Chapter 34: Touring and Recording

Kitchen on Tour

January 1987

The New Year’s Eve concert in Victoria Park was much like the previous years; this year we shared the stage with Mental as Anything and the Cockroaches. It was great to be on stage with the Mentals again, Greedy Smith, Martin Plaza, Reg Mombassa, and the others, they were all great guys, and lots of fun to perform with. The guys from the Cockroaches were new to me; I had heard them around, but never had a chance to see them live. But they were all great, fun-loving guys, we had lots of fun working on the final, combined set. Just as in the previous years, there was a huge crowd, well above thirty thousand. Something to get us in the frame of mind for our upcoming tour gigs. Not that I expected any of them to have crowds that size, but it was energizing playing to a large crowd; our usual gigs didn’t have the same energy.

It was good to perform with the others; I think being part of a large celebration got me out of my depressed state. I think Barry, Peter and their wives enjoyed attending the concert, as did Christine and Ed; I think they enjoyed the break and listening to the music. It was close to 2 a.m. on New Year’s Day when we all got home, at least we could sleep in. Christine, Ed, and their kids drove back to their property after lunch, Christine said she would check out places where they could donate all of Olga’s old clothes. Saturday morning we would be heading down to Wollongong, the first stop on our tour. Friday we would be checking all of our equipment and loading the truck – under Mary Beth’s watchful eye, of course. We had already worked out everything we would need to take with us for the four weeks; as we loaded the truck, we checked things off on the master list.

That night in bed, it was just Lisa and me. I wasn’t looking forward to us being apart for the next week and a half, but she would join me when we arrived in Newcastle. Right now, it was more important she spends time with her father and helping her sisters sort out her mother’s things back in Bathurst. But tonight – tonight was just for us, a night of nothing other than making love with each other. I wished we had been able to lie in bed when we woke up, but the tour bus was leaving early, so there was just time for a shower together, breakfast, and then a final check of my bags.

The first day of a road trip was always exciting; we had everything to look forward to, and the inconvenience of being crammed together in the bus and spending night after night in rough accommodation hadn’t yet taken its toll on us. We laughed, talked, teased each other, would have impromptu jam sessions, do pretty much anything to make the miles pass quickly. Before we knew it, we were pulling into the Dapto Showground. The trucks with the stage equipment, the lighting and sound gear, the generator truck, and the accommodation trailer had arrived on site yesterday, and the base of the stage was already set up, and the riggers were working on getting the lighting scaffolding in place, plus the towers for the additional PA speakers. Fifa had mentioned that for this tour, they would be beefing up both the sound and lighting; last year the PA system wasn’t quite up to the task of coping with the large venues we were playing in. Chris had mentioned all of the details, the number of individual amplifiers, the total music power in watts, how many equalizer channels there would be, but most of that was over my head. The same with the lighting equipment, he said they had ninety-six programmable channels, which to me seemed a rather large number, he had mentioned how many individual lights – or ‘luminaires’ – there would be, but the actual number escaped my memory. Suffice to say, I felt we would look and sound impressive, assuming our playing would match the equipment.

We pretty much had most of the day off; all going well there would be a preliminary sound check late in the afternoon, but the final check and a quick rehearsal wouldn’t be until just before lunchtime tomorrow. There was a scheduled ‘media’ show in the afternoon, the local TV station would be doing a brief segment for the local evening news. A few of us – Fiona, Allison, Mike and Karen and myself – headed across to the Dapto shopping centre, and found a café to have lunch. Mike pushed the baby stroller with their young son in it; as Karen said, at his age, there’s no trouble with his meals.

“All of his food comes along with me,” she said. “Provided we can find a discrete corner to sit, I’ll pop a boob out, and Karl will be happy!”

We were able to find a suitable table at the back of the café, but the waitress wanted to fuss over Karl. She called some of the other staff over, all women in their forties and fifties, and they all said how cute he was, asked Karen how old, was he sleeping through the night. Probably all standard questions mothers ask other mothers of young babies; it’s probably some informal ‘motherhood support network’. Karl was unfazed by all the attention, he lay there against Karen’s breast, having his midday meal.

