THINKING ON YOUR FEET

THINKING ON YOUR FEET

A Rock’n’Roll Memoir

by

Dr. Greg

At the start of the Eighties I was sitting on my arse in Melbourne.  My missus had left me, and my band had gone down the tubes.

 I had been working as a night watchman at the local hospital, but after I’d sprung a couple of staff-members loading up their car from the back of the dispensary about 3am on a rainy morning, they threatened me, and I reported it. There were obviously bigger fish involved because I was subsequently hassled to the point where I chucked the job in. My only income then was the dole, and a pittance coming in from shifting a few bags of pot around the district to keep me in beer money.

I decided to leave town: a mate of mine had moved to Sydney and was working for a new music magazine that had just spread its wings from Melbourne.  He told me to head on up and he’d put me up on the floor until I got sorted out.  I knew the magazine’s owner socially, and when he heard that I was moving up there, he offered me a job as a delivery driver because the local guys didn’t seem to be able to co-ordinate the distribution properly.

That didn’t surprise me, I had visited my mate once or twice and the staff were in permanent party mode. It was all happening: the office was a chaotic mess, and the amount of drinkin’, rootin’, and general bad behaviour going on  (in and out of business hours), amazed me. Any chance of getting in on the action and getting paid for it was a big win.  I packed my record collection and a few odds and ends into the back of a rented car, and headed up the Hume into the hurricane.

The Sydney music scene in those years was really taking off, as the old Mushroom axis in Melbourne had gone a bit stale (even allowing for a few fops like the Models and the Hunters). Sydney was rockin out:  Chisel had moved in, the Oils were just getting bigger and bigger, INXS were starting to make their mark, and bands like the Sunnyboys were packing out the inner-city pubs.  Sardine were on at the Hopetoun, The Trade Union Club was roaring, and the whole place was buzzing in a big way. 

The magazine, (let’s call it ROKK), was the hot new street organ, and every issue was eagerly snapped up by the punters as it was delivered to the clubs and venues.  Getting it out on time was top priority and I threw myself into the task.  The set-up had several drawbacks: apart from all and sundry being permanently stoned as maggots; the whole thing was laid out and printed in Melbourne, then shipped up to Sydney for distribution. 

This put all the pressure on me at the end of the chain: the uncertain printing schedule meant that no commercial carrier would guarantee arrival times in Sydney because they didn’t always get them at the same time, and obviously wouldn’t hold up their trucks for a few boxes of pocket-sized music mags.  Many editions had to be rushed up the highway by speed-fuelled staff in an old station wagon, or flown express; blowing that issue’s budget to the shithouse.  I was hopping into the goey myself trying to single-handedly spread 10,000 copies around 250 outlets from Narrabeen to Caringbah via Parramatta.

There were more than a hundred outlets in the inner city alone and they all had to be out by 5pm Friday.   I rarely got them before lunch on a Thursday and often a lot later than that.  It was punishing stuff, and the pay was shithouse; but the fringe benefits made up for it.

It’s a big task organising a social life in a city where you hardly know anybody, but there was no worries on that count; the mag was the hippest thing in town, and gave instant access to any and everything going on in the music scene.  I had a backstage pass to the whole town, and the girls knew it. 

I was lucky to get home more than two or three nights a week: if I wasn’t shacked up somewhere, I’d be passed out in the back of the company van parked in an alley behind the Manzil Room.  This was the late night epicentre of the scene at the time, and every man and his dog ended up there as the other venues closed. 

Woe betide those not known to the bouncers, or not deemed cool enough to be admitted and shovelled out legless at dawn.  In a very short time I was like the guy in the Dave Warner song: I knew every bouncer in town by his first name (but I didn’t have to pay me 5 bucks).

Once I got organised I cadged a bigger budget, started hiring other drivers, and setting out proper run sheets and the like. Things started to run a bit more smoothly.  My guys were also picking up copy and cheques, so money started to flow more evenly.

The editions regularly hitting the venues on the button gave the advertisers a lot more confidence in us. The ads are your lifeblood on a free magazine, and they have to be looked after very carefully, so a lot of schmoozing and boozing began to take up my time...good PR some call it.   I thought it was the biggest gravy train I’d ever been on, and went the whole hog; I was out seven nights a week, and couldn’t get enough.

