LOUIS BURKE | Culture | CONTACT
Last night at Betoota live music institution The Roo Shooter, the pre-show sound check ground to a halt as sound guy Vic “Vicco” Johnson (56) started boring the bands shitless with a 45-minute long story about Australian musician Nick Cave.
While demonstrating to the closest person nearby that he understood what every one of the switches on the sound desk did, Johnson launched into a story involving a gig he worked for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds roughly 28 years ago.
“Normally I set mic one about here, but for Nick, cause of his voice, I had to set it here,” stated Johnson as he moved a switch on the board that the listening vocalist could never even begin to understand the function of.
“Funny thing about Nick actually, he asked me for a cigarette but I told him I didn’t smoke, never have, not after I’ve seen what it can do to you, I vape now, but that’s another story.”
As members of the performing bands began to gather by the sound desk to ask what in the great world of fuck was taking so long, one-by-one they ended up trapped in the tractor beam of Johnson’s tenuous and predictably pointless story about a musician most of them only know by name.
“Vicco. Fucking Vicco every time,” stated drummer Tom Gretsch.
“I could have ripped that stringy little goatee off his chin and he still would have kept telling that story about how he once bought Nick Cave a packet of cigarettes and that he never paid him back for. It was like $4 a deck back then shut the fuck up dude.”
The ordeal was finally over once Johnson ended the story with a rehearsed thump of the sound desk that meant he had to reset all the levels again.
“Sorry I’m really fussy about this. You know who else is really fussy? Quan from The Gurge. Funny story about him. He had this great big dog he used to bring to gigs and I said to him ‘mate, you can’t bring that in here’ and he asked if he could borrow my phone to call someone to pick it up. This is all happening while I’m working with a system about half the size of this by the way, but I give him my phone, an old Nokia, remember those? Anyway he makes the call which would have cost about $3 back then which used to get you a beer but I thought ‘forget it, surely he’ll slip me one from the rider later’ but I look at the phone number he’s called and it’s the same number of an ex of mine. Long story short, I’ll give you some context about my ex who I met at this club, it’s not around anymore…”
