Old man Sam

We’re all here, drinking beer
Drinking beer without a care
Drinking beer
Without a care.
- Spiderbait, 1993

Cometh the hour, cometh the pisshounds. Our audience gathered, slowly at first, in the garage at Chateau Dodgy. Marty was worried there wouldn’t be enough people around to get the sound and atmosphere of a real live performance. Phil countered that a lot of the Live at the Wireless sets which Triple J broadcast didn’t have an audience at all, they were just recorded live-to-tape in the ABC studios, so whether there was endless cheering, screaming, whooping and/or proposals of marriage between songs didn’t really matter. Marty’s point, equally valid, was that it’d definitely sound better with a receptive audience. Handbags at five paces were avoided when Jessica arrived with Marty’s sister Gina and some of their friends, as well as some of the bar staff from Maggie Moore’s, including the exotic Cassia. Bill and Ben dropped in from next door with as many of their ragged mates as they could assemble. Some of my classmates from education came over, as did various muso mates of Marty and Phil’s, as well as a few of McCarthy’s workmates, including the Star’s young and spunky entertainment writer, Andrea. I had my suspicions that Andrea had her eye on Uncle Sam, but I was assured by him that she most definitely did not.

“What sort of write-up are we likely to get?” I asked her with a grin.

Andrea smiled good-naturedly. She clearly thought I was a tosser. Not without justification, I’ll admit. I’d previously made behind-the-scenes inquiries in my own interests at a gig of one of Phil's mates' bands, several sheets to the wind, and had been shot down in flames.

There would have been a good 25-30 heads cramming our garage by kick-off time. All those people, just here to listen to us play! (And drink the four cartons of el cheapo beer we’d put on, not to mention throwing a few snags on the barbie we’d fired up in the driveway.)

Marty and Phil set things rolling at the mixing desk, then fanned the crowd’s enthusiasm, gesturing for Big Noise as we ‘walked on stage’, i.e. got off the couch, put down our beers and picked up our instruments. Marty had wanted us to stay off the beers until after the ‘gig’ to make sure we would be as ‘tight’ as possible, but McCarthy and I protested this on the basis that we hadn’t played guitar totally sober in years and were worried we’d forget how to do it. So Marty was our only teetotaller on the set. Granted, Phil hadn’t had a beer yet, but the six cones he’d shared with Bill and Ben had presumably taken the edge off his performance anxiety.

McCarthy grinned broadly as he surveyed the familiar faces. Old mate wasn’t as nervous as I figured he’d be, knowing him. Either that or he was hiding it well, riding the performance anxiety like a wave of energy.

“G’day folks, thanks for coming out,” he began, idly tuning his guitar, largely to keep his hands busy. “We are Flange Gasket, the greatest rock and roll band in all of Goonellabah. Remember our name,” he continued, “because you’ll be screaming it later.” He signalled for Big Noise, and got it from the eager-to-please crowd. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he growled cheerfully, confidence growing. His stage voice, which was getting its first ever airing today, was gravelly and throaty, edged with an evil sounding laugh that seemed directly lifted from Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler at the beginning of Love In An Elevator. He bashed a couple of ‘tuning’ chords out of the old Epiphone, and let it settle into resonant silence. “This is my good friend Angus Young, folks. He’s got something he wants y’all to know about. Ain’t that right Angus?”

“You bet yo’ ass, Uncle Sam,” I drawled, keen to have a go at this ‘stage voice’ carry-on as well. Glancing at Phil, I nodded, and he counted us into Sketchy’s thunderous opening.

My God, where did this come from? We’d seen a fair number of bands in our time, from duly famed, big-name ‘originals’ outfits to beer-garden covers-merchants. I guess we were gonna play this for as much fun as it was worth.

Sketchy felt like it was over before it started, we seemed to fly through it. From where I stood, it sounded tight and enthusiastic. On the other side of the amps it could have sounded like Thor, the Norse God of Thunder, gargling marbles in his arse underwater for all I knew. But our loyal crew seemed to like it. Or maybe they were pissed. Either way, they got into it, with a crescendo of noise to signal the end of Sketchy.

“I love you, Angus, you’re my hero!” Jessica squealed histrionically, to much amusement.

