CherryRock
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CherryRock

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“We had a good chat,” Young says. “I called him ‘Mayor’, and he said, ‘Just call me Robert’.” The battle between live music culture and local commercial and residential amenity has both local and broader aspects. At the conclusion of last year’s CherryRock, Young suggested that the impending move of new tenants into an adjoining building could spell the end of open-air festivals at Cherry Bar. (Young’s commitment to live music transcends mere rhetoric and Cherry Bar: about a month after this interview took place, Young, fearing another live music venue could bite the dust, swooped into Yah Yah’s on Smith Street one evening and agreed to buy the business from the current owners).

Young staged the first CherryRock festival in 2008, headlined by Eddy Current Suppression Ring (capped off with Brendan Suppression’s recreation of Iggy Stooge’s famous crowd walk at the 1970 Cincinnati Pop Festival). Now, with the impending opening of an alfresco restaurant immediately proximate to Cherry Bar, Young’s beloved outdoor festival threatens to become a thing of the past.

Young concedes that the current chapter of CherryRock is about to conclude. “This CherryRock is certainly going to be the last CherryRock of this form and of this type,” Young confirms. “While I remain quietly confident that we’ll have the support of the Melbourne City Council for festivals in AC/DC Lane or some other location in Melbourne, the reality is that with a Peruvian al fresco restaurant at the base of AC/DC Lane we’re just not going to have space for the huge stage we put in.”

With Cherry’s new neighbour’s restaurant due to open in June, Young has brought forward CherryRock014 to Sunday May 25 to offer the event a suitable send-off. “I don’t know what I’m going to do after this event, but I’m not going to let the concept of CherryRock go, but this will be the last one of CherryRock as you have known it,” Young says. “For the future, the ball’s really in our court. We can go one of two ways: we can either go smaller, make the stage smaller and move it further up AC/DC Lane, or alternatively we can go ballsy and set it up further up Flinders Lane with a bigger stage and have people all the way down Flinders Lane. If we did that, AC/DC Lane might be where you’d put the food and toilets. And maybe we could put a stage on AC/DC Lane, so you were looking up and instead of down – like an outdoor cinema in Paris – Le CherryRock,” Young laughs.

And while reports of its permanent demise might be exaggerated, the current form of CherryRock is going to be farewelled in a hard rocking frenzy. Legendary cow punk rock band Meat Puppets and Brant Bjork are the event’s headliners; a host of local bands including the Bitter Sweet Kicks, Don Fernando, Drunk Mums, King of the North and Child will provide a potent entree.

Young is especially looking forward to the appearance of Arizona’s legendary Meat Puppets in the band’s first tour of Australia in over 20 years. “We don’t put a lot of strategy into choosing the bands for CherryRock other than what are the bands that I want to see, and how can I convince them to come and play?” Young says. “With the Meat Puppets, they’re famous for the huge influence on the SST bands, and on bands like Soundgarden, Nirvana and Pavement. They broke up and had a very tumultuous, true punk journey”. That punk journey took the band members from belated commercial acclaim to – especially in the case of bass player Cris Kirkwood – the edge of the narcotic abyss, and back again.

“We noticed that they were back on the scene in America and getting rave reviews,” Young says. “So we realised that the time was right and we managed to get them out here.”

Young says getting Meat Puppets on the CherryRock014 bill provided him with the confidence to take the event outside of Melbourne for the first time. The first non-Melbourne CherryRock will be staged at Sydney’s Factory Theatre in Marrickville on Saturday May 31. Young, who was born in Sydney before moving to Melbourne some years ago, is approaching the inaugural Sydney CherryRock with bridled enthusiasm.

“The gig will be in Marrickville, which is outside the so-called ‘violent circle’, so the licensing issues are a bit different,’ Young says. “People tell me that Sydney is a hard nut to crack. But I was born in Sydney, and I know there are plenty of great bands in Sydney and there’s a love of rock’n’roll in Sydney, so with the right lineup and an affordable price it will work well there,” Young says.

With a lineup heavily weighted toward Melbourne bands, Young is conscious of playing too much on the Melbourne-centric aspect of the event. “It could be a bit controversial and arrogant to turn up in Sydney and say, ‘Here’s ten awesome Melbourne bands – you should be grateful,’” Young says. “So the attitude has been more along the lines of, ‘Why do you want to see what you can see every week? You might not know bands like Chris Russell’s Chicken Walk, Child and Bitter Sweet Kicks, but you’re gonna fuckin’ love them, and I’m going to come away with bruised shoulder blades from all the patting on the back!’”

Young gushes with praise for those “awesome Melbourne bands,” including Chris Russell’s Chicken Walk (“this is a band that despite being a Melbourne two-piece blues band managed to get The Boot at Golden Plains – they’re absolutely world class”), Child (“my new favourite band – three-piece, long-haired psychedelic stoner-blues rock … incredible debut album with only five tracks on it, most of them about eight-to-ten minutes long – it’s so incredibly nuanced that at some points their new album reminds me of Dirty Three because of how artistic and spatial it is”) and Bitter Sweet Kicks (“they’re the closest band I can think of to the Powder Monkeys – high energy, high intensity live band who continue to get kicked in the teeth, and just can’t seem to get the recognition they deserve. When you see Jack Davies out the front of the band hanging upside down off the wall, as he often does, it’s Stooges-esque in its energy levels”).

Then there’s Drunk Mums (“I manage Drunk Mums, so I’m biased. I never want to manage bands, I hate managing bands but they’re that fucking good I had to manage this band – they flew down from Cairns to Melbourne, they’ve got three songwriters, they’ve got the best haircuts in Melbourne, the hottest girlfriends in Melbourne – one of the guys wants to be a ‘60s Rickenbacker powerpop band, the bass player wants them to be a punk band like The Scientists and the other guy wants there to be this punk ethos flowing through the band, and doesn’t really care if they’re successful or not”). And from across the Tasman comes New Zealand’s Beastwars (“an absolutely brutal rock band – when I saw them play at Cherry I thought they were one of the toughest bands I’d seen – in a couple of years’ time they’ll be on the main stage at Soundwave”).

With music festivals dropping like flies in recent months, Young sees the continuing success of CherryRock – whatever its future guise and location – as a beacon of rock’n’roll festival hope.

“We’re accidentally the hero survival model for future music festivals – which is a modest crowd size of about 800, a modest price of 70 bucks, an incredible lineup of mostly local bands, and really designed for the heavy drinking, heavy music-loving [punter],” Young says. “It’s always a fantastic day – there’s nothing like standing on the cobblestones of AC/DC Lane with an ice-cold can of beer watching rock’n’roll blaring up the lane, feeling like you’re rebelling against the corporate structures that cast a shadow upon your day.”

BY PATRICK EMERY