a band

 5march2012
when i look back through the sixties there was a few bands around, young friends had elder brothers in bands, some backyard jams,  i remember one or two. it wasn't hitsville but it was there, at that time we were involed in vietnam. my teenage years were not the best, there's a song from a womans point of view, my mother worked in the rag trade and did sew my jeans , my father was a gambler and a drunk. they were hard years for this little fella. by 1975, i was pretty much the same streetboy that rodriguez sang about. sometime around this, a friend asked if i wanted to be in his band, they needed a singer so the main singer/ guitarist could concentrate on guitar and backing vocals, i thought about . i was pretty much in a mess at that time, i declined , no self confidence  probably 16 or 17 at that time , i was old

6march12
i forgot to mention the main influence for that band was ted nugent, i was never really into him, i did get the album with stranglehold on it , that's as far as it got. i was more into pink floyd, alice cooper, hawkwind space ritual ,black sabbath paranoid & vol4, frank zappa a bit later on. i swapped schools out for sticky fingers around 74. getting back to this band blog, guys around me were also trying to play the guitar, i dont think they were much, cause i dont remember any of the stuff, probably just strumming , all too much for me. around 76 i began to hang around my suburb , rather than the streetlife of town.

7march12
it was during this time i actually hung around some young foes from school and other. what is termed fun parlors, pinny shops or pool halls were the hang of choice. i had my first taste of rock 'n roll in such a place, we had one in the early 60s , i mean early 61. i apparently got an electric shock from a jukebox , so they reckon. i was no stranger from these kind of places, a gap from say 63 to 68 or something. from 69 on i played heaps of pool and pinnies. i remember these young guys buying an acoustic and couldn't tune it , they asked the shop keeper to tune it, they wanted to play pink floyds wish you were here. i had that in 75 , i remember the big thing was double j radio playing the whole album first week out. it took me years to like that album , i used to play a few tracks and lift the needle. them guys spent hours just strumming rubbish , at best there was a vague version of dueling banjos , no pink floyd though. me, i didn't bother with such nosense, although some young guy left an electric and ones place , i borrowed it for couple of weeks that was ok. then the guy wanted it back, all he played was my sharona. i thought them guys were getting in to it too late, no songs just racket, i did have a song i played with the top two strings ,e and a. a little rhythmic ditty called fuck me suck me , which i played for them for about 10 minutes till his mother told me to stop that noise. funny thing is i seen one of them years later he said he used that rhythm in a ditty he wrote, i said  it probably wasn't as good as my fuck me suck me. they did get on the acoustic front , numbers by neil young , bob dylan knocking on heavens door was their big play, jimi hendrix hey joe and all along the watch tower . you know that stuff.

8march12
you know these things happened between 75 and late 79 , a lot of things happened in that space of time, so the accuracy on whether something happened before another maybe out a bit. like the time at which they got their guitars and actually played anything proper may have been quite sometime. me, personally didn't hang with them also often , me being somewhat of a loner and also different stuff like trail bikes and such, like the pub. at my 21th them guys turned up at my grandmothers place, still old fashion wood shove and that, i lived there for a few years till i was about 14. one of them guys was actually playing quite good type classical guitar, doing mr bogangles , american pie etc. i thought he was wasting his time just playing that stuff , but he seemed happy with it.

11march2012
so here i am back in 1980, i split up with my girlfriend , was at home feeling bored. my little sister had these hobby tex things like tubes of toothpaste and my mother being in the rag trade was always bring home t-shirts and things like underpants , so i was okay in that department. i decided to hobby tex a t-shirt , but what? i was listening to the bollocks album , i put the cover in a yellow t-shirt and traced sex pistols and coloured it in with the hobby tex. it came out quite good, i thought to wear it around here, i dont know, bit dodgy . i went to the pub in town , i had it under something else, after a few beers i took the jumper off , or whatever it was. the whole atmosphere at me changed , like i dont know, strange in a good way. got talking to a few different people , one guy had like sandshoes with two tone squares textaed on them. he said, he was in a band and they played a sex pistols song submission, he asked me if i knew who sang it, cause it was different. i wasn't sure, i thought rotten, that's about as much as i knew, not much. he said they were playing here in a few weeks and i should check them out.

14march12
now it begins to be complicated, yeah i did see them, they were my age, the mixer was an old foe from primary school , he went to public(different from english, low generic), i went to catholic . he and a few mates spotted me going through the park to my grandmothers for lunch, we had a bit of a blue. i went to the same high school though, i wasn't that tough there, with all the home problems, bit low on the confidence. anyways the mixing wasn't so good . that band was mostly my age excepting for the drummer , who was even too young to get into the pub, a good drummer though, they were different from most local pub bands. the local bands just played covers, the one that was flogged to death was j.j. cales' cocaine, i mean i had that troubadour album, but i really got sick of that song. on  occasions a sydney band would play, they weren't bad, there's was a local , i think they were local, they played the traps, called johnny demon dance band or something. they had a song called, you make me spew. they weren't bad, more of a novelty really. i think the guitarist went to england and join a  band called nine below zero. i'm not quite sure of that but i think yes. that was what i heard , i had a few beers with that bloke anyways. i did a google to find out all i found was this johnny demon and the devils  ,they changed their name .

15march2012
i'm going a bit off track here, i told you it was complicated, see how i go. this has got to do with johnny demon and the devils. there was another band called johnny devlin and the devils around the late 50's . i 've got him doing blue suede shoes with a young backing group called the bee gees, yeah them. i'll have find it on festival . anyway , the cheap alternative to 45s for awhile was rock n roll on cardboard , here's johnny on cardboard ,   cardboard rock , use devils2 for password. i'll have to get a photo of them 2 items for here, i think i gave the cardboard record to an old codger, when he was 16 he was a fan. i'll see

17march2012
as you'll find with me everything has relevance to and from the past, the future may also be there it depends  on how and who reads it. i looked for the blue suede shoes 45, no luck, hey St. Patrick it's your day where's me luck, maybe i need a beer. i did find another cardboard record , sea of love b/w the shape i'm in , i think that's the johnny restivo number , by peter ash and the rockets with the satellites. i thought i better explain the cardboard records . there a bit like the later flex discs (very thin plastics) that came mainly with magazines of that era. the cardboard were put out by penguin and sold for 3/6 , at newsagent , record bars and department stores, 33 1/3 rpm and will play 500 times without damaging the needle. remember the paddle pop story the competition ends in may, john delvin lives out corrimal where paddle pops were invented. i'll get back to the band later.

18march 2012
so much the the band blog , probably have to start another blog. as with anything that involves money, so  the locals want a piece of the action, whatevers a hit elsewhere . so begins the cover band wagon, from bandstand to wheel of fortune. devlin was a new zealander , one of the first of a long list to hit our shore. i think things got bad in the early 70's with djs only playing local versions of os hits, you know the story cause its still going on, one way or another. one of the biggest in the 50s was crash craddock who was suppose to be a big hit in the states, they never heard of him, i think the real craddock was gene vincent, who had success here anyways, but not as much as crash. i'll leave this blog with a pub band from probably sydney , who played the wollongong pub heaps of times in 1980 and before , this ep was on the jukebox by request and played to death,

the layabouts - loose & lively ep, piranha records

ps
i did a google of the layabouts, not much, just a few later ones even a detroit band, and the bushwackers credited with marijuana australiana, which is on the above ep.

11nov2016

i don't know what i wrote about there, couldn't give a stuff. as i think about it , the truth is, i'm not like them people