The Wilderness Years
The casual reader may feel that The Wilderness Years is taking it a tad too far, but as I went around the circuit on the morning walk I wasn't able to come up with a better label for the years between the Underworld Era and the renaissance of Hughesy's interest in music in the early to mid-90s.
The arrival of a school principal outside my classroom door, sheaf of transfer papers in hand along with the news that I was bound for the Aboriginal settlement on Palm Island, is probably the logical point to mark the transition.
For a start, while I was out of town most of the old social circle left and, despite frequent returns on weekends, I didn't have the opportunity to replace them with new contacts.
If your tastes are a reflection of the circumstances around you, it probably comes as no surprise that twelve months on the Palms, which still equates to a Third World environment, shook me out of some of my previous musical interests.
Under other circumstances I may well have followed up on recent buys like Roxy Music, the Velvet Underground and Bowie's Hunky Dory but those musical styles don't quite cut it in a Third World environment, though some gender-questionable elements may have gone down rather well in the island’s queenie/cat subculture.
That, however, wasn’t an avenue I was keen to investigate.
On the other hand when I found myself sitting on the veranda on a tropical island, beer in hand, the soundtrack tended towards the blues, particularly Taj Mahal, along with bits of soul, R&B and the Allman Brothers Band. I came away from the island at the end of 1973 with everything in place for a growing interest in reggae thanks in part to Taj's Mo' Roots, though examples of the music weren't exactly thick on the ground when I got back to Townsville.
In any case, a year later I was back at University finishing off a degree, and a severe drop in my finances wasn't going to permit much in the way of new purchases, and the flow of interesting music was gradually drying up. You could read about Glam Rock in the English music press, but I didn't feel any significant connection with it.
Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin were huge, but having heard the first Led Zep I'd already written them off as an inferior version of the Jeff Beck Group before the allegations of musical plagiarism kicked in, and while Deep Purple worked well enough in the crowded bar underneath Buchanan's Hotel on a Friday night I didn't feel the need to hear that stuff more than once a week.
In fact, once a week was more than enough...
Most of my attitude towards both outfits can probably be traced to the preponderance of riff-heavy bands with wailing vocalists. Sure, the Purples and Led Zep were far from the worst of them, but the preponderance of rifferamas delivered with the subtlety of a flying sledgehammer made it hard to distinguish between the various practitioners and without access to some external filter in the form of someone whose musical judgement I could trust I wasn't inclined to expend too much effort trying.
Looking at the music in heavy rotation chez Hughesy around 1975 you'd have found the Allman Brothers, The Band, and Little Feat, fairly predictable good taste in music fare, along with more R&B fare by the J. Geils Band. Van Morrison's It's Too Late To Stop Now was a particular favourite.
I'd followed down a number of blind alleys looking for something interesting in the pop-rock sphere, including the first live double by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, and when Springsteen's Born To Run turned up in 1975 it was a reminder of the way things could be if people were inclined to make the effort to rock rather than recline.
Cyclone Althea's demolition job on the church hall where the Raintree Motel now stands, along with the departure of most of the people who'd frequented the place meant I wasn't hearing much of what the scribes in Melody Maker and NME were raving on about via friends and acquaintances, so it was largely a matter of what I could get hold of myself, but there was still the odd quirky little outfit to connect with.
Two of them, noteworthy in the name department and possessed of musical chops to match were Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers, one of the London pub-rock outfits, and Hatfield and the North, a spinoff from the Canterbury scene that had produced Soft Machine and Caravan.
Stylistically, Chilli Willi and the Hatfields were poles apart, one reasonably straight ahead countryish rock with a few other elements thrown into the brew, the other coming straight from prog rock territory with song titles to match. Gigantic Land Crabs in Earth Takeover Bid, for example.
What both bands had in spades was a degree of playfulness which presented a welcome break from the increasingly formulaic offerings that were coming out from the major players on the scene, and I was after more.
Not necessarily more of the same, though. I found myself scouring the album reviews in Melody Maker, NME and Rolling Stone in search of something that might pique my interest but the results were almost invariably disappointing. I suspected, after the diversity that had grown up in the late sixties, the record companies had worked out what sells and had re-imposed a commercial orthodoxy on anyone looking to establish a career in the rock music industry.
Apart from the regular music press there was the odd monthly magazine that provided details of what was happening on the fringes of the mainstream. ZigZag was the best of them, though haphazard distribution of its earliest incarnation meant that I missed those issues, and when it did become available in these parts I seem to recall the newsagency beside the Hugh Street traffic lights in Garbutt as a totally unexpected source for a quality music magazine.
Most of those copies went adrift as I moved between residences, and would probably be worth a mint now, but one item that still graces my bookshelves and is regularly used as a reference is ZigZag founder Pete Frame’s Rock Family Trees, worth every cent of the $US20 you’d pay somewhere like Amazon (last time I looked $25 through the antipodean Fishpond). There are, predictably, ways to revisit those magazines, but I’m currently disinclined to shell out the $US200 they’re asking for a twelve month subscription to Rock’s Back Pages.
Those sources pointed me towards plenty of stuff I was already familiar with, along with the latest developments in areas that didn’t have the same appeal, but when I managed to find something interesting, it wasn't exactly easy to get hold of. Around the time I was finished at University and back at work, the place I'd been buying my music closed down its downtown operation, shifted to the suburbs for some reason, and died a lingering death.
On top of that, the budget wasn’t totally conducive to eclectic extravagance in the music department and the loss of the old circle of acquaintances meant that if I wanted to hear something I was going to have to buy it myself.
