Speaker 1: Him, I boris and this is straight talk. I used
Speaker 1: to walk to a drug dealer's house thinking I dropped
Speaker 1: dead yesterday, and someone revived me. Why am I doing this?
Speaker 1: Rick Rossman, world went straight talk? Mate? Why did you
Speaker 1: become a guitarist? I've always absolutely just loved music and
Speaker 1: I wanted to be heard and I felt like I
Speaker 1: was invisible and a guitar was a good way of
Speaker 1: speaking that out. And I went to see led Zeppelin
Speaker 1: when I was fifteen. Changed my life. I said, I'm
Speaker 1: going to do that. I looked at those four guys
Speaker 1: on the stage and I thought, you guys don't have
Speaker 1: a problem in the world. You know, it's just a
Speaker 1: joke to think that. And I know that now. So
Speaker 1: heroin is a painkiller. There's steps, you know. It became
Speaker 1: more and more prominent in my life. It was an
Speaker 1: absolute nightmare. Got up on stage that night, crowd and
Speaker 1: playing away. It's really good and I look down this
Speaker 1: blood coming out of my arm and I just, I just,
Speaker 1: I can't tell you. After being that kid who just
Speaker 1: love music so much crushed me. I just thought I've
Speaker 1: got to I've got to do something about this.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, and border and I grew up podcast
Speaker 2: podcast over.
Speaker 1: Brick Grossman. Welcome straight to mate.
Speaker 3: Explain you know, I guess this is the state of
Speaker 3: origin Jersey, as you know, and of course you're a Queenslander,
Speaker 3: but we're going to get into that in the second
Speaker 3: how you could possibly become a Queenslander if you were
Speaker 3: born in your South Wales. But in any event, this
Speaker 3: is Madge. I'm wearing it on the podcast, like I said,
Speaker 3: I would, thanks very much. And I know it's not
Speaker 3: about you. So the Origin series is not about Michael Maguire.
Speaker 3: It's about the Jersey and I just want to do
Speaker 3: this one thing that's better than any queens and queens
Speaker 3: and Queensland A chance you're ever going to hear it
Speaker 3: about New South Wales dudes?
Speaker 1: Right? Can I just say something now? Is your now?
Speaker 1: I just want to say that it's clear being a
Speaker 1: Queensland supporter. I just want to wish Madge the best
Speaker 1: because he's such a top blog. He's good. I haven't
Speaker 1: seen him for a couple of years and we've had
Speaker 1: some very We've had some lovely discussions over the years
Speaker 1: he and I and I look forward to seeing him
Speaker 1: after after the after the Origin well, now you can
Speaker 1: explain yourself, so my family will move to queens and.
Speaker 3: Give his excuses. Just go back a second. Where were
Speaker 3: you born? I was born here in Sydney. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: So how long did you live in Sydney for.
Speaker 1: All my life? Years? Okay?
Speaker 3: So so and what's your cop out?
Speaker 1: Your family moved to Queensland. Yes, that's my cop out.
Speaker 1: It's not actually cop out, it's half my cop out.
Speaker 1: I was I actually hadn't been taking any notice of
Speaker 1: rugby league in the early eighties. And I mean, I
Speaker 1: love rugby league. I'm a South supporter, and I grew up,
Speaker 1: Oh my.
Speaker 2: God, and a South supporter, and I grew up podcasts.
Speaker 3: Over go on. But why did you go a quizot
Speaker 3: because they won a lot?
Speaker 1: No? No, no, no. I'd been away and in the
Speaker 1: early eighties, you know, I was in the the Vinyls,
Speaker 1: and we spent a lot of time out of the country.
Speaker 1: And i'd come back. It was about nineteen eighty three
Speaker 1: and my cousin said to me, oh, we've got to
Speaker 1: go and see this thing called state of Origin. Now
Speaker 1: I'd read quite a bit about Wally Lewis. My family
Speaker 1: all lived in Queensland, they'd all been living there in
Speaker 1: the seventies, and so we go out of the cricket
Speaker 1: ground and we'd had a couple of puffs of something,
Speaker 1: you know, and we're sitting out there, and it was
Speaker 1: one of those games where Wally it was quiet for
Speaker 1: the first half, and it was like halfway through the
Speaker 1: game he just sort of decided to start playing and
Speaker 1: scored this magnificent try. The crowd had been chanting Wally's
Speaker 1: a wanka ad him and he scored this try and
Speaker 1: the place went quiet, and he sort of turned around
Speaker 1: to the stand put his finger up at the stand,
Speaker 1: and I just fell in love with him. I just
Speaker 1: thought this guy's great and started following him. Then I
Speaker 1: became a few years later, I became friends with Choppy
Speaker 1: Clothes Chris Close, who, by the way, was assistant coach
Speaker 1: for Faddy Vorton when they won three that's right, which
Speaker 1: is quite amazing. I mean, not that I'm here to
Speaker 1: give Faddy a rap, but it was quite amazing. That
Speaker 1: was like the nineties nineties. Yeah, yeah, And Faddy took
Speaker 1: me along to some games. I really had to sit
Speaker 1: in the you know, Faddy's long lost brother or something.
Speaker 1: I love Fatty. I don't look like Fatty, do I? Fatty?
Speaker 1: He rings me. He used to say him my second
Speaker 1: favorite bass player. That's exte Gene Simmons kiss. He's a
Speaker 1: top blow, A great bloke, Fatty. I really miss miss
Speaker 1: seeing him on TV whenever he's commentating. I love Fatty.
Speaker 1: I think he's genius. He got me to come along
Speaker 1: to a game. I mean, I guess we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about all this stuff. Becurse of my history because
Speaker 1: of my.
Speaker 3: Sobriety, which usually follows a yes so.
Speaker 1: And he asked me. A lot of those guys in
Speaker 1: the nineties, eighties, nineties used to come and see us
Speaker 1: play a lot, you know, and and I became quite
Speaker 1: friendly with a few of them. We all of us did.
Speaker 1: And there's one particular player, Julian O'Neill. We played fullback. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fantastic bloke, a great player, one of those guys when
Speaker 1: he drinks you get out of the room. And he
Speaker 1: was in the Origin. Fatty asked me to come out
Speaker 1: to the Origin out of the training to talk to
Speaker 1: Julian one day and went out there and I just
Speaker 1: sort of hit it off with Fatty, and i'd met
Speaker 1: him before. We've been on I think, yeah, we've been
Speaker 1: on the very early version of the Footy Show, and
Speaker 1: Choppy and I just sort of hit it off. And
Speaker 1: for the next eight years, I think I went along
Speaker 1: with them whenever the origin was on the I go
Speaker 1: up to Brisbane and go along with the team and
Speaker 1: sit on the bench, and there's more of the dudes,
Speaker 1: more of the personalities involved that you sort of it's
Speaker 1: not that you fell in love with Queensland for Queensland, say,
Speaker 1: but more of the people who are behind the queens
Speaker 1: and teams. I loved. I just loved. I mean, I
Speaker 1: know it's I shouldn't talk to you about this because
Speaker 1: you were just doing this, you know, but that that passion.
Speaker 1: I've sat in some of the team talks and I'm
Speaker 1: sure Ricky Stewart was like it was the same, you know,
Speaker 1: be the same, but there's just something up there. I
Speaker 1: don't know. The Queensland as they travel for for days
Speaker 1: to go to the games, you know, they all you know,
Speaker 1: they come from the mining towns and they're so over
Speaker 1: the top about it up there.
Speaker 3: It was one of the things they win too and
Speaker 3: like and they went it well like they but they
Speaker 3: lost for so long yeah, yeah, true.
Speaker 1: They lost for so long. And I was at that
Speaker 1: game that they lost fifty six to twelve. I think
Speaker 1: when they were all the try celebrations and I went
Speaker 1: to the the the it wasn't a celebration, it was,
Speaker 1: you know, the after after game function. It was bad.
Speaker 1: It's like a death family. It's bad. Wally Lewis said,
Speaker 1: it's the worst day of his life watching that. And
Speaker 1: following year they started to show the try celebrations in
Speaker 1: the dressing room just to stir them up, and then
Speaker 1: from then on the one eight years in a row
Speaker 1: with them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they haven't stopped and it's pretty fucking annoying. Well,
Speaker 3: I just hope. I hope magic can work out. What
Speaker 3: is the magic dust that Queensland sort of sprinkle over
Speaker 3: their players to make them play better than they usually
Speaker 3: play in club rugby for example and rugby League, And
Speaker 3: also what is going to be magic dust for New
Speaker 3: South Wales because we actually don't have that magic dust.
Speaker 3: We just don't have it. We have great players, great skills,
Speaker 3: can do anything, but just there's something about Queensland they
Speaker 3: just pull through on each occasion. I'm just dying to
Speaker 3: know what that is. And you know, hopefully just smart
Speaker 3: guy and he's pretty bloody determined, so I hope you
Speaker 3: can pull it off, and anything I can do to
Speaker 3: help me, I will help him. But let's talk about
Speaker 3: Rick Rossman. I actually you're the very first rock superstar
Speaker 3: in my view that's come onto our show straight to three.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you are a superstar.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And it's definitely the bands in an Australian sense, especially
Speaker 3: obviously globally, but.
Speaker 1: In an Australian sense.
Speaker 3: I meanly, I like, I feel like I'm sort of
Speaker 3: sitting in front of Royal. You probably don't feel that
Speaker 3: way because you know you're part of it, but you know,
Speaker 3: from an outside, I was one of you.
Speaker 1: Like I told my brother, my young.
Speaker 3: Brother, who's sixty two or three or something like that,
Speaker 3: our time is coming to do the podcast you do
Speaker 3: with you today because he and I are in a
Speaker 3: meeting before I got it, which why I'm not missed Slate,
Speaker 3: and I couldn't shut him up, and I said, man,
Speaker 3: I've got to go do.
Speaker 1: This, and he went, what the fuck? He said? You serious?
Speaker 3: My brother's a lawyer and hard nos lawyer his whole life,
Speaker 3: but always wanted to be a rock star.
Speaker 1: He always wanted to be.
Speaker 3: We had to learn music as kids, piano because of
Speaker 3: my mum's family, and my brother was the only I'm hopeless,
Speaker 3: but my brother was naturally good at it and he
Speaker 3: always wanted to be a rock star and he still does.
Speaker 3: I mean on his sixty birth that he was up
Speaker 3: there singing the songs and like pretending to be a
Speaker 3: rock star and stuff like that. But right in front
Speaker 3: of me is the real deal, the real deal. And
Speaker 3: I'd like to know. What I like to know is
Speaker 3: how did you become well mora?
Speaker 1: Really?
Speaker 3: Why did you become a guitarist? Apart from you know,
Speaker 3: getting into the various groups, why did you initially want
Speaker 3: to become a guitarist?
Speaker 1: An interesting question someone asked me a while ago. You know,
Speaker 1: why do you play music? And I can say to
Speaker 1: meet girls, do you money? I want to make lots
Speaker 1: of money. I mean, that's a joke. But when you're
Speaker 1: fourteen thirteen and you look at the rock star and
Speaker 1: back then there was no internet or anything. So I
Speaker 1: used to get the music papers and I'd look at
Speaker 1: these photos and I think, wow, these guys must have
Speaker 1: the most incredible lives. I went to see led Zeppelin
Speaker 1: when I was fifteen, and it was like a spiritual
Speaker 1: experience for me. I'd been learning music and since I
Speaker 1: was five, but classical. I learned violin. I absolutely hated it,
Speaker 1: and I used to wag the classes at the conservatorium
Speaker 1: go and sit in the botanical guards way for my
Speaker 1: dad to come and pretend I'd been to the lesson.
