For a decade or so last century, at this very time of year, my family travelled to Wilsons Promontory for a summer camping holiday.
The dimensions of the Tidal river camping grounds were (and remain, I hope) set out so that of an evening, everybody else’s tent chatter was the soundtrack to your night. This usually meant hearing little kids saying things like: “Daddy! There’s a wombat in our tent!”, but on a particular stretch of tea tree-lined dirt road, it also meant the sweet, sweet sounds of Mike Rudd’s harmonica serenaded the campers: Spectrum’s I’ll Be Gone.
Though I never ascertained whether the song’s fans were of the same vintage or just youths with a taste for the 70s (one particularly baby-faced camper used to put Santana’s Abraxas on repeat before indulging, no doubt, in certain secret herbs and spices), it embedded the song in my psyche at an early age as shorthand for summer.
Perhaps it’s because Rudd’s harmonica line sounds like a hot breeze over a dirt road, or the way the wistfulness of the lyrics feels a little like a meditation on new year’s resolutions. Lines such as: “Someday, I’ll have money” has, I’m sad to say, never stopped being a personally relevant refrain over the past two decades.
The song was something of an outlier in Spectrum’s catalogue, a vaguely folky jam that set itself apart from their more determinedly prog numbers, and would later give them the rather unkind label of one-hit wonders. And it certainly was a hit, reaching No 1 nationally and the top five in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane after its release in January 1971.
(It was well thought of by other prog acolytes, too: Manfred Mann’s Earth Band recorded their own cover, in a tribute of sorts, on 1974’s The Good Earth but it wasn’t a patch on the original’s breezy charms, subbing out the harmonica for snooze-button fuzz guitar and flute – perhaps enjoyment of it would be increased with some of those Santana fans’ herbs.)
On release, the original I’ll Be Gone turned out to be a runaway hit. “The middle of 1970 we recorded it, maybe even earlier, and the song gradually clawed its way to No 1 the following year,” Rudd told ABC’s Bill Brown in a video interview in 2010. “With the Whitlam government coming in, as well, there was a great upswell of acceptance of [all] things Australian. There was us, Daddy Cool, Billy Thorpe, and a whole bunch of acts that were on the charts.”
The song was accompanied by one of Australia’s first official music videos, directed by Chris Löfvén (who later directed the classic video for Daddy Cool’s Eagle Rock) and celebrating the quintessential Australian summer. Watching it now, if I squint, it almost looks like Rudd is walking down the tree-lined track from Norman beach to the shops for cup noodles, so deeply is it embedded in my memories of those camping holidays.
Of course, it was shot elsewhere in Victoria because the band – despite the song’s nationwide success – were very much a Melbourne institution. But whenever I hear that harmonica line fire up, I’m transported immediately back to Wilsons prom on a hot January evening.
