Big Blue Sky

by Peter Garrett

  More reinforcements—theirs, not ours—had arrived, and several vehicles, one with four large occupants, circled the hotel, going past us every few minutes. After the third circuit a window was wound down and the end of a shotgun appeared. Its owner, who looked awfully like an off-duty cop, sneered, ‘This is for you and your fucking smartarse mate.’

  Surely we weren’t going to get shot now, when we were just getting the hang of touring and recording, and in suburban Blacktown of all places?

  Time froze as we awaited the next development—which failed to materialise. But the threat had the desired effect: we were scared witless.

  The crew hurried the pack-up, and at last we were able to quit the battleground, relieved to get everyone home in one piece.

  …

  We had blasted through recording our first album, simply titled Midnight Oil, in six days in the winter of 1978 with Double J’s live broadcast engineer Keith Walker. We pretty much put all the songs down live at the Alberts Studios, then located in the middle of Sydney’s business district. It was the closest thing Australia had to the famed Brill Building on Broadway in New York City, where songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and husband-and-wife team Gerry Goffin and Carole King, wrote hit after hit through the 1960s and 70s. Here Harry Vanda and George Young, formerly of the Easybeats, worked as in-house writer/producers for AC/DC, John Paul Young, the Angels and others, composing and recording a raft of hits. Was that the bass line to ‘Love Is in the Air’ wafting through the wall? We were in the company of champions.

  Our first single, ‘Run by Night’, didn’t travel quite the distance that ‘Love Is in the Air’ managed, and the album closed out with an eight-minute track full of solo guitar called ‘Nothing Lost—Nothing Gained’. Not very punk. Still, at long last we had some recorded material available for our growing fan base—and we were well and truly out of the garage.

  There is nothing like having your first album under your belt, maybe even hearing one of your songs played on the radio. I’d listened for so many years to other bands, and to friends who’d finally got a run, but now the joy of discovery was magnified—it was us! Thus proudly equipped with a round piece of vinyl with our name on it, we continued to play far and wide.

  Head Injuries, a tighter and tougher album, was recorded nearly as quickly less than a year later at Trafalgar Studios in Annandale. It was produced by Lez Karski, who’d toured Australia with English funk band Supercharge. His only complaint was that the songs contained too many ideas, but by now most of the tunes had been well honed in the pubs. During recording we often came in after a show to lay tracks until nine or ten the next morning.

  The injection of politics on songs like ‘Stand in Line’ and Rob’s ‘No Reaction’ gave the record bite. My take on the archetypal Australian surfing odyssey emerged as ‘Koala Sprint’, and one of Jim’s wild pieces (with some additional lyrics), called ‘Is It Now?’, ended the album in a flurry of noise, just as the shows did. Head Injuries was everyone pulling in the same harness, paring down the songs to reflect the intensity of the live performances that, in the absence of healthy record sales, were keeping the wolf from our door.

  …

  My grandmother Emily, by now in her mid-nineties, was still living at her home in West Pymble. Her husband and closest daughter gone, she’d set her jaw and pressed on.

  If I was in town I’d go up on Sundays to mow her lawn and we’d go on her favourite outing, a drive down to Newport Beach for lunch, Gran with a blanket on her knees and a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken, me with a burger and my flippers in the boot in case there was a decent swell running.

  When we played a free outdoor afternoon concert put on by radio station Double J at St Leonards Park—reasonably close to home—in April 1978, it was time for Gran to see what her grandson had actually been up to for the last few years.

  Doddo brought her down for the show and she sat in a wheelchair up the back behind a monstrous crowd that had materialised out of nowhere. There was plenty of noise as the bands pushed the PA to the limit, and people danced and swayed, stepping around groups who’d set up camp for the day with blankets and eskies, amid growing piles of cans and food wrappers that carpeted the park.

  Afterwards, when I asked Gran what it was like, she said firmly, ‘It was very enjoyable, dear.’

