswick one too, to some extent – is rootsy, and country-themed. Miller and Lee check shirts, tatts and The Band, Gram Parsons or Townes Van Zandt covers. Always played very well, and moderately enjoyable … up to a point. But the newest addition to our set is ‘Shout It Loud’ by Kiss. Enough said.)
We are called The TV Set. We’ve played four gigs, each much better than the one before. It’s fully sick rad. Last Sunday we got 300 bucks for two forty-minute sets at the Marquis of Lorne (it was worth soldiering on despite the back thing). This is a remarkable result. As much as Melbourne is lauded as the rock capital of the world by many a self-congratulatory band or punter, and as much as the pressure on the suits to leave the venues alone has brought some changes, the fact is that bands get fuck all money. It never changes. You got ninety bucks for a support slot in 1996? It’ll be eighty now.
There are venues that cry foul about noise complaints, etc, and fair enough, but some just know they can get away with giving enthusiastic young bands peanuts. If you’re new, it’s quite a triumph to get any kind of place on a bill. But that’s part of the whole thing. It verges on pay to play.
Michael, one of our mighty duo of guitarists, plays with Kim Salmon in various projects (in the studio and at gigs) and when I informed him I had seventy-five bucks to give him, he emailed me, saying, ‘Wow, I’m a professional!’ He was joking. But he could mount a pretty good argument that he wasn’t.
So many groups and singers these days. They seem to proliferate as rapidly as Australia’s population. Brumby’s pre-election Music HQ grant scheme was a double-edged sword. With a bit of money to spend, any self-respecting young band should be blowing the cash on booze and drugs, should be chucking up in clubs, should be infamously mad, bad and dangerous to know, and ready to go to rehab. But now, if a band fancies the money (so that’s everyone), they have to be sensible and polite, and fill in one of these application forms with more pages in it than War and Peace.
Come on, a bit of sedition, people. I never got a grant when I was a boy. I paid my dues and I’ll tell you this: I’m ENTITLED to be well paid for banging out some fun tunes for old people. (Both our drummer, Jamie, and guitarist Michael are in their early thirties, which makes them laughably young for Murray and me to be hanging about with.)
The kids are alright, I suppose… just alright … not great. It’s up to we the elderly, it seems, to be insulting and anarchic and reckless and … y’know, situationist and shit.
I dare you to come and see us. Come on, have a go if you’re hard enough.
I’m now consciously and deliberately choosing songs to play from the set list of my first band, which was playing in 1983. I’ve been playing ‘Surrender’ by Cheap Trick now and then in bands for almost thirty years. It might seem ridiculous for The TV Set – or the two members over forty-five, anyway – to be playing ‘Teenage Kicks’ but the smiles on the audience’s faces prove that loud guitars, good tunes and valuable, indestructible friendships will never die. What does that say about me? About us? I’m just not sure.
That Sunday I went for the Pete Townshend mid-air power chord, and gravity, once more and cruelly, dumped me back down on a pair of stiff legs and arthritic knees, which crackled noisily in complaint.
I’m not sure what the definition of old is these days but I still hope I die before I get to it. If I haven’t already. I will rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light. I will not go gently. I will rock. I will RAAAAAWWWKKK! Just as long as I can have a bath and a cup of tea straight after.
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