DENIZ TEK – FULL THROTTLE: BOOK REVIEW
DENIZ TEK
Full Throttle (Picador)
IN A LIST OF LIFE acts/achievements for one person, being an ER specialist doctor, a navy pilot and medico, an adult initiate into a Native American community, and a Hawaiian farmer who once sold a guitar to Keith Richards – not to mention being a father - would in most cases and for most people, outrank being a musician in a series of industry-insignificant if culturally-vital rock bands whose greatest presence was in the relative backwater of Australia, not your native America.
Even if that band is Radio Birdman, the eulogised, mythologised, amplified, overpraised, undersold foundation of Sydney’s underground scene of the late ‘70s and ‘80s and a section of Australia’s alternative rock movement for the next two decades. (See Silverchair, joined by Tim Rogers of You Am I, closing out the 1995 ARIA Awards thrillingly performing Birdman’s New Race.)
That’s the territory ahead of reading Deniz Tek’s memoir, Full Throttle, whose title is as much about the way he’s lived his life as the fast things he flew, the full-on demands he faced, and the commitment which many of his songs demanded in Birdman, the half-Birdman/post-Birdman New Race and more. Obviously, music was going to matter, but equally obviously, the real human revelations would come in the other stuff which would be more interesting.
Certainly, if you were to tote up the potential yarns to spin – the promise of outrageous-but-true tales, my-god-how-did-you-do-that anecdotes, you-can-never-imagine-no-matter-how-many-movies-you’ve-seen perspectives – those non-musical lives surely offer the richest vein to tap. Which would be true even if you can tell the tale of being offered a lift back to Sydney from an early ‘70s rock festival in Picton by a bunch of men whose chemical indulgences were all too obvious but whose main man, Beetle, said to you “I'll drive. These blokes are drunk, stoned & tripping. I'm really drunk & stoned but at least I'm not tripping.”
But still, “interesting” vs “what people expect to read”, suggests at best a 50/50 split in material, though more likely, as with sneaking in the new album songs on a hits-and-memories tour – the toilet break section in most legacy act shows – a leaning to crowd satisfaction dominated by the yarns anybody who has followed Australian music since the mid ‘70s have learnt at the knees of grizzled old men and women who get misty-eyed at tales of sweaty, deafening nights at the Funhouse in Oxford Street as The. Most. Exciting. Time. In. Music. Ever.
Tek thought otherwise.
The first 91 pages of 329 briskly take him and us from childhood in Ann Arbor, Michigan, through share house and medical school living in Sydney’s east, to the beginnings of Birdman poised to create a scene and a legacy, only to, literally at the turn of the page, jump forward several years to the eve of the band’s second album. Barely a breath later at page 100, Birdman have split, not to be seen on stage or in book again for 18 years. And even then it is told almost in passing. Well then.
Tek explains in a postscript that he wanted to focus more on his solo work and points Birdman-needy readers instead towards a documentary about the band and Murray Engleheart’s comprehensive band history, Retaliate First. And you know what? Fair enough. Except …
… except Tek really struggles to make the non-musical life vibrate off the page, and the musical side, including collaborations with hometown heroes like members of the Stooges (including Iggy) and MC5, doesn’t fare a whole lot better. There are anecdotes aplenty – a snake bit patient being saved; a drunk woman at a navy function; a meth addict ranting; ex-MC5 Wayne Kramer getting jealous; drives in Montana and a close shave with a gangster in south-east Asia – but they accumulate rather than enlighten due to the absence of structure and any attempt to link and explain.
Things happen because things happened and then something else happened, and that’s about it, with stories regularly stopping without further context bar the occasional touch of light philosophical musings that veer towards cliché. This feels particularly absent in the first of his two, well separated, sections on engagement with the Apsaaluke (Crow) tribe, though rescued with more depth in the second section telling us his experiences in along religious ceremony.
Often however, mistaking detail for value, he will resort to verbatim exchanges in ERs and between pilots and control towers– which feel unlikely in their length and lack of anything suggesting understanding of the frailties of memories – and lists of actions or activities, as if their very mention is crucial. And usually, they’re not.
A storyteller with structure and a tougher voice from an editor could have made this a punchy tale of a life that’s had more than two or three lives-worth of action. As it is, Full Throttle is a bit of a slog that sparks occasionally.
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Deniz Tek – Full Throttle is in stores from October 27
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