The 'Parable' Of Powderfinger’s Ill-Fated First Album: 'We Got Lost'

Thirty years ago today, Powderfinger released their debut album.

Chances are, you haven’t heard it. Sure, they became one of our biggest bands ever, but it was not because of their first album.

The record was called Parables For Wooden Ears, and the title proved prophetic as not many people listened. Parables sold just 10,000 copies, with more than half of those sales coming in the band’s home state of Queensland.

But three decades on, is it time to reappraise Parables For Wooden Ears?

I revisited Parables at the same time as I watched Andrew McCarthy’s Brats, the new documentary on Hollywood’s “Brat Pack” in the ’80s, which was inspired by McCarthy’s autobiography, in which he wrote:

“Like the first light of dawn, there is a transitory magic in it, a singular quality, something so fresh it seems it must be occurring for the first time.

“Only after this moment – which seems it can never end even as it’s vanishing – does the long day develop and careers are made or not.”

Some Australian bands nail it on their first record – Skyhooks, Australian Crawl, Men At Work, Silverchair – but other major bands, including Cold Chisel, The Angels, Midnight Oil and INXS, took a while before they found their sound.

By the time they released their debut album, Powderfinger had clocked up more than 30,000 km in their tour van, an old white Econovan, which had a top speed of 85kmh and no stereo or air-conditioner. In 1993 and 1994, the band’s routine was: Every six weeks, pack the van, drive 1000km to Sydney, play gigs, drive 1000km to Melbourne for more gigs (adding 500km if Canberra was part of the itinerary), drive 2000km home, unpack, wash clothes, hang out clothes. Do it all again.

This was a band that paid its dues.

After signing to Polydor, Powderfinger released the Transfusion EP in 1993. Featuring Reap What You Sow, the EP topped the national alternative chart, knocking off Nirvana’s Heart-Shaped Box.

“They [Polydor] heard Reap What You Sow,” singer Bernard Fanning told Dino Scatena for Footprints, the official Powderfinger book, “and must have rubbed their hands, going: ‘Alright, let’s have a big glam rock, Noiseworks-meets-Guns N’ Roses record.’

“And that’s nothing like what they got.”

The budget for the ’finger’s first album was $70,000; not an outrageous sum for a major label release in 1994, but still a significant outlay for a debut album.

The band spent a month at Melbourne’s state-of-the-art Metropolis Studios with producer Tony Cohen, who had just made hit records with The Cruel Sea (The Honeymoon Is Over) and Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds (Let Love In).

The band and producer didn’t click.

“It was a mismatch in personalities,” believes Powderfinger’s manager Paul Piticco.

“Tony was a bit of a fruit loop,” says bass player John Collins. “Lovely, but a bit of a mad scientist; all over the shop. It was a bit daunting for us. I don’t think we knew how to handle a producer.” 

“It’s true, I am a little mad,” Cohen admitted in his autobiography Half Deaf, Completely Mad, published posthumously last year and featured just a passing mention of Parables. “But years in a recording studio will send you around the bend. Still, it’s a healthy kind of madness. I don’t go around chopping people up with chainsaws. It’s more a feeling of vagueness.”

When Powderfinger entered the studio, they were tired of being compared to the Black Crowes. In an early live review, I had joined that chorus: “At first look, I thought, ‘Black Crowes’,” I wrote in Inpress. “Then I laughed and thought what a strange musical world we live in when we are now comparing bands to bands who have been compared to bands …”

Powderfinger reacted to that comparison by over-complicating their songs and becoming more like Soundgarden.

“Brisbane music was going berserk at the time,” Fanning recalls. “There were a lot of bands, and we were all rehearsing at the same place [the TC Beirne building in the Valley]. A lot of the bands, like Brasilia and Pangaea, were really into progressive music, with the emphasis on originality, with lots of weird time signatures and keys.

“That rubbed off on us for a while, but it didn’t fit our style of music. And that’s why our first album is crap.”

“They [the other bands] were really good at it,” adds JC. “We weren’t.”

Fanning told Andrew Stafford, author of Pig City, the seminal work on the Brisbane music scene: “It [the sound] was all very technical. But that wasn’t our strength at all, and that’s why our first album was so misguided and strange. As someone said at the time, it disappeared up its own arse!”

“We try to colour our songs with texture, and we’re more bass-driven,” Fanning explained to Juice’s Samantha Clode in 1994. “We try not to align ourselves with one style, or else it’s just too self-limiting.”

Initially, the guys dug their debut before disowning it. “As we were doing it, we thought it was fucking great,” guitarist Ian Haug smiles. “We thought we’d created this complicated opus. I remember getting home to Brisbane, cranking it up on the car stereo and thinking, ‘Wow, we’ve made a beast.’”

