It’s not quite a case of Beware school principals bearing papers but the arrival of the boss with correspondence in hand has signalled a couple of transition points in my life.
For a start there was a transfer from Townsville to Palm Island which effectively marked the cusp between The Underworld Years and The Wilderness Years, and a transfer from Townsville to Bowen brought me to the place where, if I have any say in the matter, I’ll be ending my days.
Early in 1995 the boss’ arrival bearing a letter from the Director-General of Education defines the change from The Wilderness Years to The Internet Years.
Over the preceding couple of years I’d been buying various computer bits and pieces from a company in Brisbane. One of my cricket mates, on unpaid leave from the Department, was the Education Accounts Manager and I’d been handed the responsibility of looking after the school’s information technology committee.
There were a couple of issues on the horizon that needed to be addressed and when Granty offered to fly up and offer a bit of on the ground advice, you don’t go looking gift horses in the mouth. Things went off fairly well, and just before his departure I was asked whether I’d be interested in acting as an agent for the company. I said I’d look into it....
In these circumstances you’d obviously go to the Education Department for advice since there were obvious conflict of interest issues. A letter was drafted, despatched to Regional Office in Townsville and I sat down and waited for a reply.
And waited, and waited.
Polite inquiries were answered with the news that the matter had been referred to Head Office, and apparently the letter made its way up and down Education House while the implications of the issues it raised were kicked around.
When the response eventually arrived I’d almost given up on the idea, and if the letter had contained a flat No I would probably have accepted that without question. What arrived on my doorstep was a highly conditional Yes and in view of the amount of time and effort that others had expended to bring things to that point I felt I was obliged to go ahead.
The business, however, never really got off the ground.
The school was looking at installing a computer laboratory, and I was obviously going to be putting in a quote to supply hardware and software. Granty and I worked through the details, I put in the quote and sat back to wait, only to discover that I’d been beaten by someone from the Brisbane office of the same company that I represented!
And he’d undercut me using an outdated price list, so while I missed about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of business Brisbane actually incurred a loss on the deal. Strange. To rub a bit of salt into the wound, as the resident Apple enthusiast I had to do most of the set up and administrative stuff associated with establishing the computer lab.
While I still managed to sell a bit of software to the school, and a couple of computers to various friends, acquaintances and total strangers, the business never really got off the ground, and when I was forced to spend the latter part of 1996 off work due to depression-related issues that was, more or less, that...
That unsuccessful business venture did, on the other hand, put a couple of significant factors into place.
For a start it wasn’t appropriate to conduct my business from Government teacher accommodation, so I moved into the flat I referred to as The Full 360 and began the process that led to the construction of the Little House of Concrete.
Secondly, one of the selling points behind the computer business was this newfangled thing called the Internet, as part of setting up the business I bought a new computer and a modem and started to investigate the on-line world.
It’s rather amazing to realise that just fourteen years ago this internet thing was something that plenty of people had heard about but not too many had actually experienced.
Since Apple was running an ad campaign along the lines of The internet - discover it on a Mac! I needed to start doing a bit of exploring for myself. As a confirmed music freak the avenues I was likely to investigate were obvious. The first thing I found were email list servers that provided music fans an avenue to keep in touch with each other and discuss matters of mutual interest.
Never being one to do things by halves I signed up, in rapid succession, to lists devoted to Little Feat, the Allman Brothers, Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix and Richard Thompson. There were others, but those five had a great deal to do with what happened over the next couple of years.
The next thing I discovered was these lists were populated by the sort of music fans I’d been looking for since the end of The Underworld Years, and it was like coming home.
Even better, the lists put you in touch with developments in the world of music almost instantaneously, and I found myself reading about concerts, recording sessions, rumours and the like as they happened. The perfect example was the series of stealth shows Neil Young and Crazy Horse played at the Old Princeton Landing and other small venues around the Bay area in May and June 1996.
First off I read the rumours. When they turned into fact I read the night by night accounts of how various fans who were lucky enough to live nearby got into the shows, and shortly afterwards there were set-lists, first-person accounts and all manner of commentary and speculation. Even more interesting, each night members of the audience managed to smuggle in stealth recording devices and those recordings were soon in circulation.
So, in other words, you could not only read about the shows - before too much time elapsed you could hear them as well.
Which brings us into the murky world of bootleg recordings.
Bootlegging music is something that had been going on for years. As far back as The Underworld Years various bootlegs were in fairly wide circulation. While I was on the Palms in 1973 I knew the names of a couple of Neil Young bootlegs that subsequently managed to find their way into my collection twenty-plus years later, but while you might have known of them hearing the things was another matter entirely, particularly if you lived in regional Australia.
