Lust for life
Time is catching up with a generation of music legends, and we should celebrate their existence while we still can.
AS we join the queue outside the Croxton Hotel to have our tickets scanned and our wrists stamped with ink, we pass a giant black and white poster advertising an upcoming gig for Died Pretty at the same venue, with a young Ron Peno’s dark eyes staring intensely from the centre of the band photo.
Except the gig won’t be going ahead, cancelled just days earlier with the sad news that Peno, now aged close to 60, is receiving treatment for oesophageal cancer.
There’s a bitter irony that tonight we are going to see The Beasts, the band formed from the ashes of the Beasts of Bourbon, who have themselves been shadowed by death and cancer over the past 12 months.
This new incarnation of Australia’s most dangerous band still has Tex Perkins out front, but gone are guitarist Spencer P. Jones, who died from liver cancer in August last year aged 62, and bassist Brian Hooper, who succumbed to lung cancer in April, at the age of 55.
Inside the Croxton, we join a mostly male, middle-aged crowd like ourselves, half of the faces recognisable from dozens of similar gigs in beer soaked Melbourne pubs over the years. And in the pantheon of Melbourne pub bands, none stood taller than the Beasts of Bourbon in their prime: the maddest, baddest, wildest, most deranged rock band of their day. A band renowned as much for its excesses as its music, for whom no rider was ever enough, who the drug dealers welcomed whichever town it was they had arrived in that night, and on who pub owners could comfortably rely to draw a hard drinking crowd eager to spend every last cent on booze.
From their formation as a covers band in 1983, they put out half a dozen studio albums over a quarter of a century but it was live you really had to experience the Beasts.
In Tex Perkins, they had one of the great frontmen, six feet something of muscular, snarling aggression. And behind him were a rolling cast of brilliant songwriters and musicians, none more so than Jones and Hooper.
My ears are still ringing from two memorable gigs by the Beasts: one at the Big Day Out in the mid-2000s, and the other at The Corner Hotel about the same period.
But time has well and truly caught up with the band, losing two core members last year. Tex Perkins is still there, so is Charlie Owen and Tony Pola behind the drums. Boris Sujdovic is back on bass, for his third or fourth stint in the band, and filling Spencer’s place back on guitar is another original member, Kim Salmon (not a bad substitute at all).
They are touring a new album, which they began with a spontaneous recording session just a couple of days after Hooper’s funeral last year (his last gig with the band was in a wheelchair at a benefit in his own name at the Prince of Wales just a few days before his death).
But there was nothing funereal or elegiac about Saturday night’s show. Instead, what we saw was a group of middle-aged men who have done some heavy living and bear the scars and bruises to prove it, but who are defiantly, joyously still alive and determined to continue making a noisy, ramshackle racket.
THEY’RE dropping like flies.
It’s been a grim 12 months, as a large part of Melbourne’s musical royalty have kicked the bucket. Brian Hooper, Spencer P. Jones, Conway Savage, Chris Wilson, and now the news that Ron Peno is fighting cancer.
All of them left an indelible mark. In the cross-pollination that was Melbourne’s pub rock scene, they were key parts of the spider’s web of inter-connected bands. Spencer, possibly the most under-rated songwriter and guitarist in Australia, beginning his career with The Johnnys and through numerous incarnations of his own bands, whose fingerprints can be found on countless significant recordings over the past three decades; Wilson, the sublime harmonica player with the booming voice who performed solo, with his band Crown of Thorns, in Harem Scarem, and as a session and band musician for many others, most notably Paul Kelly.
Conway Savage was the long-time keyboardist in the Bad Seeds, performed and recorded solo and with others, and was the uncle of Cash Savage; Brian Hooper played bass in the Body Electric, with fellow Beast Kim Salmon in the Surrealists, and recorded a couple of well-received solo albums, made all the more remarkable after he broke his back in 2005.
And now the incomparable Ron S. Peno, the darkly gothic and mesmerising frontman of the legendary Died Pretty and collaborator with untold numbers of other artists, including, once again, Kim Salmon.
In the great gig in the sky they have all joined other key members of Melbourne’s music mafia like Rowland S. Howard, Ian Rilen, Tony Cohen and Maurice Frawley, fellow bandmates and collaborators who have died over the past decade.
There’s no mystery why they are all dying now, aged in the late-50s or early-60s: after a lifetime of abuse, they’re bodies are packing it in. Smoke a pack of cigarettes a day and you shouldn’t be surprised if you get lung cancer; drink a bottle of bourbon or Scotch a day, and your liver is going to pay the price.
Those who are left from that 1980s post-punk scene, the ones who didn’t speed into oblivion or ride the horse to an early grave in their 20s are like soldiers who have survived a horrible war, the ones who came back to tell the tales after watching their mates die on the battlefield, but living forever with what they witnessed as young men.
They survived into middle age, and then the lifestyle caught up with them. Still relatively youngish men dying of old men’s diseases: cirrhosis of the liver, lung cancer, throat cancer hepatitis. Time catches up.