Full disclosure: I wrote the record company bio for the Parables release and remember loving the record. To this day, Tail still thrills. It’s probably a little overblown, but I reckon it’s as exciting as anything any Aussie band released in the ’90s.

Polydor were disappointed when they heard the finished product, with Fanning saying the boss described it as “awful”. But the label released three singles – Tail, Grave Concern and Save Your Skin – hoping the album would catch fire. It didn’t. And Tail was the highest-charting single, peaking at #118.

Rolling Stone gave Parables three stars, with reviewer Jack Marx declaring that the band “create painstaking technical works of art. This is not necessarily a compliment. Sometimes, it’s a certified jerk-off.”

“We were gutted when we heard the record,” Polydor’s Tim Prescott recalls. “There was nothing for radio. Then we thought, ‘Maybe the kids will all get this, and we don’t.’”

They didn’t.

As for the album title, “We had a band meeting, and someone suggested Parables For Wooden Ears,” Fanning told me at the time. “It was also a bit of a payout on ourselves: stories for idiots.”

The title came from a line in the opening track, Walking Stick:

Dogs and children lift their legs/ To tattoo a teenage mother’s breasts/ Widows of precocious days/ Wear slogans resurrected late/ Parables for wooden ears/ Steer vehicles of wisdom.

As Dino Scatena remarked: “What the hell does any of it mean?” But he discovered it was inspired by an acid trip that Fanning and Haug took at one 4ZZZ Market Day in Brisbane.

When Fanning later reviewed the album’s lyrics, “it all seems quite paranoid and conspiratorial. A bit Orwellian, Catholic guilt, universal power-is-out-of-my-hands kind of crap.”

The singer highlights Hurried Bloom as a lyric he’s proud of: “more poetic rather than just doom and gloom”. It remains a lost gem, hinting at what was to come for the ’finger.

In 2004, I worked on a radio special to celebrate the release of Powderfinger’s first best-of, Fingerprints. When it was highlighted that it featured just one song, Sink Low, from their first album, JC responded: “It’s a best-of; we have to be honest with ourselves.”

“They’re gonna come out on our ‘Pile-Of-Shit-of’ album,” joked Fanning.

“Yeah,” JC added, “‘Powderfinger: The Metal Years’.”

Following the failure of Parables, which stalled at number 51 on the national charts, Polydor considered cutting their losses and dropping the band. But some at the label, including A&R director Craig Kamber, fought to give the ’finger one more chance. 

As the band pondered in Grave Concern: “Is there a turnaround? Will the spirit rise from a corpse that’s been rotten in the ground?”

With their tail between their legs, the band embarked on writing songs for album number two. Some lines in Solution hinted at the direction they needed to go:

“I think I better ease back and let the demons slide. There’s a season ahead, a celebration of life.”

The label’s faith was rewarded when Powderfinger delivered the single, Pick You Up, which Fanning wrote on a $15 guitar.

“My mum used to be a bit of a garage sale maniac,” he explained, “and she brought home this guitar one day. It was a ’60s Maton Flamingo, an amazing guitar. It hasn’t got the greatest playability, but it sounds amazing and just made that song appear.”

The album featuring Pick You Up, Double Allergic, was a triple-platinum smash, and a decade later, Powderfinger had sold nearly two million albums in Australia.

When Pick You Up raced to #23 on the ARIA charts in 1996, Fanning laughed when I told him about a bet I had with my best mate.

In 1993, I argued that my all-time favourite band, Horsehead, would have a Top 40 hit before Powderfinger. We loved both bands—and they played many gigs together—but I thought that Horsehead would be the first to break through. Little did we know that the bet would not be resolved for three years.

I’m happy to admit that most of my music predictions have been way off the mark, though I will proudly quote a Powderfinger review that I wrote for Inpress in May 1993:

“With an average age of 21, these guys are gonna be huge for years. Powderfinger is going to be the biggest band to blast out of Brisbane since the Bee Gees.”

Sometimes you get it right.

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald described Tom Buchanan as “a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax”.

That certainly wasn’t the case for Powderfinger. 

Parables For Wooden Ears isn’t the band’s best, though I reckon it’s underrated and definitely worth another listen. 

The band’s biographer, Dino Scatena, concluded: “Parables was an abject failure. It was by no means the worst-selling record of all time, but nor did it leave an enduring mark on the Australian musical landscape.”

“We stuffed up along the way,” JC reflects. “We got lost. Parables was a bit of a mistake.”

As Bernard Fanning sang in Bridle You, “Novelty wearing thin, overload of truth and advice.”

Yep, Powderfinger’s debut was a misfire. But it provided a glorious glimpse of what they were capable of.