Nine Parts Water, One Part Sand. Douglas Galbraith
Friday night came around and Dave rang up to say ‘We’re going out tonight,’ the horizon opened up only as far as the Broadway Tavern to watch the Elks play more blues. Kim Salmon again was searching for something to happen.
‘I’d done a year of art school but I still knew nothing. It seemed like art school was standing around drawing nudes while John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ was playing on a crappy turntable all day. So after a year, I dropped out.’
Free from art school, Kim attempted to enter conventional society by getting miserable, ill-fitting jobs in hospitals and banks. It was an uncomfortable accord. ‘I just thought fuck this, I’m going to get into a band. I don’t care what band it is, even if it’s playing music I hate, at least I’ll be playing music. If I’m going to make a living from music, that’s what I should be doing.’
So he auditioned. For anything. But a mountain of cold calls to prospective cover bands didn’t land him a gig. ‘I just didn’t have the right sound.’ It wasn’t until Joy answered the phone to a Fremantle bandleader John Farley that things looked up. John was singer, bass player and band leader of Troubled Waters, a covers outfit that played ‘50/50’ — a repertoire of half hits, half ‘oldies’ — and on Joy’s recommendation he invited Kim for an audition.
At the first jam, Kim was taken through Walking the Dog, Honky Tonk Woman, Your Cheatin Heart and a Decker song called The Israelites, songs he’d heard once or twice at best, but played well straight away. John said, ‘Okay, we have a gig tonight, you’re in. We play three sets a night from 11pm to 3am, six nights a week. And we don’t play any heavy music, so no Smoke on the Water or Black Magic Woman.’ Kim was in Troubled Waters.
That night he arrived at the venue, the Tarantella Tavern in Fremantle. Prickly with pre-gig nerves, Kim swiftly collided with the drinks menu and kept a safe distance from his new band mates. At show time, he stepped gingerly onto the sweaty, slightly too small stage of the Tarantella Tavern with John’s advice fresh in his ears — ‘If you don’t know the song just turn your amp down.’ Amid the darkness, smoke haze and low, shady murmuring of the Tavern’s interior, Kim plugged his guitar into the small amp leaning against the dirty wall. Years later, he would capture his time at the Tarantella Tavern in the song Shine:
I look out across to the bar, as I hide behind my guitar
Given up on all that lies in between
Anyone who’s worked this kinda shit pit is gonna know what I mean
The band got underway, punching out a sharp version of the Beatles Birthday, which, it turned out, bookended every single Troubled Waters set. The set list of curiously combined hits and oddities washed out onto the Tavern’s only vaguely interested audience. As Kim and the other guitarist traded guitar duties, John sang raspy tenor with a cockney accent.
And the singer is crooning at some age-old song
Its meaning obliterated in time, but his voice is still strong
Though somewhat off key it kind of falls on deaf ears
This is the kinda place that could rise to anyone’s fears
A refugee from the London Beat scene, John regaled the band with tall tales of his encounters with Charlie Watts and Mick Jagger and unveiled the old tricks of early 60s R&B music. John respected the grimy atmosphere and dangerous potential of the Tavern. His ethos was simple: work hard, always take requests and keep out of trouble.
But I’ve grown used to it and its denizens of the night
Learned how to keep my trap shut and stay out of fights
Only two songs til the end of the set
Johnny B Goode can sound a good deal better yet
The Tarantella Tavern was a strip club and hookup joint for prostitutes and drunken sailors; an underground haven for the crooked, transgendered and otherwise excluded. Patrons would compare the merits of local penitentiaries and make deals while hunkering shadily around the bar tables, watching the strippers out of the corner of their eyes. Each night, one of the prostitutes would climb to the highest point and sing House of the Rising Sun, the performance often descending into an all-in-brawl, with the singer and her sister — both big ladies and tough as — taking on all comers.
Then it’s time for the stripper, and her dance of the seven veils
Here’s John the Baptist and he’s looking kind of pale
I look hopefully out as I see you walk in
Whoever you are, you don’t belong in this stinking rotten bin
It was gruelling work. John drove the band hard, playing long sets with new songs each night from a repertoire that stretched to well over two hundred. It was a quick education for Kim. ‘I saw a lot and I played a lot and we played new songs I’d hardly heard. I learned to make something up and play what suited the song, the beginning of the salvage operation.’ The seedy environment and nefarious characters of the Tavern were always entertaining, but the grime was starting to rub off on Kim and before too long he was looking for the fire escape.
Show me the way, outa here with its strippers and hookers and drunken old sailors
And over-dressed pimps in purple suits who could use a better tailor
And all the has beens and never were all destined to loseStill trying to hang onto their dreams by feeding them with too much booze
After a few months, Kim left Troubled Waters with a glowing reference from John, which, alongside the reputation Kim had built on stage, ensured a solid year’s well-paid work as a gun for hire on the cabaret circuit. ‘I had learned a trade and I could do it, so why not? I was like a carpenter — it was fun, but work. I was adaptable and played different styles; I was the casual relief guitarist. It was like session playing. No one ever asked me to play sessions thereafter, except years later I got $200 for playing Jews Harp on a Tex Don and Charlie record.’
The countless hours on the Tarantella Tavern stage had given Kim a super charged education in negotiating the darker laneways of the music business. It had elevated his playing, sharpened his eye for detail, and implanted a shrewd song-writing nous. And Shine, the song the Tavern produced, remains one of the finest moments of Kim’s live solo shows.
You shine like a torch
You’re so outta place
I bet you’re just a dream
In fact, I suspect your appearance here
Has got a reason for being
You’re here to shine.
•••
Punk. It discovered Kim through the New Musical Express. Still contemplating his unformed identity, Kim read an article in NME titled Are you alive to the jive of 75?, Charles Shaar Murray’s grubby portrayal of the gloomy underworld of New York’s CBGBs. Kim was electrified. ‘That was the world that I belonged in. When I read that, I knew! I was looking for somewhere to land from my spaceship and it was CBGBs. I’d made connection with Ground Control; I wasn’t floating in my tin can any more.’
Gulping in as much punk music as he could, Kim scoured Perth’s record shops for anything that sounded right. ‘The common factor was that people had exotic names — Blondie, Johnny Thunders, Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine. It was just like an enchanted world. It was all black, black and white and dark. It wasn’t coloured. It was dingy. Pretty much then, my mind was made up that that was the direction I was going.’ By hitching himself to the punk wagon so early, Kim was ahead of most and at the forefront of a new force in Australian music. Isolated in Perth, he didn’t have any sense of who was doing what elsewhere