This is Part 7 of an ongoing series of articles on: “I Remember … when it was great to be . . .”
[If you haven’t read the previous article that leads into this one, you should! Click on the Triumph picture.
Or to go to Part 1, click the ship that bought me to Australia.]
So, my bike was gone, my money was gone, and I was about to discover, that soon my home would be gone. the time I got back to Melbourne I discovered that David had moved out of Portland Place and somehow, even though Lyn, Julie and David McCready and Charles and Helen were still there, it didn’t feel the same.
David had moved back to Greville Street, into the top flat of a block of three flats right opposite the Prahran Police Station. It didn’t take me long to discover why, when one day I stopped in to see if he had a smoke. At first I was simply stunned because on entering the lounge room there was this amazing glass apparatus. Glass bowls connected to glass condensers – one on top of the other. Tubes swirled, came back on themselves and eventually as the eyes followed the journey of this contraption, at the end there was a rubber tube and a mouthpiece. It was the most amazing, if not stunning water pipe I had ever seen. Each bowl had a coloured liquid in it.
Pleased with his handiwork, David rolled a joint and explained to me how it worked. How it worked? The best way to see how it worked was to use it. He just smiled, and told me I had to wait. So several cups of tea and many joints later, the sun-set and all was ready. now there were around 6 people in the room, all waiting with anticipation. During the intervening period David had set up a range of coloured dichroic lights. What is a dichroic light? Well I can tell you the result is stunning, dramatic, eye-catching and dazzling. Dichroic means two colors. When this glass is viewed from different angles, it appears as numerous colors. As darkness descended a largish block of hash was bought forth and put into the small metal cup at the top of the apparatus. All the lights except for the dichroic’s were turned off, and the apparatus was light.
To David went the honour of the first ‘toke’. As he inhaled, the air with the burning hash smoke was passed through the various bowls and the coloured liquid started bubbling. Under the dichroic lights the result was utterly mind blowing! The pipe was passed around one to another. However, the time the last person had used it, the room, indeed the entire flat, was so full of smoke you could barely see. It was somewhat haunting with streams of smoke wafting through the beams of light, being diffused and dancing in amazing patterns. We might have got paranoid except we also got stoned, very, very stoned! Personally after about 10 minutes and three tokes, and with In-A –Gadda-Da-Vida blaring out – I passed out. I wasn’t the only one!
“In a gadda da vida, ba (In the Garden of Eden)
In a gadda da vida, honey
Don't you know that I'm lovin' you
Oh, won't you come with me
And take my hand
Oh, won't you come with me
And walk this land Please take my hand …” (In a Gadda Da Vida - Iron Butterfly)
In retrospect it was bloody amazing we didn’t get busted. The flat had a rear entrance down a lane-way leading out the back to Chatham Street, but down the front stairs of the flat was Greville Street. Directly opposite was the Prahran Police Station. Now I’m not a superstitious person, but as I look back on these days it’s hard not to conclude that some how some of us were not under the protection of a guardian angel, of some sort. You see we were actually visited twice the police in that very flat.
I remember the first instance involved the engine of a Morris LD5. The LD5 was a remarkable vehicle. It was a 1.5 ton, vastly underpowered yet for many of us a far better choice than the much smaller Kombi van. David was the first person I knew to buy one, but within 2 years no less than four of us within my extended group, owned an LD5.
What an LD5 in great condition, looks like
As amazingly large as they were inside and fun to drive, the doors were notoriously pathetic. The driver and passenger doors were sliding doors and every LD5 I came across, including my own, had the ball bearings fall out of the channels basically rendering the doors useless, or severely impaired in their operation at the best! Anyway, we had barely 2 coins to rub together, so when they broke down – we fixed them.
There was an occasion when something serious happened with the engine in David’s van, so, we whipped it out. We broke it down to several slightly smaller parts and carried them upstairs into the lounge room of the flat. Now, I should say that now (late 1972) Portland Place had broken up, as the developers were moving into the area even then. Lynne and I had broken up – I think the day I saw Mick Conway pushing her to his house down near the Station Hotel in a shopping trolley, was the time I knew that we were finished.