Beyond the world of commercial bootlegging, over the years a parallel fan-based trading universe had grown up, working through the mail and advertisements in fanzines and so on even before the internet provided the chance for things to be disseminated much more quickly. Had I sent off a postcard to the Deadheads mailing address in an early live Grateful Dead live album I may well have been aboard the bus from the get go, but I didn’t, so I wasn’t.
As I read the email lists I made a very interesting discovery.
Not only were there people out there trading recordings of their favourite artists, there were artists who condoned, and even encouraged, the practice. There were also others who, while they didn’t go out of their way to promote the practice weren’t frowning on those who engaged in it.
It was obvious as time went by that there were a range of viewpoints about these things, and as electronic distribution kicked in the variation only became more pronounced.
Take, for instance, the variety of positions adopted by artists who were taper-friendly. In some cases it was a matter of we’re cool with it provided you don’t get in anybody’s way so you found fans turning up with the stealth rigs they’d use to record someone who wasn’t taper-friendly.
Then there were the bands like the Grateful Dead, who were a major influence on the whole movement, who allocated a particular area of the concert venue where tapers could set up their recording gear quite openly.
Beyond that, there were the acts who allowed the tapers access to a direct feed from the sound-board.
And that’s just the range of positions on the matter of taping. Move over to what can be done with the recordings and you’ve opened up a whole new can of worms, particularly once we moved from the days of sending tapes and CDs through the mail to electronic distribution over the internet.
Given my location and the extremely unlikely possibility that I’d be able to catch many of the artists I was listening to live, it probably comes as no surprise to learn I was soon building up a collection of unofficial recordings.
Which brings me to the next point. I quickly learned that not only had I landed in the middle of a crowd of music freaks, but that it was a generous and well-organised crowd. For a start there were a number of people who were willing to help a fan who had nothing much to trade by offering B&P or blanks and postage. You sent an appropriate number of blank tapes, along with something to cover the cost of return postage and whoever made the offer would record the tapes for you and send them back.
That was a bit tricky when it came to international postage, and the standard workaround was to throw in a couple of extra tapes in lieu of currency, stamps or whatever, but I found myself adding a few other items to packages. Back before Amazon and its cohorts became the international behemoths we know today there were albums released in Australia that were difficult to track down elsewhere, and an Australia-only CD was often ran acceptable substitute, and there was one bloke in (I think) Canada who was a big Paul Kelly fan, so...
Through these discussions, I should stress, there was a consensus that if there was going to be money involved at all - usually &P referred to providing a padded mailer and stamps to the appropriate value rather than currency - it should only be enough to cover the actual costs involved and no one should be seen to be profiting financially.
Once I’d started to build my collection I tried to be generous when I ran across people starting out since some very generous people helped me get started. Much of that generosity was shown in the formal setting of a tape tree - an entity that is now, more’s the pity in this wonderful new digital world, more or less extinct.
The principle was straightforward. Someone had a recording they were willing to distribute and the tree was the structure through which it was done. The recording itself was the seed and whoever made the first set of copies was the trunk. From there you went to branches and leaves.
As a rule, each tree was a separate project, with its own structure, but there were permanent versions, where the structure remained in place and someone provided a new seed from time to time.
The first one I encountered was the Mushroom Express, which distributed a couple of Allman Brothers or Allman-related shows every couple of months, and the idea was one that I borrowed for what became one of the most surreal little episodes in my life as a music fan.
It probably comes as no surprise to learn there was a deal of discussion covering these issues in on-line forums, and most people would have been aware of a particular artist’s views on the matter of unofficial recordings. In many cases, the artist was open and up front on the issue, so everyone knew where they stood. If they didn’t condone the practice I tried to stay away from the illicit recordings - not always possible, of course - but where artists were taper friendly there was no secret about it.
Getting your hands on the recordings was not, however, always straightforward.
The Little Feat Hoy Hoy mailing list might not have been the first such entity I subscribed to, but it was one of the first few, and it was soon obvious that Little Feat were taper friendly and, moreover, Bill Payne and Paul Barrere from the band posted intermittently on the mailing list.
On other lists (the Neil Young Rust list was an example) there were frequent posts offering shows for trade or B&P, announcing new trees, or otherwise related to such matters. On Hoy Hoy, however, the offers were few and far between.
So, working on the Mohammed and the Mountain principle, figuring that there’s nothing like going straight to the top I emailed Bill Payne and Paul Barrere with a proposal for a permanent tape tree and around the middle of 1998 I received a reply from Bill telling me to go ahead and to expect to hear from band sound engineer, Jerry Manuel.
