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| WILD
ABOUT YOU: What were the first rock records that you remember hearing during
the early 1960s?
HERMAN
MARCIC: We actually
had a friend whose father had one of those short wave (radio) outfits
— and we used to listen to England. So
we’d be playing things like Baby
Please Don’t Go by Them, months before it came out in Australia.
WAY: That’s interesting, because
most bands of the period tended to scrabble around looking for imports,
but you guys had a secret source.
HM:
You’d listen to
it every night and get the top-40 type of thing — and it’d be fade-in
one ear — and fade out the other. We
had a little two-track (reel-to-reel tape recorder) which we’d record
it on, and then learn it.
WAY: Your first band with your brothers
was called The Beagle Boys, wasn’t it.
HM:
Yeah… there was
myself on bass, Eric (Marcic) on guitar and Rudolph (Marcic) on drums
— and we had fun! We actually
supported the Easybeats before they were huge, and the Easybeats suggested
to their management that they should take us to Sydney, we’d do well. So we ended up being the band that followed
the Easybeats around. Places like
the Bowl in Sydney…and also The Beatle Village — which was the place to
be. It was a little underground cellar sort of
thing — one way in, one way out! (laughs)
WAY:
Was your 1965 set similar to the later Creatures sound — that driving
R&B thing, or more Shadowsey?
HM:
We really got into
things like the Rolling Stones, it was never instrumental as such. We may have done a couple on the squeeze-box
(accordion) — my brother Rudolph who was also the drummer, played squeeze-box
— so we maybe did a few things like Red
River Rock and so forth, but that’s about it. The rest was mainly Rolling Stones. We didn’t really follow the Beatles too much, mainly the Rolling
Stones because they were more the rebellious type.
WAY:
How was it playing that kind of music in Mildura? Was it a fairly conservative
country town?
HM:
No, not really. There was a great band there at the time by
the name of the Rhythm Rockets. They
were mainly a Shadows-type band, but then they started doin’ songs that
were hits. But it really wasn’t “us” there at the time.
We really had to get out. |
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WAY:
I guess you all grew up in Mildura?
HM:
Yes we did. Except for later on, when we had a guitarist
(Greg) “Sleepy” Lawrie. We actually
went to Surfer’s Paradise (in 1967) and stayed there a while. Then my
brother Eric decided he wanted to go back to Sydney.
So we ended up getting a “non-guitarist” as such, who was just
learning, basically. I think he
was hoping to be a guitarist, but he was just able to play chords and
that was about it. But he (Greg Lawrie) taught himself and ended
up being very accomplished. He’s a brilliant guitar player now. He also started up Carson County Boogie Band
and played with Chain and guys like that in the end.
We had a great time with Sleepy Lawrie.
There was a time in Surfer’s Paradise, I remember the time well,
when he didn’t have coloured hair and we all did — I was bright blue!
Eric was red at the time, the singer was purple and Rudolph, my
brother, was green. But Sleepy Lawrie had very short brown hair,
so we decided to give him a red wig, and one particular night he was trying
to chat up this girl and he wouldn’t come up (to the stage). So we decided to go down and drag him up and
throw him on stage, but his wig came off!
WAY:
So his secret was out…
HM: Exactly. But he put it back on and it was the wrong
way, and he couldn’t see what he was doing. (laughs)
WAY:
When did the dyed hair thing come in?
HM: That was
actually in Sydney. A hairdresser
friend of the singer (Keith Matcham) said, ‘Why don’t you actually dye
your hair? You could get the stuff that washes out.’ But this was back in the sixties and you had to have blond hair
as such, so we all dyed it, and it was terrible stuff really, because
you’d go to sleep and your pillow was all blue and your collar was all
blue and god knows what.
I got chased down a road once. I was walking down a main street of Surfer’s
Paradise and I had this pair of shorts on — ripped jeans made into shorts,
with no T-shirt or anything on — and if you could picture from the back,
I had long blue hair down to me bottom.
He thought I was a girl with no top on. (laughs)
The poor bugger crashed his car into a lamppost and chased me!
WAY: Having such long, brightly coloured
hair … these days it’s quite common, but back then, what was the reaction
of people?