  After the manic pace, and all the losses and gains of the past couple of years, what more could I ask for?

  7

  OUT AND ABOUT

  BEING ON THE road lifts the scales from the musician’s eyes to a wider world. In the era before Walkman players and iPods, once the local radio had been exhausted, you spent a lot of time gazing out the car or van window as the landscape rushed past.

  You could see the physical shapes, the different outlines of locations, but also the way people lived, and you got a sense of their habits as well. Coming into town for a break I’d look out for the markers: street names, the descriptions in ‘For Sale’ signs, notices in the local supermarket window, headlines in the local rag, Tidy Town awards, the noticeboards outside empty churches, garage sales, graffiti—all these visual clues to be read like a detective searching for the ideal town. It was interesting, too, to see what people had stashed in their backyards. Old caravans, multiple car bodies, maybe a vintage model covered by long grass and dandelions, abandoned play equipment, scabby concrete statues, well-tended vegie gardens, fire pits, overgrown sheds, trail-bike tracks, granny flats. There was no end to the variety, or to the endless, unfinished projects that littered these quarter-acre paradises.

  I was sucking in parts of the country I hadn’t seen before and still enjoying the novelty of being in a different town most nights. Constant touring meant the opportunity to explore and the thrill of possible new discoveries. One day you’re checking out amusement parks and beer gardens, overgrown cemeteries and sports grounds; the next, you’re exploring shell middens and marvelling at drawings on the wall of a cave, the outline of the sail of a prau from the Celebes that last cruised the northern coast hundreds of years ago.

  I could see that Australia isn’t uniform. Each state is different, each city and town a product of its past, with different geography, histories, stories—there were things going on above and below the surface. We found that touring Queensland in the late 1970s and early 1980s was noticeably different from other interstate trips. Heading north you could taste the tropical flavour as grevillea and palms took over from dry-weather eucalypts. But it was the politics of the state, playing out like a 1930s newsreel, that hit you in the head. These were the final years of the regime headed by Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Corruption in the police force, and in the highest levels of government, was rampant. This right-wing crowd came down hard on those who dared to criticise.

  As is often the case, activists and artists were singled out for attention. We’d heard Queensland called a police state but were still incredulous to discover an unmarked police car nestled in a parking bay, right in front of the motel we’d checked into on our first visit. It said something about the reach of the regime, and its stupidity, if some young Sydney rock band with a few political songs in its repertoire—although none yet about Queensland—was judged a threat to the government.

  My old friend from Barker College, Nigel Cluer, was now studying dentistry at the University of Queensland and had been swept up by the police and locked up overnight as he tried to make his way past a demonstration. Until then he’d been apolitical, but the shock of finding himself behind bars for no reason quickly turned to anger, and like many other Queenslanders, he became an implacable opponent of the conservative government.

  He was living in a state where the government held power by gerrymander (with voters in rural areas effectively getting more say than city dwellers), led by a man who’d benefited from insider knowledge in share dealings, who had actively fostered corruption in the police force, planned to mine the Great Barrier Reef, and then sent a delegation to a United Nations meeting in Pa
ris to oppose the federal government’s push to have the reef added to the UN’s World Heritage list.

  This was a state where the premier was so in league with property developers, the so-called white shoe brigade, that at one stage they backed his push to become prime minister. During his time, no building, however culturally significant or historically important, no wetland or rainforest, no matter how environmentally sensitive, was safe from the bulldozer.

  A prime example was the pre-dawn demolition of the popular Cloudland Ballroom in Brisbane. Built in 1940 on a hill overlooking the city, Cloudland was unlike any other venue in Australia: a classic two-storey white building with a gracious entrance featuring an eighteen-metre arch, a specially sprung wooden dance floor, decorative columns running around the internal walls and a spacious upstairs viewing area. The scene of much of Brisbane’s social and cultural life in its early days, Cloudland hosted dances and jazz band concerts. Buddy Holly had played his only Australian shows there, and many entertainers of the 1950s and 60s had graced its beautiful stage.

