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Part II: Blues on Broadbeach
March 2007
By BOB MALONE
guess I haven't really gotten around to mentioning this yet, but our reason for being in Australia was not play to tourist in Sydney, but because I was booked to play for four days at the Blues on Broadbeach Music Festival. For years, I had been getting airplay on various Australian radio stations, but all attempts to travel down under and play live had been thwarted. Eventually, a very helpful radio guy supplied me with a list of Australian blues festivals, and I got to work, shamelessly soliciting. The result: here I was, flying to Brisbane Australia, all expenses paid! It all started with one email, sent at two in the morning. Pretty amazing, when you stop to think about it.
The festival sent a car and driver, and we were whisked in high style from the airport for the one-hour drive to the Gold Coast, where the festival was happening. Our driver was Jeoff - a real Aussie if there ever was one. On the way down, he gave us various tips on speaking Oz. "How'd ya scrub up?" is what you ask someone the morning after a hard night of drinking. And "Good on ya!" which is the delightful Aussie version of "good for you!" or "you rock!" And that being called a bastard is a good thing, provided there's an adjective preceding it. As in "funny bastard!" or "crazy bastard" or "queer bastard" - which is not to be confused with "queer," which is of course something else entirely. However, plain old "bastard" means, well…bastard.
During the ride I was again struck by how much what I was seeing along the road reminded me of America. The same Home Depots and K Marts and TGI Fridays. No Outback Steakhouse, however - we were not successful in selling a watered-down parody of Australia back to the Ozzies. As we got near the Gold Coast area, theme parks began to appear - one was kind of a dinner show/circus/theme park hybrid called the "Outback Spectacular," which reminded me that even for most Australians, the Outback is a mysterious faraway place.
We really could have been anywhere…except we were driving on the wrong side of the road, of course. It saddened me to think that our aggressively homogenized suburban chain-store and parking lot landscape had spread even to this faraway land. Because you know the Australians didn't invent this shit. This one is all on us.
Soon enough, we reached our destination. The Gold Coast is a major resort area, very much the Miami Beach of Oz. It is a land of pristine white sand beaches, pastel high-rise hotels, bungalows and boats lining inland canals. This wasn't going to be a gig, it was going to be a vacation!
We arrived at the Sofitel Goldcoast and the rock star treatment began immediately. I was met by the delightful Joy, from Broadbeach Marketing, who welcomed me warmly and explained that if I needed anything…anything at all, she would provide it. Then I was introduced to Adam, the hotel manager, who promised to be at beck and call at all hours. I hadn't even played a note yet, and already I could say without hesitation that this was the best gig I ever did!
Back up at the oceanfront view room (complete with complimentary champagne and cheese-plate), Karen articulated what I had already been thinking. If we hadn't already been married, and Karen was a chick I had recently met and was trying to impress, that incident in the hotel lobby would have most definitely gotten me laid. In fact, it seemed to have put Karen back in touch with the leather and long hair Sunset Strip Rock & Roll groupie chick that I know is still inside her. She perhaps viewed me in a whole different way.
My first task upon arrival, however, was not to get laid, it was to do a phone-interview with Gerry Blain - AKA "Chillblain" of "Chillblain's Port & Cornflakes," a blues show on Noosa Public Radio. He was covering the blues fest on his show and had been playing my CDs for a while, so we were going to do an interview. The phone in our room was a sleek little wireless unit - nothing about it screamed "prohibitively expensive per-minute hotel phone charges" like a standard hotel phone usually does, so I heedlessly picked up the phone, settled into the balcony chair with the idyllic view of the beach, and dialed Gerry. There was even a rainbow out there, room charges were the furthest thing from my mind. Well, two hours later and forevermore, that became known as the "Hundred Dollar Radio Interview." It was worth it, though - Gerry and I were on the phone for nearly two hours, and became friends in the process. I'd say only about twenty minutes of the conversation actually made it onto the radio - the rest was just a pleasant shooting of the shit.
I was contracted to play four shows, all within walking distance of the hotel: a private party for the donors and other bigwigs that made the festival possible, a show at the local shopping mall (somebody get me Tiffany's manager on the phone!), a set on the outdoor mainstage, and a gig at Conrad Jupiter's Casino. On paper, it looked like an entire "Behind the Music" career trajectory all in one weekend. From his humble beginnings playing small parties and shopping malls, to his meteoric rise to fame playing to thousands on festival stages around the world, to his tragic decline on the casino circuit, through it all Bob Malone has…
The shopping mall was attached to the hotel, and during the two days we were in town before I had to play there, we passed through the place many times on our way in and out. Deep in the bowels of the place, there sat a grand piano, surrounded by a shoe store, a rug shop, and a women's plus-sizes outlet. Every time I passed by the piano, I was overcome by a great stomach-churning spasm of dread and foreboding. After the second or third time by, I declared a moratorium on sniggering comments from my wife about shopping mall gigs. It became "The Gig That Dare Not Speak Its Name." I simply could not believe I had agreed to do this.
