Larry Schwartz
Country music star Slim Dusty’s life took on a whole new direction when he adopted his moniker and started touring. Larry Schwartz reports.
ARRIVING in Italy some years ago, Slim Dusty thought he was incognito.
But no such luck. He was about to go through Customs, when he heard a compatriot yell:”Christ, Slim, what’re you doing here?.
The hat was the giveaway. When he wants to go unnoticed in Australia, the veteran country singer has only to wear sunglasses and leave the Akubra at home. “You put the hat on and most people pick you,” he says. “I go through a couple a year. There’s a waiting list for them..
The one he has with him now has clearly been knocked about. In the band is a tiny wooden hat a mate carved for him. He shows how he bashes the crown “Boom, boom,” he says and bends the brim. “The hat makes the difference. It’s the costume, really..
It is the most obvious prop in the persona he has taken on since first being drawn to country music and cowboy stars such as Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy back on his parents’ farm at Nulla Nulla Creek, near Kempsey, New South Wales.
It was there, on the Upper Macleay River that his dad grew corn, potatoes and pumpkins and raised pigs, heifers and steers. It was there, too, that young David Gordon Kirkpatrick the name that still appears on passport and official documents dreamt of breaking out of that isolated world,
briefly calling himself Buddy Bluebird.
He had swapped it for Slim Dusty by the time he wrote his first song, `The Way the Cowboy Died’, at the age of 12. In an old photograph enlarged for him, he is an exuberant 16-year-old, waving a hat in one hand as his horse rears back, the all-Australian cowboy.
Slim was a good cowboy name and Dusty, he would write in his autobiography, `Walk a Country Mile’, “something as Australian as the blowfly”.
“Slim Dusty was never just a kid’s cowboys-and-Indians play-name .
. . When I took that name, I became Slim Dusty . . . Gordon Kirkpatrick was somebody I hadn’t liked being. But Slim Dusty was a new person I could create. To me he meant freedom and a chance to leave the past behind..
He had been a shy, introverted boy who kept to himself, his imagination fired by old 78s he heard on wind-up gramophones. Gordon Kirkpatrick might not have ventured far but Slim Dusty would. “Just taking the new name gave me self-confidence and somehow changed my personality..
It is 40 years since he and songwriter wife Joy McKean, who was half of the McKean Sisters duo when they met, took to the road full-time with a travelling Slim Dusty Show playing small halls, showgrounds and theatres in country Australia that forever
linked him with the outback.
Now 67, he has just recorded his 88th album and is still on the move, averaging about three to four months on the road a year. The couple recently returned from a tour of New Zealand. “The reception was really terrific. The band and the show really blew their minds, you know..
The day before we met, he and McKean had attended the unveiling of a plaque at a scene commemorating an incident that inspired a song she had written about 20 years ago after reading a newspaper report of a truck driver who buried the remains of his wife beside the highway near
Singleton.
Upgrading the road, the Main Roads Department had avoided a tree where the Melbourne driver had left the ashes of his beloved wife who had been so close she would often accompany him or fly to meet him.
“The truckies give a blast of the horn so she’ll never be lonely, sort of thing..
In recent months, he and his wife have travelled to Western Australia and done charity shows in drought-stricken Queensland.
“It will need months and months of constant rain. Constant, continuous storms to saturate the country . . . A lot of our politicians I don’t think realise how bad it is. I think a lot of our leaders in Canberra live in another world..
TROUBLED by a few nodules on the throat some years back, Slim Dusty attributes his good health partly to a rigorous daily exercise routine shown him years ago by “a chap called Kevin”. He shows no sign of quitting and talks of two new albums next year and even more time on the road.
He and McKean live in a sturdy brick, country-style home on Sydney’s North Shore. At the back of the property is a large block with mulberry, fig, plum and other fruit trees.
When they want to go bush, they have only to hitch up a caravan to “Old Purple”, the Ford Fairlane he bought new in 1972, and drive.
