Many music critics cite the 1970s as the nadir of musical achievement. The innovation, exhilaration and experimentation of the 1950s and 1960s was over. The Beatles disbanded. The Rolling Stones reeled from the aftermath of the Altamont Speedway tragedy. A trinity of influential musicians died before their 28th birthdays. Even Elvis lost his mind, his mojo and his waistline.
I was 9-years-old in 1970 so this allegedly barren period coincided with my musical initiation. While the criticism of 1970s music may be somewhat harsh, there was much scraping of the bottom of the barrel going on. Worse, just as it is impossible to un-ring a bell, it is impossible to un-hear odious songs from one’s formative years. Although I barely recall yesterday’s events, the tunes and lyrics of almost any song on any list of the worst songs of the 1970s fester in my subconscious.
In 1970, tweens listened to music on transistor radios. [For spoiled brats raised on iPods and smart phones, a transistor radio was the approximate size of a packet of cigarettes with the approximate sound quality of a "phone” crafted from two tin cans with a string in between.] There was no streaming or downloading the entire history of music. The DJ – who may be a music aficionado or simply a hack with a golden larynx – played typical AM radio fare consisting of Top 40 hits and wannabe hits.
I thought I was the cat’s PJs lounging on the scratchy green carpet with the transistor jammed against my ear or spinning discs on a record player in a tiny vinyl suitcase with my "record collection” stored in a single drawer in my dresser. As Rickie Lee Jones, a virtuoso in a sea of dreck in the late 1970s, sang, "’Cause we was Coolsville”. For arguably the only time in my life I felt cool … but it was not to last.
By 1975, my fandom evolved to fanaticism. I could gild the lily and pretend I was on a wavelength with a bono fide genius like David Bowie but that would be a blatant lie. The truth is I was pledging allegiance to the Bay City Rollers. Speak up? The Bay City Rollers, OK?
In my defence, they were simpler times. The music was not yet paramount. It was a soundscape for romantic fantasies about a boy you would likely never meet but, nevertheless, dreamed of marrying. My prospective husband, Stuart "Woody” Wood, shared the same surname initial as me which seemed inordinately significant although I can’t remember why. Let’s face it, 14-year-old me was not compiling a glory box of monogrammed sheets and towels I would have to discard if my betrothed had a different initial. [Apologies to women’s libbers but I never contemplated keeping my own surname; I would proudly become Mrs Wood.)
Perhaps it is oxymoronic – or simply moronic – to claim the Bay City Rollers made a rebel of me but they did. Before they evaporated from the stage of their 1975 concert at Brisbane Festival Hall, they announced they would return the following year. I was so enamoured, I considered this a promise rather than a threat. It never occurred to me the statement was standard shtick for a touring band or their popularity would not survive the intervening 12 months. There and then, I decided I was going on tour; if not "with” the band, certainly on the bandwagon. When I announced my intent to my mother, I met surprisingly little resistance.
I began saving the approximately $8 a week, from my Saturday morning job as a checkout chick at K Mart, and planning logistics. I already had a network of penpals, like-minded BCR fans, around Australia which enabled me to purchase interstate tickets. Some invited me to stay, thus, eliminating accommodation costs.
The late November / early December 1976 tour was announced, I booked a flight to Newcastle … and the shit hit the fan. Apparently, my mother previously raised no objections because she never considered their tour or mine would happen. She certainly raised objections now which culminated in her forbidding me to go. I was not rebellious or wild but had been immersed in a dream for a year and was damned if I would abandon it. [Before you judge, consider the impracticality of a single working woman stopping a determined teen without physical restraints or reporting me to the authorities.]
The tour took me through pit-stops in Newcastle, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide and Melbourne. My memory has jettisoned every detail except one incident which represented both the best and worst of the tour. On the flight to Melbourne, I found myself onboard the same flight as the band. When it landed, I timidly and politely approached the band seeking autographs but their manager, Tam Paton, blocked me. I was devastated and behaved precisely like a thwarted 15-year-old. I burst into tears. [Subsequently the manager would serve a prison sentence for paedophilia and be accused of attempted rape by the newest youngest member, Pat McGlynn, during the Australian tour.]
With the benefit of maturity and hindsight, I realise how my behaviour must have appeared to outsiders including the families I stayed with. I was too naïve to be perceived as a precocious groupie but I doubt I was considered entirely "normal” either. My mother too must have seemed suspect; too liberal at best, downright negligent at worst. It genuinely never occurred to me I was in a potentially dangerous situation.
