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Bruce Wellie is one of the unsung heroes of Australian rock music.
Born in the Gorbals area of Glasgow in 1953, Bruce emigrated with his mum, dad
and three older siblings to Adelaide in 1960. After a few brushes with the law
during his early teenage years, Bruce followed his dad Jimmy into the welding
business, and on leaving school took a job as an iron smelter with South Australian
Railways. A chance meeting with singer Bon Scott in 1970 inspired him to
take up rock music, and it wasn’t long before he’d quit his job as a smelter.
He was quick to master the musical instruments that came his way – guitar,
bass, drums, flute, harpsichord, violin, piano, penny whistle – and while
cutting his teeth as a multi-instrumentalist he worked as a drum roadie to keep
the wolf from the door. Bruce’s first appearance on film is a split second
glimpse of him lurking behind the amps, watching his mate Bon singing “Seasons
of Change” (a big hit for Fraternity in 1971). Bon, of course, went on to fame
and fortune with AC/DC, while Bruce had to keep working as a roadie to earn his
daily bread. Nevertheless, by the mid seventies he was raking in the dollars as
a top-notch session musician.
Musical History – ”The man with the golden tonsils.”
It was around this time that Bruce began to play keyboards with The
Blind Deacons, the Hobart pop-rock band that had a hit with “She’s a Tasmanian
She-Devil”. One night, when the Deacon’s vocalist Dave “Legs” Anderhoots got
too loaded to perform, Bruce took his place in the spotlight and, as much to
his own surprise as others’, found that he was a natural born singer. Soon he
was fronting his own group, The Sunset River Band, a more serious project which
took its influences from American Blues and indigenous Australian music. Bruce
was breaking new ground with this approach, especially in his vocal style.
Fascinated by the multiple harmonic resonances of the didgeridoo, he applied
the same circular breathing technique to his singing that didge players used
with their instruments. By this method he was able to achieve a continuous
vocal sound, the so-called “Wellie long-breath”. This can be heard on “Swagman
Blues”, a stomper of a song that became a regional hit for the Sunsets, leading
critics to dub Wellie as “the man with the golden tonsils.” Jay Goldfarb, the
influential music critic for The Adelaide Advertiser, even went as far as to
say that if Robert Plant had been born at Ayers Rock, instead of in West
Bromwich, he would have sounded something like Bruce. Goldfarb also recognised
Wellie’s revolutionary synthesis of Blues, African and indigenous Australian
music. A key element in this was his fusion of the local aboriginal Kun-borrk
style with the modal tunings of American Delta Blues.
Wellie – the early years – Warfare in the suburbs.
The social mileu in which Bruce grew up can be seen in such classic
Australian movies as Turkey Shoot, The Loved Ones, Wake in Fright, and Razorback.
In other words, Bruce came up the hard way, and many of the Sunsets’ early gigs
resembled riots rather than musical performances. Bruce soon became an adept in
the art of bottle-dodging, a necessary prerequisite for any Australian musician
in the early 1970s. It was at one of these shows that a member of the audience
heaved a lamb’s carcass onto the stage, presumably as a sign of his
disapproval. Bruce, in a moment of inspiration, picked up the dead animal and
draped it around his shoulders, an act that whipped the audience into a state
of frenzy. Since this legendary concert, a sheepskin jacket has become an
obligatory part of Bruce’s stage-gear, something like a talisman, some would
say a fetish.
Breakout – The
journey begins (1974-1975)
During the course of 1974, The Sunset River Band (Bruce Wellie –
vocals; Beeb McArdle – guitar; Graham Gobble – keyboards; Mal Hirschfelder –
bass; Tony Herring – drums) began to break out of Southern Australia and reach
a wider audience. With the famous Strongarm Management Agency batting on their
behalf, high profile concerts followed on the east coast, one of which was
supporting Bruce’s old friend Bon Scott in his new band AC/DC. Things were
looking good for the lads, and as more gigs followed they criss-crossed the
country in Strongarm’s private Lear Jet. It was a magical time for all
concerned, and when their second album, “Old Enough To Bleed” (the title oddly
reminiscent of The Stooges’ song “Open Up And Bleed”), charted internationally in
the latter part of 1975 a US tour was organised. This included an appearance on
the newly launched variety show, Saturday Night Live.