“I’ll bet I am, baby,” I replied. “Just take a number, and get in line…”

McCarthy, who’d lost it then and there, managed to compose himself enough to crank into the not-quite-actionably Teen Spirit-esque lead-in to Nirvana in Pyjamas, and threw the whole force of his desperate adolescent unhappiness behind the abject misery and fury of his vocal performance. I hope Noni Hazlehurst realised the hurt and anger she’d brought into the world.

Laughter was beginning to augment the post-song cheering, I began to notice. Excellent. They were getting it.

“Thank you very much, you’re beautiful people, every single one of you,” ‘Elvised’ McCarthy. “But don’t go on and leave the building now, we got a few more songs to go, uh huh… We got any surfer guys in the audience?” A cheer. “We got any little surfer girls out here tonight?” A bigger cheer. “Well that’s good, ‘cause my man Angus here has something for YOU, kids.”

We’d figured that if I had most of the vocals in a song, he’d take the harder of the guitar parts, and vice versa. The intro to Learn To Swim Etc was a Johnny Be Goode-style guitar lick which led into the upbeat surfin’ safari progression of the main body of the song. McCarthy ripped into it like a whirling dervish, thrashing through the riff, vaulting clean over the bum notes like they’d never happened, even kicking in a few Chuck Berry duck-walks as he charged around the garage, entangling himself in his own guitar lead, grinning like a loon.

Always knew he was ADHD.

Learn To Swim With Harold Holt went down a treat, particularly the incredibly juvenile line about getting sandcrabs in your pubic hair, as you'd expect. I couldn’t hear the squeals of laughter over the racket we were making, but I could see their effect on the audience. Jessica was giggling somewhere near uncontrollably. I hoped this was the effect we was going for…

“Thank y’all,” I said. “We’ve got one more song to go…” Isolated booing. Nice touch, folks. “We’ve been Flange Gasket, and you’ve been fucken tops,” I declared. “I give you Marty Monster on the keys, and Mo’-Than-Enough Duff on the skins… let me hear you boys…”

Marty had set up his Roland to give a seamless simulation of a big fat bass guitar sound on his left hand, and a couple of switchable options for his melodic hand. His left hand rolled straight into the loping bassline from How Many More Times, with the Duffer’s riding hi-hat sliding on alongside.

“How many mo' times…” I began, “treat me the way you wanna do…”

Midway through Git The Led Out we made our first serious balls-up. Other than coming up with the idea of doing this in the first place. T'was my bad - I thought we were diverging off into Out On The Tiles when we were supposed to transition into Misty Mountain Hop. We covered it OK - given that we were the only ones in the room who knew what we were doing, I figure we were the only ones to notice. Our hugely enthusiastic rentacrowd whipped themselves into a frenzy of rapture at the end of the ‘gig’. They’d certainly earned their free beer this afternoon.

Over the cheers, I heard Marty psssting me for attention from his keys, and I trotted over. Psssst. Did he have a puncture? No, but he did look rather concerned. He indicated the stopwatch on his Casio.

“We’ve only been going for 17 minutes,” he muttered. “We need at least twenty.”

“Shit,” I correctly observed. Another of Chris Kurtin’s stipulations. Ironic, again, that it related to length. Out of material, and we hadn’t thought to prepare any other songs, certainly not to ‘performance’ level. We'd committed the universal first-time live act sin of playing too quickly, or at least more quickly than we'd projected to. I conferred post-haste with McCarthy off-mike, and we couldn’t think of anything from our spurious back catalogue which we could shoehorn into playable shape in the space of thirty seconds, even though we trusted that Marty would be able to play along with pretty much anything, and Phil could probably fudge it if we kept it simple enough.

“Time for one of yours?” I suggested to Marty. It was worth a shot. He winced, and shook his head.

“We haven’t rehearsed anything,” he protested.

“Just tell us the chords, and we’ll accompany you and Phil,” I offered, but he wasn’t brave enough.

The wave of last-song applause was beginning to fade out. Panic time.

McCarthy looked pensive, then a grin spread across his face, and he gave us the thumbs-up. Uh oh. He’s up to something.

He waited for the applause to die right down, then signalled frantically for Big Noise. Amazingly, our crew took the bait, and ran with it. Jessica, correctly reading the situation, lead the calls of “Encore!” and “We want more!” Bill and Ben topped this by standing up at the back and bellowing “Go the fuckin’ Gasket!!!”

