CHAPTER 22
1993 - On The Road
The circus comes to town…….
Ticket price : $45+fees.
National attendance : 56k.
Part of the philosophy with the BDO was to make sure we had seen the act live before we made an offer to include them on the show.
I headed over to Charlotte, North Carolina in August 92 to arguably the best line-up of the 90s Lollapaloozas. I didn't want to see the event in a major city in the US, backstage can be very wanky at the big shows. The bill included Chilli Peppers, Ministry, Soundgarden, Ice Cube, Lush and friends Jesus and Mary Chain. Opening the show was Pearl Jam. The standard was incredible. I even witnessed Eddy Vedder at the Jim Rose sideshow, having a few pints of beer poured down his throat via a tube, then throwing it up into a yard glass, then sculling it in one go. He lost a bit of respect from me that day. However, it was the vibe that was strange. Being a midweek show in a small town, the audience was much smaller and calmer than the bigger cities. That was to be expected, however backstage there was no vibe at all, and no one knew where anyone was staying. The acts were left to sort out their travel and accommodation. Plus, they had those huge bunk bed fitted out tour buses, so some left after the show and some stayed at hotels until the morning. I didn’t like that at all. There seemed to be no central organisation beyond production. There were 36 shows over 2 months, crazy to have so many shows each week. It was all work, no play.
I then headed off to the Reading Festival in England where Nick Cave, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Wonderstuff and Pj Harvey were playing. The backstage guest area was great as artists, media, record labels and friends could hang out. It had its own bar and food outlets. I remember Nick Cave procrastinating over whether they could film their set or not. By the time he said yes, the producer said, ‘too late, I've rostered the time as dinner break’. Back at the artist hotel where we were staying, which was only a few hundred metres away, I ran into Lollapalooza co-producer and friend Marc Geiger. I reintroduced myself and he came back with, ‘don't be silly, I know who you are’. You never know.
I soon realised that a multiday, single location festival had the advantage when it came to infrastructure and that a travelling event struggles to be more than a roadshow of bands.
When building the plan for 1993 I wanted to find a way to produce more than a roadshow. We needed a more hybrid approach to creating the best events and keeping it fun for the artists. The run ended up being Sydney, Melbourne, Perth & Adelaide in that order. Auckland wasn’t viable & we didn’t attempt Queensland out of respect for Peter Walsh’s Livid Festival, which had started before the BDO.
In those days the alternative scene and mainstream were pretty much divided with a high brick fence. Nirvana may have helped blow up the music industry when they kicked through the commercial door, but they also inadvertently destroyed the independent scene, including record labels & stores. Soon, all the major labels wanted the next Nirvana or bought labels that might have the next Nirvana.
But in 1993 it was still open territory. Putting the bill together was great. No one was pitching to get anyone on in those days. Not the agents or record companies or managers. We simply chose who we wanted & then went to work on securing them. Iggy Pop in particular was the one I wanted. Frontier had toured him in 1989 & it didn’t go well. He even supported Jimmy Barnes in New Zealand and created trouble when he bagged sponsor Pepsi from the stage. From memory, he left before the tour ended, too exhausted to finish the dates. I believed in him & felt he deserved proper recognition.
Next was Sonic Youth. They had just released ‘Dirty’, the best album of their career, and were heading down the Nirvana road, but not as extreme. The bill was coming together quickly & one day Mick Harvey knocked on my door and said, The Bad Seeds would be up for the show. I think he actually said, "Don't you think you need a well-dressed band on the bill? “. I responded with ‘who?’ before the penny dropped. Now with three headliners I did the only logical thing and rotated the three last positions on the main stage. This became the only time rotating positions were programmed. That's kind of a shame as it worked really well, but it was simpler times. Talking directly to the artists was always the best way to find solutions. Agents and managers simply got in the way of logic as egos came into play.
Eventually, the line-up became IGGY POP, NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS, SONIC YOUTH, DISPOSABLE HEROES OF HIPHOPRISY, CARTER USM, MUDHONEY & HELMET. Locally we had BEASTS OF BOURBON, HARD ONS, CLOUDS, COSMIC PSYCHOS, THE MEANIES & YOU AM I. We even travelled this huge fucking skate ramp & John Fox had secured skaters including Jason Ellis and Tas Papas, (on their way to world champion status), to be on the tour.
