Transcript
Ad Voice (0:00)
Foreign.
Jake Brennan (0:04)
Double Elvis. So you may have noticed we've got quite the output over here at Double Elvis lately. We've got Disgraceland, of course, Hollywoodland. New show called this film should be played loud. A bunch of bonus episodes. You know, that's a lot of content to power through, which is why I'm a big fan of five Hour Energy. Five Hour Energy has this great flavor. Fruity Rainbow five Hour Energy Dark. These shots explode in your mouth with fruity flavor. And the caffeine kick is incredible. If you need something different to get you through the day, if you need something exciting, if you need something that's going to wake you up, it's going to taste great. The new Fruity Rainbow five Hour Energy shots are where it's at. And if you want something different, they have tons of flavors to choose from over at five Hour Energy. Seventeen flavors. Seventeen flavors. But again, I'm going with this Fruity Rainbow five Hour Energy shot. Huge flavor in a tiny bottle. Five Hour Energy Shots pack the flavors of the season in a portable two ounce shot. These bottles are resealable. You can take them anywhere you go. Zero sugar. Treat that. You know, if you're a sweet tooth, you're going to approve. So get Candy Flavored Chaos with fruity rainbow 5 Hour Energy shots available online at 5 Hour Energy.com or Amazon. Again, get Candy Flavored Chaos with fruity rainbow 5 hour energy shots available online at Fiveourenergy.com or Amazon.
Carvana Advertiser (1:30)
Hey, Sal.
Jake Brennan (1:31)
Hank. What's going on? We haven't worked a case in years.
Carvana Advertiser (1:34)
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Jake Brennan (1:38)
Think something's up?
Carvana Advertiser (1:39)
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Jake Brennan (1:46)
It sounds like Carvana just makes it easy to buy your car, Tank.
Carvana Advertiser (1:51)
Yeah, you're right. Case closed.
Ad Voice (1:54)
Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.
Jake Brennan (1:59)
Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. This is a story about danger. About how danger never really goes away, even after you've escaped the most dangerous place you've ever known. And this is also a story about a band that survived one of the most violent, lawless music scenes on Earth, only to discover that the farther they traveled from it, the nearer danger drew them in. This is about riots and near death experiences. About criminals hiding out in mining camps. It's about crossing over, about paying a price. And about controversy. It's a story about how even the bands that make it out alive don't always make it out unscathed. This is the story of how INXS became one of the biggest rock and roll bands on the planet. So of course it's a story about great music. Unlike that clip I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melotron called yeah, NA MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to My Sharona by the Knack. And why would I play you that specific slice of Kurt Cobain inspiring cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on September 19, 1979. And that was the day that Australia's music scene literally went up in flames. And six guys from down under forged in the white hot fire first set their sights on global superstardom on this, a special Part two episode. Wild Places, Lawless Scenes, Criminals, Mining Camps, Controversy and in Excess. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace. It was a land of opportunity and dust. A place for men who weren't welcome back home. Men blown west by the wind and hardened by the sun. Criminals running from their past and running from the law. It was a land without laws. Out here, there were only promises. Promises of wealth, of fame, and of a new life. A vast life, one that seemed as endless as the horizon. But those promises in that life were hard earned, and they came at a price. And so this was also a land of violence. It was a land where you backed up your best shot with bare knuckles. A land where blood was spilled and where justice came at the sharp end of a knife blade or the jagged edge of a broken bottle. This land was not the Wild west of America in the late 1800s. This was the wild west of Australia in the 1970s. Or should I say the Wild west of the Australian music scene in the 1970s. Of course, new York had the Ramones and Suicide and Patti Smith. And London had the Clash and the pistols. But by 1977, Australia had something even more untamed and unchecked. The Australian rock and roll circuit was lawless. From Sydney to Melbourne to far flung mining and fishing towns like Kalgoorlie, Port Hedland and Bunbury, Australian audiences were desperate to rage, as Midnight Oil's Peter Garrett once put it. And whether it was Midnight Oil or the Saints or Radio Birdman or Cold Chisel or even the Boys Next Door. That's what Nick Cave and the Birthday Party called themselves. At first, Australian audiences were radicalized, mobilized and energized by the music they wanted to be part of. The show, and I mean physically. Street tough, sun hardened subcultures like the Sharpies would roll up their crop cuts tight and their T shirts tight and their jeans tight too. All of it tight, all of it sharp as fuck. They'd wait for a hippie or a mod or a rocker, anyone who wasn't a sharpie really, to do the wrong thing, to look at them the wrong way, to say the wrong word. And it was on. And that night's entertainment would then soundtrack the raw primordial violence at ear splitting volume. Meanwhile, a couple of truck drivers six pints deep would begin to beat each other's faces. And while some half baked townie at the bar weaponized a beer bottle in order to express his displeasure at the fact that he couldn't hear the football game on the shitty television set that hung above the cash register. But one venue's bar in particular served as a buffer between the