Finally, the day came. Showtime was in the afternoon, around 2, so at 1:00, I went down there to see if it was time to sound check. The piano was there, as always, but that was it…no PA, no sound guy, no chairs for the audience. They did tell me that chairs would be set up, so I wouldn't just be sitting there playing and singing while people trundled by, on their way from Spencer Gifts to the fucking 12-Plex. I hurried back to the room, and called the promoter to tell her what was up. "No worries, I'll take care of it" she said. That is what I like to hear! And is there a better Australian phrase than "no worries"? I think not.
A half hour later, I tried again, and there was the P.A. system…sort of. It was a single speaker, and a microphone, and the guy from the mall. He was a great guy, really friendly, extremely helpful…but he had no clue about how to run that PA. I did an end run around the prima-donna fit I felt coming on, and became one with my new mantra: "No worries! No dramas!" After all, I was in Australia, at the beach, on vacation, and getting paid for it - what was there really to be upset about?
Then, about ten minutes before I was supposed to start playing, a crowd started forming - a good crowd - filling the whole area around the piano. People standing, people sitting on the floor, people sitting on benches. I could not believe it. And then I realized - it was in the program! This wasn't just some gig in a mall, it was part of the festival. All over town, there were slick little booklets listing all of the blues fest shows, and this, of course, was one of them. All that worrying for nothing.
Sometimes I am such an ass.
Well, I beat that piano and shouted into that microphone for two and a half hours, and enjoyed every second of it. The crowd was great to play to! And considering that nobody had a comfortable seat, they were possessed of an astounding attention-span. I kept expecting the standers to wander away after a few songs, but they never did.
During the break, I met Harry Miller for the first time. He was there with a video camera and wanted to know if it was OK to shoot. As the days went on, I realized that everybody in the Oz blues scene knew Harry. He is famous for his house concerts and sausage sizzle. "You're nobody til you've played at my house, mate!" He was joking, but I am pretty much nobody in the grand scheme of things, so I secretly figured that playing his house could only help. I'll be doing the gig next year!
Later that evening we met Gerry and his wife Carmen and Baiba and Joy and a whole table full of people from the festival booking office for dinner. We talked and laughed and ate for hours, and made new lifelong friends in the process. It was a wonderful night.
So now I was two gigs into the festival week, and it still felt like a vacation. It was a unique experience. Usually, if I've gone somewhere to play music, no matter how idyllic the setting, it is nothing like being on vacation. You are working - fun as this particular job may be. But here - Karen was with me, we were staying at a resort hotel at the beach, we were being treated like paying customers…and my next show wasn't until tomorrow.
We spent the morning walking along the white sand beach, looking for shells. "That's because you both have OCD!" Karen's mom once said, when told of our shared interest in Conchology (she was right, of course). Later on, we cruised down to the next town along the coast - Surfers Paradise. "Surfers" to the natives. Didn't like it as well as Broadbeach, it was mostly tacky t-shirt shops, mediocre restaurants, and strip joints…nothing we hadn't seen in Venice Beach or Lauderdale. If we were still twenty-something years old, we would have loved it.
Today was also Karen's birthday, and I got her just what she wanted: the Night Tour of Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary. Joy at Broadbeach Marketing set it all up for us, as promised. All we had to do was wait for the driver to pick us up.
Most Australian creatures are nocturnal, so this was a chance to see in action the Koalas, Wombats, and Tasmanian Devils et al that were asleep at the zoo in Sydney. Upon arrival, the very first thing they did was put a baby saltwater crocodile in our hands…mouth taped shut, of course. The "Saltie" is just about the deadliest, most aggressive critter in Oz. And this is a land of many deadly creatures. These guys will eat anything. At the Sydney Zoo we saw two baby salties, not more than eight inches long, viciously attack the zoo-keeper when he opened the door to feed them. They are apparently born with a taste for man-flesh.
The one we held was…uh…how do I put this? Cute. Karen cooed over the little reptile like it was a fuzzy newborn kitten. Given the chance, it would have chewed her face off.
Shortly after, we watched close up as a beautiful white owl disemboweled and ate a live rat. It started by biting off the head, after that, the internal organs and intestines really began to fly. The zookeeper and the other Ozzies in the crowd were completely unfazed by this. Amused, in fact. We tourists were not handling it quite so well.
