It would be a great injustice to Tim Rogers to label him as enigmatic. To be great, after all, is to be misunderstood. The world moves in cycles, beginnings are loose and at best approximate. For instance, did Tim Rogers’ career in music begin in a pair of pinching footy shorts somewhere in the leafless suburbs of Kalgoorlie? Did it begin auspiciously in a dentist’s chair in Adelaide under the sweet influence of N₂O and Keith Richards? Or were the seeds for You Am I’s slow creep into the

national subconscious sown when he was kicked out of school in Adelaide for ‘selling wine’? It doesn’t matter. These days, Tim Rogers stands for something. Something rough and tumble, sleeves rolled up, dusty around the edges, grit in the grooves.

When he showed up to Falls in Hobart at the very beginning of this year at the sheer, slippery apex of a six week drinking binge, it is fair to say people noticed. But Tim has a way of overcoming obstacles by ignoring them. With a new solo double album out in September with The Temperance Union (titled ‘Dirty Ron/Ghost Songs’), and a You Am I album due out at the end of the year, Tim Rogers has glided through another year unscathed. Indeed, inspired. One can only hope that inspiration comes easier in coming years. That kind of purchase can leave a man shortly without credit.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” says Tim after heartily clearing his raspy throat, and before explaining the start of his year. “Me and Dave had a great night the night before and got really fucked. Ran into Missy who’s a really good friend of mine. Said G’day, fell over it . . . we both knocked each other out . . . and so the gig was crap. It’s just a storm in a teacup . . . and I’m sick of being asked about it, to tell you the truth. I just wish You Am I could go down to Tasmania and play a good show. I’d knocked myself out, I’d been drinking for, I don’t know, about six weeks. I was disappointed because I just wanted to play a good show.”

“I’m thirty-five and the way I live my life is probably a little more indulgent than someone else who is thirty-five. It’s not really a pursuit, it just sort of happens. I’d hate to think of it as a pursuit. There’s a certain way that you carry yourself that makes it look like you’ve seen too many rock and roll movies. I guess I’m a little bit of a try hard in some respects, but it feels good and natural. Nothing feels better than a guitar slung across your shoulder, it’s just the rest of the day that’s more difficult.”

Tim got his first guitar at age fourteen. That makes twenty-one years of playing under his studded western belt. And it all started, if it has to start somewhere, with Keith Richards. “I had a bit of an epiphany . . . well, that’s probably too theatrical. There’s a story that I’ve told a lot that I was getting my teeth fixed in a mobile dentist in Adelaide and heard the Stones on the radio. Maybe it was the gas I was on, but I knew exactly what I wanted to do then. I know it sounds really kind of theatrical, but it really did happen like that. I distinctly remember the whole experience; it was ‘Start Me Up’. I wasn’t working at this stage, I was going to school. It was a second hand gut string. And I was better then than I am now, something I regret. I was good for a while and it all came apart. I didn’t start listening to my brother’s records until later, and if mainstream radio was the way you got access to music then, the guitar sound at the time was quite raw for stuff being played on the radio. Of course there was more brilliant and extreme stuff, I didn’t hear Discharge in ’81. As far as what was accessible to footy-playing school kids, that [‘Start Me Up’] was quite raw and really made an impression.”

“I left WA when I was ten,” says Tim, going back to another level of beginnings. “I lived in Kal ‘til I was six. It was all just about footy then, and cricket. That was all I was doing and going to school. It was only when I hit Adelaide that music came into my life. And concurrently, I don’t know if the two went hand in hand, but when I was thirteen I got thrown out of school in Adelaide for pot and for selling wine at the school. Coincidentally the family left Adelaide to go to Sydney. I don’t think I precipitated that, but Adelaide has very strong associations for getting in trouble.”

“My brother, through him I started going, predominately, to see hardcore shows. That was possibly a bigger revelation because we used to actually go to all these shows. Particularly because the hardcore, punk scene embodied the whole Do-It-Yourself, for lack of a better expression, way that you got shows. I was really very impressed. Even though my right hand never moved quick enough to play the music properly. You suddenly saw, you can get shows. And a lot of those bands like the Hard-Ons and Mass Appeal and the Hellmen, they all gave us shows really early on. They all showed us, this is how you do it. We were all western suburbs kids from Sydney at the time, and it all became possible. This is how you do it, go to pubs, talk to people, try to flog your band. Making records or speaking to managers was the furthest thing from our mind at the time.”

“I wasn’t interested in writing until very late. It was all just about playing and maybe one day being in a band. Even the idea of being in a band didn’t really come up until later. The kids I know now who are younger and playing, getting into a band just seems like the second or third thing to do, when it was probably the hundredth then. First I wanted to get the right pair of trousers . . . it just didn’t seem plausible. I didn’t even know what gigs were. I didn’t even used to go to gigs in Adelaide. I used to get together with friends and try to play Sex Pistols or Stones songs, or Hoodoo Gurus songs or something like that, but the thought of getting shows never came into it.”

