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analog daze ~ clear light of jupiter

I was listening to the 1972 Yes album called Close To The Edge and the phone rang. ‘Garry how are you, it’s been a while, are you playing in a band at the moment? Are you in touch with Gus, is he playing in a band? Do you know any drummers?’

It was Daniel from Clear Light Of Jupiter Records. Clearlight was the name of a brand of LSD in the early 1970’s, about 4 times stronger than LSD in the 1990’s. I hadn’t heard from Daniel for a while and in three sentences I had joined the band he had just recorded an album of. Alpha Omega, an instrumental jazz/rock fusion band in a similar vein to Weather Report at the time. It was 1976 and I was 21 years old.

The guitarist was very good but didn’t like the way the recorded album sounded, so he had sacked all the band. Fair enough one might say, if not a little over dramatic, but the band was booked as opening band for the Australian tour of the brilliant guitarist Jeff Beck. Beck was recording all the tour dates for tracks for a planned live album [released in 1977 as Wired] Clear Light of Jupiter wanted to record a live album of Alpha Omega while all the recording gear was there. A good idea. Recording an album in the 70’s cost an arm and a leg just to walk into the studio. A mobile studio was rare and expensive. So all Clearlight needed now was the band.

This was a very familiar situation to me, very much like one about a year and a half before when Gus had a great offer and needed to put a touring band together in the blink of an eye. Now it was my turn to call Gus.

YELLINGBO

 
Gus was an old friend, a bass player. We’d been introduced through a mutual guitarist friend. Gus had been playing bass for a band called Sebastian Hardy. Quite a well respected band. Sebastian Hardy’s bass player and drummer were brothers, who fought a fair bit, well quite a lot actually. So the other members decided it was easier to get another bass player than a drummer, so the bass player brother was sacked and Gus was hired.

But then the brothers made up and were going to tour Australia, so Gus got sacked, but was offered the opening band spot for the tour as consolation. They liked his playing and got on pretty well together, but the offer was conditional that he could get a band together in time. The tour was to start in about 10 weeks, around October 1975. It would finish at the 1976 Sunbury Rock Festival, just north of Melbourne. It turned out to be the very last Sunbury too.

So anyhow Gus wanted a keyboard player for this new band, one who could handle and write complex synthesiser based music. We jammed and got on immediately, and settled into working up a live set to tour with Sebastian Hardy.

We needed about an hours material. Things were pretty regimented set wise in those days, a fast track, a slow track, a reggae number, a funk number, a big ballad, and a slow 12 bar blues were mandatory, but things were slowly changing. We wanted to bring some new ideas into the rock arena, with an Australian edge. But unless you were an English or American act, or sounded like one, there wasn’t a chance of getting a record deal.

Synths were making headway and with bands like Yes, Genesis, Emerson Lake and Palmer and the newly huge Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, completely restructuring the rock scenario, the audience was wanting more. You were still hard pushed to ever hear these bands on the radio, which were simple AM mainstream pop stations. Top 40 nothing else. And only singles too.

You’d never hear other tracks off an album unless they were singles. Indie (independent) radio stations PBS and RRR didn’t exist then, but the underground networks were strong and album sales flourished. New Indie labels like Mushroom records and Clearlight Of Jupiter, began to spring up, breaking the monopoly the major companies had on pretty much everything that had to do with music.

You couldn’t even get a record pressed in Australia unless you had a deal with EMI in Sydney. They had the only pressing plants in the country, and Indie labels were of no interest to them at all. Audio cassettes were basically non-existent, a lot of 8 track cartridges though.

For an Indie band, simply getting product recorded was a major drama, it cost around the price of an average suburban home to do a two sided 10 track LP, home studio’s were only very rough demo quality, often using one stereo channel for the whole band track and the second stereo channel for vocals or solos. Multi track recorders cost about 20 suburban houses.

And even if you could get the cash, you still needed to manufacture the vinyl records, then convince a conservative music industry to distribute it in their very mainstream family friendly retail outlets. All before you hustled the commercial radio stations who only played American and UK pop superstars, to play the music of an unknown ‘local’ Indie act.

