I'll Be Gone: Mike Rudd, Spectrum and How One Song Captured a Generation

By Craig Horne

I'll Be Gone is not just the story of an accidental masterpiece, a song written by Mike Rudd and recorded by his seminal Australian band 'Spectrum' in 1969. It is also the story of a time of unprecedented political and cultural upheaval and promise both in Australia and the Western world.
Most of all, I'll Be Gone is the story of a unique artist and his unerring artistic vision, often in the face of immense personal hardship and sorrow.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781925556667

Book preview

Introduction

I’LL BE GONE

Someday I’ll have money

Money isn’t easy come by

By the time it’s come by I’ll be gone

I’ll sing my song and I’ll be gone

Someday I’ll have lovin’

Lovin’ isn’t easy come by

By the time it’s come by I’ll be gone

I’ll sing my song and I’ll be gone

Livin’ a life of luxury

doesn’t seem to be for me, be for me

Movin’ around comes naturally

Movin’ around and feelin’ free, that’s for me

Someday I’ll have lovin’

Lovin’ isn’t easy come by

By the time it’s come by I’ll be gone

I’ll sing my song and I’ll be gone

(Or alternatively)

Someday I’ll have money

Money isn’t easy come by

By the time it’s come by I’ll be gone

I’ll sing my song and I’ll be gone

Livin’ a life of luxury

doesn’t seem to be for me, be for me

Movin’ around comes naturally

Movin’ around and feelin’ free, that’s for me

Someday I’ll have money

Money isn’t easy come by

Lovin’ isn’t easy come by

Neither of them easy come by

Mike Rudd

When Mike Rudd wrote those words in 1970, Australia was at a turning point. At that time rape within marriage was legal, homosexuality was illegal, ‘God Save the Queen’ was our national anthem and only married women could access the pill. But there were green shoots of change. If you were alive to it you could feel the old world slipping away and a new one taking its place. Empty pleasantries of the past were being replaced by something more relevant, more sincere.

By 1970, twenty-five years had passed since the Third Reich submitted to Western and Russian demands on 7 May 1945. Then in August of the same year the world was blown apart when the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing well over 100,000 civilians. This monstrous act drove a fist into the faces of the Japanese and finally brought an end to the six years of suffering, courage and endurance that defined World War 11.

With the end of the war, Europe was in chaos. Germany, Austria and Italy had been crushed and the European map was being carved up by the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill all acted in their own interests, all oblivious to the suffering of millions of ordinary people. Between seven and eleven million refugees, some of whom were former concentration camp inmates and released slave labourers, lived in displaced persons’ camps right across Europe, with seven million people alone in Allied-occupied Germany. It became crucial for the Allied forces to find permanent places of residence for the war refugees.

Suddenly migrants (or ‘refos’ as we called them then) began streaming out of Eastern Europe to safe havens like Australia. This stream turned into a flood once the US and the Soviet Union descended into a bitter and dangerous Cold War, a war that threatened nuclear conflict and possible worldwide annihilation.

In the west, shrill, anti-Soviet propaganda frightened people into believing that Moscow was about to drop their very own bombs and storm troopers from the sky onto their cities and towns. It was a strange fantasy that infected most of the western world and contributed to more than two million migrants arriving on Australia’s safe shores between 1945 and 1965.¹

These migrants worked in the new factories that sprang up in cities like Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide or on farms or nation-building projects like the Snowy Mountain Scheme. It was the Postwar migration influx that ushered in what would become known as multiculturalism, a key element of change in Anglo-Saxon Australia.

These Postwar years also witnessed another corresponding social revolution; one driven by demographics and educational opportunities as well as external cultural influences like The Beatles, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, the space race, Vietnam and flower power, all of which were beamed into the comfortable lounge rooms of Australian homes courtesy of the new media, television. More of this later.

In 1970 the first baby boomer babies were turning twenty-one and many were becoming financially independent. They wanted to participate in the wealth of new ideas and opportunities of the era. But there was one thing standing in their way.