February 1976 – Tragedy
strikes
It was while returning to Adelaide from their latest Australian
tour, just before leaving for the States, that tragedy struck The Sunset River
Band. As the band were flying over Hanging Rock in Victoria – the Bermuda
triangle of the southern hemisphere – the plane’s navigation system went
haywire and it crashed in flames, killing all four musicians, as well as their
travelling companions. Luckily , Bruce wasn’t on the flight that day, having
already left for the States to do interviews promoting the upcoming tour. A
support slot with international superstars Aerosmith had been arranged, the buy-on
reputedly costing Strongarm boss Artie Fichenheimer half a million dollars and
an ounce of uncut Bolivian cocaine. Rumour has it that when he learned of the
crash at his hotel in New York, Bruce broke down and wept, retiring to his bed
with only his sheepskin jacket to comfort him.
1976 – 1979: The lost
years
Having lost his band, not to mention his shot at world stardom,
Wellie went into a tailspin of self-destructive behaviour that almost resulted
in his own death. Instead of returning to Australia, he prolonged his
stay in New York, hanging out with members of The New York Dolls, Wayne County
and The Backstreet Boys, Blondie and other regulars at the legendary Max’s
Kansas City club. It wasn’t long before he began to have problems with drugs
and alcohol, missing appointments with potential record producers, preferring
to spend his time instead with sympathetic groupies and dealers. Finally,
Fichenheimer lost patience with his protégé, and Bruce was dropped from the Strongarm roster. While his old mate Bon Scott was going from strength to strength
with AC/DC, Bruce was forced to live off the diminishing royalties from the two
SRB albums, and by 1979 he’d hit the skids and was no longer taken seriously by
the record industry. He did a couple of novelty records for disreputable
labels, for which, incidentally, he never got paid. The first of these was
called “Smells Like A Sheep” (in a similar vein to Rolf Harris’s classic “Tie
Me Kangaroo Down, Sport”), and the second was called “Cum As You Baa”. Neither
of these records charted and the shops rapidly consigned them to the bargain
bins. However, unknown to Bruce, both of them became collectors’ items, not
only in Australia but in Britain and America too. The youthful Curt Cobain, for
example, possessed both Wellie discs, and for those in the know the connection
is obvious. It is also a historical fact that the working title for Nevermind
was Sheep...
Tragedy strikes again
So toxic was Wellie’s condition in the late seventies that the
arrival of punk rock passed him by largely unnoticed. While the record industry
reeled under the combined assault of The Sex Pistols and The Clash, Bruce was
living hand-to-mouth in a succession of skid row hotels and groupie crash pads.
Even so, his name was not absent from
the lips of the cognoscenti. He’d become something of a cult figure, famous as
much for his self-destructive lifestyle as for his music. In a notorious 1978
interview on a New York cable TV station Sid Vicious – in the company of Nancy
Spungeon, Stiv Bators and Cynthia B-Girl – was asked why he liked Bruce
Wellie’s music so much, when the rest of the “old wave” were the subject of his
unremitting contempt. His characteristically blunt answer was: “Because we like
it!” Jeff Lynne of ELO, though, far from admiring Bruce’s hedonistic lifestyle,
expressed his worry and concern over the fallen idol’s condition, and pleaded:
“Don’t bring me down – Brooooce”. When
“Don’t Bring Me Down” was released in July 1979, the record became an instant
worldwide hit. Unfortunately, Lynne’s concern proved to be all too prophetic.
While Bruce was “partying” at the Chelsea Hotel one hot August night in 1979,
the combination of Qaaludes, alcohol and platform boots nearly did him in.
Stumbling outside to get some fresh air, he misjudged the distance to the
safety railing and fell three floors to the sidewalk below. Lucky not to be
dead or paralysed, his fractured skull was repaired with a steel plate and he
spent the next six months in a coma.
1980 – 2000 – The quiet
years
After he emerged from the coma, Bruce decided to return to Australia
to recuperate and reflect upon his life so far. Ever the humorous optimist,
when asked about how it felt to be walking around with a steel plate in his
head he quipped: “No worries, mate – I always did like heavy metal. Now I’ve
got a lump of it in me ‘ead!” But as far
as music was concerned, little was heard of Wellie in these years. In 1990,
Nick Chives, a journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald, managed to track him
down for an article in the Herald’s human interest series “Whatever Happened
To...” Bruce was working on his uncle’s sheep farm at the time, and the
interview found him more interested in the rearing of these gentle animals than
in his personal history as an almost
famous rock star. However, by the late 1990s Wellie’s thoughts were again
turning towards music. He was discovering the great Australian bands of the
late 70s and early 80s, bands that he had missed for one reason or another,
such as The Scientists, The Cosmic Psychos, Grong Grong and Lubricated Goat.