After we had finished, it was back to the showground, where Graeme Thorpe wanted to give the guitars a thorough check over, to make sure the strings were in good condition, pots and connectors were clean, and everything sounded right. Nothing much more to do until the stage was ready and all the audio equipment had been connected; so we just sat around in the accommodation trailer until we got called to do a soundcheck.

When we got on the stage for the soundcheck, all of our instruments were set up in their places, and the microphones were in place. Even my pedal board was there; one thing about the road crew that we had for this tour (and last summer’s tour), they were incredibly professional, they knew exactly how we preferred our instruments placed, where we like our microphones, once they had done their job, very little needed adjustment. The lights still needed to be installed, at least cabled up, the electricians and riggers were working above us on the gantries, connecting the cables and control boxes. Every few minutes, one set of lights would be brought up, the intensity varied, then turned off, and another set would be turned on.

We started the soundcheck; Mary Beth would give instructions, through the foldback speakers, and we started with the two drum kits. We slowly worked through all of our instruments, then the vocal microphones, until they were happy with the levels. We were then asked to play something together, so they could get the overall balance right, and adjust the equalizers so that the sound was to their liking.

“Crossroad Blues, everyone?” Phil suggested. “Take us away, Will.”

I led off with the introduction; then everyone joined in. When we finished, I told Mary Beth and the other sound engineer that my foldback speakers were a bit ‘muddy’, it was difficult for me to hear the music. There was also an intermittent problem with Rose’s microphone, every so often the sound would cut out, and be replaced with a buzzing noise. One of the techs removed the offending microphone, replaced it with another one, and headed off to diagnose the problem. Meanwhile, some adjustments were made to the equalizers for my foldback channel, and we were asked to do another song.

“What about ‘Jet Airliner’,” Garry suggested. “You know, the Steve Miller Band one.”

“Sounds good, what’s the key?” I asked him.

“C, F, and B flat. I’ll call out the changes,” he replied. “Capo on the third fret makes it easier.”

Phil started the opening lick, then Garry and I joined in with the rhythm backing. It was pretty simple, C to F, a B flat thrown in for good measure. Rachel and Bruce provided a solid, driving rhythm, Andrew had a great bass riff going. The rhythm pattern was a basic boogie style, using my right palm to mute the strings to give some syncopation to the rhythm. It was a fun song to play, everyone picked up the rhythm pretty quickly; I felt that somehow the others had practised it before.

This time, the sound system worked faultlessly; the foldback was perfect, there weren’t any microphone failures. Graeme returned with the faulty microphone and swapped it back, and suggested we try it now.

“Dirty battery contacts,” he explained. “As it would vibrate, the battery would cut in and out, hence the lack of sound. Nothing that some good CRC contact cleaner can’t fix. I’ll check all of the other mikes tonight, when we’ve finished here, they could be going bad too.”

“Okay, do we want to do one final test?” I asked, and everyone agreed.

“Promised Land?” Phil suggested. “Take us home, Will!”

I strapped my Telecaster on, wound the overdrive up, and checked the settings on the amp.

“Let’s blow the cobwebs outta those speakers, Mary Beth,” I said. “I’ll have everything turned up to eleven for this one!”

“You want me to take the first instrumental break on my fiddle?” Allison asked.

“Yeah, sounds good,” Phil said. “Garry and I can take the second, and we’ll play it by ear from that.”

Allison made sure she was plugged into her amp, checked the levels and tuning of her electric violin, and nodded to say she was ready. I looked around, everyone was ready, waiting for me to start the intro.

“This one’s for you, Chuck!” I said and hit the intro.

Andrew had a solid ‘walking bass’ rhythm, Bruce and Rachel had a solid drum rhythm going, time to start the first verse. After the second verse, Allison improvised a great instrumental break on her fiddle, then Garry and Phil did their usual solid job playing off each other.

“Another run through,” I said, and we played through the second half again, this time Paul, Mandy, and Fiona played a hot horn break.

I didn’t feel like ending the song, I was having so much fun, so I called out ‘from the top’, and we did the whole song again, finally, somehow all of us finishing together.

“That,” Mike said, “that was fucking BRILLIANT! Can we squeeze that into one of the sets?”

“We need to include that in our Tamworth list, too,” Allison said. “That’s going to get the whole audience moving, and that’s what that festival is all about.”

