Facing the music

By Larry Schwartz

HAD AN UNKNOWN motorcyclist not crashed into a 14-year-old Billy Pinnell, breaking both legs and causing him to miss a year of schooling, he might have ended up in another line of work.

“All I knew was sport and music,” says Pinnell, 55, who has lost neither his early passion for the Magpies nor an eclectic taste in music that has him enthusing about Pearl Jam one moment, John Coltrane the next. “So I had to find a job that had to do with either of those two subjects.”

Forty years have passed since Pinnell emerged from calipers and plaster to embark on a radio career. “It wasn’t to be a radio announcer,” he says of the lure of the airwaves. “It never was. It was to get involved in the music.”

Whether as music director at 3KZ, where he started out as office boy, or hosting his popular Album Show on Triple M later, he has exerted a huge influence on music radio.

Though out of work at times, he remains one of the most respected voices, with a daily segment on Ernie Sigley’s show on 3AW, fortnightly comment on Brian Wise’s Off The Record on Triple R, and a regular stint on 3RPH, Radio For The Print Handicapped. “What I hated and still do was for people to take whatever I’ve done seriously,” says Pinnell, who also coordinates inflight music and comedy programs for Ansett. “I like what I’m doing. But to be called the rock brain or the rock guru doesn’t sit comfortably with me.”

He prefers the tag used by friends during a stint on the D-Generation in the ’80s. “They always referred to me as the rock boofhead and I loved that. I thought that was fantastic. The boofhead of rock, there he is…”

He is small in stature, quietly spoken. Anyone who knows the voice will have a different expectation. When we sit down to talk in a South Yarra coffee shop, he is less interested in talking about himself than thanking others who have stood by him.

It says something about the man and his values when he describes D-Generation alumni at Working Dog, for instance, as “people who aren’t just the most creative people in their field but you ask anyone who has worked with them what they’re like as human beings. And that’s more important in the scheme of things…”

It epitomises his own approach. Who else would have taken the trouble, without fanfare, to arrange decades back for an intellectually disabled child of a friend to meet his biggest hero, Johnny O’Keefe?

There was no publicity, no fanfare. Just the “Wild One”, the boy and his parents, radio show host John Bright and himself. O’Keefe sang, at the boy’s request, a song called I’m Counting On You. “No one would ever hear about that. So that was what Johnny O’Keefe was. I’m sure he was a lot of other things too. He was a very complex character. But the kindness he showed that day was what John was about in lots of ways.” Billy Pinnell too, perhaps.

HE’S the eldest of three sons of an Abbotsford laborer who supplemented his income as an SP bookmaker. There was not much money in the household when a teenage Pinnell contemplated the need to join the workforce.

“It was financially tough back then. We had a grocer who would let us put our stuff on the slate until my dad got paid at the end of the week.”

His parents spent hard-earned cash on a rare luxury in his neighborhood. “We were one of the first families in the street to have a television,” he says. “Kids from houses that didn’t have a black-and-white TV would march down to our house. And we might have 20 kids – I’m not exaggerating – sitting on the floor in the loungeroom, watching the TV.”

Ernie Sigley, who now has him on his show, had a program called Teenage Mailbag. “People would write in their favorite song so that he could sing them. There were no film clips in those days and the artists weren’t available to sing on the show. So Ernie and a girl called Heather Horwood, who was his partner in that show, would sing.”

Sigley had a show on a Sunday morning on 3DB on which he’d play the top songs of the week. After Buddy Holly died in a plane crash on 3 February 1959, one of his songs, It Doesn’t Matter Anymore, made it to the top of the US charts.

Sigley told his listeners he would play it the following week. “I thought, `Oh crikey, I hope he plays that song’. I tuned in the next week and he actually played it. And that was one of my earliest memories of the powers of DJs.”

