Can’t Get This Stuff No More

Here’s a piece I wrote on my relationship with my teen heroes, Van Halen, inspired by author Greg Renoff’s 2015 biography of the band’s early years.

Vale Eddie Van Halen, 26/1/55 - 6/10/20.

Here’s my mixtape of early VH obscurities.

Classic, 1978 vintage Van Halen never really blew up out here in the Antipodes.

Sure, the band’s legend is now cast in solid platinum, but I’d imagine that, back in double-denim triple-bourbon late-70s Straya, these flashy Californian wunderkinds would have presented as a musical bridge too far for the sticky carpet blooded, Acca Dacca indoctrinated rabble.

I mean: the tunes are danceable, the musicianship is impeccable, and, seriously, who does their lead singer fucken think he is…?

In the ensuing years, of course, David Lee Roth dropped in for a solo jaunt (1988’s ‘Skyscraper’ tour), and the band made a belated visit in 1998 with ill-suited (watch the tour videos) singer number three, Extreme’s Gary Cherone, a paltry scrap of an affair after years of anticipation for the main game.

Trust me, I was there, bro…and in the interests of full, shameful disclosure, I’m here to admit that my first fully conscious (nonetheless misguided) Van Halen exposure was via 1991’s bloated, Sammy Hagar fronted album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (such scallywags!), an album perhaps best remembered for its lead singer’s dedication to gentlemen’s exercise wear and its virtuoso guitarist’s deployment of over-sized blouses paired with white jeans.

Second shameful disclosure: I’ve trialled the odd blouse/jean combo, and had a few of the Ed Van Halen hairdos over the years (fuck you, Guitar magazine cover with Jimmy Page, circa 1994).

(Quick caveat: I very quickly realised the original lineup was the real deal, and tortured the parentals with marathon listenings on long family drives, breathlessly rotating the original six albums, on tape, for hundreds of kms on end).

Drilling down into some serious, autobiographical pedantry, yours truly punched in for six months drawing the extremely unauthorised Van Halen: Strange & Twisted Tales, written by Mr Lance Watts, and, as a consequence, ended up drawing a short-lived web comic for Diamond Dave himself (also scribed by the venerable Mr Watts).

Which is all an extremely roundabout way of saying: I’ve given the brothers Van Halen, their totemic original lead singer and the minutiae of their cartoonish, soap opera hijinks an embarrassing amount of consideration down the years.

Greg Renoff’s excellent Van Halen Rising, then, strikes out boldly into completely uncharted realms of the band’s pre-history.

Where, traditionally, the group’s biographical details followed a rigid, tightly controlled (potentially elastic) narrative (the Van Halen brothers) or were beholden to fantastical, free-style embroidery with a wild, myth making eye on the spotlight (Roth), Van Halen Rising offers a forensically researched insight into the nascent, priapic evolution of the combo’s original sunshine sound, look, dynamic and power structure through the insights of over 200 interviewees from way back when.

Renoff deftly sketches his tale’s quirky dramatis personae — the migrant siblings, inseparable; the ADHD, driven rich kid; the series of dodgily mustachioed bassists and their eventual, lukewarm (okay, amiable) replacement.

Charting the band’s rise from junior high novelty act to gigging bar band, Van Halen Rising enlists a legion of former girlfriends, schoolmates, neighbours, managers, cops and riff raff to bring you a sense of the artful debauchery, calculated bonhomie, marketing chops and carnival antics of the nascent superstars’ early backyard parties, gigs and ongoing internal wars of attrition and egomania.

All the kinks, licentiousness, drive and persistence are in ready supply, Renoff’s bio is replete with refreshing colour, detail and heretofore unheard insight. Van Halen tragics (amongst whose numbers I’d cheerfully include myself) will be delighted.

Insiders like Ted Templeman, producer of the band’s eponymous, landmark debut, provide early testament to the band’s contradictory alchemy, while Renoff conjures scenes from pure anecdote, evoking an era of innocent hedonism sliding into the excesses of the ‘80s.

Ending in 1978 with the release of Van Halen’s first album, Van Halen Rising crescendos, much like Eddie’s signature six-string blitzkrieg, Eruption, with a note of sustained portent.

If you’re into the band, this book is a given; if you’re into well-spun behind the scene tales of acts in their ascent, ditto. This is an accessible, vastly entertaining, admirably researched prelude to the tale we tragics know so very intimately.