In the process of setting up the tree, which was known as Highway 95 I ran across Chris Cafiero, who went on to become the band’s official archivist.
My involvement as administrator of the tree only lasted two years, and Highway 95 slowly faded off the scene after that, but, while I was involved I was in touch with Bill and Paul from time to time. Shortly after I took up with ‘Er Indoors breaking news indicated that Little Feat would be making a return visit to Australia after a twenty-six year interval.
Predictably, Hughesy went, and Madam was along for the ride. The 2001 Little Feat Australia/New Zealand tour was built around two appearances at the Blues & Roots Festival at Byron Bay over the Easter long weekend, and some swift footwork saw a group of fans booked into a three-bedroom townhouse near Belongil Beach. Cost us $1500 for the week, which ain’t exactly chicken feed, but we had accommodation, tickets and the wherewithal to go.
Early on Good Friday we found ourselves boarding a plane in Mackay, bound for Brisbane where Madam had organised a lift to Byron with an acquaintance who likes driving. Seriously, he’s the kind of guy who’s been known to hop into his car in Brisbane, drive across the country to Perth and turn straight around and drive back again.
As we boarded the flight, Madam requested a look at the copy of the Hotcakes & Outtakes box set I’d brought along with a view to getting it autographed. She thought it might be handy to familiarise herself with names and faces in case we met anybody.
It was shortly after one o’clock when we were dropped off outside the townhouse. A quick phone call put me in touch with Tony, who’d done the legwork on the accommodation arrangements and was out and about around the ridges.
Shortly thereafter, Tony pulled up to let us in, inquiring whether we wanted to stay at the unit and freshen up.
Or perhaps we’d care to accompany Tony and Katie to Ballina, where they were headed to meet up with everyone. Asked to define everyone Tony indicated that the definition included both the band and the Hoy Rollers, Stateside fans who’d made the trip across the Pacific, so we were obviously going to be along for the ride.
Around an hour later we were sitting around a table at a swisho resort, chewing the fat with, among others, a San Diego real estate salesman and a Florida dermatologist. While the whole group had travelled to Sydney together the band’s arrangements had taken them from Sydney to Brisbane, while the fans had been able to fly direct from Sydney to Ballina.
Paul Barrere and Richie Hayward got a lift with Marcel, while the rest of the band travelled on the Bluesfest shuttle, so we had various arrivals, check-ins and introductions over the next few hours, and it was mildly surreal to introduce myself to somebody I’d been listening to for close to thirty years and find that they were apparently as buzzed to meet you as you were to meet them. Within eight hours of scrutinising the photos in the box set just in case Madam found herself chatting to Bill Payne’s missus.
A cynic might suggest those reactions were feigned, but subsequent experiences seemed consistent with those first reactions.
On the other hand, as the party broke up and we prepared to head off to the festival, where I was planning on catching Tony Joe White, Emmylou Harris and Taj Mahal, Mrs Payne expressed the hope that next time the band visited Japan it would be nice to have a friend along for the trip.
The following morning in Byron I was buying a weekend paper when Madam was greeted by an American accent that turned out to be coming from guitarist Fred Tackett.
The residents of the townhouse made their way to the day’s entertainment in various permutations, and the consensus was that we’d meet up beside the sound board around nine that night. There wasn’t much else we could do, given the fact that we didn’t have access to a mobile phone.
We arrived in the big tent (there were three in operation) about half way through a set by Joe Camilleri and the Revelators, made our way towards the agreed rendezvous and hung around there through subsequent sets by the Reverend Horton Heat and Midnight Oil, but by nine o’clock Tony, Katie, Marcel and Mark from WA were all conspicuous by their absence. I had a fair idea where they were, but no way of verifying my suspicions.
As the Midnight Oil - Little Feat transition took place it was time for a decision. Hang around in the middle distance or head for the front? No-brainer, really. Off we went. Madam’s lack of height means she’s fairly adept at worming her way through crowds and while we didn’t end up right in the front row we were only two or three rows back when Little Feat hit an Australian stage for the first time in twenty-six years.
If you’re interested, there are reminiscences on the actual show on a separate page, but when the set finished the bloke standing next to me expressed disappointment that the band hadn’t played Dixie Chicken.
Maybe in the encore, I suggested, and the suggestion was right on the money. Over the previous couple of years I’d picked up a number of Feat live recordings and almost invariably Dixie Chicken appeared somewhere in the set-list, so it wasn’t really all that hard to predict, but the half-hour version that took the band up to the curfew featured an arrangement I hadn’t heard before.
