MID TO LATE SIXTIES
‘There’s a new age dawning this year, he told me. ‘An old cycle’s ending and a new one begins, in 1966. Did you know that, Dick? The earth-forces will come into their own, and people will be liberated.’
– C. J. Koch, The Doubleman1
The story of the counterculture that developed in the western world in the late 60s is, like that of any mythological era, riddled with half-truths crossed with untruths. As we shall see, the notion often expressed at this time that all was now opportunity and possibility – from the breaking down of rigid, millennia-old institutions to the radical act of releasing a single that was more than three minutes long – amounted in fact to one step forward, three steps in another direction entirely.
Visceral and showy, it is easy to imagine the period as boldly painted in illusory deep patterns of ultra-sensation. ‘Somehow with the optimism of the sixties,’ the film director Peter Weir claimed two decades later, ‘there was a feeling that everything was going to work out, that you didn’t need to plan.’2 Of course, this is only a very small segment of the cultural mix, inseparable from the rest. Pip Proud claimed that the best way to typify the late 60s in Sydney was as a time when special inspectors had the power to measure women’s bathing costumes at Sydney beaches – which is to say that it was a time of prudery thrown into stronger contrast by a small number of ‘liberated’ minds. Certainly the Australian government remained conservative throughout this period, during which three Prime Ministers – Menzies, Holt and the slightly more interesting Gorton – presided over a persistently strong ‘lucky country’ economy.
Similarly, even though the counterculture was sold by means of rhetoric that invoked anti-commercial, even anti-capitalist values, a general cynicism prevailed in many quarters as to whether particularly ‘out there’ artists were genuine and their work valid, or if consumers were not so much going on a trip as being taken for a ride. This scepticism extended even into the alternative scene(s). Essentially, there were very few people throughout the world, including Australia, who didn’t think that the action – where the beautiful people were making free decisions based purely on their own enlightenment – was happening somewhere else. Barry Miles, a self-proclaimed insider in the London ‘underground’, has discussed the way his small, select gang felt that the Move, a group from Birmingham, had demonstrated hypocrisy by suddenly experiencing an ‘overnight conversion to hippiedom’ when they released ‘I Can Hear the Grass Grow’ in early 1967. ‘The point,’ says Miles, ‘is that psychedelic music grew from an environment, a very specific London one . . .’3
In fact there are quite a few ‘points’, and the most pertinent one is that while many, indeed most, kowtowed to London as the centre of the counterculture universe during this time, there is no reason to assume that London’s psychedelic explosion was any more exciting than anyone else’s. Miles is presumably speaking only from his own experience at what seemed like the pumping heart of a movement. For that matter, when Proud ventured to London at the very end of that decade he found that his few Sydney friends who’d made good didn’t want to know him, and the scene, in general terms, was dismal. In any case it is quite possible that the interpretations of that cultural style that were created in other places were more impressive than the original – whatever that original actually was. Russell Morris’s ‘The Real Thing’ may be ‘a dog of a song’ without ‘much there melody-wise and lyric-wise’, as Dave Mason of the Reels once put it.4 But as a studio experiment allowed to run riot in the form of a 7” single, it was a stunning leap in a new direction, and its similarly chart-topping follow-up, ‘Part Three: Into Paper Walls)’, went twice as far again.
Many others talk of this period as one in which technology (especially those mundane matters of amplification and multi-track recording) could never match their own vision or ambition; at the same time, tape recording was becoming more convenient and compact: a ‘new boom in electronics’ was announced in 1967, as the cassette tape was readied for launch.5 Similar advances at both the home and public music production level were made rapidly in the later 60s and into the 70s.
Very few people of any stripe trust art, or their responses to it, and art – pop music included – often goes out of its way to be untrustworthy. Towards the end of Patrick White’s 1970 novel The Vivisector, a life of the fictional modern artist Hurtle Duffield, White gives over more than five pages to snatches of dialogue from the vain, trivial, pretentious and foolish glitterati of Sydney responding (or not) to a retrospective of the artist’s work. The themes of the babble include whether or not Duffield sells largely to Americans, how rich he must be, and how little the attendees actually understand the work in question. It’s an extended riff on the same type of hollow chatter Jan Smith relates from the Beatles press conference (see chapter 2). White, as one of Australia’s most celebrated and yet most misunderstood writers, is in part bemoaning his own fate (he even includes a dig at himself6), but he is also reflecting on the fate of creators in the marketplace, as indeed his character’s life itself is an extended reflection on the 20th century in Australian art. The point White makes, writing as he is on the cusp of what would turn out to be non-indigenous Australia’s greatest leap to date in terms of artistic flowering, is that art and commerce are inseparable, that commerce’s blunt, mulish desire leads art wherever it wants it to go. Even in the case of Duffield – who comes (through adoption) from a wealthy background but whose interest in money goes no further than its power to free him to paint pictures when he pleases – materialism, the dictates of fashion, and the petty lives of the miserable rich women he courts are bound up with his life as an artist.
In 1970 Marty Rhone – a Dutch-Indonesian Australian with handsome, apparently Asian features and a string of very fine, but for the most part commercially unsuccessful singles behind him – released a self-penned parody song, ‘So You Want To Be a Pop Singer’. In it, he mimicked and satirised three vocalists who are rarely, for all their good qualities, spoken of in the same sentence: Russell Morris, Bob Dylan and Johnny Farnham. Rhone’s record focused particularly on the ‘manager’ operating the star (Ian Meldrum, Morris’s manager and Farnham’s manager Daryl Sambell were both referred to by their nicknames, ‘Molly’ and ‘Sadie’). Rhone was holding the pushy hand of the industry up for examination, and while he delivered the song with a smile on his face, its humour bordered on viciousness.
Rhone was vicious because the pop scene was tough, particularly for Australian artists. Only a small percentage of consumers would have failed to make a distinction between locally made and international records and acts. Increasingly, fans of Australian musical stars came to see international acceptance as, if not the raison d’etre of local performers, then certainly something worth grabbing at any opportunity. Record companies were, of course, complicit in this. Australia could be a proving ground for numerous artists, just as the Bee Gees or the Easybeats had honed their skills there. By the 1980s, groups like INXS were readily peddling the nonsense that their hardiness as a band was forged in the fabled ‘beer barns’ of the Australian suburbs. Yet it was also true that any Australian group which had experienced success in its homeland potentially offered the best of both worlds to a British or American record company – it was both new (at least to audiences outside Australia) and polished. Thus Bee Gees’ 1st, or Procession’s remarkably assured, crafted, and tasteful second take at a debut LP; or the Masters Apprentices’ third album, Choice Cuts, their first release in Britain after numerous Australian hits. The La De Das, the Twilights, Johnny Young, the Easybeats, Olivia Newton-John, MPD Ltd and many others were able to reinvent themselves in the northern hemisphere. But while Australian impresario Robert Stigwood’s willingness to take on an Australian group called the Bee Gees made it possible for them to land on their feet overseas, most Australian acts suffered as a result of the insularity and provincial nature of the ‘scenes’ they were trying to break into. This may well have been a result of outright prejudice in some cases, but more often – as we shall see – the networks that mattered simply weren’t available to new arrivals.
The internationalists nevertheless made inroads –