~ the eve of the ballroom reunion

When the Ears played at The Corner last year, I spent the majority of the time either on my knees or flat on my back. The gig after that I resorted to an on-stage oxygen bottle. Tomorrow evening, which I am looking forward to exceedingly, I hope to vastly increase the time I spend on my feet. I’ve gotten into some sort of routine with my swimming, so my wind is better, my voice is louder and my legs are strong. Relatively speaking.

The vibe on this thing is extraordinary. Every man and his dog seems to know about it. And it’s a truly novel experience watching the discussions unfold ahead of time on the facebook events page ... and perhaps elsewhere, for all I know. Issues left unresolved a quarter of a century ago have resurfaced. There’s been bitterness, vitriol and sweet love. Old wounds have been reopened and cruelly salted.

Sociologically, it’s just so interesting.

A loose clique of friends and associates with similar interests, beholden to a similar fashion sense [mostly involving the colour black] and drawn to certain venues where its needs were most adequately served, dissolves over the decades into the greater cloud of humanity and is gone.

Then, much much later - like a male salmon releasing his milt into the stream - a package of memetic signals is released into society.

These signals are clues - gestural, semantic, mnemonic, perhaps even pheremonal - and intuitively, instinctively, the former members of the clique take note and respond - with the massive assistance of the tool that is facebook.

At once they precipitate from the population. From the suburbs they come, from colonies in the bush, from renovated terrace houses in places that used to be cool, and gather for a few precious hours,

Briefly, the old scene - wearier, less pert, less lissom, less nubile, more sluggish, flabbier, the heroin in their blood superseded by prescription medications - is born anew and briefly blossoms, before once again - like a shooting star in the heavens - it fades away.

How’s that for an analysis? I defy you for a better one!

I know it’ll make it a long evening, but I do advise getting there reasonably early for tickets. Our manager Dolores suspects that it may be a sellout and from the extent of interest I’m inclined to agree. I’ve even learnt that the person who heard mention of the Ears on Gold 104 was not, in fact, hallucinating.

The Ears rehearsed last night, by the way, and are champing at the bit. Cathy is down from Sydney with at least two outfits from which to choose. Nothing’s gone wrong with my voice. Mick is damn serious about it. Ross is just a fantastic bass player and is fundamentally conjoined with Carl. There’s something satisfying about watching experienced old ones do it just right. Our keyboardist, Andrew ‘Terence’ Park, is being tracked by the Parkes Observatory as he passes through the Kuiper Belt.

We don’t play often these days, so it feels like we’ve got to make it count. Strangely, we’re going to attempt a new song. It’s provisionally called ‘energumen'. Here are some of the lyrics ...

“I ate a golden egg! I ate a golden egg!”

Oh and the name-tag idea ... functional, ironic, stupid and monumentally off key, just my kettle of fish. Surrender your vanities at the door, my dark haughty emaciated brooding beloved.

~ why must we grow old?

I couldn't resist reposting these Ears photos which appeared on facebook the other day. That's me above, not Iggy Pop, and down below is Mick. The band is ready to peak on Sunday night, by the way.

~ the ballroom reunion #1

~ ears at ding dong club

The official I Got Drunk At The Crystal Ballroom reunion evening is now happening on Sunday May 9 at the Ding Dong Lounge in the early evening with The Pang (Rob Wellington, Adam Learner), Little Murders (eighties Mod phenomenon) & The Ears. This is as locked in as locked in can be. It’s $5 at the door and there will be pre-bookings probably costing a couple of dollars extra.

I’ll post any changes on Twitter (link in the right column somewhere) and the IGDATCB facebook site will be up to date on everything I’m sure.

All very exciting. The photos are from the last time by Carbie Warbie

* 23 April 1981 Thursday 12.30am

After spending most of the day drinking with Pierre, I spent most of the evening drinking with Pierre. He has a vital, but diseased and cynical attitude to life. Through those many hours I shared with him, he must have described in detail at least twenty of his most memorable fucks. There is much to be said for his way of life. I wish I were capable of allowing myself such wanton shallowness.

I don’t think I even like Cathy D--- any more – perhaps because I associate her with Pierre and his bunch of cronies – perhaps because I’ve just lost faith.

I think it’s better to be alone and lonely rather than to be intimate with fools. I drank a bottle of whiskey with old Mick Lewis later that night

I slept with Tobsha on Monday night. We were celibate. She’s a dominant kind of girl. Lovely in many ways, but just not my type.

My voice is better now. It’s exciting to be able to sing again.

I am hating too many people now… or else I am feeling nothing for them… not caring – not at all –their lives seem so bleak and desolate… it depresses me – I keep looking to their deaths, or their old age. It is just one of those times; I cannot keep all those brutal facts of life out of my mind.

