1973 event away from ‘the university scene’ to a location in northern NSW. The small town of Nimbin was chosen by co-directors ‘Kaptain Kulture and Superfest’ (Johnny Allen and Graeme Dunston of the NUAUS),32 who ruminated: ‘The big if is whether the locals would take kindly to an inundation of heads.’33 Many of them didn’t, but within a relatively short time the ‘heads’ became the locals – Nimbin was soon known in Australia as the epitome of an ‘alternative lifestyle’ town, though today it is perceived as a bastion of elderly hippies and hard drugs. Another festival in northern NSW, the Tamworth Country Music Festival – now a national institution – began as a low-key and very traditional affair, also in 1973.34
For most Australians old enough to remember the early 70s, the most important rock festivals were the four Sunburys, staged by Odessa Promotions, which was headed by promoter John Fowler. The first was in January 1972; all took place in a ‘natural amphitheatre’ by a stream just outside Melbourne. Not only were many of the performances legendary (particularly those by Chain, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, and the Coloured Balls), there were also – importantly – films and records made of at least some of the Sunbury shows, which greatly increased their impact. At Sunbury ’73, Paul Hogan – ‘everybody’s favourite clown’ for his TV work and witty cigarette ads – entertained the crowd.
Skyhooks, in only their first year of existence, and with original singer Steve Hill, were notoriously a major event at Sunbury ’74. They were booed off stage; Hill quit after seeing film of himself from the day. The group would triumph with new singer Graeme ‘Shirley’ Strachan at next year’s Sunbury. Sunbury ’74 also saw ‘one of England’s up-and-coming name groups, Queen,35 perform twice and get pilloried by the crowd despite – or because of? – Michael Chugg’s appearance beforehand to ‘bawl everybody out before they started, with an order for indulgence or good manners or shut up or piss off’.36 Queen vowed never to return to Australia (though their moral rectitude didn’t prevent them playing Sun City under apartheid, and evidently what they meant was that they would not come back to Australia until the nation embraced them commercially.) The four Sunburys were not all momentous debuts and presentations of ‘the ripe raspberry’ to British pretenders; Australian Rolling Stone blithely reported (with its usual mix of poor writing and obliquity) of 1974’s event that ‘someone drowned on the last day, and there were a couple of casualties’;37 while Sunbury ’75 has been described as a ‘shit fight in the mud’.38
Deep Purple were the only band who played Sunbury ’75 and got paid, apparently because they were the only band paid up front. When the show was less lucrative than expected (torrential rain meant that less than half the expected number turned up), there was no money left to pay anyone else; of the Australians, only Jim Keays – who’d done a deal with Colonial Jeans to present his Boy from the Stars – made money at the time. When Deep Purple returned to Australia later that year, the musicians union brokered a levy on their fee to provide recompense to the other bands. Nevertheless, the unfairness of the original situation understandably raised the ire of many participants – Billy Thorpe suggested it was the reason he left Australia for America.39
Unsurprisingly, drugs were a major feature of these events. Two youths were charged with selling LSD at Sunbury ’7340 and gaoled for three months. Another attendee was remanded for riotous assembly and hindering and assaulting police.41 Drugs, of whatever stamp, were of course an ongoing issue. Johnny Young philosophised that ‘If marijuana were legalized, nobody would be interested in smoking it . . . It is like underground music – as soon as it becomes a commercial success, underground freaks lose interest in it.’42 At the same time, self-proclaimed ‘prude’ and ‘teetotaller’43 Moss Cass – the Labor MP for Maribyrnong and just under two years away from becoming Minister for the Environment and Conservation in the Federal Labor government – was promoting the legalization of marijuana and claiming that nicotine and alcohol users were hypocrites for resisting such a move.44
The T. F. Much’s successor, the Much More Ballroom, had been closed in 1972 ‘because of a complaint that marijuana was smoked there’ (presumably, on more than one occasion) and Wendy Arnott in the Age opined that ‘without it, the picture of places to go and enjoy rock in pleasant conditions is quite desolate.’45
By mid 1974 the dichotomy between festivals and smaller venues had become a major issue: the former, it was argued, offered mellow, introspective music for the intellect, in contrast with the harsh, loud, dance music for the feet provided in the latter. Having only just established rock music as an art form, of sorts, some observers were out to pillory “pub rock” and its main promoter, booker Bill Joseph. In The Rock Scene 1974, a documentary begun by Bert Deling and Gary Martyn but seemingly never finished, Captain Matchbox’s Mic Conway suggests that Joseph’s bands are ‘practically all heavy rock bands . . . the music itself is innately aggressive which I’m not saying is a bad thing’ unless ‘it’s the only thing that is happening . . .’46 Few groups straddled the two scenes, though one worthy of further investigation is the pointedly camp Cranberry Junglepuss’s Fourteenth Tree Group, a band which used its exceptional two-drum-kit line-up to resounding effect live in both intimate and festival settings. The group’s one album, Jumbo’s Tea Party, attests to a rowdy combination of funk, grooves and general hedonism.47
As we will see, pub rock – a form no-one thought of as anything but throwaway in its early days, when larger, outer-suburban pubs were experimenting with ways to bring in clientele – would come to be a genre all its own. Usually thunderous music with chanted vocals and catchy choruses, it was instantly appealing, anti-intellectual, also often good-humoured. Its musical originals may have come from garage rock and R&B; its roots might also be in the foot-stomping boogie of Billy Thorpe or Lobby Loyde’s Coloured Balls. In its initial phase it meant bands like Buster Brown, a group described by its vocalist, Gary ‘Angry’ Anderson, as ‘a real tiger on the end of a rope.’48 From 1973 to 1975 he trumpeted that band as a voice of the downtrodden working class; he would then transfer that rather ill-defined but apparently heartfelt spirit to Rose Tattoo. In The Rock Scene 1974, former T. F. Much proprietor John Pinder criticises the nascent pub scene, talking of ‘giant drinking farms where people can only come in their Holden Monaros to listen to that very aggro, negative sort of music which is popularised by that environment;’ what Pinder wanted to see, on the other hand was a ‘discotheque-y kind of venue’ that could operate as a workshop. Underlying this was apparently a desire to see greater experimentation and less professionalism: Pinder felt that mistakes were important: ‘There’s nowhere for people to be bad anymore.’49
Drugs and religion seemed to mix in strange ways – although both promoted a higher consciousness, after all. Megan Sue Hicks visited Australia from the US in 1970, and made her own impact, albeit small. She was twenty years old:
I came to Australia in 1970, when my father’s company transferred him to Sydney. He worked in the oil industry, and the South Pacific was booming at the time. I had a one-year work visa . . . In some respects Sydney was so sophisticated and so cosmopolitan. In other respects, in terms of the music business, it seemed like everyone was trying to invent it and no one knew what the thing would look like when it was done. There was a lot of squabbling, and jockeying for position and posing, and it seemed like kids trying to find a grown up way to behave, and when you think of it most of us were kids – I didn’t know anyone over 30.
Through my mother’s involvement in one of the churches in Sydney, I met Clelia Adams . . .50 She was the office manager for the Sydney bureau of Go-Set . . . She was hanging round with a bunch of Christadelphians at that time, a strange little sect. One of the guys at Go-Set was a Cristadelphian, I think he was trying to date Clelia, or convert her – if he couldn’t do one, he’d do the other. My mother was very religious, she’d dragged me along I think it was the Methodist mission. They had youth groups and services but it was pretty much a snore.
Hicks was soon working as a ‘gofer’ at Go-Set’s Sydney office. Her Christian beliefs would have stood her in good stead at this period. Agitation for change