The Underworld Years
While it seems, increasingly, the hard and fast rule is that there are no hard and fast rules I think it’s still reasonably true to say that it’s the music you listened to during your University or College years that tends to stay with you for the rest of your life.
Looking at it, that’s hardly surprising since those years are probably the time you’re most likely to be hit with a wide range of influences. I suspect that for most of us there’s a gradually expanding social circle from the time you’re a toddler until just after graduation (or the equivalent), followed by a fairly swift shrinkage as work, relationship and family responsibilities kick in.
Of course, there are ways of minimising the damage to your wide-ranging musical interests. These days there’s the internet with all sorts of avenues to explore, but most people talk much faster than they type and, in my case anyway, the damage has already been done.
Much as I’ve tried over the intervening years I’ve never managed to find anything like the social and musical network that existed in my part of Townsville between about 1969 and 1972.
It wasn’t as if we thought Townsville was a musical hotbed at the time. Most of us looked south with intensely green eyes. There were a surprising number of individuals who went on to emerge in the Sydney music scene a few years later, and there was even a spell when the Sunnyboys and Paul Kelly had long-term residencies at pubs around town, but Hughesy was well and truly in shrinking social circle mode by that stage.
The scene I look back on with considerable nostalgia emerged from a number of loosely intersecting factors. For a start we had a couple of collectors who were happy to sink a large part of the weekly pay packet into vinyl.
I became one of them when I escaped from Teachers’ College at the end of 1971, but for a fair chunk of the preceding eighteen months I’d been on an income of precisely minus six cents per fortnight, so I spent most of that time listening to what others had accumulated rather than pursuing my own interests.
So we had two substantial collections on opposite sides of town and while there was a degree of intersection, different interests meant that there was plenty of variety on offer.
My acquaintance with both collectors dated back to Year Eleven at High School, and while Jim had escaped from the classroom and ended up in an accountant's office, Eric stayed around to the end of Year Twelve and then had a second attempt the following year.
The two collections also provided an interesting contrast.
Jim, moving on from an early interest in harmonic pop - The Mamas & The Papas, The Association, Simon & Garfunkel and Them figured prominently in the early stages of his album collection - into the realms of the singer-songwriters and could be relied on to have a copy of anything that had come out recently that was regarded as halfway decent.
There was the odd slightly more eccentric effort as well. A mail order from Virgin Records in London, for example, produced Townsville’s first known copy of The Fugs' live Golden Filth.
Eric, on the other hand, started off from The Ventures, veered into Dylanology and seemed intent on acquiring the complete musical output of anybody with any artistic significance. If you needed to investigate the antecedents or ramifications of just about any known musical scene (or, at least, the known scenes that had come over our personal horizons) you were likely to find it at Eric’s, along with a large quantity of interesting reading matter.
If you called around to Jim’s, on the other hand, there was a fair chance you’d be able to hear just about anything that was currently regarded as interesting and relevant.
A third, smaller, collection assumed greater prominence in the scheme of things when it, along with the owner (Mr Dave) moved into the flat I’d found in West End, but that falls into the Wilderness rather than the Underworld era.
Around those couple of collections there was an intersecting number of social circles that encompassed graduates of both of the city’s big high schools along with contacts around the various residential colleges at the University and the various student houses scattered around Castle Hill.
There weren’t many places those people could gather, however. From time to time there was a cabaret at the University Refectory in Pimlico. Downtown the old Sadlers’ Sound Lounge was transformed into the Inside Out Disco with Cairns band Barabbas as the resident act and occasional appearances by an outfit called Gutbucket, who were largely Army personnel.
Thanks to the National Service ballot, the presence of a number of blokes out at Lavarack Barracks who’d been wandering around Sydney and Melbourne with hair half way down their backs a few short months before was another wild card that was thrown into the mix. I know that the song says that you can’t judge a book by looking at the cover, but it was a time when you couldn’t tell a bloke’s musical taste by his haircut.
Many of my fondest memories from the time are linked to a small hall behind St Matthew’s Church in Mundingburra, and there are a couple of interesting links that come into play in what I’ve come to think of as the Underworld Years.
The whole thing came about thanks to the elder of the Fabulous Furry Buff Brothers who lived over in Belgian Gardens. I’m not sure how he did it, but he persuaded the parish priest at St Matthew’s that opening his hall two nights a week to a group of young people of no particular religious affiliation was a good idea.
Apart from the odd priestly visit the religious factor throughout the Underworld Years was virtually nil.
It wasn’t, however, a place that drew a large crowd. There was a fairly static core membership numbering about a dozen who were present on most nights.
Thursdays were quiet and, if I recall correctly, didn’t last too long. Saturdays tended to be noisier, particularly when the boys from Gutbucket were in town and at a loose end. For most of the time, however, the entertainment was provided by a record player and a selection from one of the extensive record collections previously referred to.
There was the odd musical interlude as well, of course.
From time to time Gutbucket dropped by, and some of those who came and went played guitar, sang and wrote.
