Ghost of the Big Day Out

The Ghost of the Big Day Out (2006)

Rock’N’Roll first came into my life when my Christian mother confiscated my younger brother’s Ramones tapes off him. “You’ll not be listening to that filth in my house” she declared with much wrath. Her reasoning was, that if you weren’t for God, you were against him. But aside from her religious views, the confiscation of music failed to stop my brother from getting into trouble.

He walked out when he was 13. It was hard to believe someone that young could just up and leave. Mum and I were standing in his room, his hot small narrow space. The room had long ago been converted from a verandah into a bedroom by adding French glass windows from waist level to the ceiling, at the front and side. A real hot box in summer. She was packing up some things for him, mum style, to send to him at his friends place. Jumpers at the beginning of summer and other stuff he probably didn’t want.

She couldn’t get the words out to tell me that he’d gone for good and I don’t think she wanted to believe he had because I was sworn to secrecy and not to tell friends at school. His room was kept shrine like in its mess -  his strewn magazines,  the dirty clothes, odd shoes, the electronic equipment half pulled apart. It still smelt like him. Young boy smells. Stale cigarette smoke, bong water stains and rank socks. Without him here filling up the space, it felt like walking into a room full of left over decorations from a party the night before. You could sense the life and the anarchy that had once been so alive. ‘Watch out for needles’ mum said raking bare hand through the rubble. I picked up his tape box and sat in his doorway and thought about how mad he’d be if he could have caught me with it.

Tape by tape I deciphered the box, each cassette with its scrawly liquid-paper subtitles. His musical world. Twenty muffled recordings that I dared to blare louder and louder as the house emptied out. Mums anger and unhappiness had to turned to blankness and often she just wasn’t there. The tape box became everything. The forbidden bands ‘Niggers With Attitude’. In your face punksters ‘Public Image Limited’. The moments of lightness with The Beatles. And my favourites, the sledging grunge bands with their drawling melodies. Sonic Youth, Mudhoney and Nirvana. They were a soundtrack that ran at loggerheads with the monotony of home life after mum went all zombie like. I’d put the younger siblings to bed. Get them up, weetbixed and dressed. Wake mum up. Then school.

Australia didn’t know it then, but the first Big Day Out was to change the way international music toured around this sprawling landmass. Princess Di was divorcing Charles and it was all over the papers. The grunge band Nirvana was making news on the radio and we thought it was a miracle that a band like that would come to a place like this. Australia had barely any people and barely any record sales. Even though Princess Di came every year.

How could the two music promoters, Ken West and Vivian Lees have known as they put together that first Big Day Out line up, that one of the unknown bands on the bill, Nirvana, were to reach a God like status by the time the festival rolled around in January ‘92. Or that there was something bigger happening outside the showground turn-styles as the very first crowds gathered round. That the ‘eerie’ feeling in the old Sydney showground buildings would account for so much, the rotting, creaking wood that harboured a sense of righteous dark and dirty. It was there down Driver Avenue where my friends and I Iined up outside the entrance. Beneath the hot morning sun and the fig trees with bats stirring in their sleep. Something very big had been born.

It would be there all day in the lines. Lines at the front of stage gazing up at the music, lines for drinks, lines for toilets, lines for the one single ATM machine and the endless line for the Telecom phone booth. Lines upon lines where we felt the showground haunts of past gamblers, of disgruntled runner ups in craft competitions, of lost children that were never found, or the bad spirits of mistreated livestock. Of the drunkards and their sins that had terrorised the showground alleyways. Today was no different, there were no cake displays, or drunks with axes at wood chip shows, but there was a crazier thing happening. There was Rock’N’Roll. It was like some fucked up demon from the past had descended upon the Big Day Out, to revel with the crowds of misfit rockers, punkers, gothics, skaters, ferals and us, the impressionable 16 year olds that had bought tickets using mail order ID cards sent to us all the way from the Gold Coast.