“Thanks so much, you’re too kind,” McCarthy said, and to our bewilderment, began playing a simple two-finger country-fried riff. Ding-plunk, dung-plunk, ding-plunk, dung-plunk. I struggled to recognise it. Old Man Sam by Spiderbait? Close, but didn’t quite seem like it… “Who wants a beer?” he declared. Rousing reception. “I’d love to have a beer with all of you,” he replied. And then I realised what he was playing. So did Marty, who laid a simple bassline under it. He was seemingly too panicked to do anything much else. Phil, following his lead, put a little country boom-chick drum beat into play for us to work with.

“This one goes out to Chris Kurtin of SCU,” declared McCarthy, “without whom, I’d be at the fuckin’ pub instead of here singing this rubbish…” And then started to drawl in true Tamworth style:

I love to have a beer with Kretin
I love to have a beer with Chris
He’s so damn good at everything
We’re not fuckin' worthy to drink his piss
We drink at Maggie Moore’s pub [crowd cheers]
For the good old Irish craic
I’d either have a beer with Kretin
Or kick him in the sack.

“Angus Young,” McCarthy continued, riding the raucous applause (led primarily by Marty and Phil’s classmates), “let’s see what you got.”

I glanced at Marty, who was trying not to look, and joined in.

I love to have a beer with Razorslash
I love to have a beer with ‘Slash
They’re not much into drinkin'
They’d prefer to fuck off home and smoke some hash
Inject smack behind their eyeballs
And Draino up their arse
I love to have a beer with Razorslash
‘Cos they’re fuckin’ class.

Cue brief band derailment instigated by idiot giggling from idiot singer. Andrea, who had to review a lot of Razorslash’s appalling gigs, was doubled over, either with laughter or the effects of a dodgy BBQ snag. Even money either way, I suspected. Poor Razorslash. Whatever did they do to deserve this? Apart from being shit, of course.

“Marty, you’re up,” I grinned.

Marty tinkled the (plastic) ivories, changing the tempo and the whole feel, leading into a stylish piano-lounge version of the old country standby. Phil followed, swinging the beat into a jazzy shuffle, still riding that hi-hat like a deranged trackwork jockey.

“Nice,” commented Uncle Sam. “Not so Dusty.“

Marty began crooning in the style of the endless Dean Martin LPs his old man used to play on their ancient system at home. Childhood scars never truly heal.

I love to have a beer with Duffer
I love to have a beer with Duff…
He’s always in the bathroom…
'Cos of his obsession with Asian muff.

Cue agonised gales of laughter from all parties. Marty continued, wavering slightly:

What he’s up to, couldn’t tell you
It’s prob'ly less than great
I’d love to have a beer with Duffer
But he’d rather masterbate.

“Oh Martin, how could you,” lectured McCarthy. Marty grinned guiltily, avoiding the dirty look which Phil was boring into the back of his skull.

“He was such a nice young boy,” I muttered, “before he started living with those horrible boys from out of town…”

And so it went. Everyone ad-libbed a few verses each, pretty much slagging off everyone from Johnny Howard to the girly-looking Gavin Rossdale from Bush, and tried not to giggle directly into the mikes too much. And so was born the countrified rockabilly singalong favourite, I Love To Have A Beer With Pretty Much Anyone. It was going to be called I Love To Have A Beer With Pretty Much Anyone Who Happens To Be Wandering Past At The Time, but we couldn’t fit it on the recording notes we filled in afterwards - after, of course, we’d put our tools of trade away and proceeded to get on the piss with our invited guests.

And that was that, really. The borrowed gear went back to the Music department on the Monday, McCarthy and I went back to jamming a few nights a week on our old busted instrumentation over a few beers - not that many on school nights - and Marty and Phil spent most of the next week pulling late nights in the department’s mixing facilities trying to ‘polish a turd’, as experienced mixers and producers often call it (when they deal with us, anyway.) So endeth our rock ‘n’ roll careers, we figured. It was fun while it lasted. Hey, at least we’d had one decent gig to remember our ‘band’ by.

And a CD, of course. Well, two hundred CDs, to be exact. Courtesy a standard-issue Duffer brain-fade, he’d ordered not 20 pressings (OK, let's not be grand about it, burnings) of our recording from his dodgy mates in the computer science department with access to the fastest CD burner in Lismore, but ten times that amount.

“But it worked out so much cheaper!” he maintained. “Instead of two bucks a disc for twenty, it was only 45 cents per unit for 200!”

