Drugs, Dransfield, Women and Songs

My name is Phillip John Proud and this was naturally shortened to Pip Proud a few years ago. I was born 11.9.47 in Adelaide. My parents are middle class and so on, and so on. I decided to write when I saw an answer to two questions at once. What is value, and what would be entertaining for a young man. The whole thing is such a farce in that sense that I feel quite smart about it all.

So wrote Pip Proud, brother of painter Geoffrey and friend to poet Michael Dransfield, in Thomas Shapcott’s Australian Poetry Now! published in 1970. Dransfield (1948–1973) was a prodigious, eloquent and deservedly fashionable rising talent in Australian poetry; he published his first collection, Streets of the Long Voyage, that year and remains one of the best-known and -loved poets of his generation. Dransfield, a fan of Proud’s before the friendship, had insisted Proud be included in the Shapcott volume. Proud was already renowned in underground circles as the composer and performer of some of the most uncompromising and extraordinary pop music of the 1960s, exemplified in the albums Adreneline and Richard (1968) and A Bird in the Engine (1969). The popular press acclaimed him as ‘a pop primitive’, but the combination of his fragile, intimate vocals, naive guitar playing and raw performing style created scornful opposition alongside his hard core of devotees.

By the time Australian Poetry Now! was in the shops, Proud had decamped to London, where he continued to struggle. The Beatles’ Apple label almost signed him and John Peel’s Dandelion label did say yes but nothing came of it. Proud, and his loyal girlfriend Ali, were meanwhile starving, committed to his art. He was writing a novel called ‘The White Forest’, which Dransfield planned to (but didn’t) publish.

Proud returned to Australia in 1971 in mourning, following the suicide of his adopted sister. Phonogram, his Australian record label, did not want to release his new songs (or perhaps he didn’t ask them to). After some time in Sydney, where he wrote plays for the station then known as 2JJ, he disappeared to Tasmania, then to Tenterfield in country New South Wales for twenty-five years, returning to the music scene with a 1995 Half a Cow reissue of his sixties Phonogram material, entitled Eagle-wise. Interest in Proud was further inspired by a laudatory song from New Zealand’s Alastair Galbraith titled simply ‘Pip Proud’ (Galbraith had inherited his mother’s copy of Adreneline and Richard), and the 1997 success of one of Proud’s old songs, ‘We Crossed the Atlantic’, covered by Melbourne group Hydroplane. Proud has since recorded four new albums issued on the Emperor Jones label of Austin, Texas; the critical and consumer response has ranged from dazzled to confused. He is planning a fifth, and Emperor Jones is working on a double retrospective including a live recording from an extraordinary performance given in Melbourne in 2006. The following short memoir of a music career was recently penned by Proud who is still actively writing.

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Pip Proud: Have you any idea how brave I was to do that music? It’s a bit like in a video game, you lose a life every time you fail. I suppose there’s a difference between strength and bravery. The less strong you are the braver you are.

After all these years I say it now with very little feeling, but I always knew I was the bravest. Apart from those guys in Vietnam. It was almost like a whole theocracy that had to be overthrown. I wasn’t alone. Maybe I was the most outrageous. Listening to those soft words of mine, can you imagine they could outrage people? But yeah, they did.

I never understood why people laughed at my music. I still don’t understand why I wrote such stuff and thought I could get away with it. Arrogance or naivety, maybe a bit of both. The trouble is I can’t understand why I should have been arrogant. And with my upbringing, I certainly wasn’t naive. Maybe it’s a form of retardation or displacement. I think the whole hippy thing was kind of like that. We just had to escape this horrible world, so Adreneline and Richard carried sticks in the forest, and yeah, we’re only worth our weight in meat. I was spaso from birth. Something to do with RH-negative blood. I was knocking my knees together for a few years and then I was bow-legged. I couldn’t talk properly for a long time and I certainly couldn’t write. It was damning and I felt ashamed. I suppose that’s why I tried to do music. It was a ‘fuck you’ sort of gesture. I guess that’s why my lyrics are kind of dreamlike. I lived in my own world. But Christ, I was sick of being laughed at. I developed an artificial arrogance. Maybe that’s bravery. Maybe it’s showmanship.

All this lugging my guitar around trying to figure an E chord from an A chord. My brother trying to paint pictures. Once we rented a laundry to live in. It had a sloping cement floor with a big old cement laundry tub and a Bunsen burner for a stove, but somehow we didn’t mind. We had our dreams of fame and wealth one day, but the pleasure was from the sheer iconoclasm of it all. It was bloody hard and cold, but each day seemed new. I liked pissing out the window or in the laundry tub. It was cool to see how many days we could stay awake without sleep. We used to compete like that. I think five was our record though I’m not sure who won. My brother painting and me trying to figure out how a damn guitar works. We got some money at one stage and were determined we wouldn’t starve for a while so we bought a carton of spaghetti. Like about ten kilos. But we forgot the sauce. I’ve had a thing about spaghetti ever since. My brother used to paint all night and all day. I used to stretch the canvases for him. It was a constant job.