Speaker 1: Can we just stop there? Because why is that?
Speaker 3: Because today it's quite by kids who go there. It's
Speaker 3: quite a coveted place to be accepted into today he'd
Speaker 3: be accepted in there. And I had this experience recently
Speaker 3: with a young fellow who's my godsid like he wanted
Speaker 3: in order to get and he had to be able
Speaker 3: to play two instruments these days, and had to have
Speaker 3: certain school grades as well, and in his case he
Speaker 3: was playing piano and sax. But you had to be
Speaker 3: at a certain level too. And everybody tries to get
Speaker 3: in there today.
Speaker 1: But yet you're there and you'll go You're got pdscs
Speaker 1: from it. I absolutely hated it. Why it was felt
Speaker 1: all I can say now, I mean, it was boring,
Speaker 1: old fashioned. It was like this sort of discipline. It
Speaker 1: was this horrible kind of this woman I'm sure. She
Speaker 1: was very nice, but she was like my grandmother at
Speaker 1: the time, you know, she was like very humorous. It
Speaker 1: was very cold. It's like being in a math class
Speaker 1: at school, you know. And I used to go home
Speaker 1: afterwards and I'd set my violin up in the kitchen
Speaker 1: next to my mother and just scratch away, just like
Speaker 1: I'm going to torture. It's because you didn't like the violin, there,
Speaker 1: is it because you didn't like playing the violin and
Speaker 1: you'd rather play some of those rings. Well, I wasn't
Speaker 1: sure my mother, she just wanted me to play an instrument, right,
Speaker 1: you know. I loved I loved music from when I
Speaker 1: was little, and when I was really little, I used
Speaker 1: to get night terrors. So my parents bought me this radio.
Speaker 1: It's one of those big old bake light things, and
Speaker 1: it had a fault in it. It used to fade out,
Speaker 1: and they put me in bed and be dark, and
Speaker 1: I'd be listening to the radio and start to fade out,
Speaker 1: and I get scared. Now I'd bang it. You could
Speaker 1: bang it and would come back to life. And so
Speaker 1: you know, if I hear under the boardwalk by the
Speaker 1: Stones or some songs remind me of being in bed
Speaker 1: in pajamas, you know, the Kinks and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: And I think maybe that was a subliminal thing for me.
Speaker 1: It seeped into me, you know. And there were certain
Speaker 1: things that I loved in music, and i'd hear my
Speaker 1: parents used to play musicals an opera. I hate both
Speaker 1: both those things now, opera and musicals. And but there'd
Speaker 1: be certain hearts and certain songs that i'd get a
Speaker 1: kind of a visceral sort of reaction to. And I
Speaker 1: didn't know what it was at the time, but it
Speaker 1: was a good feeling, you know. It was a good feeling,
Speaker 1: whether it was a melody or a chord progression or
Speaker 1: some words. And I started playing violin. I hated it.
Speaker 1: Then I was at Scott's I started playing cello. I
Speaker 1: loved the sound of the cello, but I didn't really,
Speaker 1: you know, I just didn't like the the it's the word,
Speaker 1: not the discipline, because I mean, you have to be
Speaker 1: disciplined to be good at music. But I just didn't
Speaker 1: like the it's the word. It's too stage. It's too stage,
Speaker 1: too organ you know, it's too there's no improvisation, there's
Speaker 1: no go the script.
Speaker 3: You've got the music, your role in this piece with
Speaker 3: the rest of the orchestra at Scotts or where it was.
Speaker 1: It's like the difference between architect or a draftsman. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're you're But is that?
Speaker 3: But is that because of maybe perhaps of your mindset,
Speaker 3: the way you think that you don't you you like
Speaker 3: the ability to well, you're just hard to control you're
Speaker 3: thinking because you know, if you're playing something like a
Speaker 3: cello or even violin, usually it's unless you're so good
Speaker 3: you're doing a solo thing, you're in an orchestra or
Speaker 3: something like that.
Speaker 1: Like that.
Speaker 3: You know the conservative of music about those days about
Speaker 3: building people going the Sydney Symphathy Orchestra.
Speaker 1: That's where ultimately ended up.
Speaker 3: If you're any good, and if you're really good, you
Speaker 3: become a soloist in the SSM. But if you if
Speaker 3: you're pretty good, you're in the in the in the team,
Speaker 3: and then you've got a part. You've got a bit
Speaker 3: part play and that's it. You've got No there's no
Speaker 3: as you said, improv. You can't just say fuck you,
Speaker 3: I'm just going to start doing this.
Speaker 1: Well, it's like, I mean, I don't know, I mean,
Speaker 1: you're you're you know a lot about rugby league. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you've got a player like Andrew Johns or someone
Speaker 1: like that in your team, you're not going to say
Speaker 1: you have to do this and this and this, and
Speaker 1: you're going to let them play their own game. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I just didn't like that. I didn't like that about
Speaker 1: the classical music, you know, I just I wasn't really interested.
Speaker 1: And now I started to hear, you know, the rock music,
Speaker 1: and I started becoming really interested in that in the
Speaker 1: late sixties, and I love the freedom, you know. I'd
Speaker 1: Jimmy Hendrix and I remember sitting on the steps of
Speaker 1: Bondi and someone had a radio and a whole lot
Speaker 1: of Love came on, so it would have been nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, sixty nine, and everyone went quiet. It's like,
Speaker 1: what's that? What is that? Noise? So so exciting? I
Speaker 1: found it so exciting. And there was a guitar in
Speaker 1: our house. I still don't really know where that guitar
Speaker 1: came from. I often wondered where it was an acoustic guitar,
Speaker 1: and I picked it up and I found that I
Speaker 1: could I didn't pick it up and I could play it,
Speaker 1: but I loved it straight away, and you know, my
Speaker 1: parents had thrown their hands up and give up training
Speaker 1: to make him play an instrument. I picked that guitar
Speaker 1: up and improved really quickly, but just self taught that.
Speaker 1: I've always been self taught, Yeah, and adolesent.
Speaker 3: And where did you go from there? I mean, like
Speaker 3: I meant of the pub scene is pretty alive in
Speaker 3: those days.
Speaker 1: But where did you go for that? It took me,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean I was at school and I
Speaker 1: just when I went to see led Zeppelin. It's a
Speaker 1: funny thing, you know, I remember watching them, and you know,
Speaker 1: I think most people when they're growing up, they're uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: you know, teenage, when you're a teenager, most teenagers are uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: Totally all good. And I always felt, you know, I felt,
Speaker 1: first of all, I felt invisible when I was a kid.
Speaker 1: And I also felt because of stuff that was having
Speaker 1: our family, and I felt that someone hadn't given me
Speaker 1: the the playbook about life. You know, everyone seemed to
Speaker 1: have it sort of sorted. And I saw these guys,
Speaker 1: these four guys play and there were thirty thousand people
Speaker 1: out of the showground, no lighting, no nothing. It was
Speaker 1: just purely the music and changed my life. I just
Speaker 1: I mean, I was playing music and I love music
Speaker 1: before them, but I just saw that and I'm going,
Speaker 1: I'm going to do that. And when my grades at
Speaker 1: school went down after that, and it was just that's
Speaker 1: all I could think about. But well, what did you
Speaker 1: do next?
Speaker 3: Tent? So, like you said, I want to do that.
Speaker 3: I want to be like leads of a band.
Speaker 1: Yeah. See, I looked at those four guys on the
Speaker 1: stage and I thought, you guys don't have a problem
Speaker 1: in the world. One of them died, you know, one
Speaker 1: of them ended up a heroin addict, and one of
Speaker 1: them lost one of his kids, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: You know, it's just a joke to think that, and
Speaker 1: I know that now, you know.
Speaker 3: But but naivity, though, it's a big bonus in terms
Speaker 3: of give empowering you to do things, because if you knew,
Speaker 3: if you weren't in reality and you knew the reality,
Speaker 3: you may never have done it.
Speaker 1: No, it might have been a constraint. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know. I've always absolutely just loved music,
Speaker 1: and I found you know, I've improved quite quickly. Then
Speaker 1: I just found some other like minded people around where
Speaker 1: I lived in the eastern suburbs and we'd kind of
Speaker 1: get together whenever we could and make this horrible racket.
Speaker 1: And my mother was running a theater. And my godmother
Speaker 1: actually sat me down one day. I don't know, this
Speaker 1: was a seminal moment in my life. She was an actress.
Speaker 1: She said, do you remember they're a weird mob? So
Speaker 1: sure do. She was in that film and she she was.
Speaker 1: She was a great woman. Her name was Doraene Warpurton.
Speaker 3: She showed me the writing of how to advertised. It
Speaker 3: was very sort of sixties flower power. That's really looking
Speaker 3: the way that the writing of the of the on
Speaker 3: the on the advertising for the for.
Speaker 1: The for the movie, for the show. Yeah I remember
Speaker 1: it's about the Italian Yeah, I remember. Well, just funnily enough,
Speaker 1: our singer in the Hudu Gurus has brought the rights
Speaker 1: to that and they're writing a musical for it at
Speaker 1: the moment. But my godmother sent me down one day
Speaker 1: and my fourteen year old, fifteen year old brain. I
Speaker 1: don't know why I actually paid any attention to it,
Speaker 1: but she said to me, you know, if you if
Speaker 1: you're going to be a musician, thinking about a career
Speaker 1: like that. You have to be you have to have
Speaker 1: your own thing, your own style. Now I don't know
Speaker 1: why I thought, but why that's sunk in. But when
Speaker 1: I started playing with other people, I became quite neurotic
Speaker 1: about that, about having my own thing. So what does
Speaker 1: that mean? It's own style of playing? What does that
Speaker 1: mean that to me? What do you person Well, I
Speaker 1: guess your personality comes out through the instrument, and what
Speaker 1: is that? What had in angry? Really was it was aggressive? Aggressive?
Speaker 3: Yeah, but was that your personality? Was that what you
Speaker 3: adopted for this frustration? It was more frustrating.
Speaker 1: I'm not an I wasn't an outwardly angry person. It
Speaker 1: was very quiet when I was, you know, back then.
Speaker 1: But I was frustrated and I just didn't I wanted
Speaker 1: to be heard, you know. I felt like I was
Speaker 1: invisible and a guitar was a good way of speaking
Speaker 1: that out. And you know, people nowadays. It's funny. We're
Speaker 1: doing a gig a few years ago. We do these
Speaker 1: things all day on the green or red hot summer,
Speaker 1: and we're playing with Daryl Braithway, his bass player, came
Speaker 1: up to me and said, oh, you know, I really
Speaker 1: like the records you played on how do you get
Speaker 1: that sound? And I said, I can't really, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I can't really answer that, and he kind of got
Speaker 1: the shits with me and said, oh, keeping it a secret.
Speaker 1: I said, mate, I don't know. There was just a
Speaker 1: way that I found a guitar could. I know. It
Speaker 1: sounds corny to say it, but I could kind of
Speaker 1: express myself through this piece of wood with wires on it,
Speaker 1: you know, And I could just and I still do.