There was Steve from Ayr, who’d drop by with girlfriend and guitar and could generally be persuaded to treat us to a rendition of Soul Singer Sammy and a little ditty about Ned the Kangaroo, Bill the Porcupine, tea and coffee. There was another one called I Can’t Explain It that was only performed under extreme duress in the absence of the girlfriend.
Jim the guitarist from the earliest version of Heavy Chunder was, believe it or not, a prawn fisherman and a huge fan of Love’s Forever Changes, and could be persuaded to attempt Alone Again Or from time to time, though he never managed to get all the way through the little guitar solo in the middle of Andmoreagain.
Usually some time around eleven each Saturday night a vehicle would disgorge two well-dressed gentlemen who’d been out and about. Mr Dave and Edge were fond of the good things in life and tended to sample them before they called in.
My mate Eric’s sister Irma played piano, and did a nice line in jazzy blues vocals in a trio called Mattoid, with Irma on piano and vocals, the younger Buff Brother on bass and vocals and the inimitable Rockhead on drums, and it was Irma who prompted what remains one of Hughesy’s fondest musical memories.
There were a number of people that came and went on Saturday nights, popping by to check what was happening, man. The highest-profile dropper-by drove a white panel van. Ric Montgomery played lead with Barabbas, who’d relocated from Cairns to the Inside Out, and, on this particular night called in looking to play some blues with young Irma, who he rated very highly indeed.
After all, it’s not too often that you hear of the leading band in the region offering a spot in the line up to a fifteen-year-old girl. She’d have needed to acquire a Hammond B3 as part of the deal, and her parents would have put a very quick and firm kibosh on the deal, but the offer was, as far as I can recall, actually made.
It was one of the nights when we’d inveigled Gutbucket onto the premises, and when Irma wasn’t keen to jam, there was an invitation to jam with them. A guitarist named Trevor Bailey was involved, and while he wasn’t bad, bore some facial resemblance to Jeff Beck and played fair enough guitar with appropriate facial expressions when he was away from his regular gig with the Army band, he wasn’t in the same league as Mr Montgomery.
As a bystander watching proceedings develop I recall an initial reluctance on Ric’s part to join what was more than likely going to end up as a cutting contest, when he’d been anticipating playing a little bit of low-key tasteful blues.
While I’ve got all the instrumental ability of a gnat, I can imagine the mindset when you’re the acknowledged #1 guitar-slinger and there’s an endless run of young dudes with attitudes in excess of their ability who want to try to knock you off your perch.
I suspect it’s very much a case of Not this shit again.
Talking cutting sessions there’s a perfect example at the end of a movie called Crossroads, the one where the kid from The Karate Kid helps the old blues man who sold his soul to the Devil at the notorious Crossroads (along with Robert Johnson). In the movie the deal is that if the kid can outplay the Devil’s protege the old guy gets his soul back, while if he loses, there goes his own soul.
In the movie, while the guitar work is provided by Ry Cooder and (mainly) Steve Vai, on screen you see a stone-faced Ralph Macchio versus Steve Vai dragging out every facial contortion in the heavy lead player’s repertoire.
I’m not for the moment suggesting any correlation between fresh-faced Macchio and a reasonably grizzled veteran guitarist like Ric Montgomery, but the contrast between players was the same - Bailey going all-out with the facial expressions to match, a stone-faced Montgomery matching and topping each effort.
When I saw Crossroads close to twenty years later I was able to say that’s the kind of thing I was talking about to anybody I’d described the earlier incident to.
Ah, memories...
Of course, that scene was never likely to last long.
Much of my nostalgia about Underworld was based on the fact that for the whole of 1971 I was living in a residential college out at the University while I finished my course at Teachers’ College and, once income tax had been deducted from my fortnightly scholarship cheque, I was six cents short when it came to paying the board and lodging.
That fact alone would explain the attraction of a no cost source of entertainment.
If there was nothing much happening at Underworld, a quick walk down Carmody Street got you to the flat occupied by Jim, his sister Brenda and my mate Bob.
As it transpired, on Christmas Eve 1971 Cyclone Althea demolished the hall, along with many other buildings around the city, and today the site is occupied by the Raintree Motel.
Even if Althea hadn’t arrived I suspect Underworld’s days would have been numbered, but we’ll never know for sure.
As it was, once I was getting a regular pay cheque I was able to start accumulating vinyl, building up a substantial collection, much of which still sits in the living room. Notable purchases at the time included the first copy of Roxy Music’s debut album sold in Townsville, Bowie’s Hunky Dory and a German import compilation sourced from the early Velvet Underground albums.
One by one, the Underworld participants either left town or dropped out of circulation. Without a venue there wasn’t the same opportunity to run across new faces with similar interests. Meanwhile, around the corner, fate was slipping the lead into the boxing glove and around my twenty-first birthday the principal turned up on my classroom doorstep with a sheaf of papers.
You may need to hold on to the railing, I was told. You’ve been transferred to Palm Island.
