Part 1: A beginning

In reflecting on the process of music making, here’s some observations of a group reaching its creative peaks and some insights on drumming as a part of the whole, in performance and recording.
 

When I was 19, I responded to a 3RRR radio ad for a psychedelic rock drummer. This was my introduction to a band who would become The Bo-Weevils.  As it turned out, the members were aficionados of wild 60’s garage psych-rock and, even though I was listening to mainstream bands like U2 and The Police more than anything back then, it was as good a foundation as any for developing my rudimentary drumming skills.

Under the tutelage of lead guitarist, organist and singer Ian, and coupled with Steve’s fuzz soaked guitar and Neil’s booming basslines, we channelled a naïve intensity that saw us regularly playing the St Kilda alternative music scene of the mid 80’s.

Every band needs a HQ from which to base it’s operations, and Ian’s sprawling California Bungalow served as the launching pad for touring Sydney a few times and releasing a self-titled EP and a single on the Kavern 7 label. Ours was a raucous garage punk manifesto, summed up on the 7inch single That Girl:

‘If that car don’t go
and that ring don’t shine
I’ll buy another
for that girl of mine’
 

A highly charged gig at The Tote captured the essence of this line-up and a great example is the stomp of Ball And Chain with the desperate howling of a vocal line, piecing Farfisa organ and amoebic like fuzz guitar driven forward by a pounding primeval beat:

‘You know that I, I go to jail
with a ball and chain
it’s draggin’ me down
draggin’ me down’

Anyway, just like one of Ian’s old Citroens, the wheels eventually came off and the catalyst for an accelerated period of development came in the form of a new line-up with Davern taking over guitar, lead vocals and organ and Nino on guitar and vocals. It is this period from ’87-‘94 that really got interesting in terms of a classic creative arc of recorded work. I still use a lot of stylistic things from this era in my drumming, albeit with other rhythmic approaches learnt along the way.

Musicians develop their technique by relentlessly breaking down a phrase, lick, fill or pattern into the smallest component and slowly repeating these until they are in the muscle memory and can be deployed with speed in any given situation. With garage rock I was often stuck playing single stroke rolls around the kit and it sometimes sounded like a drum set tumbling down the stairs. A fresh approach helped me to go back to the principle of repetitive and guided practice and an ongoing fascination with the art of arranging interesting drum parts.
 

Part 2: The transition
 

The transition from garage band to something more accomplished took The Bo-Weevils about 3 years of extending our grasp of playing rudimentary rock and developing the chemistry of an original group vision. This metamorphosis began with the 1987 EP Have You Been To Mars (Kavern 7), engineered by Ross Giles on an 8-track home studio with minimal production and a purist 60’s aesthetic.

This slab of wax is still a garage band consolidating the basics of technique, dynamics and song craft but it has the redemption of the title track as an exemplary garage rock tune that is full of energy as well as being tightly focused in its playing and arrangement with an authentically hilarious vocal. The Future Primitives recently did a cool cover version and video of this track.

On this EP and the debut album that followed I used a late 60’s Premier 5 piece kit with mediocre cymbals and it kinda shows in the washy sound and coconutty tom tom sound.

Part 3: Stretching out
 

The 1988 album Where Particular People Congregate (Mr Spaceman Records) benefits hugely from recording in a large studio at Sing Sing Studios, Richmond with engineer/producer Kaj Dahlstrom and with the band stretching more ambitiously into the psychedelic realm. In particular, there are two key tracks that are economical, focused and played with a growing skilful conviction.

The title track Where Particular People Congregate is a shimmering beauty of jangly guitar psyched-out pop with a generous serve of plate reverb on the mix and soft vocals guiding you to a Zen state of being. I even overdubbed a woodblock for some temple like ambience in the chorus and the limitations of my kit were skilfully masked with gated reverb and the subtle mixing of snare samples. This technique can result in a machine-like quality, note the dreaded 1980’s drum curse on many an album of that era, which was avoided by Kaj’s expertise in this case.

The other track that leaps out is Indian Bride, with a sound inspired from the Underground Paisley scene of bands like The Dream Syndicate and Green on Red. This vignette of the American Indian genocide is tightly played with a superb harmonica solo and insightful lyrics:

‘All the horses they’re with us
Yeah you could hear them, they were singing our song
I saw the signals of smoke, the flash of blades
I knew it wouldn’t be long
Then suddenly they are on us,
brothers falling at my side
I looked up into the blazing sun
saw the face of my Indian Bride’

The drumkit arrangement works nicely with creative groupings of the bass drum and tom fills signalling the stop-start attack which a reviewer likened to sending smoke signals! The same reviewer noted we were moving ‘out of the garage into the carport’, and this meant a leap into a broader canvas of sound, song craft and storytelling.

One of the snappy garage-rock tracks on the album, ‘She’s far out’, was made into a fun video as part of a New Zealand tour promo.

Part 4: The watershed album

The band was now playing live and touring regularly, the famous Punters Club was our base where Nino served his speciality drink ‘Cosmic Reality’ and with whom I lived down the road in a share house behind the Black Cat café. Fitzroy was kind of the Haight-Ashbury of Melbourne at that time with cheap Victorian terraces to rent, diverse people drifting in and out, plenty of arty venues, bars, alternative food and lifestyles. Around this time I recall Timothy Leary gave a talk nearby at the 3RRR radio studios on virtual reality, which drew freaks from around the world for a few colourful weeks!

The video filmed at the Punters for the upbeat track ‘Remember’ reflects the vibe of this time whilst footage of a public TV benefit at the Richmond Club is a wild snapshot where I had the pleasure of a caveman playing tambourine suspended upside-down over my head! The later gig was captured in a hilarious comic format and featured in a limited release pizza pack for the next album.