Speaker 1: You know. I love the sound of bass guitar makes
Speaker 1: when you hit it hard. There's a great quote of
Speaker 1: Angry Anderson's you know, no one hits a guitar like
Speaker 1: a NAUSI why is that you reckoned? Well that was
Speaker 1: a bit later on. I mean, there's a whole Australian
Speaker 1: sound that happened in the pubs here. It's very very unique.
Speaker 3: Can you talk about it though, because that doesn't we
Speaker 3: don't see that anymore really, I mean, it's not a
Speaker 3: thing today, but it was in the sixties and seventies.
Speaker 3: It was my period in eighties. Yeah, that was awesome.
Speaker 3: Like I remember going this into groups like Hush Yes, and.
Speaker 1: You know, I used to love Ray Brown and the whispers.
Speaker 1: You remember Ray Brown.
Speaker 3: It was fantastic And these days that sort of stuff
Speaker 3: doesn't exist. I don't think of and I thought to
Speaker 3: go to pubs anymore. But to be honestly, but it
Speaker 3: was a thing as an Australian thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh mate, it was huge. It was huge and
Speaker 1: it it it's the sound of how can I put this,
Speaker 1: it's a four on the floor. It's like being in
Speaker 1: a car on a highway, you know. And we used
Speaker 1: to spend all our time driving and there was this
Speaker 1: kind of energy in the music it started. Does it
Speaker 1: come from you or from the crowd or well, it
Speaker 1: comes from a confrontation really with the crowd. So in
Speaker 1: the seventies mid seventies, most bands played in church halls
Speaker 1: you know in the country, you know they do. And
Speaker 1: this was before my time. When I joined, the pubs
Speaker 1: were just starting. And that was in Melbourne. I first
Speaker 1: played in my first professional bands in Melbourne and played
Speaker 1: six it's a week in these pubs and I guess it.
Speaker 1: By the time I got back here at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the eighties, it was it was huge. You go
Speaker 1: out to these there's no internet, no Spotify, no mobile phones.
Speaker 1: People would work all week and want to go out
Speaker 1: and just no h and s so that you'd get
Speaker 1: two thousand people packed into a pub, used to rain
Speaker 1: inside so hot, and you'd play and they if you
Speaker 1: were introverted, or if you were kind of shy, or
Speaker 1: if you were you know, insular or in any way,
Speaker 1: or they just throw shit at you. Serious, absolutely absolutely
Speaker 1: so we this thing happened. We call it. You know,
Speaker 1: you are someone from Guns n' Roses or Nirvana or
Speaker 1: all these bands overseas, and they talk about an Australian sound,
Speaker 1: which is this sort of aggressive Russian and it's even
Speaker 1: you know artists like Paul Kelly have it, you know,
Speaker 1: where they had to sort of confront an audience in
Speaker 1: a pub. Is that for real though? Yeah? Absolutely absolutely?
Speaker 1: Oh mate? And then how do you dominate? Is it about?
Speaker 3: Then then you're confronting, but it is also then I'm
Speaker 3: going to dominate this audience. I'm going to get on
Speaker 3: top with my sound YEP and my.
Speaker 1: Movement yeah sound. And they wanted to, you know, they
Speaker 1: wanted to be satisfied. If they weren't satisfied, they'd throw
Speaker 1: stuff out there. And it was glass and it wasn't plastic.
Speaker 1: How go. Was that.
Speaker 3: I mean, I sort of like it. I mean I
Speaker 3: shouldn't say that, but I sort of like it.
Speaker 1: And I was in a band that had a female singer.
Speaker 3: That made it a bit tougher, and she she confronted him.
Speaker 1: Oh, and she she was in a I mean, there
Speaker 1: were no other female singers who did that. Then you know,
Speaker 1: you have Renee Gayer and you know, but not a
Speaker 1: rock rock singer. She was. She was one. She was
Speaker 1: on the outer you know, and people didn't take us seriously.
Speaker 1: And out of all the people I've played with in
Speaker 1: my life, I mean, she was the real deal. She
Speaker 1: wasn't a novelty actor. It was her spirit, you know,
Speaker 1: it was her She learned when she first started in
Speaker 1: the band. She would stand with her back to the audience,
Speaker 1: and she learned that she could be a personality. She
Speaker 1: learned that kind of from Barry Humphries. Really, how Barry
Speaker 1: Humphries could say or do anything in character. She learned
Speaker 1: she could do the same thing in character. I mean
Speaker 1: she was pretty fiery woman off stage too, but she
Speaker 1: confronted those audiences. And we'd go out to those big
Speaker 1: suburban pubs in the early eighties, and you know, the
Speaker 1: band was an energetic band anyway, but she do you know,
Speaker 1: some guy ll stuff at her in the crowd and
Speaker 1: she'd be into the crowd and fighting people, and absolutely
Speaker 1: I had to get into the crowd pull her out
Speaker 1: of the crowd. And people learned pretty quickly that the
Speaker 1: crowds learned that she wasn't to be messed with. Don't
Speaker 1: not be trifling with her. I mean, does that give you?
Speaker 1: Did that energize you though? Absolutely? Yeah, incredible. And we
Speaker 1: used to I mean, she's an incredibly beautiful looking girl, chrissy,
Speaker 1: you know, and she'd be doing a kind of monster
Speaker 1: act we used to call it at the crowd and
Speaker 1: she'd be out on the pa or she'd be, you know,
Speaker 1: doing that and she turned around to look at us,
Speaker 1: and she'd give you a look like what am I doing?
Speaker 1: You know? And you'd look out there and there'd just
Speaker 1: be it'd be fights, all sorts of stuff going on
Speaker 1: out there in the crowd. It was wild. They were
Speaker 1: wild times, wild times.
Speaker 3: Could you sort of give me a description, so a
Speaker 3: learned description, like, yeah, a bit of a scription, maybe
Speaker 3: a narrative when you're when you arrive at the pub
Speaker 3: that you're going to perform at and you're just setting
Speaker 3: up you guys. I guess you said it before everyone
Speaker 3: arrives or something like that, But like, what's the feeling
Speaker 3: between everybody you and the rest of the band before
Speaker 3: you actually get on the stage and performed, Like, what
Speaker 3: are you guys doing?
Speaker 1: Do you mean now or no? Then?
Speaker 3: Back then, just back then, before you knew you knew
Speaker 3: you're going into confrontation years is going to be foragn
Speaker 3: you knew the particular ven you're at. It had a
Speaker 3: reputation amongst you and amongst others. What would you be doing?
Speaker 3: I guess you were behind the stage, but at the
Speaker 3: back of a room. Somebode were like, what was the
Speaker 3: feeling before we had a thousand vodkas?
Speaker 1: You couldn't. People used to say to me, you guys
Speaker 1: must have been really out of it playing. You couldn't
Speaker 1: do it physically. You couldn't do it in a band
Speaker 1: like that. It was a workout like the Who the
Speaker 1: Gurus or a workout to physical workout. The Divinals were
Speaker 1: physical workout. You could not do it. We'd have it,
Speaker 1: maybe have a drink before, but what then We'd play
Speaker 1: in these big suburban pubs and you'd go out there
Speaker 1: and that's quite often there are no facilities. Yeah, it's ridiculous.
Speaker 1: You'd have to share the dunnies and whatever would get
Speaker 1: changed in the cool room or and sometimes there'd be
Speaker 1: motels attached, so they give you a motel room and
Speaker 1: we'd all be in there and Chrissy, how do you
Speaker 1: want yourself up? Well? Everyone everyone go quiet really yeah,
Speaker 1: into their respective you did warm up on you, and
Speaker 1: we do it in the gurus. You know, everyone goes
Speaker 1: pretty quiet and we don't really let anyone in the
Speaker 1: last half an hour or forty minutes. And even today
Speaker 1: my wife when I've got it, when I have to play,
Speaker 1: my wife says, oh, he's got the head on. That's
Speaker 1: what she'll say, because I get the performer's head. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I start to think about it. And then it was
Speaker 1: there was much more what's going to happen tonight. It's
Speaker 1: like anticipation, Yeah, what's going to happen? Is there going
Speaker 1: to be a big fight and people going to get
Speaker 1: up on the stage. Road crews back then were guys
Speaker 1: who were The music industry is starting starting to become
Speaker 1: a lot more professional then early eighties, but essentially a
Speaker 1: lot of the guys who were roadies for you were
Speaker 1: guys who had been in prison or you know, there
Speaker 1: were guys to protect the band from the audience. And
Speaker 1: you know, quite often you'd be after a show, you'd
Speaker 1: be going out to the car to leave, and there'd
Speaker 1: be guys out in the parking lot because you know,
Speaker 1: you've smiled at some girl in the audience and some
Speaker 1: guys you know, and the crew would be out there
Speaker 1: trying to you know, microphone stands, and they ever be drunk,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 3: So you see, you're very performance folk, castand or focused.
Speaker 3: We listened to ac DC just to wind yourselfup a
Speaker 3: B a few ac DC songs. We turn right up
Speaker 3: in the dressing room and get ourselves revved up. And Chrissy,
Speaker 3: I mean everyone to get in there, think.
Speaker 1: But Chrissy would get.
Speaker 3: Very very sort of focused, and would she be like
Speaker 3: the I don't call it the leader, but like was
Speaker 3: she the person who kicks it off, like up on
Speaker 3: the stage like you guys are at the back, strumming away,
Speaker 3: et cetera, but like which she would get up the
Speaker 3: front of everybody and start to wind the audience up
Speaker 3: with her own performance.
Speaker 1: Like people didn't you know. I mean it was a
Speaker 1: great band came to see her. She's an incredible performer,
Speaker 1: great singer, just so different, so unique. You know, it's
Speaker 1: like she's just like angus. Are I remember it well?
Speaker 1: I mean did you can?
Speaker 3: You? Were you? Your senses are all going like you're
Speaker 3: up there on the on the stage, and your your
Speaker 3: senses are going mental like obviously sound and watching what
Speaker 3: people are doing and what you guys are doing. But
Speaker 3: what about things like smells and can you remember smoke?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, beer and smoke, beer and smoke. You come
Speaker 1: off stage and you're clothes to be soaking wet, and
Speaker 1: you put them in your bag. You go home, you
Speaker 1: open your bag to get your clothes and it's just
Speaker 1: like an ash tray with beer. You know, there'd just
Speaker 1: be beer spilt everywhere.
Speaker 3: And yeah, and and and in terms of sound, can
Speaker 3: you mostly just hear the music or you can hear
Speaker 3: the audience?
Speaker 1: What what do you make you don't hear the don't
Speaker 1: you hear the sound? Really? Yes? Don't really? Between songs,
Speaker 1: you know, people yell stuff out and what were they saying?
Speaker 3: They'd say stuff to Chrissy and get your tits out, Yeah,
Speaker 3: stuff like that, she'd.
Speaker 1: Be into the audience, she rip in. Oh she oh mate,
Speaker 1: she'd be gone into the audience and what did you say? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and she'd be She'd have bad she had bad eyesight,
Speaker 1: so quite often she'd jump on the wrong guy. Ah
Speaker 1: be going no it's him, and then guy running away.
Speaker 1: But people got scared of her while, you know, because
Speaker 1: she was she was she was very big, feisty. No
Speaker 1: it's not very big. It's liked full on. Oh yeah, feisty.
Speaker 1: Any woman I've ever had a physical altercation with?
Speaker 3: Really, So, how do what is the the interaction between
Speaker 3: various members of the band.