Strangely, Tim is mainly known for his songwriting prowess, but he claims that when it came to writing his own songs, it was purely a ‘last option’. “I started writing when I started You Am I. The bass player at the time, Nick, who was my best friend and Jamie my brother who was the drummer at the time, we tried to cover songs. I think the first songs we tried to cover were a Gangrene song, a DRI song, a Hard Ons song, Mass Appeal . . . and we just couldn’t do it. So, in order to play songs I had to write them because we weren’t proficient enough to play together. I was probably the best musician at the time, knowing about eight chords. But we weren’t proficient enough as a band to play other people’s songs, so we had to write our own. If they weren’t simpler, they were stuff we knew so we didn’t have to learn it. That was probably around eighteen or nineteen when You Am I were starting up. It wasn’t about ‘creating’ or anything like that. It was just desperation.”

Success came in degrees for the fledgling You Am I. Tim suffered bouts of depression that dragged on the band. But Tim maintains the band was the only thing that saved him. “Anything to do with the band, the band essentially got me out of the house, so it was a massive success in itself in that I was forced to get out of the house because the band wanted to go and do shows. We even got offered some little tours down to Melbourne really quickly. So that was, on a personal level, an incredible success.”

The band successfully recorded their first EP, ‘Snaketide’, and slowly gathered around themselves a flock of fans as far south as Melbourne. “When we got more than 100 people in Melbourne, which was after 600 shows down here, I remember that being a significant moment . . . that was probably ’93-’94, about four years after we started. I think Melbourne, to us and definitely to me, was a town that we always had a lot of feeling for because it was where my family was from and I used to live here so to come back to play was a big deal . . . also the musical community down here was really strong and very impressive and quite intimidating.”

Despite recording several albums that to this day most self-respecting music lovers in Oz will readily proscribe as among the best vintage to have been borne out of this dry country, You Am I never realised that great golden ring in the sky for rock and roll bands, a hit single. It may be that their albums are to be regarded as albums, rather than vehicles for hit pop singles, and as far as Tim can see it, that’s a good thing. “Well we tried, believe me. It just never happened. Retrospectively, it was definitely a good thing. I think hit singles can do amazing things but it is almost dangerous to have one, in a way. The personal relationships between us, we were always very close friends but we just didn’t have a great support network around us. It was always just jobs for friends. We wouldn’t have had the ability to deal with a big single in a way that was not going to blow us wide. With hype, it seems you nearly have to kill yourself to avoid it, if you’re caught in that. I think I quite like being a working band.”

“Being Australian and not having a profile anywhere else, you just can’t tour that much. We’d like to tour ten months of the year, but we just can’t. It’s really frustrating. We’re just this little band from Australia. If we had any regrets, that would be it, that it is difficult for us to tour overseas. That’s where all our great experiences have come from. We’ll probably do another couple later this year, but it is expensive to take the whole band over.”

Consequently, Tim finds himself with a lot of spare time during the year when he can’t tour financially. “We really didn’t have any money, we were completely broke, we still are. You can’t tour Australia forever, and I’m not going to go gardening. I like playing music and so I put a band together just to keep playing. I don’t live in Sydney anymore, and Dave and I needed other things to do. We don’t have any other interests at all. The way I do things with the Temperance Union, it’s all very stripped back. I don’t have a manager or anything, I do it all myself. I can’t be fucked mucking around with gear. I like to get in and play. It’s just amplified folk music. I just can’t stand fucking around or waiting for somebody’s computer to start up. I appreciate people who are into that kind of music and do it but personally I just haven’t got the patience. I want it now. I’m not very careerist about it. I’d like to be more popular but there’s nothing I can do about that. I just really enjoy the hell out of it.”

Drawing inspiration from a wide array of sources, Tim has injected the amalgamated mix into his albums with a raw honesty that engages the listener immediately. We know what the cake tastes like, but what ingredients went in? “The Stones have never really been an influence for the band, that’s just my personal little fascination. Andy’s not a big fan of the Stones. Stuff that’s a little bit left of field would have meant more to the band. Someone like Guided By Voices or Chocolate Watchband, just a whole bunch of pimply hopeless 60’s garage bands that we loved. The Liars, and other 80’s 60’ revival bands. And people that we toured with, that we found such admirable characters. I think touring a lot, particularly overseas touring, to have a band that you’re touring with that you realise are great people with great relationships that just aren’t twats being puppeted around, guys like Rocket from the Crypt in particular, they were our heroes at the time because they were really together guys, a fantastic band . . . and we had access to that. They were like our drunk uncles. Heroes, otherwise at the time, would have been from places like jazz, whether it was Oscar Peterson or Lionel Hampton . . . Miles Davis. I just didn’t want to listen to people who were doing the same thing as me or trying to do the same thing as me . . . and being better at it . . . cunts. If I heard someone doing pop-rock with smart little Beatles chords, it made me want to hurl. I don’t like listening to that music that You Am I were trying to do. It’s just that physically, it feels good to do. But it’s not stuff that I would surround myself with.”

Well, the rest of us are free to surround ourselves with as much You Am I as we want . . . and all I can do now is offer a humble toast to rock and roll, long hair and guitars, and tight-fitting western-cut shirts. Hail Tim Rogers.