SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT. Part 2. Story by Paul Mitchell.

 

 

It was 30 Years Ago Today: Tall Tales of a Planet Shaking Year in Rock.  Part 2.

Paul Mitchell concludes his story of Geelong’s greatest band from 1991, Tall Planet.

Part 1  ended with Paul meeting a band called Deer Bubbles, whose singer, he learnt, was Adalita…

Second in the battle of the bands to Deer Bubbles’ magic, I used my old Belmont footy club network and got Tall Planet a gig at the famed Barwon Club Hotel. Doddsy ran the place and he and his family were Belmont legends. He’d let me drink there since . . . well, I’d enjoyed a few drinks there. Before we were set to play at the BC, Andrew rang me up one Tuesday night and said I had to go down with him and see a gig there, right now.

“Tex Perkins’ new band’s on tonight. And Kim Salmon and the Surrealists are supporting.”

I had no idea who or what he was talking about.

“Salmon was in The Scientists,” he added.

There were a dozen people in the prestigious band room when we arrived, none of whom were in lab coats or art smocks, but all of whom were likely in the bands. Andrew pointed to a bloke with floppy hair and a beaten jacket, asleep on a couch.

“That’s Kim Salmon,” he said. Not long after, Kim awoke and played a blistering set with the Surrealists that sounded like a disco-dancing power saw operator fighting a drunkard with a jackhammer. Then he went back to sleep on the couch.

A dark-haired man taller than every member of Tall Planet got on stage a half-hour later, wearing a dark denim shirt. He was surrounded by a few blokes likewise shirted, one wearing a white cowboy hat. I was thrilled to see an acoustic guitar on a stand. Tall Planet were still onto something.

“That’s Tex,” Andrew said, and I thought he meant the bloke with the white hat. The band started up a swaying, twanging, country surf-styled instrumental, while Tex held the mike stand, nodded and watched. The music was so good – and the sound so clear – I got the chills. Kim Salmon may even have woken up.

When he singing started, this group called The Cruel Sea sounded to my ears like the greatest band in rock history. The audience of about fifteen agreed, whooping with delight, but Tex only engaged with the crowd once. At the end of a brilliant tune, a bloke down the back yelled out, “Go back to uni!” and the audience laughed. Tex simply gave the bloke the two-finger salute and the next song rumbled into gear.

I told everyone I could about this Cruel Sea band – right up until they took over Australia in October that year with the release of their little album, This is Not the Way Home.

The Cruel Sea shook our sound up. And shook me up, personally. Tex Perkins had a deep, snarling voice and a tattoo. These were times when tattoos meant you liked booze and fighting, not man buns and making coffee. I tried to boom my voice, snarl it up – we gave my acoustic guitar some grunt through the PA with a distortion pedal. I didn’t know how to work it. Tall Planet effectively became Cruel Planet Pizza, mixed with David’s Happy Mondays drumming and Martin’s bass thumping, as he channelled some bass player called Krist Novoselic, who was in some band that had released an album called Bleach in 1989.

Nineteen-eighty nine, Martin? Get with it, this was 1991! The future of rock was now – and it was Tall.

We played our gig at the BC and started off with Sweet Something and She’s Got Her Own Life, a new song I’d pencilled and scrap-papered with Andrew that featured my powerful, early twenty-something understanding of dependent relationships.

We sounded good. So good that friends I’d known from uni started to move closer to the stage. Hey, yeah, Mitchell played footy and wrote a bit of poetry, but this Tall Planet mob could be onto something, they sound a bit like . . .

Oh, shit – feedback suddenly blasting through the speakers, my acoustic guitar buzzing and shaking in my hands as I sing out of time and tune because I can’t hear myself through the wedges, and Martin, his bass slung low, laughing as the whole thing fell to bits.

Ah, the live gig.

In the next few months, two catastrophes hit: we couldn’t figure where else to get a gig in Geelong and, between August and November, international rock bands released albums that changed the course of Tall Planet. And rock history.

First, Metallica’s Black Album and a single called Enter Sandman. A metal song on the charts. “I think I’m going to buy my first-ever metal album,” Andrew told me. I went on a downer lower than an e-minor chord. What about my acoustic guitar? REM and sweet somethings?

