In the middle of a nazis-on-parade election in the USA and the prospects of a local-nazis-on-parade election here next year, it’s good to be reminded that lunacy isn’t always dangerous. Sometimes it just scares administrators, ruffles the actors and blows a few minds.
“If you don't like us, fuck off.”
At least that’s how a certain night was remembered in this story from 2011, as members of The Aztecs – the band, not the Central American kingdom ruled from Tenochtitlan – reconvened to mark the release of a live album recorded when the band were invited, possibly by accident, to perform at the freshly opened Sydney Opera House.
Memories held up better than livers, but the recording held up better than them all. Take it away … The Aztecs.
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IN 1973, BILLY THORPE and the Aztecs were one of the biggest and most notorious bands in Australia. A year earlier they’d headlined the three-day rock festival-cum-debauched outdoor event in Sunbury, Victoria, and for some years now they’d been filling and often enough (due to lax licensing laws and well compensated licensing policemen), overfilling venues around the country.
And they were also hairy, scary guys who played incredibly loud rock 'n' roll.
"We were loud. We were rebellious and the rest, yeah. But you see, the crowds loved us," says drummer and guitarist Gil “Rats” Matthews today. "I think because of the rebellious thing, the whole attitude of here we are, we're The Aztecs and if you don't like us, fuck off. The crowd got the vibe that this was a band that didn't give a shit about anyone or anything, just wanted to get up and play really loud music."
Meanwhile in 1973 the freshly built Sydney Opera House began live performances with productions of Prokofiev's opera War And Peace, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performing Wagner, Shakespeare's Richard II put on by the precursor to the Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Ballet premiere of Sleeping Beauty.
The building itself was officially opened in October by Queen Elizabeth and all the good burghers of Sydney could look happily at this monument to high art and class.
So how the hell then did a band like the Aztecs get to play in the Sydney Opera House in November of 1973?
"The board at the Opera House thought that The Aztecs was a string quartet," guffaws Matthews, whose Rats sobriquet came from his teen years playing in Disney’s Mousketeers band.
It's fair to say that neither then nor now would you find any string quartets with an audience prone to chanting "suck more piss" as was the Aztec fan’s wont.
"No they don't," Matthews concedes. "Although they'd probably like to."
And what happened when the Opera House realised their mistake?
"It was too late. The PA was set up, the band was in there, the crowd was outside. They had to grin and bear it" says Matthews who remembers looking at the concert hall’s now famous acoustic enhancements and thinking "those were a waste of time. We had a thousand watt PA."
That concert was recorded and released the next year as Aztecs Steaming At The Opera House, its cover an illustration of a wide mouthed Thorpey astride the iconic white sails, his gold top guitar piercing the sky. For all its groundbreaking nature though, that album has been out of print for decades and memories were fading, until a remastered reissue released this month, brought it back like a deeply satisfying Tooths KB belch.
Once again you can hear the band of Thorpe (who died in 2007), Matthews, Warren Morgan and Teddy Toi, augmented in some sections by ex-guitarist Lobby Lloyde and two of their former drummers, Kevin Murphy and Johnny Dick, play a heavy-duty, sound affects-enhanced concept piece on the theme of war (it was the era of Vietnam after all), a closing full-on rock set and, for the first time, an opening acoustic set.
An acoustic set? The hardest band in the land turned into a bunch of hippies? Not that anyone in the room would have dared call out something like that.
"Billy would have had them for breakfast if they did that," Matthews says.
If not hippies, then at least they were taking it seriously back then as Warren "Pig" Morgan recalls, with a couple of basic rules.
"It was very important that we go on sober and limit the drinking and we organise rehearsals,” he says. "It was agreed to by the band .... except for one."
That one member, Kevin Murphy, provided the standout memory for Matthews. "He drank two bottles of bourbon before the gig, wandering from his drum kit - because we had three drummers - in the middle of Be Bop A Lula and sitting in the front row of the audience, whilst we were playing. Pretty normal stuff really.”
As Morgan remembers it, it wasn’t just a certain drummer’s brain cells which took a battering that day. A theatre company was rehearsing Othello in the drama theatre downstairs, theoretically protected sonically by the acoustic arrangements in the House. But the otherwise brilliant and far-thinking architect Jorn Utzon hadn't allowed for a rock band "detonating" an atomic bomb during a show.
"They tossed it in and came up and had a beer with us. They'd had enough,” says Morgan. “Apparently the Opera House was resonating."
It's entirely possible there are some little cracks in the foundations which one day will be traced back to November 1973.
"Most likely there are spirits hiding in the corner," laughs Morgan.
Not if Kevin Murphy got to them first.
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