Book extract:
Blood, sweat and beers
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ipad-application/book-extract-blood-sweat-and-beers/story-fn6bn9st-1225973286626
AUTHOR Murray Engleheart recounts the Aztecs' lead-up playing at the
first Sunbury Festival in 1972.
December 19, 2010
BY LATE 1971 it was almost possible to see the Aztecs' numbing volume
under the stage lights, as if it were an actual entity. Little wonder
that when the outfit played at Coburg Town Hall, the inmates at
Pentridge Prison some distance away could hear every note, while the
sound levels for their appearances on the ABC's GTK program regularly
reduced studio technicians to tears, as the decibels not only rattled
the delicate internal mechanisms in their cameras but produced
visible lines across the screen.
The arrival of keyboard player Bruce Howard had cemented the Aztecs'
classic line-up with a tide of white noise which in some quiet yet
bristling ceremony, seemed to confirm the unit as a fiercely
working-class, almost boys-only band for legions of hard nut males
forged in suburbs like Coburg, Moorabbin, Dandenong and Sunshine.
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Much of the band's core following was bred out of the mayhem of gigs
at the Village Green and their increasingly legendary regular
Thursday-night spots at the Whitehorse Hotel at Nunawading.
Billy Thorpe: "The Whitehorse was really the sharpie bastion.
"There were fights every night at every gig for at least a year. I
mean if I did 20 gigs in a week I'd have a fight at 18 of them.
People used to jump on stage and fight. And really it was the bands
that could handle themselves that gained the respect of these kids;
they were hard kids; these were really lower working-class kids with
the a--- hanging out of their pants who were begging, borrowing and
stealing to come and support bands like us. We earned their respect
and they earned ours."
A dramatic taste of just how big the scene in Melbourne had become,
and the strength of the Aztecs' position within it, came via a free
festival at Christmas 1971 called Rosebud, with Daddy Cool, the La De
Das and others. It took place at Mornington Golf Club. Such was the
traffic congestion on the day that people were forced to park as far
as eight kilometres away and walk to the site.
Billy Thorpe: "They expected 5000 people and 40,000 people turned up.
It blocked the back freeway. You see, it was all growing, it was all
starting to happen. I remember to get us into the site the Hell's
Angels came out and put us on the back of their bikes and we actually
tore up the golf course and arrived at the side of the stage. That
was a moment."
But it was the general atmosphere not the size of the crowd that was
a major concern for some.
Ross Wilson (Daddy Cool): "The site was surrounded by large cedars or
pines and drunk people were climbing them and falling out and hurting
themselves! It was a very heavy vibe, and I remember these guys on
motorbikes riding down the dirt track that was the only way in or out
and just sticking their feet out and kicking people as they went
past. It was horrible."
With Melbourne so obviously exploding with excitement, bigger plans
were made to place the city's rock culture on show. Accordingly, the
inaugural Sunbury Festival was held over three days on the Australia
Day long weekend in January 1972, on a property on the outskirts of the city.
The bill was largely a who's who of the Melbourne music scene, with
the Aztecs the pinnacle of the rock heap.
The festival drew 45,000 people and Channel 7 devoted much of an
entire Saturday afternoon to the event, as if it were a major
sporting fixture. But while it was loosely billed as Australia's
Woodstock, it was the smell of beer rather than flowers that was in
most people's hair.
Sunbury indeed turned out to be a street-level party populated by the
same tough, working-class and fiercely loyal crowds that made up
Melbourne's thriving pub scene.
Billy Thorpe: "Every kid that went to the Whitehorse was at Sunbury.
Not just a few, every one of them. And the same with the people who
went to Box Hill Town Hall. So what Sunbury was, was all the kids who
went to all the gigs."
Thorpie and co played twice at the festival - at night and during the
day - and both performances delivered almost the same ear pressure as
they did in the confines of a pub.
Michael Chugg: "It was pretty scary the night Billy played. Just the
energy was incredible. Billy goes on and I'm standing in front of the
stage and in those days the fence (which separated the crowd from the
area in front of the stage) was like mesh wire. The crowd are going
nuclear. I grabbed my wife, jumped in the car and we went home, three
songs in. It was like being (at) a Hitler rally! It was amazing. The
noise. It was incredible. I'll never forget that."
While a young Jimmy Barnes jostled for a prime position hard against
the wire fence that separated the general crowd from the stage, Ross
Knight, later of Melbourne thug rockers the Cosmic Psychos, had a
grassed dress-circle seat, the blessing of a father who was working
on a property that overlooked the festival site.
"When Thorpie played I guess that was probably the first live concert
I'd ever seen on the telly and I remember running out of the house
and down to the hill and actually listening to it live, even though I
couldn't really see it."
Billy Thorpe: "(Sunbury) was just one of those things where
everything comes together."
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