There were other interests getting in the way as well. School principals arriving on the doorstep have been known to herald significant changes, first with a transfer to the Palms, and at the start of 1975 I found out that I was going to be coaching the Year Six cricket team. But Alec, I protested, I know nothing about coaching cricket.
Don't worry, came the reply. You'll learn.
And learn I did.
In retrospect, some of the same personality quirks that promoted Music Freakdom kicked in. Where someone else might have been content with taking the more or less mandatory two practice sessions per week, and stand out in the middle for two hours on Friday afternoon, I found myself becoming intrigued by the finer details of Australia’s national game, the way you might embark on a quest to run down, for example, a complete set of bootleg recordings from a Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen tour.
The learning process dovetailed neatly with other things happening around me, and while it involved some of the elements that had made me one, I found myself in an increasingly Music Freak Free environment, though over the next nine years there was the odd light on the horizon.
There was one bloke on the staff at Aitkenvale with tastes that ran to the new west coast country-rock exemplified by the Eagles, which was interesting at the start, and he'd picked up on a couple of other odds and ends - Jerry Jeff Walker and Jesse Winchester, for example. Named his son Jesse, not necessarily after Mr Winchester, as far as I recall, but familiarity with Biloxi and Brand New Tennessee Waltz had something to do with it.
After Bruce left town, headed back towards home on the Sunshine Coast, I got to know the District Relieving Teacher based at the school, a bloke who wasn't always there, since the DRT was likely to end up in odd locations like Petford, Mount Surprise or Lockhart River for extended spells, but Terry had similar musical interests to mine, tended to convert the cheques that reimbursed his travel expenses into vinyl and had been known to take a drink.
Over a drink there was the chance to talk over some of the not-exactly-new faces that were coming to prominence in the wake of the Punk Rock wave, and it was through Terry that I ran across a copy of Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True. There was also a mutual interest in some of the more interesting figures on the Stateside music scene like Little Feat, Warren Zevon and Mink De Ville.
After a spell of 'dice drinking' at the pub up the road over the Christmas holidays at the end of 1977, we wandered back to my flat, where he met the lady he relocated to Melbourne with three months later.
Around the same time a new record shop opened in downtown Townsville, and I spent more than my fair share of time around Wavelength Records, which was handy when it came to purchases, but didn't generate a new social circle outside working and trading hours.
When I found myself surplus to requirements at my old school holding a bundle of transfer papers in my hot little hand, that avenue wasn't exactly closed off, but relocating to Bowen wasn't going to make the collecting caper any easier.
Equally significantly, though I didn't realise it at the time, I'd somehow been inveigled into going to Cairns for a State Primary Schools' Cricket carnival at the end of 1982. That little jaunt meant that I was sticking my hand up for the Manager's gig with the 1983 North Queensland team.
When I arrived in Bowen in 1984 I immediately found myself landed with the District and Zone coaching role with the School Cricket. Figuring that you couldn't do the School-kid thing without being involved with the local Junior Cricket as well, I found myself with plenty to do on the weekend between August/September and Easter each year.
Once Easter rolled around and we'd held the annual Junior Cricket break-up an inclination to do nothing, put your feet up and please yourself for a while was probably an understandable reaction. As a result, visits to Townsville became increasingly rare, and when they did occur I was more likely to be standing around a cricket field than browsing through the racks in a record store.
Things on the musical front weren't a complete wipe-out, however. In 1987, armed with a windfall from the punt I'd shelled out for a CD player, and though, like everybody else, I bought a substantial chunk of my record collection over again, there was enough interesting new stuff to keep my bank balance down.
The need to keep track of what was coming out also got me back into buying music magazines. I'd stopped buying them, apart from the occasional Rolling Stone when I'd left Townsville, due to the increasing disparity between what the magazines were writing about and what Hughesy was listening to, but by the early nineties, with the flood of reissues coming out on CD buying some appropriate reading matter was a matter of necessity.
The first one I'd found was Q, which was bulky enough to give me something to read apart from the CD reviews, but a trip south to attend a wedding found me needing something to read on the way back, and the newsagent in Brisbane's Roma Street Transit Centre had a copy of Mojo, which seemed worth investigating.
Armed with the information from those two magazines it was a simple matter of getting to know the people in the music section of the one electrical store in town that dabbled in such matters and browsing the Platterlog in search of stuff I'd read about.
The best (or worst, depending on how you like your bank balance) thing about that era was the reappearance of large numbers of titles that'd long been out of print in the vinyl department on CD. A year or two after I'd tracked down a non-second hand (I'd had two and played them into the ground) brand new copy of Forever Changes (Japanese import and priced accordingly through an import business operating out of Hobart) there it was on CD, believe it or not, as a nice price release.
The conversion process from analogue to digital wasn't always given the care and attention it deserved, however, but as time went by there were re-masters and compilations that were guaranteeing that you'd be buying parts of your collection again and again.
And around 1995, lurking in the background was this thing called the Internet which everybody was hearing about, a strange frontier offering something that wasn't defined, but was going to be the next big thing. How big, and how pervasive it would become was something that few people imagined.
Thanks to some significant increases in teacher salaries I was finally in a position where the finances could cover a fair bit of self-indulgence and a new computer and modem bought as part of the process of setting up my own business as an agent for an Apple reseller in Brisbane launched me into cyberspace in 1995.
In part because of the computer business, but mainly because I was going to need a place of my own paid off before I retired September 1995 saw me moving out of teacher accommodation into the Full 360, which marks the obvious transition point leading into the Internet Years.