Watching the Beasts performing on Saturday night, you couldn’t help but wonder who will be next?
“In music, there’s two types of people — wannabes and lifers.” — Spencer P. Jones
LIVE fast, die young, leave a pretty corpse. That’s long been the unofficial motto for every musician since Robert Johnson first made that deal with the devil at the crossroads in the 1920s.
Great, exciting rock music is all about attitude: anger, aggression, passion. It can’t be faked. But that attitude often comes at cost. It’s no coincidence that many of the great artists have flirted with death and embraced a self-destructive lifestyle, one foot in the door, the other one in the gutter, as the song goes.
It’s the mad, bad and dangerous ones we exalt the most: Keith Richards, Johnny Thunders, Lou Reed, Shane McGowan, Paul Westerberg, Mark E. Smith, Iggy Pop, Peter Doherty, Tim Rogers, Gareth Liddiard, the list goes on.
Some – Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain – pushed too hard to the edges and couldn’t pull back.
We’re drawn those who are most self-destructive because – let’s not kid ourselves – we live vicariously through them .With live music played late at night in seedy pubs awash with sex and alcohol and other illicit substances, the scene is both alluring and addictive.
But while most of us in the audience go home at the end the night to nurse a hangover until we resume our mundane lives again at nine on Monday morning, for real rock and roll animals, there is no ordinary life to provide refuge. You buy the ticket, you take the ride.
There’s also a great narcissistic selfishness in choosing this path, leaving behind a trail of damaged relationships, friends who have been burnt, children neglected, and partners who have been cast as some kind of hybrid nurse/muse/wife/whore/mother. They’re the ones who faithfully attend every gig but can’t party on because they have to get up next morning for a job that keeps a roof over both their heads, who hold it together at home while he’s in the studio for 15 hours straight jacked up on speed or touring interstate, or passed out somewhere at the end of a three day bender. Then she’ll nurse him back into shape so he can do it all over again.
And it’s her who will care for him on his deathbed, making the funeral arrangements and keeping the world informed of his progress through his Facebook page. But maybe she also bought a ticket for the same ride.
“In music,” said Spencer P. Jones once, “there’s two types of people — wannabes and lifers.”
Problem is, eventually the lifestyle will catch up with you, and if it’s not the needle then it’s the damage done.
THE Beasts close their set at the Croxton with ‘Execution Day’, from Spencer P. Jones’ first solo album, Rumour of Death. It has all the hallmarks of a Jones classic, an earworm of a riff, droll, black-humoured wordplay, and furious guitar soloing.
You can find it on YouTube, and what strikes you is of the five musicians in that video, only one, Tony Pola, is still alive. The others, Jones, Hooper, Roland S. Howard and Conway Savage, are all dead.*
Coming in my 50th year, there is no doubt that seeing so many musical heroes kick the bucket is an unpleasant reminder of my own mortality.
But it’s also a sign that their era has passed. The misogynistic machismo the Beasts embodied in their heyday is now as out of kilter with today’s #metoo zeitgeist as their four-on-the-floor guitar, bass and drums attack is with a musical palette which encompasses electronica, sampling and a range of other influences.
OF course, their music will live on in one way or another in the grooves of vinyl and on CD and videos on YouTube. In that sense, they are immortalised forever. But the essence of rock music is live performance and that was the natural habitat of Spencer P. Jones, Brian Hooper and the like.
Performing live was an addiction, just like the drugs and alcohol and cigarettes they shot up, snorted, swallowed and smoked. They never held anything back on stage, and one suspects they wouldn’t have died with too many regrets.
But that’s where they will most be missed, knowing that on any given night in Melbourne, you could go to the Tote, or the Prince, or the Corner or the Cherry Bar, find one or more of them performing.
And even though they’re dropping like flies, some just seem to survive.
On April 21, his 72nd birthday, I will see Iggy Pop perform at Festival Hall in what will certainly be his final headlining gig in Australia.
If anyone is a survivor, it’s Iggy, whose body and brain has been heavily abused over the years — and about who the song ‘Real Wild Child’ seemed to have been written — but somehow through willpower, the constitution of an ox, or a lust for life, he’s still around and still making vital music. He’s the last of that incredible triumvirate of himself, Lou Reed and David Bowie, having outlived the other two, against all odds.
No doubt, we’ll raise a glass and wish Iggy a happy birthday that night, Easter Sunday, and although I’m sure he will be too sick to be among us, I’ll also raise a glass and whisper a prayer to Ron Peno.
Goodbye my friends, you disappoint me
You’ve all grown old and become junkies
Although I love you all, you just bore me
So goodbye my friends, please forgive me
- ‘Goodbye Friends’ (written by Tex Perkins, recorded on The Low Road)
*It has since been pointed out to me that the drummer in the ‘Execution Day’ video is Peter Jones, who is also now dead.
