Keith’s Melbourne Wife
The Quest of a Woman in a Paragraph
This story first appeared in the book ‘Rock Country: The sounds, bands, fans, fun & other stuff that happened’ (Hardie Grant, 2015), edited by Christian Ryan. If you like my writing, join my Substack ‘Good one, Wilson’
Jenny Brown remembers handwriting the invitations. It was a hot Thursday night in February 1973, the night before The Rolling Stones were due to roll into Melbourne; the night before the Stones’ scheduled afternoon press conference in the mud-brick surrounds of the artist colony at Montsalvat; the night before Brown’s full moon twenty-first birthday pool party at her parents’ home in North Balwyn.
Brown decided to invite the Stones. ‘What can I say?’ she grins, as we order breakfast at the Northcote cafe where her daughter was working. ‘It was a brave time.’
She had a head start on the average fan attempting to lure The Rolling Stones to her twenty-first: Brown was a music writer, which meant access to Montsalvat and the band. On the morning of her party she actually sat on Mick Jagger’s hotel bed, scribbling notes, while Jagger and tour manager Peter Rudge assessed artist Ian McCausland’s image of a curious kiwi prodding an extended tongue for a New Zealand tour poster. When the meeting broke up, Brown experienced a breathless moment, recounted in the alternative paper she was writing for, The Digger:
As we’re leaving Jagger deliberately jams himself into the doorway with me, his famous body crushed against mine, and grins into my eyes. ‘You look like you’re ou’ of it,’ he says, but he’s wrong. In fact I’m just practising with Tantric devotion the writer’s art of shutting up and listening.
Brown was young and radiant, and had a quality that attracted musicians. In her future she would live with Skyhooks’ Greg Macainsh, marry Dragon’s Todd Hunter, and spend six and a half years with Cold Chisel’s Don Walker. In the words of friend and twenty-first birthday attendee Philippa Finney, ‘She didn’t seem to realise the impact she had on people. She had this aura.’
At Montsalvat, a glorious informality helped Brown follow through with her invitation plans. After a banquet with open bar in the Great Hall, band members scattered individually around a picturesque reflecting pool, entertaining a well-lubricated press corps. ‘I walked around to each member,’ Brown says, ‘and gave them an invite. I imagine they were quite used to strangers handing them stuff. They kind of smiled and nodded.’
The party was at 39 Woodville Street, North Balwyn, a large family home that Brown’s father had built himself, set on a hill between Doncaster Road and Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbia. Famously, North Balwyn is a ‘dry’ suburb. On this hot, windless night, it was anything but.
‘A sensational party,’ says Brown. ‘It was one of those parties you’d want to have if you were turning twenty-one and you were in the rock press. A lot of journalists came, a lot of musos. We had MacKenzie Theory playing — they were an acid art rock band who I adored. Dave Dawson from the Truth was thrown into the pool by various members of the alternate press. People swam naked. Skinheads tried to break in. They threw a brick through the front window and Michael Chugg bounced them. I’ve always been grateful to Michael for that.’
And, then, The Rolling Stones came. ‘They just sort of materialised, like this amazing mist. I think it was about 3 a.m. Things were getting quieter. And lo and behold this limo pulls up out front.’
Through a side gate and into the Japanese-style garden area wandered Keith Richards, Mick Taylor, horn player Bobby Keys and some road crew. ‘It astonished me they came that late,’ says Brown, ‘because we all knew they had a noon show at Kooyong the next day.’ Taylor had a conversation about architecture with Jen’s mother. ‘He was very interested that Robin Boyd had co-designed the house with my father and I remember this very beautifully dressed, stunning and quite shy young man talking at length to Mum.’ Keith stayed outside, smoking in the Japanese garden. ‘A beautiful spot. Dad had built it with a little platform out over a small waterfall, and a pond, and a weeping cherry.’
Brown remembers seeing her editor, Phillip Frazer, chatting with Keith. She didn’t talk to Keith herself. ‘We were all being pretty cool. Nobody was going to make a fuss or ask for photos or anything. They stayed for about an hour and a half, and headed off after four in the morning.’ She smiles, basking in a forty-year-old memory. ‘They blessed me with their royal presence.’
