Plumbum, p.1
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DAVID FOSTER
PLUMBUM
THE ULTIMATE HEAVY METAL EXPERIENCE
About Untapped
Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Supported by funding from state and territory libraries, philanthropists and the Australian Research Council, Untapped is identifying Australia’s culturally important lost books, digitising them, and promoting them to new generations of readers. As well as providing access to lost books and a new source of revenue for their writers, the Untapped collaboration is supporting new research into the economic value of authors’ reversion rights and book promotion by libraries, and the relationship between library lending and digital book sales. The results will feed into public policy discussions about how we can better support Australian authors, readers and culture.
See untapped.org.au for more information, including a full list of project partners and rediscovered books.
Readers are reminded that these books are products of their time. Some may contain language or reflect views that might now be found offensive or inappropriate.
Contents
Thousan’ Miles from Nowhere
Don’t Nobody Know My Name
Blackman Brothers Band
Tombstone for a Pillow, Fairgroun’ for a Bed
Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking
Thousan’ Miles from Nowhere
1
The little-known Blackman Brothers Band are in the studio to record their first album, Thousan’ Miles from Nowhere. Pete Blackman, bass guitarist, dark and slightly built, can scarcely believe he is standing in the Bungendore studios of Arafat Records, a shoestring outfit designed to record rural radio commercials. His brother Jason, tall, blond and strikingly handsome, stands by wearing an outsized trench coat made from an old Guards uniform. Felix Farquahar, a swarthy New Zealander, sets up a drum kit. Roland Rocca, the keyboards player, fat man of many voices, displays his command of the Mel Blanks repertoire as shapely, Titian-haired Sharon Scott, lead vocalist, conceals her nervousness by chain smoking, goosing, from time to time, the sound engineer as he bends over the antique console. It was Jason’s idea to use this studio, but Pete insisted on outside technicians.
Fellas, I’m going to have to spend some time just sorting this bloody thing out. Pete, can I have some bass guitar, please? You see what they been doing here?
Pete retires to one of the tiny guitar booths at the back of the studio. He clamps on the headphones, shuts his eyes, tunes his guitar and starts playing …
Despite being no more blind than you or I, Blind Willie Dickinson is the most authentic blues singer ever to come to Canberra, and Jason Blackman is keen his father should see a real blues singer. Arthur Blackman is thirty-five years old and his son seven. Even so, they disagree about most things, music in particular. Arthur wants Jason to be a concert pianist; though he’s only been learning piano six months, Jason is something of a prodigy, already stumbling through one of the easier of Bach’s two-part inventions, but Jason, for his part, is keen on blues, and when he learns, from a fellow student, that Blind Willie Dickinson is coming to town, he nags his father unmercifully.
Arthur is not enthusiastic. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of family man, the handyman and the drunkard. You can drive down any street and tell without difficulty who lives where. The handyman’s house, if it doesn’t feature the handyman himself hanging under the eaves, is freshly painted, newly guttered, recently retiled, and has a brightly coloured canvas awning shading the front main bedroom. By the back door, under a lemon tree so glossy it could be made of plastic, are several white-painted items of garden furniture, seldom used. There is a small blue spruce in the front lawn and a camellia on the south side of the house. Arthur Blackman is no handyman, but he has the curmudgeonly nature. The handyman is a refugee and so is Arthur Blackman.
The drunkard’s house, by contrast, sprawls down a block which terminates in a no man’s land of tethered wethers, unroadworthy vehicles, and woodheaps pink and grey as herring. The weatherboards are often white, for the drunkard means well when he climbs the ladder, and fondly imagines he can achieve, in a single afternoon with one coat of paint, what his neighbour worked at for six months. The result is the characteristic flaking finish, like that of the drunkard himself. The letter box, wired to the gate and stuffed with householder mail advertising clearances of bedroom suites in vinyl teak, the water meter covered in the white-painted half Dunlop retread, the deep blue bargeboards, the grizzled dog on the open verandah which serves as furniture repository—those moribund, variegated leaves spilling out of plastic pots—the red dinky with the rubbers off the pedals.