We had to get darker, heavier, but we didn’t own another guitar. So we just jacked up the distortion further on my acoustic. I wrote an apocalyptic song called Final Curtain and another called Who Shot His Heaven Down? We sounded like The Birthday Party meeting Shaun Ryder, slapping Bono in the face, and then the whole menagerie getting pushed off a cliff screaming, never to return.

I wrote a song called 13. It was about black cats and witches hats, bad luck and broken mirrors. The first part of the song was just me counting the song in, one to 13, in a jerky, post-punk rhythm.

“My friend Mark would love this song,” Andrew said when we started rehearsing it. “We’ve got to play it with him sometime. He’s in a band called The Meanies.”

I’d never heard of The Meanies, but if David didn’t mind, there couldn’t be any harm in Mark having a bash with us. David played faster and said, “Sure, sure, that’s okay,” bang, bang, ticcity ticcity.

I found out about The Meanies. They were biggish. Minus David, Tall Planet played 13 at some house in Grovedale one afternoon with Mark, AKA Ringo Meanie, on drums. He loved the song. So, did we offer it to The Meanies? Or did we ask if we could support The Meanies? Did we even ask Andrew why he hadn’t told us previously that he was connected with The Meanies? No, we just had our vegetarian pizza, which I was starting to like, and went home.

We should have disbanded on 24 September 1991. But, no, we pushed on, despite the fact the Krist Novoselic bass player guy’s Nirvana had released Nevermind, and some LA crew called the Red Hot Chilli Peppers had popped out Blood Sugar Sex Magic.

Grunge and new wave funk!

The impact Nirvana’s album had on rock was similar to that which the Twin Towers falling had on world peace. And at about the same volume. Nevermind not only changed the rules, it said the rules had never existed, needed to be written, but only so they could be set on fire again.

I couldn’t sing like Kurt. Our Dave couldn’t drum like their Dave. Who could play bass like Krist? Martin, but, hey, he wasn’t in Seattle, he was in Tall Planet, with an acoustic guitarist singer now trying to be a cross between Tex, Kurt, Bono, Anthony Kiedis and Michael Stipe.

Then, in November, U2 released Achtung Baby, sawing down The Joshua Tree as Bono put it, and Teenage Fanclub pushed out Bandwagonesque. Andrew and I realised how far our influences were travelling away from us – and how much more sleep we’d lose if Tall Planet kept drifting away from REM. We were losing our religion, losing our focus – and our sound had become the entire pizza take-away menu. Except, of course, the salami and ham.

“I think we should focus on sounding like Creedence,” Andrew said. And I kinda got what he was saying. Our sound was simple, like theirs. But our songs were . . . much simpler than theirs. And not catchy. They were the sonic equivalent of mushed eggplant, raw capsicum and stale olives.

I moved back to Melbourne and we even played some gigs there. Andrew got more serious about his study, so serious that, after one Melbourne gig, I’m sure he was playing the last riff from his car seat, desperate to get home. David’s girlfriend left him for another woman. It slowed his drumming, but I hated seeing him so downbeat. Martin expressed his interest in leaving the band, citing musical differences.

“I don’t like Paul’s singing,” he said, putting his instrument into its case after one particularly poor rehearsal. Normally unflappable Andrew blew up. Well, he said something.

“Whoah, hey. That’s not very nice, Martin.”

“But I don’t.”

I was gutted. “I’m a singer. That’s what I do.”

Martin gave me a smile and a look that said, Young man my age, if that’s what you do, you better get a decent day job.

And so it comes to pass that I write, not sing about 1991, the best and worst of times, but the greatest in rock history.

 

Stereo Story #641

 

Paul’s list of  rock changing albums that Tall Planet didn’t release in 1991:

Nevermind – Nirvana

Out of Time – REM

Achtung Baby – U2

Screamadelica – Primal Scream

Bandwagonesque – Teenage Fanclub

Blood Sugar Sex Magic – Red Hot Chili Peppers

Ten – Pearl Jam

Trompe Le Monde – Pixies

Loveless – My Bloody Valentine

This is Not the Way Home – The Cruel Sea

The Low Road – Beasts of Bourbon

Doughboy Hollow – Died Pretty

Pretty on the Inside – Hole

Green Mind – Dinosaur Junior

Metallica – Metallica (Black Album)

Badmotorfinger – Soundgarden

Use Your Illusion I and II – Guns and Roses

Girlfriend – Matthew Sweet

Mama Said – Lenny Kravitz

 

This story was first published in The Big Issue in June 2021, as ”The Year My Voice Broke”.