But after that heapin’ helpin’ of Chicken there were matters that needed to be addressed, and most of them involved gaining access to the accommodation since there were only two sets of keys and we didn’t have either of them. Working on the principle that Marcel or Tony might have made their way to the agreed rendezvous by this stage we headed back to the sound-board.
On arriving there, with no sign of the others, I turned my attention to Jerry Manuel, who’d been looking after the sound mix. Inquiries revealed that:
(a) The people we were looking for were backstage (as suspected);
(b) Jerry couldn’t get us back there since he was still engaged in breaking things down, but;
(c) SkinDoc, who’d watched the set from the sound-board while taping the performance, was headed that way and could get us where we needed to go.
Follow me, was the terse instruction as the Florida dermatologist set off at a fair clip towards the VIP Area.
These people are with me. They’re OK, was the comment as we passed the security bloke on the door, and made our way into the hospitality area. Under different circumstances you might have been tempted to stop and sticky-beak, but Doc wasn’t wasting time and repeated the same message as he passed the security bloke monitoring access to the backstage area.
Security Dude’s arm, however, came down, and if previous events had been slightly surreal what came next kicked the surrealism into overdrive.
Alerted to the difficulty, Skindoc turned to the security bloke and stated, These people are personal friends of Little Feat. The band would really like to see them. You have to let them through. The progression from looking at photos just in case to personal friends of the band in under forty-eight hours was more than a little mind-boggling, and mine duly boggled.
But, countered Security Dude, they’re wearing the wrong wristbands. I can’t let people with those wristbands past here.
Doesn’t matter, (or words to that effect). You have to.
And through we went.
Arriving backstage, the first person I sighted was Bill Payne.
I think, Bill remarked, we nailed that one. I thought it was a remarkably accurate assessment.
Meeting up with Tony and Marcel revealed a further complication. Tony’s car was parked at the resort in Ballina and we’d need to head back there on the coaster bus, which was fully loaded, to pick it up.
Madam and I were the last two onto the bus, and were scanning the seating options when Guitar Fred summed up the situation, motioned us into where he was sitting and proceeded to occupy the seat beside his mandolin case....
It was well and truly into the small hours by the time we’d made it back to the townhouse at Belongil, but there was no chance of sleeping in on the Sunday morning since the game plan involved hosting a typical Aussie barbeque for the band, the Hoy Rollers and whoever else had managed to wangle an invitation.
Tony had organised the catering through a local providore, and I was delegated to look after liquid refreshments. Someone had laid in supplies of various soft drinks, but you can’t do the typical Aussie barbeque without beer.
A visit to the liquor barn produced a range of boutique beers, and since I was working on the basis of boutique beers that I thought might turn out to be interesting I may have over-catered, but there was no way of telling how many people would turn up, and no way of knowing which way their liquid preferences ran.
Cheryl Payne had expressed an interest in wine, so I threw a bottle of de Bortoli Noble One into the mix for good measure. These days I probably would’ve thrown in a bottle of Clare Valley Riesling in as well, but the renaissance of Hughesy’s interest in Riesling was still a couple of years off.
Arriving back at base the caterers had delivered the food and fridge space was consequently at a premium. The town house didd not come with much in the way of insulated storage once you took the fridge out of the equation, but anyone who knows the typical Aussie barbeque would have found instances of the sink or the bathtub as a beer cooler.
The bathtub was upstairs, and the sink in the laundry wasn’t going to be big enough. Then inspiration struck.
Why not use the washing machine?
Tony’s inclination when it comes to catering tends to run along the medieval baron/lord of the manor school of thought and when the party broke up we were left with vast quantities of uneaten food.
He’d gone in heavy on the Vegemite sandwiches and fairy bread for a start and no one had taken anything more than a slight nibble at either, but there were enough prawns and other crustaceans left to provide Madam, Mark from WA and I with a substantial breakfast on Monday morning.
Around three, the five-sevenths of the band who’d shown up for the barbeque were heading off for the gig, and after we’d cleared the decks we did the same, and after they’d played we more or less bid farewell and headed back to the unit.
Tony, Katie and Marcel were planning on an overnight drive to Sydney, where the band were playing on Monday night, so they weren’t inclined to hang around too long, but Mark and I ended up sitting well into the small hours chewing the fat, talking music trading and related matters over a couple of chilled articles.
Washing machines, as it turned out, are remarkably well-insulated and the ice lasted until well into Monday morning.
That meant we weren’t out of the starting blocks as quickly as we might have been, but there was only one item on the To Do list - Mark had to return a hire car to where it had come from - so we headed back down to Ballina to check that no one at the resort needed a lift to the airport, and when no one did thought we might as well head out to the airport ourselves.