Such a desperate time it was, man, ask Janis and Jimi. Every night on TV bombs dropping defoliants [in Vietnam] and the government telling us to like it. We had full employment back then and what a smug fat-arse pack of bastards we were. We were so full of shit and self-confidence we allowed the Aborigines to vote. We let them become real people! Weren’t we cool!

I remember the Stones, Mick Jagger playing the harmonica like he was raping it (I thought: how incredibly spunky) and Buddy Holly on black and white TV. I’d go to symphony orchestras—my parents thought I was round the bend—and dances in Adelaide where I’d see the Masters Apprentices and others. I started playing guitar when I was about fifteen. I tried to learn a few Buddy Holly covers. I liked John Keats and Shakespeare and I suddenly understood how beautiful words could be. I don’t remember what my first song was—some hippy thing, like ‘I Love You Best when You’re a Leaf’. I was living in Sydney and a stockbroker friend, Michael Hobbs, was supporting me there for a while. He bought me a tape recorder and I made fifty copies of an album called De Da De Dum. I took the album to quite a few record labels, and Bob Cooley from Phonogram called me up and said he thought it was okay, and I re-recorded it as Adreneline and Richard. I knew Garry Shead through Frank Watters and he made a film about me called De Da De Dum.

Really, I just freaked everyone out, they simply couldn’t cope with someone outside their parameters. The bastards on TV used to try and set me up like they were going to have a joke at a performing fat woman or a dwarf. I never let them get away with it. I always gained the audience’s sympathy in the end. But it was pretty hard sometimes. The blue-rinse ladies pulled me through, the young girls, and all those whimsical young poets who used to talk to me. I wonder where all those young poets are today. And those girls I signed autographs for, probably grandmothers now.

Buster Fides [alcoholic comedian] talked to me once. He was beautiful. He said I shouldn’t drink so much vodka before going on TV. We sat back stage and I drank vodka. He was a hell of a nice man.

Those dumb-arses who made these TV shows used to say ‘Stand on the little red dot’, on the floor and they always used to make you mime a song. I never would do that so they used to get a mike. Christ they were fools. They could never talk me into anything, but shit, they tried. There was a kind of smugness about them. They had fake English accents. It was a huge pleasure to walk off the little red dot. It was great to make them move the cameras so far the end of the set showed. It was great to be a smart arse, but much more importantly, it was great to run the show, to break the ice, to break the dam. Such tight-arses, man, it was great to humiliate them. I was young then, but I did it.

They used to try and set me up before an interview. They gave me stock answers to questions I’d be asked. I’d say ‘Oh yeah, yeah,’ then when we were on live I could talk honestly and it used to freak these guys out, talking about peace and innocence and all these guys fighting in Vietnam at the same time.

The record company would fly me to Melbourne to do TV appearances. I hated the Hilton and used to find a groupie and go to her place instead. Got to know some strange places and some beautiful women. I had a permanent bed at this house that a Russian woman owned. She used to have pet pigs back in the old country. She shared the place with a microbiologist. The Hell’s Angels used to visit for three-day beer-drinking contests and a lot of professors from Monash Uni. Strange mix of people. Anyway this woman screwed all of us. You’d wake up in bed at night with this naked woman doing sexy things to you. The whole Russian ballet and the best minds at Monash, and me, all got a dose of some STD. All nice people. She was considered a hero. Funny, I can’t even remember her name. She once tried to seduce me at a bus stop, in broad daylight, with people around. Nearly got me too, but I was scared someone would steal my guitar if I put it down.

My girlfriend Ali and I had an ‘open’ relationship. In retrospect that stinks. I don’t think they can possibly work. But yeah, I used to like the groupies and a lot of them were good friends for a while (till they found something more stable) and I still love them. There was no AIDS back then, you might get some STD but no-one cared. I say this with a kind of bewilderment, but there was a time there when I was screwing eight women. I made house calls, half the day and all night. I was pretty spunky and I had this feeling towards all these fellow musicians who were being smart arse and doing C13 chords and putting me down: to hell with you, I’ll show you what music is all about. It’s about basic chords, simplicity, a little ornamentation and the lyrics kind of falling down like the dew on the grass. But mostly, it’s about sex.

Music is sex, I think so, it feels that way to me. At least, it’s passion. Does passion have to lead to sex? I don’t think so. I have a passionate love for so many people and there’s no sex or desire. I really don’t understand, but when I make a new song it’s unrehearsed, like I found a new lover. They’re done in one take and that’s the only one there will be. From my end it’s absolutely exhausting. Sometimes I think I’m a real slob, but then no, a ten-minute song takes a week’s energy, maybe not in calorific terms, but somehow it bleeds you dry.