It’s to do with fear, you know – feeling so cold towards them …


*

I’ve mentioned the remarkable Pierre Voltaire before. He was a charismatic rake with a charming manner and with a goatish sexuality. To be succinct, a devil. At this time or very soon after he would be singing with The Fabulous Marquises, a pretty cool group which also boasted the talents of Ed Clayton-Jones, [who was later to play for The Wreckery and, briefly, the Bad Seeds].

I recall that night with Tobsha vividly. It was a clean, very white, very comfortable bed in a small room. There was definitely some form of attraction there, but nothing ever happened - I think, in a way, we were polar opposites. And I know I was intimidated by her sexual predation.

Mick Lewis reminded me of something amusing the other day. At some point around this time, [it may even appear later in the diary,] The Crystal Ballroom hosted a battle of the bands, with the voting done by the audience. The Ears took first place and the Serious Young Insects came second. First prize was a record contract with Laurie Richards and second was a crate of cider. There was no way we were going to get into a legal situation with Laurie [as Mick tells it] so we negotiated with the SYI to swap. In those days of short term goals, pennilessness and the necessity of immediate gratification, a crate of cider was magnificent recompense.

Diary of 1981 - index

* 21 February 1981, 11.13am

The following appears to have been written under the influence of amphetamines – therefore I’ve made an editorial judgment to amend some of the crazed grammar that fizzed from my young mind.

Speed was then amphetamine sulphate, not the methamphetamine we have today. Traditionally, it came in small translucent red capsules worth twenty dollars. Heroin came in half clear/half red capsules referred to as double oh’s. The caps were sourced, I think, from a cold medicine and if the smack was not served up in a double oh, it was instantly suspect. Later, foil and paper folds came into fashion. Later still, balloons. In 1981 a ‘cap’ was fifty dollars – and, unless things have changed just recently, the price remains the same.

*

I went off to the Crystal Ballroom last night, though I can remember little of it. Afterwards, we visited Constance at his petrol station, and some friends came over to Milton St. – Jane, Leia & Cathy [a visitor from Adelaide]. We drank a huge amount of vodka and wound up being very sick. At about 9.00 we awoke from our stupor …

The Ballroom was full of friends. Even Warren Coleman was there - he dropped by with [Paul] Storm at four yesterday morning and yapped… and yapped …

I found myself in a very lurid mood. The girl Tobsha was giving me the eye, I’m sure, and I was returning it. My recollections of the night are full of skirt-filled flashes … Sometimes I’m like that; most of the time in fact, but never wholeheartedly. When I think of Christine, I lose any active interest.

I am on speed and have not slept a wink.

It was probably a foolish thing to do, taking it, but it was kind of fun.

There’s a lot I have to say, but I’ve little inclination to say it. I’m experiencing that dreadful speed state in which you are forever teetering on the edge of a ghastly chasm*, waiting for your life to crumble around you…

Somebody asked me to write a story for a magazine last night… Mmm … perhaps ... It will feature a pallbearer and be called ‘The Pallbearer’.

Christine is going to live here for a month, she thinks, before she moves in with Craig Elrick. In my paranoid state I can’t help being worried about that… We may be going to Adelaide. That visitor I mentioned, Cathy, she would be arranging it.

Wally is sweeping the path outside. A slow fly is on this book. Christine is in bed, awake, and probably grumpy….

*

Paul Storm, a school friend, was living around the corner around this time. I remember running to borrow money off him for a cab, after cops – called by my mother - came to my door and alerted me to my father’s terrible stroke. It was only a few months previous to this diary that he died.

I see Paul often these days. He has a daughter Polly’s age, Caitlyn, and as we’re all Sainters, we catch quite a few games together.

1982 beargarden

Constance working at a petrol station … I believe he would die if he knew this information was publicly available. He’s a serious [and I think successful] visual artist now - whom I last encountered at Troy’s wake.

Warren Coleman was another school friend. He was one of the boys in The Devil’s Playground and a co-writer, I understand, of Happy Feet. I don’t know much of what fell between, but we used to share very similar tastes and it was he who came to school with an Aladdin Sane haircut and he who introduced me to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and thence to Philip K Dick … My parents hated him, blamed him for the incident when I took Bowie’s Young Americans record cover to the hairdresser and asked them to duplicate it. [The Gitane I could arrange myself.]

And Tobsha. Hmmn… A strange game of sexual chess stretched for years before burning out sans consummation. Then a VCA sculptress living at the end of the street, now she lives in LA and writes erotic novels with names like Quiver and Tremble and The Witch of Cologne. I’ve always been jealous of her success, principally because once I was far superior at spelling.

* Wasn’t someone teetering on a brink in my last post? I wonder how often I use that metaphor? Possibly a lot – I always seems to be treading the edge of some abyss or chasm or whatnot ...

Diary of 1981 - index