From the moment my friends and I teetered through the wooden gates, the wild feeling began to flutter. It grew slowly as we scoped out the landscape. Twenty one bands, four stages, a skate ramp, the boiler room and dodgy carnival rides. It grew shyly as we stood in the back rows, soaking in the older crowds of guys in leather jackets that went about eating Aloo Matar with rice, and chugged down Wild Turkey. Until mid arvo when we grew braver and light headed with beer. Dipping our toes into the moshpit, edging forward until we were almost knee deep.

It was the first time we’d see ragged stage divers line up side stage to have a security guard let them up for a moment of glory. Running from the back of the stage past the drummer, through the guitarists and off into the air above the swirling crowd. And when that boot of theirs came towards you, there was a sea of arms go up to protect your communal head and to catch your fellow airborne friend. In moments of crowd surge, your limbs could get stuck above your head, or stuck down by your sides while you bobbed round like a peg. In years to come Nick Cave would stand on the same stage at a Big Day Out and resonate that very feeling when he sang ‘If you stick your arm into that hole, it comes out sheared off to the bone’.*

Nothing in that moshpit scared me that day. Not the heat or the drunks, not the 9000 bodies pushing up behind me, not even my arms that got stuck in the air, kangaroo like, above the stage barrier.  I wanted to find my brother and impress him. Show him I could live out on the edge. I think back to the day I decided to buy the ticket. It was at the Blue Mountains rehab for teenagers, mum and I trudged in with the kids on Boxing Day, the first day we’d been able to see him. A special family visiting day with a modest BBQ, that not many others had bothered to turn up for.

He had stalked into the room, his thin frame buckling as he ducked his head through the doorway, all blonde hair and smiles. His cheeks looked fuller and his eyes were clear and he offered me a seat. ‘Don’t mind the mess’ he said, pushing a chunk of foam back into a floral lounge. It was the happiest I’d been since he left. He showed me what he’d learnt on the guitar. A mishmash of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin riffs and then the favourite, Nirvana’s ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ from beginning to end. An impromptu sing along, the two of us while mum was out having a fag. The cheap guitar strings chiming out in the unhomely lounge room. The grey blue walls and a bright blue sheet of material tacked up above the lounge. It had an ‘NA’ logo screen printed over the prayer “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…”. He dug out a toy ukulele from under a pile of skateboards and jackets.
“Here you go sis, I’ll teach you something. Anything. Whatever you wanna know.”
I groaned out loud with each mistake, the D chord, and the G and C.
“I’ve been clean for 37 days” he said in a small voice.
“It means I get privileges” he drifted off. I looked up at him packing away the guitar into the case. Deadpan he mouthed the words ‘The Big Day Out’ and then broke into a grin.

The whole venue had gone to a place beyond wild. Lights pulsed out across the blackened Pavilion as the crowd surged forward, sideways and back again, lifting me off my feet. I searched the back and front for every blonde until my neck hurt with strain. Heaving up and down, hollering lyrics in a deafening chorus. A hot frenetic January mass. Kurt Cobain on stage, his blonde locks in his face. He looked small as his words echoed out across the crowd.  A messy congregation of elbows below him, working their way for personal space. Shoulders getting ferocious. Circles of pogo-ing and slam dancing breaking out.

I think about a heatwave a few years ago when my brother let me sleep in his room on a mattress on the floor.  When the cool change rolled in, we opened every one of his bedroom French glass windows and the wind blew through, cooling us down and easing us to sleep. The memory feels like it is a hundred years old and I shake it from my head. My chest squashes hard against the steel barrier in front. If only he could see me now in this airless front row. Other people’s sweat clinging to me, dripping on me. The music, the crowd. It’s like some  fucked up mud swamp, thick and heavy around your neck. Bright lights from the stage flashing out in dazzlement. Lighting up faces. Connecting strangers with each other in brief, almost intrusive moments.

Until finally, as the lights flash up again, I realised I’ve been dragged to the back of the Pavilion and there is a new song riding out. My insides lurch. It is The Song. The Blue Mountains one. The one that made me buy a ticket to this wild and frantic mess. I sing along to Nirvana’s last song. A bouncer has wedged open a side exit door, a cool breeze whips in and I begin to shiver. The day is nearly over.

* [From the song, Papa Won’t Leave You Henry by Nick Cave. 1992.]