Undoubtedly the key, defining event for many young people at this time was the Vietnam War. This was a war that started as an anticolonial struggle in French Indochina. The Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh wanted to boot out the French after one hundred years of colonial rule. The French had turned Hanoi into a giant brothel, the so-called ‘Paris of the Orient’, and had been raping the country for years. Ho tried to put his foot down, but the Americans had other ideas. See, Ho was both a nationalist and a socialist, so he looked to China and the Soviets for support. By the Cold War standards of the time this made Ho an enemy of America, so he needed to be straightened out and terminated—with extreme prejudice.

America’s great friend and major ally, Australia, was drawn into the conflict. Why? It was something about the ANZUS treaty that apparently committed Australia to support every nasty, hair-brained US foreign incursion until the end of time.² But our army was hopelessly under-resourced in 1965, so what to do?

There was only one obvious answer: hold a lottery! A bingo barrel was commissioned from Tattersalls and 181 numbered wooden marbles representing the days of the year from January 1 to June 30 (184 for the remaining days) were poured into the barrel. If one of the balls drawn out by a government official corresponded to the birth date of any twenty-year-old young Australian man then by law, he was required to register for National Service. He then became eligible to be called-up to fight in, what some Australians had come to believe to be, a tragic imperialist intervention designed to crush a movement of national liberation.³

However, the majority of Australians initially supported the war. The then Prime Minister Robert Menzies managed to convince the vast majority of our population that this was a war of resistance against the red tide of Communism. A failure to engage would result in Australia being flooded with rabid, Asian Marxists. When Menzies agreed to send Australian troops to Vietnam in April 1965 a Morgan Gallup Poll found that sixty-four per cent of people believed that communism would overrun South-East Asia if left unchecked.⁴

For the duration of the war, forty thousand young men fought in Vietnam while others resisted. The resisters burned their call-up papers. Many were arrested, dragged out of their homes and places of employment, put on trial then sent to jail. Those who managed to avoid arrest were labelled outlaws and were hunted by police. Is it any wonder a significant number of young people felt that there must be a better way of doing things? As the years dragged on and the church bells rang and the long black limousines drove the 521 coffins draped in Australian flags to their resting places on the edge of cities, many older Australians were converted to the same view. By 1970 support for the war evaporated.

It was in March of that year that two hundred thousand Australians marched in Vietnam Moratorium rallies held all over the country signalling to all who wished to listen that the game was up; the mood of the nation had shifted. In two short years Australian combat personnel would leave the burned, busted and twisted jungles of Vietnam and fly home to a muted reception. By 1972 our involvement in Vietnam—the longest twentieth century conflict in which Australia fought and the first without Britain as an ally—had ended, courtesy of the newly-elected Whitlam Government.

Many draft resisters and their army of supporters were university students reading Marx, Camus, Weber, Voltaire, Rousseau and Mills; all visionaries. The chintz lounge chairs, venetian blinds, vacuumed, clean floral carpets and shining timber dressers of their suburban middle-class homes suddenly seemed ridiculously bourgeois. Many young people decided that all the suburban materialism made no sense; it simply hadn’t got them anywhere. Suddenly nothing fitted together. They needed to take control, they needed to create an alternative narrative for their lives, and that narrative came to be known as the counterculture.

The counterculture was very much an imported concept in Australia. It came from overseas, from England and from America. In 1968 The Beatles were meditating in India, taking acid and getting a different perspective on things. There were freak-outs and sit-ins. Students were seizing control of American universities, and anti-war activists and black power proponents were burning down cities like Chicago, Birmingham and Los Angeles.

In Orange County, California, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, an organisation of drug users and distributers, were busily cooking up and distributing a mountain of LSD in the hope of starting a psychedelic revolution in the United States.⁵

But there was another stream to the counterculture that was a kind of antidote to the rage, the wrecking and the acid. In 1970 many young people wanted a simpler, sustainable and more peaceful life. They didn’t want to lead a charge against the Roman Empire; all they wanted to do was to find a more hospitable place in which to live, a place free of materialism, bad medicine and crazed violence. They wanted to find a new reality for themselves where they were free to pursue artistic, intellectual, humanitarian and ecological concerns. They wanted a life that measured personal and social progress, not by the conspicuous display of wealth or status, but by increases in the quantitative richness of their lives.

