The Making of a Music Freak
I have no problem with being classified as a Music Freak. I think it’s a reasonably cool thing to be.
Over the years various friends and acquaintances have classified me, mostly but not always fairly under various other categories of Freak.
The Gralton, for example, claimed I turned the kids in my class into little hughsoids - strange creatures with a warped sense of humour and a tendency to walk around saying things like, why did Captain Cook?
Looking at my class one day and asking where I’d found this motley crew produced a wonderful reaction from eleven-year-old Bugs. Drawing himself up to his full four foot nothing he fixed the Big Red Man with a steely gaze.
We copied off you.
If you travel back to that era around the late sixties, freak was the term used to label someone with an almost overwhelming affinity for something-or-other. For example, there were dope freaks, booze freaks, sports freaks and whips-and-leather freaks.
And, of course, music freaks.
You don’t need a formal background in music to be a music freak.
In fact I should point out at this stage that I don’t even have an informal background when it comes to the theory and structure of music, but I do have an affinity for listening to different stuff and a desire to unearth different stuff to listen to.
Like just about everyone else in my generation I started listening to the radio in the fifties. It wasn’t like there was a whole lot of choice when it came to entertainment. There was the radio and the movies and that was about it.
Sure, television came to Australia in the late fifties, but we didn’t own a TV set until some time in 1965. Occasionally, if we’d been doing well at school, we might get to watch a rented set over the school holidays or something. The exact details are long lost in the mists of antiquity.
I do, however, remember listening to The Beatles live at Brisbane’s Festival Hall on the radio in June 1964. I can even recall Sounds Incorporated as the opening act, and while it might have been interesting to hear it again (assuming someone had bothered to hook up a big old reel-to-reel deck to the radio receiver) I recall a preponderance of screams over musical notes.
From there, it was a predictable progression, listening to the radio, watching the charts, and then, towards the end of 1966, buying records. All in all, an unremarkable sequence.
I don’t recall exactly how it happened, but by the middle of 1967, I’d moved on to buying music papers and magazines. Somewhere around that time I discovered that knowledge of what was going on overseas and some rare or interesting items in your record collection tended to raise your standing among your peers.
That was an important consideration for a mildly geeky bank manager’s son with no claim to sporting prowess or anything else with a positive coolness rating.
Suddenly, towards the end of that year I found myself being greeted with lines like, Hughesy, X’s folks are away for the weekend. We’re having a party. Want to come? Oh, yeah, and bring your records.
Once I’d detected the trend, the discovery had a significant influence on my listening and buying habits, but there was no way I could afford to buy everything. The finances were never going to stretch that far.
What mattered, as I discovered, was the ability to track down something that nobody else had. If you could only afford to buy a couple of singles a week, and the odd album here and there, it was important to buy the right ones.
Some of the right ones were obvious. You couldn’t go wrong with Cream or Hendrix, but they were obvious, and there were others.
Some time in 1967 the Vanilla Fudge, in full-psychotic meltdown rearrangement mode with You Keep Me Hanging On had a coolness quotient of several thousand, and the Blue Cheer version of Summertime Blues may well have been proto-heavy metal sludge by the world’s loudest (allegedly) band, but it carried considerable cachet in Year Eleven circles at Pimlico High.
So where some people would be quite happy to follow the dictates of fashion and the charts, I tended to head away from the stuff I could hear on the radio. After all, when you’re working from a limited budget you don’t need to have a copy of the latest #1 smash hit. You can hear it over the airwaves, and your friends and acquaintances will own copies.
Better to shell out for that copy of Sam & Dave’s Soul Man, or the Small Faces’ Tin Soldier, which worked well as Mickey’s big hand nudged towards midnight and the school dance surged into full pre-shutdown orgiastic frenzy.
As the stores found they had unwanted copies of things that had failed to attract chart action there were bargains to be had in the cut price bins provided you knew what you were looking at.
That, of course, was where extensive perusal of overseas music magazines came in handy. At a time when you can obtain almost anything from almost anywhere almost immediately (absolutely immediately if it’s downloadable) the time frames that operated in the sixties and early seventies are almost staggering.
It took a good six weeks to two months for the latest Melody Maker, NME or Disc and Music Echo to hit these shores, and a little longer to transfer them from the port of entry but you could still read reviews of most of the latest stuff comfortably before they appeared on the shelves at your friendly local record shop. There were exceptions, like The Beatles and The Stones, but they weren’t what I was looking for anyway...
In most cases it was a straightforward case of read the reviews, add items to the watch out for these ones list and then scan the latest release sheets for a local release. If finances permitted, items could be ordered, otherwise there was the possibility of picking something up a bit later in the cut-price out they go bins.
In between sessions around someone’s stereo, you listened to the radio, which was useful in many ways. You weren’t going to be a big fan of everything you heard, of course. There was plenty of stuff on the charts at the time that was verging on the downright execrable, but if you were listening at the right time there were plenty of diamonds scattered among the dross.
If you were quick enough off the mark there were giveaways you could phone in for, and after a while certain DJs got to know your voice, and you might get a request played on air. That doesn’t seen like too big a deal, but, increasingly, a call to one particular DJ resulted in suggestions that you might be interested in their review copy of this album...
I seem to recall the going rate was two dollars. Strictly against the rules, of course, and there were a few eyebrows raised when people sighted the little Sample Record - Not For Sale sticker on the inner record label.
Anything that the guy really liked stayed, but since his taste didn’t run to John Mayall, Steve Miller Band or Terry Reid, copies of The Blues Alone, Diary of a Band, Your Saving Grace and the album that got a rerelease as Superlungs ended up in Hughesy’s collection along with Procol Harum’s Shine On Brightly.