So I moved into David’s flat. Now picture this. The entire lounge floor was covered, absolutely covered, in parts of the LD5 engine. One night we were sound asleep when I heard David stir and then I heard voices. I thought nothing of it and went back to sleep. It turned out that the cops had visited us! Now David had fallen asleep on a mattress in the lounge and it was only the next morning that I learned of the story.
Apparently we had left the back door open and the cops had decided to visit us, not worrying about niceties like warrants or anything. However, when they shone their torches into the lounge room all they could see the light of their torches was, van engine parts like the crankshaft, pistons, bits of this that and the other. It seems that the lead cop simply turned to the others and said something to the effect of, “Oh it looks like bikies, not the people we are looking for”!
Were we the people they were looking for? That question was never answered, but for whatever reason they chose not too look any closer, and that was fortunate because we were holding. Thank you ‘Guardian Angel’ . . .! Now hopefully the statute of limitations kicks in with the next story – and it’s not one that I have spoken about before, but, it is part of folk lore and it is time to confirm the story because, not only did it happen, but it reflects the craziness of those years.
David and Charles, despite discovering that my chemistry background really wasn’t of use to them, decided that they should have a try at making one or more compounds that were desirable, but not readily available. In fact this ‘experiment’ had commenced prior to the establishment of the Greville Street flat. So it becomes necessary to jump back around 3 or 4 months before following on with this story. Equipment was bought, chemicals were bought and serious attempts were made at manufacturing DMT. N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT or N,N-DMT) which is a psychedelic compound of the tryptamine family. Its presence is widespread throughout the plant kingdom.
DMT occurs in trace amounts in mammals, including humans, where it putatively functions as a trace neurotransmitter. Indigenous Amazonian Amerindian cultures consume DMT as the primary psychoactive in ayahuasca, a shamanistic brew used for divinatory and healing purposes. You might recall the series of books written Carlos Castaneda starting with The Teachings of Don Juan in 1968. Castaneda wrote a series of books that describe his alleged training in shamanism.
This work intrigued Charles and he was keen to experience the effect for himself. Obtaining the leaves from the required plant (which grew in South America) was simply impossible. So the logical conclusion was to manufacture it.
The boys first effort started in Portland Place but with so many people around, it was deemed not to be ‘cool’! So a flat down the Yarra River was leased and a second attempt was made there. One of the disturbing things about the process was the amazing amount of heat generated during the chemical process and keeping the whole thing temperature cool (let alone place-wise cool) was really, really a challenge. On more than one occasion the reaction went out of control and while there was almost no chance of an explosion per se, more and more often the ceiling of the bathroom where it was all set up, was covered in the most evil smelling muck.
Look, you put this experience down to the trails of fools, albeit desperate fools. I don’t write about this to glorify what was done, but more to document this untold historical, if not social, occurrence. It was certainly an enterprise that could have bought a lengthy gaol term, but we tried to be as careful as possible. Eventually a rather dubious final product was produced. It stank! No really, it absolutely stank, and the only thing worse than its odour, was the taste when smoking it. A chillum was packed with tobacco and the DMT. It was lit and the person taking the puff barely had time to inhale (and if lucky pass it on), before “WHAP!” It was like being hit a runaway freight train on fire.
At the time we put it down to the DMT and I’m certain there was a certain quantity of active ingredient in it – it was best described as being like a weird acid trip that began and finished in a bout 5 minutes! Thinking about it a bit more, I suspect that it was probably still quite impure and that we also were suffering from inhaling various forms of alcohol fumes! All in all, it was not deemed a success and the project was abandoned, partially because the product was so terrible, and partially because the flat was beginning to stink to high heaven.
However, it wasn’t all that long before I came home one day to the Greville Street flat to find the bathroom completely full of the chemical apparatus that had been removed from the flat down the Yarra. No, the boys were not going to try and synthesis anymore DMT, that lesson had been learned. This time it was going to be Mescaline. The connection with the works of Carlos Castaneda was being revisited in a slightly different way. Now Mescaline is the active psychotropic ingredient that occurs naturally in the peyote cactus.