The concept was that we would deliver most of the talent with around a third of the show being made up of local acts. In this way, each BDO would be unique to each city. This was really important as I didn't want it to be perceived as this 'Sydney" thing or parasitic to the local scene.
Originally Vivian & I were looking for venues that would work with small numbers but had room for growth. We eventually settled on Fremantle Oval in Perth, Adelaide University & after much debate Vivian accepted my logic on the Melbourne Showgrounds. One of which was to hopefully prove that it was the perfect venue for a music festival. In essence, the Big Day Out was a Royal Show with bands substituting for the farm animals, so what better venue than showgrounds.
Getting council permits though was another story. In Sydney, I had to underemphasize the music and overemphasise the other aspects, eventuating in calling it a Youth Music and Lifestyle event in my DA application. In Melbourne, Viv ended up enlisting the Youth Council which made a submission to the council to support the event. The mayor told Viv that they had to approve it as they have never submitted anything before. In Adelaide it was the University, so no permit was required and in Perth, some envelopes were involved.
With another fabulous poster from Richard Allen. This time with a speeding bug on wheels the message was clear, The Big Day Out was on the move and heading your way.
The first announcement of the travelling Big Day Out was with much fanfare but few sales. Sydney of course was a big seller, but we needed around 40,000 people to cover the four shows, so a lot was riding on it. Vivian was freaking, we had everything including our homes on the line. We were using ticket sales money for cash flow, put everything on account we could & we had no way of covering any major losses. I drove that tour by will, business logic, self-belief & optimism. One week out from Melbourne we were on 5,000 sales, eventually, we ended up with 15,000. Blind faith got us over the line.
Travelling this circus was another story altogether. Initially, Sonic Youth & Mudhoney responded negatively to Iggy being a headliner, they didn't seem to accept his importance. Nick Cave on the other hand saw him as a God. So, in effect, the shows revolved around Iggy. For these bands, it was the first time they had performed on a travelling festival. It was a real eye-opener to see these acts change over those two weeks, in their performances, attitude & interaction with others. We had chosen well, people made friendships quickly, the performances were incredible & everyone left their ego at the door.
In Melbourne, it rained. but it wasn't an issue until Mudhoney, on the second stage ironically started a mud fight, creating a huge mess on stage. The rain was that annoying on/off Melbourne rain, but we were coping well. However, things changed at around 7pm when I looked up to see a swimming pool forming on top of the stage roof. Underneath the pool were all of Sonic Youth's guitars, polished & tuned for the show. There must have been a ton of water sitting there, ready to drop & sooner or later it would. One of the guys bravely climbed up into the crossbeams and using his back rocked the pool of water until it ran off the back of the roof. If I hadn’t noticed we could have easily lost the show, tour or lives. It’s that easy, you can never drop your guard. Of course, when Nick & the Bad Seeds went on stage the skies cleared and a rainbow lit the sky.
I quickly realised that I could no longer have the relationship with the artists that I once loved. The show itself consumed me. Our small team left the Melbourne site around 2 am. We had a 6 am flight and some of us got one hour sleep. One hours sleep for the uninitiated is like putting your exhausted head on the pillow & being hit with a wet newspaper to wake you up. I don’t even think we had speed to help us through the day. We crawled to the lobby, drove to the airport & arrived in Sydney total basket cases. Luckily my friends Duckpond & Larry had formed the ambience team whose primary duty was to make us laugh. In Sydney Airport, Larry, in a bear suit rode the baggage belt through the security flaps and returned cross-legged like a swimsuit model. It was 7.15am and the entire bleary-eyed airport including security staff were all laughing like crazy. How times have changed.
Most of us went straight to the venue to set up the next show. We had 24 hours to pull it together & we needed at least 48. The day before the show consists of pass allocations, production, final fencing, riders, security briefings etc etc etc. All the things you shouldn’t do sleep-deprived. A few of us passed out on the site office floor. The lucky ones got to go home for a while.
