Chapter 1: What recent literary award did Melissa Lukashenko win?
This is an ABC podcast.
Hello and welcome to The Bookshelf on RN, online on your podcast catcher. I'm Kate Evans.
And I'm Cassie McCullough. And the first thing we should say is congratulations to Melissa Lukashenko, who won the Miles Franklin Literary Award on Tuesday night for her novel Too Much Lip. Well done.
Fabulous novel, fierce, funny. She'll be on the book show on Monday talking to Claire Nicholls and also keep an ear out for a conversation that she's having with Daniel Browning. They're both Bundjalung people. That's going to be a very special conversation, I reckon.
And delightfully, Daniel was on hand to award her that prize on Tuesday. So good.
And you read your Emily Dickinson And I, my Robert Frost And we note our place with bookmarkers That measure what we've lost
Now, today on The Bookshelf, we're talking all things counterculture with the help of three music writers, including Lily Brett, who headed off to London and the USA from Melbourne in 1967 to interview everyone from Janis Joplin to the Kinks.
And also Andrew Stafford, who wrote about the punk and indie scene in Brisbane in his book Pig City and whose latest is called Something to Believe In. He'll be along later for our Me, My Shelf and I segment.
And here with us, right here, right now, is the legendary Stuart Coop, music writer, dedicated and wide-ranging reader. His latest book is Roadies, The Secret History of Australian Rock and Roll, which flew off the shelves. His next project is a biography of Paul Kelly.
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Chapter 2: Who are the music writers featured in this episode?
Stuart, good to have you here.
Lovely to be back with you both.
Hi, Stuart.
How are you doing?
Now, how do you get started as a music journo?
I'm a great believer you just start doing it. It helps if you like music. Well, that's how I started. I still type after all these years. I've typed and had millions and millions of words published. I still type with one finger. Oh, that's good to hear. And I have no formally recognised qualification for doing this. I just happen to really like music and like expressing my thoughts.
But you can't just like music. You kind of actually have to hate it as well and be willing to say so.
Yeah, look, I think that's one of the things I lament about music journalism these days. You know, there's not enough nasty. And, you know, I was lucky enough to... Bring back the Biff, you reckon? Oh, Biff is good because, I mean, every review these days seems to be four stars out of five. I'm wondering if there's any record that's not made that's not quite great but pretty good.
And, you know, I came out of an era, the late 70s, early 80s, when I was doing a real lot of music reviewing, and if something was truly, truly wretched, it was absolutely fine to say that. And I think you need to do that. I mean, you don't want to, you know, criticise everything, but it provides a frame of reference for what is really good.
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Chapter 3: How did Stuart Coop get started as a music journalist?
So I read all of the fiction and nonfiction that was considered to be counterculture. And I had the whole earth catalogue. What's that? It was a massive telephone box. book-like guide to the counterculture and surviving in this era. It was a global phenomenon. Oh, really? Oh, too young, obviously. The Whole Earth Catalogue. Go and Google it. Okay. Worth a fortune these days. Everybody had one.
I mean, you weren't a child of the, you know, growing up in the 60s and in the early 70s if you didn't have the Whole Earth Catalogue. Okay. Which both of you clearly didn't have. All right. Okay. That's why you're here. Let's move on. Okay. But no, you know, look, I read the Hunter S. Thompson's and the Jack Kerouac's and all of the writers that were considered counterculture.
You know, I was at university. You know, what are you going to do? Of course you're going to read these books. And I was at probably at the time Australia's most radical university, which was Flinders. in Adelaide in South Australia. So we were studying this, you know, Richard Brautigan I'm thinking of now and Allen Ginsberg, all of these people as part of our curriculum.
Who ironically became the canon.
Yes. But at the time that I started writing, no, I was a punk rocker, thanks.
LAUGHTER
Yeah, I was Clash, Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, The Dab, Hello.
The Dab, which you could argue, I mean, is still a counterculture in that it was counter to all sorts of things.
It was an alternative culture. I mean, we were, you know, flailing against these, you know, horrible dinosaurs from the, in lots of cases we were flailing. Well, these bands were directly up against these big superstars that had emerged in the 60s and the early, early 70s.
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Chapter 4: What was the significance of the Whole Earth Catalogue in counterculture?
For what? Gee, this is great.
Oh.
You and I will talk afterwards.
I need an education.
But no, Go Set was absolutely it. You know, it was a precursor to the magazines that were around. You know, I came to Sydney to write for Ram magazine, Rock Australia magazine. That was coming out of Sydney. Duke was coming out of Melbourne. But Go Set was it. You know, Wendy Saddington, the great Australian singer, had an advice column in there.
Ian Meldrum was about sort of 14 and writing for Go Set. Boy, you didn't miss a Go Set if you wanted to know what was going on.
But the person who Ian Meldrum took over from on Go Set was Lily Brett. Now, we now possibly think of Lily Brett as a memoirist, as a novelist, an Australian who's lived in New York for a really long time, but she left school and went straight into Go Set. I talked to her a couple of days ago from New York. Let's hear what she had to say.
Well, I see you got your... Brand new leopard skin, pillbox hair.
Yes, it was my entree to the world of writing. If I hadn't got the job at GoSet, I never would have known I could write. It was not something I thought about. So you just sort of fell into that? Well, I did, yeah, because I needed to get a job. And my closest friend said to me, oh, there's a very interesting new newspaper opening up. why don't you go and see them? So I did go and see them.
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Chapter 5: What are the defining moments of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival?