*
Another was in Melbourne, Australia. She had a baby. Sweet, shy, unassuming, she was on the scuppers; the old man had left her with the kid. She could get me pure cocaine, pharmaceutical. And she kept coming to the hotel to deliver, so I went, hey, why don’t I just move in? Living in the suburbs of Melbourne for a week with a mother and child was kind of weird. Within four or five days I was like a right Australian old man. Sheila, where’s my fucking breakfast? Here’s your breakfast, darling. It was like I’d been there forever. And it felt great, man. I can do this, just a little semidetached. I’d take care of the baby; she went to work. I was husband for the week. Changed the baby’s diapers. There’s somebody in a suburb in Melbourne who doesn’t even know I wiped his ass.
– KEITH RICHARDS, Life
Keith’s Melbourne suburban adventure apparently didn’t end in North Balwyn. The ‘Sheila’ paragraph of Keith’s 564-page memoir, Life, has delighted and mystified Australian Stones fans. Who was she? Is she still alive? Could the owner of the wiped ass be found? Who would look at the 1973 Keith Richards and think ‘babysitter’?
I ask Jenny Brown (who is now Jen Jewel Brown and a contributor to this book) and she shakes her head. ‘I don’t know anything about that. It’s quite possibly true, but I really don’t know.’
I speak to Brendan Mason, owner of Real Guitars in Glen Iris and the guitarist from Madder Lake, who supported the Stones at Kooyong that weekend. ‘I didn’t take any notice of whether Keith was hanging around with a particular girl. I do remember he was absolutely off his nut. He may as well have been on the planet Zargon for how much sense he was making. But we weren’t with them except for backstage. I didn’t even get to go to Montsalvat because I was having my knee operated on.’
David Dawson, the trained tabloid nose who was chucked in the pool, suggests Jagger ‘hooked up with a blonde Sun journalist after the banquet at Monsalvat and so never made it the party in North Balwyn’. He has no post-party information on Keith.
I email ex-Stones tour manager and rock management impresario Peter Rudge via the ‘contact us’ section of Octagon Music’s website. That goes as well as expected.
I try the same trick with Fran Curtis, a director of the band’s PR firm, Rogers and Cowan.
To: fcurtis@rogersandcowan.com
Subject: Keith Richards’s 1973 Melbourne Mystery LadyDear Ms CurtiS
I’m guessing that with a 50th anniversary tour to organise, this won’t go straight to the top of your list …
Ms Curtis accepts my prevarication invitation and I’m still to hear from her.
My best chance is my close university friend, Tim McGregor, now group managing director at Paul Dainty Corporation. Paul Dainty promoted the 1973 tour — an anecdote in Rock Reader: Underneath the Riffs tells how Jagger, a notorious practical joker, got Rudge to purchase hundreds of pigeons for release in Dainty’s room, because Dainty disliked birds, not realising that Dainty himself had simultaneously arranged for sheep to be put in Rudge’s room, the end result being screaming, pigeons flapping everywhere, and sheep in the elevators and trotting up to the hotel bar. This was a time, let’s bear in mind, when the Stones were the world’s biggest act. They’d hit a creative sweet spot that produced Sticky Fingers (1971) and Exile on Main Street (1972) and were coming off a boisterous, colossal, headline-grabbing American tour. Forty years later that tour, sometimes known as the ‘Cocaine and Tequila Sunrise Tour’, stands as an Everest of rock & roll excess: the Playboy mansion, drug busts, Hells Angels, guns, groupies and a celebrity entourage that extended to Truman Capote and Andy Warhol.
I ask Tim about the wild barnyard scene and whether Dainty might comment on its veracity, with a view to slipping in some further questions about Keith’s suburban getaway. But Tim says Paul is overseas. And then, at Tim’s wedding no less, I discover he too is heading to London to pitch Dainty Corporation as promoters of the Stones’ ’50 and Counting’ tour. I know Tim has had face-to-face meetings with Mick and Keith before, so I call later to wish him a happy trip, and ask whether he’d pump Keith for Sheila’s real name.
