Read an Excerpt
LOOK MUM, NO INSTRUMENTS
Running was still far from becoming a part of my life. All I wanted to do at this point was to become a bass player in a rock band. I immediately went on the dole — also known as the ‘Paul Keating Scholarship’ or the ‘Fortnightly Arts Grant’. It was rather easy to get unemployment benefits in those days. You really just had to turn up to the CES office every two weeks and be polite. Each Saturday I would eagerly scour the newspaper entertainment classifieds for bass player gigs. I don’t know what part of this process broke down, because six weeks after moving to Melbourne I was singing in a barbershop quartet.
If you’ve never seen nor heard a barbershop quartet, let me try to describe it for you. It’s a group that sings music in the style of ‘a capella’. A capella is an Italian term that literally means ‘can’t afford instruments’.
Imagine the song ‘Tom’s Diner’ by Suzanne Vega. It’s the song where she sings unaccompanied, describing all the things that go on in a diner like how she’s waiting for her coffee and someone’s got an umbrella and two people are talking and she’s reading the zzzzzzzzzzz… Sorry, I dropped off for a moment there. Where was I? Right, so imagine there’s Suzanne Vega singing with no instruments, actually imagine four Suzanne Vegas singing with no instruments, and they are all wearing stripy vests and boater hats and they’ve all got large black moustaches… This is not really working, is it?
If you don’t know what a barbershop quartet is, Google it.
Our barbershop quartet was called Four Chairs No Waiting. Four Chairs No Waiting is an old term often heard in turn-of-the-century barbershops that means ‘can’t afford instruments’ or something.
We sang around Melbourne at various fetes, festivals, shopping centres and theatre restaurants. We did the floorshow at one that boasted it was ‘Melbourne’s only fondue theatre restaurant’. You think fondue is cheesy? You should have seen the show…
The show wasn’t that bad, actually, though the owner, who considered himself a bit of an ‘actor’, insisted on being a part of the show, and we had to write a sketch for him to ‘act’ in.
I remember that the theatre restaurant was located, oddly enough, between a Jewish bakery and a Christian bookstore in a strip of shops in a rather dull outer suburb and that it had a total capacity of 51 people. The three other members of the barbershop quartet were a pot-smoking, hard-drinking hippie; a John-Farnham-loving Mormon; and a fuzzy-haired, ex-operatic bass singer with a metal plate in his head. We would have made an excellent social squash team.
The hippie was the one to whom I could relate the most. Apart from being a decent singer, he was also a pretty good actor and he had a great sense of theatrics and professionalism when it came to performing. Well… mostly. As long as the pre-performance routine involved a good bottle of red and a joint or two. I have the hippie to thank for introducing me to positive thinking and meditation, and also for teaching me how to roll three-paper joints. Though in retrospect, most of the positive thinking and meditation usually came after one of the three-paper joints. One night the hippie went onstage at the House of Cheese or the Fondue Hut, or whatever the fuck it was called, after consuming half a bottle of scotch and three or four flu tablets. In one of the all-time worst performances I have ever been involved with on any stage ever, he managed to forget his lines, fall on one of the front tables, and vomit off the back of the stage. All during the opening number.
The bass singer, who we called Big Roscoe, was an intriguing man. Due to the plate in his head, he had some memory problems that caused no end of trouble regarding rehearsals and forgotten gigs. It was frustrating as he stubbornly refused to use a diary. We were stuck between feeling sorry for him and wanting to punch him.
