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RRR
RRR’s imminent move to new premises in
Brunswick will mark both the end of an era for the station &
a personal one for me. My involvement with RRR as a broadcaster
began at the current building, although I had been listening for
years prior to that, visiting the station’s Cardigan St inverted
matchbox size terrace house only once to pick up my bribe to subscribe,
an album & tickets to Snakefinger’s show at Melbourne
Uni. When they had to leave that site, Victoria Street was not yet
ready & the station briefly broadcast from breakfast announcer
Helen Thomas’ Carlton house front bedroom with presenters
climbing in & out of the window day & night. Typical of
the gonzo determination & indomitable sense of mission that
people involved with the station had at the time.
But my attachment to Victoria St actually preceded my RRR involvement,
for it was there years before that I had actually bought my first
punk records, a life changing experience, almost directly under
the current studio that I have broadcast from so often over so many
years.
In the late 70s the entire building in which RRR currently resides,
was transformed from a then unwanted factory/warehouse into The
Universal Workshop, an incredibly ambitious project based on hippie
ideals in action. Theatre spaces, galleries, restaurants & studio
spaces were all set up for the community to utilise as they saw
fit, by what was rumoured to be a bunch of groovy lawyers who had
got rich from defending dope cases or Rastafarian Scientologists,
depending who you heard it from.
The latter theory was perhaps borne out by the
massive ground floor area that was open seemingly 24 hours a day,
an enormous counter area from where coffee & toasted sandwiches
flowed to the throngs of hippie/punks who had no where else to hang
out for free, talking, smoking & being entertained/annoyed by
a raggle taggle bunch of sub busker performers who took to the small
stage in the corner whenever inspiration hit. All of this was dominated
by the seemingly hundreds of ridiculously heavy & uncomfortable
high backed chairs all painted in Rastafarian colours that crowded
the space. Leading off this area was a corridor that led to a flea
market still in the hippie era , but on either side of it were cupboard
sized rooms that were let as shops, so they actually sold stuff
that was worth something & merited the occasional browse to
escape the ambience of the enormous room.
And it was here that the couple of hundred records
masquerading as a shop called Climax Records for some reason had
found a home. This in the day where alternative was a choice rather
than a lifestyle & the new music being played on RRR or written
about in NME was simply not available, the import stores few as
they were still caught in the Little Feat /country rock post hippie
style. Here was this shop jammed between a homemade hammock shop
& flea market tat that had the records, most particularly those
soon to be fetishised 7 inch singles on small labels & the early
albums all coming out of the English punk rock & D.I.Y. explosion
seemingly vibrating with the amphetamine sulphate that fuelled it.
It was that fresh. Here I could get the Sex Pistols, The Jam, The
Clash, The Motors, and The Adverts that I craved & the rest
of this corner of the world had no idea of what was to hit it.
The shop seemed so at odds with the culture of
the workshop around it, a clash of tie dye & leather jackets.
You hardly ever saw anyone in there except for the occasional hippie
flicking through the racks, which didn’t take long & not
recognizing any of the artists & maybe asking if they had the
new Jesse Winchester album, only to be turned away with a civil
sneer. It was my kind of shop!
Unfortunately the Universal Workshop had as a
neighbour an ex Mayor of Fitzroy who managed to hound them out of
existence, complaining loud & long about anything & everything
about it until the council put in the traffic hazards that still
exist in the street & revoked their permits to operate. In the
early days of RRR’s tenancy he used to complain about the
volume of the monitor speakers on the Commander telephones in the
office!
Well you could get rid of the hippies but not
the punk rock scum, even though you could fit them all into one
smelly telephone booth. Climax Records resurfaced in the then run
down end of Gertrude Street near Rathdowne Street. A brisk walk
from the city! And you didn’t have to put up with the hippies!
Only each other! I remember loitering around the shop with a couple
of other sociopaths, smoking, looking studiously bored, a complete
absence of small or large talk, disinterested & disaffected.
On the outside at least. Inside we were all eagerly awaiting like
little boys the opening of the boxes on the floor that had arrived
that day, full no doubt of 7” one chord wonders & precocious
genius. The tension was palpable as we pretended not to look at
artifacts like John Cooper Clarkes’ Gimmix in the shape of
a plectrum, Brian Eno’s set of Oblique Strategy cards &
10’’ samplers .We could hardly stand it!