Tim says he’ll ‘do what he can’. But we both know it’s a long shot. When is the right moment in your business meeting with the Stones to lean forward and say, ‘We can really do a good job on this tour for you boys, and … yeah, while we’re here chatting — Keith, I don’t suppose I could ask you about this chick you were shagging forty years ago?’
It isn’t going to happen. And it doesn’t.
I google ‘Keith Richards’ + ‘doesn’t even know I wiped his ass’ and discover a Ballarat-based writer named Nathan Curnow who’s as captivated by the paragraph as I am. His play “Keef: A Musical Romance” features Keith, Mick, a goldfish, Adolf Hitler, Queen Elizabeth and … ‘Sheila Roadnight’. I ask Nathan if he knows who the real Sheila is. He doesn’t, and nor does his team, which includes former Stones lighting director Chip Monck. Nathan emails: ‘I’ve been told we have Buckley’s chance of tracking her down. Still, a bit of mystery makes this story folklore, and Keith is the master of folklore …’
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*
I find her. When I say ‘I’, I perhaps mean ‘we’, because it wouldn’t have happened without Jen Jewel Brown. And when I say ‘we’, I perhaps mean ‘she’, because it would have happened without me. Four months after our first interview, Jen emails to ask how it’s going. I tell her it isn’t particularly — the Sheila trail is cold, and I’m battling to structure the article. Jen replies that she’ll ‘ask a friend of mine, who knows a million rock chicks, just in case’. Twelve hours later I check email:
She’s a rock chick. I know her. My friend is on the trail. She’s not well and is in Queensland. Will be in touch.
Nine days after that, Jen and I are sitting beside each other on a flight to Maroochydore. I’ve had the briefest conversation with Karen, for that is Sheila’s name, and she has not only agreed to be interviewed but invited us to stay. Again, the key has been Jen: it turns out she and Karen were good friends.
Jen tries to work on her Max Q article during the flight but I keep peppering her with questions.
‘No, “Balwyn Calling” isn’t about me. Everyone always asks that. It was written before Greg and I started seeing each other …’
‘I was there when Jimmy and Jane [Barnes] met. She was a chocolate milk girl at this speedway-type gig Chisel were doing …’
‘Don was originally going to call “Saturday Night”, “Show Me a Light”. I got to see some early drafts …’
I sing, ‘Show me a light, my company’, flat and off key, just to indicate I’m aware of the final draft. ‘Yes, that’s the one,’ Jen smiles.
She returns to her article. I resume reading Life.
The groupies were just extended family. A loosely framed network. And what I liked was there was no jealousy or possessiveness involved in any of it. In those days there was a kind of circuit … They’d just pass you on to their next friend down the road … And they were nurses, basically. You could look upon them more like the Red Cross. They’d wash your clothes, they’d bathe you and stuff. And you’re going, why are you doing all this for a guitar player? There’s a million of us out there.
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We drive with the windows down, a chance to savour the air that Melburnians know as ‘Queensland warm’. Troubled independent MP Peter Slipper’s campaign office appears on the left. Jen gets me to stop the hire car while she takes a photo. We pass liquor marts, fast-food joints, Mick’s Meat Barns and the like, before turning off the highway and heading towards Caloundra. Karen lives on the third floor of a ’70s-style crème-brick apartment complex, two streets back from the beach. It is not a luxury complex. Access is up a dark, claustrophobic staircase exuding the aroma that old carpet accumulates in warm climates, but as we climb the final flight there’s a fresh blast of incense, and a beam of daylight spilling out of an open door.
‘Hello,’ Jen calls, knocking and yoo-hooing into an empty kitchen/living space. When Karen appears, she offers a delighted ‘hey!’, and they step into a long embrace. ‘What’s it been, thirty-five years?’ Karen has short, dyed red hair, black-rimmed glasses and is as fine-boned as the butcherbirds hopping about the balcony outside her window. She hasn’t been well, losing a third of her right lung to cancer and breaking a hip during recovery from a separate hospitalisation involving an aortic aneurism. Her voice is husky, deep and richly Australian, a smoker’s voice, although Karen is now an ex-smoker, except for forays into the medicinal variety that’s always interested Keith Richards.