Final, shameful disclosure: your correspondent was once involved in the choreography of a high school aerobics class soundtracked to the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge single Runaround.

It was a time.

GARBO - short fiction

Brad was in his basement man-cave, scoping the drone footage.

Sickly blue CRT flicks returned from the Wasp’s deeply primitive drone firmware.

It was a bird’s eye view situation. A peloton of soft geezers fizzed past on a tail-wind, lost focus, then returned to clarity as the sky-borne electric eye centred.

Brad adjusted settings, flicked through the bands.

The Outriders – state Gestapo, lycra-shod sentinels in light armour – rode the outskirts at sun-up, enforcing the Curfew. Silent, superannuated cops on thirty-K carbon fibre rockets.

The Yu variant had leaked to the mainland from the island state of Southern Arcadia and steadily encroached north, and here we were.

Federation at war. Eternal nightsticks. Infinite lockdown.

Vaccine supplies were decimated, meth labs requisitioned as last resorts.

Water supplies were looking average.

Food at a premium.

Thanks, hill-people.

A torn ember of sunrise, the horizon a smouldering rip of fire, briefly blinded the Wasp.

Brad recalibrated again, dropping a couple of spectrums.

Refocused.

There they were, glowing infra-red in leafy Yerwoong, average house price a lazy $2.4m.

First, the Garbo, swinging his truck’s arse-end into the bend as the pigs accelerated into a sharp left, maw gaping.

Then, a gleaming lethal filament licking across the screen, neck height.

A thick black tube, concertinaed, guzzled human fat from an expensive hotel’s trap on a monitor. A face, bloated and fatally aerated, gurned up from another. A hedge-trimmer bore down on exposed genitals, making blunt, bloody work. A beer keg full of fresh viscera briefly winked by on yet another.

Brad popped a No-Doze, chewed, tasting earthy upper.

His jaw locked as the peloton accelerated into their decapitations.

Six heads cascaded, thunkity thunk thunk thunk (thunk thunk), quick, clean and satisfying.

The Garbo made short work of it all – bodies into the crusher, bikes requisitioned.

A street sweeper, bringing up the rear, sorted the heads-errant situation.

Here’s what was happening.

The Revolt was on.

It was Brad’s day off – he was a delivery driver – which meant he worked a shift manning the drones.

The Yu variant – that’s Greek, by the way – had cast the Class diaspora into even more extreme relief. The haves had their Outriders protecting their largesse, the have-nots were merely fucked. Essential servitude was the order of the day, probably a death sentence, while the non-essentials wallowed.

Brad had a plan, though.

He could broadcast the Truth.

The Wasp just needed carbon fibre.

More antennae to throw the signal.

More Outriders, more pelotons.

The fat-trappers, the keg-haulers, the arborists and all of the other invisible laborers were out there, collecting.

Getting it done.

Doing the work.

Boosting the signal.

Brad tapped at the keyboard, offering coordinates to another Wasp, another cohort of workers in the Capital.

Parliament House.

He popped another No-Doze, tasted dirt, and hit send.

Time to do some actual work.

Best of 2019 mixtape

ET CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES (sigh)

Extremely white middle class confession: I’ve never been able to maintain interest in more than one telly show at a time.

I am an individual for whom peak prestige telly has been alienating.

As a somewhat early adopter of the no-telly aesthetic – not to mention being at the whims of the Australian internet infrastructure farce – the ol’ boob tube hasn’t really been my go-to entertainment source since the Buffy shows finished up.

Thus, a decade or two of “must watch or be a pariah at the watercooler!!!11!” hot takes have washed over me like a warm, numbing antiseptic wave of DGAF.

Of course, I’ve dipped in here and there over the years, but have been left nonplussed by the culture of constant mandatory viewing, usually tapping out after an episode or two (see: a list too long to include here).

The advent of binge viewing felt like a punishment, unless suitably medicated.

By and large it’s been one show at a time for me, ever since Joss Whedon hung up his vampire slaying fedora.

HBO’s Watchmen is currently my show.

Disclosure: I have seen approximately three episodes of Damon Lindelof’s oeuvre, combined.

Watchmen, the show, is set thirty odd years after the books.

It’s a world where superheroes were outlawed, but in which cops now wear masks. 

White supremacy underpins the show’s narrative, much as it does our present day.

Nothing is really that different, but everything is.

