Chasing the Dragon

Jeff Apter

Description

He had it all: the heroin chic thing before it was chic, the scars, the swagger, an incredible stage presence. After bursting on to the Australian music scene in 1975, Dragon fast developed a reputation for both hard rocking and hard living. As the highly visible and charismatic lead singer, Marc Hunter was the voice behind such timeless hits as ‘April Sun in Cuba', ‘Are You Old Enough?' and ‘Rain'. Yet Hunter was also a maverick whose destructive genius and serious heroin addiction led to a turbulent relationship with his bandmates, including older brother Todd. And it contributed to his early death at just 44. Originally published in 2011, this intimate portrait was written with full co-operation from Marc's mother Voi and his brother and former bandmate Todd, as well as contributions from many high-profile Australian music personalities such as James Reyne, John Paul Young, Kate Fitzpatrick, Richard Clapton, Don Walker, Kevin Borich, Tommy Emmanuel and Robert Forster.

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Performing Arts
• Biography
• Entertainment
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Woodslane Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781922800343
• Langue: English

Extrait

Jeff Apter has written more than 30 books about Australian music and musicians. His subjects include John Farnham, the Bee Gees, Bon Scott, Daniel Johns, AC/DC’s Young brothers, Marc Hunter, Johnny O’Keefe, Jon English and many others. As a ghostwriter and/or co-writer, Jeff has worked with Kasey Chambers, Richard Clapton and Mark Evans (formerly of AC/DC), and was on staff at Rolling Stone for several years. Jeff lives on the NSW South Coast with his wife and two children, and enough pets to fill a small zoo.
Also by Jeff Apter and available from Woodslane Press:
Behind Dark Eyes: The True Story of Jon English
Playing to Win: The Definitive Biography of John Farnham
Tragedy: The Ballad of the Bee Gees