Now to try and have a mescaline experience, religious or otherwise, meant either importing peyote buttons which while not being impossible, was certainly risky. The other option meant synthesising it. The boys chose the later. And so the ‘hubble bubble’ of the apparatus originally set up in the flat to work as a ‘space-age’ smoking pipe, was now bubbling along making mescaline. This exercise was actually fantastically successful. However, whilst a very pure yield was obtained, the quantity was very small only enough for three! The two boys took one capsule each and I was given the third.
Mescaline
A sunny afternoon in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens quickly turned into a most wondrous afternoon!
"Help me, help me, help me sail away,
Well give me two good reasons why I oughta stay.
Cause I love to live so pleasantly,
Live this life of luxury,
Lazing on a sunny afternoon." (Sunny Afternoon – The Kinks)
So for all that toil this time came real reward. You could be forgiven for asking the question, “Did they make more”?
Well here the story takes a dramatic turn. It was only about 48 hours after experiencing the results of this experiment and the time was the very early hours of a particular morning. Again I remind you that the flat was almost directly opposite the Prahran Police Station. You will be familiar with the saying, “The best place to hide something is in plain sight”. Well, that philosophy had stood us in good stead. So much time has passed I can’t recall clearly now the precise details, but suffice to say in the early hours of the morning I went to the toilet and as I came out I was a aware of torchlight flashing up the staircase. Our front door, that faced the inside stairs, had a frosted glass panel in the door.
I could hear voices and I knew instinctively that it was the cops. I quickly and quietly roused David and we were trying to decide whether to leave out the back door. Things were happening fast! We knew it was a raid and surely that would be caught out . The lights, the (heavy) footsteps and the voices got even closer. Suddenly there was an almighty crash, it was the sound of a door being broken in but, it wasn’t our door! Iit was the door to the flat on the second floor, the floor below us.
now we were frozen solid, crouched on the floor, barely daring to breath. Noises went on, voices were raised the lights flashed up the staircase. There was a loud thump! thump! thumping noise. It was our hearts! Then, there was silence. . . it was all over. They had left!
Do you know, we never knew what the poor bastard downstairs was busted for, but the message to us was clear. We had used up all our luck and if they had discovered what was in our bathroom, the key would have been thrown away. The equipment was packed up the very next day and taken away to the factory of a friend for storage in David’s LD5.
That ended the experiments in chemistry, clearly the ‘guardian angels’ had worked their magic again, but we were not about to push it!
Money was becoming an issue. Rents were rising and as much as we could live cheaply, I wanted to buy a van and David had his own financial agenda’s and in addition we figured we had to get out of the flat, and really, out of Greville Street. So it was back to taxi driving! Now I had previously driven cabs as alluded to previously, but David decided that he should drive as well. This had a major advantage in that we could have the one cab with me taking the day shift and he, taking the night shift. Apart from meaning I no longer had to take the cab back to the depot at the end of a shift, it was kind of neat having my now best friend sharing the experience.
So “Gay 50” (our call sign) became the focus of our lives. On most occasions driving a taxi is fairly tedious, if not boring. You also need to understand that back in the days when we were driving, the connotation of the call sign being ‘Gay’ wasn’t an issue and it was only years later that it became funny to us. Now back in the early 1970's taxi drivers were fairly secure in the knowledge that they would arrive home in the same condition as when they left. There were almost no attacks on cabbies, and the worse you might expect, was to have a drunk throw up in the back of your taxi. How things have changed today. It would be easy to fill up a page or more about taxi driving but the fact of the matter is, it is was fairly mundane and boring.
An example of an exciting day driving cabs for me was having someone jump into the cab in the city and to tell me to start chasing a train that is on its way to Morwell. After missing it at Dandenong (a decent ride), I was told to keep chasing, we never got close and in the end I had the fare all the way to Morwell.
now we decided to move on from Greville Street. It was beginning to loose a little of its ‘hipness’, already the part-time ‘hippies’ were moving in, working their 9 – 5 jobs and after hours and on weekends changing into their ‘finery’ and beads.
