Once upon a time, in a land far away, songwriters mainlined their tunes and rhymes into our hearts and minds. To many young Australians, musicians were god-like beings who ripped thunder and lightning from the sky and dashed them onto the sticky carpets of the nation’s hotels. A night out with your friends either started or ended at a gig - sometimes both. Record companies would sign and drop bands at the drop of a hat and musicians and songwriters could make records in the knowledge that radio programmers would actually put new Australian music on rotation. Record stores were a license to print money: indeed, the music industry was an important economic driver in a world where a Commander phone system was the epitome of telephony and the internet was a nascent technology that most of us happily ignored.
They were heady days. A band could move in to the Diplomat Motor Inn, in Acland Street St Kilda, and perform in Melbourne and regional centres every night for three weeks without playing the same venue twice. A national tour could start in Adelaide and take three months to wind its way to Cairns.
You couldn’t get a job unpacking boxes in a record shop unless you knew who played bass on Vanilla Fudge’s fourth album. If you were from Adelaide, you were actually taken seriously because the City of Churches was pretty well accepted as the veritable cradle of the Australian music industry. Every stobie pole and hoarding was at least a half an inch deep in tattered gig posters and if you weren’t in a band yourself, you were best mates with someone who was. Poker machines were the province of pensioners on bus trips and record company executives were taken seriously. As were music journalists.
Flicking through the Roadrunner Anthology 1978-82 it strikes me that this is a very important socio-cultural document. Back then contemporary popular music was, arguably, the most accessed and accessible form of cultural activity. During those years, Roadrunner chronicled and critiqued Australia’s prodigious musical output, rather like JF Archibald’s “The Bulletin” did for our national literature over a century ago.
It also strikes me that, unlike many “entertainment” journalists of today, people like Donald Robertson, Stuart Coupe and Larry Buttrose could actually find their way with grammatical rectitude and elegance from the uppercase to the period. There was more than enough intellectual firepower in the editorial offices of Roadrunner not to embarrass itself in conversation with the likes of Don Walker. In 1979, when Roadrunner scooted past the Tollgate and on to the national landscape, it actually boasted a Poetry Editor, one Donna Maegraith. Imagine that!
Among its peers, Roadrunner was marked by a deeper understanding of the culture that it served. It looked long and hard into our national soul, without fear or favour. Ever skating on financial thin ice Roadrunner was, at once, literate, entrepreneurial and courageous – its courage demonstrated by Larry Buttrose’s less than glowing review of Midnight Oil’s gig at London's Marquee Club in August 1981. My own band, Redgum, was accorded a cover edition in 1980, at a time when we were almost wholly dismissed as a pinko left-wing folk band trading in little more than ‘agitprop’. Roadrunner treated us with respect because, unlike most of the mainstream industry, it knew that we were selling more records and pulling bigger houses than many of the bands who pimped around on Countdown every Sunday night. Importantly, and to our eternal gratitude, Roadrunner championed the important indigenous bands, No Fixed Address and Us Mob. It heralded the arrival of Bruce Springsteen, took the record companies to task (notwithstanding free trips and free drinks) and allowed its readers to vent on a vibrant and no-holds-barred Letters page.
It’s not hyperbolic to say that Donald Robertson et al did us all a great service with Roadrunner back then. He has done us a great service by putting together this anthology now. There is much, much more to this document than an exercise in nostalgia for the cognoscenti. Roadrunner - The Anthology 1978 to 1982 is an important chapter in Australia’s story.
As Mark Twain so memorably observed, “History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme”.