And someone said, why? And she said, after you've spent five hours talking to John Lennon and the tape is blank, she said, you have a backup.
Oh.
So there's either I don't have a tape recorder or, yes, and now I don't know what you're like when you're recording things, but certainly for my entire life I'm always nervously looking and I miss the days of cassettes because I used to get reassurance from just watching that little cassette wheel going round and round and round.
I find it's 100% better when you press record than when you don't.
I think we've all lost an interview. You do it once, you never do it again.
Well, you hope you don't do it again. You hope.
But I kind of like the idea of the lost five hours of John Lennon. It's almost an invitation for a speculative play or a piece of fiction.
Yeah, but can you imagine just going, wow, you know, John Lennon has just told me everything about his entire life. This is the best interview ever.
Yeah.
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Chapter 6: How did the events of Altamont mark the end of the optimistic counterculture?
And incredibly naive and also I was not remotely interested in the people I was, you know, I wasn't one of the girls. Girls were throwing themselves at all of the young men, which made me really sad even in those days. I understood there was something really wrong with that. But I wasn't one of them. I was so focused on what I was doing.
And what was the assignment that Ghost Head had given you? Was it just to look at the scene overseas in 1967, or was there a particular festival or focus that they wanted from you?
I think assignment is too precise a word. It wasn't an assignment. You know, they said they had free tickets from what was then BOAC, British Airlines now, And so they sent me and the photographer over there with no contacts and just no instructions.
Was this to America first or to America and Britain?
No, it was to London first, which was probably in hindsight a very good thing because... I saw Jimi Hendrix before anybody much had heard of him. He was not famous in America, but he was quite revered in England. And when I saw him, I saw him in a very, very small theatre. And I also saw that there were really mega pop stars in the audience.
But I could see straight away that he was quite electrifying. In what way? Oh, well, he made just the things he did with his hips and his tongue. I'd never seen anyone do it. I really didn't know that anyone could move their hips like that. So I was a little terrified. And you could see he was just so, so involved.
And I was a bit nervous because I had to interview him in the dressing room afterwards. And I found most of the music very loud. And I was discreetly trying to put my hands and my fingers in my ears. But I knew that he was going to be famous, if not hugely famous. I just knew because...
He was so, so intense and it turned out he was an incredibly nice human being and kept asking me how I was, which was not all that common.
And you write about him in your novel, Lola Bensky, with a real tenderness and I noticed that too with the way that you write about Janice Joplin.
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Chapter 7: What role did music journalism play in the counterculture movement?
Yes. Just how important was that festival, do you think?
Well, I think it was the first of the major pop festivals anywhere. And it also was, I think, the beginning of what looked to me as though it was going to be life changing, as though everything around us was going to change because peace, love and brotherhood was everywhere. I'd never been anywhere where people wanted to share food and everyone spoke to everyone else.
And I had this very, very strong feeling that the world was going to change and it was going to be a much more equitable world. It seemed so exciting to me and I knew the world could change overnight. I knew that very, very well because from both my mother and father, the world did change overnight. They lost everything and went on to lose everything they could have lost.
And so I found it really, I found it just thrilling. I felt so optimistic. And it did change the world, but not enough. But for quite a while there was a peacefulness among a certain part of society in certain Western countries and young people were speaking up for themselves. That was pretty exciting and the social classes seemed to be changing, especially in England where the working class,
kids were having a voice.
So Lily Brett, you then returned to Australia for a while. So you weren't in America when Woodstock happened in 1969. And then a few months after that, there was another free concert, Altamont. So what was happening by 1969, do you think?
Well, I think that Altamont was really the beginning of the end of that very hopeful, optimistic love, peace and brotherhood movement. It was the beginning. And things just got worse after that.
Because Altamont was the festival where there was rioting and a young man was killed. Killed, yeah.
Lily Brett, talking about her experience of the counterculture at the end of the 1960s. Now, her latest novel, Lola Banksy, is a fictional version of her time as a rock journalist. So from the hopefulness of 1967 and the Monterey Pop Festival through Woodstock and then the next big one, Altamont, something changed. And it sounds like things went darker and darker, Stuart.
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Chapter 8: What insights does Andrew Stafford share about his book 'Something to Believe In'?
You mentioned the Beach Boys. Of course, they had Charles Manson move into their house, right? In Los Angeles.
Dennis Wilson, who was the beach boy that Mum meets in Eat the Document, you know, yes, had Manson and the family staying at his home. You know, they basically lived with him for a long period of time. They stole his gold records to finance whatever they were up to.
They couldn't get rid of the Manson family and Charles Manson himself, so they actually moved out and cut the lease.
Yes. So...
I'm really uncomfortable, though, with the way in which the Manson family is used as a touchstone for that period. And of course, they come up again and again in popular culture, in film. And for that reason, there are some books that have been really critically acclaimed, like Emma Klein's The Girls, which I avoided reading completely. partly because it revisited the Mansons.
And I'm probably wrong to feel sort of ethical qualms about it. But have you read that one?
Yes, I read The Girls. And look, I think you're right. I mean, Manson's easy. You don't have to think that much. I mean, you've got a ready-made array of pretty... astonishingly well-drawn, well-documented characters to base your fiction around. And sometimes, yes, it is like just a little bit obvious to go, okay, we're going to explore Manson's world and Manson's California.
But, you know, it was the dominant thing of that era.
And it's such an extraordinary story, as you say. It's this personality, which for all the reasons should be completely repugnant, but in fact is compelling. And even people who visited in jail, you know, kind of fell under his thrall. So there's something quite...
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