There’s a man in a castle stage managing clones, a superman exiled on Mars and a 105 year old African American man maybe lynched the police chief and just might be the ur superhero in this universe.

They might even all be the same bloke.

But probably not.

The show runs the gamut of Important Concerns, pivoting off, updating and expanding on Co-Creator Dave Gibbons’ work (that one’s for the credits nerds).

The morality of justice and the murky notion of heroism is back under the microscope here, promising to prove irksome to those who like their worldview high contrast.

Which is to say: I despair that there those who still think cop = good guy as much as they think Rorschach, the book’s protagonist, is a hero.

It’s eccentric, it’s educational, it elaborates on and expands the originals in weird and wild ways and that’s just the first two episodes: HBO’s Watchmen is my show.

BATTEN, DOWN - short fiction

Batten: 26.3645° S, 152.9677° E.

The Mayor, Jimbo Paddock, had annexed the surf beach and area surrounding his wellness cafe at sunset.

He was a boiled-pink, barrel-chested, lats-flared, fluoro dick-stickered, self-funded retiree Spartan with an iron-streaked braid.

Murdered the fuck out of a bunch of families and resort staff, right up in our faces, as the light dimmed.

Jimbo was into exotic food and carried a spear he’d made from his decommissioned Cool Cabana. He’d slung the shade sail’s bloodied polyester sleeve over his shoulder, filling it with gory trophies of his innumerable kills.

A real mean Boomer survivalist motherfucker.

An apexagenarian predator.

The resort sauna’s toilet had been full of blood.

That’s when we’d decided to make a break for it, obviously.

It was our first actual family holiday in, well, ever. We’d burnt all our financial bridges for this solitary 72 hours of scheduled familial bliss: me, him, bub.

Saved like fuckers for a weekend on the white sand.
Aspired.

Gone hard.

Sweated, scrimped, saved.

Sacrificed.
Argued.

Saved again.

Remortgaged.

Gotten a loan.

Argued.

Gotten a loan from the parents.

We needed the break.

It really was that dire.

Of course we were at each other’s throats.

So it was sort of a relief when the end of the world kicked in…

Read the full story in Yarns From the Fuck-You-Ni-Verse.

Collateral Damage

I picked up my copy of Collateral Damage: The Zodiac Mindwarp American Tour Diaries from the late, lamented Polyester Books on Brunswick Street, Fitzroy in 2004.

Ever the savvy economic manager, I dropped ten percent of the 500 bucks I’d earned (at roughly $7.50 an hour) making my mates Neon’s debut video clip for a major label on this and Fucked By Rock.

Both tomes were penned by Mark Manning, the notorious Zodiac Mindwarp, a reptile in SS leathers I’d encountered on some old Rage tape doing a song I’d misremembered as ‘Presidents of the United States of Love’ (it was actually ‘Prime Mover’).

Manning, a slippery former comics artist and graphic designer who’d sniffed the skirts of the ad world - hang on a moment - is a dab hand at Wagnerian sex and drugs and rock and rutting in both the musical and literary senses.

Wrap your oculars around his other books - Get Your Cock Out!, Bad Wisdom, The Wild Highway and so on - and you’ll no doubt clock that the author is prone to flights of Caligula via John Milius fancy. 

Collateral Damage: The Zodiac Mindwarp American Tour Diaries came out in late 2002, and is purportedly a record of the band sleazing around America in the wake of 9/11. I’d imagine Twitter’s collective heads would have exploded if that knotty cyst on our collective unconscious had existed in the Bush era, such is Manning’s casual, cynical dismissal of the moment the 21st century hit the clogged s-bend.

Zodiac and his band of ageing, lardy pork swordsmen are far more concerned with snorting, buggering and puking their way around the States, and if that’s not a sound metaphor for the whole sorry state we find ourselves in nearly twenty years later I don’t know what is.

Mark Manning definitely casts a long shadow over Home Brewed - his gear was the first (for me) that connected the Gonzo self obliteration of Hunter Thompson’s American Dream with the sleazy, take it to the limit emptiness nihilistic excess of all the bands I used to love and now find desperately sad, even if their songs still do sort of own.

2004 has a lot to answer for, as this reading series will attest. Home Brewed often skates the razor’s edge of Manning’s brand of filthy gonzo autobiographical fantastia - it’ll be up to you to discern just when.

(My copy of Collateral Damage is presently worth 40 bucks, so who’s a canny investor now, eh?)

