Unbroken bones

VIN MASKELL

IT is 25 years since the band manager threatened to break all four of my limbs. He made his threat at the time of his band riding their first and only wave of success, a wave that saw them selling 150,000 albums.

I was an aspiring rock music journalist, though more devoted fan than objective journalist, more naive groupie than tenacious reporter.

The manager seemed to think, with much enthusiasm but with no logic, that I might criticise his band. Up until that moment I was as likely to do that as I was likely to, well, break someone's arms and legs.

That the band's fleeting fame was based on a song about social justice made the manager's words all the more bewildering.

It is often said you shouldn't get too close to your heroes, for fear of disappointment and disillusion. I hadn't counted on devastation. I wanted to write about rock music because I thought it was how I could best express my gratitude for all that the music had given me: faith, hope, ritual, energy, fun, and, especially, a sense of wonder.

But the manager took all that away in an instant. In the middle of an emptying pub after a gig I learnt that as moving as music can be, it is like much of life: damaged goods. To protect yourself you eventually learn to roll with the punches, so to speak. You develop a thick skin.

I still loved music and I kept writing about it but a scar is a scar.The band soon fell in a heap so there was little chance of crossing paths with the manager. We did bump into each other at a Bob Dylan concert in the early 1990s at The Palais Theatre inSt Kilda.He may have beenabout to make a reconciliatory gesture but I would have none of it.

Then, in 1996, a chance meeting at a suburban football ground. There were so few people watching the midweekSacred Heart Missiongame that the manager and I couldn't avoid each other.

Maybe it was because I was a busier man now, with family. Maybe it was because rock'n'roll journalism no longer burnt like a flame. In an instant I realised that there was nothing to be gained from not talking to this man. He was just a man after all. A man of mis-placed enthusiasm, certainly, but a man who, like me, loved his music. He was just flesh and blood. And bones.

I can't recall if he actually said sorry but his apology, and my forgiveness, were there as we watched the football game and talked. He wasn't a band manager anymore and I was no longera groupie with a notebook. And he never had broken my arms and legs, although he nearly broke my heart. Other managers of other bands have no doubt done a lot worse. The football game over, we bidded farewell.

Every few years the manager rings. The band's singer is in town. There will be free tickets for me at the door. Just like there were all those years ago.

We are at a Rockwiz recording at the Esplanade Hotel. 2006. The manager is talking, as ever. We know who is behind the red curtain and what song he will sing. It will be the song he wrote more than 25 years ago, the song that sent his band from pubs to Countdown. The song that seemed more heavy metal than folk rock.

It will be the song that the singer has kept playing, long after the band collapsed after its second album. The song that he's performed at the MCG and at Uluru and at a thousand places in between.

Later in the night the singer will do a duet with a woman from Ireland. They will sing a song not nearly as well known as the thunderous hit single about colonialism and injustice but a stirring song nonetheless, a song about kinship, about flesh and blood.

Backstage after the show the manager and I chat. We don't have much in common but the love of another man's music. We shake hands before going our separate ways again.

18 November 2007

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