Double vision

..projected
was the be all and end all of their personalities, and never imagined there
was another dimension to their lives, let alone that they might exhibit a subtly,
or even radically different persona in that other dimension.
The only exception was my housemaster at College, one Mr Jim (or was it John?)
Pine, whom we styled ‘Jaypine’ after the popular disinfectant. He
was one of the few masters of his day who actually engaged his students with
charm and enthusiasm rather than the hostile bluster routinely employed by the
rest of the teaching staff. I suppose it was because he was also our housemaster
that we came to know him a bit better than the rest of his cronies, and there
was a justifiable suspicion he had a bit of a life outside of school, as we
Condell’s House lads were privy to the fact that Jaypine was married and
had a vivacious young wife. Japes was a good guy, but he was also apparently
at least two guys, one guy in school and another guy at home.

There is some sort of philosohical link between this and the next section,
but I’ll leave it to you to come to the appropriate conclusions. It (the
link) made some sort of sense when it first came to me, something to do with
how we are able to accommodate two opposing views at the same time, but to make
it absolutely clear would take up too much space – and it’s probably
not worth the effort for either of us. I acknowledge that I’ve made a
commentary about drugs in sport before, but the following is sufficiently different
I think..

Let’s fast forward to the present. The recent drugs in sport revelations
have revealed a very unworldly, some would say naive appreciation by the public
of what is going on, fed as we are by a rabidly PC media. (Yeah, right). Let’s
ask ourselves what it is that we (that is, we the public) actually want here.
We seem to want our sportsmen (the spotlight hasn’t swung onto sportswomen
yet, which says more about the status of female sports than anything else),
to play their chosen sport to the best of their abilities – but not too
well, because then they’d be suspected of taking performance-enhancing
drugs. (Unusually, nobody’s opted for the acronym here – PEDs –
so I will). Most people seem to tacitly agree that nobody should have an unfair
advantage – enter the mythical and all-pervasive level playing field.

In any case, with the current AFL and NRL brouhaha, PEDs aren’t the issue.
The steaming hot issue of the moment is recreational drugs. Excuse me? Recreational
drugs? I gather that even booze is sneaking into the definition of recreational
drugs, but I imagine they’re mostly talking about marijuana, ecstasy,
ice, cocaine and whatever constitutes downers these days (OK, I’m out
of touch). I’m sorry again, but bi-polar Joey (rugby league’s Andrew
Johns) still managed to be the world’s best player in his version of rugby
while intermittently knocking down a cocktail of booze and recreational drugs
between or during bouts of depression. I’m sure in a lot of people’s
eyes he’s a bloody hero! In my day he would’ve got a medal. In fact,
if we considered rock’n’roll to be a sport, Joey would’ve
got a much bigger medal (or a month’s supply of dope) if he’d conspicuously
passed out on the pitch before the kick off and had to be stretchered off. International
rock’n’roll heroes in this category include Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker,
Keith Richards – well, it’s a long list.
Apropos of this passing-out-before-the-main-game concept – when Ariel announced
it was calling it a day, our manager, Phil Jacobsen, threw a luncheon at our
revered local Chinese restaurant in Glenferrie and invited all the major players
at our record company and agency to attend, i.e. Frank Stivala, Michael
Gudinski, Molly Meldrum etc. Bill had acquired some hash and persuaded
me to eat a handy-sized block before the first course arrived. I lasted till
the second course – and then had to be unceremoniously carried out, taken
home and put to bed to sleep it off.
OK – one more yarn. Spectrum, and to a lesser extent Ariel, had the reputation
of being ‘head’ or ‘drug’ bands, almost entirely due
to people taking literally some of the songs we’ve played over the years,
like Make Your Stash and Some Good Advice for instance. Funnily
enough, Bill and I have always adhered to the ‘playing straight’
rule, and the odd occasions that we’ve accidentally transgressed (twice)
have simply reinforced the rationale behind the rule. Spectrum’s music
is too structured to lose concentration for any reason, and we’ve seen
what happens to other bands when the drug mix becomes uneven. We’ve even
had a hand in their demise on some celebrated occasions..
Ariel played the Marquee Club a number of times when we were in London in the
seventies. The support band was inevitably this one Scottish band, somewhat
aptly called Harlot – they seemed to play support for everybody at the
Marquee. (Support bands didn’t get paid and sometimes had to cancel for
one reason or another and Harlot were always there with their hands up).
Anyway, the drug of choice in London at the time was hashish, and we used to
smoke it in improvised matchbox pipes, an invention of Bill’s made from
a matchbox and some alfoil. The bass player from Harlot was intrigued and wanted
to know all about our pipes, and so, for his benefit, and to add a little exoticism,
Bill dubbed them Aboriginal Pipes. Harlot was at the Marquee again getting ready
to do a support for somebody that we wanted to see, so we dropped in backstage
to say hullo. The bass player’s curiousity got the better of him, and
out of the hearing of the other band members, he demanded we give him a smoke
from Bill’s bloody hopeless Aboriginal Pipe before he went on stage.
Bill and I went out into the audience to see what would happen. By half way
through the first number the rest of the band knew something was up, and when
their glassy-eyed bass player turned his amp up full bore, they just glared
at him helplessly. He was totally oblivious of course, and the rest of the set
was effectively a bass solo with the rest of the band getting increasingly frustrated.
Very funny from our perspective – we showed him not to mess with our Aboriginal
Pipes..
I’m not suggesting that sort of thing is appropriate behaviour on the
(curved) playing surface of the MCG, but I’m not surprised that sports
people take recreational drugs, nor am I appalled, as long as their behaviour
remains within certain bounds and they don’t hurt anybody else. I also
imagine that recreational drug taking by sports folk of any and every denomination
will continue to be tolerated when the heat is off. In the meantime, if they
invent a drug that shrinks some of these immature party tragics’ egos,
I’d bloody well insist they take lots of it.