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JULIAN WU'S TRIBUTE
(Long time friend and associate. Knows how to play more Triffids songs than any of the Triffids.)
David McComb changed my life. I know if I had not met Dave the course my life would have taken could have been substantially different from the life it became. There was so much of that David had to offer that I don't know if I could fit it all in, even if this was a full length book. Dave gave so much to me, as he did to all his friends. Here are a few ways in which he affected me.
When I met Dave I was 17 years old, and fresh out of high school. I had deferred from university for a year and was spending a year working out what I really wanted to do with myself. I was writing for fanzines and was working as a volunteer for RRR and PBS. A great many of the people I met around that time, ended up going back to university and did a "sensible" degree like law, medicine, or commerce. They now probably look upon that time as a youthful indescretion. When I met Dave that path closed itself to me. I knew that music was going to be one of the most important things in my life and that it was more important to have a life than to just make a living.
The first time I met Dave was when the Triffids were making their first tour of the eastern states in mid 1982 and they were playing at the Mr Erica hotel in Prahran. I approached Dave to ask about interviewing the band, but in the ensuing conversation we seemed to uncover a lot of common ground and I can't remember if we ever got around to doing a proper interview. By the time I saw him again a few days later when the Triffids played a lunchtime gig at Monash University it felt like we were old friends and they offered me a lift home in the band van after the show. (Incidental note. The van was called Happy Wheels and served the band well for many tours. It can be seen in the film clip for Red Pony)
We were both fans of bands like Television, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, (Dave once told me that he wanted to call the live album "Stockholm LAMF"), Patti Smith, and the Velvets, but Dave was one of the few people of that time who would also admit openly to liking Elvis, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and the Beach Boys at a time when it was not particularly fashionable to do so. Dave was passionate about music and one of his great pleasures was to make compilation tapes of stuff he thought you might like or even what the thought that you OUGHT to like. Dave was a great fan of music (in the truest sense of 'fanatic'). He would read the music papers avidly and call you up and ask if you had read a particular article about a band and wanted to know what you thought about it.
But while Dave was a fan, he possessed an almost McLarenesque sense of cynicism about the music industry. He had an uncanny ability to detect bullshit and like Cassandra, (Read your Greek mythology!) he would be able to point to this weeks critical darlings and accurately predict their fall from grace.
Later that year in September the Triffids moved to Melbourne where they lived above the Black Cat in Brunswick street for . Over that period we cemented and strengthened our friendship. We would see each other several times a week.
During the time that the Triffids were living in Melbourne I was privileged to see and hear the band evolve at a rapid rate and start to define the sound that would earn them their place in the history books. Many of the songs from Treeless Plain originate from this period.
Dave showed me that a commitment to music was just as valid and noble as the commitment to a spouse or job.
Dave insired those around him by his own great self confidence. In the early years at of the Triffids (when the average age of the band was 15), they were so convinced of their place in the history of rock and roll, that they took great pains to document their own history, including the purchase of their first instruments. These moments were all fully documented with photographs in a series of scrap books which still exist in Dave's collection. (I hope whoever writes Dave's biography appreciates this!) Through his confidence in his own abilities as a songwriter and musician, and the confidence he placed in his friends, you had no choice to but to rise to the occasion as you didn't want to let him down.
In 1985 I was invited to be part of the Triffids crew for the east coast leg of the Born Sandy Devotional tour. I think that it was my experience during that tour which well and truly decide that I could never only have just a normal life again. It was a pleasure and joy to be part of the Triffids family for a three week period. I was supposed to be their stage roadie, but by the time we reached Byron Bay, I was made lighting operator. At that point I had never done lights before, but I was told that I knew the songs, and that I would "figure the rest out soon enough."
It was Dave's belief in Rob Snarski's talent which led him to form the Blackeyed Susans. He wanted other people to know respect Rob's abilities as he did.
Dave had a wicked sense of humour which was always lurking beneath the surface and would pop out even in the blackest of times. When Dave recovered from his heart transplant, the song he chose to record for W.Minc's Where Joy Kills Sorrow compilation was Johnny Winters' "Still Alive and Well".
© Julian Wu
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