Kids in a thousand garage bands dream of getting a regular pub gig. Larry Schwartz discovers that even then it’s a long way to the top.
“So you want to be a rock ‘n’ roll star?
Then listen now to what I say.
Just get an electric guitar.
Then take some time.
And learn how to play.
And with your hair swung right.
And your pants too tight.
It’s gonna be all right.”
(`So You Wanna Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’ – Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman).
THE DRUMMER is thickset with a goatee beard. Smoke from his lips hovers in a blue stage light. His sticks seem to move at will.
Late night at the Punters Club Hotel in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. A harmonica wails; a slide guitar rings. Blonde hair asparkle, Barb Waters edges up to the mike. “Don’t listen to what they say,” she sings.
The music is great but the crowd is dwindling. Someone claps and yells a lame “whoo”. Waters and her Rough Diamonds battle on. “Darling, tell me true have you forgotten?” she sings.
“All those promises that we made.”
Someone chalks a pool cue. Colored balls scatter on green baize. Someone guns a video-game race car. “Race Leader,” the red-and-orange sign flashes. The pinball machine lights up: “Skill shot.” Bing, bing.
Waters is respected in the local music scene. She sings songs of country-inflected, roots-rock beauty. She wields a big acoustic steel-string, slung about her small frame, then a shiny electric, telling the crowd: “We can rock when we have to”.
This after offering $5, later upped to $6.50, to anyone willing to “pull the plug on those machines”. There’s even a discount on CDs on sale after the show. None sell.
“I’ll never walk this way again,” Waters sings. “I won’t be coming back this way again.”
But you know she will.
Such is the life of a working musician in Australia today.
For all the fanfare that greets the international success of a silverchair and the kudos that goes to those who make a name overseas – Midnight Oil, INXS, the Church, Little River Band, Air Supply, Peter Allen, Olivia Newton-John, AC/DC, the Easybeats, Kylie Minogue et al – a horde of lesser
knowns receive little reward, financial or otherwise.
Many will forgo the Musicians Union of Australia’s minimum fees: $83.61 per player before midnight for a minimum three- hour gig, time-and-a-half after midnight, double time on Sundays and public holidays. Many survive on the dole.
STILL, there must be money to pay for the PA, lights, the roadies, management commission, radio and press ads, street posters, handbills.
Waters and co receive $2 of every $3 patrons pay to enter the cavernous rooms at the rear of the pub. Minus $150 they have agreed to pay for the the upbeat opening band, Blackthorn Stick, a five-piece Bendigo outfit whose iconoclastic approach to Celtic music has raised the ire of
traditionalists while pleasing the rock crowd.
Though Waters will later insist the turnout of 100 is reasonable for a mid-week show, little is left over for her and the Diamonds.
With the advent of poker machines, bands are being squeezed out of the traditional rock venue, the pub. Some hotels, including the Punters Club, are now under pressure from the Liquor Licensing Commission to keep crowds down to numbers stipulated on official permits that organisers
say are inappropriate.
Against the odds, new bands continue to reach for bigger audiences. Magic Dirt, from Geelong, has released two EPs on the small independent label Au Go Go, and is set to sign an overseas deal. But, at a time of restraint and caution, it’s tempting for the labels to become conservative
purveyors of proven pop success and avoid risk.
As general manager of Michael Gudinski Management, Ian Smith looks after the interests of Jimmy Barnes and Diesel. He believes that with fewer opportunities to play at pubs, bands must make an increasingly difficult leap from the suburban garage to success.
Smith characterises the adulation accorded to Newcastle’s silverchair as the ultimate Aussie dream. “I’m young. I came out of my garage with a few songs. Everyone loves them . .
.”
What then was the secret of their success? “Mate, if I knew I wouldn’t be sitting here. I’d be sitting in the Bahamas on a big boat.”
Richard Moffatt heads an independent label, Way Over There.
Its bands include The Body Electric and Breather Hole. He also books bands at The Punters Club and The Corner Hotel in Richmond. “If a new band rings me up and says,`We want work’, I just feel like saying, `Look you are silly to think of it as work’,” he says.
In many cases, you have to be willing to persevere for years with meagre pay “and eventually some luck does start to happen.
” To Moffatt, only one in 1000 bands might have some success.
The rest play a half dozen gigs and have a good time. “That is the reality of it. That’s what it’s all about.”
A telephone psychic with a $6-a-minute service, Cobina Crawford, 19, is bass guitar player with a band called Sourpuss. She is one of 240 young Melbourne musicians who frequent the non- profit Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, in Richmond. Her band has a single out with the independent label
Fellaheen.
“Of course, everyone says Yeah I’m into it for the playing the music,” she says. “But fame is very seductive and I’m sure that not one person who picks up the guitar isn’t seduced by the imagery associated with it. They wouldn’t have started in the first place.”
Meanwhile real talent is ignored or discouraged by an album- buying public that favors overseas artists and sticks with user-friendly veterans: Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Billy Joel and so on.
Gus Macmillan, 29, played electric guitar and flute with a seven-piece band called Barroworn that mixed Celtic and Australian influences on a critically acclaimed album last year. But the the glorious, folksy, 18-track `Mangowak Days’ did not sell well and the band owes about $5000 of the
$12, 000 borrowed to make the recording.