“Oh Oh yeah Who's that coming round the corner
Tell me Who's that coming round the bend
He doesn't look like me
But the mum and the dads think he's gas
Who's that coming round the corner
Ha, He's so square and laughs at me
He's a 5:10 man
It's kids like us that he cans
He can see that we're free and We know that it's just jealousy
Who's that coming round the corner
Who's that coming round the bend
You can see him catch the 5:10 train
You can see him with his hat and cane.” (5:10 Man, Masters Apprentices)
The Station Hotel had started hosting live music and that was both good and bad. Good because there was live music, but bad because it was attracting more and more of the dealers of the harder substances. The street would survive for a few more years, and the Station Hotel would give birth to a fantastic live album, called, "Live at the Station Hotel". I have to be honest, I was a bit chuffed to see I got a couple of mentions and a quote from me end up on the liner notes. But for all that in my mind, this period was the beginning of the end. This equated to three years approximately from the time Mark invited me into the Bakery, to the 'visitation' the police on the Greville Street flat. It wasn't a long time, but what a time!
So David and I went to the extreme and rented a house somewhere out Malvern way. We had little in the way of furniture; in fact, we had little in the way of anything! Something was lacking in my life and I didn’t know what it was, but I was about to discover it. It was a Saturday and David decided to drive ‘hungry’. This is the taxi driving term for basically driving a double shift, day and night. So he was taking my day shift and driving through the night. I don’t remember why, but it was probably a need for pouring more money into the LD5 (again!).
He had only been gone a couple of hours when suddenly he turned up at the front door. It turned out, he had picked up his first fare for the day, was going through an intersection when he was T-boned when another driver went through a red light. The cab, dear old Gay 50, was a write off. Thankfully David was fine, certainly shaken and a bit stirred up as well. We both took this as a sign. It was time to quite driving cabs! So after a cup of tea and we decided to jump in 3FQ and take a drive.
Why 3FQ? Well that was the sticker on the windshield, kind of like (radio) 3UZ, but I’ll let you work out what it really meant. We were driving along Whitehorse Road out Wantirna way, when David pulled over. He had seen a Steam Traction Engine display, and wanted to see more.
As he wandered around the displays I took off and found a large compound full of energetic puppies. I put my hand in and this young female came running up, and, sank her young teeth, her very sharp teeth, into my hand. I was bitten, and smitten. I had to have her; I had found what was missing in my life – a dog! It turned out she was a cross between a Labrador and a German Shorthaired Pointer (GSP). Apparently the GSP bitch had escaped and well, she was the result. It wasn’t until many years later that I discovered I had been very fortunate. Apparently the breed of GSP's hadn’t been introduced into Victoria all that many years prior and had she been a full bred GSP, she would have cost much more than I could have afforded.
At first I called her Acid, because her bite was like sharp needles covered in acid, but she was far too sweet and besides the name also had an associated with LSD, also known as Acid, so, she became Astrid.
Astrid at 3months of age
Very quickly she worked out that the ends of blind cords had plastic ends and that they were fabulous for chewing and soon all the ends of the cords were quickly destroyed. This wasn’t going to be good with the landlord, so we did a midnight flit! We figured he had our bond, so it all balanced out. I needed wheels, there was no doubt about it, and so what did I buy? I bought a Morris LD5 of course. Best of all, it came ‘signed’ with the name of a local courier, so it made sense to go to the for work. They were located in Auburn and I became a parcel delivery guy. I loved it!
Of course being the ‘newbie, I got the absolute crap runs. Long distances out through the Western Suburbs, covering a lot of kilometers, and not a lot of parcels. But for me driving along the roads through Altona and even further out meant driving along large empty paddocks. Astrid would come with me and I would let her out and she would run along the side of the road for exercise and then lay on the floor on the passengers side, door open, watching the world pass . These were really happy times. Astrid and I became inseparable. Luckily the people whose house I was staying in, loved her as well.
now David had abandoned his predilection for acoustic guitar and had bought a Fender Stratocaster. At that time I had no inkling of how important this would be in afew years, to both of us. There wasn’t a lot of music happening, we had met up with another guitarist, Barney, and he and David had jammed a few times and David even played a small gig with him.
