AN IDIOT'S SEARCH FOR THE COOL

 

I can’t recall exactly when I started taking an interest in music but I do know that it was pretty early. I’ve only recently been carbon dated at 63 so that the formative years in taste establishment focus on the late 1960s to mid-1970s. However, the Summer of Love’s free-wheelin’ sex and associated humidity didn’t really wind their paths to suburban Abbotsford….at least as far as I remember. The influences that did matter were far more tangible and much easier to peg.

Strange or bent pop music always caught my ears when I was a very early teen. The Beatles never really attracted me but I quite liked Brasil 66’s rendition of Fool on the hill. Other noteworthy attention-getters included Thunderclap Newman’s Something in the air, the Doors’ Touch me and Gun’s Race with the devil.

Pop music was all the go in those times and Top 40 countdowns were everywhere on the dial of my black transistor radio. Most of the stuff which is now eulogised (Elvis Presley, The Hollies, Ronnie Burns, B.J. Thomas, Diana Ross/ Supremes etc etc) I thought was shit even back then. Moreover, the currency unit of the screaming teens was the vinyl ‘single’. Charts were compiled based on the number of units moved and there was a depressing sameness about the sounds and themes. A few singles had made their way into my possession but that was about to change.

Always, the best things happen after hours, by accident, while the cat’s away, when the moon goes behind a cloud and there’s no-one else around. Certainly the best music…….is made after twelve, deep in the rock and roll dungeons.

This extract from Michael Thomas’ liner notes for Super session (1968) sums up where I was heading with regard to musical interests.

I reckon that I first heard In-a-gadda-da-vida at some school friend’s place late in 1968. The Iron Butterfly epic has suffered badly in subsequent decades but I’ve never joined the revisionists in bagging it. My aunty bought it for me as a birthday present in that year and I couldn’t take it off the HMV radiogram at our inner west ranch. Its importance was twofold. The music didn’t sound like anything that was on the radio and the title track went for just over 17 minutes so it established the ‘album’ as the new dime when acquiring vinyl. I would never buy another single again.

A few visits to the dungeons followed over the next months and I was soon in possession of Jeff Beck’s Truth, A saucerful of secrets (Pink Floyd), Led Zeppelin II and Vanilla Fudge’s Near the beginning. All of these albums were different from one another- one totally bombastic- but they helped fix the boundaries on a lot of stuff that was to enter the vaults. However, there were some other things that have influenced the collection and, as a consequence, that initial range finding.

The dungeons themselves were significant. The two main stores I frequented were Nicholson’s and Palings in Sydney. The 438 provided the transport on either a Thursday night or a Saturday morning. One of them had a basement level where you descended from the street and I think it was Palings in Pitt Street. There were stacks of interesting stuff down there and you could easily spend a couple of hours thumbing through the display shelves. Tom Jones’ and Archies’ records were upstairs so you weren’t wading through the dross on most occasions. LPs sold for between $5.50 and $5.95. Much of the vinyl I acquired came from these two outlets.

An even better sound lounge opened at Town Hall station a little later. It was Anthem Records and it specialised in imports and bootlegs. I bought The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (1965) album there but it cost a fuckin’ bomb. I’ve never had a good track record (no pun) in anything associated with Butterfield. About twenty years on, I bought a shitty second hand copy of East-West (1966) for around $50 at Castle Music in Parramatta. The owner must have seen me coming. I still cringe about that especially when considering that I later acquired a deluxe CD re-issue for less than $20 in Byron Bay.

It’s worth noting that my vinyl buying also included some visits to Lahanas Record Bar in downtown Five Dock. There was a fabulous looking young woman who was behind the counter and I’m not sure if it was impure thought processes or LP acquisitions that motivated such visits. Hell she was beautiful but I did buy a Dutch Tilders’ classic and Four moments (Sebastian Hardie- 1975) at the establishment. I routinely required hosing down whenever I returned to the compound from Five Dock.

Chris Winter’s ‘Room to move’ 2BL radio program (Monday nights) was, by far, the most informing introduction to music that I’ve ever listened to. In 1971 and 1972, it was untouchable in opening the doors to stuff that you’d never hear anywhere else. Soft Machine, Edgar Winter’s White Trash, the Grateful Dead and Weather Report were just a few of the names regularly featured. I listened to every bloody show and soon recognised that having a pencil with paper beside me was a necessity when it was on. I bought tons of records and CDs based upon what I heard in those years and the lists I kept.

The power of live performance has also left its mark regarding titles I’ve collected. I went to Pink Floyd’s first tour of Australia in 1971 at Randwick racecourse and, apart from having my ears blown off, was able to bookmark Ummagumma (1969) as a double that must be added. A school ‘dance’ which featured a just formed Blackfeather in 1970 led to the automatic acquisition of At the mountains of madness (1971) when it was recorded some six months later. Even as recently as 2013, a Shuggie Otis encounter at the Enmore- when he appeared on a triple bill with Robert Cray and Taj Mahal- had me quickly back mapping and running in the direction of the shops to secure his entire catalogue which spanned some forty years.

Overall, the cool is really anything you want it to be. While the above chronicles only a fraction of what I’ve collected or been interested in over fifty years, I hope it does give some background into the forces that led me to choose stuff. I’ve included a short list of albums below that were linchpins in expanding my collection in various directions….and yes, there are quite a few more that I have to buy before croaking.

 

Iron Butterfly: In-a-gadda-da-vida (1968); Jeff Beck: Truth (1968); The Mothers of Invention: Burnt weeny sandwich (1970); Chick Corea: Return to forever (1972); Miles Davis: In a silent way (1969); Joy Division: Closer (1980); Spectrum: Milesago (1971); The Crusaders (aka The Jazz Crusaders): Free as the wind (1976); The Nice: Elegy (1971); Various: The live adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper (1969).