Once we were inside the terminal I would have been quite happy to stand around on the edge of things but Bill Payne insisted that we take a seat at the table in the coffee shop and we had a lengthy chat until it was time for the travellers to head into the Departure Lounge and the car to head back to the rental place in Byron.
We’d had to rent the townhouse for a week, and since Mark was heading to WA on Tuesday Madam and I had the run of the place until it was time to head north to go back to work and get involved with the community radio station which had started broadcasting over the Easter long weekend.
If my experiences over the preceding couple of years had done anything, they’d rekindled a desire to establish contact with people whose musical interests reflected mine.
Around the end of 1997 I’d run across the father of one of the kids in my class who was, coincidentally, chairing the committee that was launching Bowen’s community radio station GEM-FM.
Had I known what I was letting myself in for, I might well have restricted my comments to how Shucks was doing at school and refrained from volunteering myself for anything, but an expression of interest seemed a harmless enough idea, and I gave it very little thought until a phone call informed me that they were taking a group of people to Townsville for the first part of presenter training.
With hindsight, after a two-hour car trip on either side of an information session that was short on detail, contained next to nothing in the way of hands on activity and wasted an entire Sunday, I probably have kept my mouth firmly shut rather than volunteering to look after our presenter training when we were closer to having the station up and running.
Volunteering to do that meant that I was obliged to involve myself in the process of getting the station on the air, and again, there were warning signs that I should have heeded.
For a start, there weren’t many people involved. Committee meetings seemed to spend a long time discussing fairly trivial matters. Most alarmingly, the committee had great difficulty finding (and keeping) secretaries and treasurers.
Alarming because if there was one job that Hughesy definitely didn’t want it was Secretary or Treasurer.
Still things rolled along quietly, applications and submissions were submitted, grants received and equipment bought and GEM-FM hit the airwaves around Easter 2001.
There had been a couple of test broadcasts before that, but once I got back from the BluesFest jaunt it was a case of trying to get the thing going in something approaching a satisfactory manner.
Nobody involved had any experience with running a radio station, so everybody was flying blind.
The first thing, as far as I could see, was to get enough on-air presenters through the training process to have a human in the studio during what you might think of as the peak periods - weekday afternoons and evenings and right through from morning to midnight on weekends.
Given the Townsville experience, I wasn’t keen on setting up a lengthy training process, so I put together a simple orientation leaflet explaining what the station was about, along with the rules and regulations that applied at the time.
Presenters needed to have a fair idea of what they couldn’t do, so the orientation leaflet was followed by a longer document based around media law and some traps that might ensnare young and enthusiastic players.
Once we’d talked the aspirants through those topics it was, I reckoned, a matter of getting them into the studio as soon as possible and baby-sitting while they learned to drive the thing. We started out with three or four presenters who had some idea of what they were doing from the trial broadcasts, and figured they’d be right to do the baby-sitting.
Unfortunately, just about all of them found Sunday was the best day for them, and we found that we had a succession of live presenters from around nine on Sunday morning till four on Sunday afternoon, and not much beyond that.
Figuring that we’d soon have a fairly full roster and you didn’t want to seem greedy I’d put myself down for two shows a week - Fools’ Gold on a Tuesday night and Just Another Sunday at the end of the live presenter parade.
Unfortunately those two time slots were about the only ones that could be used to baby-sit aspiring presenters.
Not that I minded greatly. I did my show, sat around in the studio while whoever it was learned how to work things and once they seemed reasonably close to competent it was time to give them their own time-slot and away they went.
Since it was a community radio station I thought that it might be a good idea to get community groups involved, so before too long I’d kicked off the school Radiokids program.
Again, with hindsight, I should have known better, but the process of working with the first bunch of Radiokids proved to be deceptively simple and totally non-time-consuming.
At first, I managed to wangle some school time to do the show, and once I’d set up a basic script format it was a fairly simple matter of having a quick chat to the three or four kids on a Friday lunchtime and again on Tuesday afternoon to make sure that everything was under control.
Gertrude and her pals, in other words, looked after everything, put it all together and even produced a script.
That first year was enough of a success to see Hughesy trying to get the rest of the schools around town involved, but Year Two of Radiokids soon showed there was no such beast as a consistent form line.
For a start, instead of having a group that were self-starters and would act on their own initiative, I found that every year if there was going to be someone producing a script for each week’s show, the someone was going to be Hughesy.
Second, while from time to time you could get your cub reporters out to report on what was going on around the school they were not interested in doing so in their own time. In school time, fine. In their time, forget about it.