What was really strange, I still had no desire to return to playing guitar. Then, out of the blue, David announced he was taking 3FQ and driving to Northern Queensland as he wanted to see Mission Beach. I was still interested in working, and besides, he never invited me and so it was, that we parted company. It was a bit strange, as we had been living in each others pockets for so long and we had become very best friends.
Now the house I was living in had a number of great people in it, including a young New Zealand woman whom I shall call Mo! She seemed to be as interested in me as I was with her and we began to ‘hit it off’.
Lynne was long gone out of life and I had been seeing a few women, and unbeknown to me, one left her legacy that would shortly make itself known. It turned out that I was Mo’s first lover and I think that occasion was accelerated one evening when a female visitor to our house was showing a lot if interest in me, and I guess Mo decided it was there and then, or not at all.
I was still driving taxi trucks, but an accident one day took me off the road for some time and in fact if not for the skills with oxyacetylene torch and a good friendship with a mate, Doug, who not only welded a new set of steps onto the passengers side but basically rebuilt the whole passengers front side, I may never have got my LD5 back on the road.
So because I wasn't working I used to laze around, smoking a lot, drinking a lot. Then one morning I woke up and I quickly realised it was not a hangover I was suffering from. In fact I was as sick as the proverbial dog. I don’t remember whether I took myself, or someone else took me to the doctors, but with in 24 hours I was in the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital with Hepatitis. It turned out that one of the ways of contracting Hepatitis (B), is through sexual contact and then I remembered a one-night stand with a young woman who wasn’t feeling all the best herself, and I had been got!.
That taught me a lesson! I don’t remember how long I was in hospital but it was certainly at least a month. The good news for me was that there were no lasting effects. In fact I had a follow-up set of tests about 16 years later and was totally clean with no liver damage. Thanks to the guardian angel (yet again). the time I was back home the LD5 was ready, and I was ready.
I had decided to head north. I had received through mutual friends a letter from Lynne and she was sharing a house outside a small town of Cooroy, about 130 Kms north of Brisbane. To get there all I needed was some money. Taxi truck driving was just not providing enough. some means or another I scored a job as a spot welder in a factory. It was repetitive work, there was no protective clothing, not even protective goggles. Fortunately I was wearing glasses because at one point I had a dose of weld splash and it resulted in my glasses being seriously pitted with molten metal. So spot welding stuffed my glasses, stuffed my clothes and I put up with it for about 3 months.
Come late 1973 I quite with enough cash to get to Queensland and some to splash on a cassette deck for the van. I packed the van, packed Astrid and asked Mo if she would like to come and we headed off! The journey was pretty uneventful and the LD5, while not breaking any speed records, did it just fine. We had no problem finding Cooroy but then it got really interesting.
It turned out that we had to travel around to a turn off, a dirt track turnoff that went into the State Forest. About 15 minutes drive we suddenly found a car parked at the top of a very, very steep hill. The driver obviously had thought better of driving down, because there may have been no way back up. I knew the might LD5 would take it in its stride, and down we went.
It was a bit freaky, because the brakes on the LD5 weren’t fantastic, and after such a long drive, they were even less reliable. In fact one of the weaknesses of the LD5 was brake bleeding. You could bleed these buggers until you were sick of it and yet they would still be spongy. It turns out that they were meant to be pressure bled, but I didn’t know that then and besides, I didn’t have the money to spend on such luxuries.
At the bottom of the hill was a quaint little house. It had a small entrance with a bedroom to the right, into a lounge with another bedroom to the right, into a kitchen, with a bedroom to the right. That’s what it had. What it didn’t have was, electricity, gas, heating (of any sort) and mains water. It did have a bed in all three rooms and the middle bedroom actually had a double bed and mattress, a most unusual luxury. There was a mattress in the lounge for a couch and also a couple of large cushions. There was a wood stove in the kitchen and no fridge (well for god’s sake, there was no power!) and not even a table, just some built in benches.
