Metal City - Hai Ina Ia Mai Ana Ka Puana

Forgotten but not gone - Australian Progressive Rock, 1969-1975

Okay. I admit it. I promised myself that I wasn't simply going to spend my time writing endless, endless material on old records - but it's been such an interesting few days that I feel compelled to do it. Again. I'm sorry.

I wrote an article a few days ago about Australia - or the absence of Australia, really. Rather than rest on my laurels and feel all smug and superficial, I thought I'd put my money where my mouth is, and do a bit of digging into the archives of Australian rock albums. Stuff I might have missed. And lordy, was it interesting. This article is going to bore 99% of you to tears. I'm just going to get a few things down that have been kicking around inside my head over the last few days.

Steve is an incredibly cool guy. Steve gives me things. Wonderful things. Steve gives me old records - and, ironically, he has a better collection of Australian albums than anyone I know - and he doesn't even live here. I noticed he had the first two Dragon albums - Universal Radio and Scented Gardens For The Blind - and although I'd read about them many years ago, I'd never actually heard them.

They are quiet albums. The vibrant pop of their later material hadn't surfaced quite yet - they are basically unrecognizable as the band who would later do 'April Sun In Cuba' and 'Are You Old Enough?' - but there is something special about them. Something that sets them apart. There is darkness there - even though Marc Hunter's voice is still undeveloped, lacking his trademark yowl, yet the tracks do sparkle with a pop undertone. You can tell that these guys weren't going to be happy doing psychedelic mood music for too long.

I remember when I was an undergraduate student at Latrobe Uni, there was a market every week - and I became friends with the insane man who ran the second hand CD stall. For legal reasons involving the Federal Police, I can't use his name - but let's just call him Bongwater. Bongwater was a bootlegger, who got me many interesting things - which are stories for another time - but the one thing that he was especially good for was finding out about lost Australian bands. I got my first copy of The Masters Apprentices' 'A Toast From Panama Red' from him, booted from a German import CD - and it truly blew me away.

I'm wandering off the path, so I'll refocus. The point of the story was that Bongwater had a number of albums that were kicking around that I never made the leap of faith to actually buy. One of them, Buffalo's 'Volcanic Rock' had one of the most tasteless album covers I have ever seen - a volcano, the lower half of which turns into a naked female, who is menstruating lava.

Which is, ironically, probably the best way to sum up the album - which I finally listnened to today. Ever have one of those moments where something seems so familiar and perfect that you can't believe you haven't spent your entire life experiencing it? This is one of those things. 'Volcanic Rock' is exactly what it says it is - a punishing, savage collection of progressive rock, with a metallic anchor. There is something primal about it - something hot, and violent, and untamed. The guitars snap and snarl like severed electrical cables, and the whole sound seems as if it will fall apart at any second. It is cacophonous, and expansive in scope - a truly panoramic vision of sonic violence, the only comparison that I can think of being Wizzard's 'Wizzard's Brew', another album that can only be described as an act of terrorism upon the unsuspecting listener.

Anyone living in Melbourne will remember Spectrum's 'I'll Be Gone'. Remember that angular harmonica line, and those lyrics - 'Someday, I'll have money... money isn't easy to come by.. by the time it's come by, I'll be gone..'? If you've listened to a radio in the last 20 years, you will have heard it a billion times. I always wrote Spectrum off as a bad blues pastiche - but I was incredibly wrong. Spectrum's "Part One" is a superb mixture of blues, folk, and prog - and although 'I'll Be Gone' was a hit, it isn't a 300lb canary - it fits into the work in the context of the album. I remember being at Volumes in Eltham - a very snooty, upmarket coffee shop near my house - and seeing a poster for Mike Rudd and Spectrum, who were to be playing there the following month, and considering going, but wondering if I was going to wait for 'I'll Be Gone' before splitting for the bar. What in the hell was I thinking?

Remember "Boppin' The Blues"? Remember wanting to smash the radio? Me too. An insufferably annoying load of old swill, it was - but don't be so cocky as to write Blackfeather off. Just as an aside, when I was a kid at school, they used to make us listen to ABC Radio every Friday afternoon for their 'Sing' programme. Designed to get kids into music, we'd be given a bunch of books from the ABC with the words illustrated by cartoons printed in them - and we'd be bullied into limply singing along with any number of horrendous songs. 'Boppin' The Blues' was one of them - and I stilll reel in horror at the thought of a jiving Melbourne cop on the page. There was another song called 'Exterminate' in there, which went something along the lines of 'Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate all blowflies! Hit 'em with the fly spray! Pretty soon they'll go away!'. If anyone has a copy of this, email me at the usual address - it'll be good for my personal therapy to hear it one more time.

But, I digress. So, the state of play a week ago was that Blackfeather were an insufferably annoying band who had a hit that scarred me as a young boy. Steve reccomended that I download 'At The Mountains Of Madness' - and, reluctantly, I did. And in yet another moment where I realised just how much of an ignorant dimwit I can be, I became entranced. There's a song on there - 'Seasons Of Change', which everybody should hear - at least a million times. The guitar line is pure elegance - a simple, plucked, circular riff, which builds slowly over the four minutes running time into a powerhouse of massed orchestras - and a wailing, desperate vocal which literally shreds itself to pieces.

And, speaking of the Master's Apprentices, did you know that Jim Keays did a solo album? You didn't? Well - that just goes to show what a knave you really are. Yes, our Jim unleased 'The Boy From The Stars' in 1975 - a concept album about a boy coming to earth to warn humanity about blah blah whatever, or some such shit. Forget about the concept, because it makes no sense, and concentrate on the music - which presents a softer, more contemplative, but no less successful incarnation of the basic foundation of the Masters Apprentices sound. The real gem on the disc is only one minute - a snippet of 3XY's coverage of the Sunbury '75 rock festival. It is so interesting to listen to the interviewer treating Jim with such reverance - and the salient point in light of the other night's observation session is that the only foreign band present in '75 - Queen - were booed off the stage in favour of local artists. Consider this - can you imagine Nine Inch Nails or Green Day being told to pack up and fuck off in favour of Powderfinger or Grinspoon, in this day and age?

It has been interesting. A kind of alternate history of rock's development, when you think about it - if you start to trace Australian rock's chronological ascension, it parallels the developments in Europe and America, yet the purity of the music is intact. Trapped on a continent in the middle of the ocean, and ignored by the rest of the world, these people managed to operate unfettered by economic concerns - they exist simple to make the best music possible. I got into a minor scuffle with a friend of mine today over the relative standing of a Led Zeppelin in contrast with a band like Buffalo. Both were extremely good at what they did - yet do we see any VH1 retrospectives on Buffalo's career? Where are the accolades? Where are the reissues? Where are the multi page spreads in Goldmine?

Yes, Led Zeppelin are more popular. That's a given. But WHY are they more popular? What this boils down to is accessibility - and the simple fact that most of these bands were under-recorded, under-promoted, and languished in the idealism of the Australian music industry, which seemed to almost deliberately shun the notion of compromsing artistic integrity for global success. I don't begrudge Zeppelin, or Deep Purple, or any of the megabands their success. They were all fantastic at what they did. It is hard not to listen to these lost Australian records, though, and feel a little sad - the lost opportunity slaps you in the face, and it is hard to wonder where a lot of these bands would have gone, and what amazing things they could have created, if they'd been loved with a little more reverence.

Posted by David at February 17, 2004 01:02 AM | TrackBack