Guess who ended up writing most of the script material?
As time I was spending on Radiokids escalated, something had to give, and the first something was my Tuesday night time slot. In itself, two shows a week hadn’t been too time-consuming - take out a few CDs and some reference material and spend two hours playing and talking about music. Fine.
And there were ways to make things easy for yourself. For a start, with a computer and a CD burner you could assemble the show at your leisure, burn it to disk and cut out that tricky fiddling with disks and finding track numbers.
Shortly after the station went on the air I found myself looking at a new computer, and it seemed logical enough to buy a laptop since I could use it in the classroom as well as at home. Given the presence of iTunes on the machine, I was quite happy to sit in my classroom during breaks listening to music while I did whatever preparation and correction was staring me in the face.
It didn’t take too long for the penny to drop.
If I was carrying a substantial chunk of my CD collection in the hard drive, why not use it to do the radio show? Put the playlist together, plug the machine right into the desk at the station and Bob’s your uncle. At the same time, if I was baby-sitting someone learning to drive the station once I’d finished my show, I could use the time to do school work.
Unfortunately in some ways, things became a little too easy.
From the time I got up on Sunday morning I found myself spending an inordinate amount of time tinkering with the running order for the afternoon’s show. I usually ended up with more than I needed, but that was fine - the surplus went into the mix for Tuesday night - and by the time I hit the studio around one-forty-five I’d have around two hours of material broken into twelve- to fifteen-minute brackets with the individual tracks crossfading nicely from one to the next.
Personally, I thought that it worked rather well, and so did other people on the committee because I was repeatedly told that if I felt inclined the station could probably pick up some extra income by selling the show to other stations over the community radio satellite network.
There were several problems with that little scenario.
First, I was quite happy with the Sunday afternoon time-slot and had a nasty sneaking suspicion that if I volunteered the show for wider distribution I’d be looking at some other time to record the show for later consumption.
Second, I was spending quite enough time on the show as it was, thank you very much. As indicated it occupied most of Sunday and. I wasn’t interested in adding to the workload.
Third, although I was getting encouraging feedback from some quarters, almost none of it came from the listening public, and after a couple of years putting together a show that was meant to draw people with similar musical interests out of the woodwork it hadn’t happened.
It wasn’t as if people weren’t listening.
One old acquaintance informed me that he heard the show every Sunday since his neighbour seemed to have lost the volume control. That was Radio Norm. There was The Brisk Bay Phantom, though his identity was a closely-guarded secret until his daughter spilled the beans, and Wilko, the well-known disruptive influence down at the local music outlet, regularly reported that someone had come in to order something I’d played on air.
Wilko and I had a running gag about it. Soon, he suggested, Hughesy’s listener base might grow into double figures, and we might even be able to have a Christmas party!
It seemed like a good idea at the time, and Swelter down at the Irish bar offered to host it and provide nibbles. I did my best to talk it up, but when the big night rolled around there we were - some of the station committee, Radio Norm, Wilko, Madam and I.
Along the way there were reshuffles in the people involved with the station.
The original chair of the committee dropped out after a family tragedy that would have made anybody buckle at the knees, and, as vice-president I took over the reins. Knowing that we needed a treasurer I’d managed to exploit a mate’s momentary weakness to fill the position, and things on that front looked to be running smoothly.
After a run of secretaries, we found someone who looked like staying involved.
Unfortunately staying involved included aspirations to the top job. Not that I was objecting, but while I had the top job, that ruled me out of other responsibilities.
Namely Secretary and Treasurer.
Informed of the leadership spill, the Treasurer said that if I went they’d be needing to replace him too. Faced with an upcoming annual general meeting where there were no likely candidates for those two jobs there was no way anybody was going to inveigle me into one of them.
I had enough on my plate, and there were expressions of impending involvement from a local identity whose voice I thought I’d recognised on the other end of the phone line one Sunday afternoon. Come on, Hughesy, the voice had demanded. Play something decent.
Remembering that I’d actually bought everything on my playlist with cold hard cash I thought I was already playing something decent. Mileages obviously vary.
The long and short of it was that I pulled the pin as head honcho before the annual general, didn’t go to the meeting and found an excuse to disappear from the airwaves.
Prolonged exposure to the North Queensland sun had taken its toll, and a visit to the doctor resulted in an attempt to remove a melanoma from my neck. The biopsy revealed that the first attempt hadn’t got all of it, and while a second procedure looked to have succeeded, it left me with a temporary irritation in one ear lobe that meant I was uncomfortable wearing headphones, which were an inescapable part of driving the thing.
