Back in Melbourne I didn’t drink so much. I had things to do there. But what was I going to do after Perth? The Dingoes had a good shot, but we had gone as far as we were going. I thought for an instant what it would take hours to tell: I was glad we were finished — I was ready for something new.
Kerryn, our main songwriter, called me from our beachfront hotel. He was shouldering the glass door to hold it open against the heavy westerly. He was beckoning me to come over.
Buffeted by the almost-cold wind, I picked up my shoes and scuffed across the street and into the protective stillness of the hotel lobby. Kerryn held a piece of note paper; Stockley, Brod, and J.L. looked on expectantly.
I walked over to them.
‘What’s up?’
‘How do you like this for a message?’ Kerryn said, as he handed me the note with the Sandy Beach Hotel letterhead.
I read it aloud, ‘Ring Paul McCartney at the Rolling Stones’ office.’
‘What do you say to that?’ asked Kerryn.
‘Poor sort of joke,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Brod. ‘That’s what we thought. But the receptionist swore it was America calling.’
I could hear the muted percussion of the wind against the plate glass of the motel front.
‘But we can’t ring ’till six tonight,’ said Kerryn. ‘It seems it’s still yesterday in America.’
We looked stupidly at each other until Stockley shrugged and said, ‘Well, there’s nothing else for it. Who wants a beer and who’s a poofter?’
We walked briskly to the bar of the Sandy Beach Hotel.
The bar, which had just opened, consisted of three areas: a dingy little lounge with a cranky old bartender elbow deep in dishwater; a beer garden; and off to one side of the bar, a pool table on a parquet floor. The bartender was too intent on his work to notice us.
Stockley tried to get his attention, ‘Excuse me. Could we have five pots, please?’
Without acknowledging him, the bartender wiped his sudsy hands on his apron and poured our beers.
As we sipped, we quickly exhausted all the possibilities of the phone call. It was a hoax.
It wasn’t a hoax. It could be either Paul McCartney or the Rolling Stones. Or, it could be Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones teamed up especially for a joint project: The Dingoes.
‘They’re all impissabolities,’ slurred Stockley, staring into his glass and impersonating his favourite Melbourne drunk, Maury.
‘Anyone for pool?’ I asked.
‘Rack ’em up, John,’ said Stockley as he slotted money into the table. The balls dropped with a resounding thud. I searched for the triangular pool rack.
‘Where’s the thing?’
‘Here it is,’ offered Brod as he came over to watch.
As soon as I finished racking up the balls, Stockley propelled the white ball into the pack with a shattering force. Only two balls broke free.
‘Christ, what’s a bloke gotta do?’
‘It’s all finesse in this game, mate,’ I said. ‘That’s why you’re pist’ry!’
I dropped a low ball and left myself without a shot.
Stockley stood with a beer in his left hand and the pool cue in the crook of his left elbow. His shirt was open, as usual, to reveal his scars — he was stroking them. Only a year ago, he was the victim of a weekend shooting spree by two prison escapees. They fired two bullets into a crowd just for fun. One of them got Stockley in the back and the operation to remove it left three huge, vivid, purplish scars. He stroked them constantly: he was very proud of them.
‘Would you mind not stroking your scars so loudly?’ I said, walking around the table, trying in vain to find a shot. I fired into a pack and left him with good position.
Stockley smiled, ‘Thanks for the po, John.’
I sat down as he made a great show of not being able to decide which easy shot to drop first. Brod gave me a look of pity as Stockley sunk his first ball and winked at me. Kerryn and J.L. sat talking at the bar.
I thought about the message. It was probably a horrendous mistake, a fabulous garbling of syllables by the receptionist.
Six months before I would not have been so sceptical. Then, at the Station Hotel, in Melbourne, we were a five-piece dynamo. Derelicts and dole dependents normally peopled the Station, as well as besotted bon vivants who claimed it was a haven of mateship, a place where men could be men out of earshot of nagging women. But to the untrained eye it looked more like a place of banishment.
Nevertheless, on Saturday it was transformed into a subcultural temple. The gods of that subculture were … The Dingoes. The Station was licensed to seat eighty persons, but when we played there the only crowd restriction was the amount of discomfort people were willing to bear. However, the only intolerable discomfort was inability to get to the bar.
At two in the afternoon, three hundred people and five gods converged on the bar. At six, three hundred drunks and five drunk gods waded across the beer-soaked carpet and out into a world strangely untouched by the four hours of sweat, inebriation and rocking music.
We were not stars. We satirised stardom. The Station audience loved us because we refused to take anything, including ourselves, seriously. We disdained the slick professionalism of nightclub bands; and as we argued and clowned around between songs, we happily exempted ourselves from superstar status as well.
But this overt anti-professionalism, while it was one cause of our celebrity at the Station, drastically limited our appeal. When we played anywhere else, people stared at us as if they were watching a foreign-language film without subtitles. And our manner and dress were so un-star-like that often, when we arrived at a new place, people would ask us what time the band was coming — they thought we were the road crew!
On stage we had no light show, no props, no choreographed moves, no staging of any kind. We didn’t vomit blood, or leer like trolls while rolling our tongues lasciviously at the audience. Our strengths were our personalities and our music. And at the Station, the room was intimate enough for both to count. On a good day, we believed, our characters and our music formed an irresistible winning combination.
The central element of this winning combination, our lead singer Broderick Smith, sat next to me as Stockley dropped his second gift-ball. Brod’s hand shook as he lifted his glass to his lips. He had a very complex and puzzling personality. As fantastic as he was onstage, offstage, and particularly behind the wheel of his vintage Land Rover, he was stodgy and anxious. Maybe, I thought, he was trying to keep his zany side at bay, as if it were a strange beast — a mercurial, abnormal thing, which could only be released safely at showtime when outrageousness is customary. He must keep it in check lest his veneer of sanity cracked. If I had his gift, I thought, I would revel in it twenty-four hours a day.
Stockley dropped his third cinch shot.
Brod had a complexion that was prone to ashenness. He had grey-blue eyes and a large, expressive jaw that jutted out heroically. He had a dimple in his chin. Brod resembled the Germanic ideal, but he had an endearing scruffy quality — like an Aryan the cat dragged in.
The contents of his flat affirmed his zany side. His formal need to cling to sanity was apparently abandoned amid the eccentric clutter of his collection of bric-a-brac. A Remington statuette of a cowboy on a rearing horse stood in as a heroic paperweight. It was on a large glass museum display case, which, supported by antique filing cabinets,