Gutbucket Jug Band

Gutbucket Jug Band by Bruce McNicol

The Gutbucket Jug Band (GBJB) started as a five piece.

- Four of us never played jug, because Tony Dunn did it so well on his big earthenware number, which later flew forward and broke his skull in a road accident. At least he survived. The precious Bendigo jug didn’t.  He also had a fantastic collection of old 78s. We conclude that jug players should wear helmets whilst driving.  

- Rick Ludbrook from Frankston was our lead singer.  He also played guitars, mouth harp and kazoo. 

- Ron Davis had played this music in New Zealand. He was our rock steady rhythm guitarist, and also played washboard and occasionally trombone.

- Colin Stevens was an art student from Bentleigh in those days. He played mandolin and harp and shared the singing.

- Bruce McNicol (me). Colin indicated that I played anything that made a noise. Starting with guitar, mouth harp (cross and straight), washboard with traps, kazoo, piano, I added banjo when it became obvious to us we needed that sound, and similarly, taught myself violin one phrase at a time from my tape recorder. Bassoon was my second instrument at uni, and we used that occasionally too. Lucky I didn’t play steam calliope!

We played regularly in the breaks between jazz bands at Esquire and Campus in Glen Iris and other similar venues, and did a gig at Emerald Hill Theatre in South Melbourne.  The Gutbuckets also played at Traynor’s, Outpost Inn and such places, and even appeared on New Faces, something which we certainly couldn’t do now.  I remember one night we played by invite at a jazz party. This was pre-arranged, not just a happening. Someone said, “Do you mind if I sit in?  I just happen to have my euphonium with me”. As we had a jug we declined, and “I just happen to have my euphonium with me” became a standard joke ( it bit me in the bum in the eighties when I played eupho as leader of the Kyogle Brass Band).

Things were so primitive then that when we recorded at East Studios, reverb was achieved by placing a speaker in a concrete stairwell and adjusting the distance of a microphone from it to control the reverb in the re-recording!  We used bassoon as the solo instrument on “What Are You Waiting For, Mary?” sung by Colin Stevens. Probably the only bassoon solo from a jug band.  Hopefully so!

In 1966 we appeared at the National Jazz Convention in Kew Town Hall (see pic), and were included in the final concert, which pleased us, but didn’t please everyone. We felt relevant as city jug music was jazz pretty much. Incidentally, although I don’t remember when, Barry Wratten sometimes sat in with us on clarinet.

GBJB at National Jazz Convention 1966 – L to R: Rick, Bruce, Colin, Tony, Ron

Soon we were six!  After a while we invited Brent Davey to join the band as banjo player. He too had a really solid rhythmic style. I had got to know him in Ormond College where he lived whilst studying engineering.

We played at the first two festivals in Melbourne, and at the third in Brisbane. For the fourth, in Sydney there was a combined gig with Gutbuckets and Captain Matchbox all on stage at once, with muggings in the middle trying to hold it together on piano. At least I knew both arrangements, which were so similar. I suppose it was recorded, but we never heard it.  If anyone knows, etc etc blah blah.

Earlier we had had two breaks in our existence.  The first was while Tony was recovering from his accident. The rest of us formed an electric band which we called Diamond Jim’s Eat and Drink Band for one night, then The Grunewald Burlesque, which lasted some months. We played from Wilson Picket and Otis Redding to Bob Dylan , and Frank Zappa. Colin played electric mandolin and harp, Rick played  my grey garage band bass and sang, Ron played rhythm guitar, and I played lead guitar (red Telecaster) and electric bassoon(with a mike shoved into its mouth, which made it slightly flat, and it had to be mouthed up). Our drummer was Terry Nott from the Loved Ones (Gerry Humphrey’s pop band).  We were the band for Jim Sharman’s production in the Ginza Disco which was an expose of the hippy movement. We added organ(I think) and trumpet and trombone for it. We played at Sebastions and various other rock venues, including uni gigs.

We would turn up for auditions, and the guys would invariably say, nah, the kids wouldn’t dig it, but . . play another one! After a while we became the residents at the Love Inn in Faraday Street Carlton, which when it burnt down, stayed a blackened hull for many years.

One night in the Royal Ballroom for the uni ball we needed Strauss amps to loan us some incomplete amps for the gig, because they hadn’t completed the ones we had on order. The controls weren’t in cases yet, so the guys that brought them along set them up for us. On with no sound check, we had to ask them to come and turn them down, because there was a swathe of bare floor in a triangle from us outward, where it was so loud, no-one could stand or dance. It transpired I was playing through a 230 watt amp!!

When Tony recovered (and found another jug) we resumed the GBJB. 

After a while (I don’t remember how long) Tony was sent to work in Sydney for a few months. Just about this time I picked up a hitch-hiker in Bourke Rd Camberwell, who got in with a plastic bag of harps.  “Aha” I said, “mouth harps”.   He answered, “I know who you are.” This was Jim Conway.  He told me that he and his brother Mick liked our music so much, they’d gone out and bought the records.  They and some school friends at Camberwell High had entered the school talent quest as a jug band  to send it up,.  They won the quest, and have been playing ever since. As the GBJB was in recess, they invited me to sit in.  At that time we were the Jellybean Jug Band, and included Peter Crichton, with whom I later worked in the Whole Earth Incredibly Loud Band (which wasn’t), and in the eighties with his sister Lisa Yeates and Soozah Clark in Silly Symphony.  I remember when Mick and Geoff Cheeseman came round with great excitement one day, because they had come up with THE NAME. The Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band. There were seven of us.  We used to get about $3 each per gig. Coffee lounge owners would say, “this is how much I can pay.  If you want the gig you can have it.” It was usually about $30.00, no matter how many people you drew.

After a while I noticed a poster for the Gutbuckets.  I was very pleased and rang Tony. He said he’d talk to the others about it.  Turned out I wasn’t welcome any more, which was sad, but understandable.  Someone told me they thought I had ripped off all the arrangements.  Not so.  Both bands had ripped off all Jim Kweskin’s and other recorded arrangements. I had used one bar of one song, my own idea, which was a bar of silence. It left me in a silence of considerable duration.  Later in the nineties the Gutbuckets did a 25 year anniversary gig, which I was welcome to. It was good to be out of that cone of silence, and it’s great to see that the band is still going.  Good luck to all who sail in her.

I’m grateful to the GBJB for all that music we played back then, at first rehearsing in our parent’s houses as we got ready to leave home and be adults.

I stopped playing jug band music when I left Captain Matchbox in June 1970, after we recorded a gig at The Commune.   I felt I was playing too many instruments not well enough, so stopped playing banjo, violin, and T chest bass (the tea chest carried all our stuff).   Nowadays I’m playing Klezmer accordion in  the KaOZ Klezmer Orkeztra, solo French and Italian accordion, singer/songwriting, and writing and singing choral music.