The majority of the copy was still coming out of Melbourne, however, and local bands and venues started grumbling. We had a local editor, but he tended to focus his articles on the major record companies and international acts; and we were supposed to be a street mag.  A couple of the southerners came up and reviewed some local acts, but not often. 

After I’d been to a couple of gigs and read reviews of them afterwards, I told the rest of the crew that it was dogshit: I’d been there, and it read differently from what I’d seen.  I opined that monkeys would have churned out a better story.  The inevitable rejoinder was: “who the fuck are you? Can you do any better?”

I went down to an op-shop, bought an old Remington for $10 and proceeded to find out.  I started reviewing local gigs.  Not having any toes to step on (as far as I was concerned), made me fairly irreverent, and I called it as I saw it. The response was good, and I was given record and film reviews as well: I was now a journo... not bad for a mug from the meatworks, I thought.

There was no extra pay for my efforts, but the red carpet rolled out wider.  I now went to Press conferences, Film previews, Fight promotions, Product launches, you name it.  Breakfast, lunch, and tea were now being provided by some PR mob or the other as I rampaged all over town on a freeloading merry-go-round. The cream of the crop was the major record company parties that usually ended in drunken food fights, brawls, and all manner of sexual misconduct.  Coke was everywhere you looked, and the cheap champagne was starting to rot me liver.

A dark cloud was looming though, and the storm was close.

The staff were beginning to fray at the edges: the pace was telling, and there were some rum things going on.  Some of the "investors" in the magazine had serious drug connections, and were using the office as a depot. The amount of pot lying about was an embarrassment. 

It wasn’t a good look for clients from reasonably straight businesses to see garbage bags full of dope being trundled in and out during their visit, although many industry figures gladly got on the tit: it was good heads and there was tons of it.  The mag began to acquire a very shady reputation.  The other burr under the saddle was the domination of the Melbournians in deciding what copy went in; after all, they were only ten feet from the art-room, and a lot of our stuff began to be pulled at the last moment.

There is a lot of give and take in a free publication:  the advertisers rely on good representation, and if you say you’ll review such and such a band at this or that venue, it’s incumbent on you to do so.  Your word must count when you give commitments to your advertisers.  The other office was spiking our stuff to the point where we were being made fools of, and we had all begun to take ourselves pretty seriously by this stage.

The final straw came when we promised, after several failures, to give the centerfold to a particular band who were killing it at the time: they were the hottest thing in town, and we guaranteed them the spot.  I think someone was fucking somebody as well, if

I recall correctly, but it was considered a done deal.  When the mags arrived, what did we find in the centre pages?

An ad for some bloody record shop in St Kilda or something similar, and our much anticipated photo spread reduced to a quarter page down the back of the mag.  The boss in Melbourne was unsympathetic:

“Did they pay for the spot?”   No.   “Fuckem then, these people paid for an ad, and that takes precedence. End of story.”

A crisis meeting was held, and the Sydney staff decided to break away and start their own publication, taking all the clients with them. I was still being paid from Melbourne, but I was promised a job on the new mag by the conspirators, so I kept my mouth shut and waited to see if they were all talk or not before I made a decision.

There were more clandestine meetings with solicitors et.al. But I was left out of the loop:  I must have been seen as suspect due to my non-committal approach and Melbourne connections.  As it transpired, they should have paid more attention to security, because I found a folder lying about full of documents outlining the prospectus and staff structure...I’d been lied to.... my name was nowhere on it.

I kept my powder dry, and said nothing. The boss called me after a couple of weeks, and asked the state of play with the proposed new mag.  Some of the advertisers had alerted him to the approaches made by the rebels, and he was onto the whole plot:  the cat was well out of the bag, and scratching.  I told him what I knew, and he replied that he was going to sack the lot of them. 

Which way would I go?  I just said that my loyalty lay with whoever paid me and that was him as far as I knew. He said  “Right, we’ll run all copy from here, except your stuff and the local gig listings. Go hire a couple of people and hold the fort, you’re it for the moment.”

Fucking hell, from shitboy to boss in less than six months, what a turn-up.

I did as I was told, and hired a couple of bright young things: a guy on a motorbike to go round and pick up the now desperately important cheques, and a typist/office girl; needless to say, the casting couch got a hiding as I vetted the applicants for that one.