He then proceeded to hit us up for a quarter of the upfront production costs each, reasoning (poorly) that was a fair split. After much whinging, McCarthy and I relented, and paid him. In beer. Powers Bitter, in fact, because we were rather bitter (ha) about it. And because it was currently on special for exactly $22.50 a carton at Liquorland, putting the ‘cheap’ back in ‘cheap and nasty’, and neatly covering our split of the outlay. And then we proceeded to drink most of it on him.

Actually the fallout, such as it was, continued to affect our happy home for some time to come. The anticlimactic hangover from the adrenalin buzz of the gig seemed to cast a pall over the atmosphere at Chateau Dodgy for the next week or so. Granted, there were also a few other issues in play here - Marty and Phil were in full turd-polishing mode, surviving on Jolt Cola and Pizza Hut delivery, not to mention three hours sleep a night, and were rather grumpy little buggers (with each other and everyone else). I could tell McCarthy was antsy as well. He and his latent ADHD had revelled in being the centre of attention for an afternoon, and he’d rather enjoyed it. He kept bringing the gig up in conversation, reminding me how much fun we’d had, inferring we might have had a future of sorts there, suggesting surely we were too good at this to just leave it at that?

Given I took McCarthy in this mood about as seriously as I did the Rev. Fred Nile, Marty and Phil was the more significant problem. It was trouble in paradise. I’d never seen them bickering - I’d seen them take a few sly verbal shots at each other before, bitch a bit behind each other’s backs, but now they were picking at each other like an old, unhappily married couple, knowing exactly which of each other’s buttons to push to get the best response. My diagnosis, for what it was worth (two cans of Jolt and a Pizza Hut coupon) was that apart from simply getting on each others’ nerves with stress, no sleep and too much time together, there was Other Stuff Going On. I think - well, I know, because Phil told me - that Marty was badly regretting recording I Love To Have A Beer With Pretty Much Anyone, and wanted to excise it from the set, even if it meant dropping under the 20 minute set minimum. His reason, according to the Duffer, was that it was a cover (of sorts) and would get them into trouble. In fact he was just poo-scared of Chris Kurtin and how he’d react to (a) McCarthy slagging him off, despite never having met him, and (b) me slagging off Razorslash and CK’s apparent protégé, Steve Bennett. Oh yeah, and (c), having panicked and made up an embarrassingly juvenile ditty about his flatmate’s masturbatory habits, to the tune of an old Slim Dusty song. For his part, the Duffer was shitty with Marty for largely the same reason, i.e. (c). In fact, you could just see Phil waiting for the perfect opportunity to score one back on Marty in the verbal jousting that was life at the end of Mountain View Drive.

And he got his opportunity late Thursday night.

I should say a bit about Marty’s taste in women. Real ones weren’t his forte. Not that he had some rubber-doll fetish, just to point out that he was painfully bloody shy, and had persistent issues attempting to interact with them without humiliating himself terribly, or fearing that he would. No, instead, he had massive celebrity crushes. Borderline obsessive fixations on famous women - the lad would have made a pretty good stalker had he been gifted with more bravado and a decent sociopathic streak. Some slightly bewildering in amongst the listings, too. Kylie Minogue, for instance. OK, I could kind-of understand that one, up to a point (that point being any time in her Stock, Aitken and Waterman career phase) - she did have a damn fine arse undoubtedly firm enough to open a stubbie with. But his interest extended to actually purchasing, and then LISTENING TO, her music, or attempts thereupon. Ditto Alanis Morissette. Weird huh. Then there was Buffy, of course, occasionally referred to as Sarah Michelle Gellar, who Marty loved to bits - have to say I was more into Cordelia personally, being well into vacuous bimbos; McCarthy, meanwhile foreshadowed his own nascent self-destructive streak by nominating himself as a Faith man. Again, he watched every episode, regardless of the fact he already had each series on videotape.

But Marty’s big crush at present was (drum roll please)… the drummer sister from the Corrs. I think her name was Sharon. Or Andrea. I think Caroline was the singer wasn’t she? And I know it wasn’t the brother he was keen on. (We always figured he was the unluckiest bastard alive. Unless they were from the Deep South of Ireland and he had more, um, reciprocal playing rights than he probably should.) Anyway, you can tell two things here: (a) I’ve researched this book thoroughly and (b) none of the rest of us could distinguish one Corr sister from the other. But Marty could, and he was definite: it was the drummer who was the hottest one. And he mentioned it whenever he could drop it into conversation without appearing an idiot, probably to ward off any impression that he might have actually been gay.