Terry Reid, you may recall, was the preferred option when Led Zeppelin was looking for a vocalist. He knocked the gig back but suggested this bloke called Robert Plant.
What you ended up with, of course, was a matter of luck and available finance. My mate Eric had a bit more cash at his disposal and managed to get in at the right time to score copies of Quicksilver Messenger Service’s Happy Trails, The Band’s Music From Big Pink and the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth.
While I’d possibly have preferred to have those albums sitting in my collection, it didn’t make all that much difference since I was spending a fair chunk of each weekend in the room on the lower slopes of Castle Hill that housed a substantial record collection, along with an extensive library, heavy on science fiction as I recall, but with enough other genres represented to pretty well cover the gamut of what was out there and interesting.
Some of it was definitely out there.
It was around this time that I learned one of the basic facts of music freakdom. No matter how much you’d like to, you can’t own everything. There’s just too much out there.
With access to second hand shops and cut out bins, of course, you can end up with a fair proportion of the music that interests you, and Eric managed to build up at least three substantial collections in Townsville, Adelaide and London, and I’m talking thousands rather than hundreds, but would more than likely have ended up with a wants list that was at least as substantial as the stack of vinyl he’d accumulated in any of those locations.
Once I’d finished Teachers’ College and started pulling in a pay packet, I set off down the same road of acquisition, though there was no way I was going to accumulate anything to match those collections.
To this day, people look at the piles of CDs around the house and assume that I’d have, for example, the complete works of John Fogerty from the Creedence era to today.
Or Cat Stevens or the Moody Blues or Led Zeppelin.
It’s quite possible that Eric would have ended up with those, assuming, of course, that the artists in question continued to hold his interest. He was well on the way with all those examples, but there were a couple of (I thought) good reasons why those artists were noticeably absent from Hughesy’s collection.
For a start, if I needed to hear those albums I knew where I could go to hear them. As well, some of those artists were played so much back in the days when I listened to the radio that buying a copy didn’t seem necessary.
That’s why my Creedence collection amounts to one Best of CD, bought to play in the background at a party when my usual listening wouldn’t be all that popular.
On top of those considerations, if I wanted to hear, say, Cat Stevens, which I didn’t feel too inclined to do in the first place, there was plenty of his stuff on the radio,and practically everyone I knew had the albums.
In other words why get the new one from Cat Stevens when I could be getting the latest Van Morrison instead?
There were other factors pushing me along the same road.
There might be someone out there who can explain why a Woolworth's store in Townsville, north Queensland should have multiple copies of virtually every obscure album that appeared on Festival Records or the labels that made up the Phillips/Polygram group on sale in the cut out bins.
I’ve often wondered who did the ordering.
Was there some freak somewhere in the Woolworth's hierarchy who wanted to help underground artists?
How come all that stuff ended up in Townsville, of all places?
Was it something to do with the fact that it was the era of conscription and the Vietnam War?
In Townsville there were large numbers of twenty-year-old blokes who’d been walking around Sydney or Melbourne six months ago with hair half way down their backs and now found themselves wearing jungle greens and being sworn at by sergeant majors,
Whatever the reason, the cut-out bins at Woolworth's provided an endless supply of albums you could buy on spec for a dollar.
So my mates and I did, in a flurry of attempted one-upmanship to see who could come up with the most obscure little gems. While there were the inevitable duds, but the gems that were sitting in those racks waiting to be unearthed made up for them.
For a start I ended up with a copy of Dr Strangely Strange’s Kip of the Serenes, which seemed to be in fairly plentiful supply. At a time when anything on Island Records was worth checking out, I ended up with copies of Richard Thompson’s Henry The Human Fly and Bryter Layter by Nick Drake in 1971.
Some people, of course, I just didn’t get. Even though the fabulous furry Buff brothers raved over the Moody Blues’ albums and they were often heard when my acquaintances got together, for some reason the music never really registered on my consciousness. Maybe if I’d been a dope smoker and been regularly stoned with In Search of the Lost Chord as a soundtrack, I’d have been more appreciative. But I wasn’t, so I’m not...
Some things I just ignored.
So when I heard the first Led Zeppelin album a month or two after hearing Jeff Beck’s Truth, recognising similarities between the two, and knowing that Beck had been ahead of Jimmy Page in the Yardbirds I just assumed that I was hearing a cardboard imitation of Mr Beck and subsequently ignored the entire oeuvre of one of the major acts in rock & roll history.
Snap judgements R us....
Of course, there was probably also a financial element in that judgement, because there was no chance that a Led Zep album was going to end up in the dollar bin...
Unlike the other sections of this exercise in reminiscence there’s no obvious transition point between this part of the overall story and the next. People came and went, new friendships formed, people changed along the way.
So, purely for the sake of arbitrarily closing one chapter if I had to draw a demarkation line, the logical point would be starting University in 1969. Things went along in much the same way as they had the year before, but there were new elements that came into play as the year wound on.
For a start Eric, whose literary and cultural interests rarely coincided with the academic priorities associated with Year Twelve, was persuaded to have another go at the Senior Examination, and elected to so at a different high school, adding a few previously unfamiliar faces. The Fabulous Furry Buff Brothers in particular, to the social mix.
That’s not to suggest that there was absolutely no interaction between the schools up to that time. I knew a couple of people who’d gone to Town High (I went to Pimlico) but I’d run across them away from a school environment. Once you’re stuck in a class, as Eric was, with a group of previously unfamiliar people the result is going to be a new, larger circle of acquaintances.
While the old University College of Townsville (it didn’t become James Cook University until the following year) wasn’t a hot bed of music freakdom much the same thing applied at University.
Those two factors brought new figures onto the scene and neither of the next two episodes, Hughesy’s less than distinguished career as a performer and what could be termed The Underworld Years would have happened without them.