This stream of the counterculture was very much a quiet revolution, where time was made available for social engagement, political participation and sustainable living. It was a philosophy that may not have dominated mainstream 1970 Australian society, but it certainly was a major idea incorporated into the world-view of many progressive young people at the time, and it was an idea articulated in Australia’s emerging artistic sensibility.

In 1970 the arts were experiencing the first stirrings of a nationalist revival. John Gorton, the then Liberal Australian Prime Minister, announced a major funding boost to the Australia Council for the Arts that ushered in increased support for a range of arts organisations and programs, including the establishment of an Aboriginal arts program, an increase in funding for Australian theatre and the establishment of the interim council of the National Film and Television School, a key initiative that resulted in the revival of the Australian film industry.

But it was through music that many young people were able to express their support for the anti-war and countercultural movements at the time. Sure the 1970 charts were dominated by ‘Let it Be’ by The Beatles and ‘Whole Lotta Love’ by Led Zeppelin, but by then Melbourne had indisputably become the music and countercultural capital of Australia and hosted a healthy, alternative music scene that reflected it. In inner city venues like Bertie’s, Sebastian’s, the Thumpin’ Tum and Catcher, you could catch a glimpse of where the counterculture was ‘where it was at man, dig?’⁶

Ross Wilson’s super group, the Frank Zappa/Soft Machine influenced, Sons of the Vegetal Mother, was very much a band whose repertoire and general raison d’être encapsulated the one stream of the countercultural philosophy. They played Bertie’s and art gallery openings, as well as special events and happenings. Their material, Wilson explained in my book, Daddy Who? consisted largely of songs about healthy eating, or as the band’s drummer, Gary Young, clarified:

The band was a vehicle for Ross’s dual brown rice/macrobiotic obsession. One song I remember was ‘Brown Rice’. It was very Frank Zappa, ‘Brown rice, BANG, is better than white rice, lawdy lawd …’ Another was ‘Chew Your Food’, ‘Ya gotta chew your food one hundred times.⁷

But it was the folk clubs of Melbourne, such as Frank Traynor’s in Exhibition Street, Little Reata’s in Little Collins and Jazz Centre 44 in St Kilda where the counterculture gave its full political and cultural expression. Progressive artists such as Margret RoadKnight, Glen Tomasetti, Trevor Lucas, Mick Counihan, Judy Jacques and Shirley Jacobs performed songs that railed against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war, or promoted worker, Aboriginal and women’s rights. As Trevor Lucas said at the time:

I believe I’d be a conscientious objector if total war came…when I was in the school cadet corps, an instructor demonstrated the Bren gun, pointed to a group of school kids playing in the park, and said: ‘This gun would stop them all within seconds.’ If social protest songs help rid people of ideas like that, then I’ll keep singing them …⁸

Countercultural ideas such as these were also being explored at this time in Melbourne-based music publications including Go-Set, and later, the Daily Planet and Digger, as well as student union produced newspapers from the University of Melbourne, Monash and La Trobe universities.

Arguably, 1970 was the watershed year for the student movement; this was the year when the best-educated generation in Australia’s history articulated their demands on university campuses throughout the country. As historian Sally Percival Wood writes in her book Dissent, Student Press and the Rise of the Counterculture in the 1960s,⁹ student radicalism was given voice in student newspapers where they probed the Vietnam War and the idea of resisting conscription; they challenged racism and the absence of Aboriginals on campus; stirred gender politics; and tested the limits of obscenity.

It was these audacious ideas that were put forward by a newly educated and relatively wealthy generation of young people; ideas that ripped and mangled the political and social conservatism that had dominated Australian society since the war; ideas that would usher in a new approach to living. It was an approach defined by an anti-war, anti-materialist, pro-environmental philosophy that promoted racial, sexual and gender equality and a simpler way of living. It was an approach that was perfectly captured by Mike Rudd by his song ‘I’ll Be Gone’ and recorded by his band Spectrum at Melbourne’s Armstrong Studios around the middle of 1970.