So Marty and Phil dragged themselves back home after another long day trading ideas and insults over the mixing desk. McCarthy slung them both a frosty bottle of Powers Bitter-and-Twisted out of the fridge, and they slumped silently into separate corners of our ‘nice’ couch (i.e. being our least shabby one, it hadn’t yet been consigned to downstairs.)

“Come on lads,” I offered, “can’t be that bad… getting through it aren’t you?”

The response was largely mumblings of dissent. McCarthy put some communally-acceptable tunes onto the stereo and suggested, Happy Gilmore-style, that they should ‘go to a happy place’.

“Like the pub?” Phil suggested.

McCarthy’s brow furrowed. “Interesting concept,” he ventured.

“Aren’t you on the police beat tomorrow?”

“Shit,” he said by way of confirming my assertion. “Could probably self-generate it,” he continued, his current phrase for making it all up and/or bullshitting. He dictated his piece. “Some fuckin’ yeehaa was apprehended attempting to steal his fuckin’ yeehaa neighbour’s rusted-out 1974 Ford Cortina. Said the alleged perpetrator, a Mr Johnno Redneck of North Lismore, ‘Yeah, I’d have probly fucken got away wif it ay, ‘cept it was up on blocks already…”

“This is a happy place?” asked Marty wearily, slurping reluctantly on his lousy domestic beer. Marty wasn’t big on beer, but if he had to, he preferred Coronas. With a slice of lime, of course. Lemon was an option; inferior, but palatable. Powers Bitter was a bit of an imposition, but he was desperate.

“There’s nothing wrong with North Lismore,” protested Phil, to general astonishment. “That a 20 megaton nuke couldn’t fix,” he then added, and all was right in the world.

I swigged from my beer. I’d had a few to get over the taste now, so I didn’t mind so much. “A happy place. Just think. Lying on a beach in the Whitsundays, sun beating down, the girl of your dreams sunning herself on the towel next to you… the rich scent of sea spray, warm skin and coconut oil in the air…”

“Look out folks, he’s off again,” McCarthy grinned. “What you and Jessica get up to you in your own time is entirely your prerogative.”

“So is Jessica your ideal woman, then?” pursued Phil. “The girl of your dreams?”

I shrugged, as honest answer as I could give. “Close enough for government work.”

This apparently threw the floor open for discussion, the topic: the girl of one’s dreams, or approximations thereof. A happier place than North Lismore, anyway.

“Always had a thing for tall brunettes,” McCarthy admitted, somewhat ruefully. “Hasn’t always been good for me.” I nodded. Clear the area, Lena alert…

“We can guess what Phil would say if you asked him the same thing,” Marty piped up. “Dining Asian again, hey Phil? Love you long time…”

“I reckon we’ve heard enough from you over the past week about my preferences, mate!”

“What about you, Marty?” I asked. “Your perfect partner?”

“Everyone knows about my perfect partner,” Marty replied breezily. “My perfect partner would be around five foot ten, brunette, brown eyes, a drummer, and of Irish ancestry…”

To which Phil coughed nervously. “Ahem,” he coughed nervously.

“Coming down with something, mate?” inquired McCarthy.

“No, actually, it’s just that…” He paused. “It’s just that I’m five foot ten, brunette, brown eyes, a drummer, and of Irish ancestry…” As McCarthy and I started laughing, Phil turned to Marty and added, “So I reckon I’ll be locking my bedroom door tonight!”

Anyway Phil and Marty got the thing mixed, mastered and pressed in time for their Friday assignment deadline (with just the 199 copies in reserve, should the original be somehow mislaid) and all was well. I escaped the momentarily bad karma of the house for the weekend by taking Jessica to Byron for some quality time together. It basically rained all weekend, so we didn’t see much outside of the hotel suite. (OK, the on-site van at the beachside caravan park). However, we managed to ways of amusing ourselves.

I dropped her back at her place on Sunday night, then pedalled the postie van up the hill and down the other side to Chateau Dodgy. The lights were off, but someone was home. McCarthy was sitting downstairs in the gloom attempting to singlehandedly alleviate our chronic oversupply of Powers Bitterly Disappointed (our own fault for buying more than the requisite number of cartons needed to repay the Duffer – just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it’s worth buying) while listening to AC/DC Live cranked to Defcon Bleeding Ears. He only listened to AC/DC Live cranked to Defcon Bleeding Ears when he needed firing up or needed cheering up. Judging by the ranks of dead marines amassed around him, I figured the latter.

