from SAME HEAD DIFFERENT SHIRT

NIMBIN TO NYMAGEE – THE GENESIS OF THE RE-MAINS

 

The first ever official Re-Mains gig was at the Nimbin Hotel on March 23^rd, 2002. It was actually a duo show – just myself and Leigh Ivin. This was the pattern for the first few shows – Nathan Nancarrow and Shaun Butcher, though they’d both been in on the email discussions that saw the genesis of the idea of the band, were neither of them rehearsed or ready for all the new songs Ivin and myself had been working on – and there were a lot of them.

Ivin was still finding his way around the Maton Console steel guitar he’d bought from Greg and Russell at Instrumental As Anything in Lismore earlier that year. Apart from that I believe he was playing his Fender strat or possibly his Mexican copy of a Tele – modified to his own specs.

I was playing my trusty old racing green Maton EC325 – the Avocado as it was dubbed. It had already travelled the world and worked across the UK, Germany and Portugal. It was in for an illustrious career of getting bashed and bled on across large tracts of the rest of the world.

We probably played a lot of the songs I’d been dragging around for some time, some of which would surface on ‘Keeping It Steel’ and ‘Thank You For Supporting Country Rock and Roll’ and had already peeped into existence on the fledgling ‘Humdinger’, my personal demo and EP.

That would be the likes of ‘Take It As You Find It’, ‘She Never Done Nobody Wrong’ (otherwise known as ‘379’ after the tape counter on the Dictaphone on which I originally recorded it), ‘History of Flies’, ‘You Look Like Keith Richards’, Ballad Of A Wrong’un’ and other ballads with long-winded titles.

We also ripped into a few covers – including the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s ‘Full Grown Woman’ and probably something by The Who, and more than likely Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, which would later become a staple of the band’s setlist.

I remember we had a good reception – not a massive crowd but a kind of diminutive home-town cheer squad. I’d lived in Nimbin on and off for years before my extended overseas sojourn, and had visited and played there many times on my frequent summer holiday jaunts, in concert with Nancarrow and other line-ups including the likes of Jimmy Willing’s Ragadoll and the Bush Punk Cowboys.

I’d played one short set at the Nimbin Bush Factory with Nancarrow earlier that year – just after returning from the UK in fact. That had been part of a larger bill including the Durga Babies – the surf-pop outfit Nancarrow shared with long-time Tuntable resident, gun drummer, singer, DJ, booker, promoter and all-round impresario Tim Tonkin and ex-Wild Pumpkins At Midnight frontman, latter day yogi Michael Turner.

It was Mick Turner who turned me on to the Gram Parsons anthem later to become a signature Re-Mains song – ‘Sin City’.

I remember he said to me once, one morning after a wild party at Nancarrow’s Gungas Road house – “If you’re playing alt-country, or country rock, or whatever you call it – you have to play this song.’ And he was right. He also recommended ‘100 Years’ – another great Burrito Brothers song which we later tried many times but which never really took off.

My return from the UK had been engineered by my relentless desire to get just this kind of band going. The urge to form a hard-touring band to play my songs had been smouldering for years, but never yet burst into flame for various reasons – mainly my other addictions – to travel, adventure, pot-smoking, chasing women across continents. But over the past few years while I worked in Europe it had steadily become an obsession, fuelled by incessant songwriting and daydreaming and a handful of solo shows in the UK, Germany and Portugal.

I had previously played with Nancarrow in many outfits – Ragadoll, Jerk Nation, and in various duos and trios – often with ex-Bushpunks Marty McDonnell and Mal Finnan, and Nimbin/Nepal stone-sculptor, hard-living hobo and genius multi-instrumentalist Donato Rosella.

Most of the planning for the projected new band was done in cahoots with Leigh Ivin however. I’d known of Ivin years before, when he was guitar god in mid-90’s Lismore rock band Spawn – an act at the other end of the rock and roll scale to my own shambolic hall-clearing champions The Bush Punk Cowboys.

Spawn were rehearsed, mathematical, glamorous and popular where we were underground, weird, optimistic and stoned – and we hated ‘em. They were into Soundgarden and Zappa, where we were into The Butthole Surfers, Beasts of Bourbon and The Dirty Three. Spawn were buddies with Grinspoon, Lismore’s great success story, while we were mates with the Mail Order Brides and various Nimbin lunatics.

But I’d run into Ivin in Sydney sometime in the late 90’s when I was home one summer. First at a party in Newtown, then at some gig somewhere – he’d also been house engineer at NSW Uni Roundhouse when I came through as part of a folk tour from Nimbin with Lisa Yates, Andy Parks and Neil Pike.

We’d had conversations and discovered mutual musical territories and interests – The Who, the Blues Explosion – and importantly, some areas of country music. Ivin was originally from Tamworth and interested in steel guitars and tunings.