“How did it sound out there, Mary Beth?” I asked.

“Well, I’m pretty sure the volume will be plenty loud enough and everyone in the audience should be able to hear,” she said. “And let’s see where we can fit it into our setlists, not just for these shows, but Tamworth as well. It sounded great, loved the fiddle part, Alli.”

Time to call it a night, at least to leave the lighting crew to finish their installation work; we would test the lighting a bit later, once the cabling was complete. Time to have dinner, and we could discuss changes to the sets.

“You can’t beat those old Chuck Berry songs,” Mike said, as we headed into the ‘refectory’ – the dining area. “Man, that guy knew how to pen a great rock and roll song.”

“If you look up ‘Rock and Roll’ in the dictionary,” Rose said, “there’s a photo of Chuck.”

“Amen, Sister!” Phil said. “We could try to work in a few more for Tamworth.”

“What about ‘Teenage Wedding’?” Allison suggested.

“Well, you never can tell how that would work out,” I said.

Everyone groaned at my terrible attempt at a pun.

“Despite Will’s weak attempt at humour, that would be a good one to work on,” Phil said. “What if we work on that? Do we have the music for it?”

“I’ve got two books of Chuck Berry songs,” Fiona said. “I’m sure that’s in it, I’ll go and look.”

She left, and returned with two slim music books, and flicked through them.

“Here it is,” she said. “If we can get some photocopies of the pages, we can start working on an arrangement tomorrow morning. Who should sing? Alli and Rose? At least to give your voice a break, Will.”

“What key is it in?” Garry asked.

“The key is A, chords are A, E, and E7,” Fiona said. “Pretty simple, really; but lots of opportunities for us to embellish around the melody.”

“We can start on it tomorrow morning,” Phil said.

After our meal, we kicked back in the lounge area, discussing how we could modify our setlist to fit ‘Promised Land’ in. We decided to drop ‘Fast Woman on a Slow Moving Train’ and ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, shuffle a few others around, and we would end the first set with ‘Promised Land’. We also looked at refining the sets for Tamworth, but by the time we were called back for the lighting check we hadn’t worked out any suitable changes.

“We want to test some of the lighting effects,” Chris said over the PA system. “We will keep the sound levels down, but what if we start with the opening songs, we can get the spots aimed properly, then get into some of the rockier, up-tempo tracks?”

We began our usual intro, ‘Time is Tight’, and when I introduced each person, a spotlight was brought onto them; a few required some adjustment, and Chris told me to pause at various points while the lights were centred properly. When they were happy with how the spotlights looked, it was onto the next songs; Chris and the other lighting techs were experimenting with some lighting patterns, there were several banks of different colours up in the ceiling, purple, red, blue, orange, which would come on with the music. There were also six large floodlights arranged along the central axis of the stage, from left to right, that had either a clear white light or a deep blue colour, these would come on and have those of us in the front in silhouette. After we had finished a few tracks, Chris asked us to do some of the softer, quieter songs; Rose’s ‘Showing you my Love’, ‘Always on the Outside’, ‘Baby’s Lullaby’.

I quickly saw why they wanted us to do some softer songs; the lighting effect was quite different, mainly blues and greens, no bright flashing strobes, the effect was peaceful, serene. Mandy, Fiona, and Allison had worked on harmonizing with Rose, at one point Allison would do a violin solo, adding to the mournful nature of ‘Always on the Outside’; combined with the lighting effects, it was very dramatic.

“Okay, that was great,” Chris said. “Let’s try Allison and you, Will, doing ‘Desperado’.”

Allison moved forward, putting her microphone stand just to the side of my piano; all of the stage lights were turned off, except for a single spot on Allison. There was enough light from that for me to see my keyboard; I looked across at her and smiled. This was one song that the two of us loved performing together; it built a strong emotional bond between us. This time, once we had started the song, some of the stage lights were brought up, some soft reds and oranges, bathing the stage in a warm glow. The effect added to the song. The next song was ‘Paint it Black’, part of our Stones cover group; Chris wanted to test out the strobe light effect that would be on Mandy. It looks like there were two strobes set up on her; each at a slightly different rate; the effect was quite different from how it was with just the single strobe.