HM: Oh we were
called everything, you know. There
was one bloke walking past who said to his wife, ‘It’s gotta be from outer
space, no one would do that’.
WAY:
Keith Matcham was the singer of the Creatures.
When did he come into the band?
HM: He
was there from the start of the Beagle Boys virtually, in. He was from Mildura as well. He was actually a roustabout — a bloke who
went out and chased sheep. |
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WAY:
When you went to Sydney you got picked up by Tom Towle I believe…
HM: That’s
right. Tom Towle was the person
who actually toured the Easybeats before they were big. He became our manager. We
had a great little house over the Georges River and we used to have to
listen to the tidal (warnings) because your shoes would float away if
there was a real high tide, because it’d come into the house.
It was terrible! (laughs) But
it was a good house in the summer.
WAY:
How was it playing in Kings Cross at that time, especially with the Easybeats?
HM: If
you could picture a country lad going from no streetlights or anything,
going through Melbourne onto Sydney to see the lights — it was just flabbergasting,
it really was. It was unbelievable,
I couldn’t think at the time that there’d be so many lights on at any
one time! (laughs) ‘Cos I’d never been to the city.
It was actually
scary at the time as well, because there was always the Sharpies and the
Rockers and then you had the Mods, and the Mods had long hair. The Sharpies…Rockers and Skinheads…all hated
the Mods because they hated them taking their GIRLS from them. We used to get chased and god knows what.
In the end it got
to the stage where we just had enough, because we’d come from a country
town where we stood our own. But
it got to (when) they’d come from behind the stage and say, ‘D’ya wanna
go do ya?’ — just like that. And
you’d think, ‘Oh no, not again…’ you know?
And you’d have four or five bands on in one night in those days,
and they’d run for the hills. So in the end we said ‘Ah to hell with it!’
So we grabbed our microphone stands and stood our ground and bashed the
livin’ HELL out of ‘em!
WAY:
So did the hassles end after that?
HM: Yeah
pretty well. There was one time
in Bathurst — this was a scary one — our car broke down, it was an old
Buick. We went out to Bathurst to play in the town hall there, there was
about five or six Sydney bands — The Midniters and guys like that…But
there was a little band called The Verdettes whose singer was actually
a Pom — and I suppose to the girls he was really cute, he had long hair
and a pommy accent. And this particular person’s girlfriend took
a liking to him, and of course he didn’t like it, and so he started beating
up on him. And (the band) came
running over to my brother Rudolph and said, ‘Ohhh they’re beating up
poor so-and-so’, so we all went in and stood our ground, and of course
a couple of hits and the guy went down.
And Rudolph said, ‘Righto, let’s get back!’
Everything was done.
So we were actually
the last band out of town, and on our way back to Sydney we happened to
see these drums and guitars in trees.
We thought, ‘God, a bad accident!’
But what had happened was, the guy had got his mates and they waited
at the end of town and — I think it was the Midniters or one of those
bands — and they ended up putting them in hospital.
We thought it was a bad car accident!…drums and god knows what
hangin’ from trees, they just DEMOLISHED the equipment. But they were really after US.
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WAY:
It was an extremely rough time by the sound of it.
HM: Oh
yeah. Especially Darlinghurst,
where you had the Maltese contingent to deal with as well. Their secret was to send a small bloke out and he’d sort of pick
on someone, and then when you retaliated, he’d give a whistle and about
a hundred of ‘em would come around the corner.
We ended up saving
one of their guys. There was a
rocker beating one of them up and we just ended up stepping in and taking
over and helpin’ the poor bugger. And
after that, we were the kings of the Darlinghurst nightclubs. It didn’t matter where we went, we’d be invited
in — couldn’t speak a word of Maltese! (laughs)
WAY:
There were a lot of gigs to be had back in the sixties. It seems as if bands would often play three
or four shows a night.
HM: Well
the (band’s live) production was so small, you could put it all a small
car basically. Our car used to
be a FC Holden would you believe? We
actually got picked up in a country town in the Taree area and they booked
us on an old law, because the singer was quite cheeky.
