Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  When the band pleaded in an ad for the single, “Please buy a copy—we’re starving,” they were only marginally stretching the truth. They had by then moved back to Melbourne and recruited a new drummer in Doug Lavery, and though they were starting to get ahead playing the Ivan Dayman circuit, Vince was still looking for a stronger connection.

  They moved into a two-storey terraced house in seedy St. Kilda, in Dalgety Street, just off the notorious Fitzroy Street sleaze strip. Bon, now a legitimate bachelor again, had the attic bedroom, which he painted fire-engine red, where he reigned as gay blade supreme.

  It was around this time he met Mary Wasylyk, who would become a lifelong friend. Born in 1950 of Ukrainian parents, Mary grew up in Melbourne’s grimy western suburbs, and after school went into fashion design. She saw the Valentines for the first time at a Sunday afternoon show at the Bowl, a disco in Melbourne. “You used to have arguments, you know, who was better, the Valentines or the Zoot? I used to make these hippie beads, and the band all really liked them, so I got to know them, and I stayed friends with Bon ever since.

  “They were just trying to copy the English bands, sort of like an extension of the Easybeats but not as good. I mean, looking at them, none of them seemed talented, really!”

  It was at Dalgety Street that the Valentines started to run really wild. They became the premier party animals in a scene that aspired to complete psychedelic degeneracy. It was 1968. Sergeant Pepper’s had changed everything. Hendrix and the Doors were having hits. Bon’s brother Graeme, then 15, came over on vacation and had his life changed. “Women were everywhere, and ganja. Vince gave me my first smoke. They’d go off to a show, and come back with women, sit up all night and smoke, whatever. For someone like me to come straight out of Fremantle, I couldn’t go back to that, so the only way out was to jump a ship.” Graeme remained a merchant seaman for many years to come, and he would drop in on Bon whenever he was in port.

  Vince sussed a new opening for the band back at AMBO. Headed by Sri Lankan-Australian Bill Joseph, the agency had been revitalized by its employment of one of the new breed, Michael Browning. Browning was running two discos, Berties and Sebastian’s, and also managing Doug Parkinson in Focus, then the hottest new act in town. Vince figured that if he could parley an AMBO agent into managing the Valentines, too, the band might find favor in the same way Doug Parkinson seemed to.

  The Valentines were well drilled, well established on the live circuit, and even though “Peculiar Hole in the Sky” had failed to set the world on fire, its potential, plus Vince’s determination, was incentive enough for AMBO boss Bill Joseph himself to take on the band. Ron Tudor, who was then launching his own June Productions company (and would go on to form the Fable Label), also came on board, signing the Valentines to a deal whereby June would record the band, and then lease the tapes to Philips.

  Everything was thus in place, finally, for the Valentines to launch a full-scale assault on Australian teenagers.

  The Summer of Love took place officially in San Francisco, and nominally also in London, in what was Australia’s winter of 1967. Its impact would be superficial in Australia. A local pop hit that could be described as psychedelic did not arrive until 1969, in the form of “The Real Thing.” Acid rock, as such, hardly happened at all, at least not until a later mutation appeared.

  The reason why Australia missed the first blooming of flower power was essentially because the guards had reclaimed control of the asylum. The new order that had pulled the rug out from under the music business establishment in the early to mid-sixties—independent record companies and young entrepreneurs as well as artists—had by then been absorbed by the mainstream. The big record companies, those that traditionally ran the music game, had had enough time to adjust to the new rules and now they wanted their ball back.

  Radio was reluctant to play far-out new acts like Hendrix, feeling more comfortable with the Monkees. The black soul sounds of Tamla-Motown and Stax, so successful in America and Britain, were hardly heard in racist Australia.

  1968 was not a vintage year for Australian pop. Not a single Australian record went to number one all year, whereas previous and later years saw many local chart-toppers. The impetus of 1965-66 had been completely dissipated.

  The success of acts like the Ohio Express and the 1910 Fruitgum Company, following in the footsteps of the Monkees, certified bubblegum as the biggest commercial trend of the year. Bubblegum was music that was shamelessly commercial—simplistic and repetitive to the point of inanity. Ultimately disposable, and more than likely manufactured, it particularly impressed Australian record companies.