They were happy with how the lights had been set up; all of the light fixtures were aimed correctly, they were all responding to the controls correctly. That pretty much concluded all of the setup for today; time to get to bed and sleep. Tomorrow we would have the main rehearsal session, during which there would be a news crew from the local WIN TV station would be present to record a short segment for that evening’s broadcast. One of the local radio stations was hoping to be present tomorrow afternoon and would do a live broadcast of our final rehearsal session. Mary Beth said that should pretty much guarantee the remaining two nights would be sold out.

That was it for the day; we all decided to head off to bed. It had been a long day, up early, several sessions for sound and lighting checks. Tomorrow would be the first of our big shows for the summer tour, I wanted to be fully rested and at my best. Fiona asked if she could sleep with me for the night; I agreed but said I would want to get to sleep fairly soon. Despite my intention of going straight to sleep, once Fiona and I were holding each other close on our narrow bunk, nature took over. We made love slowly and gently, and immediately after I reached my orgasm, I must have fallen asleep. We woke up early in the morning, I was still on top of Fiona, but my prick had slipped out, no doubt when I softened.

“I thought you just wanted to sleep?” Fiona asked.

“Well, we did sleep,” I said. “I feel a bit refreshed now, so...”

“Why don’t we lie side by side, you behind me, spooning, and...”

“Spooning can lead to forking,” I said.

“Please, you can fork me any time...” she replied, as I pressed my prick – my rapidly stiffening prick – against her backside.

Fiona reached behind herself and positioned my prick between her thighs, my knob against her wet pussy. A slight change in position, and angle, and I was inside her. We slowly rocked back and forward, making love and managing to come together, before drifting back to sleep. We woke up later in the morning; time for a quick shower and some breakfast. Most of the others were already up; Phil, Allison, Mandy and Paul were working on the arrangement for ‘You Never Can Tell’; they had called Rose and Mike in to see what keyboard embellishments would work.

“Hey Will, do you want to join us with this?” Phil asked. “Do you think you can work on some type of rhythm pattern?”

I grabbed my acoustic guitar and looked at the sheet music that Fiona had provided last night. I hummed the melody, since I wasn’t sure of the words yet, I improvised with some ‘scat’ vocals. Bruce provided rhythm, tapping his hands on the table, and got a basic groove going. I started with a basic boogie shuffle on A, and at the end of the second line, it was E followed by an E7. The next two lines were E, E7, E and E7 again, ending on A. It took a few attempts to get something that sounded reasonable, and I lamented not having access to Bruce’s extensive record and bootleg tape library. I was sure somewhere there was a recording that had just the sound I was looking for, but, of course, they were back in the studio at Banksia Lodge.

Once I had come up with something that seemed to work, and everyone else thought it would fit in well, I started to transcribe my chord pattern, along with the words, and notes on who would take the fills. While we were working that song up to make it ‘performance ready’, there would no doubt be changes to it, but at least I would have something to work with.

“I’ve got a bootleg tape that has something similar to the sound we are working towards,” Bruce said. “Dave Edmunds, and a band called the Refreshments, I think. I should call Lisa, and see if when she’s back from Bathurst, she can find it; and bring it up with her when she meets up with us in Newcastle.”

“Okay, I’ve got the number for Bill’s place there, maybe we can call around lunchtime,” I said. “Do you know where in the studio it is?”

“I think so, anyway, when I talk to her, I’ll give her some ideas, and tell her what should be written on the outside of the cassette box.”

I spent the rest of the morning, off by myself practising ‘You Never Can Tell’, memorizing the melody and words, until I felt I was confident singing lead for the song. Just before lunchtime, I called Lisa at her father’s house in Bathurst, to see how things were going, and to have Bruce give her the details for the cassette he wanted.

“I didn’t realize just how many clothes my mother had!” she said. “We’ve gone through one closet, and Christine and Desley have just left for the Salvation Army op shop. There are still heaps more to do. How are things going there? I guess tonight is the opening night in Wollongong.”

“Yeah, we’ve got the full rehearsal in a few hours, and a TV crew is interviewing us, plus one of the local radio stations. I’ve got Bruce here, too, he wants to see if when you get back home, you can find a cassette he’s wanting, and bring it up to Newcastle with you.”

