John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers

Saturday 25th October 1986. Do you remember where you were that day? I can tell you where I was. Selina's at the Coogee Bay Hotel. What a night!

I was working for Bandanna and we had gotten a gig that we were all rapt about. Supporting John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers as well as Aussie blues legends, Chain. This was a big gig for us, band and crew alike. John Mayall is such an influential person in the music industry that it was like doing a gig with some sort of minor God. To quote John Mayall in one minute:

• John Mayall and Eric Clapton's Bluesbreakers album was groundbreaking when it was released in 1966. Suddenly everyone wanted to emulate their music.
• Eric Clapton joined Mayall after leaving The Yardbirds in '65 and left to form Cream in '66.
• John McVie was the longest serving Bluesbreakers musician of the 60s, lasting four years, before forming Fleetwood Mac with fellow Bluesbreakers Mick Fleetwood & Peter Green.
• Mick Taylor was their star guitarist in the late 60s until he left to join The Rolling Stones.
• His Laurel Canyon mansion is home to one of the world's largest pornography collections, worth over a million pounds.

Heavy duty resume, eh?

We arrived early that afternoon for the bump in with the bands gear. After helping get the main acts' PA system in & setup, It became obvious that they had underestimated the size of the room and didn't have enough PA. They asked could they hire ours as well to supplement it. Yeehah! We were getting paid by our band already so the extra cash was a bonus. This was going to be a reat night. Not only was Chain & Mayall playing, but at Selina's in those days you could not load your gear out until 9am the following morning due to noise restrictions. They would then give you a hotel room to "sleep" in. Party, party party!!

The afternoon was a bit of a blur as we rushed around adding our system to theirs and getting soundcheck done etc. Finally, the show started. We were first up and the boys played like demons. Talk about rising to the occassion. the place was packed and was going off. I was surprised at how many of the crowd were Bandanna regulars. The set seemed to last only 5 minutes & then we were dragging gear off the stage. A couple of quick beers & then Chain hit the stage. If you never been to a Chain concert then you have truly missed out on one of lifes great pleasures. I got to work with them a few times over a period of years with various lineups and it was always outstanding.

Finally, the big moment arrived.


Selina's is a great venue as it has a mezanine level which in those days was only open to "VIP's" & drunken roadcrew. We stood up on the mezanine, just off to side stage and just stared. Wow, what a band! Apart from the amazing Mr Mayall, his band contained guitarists Coco Montoya and Walter Trout as well as drummer Joe Yuele. We were just mesmerised by this performance. Hot, sweaty, gutsy... everything you expect from an actual blues legend. Man, this guy was the same age as my Dad!
I remember walking up to Joe Yuele after the show and declaring that I was going to throw my drumsticks away in disgust after watching that.

Upstairs in the band room was a sight that we didn't see very often. A real rider. A "rider" is the bit tacked onto a performers contract that sets out things like food and drink to be supplied by the venue. Usually the best we could hope for was a carton of beer but this was something special. Cheese platters, cold chickens, bread rolls, fruit platters.... the bloody lot mate. The Mayall crew had all had a good go and declared we could hoe in & finish whatever was left. Yeehah. I remember sitting pissed as a nit and still buzzing from the show, making sandwiches, when Walter Trout staggered in, barely able to remain upright, wondering if we had anything that "might help him stay awake". We couldn't help him but somehow it felt like a compliment to us to be asked. Weird eh? Walter was a legendary partaker of anything remotely illegal but apparently is a teetotal these days. Beats choking on your own vomit I suppose.

Walter Trout

I'm not sure what time we stopped drinking & talking about the show. Somewhere just before 9am I suspect. What a night!

Linkage

Hi folks, I have added a few links to the list over the weekend that you may find interesting.
Cx Magazine and Julius Media are both great sites run by Julius Grafton who is a legend in the Australian production industry, even moreso in recent years with his efforts to bring effective training courses to our industry.
ALIA is the site of the Australasian Lighting Industry Association & should be staple reading for all of our Trog friends.
The last one for this update is the ProSound Web Forums, a genuinely helpful site for all the noise boys(and girls!).

More to come soon...

Yellarock 1

Round about 1990 we got a call from a Biker Club about doing a big gig for them. It was to be a three day festival of bikes, booze & music about halfway along the Putty Rd to Singleton. My boss at the time was a guy by the name of Rick Doolan who was no stranger to the wonderful world of the Biker. Rick was the original drummer in Bandanna and had lured me away from my comfy job at the bank to go full time with his PA company.