  In the 1970s and early 80s, as the local music scene exploded, it again became a popular venue. It was a wonderful place to play, with the made-for-movement floor a brilliant feature. Once a show got going it would start to flex, as crowds up to two thousand strong bounced up and down in unison, under a roof thirty metres high. The audience would then stream outside to cool off in the breezes that blew across from the Brisbane River and Moreton Bay, with the lights of Brisbane twinkling below—pure magic.

  Over the strenuous objections of the public and without any warning, this heritage-listed treasure was flattened in the early hours of the morning to make way for blocks of flats in 1982. We eventually recorded the song ‘Dreamworld’, which referenced the sorry incident, on the Diesel and Dust album. A year after Cloudland was demolished, the Liberal/National Coalition was finally swept from power.

  …

  In the early years, to get from city to city we drove and drove, along the way blowing tyres as if we were bursting balloons at a kid’s birthday party. Bang! went one on the way from Sydney to Brisbane.

  A few days later—bang!—another one blew outside Albury as we were driving home from Melbourne. Short on sleep, and pushing as fast as I could, I managed to pull the swaying rental wagon up before we careered into a dusty paddock.

  We were all a bit shaken, but at this point Andrew James decided he’d had enough. The Bear had now used up a couple of his nine lives; it was early 1980 and the touring schedule was only just kicking in. Added to which he’d been crook and was homesick, an affliction that everyone would fall prey to at different times in the years ahead. There’s nothing natural about being constantly on the move, but it satisfies the nomadic instinct for some. Others are just not built for life on the road, and our first bass player was one of these.

  Once Bear announced his early retirement we needed a replacement quickly. We were geared up to keep playing, and finding someone in a hurry meant broadcasting for a new member as widely as possible. Peter Gifford, a carpenter from Canberra who’d moved up to Sydney to find a band, heard on the radio that we were holding auditions for a bass player and came in to try out. Giffo thought like a member of King Crimson but played like he was in AC/DC, with a tradie’s voice to match. He was in, and in the deep end at that, as we were back on stage days later.

  The pressure, with Gary Morris directing traffic, a phone on each ear and only a few hours’ sleep a night, was by now building to an unnatural level. In the space of a year or so we’d gone from playing a couple of nights a week to year-round touring, doubling as record company, promoter and publicity machine in between—but we still struggled to break even.

  The workload piled higher as we tried to make every show better than the last, driven by the conviction that we shouldn’t repeat ourselves. It was a whirlwind of costly self-improvement: new poster artwork, better sound equipment, trying new instruments, different arrangements and songs, capped ticket prices, organising our own events, doing fundraisers and even more extensive touring schedules.

  Endeavouring to cover all the possible bases—ensuring adequate security, liaising with community groups, producing media, and more songs to soar—was stretching the people around us to breaking point, but on it went. We would continue to sweat across the stages of Oz as the audience kept us alive and we, in turn, kept giving back to them. We were honouring an unwritten contract, and despite the wear and tear on everybody involved it kept us in good shape for years to come.

  An epiphany at a Billy Graham crusade saw Gary suddenly depart the scene in 1980 for a few years. Initially we did his job ourselves, and I was the bagman, getting in late and stashing the night’s takings on top of my wardrobe, but the hours were insane and it couldn’t last. Gary had suggested we look up a young Melbourne promoter, Zev Eizik, and eventually he took us on.

  Zev was another one not built for the road. He had other business interests to keep an eye on so he delegated tour-managing duties to a young Californian, Connie Adolph, aka the Boogie Queen. Constance came with impeccable showbiz credentials: she’d been an original Walt Disney Mouseketeer. This meant she could muster enthusiasm in any situation, however dire or uninspiring. And with her effervescent personality, the Boogie Queen was the perfect foil for the sometimes dour and determined Oils she was charged with safely getting from gig to gig.

