Last Dance at the Tote

I unwittingly found myself caught up in the throes of protest last Sunday afternoon. It was my first serious protest, my active public dissent cherry finally popped. I must say, it wasn’t an unpleasant experience though it did appear to be somewhat middle class and white, despite the most noble of intentions of the 2000 in attendance. Protesting has never really been my thing. It has always been something for irrational lefty idealists trying to play out their martyr fantasies. More annoyingly, protests tend to be a haven for clichés, poor spelling and appalling oratory. Whilst on my way to Dr. Follicles to receive a haircut and a beard trim last Thursday, I was held up by a band of Coptic Christians protesting their oppression along Swanston Street. I’m not really sure what a Coptic Christian is and I plead ignorance on all claims of oppression but I do know that they won’t receive my support when walking around with signs saying “Coptic Christians Won’t Be Quite”. Won’t be quite what? Won’t be quite as lazy with your spelling? That would be a start.

It is fair to say that I looked on with some condescension towards the group I labelled The Hobbyist Dissidents. They seemed to have plenty of time on their hands and they could be relied on to save the whales and stop the nuclear testing and ensure any form of economic or political convention would involve a lot of shouting and a police presence. This was not my scene. It was all a little trite and contrived to make the protester feel they have purpose to their being. The only time I was tempted to hit the streets before Sunday was to save jumps racing and had I have been in Melbourne at the time I would quite happily have whacked the ear of any animal liberation skirt and I would have been most pleased to spill blood for the noble cause that is jumps racing.

We drift, however, along a tangent that doesn’t really mean anything other than to suggest most protesters are purposeless fools.

Alas, I lost my protest virginity last Sunday afternoon. And aside from being scared by a gaggle of short-haired hipster dykes, it was gentle and I will recall it fondly in the autumn of my life. When I set out for The Tote on Sunday evening for a farewell drink at a truly iconic pub and what can safely be described as the most interesting place in Collingwood, I naively did not expect to end up taking to the streets, as they say. Taking to the streets it was though as by the time I had wandered down Johnston Street, past The Wellington and Jim’s Greek Tavern, around 2,000 people had gathered outside The Tote. There would be no farewell drink at The Tote, which was already overflowing with a sentimental crowd of tattooed old rock dogs, wistful young hopefuls and a steady stream of nostalgic well-wishers.

Traffic was diverted with sections of Wellington Street and Johnston Street closed off. The Special Response unit was supposedly bought in but the only police officers I saw were aged over sixty and chomping casually on Granny Smith apples. The balcony atop the Singapore noodle store across from The Tote was full of revellers and a sign demanding that The Tote be saved. Some keen punters waved home made placards. There were the necessary bongo drums, seemingly a staple of the protest movement. A petition was passed around. So was a dude named Merlin. One old timer climbed up on the façade across the street and started a good spirited chant. Speakers rallied the crowd from upstairs at The Tote. The crowd cheered and booed and listened and sang and drank long necks, purchased from a very pleased bottle shop owner a block down Johnston Street who somehow had business turning over at such a clip that he ran out of long necks by seven o’clock.

For many, it was a reunion mixed with a wake. Old friends stood around, most laughing, a few crying. There was a little bit of anger but nothing that would have led to any kind of trouble. It was about as far from Chicago, 1968, as you could get. The locals who had been regulars on the sticky carpet for twenty years were there for a last drink. Others who had been locals twenty years ago returned for one last salute to a place that meant so much to them once upon a time. Musicians who got their start at The Tote started impromptu sing-a-longs. Music nerds who had so many intellectual orgasms came for one last memory. The Tote was dead. And with it, a little part of everyone who had ever been there died too.

The Tote, of course, is closing down because of bureaucratic inflexibility, governmental callousness and this modern push for sterility as solution. John Brumby and his Labor Government have forced The Tote, one of Melbourne’s most iconic and long lasting rock venues, to close its doors. Brumby and his left-wing cronies will continue to tout Melbourne as a cultural centre like a spruiker selling the girls on the footpath outside a strip club even though they are doing their best to sterilise Melbourne. It is Brumby’s liquor licensing laws that have forced the closure of The Tote. Laws designed to stop violence outside King Street strip clubs and bogan fly traps in the city are being applied to small live music venues like The Tote. This meant that The Tote was and is required to hire two security guards whenever there is any live music, among other things. The pub was described as “high risk”, putting it in the same category as violent inner city bars and clubs where large groups of men with faux designer haircuts and Ed Hardy shirts go to drink and fight and grope women, despite a local Collingwood officer stating that it was not a trouble spot and never has been. Any attempts at finding some flexibility were squashed by Liquor Licensing boss Sue MacLellan, renowned for her giant ego and generally putrid and vindictive personality. MacLellan and Brumby have, out of laziness and ego and this need for sameness, ensured the live music scene in Melbourne will be dead within the next decade because good venues with a sound ethos and an unblemished police record are treated the same as strip clubs and beer barns renowned for Saturday night glassing’s and Sunday morning bloodbath’s.

It, of course, is not surprising that a Labor Government would screw its own constituency in such a brutal, hypocritical and inconsiderate manner. It is every man for himself on the left, particularly when populism is in vogue. The ALP promotes cultural diversity until it becomes inconvenient and a drag on electoral prospects. The Greens are even worse. They are supposed to fight against bureaucracy but were disgustingly quiet as The Tote had its doors forced closed. Anyone who ever votes Green is voting for the filthiest of beasts.

So Melbourne takes another step towards the sterile nightlife scene of a place like Canberra where live music is as rare as an honest Labor politician, every bar is as new and charmless as the next and locals that most definitely do not contain locals are the norm. In the last ten years Gypsy Bar was killed, Toast came and went like a cheap acid hallucination and, well, that’s about that if you don’t count the plucky Old Canberra Inn. It is easier to get pissed on by Todd Carney than it is to find a decent live music venue with a taste for rock and an indie aura in Canberra. It is only a matter of time before Melbourne becomes the same.

I won’t pretend to be a regular at The Tote. In the eighteen months I have lived in Melbourne, I have been a handful of times, seen a handful of bands. I have smoked in the garden, smashed pots at the bar and spewed in the bathroom. I thoroughly enjoyed the place. It had character and purpose, a kind of urban charm that attracted those of us who fear the malaise of suburbia. As Marieke Hardy this week wrote, it was the place “where we all got happily pissed and manhandled each other on the dance floor”. When you went to The Tote you felt like you were living music history through a wiry drunken haze. Hell, as every nostalgic piece written about The Tote has noted, it had the only jukebox in the world with Television’s “Marquee Moon” on it and that is a notch in the bedpost well worth remembering. “I remember when the darkness doubled, I recall lightning struck itself, I was listening, listening to the rain, I was hearing, hearing something else”.

The Tote may yet be saved. The owners of The Old Bar are trying to work something out, bless their rock and roll hearts. The odds are long, however, and the likelihood of The Tote reopening its doors are unlikely. A callous government and an inflexible bureaucracy have seen to that.

We have had our last dance at The Tote. The memories will live on for those lucky enough to have been there for the best and worst of the joint but the sad reality is the extermination of The Dingy Rock Pub continues, a pogrom on live music and creativity and freedom. If they can kill The Tote, they can kill anything. If they can spit in the face of the 2,000 people who showed up to protest its closure, they can spit in anyone’s face. These politicians and power whore bureaucrats will stop at nothing to culturally sterilise us all. We should all be scared because The Tote is only the latest casualty of this sickening war on individualism and creativity.