Woodslane Press Pty Ltd
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Warriewood, NSW 2102
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Tel: [phone] Website: www.woodslanepress.com.au
First published in Australia in 2012 by Hardie Grant
This re-issued edition published in Australia in 2023 by Woodslane Press
© 2023 Woodslane Press, text © 2012 and 2023 Jeff Apter
ISBN: 9781922800343
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Cover image courtesy and © Philip Morris, all other images © Jeff Apter
Text design and typesetting by Patrick Cannon and Cannon Typesetting
Cover design and text revisions by Luke Harris
For Boo, my main man
Contents
Prologue
1 Hunters’ Hole
2 Bland on the Run
3 Big Fish, High Times, Dodgy Contacts
4 Cider & Mince
5 Running Free
6 Redneck Rampage
7 A Barbarian, a Cretin
8 Bumping Garages with the Lady of Soul
9 Fire & Rain
10 Glamour all the Way
11 A Million Dollars Down
12 Old Habits and New Dreams
13 One Death, Many Devils
14 To the Headland
Coda
Acknowledgements
Marc Hunter selected discography
Bibliography
He had it all—the heroin chic thing before it was chic, the scars, the swagger, an incredible stage presence. He was a really intelligent, funny, talented man who enjoyed life and thought it was there to be enjoyed. He chose to take big bites.
— J AMES R EYNE -->
Prologue
T IMING, AS ANY sportsman, musician or junk bond trader will tell you, is everything. So, surely it wasn’t some random coincidence that within days of my beginning work on this book, a newspaper report asked the curly question: ‘Who will be the next Michael Hutchence?’
Although the elegantly wasted INXS frontman was more than a decade dead, the general response seemed to be that since his unfortunate demise we’d lost the ability to produce sexy, dangerous rockers. Tim Rogers? Never crossed into the mainstream. Daniel Johns? Too arty. Bernard Fanning? Too grounded. Dan Sultan? Too early to tell—and anyone who saw him in action at the 2010 NRL grand final, belting out the Stones’ ‘Brown sugar’ while dressed like an accountant, would question whether he had the devil inside.
Yet there, deep into the article written by The Sydney Morning Herald ’s Bernard Zuel, was an observation from Robert Forster, former member of Brisbane indie pop band the Go-Betweens. Was Hutchence even the correct benchmark for antipodean rock-and-roll swagger? Hadn’t we forgotten someone?
‘Marc Hunter [was] the full deal,’ noted Forster. ‘The strutting rooster, the glint in the eye, reckless, camp and selling a lot of records … he had a bit of a smirk on the mouth, great clothes, great body, voice. And the other thing about Marc Hunter is he enjoyed it. You could see that look on his face all the time and that is important.’
While some might question Robert Forster’s take on Hunter’s ‘great clothes’—the pirate look of the late 1970s and early ’80s, predating Captain Jack Sparrow by some years, remains a fashion crime—there is no doubting his insight. Michael Hutchence may have sold more records, bedded more supermodels and recorded more No 1s than Marc Hunter, but nobody seemed to relish their time in the spotlight with quite the same zeal as the Dragon singer, sometimes known, for better or worse, as ‘Marc Cunter’. That smirk never left his face, even as the curtain quickly fell on not just his career, but also his life.
There’s no disputing that Marc Hunter required some seriously high maintenance during his forty-four years—according to his big brother, Todd, who knew him as well as anyone, he was a contradictory character who ‘felt there was a veil separating him and the rest of the world’.
During the research for this book, I was related stories of a family man given to lengthy benders, and of a great singer who was reluctant to enter the studio. ‘Marc had the incredible ability to create a parallel reality,’ a friend of his told me. ‘It always came as something of a shock to him when people would shake their heads and say, “Boy, you really fucked that up.”’
For much of Hunter’s life, he seemed torn between the hedonistic lure of the pop world and the stark realisation that he was trapped in an often facile, remarkably shallow business. Perhaps this cynical, well-read and eloquent man was a little too smart for rock-and-roll. He could see straight through the facade of celebrity and stardom, yet he loved the spotlight. Marc was the kind of person who could readily negotiate his way through a debate on the merits of free will versus chaos theory while ‘comfortably wading in the gutter of [seedy Sydney venue] the Manzil Room’, in the words (and sometimes company) of writer Anthony O’Grady. He once became involved with a scheme to float zeppelins over Mexico City in an attempt to clean up the ozone, yet he smoked like a chimney. Was he conflicted? You bet.
Mike Caen, a guitarist in Dragon’s final tour of duty, wasn’t the only person to note that Hunter reminded him of legendary louche actor Peter O’Toole. ‘Marc’s wonderful side was very good and his bad side was pretty bad. When he was in a bad mood he could be a real prick.’ Such as the occasion during a 1988 tour, when Hunter’s band mates looked on aghast as Marc emptied a bottle of beer over the head of an over-zealous female fan—neither the first nor last time he’d do such a thing.
Hunter would sometimes regard press interviews as verbal warfare. ‘You expect me to answer that?’ he would snarl at some under-prepared journo. ‘What kind of question is that?’ Then he’d flash a smile and all was forgiven—and forgotten.
‘Marc was the real deal,’ said Ed St John, former head of Warner Music Australia. Ed first encountered the singer while on assignment for Rolling Stone in the mid 1970s, Hunter casually crushing mandrax tablets into powder as they spoke. ‘Scary, sexy, threatening, deeply intelligent—and really, on occasion, a perfectly charming fellow. But, man, he had a tongue like a viper.’
‘He had it all,’ singer James Reyne told me. ‘The heroin chic before it was chic, before anyone had heard of Nick Cave and those other guys. He had the scars, he had the swagger, an incredible stage presence. He was a really intelligent, funny, talented man who enjoyed life and thought it was there to be enjoyed. He chose to take big bites. The Marc I knew was never malicious or mean-spirited—unless someone was an idiot and then they deserved what they got.’
Others believed there were two distinctly different sides to the man. In the words of Keith Walker, who knew Hunter for more than twenty years and worked closely on his 1990 album Night & Day : ‘In lots of ways Marc was quite a shy person. He’d get uptight before going on stage but then he’d walk on, the lights would go up and bang, he’d become Marc Hunter.’
According to Mark Walmsley, another studio guy who was tight with Marc for a couple of years while working on his 1994 solo release Talk to Strangers , Marc had the so-called ‘X factor’ before anyone actually knew what it was. ‘He was certainly self-destructive; you couldn’t spend any time with him and not see that. But he was also incredibly urbane and one of the most charming people I’ve ever met. I miss him still; he was such a lovely guy to me.’
Highly regarded record producer Richard Lush, who worked on two of Marc’s solo LPs and saw his many sides, likened Hunter to Beatle John Lennon. ‘John and Marc were very similar,’ Lush told me, ‘very impatient. In the studio they both wanted to get on and do it, move on. Marc didn’t want to labour something too long, he’d get impatient and annoyed.’
‘I’d say Michael Hutchence got a lot of his swagger from Marc,’ said drummer Mark Kennedy, a running buddy and collaborator of Hunter’s in the 1980s and ’90s. ‘But Marc just wouldn’t pl