Speaker 1: Well, so, in the The Vinyls, it was like a
Speaker 1: dysfunctional family. We were a gang when I first started
Speaker 1: playing music. This is you know, it's different these days,
Speaker 1: but I just I wanted to be part of a gang.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to be part of an orchestra. I
Speaker 1: want to be part of a gang. And the The Vinyls,
Speaker 1: out of all the bands I suppose I've been in,
Speaker 1: and it was very much like that. We used to
Speaker 1: fight between ourselves, but any outsider it was like, no,
Speaker 1: you know, we're very protective of one another. We spent
Speaker 1: so much time together on buses and planes and you
Speaker 1: know then you know, we'd go to America for six
Speaker 1: months and there was no internet. You know, you'd be
Speaker 1: in Oklahoma and you try and make a phone call
Speaker 1: to Australia and they go, what in the hotel? Then
Speaker 1: you had to get them connected, so you'd be quite isolated.
Speaker 1: So we learned to you know, we became quite quite
Speaker 1: tight and rely on each other. But then you would
Speaker 1: fight with each other too incredible because you were with
Speaker 1: each other too much. And then Chrissy and our guitar
Speaker 1: player Mark became we're in a relationship together, so that
Speaker 1: was made it harder. That was a whole other thing.
Speaker 1: And oh we've I've got many stories of going to
Speaker 1: Melbourne and get two higher cars in Melbourne and Chrissy
Speaker 1: and Mark they'd set off with our tour manager and
Speaker 1: the three of us again and the other kind of
Speaker 1: driving down the Tullamarine Freeway and there'd be Mark walking
Speaker 1: down the middle of the freeway. Yeah, and he's you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not playing with her anymore. I've had it, you know,
Speaker 1: so many fish, you know, punch ups. But it was
Speaker 1: a man, it was intense, you know, and after you
Speaker 1: finished playing everyone to drink and whatever, do whatever else
Speaker 1: and and it was intense and it was chaotic.
Speaker 3: But look, you'd finish what like you finished you said
Speaker 3: it like I know in those days above its ten,
Speaker 3: ten thirty, sometimes later than that later but then then
Speaker 3: then because I mean then you're completely fucking hyped up.
Speaker 1: So it depends on what. Yeah, So if we were
Speaker 1: playing saying Sydney, we'd all go as it used to
Speaker 1: be a place I'm sure you probably knew it called Manmer, Bennie's, Benni's. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'd be there, you go to Benni's. Yeah, oh yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was scary.
Speaker 3: I knew if I was and Bennie's, I was in
Speaker 3: the wrong place because you know, like I knew the
Speaker 3: blake who I owned the joint, or Kenny Carter and
Speaker 3: he's one of the owners and neck and himself. But
Speaker 3: it was a fucking scary, Like it wasn't scary place,
Speaker 3: it was cool, but like you knew you you're in trouble,
Speaker 3: you know, like especially if it was specially if it
Speaker 3: was Sunday night, you knew you in trouble because you know,
Speaker 3: in my casaid he had to work the next day
Speaker 3: and starting to work in those days to a law
Speaker 3: firm at nine am, and and it was it was
Speaker 3: a pretty greasy wake up, you know.
Speaker 1: But so Benny's a great example. Well it was the
Speaker 1: mansl room. So that was the place that you could
Speaker 1: go and you know, meet up with a lot of
Speaker 1: your peers there. A lot of other bands have be
Speaker 1: coming back and hanging out there. And many a time
Speaker 1: I lived in a I lived in Paddington then and
Speaker 1: I walk up, you stunt coming up walking home from
Speaker 1: the man's room with your guitar sometimes and they were fun,
Speaker 1: you know, it was fun fun. It was fun times.
Speaker 1: So obviously you ran a bit of problem, personal problem.
Speaker 1: So how does that shit happen? Like how did you?
Speaker 3: I mean, I know how that you can start taking
Speaker 3: drugs because that's the that was the vibe then. It
Speaker 3: was like most people don't realize, but in the a's
Speaker 3: there's a lot of coke around, Like everyone's getting drunk
Speaker 3: and taking coke. In the seventies it was more more heroin.
Speaker 3: A lot of pot late sixties and seventies, a lot
Speaker 3: of pot. It was it just a natural movement for you. Well,
Speaker 3: so heroin is a painkiller. You know, some people are
Speaker 3: like the up drugs. But it was explained to me.
Speaker 1: Once by a doctor. He said, you know, heroin comes
Speaker 1: from morphine. Morphine was developed for soldiers, basically who and
Speaker 1: morphine is not actually an anesthetic. What it does is
Speaker 1: remove fear. Was that right, Yeah, And it works on
Speaker 1: a certain part of the brain. It's not it's not
Speaker 1: like an anesthetic. I mean, it's a painkiller, but it
Speaker 1: works on a certain part of the brain that removes fear.
Speaker 1: And so that's why, you know, some people love those drugs.
Speaker 1: I love that drug. You know. I first had it
Speaker 1: in the seventies and didn't really think about it all
Speaker 1: that much. I had it. There were some people i'd
Speaker 1: started playing with when I first left school and they
Speaker 1: were older than me, and they had some and I
Speaker 1: smoked it and thought it was terrific, but I didn't
Speaker 1: really think about it because I was I was how
Speaker 1: do I put it? I was fulfilled by what I
Speaker 1: was trying to do, you know, the music and the
Speaker 1: excitement and playing with people, and that's all I wanted
Speaker 1: to do. And the drug thing. I mean, I always
Speaker 1: smoked pot and did whatever. I always enjoyed that, but
Speaker 1: it didn't it came back into my life in the
Speaker 1: eighties when I moved I moved back up here from Melbourne,
Speaker 1: and it seemed to in the seventies, I guess, you know,
Speaker 1: because of Vietnam, there are a lot of heroin came
Speaker 1: into Australia, much more than coke, especially here in Sydney,
Speaker 1: you know, you know the vand Aerosmith. So this is
Speaker 1: a funny little anecdote. I always love this. But they're
Speaker 1: all in recovery, all those guys now. But we did
Speaker 1: a tour with them in the the vinyls in the
Speaker 1: in America in the eighties, and they're all trying to
Speaker 1: stop taking drugs, and they're guitarist Joe Perry, who's kind
Speaker 1: of the second coolest guy in music, you know, he's great,
Speaker 1: and we had a great time and they were great,
Speaker 1: great guys, and we did six weeks with them in America.
Speaker 1: And it's a story in itself. But I remember talk
Speaker 1: doing one day and he says, what's the coke like
Speaker 1: in Australia, And I said, well, it's not really a
Speaker 1: thing there. You know, it's in the eighties, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not really such a I mean America in the
Speaker 1: eighties it was everywhere. You go into a bar and
Speaker 1: people have had it on the bar, and so it's
Speaker 1: not really you know, we're much closer to Southeast Asia
Speaker 1: in Australia, so it's a much more of a heroin
Speaker 1: sort of thing there. And he looked at me without
Speaker 1: a touch of irony and said, I got to get
Speaker 1: down there. It's great. But yeah, I mean it was everywhere.
Speaker 1: It was in your world. In my world, it was
Speaker 1: a circle of friends I had. They started it started
Speaker 1: to come in and on the weekends, we you know,
Speaker 1: I was in a band called Matt Finish before the
Speaker 1: di vinyls. It was a great band. It was doing
Speaker 1: really well, and it sort of seeped into that band
Speaker 1: a bit, and I didn't see it as as a
Speaker 1: as a problem. Then it was.
Speaker 3: Easy to easy to take to. You didn't have to injects.
Speaker 3: If you smoke it, yeah yeah, you soaky weed in
Speaker 3: it or something like that.
Speaker 1: I really put on tinfoil and smoke it all. But
Speaker 1: and when I when I, if I look at it,
Speaker 1: I can just see there's steps. You know. It became
Speaker 1: more and more prominent in your life, my life, my friends,
Speaker 1: and then when I started playing with the vinyls, I
Speaker 1: think pretty much because we were away so much, you know,
Speaker 1: we were we were in America for for a month
Speaker 1: and six months at a time, and there was coke
Speaker 1: and alcohol and you know, but we were traveling and
Speaker 1: m H, I didn't really think about it, and I'd
Speaker 1: come back to Sydney and someone has died or someone's
Speaker 1: gone to jail, or someone's disappeared, and you know, it's
Speaker 1: all getting kind of dark. And then I guess h.
Speaker 1: In the mid eighties, I had a partner and she
Speaker 1: said to me one day, you should stop taking that
Speaker 1: stuff because it could become a problem. And I was
Speaker 1: really offended. I said, what, I can stop whenever I want.
Speaker 1: She said try, and I couldn't know. Everything went downhill
Speaker 1: from there and it became this was it was an
Speaker 1: absolute nightmare, and it was like a secret. I could
Speaker 1: keep it a secret. In my world music industry, you know,
Speaker 1: everyone's kind of pretty out there, especially then with alcohol
Speaker 1: and coke and speed and drugs like that, and heroin
Speaker 1: had a certain stigma. You didn't tell people that you
Speaker 1: were doing Hell.
Speaker 3: Yeah, coke was cool, marijuana was sort of cool, still
Speaker 3: a little bit cool, but heroin.
Speaker 1: Smacks mentioned that, and people sort of grabbed their wallets
Speaker 1: and back away from it.
Speaker 3: It was King's Cross and it was sort of like prostitute.
Speaker 3: But is it part of that sort of a bit
Speaker 3: darker scene. So I can give you a little example
Speaker 3: of the progression. So it's nineteen eighty two. I go
Speaker 3: up to the manseel room and they would basically roll
Speaker 3: out of a carpet. They come in, what do you want?
Speaker 1: Do you want this? And you don't? Free drinks and
Speaker 1: meet this girl Rick, you know. By eighty five, I
Speaker 1: went up there one night with a guy who was
Speaker 1: a news He was in a band from New Zealand,
Speaker 1: and we both used some some dope and we've gone
Speaker 1: up there and they had these bounces, these two guys
Speaker 1: who worked there who were notorious. One of them ended
Speaker 1: up going to jail for murder with their big islander
Speaker 1: bouncers and they were famous for bashing people. So I've
Speaker 1: gone up there and heroin makes you vomit. Sometimes we'd
Speaker 1: had this heroin and I ran to the bathroom and
Speaker 1: I'm in the bathroom and the toilet and the door
Speaker 1: gets kicked open. It's one of these islands. He grabs me.
Speaker 1: He says right, I don't like junkies. Here. We're going
Speaker 1: to take you down the back alley and I said
Speaker 1: I'll just go, and they go, no, no, no, you're
Speaker 1: going to come for a walk with us. And my
Speaker 1: friend knew one of them, and he said, oh, look
Speaker 1: he's a member of the device. We'll just leave. We'll
Speaker 1: just leave. He said, Well, I remember thinking how things
Speaker 1: have changed. Yeah, you know, that's that's the progression, you know.
Speaker 1: And so what happened though? They let me go then,
Speaker 1: but other things started happening, you know, bad thing suck ups. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know I kept playing, but it took away
Speaker 1: the great thing. It took away my love of playing music.
Speaker 1: It took away absolutely what's great about that? No, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying it's great. I'm saying it. It removed.
Speaker 1: It removed that, it removed everything. I mean. They an alcoholic,
Speaker 1: they call alcohol the great remover and the same with this.