In the house are paintings he has done, including one of the old family farmhouse at Nulla Nulla Creek, last visited about 10 years ago. The CD collection includes Beatles hits, Richard Clayderman, Tommy Emmanuel, Frank Sinatra and Willie Nelson. There are videos of the `Star Trek’ series
and `Fawlty Towers’.
Slim Dusty has a picture of a meeting with the Queen in Brisbane, a wooden key to Kempsey, and a framed letter acknowledging his contribution to Australia signed by each member of the federal Cabinet, dated 19 November 1986.
He took time to remember a career that began in his early teens, with a love of music partly inspired by his Irish-born father, nicknamed “Noisy Dan”, who would play the fiddle and sing at the fireside after work. By 15, he was already performing at local cinemas, broadcasting from the local
radio station, playing at rodeos, even busking.
When he played the guitar during our visit, it was mostly a three- chord strum. He talks of the “bush-ballad guitar sound” developed with musician friend Barry Thornton. “It’s a very, a very definite, direct way of playing. No frills or spills about it. It’s just playing the exact tune and not being
too fancy..
He jokes about buying a cheap guitar to wreck on-stage after a show at Tamworth Country Music Festival, the way rock stars did decades ago, and plays a version of the Rolling Stones’ `Honky Tonk Woman’, changing the location “Jackson” to “Darwin”.
He is sometimes accompanied by his son, David, a hospital administrator. Daughter Anne Kirkpatrick is a successful country performer.
He remembers his start in the business. “I was lucky. I travelled with a lot of tent shows and variety people. Jugglers and comedians.
They taught me a lot.
“It was a gradual situation in those days. You slowly climb the ladder and you establish yourself pretty solidly. But today . . . they can shoot you up so quickly and you can be shot down just as quickly..
Dusty predicts “a big explosion” in country music. “All the record companies are swinging over to putting a lot of artists on their labels. There’s going to be a bigger upsurge than we’ve ever had before..
He has written hundreds of songs, among them “about 125 gold and about 40-odd platinum”. Though his wife has penned many of the songs he plays, they generally write separately. “I think you jinx it. When you have that finished product, then you can discuss it. It’s a very private thing..
Winner of 28 gold guitars at the Tamworth festival, his memorabilia are on display this month at the first exhibition of memorabilia in its new Country Music Archive Museum.
There will also be the Gibson guitar he hauls out from a music room above the garage, with which he recorded his 1958 hit `Pub with No Beer’, a song by friend Gordon Parsons based on a poem by Queensland Irishman Dan Shean that became the only Australian 78 gold record.
He tells of the time he found a pub with no beer in a small town in western Queensland. “All the locals thought the song was very amusing and for the first time people listened. You don’t get that much response.
“So we said to the constable, `This new song seems to be tickling the fancy of the locals.’ He said, `Ah, why not? During the wet season the trucks couldn’t get through with the beer. So they went for a month without beer.’ So they understood the situation really well..
“Heh heh.” Softly, humorlessly, Slim Dusty was laughing. “Heh heh.” He reverses out Old Purple and is posing for photographs in the garage.
“Heh heh heh.” You wonder what the joke is, then realise the forced laughter is a trick of the trade the veteran performer has learnt to maintain a cheery look in front of the camera.
Slim Dusty might think he has left behind him forever the childhood self of the son of an Irish-born farmer, the shy Kirkpatrick whose heraldic motto is the bold “I make sure..
There is more Slim Dusty in Gordon Kirkpatrick than you would glean simply from the hat, gold collar clips, leather waistcoat, suede boots and guitars. He stands there, trying to remember the names of Australians honored with him in a special award as “living treasures”. Sir Donald
Bradman, Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke. Pause.
Probably not Hawke, he decides.
When I ask about being an Australian icon, he smiles: “I don’t think too much about it. You just do you job and continue on. Don’t believe your own publicity too much.” Was that Slim Dusty talking? Or David Gordon Kirkpatrick after all?
THE SUNDAY AGE, 22nd of January 1995
Larry Schwartz Writer 