The confirmed drunkard spends no more time at home than absolutely necessary, but Arthur won’t go out, except to work. He is drunk and querulous on the afternoon that he and Jason set off for the concert.
People will tell you Canberra in the 1950s was like a big country town. Strictly speaking, not so: the cachet—that strangely remote and disorienting lustre—was there. No tan bark or pampas grass in those days, for living was modest; but I guess I should make clear at once I wish to praise Canberra, to celebrate her charms. Rubbishing the capital is all too easy. Besides, is there not, in each guilty heart of us, a longing for the bloody place? Mother Canberra?
Arthur and Jason leave home, arriving at the Albert Hall in time to see Blind Willie being led from the direction of a nearby hotel. Arthur takes one look at him, turns to his son, and says (in a loud voice), ‘No more blind zan you or I’.
Tabby Tibbs, the world’s worst trumpeter—a title held jointly with several thousand men—begins to shake like a victim of palsy.
‘W … w … what would you know, you w … w … w …?’
Anticipating the epithet, Arthur, a tall, blond, foreign-born man, lashes out. Years later, Jason can still recollect the flush and hear the tinkle. A small-scale riot ensues, with Serbs recognising Croats in the crowd.
Jason watches Blind Willie, who’s been left unattended and pointing the wrong way. He must be eighty years old, but Jason knows it’s he, because he’s black. Willie hesitates, smiles broadly, mutters something to himself, then heads off for the Cooma road in the jerky goose step of a marionette. As Jason watches, a laden lorry rounds Capital Hill.
Blind Willie, who’s also deaf, as his later recordings amply confirm, hovers at the kerb. Interviews suggest he never knows what country he’s in. The lorry driver is chopping through the gears now, crunch crunch crunch. As a Jindabyne taxpayer, he resents Canberra’s affluence. El Monaro Dorado. Tidbinbilla Tintagel.
Willie leaves the kerb, heading for the Treasury. The lorry knocks him flat.
That evening, Jason and his father argue. Arthur maintains that Blind Willie was either depressed by Canberra or caught in a web of circumstance which left him no option but to act as a blind man would. This is an interesting theory, coming from an immigrant who sees himself in much the same light, and it can’t be disproven; but it has the effect of leaving Jason ambivalent, his whole life long, as to whether he has witnessed pathetic farce or an act of superhuman will. As a result, he tends to confuse the two. Years later, he’ll take the opportunity of asking an associate of Blind Willie’s, a man from the south side of Chicago with gold incisor teeth, whether in fact Blind Willie was blind.
‘Yeah, man.’
‘From birth?’
‘Oh, at least.’
The issue is further complicated by Arthur Blackman’s admission, made in the heat of the moment, that he knows so much about eyes because he used to be a medical student in Utrecht. This from a man who won’t discuss the past, and who has always claimed to have sprung, fully grown, from an arm of a deck chair on the immigrant vessel Johann van Oldenbarneveldt.
In any event, Jason feels duty bound to replace Blind Willie the Untutored, and he declines to practise piano. Arthur raves, threatens and rants, but in vain. Indirectly, he has murdered his own son’s mentor; the little boy can no longer respect his father as he should.
It’s easy, however, to understand Arthur’s ambitions for his son. A second-rate culture can still produce a first-rate interpretive artist. Take the ABC guest performers, who come from some funny places; Uruguay, Chile, Nicaragua. It’s a safe bet that most of these maestros had fathers like Arthur Blackman; immigrants, fleeing the misery of war-torn Europe, but obliged to leave behind all that makes life livable—cakes and culture. Besides, Daniel Barenboim has something in common with Bjorn Borg; he knows how good he is. His game has rules, on which we can agree. Who wouldn’t want that for an only son?
It’s not sufficiently realised today that Canberra in the 1950s was a city of reborn people. This artificial metropolis attracted reffos of a certain kind the way the blue light in a butcher’s shop does flies. And where was the enlightenment? Where the wisdom, where the insight?