While I wrote copy, sold ads and generally tried to run things, the political shitfight intensified:  the editor had changed sides, while the rest of the erstwhile staff bad-mouthed me and the mag all over the place, and the boss started making alliances with other local interests to try and hold the ad-base together while we rode out the storm. 

The owners of the office building were even invited in to try and lay off back-rent against future takings. This was a bad move: negotiations quickly went sour with these blokes, and they got nasty.  Or maybe they got greedy; I’ll never know, because things took a dramatic turn.

I arrived in the office at about 9 on the second Monday of the crisis, and my jaw hit the floor.

The entire contents of the office: desks, in-trays, phones, files and cabinets, had been demolished and bulldozed into one corner of the room. Posters had been torn down, and the white board smashed. 

Several people I’d never seen before were sitting at their brand new desks beavering away setting up another magazine. This one had been started by the jilted landlord and some of his rellies.  A large moustachioed Lebanese grabbed me when I walked in and said:

“Right, you, we have a new paper here now, you are finished. You bring out another issue... we kill you”.

He picked up a saucer from the wreckage, held it under my chin, and growled:  

“I eat you bolce off this, bastard. You understand? We kill you, fucken bastard.”  

He opened his jacket, patted the lump I assumed to be a gun, and said “You finish... you fuck off.”

“That’s not very nice,” I said, “ why did you have to make all this mess?”

I’ve had lots of dealings with bikie gangs and other assorted toughies over the years, and it is extremely important to be cool and professionally polite.

“ You don’t listen, smart cunt, “ he replied.

“ I’m listening,” I said, “But you have to realise that I only take orders from the people who pay me, but I’ll pass on your thoughts to them. Who’s your boss?”

“ I the fucken boss!!”  he yelled as it dawned on me who I was dealing with.  I had seen him before at a Lebanese restaurant I used to go to on occasion; being a bit of a fan of Arabic music.

He owned a place in Chippendale, and was up to his nuts in the nightclub war that was flaring up and down King Street at the time. They were having great fun firebombing each other’s joints and generally carrying on like they were back in Beirut.

Just then the landlord came in. He was a lot more urbane and gave me a quick rundown on the situation vis-a-vis my boss in Melbourne, apologised for the mess, and told me to piss off before his mate got too excited.

I grabbed my trusty old Remington and headed outside to wait for the other two. The company van had vanished with the rebel faction, so I had grabbed a ute from a cheap car-yard. I parked it beside a phone box and it was business as usual as best I could manage.  After talking to the rest of the staff, I resolved to move the whole operation to my rented house in Paddo as soon as I could, and organise for the next edition to be sent there. I was in the process of doing this, when the shit really started flowing.

The policy of rampant pot abuse in the workplace that so characterised the Melbourne office came home to roost in the worst possible way.  Some out-of-it clown down there put a full page ad in the next issue naming the company owned by the Lebboes as being responsible for all our troubles: and of course the company name and the name of the gangster’s nightclub, were one and the same.

To cap it all off, the stupid hippie bastard sent the shipment to the old address instead of my place. The Lebs went mad when they saw it: they hijacked the whole 15,000 copies and were on the warpath.

I rang the boss and told him: “It’s really fucked now mate, what do I do?  It’s Thursday arvo and I’ve got no magazine, they reckon they’re gunna burn the lot.”

“Go and get ‘em back,” he snarled.

“Listen mate, these pricks aren’t kidding, they are gunna sue you and shoot me, whaddya fucken mean? Go get ‘em back.”

He was unfazed.

 “Listen. I’ve got some blokes arriving up there to back you up; they’ll be on a plane by lunchtime. We’ll sort these pricks out. There’s heavier cunts than them around. You tell ‘em to give the bloody things back. You can handle it. What do I pay you for?”

The boss was the son of a well-known underworld figure so I knew that he wasn’t kidding: this was serious.  I was in it up to my neck and all for 150 bucks a week. I must have been mad.

Nevertheless I went over to the old office, and there was a very bad vibe about. I had to negotiate with them to get the missing issues back before it got out of control. The stroppy one was with the mags at a secret location, so I only had to deal with the landlord: he was no hero and could see that dangerous waters were close. 

The fidgety young ethnics pacing round the floor were raring to go, and it had to be sorted out quickly.  Phone-calls and threats were flying all over the place. By later that afternoon, we had arrived at a deal... The next day I could go and inspect the mags to make sure they hadn’t destroyed or damaged them, then organise for some workers to remove the ad by tearing out every offending page.

