A Less Than Distinguished Musical Career
My long-standing rating of Mojo magazine gets called into question from time to time, particularly when (as happened with the March 2009 issue) the cover features someone like Nick Cave with promises of Cave-heavy content within.
Portrait of a 21st Century Genius?
Piffle. Put me to one side and call me a fuddy duddy.
A quick flick through the pages, however, restored my equanimity when I sighted the Filter: Buried Treasure page, featuring the wonderfully titled A Meal You Can Shake Hands With In The Dark by the equally wonderfully named Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments and the reminiscences came flowing back.
Given Hughesy’s affinity with the obtuse and the obscure the average reader may be surprised to discover that most of the Buried Treasures unearthed on that page are items I’ve never heard of, and sighting the Battered Ornaments there came as something of a surprise, since the album holds a significant position in Hughesy’s memory.
A Meal You Can Shake Hands With In The Dark appeared on the horizon at some point during the year when the first phase of Hughesy’s academic career went down in flames and one of my mates was in the process of repeating Year Twelve and seeing whether he could drag the results from a pretty ordinary first attempt even lower.
It was a time when the explosion of musical innovation was just starting to subside, having swept the world to the point where every town or city of any significance in the western world had a head shop, a rock festival or two and, in many cases, an underground newspaper.
Faced with the need to take a break from the pressures of business, the proprietor of Townsville’s first and (as far as I can remember) only head shop needed someone to look after the shop and, for some reason decided that one of my acquaintances was the man for the moment.
The times being what they were, the entrepreneurial man of the moment decided to parlay the profit from the store into a rock festival to be held at the Townsville showgrounds.
Remembering that I wasn’t intimately involved in these developments, the exact details are somewhat hazy and the exact circumstances surrounding the event may differ significantly from Hughesy’s recollections, but I seem to recall being enlisted to assist in collecting money at the gate, an assignment that lasted about as long as it took the first band to set up and start playing.
The siren song had nothing to do with quality of musical output because the opening act, who traded under the name of Thor, were a particularly undistinguished aggregation. With a nod towards Steppenwolf’s heavy metal thunder they’d named themselves after the Norse God of Thunder though my social circle, in all our late-teen sophistication, had christened this particular outfit the Chunder God.
Nearly forty years later I don’t recall much of what took place that afternoon but I distinctly remember three things.
There was a vocal and guitar call break in the middle of Barabbas’ headline set that I recognised a year or two later in the Allman Brothers Band’s Black Hearted Woman. Considering the fact that it took another couple of years for the ABB to make it big that meant that a copy of their first album, which was recorded earlier that year, had made it to Cairns within a mere matter of months.
Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon there was a little half-hour set by a jazzy little piano, bass and drums trio called Mattoid, featuring my mate Eric’s sister Irma, that closed with Alexander’s Ragtime Band.
And towards the end of Thor’s opening set I was standing next to Mattoid’s bass player when I suggested that if we were to put a band together from scratch, even with minimal rehearsal we couldn’t be that much worse than Thor.
Of course, given the circumstances we were.
We had a ready made rhythm section courtesy of Mattoid, so it was a matter of finding a guitarist, and there was this bloke called Jim, who worked on a prawn trawler. Given that I’d come up with the suggestion I thought I could do a bit of vocalising and maybe blow a bit of kazoo.
So there, within a matter of about fifteen minutes, we were.
There was still the small matter of getting some material together, but it took no time at all to come up with a name. Given the fact that Thor played what we regarded as heavy metal chunder it was obvious that if we were in fact worse than they were we’d have to be Heavy Chunder.
So we were.
When the members of the nascent Heavy Chunder gathered for our first rehearsal the following morning we were operating on an extremely limited time frame.
Part of the arrangement that had brought Cairns-based headline act Barabbas to the festival involved a second gig for the band at the Cycle Club Hall near the old Ross River Meat works, and we figured the gig would be a suitable occasion to unveil Heavy Chunder on an unsuspecting public.
With rehearsals limited to a couple of hours, choosing material was a potentially thorny issue, which was where A Meal You Can Shake Hands With in the Dark came in.
The Pete Brown in Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments was the Brown half of the writing duo who contributed a substantial chunk of Cream’s repertoire, and A Meal ... included a version of Politician preceded by a vocal rant that Hughesy had, coincidentally, learnt by heart.
Brown was also a figure of note on the British underground poetry scene and I’d managed to track down a copy of a slim volume titled Let ‘em Roll Kafka and had located the odd other work in various anthologies including Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain. Given the slightest provocation I could, and did, run through the monologue that started with:
Aaah, I’d like to tell you a tale of a wee piece of tail..”