She was twenty-five in February 1973, making her sixty-five now. ‘I know I look older,’ she says. ‘It’s been a hard life.’ She is indeed frail, and Queensland sun has etched some lines across her face, but she has Hollywood lips and her eyes are wide, green, striking. On the mantelpiece, among native American curios, oil burners, a Thai Buddha and a dozen family snaps, stands a single framed photo of Karen in her early twenties.
I pick it up. ‘That’s how I would have looked,’ she says, ‘when I met Keith.’ I tell her she was beautiful — only word for it. The same full lips; thick, well-defined eyebrows. Amazing backlighting sets fire to individual strands of hair, with the rest falling long and dark past her shoulders. She’s wearing a striped sailor top. She looks like Natalie Portman in ’60s mascara. Barbara Feldon with a slightly wider nose.
‘Thank you,’ she says, fixing us drinks to go with our camembert and kabana. ‘There’s another one over there of me and Shannon.’
In this photo Karen is nose-to-nose, lip-to-lip with a preschooler who has matching dark lashes and a Beatles bob with earflaps. So that’s his name, Shannon. The nappy wearer. Owner of the tiny backside that sneaked into one of the world’s most read autobiographies. In the picture he’s adorable.
Jen and I sit at a glass coffee table, and after a brief pause to survey a passing cargo ship — ‘I love the ships, watching them is one of the best parts of living here’ — Karen closes the balcony door and takes a seat beside us. ‘Anyway — Keith — from what I can remember, I went to this party in North Balwyn …’
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The initial encounter was in the Japanese garden. Karen remembers escaping the house. ‘Some really straight stuff was going on in there.’ She headed outside for a joint. ‘This guy came up and said, “Are you smoking spliff?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Could I have some?”, and I said, “Certainly.” And then he said, “Would you like a line of coke?”, and I said, “Certainly.”
She didn’t realise who he was till she and him were standing at the front gate. ‘The limo was pulled up, and I thought, who is this guy, and then I had another look and worked it out. I mean, I was having a smoke in the middle of Balwyn. Who expects The Rolling Stones to roll up in the backyard?’
After sharing lines in the back seat, Keith asked Karen if she could access some more. ‘I said I could, but then he told me how much he wanted, and I went, “Well, I’m not sure I can get quite that much.” We were used to going and getting a little bit for the night. Not enough for the whole country.’
They returned to the party for about half an hour then left in the limo. Karen, unlike Jen, remembers it being earlier than 4 a.m., because she made it to Noah’s, the Stones’ hotel on Exhibition Street, then over to her supplier in Port Melbourne and back to the hotel all while it was still dark. ‘The first order I think was for $700. That was the cash they had on them. When I got back to the hotel there was security everywhere. I had a code — something like “Charlie” or “Bill” or “Bob” — to get past.’
Karen made her delivery and was invited to stay on at Noah’s, where the Stones had taken over an entire floor. Shannon was being babysat, so Karen accepted the invitation to party. She remembers Keith decorating the room. ‘He was saying “the room’s too bright”, and he put scarves over the lights, really nice-looking scarves. He made it look more like a pirates’ cove.’
She goes on: ‘Most of the coke went to Keith. The pretty one, Mick Taylor, he might have had some. I know that soon after I came back they all started playing cricket with the crockery. Up and down the hall. They were using the cups as balls.’
I ask if the cricket-loving Jagger was involved. Karen shakes her head. ‘I hardly saw Mick. He was in his room the whole time, locked in. It was actually quite weird, I thought. They had this joke going where they’d call him a girl’s name, “Mabel” or “Martha” or something. “Mabel’s in her room, she’s carrying on again.”’
The rest of the band impressed Karen with its inclusiveness. ‘You want a sandwich?’ they’d say. ‘We’re ordering room service.’ ‘Want a drink?’ ‘Pass the joint.’ At one point Karen needed two elastic bands for her hair. ‘And they sent down to room service,’ she remembers. ‘The room service guy said, “We haven’t got elastic bands”, and Keith said, “Well, get ’em.”’ Karen laughs at the memory. ‘And he did!’