The only problem was that they weren’t taking any chances by this stage, and they demanded that hostages be provided while I went to check out the shipment in case I alerted our people and they went in with guns blazing. Time was pressing but it was the best I could get from them, so I said, “OK, I’ll be back here in the morning.”

I couldn’t spare the two staff I had, I needed them to keep some semblance of normalcy going: manning the phone and picking up ad copy etc.  There was nothing else for it: I put a classified in the Tele for casual workers, and told my office girl to send the first two callers to meet me at the old office first thing in the morning.

A couple of girls were the first to ring the next day: they were Kiwis, and fresh arrivals. They’ll do nicely, I thought.  Send them over.  I turned up, met the girls outside the office, and took them in. I organised a cup of tea, and said: “Look, I have to go get these magazines, you just relax, and I’ll be back in a tick. These blokes will keep you company.”

Maybe I should have told them the whole story, but they wouldn’t have hung around then; and besides, that’s life in the big city.  I was tap-dancing too fast to give a fuck, if the truth be known; I might get shot myself.  I went and checked out the mags in a garage in Marrickville; the minders had a shotgun and weren’t very friendly.  I smiled at mumma dressed in black and did my best godfather moves.  Everybody loosened up over some tea, then I went back, and the mags arrived about twenty minutes later.

I got to work tearing out pages with the girls, who were blissfully unaware how dangerously the last two hour’s pay had been earned.  I also rang up a band I knew who were in town on tour, roped them in, and soon we were powering through the pile of issues.  It was about 4 o’clock Friday and I could get some of them out that night.

Then the landlord rushed in sweating and carrying on, “Get out, get out, take your bloody papers, go, go, this is too much. I don’t care any more.”  and so on.

What the fuck was going on now.

The boys from Melbourne must have arrived; something had happened with his children: I don’t know what, maybe they visited the school, or followed them home.  Maybe they just made a telephone call, I never found out, but his wife was howling like a lost soul on the phone, and he was shitting himself.  He told us to get out of there before his mad mate got back because he couldn’t say what was going to happen when he got wind of it.

We took off with the mags in the ute and immediately started delivering them, fuck the ad, the game was past that point.  We were expecting big trouble as we did our rounds but nothing eventuated.  I had them all out by Saturday night, and before the week was out it had all settled down; we soon began to put the magazine back on some sort of steady footing.

Both the supposed rival publications never got off the ground, and we were back on deck, but the damage was done. The old editor came back and we kept going for a few more months, but Sydney is a gossip driven town. Word had got around about some of the drama, and there was a definite aura of criminality around us.  I went on JJJ (or was it still Doublejay?) to try and dispel the rumours, but the boat had been holed too badly. The big money ads were a lot harder to get.

I kept an eye over my shoulder for a while, but the Leb nightclub soon went under and all was forgotten.  Some of those guys went down in a huge coke bust a bit later, and I could walk Cleveland Street with no worries.

I was now working like a madman, I was Sales Manager/reviewer/office co-coordinator/distribution manager, and delivered the bloody things as well. The hard partying didn’t stop either: the increased workload meant that I needed a lot of executive stress relief.

A free tabloid-sized paper started up, dividing the shrinking cake a little bit more, and I embarked on a publicity blitz to show we were still out there and on top of it: I hired Playboy bunnies to hand out copies in the suburban venues, and other similar capers, but it was a losing battle, and after a while I was too burnt out to keep going. 

The younger staff members took over and it gradually fizzled away after they started charging a cover price. My severance pay was three sheets of perforated paper totaling 150 trips, and I cashed them in at the Tanelorn Festival while strolling around in a sarong.

The boss called me back in to collect all the outstanding monies after the mag collapsed a while later, so I had a chance to monster all my old clients for the ads they never paid for, and pick up extra commission on the original sale.

This went down well with those who had a sense of humour and I didn’t have to get really nasty with anybody.

After the floors had been swept I went back to playing in bands for a while, but the taste was still there so I dabbled in a few more music publications over the years, before finally chucking it in. It got to the stage where the deadline was just another line, and I wasn’t looking in the mirror to admire myself.

It had been fun though, and I‘d had more than a few laughs.

I wonder about those two Kiwi girls sometimes, what would have happened if things hadn’t gone to plan that day?

But they did, and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?