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Evolution of a rock legend

...continued from front page

Thus was born a legend in rock ‘n’ roll history. The boys got down to recording an album, and were joined for the task by Enrique Hans Elbow, a funk bassist who had played with the Righteous Brothers (as a lad in their kindy sandpit), Gerry Anthoven on drums (who went on to fall under a bus of his own), and Candice Patel as the singer.

However, before the recording could be done, Guzzit changed the name of the band to (the now well-known) Crikey and threw himself under a bus.

The band was in shock, and went into recess. It was five hours before Elbow revealed he could play the comb and the recording got under way. Within seven weeks, 11 tracks had been laid down, including their next single, Angel Underarm Hair, which shot to number two on the Fuzzy Batshit Crossover Chart. Other numbers on the album were Can’t You Read the Signs of the Times, Please Don’t Beam Me Up Scotty, Snortin’ USA, and the long rock anthem in five parts, Prelude and Fugue to Tommy Dorsey’s Hip-Joint Replacement.

By the time the album hit the stores, the band had become Atticus’ Tie Rack, and Pult and Patel had left to join an ashram in Broadmeadows. Rita-Maree Presterjohn, who had played the knee harp with The Group before it changed its name to The Small Group, took over the vocals’ chair, and, for the first time the band was without a banjo and it remained a quartet to the end (except when it was a trio).

It was this lineup of Elbow and Presterjohn, joined by Toto Harvest on percussion and drums (Anthoven by this time having been caught by the 603 bus along North Road) and Neil Elderly on rhythm teeth, that went on to record, as Pink Puke, the most controversial album of their career. When, in May 1973, Warbling Bertie Wooster hit the shelves, it stayed there and the band, by now known as Mother Tongue Father Land, was struggling to fill a phone booth let alone the stadiums they had packed out earlier in the decade.

Despite the lack of popular success, this album received rave reviews from the critics for its black wriggly lines on vinyl and its perfectly formed circular shape. Some of the songs are songs to this day: Day of Execution, for instance, and Stay of Execution must be among the songs that will live forever (if they want to).
However, the band was on the verge of dissolution. Elbow left to pursue a solo career in funk bass base jumping, Presterjohn became a nun and a priest in the Ethiopian Church of Mutiah the Prophetess, and Harvest got crushed between two buses at the Box Hill Interchange.

Elderly had pawned his teeth and, but for a chance meeting with Alonso Baedeker outside the pawnshop, that would have been the end of the line for Outside Dunny, as Elderly had renamed the group. Baedeker had just left heavy metal band Staple Diet where he had played axle and suggested to Elderly that they contact drummer Wilson Knudel, who was out of work and was laid up after being clipped by a bus while on holiday in Venice.

This teeth, axle and drums trio, named Katya’s Custard Stand, played the for several years at the Bourke Mall Roxy before anyone became aware of its existence.

It was into such oblivion that one of rock’s most longevitous bands finally disappeared. An inappropriate and somehow whimpering, albeit predictable, end.

Long may it shake, rattle and roll!

For those obsessive fans amongst you (I know I'm one!) here is the full story, in all its dynastic drama, in overview (or omnibus) form:

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