The theory was that this would be a fairly straightforward vehicle for our first public Chunder. The monologue, a bit of freeform kazoo blowing, followed by the Cream rather than the Battered Ornaments version of Politician.
After a few runs through the riff we were satisfied with the way things were going and that was that. A few hours later we completed the negotiations with Barabbas and, much to the bemusement of the masses there we were, in full flight.
In full flight, that is, as far as the monologue was concerned. One of the good things about a monologue is the fact that you don’t have to rely on interactions with anyone else.
The kazoo solo, a little bunch of roses for the politician also went fairly smoothly though what the audience made of what could best be described as a freeform constipated duck call channelled through Barabbas’ wall of sound gear could be a matter for considerable speculation.
When the trio behind me lurched into the riff (Dad-dah, dah-duh, dah-duh-dah-do-dah-dah-dah-duh, dah-duh) everything was more or less fine.
I launched into Hey now baby get into my big black car and some time over the next ninety seconds the wheels fell off.
Guitarist Jim decided he’d rather be elsewhere and, without any warning, stopped playing, unplugged and decamped.
Noting the sudden absence of a lead instrument, the bass player took a look around, noted the departing guitarist’s back and followed suit.
Once he’d locked into a groove the drummer, who didn’t exactly rejoice in the name Rockhead but deigned to answer to it, tended to keep his head down, possibly a wise move under the circumstances but didn’t exactly provide optimal awareness of what was going on around him.
The drums continued for around five seconds after the bassist’s departure, then fell silent.
Being in the middle of a vocal line I completed it, like the true non-professional I was, shrugged to indicate that it wasn’t my fault and made my exit.
Given that ignominious departure the reader might assume that was that as far as Heavy Chunder was concerned, but we managed to locate a replacement guitarist and managed a number of other performances around Townsville to almost universal indifference, though it seemed that musicians tended to like us.
Presumably there’s comfort in the knowledge that however minimal your own musical accomplishments may be there is someone out there who is even more musically challenged.
Heavy Chunder, in fact, lasted until the bass player departed towards the National Institute of Dramatic Art along with a certain John Jarratt. As a result, Heavy Chunder morphed into the equally undistinguished Snafu.
Given the fact that the set list remained much the way it was, the reader may question the need to change the name, but a departing bass player provided an excuse for Rockhead to decamp from the drum kit, leaving an Original Chunderer quota of one.
So, by the latter stages of Hughesy’s less than illustrious music career, what was included in that set list?
The standard opener was based loosely around The Werewolf by the Holy Modal Rounders, usually followed by a version of Batman that set a poem by the Liverpool Scene’s Adrian Henry to the theme from the TV show, assorted other odds and finishing with something based on the Bonzo Dog Band version of The Sound of Music.
There may have been a version of the Bonzo’s classic Canyons of Your Mind in there as well, and I have vague memories of working up a version of The Liverpool Scene’s I've Got Those Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack, John Mayall Can't Fail Blues that morphed into a cover of The Who’s version of Summertime Blues.
If that last bit sounds more than slightly overambitious I should point out that two members of the final Snafu line-up went on to bigger things in the south and are listed in my copy of the Who’s Who of Australian Rock.
Conflicting musical ambitions might be seen as the cause of Snafu’s inevitable demise, but the more important factor was the cyclone that demolished a substantial part of Townsville on Christmas Eve 1971.
The loss of a suburban church hall wasn’t all that important in the big picture, and Hughesy’s memories of Underworld deserve a lengthy reminiscence of their own, but those Christmas Eve winds took away the most regular venue for performances and the most likely avenue when it came to recruiting new participants.
It’s interesting to speculate what might have been without Cyclone Althea. Given a continued flow of people who could be inveigled into participating and a venue to play around in it’s possible that Snafu may have morphed into an ongoing collective, with elements of Captain Matchbox, the Bonzos, the Holy Modal Rounders and other proponents of what might loosely be termed freak folk jug band music.
In the long run, given the absence of a sympathetic venue, limited opportunities to do anything apart from rehearse and players whose ambitions lay beyond the limited capacities of most of the other participants the demise of Snafu was inevitable.
On the other hand, once Snafu and Heavy Chunder had been consigned to the dustbin of history the memories gave me the opportunity, whenever I happened to come across one of the participants to venture the suggestion that I was thinking of getting the band back together.
Unsurprisingly, the invariable reaction was immense horror.