Speaker 1: It just starts to remove stuff out of your life,
Speaker 1: as in strips your soul a way sort of absolutely
Speaker 1: you become. It took away my personality, you know, my
Speaker 1: I was a pretty social person. Took all that away.
Speaker 1: It took away my love music, It took away my family.
Speaker 1: People sort of started to back off, and I just
Speaker 1: wanted to be left alone pretty much. Then it became
Speaker 1: about managing myself as just to be normal so people think,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a party or it's not. It's it's
Speaker 1: about survival. And you know, if I had the money,
Speaker 1: I was drinking in the mornings. But I just I
Speaker 1: just couldn't stand just being without anything. If I was
Speaker 1: sober straight, it felt so horrible, so horrible, and I'd
Speaker 1: go My family lived in Queensland, and I'd go up
Speaker 1: there and i'd stay with them for two weeks, and
Speaker 1: for the first four days I'd be physically sick coming off,
Speaker 1: but then physically i'd kick back pretty quickly and I'd
Speaker 1: be all right physically, but emotionally or mentally or spiritually,
Speaker 1: you know, like this whole inside it was just awful
Speaker 1: and life was dull and heavy. And I said, if
Speaker 1: this is what being straight is, I can't do it.
Speaker 1: And I tried that. Each time i'd go up there,
Speaker 1: it was worse, it was harder. And you know, addiction
Speaker 1: is I know a lot about addiction now, and I
Speaker 1: know that it has nothing to do with rational thinking.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can have people who are social drug user,
Speaker 1: social drinkers. They might drink for like my sister will
Speaker 1: do it, you know, she'll smoke pod or and then
Speaker 1: just stop and won't say I don't feel like any
Speaker 1: My son is like that. I don't feel like a
Speaker 1: drink tonight. You know, I wasn't like that. When someone
Speaker 1: is an addict or has the disease or whatever you
Speaker 1: want to call it, the disorder of addiction in them,
Speaker 1: it has nothing to do with rational thinking. You can
Speaker 1: walk up the road and see girls walking, hardly any
Speaker 1: of them there anymore, but you know, and you ask
Speaker 1: them what they're doing, and they go, I'm just going
Speaker 1: through a bad time. I'll get it together. It makes
Speaker 1: you do things that you would not normally do. It
Speaker 1: makes you it turns you into a person that you
Speaker 1: don't want to be, and you know, you lie to
Speaker 1: people and you really it's bleak, it's it's awful.
Speaker 3: What what what what negative outcomes did you apart from
Speaker 3: the emotional so, but what need of outcomes did? Did
Speaker 3: did it to you in terms of affecting your life,
Speaker 3: your business life as that as in being a guitarist,
Speaker 3: I mean, did it affect your relationship with the de vinals,
Speaker 3: and then I became that.
Speaker 1: Very quiet withdrawn and in the end I had to leave.
Speaker 3: Did they actually leave or you made a decisions?
Speaker 1: You just took the from here actually in a house
Speaker 1: two hundred yards from here. Yeah. I just wanted it
Speaker 1: all to stop, you know. And I knew that I'd
Speaker 1: had a few close calls dying, dying, I'd started to
Speaker 1: use it intravenously. You know. My health was terrible, never
Speaker 1: had any money, that was you know. I mean I
Speaker 1: often think, how did I how did I actually live?
Speaker 1: I can't I don't remember going to the supermarket or
Speaker 1: you know, I just I guess other people took responsibility
Speaker 1: for me in a way.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: I had a I call her a hostage, a girlfriend,
Speaker 1: you know, who looked after me for a while. But
Speaker 1: also I mean I was going away too with the band,
Speaker 1: and I'd go away and I I don't know. The
Speaker 1: last year it was very difficult, very difficult to try
Speaker 1: and keep it together. A friend of mine puts it,
Speaker 1: it's like you've got a balloon a full of water,
Speaker 1: and it gets a hole, and as he put one
Speaker 1: hand up and another hole, then it gets another, and
Speaker 1: you're trying to stop it all, you know, and you
Speaker 1: get you just get tired. I got really tired of
Speaker 1: it physically, mentally. I just wanted it all to stop.
Speaker 1: And at the time, I thought, well, maybe I just
Speaker 1: need to go to the country for a few months,
Speaker 1: you know, get myself together, fresh air. That's what I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, as they say, all good junkies go to
Speaker 1: queens and yes, uh yeah.
Speaker 3: I thought, what was the moment where you thought they're
Speaker 3: going to I'm going to able to rehab, but I'm
Speaker 3: going to.
Speaker 1: Do something, actually do something. I had a couple of moments.
Speaker 1: There were a couple there were There's a story I
Speaker 1: had that I told Nick actually Nick Fordham about this,
Speaker 1: and uh he's sort of trying to organize for me
Speaker 1: to do this book of stories, you know. But where
Speaker 1: I was, you know, I like Gallows humor. I have
Speaker 1: a Jewish background. I like the the you know, you
Speaker 1: can talk about the most horrific stuff in a funny way,
Speaker 1: and I like that. And but I was. I used
Speaker 1: to go and meet this woman in Coles in Redfern.
Speaker 1: She used to there's no mobile phones, you'd ring our
Speaker 1: and she's RB in Cole's between two and three. So
Speaker 1: you'd go and she'd be walking up and down the
Speaker 1: aisles with the trolley and she'd buy your dop offer.
Speaker 1: And I was on the corner of Cleveland Street and
Speaker 1: South Downing Street before it was a freeway, waiting for
Speaker 1: my partner in crime, who was a drummer in the
Speaker 1: de Vinals, to pick me up. And these two blokes
Speaker 1: approached me, these two young guys, and they said, can
Speaker 1: you come with us? Took me around the corner and
Speaker 1: they pulled out badgers and they said, no younger, younger
Speaker 1: than the mid twenties. And they said, we've been watching you.
Speaker 1: It looks like you're casing a house to break into.
Speaker 1: I said, no, no, I'm waiting for a friend of
Speaker 1: mine to pick me up. That's all. Radio leans over
Speaker 1: and in my pocket, pulls out a syringe. Out of
Speaker 1: my pocket, He says, you got any drugs on you?
Speaker 1: And I said no. He said you're going to get some,
Speaker 1: are you? And I said yeah? And he said where
Speaker 1: you're going? I said, Bondo Hotel. He said, of course,
Speaker 1: you don't know the name of the guy who's selling
Speaker 1: it to you, do you? And I said no, I don't,
Speaker 1: so it's the radio and he turns to his partner.
Speaker 1: He says, you know this guy, Oh my god. And
Speaker 1: you know when someone starts talking about you're like, you're
Speaker 1: not there. So they start having this conversation. Remember Selena's
Speaker 1: three weeks ago. You know, the guy said, oh, the
Speaker 1: choir boys say no, I'm not the choir boys. Look,
Speaker 1: he's a guitarist. Are the the vinyls?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember they have this conversation. I'm just devastated.
Speaker 1: And I see my friend drive past the back. He's
Speaker 1: driving around, keep driving. Yeah, And this cop turns around
Speaker 1: to me and he puts us fringe back in my
Speaker 1: pocket and he says, he says, you know, you've got
Speaker 1: a career. You're playing this band, great band you're playing.
Speaker 1: You've got this great career that most people give give
Speaker 1: anything to be in your position. And look what you're doing.
Speaker 1: You make me sick. Fuck really, get out of my sight.
Speaker 1: WHOA And what did that? Was that? Like a wake
Speaker 1: up call to you? Though?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: It was a definite crack in a moment, you know,
Speaker 1: But I mean an hour later, I didn't really think
Speaker 1: about it because we went and got some drugs.
Speaker 3: But the.
Speaker 1: Big one for me was we had gone to Brisbane
Speaker 1: to play, and you know, you were asking me about
Speaker 1: what it was like before and before a gig, and
Speaker 1: this is nineteen eighty seven and we had done this.
Speaker 1: We'd done this big tour called Australian made with Jimmy Barnes.
Speaker 1: It was first of those sort of big day out
Speaker 1: concerts and in excess, Jimmy Barnes to violence as a
Speaker 1: film of it and the models mental as anything, and
Speaker 1: we've done that. I was just trying to keep this
Speaker 1: together and I'd have a little bit of dape in
Speaker 1: the morning just to be normal, you know, so I
Speaker 1: could get through the day and a pean normal do
Speaker 1: my job struggle. And we went off to play after that,
Speaker 1: and we had gone to Melbourne and I was gotten
Speaker 1: really sick in Melbourne and we went to Brisbane to play.
Speaker 1: And we're playing one of those big suburban parks in
Speaker 1: Brisbane and it's amazing, you know. And they talk about
Speaker 1: street cunning, what you can if you're really desperate, what
Speaker 1: you can get together. You get quite creative. And I
Speaker 1: got on the phone and I've got this drug dealer
Speaker 1: in Sydney and I said, can you drop this stuff
Speaker 1: off to this friend of mine? And he took it
Speaker 1: to our office and I told him at the office
Speaker 1: that I had this really important cassette that I needed.
Speaker 1: So one of the guys is coming up to see
Speaker 1: us up in Brisbane. They waited all day and he
Speaker 1: arrived and he said, I've got this cassette for you, Beauty,
Speaker 1: I've got this cassette. Go out to this gig, big part,
Speaker 1: and I was physically sick, you know, and running around.
Speaker 1: Chrissy runs into the bathroom, of course, and takes the
Speaker 1: bathroom and thinking where am I going to go? So
Speaker 1: run around. I remember in this panic before the gig,
Speaker 1: and I found this bathroom and I had this little
Speaker 1: shot just all of a sudden, I'm like Popeye, you know,
Speaker 1: with the spinach, right, I'm like, what was all that
Speaker 1: drama about the last few days. I'm perfectly okay. And
Speaker 1: got up on stage that night, big crowd and playing away.
Speaker 1: It's really good and the lights and the sound. I
Speaker 1: look down there's a little bit of blood coming out
Speaker 1: of my oh, and I just died. I just I
Speaker 1: can't tell you. After being that kid who just loved
Speaker 1: music so much, and I just loved just it was
Speaker 1: my life, you know. I was obsessed with it, and
Speaker 1: I just no one else saw that, you know, and
Speaker 1: I just crushed me. I just thought, I've got a
Speaker 1: I've got to do something about this. So it was yourself,
Speaker 1: you did it well, I saw it, yeah, and I
Speaker 1: The next step was two days later. I was in
Speaker 1: we were in Milula bar and I went to see
Speaker 1: my mother and I told her and her and my stepfather,
Speaker 1: and it's the first time I really told anybody like that.
Speaker 1: I mean, other people knew, but it was my family
Speaker 1: and my mother I remember said, oh, we knew there
Speaker 1: was something wrong with you. We didn't know what it was,
Speaker 1: so now we know what it is. So then I
Speaker 1: went to see a drug counselor. One hundred yards up
Speaker 1: here was a methadone clinic then, and I don't know
Speaker 1: why they didn't put me on methadona. They sent me
Speaker 1: to a hospital. I was introduced to aa NA and recovery,
Speaker 1: and I know it. It's a whole different world. I'd
Speaker 1: never seen anybody stop and be happy about it. I'd
Speaker 1: seen people go to jail or die or die. I had,
Speaker 1: and some friends of mine who I used with disappeared.
Speaker 1: I had no idea where they were now found out
Speaker 1: where they were. They were sober, and they kind of
Speaker 1: grabbed me and dragged me into this sort of other world,
Speaker 1: which it took me three years of to actually surrendered
Speaker 1: to it, to the recovery. It kind of relapsed a
Speaker 1: couple of times.