I went around to his house in Auburn, Sydney, one afternoon while I was living in Marrickville – where he’d also lived for a spell and had discovered a mutual fondness for Vietnamese noodle soup, or pho.

We put down a few of my songs on his 8-inch Ampeg tape machine – the same rig on which parts of ‘Field Conditions’ were to be recorded. This was in about 1999, when I was home for a year and working as a roadie and film extra in Sydney, saving up cash for a return to Europe.

We got talking about future plans – and both expressed long-held desires for careers as professional musicians – whatever that meant. Neither of us had any delusions about making a fortune, we’d both been around long enough to know the reality of fiscality in this business, but both thought we could carve out a living of some sort.

It was about this time that I’d been travelling to Newcastle to play as guest bellower and sidekick with The Australian Beefweek Show – a kind of country rock Australian version of The Pogues – their modus operandi was to get as drunk as possible wherever they played, be as loud and obnoxious as they could, and by the end of the show get completely naked. They also wrote some killer songs and played with a vulgar panache that was irresistible – I loved the attitude and the sound.

I knew two of the blokes in the band – Pete ‘Bufo’ Hansen and Chris ‘Washy’ Greenhalgh, from the old Bushpunk days. We’d frequently toured to Newcastle and played on large bills with their bands – respectively Bufo Marinus and The Wash, who’d actually been Triple J darlings at one point in time. Washy and I had a lot in common, including an ex-girlfriend who we both still love and admire.

I’d played some wildly interesting gigs with Beefweek, including in the middle of a forest doof at dawn during torrential storms, on and falling off the back of a truck in Bourke and at a horse stud in the Hunter Valley to a bunch of stupefied Irish wranglers – all very drunk and inevitably naked affairs.

Anthony ‘Mudgee’ Mudge, lapsteel and guitarist for the band, also played on ‘Humdinger’ and later some shows in the UK and Portugal with me. But neither he nor Bufo were able to get out to a very special gig in outback NSW that the band had been offered.

Nymagee is in the geographical centre of New South Wales. The site of a brief copper mining boom and even briefer gold strike, it at one time had an estimated population of about 5,000 Chinamen, Cornishmen and itinerant indigents of all pigments. But in the early 20^th century the transportation magnates had decided to stop the vital railway at Cobar – and Nymagee became too expensive a proposition to freight ore from.

What was left was a gigantic slag heap and a pastoral industry in gradual decline, by 1999 a mere memory of the dynastic properties which once hosted tennis parties, football games and grand dances where marriages and feuds were contracted. As the drought tightened its grip on the country throughout that century the people had fled into exile in the cities and still habitable rural areas closer to the coast and by degrees the rabbits and the devil-head burrs became the only thriving concerns.

Now only a pub and a few houses comprised the township where market gardens, three pubs, a butcher shop and a bank once flourished. But Jay Dunn, daughter of a local landholder and an enterprising musician herself, had decided to revive the tiny hamlet’s fortunes with a music festival held beside the slag heap.

She knew one Tonchi Mcintosh, a talented and charismatic folk-singer from Bourke who now lived in Newcastle, and Tonchi just happened to know Washy.

Tonchi, a burly, six foot two son of a Mexican aristocrats daughter and a Kiwi academic/farmer, is married to a handsome Aboriginal woman named Kelly and these days lives in Melbourne. His album, ‘Bridges’, produced by Shane Howard of the Goanna band fame, is for mine one of the best Australian albums ever, a deep, soulful, uplifting album on a par with anything Paul Kelly or Nick Cave or … ever made.

He also liked to knock about with some wild characters and he and Washy used to play a lot together. So when he got wind, through his Bourke mate Hully, that there was to be an outback festival in Nymagee, he let it be known that there was a gig to be had out bush. The money was terrible, it was a bloody long way away and the conditions were likely to be abysmal – Washy jumped at the chance. Only trouble was, Pete Bufo had quit the band and Mudgee had gone AWOL on an extended drinking spree.

Washy had asked me if I wanted to go out there, so I in turn asked Leigh Ivin if he was interested. He said sure, it sounded like an interesting proposition. I gave him a copy of the Beefweek CD ‘A Russian Lunch Affair’, and he already had my own ‘Humdinger’ a few songs from which the band was playing, Beefweek’s drummer, Pete Moffit, was keen for an outback jaunt, so I rang Washy, told him we had a guitarist, and we were on.

On Saturday morning the … of October Ivin and I loaded into his XB Ford and we drove up the Princes Highway to Newcastle. It was a blistering hot day and when we pulled up at Washy’s house next to Fort Scratchley above the harbour at Newcastle, only a stiff sea breeze kept the fug at bay.

Washy lived in a beautiful old terrace house that’s probably now a yuppie condominium, one of those real estate anomalies owned by a stubborn old timer who refused to secede to the Steel City’s refurbishment renaissance.