“Sorry mate,” he said, “didn’t notice it had got dark.” He turned down my namesake’s precision axework, grabbed a beer for both of us, and settled back into the couch with his unplugged Les Paul copy. And then balefully told me the news: Cassia had broken it off with him. I said I hoped it could be surgically reattached as he might need it again at some stage, even if only for his own entertainment. Having totally spoiled his carefully contrived self-indulgent sulking, he threw one of the skanky-scented couch cushions at me and immediately reverted to being the cheerfully fatalistic McCarthy we knew and loved, well put up with at least.

“You’ll love this,” he remarked sourly. “Guess who she’s taken up with.”

I couldn’t guess. So he told me that as he understood it, Cassia and some of the other girls from work had gone out to see a band, now that she was all musically-oriented and stuff. And one thing led to another, and she and the lead singer/guitarist’s eyes locked across a crowded, smoke-filled venue, and she’d got her dampened knickers in a twist over the way he played, and sang, and did the whole lead singer/guitarist thing… and basically threw herself at him after the gig. Not being one to dwell on the dental hygiene of gift horses, our man in turn took her home and presumably banged her silly.

“And here’s the best bit,” McCarthy continued wryly. “You do know who was playing that night, don’t you.”

“No! Not…” The colour must have drained from my face because McCarthy almost burst out laughing at my reaction.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “She’s taken up with fuckin’ Steve Bennett of fuckin’ Razorslash.”

“Dear Lord, no,” I offered. “Of all the cunts…”

He grinned. “Perhaps we shouldn’t have been so vocal about the failings of his music,” he suggested. “It clearly works on some people.” And began strumming, the chords tinny and distant on his unplugged axe. I recognised the progression, and joined in on the acoustic.

“Instant karma’s gonna get you…” we warbled.

He had rather walked into that one. Leading with the jaw, as ever…

“Can’t say I really mind,” McCarthy said later that evening, dismissively, and patently lying through his teeth. “I mean she was a nice girl, very attractive and all, but a bit… limited in her life experience, shall we say.”

“And as thick as two short planks,” I added. “So, are you going to finally ask Andrea out now, or what?”

He winced. “Finally? It’s been, like, two months that I’ve even known her. She’s not after me anyway, and would you stop going on about it? It’s just getting boring.”

“The laddie doth protest too much, me thinks,” I misquoted.

“Oh, fuck off,” McCarthy replied intellectually.

So our little adventure into the world of rock and/or roll had failed on one of its major objectives, i.e. getting our man Uncle Sam into the pants of young Cassia, the vivacious, if ever so slightly dense, Latina dancer. The other objective, helping Marty and Phil pass their audio engineering subject, wasn’t looking too good either, as Phil reported later that following week.

“Everyone else appears to have got their marks back from CK already,” he muttered, “except Marty and me. He keeps looking at us funny, like he’s trying to make us uncomfortable.”

“Is it working?” I asked.

“It is on Marty, he’s packing it,” Phil replied. “It’s worth a decent slab of our overall assessment, I suppose. I’m not that concerned though. Already failed this subject before, I can fail it again.”

“Look, Phil… Sam and I are sorry, mate. We didn’t mean to cause you any grief, we were just… ad-libbing, I suppose.”

“No worries,” he said. “My fault. Marty wanted to cut the last song, but I insisted we keep it. It’s part of the set, it’s [musically] tight, and it gets us over the 20 minute limit,” he maintained. “Besides,” he added, “it’s as funny as hell. If old mate Kretin has an issue with that, so be it.”

Presumably he did, but he wasn’t the only one. We had the issue of trying to get rid of 190-odd copies of the Flange Gasket Live CD. Basically we just threw copies to everyone we knew - friends, family, workmates, random passers-by - not to make any favourable impression on them, just to get them out of the house. Our neighbours Bill and Ben helped out by taking a dozen between them. Presumably it was archetypal stoner music, or they were short of drinks coasters next door. To make the product identifiable, McCarthy, a frustrated graphic designer from way back (his sister Anne was by now a marginally less frustrated professional in the same field) had put together some basic monochrome cover-art, a conceptual rip-off of a blank CD liner - OK, so it was an actual blank CD liner with text photocopied directly on top, but it worked as a design concept. The CD title was the simple, and rather poetic, Insert Title Here (the suggested alternative title of Live AIDS mysteriously lacked majority support); the tracklist, as per program.