Macmillan now plays regularly with a group called the Blue Grassy Knoll. He has also managed bands and worked as venue promoter for the Empress Hotel, in North Fitzroy. He has not been tempted to forsake his precarious vocation for the security of a day job. It’s not the frenzy of fans
that he pursues but “that magical moment when you are actually watching yourself playing and you have no idea what’s going to happen next. You feel that you are completely connected to everybody else in the room. You can’t plan it. You’ve got to wait and hope that that happens.”
He has no illusions about popular success. “I realised long ago that the rock ‘n’ roll dream is not a realistic one and it’s not particularly desirable one either,” he says.
“. . . to me, what’s really important is to play really good music and support myself on that.”
The Rough Diamonds finish their Punters Club set at midnight.
Someone yells. “One more for the road.” Too late. They are gone.
BARB WATERS has worked as a secondary school teacher and, in recent years, a waitress. She has had relatively little return from four CDs.
“I thought it would be pretty exciting and it was for six months,” she says. “And then the reality started setting in and it hasn’t stopped since . . . It was the 1980s and friends of mine were getting big record deals and chunky publishing advances. But that stopped.
“Maybe I had some expectation that that would happen for the Rough Diamonds. And it hasn’t.”
Nor can the established stars in the local firmament rest easy. Richard Clapton is still regarded in some quarters as among Australia’s finest rock lyricists. He says his albums have rarely sold fewer than 20,000 copies and one, `The Great Escape’ (1982), almost 80,000. He claims that, with the
release of each new album, 2000 or more of his older works sell.
But frustrated by his inability to make headway in the 1990s, he paid about $15,000 to set up recording equipment in his Queensland home and found 20 investors from outside the industry to finance a new album, `Angeltown’, recorded with a little help
from friends including Diesel and distributed through Village Roadshow.
“There’s no Australian musician young or old,” he says, ” – or you can count them on one hand – who are actually earning any kind of living.
“A young musician would earn zilch, absolutely not a cent.
With my generation, it’s almost as though because the last one and-a-half years have suddenly gone very tough . . . we’re not earning a living at all. I’m just scraping by week to week. And, being married with children, it makes life almost impossible.”
Others say Clapton is overstating the case. “There’s a fair few middle-level musos making a reasonable living,” says Pete Steedman, executive director of Ausmusic.
But the domestic market is limited and, although he is heartened by the international interest in a recent compilation put out in conjunction with Triple M and featuring groups such as Pollyanna, the Meanies and Magic Dirt, Steedman concedes Australia has “never had more than four or
five (bands), maybe 10 all up at different times, making real dough overseas”.
Many artists look beyond our shores. Some heavy metal bands hardly known here have a big following in parts of Europe.
Young dance bands are making it big in Asia. To ex-Masters Apprentices frontman Jim Keays, Europe has become the only escape route. He’s off to England in a few days, hoping to release an album, `Pressure Makes Diamonds’, in Germany.
At 49, Keays relies on royalties for old songs to boost his modest earnings. ‘Because I Love You’ has been used in a jeans ad; ‘Turn Up Your Radio’ by a brewer. He says he has been in the industry for “31 years and it is a miracle I survive, honestly”.
As Ian Smith says, few enjoy a long career in the music industry. “You can’t last forever. In this industry, if you last five years, you are doing well. If you last 10, let me know how you’ve done it.”
Albums by veteran singer-songwriter Broderick Smith sell between 3000 and 5000 copies. Someone has approached an American folk label on his behalf. Not for him the conventional rock dream. As a youngster he wanted to change places with Muddy Waters’ son and had a recurring
nightmare of being invited to play with Joe Zawinul, of Weather Report, but failing because the music was too complex.
“When you’re young, you either spend a lot of time dressing up in codpieces or you actually get off on the music,” the ex-Dingo says. “The ones who get off on the music generally stay with it. The other ones generally end up as floor walkers in department stores or TV quiz show hosts.”
Some will seek record deals with the independents. Others might make it to the majors. Many are electing to publish their own albums.
In a useful guide for young musicians, The Push music organisation gives the following breakdown for releases through distributors: CD retail price $30; minus 30 per cent retailer margin, $21; minus 21 per cent sales tax, $16.59; minus 25 per cent distributor’s fee, $12.44.
“Looks terrible,” the guide says. “But if you’re getting airplay, a good response from the public and no bites from record companies, it’s probably the best alternative.”
Richard Clapton is hardly unique in recording his own work.
But he sees his approach as an example that can free others from dependence on record companies. Then again, where to find investors ready to punt on an unknown?
“Richard Clapton can do it now because Richard Clapton’s got a name,” says Stephanie Bourke, a classically trained pianist turned drummer with the band Hecate who runs the Richmond- based Rock ‘n’ Roll High School.
“If Richard Clapton had done it when he was 16 and pimply, it would have been a lot harder.”
At 14, Erin Jones is lead singer and rhythm guitarist with a four-piece band, Tuff Muff. Its music is “punk rock, pretty heavy,” she says.
She has rock ‘n’ roll dreams befitting her times. “Basically, I’d just like to see myself with a good amp, a good guitar and the rest of the band having good equipment. To do a show when we want to do a show and have a couple of releases out on an independent label that you can trust.
“It’s one of those kids’ dreams,” she says. “(Maybe) it’ll never happen. But hopefully I will get a good amp.”
The Sunday Age 02nd of June 1996
Larry Schwartz Writer 