How Meldrum dodged suits for Aussie classic

The story of The Real Thing by Russell Morris is almost unreal.

Ian 'Molly' Meldrum and Russell Morris.

Cliff Baxter worked at EMI Records from the early 1950s and helped turn more than a few suburban hopefuls into household names.

But for him, John Farnham might have been an Adelaide plumber with outstanding pipes.

Baxter’s enduring legacy is his role in saving Australia’s best known — and perhaps best loved — rock song.

He was EMI’s Melbourne boss at the start of 1969 when budding and excitable producer-manager Ian Meldrum set about deconstructing a gentle, unrecorded Johnny Young ballad that Meldrum had reimagined as a lavish, nine-minute psychedelic tour de force to kick-start Russell Morris’s solo career.

The story of The Real Thing is almost unreal.

Morris had been modestly successful with Somebody’s Image, whose remake of the Joe South song Hush charted well in 1967.

But the Bob Dylan fan liked the idea of going solo, and Meldrum liked the idea of managing him, and knew he needed a hit to start the ball rolling. Early in 1969, Meldrum was backstage at the old Channel 0 studios during the live broadcast of Uptight, its four-hour, Saturday morning pop show.

Young was strumming an acoustic guitar and singing a song he planned to give to Ronnie Burns called The Real Thing. Meldrum heard in it a song that Young did not and insisted then and there that Morris was the man to sing it. Young saw it as a folkie baroque-pop affair, perhaps driven by cellos like the Beatles’ I Am the Walrus, and unsuited to a solo artist.

Meldrum booked time at the then already legendary Armstrong recording studio opposite Melbourne’s Albert Park Lake.

To describe what Meldrum had in mind for the song as wildly ambitious is to understate his daring. The plan — if he had one — was to distil every recent achievement at London’s famed Abbey Road studios into a heroic Sgt Pepper’s-in-a-single. Young’s song was just its skeleton. Meldrum often has been underestimated through the years; rest assured, this was a purposeful departure from the cheerfully functional pop hits of the day.

His first act of defiance was to ignore the rule that radio wanted three-minute pop songs. The year before, the Beatles’ Hey Jude had doubled that. Meldrum would treble it.

Rock bands had four or five musicians. Records were made to strict budgets. Time in the studio was metered. There were rules. Only a bundy clock was missing.

Morris was a solo act. So Meldrum built him a band, recruiting Australia’s rock elite, starting with the Groop, and its singer Ronnie Charles, keyboard player Brian Cadd and bass player Don Mudie.

Weeks later Cadd and Mudie formed Axiom. Roger Hicks, from Zoot, shaped the song’s distinctive acoustic guitar motif, and Billy Green from Doug Parkinson In Focus was on lead guitar and sitar.

For the first few minutes of the song Morris tells us, with the thin details supplied by Young, about The Real Thing. As the pace picks up, the band deviates into melodic corners and a children’s choir enters tentatively but then threatens to take over.

Young’s song and Morris’s singing barely survive the oceanic force of its swirling musical crescendo, at which point Meldrum inserts some lines of the Hitler Youth’s marching song Die Jugend Marschiert, ending with a rousing “Sieg Heil!”.

Rising above it all is a commanding German-sounding accent assumed by many to be Adolf himself, but it was a playful Cadd reading out the instructions from the back of the Agfa-Gevaert reel-to-reel tape box: “And you, the receiver of this product …”.

Just when it seemed breathlessly unstoppable, Meldrum sets off a bomb to bring it all to an end.

After four weeks the song remained unfinished and invoices for studio time started piling up at EMI’s Sydney headquarters where, it was assumed, The Real Thing was a costly album.

On discovering it was a single — indeed, just one side — an executive from Sydney was dispatched to sort it out and cut Meldrum down to size.

Fearing his unfinished masterpiece was about to be seized and hurriedly completed by soulless company men, Meldrum, perhaps emboldened by the brandy that had lubricated the long sessions, stole the tapes and hid at the Albert Park Golf Club across the road.

He called EMI to tell them he had the tapes. And a match.

Baxter, who loved The Real Thing, bartered a peace deal. Meldrum had one more day to complete the song.

Morris went out with a torch to look for his boss and found him sleeping in a bunker.

Meldrum trusted Baxter but was wary of Sydney. He and Morris broke into the studio at midnight to completed the 6½-minute masterpiece with which we are familiar.

Corners were cut, and so were several minutes from the song. Morris’s “oo mow ma mow mow” line — first uttered by Meldrum and meant to indicate where a Jimi Hendrix-like guitar part would be — would have to stay.

As testament to Meldrum’s influence even then, radio did play it, sometimes as an act of rebellion, but mostly because it was so different.

Within weeks it was a hit and Morris, 20, a star. The Diamond label issued it in the US — with half the song on each side — and it charted in New York, Chicago and Houston.

The Real Thing was the biggest selling song in the country when Australians sat down to watch flickering black-and-white images of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon.

It was one giant leap for Australian music.