Though the later half of the 60's and the rise of
psychedelia in Australia has been relatively well covered it is
surprising to find both Peter Mudies "Ubu Underground Cinema" and Iain
McIntyres "Tomorrow is Today" - both comprehensive to a sometimes
exhaustive level in their documentation of the period - omit any reference to
Graeme Lyall's 'Psychedelia '67. Strangely there has been no subsequent
documentation or even mention of it anywhere. Performed in September of 1967 at
the Cell Block Theatre in Sydney and The Canberra Theatre in Canberra, it was arguably
the first large scale, self consciously (and self avowedly) psychedelic total
environment to take place in public in Australia. Conceived as a three part
jazz suite based on the movements of an acid trip, it was performed by the the crème
de la crème of the Sydney modern jazz scene in collaboration with the extended
Ubu Films group handling live light and film projections.
Graeme Lyall started off in Melbourne in the late 1950's
playing tenor sax in the rock and roll group The Thunderbirds whilst being actively
involved in the modern jazz boom that had emerged almost in tandem with the
rock n roll craze, Moonlighting at the Embers nightclub and the Jazz Centre 44
(sitting in on their Sunday afternoon sessions, in-between matinee and evenings
shows with the Thunderbirds) Lyall was a part of the small exodus to Sydney
that took place in 1960 (fellow Jazz Centre habituates such as Horst Liepolt,
Stewie Speer and Keith Hounslow also made the migration north) and commenced
studies through the Sydney Conservatorium. He naturally fell in with the El Rocco
scene (Sydneys more successful, long running equivalent to the Jazz Centre 44)
and performed on Judy Baileys "My Favourite Things" (CBS, 1965), the
compilation Australia Jazz '67 (Columbia, 1967), Don Burrows ‘2000 Weeks’
(Columbia, 1969) the Charles Munro Jazz Orchestras "Count Down" (EMI,
1969), and John Sangsters "The Joker Is Wild" (Festival, 1968).
The musicians who participated in ‘Psychedelia’ included
all those above whom Lyall had been playing with in Sydney; Don Burrows
(clarinet and alto flute), Charlie Munro (alto saxophone) John Sangster
(vibraphone) Judy Bailey (piano) along with Neville Blanchett (trumpet), Bob
McIver (trombone), Barry Stewart (drums), and Cliff Barnell (bass). All had
been influenced, to varying degrees, by the new thing that had been
coming out of America over the decade, and ‘Psychedelia’ seems one of the more
audacious, large-scale flirtations with free jazz and improvisation at that
point in Australia.
Though the
music had been scored by Lyall the 'jazz happening' was very much a three way
venture between Lyall and lighting artist Gordon Mutch, along with classical
concert promoter Donald Westlake;
Gordon Mutch, an active and ever present footnote
throughout the 1960's underground scene in Sydney, hasn’t had much concretely
written about him. As a teenager he had moved from Perth to Sydney and fell in
with the bohemian milieu of the Bodgies, Widgies and The Paddington Push that
defined the late 1950’s/early 1960's in parts of Sydney. Principally involved
in the theatre scene (including the controversial debut staging of Alan
Seymours "The One Day of the Year") his approach mutated between '63
& '65, becoming more probing and free form and less involved with the
theatre per se, as generally was taking place with his associates Albie Thoms
and Clem Gordon - he was involved with, among others, The Human Body, Ken
Kerney, Black Allen, Ubu Films and the PACT Theatre. A jack of all trades he
pursued film making with the experimental short Hallucegenica ('68) and he unsuccessfully attempted to make a
feature length film, Once Around The Sun
an experimental document of the Ourimbah Pop Festival (recently completed by
David Hugett in 2012) as well actively working as a painter and amateur
musician. His friendship and musical collaboration with Indigenous folk singer
Black Allen transformed into more urgent expressions in the early 1970’s as
both became key figures in the burgeoning anti-Nuclear movement, instrumental
in the formation of Australian Greenpeace.
Donald Westlake, much older then either Lyall or Mutch,
was a transplant from the upper crust of 1950's Perth society who had become
the principal clarinet player for the Sydney Symphony and a lecturer at the
Conservatorium. Though all the contemporary news reports paint him very much as
the odd man out, ‘the straight cat’, he was relaxed enough to involve himself
in the project (and likely had a keen eye for business if the audience figures
were anything to go by…)
The key concept for the 'jazz rhapsody' was the
recreation/exploration/evocation of an acid trip. A tired idea, even then, I
suppose it was a convenient vehicle for Lyall to stake his own generational and
social connection with what was 'going on' (he was only 25 at the time) The
relative size of Sydneys music community ensured extended connections of some
in the jazz scene, like John Sangster, with the counter culture. That is to say
jazz was a part of the counterculture, one of the many threads in the
fabric. Jazz had yet been neutralised from youth culture - it still remained in
currency. Albie Thoms, one of the principal figures in Ubu, talked about their
light shows being “an extension of jazz
improvisation, the idea rather then the music,” (he also lived in the same
building as Sangster - upstairs from the El Rocco club) Lobby Loyde described
his experiences touring Sydney with The Wild Cherries in 1966, “The Sydney crowd was very interesting…People
in Melbourne talked about Sydney as this kind of uncouth place, but I found the
psychedelic crew up there were way harder and more bizarre…Every time we went
to Sydney to play I’d fall into the bad company of all these musicians who were
playing jazz and the early sounds of the Sydney underground. They’d pass you
silly cigarettes and pieces of blotting paper and say “Try this man!”.…I am
ignorant of the history of LSD in Australia though it presumably started, like
overseas, as ‘medicine’ open to high end doctors that slowly spread outward as
word spread (LSD was not banned in Australia until '68, I think) If the likes
of Peter Sculthorpe were receiving LSD therapy in Hobart circa '62 (care of Dr.
