Those things, in places like Townsville don't last, and in any case those youthful alliances have a tendency to splinter wherever they are formed as careers and relationships impinge on their territory, but a year away on the Palms, another year finishing a university degree and the gradual dispersal of the old peer group without a new one coalescing meant I can't think of a better tag that The Wilderness Years for the period between 1973 and the start of the internet era, where I suddenly found myself back in something that wasn't exactly like The Underworld Era but wasn't too far removed from it either.
In between, switching from vinyl to CD in the late eighties helped as well, since it brought the realisation that there was a swag of material I hadn't managed to acquire first time around they had been reissued, often with enhanced content, which is why I ended up buying the Elvis Costello back catalogue four times (once on vinyl, once on CD, again in expanded versions and a fourth time as the album plus accompanying bonus disk).
It's easy to take the Internet for granted these days, and unless you were there at the time it's probably hard to comprehend the liberating aspects of almost instantaneous communication among music freaks.
Then there was the whole tape and CD trading bit that allowed the participants to build up extensive collections of unofficial recordings so you could, should you be so inclined, build an archive that covered every incarnation of Neil Young's concert persona, from the early solo work, through the Danny Whitten Crazy Horse era, the Tonight's the Night excursion towards the ditch, the reformed Crazy Horse through the late seventies, the Trans band, the International Harvesters run, the rockabilly and R&B excursions…
I could go on, but that's enough to make the point as far as Mr Young is concerned.
If your tastes ran wider than Neil Young you could (and I did) do much the same thing with the works of Messrs Costello, Morrison and Thompson. Had my earlier interest in Dylan survived the Dylan, Self Portrait and New Morning era I might have done the same thing with the Bobster, but there were outfits like the Allman Brothers and Little Feat that needed to be investigated and a man's only got so much listening time, eh?
Once we started to move into broadband, peer to peer torrenting, digital downloads and the whole iPod portable player bit things, predictably, changed again.
That means, regardless of the personal story, that we've covered the landscape from the era where the 45 rpm single reigned supreme through the age of the album, the emergence of the cassette, the rise of the CD and the devolution into digital. It's been quite a journey...
Along the way there’s been a bit of live concert action, so it made sense to hive that off from the other reminiscences, separating the concert content into the Townsville years and the Bowen years.