A eulogy for MAD magazine

So, MAD Magazine’s having its last rites read.

There’ve been a lot of spilt Tweets, a lot of gnashed teeth, a lot of think-pieces awkwardly crowbarring in a “What, Me Worry?”.

Honestly, though - when was the last time anyone actually bought it?

Maybe we should have seen the writing on the wall when Trump, whose pop cultural memory surely climaxed in 1988, bestowed Dem presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg with the nickname ‘Alred E. Neuman’.

Ominously, Buttigieg, 38, professed to have fuck all idea who that was.

And that’s fair enough, considering MAD magazine – the dorky mascot’s home – has barely rated a blip on the pop cultural radar since the days of LA Law.

It was announced last week that the once influential satire mag, now a quarterly, would be consigned to pumping out reprints until the end of the subscription cycle, when the masthead would probably be taken out behind the shed and finally put out of its misery.

I picked up the reboot a year ago out of morbid interest.It was grossly expensive and utterly devoid of laughs, mostly consisting of softballs for Trump and reheated Spy V Spy japes.

The Trump era offers plenty of chum for a satire mag with ‘nads, but instead we were offered up toothless, reheated staples with a coat of 21st century kitchen sink graphic design, wallowing in the kid glove pop culture skewerings MAD has leant on since I was a kid,

It’s an ignominious, wet fart ending for the iconic satire rag, which was birthed out of EC Comics by the iconic Bill Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman as a counterpoint to the square and paranoid fifties.

The ‘usual gang of idiots’ that made up the magazine’s golden era included master cartoonists like Jack Davis (below), Wally Wood, Al Jaffee, Sergio Aragones and on and on. Even as the harder edges were shorn off, names like Mort Drucker, Angelo Torres, Don Martin and Sam Viviano resonate.

Maybe not Duck Edwing though, he shat me up the adolescent wall. 

(There were obviously a crack stable of writers, too, but the only one that springs immediately to mind is Dick DeBartolo and his endless movie parodies. Many of the artists did their finest work writing for themselves, too.)

Go back and read the slender paperback collections and marvel at the razor sharp bite of the mag’s first golden decades, a wild, nervy outlaw spirit lasted into the late ‘70s. They were transgressive, occasionally nasty and ugly, often tasteless.

MAD was a masthead that felt dangerous, countercultural on a par with Rolling Stone or Esquire at the time.

The death knell surely sounded when MAD detached from the zeitgeist and kept rehashing the 17 greatest hits, while reviled pretenders like Cracked evolved and adapted to the accelerating times.

I gave up on MAD as I exited my mid-teens and got into “grown up” comics, but the irreverent sensibility’s always stuck with me. Home Brewed contains a healthy dose of the snickering, knowing asides of MAD at its best, I hope.Let’s be honest - the Aussie version, which rudely replaced the OG Yank version on newsstands in the late ‘80s was unreadable dreck - especially considering the available talent in this country. An embarrassment.

In an ideal world, MAD would eventually be rebooted and overseen by the transgressive, contemporary descendants of Gaines, Kurtzman, Wood and so on.

Cartoonist Matt Bors made the offer on Twitter, and the prospect of a rebirth with angry, relevant creators like Eli Valley, Lisa Czech and Johnny Ryan at the helm is a compelling one. 

So, yeah.

While we need you in the here and now, MAD, you just aren’t cut out for it in your present form.

Evolve or die.

Vale.

Behind the scenes at the ALP policy retreat, June 2019

ALP post-election policy meet up, Ablo’s man-cave, Marrickville.

The scene: it’s your standard wood laminate lined back shed situation. 

Old Picture Magazine, Australasian Post and CarToons pin ups festoon the walls. There’s an old foamcore Red Eye Records sign hung over the bar, which is stocked exclusively with Tooheys New. Ablo’s wheels of steel are dormant on the bar, mixing headphones perched on top of some truly egregious BOSE woofers.

Joel Fitzgibbons (absent) has positioned a cardboard standee of Acca Dacca’s Angus Young with his dacks down on top of one of the Razorback pinnies next to the Happy Hour Tiki Bar.

The old chrome and neon jukebox is unplugged in deference to the imminent, epic meeting of the ALP’s most throbbing progressive minds.

Ablo, Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Shadow Home Affairs Minister Kristina Keneally have their arses parked on pleather HSV beanbags, which are arrayed around an empties-strewn glass coffee table. 

