['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.]
Well hello there listeners. Welcome to episode three 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 young behemoths of the Ballarat, Victoria music scene, song by song by song by song by song.
This week, we finish our in-depth recollection of Doctor Rock’s first gig, at Josh from Mr Feenjeen’s 17th birthday, and begin our examination of the ’45 Minutes of Rock’ demo in full. We’ve already talked about Your Last Fucking Waltz and Abasid from the show. That just leaves two covers: one of which was played at practically every single gig from then on, and the other of which was never played again and talked about even more seldom.
Fortunately for you, listeners, as there is no audio of the show, you won’t have to put up with listening to Doctor Rock’s take on Duran Duran’s Girls on Film. Actually, it was more like Doctor Rock’s take on the Wesley Willis Fiasco’s take on Duran Duran’s Girls on Film, which suggests it was probably a bad idea from the start, really. When you consider the fact that it was being performed by three under-prepared 17 year olds and a red-headed 16 year old, it seems even worse. And when you add in the fact that the drums were coming from Scrappy’s keyboard, one guitarist wasn’t interested in actually performing, and I was trying my inadequate best to sing and play bass at the same time, well, it’s probably for the best there’s no audio.
As for the other cover song, there’s probably no more important tune in the band’s history - after all, it was Ween’s Doctor Rock that we named the band after. Or I did. Or something. I guess if we’d called the band Captain Fantasy, we would have ended up having to cover that at every gig.
Let’s do things a little different this week, and familiarise ourselves with a little bit of Ween before we get to Doctor Rock’s version. Here, from 1991′s classic ‘The Pod’ album, is the first version of the song released.
And here, from Ween’s live album ‘Paintin’ the Town Brown’, is a little of a live version - stylistically, probably more of an influence on Doctor Rock’s cover than the album version.
As for Doctor Rock’s version, we’re going to take a particularly strange version of the song, from ’45 Minutes of Rock’.
As noted before, this demo was recorded on a little blue ghetto blaster at one of the band’s first two practises - most likely the second one. It was only a short time after the first show that the band scored new members - Matt, a guitarist of some note who’d previously been in a metal band called Oxide with Josh Feenjeen, but wanted to try his hand at singing. And Mick, a handsome and rascally new kid at the school who played drums and bass. In fact, he’d replaced me on bass in Mr Feenjeen, and already played drums for a metal band named Imune (with one ‘m’). The two guys approached me, and we quickly set some times to get together at Mick’s house, once on the weekend and once after school, to run through some songs in Mick’s lounge room.
Jake, unfortunately, couldn’t make it to the ’45 Minutes of Rock’ practise. Or the one before. Or the one after. Combined with his reluctance to actually play guitar at Josh Feenjeen’s party, this suggested a problem soon to come to a head - a sad state of affairs considering he was effectively one of the co-founders of the band. But that’s a story for another week.
The initial idea was to have Matt sing Doctor Rock, which made sense because Matt was the singer. Matt wasn’t much of a Ween fan, though. Matt was mostly just into metal. And industrial metal. And death metal. And black metal. So, not so much with the Ween then. This slight issue was compounded by the fact that we didn’t actually supply Matt with a lyrics sheet - just told him to make something up over the song as we played it. Which he did. As far as i can tell, he sings: “your mum and your dad get drunk and then fuck on your bed”. Maybe.
Despite the inventiveness of said lyrics, we later came to the conclusion that perhaps I should sing the song instead of Matt, and so began a Doctor Rock tradition of mid-show instrument swapping between him and I.
Mick, it’s worth noting, also wasn’t familiar with the Ween song - he was a metal and punk fan. Fortunately and to his credit, he also happened to be a quite skilled improviser, with a knack for playing along with and anticipating changes in songs he’d never even played before.
The day after recording this, I played it to my dad and sister in the car on the way to school. They were mostly unimpressed. ‘Why can’t you go back to being in a good band like Mr Feenjeen?’ Dad asked.
We played it to everyone who ate recess and lunch in the year 12 common room. They were also mostly unimpressed. Of course, listening back to ’45 Minutes of Rock’, it’s not hard to understand why.
But hey, why take my word for it? Judge for yourself! Here’s Doctor Rock, the opening track of ’45 Minutes of Rock’, by Doctor Rock. Next week, we’ll be talking about a particularly uncomfortable cover. Until then, as always, look for the .MP3 below, and join us next week for another episode of ‘On the Boarderline: A Doctor Rock-umentary’.
Download Doctor Rock
