by Al Ward

Images from the memory of a Sydney, now Blue Mountains, acoustic musician, writer, guitar teacher and festival organizer.

From my digs at the top end of Goulbourn Street in Darlinghurst it was a short stroll to a number of acoustic music haunts. They were all different in character and clientele and some were quite scary for a nineteen year old once a week shaver.

I used to haunt PACT Folk, French's Tavern, The Arts Factory in Goulbourn Street, The Elizabeth Hotel (The Liz) and the Wayside Chapel, as well as informal gatherings in the Domain on those fantastic noisy Sunday afternoons when Webster, Monty and Auntie Ada had crowds enthralled with their wit and wisdom and frequently dodgy rhetoric.

My first destination most Friday and Saturday nights was the PACT Folk Cellar, three floors down in the basement of the YWCA in Liverpool Street. Friday's sessions were run by suave English 'man on the move' Cliff Atkinson, who mixed the Folk heavyweights like Mike McClellan, Doug Ashdown, John J Francis and flautist Alan Luchetti, John Currie, Terry Hannigan and Marion Henderson with up and coming talent like Al Head, Ian Young, The East Neasdon Spasm band, Paul Brosgarth, Peggy Daroesman, Steve and Kerry, Dave White, Jim Jarvis, Paul Joseph, Ivor Davies and the Lucy Fields Jugband, Richard Clapton, the various Gillespie brothers, Russell Shipton (over from Canada) and fresh from the suburbs, Merryn Joseph, Don Hopkins, Crispin Dye, Alan Caswell, John Summers and myself amongst others.

Two flamenco players, Peter Richardson and Timothy Andrew also turned up from time to time. Peter was English and Tim was from Perth. Flamenco fascinated me, but I never had the fingernails or discipline for it, although I've always had at least one nylon-string guitar around me at all times.

Playing a nylon-strung guitar with the bare fingers is an unbeatable feeling. I loved listening to Peter and Tim. It was the first time I'd seen guitarists really cooperating to make music. I found it much more interesting than the rhythm guitar-lead guitar routine that was so prevalent. I watched the stage from the side of the room with a black and gold sobranie cigarette dangling from my lips, filled with elation, feeling grown up and cosmopolitan.

We did our tuning up in the little triangular switch-room under the stairs. The acoustics there were great but on some busy nights there was a queue to get in and you had to try the room where they kept the judo mats.

That room was also quite good if nobody was bonking in there on the mats. Saturday nights were the big turn every week. They were tightly directed by the marvellous and dedicated folk promoter Frank French. “Good evening folk” he used to say with no hint of embarrassment. Frank also booked Ashdown, Henderson and McClellan, as well as Margret RoadKnight, Bernard Bolan, Greg Quill, Bob Hudson and the others, and lung-busters Grahame Lowndes, Al Head and Jeannie Lewis.

Jeannie Lewis was unlike anything I had ever imagined, let alone seen and heard. Her theatricality and habit of turning up with exotic classical and jazz musicians gave her a mystique that nobody else seemed to have. I think she was the closest thing to a beatnik I ever met. If you had told me on one of those Saturday nights while I was sitting on the stairs waiting for Frank to say "two songs - two dollars", that I would end up playing as sideman for most of these singers, I would not have comprehended it. They were my inspiration and my tutors.

Marion Henderson's poise and sensuality, along with her warm purring voice, sent me into a trance every time I heard her. A guy called John Jackson played second guitar for her at that time and he was tall and inscrutable and played lovely fills with a hand that hardly seemed to move. I envied him his singer, his Epiphone guitar and his great three-quarter length suede jacket.

Grahame Lowndes dragged an asthmatic stooped body onto the stage some nights, thumped a huge minor seven chord and launched his enormous voice into the smoke that curled around the basement plumbing. Grahame pounded his own, or some other poor bugger's guitar like it was a drum and broke more than one string most nights.

The condition or intonation of the instrument didn't bother him. What mattered was that relentless chopping of chords, or when he brought it down, a soft scratching that accompanied his vocals better than any fancy noodling. He wasn't a virtuoso guitarist, but he really knew how to exploit what he had.

McClellan and Ashdown were virtuoso guitarists and they taught me about crowd control. Both had by then had club and television experience and knew when to tell the joke and when to flick off a bit of dazzling guitar work.