*
For many Melburnians, the Stones’ back-to-back Kooyong shows that day, starting at midday, are seminal music events in the city’s history. It was bakingly hot, so hot that nobody who was there fails to mention the heat.
‘Breasts,’ says long-time Triple R presenter Max Crawdaddy when I ask him his Kooyong memories. ‘So many bare breasts that my hormone-charged fourteen-year-old brain went into overload.’
Jagger arrived on stage in a satin jacket and carrying a parasol, and with a setlist containing “Brown Sugar”, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, “Midnight Rambler”, “Street Fighting Man” and “Honky Tonk Women”, it was an endless parade of great songs played to an audience near-delirious with heat and expectation. ‘I remember laughing out loud — just at the sheer amazingness of being in the same arena as The Rolling Stones,’ says Rockwiz’s Brian Nankervis. It was the weekend of his seventeenth birthday. In the gap between shows, Nankervis and his mates scaled the nearby Scotch College wall. ‘It was like we felt all-powerful. Completely sober: no alcohol, no drugs, just absolutely high on the excitement of seeing The Rolling Stones. So we jumped the fence, swam in the pool, got out of the pool, and went and saw them again.’
The band itself was high on more than life. Jagger vomited. (Perhaps as a result of heat, or illness.) Bobby Keys, in his memoir, has this to say about ‘Oolong’:
We played one memorable — or not so memorable — show at the Oolong Tennis Centre in Melbourne. This was at the height of me and Keith’s bottle of Jack a day, bottle of tequila a day, and just about whatever else we could get our little hands on to amp up the situation … Well, in Melbourne … somebody had given us some psychedelics. LSD. So hey, down the ol’ gullet they go, man. This was like an hour and a half, two hours before the show.
There were three shows in two days, all of them attended by Karen, who thinks the partying took its toll. ‘They were out of time, out of tune. They were terrible. I mean, the vibe was fantastic; the vibe was unbelievable. But if you want to go in and nitpick their performances, they weren’t very good at all.’
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In Life, Keith says he spent a week in the suburbs with ‘Sheila’. The tour dates suggest a week was impossible. The Stones arrived in Melbourne on Friday the 16th and had an Adelaide show on the 20th. Assuming Keith flew on the evening of the 19th, the ‘week’ was more like a long weekend.
Karen laughs as I try to calculate exact times and dates. ‘Well, my time’s warped, so why wouldn’t his be? He was twice as fucked-up as I was.’
Karen purchased an extraordinary amount of cocaine for him. She made ‘four or five trips to Port Melbourne’ and paid ‘about five thousand dollars’. ‘He was interested in not having heroin at the time,’ Karen says. ‘The idea was to take everything and anything else that would take his mind off heroin.’
I ask Karen whether she minded buying such quantities, given the personal risks involved. She grins. ‘I didn’t mind, because I was making quite a bit on it.’
Jen bursts out laughing. Karen is mock indignant. ‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you? Obviously I’ve got to make something out of it, and given it’s The Rolling Stones …’ She adopts an Italian mama’s voice: ‘I make something good for myself.’
At some point, Karen went home to two-year-old Shannon and the babysitter. Yet the cocaine orders kept coming. ‘They sent the limo, and I went and got more, and then Keith said, “This is stupid, you and the kid having to come back to the hotel all the time. I’ll come stay at your place.”’
Which is how Keith Richards ended up on Inkerman Street, South Caulfield.
There was no sex involved. I presumed from reading Life that there was, as did Nathan Curnow; “Keef” the musical opens with sexy Sheila lying naked on a kitchen table. I tell Karen this and she laughs herself into a coughing fit. ‘Had I been the most beautiful woman in the world, I don’t think Keith Richards could have risen to the occasion. I don’t even think it was on his mind. Had circumstances been different, there might have been sex, but everybody was too mindless.’
There was though, says Karen, an immediate connection. ‘Within half an hour of knowing him you were over the fact he was Keith Richards from The Rolling Stones, and he was just someone who was good fun to be with for a while. He was a very nice person, a very kind person. Very gentle.’
I pull out Life, and read out Keith’s memories of ‘Sheila’.
