Tough Guys

Dont Dance

Of course Tough Guys Dont Dance is a title of a mid career book by American author Norman Mailer. One of those titles that lodged itself in my mind. As a young man I craved certainty and unequivocal opinions and stances. I loved people who exhibited closed, hard boiled attitudes. Nothing impressed them. They thought nothing of the future and explained less. Unreflective, sombre, types. Smokers, drinkers, artists by happenstance. Devil may care bastards. Tough guys, I suppose. I have to say I haven’t read the Norman Mailer book. Earlier this year I made my way through his late period epic, Ancient Evenings and absolutely loved it. I don’t know if books like that will ever be attempted or written again. It must have involved several researchers to aid the author who listened to and aggregated their intelligence as he slowly made his way into the boxing ring and then fought his way through the story in the bright spotlit arena.

At the time, and probably still, I never bought much in the way of clothes or books off of the rack. Nothing really fresh from the printers and the business. I liked to find stuff in second hand shops. Stuff that had been handled, then got somehow hidden away. In the 80s I loved second hand book shops where I would look for books by American pulp writers of the 30s to the 70s. James M Cain was my first jam (!), Horace McCoy, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson of course, Paul Cain, Cornell Woolrich, Chandler, Hammett, Loren D Estleman, Chester Himes, Raoul Whtifield, basically all the Black Mask Boys. I sometimes moved to the British authors such as Patrick Hamilton and Graham Greene and Colin Macinnes. I got out from under all that by the early 90s but it all definitely shaped my aesthetic and my general tone. Yes, I thought I was a tough guy. And in the milieu I was in, I was and am a kind of hard boiled character. Alternative or indie rock! Its not hard to be tough!

To talk of the world of rock in general. Full of upper middle class types and their hangers on or commentators raving on about excess and boozing and drugging. I did not get into music to access any of that! I came from a family and a world of heroic, prodigious boozers and smoked bales of weed as well. 70s country South Australia. It was normal to be wasted if you were young. Teenage heaven. Teenage wasteland. Drive ins, hot rods, hot cars, discos, surfers, fights, football, all that stuff. I was a made guy. I had dove in and had been dumped by the wild waves and lived on. Then I washed up in the rock scene in my early twenties.

But tough guys. Rock n roll tough guys. I’m here to talk on that.

There have been violent people but thats not really tough. Who wins a fight? The one who hits first. Is that tough? Cunning, sure, knowing yes. But not really tough. Toughness would be more like getting hit and getting up again.

I saw Rose Tattoo in 1977 at Checkers in Sydney. I was in the audience and was served cans of KB beer by a waiter with a tray. Angry Andersons skin was yellow. They did actually look tough. Peter Wells was a giant and looked even taller standing next to Angry Anderson. I am unsure if Ian Rilen was still in the band then (he wrote the song) , their first album was just coming out. But I was driving around the east coast alone and was 18. I heard the song on the radio and they were opening for Santana and Fleetwood Mac at the Sydney Showgrounds. I thought it was a new Rod Stewart song. I walked around Paddington market by myself and bought a punk fanzine which had an interview with the band in it. At that time, all sorts of things were pulled into the new and powerful punk whirlpool. Ian Rilen went on to swim through more post punk waters with X and then Sardine V and then probably X again and more adventures. He was some sort of authentic rock n roll streetlife figure in 90s and 2000s Melbourne (St Kilda) alt rock culture. Amongst all these sweet things there he was, smiling as he drove past in his open topped car. I’d say he was tough. Resilient, flexible, agile, aware of the situation and any possibilities.Like a shark. Like the mad way Angry kisses guitarist Mick Cocks in the clip below, Ian was sometimes prone to kissing male friends on greeting. Fully toungeing in. In a tough guy, challenging/shocking kind of a move.

But mostly musicians are people who have spent years in their rooms, practicing and learning their instruments. Away from the numbers and the world. Dreamy, solitary rebels. Is that tough? Perhaps it is. But I wouldn’t say it meant they were tough in a violent way or dangerous. Unpredictable or in that very 2026 terminology , “on the spectrum”? Certainly.

Would I be scared if Guns N Roses walked into the room? I would probably leave it because they would have so many people hanging off of them.
Stories of Nick Cave in the Boys Next Door/Birthday Party years when he was challenging skinheads and street people with his presence were always quite thrilling to hear of. But he had some sort of mad recklessness that involved Australian ignorance mixed with fearlessness at play. Lots of those people from that Melbourne crowd would have had quite fraught teenage years on trains and buses, the violent years. Violence directed at them. Oh well, thats life, Fauntleroy!

A friend once told me of seeing the band JAPAN in their native Croydon in outer London getting about in full glam war paint and costumery on public transport. That involves some sort of resolute toughness.

