IT WAS 1956 IN ADELAIDE

IT WAS 1956 IN ADELAIDE

It was 1956 in Adelaide and a revolution was brewing. Zoot-suited beboppers howling against bourgeois intransigence seemed to be teeming out of every café and bar from Grenfell Street to Grand Junction Road.

Neil Cassady, Jack Kerouac and Marlon Brando shared endless cappuccinos at Al Fresco while a bemused Sartre puffed on a Galois and contemplated a weekend in Goolwa.

The pushes were at the peak of their power. Almost every weekend the Rose Park mods, the Daw Park rockers and the Wingfield teds, would descend on Brighton -on their respective donkeys, Cadillacs and Vespas -to recite Howl, dance to Motown and debate multiculturalism, until the inevitable scuffles and breaking of shop windows would bring the army in to cool things down until next weekend.
Bob Dylan appeared from nowhere – although some said Bordertown –and in what seemed like minutes but was in fact three weeks –busked his way from The Mall and into Le Rox.

A young John Schumann – already sporting a beard and often in school uniform – followed his every move with a Dictaphone. At every opportunity he would corner you at parties and tell you who Mr Jones was; claim Lay Lady Lay was written about him; and state that within weeks Dylan would go electric and alienate his hardcore Magill folk following. Some of you may recall that song;

Johnny’s in The Rundle Mall

Counting all the silver balls

I’m in Myers, looking for some pliers

A busker with a white face

Is juggling tubes of toothpaste

I went to Pulteney Grammar

But I ended in the slammer

Ah it was a magic time. They say that choice is the enemy of commitment and that was so for me. Every Thursday morning I would rush to the letterbox of my brownstone one bed and breakfast duplex, grab the entertainment lift-out and scan it for my plans for the weekend. Ah, what would it be? Miles Davis at The Colonnades? Or a double bill of Frankie Ifield and Peter Tosh at The Cargo? Sometimes we’d do both and then end up at The Bridgeway, where all the musicians would descend after their gigs for the inevitable jam session.

The disparate elements moved freely there in those days. Existentialists from Norwood would dance with Marxists from Clapham while creationists from Findon Park–often in Kabuki masks – would cheer them  on, exhorting them to even wilder levels of abandon.

It must have been at or around this time that Hunter S Thompson first started writing his weekly columns for The Sunday Mail. His vigorous prose and legendary drinking sessions at The British Hotel quickly garnered him a small but vocal following - although some students were slow to latch on preoccupied as they were with The Vietnam War, at this stage several years away but nevertheless the favoured topic of conversation at such bohemian haunts as Sarah’s Café and the delicatessen just past the intersection of South Road and Goodwood.

It is possible that with the lapse of time my memories of this era have become distorted and inconclusive –as if one were staring down the wrong end of a pair of binoculars on a particularly misty morn - however it has been my great pleasure to share them with you

Nasty Nigel 1990