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| June.07 Cover - Radio Birdman |
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| Written by Jud Cost | |
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Page 2 of 4 After three semesters back at the University of Michigan, Tek got a case of post-pubescent wanderlust and headed Down Under in 1971. He soon started a band called TV Jones to play Velvet Underground, Pink Fairies and early Alice Cooper covers, as well as later Birdman classics "Man With The Golden Helmet" and "I-94" ("We called it ‘Eskimo Pies' back then," says Tek). And he entered medical school. 
A student-housing bulletin board ad led Tek to future Birdman drummer
Ron Keeley, who was in a band called the Rats along with Rob Younger.
"We were playing New York Dolls and Stooges songs, and the few people
who came to see us thought it was all original stuff," says Younger.When both the Rats and TV Jones expired around the same time, Radio Birdman, its name taken from a Stooges lyric, was the natural next step. "When you think about it, it was quite unusual to find an American living in Australia at that time," says Younger. "But Deniz came with a few songs from his previous band, so I inherited a repertoire. I just barked like a fucking dog at first. I couldn't sing for quite a few years. I could sing easily along with a record, but give the man a microphone and he's fucking useless." Younger's not really sure why he became a singer. "It'd never been my ambition, but my grandmother died and left me a meager amount. I was living with a friend, we'd just discovered the New York Dolls and we put two and two together. ‘Ahh, I can afford to get a PA.' I can't imagine why we thought we could play music. I guess we had nothing else to do." "I'm not sure about his influences," says Tek of Younger, "but Rob knew about Iggy as someone out there on the fringe. I know the Stooges LPs were released in Australia, because you could always find them in used record shops for a dollar. I'd buy 'em and pass 'em out to people: ‘You gotta listen to this.'" The first live Radio Birdman gig, with Tek, Younger, Ron Keeley on drums, Pip Hoyle on keyboards and Carl Rourke on bass took place in 1974 at the Excelsior Hotel in Sydney's Surrey Hills district. "It was across the street from the Central Police Investigative Unit and the cops used to drink in there," chuckles Tek. "The owner was careful to not let us start until those guys went home for dinner." Younger recalls the five-piece band outnumbered the crowd that night. "And we had to move the pool table so we could set up our gear," he adds. Sydney in those days was awash in a Sargasso Sea of jam bands playing the pubs, says Tek. "It was an endless series of drug-addled boogie bands, all mind-numbingly boring. We didn't want anything to do with that." Unfortunately, Radio Birdman had to roll up their sleeves and create their own scene, brick by brick, just to survive. "The more problems we had with different venues, the more obstinate we got," says Tek. "We'd deliberately start provoking people. We made it louder and blurred the lines between the band and the audience. Some nights we had banks of TVs onstage and smashed 'em up." Then there were the nights when Birdman would lay down their guitars and ... start to dance. "We'd do some things we'd seen Curly of the 3 Stooges do: Get down on one elbow and run around in a circle. We did crazy shit like that just to push people into being free and wild and have fun doing it." Once the word got out among bookers about this unruly rock band, Birdman could feel the noose tightening around its collective neck. "We'd been banned just about everywhere in Sydney, so we started hiring our own places and booking our own shows," says Tek. "We'd charge people a dollar to get in, then give the money to the girl who took the dollars to keep it non-profit. If the police came, that was fine, we didn't care." The word started getting around that something was happening here. About 200 people would now show up wherever they played. |
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