audience and the band. At the Star Hotel in Newcastle, New South Wales, the band played behind the bar, while the 200 or so patrons packed inside had a stand on the bar if they wanted to really connect with the music on that untamed physical level. But the physical state of the Star Hotel was just about as dodgy as its rough around the edges clientele. And so on September 19, on the 17th, 1979, the venerable live music venue hosted its final shows before shutting down for good. Bands began playing at noon that day and they went until 10pm that night, which per a local ordinance, was curfew. The club was at capacity inside, but outside thousands more had gathered to give their beloved Star Hotel the send off it deserved. The cops walked into The Star at 10pm on the dot. One of the local bands, Heroes, were wrapping up their final song. The thin walls were shaking and the stench of sweat and beer and cigarettes was as strong as heroes were allowed. But the cops aimed to be louder. Just by being present. They forced the music to stop before that final song was technically over. But not before Heroes lead singer leaned into the mic with a parting thought. The pigs say we gotta go. The place erupted. All that untamed energy that had been put into the music, into this codependent symbiotic relationship, now had nowhere else to go but to refocus itself on the ones who had denied them their joy in communion and rage as the cops put the heroes as defiant singer in handcuffs. The crowd emptied onto the street and out there in the warm spring air, a riot broke out. Chants of Piss off pigs. While the locals wrestled with the police as One bystander was led into a waiting ambulance with blood running down his face. Another managed to steal a cop service revolver. A group of men rocked the police car back and forth, finally tipping it over. And as it came to rest on its hood, fuel began to leak from the gas tank and spill onto the pavement. Some random source of ignition was then tossed onto the liquid. A stray cigarette perhaps. And within seconds the cruiser erupted in a fireball. The flames quickly spread to a nearby paddy wagon which burned alongside the cruiser while the memories of all the shows inside the tiny Star Hotel drifted off into the night like the smoke that was now billowing from the wreckage. Only a few weeks before the now infamous Star Hotel riots, the Sydney by way of Perth band the Ferris Brothers had just played their first gig under the catchier new name inxs. Just like heroes in cold chisel and midnight oil and all the rest, INXS and the brothers Ferris, that's Andrew, John and Tim, along with Gary Beers, Kirk Pengilly and lead singer Michael Hutchinson, had come up in the lawless years of the Australian pub rock circuit. They were forged by the white hot danger of the scene. Even if your perception of INXS has always been the pretty boys of the 1980s and early 1990s era of rock and roll, the pretty boy thing was just attention getting. The pretty boy thing sold records, millions of records. But I'm getting ahead of myself. By matter of fact, In Excess were a product of an exceedingly hostile environment. And this environment wasn't necessarily the Star Hotel on the evening of September 19, 1979. Instead, theirs was a mining camp in Goldsworthy, a two day drive from Sydney, where they were offered $1,000 to entertain the workers for a week. And like some of the crowd at the start, many of these mining workers lived well, one step ahead of the law. They came to Goldsworthy to hide from judges and lawyers and women. Out here in the dust and the dirt, all their pent up aggression, all their violence, it ripped into the ground beneath them with their shovels, with their picks that they held in their calloused hands. This area of Australia was unforgiving. A dystopian Mad Max vision where chaos and disorder lingered in the silences, where the miners made it through another day only because they knew that a bunch of bust in whores were waiting for them in the decrepit shacks on site. This was a land where, as INXS tour van rocketed west and then north, John Ferris looked out the window only to see a pile of dead Kangaroos on the side of the road. It was a land where you didn't know whether the audience was going to applaud or jump from their chair and strangle you to the life was squeezed from your body. It was a land where there was fear even in the communal bathroom, which was crawling with spiders as big as one of those working man's calloused hands. But a thousand bucks was a thousand bucks. And so John Ferris and Michael Hutchinson in Excess did what any other band in Australia circa the late 1970s would do. They took the gig. Besides, some steady money meant that Kirk no longer had to sell weed out of his guitar case to make ends meet. And in making the drive and taking the gig, surrounded by dead kangaroos and giant spiders and hardened criminals and all in excess learned how to survive. But survival wasn't enough. John Kirk, Michael and the guys aspired to things bigger than the vastness of the brutal Australian scene. They wanted the world. They wanted to cross over to the world, which was something that some of even the most popular Australian bands, like the great Cold Chisel, were never able to achieve. INXS also didn't exactly fit in with the Australia thing. And what I mean by that is that they weren't banned for the raging crowd. They didn't inspire the sharpies and their rivals to bang heads. They were a band that made you shake your ass instead. And so they used that to their advantage to pull themselves up to that next rung of success. But it took more than ass shaking funk, more than talent and drive to realize crossover worldwide success. It required an ever present danger as your companion. Because once INXS left Australia to take on the world, danger followed them. It rode with them in tandem until it eventually threatened their lives.