Back in Townsville after that Festival Hall show it was very much a case of nothing much on the concert scene.
After I’d finished Year Twelve in 1968 a year at University, while it wasn’t exactly an academic success, was followed by two years at Teachers’ College and the live music scene centred around the odd University Cabaret and Friday nights at The Scene.
I suspect that every city in the western world boasted a venue called The Scene.
The other venue that packed them in on Saturday nights was the old Sadler’s Sound Lounge, universally known as The Scrounge where live music wasn’t on the agenda but large numbers of females were.
Somewhere along the way, the old proprietors of The Scrounge were bought out by a local businessman and the venue was reincarnated as the Inside Out, a pretty standard disco/rock club with the formerly Cairns-based Barabbas and a blues band called Gutbucket, who were about fifty-fifty Army conscripts from down south and local long-hairs.
For most of us Barabbas was pretty much where it was at, a four-piece (power trio plus vocalist) who drew their repertoire from the heavier end of the musical spectrum and featured a bloody good guitarist by the name of Rick Montgomery (or Montgomerie?)
We’d seen Barabbas a couple of times before they made the big relocation and I had a nodding acquaintance with Rick & Co by the time they made the move, which meant that in the small hours of an Easter Saturday morning I found myself on stage jamming on the blues kazoo...
After my father was transferred to Brisbane I ended up spending the last bit of 1970 and all of 1971 in a University residential college, and an effective income of minus-six cents a fortnight meant that there wasn’t a great deal of spare cash to pay for live music.