Fine, I thought. I’ll take a little break, see if it clears up, and if it does and it looks like people are missing the show I can make the big come back.
Predictably, my disappearance from the airwaves was met with a resounding silence, and although I picked up the odd comment here and there over the ensuing years I found that I liked having Sundays to myself.
Still, I suspect when it happened the end of Hughesy’s broadcasting career took a couple of people by surprise. If it did, there’s a straightforward explanation, They probably thought that I’d become involved with the station due to an interest in community radio as such.
Wrong....
The reality was that I’d spotted an opportunity to end the sense of isolation that had characterised The Wilderness Years. I’d given it a couple of years to see how things worked out, and once I realised that I wasn’t going to end up finding the sort of personal interaction with like-minded individuals it was a matter of finding a convenient excuse to make an exit.
In that regard, the emergence of other people who became involved with the station to pursue their own agendas made the process easier. I suspected my successor in the chair thought that I’d stick around and could be persuaded to take on some other role but that was never going to happen.
Still, the experience and The Internet Years as a whole had brought plenty of welcome developments and the on-air experience ended up being rewarding in itself. Actually, it had been a lot of fun, but I’d reached the point where the fun quotient wasn’t enough to justify the time I was expending on the exercise.
As well, the need to keep on adding material to the playlist gave me the excuse to fill in the gaps in the CD collection, so that by the time I’d escaped from the airwaves I’d built up the collection to the point where I had the complete works of most of the artists who interested me.
I’d also had to actively go looking for interesting new material to add to the mix and while a glance at the 1500 Most Played playlist in my iTunes reveals most of the tracks there probably would have been there anyway, regardless of the airwaves factor, that’s more a result of an existing mindset rather than any amazing new discoveries.
Seriously, when you look at it, there’s not much out there that is new, and what there is doesn’t interest me all that much. I’m finding things are, effectively, some of the same old elements put together in a slightly different way.
There’s the odd exception, but even there you’re going to find that it’s a matter of taking something familiar and adding a couple of interesting influences to see what happens.
The perfect example of what I’m talking about is a guitarist named Derek Trucks, and I’m inclined to use Derek as the perfect example of some of the things I’m talking about.
Now, for a start, without the sources of information that the Internet brought to the party, I’d probably have remained blissfully ignorant of the man’s existence. For a start, if I hadn’t signed up for the Allman Brothers Band mailing list the Allmans element in Hughesy’s CD collection would probably would probably have stayed at the Dreams box set, Fillmore East and, possibly, Hitting The Note and the Live at the Beacon DVD (if I’d become aware of their existence, which is, in itself, a dubious proposition).
As it was, given the Allmans’ taper friendly attitude I’d built up a substantial collection of official and unofficial live material. Over the past few years there have been a couple of official live Archive releases which I’ve dutifully bought since supporting the artist’s official releases is supposed to be part of the taper/trader mindset.
And without the taper/trader influence I wouldn’t have picked up on the quality of the more recent additions to the Allmans’ mix.
Looking at them in turn, there’s Warren Haynes, who fills much the same role on the American music scene that Joe Camilleri does Down Under.
Like ChickenMan, he’s everywhere.
Haynes and bass player Allen Woody were part of the Allmans line-up in the mid-nineties and had a little power trio called Govt Mule as a way of picking up an additional income stream while the Brothers were on R&R. When their side project had reached the point where the Allmans duty was getting in the way of a developing career, out they went.
The replacements, Jack Pearson on guitar and Oteil Burbridge on bass, brought a couple of new ingredients to the mix, notably some stunning slide work from Pearson and (I kit you not) a scat-singing bass solo from Burbridge. While these things were going down I started to read about this young guitar-slinger Derek Trucks, nephew of drummer Butch. He turned up on the odd unofficial recording of an Allmans show, and it was obvious the kid was rather good.
Derek had his own outfit, predictably called the Derek Trucks Band, and they were taper friendly, so I started to pick up the odd DTB show here and there as well. Without the Internet, of course, I probably wouldn’t have heard of him until much later, if I heard of him at all.
Now, while he was a great player Jack Pearson had a problem with tinnitus that wasn’t helped by the volume the Allmans were pumping out, which was largely the result of guitarist Dickey Betts’ unwillingness to turn his amp down. Eventually it got to the point where Pearson couldn’t take it any more, so out he went.
The replacement? Young Mr Trucks.
All was not, however, well in the core membership of the Allman Brothers Band. While Gregg Allman, after a lengthy problem with drugs and alcohol, had cleaned up his act there were continuing issues with Betts, and, from what I can make out, the issues went quite a way beyond an unwillingness to turn down his amp.