He just loved to give the cops a hard time. And of course, this country cop picked up this book from the top
of the shelf, blew the dust off it, like you see in the movies, went through
it and found a law that he got us on.
The law was “Frightening Horses!”
(We had to pay) Eleven Pounds, and they locked him (Keith Matcham)
up. The reason why, was that we had THE CREATURES
written in huge letters across the side of the car on both sides. And so he locked us up for frightening horses.
WAY:
Were you earning much money playing live then?
HM: I
suppose you could say ‘yeah’. It’d
be the equivalent to about sixty bucks a night I suppose, back in those
days — it was quite good. But
times had started to change, and I think the boat was leaving the harbour
and we weren’t on it as such. I
think we were probably TOO rebellious at the time.
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WAY:
When you were playing the Beatle Village and venues around King’s Cross,
what would be the response from the crowd?
Herman Marcic:
Oh great. The
boyfriends hated us with a passion — (laughs) for obvious reasons! We didn’t hold anything back, I mean if there
was gonna be an f-word in it, then we threw it in.
WAY:
What sort of numbers were the band doing?
I know on the singles there are some originals, but most bands
of the time were doing covers. Did
you have a lot of originals?
HM: No,
not really, we had four or five originals and that’s about it. The reason for that was, in the sixties and
probably in the early seventies too, if it was an Australian number you
really didn’t get recognised — it had to be an overseas one. You probably did better by recording someone else’s (song). The Throb did Fortune Teller and made it huge before the Stones actually got it
out. That’s pretty much the way
it was.
WAY:
You were saying you did quite a few Rolling Stones songs yourselves.
HM: Nearly
all of them. At the time it was
things like Oh Carol, Not Fade Away
— all the full-on ones — Satisfaction,
The Last Time…
WAY:
Any other bands you were covering at the time?
HM: Oh
yeah, Them and so forth — like Baby
Please Don’t Go — Chuck Berry… Pretty much following the line of the
Stones, and not so much the Beatles.
To us the Beatles at that time were too, how would you put it? Pristine I suppose, compared to the Stones.
WAY:
So when you were playing live, other than the bright hair, did you have
any particular costumes??
HM: I
used to try and dress up a bit like Buffalo Bill, with a bit of a goatee
on and god-knows-what. I remember
one time in Melbourne I was trying to show off playing the bass and had
tight jeans on, I used to smoke then, and I grabbed a packet of cigarettes,
took out a cigarette, put the packet back in my pocket, pulled out a Ronson
lighter and — still playing with one hand — lit it, and burnt my goatee
off! The crowd thought it was great that my whole
face was on fire. Because as I
pulled the lighter it turned on full. I had a big Bunsen Burner happening.
WAY:
Did you have the goatee dyed as well?
HM: No
no, this was after that, and we’d gone back to normal (hair) colours. |
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WAY:
In 1966, other than this “frightening the horses” thing, I read that you
had all sorts of problems on your tours in the country, people stealing
stuff and…
HM: That
was actually um… he had so many aliases, I forget the guy’s name — I think
he’s in jail now. I think it may
be someone called Freeman, or one of those heavies.
I’m not sure what his real name was.
He had an entourage of real thugs.
They had round knuckles and god-knows-what. We all got on well with him ‘cos he was taking us on tour, but there
was one time, I think it was Grafton or one of those places — it may have
been Coff’s Harbour — where we were on stage and it was just wall-to-wall
people, huge room, and he wanted to get up and have a sing. So he got up and had a bit of tune and everyone
was goin’ “Get off!” I think it was an Elvis song like Love Me Tender…and of course that’s the
last thing (the crowd) wanted to hear.
Now he used to have a Dodge (motor car) emblem, which was a charging
ram. Solid. A solid ram, I mean it was pretty well like a figurine thing, but
it was solid steel! And he pulled
it out of his pocket and called a guy over and just whacked him over the
head. And brains sort of popped
out the side, and we thought, ‘Oh NOOO!!’ — or words to that effect, you
know.
He’d booked us into
a caravan and the whole town was there, and the brother of the bloke who
got crowned said, ‘Look it had nothing to do with (the band), you’ve gotta
find this other guy.’ And of course
he’d skipped town to Sydney, leaving us holding the bag. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to hitch-hike on the side of
the road with blue hair, purple hair, red hair and green hair. It’s a bit scary.