The shop lasted a couple of weeks but left a
permanent mark on my record collection. All right! & On my life!
Another record emporium that also shaped my musical
mind was a broom cupboard size shop in the corner of the Port Phillip
Arcade in the City called Pipe Records. It specialised in German
music, Kraut Rock, hard to find elsewhere in Melbourne. It was music
barely mentioned by the music press but frequently referred to by
people like John Lydon, Pete Shelley, Howard De Voto & others
who dropped names like Can, Faust & Cluster into interviews
& press releases & tweaked the curiousity of young aussie
blokes like me. The entire outer wall/window of the shop was covered
by record covers with ultra cosmic art & pretentious names.
Oh & the shop seemed to exude a sort of low rumble hum that
from the outside that was barely discernible as music but once inside
vibrated your eyeballs with low frequency bass & electronic
blips & beeps oscillating out of the speakers that each had
built in a light show! People you’d never heard of stuffed
the racks with records & the shop was full with more than 4
or 5 people in it.
But the dominant feature of the shop was the looming
presence of the owner, who I came to know as Daniel & often
referred to as the Black Russian, an incredibly dark almost sinister
presence who had an intimidating stare & almost menacing disposition
behind the counter & who would have a disgusted look on his
face if he disapproved of your choice of record. Or if you ventured
too close & it was hard not to be, would put a pair of headphones
on you & growl in teutonic tones “You Vill Lissen To Dis!”
before he turned up the volume to supersonic levels & fixed
you with a lupine glower. It was intense! And he was between you
& the exit! I should perhaps mention here that I had as I often
did, come into the city on a record & bookshop reconnoitre &
paused to smoke a pre rolled joint at a tram stop loitering with
casual aplomb before crossing Swanston Street into my first port
of call ….Pipe Records ! So it was never a fair test of wills
& as a result I have the pleasure of Can, Faust, Neu, La Dusseldorf,
Die Krupps & other musical gems in my record collection &
my recollection.
In the early 80s hip hop was the most exciting
thing on musical offer, even though most of my peers & no doubt
quite a few listeners disagreed , I connected with it big time in
a white boy kind of a way. Echoes of Burroughsian cut up techniques
& abstract sound collaging, of using the history of recorded
music as raw material, the beat as only understood & mastered
by black musicians, the incantantory play with language & rhyme,
the evolution of a new voice, the primitive & the sophisticated,
it was all there. I had bumped into “The Adventures Of Grandmaster
Flash & The Wheels Of Steel “by accident & craved
more, but where to get it in Melbourne? The places I bought my “rock
“ records at didn’t stock it or didn’t want to,
they were kind of antagonised by it. Outsider music. This was back
in the day when we had a city square, a grey edifice that also incorporated
a number of shops including Central Station Records, a shop that
specialised in disco music, you could tell that you were getting
closer to it’s portals, the dull thud of the disco beat reverberating
through the concrete & the sharp dressed young Greek & Italian
kids who hung harmlessly around living out their post Saturday Night
Fever fantasies.
Perhaps this place could be my hip-hop connection?
I mean hip hop was kind of dance music after all. So I wandered
into the shop. The only Anglo with a blond Iggy kind of shag that
I ever saw in there, on my first & subsequent visits was me
& I was immediately sonically transported against my will to
some disco hell dancefloor I didn’t want to be on, surrounded
by sharp dressed youths all with a “what the hell are you
doing in here?” looks on their faces, while I tried to navigate
walls of 12” singles from people I’d never heard of
& going by the covers, people that I would ever want to be seen
with. Everybody seemed to know each other but me. Finally through
trial & error & having given up thinking I could ask anyone
for directions or that they spoke my language, I stumbled upon the
2 racks amongst the hundreds that was labelled hip hop/rap. And
there they were, the early 12” releases for LL Cool J, Public
Enemy, Beastie Boys in the bold Black Def Jam covers, first albums
for them also plus Eric B & Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Dougie Fresh
& more.
It was a golden era & each week when I went
in it was like a wishing tree where a new treat would appear time
after time. I still play those treasured artifacts on the show &
they still mark in my opinion a high point of musical creativity
& cultural subversion. Sometimes feeling out of place is the
right place to be.
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