K.R: ‘Sweet, shy, unassuming …’
Karen (snorting): ‘That sounds like me, especially the unassuming bit.’
K.R: ‘She was on the scuppers.’
Karen: ‘My old man and I had broken up, and I had the kid, and he wouldn’t give me any money. He used to come around all the time at night, pissed out of his mind … He was never violent, just argumentative, and abusive.’
K.R: ‘She could get me pure cocaine. Pharmaceutical.’
Karen: ‘True. It was better than they’d had for a long time. They were blown out by how good it was. (Laughing) So good I could cut it down just a wee little bit. (Laughing harder) Like Keith says, “sweet and unassuming”.’
K.R: ‘Living in the suburbs for a week …’
Karen: ‘No, it wasn’t that long.’
K.R: ‘Sheila, where’s me fucking breakfast?’
Karen: ‘Bacon and eggs and a cup of tea. A cup of tea is a necessity with him.’
K.R: ‘Just a little semidetached.’
Karen: ‘It was a small house, two bedrooms, bathroom, lounge room, kitchen. I felt really embarrassed, thinking he’d be used to all these mansions, but he loved it. Thought it was cosy, cute. Told me it was the sort of place he could live.’
K.R: ‘I’d take care of the baby, she went to work.’
Karen (appalled): ‘I didn’t leave Keith in charge of my kid! I’m not stupid. I had a babysitter when I wasn’t there. Christine.’
K.R: ‘Changed the baby’s diapers.’
Karen: ‘He changed him once. It was just a wet one. Not poopy.’
K.R: ‘There’s somebody in a suburb in Melbourne who doesn’t even know I wiped his ass.’
Karen: ‘Shannon has only just found out, since Jen and you called.’
Curiously, the Keith Richards ass wipe is not Shannon’s only brush with rock & roll immortality. In March 1975, Skyhooks frontman Shirley Strachan put Shannon, aged about four, on his shoulders for “All My Friends Are Getting Married” in front of 300,000 people on the banks of Melbourne’s Yarra River as part of the Moomba Festival. Later that year, after the final Australian gig of the ‘Wings Over the World’ tour, band and crew, including Paul and Linda McCartney, came to a party at Karen and Shannon’s house in Moorabbin. ‘The police rolled up because of the noise. Then they found out it was Wings so they blocked the road off at each end.’ Karen grins. ‘The road crew stayed for a fortnight.’ Shannon also met B.B. King. And when Shannon was ten, he toured the US for ten months with Little River Band.
Shannon’s father Barry Sullivan, better known as ‘BG’, or Big Goose, was LRB’s bass player at the time. With Barry Harvey, or Little Goose, he’d been a member of the band Chain in its classic Toward the Blues incarnation of 1970–71. In Sullivan’s obituary, rock writer Ed Nimmervol described the Sullivan–Harvey pairing as ‘the greatest rhythm section Australian rock has known’. He was also Karen’s ‘old man’, referred to in the Keith passage. The one who left her ‘on the scuppers’.
After that relationship broke down, Karen lived with a prominent lighting/special effects director, Michael Oberg, who is now the tour and production manager for The Killers. She managed some significant bands in her own right, among them The Ferrets (“Don’t Fall in Love”) and Buster Brown (featuring a pre-Rose Tattoo Angry Anderson and a pre-AC/DC Phil Rudd). Towards the end of the ’70s she ventured overseas, primarily to Amsterdam and London. She moved to the Gold Coast, starting an entertainment agency and running a nightclub called The Grapevine. She raised three kids and dropped out of the music scene. ‘There is no music scene in Queensland,’ says Karen, as we tread an ocean-hugging boardwalk under a night sky of streaks and stars. She waves a delicate wrist in the direction of the surf. ‘What you get in Queensland is this.’
*
Back in February 1973, Sullivan and Karen had been split for a matter of months. When Big Goose heard she was spending time with Keith Richards, he hit the roof. ‘He assumed it was a sexual thing. I mean, everyone assumed it was a sexual thing. You know, Melbourne chicky babe meets Rolling Stones guitarist; you just would assume that.’ Big Goose was a heavy drinker and, as we’ve heard, a regular and unwanted late-night visitor to Inkerman Street. ‘The whole time Keith was at my house,’ says Karen, ‘I was scared Barry was going to turn up.’