Speaker 3: And is that about admitting to yourself that you're an addict?
Speaker 1: First, Yeah, it's admitting that you're done. It's like, don't
Speaker 1: get back in the ring. You're going to get the
Speaker 1: crap beaten out of you. Just don't get back in
Speaker 1: the ring. And once you do that, you set free.
Speaker 1: It's a sort of a dichotomy in a way. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like admit that you defeat and then you're set free,
Speaker 1: or you're depending on this fellowship or you know, and
Speaker 1: you have this freedom, incredible freedom. And I you know,
Speaker 1: I'd always wanted I just I always just wanted to
Speaker 1: live in the world with some peace and feel okay
Speaker 1: about myself. Never had that. And you know, I thought
Speaker 1: that if I could get famous enough for I mean money.
Speaker 1: I had never made any money then, but I thought,
Speaker 1: if I could just get enough of something, it would
Speaker 1: fulfill me. And it never did. And when I you know,
Speaker 1: as a kid, I dream about being in a band
Speaker 1: touring America, and I did that. But the more of
Speaker 1: that stuff I got, the more drugshold use, because I
Speaker 1: found that that did not fulfill me. And you know,
Speaker 1: I'm just one of those people who my sister's not
Speaker 1: the same We grew up in the same house. But
Speaker 1: I have this thing in me that's like a whole,
Speaker 1: you know, and try to fill it with different things.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I'm not religious at all, but I
Speaker 1: you know, I just life. Life on life's terms was
Speaker 1: never enough. Do you still have that whole?
Speaker 3: And so how did you, let's call it, how did
Speaker 3: you either get rid of the hole or how did
Speaker 3: you feel it in the meanwhile?
Speaker 1: Well it's a so this is this is where I
Speaker 1: can get diicy talking about it. But because I'm not
Speaker 1: I have to stress that I'm not religious. I don't
Speaker 1: like religion, you mean institution religion as opposed to spirituality. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's just what I do is a spiritual thing, and
Speaker 1: it's a spiritual malay, you know, it's a spiritual lacking.
Speaker 1: It's a it's and I had to basically, I mean,
Speaker 1: it sounds really corny to talk about it, but you know,
Speaker 1: I had to find out who I was. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm not you know, what I do is not who
Speaker 1: I am, you know, it's it's I had to fight,
Speaker 1: you know, just find myself. Really and I found out that,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm good at playing a guitar and and
Speaker 1: and you know, got asked to join the hooda Gurus
Speaker 1: and it's fantastic, you know. But I thought, I really
Speaker 1: thought that part of my life was over, the music part.
Speaker 1: I thought I that was it and that was my
Speaker 1: chance and kind of blowing it. But everything I have
Speaker 1: in my life today is because I went that route,
Speaker 1: the recovery route, and every day of my life I'm
Speaker 1: grateful for it. I woke up this morning, I went, okay, great,
Speaker 1: you know it was about is it because you felt?
Speaker 1: Is it because I was coming to see you? I think, well,
Speaker 1: you know, but you know, I have this sort of
Speaker 1: you know, it's hard to talk about our faith in
Speaker 1: not in in myself, but the recovery has made me
Speaker 1: believe in myself and I'm okay in my own skin.
Speaker 1: You know. When I used to go to the man'sel
Speaker 1: room in the eighties, I had to either go home
Speaker 1: with drugs, alcohol or a girl. I couldn't stand going
Speaker 1: up by myself because of because you're uncomfortable yourself perhaps
Speaker 1: one hundred percent, and now I'm not.
Speaker 3: And how does someone get how did you find that out?
Speaker 3: Like how did you come to terms with that? Like
Speaker 3: did someone guide you down that process or did someone
Speaker 3: tell you that?
Speaker 1: So the last couple of years or the last year,
Speaker 1: a couple of years of using drugs and alcohol and
Speaker 1: the chaos of it, you know, I'd have I quite
Speaker 1: like going to see a psychiatrist. I run rings around
Speaker 1: a psychiatrist. You know, you get to talk about your
Speaker 1: favorite subjects, you know. But you know, I had people.
Speaker 1: There are a few people in my life who knew
Speaker 1: what was going on. And you know people do this too.
Speaker 1: You know, Oh this is bad. You've got to stop.
Speaker 1: It's bad. What are you doing? Get yourself together, pull
Speaker 1: yourself together? Stop? You know, I think, yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll just stop. Genius, what a great idea, Just stop?
Speaker 1: Couldn't I used to walk to a drug dealer's house
Speaker 1: thinking I dropped dead yesterday and someone revived me. Why
Speaker 1: am I doing this?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: I know people who have left their kids at a
Speaker 1: dealer's house is collateral? I mean, why would someone do that?
Speaker 1: And why would someone sell their body on the street.
Speaker 1: You know what? You know, you see your mother crying
Speaker 1: being you to stop, and you go, yeah, I'll stop,
Speaker 1: and you mean it sincere, but you can't. And this
Speaker 1: is the thing people don't understand.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's something that's bigger than you. You know, It's like
Speaker 1: a counselor said to me in one of the hospitals
Speaker 1: I went to. She said, what are you going to
Speaker 1: do when you leave? I said, go to Queensland. She said,
Speaker 1: that's nice, said if you had diabetes, would moving to
Speaker 1: Queensland fix it? So of course not one. She said,
Speaker 1: well you need to look at it like that. You
Speaker 1: need something outside yourself because you're on your own are
Speaker 1: going to win against this? And she's right. You know,
Speaker 1: I tested it for a couple of years and I
Speaker 1: relapsed until I just went right enough. So I threw
Speaker 1: myself into it. For you know, I made it the
Speaker 1: most important thing in my life.
Speaker 3: In other words, the most point thing in your life
Speaker 3: is to cure yourself.
Speaker 1: Well, to open myself up to recovery. I don't think
Speaker 1: I can cure myself, but I have to do it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have to take responsibility for myself and do it.
Speaker 1: I'm not if I sit at home and think, Okay,
Speaker 1: well I'm going to fix myself now. It never worked.
Speaker 1: But see, the most profound one of the most profound
Speaker 1: things was, you know, I'd never seen anyone give up.
Speaker 1: You know, I love How can I explain this. I
Speaker 1: love what drugs did to me. You know, I love
Speaker 1: that that feeling.
Speaker 3: But.
Speaker 1: I hated all the other stuff that happened. And so
Speaker 1: I found out that I couldn't have one without the other.
Speaker 1: You know, if I'm going to drink that's going to
Speaker 1: come something, all this other disastrous stuff will happen. So
Speaker 1: you know, I thought, oh, you know, I'm going to
Speaker 1: have to give up this thing that I love. Now.
Speaker 1: I remember I was in this hospital and these two
Speaker 1: people came and they did what I do a lot
Speaker 1: of this stuff now myself. But they came in. They
Speaker 1: do what's called an H and I meeting. They stands
Speaker 1: for Hospitals and institutions. You go out to hospitals jails
Speaker 1: talk and just basically just tell your story. You don't
Speaker 1: say you've got to do this, And that's what they did.
Speaker 1: They told their stories. It was I sat there looking
Speaker 1: at them, thinking these two people, they look pretty cool.
Speaker 1: They were both like four or five years sober happy.
Speaker 1: I thought, I've never seen anything. I wasn't happy about it,
Speaker 1: about having to give up that stuff. I want all
Speaker 1: the dark stuff to stop. But surely there must be
Speaker 1: awaken I mean dream buntain or yeah, you know. And
Speaker 1: they I said, what do you do? You know? They said, oh,
Speaker 1: we go to these meetings and you know, told me
Speaker 1: about recovery and and and that was that was That
Speaker 1: was pretty pretty profan, you know, I thought then, I thought,
Speaker 1: when I first started to look at the AA thing,
Speaker 1: I thought, oh great, you know I'm going to be
Speaker 1: in a little suit selling bibles in Bondo Junction. That's
Speaker 1: what I'm going to be doing. No fun anymore. This
Speaker 1: is a penance, you know, for what I've been. But
Speaker 1: it's quite the opposite. And do you do you reach
Speaker 1: out to other people now? And have you been doing it?
Speaker 3: Reach out like help help other people that you that
Speaker 3: you know, I've got the same issue that you absolutely have.
Speaker 1: Went out to Long Bay jail two days ago, really
Speaker 1: and you tell them your story. I've been doing it
Speaker 1: for well thirty years. Is that part of your therapy
Speaker 1: for yourself. So I had this moment where when I
Speaker 1: was a year about a year sober, and we had
Speaker 1: this big gig in the hoodah Gurus at the Entertainment Center.
Speaker 1: It was a great night, Terrific. We have this album
Speaker 1: out happening. It was great, and you know, I'm thinking, wow,
Speaker 1: you know, I've got my wife back. And then this
Speaker 1: friend of mine two days later said come with me.
Speaker 1: I get your clearance to come out to the Long
Speaker 1: Bay jail and do this talk. So I went out
Speaker 1: with him. I was walking out of the jail afterwards,
Speaker 1: I had this feeling and it was a fulfilled feeling,
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking, this is what I always wanted. This
Speaker 1: is what I wanted two nights ago. And don't get
Speaker 1: me wrong, the two nights ago when I was playing Terrific,
Speaker 1: it was great, But this was different. This was a
Speaker 1: different this is for you personally. Yeah, it was different,
Speaker 1: and it's corny to talk about it. Just like you
Speaker 1: help another person, you do it, mate, I know you do.
Speaker 1: And when you help another person, I mean, I'm not
Speaker 1: some sort of mother terrasa and walk around the earth
Speaker 1: for helping people. I don't do that. I do it
Speaker 1: for selfish motives. I was going to say, I do.
Speaker 3: It for selfish reasons because it is fulfilling, and I
Speaker 3: don't get the fulfillment in any other way. And I
Speaker 3: do my mental show for that reason. I mean, I'm
Speaker 3: doing exactly what you're talking about, but it is for selfishness.
Speaker 3: I remember had Danny Abdullah there sitting one day and
Speaker 3: he runs this program about forgiveness after his kids were
Speaker 3: killed by that motorist, and he said the same thing.
Speaker 3: He said, I run the program forgiveness for myself selfish reason.
Speaker 3: It helps me deal with what I've got to deal with.
Speaker 3: And I get, I get one hundred percent. And I
Speaker 3: think maybe sometimes some vers maybe you're one of those
Speaker 3: people to nearly take sixty years to work this shit out.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 3: Other people work it out really young. I don't know
Speaker 3: why the fuck they do, but how that happens. But
Speaker 3: it took me a long time to work out what
Speaker 3: really fulfilled is?
Speaker 1: It fulfills me.
Speaker 3: I always thought about making money or you know, smashing
Speaker 3: the banks, all that sort of stuff. I mean, that's
Speaker 3: a bit like you're playing guitar, Like I mean, I'm
Speaker 3: out there in that confrontation world. I love the confrontation.
Speaker 3: I love the challenge. But what really rocks my boat
Speaker 3: is about sitting and talk to you. Listen you talk,
Speaker 3: telling me this story or do my mental show.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting.
Speaker 3: I'm glad you told me that because it's sort of
Speaker 3: re stated in my mind. Sometimes we just do because
Speaker 3: that's what we do. I do the same thing every
Speaker 3: day and I forget why I'm doing it sometimes, and
Speaker 3: sitting here with you today is usually reminding me of say, okay,
Speaker 3: to be selfish and look after yourself.