I had noticed by now that Australians are not nearly as squeamish about blood and guts as we Americans. Even before the rat-eviscerating owl, I had noticed this. Several times on TV we had seen an anti-drunk driving PSA featuring a drunk driver taking out a woman on a sidewalk. They then panned between the mangled corpse laying on the ground and the guy holding up the woman's blood-covered baby. We had to see it another two times before we really could believe we'd seen it at all. They never would have gotten away with this at home! I think most Americans would stop eating meat if they had to kill the animal themselves. But if your average Aussie suddenly found himself without access to plastic-wrapped supermarket meat, I think he could still go ahead and cut himself some rump and throw it on the Barbie still twitching.
But it wasn't all blood and guts - we fed kangaroos, met some koalas that were actually awake, and saw a traditional aboriginal dance show. During the course of the show, audience members were invited to try the Didgeridoo. In my past casual observations of the playing of this instrument, I always thought: how hard could it be? The thing only plays one note! I was about to find out. The player showed us how there were hundreds of subtle variations on that note that kept things interesting, and how he used a circular-breathing technique to keep the note going. Still, I figured, how hard could it be?
Well, I couldn't even get a sound out of the thing. This is an instrument so primitive that the player does all of the work. A trumpet or a saxophone employs centuries of technology that result in a design so refined that that tube of metal is relatively easy to blow into and produce a sound. With the didgeridoo, you are on your own, pal! Technological advances on this one stopped right around the time the Romans were digging the foundation for the Coliseum. I walked away with a whole new admiration for that Aboriginal kid playing the music for the show.
Back at the room, it was late and we were starving. We ordered room service…something that will never cease to feel decadent to me. We ordered a couple of burgers, but they were nothing like anything we'd ever seen before. Sure, there was the standard roll and ground cow - but also beets, and a fried egg! I have to admit, I dug the burger with the sunny side up egg on it. Not the beets, however. When you get beets in anything, all you can taste is the beets. Karen's reaction was the opposite - she pulled the egg off with a cry of disgust, but as soon as we got back to L.A., she asked me to got to the store and get some sliced beets…for her burger. "It reminds me of Australia" she said with great longing.
We flipped on the TV, and stumbled upon a music video and song so awful, that it blew right past plain-old bad and moved confidently into the realm of the bizarre. Clearly an old favorite Aussie hit from the disco era, one of those inexplicable songs that manages to be huge everywhere in the world but the States, it was called "Yes Sir, I Can Boogie." The tune was sung by a couple of 'luded-out, blue-eyeshadowed Eurotrash chicks that called themselves Baccara. We stared in disbelief. This was awful even by 1977-polyester-disco-too-high-on-blow-to-know-how-bad-your-record-is standards. Rick Dees doing "Disco Duck" was timeless high art compared to this. With every second that went by, I was gaining a whole new appreciation of the artistic nuances of the Village People.
Baccara were visionaries, however. Long before it was understood or socially acceptable, they pioneered a style now known as "Karaoke Singing." They sounded like
A) They had never sung before.
B) Had no ability to do so.
C) They were reading off a teleprompter.
And they weren't even that hot.
The next day at noon, we were down at the Under The Sails stage to catch Jan Preston's set. She was quite wonderful - playing everything from straight-up blues to poignant ballads to authentic ragtime, all delivered with a transcendent joy in the pure act of making music that was delightful to watch. Her between-song patter charmed mightily, as well. Towards the end of the set, she invited me up to play, and we did an off the cuff version of "Rockin' Pneumonia & the Boogie Woogie Flu." It started with the both of us playing the piano and trading verses, then Jan realized that that rare moment for a piano player was upon her: she could be liberated from the big black beast! Suddenly I was abandoned at the keyboard and Jan was standing at the mic - belting it out. I knew myself what a great and rare feeling that is. We are always tied to our large-stationary instrument. And there's rarely another person around to take up the slack if you do want to step out and run around the stage with a mic in your hand. Piano players rarely get to interact - there are rarely two of us anywhere at the same time. It's like spotting an endangered species. Perhaps that's what we are.
The crowd went nuts for it, and after the show there was much love and camaraderie. Then Jan headed out for her second show of the day in another venue. I haven't seen her since. I hope we meet again, and make music together again, it was one of the great pleasures of my life.
Finally, the night of my own mainstage set was upon me. The mall was great and all, but this the gig I came for! I was playing on the "Surf Parade" stage, which was right in the middle of the street. The street, of course, was blocked off for two blocks in either direction, and hundreds of chairs were set up in the road. A little bit surreal when you got a close look at it.
