Doin' The Am Band Boogie
The Age
Friday February 5, 1993
I BOUGHT my car after much consultation with my mechanically minded friend Kendal. He took me over the road to the pub, and said ``do it".
We had three pots, I signed on the line and came back the following day with a bank cheque. It was grouse. It was long, lean and a classic Oz automobile _ a 1969 ZC Fairlane. It had a boot you could land a helicopter on and lots of vertically stacked headlights.
For inner-city running you just get in one door, out the other and you're there.
I fired it up and the twin pipes gurgled and hummed. I squinted to focus beyond the hood into the far distance of Lygon St and headed immediately for a service station, as the litre or so of fuel in the tank would only get me at most a few kilometres.
The all-transistor (look Ma, no valves) radio sat in the centre of the dash with the tuning dial aged the color and transluceny of ivory. I punched the on switch and it glowed an antique yellow, with a microfine red dot in the centre of the chrome vee of the Kreisler logo.
Twiddling the deluxe chromed tuning knob on the driver's side, I found some music and drove.
`Turn Turn Turn' (the power steering helped) ... `Hurdy Gurdy Man' (watch out for the rolly polly man on the pedestrian crossing) ...
`Satisfaction', `Get Off My Cloud', `Dear Mr Fantasy'. Yes, even `Baby You Can Drive My Car'.
The car was so original that even the music was authentic. For three days I didn't hear a song from after 1969.
Then nothing. Rock had fled to the FM band.
I looked at the dial. It was marked with station call signs. A litany of the long-gone. Like the memorial avenues outside country towns.
Where are Stan the Man on the Greater 3UZ, the AK good guys, 3XY where no wrinklies fly, KZ, DB, GL? Even Geelong is gone. Whole regions; the FM band has done what the AFL can't manage to do.
We inherited our Luxor big screen early-'70s color TV from the in-laws because they couldn't afford to truck it to northern New South Wales and pay for the house when they retired.
We fitted a UHV tuner to it in order to enjoy a bit of culture and try to understand some of the skits on `Fast Forward'. The VHF tuner then died, so we got a video and used it to tune the TV through the UHF tuner. So far so good. Then the stereo and the video were stolen. For reasons similar to those of the in-laws, the big screen monolith never goes.
We've had a lot of herniated burglars in our time. It took seven months to get the insurance company to provide us with an equivalent feature video recorder. In the iterim, we were stuck on a diet of SBS.
Not so bad, you reckon. Try it in Mozart's bicentennial year. World news, followed by soccer highlights, then opera, opera, opera, opera.
No points of reference useful in joining a conversation at work.
In the interests of road safety since the state election I no longer listen to political commentary. I find screaming abuse at the radio detracts from my concentration (it's in your hands, concentrate or kill).
Other drivers find the sight of me thumping the dash disconcerting. As an act of civic responsibility I listen to the Breeze. It's like driving a lift. Or Radio National. It's a cross between SBS and the university of the air.
Stuck in a lunchtime traffic jam I look around, the window optomistically open to catch a breeze. In the rear-view mirror I can see a woman in a Celica with the windows wound up to conserve her air- conditioned air, lip-synching to Prince. Lip reading, I think she's calling me something flattering. ``Still got it," I think to myself, and scan the dial to join in.
Suddenly a diet of the greyhound results from Olympic Park, radio for the print handicapped, even Ramona Koval, seems lacklustre. I want to bob my head and twitch. Burst into song. Even break into a mournful country truck-driving-three-kids-and-a-mortgage-somebody-done- somebody-wrong song.
I get 3CR. The last time I got a two-hour program that was a broadcast of the instrumental bits of the audio track to a Grateful Dead video. The broadcasters commented on the picture and explained the wierder bits.
This time I get Garry Young's `Friday On My Mind' show. Australian rock from the '50s, '60s and '70s. It's Normie Rowe doing `Shaking All Over'. It has the classic reverb twang and wammy bar solo. I bob. I lip-synch. I twitch. I crank it up and play air guitar. The cars around me bend to their tuners and search the FM dial in vain. Diddle do da do da do doooo. Shakin' all over.
© 1993 The Age