At some point, the Bay City Rollers ceased to matter. I don’t recall if their fall from grace was gradual or if I suddenly awoke slapping my forehead proclaiming, "D’oh, what was I thinking?”. The following years are vague but I was mainlining music like a drug so it is inconceivable there was a period of abstinence.
In the late 1970s, I became legally adult at precisely the time the Australian music scene detonated like an atomic bomb. Brisbane was a cultural wasteland but, even there, live music was everywhere: university campuses, a former old-time dance hall, inner city nightclubs, cavernous taverns with more beer in the carpet than the taps and seedy pubs with defective air-conditioning.
At 17, I met my first boyfriend, NT, in a queue for concert tickets and through him met other people who lived and breathed music. The romance was fleeting but I’d found my tribe. [Do I remember him? Well, he was at my 61st birthday last month!] Despite diverse backgrounds and different tastes, everyone viewed music as lifestyle rather than recreation.
The free weekly entertainment paper Time Out printed a gig guide you set your social calendar by. In any given week several bands played consecutive nights in Brisbane and the Gold and Sunshine Coasts. You were so spoiled for choice, you often had to prioritise. It was a given your favourites took precedence; mine were Dragon and Flowers / Icehouse. I saw both dozens of times over the years but saw almost everyone at least once.
In rare lulls, you sought your fix in Sydney or Melbourne. Maybe you stayed a weekend and caught the red eye back for work on Monday. Maybe you stayed a week on annual leave. Once I took a taxi to the QIT campus in the CBD in my lunch break to see Flowers.
Obviously, it was not all beer and skittles. Then as now, bands sucked outright or sucked live. Others were infamous for unpredictability: heads you got a chaotic, perfunctory or uninspired performance; tails you got an intense sensory experience. Fortunately, for every band going through the motions, several were blowing off the roof. I have a vivid memory of INXS playing a tiny club in Brisbane’s red light district, Fortitude Valley. Even on a stage the size of a postage stamp, Michael Hutchence channelled the same consummate charisma he later exhibited in arenas.
The penultimate phase of my musical evolution occurred in the early 1980s when I fell in love with AF. In our years together, he played bass in several bands without once gracing a stage. The bands revolved around duelling egos and musical differences. There were hard drugs involved too with the accompanying lengthy disappearances, deceit and theft.
Consequently, I lost touch with friends and my previous lifestyle. My only musical interludes were band "practices” which typically degenerated into battles of wills and sporadic gigs by obscure local bands of punk-gothic persuasions. I tried to adapt but I was just too damn fond of coherent lyrics and melodies.
On rare occasions AF accompanied me to an event of my choosing; sometimes with unexpected results. One night we assembled across the road from Festival Hall where U2 were playing. AF ambled across the road then disappeared into Festival Hall. WTF? He emerged later explaining Bono invited him in. At times AF had a tenuous grasp on truth so I wasn’t entirely sure Bono was involved but regardless I was furious. I was the U2 fan outside the venue while he was my sidekick swanning around backstage.
The relationship survived three turbulent years of soap-operatic scenes until the melodrama which had seemed passionate and exciting became merely exhausting. I was too invested in the relationship to contemplate leaving so I stayed until I was unceremoniously dumped for an older woman.
I was humbled to discover my friends, despite years of negligence, were there for me. Live music remained a priority for them but I never picked up the threads of my former life. Somewhere along the line I developed anxiety and panic disorder which made travelling and crowds a source of angst. My social life constricted as I became increasingly reclusive.
So I arrive at the here and now. My passion for music has not waned but my approach is different. Live music is a rare experience. In recent years I have seen Ryan Adams and Nick Cave and they exceeded my wildest expectations.
But the music scene itself is different. Fans – and fanatics – are not extinct but teens – and even tweens – have more diverse interests. The attitude to music seems less reverent. At a concert I attended, people in the audience were preoccupied snapping selfies as though the band was nothing more than a cool backdrop for social media posts. Musicians are different too. Extensive touring is expensive, monotonous and gruelling. If they can connect with a larger audience on YouTube or establish themselves through a reality talent show, who can blame them?
Vive le difference, I guess. The history of music is our history too. The music we identify with tells us something about who we are. The 14-year-old in tartan is a part of me even now and that’s OK. On reflection, the music she loved was crappy but it was only the beginning. She didn’t develop tunnel vision or remain trapped in a time-warp. She didn’t become a 61-year-old Bay City Rollers fan!