The stage was in sight of the restaurant we had eaten at the night before, and we had been able to watch the show while we ate. One of the highlights was a blues band from New Zealand called Handsome Giants who turned in an awesome set. I had met these guys two nights before when their piano player sat in at my first gig. They were great guys - the kind of dudes you always hope to be in a band with. And their piano guy could really play, and he was tall and blonde and young and thin and good-looking, too. If we were chicks, we would have had to claw each others eyes out. But since we were not, we bonded instead.
I arrived backstage with my backstage pass and sat in the hospitality tent, waiting to go on. A very loud band was on before me. Always a bad sign when you gotta go on solo. No matter how hard you hump it out there on a solo set - you can never beat the energy of a band. Although I have come very close. I intended to do it again tonight.
I went on, and did a good set, and came off stage convinced I had bombed. I just couldn't hear the crowd. I couldn't feel the crowd. There was a fairly large gap between the edge of the stage and where the seating started, so everyone felt very distant. And the lights were in my eyes. I felt as if I were playing in a vacuum.
Well, as soon as I emerged from backstage, the people started crowding around. They were ecstatic, they were moved, they wanted to shake my hand, the wanted autographs. I hadn't bombed at all. I had, in fact, triumphed.
What a relief.
I headed for the CD tent, in case anyone wanted something signed, which quite a few people did. Including a quite flirtatious and good looking Sheila who wanted her t-shirt signed. All right…this night was getting better and better.
Right about the time she was trying to steal a kiss to go along with her autograph, my wife appeared. "You know, if this was America, you wouldn't just be asking to have your t-shirt signed, you'd be offering up some bare flesh!" She said.
Now I ask you, when it comes wives, does it get any better than that? This extremely lucky guy thinks not. In the end, I signed both the shirt and a flat, taut, and tanned expanse of bare midriff. And Karen and I both got a kiss.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I love show business!
Afterwards, ravenous, we joined Gerry and Carmen for some excellent Chinese food. We conversed like we'd known each other for 20 years instead of two days. After dinner, we squeezed ourselves into an unspeakably loud, smoky and overcrowded tavern. The kind of place we had so outgrown about ten years ago. But Gerry insisted. "You have got to see this guy!" he enthused. "You won't be disappointed!" The guy in question was one Hat Fitz. A bushy-black-bearded ex-alcoholic acoustic bottleneck blues guitar slinger from the wilds of Oz.
So we crammed in near the stage, shoulder to shoulder, a claustrophobic's worst nightmare. And waited. And waited. Karen finally bailed. I desperately wanted out, but I'd waited this long…
Finally, the musicians made their way to the small stage. It was just Hat, seated with an old National guitar plugged into an ancient amplifier, and a drummer seated at a vintage, pre-rock & roll drum kit…giant bass drum, calfskin heads, the whole beyond-retro deal.
Without fanfare, the music began. It was riveting. The most primal sound I'd ever heard. It got all the way inside of me, bypassing the brain and going directly to the heart and the loins. Every song had just one chord, full of menace, and a churning unrelenting beat. The lyrics were indecipherable in the loud musical maelstrom…and it didn't matter. Words would have just gotten in the way. The crowd writhed and slithered and danced in headback, tranced-out speaking-in-tongues ecstasy. This is what the blues must have felt like when it was new. I thought. It what I imagine John Hooker or Son House or Bukka White might have sounded like when they were young and dangerous and playing the backwoods Mississippi Delta juke-joints where you had to puke twice and show your razor just to get in. Not what they sounded like on the recordings that are all that's left of them now, great as they are, but how they sounded live and threatening and whisky-soaked, when their guitars meant to blow the roof of the shack, and the gin-drunk sharecroppers and hard-bitten laborers moved together on the dance floor like a wave. The way they sounded long before middle-class white kids like me discovered the blues. Yes, it was what the blues must have felt like when it was new, and dangerous, and unencumbered by history or tradition, or the inevitable sophistication and subsequent dilution that always enter the bloodstream of a musical form after it has been around for a long time. It made me want to howl at the moon, it made me want to stomp my feet right through the floorboards. At made me want to do something I would regret the next morning. It was magical.
I was playing tonight at the lounge at Conrad Jupiter's Casino. If you were sans auto, as I was, the way you got there was to take a monorail train from the hotel over the highway and right into the casino. Karen and I had cased the joint a couple of nights before. We'd done a little gambling, and lost. Except, of course, we were losing Australian money - which is colorful and exuberant, and has little clear plastic windows in it - so we felt no sting of loss as the slot machines swallowed the cash whole. It just didn't seem like real money. American money just looks so much more serious…tells you all you need to know about our unfortunate priorities. We'd also checked out the casino lounge, where we had seen a kid with an acoustic guitar somewhere in the middle of his fourth set…murdering a few James Taylor and Jimmy Buffett tunes.