2002 – Tragedy strikes yet
again
While Bruce was catching up on his country’s musical legacy, Jimmy
Wellie, his dad, had become something of a celebrity himself. After reading
about the 11 ton Mundrabilla Meteor, which had crashed into the area now known
as Western Australia over a million years ago, Jimmy had become a committed
meteorite hunter, combing the surrounding countryside for undiscovered
fragments of extra-terrestrial rock. Now retired from South Australian
Railways, he had lots of time on his hands to pursue his new hobby, and would
drive out to the Nullarbor Plain whenever the mood took him. He’d already made
a couple of important finds, and had even been mentioned in National Geographic
magazine as a meteorite hunter of some note. He was just starting to enjoy his
new-found fame, when tragedy struck the Wellie family yet again: as Jimmy was
walking from his car to a likely-looking outcrop of Nullarbor rock, he was
struck in the head by a piece of incoming meteorite and killed instantly.
Rebirth
The accidental death of his father had a profound effect on Bruce’s
way of thinking. If such a random event as a falling meteorite could have such
awful consequences, what similar event might be lying in wait for him? Or
wasn’t it, perhaps, an act of God, a sign that it was time for Bruce to go back
out into the world and do good deeds? With such thoughts in mind, he decided
that the best way to accomplish this would be to take up music again – not to
gain fame and fortune this time around, but to bring the music of his native
land to the attention of the world. As he said when interviewed about his
decision: “There’s a lot more to Oz rock than Nick Cave and Kylie bloody
Minogue, and the world needs to know about it!”
False start
Armed with a set of songs that reflected his favourite Australian
music of the 70s and 80s, Bruce travelled east and hit the streets of Melbourne
in search of kindred souls. Unfortunately, he arrived during one of the biggest
heroin epidemics to hit the city in years, and most of the musicians he sought
out were either dead, strung-out or in de-tox. After several false starts, he
did succeed in getting a band together, an outfit called Überhogg, which played one
gig at the Prince of Wales pub in St. Kilda to a lukewarm audience response.
However, the other members were so drug-damaged and unreliable that plans for a
national tour had to be abandoned.
2008 – Departure for
Europe
It was in 2008 that Bruce decided to take a trip to Europe, a part
of the world he hadn’t visited since leaving Glasgow as a boy. Now 55, he
wanted to visit his birthplace, after which he planned to “do Europe”, just
like generations of Australian backpackers had done before him. One of his
primary destinations was the city of Prague, famous for its Astronomical Clock
and for the research carried out there in the early seventeenth century by
Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. After the untimely death of his father due to
unseen cosmic forces, Bruce had developed a strong interest in both astronomy
and astrology, and he wanted to visit the home of so many arcane experiments
and discoveries. And it was while walking through the dark, cobbled streets of
this ancient capital that Bruce made a startling discovery of his own: the
high-pitched voices of the beautiful young Czech girls he encountered, talking
excitedly and breathlessly in their native tongue, resembled nothing so much as
the soft bleating of the lambs he had cared for on his uncle’s sheep farm.
Popularity regained
Once Bruce had discovered the lamb-like nature of the Czech female,
it was impossible for him to leave. He fell in love with a beautiful blond
fashion designer, and the happy couple were married in November 2009. It was
also around this time that Bruce first ran into the musicians who would soon
come together to form The Bruce Wellie Band: bassist Ra Bob, from the Prague
band Dead Souls – an American recording engineer and producer who has worked
since the early 1980s with the likes of Steve Albini (Big Black, Shellac,
engineer for Pixies, Nirvana etc), Mike Johnson (Snakepit, Dinosuaer Jr, Marl
Lanegan Band, and Dave Pajo (Slint, Cake, Tortoise, Zwan); the deceptively
reserved English guitarist Gez Donnelly, already famous for his sessions with the
BBC’s “John Peel Show”, as well as work
with Blue Valentines and Trunk Show; and Czech drummer David Uher, a renowned
session musician who has bashed the skins with such bands as Tichá Dohoda, The
Rolling Stones Revival Band, Marií Rottrová and Jarek Nohavica. Following
Bruce’s surprise appearance with Dead Souls at their Halloween gig in 2011,
this was the line-up that appeared for the band’s debut concert at Club 007 in
January 2012. Such was the success of this low-key gig that a European tour is
now being arranged, a series of concerts that will enable Bruce to fulfil his
self-appointed mission: to bring the immortal music of the Australian
underground to the attention of an ignorant world. The fact that fashion-wise
he’s stuck in a time warp of pre-coma, mid 1970s NYC glam-rock is neither here
nor there.
The Bruce Wellie Band are:
Bruce Wellie (AUS): vocals
Gez Donnelly (UK): guitar
Ra Bob (USA): bass
David Uher (CZ): drums
bandcamp
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