Speaker 2: Go.
Speaker 3: You know, it doesn't matter whether it's addiction, you're trying
Speaker 3: to deal with whatever, it doesn't really matter.
Speaker 1: I think everybody has their own things. You know. That
Speaker 1: was my path and you know, I mean it's what
Speaker 1: it's done. Is when you're for me. If I'm fulfilled
Speaker 1: as a person, it affects every area of my life,
Speaker 1: like the marriage I have, for instance. You know, I
Speaker 1: have a great marriage now. My relationships were chaotic in
Speaker 1: my past. You know, I like, there's a great saying,
Speaker 1: you know about recovery makes the ordinary extraordinary. It's a
Speaker 1: great saying. You know. I needed to think, how do
Speaker 1: people how do people go to the park, How do
Speaker 1: people go and have a meal and enjoy that. And
Speaker 1: how do people you know, I wanted all this stuff,
Speaker 1: you know, and now I do and I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: I get to play in a great rock and roll
Speaker 1: band too, which is a huge when you're next gig
Speaker 1: we're playing, would we just stopped. We stopped a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks ago. We've got our next gigs in Brazil
Speaker 1: in August, and we've just announced two days ago. It's
Speaker 1: so great, I tell you. For a band like us,
Speaker 1: we we're constantly shaking our heads just because we're always saying, oh,
Speaker 1: this will be the last year. We've thought that maybe
Speaker 1: the last fifteen years, but people still come, you know.
Speaker 1: And we've just announced this tour straight into it in November,
Speaker 1: which is just selling really well. And yeah it's still
Speaker 1: still and you know, we we we have a very
Speaker 1: high bottom line, you know. We we we play really
Speaker 1: well and we people come to see us. They it's
Speaker 1: a good it's a good night.
Speaker 3: If Rie Crossman was to compare yourself with Rick cross
Speaker 3: and when you first joined the Vinyls and you're playing
Speaker 3: at pubs and you know, you had Christies up the front,
Speaker 3: and as you said, it was sort of confrontation and
Speaker 3: all that sort of stuff in the pub. If you
Speaker 3: were compared, you compared that dude to today, the dude
Speaker 3: is now in the Guruz and is going to play
Speaker 3: in Brazil. What's the difference between the two? I don't
Speaker 3: mean in a personal sense, and you know how you
Speaker 3: how you play, how you address the audience. Obviously it's
Speaker 3: not pub environment, but how what is the difference between
Speaker 3: the two. Is it more chilled, older, mature, in control
Speaker 3: or you're still into it?
Speaker 1: Still into it definitely you can't energy? Oh mate. The
Speaker 1: only difference is it's physically harder. Where yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: we I go swimming and you know, I have to
Speaker 1: look after myself a bit, you know, otherwise to train
Speaker 1: for it. Well, yeah, we do an hour and a
Speaker 1: half and I know we did it to a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago where I noticed that you get to
Speaker 1: about fifty minute marking starting to go losing my breath
Speaker 1: of the year, you know, because we don't we bash ourselves,
Speaker 1: you know, we go hard, and so I had to,
Speaker 1: you know, I started going swimming and that just for
Speaker 1: the stamina. Because we did this American tour, were playing
Speaker 1: five nights a week. We're in our sixties and so
Speaker 1: you have to be you have to look after yourself.
Speaker 1: And it was good. It's good. And it's a great
Speaker 1: thing too where a band like us you get on
Speaker 1: the road and you after a couple of weeks if
Speaker 1: you're doing a tour like that, because we here we
Speaker 1: will play maybe once a week or you know, a
Speaker 1: couple of times a week occasionally, you know, and this
Speaker 1: thing happens when you when you do it with the band,
Speaker 1: after a couple of weeks, you kind of get into this,
Speaker 1: into this sort of on this role, and it's a
Speaker 1: great feeling. It's a great feeling. It must be like
Speaker 1: when someone you know, some of the league players really
Speaker 1: fit and they're they're kind of you know, they've gone
Speaker 1: through their their training, their pre season stuff, and it's
Speaker 1: a terrific feeling.
Speaker 3: And what do you think about this Row music scene today?
Speaker 3: Because I'm obviously the pub scenes not where it was
Speaker 3: and you know a lot of pubs pull down what
Speaker 3: is what do you say he said it were is
Speaker 3: big on the globe platform in terms of our impact
Speaker 3: as we were back then.
Speaker 1: It's very very different world now. You know, people talk
Speaker 1: about streams and I don't know I'm the live thing
Speaker 1: is very different. I feel like it's coming back. Music
Speaker 1: is cyclical, you know, it's low fashion, a little bit
Speaker 1: low fashion. Yeah it Well, I hope you know that usually,
Speaker 1: you know, every fifteen years or something, someone comes along
Speaker 1: kicks the door in a bit and you know from
Speaker 1: the sixty Dylan did it and All Beetles did it,
Speaker 1: or Rolling Stones, Nirvana, punk rock. I hope that happens
Speaker 1: again soon.
Speaker 3: Because but I look at things like you know, Splendor
Speaker 3: and Oize they're getting canceled because for the fucking insurance
Speaker 3: and this sort of ship and that's right, and like
Speaker 3: I mean, I saw the Roots and Blues, I don't think.
Speaker 3: I mean, unfortunately, every time they hold it starts rating
Speaker 3: on all the deal is. But you know, people are
Speaker 3: sort of getting a bit nauseated by going to these
Speaker 3: events because the conditions are ship and or you get
Speaker 3: all wound up for it and it gets canceled on canceled,
Speaker 3: And I mean, I don't know how to solve this stuff,
Speaker 3: but a lot of us got to do with all
Speaker 3: the costs associated, and the promoters just can't handle it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, who was it was
Speaker 1: the guy who just came a few months ago called
Speaker 1: Fred Freddy fred again fred again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but he killed it like he just got an
Speaker 3: announced like that morning.
Speaker 1: Well all I mean they up, Yeah, all the venues
Speaker 1: were booked, it was all planned. Yeah, yeah, totally. But
Speaker 1: but but the people didn't know. The people assume of it.
Speaker 3: And because I had the boss of TG here the
Speaker 3: other day, who promoted him and.
Speaker 1: Who was that?
Speaker 3: Colin Colin, Colin, Colin's from Jeff Jones, Jeff Chants Jeff Jones,
Speaker 3: and he came on our mental podcast and it was
Speaker 3: like it was staged but still like.
Speaker 1: Incredible filled it up. I mean, I just don't. I
Speaker 1: just don't get it. I mean, it just does my
Speaker 1: you know. I mean I remember when DIA straight sold
Speaker 1: out what do they do twenty entertainment centers. I understand
Speaker 1: that this I don't understand. I just don't. It's just
Speaker 1: it's a phenomenon, you know. And Colin, who is one
Speaker 1: of the promoters, said, now there are a lot of
Speaker 1: acts who are going to try and do the same
Speaker 1: sort of thing in America and they won't. It's because
Speaker 1: it's a it's a it's a kind of it's a
Speaker 1: phenomenon really what he did. I mean, it's incredible what
Speaker 1: he did, totally.
Speaker 3: Like, I mean, I for me, I don't want to
Speaker 3: go somewhere with this toy. Mean I go the pubs
Speaker 3: all the time when I was younger. But I don't
Speaker 3: like the idea of I don't mind listens like.
Speaker 1: I'd like to.
Speaker 3: I actually do like to listen to my favorite music
Speaker 3: and musicians streaming or on Spotify.
Speaker 1: Do you play Vinyl at I've got a record totally
Speaker 1: got a record player. Yeah, see I wish I was
Speaker 1: wanted to bring you something. Yeah, I've actually got it.
Speaker 3: I got at home, and I've got one on my
Speaker 3: farm too, and and and I only just decked the
Speaker 3: farm went out more recently, set up more recently, because yeah,
Speaker 3: I love Vinyl.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love get I also CD. I also got
Speaker 1: a CD play.
Speaker 3: I've got an old banging off a bo Center six
Speaker 3: six disc CD player, which I fucking love. I just
Speaker 3: love it, like I played all the time. And I
Speaker 3: mean I and I did. I was a triple Emma
Speaker 3: for many many years.
Speaker 1: And they love I mean, that's promoting our tour, are they? Yeah?
Speaker 3: But you know, like Mark Ayre and Maddie Johns who
Speaker 3: show you've been with Cooper Uh, Gus Walland I'm going
Speaker 3: to one of Gussy's breakfasts tomorrow actually as a matter
Speaker 3: of fact, for one of his charity.
Speaker 1: The charity runs.
Speaker 3: I'm good mate to those guys, and they were such,
Speaker 3: they were your biggest, your biggest media promoters. It was
Speaker 3: unbelievable and all the trade's everyone because that's the station
Speaker 3: they listened to, Tribling and uh and and I therefore,
Speaker 3: I'd rather listen that than going to a live gig today,
Speaker 3: mainly because I don't like the fucking hassle of it.
Speaker 3: I would I do go to Splendor and things like that,
Speaker 3: though if I'm away, I mean I got out of
Speaker 3: Farmer Byron, so I will go to those things and
Speaker 3: and put up.
Speaker 1: Cop the crowd because much more relaxed.
Speaker 3: But doing what the younger people do today what I
Speaker 3: did when I was younger, just going out on Saturday
Speaker 3: night and doing my best to get and do my
Speaker 3: best to sort of crawl back home.
Speaker 1: I don't know whether I could do that these days.
Speaker 3: And I just wonder whether people who like me, who
Speaker 3: are used to that pub scene, we've all got older
Speaker 3: like you are.
Speaker 1: And we just go a little bit more chilled. You know,
Speaker 1: my closest friend in the world is the drummer in
Speaker 1: Midnight Oil Rob Hers. And they were doing their last
Speaker 1: tour and his wife, who was looking after the seats
Speaker 1: friends and family, she rings up and she says, I've
Speaker 1: got you a couple of passes, you know, thanks for
Speaker 1: the gig. And I rang back. I said, Leslie, I've
Speaker 1: got to ask you. Are they seats. They've got a
Speaker 1: big seats. I'm not coming two hours. Your legs are
Speaker 1: fucked up, mate, I can't, you know. And I always
Speaker 1: used to joke, you know, I'm in a band, get
Speaker 1: out of the audience, you know, I don't want to
Speaker 1: be in the audience, you know. And I I go
Speaker 1: and see people, you know, I went and saw I
Speaker 1: go and see recently Cheap Trick, Oh wow, sensational. That
Speaker 1: was so good. Then I went and saw the Damned
Speaker 1: you know, the English punk band. That was terrible. But
Speaker 1: I go, you know, I go out and see people.
Speaker 1: But I can't. I'm not going to go and stand
Speaker 1: a pub for two hours. No, I can't do it anymore.
Speaker 1: And I don't really like it. You know. We're doing
Speaker 1: the endmore theater this year. So was great, so you
Speaker 1: should come, We'll come on when is that? That's in November?
Speaker 1: M was great, but you don't. You don't do pubs.
Speaker 1: There's no pubs. We we do we occasionally occasionally we
Speaker 1: will do them. Was the bag of moon Bar? Or
Speaker 1: could you could you Celena?
Speaker 3: Well, that's that's cause that's a Couldji Bay Hotel Selenas.