KZ had its studios at Trades Hall, Lygon Street, Carlton. Its offices were in Elizabeth Street. On his first job, Pinnell spent much of his time delivering tapes from one to the other. Between putting money in the announcers’ car meters and buying their lunches, he’d hang out at the studio’s library, listening to music, encouraged by Neville Ragg, who had a “nostalgia show” on 3AW.

Then there was the legendary DJ, Stan Rofe, who helped spark interest in the likes of Normie Rowe, Merv Benton and Johnny Chester, organising record deals, suggesting songs, playing them on his show. “He introduced people to rock ‘n’ roll music in this town.”

PINNELL would remain at KZ for 21 years, until lured by an offer from a fledgling FM station that was later known as Triple M. Moving from AM to Melbourne’s first FM station, he says, “would have been like going from black-and-white to color TV”.

He was able to broaden his approach. “They wanted to introduce a Sunday night show where the music could be expanded. Instead of playing the hit single by a particular act, you could play something else.

“You could play acts that didn’t have hits, like Little Feat. I thought it was a great idea. I didn’t know that it was me that was going to actually host the program until a couple of weeks before. Because I’ve got no technical expertise at all – if I turn a light switch on successfully there’s a round of applause – I never even thought of doing a show of my own.

“So they gave me someone who would do the panelling for me. I had pretty much autonomy on what I could play. I could do the interviews myself, produce the show. I was given a free hand.”

He can’t remember if the first to stop by at the studio for an interview was David Bromberg, Ralph Towner or Michael Franks. “Of course, I said yes to everyone. I would interview Bruce Dickinson, the singer from Iron Maiden, the same week as I interviewed Herbie Mann or B.B. King. It didn’t matter to me. They were all part of contemporary music and I had no negative bias. I talked to anyone and everyone.”

ONE of his favorite interviewees was Iggy Pop, former leader of the Stooges. “First of all I couldn’t imagine myself calling him Iggy. because his name’s Jim Osterberg. And there’s so much more to Iggy than smearing himself with peanut butter or cutting himself with the edge of a microphone stand. There’s all this music he’d written and recorded.

“So when he sat down, I said, `Do you mind if I call you Jim and not Iggy?’ And he said, `Ah no, I’d love you to call me that’. Immediately he became relaxed… Here he was with this lovely Japanese lady who was his wife. He pulled her chair out for her and sat her down and said, `Would you like a cup of tea?’ He was so loving to his wife. I thought that was quite extraordinary. It shouldn’t have been. It was for someone who had this image of being a man with a lot of personal, drug and alcohol problems.”

Iggy Pop revealed that he based his approach to band members on jazzman Charlie Parker. “Parker would say to one of his sidemen, `Play a sunrise’. So whoever it was would play something he could associate with a sunrise. He (Osterberg) would say to his players, `play linoleum’ and give them some abstract instruction that they would elaborate on.”

Pinnell has tried to focus on the music, less interested in drugs or divorce, what he calls “the seamy side”.

Then there was Dee Snyder, of the metal band Twisted Sister, who talked about being a classically trained singer who had sung opera.

“He lived on Long Island, where a lot of street gangs were. He said he was so afraid of being beaten up because he was taking classical lessons that he started singing rock ‘n’ roll. He was interesting to talk to because you can get behind the image.”

Pinnell laments a lack of opportunity for new music to get played on commercial FM stations these days, he’s not just talking about younger bands. “I just feel a bit for a Mark Seymour or an Archie Roach or whoever it might be who makes great music but no one gets to hear.

“Whereas when FM began that’s what they wanted to do…to at least temper the older stuff with new music.”

He wonders if record companies will persevere with a world-class musician of the stature of Melbourne’s Chris Wilson. He attributes the failure of Wilson’s extraordinary last album, The Long Weekend, to the fact that few would have heard it on radio. “The alternate stations play it which is great. Triple R play it, PBS. But they haven’t got the audience that commercial stations have. It’s just a shame that they’re so conservative in their programing. That’s a sign of the times.”

The Age, 01-Apr-1999