I didn’t go home that night. From the first show, I had started what would become a tradition. I stayed or slept at the venue the night before the Sydney show. It harked back to when I was a roadie. I never left the gig until it was over. I just felt that I had to follow it through, for that day, it was my baby.
By this time, I had no wife or real home as such, so getting a few hours sleep under a desk seemed calming. This had become my home. This was also the first time that I properly linked the event with the art. We had sold over 21,000 tickets & had a staff of hundreds but at 4 am I could walk around the empty site, see it in pristine condition and realise that after all the months of work it only had a few hours of completion before deconstructionism commenced. And I was the only one there to appreciate it. It reminded me very much of Christo’s works. The process was the art, the art itself was a fleeting moment.
The usual chaos existed before doors, getting cars off-site and arguing with security. But this time it really felt like a big event. There must have been 5,000 people outside at 11 am, it felt like a football match waiting to happen.
As they started to get impatient, the huge metal roller door at the entry was under pressure. Then with one push it was off its rollers and stuck. We had to push everyone back and get it back on its track then roll it up so we could open. A 20minute delay but now it was on with the show.
Then around noon, I was called back to the office as the Police wanted to see me. Upon my return, I was confronted by a lone confused officer that had been told by his superiors that we were to turn down or be shut down. We had slipped so well under the radar that this guy was the only person allocated to the show. I said I have a permit, grabbed it to show him then realised the times were from 5 pm to 11 pm….oops. I didn’t show him. He had no idea how a permit worked & didn’t know what to do. I said we were under our limit & won’t turn down, but if he had to shut the show down, ‘HE’, had to go on stage and tell the audience. He said he would wait for instructions from his boss who was playing golf at the time, but off the record told me that if he was ordered to stop the show, he was just going to go home. That was the last I saw of him.
The show itself was mad. Everyone was still trying to see ‘all’ the bands. The concept of a festival still hadn’t sunk in so with 22,000 people on site it was chaos. During Iggy’s set this guy, totally naked except for his AAA laminate comes flying off the stage & into the mosh pit. We were all dumbfounded until we realized he was one of our drivers. No real harm done. I think he became our first nude incident at the BDO.
While the indie rock scene was exploding it was still early days for indie dance music. I had positioned a stage between the main arena & the Hordern Pavilion that for the last part of the night would be dance music. We had Disposable Heroes, Itchy & Scratchy & Severed Heads back to back. My theory was that if the rock crowd saw it they would forget their prejudices & stick around. We ended up grabbing at least four thousand of the crowd that had left Iggy Pop to go to see Beasts of Bourbon. They never made it, it became a huge rave and the Boiler Room was born.
By then everyone had really bonded so I booked the only boat I could find for the following day, the Sydney Showboat. I couldn’t work out if we would get 100 or 400 to come so I went for the bigger option. Unfortunately, Iggy Pop & most of the Bad Seeds didn't make it but it was pretty cool. It was such a great calm after all the madness. At the end of the night, Mark Arm from Mudhoney stole my huge mobile phone but couldn't work it out, so I got it back the next day. In those days we rented mobiles, they were called bricks for good reason & made you look pretty cool at the time.
By Perth it was becoming clear we were touring a reform school rather than professional musicians. The show was staged at Fremantle Oval & the hotel was only a block away.
The morning of the Perth show I am as usual waiting for shit to go wrong. One of my concerns was that I felt there were at most, 4,000 cool people in Perth & we had sold 9,000 tickets, this left 5,000 unknowns. To my relief, they had gotten with the program. The guys that would usually get pissed & beat another guy up to impress a girl or his mates had realised that it might be easier to wear an indie band shirt & look cool. This was when I realised that a daytime festival was the best place to pick up. You can actually see what you like & you have 12 hours to make an impression.
The show itself was great. The only flack we got was from Iggy Pop saying Fuck so much that the youth psychiatric hospital directly behind the main stage had to double medicate for the day.
Around midnight about twenty of us were around the pool, drinking cocktails & ensconced in arty complex conversations when we heard a yell from above. From the third-floor balcony jumped two of the skaters, screaming all the way, they just cleared the concrete & hit the pool like a bomb.