Rick Doolan in the Bandanna days.

We took a drive up there and had a look at the site in order to do a quote. It was a beauty. Set back off the main road and in the middle of nowhere. There were going to be no noise complaints here! Rick was operating two PA systems in those days and we booked both systems and crew for this one. These type of events go until all hours of the morning so you have to have a few spare bodies to last the distance.
A little while out from the gig came murmurs that there may be trouble getting the license to sell alcohol. This was a problem! The rumours came and went, mostly about a publican who had the shits about the bikers selling grog, until it was resolved. A catering company had gotten involved and they were licensed. They were then also contracted to operate all of the food stalls. This was getting bigger by the day. Wow, these guys were really moving in. They also managed to get the contract to supply the toilets! A couple of weeks before the gig I got a call from a guy by the name of Phil. He told me that he had been employed by the catering company to record the gig as the soundtrack to a video that was being shot. We chatted about the gear we were providing and organised to have a beer sometime over the weekend of the gig. This was a big deal for me as Phil was "a bit of a name" as he was the sound engineer for a reasonably big band. This industry is very much based on "who you know" so this was going to be a good guy to know.

The actual setup went very well. The staging company had erected a nice control tower with a guy rope to the stage to attach our cables to.

Mission control after the first night. First mate "Gaf" at the helm.

The first night went well with a few good cover bands including one that I worked with regularly, The Last Stand Cold Chisel Show. The main problem was that there didn't seem to be many people about. It was only Friday night though and we did expect that most of the crowd would roll in on Saturday morning.


The massive Friday night crowd in all its' glory.

Saturday was a long day with bands starting about lunch time and going all the way through to about 3am from memory. the highlight of the night was the Phil Emmanuel Band. Coming on about midnight with a light fog rolling in, the atmosphere was perfect. If you've ever done sound for a band you will know that nothing sounds better than a great band through a big P.A. system outdoors with it cranked to 11. I still rate that set by Phil as one of the highlights of my mixing career. I once heard a classical conductor say that heaven was when the sound of the orchestra matched the sound he heard in his head. Mixing is a lot like that. You have a "perfect" sound in your head that you try to achieve with the mix. A couple of times in your life you will hit the bullseye. This was one of those nights.
The only problem ws there still wasn't much of a crowd. You could see a few of the catering company managers looking a little worried. they had brought massive amounts of food and grog in anticipation of a large crowd that never turned up. Maybe they would turn up for the Sunday?


Living in the back of the truck is tops. Not! This is Ziggy the lightingmeister.

Oh well, they didn't turn up Sunday either. So far the bikers had come out very well with their deal to let the catering company promote just about everything. By midway through Sunday you could smell the tension. As the old saying goes "the smell of burning promoter hung heavily in the air". For our part it was all going well. Well, most of it! You don't sleep much at these type of events and the lack of sleep mixed with vast amounts of alcohol combined to almost spell disaster for one of our lighting chaps, Bicky. We had gathered in the back of the truck to have a few quiet beers with one of the bikers my brother and I knew through mutual friends. This guy was reasonably high up in the club and went on to become the president a few years later. All was calm until Bicky staggered in with a smoke machine in his hand that needed re-filling. This was one of the old "Mini Big Smoke" machines that were popular once. You filled them with "smoke oil" then put a CO2 cylinder into it to pressurise it. Bicky filled it with oil then let off the gas cylinder...without putting the lid back on the oil reservoir. High pressure oil went everywhere, covering our biker mates. You could see the look on Bickys face when he realised what he had done. "Near Death Experience" I think it's called. We did some very fast talking and managed to get the lads to see the funny side of it and not kill him. I felt a bit more awake after that!
Sunday progressed well from our point of view culminating in a performance by The Amazing Zarsoff Brothers. This was a band I used to see very regularly in their heyday in the early 80's and once again they didn't disappoint. I think they are still going around, get out & catch them if you can. I still have one of their albums which contains such classics as "Fucken' beauty", "Nose Pickin' Boogie" and my all time favourite, "You're a Prick(ya make me sick)".


The amazing "Izzy Foreal". He stopped the band because "some prick wanted to take his photo".

