Every Picture Tells A Story

My friend Steve Baird recently posted this pic up on Facebook and it brought back all sorts of memories for me. 

PART ONE

I guess it could be titled “Rock Stars at Play”, although Chain were never really “rock stars” as such. 

The picture was taken sometime in early 1971, most probably in a park in South Caufield and features the Northcote Road Country Club “cricket” team.

In the back row (from left to right) are Arthur (Carson’s roadie, can’t remember his surname, or perhaps I never knew it), Barry Sullivan, Barry Harvey (Big and Little Goose), Phil Manning, George Kaufman (also working with Carson at the time), Graeme Rothwell, Jiva (Chain’s roadie) and yours truly (yeah, check out the hair).

Matt Taylor was living with his partner, Toni, in Northcote Road, Armadale (not far from where I went to Primary School and my father played bowls) hence the name of this particular team.  His two housemates, Pete and Dave, are in the front row, along with “Sleepy” Greg Lawrie (from Carson) and Matt himself.

Jiva was my mentor and still is.

I was working as his “assistant” (for the princely sum of 10 bucks a gig).  As you can see, he’s holding a camera but not actually taking the picture. He was just getting into photography and it’s most probably his partner Rhonda Parker using another camera who snapped the picture.

When Rhonda snapped the picture I’d not long been back in Melbourne, after spending some months living in a house in Paddington, Brisbane with Rhonda and her friend, Helen Korn.

The girls were kind to me, I was working one day a week as a gardner there, earning $8 and sleeping on their lounge-room floor. We’d met at Monash University and were all running away from broken hearts.

One Friday night I suggested we jump in my FJ and go down to Fortitude Valley to see the “new” Chain, who were in the process of reforming. 

I’d seen the previous incarnation with Warren Morgan and Glyn Mason a few times earlier that year in Sydney and thought they were fantastic. 

Now the Gooses had returned to home soil and were rehearsing the new band with Phil Manning still on guitar and his old mate Matt Taylor singing and playing harmonica. 

Along for the ride was faithful roadie, Jiva, quoted on the cover of “Chain Live” as saying: “It was always such a pleasure to keep them supplied.”  If you listen very closely to Phil Manning's closing credits on "Chaser", you'll hear him thank Jiva for keeping the band supplied with "ooblie-dooblies".  Then you'll hear Jiva laugh.  That was Jiva!! 

I needed a job and thought “Roadie, why not?” so, after seeing the band for a second time, I nervously walked up to Phil Manning and said, “Hey, have you got  a job?”

Well, it didn’t happen straight away. But the long and short of it is that Jiva fell in love with Rhonda (and she him), came round to the Paddington house lots, brought a couple of his favourite albums (which became mine and still are today), Muddy Waters “Fathers and Sons” and Ginger Baker’s Airforce, as well as "Chain Live", and one day in late October announced that Chain were ready to return to Melbourne and would I like to come and be his assistant.  Would I!!!!!!!

PART TWO

On the way back to Melbourne we all stopped off in Sydney, paid a visit to Festival Records in Pyrmont and recorded a couple of songs the band had been rehearsing in Brisbane, “Black and Blue” and “Lightning Ground”. 

Back in Melbourne Chain became part of the Michael Gudinski – Michael Browning run Consolidated Rock stable.  Gudinski and Browning didn’t have their own record labels yet, but they did decide to start their own rock magazine “(Daily) Planet.”

That’s where Rhonda’s picture was first published. She and Jiva worked on the editorial team. I was pleased as punch when it first appeared.

A few years later it was included on the Mushroom release, “A History of Chain” and I was immortalised forever. I would pull the record out at dinner parties. It does contain three of the best live tracks you’ll ever hear, recorded amidst the heat, dust, flies, watermelon pips and requited lust at Wallacia in January 1971. Shortly after that, the photograph was taken. 

Bit by bit I lost touch with most of my fellow subjects. My time with Chain ended, George Kaufman got me a gig with Blackfeather and I still remember the night Led Zeppelin came to see the band play at Chequers. My hair was longer than Robert Plant’s!!!

I don’t remember why, but soon after that George left the band and I took over.  Bad timing George, "Boppin’ the Blues" was about to become Number One.

I never really saw George again, but he became famous in a different realm.  I kept hearing whispers that he’d been in trouble with the law, but it’s only been in the Google age that I’ve been able to find out all.

George Kaufman became the “Armadale rapist”, and as Liz Porter points out in her fabulous book, "Written on the Skin: An Australian Forensic Casebook", George’s case became the first in Australia to be solved by the use of DNA.