One of Arthur’s workmates began life in a Ukrainian hut. He never went to school, couldn’t read or write, hadn’t seen running water. When war broke out he fought for both sides and ended up in Auschwitz with Roman Polanski. Today you can find this man in the Commonwealth Club, hobnobbing with Oxford types. This is the man of whom I sing, self-made, a marvel of endurance. Such men have truth to tell us, and that truth is Canberra. Like it or not, when men have been through Hell, it is Canberra they desire, Canberra they create. If you find this hard to fathom, I guess you never went without. You probably don’t remember the Great Depression. I’ll bet you never even fought in The War.
The more Arthur praises good music, the more Jason grows to hate it. Arthur sees blues as so much shit, but Jason knows this isn’t so: one chorus of Blind Willie singing ‘Biscuit Bakin’ Woman’ does more for him than the Unfinished Symphony. But what can you do when you know you’re right and your father doesn’t believe you? Cut off your ears, or shout louder and perhaps lose your voice?
A month after coming to Australia, Arthur moves his family from the immigration camp, a Nissen hut in Bathurst, straight to the old city. Hackett Gardens, Turner, between Haig Park and Boldrewood Street. Realising earlier than most Canberrans that nothing less than a brief stay in each suburb of the ACT can satisfy that lust for experience, Jason will make it his business to acquire an intimate knowledge of more houses than most. In the course of his protracted youth he will drain tinnies on the concrete patios of Belconnen Way in many a market gardener’s dream of blond double brick with triple garage, shut aluminium windows in low-lying areas of Duffy, open embossed cedar doors on clinker-brick colonials in Mawson, and creep across Grecian goat-skin rugs in the en suites of Garran by night, one ear open for the family Peugeot. He will lounge diplomatically in Mugga Way, delighting in the envy of passers-by, who, unlike himself, will lack the key to admission there. He will plumb the heights and depths of Narrabundah, and so forth; but of all the streets in which he will leave his scent, none will be dearer to him than that first, unpretentious Hackett Gardens.
Turner, bordered by the flats of Northbourne Avenue, gritty O’Connor to the north, scholarly Acton to the south, has what is probably the highest incidence of Reader’s Digest subscribers in the ACT. Almost every day in winter, the postman, his fingers benumbed by those frosty hedges, strives to thrust unsolicited gift offer envelopes into letter boxes too small to hold them. Open Roads, two and three to a household, rot on the permadamp lawns of Masson Street in the shadow of the Haig Park pines, while here and there, between arteries and veins in which live public servants and their widows, are small capillaries bulging to encompass a park, the better to daunt through traffic. Such a place is Hackett Gardens, though a glance at some of the homes there now shows, by subtle improvement (glassed-in verandahs, shingled car ports) that these are presently the property of people young and strong enough, if seemingly unwilling, to reap the capital gains on Canberra’s frontiers, where kerbing and guttering, oregon studs and builders’ privies, are all that can be seen from the sealant-smeared windows. On the frontiers, town dogs worry sheep, and I once saw an Afghan hound, shot by an irate farmer and strung up on a barbed wire fence like a skinned fox. On the frontiers live pioneers, pushing back barriers like post-doctoral fellows, as soon exhausted and as readily replaced; for who reneges his stint out here is not a true Canberran.
Arthur and Jason live on the Boldrewood side of the Gardens, in a white brick house with a fuel stove. Years later, when Jason is working as a furniture removalist, he shifts old Charlie from the next-door house to a musty flat in Bondi, with frangipanis in the yard. At one point during the move a drawer flies open, spilling a set of false teeth and a British Empire Medal. Old Charlie chain smokes and has a beautiful deadpan delivery: one of his favourite jokes concerns a blind boy who wants to back Fire at the trots; another concludes, ‘That cat’s not coming in, it’s going out’. Anyway, with a bit of prodding from Jason (the sneaky little bastard doesn’t let on), old Charlie recalls Arthur, his neighbour.
And this would have to be, for Jason, one of those meaningful moments.
‘Funny bloke, dead thorough,’ says Charles. ‘Planted the front lawn with a spirit level. Knew him, did you?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Knew he changed his name? They reckon he was a Nazi.’
Jason drives the van off the road, waking the boss, who’s been sleeping since Goulburn. It’s a cool, late spring morning near Tahmoor, the Tegel turkey town.