WAY:
In 1967 you ended up running your own club, the Op-a-Go-Go. How did that come about?
HM: We’d
signed a contract for a certain period and things went drastically wrong
for the two promoters. I think
one must’ve played up with the other one’s wife or whatever — I don’t
know. They ended up walking out in a hurry. Left everything. Just scarpered and the next day they weren’t there. They left us
a note. So we saw the owners (of
the building) and said we’d run it, and they said, ‘Sure!’
We had this idea that people would be writing on the walls
(with textas) and scribbling, so we ended up painting the walls (with
blackboard paint) and then just left a heap of coloured chalk out. And the drawings that turned out really well
we left on for a couple of weeks and every morning we’d just wipe it all
clear. We never got any graffiti
after that.
WAY:
And you played the club every night?
HM: Every
night. Actually we still hold
the record for the longest playing band as such (in one continuous performance).
The chap from the Guinness Book of Records was supposed to turn
up but didn’t. He turned up on the wrong day. We played for four days and four nights non-stop!
And our fingers were nearly bleeding.
WAY:
How did you keep yourself going?
HM: Oh
(laughs) we won’t go into that. Actually
we couldn’t take any drugs ‘cos there was a physician there as well, you
see. So it had to be done right.
You were allowed to have I think, half-an-hour off, to like go
to the toilet and so forth. But you would really use that half-hour to
get forty winks in. Then someone
else would come in and take your place, he’d start playing and you’d stop
and then vice-versa. But you (couldn’t)
just sit there and strum, you had to actually play things, you could be
jamming, but it had to be a tune. You
couldn’t just go “bleh bluh bleghh” sort of thing.
And it really hurt! |
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WAY:
Did lots of people come to check it out?
HM: Yeah,
people sort of came in, came out. You’d
be surprised. The milkman in the
morning, the baker comes in. Of
course it was only Coca Cola in those days, it wasn’t a licensed club. But they’d come down, have a bit of a listen,
sit there and have a coke and shoot off, ‘Well, I’m off to deliver some
more bread!’ And he’d leave us
a loaf. The milkie would leave
us some bottles.
WAY:
Did you built up a good live following?
HM: Yes
we did, very much so. But like
every good thing, it’s gotta come to pass.
So we all decided to go back down (to Sydney).
WAY:
I’ve seen a photo of you guys standing out the front of the club with
a fairly big sixties car, adorned with graffiti.
HM: Is that a
white Chevy Impala?
WAY:
Yeah I think so. Did you do that
with all your cars, write Creatures all over them?
HM: No
the one with Creatures on it was actually a Fairlane 500. That was gold with a black vinyl roof with
The Creatures on the side — that belonged to the singer…
WAY:
That was your way of advertising I suppose.
HM: Oh yeah (Keith
Matcham) was always a bit on the extravagant side.
WAY:
In 1967 Eric quit and Greg Lawrie came in…
HM: (Eric)
was an apprentice electrician at the time.
He wanted to go back (to Sydney) and marry his girlfriend — and
he’s still with her now! |
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WAY:
But the rest of you were still keen to keep going…
HM: There
was a funny scenario when we got back to Sydney. We were staying in Newtown, and that’s a pretty rough place — well
at the time it was. The singer,
he had a bit of a mouth on him, and he called one of the Maltese or Greeks
a name. So of course they came
back and tried to break in and stab us with knives and god knows what. We ended up putting fridges and god knows what
against the door to stop ‘em. And
they totaled the laundry, there was no sink left (laughs) and the washing
machine was in a million pieces, they ran over it with a car! I ended up saying to the singer, ‘You’ve got
a problem and it’s called foot-in-mouth.
You can’t get the two of them to co-ordinate themselves!’ (laughs)
As far as the viciousness of the sixties went, we were actually
changing a motor in the main street, we thought we could get it done by
daybreak. We had a Dodge car and
a Dodge truck, and we were gonna put the motor of the car into the truck. And the only thing we could use to lift it
out with, was a streetlight pole. So
we got a couple of ropes and tied ‘em together, pulled it up and threw
it over the light pole. We started
dragging the motor out and it took a bit longer than we thought… the clutch-plate
wouldn’t fit.