A glowering Penny Wong is on video hook up via Hang Outs, beamed in on Ablo’s superior ADSL2+ secret shed shenanigans cable connection.

Richard Marles is at home with a crook tummy.

Ablo’s decked out in a Rabbitohs beanie and a Joy Division tee under a flanno. He’s wearing Rivers acid wash jorts and Birkenstocks. There’s a tinnie perched on his gut, and he’s humming The Choirboys’ ‘Run to Paradise’ to himself.

Chalmers sports full Maroons kit trakky daks with a #STARTADANI t-shirt slung over the top. He’s from Queensland, you know.

Keneally has opted for a full nun’s habit.

We pick up the meeting with Chalmers in full flight.

“ - polling continually indicates that voters relate most to fat losers who don’t challenge or threaten them in any way whatsoever, preferably ones that remind them of someone they bullied mercilessly at school, which is why I decided not to run for the leadership -”

“Yes, Jim, we fucken know that Billary squibbed it with all that pinko shit,” Ablo interrupts. “Clearly the punters weren’t into his is-he-isn’t-he bullshit, and bugger that for a joke moving forward. We’re going to be like white on rice with Scummo this parliament, I promise you. You won’t get a fag paper between us on policy…”

“Bang on, Ablo! Screw the plebs, we’re going to climb into the coits of those cashed up tradie shitheads for maximum bang for our electoral buck!” Chalmers froths.

Penny Wong, continuing to glower from Ablo’s clagged up old Dell laptop: “Well, we’re going to have to explain to them why Bali will be under water in 20 years, Ablo.”

“Hahaha twenty years! Fuck, Penny! That’s ages! We need to focus on the here and now, bugger “the future”! That’s why I’m unveiling our 2022 election slogan here in the cave today.”

Ablo flicks open a bashed up old A3 visual arts diary with a flourish, revealing a page with a post-it note in the top corner and a busy biro rendering of said slogan:

IS THERE A VOTE IN IT? 2022

“Whaddya think, guys? If they go low, we’re going lower! Izzy Folau for Grand God-Bothering Chief High Commissioner! Religious freedom to crucify bum bandits in the street? Tick! Enshrine bigotry in the school curriculum? Done and done! Third world internet? Yes we can! Eugenics? Why not! Anti asylum seeker missile platforms? Great for the South Australian economy! Toney Abbott for UN Envoy! Sweet as! Abolish Newstart and hand out bow and arrows? Hilarious! Abolish the tax free threshold? Eat the poor! Robodebt? Fucken send in ED-209! Repeal gun reform? Make things interesting - hand 'em out! Intervention 2.0? Fuck yeah! RFID chips for everyone! Invade New Zealand? That Jacinda chick’s getting uppity! Make Chris Kenny the MD of the ABC? Already sent him the PD! Franking credits credits? Boomers or bust! Pump ‘em with fucken multivitamins and bull cum and hopefully they’ll live to 100! Alan Jones for Governor General! Fuck yeah! Can we frack Uluru? My IPA contact says yes! Kristina -” 

“Yes, Ablo?”

“We’re really going to stick it to that munted sack of melted Play-Doh Dutto - what are the odds you do a bit of nudge nudge winky cheeky signalling to the Young Nationals set - if you get my meaning - and sign off your tweets with ‘KKK’?”

“Well, Ablo, my name is Kristina Kerscher Keneally!”

“Fucking hell, really? You can’t write this stuff!”

“Check my wiki!”

“KKK, She-Wolf of the -”

Chalmers: “Ablo, did you know there’s a bloke on twitter with your name that draws sex stuff? It won’t fly in Queensland!”

Penny Wong sighs sadly as she motions to terminate her hook up.

That’s when the roof of Ablo’s man-cave collapses inwards, birthing a crack squad of Australian Federal Pigs in full Judge Dredd tactical gear.

Their leader peels off his ski mask, revealing the pudding-like Bavarian mug of Mathias Cormann.

He sparks a Cuban and does his accent.

“Ve’ff been vatching you on your un-zehcured Hang Outs session, Ah-blo. Hullo, Penny.”

“Mathias.”

She’s terse.

Ablo rises creakily from his bean bag, pinkens and spits, “Just get it over with, you bean counting, goose-stepping fuckwit!” 

“I’ve been zent by Scow-Mow. He vants to know…”

“Out with it, man!” Ablo sneers.

“Haff you got any spare policies?”

/FIN.