With this on again, off again trajectory, Kim exited primary school having gravitated to science, art and free-thinking. His principle accomplishments outside of school revolved around making bombs, conducting chemistry set experiments, devouring Science Weekly magazines, and returning frozen mosquitos to thawed life. ‘Like Frankenstein,’ recalls Owen. Or perhaps, like a scientist.
•••
Kim’s teenage years and the start of high school coincided with the end of the 60s. Music — while always present in the Salmon house through Joy’s piano playing, Megan’s singing or Owen’s classical tapes — did not impact Kim as a child. He didn’t respond to the sounds of the 60s. For Kim, the decade was kind of like wallpaper, a backdrop of which he was aware, but which didn’t make an impression. ‘I was a science nerd. Hippy stuff didn’t wash with me. But in 1970, at age 13, I heard pop music. I went into the 70s and became a teenager. It was the beginning.’
The first thing that made an impression was Spirit in the Sky. ‘To my primitive mind, it sounded like electronic, space age music it was a combo of pop hooks and sci-fi, taking the piss out of the afterlife.’
Wandering around his new high school, Kim saw a group of girls dancing to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Up Around the Bend, their dresses hitching up as they moved. It was an inviting association. He later saw the band play at Perth’s Subiaco Oval and the spell was cast.
He watched The Kinks play Lola on TV, and was enamoured of Ray Davies’ flouncy hair, leather coat and lace up boots. He loved the humour and sharp intellect in Daddy Cool’s Eagle Rock, and the Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want shepherded him into the next era — ‘the last of the innocent before all the cool stuff happened’.
With these discoveries came the need for cash. Kim took on chores and odd jobs, doing the dishes, shoving leaflets into letter boxes, working in factories and salvage yards and enduring pathetic rates of pay. But eventually, there it was in his possession, his first LP: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Cosmos Factory’. At $5.50, it was a major investment, roughly the same price as the concert ticket. Another few weeks of hard labour and Hawkwind’s ‘In Search of Space’ joined the fledgling vinyl collection.
Music had arrived with force for the 13-year-old Kim Salmon, and out of the blue, he came home from school and announced that he wanted to learn the guitar. Soon, he had selected a $14 Audition acoustic guitar from Kmart. Joy remembers it as ‘a cheap old thing; it was dreadful’.
Despite his early lack of interest, Kim had inherited an innate musical sensibility from his maternal grandmother, Jessie, who could play anything. Banjo, piano, mandolin, and guitar — she could play them all. Kim’s great grandfather had been a travelling musician and Jessie had collected his tricks of the trade and adopted the spirit. When told that Kim was learning guitar she said, ‘Oh I do hope it’s an electric guitar!’
Unsure of how to tune the Audition, Kim adopted some esoteric tuning patterns, and as he really wanted a whammy bar (absent from the acoustic) he used the tuning keys for that purpose instead, turning the keys dramatically to bend the notes up and down. It took a sprinkling of lessons from his tobacco-stained, jazz-infused guitar teacher to eventually correct his unorthodox tuning habits.
The Audition made way for an electric Coronet. ‘I didn’t have an amp, and in the end I couldn’t get it together. It had a whammy bar, which is what I wanted, but all I could do was break strings.’ The Coronet found its way to Kim’s friend Gary who loaned Kim his Yamaha G60 nylon string in return. ‘We ended up doing a swap, and I got the Yamaha. That was where I explored music really, and where I experimented on some of my identity with the paint jobs!’ Bowie-inspired sci-fi paintings adorned the guitar only to be replaced the next week with Cat Stevens themed art work and so on. The Yamaha, witness to the early formation of Kim Salmon’s creative impulse, waits patiently at his parent’s house still, stripped back to plain wood, ready to be called into action if needed.
•••
Kim’s wit and sharp mind were quickly evident in high school. He was very good academically and by fourth year he’d progressed to the advanced work stream. It came easily and he succeeded without a stretch. The school was impressed, but inadvertently engineered the competition against which academic work had no chance. School sponsored music was drawing Kim away from his studies.
I grew up with J’taime blaring around the speakers in my high school. They used to have it going at recess. Whether it was the radio or some senior kid in there being a DJ, I was never quite sure. They played a lot of Philly soul and Motown. I remember hearing the Delfonics doing Didn’t I Blow Your Mind this Time. Eddie Holman’s Hey There Lonely Girl. Old Elvis songs. I Can’t Stop Loving You, but the Ray Charles version … J’taime just stuck in my mind. The B3 organ, that incredible melody, with the sound effects … it was a wonderful thing. Things like that had seeped through into my consciousness and stayed there.
In fourth year, Joy got a call from the concerned headmaster. Kim had declared that he was changing from the top academic stream to go into the Arts course. The attraction of sketching, painting and playing music had overtaken his other school work. Joy says, ‘Of course we knew that he’d always been able to draw and it was no great shock that he was good, but he’d never said anything. The school was concerned because they thought he was such a good student, but they didn’t understand just how good he was with his art.’
Music, too, was becoming serious. Increasingly, Kim would be holed up in his room with the guitar, picking over riffs from the radio. Or when his musical friends dropped in it became full blown band rehearsal. Dragging mattresses up against the wall to block out the noise from the neighbours, and scattering cushions everywhere to dampen the acoustics, the bedroom morphed into a band room. What did it sound like when he was practicing in his bedroom? Says Joy, ‘It was just very loud’.
•••
I get a tram to St Kilda, early 1990’s, and the Prince of Wales chalkboard announces Kim Salmon and the Surrealists are playing. It’s summer, and so hot the palm trees are drooping in the thick, still night.
Fitzroy Street is alive. Twelve-foot transvestite hookers, midget pimps, dealers in parachute tracksuits, girls in impossibly short skirts, rockers, punks and pre-grungers stagger, swagger and carousel up the street and down the laneways.
It’s already midnight and there’s no sign of the Surrealists. The Prince Piano Bar is heaving, sweating and cacophonous. It’s friendly, but dangerous and menacing all at once. The hookers are holding court at the crowded bar, and on the squashed stage Fred Negro is riding a toy horse, wearing a cowboy hat, but no pants.
I take refuge in the band room. It looks like a cathedral: lights dim, sticky carpet scattered with plastic pots and the stage lying in wait at the front of the room. It’s close to 1am when three of the coolest looking cats saunter onto stage. Kim Salmon and the Surrealists. Long hair, satin shirts wide open, pointy boots and tight black pants. Kim Salmon looks like a video clip, hair and smoke and shirt billowing around him, as he extracts shards of broken noise from nowhere. Twenty years away from the bedroom in Perth, it’s still very loud.
•••
The quiet self-reliance and impulse for invisibility of Kim’s childhood incurred debts that would become due as isolation and disconnection in adolescence. At 16, he was adrift without identity and with no place to fit.
Adolescence is like being a chrysalis stuck in a cocoon. I didn’t have a single friend, I’d kind of ostracised myself. I remember before I even liked music, I saw David Bowie perform on a Grammy Awards on TV. I knew Space Odyssey the film, and when they announced ‘David Bowie’, in my mind I thought the guy from Space Odyssey had decided to write a song and start