After an eventful and tiring weekend we crashed in the back of the truck one last time ahead of Monday's packup. We awoke to an empty paddock, covered in empty cans & bottles, and a few slow moving people. The vibe amongst the catering people was now at rock bottom. They were all wondering if they were going to get paid and the boss was wondering if he would lose his house. The sluggish silence was broken by an approaching ute. It was being driven by one of the catering staff and seemed to be chockablock full of ice. He pulled up near one of their portable bars and proceeded to unload the lot onto the ground. At this point the boss appeared and we could see that his head was now glowing bright red. The rant was absolutely priceless. "How dare you go into town and spend MORE fucking money on ice we don't need! I'm gonna lose the lot... blah, blah" On and on he went. Whipping himself into an absolute frenzy as he went. The employee was just speechless. I thought the boss was going to spontaneously combust. As he built his rage into a fever pitch, the rest of the staff were gathering around, not believing the spectacle before them. At this point we noticed that the bikers were all retreating and some had actually locked themselves into one of the nearby buildings. This guy was scaring everybody! Finally, when I thought it couldn't get any better, he launched himself into the air and came down smack bang in the middle of the ice pile. He then continued to scream incoherently as he ripped the ice bags to bits and spread it everywhere. Unbelievable! After a few minutes it all subsided and he lay there on top of the ice pile almost motionless, gasping for breath. There was just silence for a good 30 seconds then... the assembled crowd of catering staff erupted into spontaneous applause and cheering. It was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. The incident that came to be known as "The Ice Dance".

Believe it or not, the bikers weren't detered by the apparent failure of YellaRock 1 and held YellaRock 2 the next year. But that's another story...

Welcome

Welcome to Gibbo's War Stories. This is where I will be posting stories from my past life as a rock and roll roadie. I started posting some of these stories at my other blog, Gibbos Place, and they have proved popular enough to start a seperate site. I will start the ball rolling with a few stories from Gibbos Place.
Call back often.

Cheers, Gibbo

Update: We are now online!!!

Stevie

I was blown away last night to see Stevie Wright on This Is Your Life. During the late Eighties I worked for a while as Stevies live sound engineer, alongside brother of Gibbo on monitors and My Pal Brian(TM) on lights, and I have wonderful memories of some great gigs as well as some downright strange ones.


He was (I think) still on the needle in those days and was very definitley on the turps in a big way and was quite a handful. Even so, he was still very much a household name and drew decent crowds. The band, Hard Road, consisted of Peter Northcote (sax, keys, guitar), Bruno Renzella (guitar), Vic Young (bass) and Paul DeMarco (drums) and one or two others who slip my mind.
They were outstanding in both musical ability and counselling skills. It was a major effort sometimes just to get Stevie onto the stage in a reasonable condition to perform and the guys showed endless patience(usually!).

The guys started picking him up quite early in the day to get him to the gig before he got too blind. They would then keep him occupied and soberish backstage until show time. This worked for a while until the cunning bugger figured that he could just get the crowd to buy his drinks. "Who's gunna buy Stevie a Southern Comfort then?" would be the cry. Half a dozen punters would then head to the bar and buy him drinks. The look on the faces of the band was simply priceless. What can you do to help someone who is determined to trash themselves?

Poor old Stevie didn't have much of a voice left by this stage and it became increasingly difficult to get his voice to sit in the mix at a decent level. Brother of Gibbo had the worst of it as he looked after on-stage sound which was...loud! One night Stevie was having particular trouble hearing himself in the monitors so he decided he would kick them off the front of the stage, as you do. Classic rock 'n roll tantrum! Anyway, being the professional he is, brother of Gibbo wanders out from side stage nonchalantly and puts the speakers back on stage. Well, Stevie manages to kick them off again at which point brother of Gibbo decides to unplug them & remove them. Picture the scene... Band wailing, punters dancing, singer fuming and brother of Gibbo standing at the front of the stage giving Stevie a right bollocking. Common sense eventually prevailed and the rest of the show went well. During the packup I noticed out of the corner of my eye that one of the band members had brother of Gibbo bailed up side stage and seemed to be giving him a gobfull. Thinking there could be ill feeling about the incident, I wandered a bit closer just in case and managed to hear words to the effect of: "Why didn't you hit the bastard? I that had been my gear he kicked, I'd have floored him!" Brother of Gibbo explained that it wouldn't look good on his resume that he had knocked out Stevie Wright.

One day I'll tell you about the Stevie gig where I had to leave the mixing desk to punch on with some of the crowd! I've still got the scar where my tooth went through my mouth just below my bottom lip. I'll bet the other prick's still pissing blood though!

Thanks for the fun times and classic memories Stevie. Stay straight. I hope you find the peace you are looking for.