But tonight, just like at the mall, a crowd quite unlike what you'd usually see in a place like this had gathered to see the show. So I got up there and made it happen. It was a fun show, but a little strange. The crowd was like a double exposure. The attentive blues loving festival goers layered over the regular lounge crowd (who were probably wondering what the hell I was doing in there). They all liked it, but for completely different reasons. The casino people were dancing and whooping and drinking and letting it rip, even if it was a Sunday night. The festival people were…well, they were whooping and drinking and letting it rip, too, but listening instead of dancing. While I crooned a serious ballad, getting deep for the listening faction, a couple of Japanese hookers, dressed in designer rags too small to even qualify as handkerchiefs, were dancing slow and nasty with each other, drumming up business. It was that kind of night.
Karen came in from her gig about halfway through, as did Gerry and Carmen. And afterwards we headed to the 24-hour café for a late bite. Karen had wowed the crowd up in Noosa, and had done a live radio interview on the same station that Gerry broadcasts from. Didn't cost her a hundred bucks, though. I think she should give me fifty, and we'll call it even.
The next morning, our trusty driver Jeoff picked us up at the hotel. Now that my musical duties were done, we shifted into high tourist gear…and around here, that meant one thing more than any other: Australia Zoo. Home of Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. Jeoff, like many other people we had met, had a few Steve Irwin stories to tell, he was a local boy from up north of Brisbane, and general consensus was that Steve was a good bloke. It was unlikely that we'd meet him today. But we sure would meet the crocks!
It was a two and a half hour drive up, and on the way, we told Jeoff about an incident we'd had. While wandering the festival grounds, we had run into a couple of good-natured guys who'd seen the show and wanted to talk, and they asked us where else we were going while we were in Oz. We said our next stop was Heron Island, up on the Great Barrier Reef.
"Heron!" he said ominously. "Best be careful up there, mate. Watch out for the drop bears! They drop right out of the trees there and attack you!"
As soon as the guy said "drop bears," his friend started to smile slyly, as if to say "what a load of shit!" Karen, however, noticed none of this…she stepped right in it.
"Drop bears! Wow! I haven't heard of them - and we studied all the creature guides! Are there a lot of them on the island? You think we'll see any?"
At this point, they couldn't contain themselves any longer, and burst out laughing. My wife was the first person they'd ever met who'd actually fallen for it. They were extremely amused. Considering all the years they'd been trying to find a sucker for this tale, I kind of felt good that we had made it happen for them.
So of course, for the rest of the week, I busted Karen's chops about the "drop bears." When we told Jeoff about it, he was equally amused. "Yanks have been afraid of our drop bears since World War Two, mate!"
While it was true we were now in shameless full-on camera-and-Bermuda shorts tourist mode, we were still traveling in rock star style - we were taking the limo to the zoo. And it felt damn good, too! Karen, still working off her upper middle class guilt, felt a little funny about the whole thing. I was having none of that…after ten years on the road the hard way, I had earned this ride.
We did all the things people do at Australia Zoo - saw the croc show at the Crocoseum, patted (in Australia you don't "pet," you "pat") the kangaroos at Roo Heaven. Visited with a variety of deadly reptiles. We watched a Cassowary eat. My wife, absolutely fascinated by this gigantic, prehistoric flightless bird, took fifty or sixty photos of it picking watermelon pieces out of a bowl of mixed fruit. I finally had to drag her away. I paid thirty bucks to be given a tour of the wombat enclosure, where I got to pat three of these strange marsupials. If you hadn't figured it out before, you know officially know I'm a dork. We spent a good long time observing Harriet the Tortoise, who, at 176 years of age, was the world's oldest living creature. Sadly, she died a couple of months later.
Sadly still, as I write this, I have learned that Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter himself, has also died. Karen and I were very sad to hear the news. We have always loved Steve Irwin, and although every time you saw him, he was in some kind of near-death encounter, it just doesn't seem possible that he could be gone. Still, as much as we humans will miss him, the crocodiles and gators and sharks and all the other fearful creatures in the world will miss him more. He taught us all to love them all. And for that reason alone, he has done the planet a great service.
Later, souvenirs in hand, we walked out the front gate, past the crowds waiting for the bus, and jumped right into the back of the limo. A crowd of tourists waiting for the shuttle bus gawked and whispered. Call me shallow, call me vapid, call me self-absorbed…but I cannot lie - I loved it, and I can't wait to do it again.
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