| AS PRINTED IN RHYTHMS
MAGAZINE
INVISIBLE INNOCENCE
So that rock n roll holy site the legendary CBGBs
has finally succumbed to the gentrification of modern day New York.
What once was a desolate & dangerous section of The Bowery in
the bowels of New York has become an upmarket area & the miniscule
club which opened under a homeless men’s shelter in the late
70s has proved too costly to preserve.
Anyone lucky enough to have entered it’s
portals on a good night would share the same awe that such a small
& shoddy hole in the wall had such a potent atmosphere &
such global influence & reputation. But the real surprise is
that it’s going to reopen in Las Vegas! Owner Hilly Kristal
is taking bits of the stage & the bar & the urinal that
Joey Ramone & countless others have pissed in, with him to place
like sacred relics in the new premises. Even the Wise One still
in mourning over the closure of The Continental years ago didn’t
go that far, although the Rhythms office toilet bowl does look strangely
familiar.
At least they will be remembered albeit for very
different reasons, but it got me thinking about an era & a culture
in Melbourne rock n roll history that remains relatively undocumented
& uncommemorated.
Live Melbourne music may be alive & well these
days but back in the late 60s & early 70s it burnt with an innocent
vitality. On any Saturday night, thousands of young music lovers
crowded into Town Halls all over metropolitan Melbourne to witness
perhaps 3 or 4 local bands at each venue pumping out music from
8.30 until midnight. And they were all unlicensed! Even the pubs
closed at 10 pm. Between Ringwood & the City were 5 or 6 such
venues, Q Club in the Kew Civic Centre was the biggest, with 2 or
3 thousand people queueing around the block to witness current chart
toppers like The Twilights, Masters Apprentices The Loved Ones &
later on Chain & The Aztecs, while sipping on soft drink. It
was a phenomena.
It wasn’t just a suburban activity. In the
Melbourne CBD there were six unlicensed smaller but fulltime venues
to choose from. At the top of the city in more ways than one, the
flamboyant Edwardian style dandy. Tony Knight operated a 3 storey
very English style antique decorated club called Bertie’s
on the corner of Flinders & Spring Street, that was probably
the best quality live music venue in Australia at the time &
another junior more stripped down version called Sebastians in a
2 storey narrow warehouse at the other end of the street. It was
somehow thrilling being pinned between a band on the stage like
the Aztecs & a brick wall about 10 feet behind you, it wasn’t
so much as loud as positively vibrational. Tony seemed to be at
both clubs every night. Further down in Little LaTrobe street was
The Thumping Tum, the most well-known inner city Melbourne club,
housed in a 2 storey bluestone ex-umberella factory, hence the dance
floor ceiling was made of old inverted umberellas, was based on
the the English style discotheque that was so in vogue at the time.
A dark dancefloor & stage & coffee & toasted sandwiches
& people like Wendy Saddington, Jeff St John & The La De
Das, the Tum favoured inerstate acts, on stage & a couple of
hundred sober music fans. They drew an older groovier crowd, while
around the corner in Little Bourke Street was the Biting Eye, a
junior version of the Tum.
The most notorious club at the time was the Catcher,
in the dark deserted & desolate end of Flinders Lane an austere
painted black disused warehouse that you could hear from blocks
away before you could even find it. It was a walk on the wildside,
the surly sociopathic end of the rock music crowd slouched around
a bare room listening to the harder & wilder end of the music
scene. Bands like The Purple Hearts, Running Jumping Standing Still
& The Wild Cherries raged until the early hours. There was a
totally dark, mattress filled room called The Gobble Room &
everyone had an edge that may have come from raiding their mother’s
diet pills. It was very Malcolm McLarenesque punk 10 years early
& with a not so different soundtrack. The Truth newspaper had
shock horror headlines for months about the club that seemed to
be open all the time & attracted such an antisocial clientele!
There were hundreds of people at these & other
clubs 4 nights a week, with a shifting roster of bands. On a Saturday
night a popular band could do an early gig in Burwood, a midevening
in Essendon & a late night gig at one of the city clubs, three
35 minute sets in a night. Many could actually live off their live
playing & word spread, many bands from other states migrated
to Melbourne because of the scene here. It wasn’t just a night
time scene, there were 2 lunchtime gigs in the city centre, 10th
Avenue, above a hairdresser half way up Bourke Street & The
Bowl under Degraves Street where office workers could bring their
lunch & watch a band or two. 10th Avenue was opposite Coles
which was the biggest record chart shop at the time, so bands would
play their set, run across Bourke Street & sign copies of their
single as the eager throng snapped them up. It was a very rock n
roll town.
So what happened? Venues like TF Much & the
Much More Ballroom opened to cater to the first generation of dope
smokers, but more about that in another column. What really happened
was that the liquor licencing laws changed, rock went into the pubs
& became part of the marketing arm of Carlton &United Breweries
& an era when the music was enough came to an end.
back
to top
|