The hill just got steeper. ‘Local’ in those days was a dirty word, meaning poor quality amateur hick. This was thick in middle of the time known as the 'Cultural Cringe' in Australia, local product was always considered inferior to US/UK product, and that was before even hearing it.

To make it, or just get a hearing, you first had to travel overseas, make a name there and then come back. These were daunting requirements, and a couple actually broke free, such as AC/DC, Olivia Newton John, Helen Reddy, and The Little River Band. Which was encouraging to those of us stuck with the oppressive attitudes of the local recording industry. 

Consequently Melbourne had a very healthy live music scene. This made for lean and mean bands who could play well live, and whip up a frenzy with a crowd in a couple of numbers (Songs). You had to, take longer than three numbers to get people up and dancing, or at least cheering, and you might as well pack up and go home. Crowds booed at you. Drunken crowds booing at you is a very unpleasant experience.

So with keyboards, bass, drums, singer, and guitarist wanted, we all moved into a small mansion called Tudor Lodge, way out to the east of the Dandenong ranges in a place called Yellingbo. Yellingbo consisted of a combination petrol station/post office/general store which was only a little bigger than the phone box outside. It was just next door to Tudor Lodge with a primary school the size of your thumb, with just one combination classroom, in between, so that was cosy.

Tudor Lodge had its own ball room (Seriously) with a small stage that had semi circular stairs leading up to it, and rooms all over the place. It was on 12 acres of land which reduced to 5 acres every time the creek in the bottom paddock flooded. We’d often be stranded, having to row across the river in a dingy to get out. But normally there were horses running in the paddocks and it backed onto the beautiful Yellingbo State forest which had the last nesting pairs of the Yellow Helmeted Honey Eater, (a small finch like bird) in the world.

Unfortunately ALL the birdwatchers wanted to catch a glimpse of this endangered species (about 100-150 left) coming from all around the world, and they had to restrict watching times to just two days a month, because they were traumatising the birds.

We’d see the birds around Tudor Lodge every day, hanging around the backdoor getting food scraps. We didn’t know it was them until we asked a birdwatcher, they nearly fainted when we told them. We were a kind of junk food heaven for the birds. We noticed too, that on the official birdwatching days in the forest, pretty well all the Helmeted Honey Eaters where at our place, escaping the tourists. The Helmeted Honey Eaters are also the State of Victoria's bird emblem. (Pic right - Victorian govt website)

I got hold of a Moog 12 at the time. A ridiculously heavy box, 35 kilos (78 pounds) or something, but when you need that big fat Moog synth sound a la Emerson Lake and Palmer, only a big Moog will do it.  It also had patch cords. I really loved patch cords. Still do. This is the original brochure for it. (pics left). I've kept it.

I had a Roland EP20 Piano too, not too bad a sound in a band, but a bit tinny solo. I also had my Roland System 100 modular synth. It’s patch cords were thinner than the Moog which used a standard guitar/phone lead size. The Roland had mini plugs to conserve space. I never really liked them, bit too toy like. But the synth was great, and light! These (pics left) are the original brochure, from Helmuts Music in Ringwood. [hear some music with this same synth, recorded in 1974, Sequential Serenade]

There was no memory storage in those days, and to get a sound you had to set up the synth from scratch. An awkward thing to do live. So for remembering set ups, you'd use the Patch Notes (pic left) which came with the synth in a pad, and draw the pot (potentiometer - 'nob') and slider positions on the diagram. 

We were trying to get hold of a Hammond organ, but settled for a Roland String Ensemble instead (pic left). We already had a Lesley speaker. Lesley’s were about the size of a family fridge, only heavier. They had a pair of revolving horns in the top of the cabinet which gives you that classic vibrato sound of the Hammond. You need a folk lift truck to move a Hammond, unless you’re a gorilla. A big gorilla. A guy had offered us the free use of his mobile sound system and live mixing desk for rehearsals. He’d just built it and wanted to practice mixing with it before hiring it out. It was starting to feel like something big. Coming from garage band to mansion, mixing van parked outside, ball room, tour dates booked.