Mike McClellan was the smooth one, always mild and in control. At times he reminded me of a vicar. He was a generous man who always had time to talk, and he occasionally drove me home to the safety of my parent's suburban home in Eastwood, (saving me the long train ride with tired shiftworkers and a mixed bag of drunks). Mike played with flawless precision and a thumb like a metronome.

Doug Ashdown was raffish, and all gold tooth grin. His right hand was as agile as a fish as he flailed away on his twelve-string guitar. When he improvised on a blues you could see the guitarist step out of the frontman's shadow. His stories were always too long but nobody ever cared. Everyone loved Ashdown the larrikin.

The chief clown and satirist on these nights was Bob Hudson, who was as savage as he was funny. He wore a permanent smirk, and when not on stage he seemed utterly detached from his surroundings. It took me a while to see that he was shy and insecure, because he scared the life out of me when I first met him. He was a complicated man who seemed to care too much about everything. His ‘Newcastle Song’ and ‘Girls in our Town’, the ridiculous and the sublime, were huge audience favourites. Margret RoadKnight’s version of ‘Girls in our Town’ received a lot of airplay.

At the pub venues a large proportion of the audience on any night was drunk and/or stoned, or on the way to being so, so there was lively connection between performers and listeners. The organisers always kept a firm hand on things, especially at the Elizabeth Hotel Folk Club, where Mike Eves and later Dermott Ryder were 'cruel but fair'.

Back in 1970 Mike McClellan would often be accompanied by the strangely unsympathetic Buddy Wilson. A tall, well built character with a missing front tooth, he would toss extravagant flamenco runs into the breaks in Mike's ballads, and looked for all the world like a demented pirate on leave from his ship. I always thought Buddy was a cowboy from somewhere, but I am told he was Greek, and that his mum had a fish and chip shop in Newtown. The last time I saw him was in George Street driving a Cadillac convertible, wearing a ten gallon hat. There was a pale green Gretsch Country Gentleman lying across the back seat. He offered to sell it to me but I only had five dollars.

I forgave Mike McClellan this musical skullduggery because it was he and his PACT Folk guitar workshop down at the Corn Exchange building in Pyrmont who had led my mate John Summers and I into that seething cauldron of creativity.

1971 was the year I knew I could never forsake the guitar and the muse for anything else very serious, but I was young enough not to be troubled by that. The trouble came later.

Sydney was still just a big town in many ways. Everything was slower and people seemed much less self-conscious. I felt like I knew everybody, at least by sight. This was a romantic illusion of course, but not one you could entertain these days. There was much less glass, stainless steel and chrome, and bricks and tiles were plentiful.

Bea Miles sometimes sat at a picnic table in Hyde Park near Museum station, and was happy to chat, if she hadn't fallen asleep sitting up. John Summers and I first encountered her one evening when we were having a bit of a rehearsal on the War Memorial steps in Hyde Park South, near Museum Station. We were wafting through Mr. Bo Jangles or some such and she chided us for disrespecting the fallen. She then sat to enjoy a couple more songs as far as I can remember, making the odd unnecessary observation about our diction and our youth.

The YWCA building in Liverpool St., which had become the home of PACT folk after it moved from the Corn Exchange in Pyrmont was a perfect music cellar. The club nights were held three flights of stairs down from ground level, with enough room on the steps to sit and play in a fantastic echo chamber.

In 1972 an LP called " Three Floors Down." was produced, and featured tracks by most of the better known regulars. I played my first real recording session for that album, though I don’t remember being paid. It was a rung up the ladder though and I was pleased to have had some session work. The ‘home studio’ was a pop god’s fantasy in those days, and any time a mere mortal spent in a studio environment was usually treasured, and bragged about.

People going down on those weekend nights would have to descend through layers of song until they came to the dingy corridor that led to the pokey sub-basement room that was The Cellar Club. With the possible exception of the Devil's Coach-House at Jenolan Caves, there's never been a better place to play an acoustic guitar. The building was demolished in the early eighties and so was a lot of musical innocence. ________________________________________

Weekend Nights in 1971 © Al Ward is published by permission. Any persons or organisations wishing to reprint this work, in whole or in part, are invited to contact the author.