The Farm house, with Bridget & Mo
In the front bedroom there was a young woman, Bridget and her dog Raj. Bridget also had her car called Eba. It actually took me a week or so to realise that Eba was the first three letters on the number plate –duh! Lynne was in the rear room off the kitchen and so, Mo and I took the empty middle room. Lynne was very pleased to see me and it was then that I realised I had a problem.
From the bottom of the hill, Taj, and my LD5 and EBA
Despite some pretty ordinary scenes back in Melbourne involving other guys and her pretty ordinary reaction to me with other women, I was still smitten her. Yep, well that was a fine how do you do! One guy with two women. Isn't that the dream? Mo stayed with me for about 6 weeks, bless her soul. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel affection for her, I did. It was more that there was still unfinished business with Lynne. Now I knew that from past experiences Lynne would have no problem with the three of us sharing a bed, but I was Mo’s first love and I couldn’t bring myself to doing that to her. In the meantime a very pregnant Astrid, oh! I had forgotten to mention that this little happening had occurred back in Melbourne, decided to have her pups and this took some of the pressure off the whole situation for a while.
Mo and I, with Astrid's puppies
For a short period things just ticked over. There were three women in the house and that was pretty cool, not that it amounted to much. There wasn’t exactly any housework to do, there was little cooked because we didn’t have much and I suspect Bridget felt the odd ‘man’ out because of the relationship I had with Lynne and Mo. Mo was undoubtably feeling strange because of previous relationship with Lynne, who I think was digging the whole situation.
Ir wasn't hard passing the time. There were some nice walks, and a beautiful view from the kitchen window. We had nothing to smoke but there were other diversions. There were wonderful, wonderful gold top mushrooms (aka Psilocybin Cubensis) around and these certainly provided that wonderful distraction.
Gold Top (Cap) mushrooms
However, the day came when Mo announced she was going home, to New Zealand and was going to train it back down to Melbourne. I had mixed feelings but decided that I should let things play out and so inevitably she left. I wondered if I would ever see her again, I didn't know it, but I would. My parting gift to her was one of Astrid’s puppies, which was probably a bit young to go, but Mo was certain she wanted him and I wanted her to have him.
It was through Lynne that I met Barry Charles, and Andy Tainsch. They were both accomplished musicians and Barry, had and still has, a most amazing voice. Barry was also a victim of childhood polio and was forced to walk with one, sometimes two, sticks. One day, through them, I was invited to a party in Noosa Heads so I fired up the LD5 and took off with Barry.
Andy and Barry
We found the party and it was a drag. Then, if my memory serves me right, Barry stuck his walking stick into the ground and a most foul smell suddenly arose, followed seeping, stinking brown muck. I think Barry had accidentally stuck the end of his walking stick into a weak point of a very full septic tank and the contents were seeking their freedom. We moved away very quickly as the party suddenly became aware of this obnoxious odour.
We thought that maybe it was time to quietly take our leave, jumped into the van and took off. We were just leaving Noosa and all of a sudden coming the other way was, 3FQ and David!
It was like a reunion of brothers and in many ways that is the level our friendship had developed to. It turned out that David had enjoyed his stay on Mission Beach in Northern Queensland but had got wind of me being in Cooroy and decided it was time ‘to get the band’ back together. Then in a strange twist of fate, and purely coincidentally, Lynne decided she also wanted to return to Melbourne freeing up a room, which David took.
now David and I had developed a warm friendship with both Barry and Andy and we were regular visitors to Eumerella, the Tainsch property located near. Doug Tainsch (Andy’s father) welcomed us and along with his wife made us feel at home and we in turn welcomed the hot tea and scones and other delicacies that we were missing so desperately.
The other thing that we discovered about their property was that it had Gold Top mushrooms the size of dinner plates growing there and I am not exaggerating. I made many journeys in vans and cars, as this continuing story will reveal, but some of the most amazing trips were made without moving very far at all.
Many great nights were had at the little farmhouse, with Barry being a regular visitor and he and David would play guitar, I would sit with a pair of bongo’s and we would play and sing the Neil Diamond and JJ Cale songbooks.