  Australian musicians had only just come to terms with chirpy Beatles-ish harmonies, but now they were discouraged from going any further. In America and Britain, sales of albums overtook singles in 1968. But Australia didn’t even have album charts until 1970. The hot new local acts were the Groove, who would go on to win the 1968 Battle of the Sounds, and Johnny Farnham. Both were confectionery.

  At the end of 1968, an intense marketing campaign swung into action around the Valentines. In November, they made the unequivocal statement in Go-Set that they were a bubblegum group, “not afraid about being commercial.” The band had buffed up its image—Bon was dusting down his tattoos with foundation, and straightening his hair with sticky tape—and they wore matching orange frilly shirts, flares and beads. Although they would suffer in comparison with prettier band the Zoot, who exploded onto Melbourne around the same time with their “Think Pink” campaign, they hit the media all over Australia with a season’s greeting card proclaiming, “The slogan for this year is “BE MY VALENTINE IN ’69.”

  Bon filled out a profile in which—claiming to be 19 when he was actually now 22—he revealed:Likes—My room (painted red), long blonde hair, sex, showers,

  swimming

  Dislikes—People who hate Crater Critters (ex-Weeties pack),

  being disturbed whilst thinking, washing and ironing

  Loves—Parents, my pet Crater Critter

  Favorite Food—Ice cream

  Drink—Sand Zombie

  Actor—Vince

  Actress—Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave

  Groups—Beatles, Moody Blues

  Singer, Male—John Lee Hooker, Otis Redding

  Singer, Female—Supremes

  Music—Scottish Pipe Band music, soul, worried jazz

  In early December the Valentines put down a new single, “My Old Man’s a Groovy Old Man.” This was yet another product of the prolific songwriting partnership of the Easybeats’ Harry Vanda and George Young; it found its way to the band via Ron Tudor. Tudor also proffered an obscure Pretty Things song, “Ebeneezer,” for the flip-side.

  June Music had an office conveniently located just a couple of doors down from the state-of-the-art Armstrong’s Studios which Go-Set had trumpeted some months earlier: “People will no longer be able to blame a lack of equipment for poor Australian record production. Last week, Bill Armstrong’s studio in Melbourne installed an 8-track Scully recording machine.”

  The skiffle-like “My Old Man” was as dynamic as it was vacuous—classic bubblegum.

  After sessions for the single were completed, the Valentines hit the road again. Brisbane was something of a stronghold for the band; they spent the holiday there. Vince remembers a remarkable Christmas Day:

  “We had this fan up there who was Chinese, and he invited us over for Christmas dinner. But what happened was, we took this mescaline. It was hilarious. Ted thought he was a hippopotamus, he just sat in the pool all day. Bon and I went to this lunch, it was meant to be a traditional Western Christmas—roast turkey and everything, you know. So we get there, and this guy comes to the door, and as soon as we walk in the room, where the parents are there to meet us, Bon just becomes a Chinaman, you know, he’s got his arms folded and he’s squinting with this stupid grin on his face, and he’s bowing and going, Ah so, Ah so. These people didn’t know what was going on. Anyway, they serv
e the food, and I suppose we must have thought this turkey was alive or something, because we just ended up getting out of there, we were virtually running down the road screaming. We started hitching, and of course no one would give us a lift, so we ended up walking all the way back to the motel, it was seven miles or something. We got there, and Ted’s virtually turned into a prune, he’s still in the pool, he still thinks he’s a hippopotamus!”

  Returning to Melbourne, the band had to find new digs; the lease on Dalgety Street was up. Bon, Wyn and Ted set up headquarters at a flat in South Yarra, on Toorak Road, at the center of something of a pop-idol enclave. Johnny Farnham was a neighbor on one side, Johnny Young the other. Vince moved in just around the corner.

  In January Molly Meldrum interviewed not just Vince but the whole band for Go-Set. What image were the Valentines trying to project? he asked John Cooksey. “A very happy, sweet, but sexy commercial type image,” Cooksey replied. “At the same time, we want to be able to entertain the disco crowds.”