Ten o’clock Saturday
morning, we’re still onto it and of course we’re holdin’ up traffic and
god-knows-what, and tellin’ everybody to politely go and see a taxidermist
— and then of course the cops come along and locked us all up again!
WAY:
The Creatures had quite a few run-ins with the law by the sound of things.
HM: Very much
so, yes. We were their favourite
people at that time.
WAY:
Eventually you moved down to Melbourne, what was the plan with that?
HM:
Our mum was in Melbourne,
in intensive care — she was in a bad car accident. So we decided to move down and start up there. We did well. Most of the time we were supporting people like Billy Thorpe at
a lot of places like the Garrison, the Thumpin’ Tum, the Catcher and all
those type of venues, which gave us a huge break.
We pretty well started getting to things like the Cream then, and
I was getting deeper into the blues myself. |
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| Herman Marcic, 1969 |
WAY:
Shortly after you moved to Melbourne you recorded the Ugly Thing/Your One And Only Man seven inch. The single shows two
very different sides of the band because one’s got a blue-eyed soul kind
of feel while the other’s out and out fuzz-rock…
HM: That
was mainly Keith’s side of things. He
was really into that hard sort of stuff.
I was more into the blues — mind you, I was only a bass player
and I was always the youngest in the band, so I really didn’t pull much
weight. But my direction was going more towards the
blues.
WAY:
When the band recorded the Ugly
Thing you apparently had to drive all night to get to the studio…
HM: Yeah,
we had to go to Sydney to do it. The
car broke down and the singer’s dad comes screaming along in his brand
new HD or something and we all piled in that and went straight to Sydney
and recorded, then we had to drive straight back.
We only had I think an hour to do it in.
No sleep or anything — just straight there. Do it, then turn around and drive all the way back.
WAY:
It’s got a great, thumping sound. One
of the problems for a lot of the bands you read about from the sixties
was that they had a really wild live show, but their producers didn’t
know how to deal with all the distortion. Often the recordings are quite
weak.
HM: You
think it sounds alright? My personal
opinion on the thing was that if I’d had any say, I would have told the
engineer to get off and give me a go.
I knew nothing about recording but I knew about sound, and what
it should sound like. It did sound
“live” but if you listen to it you can hear the drop-ins and drop-outs.
Little >blick!< sort of things, and distortion being turned
off at the wrong time and god-knows-what.
Because they actually tried to do the lead (guitar) a bit later,
and the distortion didn’t work right, but (in the end) it was like, ‘That’s
good enough.. time’s up!’ type thing.
And that’s how it was then. You
ran your time out then that was it. |
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WAY:
With your first single (All I Do
is Cry/Mona) in 1966 you actually had to help the guy build his Sydney
studio didn’t you?
HM: That
was our first attempt at building studios, and it was actually brilliant
because it wasn’t sound-deadened it was sound-PROOF. As you walked out, you could hear the traffic like you wouldn’t
believe — but when you closed the two doors, all you could feel when a
semi went past was the rumbling in the floor, and that was about it.
WAY:
What was the deal in terms of doing the single?
HM: We
helped him line the studio and he record us.
The label was called “66” and his intentions were to change it
every year. 67, 68... that type
of thing. But I don’t know what
happened after that. He recorded
a fair few covers, some Buddy Holly stuff.
Brown-Eyed Handsome Man and god-knows-what.
WAY:
Once you were in Melbourne the second single didn’t take off, but it seems
like you still had plenty of live work...
HM: It
was really weird because we had two labels (RCA and Festival) who at the
time were two of the top labels. (RCA)
didn’t want to do much with it (the Ugly
Thing single). They wanted us to record so they got us in, recorded
us and put it out; but didn’t push it, you know? Same with Festival who
actually recorded us as well in 1969, in Melbourne. That was a track called
I’m An Animal.
WAY:
You’d changed your name to The Chocolate by that point. Why the choice of that particular track?