He lugged out his bass rig and beautiful, rare Maton bass and Pete hauled out a drumkit and somehow we all squeezed into the Ford, which had an immense boot for a sedan.

I don’t remember much about the trip – we would have smoked a lot of dope on the way – just that it was very very long and very very hot. It takes about ten hours to drive out into the desolate mallee country and for Ivin and Washy and Moffit it was the first trip. I’ve worked out here in the past as a jackaroo and shearing roustabout so I knew the country – in fact my sister and her family live on a farm at Tottenham, only about a 100 kilometres away.

We landed late at night and stumbled into a bizarre, confusing stage area, peopled by very drunk organisers and PA guys yammering conflicting directions by torchlight. We were ushered directly on to the stage, drunk, stoned and disoriented and proceeded to deliver a startlingly unrehearsed, shambolic delivery of the Beefweek songs and our own.

The entire affair seemed to last only minutes but probably rambled on for an hour. It would have been all academic to the equally drunk and mystified punters out there in the pitch-black haze, watching us reeling about in fitful light, unleashing bursts of dazzling noise in disjointed, amusical volleys and ranting cryptic lyrics down the archaic PA.

The stage itself was a cannibalised shed, tacked together and baring extremely dangerous wooden and steel fangs at all angles – a modern OH&S nightmare.

Anyway, we had a ball, and afterwards retired into the darkness to smoke cones and drink beer in our accommodation, two ancient rickety caravans in the lee of the copper mine slag heap.

We woke at dawn to a surreal vision – a hungover, Boschian horror movie. We were, quite literally, surrounded by redback spiders, leering at us from every joint and rafter of the tottering caravans, under the mattresses, in the window frames, leaning from the roof. Outside a ruthless staring sun obliterated all comfort from the land and the pitiless, shimmering slag heap dominated a cruel, jagged landscape stitched by fences, stippled by burrs and emaciated, whimpering sheep.

Innoculated by breakfast beers and bongs, we ignored the deadly arachnids and sat in the feeble shade of the caravans talking with Tonchi and peering out at the bizarre festival, where a succession of creaky covers bands and country singers played to about five drunks from the makeshift stage.

We were just pulling another set of cones when I saw an enormous policeman with arms like legs stride past the window and I hurriedly stowed the bong in a redback nest. The copper, all six foot four of him, poked his head inside and asked how we were going, squinting through a cloud of narcotic effulgence. Either he had never encountered marijuana before out here or he chose to ignore this musician’s vice, because he seemed satisfied with our polite answers and strode away without a backward glance. We took this as a cue to further hedonism and carried on for the rest of the day.

Tonchi had introduced us to Hully – Andrew Hull, a bush poet in the mould of Lawson and Patterson, who throughout the day regaled us with several of his lively and irreverent portrayals of modern bush characters and their melodramas. Tonchi and Hully grew up in Bourke together and have collaborated on various artistic projects – including a walk along the …. Track trhough outback NSW in the footsteps of Henry Lawson and countless swaggies and vagabond jackaroos in bygone days – an adventure that nearly killed them both. And thus we passed the rest of the afternoon, till in the early evening it was possible to venture out into the ebbing inferno and back onto the stage.

Our performance this time was marginally coherent and wildly extravagant, featuring wild solos from Ivin and an alternating vocal attack as Washy and I traded song for song, building up into an epic ‘Ballad of a Wrong’Un’ and ‘Grief’, a rampaging Beefweek staple about low-grade pot.

The audience this time was slightly larger also, comprising a mob of puzzled farmers and their wives, some excited children, Jay, the festival organiser and her friends, and a contingent of shearers from Condoblin who were wired on some imported speed and acid, several cartons of VB and a complete lack of food, water and sleep for days.

They greeted our noisy rock and roll onslaught with ragged cheers and some frantic, dust-kicking dancing that was completely indifferent to the rhythms we were playing.

When we finished all the songs we knew they were clamouring for more and quite specific about it, clambering onstage to ensure that we played some ACDC. We didn’t know any, but collectively decided we could piece together a fair approximation of ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’.

We launched into it with ferocious abandon, and so did the shearers, leaping about in a cloud of dust till it became apparent that one of them hadn’t made the rebound from a particularly energetic tumble and was lying still in the burrs and dirt.

They gathered around him, guffawing and playful at first, while we raged on through the PA. But then, after nudging and lifting failed to rouse him they decided they needed a bit of shush, and when gesturing at us failed to bring it about, they jumped onstage and clamped big hands on our instruments.

We stopped playing and looked on wearily as people gathered around the prone body. Repeated resusicitation efforts failed and the burly copper was summoned. He too failed to detect any life and in lieu of an ambulance, loaded the dead shearer into the paddy wagon and hared off to Condoblin hospital, over 100 kilometres away.

As the dust settled and we stumbled about, packing gear and sculling beer, we knew history had been made. This was the start of something. We just weren’t quite sure what.