A minute later the night manager turned up. It must have been 35 degrees, but he was in a suit, tie, polished leather shoes & pager on his hip. He approached us with a confident stride & ready to really lay down the law. Unfortunately, he only managed to raise his finger to shoulder height, & utter his first syllable, when Mark Arm performed a perfect crash tackle from behind & he & Mark went flying into the pool.
I immediately knew we were in deep shit & gave my goodnights. Mark jumped out & ran to his room before he could be identified, Nick Cave & the others were a bit slower but moved pretty fast when the poor soggy guy headed back to his desk.
The police went door to door for witnesses but surprisingly couldn’t find any. Needless to say, it was a bit tense at checkout.
By that stage Iggy was king. While Sonic Youth tried to be arty & the Bad Seeds were brilliant, Iggy was a powerhouse. He had a young band and delivered a greatest hit set. So by the time we made it to Adelaide, it was all about Iggy.
Creating the Big Day Out was everything to me. The artists themselves had become secondary to producing the event & by Adelaide, I still hadn’t even met Iggy Pop. This changed the night before the final BDO in Adelaide when Vivian introduced me & Iggy freaked me out when he said, “I have been really looking forward to meeting you”. I realised that if I was going to keep producing this event my intimate relationships with artists were a thing of the past. I simply couldn’t be everywhere & I had to prioritise my time. That moment uplifted & depressed me simultaneously.
Adelaide BDO was lucky to happen at all. We had calculated the trip at 24 hours to make the 2,800 plus kilometres from Perth to Adelaide for the three trucks. Unfortunately, we hadn’t added the hour and a half time difference so two hours before gates they finally turned up. It was mayhem, but within the chaos, with all hands on deck, I realised it was more than a gig for the team, more family than touring, so with only minor delays the job was done.
It was Adelaide University & I opened the gates with the 1812 overture blasting out of the PA. From day one I had a strict policy that only instrumental non-associated music could be played before or between bands. I didn’t want anyone poisoning the ears of the audience..........unless it was me.
It must have been over 40 degrees, & the fire brigade arrived to hose the audience with their massive shower spray......problem one, they destroyed the lawn. Nick Cave had a close friend taking photos backstage, he broke into a prehistoric skeleton room to photograph the band.........problem two. At the end of the night, one of the semitrailers smashed the cast-iron heritage gates.......problem 3. We were never invited back.
During Iggy’s set, it ended up as a supergroup for “I Wanna Be Your Dog”. Members of the Bad Seeds, Beasts, Mudhoney, Sonic Youth, You Am I, even Michael Franti was on stage. And then it was over, and everyone seemed lost, it was the end of summer camp & everyone had to go home.
Back at the hotel we loaded up 20 people in a 12-seater bus & were heading to the after-party when Nick yells out “where’s Iggy?”. Then everyone including Tex Perkins and Mark Arm were yelling, “Iggy!...Iggy!....Iggy!”. I had to turn around or get lynched. This bus was so full we nearly rolled but eventually, we made it back. Nick ran into the Hilton and found him but couldn't drag him onto the bus. He turned up at the party soon after & it went until dawn. That was a great night. That was a great tour.
Soon after the bands left it felt pretty lonely, so I dragged my right handers Peter Farrell & Kate Stewart with me to Hawaii to check out the Sonic Youth & Mudhoney show. That night I decided to find out what it was like to stage dive. Mid-set, with my AAA laminate on I stage dived into the crowd, mid Sonic Youths' set. I hit the crowd, then the ground & got up happy but with a broken rib. I could never do that at home, it would have been irresponsible. The next day it's beers at the hotel. Eddie Vedder was in town. He was lovely, we talked a bit, he looked pretty lost from his newfound mainstream success.
Then it was time to fly home with my broken rib to rest up then sort out my divorce.
Some of the songs that mattered that tour:
Iggy Pop - “Lust For Life”
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – “Mercy Seat” / “The Ships Song”
Sonic Youth – “Youth Against Fascism”
Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy – “Television”
Helmet – “Unsung”
You Am I – “Berlin Chair” – released post-tour
The Clouds – “Hieronymus”
© Ken West January 2022