Adelaide band Scandal apparently used to play often at Elizabeth Rugby Club. Elizabeth was the satellite city outside Adelaide and was home for a Holden car plant and the post war immigrants from the UK who worked there. It is noted for many bands who came out of it, including Cold Chisel and the Twilights and the Masters Apprentices.

Tough guys? Willie Nelson and his drummer/road manager Paul English.

Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson were tough for walking out on the Nashville music business way of doing things and going their own way. Waylon insisted on recording with his own band as opposed to using the studio session players.

This series of animated Outlaw Country war stories is excellent.

Waylon and Willie had those qualities such as stoicism and grit that I really loved, especially when the 90s grunge rock era of bawling, yarling emotionally loosed, distorted rock was all through all of the music in the air.

(They also used a lot of chorus and phasing but Waylon had been using phasing on his guitar in the 70s - just like Keith Richards).

Did you know Waylon was bass player for his friend Buddy Holly and gave up his seat on that fateful flight to the Big Bopper?

In our band the Moodists we thrilled to stories of Jerry Lee Lewis being an absolute bastard to THE WORLD. We believed it all. Aralditing his drunken bass players balls to the floor while he was comatose drunk. (Highly illogical and surely impossible…) shooting another (?) bass player in the chest for looking at his sister, literally calling everybody he engaged with “Killer” which was his own nickname, being arrested outside Elvis’s house waving a gun, drunk, threatening to kill him. Generally being an unreflective redneck hoodlum I guess. I still like to read about him. The story Nick Tosches wrote about riding in a car with Jerry lee and his drunken father, Elmo in the book COUNTRY, was a classic. Hey, sometimes you just like to see people getting away with living! (George Jones gets a free pass too).

The Grateful Dead were tough in their own way. They were supposed to play at Altamont but backed out when they saw the smoke from the burning tyres (among other reports of the day). They tried to record in studios but eventually gave up for a decade because they didn’t like it and told their fans to tape them. They existed outside the record business and became one of the biggest touring acts in the USA, only playing in Europe a couple of times - for fun - and also setting up at the Pyramids in Egypt for three nights - because they wanted to.

I should rep some rock music I suppose. So I’ll have to put in Lynyrd Skynyrd for simply having the most SWAGGER of any act I have ever seen. Perhaps led by a domineering short guy in Ronni Van Zant who drilled them to rehearse intensely. No improving, all power moves and licks. Ed King from the Nuggets era band the Strawberry Alarm Clock was the only non Southerner who joined them briefly and gifted them Sweet Home Alabama and left before the fateful p[lane crash. As that plane crashed into a swamp, killing several members an injuring others, drummer Artemis Pyle dragged himself through an alligator infested swamp to knock on the door of a farmhouse only to get shot by the farmer! He lived! And did time in prison for some unsavoury behaviour, but I think he and they were tough. Here they are on their second help, dissing their record label.

Lobby Lloyds Coloured Balls looked tough and would have had a tough crowd of young sharps. But Lobby was often given to quite philosophical lyrical flights.

As a musician, sometimes you admire people for not cooperating with the business or industry. You respect people who walk out on it. Such as when Thelonious Monk stopped recording when his label suggested he do an album of Beatles covers. Mary Lou Williams was one of only two or three female players in the classic photo of all the jazz players in Harlem ( who would get up to pose for the shot at 10am) taken by Art Kane in 1958.

She seemed to give up performing music live, only occasionally in her local church. She also opened her house to fellow musicians who were having problems with addictions. What a story! Her foundation keeps her music alive.

https://www.marylouwilliams.foundation/

One of the other women in the photo is UK born piano player Marian McPartland. She hosted a radio show for years. It featured Steely Dan in performance in one of the later shows. They must have been so thrilled.

https://www.arts.gov/honors/jazz/marian-mcpartland

For these women, toughness was essential. So many female players just give up. Men bluff their way through. Women just stop if they see that they cant do something as well as they might have hoped.
Women who continue to play are often bent into other shapes and distorted and are seen as difficult or hard work. In truth, they have to. Also, in truth, they go a bit nuts! They are all isolated from each other and set into competition as well. And must measure up in physical appearance to ideals summoned up by generations of men. Thats tough.

Barbara Dane was pretty amazing. 1927-2024. Jazz and folk singer. But also resolute commie and started issuing her music on her OWN LABEL in 1970.

When you read about Lil Hardin Armstrong, its one of those stories that seems to open up a new portal in your idea of musical history.

https://riverwalkjazz.stanford.edu/program/my-heart-story-lil-hardin-armstrong

Anyway, I would like to end on an EQUIVOCAL note. A soft footnote.

Tough guys could dance. Perhaps real tough guys.

Here is George Raft, associate of many real life gangsters (as well as playing them on the screen) and product of a real urban tenement street life, dancing the Tango in a movie, just like he used to do for a job as a young hustler.