Karen and Keith not only didn’t sleep together; they didn’t sleep. ‘This is coke we’re talking about. We stayed up the whole time. I’d like to tell you I can remember everything that was said, but that would be a downright lie. Because, you know …’ She shrugs helplessly. ‘Drug fucked.’
She does remember Keith cautioning her once. ‘He said to me, “Never get yourself a heroin problem, and never get yourself a cocaine problem.” He told me I was far too nice a person to fuck myself up with drugs. Which was possibly a bit late at that stage.’ She emits another throaty laugh. ‘He gave me this big lecture while snorting coke and giving me some.’
They spent most of their time in the lounge room. ‘That’s where the stereo was.’ The carpet was old, there was a round stained-glass window, and the gas wall-heater lay dormant. Keith had brought his guitar, and strummed it constantly. Karen played him Australian music, including Chain and Renee Geyer. There was a lot of talk about souls and reincarnation. Scarves and sarongs hung over the lights. Incense was burning; cushions and macramé were scattered about. Keith spent a good proportion of his time on his knees, playing with Shannon. ‘I think he reminded him of his own kid, Marlon. They played cars, Lego, normal stuff. That’s what he was. Really normal … No different, sitting here talking, to you, except you’re not as out of it. And I’m not as out of it.’
On that tour, Keith wore a pair of jeans fondly remembered by Max Crawdaddy for their Ford logo-shaped ‘Fuck’ badge and by Jen Jewel Brown as an outstanding example of gypsy chic.
‘Incredibly cool pants!’ Jen effuses.
‘Frayed and threadbare,’ Karen counters. ‘He had these brooches of geckos and things that weren’t quite holding them together. In the hotel before one of the shows he said, “Can you pin these up for me?” I said, “Pin ’em? I think we’re beyond pinning here.” I could hardly sew, but I got a needle and thread and at least made them wearable.’
Keith, Shannon and Karen shared a limo from the hotel to Kooyong for the Sunday show. There, waiting, was Sullivan. ‘All I could hear,’ says Karen, ‘over these chicks screaming and everyone yahooing was BG yelling out, “Starfucker! Starfucker!” He was standing right where we got out of the limo. Keith said, “Do you want him thrown out?”, and I said, “No, he enjoys himself when he’s doing this sort of shit.” He yelled at me right through the show. It’s actually my only unpleasant memory of the whole experience.’
When the show was over, Keith ‘invited me to go on the rest of the tour. I couldn’t even contemplate that. My ex would have had me in court. Keith understood. He told me he respected that I put my kid first.’ Keith’s parting gift to Shannon was a metal-cast Aston Martin — ‘the sort where the doors and bonnet open’ — that he had in his suitcase. He gave Karen a Sticky Fingers pendant, a scarf, and a thousand dollars. ‘I lost the pendant,’ Karen groans. ‘It was on a gold chain around my neck. I lost that the day I went to visit a fortune-teller.’ As for the scarf, it went missing thirty years ago during transitions between Amsterdam, London and the Gold Coast. But she still has her memories, some of them, of that weekend, and of Keith’s last words to her.
‘I’d just like to tell you, lady, you’ve got soul. You’ve really, really got soul.
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Rock Country is not in bookstores and is difficult to source online. I purchased some copies when it went out of print. If you email, I’ll sell for $30 pluys postage (within Australia). It’s a beautiful coffee table book with some of the best rock photos I’ve seen. The book was releaserd as a paperback, ‘The Best Australian Music Writing Under the Australian Sun’, without the glorious photos.
I have completed five other ‘strange encounters with rock stars’ essays which I’ve pitched to several publishers as a starting point for a book. One is ‘I was babysat by Adam Ant’. Another is ‘Lawn Bowls with Robert Plant’. If you’re a publisher, and interested in offbeat music stories, love to hear from you.
My next book is a football history non fiction, 1989: The Great Grand Final through Hardie Grant. Released 1st of March. Preorders here.
