| WE ARE STARDUST
/WE ARE GOLDEN
With the outdoor music festival season drawing
to a close & the East Coast Blues & Roots Music Festival
into it’s 26th year, growing from a cramped hall with 6,000
people in it’s first year to the sprawling 5 day international
event of today, got me remembering the beginnings of the outdoor
music festival culture in Australia.
It wasn’t exactly “ going on down
to Yasgur’s farm “ nor were we “ half a million
strong “ as Joni trille, but a couple of months after Woodstock,
it was Australia’s first rock festival, Pilgrimage For Pop,
held on the weekend of January 24th & 25th 1970. About 5000
hippies, freaks & music fanatics crossed enemy territory by
thumb or wheels (if you had longhair/beard/tiedye/beads back then
everywhere felt like enemy territory!) to a small farmlet in the
smalltown of Ourimbah on the north coast of NSW to watch the cream
of the crop of the Australian underground scene, Billy Thorpe &
The Aztecs, Taman Shud, Max Merrit & The Meteors, Tully, Wendy
Saddington & a half dozen others.
The concert opened with The Nutwood Rug Band,
a bunch of trust funded draft dodging Americans who dropped out
to Australia & who’s property it was held on, while a
pall of dope smoke & paranoia hovered over the Hobbit-like clusters
of non beer drinking hippies baking in 40 degree heat. There seemed
so few of us, the mass assemblage that we had all hoped for didn’t
happen & with over 90 police surveiling the scene, left us feeling
vulnerable & exposed while we munched on homemade vegeburgers
& tried to dig the scene as much as we could, lacking the anomnity
of numbers. Any girl daring to go topless would immediately hear
the sounds of the press cameras clicking at their scoop for the
Sunday papers.
Although Melbourne had embraced Billy Thorpe’s
transformation into a ponytailed bearded denimed high volume blues
rocker over the past couple of months, it was the first time that
he had played interstate & shocked a lot of the laidback earth
chidren before they finally succumbed to his high decibel energy.
It was also the first post Easybeats gig for Stevie Wright who played
with a thankfully short lived band with the appropriately name,
Rachette. As to the facilities, from what I can remember (I was
stoned and/or tripping a lot of the time) it was a small stage with
rudimentary sound & lights, a makeshift market selling vegetarian
food & patchouli oil & that was about it. No toilets/ showers,
just a walk into the bush. There were few arrests, no disasters,
no weddings or childbirths, just a surprisingly short weekend of
music put on by a bunch of true believers for seemingly no profit.
And there were no piles of beer cans left behind.
12 months later in December 1970, a second rock
festival, the Launching Place Festival, the first for Victoria,
once again with an all Australian bill, would provide a cautionary
lesson for promoters of outdoor events in Australia. The weather.
In contrast to the Ourimbah heat, the skies opened up over the gently
wooded site in Launching Place north of Melbourne on the Friday
night, & the rain just didn’t stop. It was abandoned on
the Saturday morning after a courageous Wendy Saddington performed
& we left, a disappointed bedraggled bunch of a thousand or
so, while someone with a sense of humour played Donovan’s
“Atlantis “ over the PA. Spectrum got a great song out
of it however, so it wasn’t a total loss.
But it didn’t deter the promoters, who inspired
by their Ourimbah experience, staged The Oddysey Pop Festival at
Wallacia in a green valley, near the Blue Mountains on the following
January. My favourite festival, even though the toilets didn’t
arrive until the Saturday & due to a lack of electricity, the
music didn’t start until midnight on the Friday, but the bands
then played all night until Tully’s ethereal acoustic sounds
welcomed the dawn. Once again it was an all Australian bill that
included Thorpie & Wendy Saddington again, plus Chain, Spectrum,
Daddy Cool, playing interstate for the first time & 20 more
non Top 40 bands. After each band had performed, fired by dope,
speed & psychedelics, there seemed to be a continuous on stage
jam going on in front of 10,000 or so enthusiatic gremlins.
A beatific Billy Thorpe in particular seemed to
be playing on stage 24 hours a day. The site was really friendly,
an enormous flea market ringed the natural amphitheatre offering
a range of exotic food & clothes, there were lots of great camp
sites, although I think I slept where I sat, in front of the stage,
in spite of the pounding PA. Once again beer was overtaken by more
herbal relaxants, so there was no aggro, no drunken mess, while
policing was discreet. Everyone had a real good time. Monday morning,
got a lift to the local train station & sat opposite goggle
eyed commuters on the trip back to Sydney & then the long hitch
home with a smile on my face.
Got back to Melbourne on Tuesday night & Thursday
moming I was on the highway to Adelaide with my thumb out, on the
way to “The Australian Festival Of Progressive Music “
at Myponga, a barren paddock in the middle of nowheresville South
Australia. The first festival to have overseas headliners, this
time the ying & yang of Cat Stevens, who didn’t turn up
& Black Sabbath, as well the usual suspects from the previous
festivals & 20 other performers from folk to jazz & beyond.
And it all went surprisingly well in spite of the terrible site,
with Daddy Cool getting the first glimpse of the wave that would
sweep them to the top, Spectrum transfixing the 15,000 audience
with their prog rock while the Sabbs hit us with smoke machines,
strobes & high decibel rage (even louder than The Aztecs) the
likes of which had never been seen or heard in Australia before,
plus Ozzie’s over the top banshee wail. Everyone was stoned
stunned.Oh, the other entertainment was the almost street theatre
like constant approaches of the Adelaide “undercover“
cops sidling up to you in their short sleeved shirts, corduroy trousers
& the hair struggling to cover their perma pressed parts asking
you “ Can you get any drugs? “ It was hilarious. Great
time, wrong place.
And then came the mud, the blood & the beer
of Sunbury. But we’ll leave that for another column...
Writing this article I was reminded of the late
poet, playwright, muse, cultural guerilla & pioneer, Adrian
Rawlins who compered all of those festivals & recorded with
Black Sabbath while they were here.
Rest In Peace
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