I’d just turned 18 and signed up for Uni at RMIT when Monkey started hanging out at this place around the corner from my classes. Apparently he’d met some chick on a tram and she’d gotten him to paint the doors for a new café that was about to open. It was a bare-looking kind of place with a few people in their late 20s and early 30s drinking coffee and tinnies, eating cheap Asian food and knocking shit around with power tools. Jerome was pretty chuffed with Monkey’s artwork, and as payment, offered to throw him a party in the bar, now that it had taken some shape. Monkey brought Ryan and Steve and I in to play records with him all night — cramped up behind the tiny corner booth table at the front window — to as many friends as we could fit in, which at that stage was only the front bar. I think it was the first night Jerome had any sort of music or DJ’s in the place, and he seemed to enjoy the idea of it, so he got us back in to play weekly from there. At first it was just us playing to our mates, and Jerome’s mates, nothing more than a handful of people hanging out. By the end of it, there was a line halfway up the laneway from about 9pm. From that first night we bought our decks into the bar and played every weekend until it was shut.
We played from about eight till 12 and got paid with a 12-pack of Melbourne cans between the four of us. When more people started showing up, we got moved to Friday, and started to get paid $100 between us to go with the cans. We weren’t really interested in making money then, so we pooled our pay together to save it for more equipment. The need for better equipment became more evident every week. The more people that rocked up and started dancing, the more body heat there was near the decks, which eventually lead to the amps overheating. We couldn’t get the music back on until the three of us that weren’t playing got the amp back down to a temperature that wasn’t too hot to touch, by fanning it with our vinyl.
That happened nearly every week. And when it didn’t, one of us would get too drunk and excited with levels and blow the speakers. After a while that stopped happening, but something else would go wrong; junkies pinched the equipment from the storeroom that we had bought with our savings. Equipment was eventually provided for us, but we’d rock up to play at 8pm Friday and there were no turntables. Or one wasn’t working. Or someone DJ’ing the night before had spilt a shot of Jaagermiester in the cross fader of the mixer. By the time Shan had joined us a few years in and we were all using Serato, we’d all perfected being able to mix on a system with one turntable, half a mixer and a sound system with two hours of power life. If it wasn’t the power cutting out from the heat, or from foul smelling sewage sparking electrical cables, or the generator running out of petrol, some dickhead would pull out an extension lead for a laugh. A night without some sort of equipment failure was a rare success.
A few years into this, we’d all been nagging Jerome to up our rider. With all the difficult conditions we had to deal with, and Jarrod sneaking half of it from us weekly, we felt we deserved it. He didn’t agree however, so we left it alone for a while. We went to the footy one day, in a corporate box at the ‘G’, to watch the Saints and the Bulldogs. Barracking for the Bulldogs at a Saints game with Jerome is a high banter affair, especially with an unlimited supply of booze. He was trying to bait me at every point of the day and when we were down in the third Jerome threw the offer of a wager up. I took him on. If the Dogs came back and won the game, he’d double our rider. I told the other boys I’d taken the bet. They were excited. Thank goodness, the Dogs won. When we got back to the bar, I told the boys that if the Dogs had lost, we would have lost our rider for good. Jerome, being a good sport, helped us drink our newly acquired rider through shotguns coupled with dancing on the bar to music way too loud for 6pm. Captain Oz kicked me off the decks and out the door very early in the night for being drunk and useless. All in all, a pretty standard sort of day at the bar.
For the amount of time I spent at that place, I should remember a lot more. But it’s the place itself I think I should blame for my horrible memory. It’s hard to remember everything that happened in so many years, in a place where there was always something going on. It wasn’t just a place to get drunk or play records for me, it was much more than that. It turned into a place of routine in my life and lots of other people’s lives, equivalent to home, or school, or work. The best part was that it was somewhere you could go and get involved in something, whether it be low key, social, artistic, or something totally ridiculous. I met a lot of really talented, interesting and amazing people at Jerome’s and made some really great friends, some that I’ll have forever. I will never forget the fun we had in that little place.
It’s the smelliest place I will always miss.