I handed the phone to Bruce and he told Lisa what he was looking for, and where it could be in the studio. When he finished, he handed the phone back to me. She wished me good luck for the night’s performance, and I told her to pass on my love to her father and sisters, and that I missed her.

After lunch, we all sat down, and made sure we were all on the same page with the setlists for the night’s gig; including the recent changes to fit ‘Promised Land’ in at the end of the first set. Mary Beth made sure the running sheets that were used at the sound and lighting consoles were all up to date and correct, and she said we were good to go for the evening’s show. Time for me to try to get an hour or two’s rest before everything started. Fiona joined me in my bed, we just cuddled, resting together. As tempting as it was to make love, we both agreed that would defeat the purpose of going to bed to get some rest before the evening’s performance.

Time for a quick shower to get refreshed, then get dressed into my stage clothes, and it was to the main lounge for the WIN TV interview. The TV crew was setting up their cameras and lights, and we were introduced to the reporter. He said he would do a brief introduction to the camera, then he would ask a few questions, and they would finish up with a short recording from our rehearsal. When the lights and camera were ready, the reporter did his introduction to the camera, referring back to our performances here in January last year, and then asked us what the audience could expect to hear.

“Well, we have some new songs coming out on our next album, which we will be recording in February,” Phil said. “Plus, a bunch of our regular songs, some from Rose Peterek’s album, and we are finishing up this month at the Tamworth festival, so we are working up some songs for that, too.”

“Sounds like a good variety; now, the lineup on stage, last year you had some additional members, I think you called it ‘The Roberttones and Friends’. Are you doing the same this year?’

“Similar,” I said. “Last year we had Don Walker and Ian Moss, ex-Cold Chisel, Chrissy Amphlette from the Divynils, and Mike Franz, ex-Salamon. This year, we’ve got Mike back with us, and Rose Peterek, who released her album last May.”

“Well, I guess the next step is to give the viewers a taste of what they can expect when they come to the concert,” he said.

We headed up on stage; apparently, the radio station had already connected their feed to one of the auxiliary outputs from the sound mixer. We decided to do ‘Promised Land’, ‘Hot Pancakes’ and ‘Home Fries and Bacon’ – the song which had the initial working title of ‘Scrambled Eggs’ – from the new album, and Rose’s ‘Showing you my Love’. The TV reporter seemed happy with what they had; meanwhile, the crew from the radio station came up on stage and asked what other songs we planned to play this afternoon. They were hoping to be able to broadcast some of our ‘rockier’ songs, we decided to do some of our blues covers – ‘Crossroad Blues’, ‘Mean Woman Blues’, and the Stones grouping.

We ran through those songs, all in all, it was a pretty good ‘warm-up’ for us; the sound system was still working perfectly, the little glitches from yesterday had not returned. After a short interview with the person from the radio station, it was time to rest, have dinner, and wait until the show started at 8:00 p.m.

“How’s your voice holding out, Will?” Allison asked me over dinner. “I’m hoping you won’t have a huge load on it, not like last year.”

“I think it should be fine,” I said. “There’s been a good lead up during November and December, enough to keep my voice strong, without overtaxing it. But I’ll try not to overload it. I will start gargling with warm salt water every morning; I need to remember to do that every day.”

“I’ll make sure I remind you,” Fiona said. “We can’t have your voice crapping out on us!”

We sat around chatting and resting until it was time to get on stage; we looked out at the audience from the side of the stage, the arena was just about full; Mary Beth said there were just over twenty thousand tickets sold, and sales were just as strong for the next two nights. Some of the early sales reports from Canberra were looking just as promising, they were opening up more of the stadium at the AIS to allow for twenty-five thousand spectators. These big summer tours were proving to be quite profitable for us – and Alberts, of course.

I thought the gig went well; we had to finish with our prepared ‘second encore’; ‘I’ll Make You Happy’, ‘Slow Woman’, and ‘The Last Wave of Summer’. As I started ‘I’ll Make You Happy’, I thought how strange it felt singing that song without Chrissy next to me. We had heard from her around Christmas day; she and the others in the Divinyls were in the middle of a tour to the west coast of the USA. According to her, the tour was going well, and she much preferred that part of the United States to the southern part, which was where the bulk of their previous tour had been concentrated on.