‘How many times I have to tell you not to drive on the shoulders, Jason? Let the bastards pass in their own good time. We pay road taxes.’
It fits, thinks Jason; tall, blond, physically fit, an Aryan psychopath, straight as a ramrod. The Dutch passport? Lies and tergiversation. Having been a medical student in Utrecht? Wishful thinking.
Charlie goes on to expatiate concerning Arthur’s thoroughness. The trait has been linked with stercoraceous humour and attributed to over-zealous toilet training. One thing for sure—fishing trips with Arthur are no fun; he spends most of his time trying to keep the boat parallel with the shoreline. When he builds a cupboard, he gives it eight coats of shellac; more if there’s any left in the can. He never does much about the place, but what he does he does right.
Actually, this attitude is less a drive to perfection than a bludgeon with which to beat others over the head. The idea is not so much to do a good job as to take an unassailable stand. There is no limit to the number of coats of shellac you can give a cupboard, and were eight the Australian norm, Arthur would apply ten and stay up an hour later to deliver the same dreary diatribe on the need for thoroughness. The worst of such attitudes is, the kids reject them: Jason is well into his twenties before he’ll concede there’s something to be said for thoroughness, by which stage he’s become a cursory, one-coat kid, like most of his generation.
He’s also become evil. ‘Evil’ is one of those old-fashioned words sophisticates don’t like hearing: they know a man capable of using this word applies it to them (making for dull company), and sooner or later to himself as well. It connotes pugnacity, fundamentalism, red ears, dandruff, and the absence of an open mind. The only inoffensive use of the word is in horror movie blurbs.
You will sometimes see a middle-aged man holding the jaws of his mind open with every intellectual prop and pole at his disposal. In such a state, he resembles a bivalve mollusc, constrained to sup whatever shit floats by.
Well, that’s one mistake Krauts don’t make. They come equipped with a cranial sphincter.
Evil is mysterious, powerful and evasive; an infinite series inviting inspection. Virtue is interesting, too, but Evil sells better. Can study of disease lead to improved health? Fifty thousand cancer funding bodies can’t be wrong.
As a virgin, Jason knows Evil when he smells it. That first whiff is the most reliable; like rotten egg gas, Evil goes unnoticed with time. You can boil a frog to death and it won’t even jump from its jar, provided you heat the water slowly enough. Frightening, isn’t it.
Fifteen years old and listening to those small-time musos boasting of their sexual conquests, Jason feels his stomach, not his gonads, churning. He stands for music and romance: ten years later, he’ll happily sodomise a sick cat under an arc lamp. He’s become evil, you see, but he can’t blame music for that; to blame society for one’s own excesses would be an evil thing to do.
Now, for appearance’s sake: have you seen photos of Lloyd Lomas, that nifty Sydney hair stylist? Jason Blackman looks like him, only bigger. Golden hair, stunning eyes, beautiful moustache—add to this the finest blues voice in the whole Southern Hemisphere, and what have you got?
Stan’ back black man you can’t shine
Yo’ lips is too thick, an’ you haint my kin’.
That do?
Beautiful, Pete. But keep playing, will you? We got problems here. Gimme something a bit more busy.
I first met Jason in that park in Hackett Gardens. I was standing on a swing in my Mitchell blue socks and Sinatra red shirt, waiting for a chick to front. Lucky for her, one never did.
I was lodged with a pair of evil old pubes (public servants) in Froggatt Street. They’d taken me out of the Dog House for Easter. I should have been grateful to them, I guess, but I wasn’t.
I found myself diverted from the dark desire to propagate by Eric, a mongrel dog. He was adolescent like me, black and white like me, friendly, and we soon had a good thing going. They wouldn’t let us keep dogs in the Dog House, so when we got back from appeasement duties, and after much mandatory rodomontade over jobs pulled and virgins violated, we often got talking, more realistically, of dogs. I was halfway up a pin oak, rustling in some dead leaves looking for the stick, when I heard a voice call, ‘Eric!’ I didn’t know the dog’s name was Eric at the time. Looking down, I see a little boy with no front teeth and hair white as ice cream.