We started work. We were all living there with girlfriends etc most of us in our late teens (Kids moved out of home early in those days) and a drug dealer was also living in the house. Needless to say work often stopped for a party in the Ballroom. Friends were always coming up from town, about 2 hrs drive away and staying for a few days. There were magic mushies in out backyard too.

There was usually a dozen or more of us. All hippy’s or ‘heads’ as they were called in the early 70’s, short for dopehead, pothead, acidhead etc. Except for the drummer, he came from Broady (Broadmeadows, a proud working class town north of Melbourne) and he liked to drink beer! A lot of beer. And then smoke a lot of dope (marijuana). Then, he’d disappear for days on end without warning. But he was a fantastic drummer, when he was there, which wasn’t often enough with a heavy tour deadline staring us in the face. So we got another one, he was brilliant too, but he left to get married and join the Army.

• You never left anything to join the Army in 1975, the Vietnam war and conscription in Australia had just ended in 1973. I got kicked out of high school in 1972 for being in the anti Vietnam War rally’s and publishing an underground anarchist newspaper called ‘Box Of Rain’ with a few friends from school. I’d never even known anyone who ‘wanted’ to join the army. But he was a great drummer.

The lead singer Steve, had his room directly under the Ballroom stage. We thought he was paranoid to start with. He’d grown up in Melbourne’s inner city suburbs, and all the open space made him feel dizzy, but when he went on about his roof moving, we really thought he’d lost it.

Then one day as we were rehearsing on the stage we heard this almighty crash. Yes, the roof had indeed fallen in! Right onto his bed. The ceiling was rendered concrete about 40 mm thick! The band’s playing had loosened it. Steve just took off. Straight out the door and down the Yellingbo road. He never came back.

The same with his little dog. A Jack Russel terrier type of thing. It had lived all it’s life in a miniature inner city backyard, the first day it arrived at Yellingbo it jumped out of the Ute (Utility car - with a tray rear), ran around in circles for 10 minutes then took off down the Yellingbo road. We never saw the dog again either.

• I had a brilliant 1973 Gentle Giant album called Power and The Glory, simply brilliant musicianship. Like all shared houses you often get a couple of copies of the same album, in the house. Being musicians we had huge rows of them in Tudor Lodge, we had the records pumped through our band sound system in the Ball room. We liked it loud. My copy had disappeared around the time Steve had left. I’d caught up with Steve a few years later and he was selling a lot of old albums. Gentle Giant, wow, I lost mine I said. Steve sold it to me for 5 bucks (dollars), because I was an old friend. Sure enough got home, put it on and it was my original album. It had the same scratch in the same track which annoyed the hell out of me.

So as the dust of another escapee settled on the Yellingbo road, we figured we could get another singer, but we didn’t figure on the Sebastian Hardy brothers fighting again and busting up again, I think it was the drummer who was sacked this time round. Anyhow the tour was off, we were shocked, the sound system got taken back, and the drug dealer started bringing home hot goods. How many lawn mowers and chain saws do you really need anyway? And when the TV’s started to stack up in the garage, every room in the house had at least one, we all figured it was time to leave.

The Sunbury Festival was a dud, which eased our pain a little, getting terrible reviews, (pic left).

• The drug dealer, a year or so later ended up murdering a guy, stabbed him 19 times with a knife. It was a contract killing, the guys wife was having an affair with another man and contracted the dealer to murder her husband, tragically while their kids where watching. The dealer got 25 years in Pentridge Jail. A few years into his sentence he broke out, sliding down a bit of white PVC pipe which had mysteriously appeared on the outside of the prison wall. He and another prisoner escaped on foot dressed in football training gear. People just thought they were going for a jog. Weeks later he hijacked a Police car with a sawn off shot gun, threw the cop out down a back road in the bush. The Police cornered him in a bush shack in the Yellingbo/Gembrooke state forest area a week later in the biggest manhunt in the States history. He surrendered, did his time, changed his ways, and 25 years later, so the grape vine says, is apparently now quite a nice unassuming bloke with a normal family and job.