['On the Boarderline' is an ongoing segment on the Movies About Girls Show, in which I talk about my high school/post-high school band Doctor Rock. As the intro goes, it's done 'song by song', meaning there's probably around 100 episodes to come eventually. What follows is the script of the segment, as well as the .MP3 of the episode's featured song.]

Hello listeners. How are you? Me? Oh, I’m pretty well, thanks. You? Oh good. Good. Welcome to the momentous episode five of ‘On the Boarderline: A Doctor Rock-umentary’. Over the coming weeks, months, maybe even years and possibly even decades, we’ll be working our way through the back catalogue of these black, black sheep of the Ballarat, Victoria music scene, song by song by song by song by song.

This week, it’s track three of ’45 Minutes of Rock’, a song that sprung at least one quarter formed from the first show the band played, at Josh Feenjeen’s 17th. Josh, lead singer of Mr Feenjeen, had been ready to kick me out of the band at the exact same time I decided to quit. As we’ve seen over the past few episodes, this lead to the formation of Doctor Rock, just weeks later.

Was Josh jealous? Bitter, as if his ex had gone off and immediately started not only sleeping with someone else, but doing all kinds of things with the new love interest that they never would have even considering doing with Josh? It’s possible. I don’t want to assume, or put words into his mouth, but there was one thing that happened later that night that makes me think maybe, just maybe, there was something a little on the irritated side floating around that head of his. It was hours on from the time of doctor rock’s debut.

Much had happened in between – alcohol and other intoxicants were imbibed in great quantities, and for some inexplicable reason, I’d brushed off the advances of a quite lovely girl named Eleanor. Mr Feenjeen had played their set, rushing through their pop punk songs within a half hour or so, but reappeared later on.

Mick – Feenjeen bass player and future doctor rock drummer – began playing a Red Hot Chili Peppers bass-line (I’ve no idea which one, because frankly I do not care for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the least). then Josh began to sing, improvising something that would stick in the minds of the newly formed Doctor Rock for years to come, influencing self-image in a way Josh would never have predicted.

“Doctor Rock suck!” Josh yelled enthusiastically. “They’ve got the right stuff!”

It didn’t make sense, but it did have a certain ring to it. And as any teenage loser will tell you: there’s no defence against criticism like laying it all out there before other people can. So we stole the catchy couplet, and wrote our own song around it. We called it Doctor Rock Suck.

Now, you may or may not have gathered this from previous episodes, but it was early 2000. we’d all lived through that nasty Y2K business, and things were kind of looking up. It was a time when combining rap and rock seemed not only a viable idea, but one to be celebrated. Lower middle class white males rapping was THE hot thing. So we gave it the old Ballarat high school try.

Or, to be entirely accurate, I did. Yes, it’s true. I fancied myself, to some degree at least, a 17 year old rapper. I spent part of last week’s episode apologising, but I could quite easily spend rather a similar amount of time doing it again this week. Aside from breaking up with my high school girlfriend Kirralee via text message and then using an un-erase program on the computer I had lent her in order to try and read supposedly deleted fragments of her diary, there’s not actually anything I regret more from that time of my life than my attempts at rapping.

I am so sorry. It won’t happen again. Obviously, at the time, we were pretty stoked about the song. It was something different by Ballarat standards, and it was novel to perform. As time went on though, it went from being novel to feeling more like a novelty. We never really stopped playing it – even by the end of the group, even once the song was hated by pretty much everyone in the band – because we couldn’t.

Doctor Rock Suck was our novelty hit, and the audiences (limited though they might have been) responded to it, in quite vocal favour of it. By that time, it was 2004. we’d been playing the song for more than 4 years – a song for which the lyrics had been written in a media studies class, and for which Clemo had quite blatantly ripped off the guitar riff from a rather horrible Australian band best forgotten. We were sick of playing it, and I was ashamed of its very existence. I still am, to some extent.

But that was all quite some time away. This version – the version from ’45 Minutes of Rock’ – was ebullient, maybe even voracious. We were certainly having fun, because who knew in 2000 that lower middle class white males rapping along to rock music wasn’t something to be celebrated? Not us. Not a lot of people, it would seem.

The .MP3 is below, as per usual. Maybe you’ll like this one. More likely you’ll hate it. Either way, it’s there, it happened, and now we must deal with it. And this? Well, we have to deal with this too, because it’s been another episode of the increasingly apologetic, ‘On the Boarderline: A Doctor Roc-umentary’.

Download Doctor Rock Suck