  “My Old Man’s a Groovy Old Man” was launched on February 14, 1969—Valentine’s Day itself. It took off immediately, although almost inevitably it was overshadowed by the Zoot’s contemporaneous first hit, “One Times, Two Times, Three Times, Four.” But the Valentines were away nonetheless.

  When they played the That’s Life disco in Prahran that night, “the audience,” Meldrum reported in Go-Set, “screamed in unison, We love the Valentines. As soon as they appeared the audience went completely berserk and started to storm the stage. The two lead singers, Vince and Bon, were dragged to the floor and Bon’s pants and jacket were completely ripped off him.”

  Writing on March 1, Meldrum went on: “This has been a regular occurrence since that particular day. Last Saturday night the Valentines appeared at another Melbourne dance, Piccadilly, and drew a record attendance of over 2,000 teenagers. Cupids (the Valentines’ symbol) were thrown out to the audience and in turn the audience threw back bubblegum. The Valentines didn’t even get through their first number before the stage was stormed.

  “Ripped clothes and accessories was repeated and when Doug, the drummer, got up to sing, he left the stage two minutes later sporting only a pair of red underpants. The group were supposed to appear for 45 minutes but their performance had to be cut down to 20 minutes because the audience became completely uncontrollable.”

  On March 10, the Valentines played a free concert before a crowd of 7,000 at the Alexandra Gardens, as part of Melbourne’s annual Moomba festival. A “riot” ensued during which Vince was arrested on charges of assaulting police. Vince was certainly a provocateur—Bon was the passive one of the pair, content to hang back and just sing—but all Vince did was push an overzealous cop from the stage with his bare foot. He was fined $50, and put on a 12-month good behavior bond.

  With a new drummer, Paddy Beach—Doug Lavery had left to join Axiom—the Valentines concentrated on gigging around Melbourne, working Beach in and consolidating their support. “My Old Man” eventually peaked on the national charts at number 23.

  Paddy Beach (né Veitch) was recruited from a trio called Compulsion, a Maori Hendrix-clone act that Michael Browning had brought to Australia from New Zealand just before they fell apart. When Paddy, who was white, joined the Valentines, pint-sized roadie John Darcy came with him. Darcy, as he’s known to all, remembers his first meeting with the band, at Toorak Road.

  “I meet the guys, and they’re checking me out, because of the size of me, you know, because they’d just started to get some of the bigger gear. They said, Do you reckon you’ll be able to handle the gear? I said, I’m pretty fit, I’ve always done a bit of boxing, I go to the gym. So they said, Alright, we’ll give it a go. Then Bon says, Hey, you feel like a fuck? Well, that sets me back a bit, but I say, Well, yeah, I could always go a fuck, and so he says, Well, just whip into the front room there, there’s a young chick there, she’ll give you a go, no worries. So I go into the front room and there’s all these chicks there, stark naked, so I figure I’ll go for it. So I’m laying on this bed, stark naked, there’s this chick going down on me, and Bon comes in and says, How do you think you’ll like the job? I go, Well, I suppose I can try and adapt.”

  The Valentines’ image might have been squeaky clean, but their reputation was easily the worst of any band around. Dope smoking was also constant.

  The band played a lot of cards and neighbor Johnny Farnham was a frequent visitor, but Farnham’s manager Daryl Sambell wasn’t at all keen on his charge being seen associating with such degenerates.

  DARCY: “You’d wake up each morning, and look out the little eyepiece in the door, and by 9.30 there’d be maybe three or four young girls there, in the hallway at the top of the stairs. At maybe 10.30, it’d be, Oh, there’s seven out there now. They were all like under 12. After lunch they’d start to get a bit older, you’d get the 14-year-olds starting to turn up. Of course, I’d be in and out, I’d have to duck up to the Toorak Village to get the papers, milk. I’d be stepping over girls. They’d be, Oh, can we come in, can we see the guys, can you get us their autographs? So I’d say, Look, I’ll see what I can do for you. So you’d let some in for 15 minutes or so, hand out some autographs. And then later on you’d let the older ones in; they could cook the meals for you, and clean the flat, do the washing and ironing. Then of course there’d be a couple of older ones who’d supply a bit more than that, give you a bit of a work-out before you had to go off to a job. It was unbelievable. Every day of the week it was the same.”