Having taken on the leader’s role much earlier on, Betts was largely responsible for the set-list, and, to be quite honest, seemed to be prone to including a track called, in various incarnations Those Eyes, Tombstone Eyes and Good Times in the mix almost every night. It’s not the greatest track you’ve ever heard and it’s a long way from the best that Mr Betts has produced. More importantly, there were items from the band’s repertoire that were, apparently, ruled out because the playing required a level of skill that Betts. it seemed, no longer possessed.
In any case, following a couple of less than stellar performances in May 2000, Betts was informed that his services were surplus to requirements and a classy player named Jimmy Herring took his place alongside young Mr Trucks. Given the grumblings over recent set-lists the first show with the new line-up kicked off with a lengthy full-blown Mountain Jam. Herring’s role in the band was always going to be temporary, presumably meant to leave the door open for Betts should he wish to return to the fold under a different set of rules, but that didn’t happen, so Warren Haynes filled the role instead.
As time went on, as things loosened up, it was increasingly obvious that Mr Trucks was a major talent, and I went out of my way to pick up Derek Trucks Band recordings, which duly found their way into regular spots in Hughesy’s on-air playlists. The version of Afro Blue on the Soul Serenade album was definitely my favourite track from 2003.
Listening to him with the Allmans while it’s obvious that Derek Trucks is a great player, the Allmans’ repertoire doesn’t give Derek a chance to work in his full range of influences. With his own band, those constraints don’t exist.
As a result, you take the blues/rock foundation from the Allmans and Derek & The Dominoes and add a variety of external influences - Coltrane and assorted horn players, for a start. Derek prefers to listen to horn players on the basis that if you listen to other guitarists you end up sounding like them.
But there are other elements in there as well. Sufi devotional music, for example. Not that you’re likely to have heard too many examples of that genre transposed onto slide guitar.
Which is what I’m talking about when I refer to the old elements put together in a slightly different way with a few different elements thrown in to bring a bit of variation.
So, while there were artists like Derek Trucks who I would have probably have caught on to anyway, there were albums I bought during the Radio Show era because I needed different elements to add to the mix. Most were the result of a favourable review in Mojo or Rhythms and while the strike rate wasn’t 100% I ended up catching some quite wonderful stuff that I might otherwise have skipped over.
Possibly the best of them was Surf, by former Aztec Camera front-man Roddy Frame, allegedly recorded at home on his iMac, just a voice and an unadorned acoustic guitar. As I went through the motions of shuffling things around with the radio shows I went as far as relabelling Just Another Sunday as High Class Music and switching the theme track from Little Feat to Roddy Frame.
While the Tuesday night show was tainting the airwaves the Fools Gold theme was by Graham Parker & the Rumour.
Now while Mojo and Rhythms (and Uncut, for a while until the movie content prompted me to question whether the continued expenditure was justified) provided a number of interesting new listens, the theory behind Hughesy’s radio career was that there’d also be suggestions coming from the listeners.
Things did not, however, work out that way.
Once I’d finished on the airwaves I was increasingly reluctant to shell out for new music. There was plenty of new stuff out there, and while people associated with the industry would suggest this was due to my trading and downloading interests the actual reason was more straightforward.
Quite simply, the local music outlet seemed increasingly disinterested.
I’d always seen buying music as an inevitable part of the whole taper/trader thing, and must have put thousands of dollars through that shop over the years once the CD revolution had rekindled Hughesy’s interest in buying music.
Early on, the people who worked in the music department at least pretended to be interested when I wandered in looking for some obscure masterpiece, and the process reached its peak when Wilko was in there, but when the store changed hands the new proprietors didn’t seem all that interested.
When I was aware of something that interested me the first step was to drop by in the middle of my lap around town, ask for a look at the Platterlog, and check whether what I was looking for was in there yet. Often, even though what I was after wasn’t in there yet, there was something else in the New Releases pages that caught my eye and produced an order.
As time went by under the new management the state of the Platterlog went from regularly updated to the new stuff’s in the front of the folder to I think there’s an update around here somewhere. Bearing the fact that I could easily spend something between fifty and two hundred dollars on music every fortnight I found the apparent disinterest more than slightly inexplicable.
It wasn’t as if I was short of stuff to listen to at home.
So, from the time towards the end of 2004 when the radio stint came to an end, new purchases dropped to the point where they were virtually non-existent.
If there was something I needed to get my hot little hands on I could always order it from Amazon or some other on-line source, but as time went by I found the inevitable delays involved with delivering the stuff a source of increasing frustration.