Chapter 1

MIKE RUDD

From a Christchurch Choirboy to Melbourne’s High Priest of the Counterculture

When Mike Rudd walked into Armstrong Studios in South Melbourne with bassist Bill Putt, keyboardist Lee Neale, and drummer Mark Kennedy to record ‘I’ll Be Gone’ he’d already had a significant career playing in both his hometown in New Zealand, Christchurch, as well as Melbourne.

In the mid-1960s, Mike sang and played rhythm guitar in a ferocious, highly successful blues band in Christchurch originally called The Chants, whose name then became The Chants R&B, before finally settling on the recording moniker Chants R&B. In 1966 the band relocated to Melbourne’s musical jungle, kicked Mike out, (artistic differences, the usual) and then disintegrated almost immediately.

Luckily for him and for us, Mike then fell into one of the most progressive and innovative rock bands on the Melbourne scene at the time—Ross Wilson and Ross Hannaford’s Party Machine. Mike played bass with Party Machine for a couple of eventful years before Wilson travelled overseas in 1969 to join Procession, an Australian band making waves in the uber-fashionable London scene at the time, leaving Hannaford and Mike to their own devices. What came next for both Hannaford and Mike Rudd would change the course of Australian music forever.

But wait, we are ahead of ourselves. Let’s start this story back where it began in Christchurch, a city famous for its genteel Englishness and more recently for two catastrophic events, an earthquake and a right-wing terrorist attack.

In 2011, Christchurch was hit with a 6.3 magnitude quake that razed major sections of the central city and its eastern suburbs, killed 185 people, injured thousands of others and, as a consequence, resulted in the city’s radical depopulation.

Before the devastating quake, Christchurch was a flat, green and very English, South Island New Zealand town. A tourist documentary of the 1950s, Welcome to Christchurch, focused on the city’s features like the Cathedral, Canterbury University, Canterbury Girls’ Secondary College, cricket in Hagley Park, boat races down the River Avon, spring daffodils and the city’s numerous gay gardens. Dr Tony Mitchell in his paper ‘Flat City Sounds: The Christchurch Music Scene’, described the southern island capital at that time as, ‘Sedate, bland, conservative and (very) British …’¹ It was certainly a restrained place riddled with implicit attitudes about class and gender. But Christchurch was a city that was never supposed to be built where it was—on a swampy, scrub-covered wilderness that would turn to liquid when the quake hit in 2011.

It is extraordinary to think that just as Christchurch was emerging from the rubble of the 2011 earthquake and just as it was being recommended as one of the nineteen places in the world to visit in 2019 by American cable network CNN—which described the city as, ‘innovative, vibrant eco—and—people conscious’,²—tragedy struck again. This time it was courtesy of a crazed alt-right, white supremacist from Australia who entered Al Noor Mosque at 1.40pm on 15 March 2019 and over the course of that Friday afternoon, shot dead fifty-one men, women and children and seriously wounded forty more innocent people.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the incident as ‘one of New Zealand’s darkest days’ and gained international, universal praise for her compassion towards victims and their families and for her commitment to ending the use of social media to organise and promote terrorism and violent extremism. For Christchurch and for New Zealand in general this incident was yet another devastating blow to its morale and to its reputation as a safe place to live and to visit.

I have been a frequent visitor to Christchurch, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. I was (and still am) a bushwalker, or ‘tramper’ in New Zealand terminology, and in those days the city was a stopover point on the way to the South Island’s southwest. The Milford Track, Green Stone, the Rees/Dart Track and Cascade Saddle are all located near the then remote town of Queenstown on the shores of Lake Wakatipu.

Sure, I saw Christchurch’s daffodils, the conifers and its gay gardens and I took in its prim Englishness. But somehow I could always detect a slight whisper of violence on the warm summer breeze.

Maybe I had read about the Parker–Hulme murder trials some twenty years before, when two school girls involved in an ‘unhealthy relationship’ bashed the mother of one of the girls to death with a brick. It was a story that Peter Jackson made into an award-winning film, Heavenly Creatures, in 1994. Or maybe I had read about this conservative university town’s high youth suicide rate, pointing to an underlying state of desperation and despair for many of its young people.

