The Loner

The prison-recorded 1973 cult classic from Indigenous singer-songwriter Vic Simms is easy on the ears but explodes in the mind and heart. AARON CURRAN salutes a reissue decades overdue.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] The story of Vic Simms’ life reads like the plot of a midday telemovie. An 11-year-old black boy is spotted singing ‘Tutti Frutti’ at a ’50s surf club by a rock idol and his brother, a big promoter. They take on management of the prodigy, who spends his teenage years joyously touring the country with his musical heroes.

But then trouble looms. As he gets older, the racism he encounters cuts deeps, changes him. He falls in with a different crowd, hits the grog, impulsively commits a crime, gets caught and sent to prison. Years pass behind bars, with just music and mateship to help him work through all the anger, guilt, and pain, all the daily indignities of incarceration. Then a record company hears a tape of his songs and decides they’re going to make him a star.

Vic Simms’ The Loner contains 10 songs of Australian Indigenous country soul that’s easy on the ears but explodes in the mind and heart. It was recorded live by RCA’s mobile studio in the hall of Bathurst Jail, where Simms was an inmate, in 1973. The LP was deleted almost immediately after its first pressing, but has just been reissued by Sandman Records after more than a decade’s effort by multiple parties, just in time for its 40th anniversary.

“It’s fitting that such a classic of Aboriginal protest music has relied on word of mouth to keep its mythology alive.”

In keeping with the oral traditions of Aboriginal culture, it’s fitting that the reputation of an album that’s now such a classic of Aboriginal protest music has relied on word of mouth and recommendations to keep its mythology alive. You certainly couldn’t hear The Loner itself unless you were prepared to travel to the National Film and Sound Archive, at least not until a song or two slipped surreptitiously onto YouTube about four years back. Instead we’d hear only what You Am I’s Rusty Hopkinson had to say about the album when he picked it as one of his Australian favourites in a Triple J poll, or what Clinton Walker wrote about Simms in a crucial chapter of his Buried Country book, or Sophie Best in a memorable 2004 article in The Age. Such acclaim has ensured The Loner’s status has grown in time.

Does the truth match the legend? Could it ever? A first listen prompted some hesitations, mainly because the sprightly arrangements felt too incongruously upbeat for the harder-edged lyrics. It’s an odd mix made more anomalous with the passage of time; much pop music of the ’70s can sound overly jaunty to contemporary ears and The Loner is inescapably a product of its era. For context, understand that the record was produced and arranged by Rocky Thomas, better known for his work with such easy listening icons as John Laws and Tom Jones, and creator of sex symbol Abigail’s 1973 chart hit version of ‘Je T’aime’.

But if you can get past the anachronisms, most of the warm, honest songs on The Loner still have life and impact. With multiple listens the album reminds more of John Wesley Harding and less of The Don Lane Show.

Opening track ‘Get Back Into the Shadows’ was the LP’s only single, a Big Bill Broonzy rewrite that speaks of hard lessons learned in formative years: “If you’re brown, stick round/If you’re white, it’s alright/But if you’re black, you’d better get back into the shadows.” ‘Poor Folks Happiness’ is a sneering putdown of a downwardly-mobile, slumming young socialite, like ‘Common People’ crossed with ‘Positively 4th Street’, set to a backing of effortlessly slinky guitar and funk-lite rhythms.

‘Try to Understand’ is a highlight, with a skipping groove and lascivious lyrics that laugh in the face of adversity: “Left the country reservation, had to see the city lights, that the glossy brochure offered luring me to unseen sights, had to meet the painted ladies who said ‘Honey come on in, it’s the colour of your money not the colour of your skin.’”

“‘Stranger in My Country’ is an anthem of dispossession somewhere between The Saints’ ‘(I’m) Stranded’ and Kev Carmody’s ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’.”

The personal and the political meld in the memorable title track, a thumping bass line driving Simms’ declarative statements of love and desire that nevertheless seem conflicted, veering between determination and self-doubt. ‘Stranger in My Country’ – a key inspiration for Roger Knox’s excellent Stranger in My Land collection earlier this year - is bitter fruit with a candied coating of perky brass, an anthem of dispossession that fits somewhere between The Saints’ ‘(I’m) Stranded’ and Kev Carmody’s ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’.

‘Everybody Had Known but Me’ is a ballad of infidelity and regret, while ‘Living My Life By the Day’ is a straight-talking mantra for manageable self-improvement, much like Paul Kelly’s ‘Little Decisions’. ‘Anybody’s Nobody’ closes the album in confident, strutting style.

Notably, The Loner’s lyrics are all about life before Simms went inside, not about prison life itself. It’s as if he was using the songs to keep much-needed memories vivid and alive while locked away: the good memories to keep him nourished; the bad to better understand how he’d ended up where he was.

“He’d been caught up in a PR stunt, meant to distract from his fellow prisoners’ protests.”

When Col Joye and Kevin Jacobsen first discovered Vic Simms in 1957, they gave him dazzling musical opportunities but failed to make him a star. The Loner’s release didn’t make Vic a star in 1973 either. He realised that he’d been caught up in a PR stunt, meant to distract the public from his fellow prisoners’ protests against brutal living conditions in Bathurst Jail. He refused to participate, putting himself on a hard road that didn’t necessarily end when he was released in 1977. But Simms overcame his hardships and continued performing and helping those in the prison system, becoming “a statesman and Elder for La Perouse Mission and the Bidjigal people” (thanks to Brenda Gifford’s informative liner notes).

It might be too much to hope that The Loner will finally make Vic a star in 2013, but its re-release will hopefully mark just the beginning of a process of paying fitting tribute to a man who’s been performing on Australian stages for 57 years.

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The reissued ‘The Loner’ is out now through Sandman.