Speaker 3: But there was one up the road call it's called
Speaker 3: there's now the holiday in Yes, yeah.
Speaker 1: The Oceanic.
Speaker 3: But there was a bar at the back or the
Speaker 3: back of the moon Bar where they had the bands.
Speaker 1: I saw a dragon there. I saw dragon there.
Speaker 3: And and I guess you were sort of you would
Speaker 3: have been around probably before Dale Breath. Would Daryl breathwait
Speaker 3: period you guys?
Speaker 1: Or the Divine the vinyls before Darryl? Would that be right?
Speaker 1: Because Darryl Daryl was the eighties? Yeah, who's eighties?
Speaker 3: But the dis are like more like late seventies eighties.
Speaker 3: We started right because he lived around BONDI somewhere, didn't
Speaker 3: he There was a house in Bondo and Pankeville Street.
Speaker 3: Everyone used to say, like a big giant was only
Speaker 3: out there and the rest apartments and everyone used to
Speaker 3: say lived there.
Speaker 1: You know who used to at the end of Pankerville
Speaker 1: Street and then go across Old south Of Road up
Speaker 1: to Barada. There was a big house there. All of
Speaker 1: my sex used to live there. Maybe I'm getting yeah,
Speaker 1: I still remember it.
Speaker 3: Like everyone used to talk about it all the time,
Speaker 3: and you used to sort of drive past and think
Speaker 3: to yourself.
Speaker 1: It was a bit of a mystery to me, mate.
Speaker 1: And when you know, I just tell you just a great,
Speaker 1: a great moment in my life when I was left
Speaker 1: school and I go out and I'd see Sherbet and
Speaker 1: Skyhooks and Ariel and Piranha and all these bands that
Speaker 1: were around. Obsessive with Billy Thorpe, and you know, I'd
Speaker 1: go sneak into pubs if they were playing pubs, but
Speaker 1: they were usually in other venues.
Speaker 3: They thort nastics, ye, And I saw everyone.
Speaker 1: You know, I was obsessive, you know, I go and
Speaker 1: see everyone, and Daddy cool. And I loved Skyhooks and
Speaker 1: I loved the lyrics and the send ups, the stuff
Speaker 1: that they did. And I'm getting right up the front
Speaker 1: of the Bond of Life Saver underneath Red Simon's and
Speaker 1: yelling at him and Anyway, my career started in Melbourne
Speaker 1: and it was completely by accident. And you've probably had
Speaker 1: moments in your life where you're kind of confronted with
Speaker 1: something and you think, logically, this is not right to do.
Speaker 1: But and I had gone to Melbourne to visit a friend.
Speaker 1: I knew one person in Melbourne. She said, bring your guitar.
Speaker 1: I went down there, said there's this band you s'o's
Speaker 1: going to have a play with them. I had up here.
Speaker 1: I wasn't playing live or anything. I was trying to
Speaker 1: form a band with people and it was hard. These
Speaker 1: guys are older than me. And I went for an
Speaker 1: audition and they said you want to stay. We played five,
Speaker 1: six nights a week, all original music and it was
Speaker 1: like I remember standing again. Yes, I mean just the
Speaker 1: logistics of it were just crazy. I didn't know anyone,
Speaker 1: I had no money, and I get taken off by
Speaker 1: these guys right And for a week we played some
Speaker 1: suburban pubs and we had a gig in the city
Speaker 1: in Melbourne, and they were from this Carlton scene in
Speaker 1: Melbourne and they were all older than me and they
Speaker 1: were quite well known in Melbourne. My first gig in
Speaker 1: the city I'm in the dressing room and they're all
Speaker 1: in there. Ross Wilson, the guys from Skyhooks, guys from Ariel,
Speaker 1: you know, they're all in the in the addressing room.
Speaker 1: They were coming up to me. I'm like he's and
Speaker 1: they were coming over and going, you know, welcome. It's amazing,
Speaker 1: absolutely amazing.
Speaker 3: And probably very inspiring to motivate the shit out of you.
Speaker 1: Incredible was the group the Bleeding Hearts at schooled. The
Speaker 1: great guy in that band was a guy called Martin
Speaker 1: Amager who went into a bank called the Sports and
Speaker 1: Martin wrote, went on to write a lot of soundtracks
Speaker 1: for Australia, Australian films and TV and ended up he
Speaker 1: passed away a couple of years ago, but he he
Speaker 1: was the head of Afters Australian Film Television School Genius
Speaker 1: but was a mentor for me and he was like
Speaker 1: this back then, he was like this sort of Keith
Speaker 1: Richards type, sort of pretty loose, sort of a great
Speaker 1: songwriter and just one of those caras, very charismatic people
Speaker 1: you meet in your life. Do you last question for
Speaker 1: you Rick, do you do.
Speaker 3: You ever think about and or feel that you are
Speaker 3: one of the still standing great Australian guitarists, having covered
Speaker 3: off like two really well known bands and lots of others,
Speaker 3: but really well known bands, it's still here.
Speaker 1: Do you ever feel as though that you have.
Speaker 3: A really important place in the history over the last
Speaker 3: fifty years, not for quite fifty years, but so nearly
Speaker 3: fifty years history of rock bands in Australia. Do you
Speaker 3: do you know that that's the person who you are
Speaker 3: or do you just think, no, that's not me. It's
Speaker 3: pretty important because you know, like Tolay, those two coppers
Speaker 3: in reference who recognize you. You know, like maybe you're
Speaker 3: not going to be necessarily recognized, but you're going to
Speaker 3: be known that people know you, they know who you
Speaker 3: who manage you with, they know the songs you was
Speaker 3: playing to, they know the venues you played at.
Speaker 1: Does that ever dawn upon you sometimes? You know? Oh,
Speaker 1: the two bands I've been in, the the Vinyls and
Speaker 1: the Hoodoos have both been put in the Australian Music
Speaker 1: Hall of Fame, so as they should be. So we've
Speaker 1: I've been put in there twice. Now I don't think
Speaker 1: about that. Glen A. Baker, Do you know Glen Baker?
Speaker 1: So he comes up to one day. He says, you know,
Speaker 1: there's any five people who have been put in? Where's
Speaker 1: the hat? He's a great speaker. He says, there's five
Speaker 1: people who have been put in twice. Rock historian. No,
Speaker 1: I don't. I didn't think that, and he says Jimmy
Speaker 1: Barnes Wow, Ross Wilson Wow, Glenn Sharick Wow. Then there's
Speaker 1: Gary Young who's the drummer in Daddy Cool and JoJo's
Speaker 1: appe and myself. So I said radio. So I got
Speaker 1: Gary Young and we had some photos taken together because
Speaker 1: we have the two blue collar faceless blue collar workers
Speaker 1: have been put in twice, you know, Jojo Zepp and
Speaker 1: the Falcons back. We're going back the seventy sevent and
Speaker 1: you know I don't, but you do. Man. I'm very grateful,
Speaker 1: and you know, I'm very grateful, and I still I'm
Speaker 1: still really active. I'll send you something after we finish
Speaker 1: as something I'm doing with with some cricketers and footy players.
Speaker 1: That's that's interesting. And you know, I'm writing some songs.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to do a book writing songs with my
Speaker 1: friend Rob Hurst, and we've done five albums together over
Speaker 1: the years called the ghost writers and they're all commercial disasters.
Speaker 1: But but you'd love doing it. I love doing it,
Speaker 1: you know, I like enjoy playing more than ever probably,
Speaker 1: And I teach at a UNI in the city, and
Speaker 1: I really get off on that. I've been doing that
Speaker 1: for twenty years, and that's a whole different world, you know,
Speaker 1: trying to you have to keep changing every few years,
Speaker 1: changing the way you relate to you know, like I
Speaker 1: started twenty years ago and I'm teaching eighteen year olds
Speaker 1: and the thing is now they're fifty. Yeah, but I'm
Speaker 1: still teaching eighteen year olds and I'm I'm twenty years older,
Speaker 1: and you have to adapt and how do they relate
Speaker 1: to me, you know, and how do you relate to them? How? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's interesting, it's good, you know, it's a challenge.
Speaker 1: It's a challenge. And I mean, you know, my son
Speaker 1: I remember said to me one day. You know, you
Speaker 1: must have walked around in the eighties just going, oh,
Speaker 1: this is amazing, what an amazing time. I said, No,
Speaker 1: it wasn't like that. It's I'd get the worksheet from
Speaker 1: the agent each week, you know, we go okay, we're
Speaker 1: playing here, and oh there's going to be that's going
Speaker 1: to be tough, that gig and you know, the Goman
Speaker 1: cutter out of Blacktown, like it's going to be a
Speaker 1: blood bath. And you know that's what it was like.
Speaker 1: You just live kind of from week to week. And
Speaker 1: I don't. I mean, I'm lucky. You know, my friends,
Speaker 1: they keep me grounded. And when I first went into
Speaker 1: recovery as a great woman, an amazing woman who worked
Speaker 1: in detox here, who saved lots of people's lives, and
Speaker 1: she saved my life pretty much. And she said to me,
Speaker 1: she used to call me Richard. She looked like Dame
Speaker 1: Edna and she said there and she said, Richard, if
Speaker 1: you're not careful, your ego will kill you. Now. I
Speaker 1: didn't understand what she meant because I've never been someone
Speaker 1: to walk around saying don't you know who I am?
Speaker 1: I've never done that. But she meant about finding who
Speaker 1: I am really and just being having some humility and
Speaker 1: being comfortable with that and being comfortable. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: you know, I don't. I mean, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: don't walk around thinking wow, you know, I don't. But
Speaker 1: I'm very grateful that I had this incredible career and
Speaker 1: I've got to play with amazing people and you know,
Speaker 1: like you you know, you know some for him but
Speaker 1: not in your game and yeah but you yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3: Look sitting here with you for me is like fucking wow,
Speaker 3: seriously and you don't get it, but that's okay, but
Speaker 3: serious it is as wow because I feel like you.
Speaker 1: Are sort of royalty in role sense for me. See,
Speaker 1: we did with these interviews a while ago for Rolling Stone,
Speaker 1: and they they wanted to do this individually. And this
Speaker 1: guy is a rock and roll journalist and he's kind
Speaker 1: of there and he's missed cool, you know, and he's
Speaker 1: asking me on this question. He said, so, you you
Speaker 1: been traveled around a lot, and you've you know, you
Speaker 1: must have met some incredible people and what's the most
Speaker 1: exciting wow? And I said, well, I've sat in a
Speaker 1: room with Mick Jagger, but I was much more nervous
Speaker 1: meeting Wally Lewis. And the look of disappointment on this
Speaker 1: guy's face he's a foot football player, I said, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and it's absolutely true when I met Wally Lewis and
Speaker 1: he's a friend of mine.
Speaker 3: Now, well the reverse, the reverse applies to me today
Speaker 3: and I want to I want to say two things
Speaker 3: probably three. Congratulations, won a wonderful career. Thanks, and it's
Speaker 3: not finished, it's going to continue, and your continuation of it.
Speaker 3: I want to say thank you for everything you've given
Speaker 3: to your audiences, which I was a small part of
Speaker 3: your your much larger audience. And finally, I want to
Speaker 3: say thank you for your honesty today about yourself.
Speaker 1: That's really important. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Brick Crossman, Oh thank you, mate, man that seriously thanks
Speaker 3: a lot, mate, Thanks
Speaker 1: Like b