In those far-away days of my hirsute youth, whenever I visited Christchurch people looked at me on the street, but not in a friendly way. I always felt uncomfortable walking around places like Cathedral Square after dark. My long hair and beard seemed to put a lot of people on edge, leading to some unfriendly remarks. I had no ambitions to stir up any trouble and all that aggravation seemed just a little lame to me so I ignored it. It was just banter; people didn’t really mean me any harm. Or did they?

In the late 1980s my friends Keith Robertson, Gib Wettenhall and I walked the Rees/Dark Track near the Mount Aspiring National Park, a world heritage area straddling the Southern Alps.

Near the end of the first long day of that five to six day walk and after crossing and re-crossing the Rees River, we emerged from the deep green conifer forests and fern gullies onto a narrow ledge, some three or four metres above a vivid blue, glacial river. It was there Keith slipped on the wet track and fell, wrecking his knee. We immediately camped in a fern glen by the river, administered cold compresses and drugs, batted off man-eating sandflies and waited for two days for the helicopter that would eventually take Keith back to Queenstown and on to Christchurch hospital.

Once we waved Keith goodbye, Gib and I walked on. We climbed the spectacular Cascade Saddle, observed the retreating Dart glacier (it was the first time I had ever heard the term ‘anthropogenic climate change’ used to explain the retreating glaciers of New Zealand’s southwest) and took in the spectacular alpine and sub-alpine scenery of the park.

We eventually arrived back in Christchurch and visited Keith in hospital. As we sat on the bed chatting about our trip, I noticed what seemed to be a familiar face in the opposite bed. Keith confirmed who I thought it was—Gregg Allman, Cher’s future husband and keyboard player and singer from the Allman Brothers Band from Jacksonville, Florida.

Gregg was recovering from having his face smashed and ribs broken by some not-so-friendly Christchurch burghers who had definitely not engaged in amicable banter with the long-haired, American keyboard player.

It turns out that Gregg was on the Christchurch streets late one night with his then partner following an Allman Brothers show. A group of thugs started harassing his girlfriend and he intervened only to have the shit kicked out of him; that was two weeks previously and he was still in hospital. Gregg’s experience confirmed what I had always thought about Christchurch at that time—genteel but with an underlying threat of violence.

Of course, Christchurch wasn’t all dark alleys and disaffected youth. Although conservative, Christchurch and New Zealand in general did introduce a number of progressive reforms throughout its white European history. Christchurch had a squeak of an artistic, countercultural movement somewhere in its metaphorical boot.

1960s Australian rock royalty Max Merritt came from there, as did Ray Columbus and Dinah Lee. Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, was a native of Christchurch, as was crime writer Dame Ngaio Marsh. There’s a list of entertainers who were born or lived in the city together with a list of sports stars like Sir Richard Hadlee, arguably one of the greatest fast bowlers and cricketing all-rounders of all time.

Christchurch was also where Mike Rudd was born in 1945. At that time Christchurch had a total population of around 150,000, relative to New Zealand’s 1.7 million, which was about the same size as Melbourne.

Mike was the first son of Lois Rutherford and the very dashing and the very young David Rudd, nineteen at the time of birth. Lois and David had met in the services during the war. A whirlwind romance followed and marriage hastily arranged when Lois fell pregnant with Mike. A brother, Richard, came soon after. Mike’s father David, however, was soon out of the picture, leaving Lois and her mum (known as Daye to the two boys) to raise two boys as best they could.

To be a young, single mother in a ‘nice little’, provincial city in an isolated conformist country in the southern Pacific must have been a daunting prospect for Lois; even though New Zealand did have a history of some progressive attitudes towards women. It was an early adopter of women’s suffrage, being the first self-governing country in the world to allow both European (and Maori) women to vote in 1893. Elizabeth Yates became the Mayor of Onehunga the year after, making her the first woman in the British Empire to hold such a position.³

Lois did have an ace up her sleeve—she had grown up in a wealthy farming family and