We all lived at Alison’s mum’s flat, me, Hilary and eventually Dransfield. Michael and Hilary used to sniff ether. He had this two-litre bottle. Christ, the place used to stink. It’s a wonder we didn’t all get blown up. I used to work with these two guitarists (John Black—he had two wives—and some other guy I can’t remember). They never could catch my rhythms. Crazy times. I don’t know how Ali’s mum put up with us. Dransfield bought a deal of dope that turned out to be oregano. Ali and I smoked it on the off chance. Meanwhile the neighbours complained about the smell and the music and Ali’s mum kept bringing back hospital food from where she worked and put up with all this shit. She’s a hero too.

Dransfield was always making me sign contracts for my books. I think in a way he was just trying to ‘disappear’ them. He just turned up at the door one day and said he was a publisher. He kind of ingratiated himself pretty thoroughly. He was so straight, worked at the tax office. I have loved and hated him, several times over. I think in me he saw something he wanted to become but didn’t want to imitate. His early work was total fantasy. He had to find a niche market. His drug poems were it. Like a punk does things with body piercing and safety pins. He did escape from his parents, but what a way to go! I got really mad at him when he started offering Hilary heroin. That’s when I hated him. I also got really mad at him when I realised he’d ‘disappeared’ my novels. They were probably crap anyway. But he was extraordinarily ambitious. I think I always knew who I was and there was really no trying, simply expressing. He didn’t know who he was, he just tried different personas until one fitted.

I was kind of dismayed when I watched Dransfield killing himself. I was totally dismayed when that made him famous. He knew it would work like that. I think he thought his father would approve of him if he was famous. What a price.

I only took LSD once but that was more than enough. It lasted for three days. Your vision fractalises like on a video game, except everything for me had six sides. The ceiling turned into a Persian carpet. Music was so astoundingly clear and right inside my brain. Sex was fantastically sensitive, almost transparent, always this feeling of stark honesty, like you were cheating. My hold was so fragile. We walked to the park and the concrete footpath turned to sand and I fell through the pavement and Ali pulled me out again. I don’t know, Ali saved me a lot of times in all sorts of ways.

In the late sixties I always got around with no shoes. I wasn’t trying to be feral: it just felt good and I liked running. I used to run everywhere. I had this romantic notion of flying everywhere I went. It wasn’t a statement or anything. I had absolutely no idea how peculiar I must have appeared. Also, so poor I couldn’t afford shoes anyway. I found a pair of shoes in a throw-out once but they were a size too small so I thought I could stretch them. I boiled them in a cooking pot for a few hours thinking the leather would stretch, but the damn things shrunk and sort of set like concrete, all curled up. I didn’t know anything about anything, but I thought I knew everything.

It was easy to get a job back then. You could get one any day you were short of cash. You could wake up in the morning and think, ‘Christ, I’m hungry, better get a job today’ and go and get one. They usually lasted about three days. I couldn’t handle regimentation, still can’t. I had this job at this car wash in Edgecliff. Three minutes. I got the internal windows section. I think they gave that job to the new guys because it was the hardest. This amazing car came in. It had a huge back window sloping at about 20 degrees and it certainly took more than three minutes. I don’t know if the guy was deaf or something, but he drove off with me in the back still cleaning his window. He got a hell of a shock when I climbed into the front next to him. He let me off in Double Bay. By the time I walked back to the car wash I’d been sacked. That’s typical of my work experience.

I don’t feel nostalgia for those days. Wouldn’t do it again but yeah, we thought we were doing just fine.

I guess back in the sixties there were as many homeless people as there are these days, but we didn’t think of ourselves like that. It was pure desperado and who gives a shit. I could pack a change of clothes in my guitar case along with the guitar. Come to think of it, most all my life I played electric without an amp. Woke up one morning about three a.m. where I was sleeping in the Homebush abattoirs, under a couple of bushes. This cop on a motorcycle had his lights on me, but he pretended he couldn’t see me and drove away. But I never felt homeless.

One night this cop got me for hitchhiking. Kept me in the lock up until about ten in the night, too late to get a ride. Slept in this bare field and that was a hell of a cold night. I had frost all over me in the morning. I was covered in ice. But yeah, still carried that damn guitar. I stopped music for a long time … I mean you can only be scoffed at so much. I played guitar at a wedding party one night in about 1990 and it had this remarkable effect of stopping everyone dead in their tracks. Fuck, that was embarrassing.

In the mid 1990s I was living in Tenterfield and I started recording again. I had to learn the guitar again. I recorded to a cassette player that was hooked up to the car to power it, then a petrol generator, then solar cells. I’ve released four or five albums on the Emperor Jones label and I’m looking forward to doing another, a call-and-response rap album. Like the Beastie Boys, except it’ll be the Pip Proud version. And I want to do it about the Third World War. It’s going to have the lines ‘holy shit, holy hell, holy war’ stuck in there a few times. I’ll probably embarrass George Bush—since he’s not game to say it’s a holy war. Oh my goodness, what the hell.