We returned to Sing Sing Studios with a batch of road-tested songs to record Destroyer of Worlds (Rubber Records). Recorded in march-april 1990 with Kaj behind the desk, this album came out on both vinyl and the new Compact Disc medium.
 
At this point I bought a 1975 Sonor Phonic John Bonham style kit, it was a monster with a 24” Bass drum and a thunderous four tom tom configuration with a crystalline set of new Zildjian cymbals. I was also studying big sounding drum performances for adapting to our songs, of which the most outstanding example is probably the cut Captain Nemo’s Secret Garden. We were mixing in sound effects and getting involved with production and for this track the drum intro is like a giant crashing through a clearing and sending birds twittering into the forest.
I nicked the beat from an old Pink Floyd song Remember a Day and turbo charged it for an album highlight of controlled psychedelic splendour.

By now Davern and Nino had perfected the intermeshing guitar fabric we could cut our cloth from and I co-opted more of my favourite beats and drum arrangements to help lay the foundation for glorious tunes like Again. This is a slow burn tale complete with a revelatory chorus awash in tom rolls and chimes:

‘And again I felt like my fate was closing in
And again I felt the weight, of the wages of my sin’

Middle of Nowhere was released as a single and as a dusty ode to outback isolation it’s a choice cut, however it is a song I would love to re-record as I think we have a better version in us.

The album had plenty of engaging diversity and was generally much more professionally performed, although there’s sometimes some niggling thing that bugs me with time and money often meaning compromise. The best take more often than not, and especially with drumming, is a steady marking of time, rather than an over thought flourish or embellishment.

Other standout performances included Palestine, with a war-torn sound effect intro over a metronomic time bomb cross snare pattern. Also, the hypnotic tom tom rhythm of the title cut Destroyer of Worlds is resplendent with chiming 12 string guitar, lyrics painting the horror of nuclear war underscored by soaring female backing vocals and a veritable meltdown ending. We had come a long way in only a few years and, with a measure of success, The Bo Weevils were looking like they had a shot at the ‘big time’.

Part 5: The comedown
 

The early 90’s was characterised by the rise of grunge and that street level ‘tell it how it is’ attitude resonated with us. Nirvana’s Nevermind album was on at every party and lounge room you went to, and no doubt this scene influenced the next few years of the band’s development, leading to recording Reap (Rubber Records) in 1992, once again at Sing Sing Studios.

Things didn’t work so consistently on this album but there were some convincing tracks of alt-guitar rock performances such as Build a Boy with a nice bass groove and dramatic duelling lead guitar work. Breakdown has a tangible foreboding feel which was a blast to play live the way it builds up and explodes into choruses with choked crash cymbal accents.

The technique mentioned earlier of mixing sampled and gated reverb drum sounds with natural ones is exemplified here with the sledge hammer snare on the apocalyptic The Afterglow and the album ends appropriately to the sound of a crash cymbal being shredded over a tangle of distorted guitars.

Also, in this year we released a live album If God Was An Astronaut (Rubber Records) recorded at Sing Sing with an in-house audience. I think it’s generally rare that live albums add much to the originals except perhaps some ‘on the spot’ impro and energy, although a new song called Teenage Pride revisits garage rock territory in a cool Velvet Underground kinda way and an edit of Planetarium, with it’s Bolero like march into sonic bliss, made for an effective theme for Neil’s 3RRR show ‘The Australian Mood’.

Luckily the best was yet to come as the band was able to channel turbulent times into a worthy mid 90’s alt-rock classic.

Part 6: Out on a high
 

By 1994 we were regulars on the Melbourne pub circuit and still weighing up the logistics of touring Europe, maybe one of those sliding door moments we should have taken a gamble on. As it was, we had undertaken tours to Adelaide, Sydney and Auckland and played with diverse bands including the reformed Master Apprentices and The Loved Ones as well as contemporaries like Died Pretty, The Powder Monkeys and The Moffs.

For the album Burn (Rubber Records) we decided to work at 001 studios in Carlton with our tried and trusted live mixer Martyn Robinson as engineer. Marty knew his art backwards and pulled a magnificent natural sound from our dark and churning set of new songs. However, when it came to producing as a team, we got lost and frustrated and the following month in June we took the tapes to Sing Sing completing the mixing and production with Kaj, minus any drum samples or sound effects.

This album is probably the most consistent and powerful work we had achieved and, I guess in times of uncertainty and doubt, when the going gets tough, the tough get going!

The opening cut Stormy World rocks with precision and purpose despite the bleak nature of the tale of personal loss. The dual attack guitar playing reaches epic heights here as well, this was the key for our sound as a reviewer noted, ‘when the guitars come crunching up against a wall of drums, that’s when the sparks fly’.

Dog is a finely-honed piece of grunge brutality that is a real test for a drummer’s stamina. It’s the fastest song we played at around 180bpm with a hellish hurricane of lead guitar, a snarling vocal put down and even an ending of the tape running out in true grunge rock style.

The gem of the entire band career is arguably Into Sunshine, a tightly arranged and powerfully executed piece of heavy alt-rock, it made lugging my Bonham kit around the country worth it! This track was released as the single for a ‘taster’ EP on Rubber Records:

‘Woke up this morning
Newspaper warning
I’m livin’ in crazy times
….and outside the weather
looks like its never
gonna break into sunshine’

Adding some light and shade to the mix there is the almost funky bounce of the power-pop Friend and two chord wonder Closer Still finishes the album as a homage to Joy Divisions Transmission, making this album a great way to go out on a high.

As things turned out events conspired against the band making the ‘next level’ and we called it a day the following year with a few compilation and anthology albums subsequently released. Incidentally we remastered the Burn album for a successful reunion gig in 2015 and so, with a number of ideas archived for possible revisiting...never say die!
 

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