Bert Engisch, a strange footnote of Tasmanian ‘society’, he was also doctor to
the Drysdales) you would think that it would have well and truly penetrated
Sydney at that time, and would’ve been truly ingrained by '67. I wonder who the
anonymous participant in the LSD trial that provided the ‘insights’ that inspired
the structure and style of Lyalls writing really were…?
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The enthusiasm for events like this hadn't really taken
off yet when Psychedelia was staged. It was amongst the very first wave of ‘happenings’
that took place in Sydney in mid 1967, in the two weeks that followed two other
‘happenings’ organised by the Ubu group took place (the ‘Id Benefit’, to raise
funds for members of the Id who had been busted for weed, and the ‘Explosion
Factory’ at the Cell Block Theatre). ‘Psychedelia’ was a harbinger of what
would come, between ’69 & ’71 (the ‘peak’ period) Ubu were staging their
own ‘Intergalactic Festivals’, as well as running their lights shows as a
successful for hire business (as were
other lighting artists such as Ellis D. Fogg) The chronology for immersive
sound & light environments ("son et luimeres") is patchy at times
but the practice slowly emerged across '67, though they only really took off as
a 'thing' in '68, initially limited as an accompaniment they served as an
augmentation or auxiliary aspect of an entertainment environment (see such as
Ginza in Melbourne, Foco in Brisbane, and The Factory discoteque in Sydney)
Arguably, and lacking any other documentary evidence at present, Psychedelia
'67 was the first performance in Australia of a total light & sound
environment. The emergence of ‘multimedia’ events in Australia was as a logical
extension of the theatre (ie. Opera, musicals, amateur theatre, the ballet etc.
the older forms of sound & vision) Relatively modern crossovers had been
taking place as far back as 1948 with the early modern jazz pianist from
Melbourne Ron Loughhead purportedly staging a ‘bebop operetta” for a modern
jazz group and contemporary dancers along with a twelve voice choir, and by the
late 50’s Peter Sculthorpe had been creating musique concrete soundscapes to
accompany the radio plays of Catherine Duncan in the ABC Studios in Launceston,
and Josef Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski was extending his explorations in set
design for opera and ballet into independent explorations of electronic music
and light & laser art in Adelaide.
Beyond the newspaper clippings I have no idea what the
event actually looked or sounded like. I suspect that the pithy summation of
one reviewer, damning with faint praise in declaring it a “light show and some
jazz music,” is likely the closet to the truth. Part of the suite did make it
to record, 'Psychedelia Pt. 3', the extended 10 minute piece was the opening
track on The Grame Lyall Quintet
(Columbia, 1969) The album strangely features trombone as well as Lyall playing
“electric” saxophone, but none of his top shelf friends are present though the
line up did include notably Dave McRae (one of the numerous jazz musicians who
left for the UK he played with Matching Mole and Nucleus) and Bob McIver (an
American GI who had played with Bryce Rhode) Due to the scarcity of Australian
modern jazz recordings I haven’t had the opportunity to hear this either.
I wonder if part of the reason this small chapter in the emergence of
psychedelia in Australia has been overlooked/out of sight was partly because of
a latent snobbery projected from the central cities. The majority of the
newspaper articles on the event seem to have been only written up in Canberra,
and then only due to the enthusiasm of their author, Gerry Raffaele, the music
writer in the 60's for The Canberra Times. Much younger and open minded in
compared to say the staid likes of Fred Blank and Romola Constantino in the
Sydney Morning Herald, he had a diverse taste for music (his ‘top discs’ for
1966 is an interesting, forward thinking collection; Ravi Shankar, The Beatles,
The Rolling Stones were listed alongside more obscure but interesting choices
such as modern jazz pianists Judy Bailey and Denny Zeitlin, folkie Doug Ashdown
as well as Ike & Tina Turner and Frank Sinatra?!)
Canberra’s sidelining is
understandable given its current state, but during the 1960's and 70's it was
an important contributor to Australias post-1960’s cultural evolution, hosting a
range of important cultural festivals (for example The Aquarius Arts Festival
and Australia ’75 amongst others) and progressive modernists (for example Don
Banks and Larry Sitisky taught composition at the university - Banks also
assisted in establishing Canberras first electronic music studio in 1972, or Stephen
Jones and his important explorations into video art)
At any length it stands as
an interesting episode in the tricky, interconnected world of art and music in
Australia.