HM: That
was the singer’s choice. I thought
it was a bit stupid. I always
thought of royalties even back then. If you do your own (song) then at
least you’re going to get your own royalties back.
You’re gonna get ALL your money instead of just half of it.
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WAY:
You were saying that by ‘67-68
you were beginning to head towards more of a ‘Cream’ kind of sound?
HM: Yeah. Especially Greg Lawrie and myself. But it started getting to the stage where (the
band) was not working, there was too much conflict. So I decided to have an argument… or the singer
decided to have an argument with ME. I just smacked him in the mouth and
said, “Stick your band!” (laughs)
WAY:
So this is by what, 1970?
HM: Yeah,
yeah. By then I joined a couple
of other bands. One was Toby Jugg,
which became Sherbet later on.
WAY:
Going back to The Chocolate. How
did your sound evolve towards the end, because music was changing very
quickly in the late 60s, were you guys following those changes?
HM: We
were actually probably ahead of it a bit.
A lot of venues would say ‘you’re too radical’ — they liked the
clean-cut look and so forth, you know.
(Things like) Hendrix (and) Whiter
Shade of Pale — we were doing that sort of stuff.
WAY:
You mentioned before that you changed your hairstyles. You said you went back to normal hair, but
there was an ‘in-between’ stage wasn’t there, when you went blond and
black or something?
HM: We
thought we’d just go all blond, and the singer would have black hair. That worked for a while but then I thought
‘To HELL with this!‘ — you had to keep touching it up, you know? So I let it grow out. Much to the disgust of the singer, because
he wanted to run the band. Things
were getting to the stage where he wanted to go more poppy. Yummy Yummy Yummy sort of stuff, and I thought:
“Nahh, not for me.”
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WAY:
What was it like playing with your brothers for all those years?
HM:
Well Rudolph wouldn’t take crap from anyone.
If you looked at him too long, he’d go over and smack you in the
mouth and then come back with a drink and say, “Look I’m really sorry
for doing that, but why were you lookin’ at me?”
That’s how vicious he was. There
was many-a time-in the back rooms where we would be swinging fists and
hitting each other with guitars, and there’d be blood comin’ out of our
lips. Oh, “Wipe it off, it’s time to go on!” like
nuthin’ happened! (laughs)
WAY:
Brotherly love.
HM:
Well that’s it! Get back out and
away we’d go again, next set, back on like nuthin’s happened. I had the
ability to come between Eric and Rudolph, ‘cos they’d try and do things
their own way. So I thought, I’ll
do it my way.
WAY:
Any other stories about touring around the country? I did hear you got done for an un-roadworthy vehicle…
HM:
Oh that was the norm! Which particular
episode? (laughs) I didn’t like
things like, when the singer would take his car to the girls’ schools
and park out the front. It wasn’t
me, you know?
When I was in Toby
Jugg, we ended up playing with Chain, which was actually the Bay City
Union Blues Band. I got to the stage where I was trying to come out with
things like (Acid Rock)…we weren’t taking the acid, but we were playing
the acid-type music, as in the sitars and god-knows-what.
We’d be doing a song with flute and so forth. (Toby Jugg) used to do a lot of Jethro Tull type of stuff, and I’d
put down the bass guitar and pick up the sitar and play that a bit. And then let the Hammond organ do a bit, and
pick up the bass again. Instead
of doing a two-minute song, it would end up being a fifteen minute song. And everyone would be sitting there going,
“Wow man, Wow!” (laughs)
WAY:
Have you seen the EP reissue that came out?
HM:
Yeah. I’m too scared to put it on. I
still haven’t put it on to this day, ‘cos that was my first attempt at
writing — All I Do Is Cry — and I’m not game to listen to it. Because I think it’s terrible.
In fact, I KNOW it’s terrible!
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Recommended Listening:
Despite Herman’s protestations all of the band’s tracks are
well worth checking out. Sadly The
Creatures (Top Shelf) seven inch vinyl EP can be difficult to track
down, but Ugly Thing can (not
surprisingly) still be found on the Ugly
Things (Raven) compilation CD. |
Picture Credits:
All photograps from the
collection of Herman Marcic. Reproduced with permission.
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