  Even in their wildest dreams, the Valentines couldn’t have imagined it would be as wild as this. Bon was in his element. He had a little trick he employed to sort out the goers from the prickteasers among the girls who came backstage. He would let off one of the smoke bombs the band exploded on stage as part of its act, and when the smoke cleared, he would be standing there naked. The girls who didn’t run off screaming had to be goers. The band performed indecent acts on young girls in the back of the bus on fan club picnics, and then dropped them off back into their worried mothers’ waiting arms, reassuring these women, as sweet and innocent as you like, that their daughters had been in good hands—as indeed they had—and then laughing at how Bon especially could put it over them with all his boyish charm.

  The band went out on the road, touring through Canberra, Newcastle, Queensland and South Australia, but cracks were already appearing in the facade. Back in Melbourne in early August, they played a reception at That’s Life to launch a new Coca-Cola commercial. “Most surprising thing though,” the Herald reported, “was to hear the Valentines play a bit of rhythm in contrast to their labeled ‘bubblegum’ style. As bass guitarist John said, ‘We weren’t under any pressure tonight, so we decided to prove a point’—that they are versatile.”

  The very next night, the Valentines failed to take out the Battle of the Sounds, finishing second to the tied Doug Parkinson and Masters Apprentices; but the band was already set on a new path. Having met with commercial success, the Valentines, predictably, now wanted artistic credibility. Bubblegum, after all, was throwaway pap for little girls.

  VINCE: “The scene was changing, it was starting to get serious, it was getting to the point where you had to be good.”

  The novelty of local bands was wearing off. It wasn’t enough to merely ape your idols any more. Australia might have missed out on the Summer of Love, but in mid-1969, with Woodstock just around the corner, it was starting to catch up. New British and American bands that anticipated seventies rock, like Led Zeppelin and Santana, had an immediate and profound impact. A deep divide was drawn between dances and discos. The dance circuit catered to teenyboppers, with bubblegum bands; whilst discos, though still unlicensed, became the province of adult-oriented so-called “soul artists” like Max Merritt and Billy Thorpe, both on the comeback trail, and Doug Parkinson and the Levi Smith Clefs, who would take Australian rock into the seventies.

  “Our aim,” Vince told Go-Set, “will be to present to dance c
rowds a wild act with a heavy sexual slant and attempt to please disco audiences by playing original free-form music. Just as Doug Parkinson made the transition from discos to dances, we hope to do the reverse.”

  The Valentines made the transition that the Zoot, and even the superior Masters Apprentices, couldn’t. They would soon become a staple on the disco scene in Melbourne and Sydney alike. Ultimately though, and ironically, the Valentines’ musical coming-of-age also proved to be their undoing.

  VINCE: “We found we had too many ideas for one band. We started to fall apart as well as become a better band.”

  As the single “Nick Nack Paddy Whack” was released, the band went out on the road with Russell Morris, Johnny Farnham, Ronnie Burns, the Zoot and the Masters Apprentices as part of the huge Operation Starlift tour. “Nick Nack Paddy Whack” proved to be something of an embarrassment. An adaptation of the children’s nursery rhyme originally cut as a possible theme for a proposed afternoon TV show, it was never intended for release. But its failure to chart was proof positive that the bubblegum bubble had burst. Further encouragement to get serious came in the better response to the single’s B-side, a song called “Getting Better,” which marked Bon’s first ever writing credit, shared with Wyn. It was a convincingly urgent call to arms.

  Bon particularly wanted his due. What credibility the band did have was largely thanks to him—his voice was acknowledged as one of the best in the business—and with an increasing amount of confidence, not to mention experience, he was ready to assume more of the initiative.

  Vince was naturally reluctant to relinquish leadership, but he knew which side his bread was buttered. At the same time, Bon was sensitive to Vince’s feelings, and so he still looked to him for the nod. But certainly, the days of Vince’s autocratic rule were over. Vince told Go-Set: “Admittedly, I’m more popular than Bon, but he’s a far better singer than I’ll ever be. In fact, I think he’s the most underrated singer in Australia.”