  There seemed no reason to alter an approach built on sweat, loud noise and outrage, so we went around the block again, and then headed off on our first overseas jaunt, beginning with New Zealand, and after that making tentative forays to small clubs in Canada and the US.

  The Kiwi trip was like going back in time. New Zealand was mostly sleepy, with lots of sheep and cows, and very green. Outside the two big cities, Auckland and Wellington, everything was closed by ten, except the quaintly named dairies (milk bars), where even the fearsome Maori gang, the Mongrel Mob, could be found.

  One night, following a show in the regional town of Hamilton, a couple of us headed out to eat, only to find ourselves crammed into a small dairy with a bevy of tattooed and drunk gang members. It was the kind of situation that could end in pain, and when the largest of them wandered over and demanded a bite of our sound engineer Colin’s burger, the stage was set for confrontation.

  ‘You want some of my burger?’ Colin asked.

  ‘Yes, now,’ came the grunted reply. A pause.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Colin asked.

  ‘Yes,’ came the menacing growl. Another pause, and shuffling from the rugby pack of massive hulks now glaring at us with evil intent.

  Suddenly Colin thrust the entire hamburger into the inquisitor’s mouth as the bikie froze for a moment, agape at the audacity of the move.

  ‘Run!’ Colin, shouted and we took off out the door—pure shock and awe. Col’s quick thinking saved the day.

  This isolated incident belies the fact that most New Zealanders were hospitable to a fault; you just needed to know where to connect with them. After playing a club show in Queenstown in the south, we repaired to a party held in a restaurant at the top of the cable car that took skiers to the nearby snowfields. In the early hours, when it came time to leave, we jumped into the swinging cable car; the last passenger having pulled the switch to set the cable car in motion, he then leapt in as we careered back down the mountain. No one blinked an eye.

  I admired the plucky resolve of the Kiwis in the face of strong international pressure when they took an antinuclear stance in the 80s, and their music scene is endlessly inventive and spreads wide for such a small nation.

  What makes something original and different in music will always be a matter of opinion laced with taste. The topic is subject to endless debates, usually conducted at the end of the night when the crowd has drifted away, or, in our case, on the big buses that served as our home away from home once we gained a foothold in America.

  Everyone strives to be different, but when different is the norm then nothing much is that, we
ll, different. In trying to stand out, lots of performers end up in uniform, unconsciously parodying themselves; just think most heavy-metal outfits.

  The Oils didn’t wear our sources on our sleeve because we each had different tastes and no slavish devotion to one band or era of music. After the beginning period, when the band was Rob’s project, Gary and I took up greater roles, conducting the operation and speaking by phone to one another constantly, sometimes for hours on end, as we tried to find the ground where the band’s composite personality could merge with the business we were in.

  Midnight Oil was often a mystery to itself. We’d start with one person’s chunk of clay on the potter’s wheel—notes, riffs, a sketch, a piece of music in draft form from Jim or Rob usually, but importantly an original idea—then all five sculptors would work away to make it a Midnight Oil song. On one level it was plain rock, played by five white guys, mainly with regular four-beats-to-the-bar time signatures, the songs around four minutes long, most with traditional verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle, chorus, outro structures. But it sounded different and we weren’t easily pigeonholed. When a journalist asked me who my musical heroes were, I replied, ‘The band.’ Because we didn’t sound like anyone else, the energy we threw out made me want to move and the music matched the semi-ordered chaos of my brain and the deeper currents of Australia.

  There are literally millions of pop songs. Some are instantly forgettable, some are competent and palatable, and some take you a lot further. Then there are songs transcendent, which stand the test of time: the Drifters’ ‘On the Roof’, Burt Bacharach’s ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’, countless Dylan classics, the Triffids’ ‘Wide Open Road’, to mention a tiny number on my list. What counts is whether the truth of the song rings through, how it speaks to the listener, how the chords, the rhythms and the melody bring the words alive. So it doesn’t sound like anyone else, it just is.