Actually, it sounded pretty good, for something recorded in our garage on aging departmental gear and mixed in a week’s evenings for a pressing assessment deadline. Phil and Marty had done a pretty exceptional job of turd-polishing. The occasional bum guitar note, dodgy vocal or mistimed snare-strike added character, I felt. Though like everyone else, belying this attitude, I always winced when hearing my own mistakes in the recording, which became more obvious the more you listened to it. So we stopped listening to it.

A couple of days later McCarthy wandered in the door after another day’s hard graft as the lowest-ranked journalist at the Northern Star, doing all the shitty little jobs that everyone above him had vetoed, on the basis that it was all part of young Sam’s learning experience to do everyone else’s shit work. Even Andrea was punting her undesirable work his way. Today, though, he seemed more bemused than tired.

“Had an interesting call at work this morning,” he reported over our usual post-workday debriefing beer. (Hey, we might have enjoyed the amber fluid, but we definitely weren’t alcoholics. They go to meetings.) “Connected through from the front desk. You’ll never guess who.”

“Elvis?”

He shook his head. “Our old mate Steve from the ‘Slash,” he replied.

“Really?” I asked. “And what did our favourite Dave Mustaine impersonator have to say?”

Dave Mustaine, some may recall, was the talentless hair-farming frontman of Megadeth, who had been kicked out of Metallica in their formative years for being Thoroughly Shit. You’d have thought he’d have fitted right in, but noooo.

“Well, interestingly, he seemed quite agitated,” McCarthy explained, nodding condescendingly. “Very agitated, I would say.”

“Really!” I remarked, catching onto the sardonic vibe. “Don’t tell me he’s contracted the clap from young Cassia and is blaming the previous encumbent.”

“Funnily enough, that wasn’t it,” he replied with raised eyebrows. “He wanted to express his displeasure regarding my suspected involvement in a musical recording which slighted, nay slandered even, himself and his band.”

“In particular with respect to their alleged pharmaceutical intake?”

“Very precient of you, Andrew,” McCarthy grinned. “He said, and I quote, ‘Are youse the cunts who fucken said me and me band was a bunch of fucken druggos who inject crack up our arseholes, who the fuck are you to say anyfing’ - yes, anyfing - ‘about me band, you’re fucken nobody, I’ll fucken smaaash youse, etc.’ Without the etc, of course.”

I considered this novel development. “Seriously mate, he called you up at work and abused you? Made threats?”

“Sure did,” McCarthy confirmed. “He called the front desk and asked politely to be connected through, then he basically unloaded. He’s rather put out. I don’t think laughing at him helped.”

I felt a little guilty about this; after all, I’d been the one who’d slagged off Razorslash, he’d got stuck into Kretin. Changing the topic slightly, I began, “I’m wondering how he found out about it, actually. You think your girl Cassia might have told him?”

“No… not directly, anyway. You see, here’s the thing,” McCarthy replied, almost conspiratorially. “Mr Bennett told me he heard it last night on the radio.”

And the penny dropped. Of course. 2NCR-FM, the local community radio station (92.9 FM, if you were in line-of-sight of the transmitter and the prevailing winds were favourable) had recently commissioned a shambolic excuse of a late-night radio show called The Stoned Roses. The show was presented by a pair of ragged SCU arts-media students with whom we were prepared to admit a vague acquaintance, and went to air very late most weeknights (basically whenever the boys remembered or could be arsed to turn up for the show). Bill and Ben, in their dissolute wisdom, had clearly brought one or more of their dozen copies of Insert Title Here into the 2NCR-FM studios for last night’s show. And not just for office frisbee either during the longer stoner-friendly numbers.

Of course, we weren’t to know this, as none of us admitted to listening to the Stoned Roses, which could loosely be described as a melange of guerilla radio, political commentary, avant-garde post-consumerist ‘concept broadcasting’, and THC-soaked stupidity. Basically it was two monkeys dribbling rubbish and laughing at each other’s pissweak jokes, i.e. a direct evolutionary precursor of Merrick and Rosso. That and their disasterously eclectic tastes in music made the show effectively unlistenable, even if you weren’t required to get some sleep for work or uni the next day. To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether us being played on their show was a triumph or a train-wreck.

But we sure as hell listened into 2NCR-FM that night to see if lightning would strike twice.