WHAT COMES TO MIND … RON PENO COMES OUT OF THE UNKNOWN
Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence, whose not-so-secret goal was to dig into my brain or soul or what might pass for both.
Each time, he pulls out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenges me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical, but it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.
This week, the late great Ronald S Peno, caught here in typically fierce, almost otherworldly mode, maybe aggressively turning to demons, maybe defiantly resisting the dark. Ron offers a chance to go from upstairs at the Trade to downstairs in the Cross, from Sydney towers to Aegean islands, from peaking to pu …, well, you’ll see.
_____________________________
THE VOICE HAD A RISING NOTE of excitement in it, having begun reasonably keen when he heard we were Australians, and then escalating as he asked if we were interested in music.
Us? Music? Hell yeah my good Greek man with a rope, like every week. Several times a week across Sydney venues, boxes of the gear in multiple rooms, tapes of the stuff in our backpacks right now made over many hours in the months leading to this year of backpacking ahead of us – mixed tapes, album tapes, old music and new ones – with enough batteries to make it through the first few months we reckoned. And of course the precious Walkman, packed with at least as much care as the Eurail pass and passport.
His eyes lit up. “Do you know Deed Pretty?” he rushed out. “Hoodoo Gurus? Hitmen?” A few more names came, but most of all, Deed Pretty.
We were on the second ferry of this leg, having basked in the sun from Bari to Patras – by basking I mean we couldn’t afford a cabin so sat/slept on the top deck like dozens of other cheap bastards – and now a week or so later, facing the shorter crossing from Piraeus to Ios, our accents had given us away. As seemingly did the fact I was more likely to have been at the Trade than the Bayview Tavern, probably more often at the Southern Cross than the Collector.
Yes, I knew Died Pretty I confessed, happily. Some of my favourite nights already had been watching them. Not that many years before this trip in fact there’d been a night where they were playing in some briefly-existing venue back a few streets from the main drag in Kings Cross – named after, or was it actually in the same place?, as a famous nightclub from its glory days of Saffron, soldiers and satin shirts – and John and I had rocked up in the back of Bill’s little car/van quite wide-eyed to see them.
I mean literally rocked up as it was a two-seater with the back given over normally to his not exactly tiny bass amp and guitar, so we just sat/lay/bounced/rolled/rocked all the way from out west while Bill played some bubblegum pop compilation. And I mean literally wide-eyed as we were, shall we say, not wholly in one piece or in one place from about half-an-hour into the hour-long journey. The lights! So bright. The sky! So big.
It’s fine, we were physically intact. Mentally? Hmm, not so much as we somehow made it down into the room in time for the support act who cranked and pulled and clattered and shuddered thrillingly with what looked like a cast of dozens of guitars and horns and horny-handed blokes who might smack you upside your fat head with a guitar or horn. Never having seen them before this assault was fresh and dark and angular, and, as we danced jerkily, obliviously, we made a point to remember the name: Hunters And Collectors.
By the time Died Pretty came on there were no purple spiders anywhere (well, probably not, though I couldn’t swear by it) but the shades of colour were luminous, viscous, and intense. From Brett Myers’ guitar. From the roiling, rolling keyboards (was it still Frank Brunetti that night? Or had he gone?). From a rhythm section that disappeared into each other as if lines between their bodies were wiped away. From Ron S Peno at the front. “We roared and danced and sang with amber-clouded eyes, now.”
What was Ron Peno like? our eager boat hand had asked. Scary, I said to him. Packed into a body that contorted like Iggy P and strutted like Jim M but at maybe half their length, he felt like a brute force wrapped in an angry metal wrap, punching out. “Out of the unknown came a face/Cries as he looks out into space.” But at the same time he was vulnerable, exposed, and could sing of displacing that anger into something less clear but also less destructive. If any of us could. He sang of a friend who’d died but whose legacy was happiness even as “we dissolve into dark”, he sang of new flowers and “blood on the chin”. Like the music, his words were tangible but not always graspable, incredibly physical and yet awash in something that elevated you above it.
(In the last interview I did with him years later, a year or so before cancer got him, he said to me, speaking gently but with flamboyance as always, “My [songs] are more imagery. I like descriptive: instead of saying I went there blah blah blah, I like interesting words that people might say why did you say that sort of thing, like ‘uncloud the day’ or something like that. I find that – dare I say it, because I’m not – poetic. Interesting.”)
All this pleased our new friend. He had friends in Sydney, wanted so desperately to go there one day, and when he did it would be to see Deed Pretty. That much he knew. And off he went.
A few weeks later I was thinking of him, or more particularly his rope, as we were on yet another ferry – a hydrofoil this time, which will matter, trust me – between Santorini and Crete. It was a night trip. A stormy trip. A bouncing up and down like someone had plonked this boat on top of a giant trampoline trip. And no one was enjoying this trip. Not the passengers, not the crew.
We were encouraged to stay inside, where it was safer, the windows closed to the waves as these much faster boats tended to be. But it was also where it was packed, airless, already smelling of things far less pleasant as the heaving of the boat led to the heaving of stomachs.
My girlfriend, turning shades of green under the tan we’d managed in the windy but sunny days half-sleeping it off on the sands the cheap, end-of-season, ouzo we’d had each night, knew staying inside was going to be problematic. Very problematic. Something had to be done.
So we went out onto the back deck, and I held her around the waist as she greeted Poseidon with offerings from lunch and breakfast and meals we are pretty sure she had never eaten, keeping her aboard but not exactly dry as the spray smacked us regularly. Me? I was teetering. Looking to the horizon wasn’t going to work when all was dark. Standing steady and breathing deeply wasn’t doing much good as each wave sent me left or right and each breath took in more spray.
If I could, if I’d had our friend’s rope I’d have lashed us to something – no mast here, Ulysses, but whatever was handy would have done – and hoped. But no. So I sang.
Sang every song I knew. Sang the Imperial Bedroom album from go (“History repeats the old conceits/The glib replies the same defeats”) to whoa (“Other boys use the splendour of their trembling lips/They’re so teddy bear-tender and so tragically hip”), including horn parts. Sang all The Blurred Crusade and The Queen Is Dead, every bit of Revolver, and you bet I was running through all the Died Pretty songs at hand, including the full 10 minutes – stabbing organ, ooh-oohs and guitar freakout included – of Mirror Blues, even if I couldn’t say I was singing the right words there.
Anyway, no one could hear me to correct me. Well one person, but she was otherwise occupied.
“Lift your gaze, stare me down, and take your fears and punch them … smash that mirror blues.” Yeah baby, we did. We made it to Crete. One of us much paler than when she’d boarded the boat, but so what? Yeah Ron! Yeah Deed Pretty!
SEE MORE
Find more work by Stuart Spence on Instagram @stuart_spence
READ MORE
Comments