Back to our performance; we finished the second encore, shut everything down, and headed back to the accommodation trailer. The consensus was everything sounded reasonably good; apart from me forgetting one of the lines to ‘Pork Crackling’. I tried to blame Traci and Fiona, they were trying to distract me while I was singing, but even still, I should be at the stage now where I knew the words to every song in the set. We decided that tomorrow we would do a detailed review of our regular setlists, plus the proposed lists for our Tamworth gig.

“We need to add at least one more song to the second set for Tamworth,” Mary Beth said. “We’ve got ‘Way Out West’, ‘Call Me the Breeze’, ‘Promised Land’, ‘Never Can Tell’, and a few others, but we want another one similar to that, otherwise it will come up a bit short. Any suggestions?”

“What about another one like ‘Call Me the Breeze’, maybe another Lynyrd Skynyrd one?” Phil suggested. “Continue the southern rock style?”

“Will, do you know ‘Gimme Three Steps?” Bruce asked.

“I can play the intro,” I said. “Da da-da-dah, da-da-dah, da-da-dada-da, da dada da dada dah,” I sang along wordlessly.

“Yeah, let me call Alberts, see if they can fax down a copy of the sheet music,” Mary Beth said. “We may as well go full southern rock, get into the ‘God, Guns and Grits!”

“What the fuck is a ‘grit’?” Fiona asked.

“It’s a porridge sort of thing, made from cornmeal; very popular in the south,” Mary Beth said. “Or, like my mother, ‘Grits’ means ‘Girl raised in the South’.

“Let me just try to play it,” I said, going to get my acoustic guitar. “It’s in the key of D, the intro is a riff on D and A power chords.”

“I’ve got a good recording back at home, too,” Bruce said. “I’ll get Lisa to get that tape too.”

Meanwhile, I had got my guitar and played through the intro. It was a fun riff to play, once we got the full sheet music, I’d try to play the complete song. It would sound much better on one of my electric guitars, I would probably go with the Tele, see how that sounded with a good amount of overdrive and compression on the guitar output. Just after our lunch break, Fifa had faxed through the sheet music of the song; I took my copy, and set it up on my music stand, and tried it both with the Tele and a Strat; experimenting with levels of compression and overdrive until I found a tone that I liked. I then played it through a couple of times, just by myself, to get the feel and timing of the song – and to start to get the words imprinted on my brain.

“I think that’s going to sound good,” Phil said, interrupting my practice. “Mind if I join you? Can you show me how some of those riffs work?”

I spent about fifteen minutes working with him, he picked things up quickly, Garry joined us, working on a good rhythm pattern. Andrew and Bruce joined us, and we had a pretty good groove going.

“The three guitars make these songs rock,” Phil said. “Garry, you need to get that lick going that Will’s worked out, we should have all three of us standing up, right at the edge of the stage. At least with Rose with us on this tour, we’ve dragged you away from that piano, Will!”

“Well, we’ll have to work on it with the others, see how we can work the horns and keyboards in,” I said. “I think it will sound pretty good, once we’ve worked on it some more. Man, imagine if we had Mossy here joining in with us!”

“Yeah, I’ve been giving him a call every couple of weeks,” Phil said. “He keeps telling me that he’s still taking a break, but when that’s done, he’ll consider joining us again. And he’d bring Don along with him; but ... I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting.”

We spent another thirty minutes working on the song, then it was time for our full rehearsal. All we needed to do was just go through a few of the new songs, mainly so I wouldn’t forget the lyrics; but Phil suggested we start with ‘Jet Airliner’, just to polish it up some. After the rehearsal I relaxed until dinner; the night’s performance was just as good as the previous night’s – even better if you count me not forgetting the words to one of the songs. Tuesday was our third and final show in Wollongong, again, there was a huge crowd, ticket sales over the three nights were close to seventy-five thousand.

Wednesday morning, the riggers had already dismantled the stage and had the trucks partially loaded up by the time we surfaced for breakfast. We were on the road to Canberra by midday and arrived at the Institute of sport around 4:00 p.m. Once the accommodation trailer had been set up, I called my brother; he would be around soon to collect Allison and me, so we could have dinner with him and Shane. To save him having to drive us back afterwards, we would be sleeping over there at his place, and he or Shane would bring us back in the morning.