For Karen, Alex and Dylan.
Ross ‘Hanna’ Hannaford parked his car in the street at the front of my house in Melbourne’s Fitzroy North. From my front window I watched him open his driver’s-side door and unravel from the front seat. It was 2001 and his wardrobe for the evening was all you’d expect: an orange beanie; a green oversized pullover under a navy blue velvet smoking jacket; large blue harem trousers, tucked into a pair of knee-length gold boots; a long red and yellow scarf wrapped around his neck. I walked to the gate to meet him, beaming.
‘G’day Ross, how are you mate?’
‘Hey Craig!’ said Hanna, his familiar deep, throaty drawl cutting through the midwinter gloom.
We walked to the rear of his little white Japanese wagon and began unloading his gear into my Toyota parked a few spots up the road. I pulled his two Vox AC15s out of the back and followed him as he lugged his effects board and Chandler guitar toward my wagon—a bulging shoulder bag bounced on his left hip.
‘Where are we playing tonight, man?’ he asked
‘Hepburn Springs, the Palais Theatre, remember?’
‘Yeah, yeah right, Wayne and Gary are playin’ too, yeah?’
‘Yep they are, it’ll be a great night, the venue’s had good ticket sales and the room we play in is gorgeous.’ The Palais was built in the 1920s and it has one of the last remaining sprung dance floors in the country. ‘Plus,’ I added, ‘they’re feeding and watering us, so all good mate.’
I had called Hanna to once again sit in with my band, The Hornets, who at that time featured his former Daddy Cool band mates: bassist Wayne Duncan and drummer, Gary Young. Guitarist and co-band founder, Jeff Burstin, was also in the mix. Jeff had played with Hanna in Gary’s Rocking Emus immediately after Daddy Cool called it quits in 1974. Jeff was unavailable for the Hepburn Springs gig so Hanna agreed to fill in.
Hanna and I had had a history that stretched back to the mid-seventies, we had even recorded a cassette album together a couple of years prior to this gig, but it was only in the last year or two that we had started playing the odd show together. I was looking forward to the night, especially playing with two thirds of my all-time favourite Australian band.
We drove along the Tullamarine Freeway towards the Western Ring Road exit with Hanna, all the while, reaching into his shoulder bag and extracting mandarin after mandarin; he must have demolished over a dozen in under half an hour.
‘These are great man, they’re the best thing about winter, so sweet and healthy, I love ’em …’
With his citrus cravings sated, he pulled a giant stash of dope out of his bottomless bag and filled the car with a memory from the old 1970s Cannabis Research Foundation. Just as his bazooka-sized joint was rolled and lit a police car zoomed by. If the police had bothered to check their rear-vision mirror they would have seen my weeping eyes peering through smoke dreams, and me trying to keep the car wheels straight and the speedo needle fixed—like a primordial vibration—on one hundred cosmic clicks.
Hanna and I pulled up outside the Hepburn Springs Art Deco-era dancehall where a clutch of punters huddled around a couple braziers burning at the front entrance. Gary and Wayne sidled up to the car …
‘Hanna mate!’ It was Wayne, his familiar index finger waggling in Hanna’s direction. Gary laughed as the three men embraced. I stood back and observed a piece of Australian rock and roll history. These three men had been an integral part of the local Melbourne and wider Australian music scene for nearly four decades. Their collective history was almost corporeal—made visible by the shared experience of beer barns and gold records, world tours and sticky stages illuminated by psychedelic lighting, and days and nights driving to Sydney stuck between speaker boxes, a ruffled stack of screen printed t-shirts and a kick drum case. It was a rich and potent history infused with the sound of a thousand audiences howling and joyful. It made the three men appear conjoined, a crazy collective of middle-aged teenagers. I realised that even though I was the singer and co-founder of a band that bore my name, even though I had co-written the songs and chosen the set list, organised the gig, driven the car, and even though I too had a long history of playing rock and roll in Melbourne’s pubs and clubs and at festivals since the very early seventies, I was not part of this rarefied world. Theirs was an exclusive club and I felt privileged to be allowed honorary membership, even if only for a night.
We set the gear up on stage, ran through a song as a cursory sound check, then disappeared to the green room to wait for our complimentary meal and relax before the show. When a manager delivered the food he asked what we would like to drink; the usual red or white wine was on offer, a beer or two. Hanna looked at the young man, obviously sizing him up and asked, ‘Hey man, got any Stolichnaya vodka?’
‘Yes maybe.’
‘I’ll have a bottle of that, cheers man.’
The young man nodded his head, hesitated for a second then disappeared towards the kitchen.
‘I reckon you’re pushing it with the Stoli mate,’ I suggested.
‘Ah well, you can only ask,’ replied Hanna as he pulled out his stash. He licked the edges of two cigarette papers and glued them to two more, sprinkled tobacco on the assemblage then—with a pair of scissors—chopped up a massive head of dope, mixed it with the tobacco and then rolled another substantial joint. Meantime, the manager arrived with a slab of James Boag Premiums in an esky, bottles of red and white wine, and the Stolichnaya vodka. Hanna wolfed down his meal, lit the joint, grabbed the Stoli and disappeared out the back of the hall with Gary.
‘Should be an interesting evening Wayne-oh,’ I suggested to Wayne who chuckled and poured himself another glass of cheeky white.
Hanna set up on a stool beside the drum riser and Wayne replicated Hanna’s seating arrangement on the other side. I stood centre-stage in the full glare of the coloured lights, my blood pumping and nerves jangling. Hanna swayed slightly as he bent down to adjust something on his effects pedal board and then steadied himself before thwaging a few chords. Gary rolled around his kit and Wayne sat motionless, staring at the two-thirds full hall with its blue and purple starred drapery twinkling in the spilled light from the stage. I decided to start the night with a simple blues shuffle, ‘Early in the Morning’, a Louis Jordan standard from 1947 that my old friend, and Ross Hannaford school mate, Kendal Bird taught me when we played together in Attila and the Panelbeaters back in the early 1980s
Early in the morning and I can’t get it right
I had a little fight with my baby last night
And it’s early in the morning (early in the morning)
Yeah early in the morning (early in the morning)
Early in the morning, and I ain’t got nothin’ but the blues….
Gary locked into the straight ahead shuffle driving the whole thing with his high hat and kick drum and Wayne walked a bassline, he truly was a master of that lost art. I was trying to keep up on acoustic guitar, while Hanna sat back playing lines and feels in the spaces between my vocals. After the second verse Hanna took a twelve bar solo, his sustained notes and left-of-centre improvisations filled the room. He then stomped on his loop pedal and recorded twelve bars of runs and feels that looped under another twelve bars of a spitting, spiralling distorted solo. Almost by magic, a simple shuffle was turning into something extraordinary. Gary urged Hanna on, banging harder on the drums, encouraging more solos, more notes, more loops, more everything. The audience began to look up from their dinner plates and take notice. It grew louder, the band played tougher