By the time Orlando Agostino returned to Sydney in the late 1990s things had changed considerably. The city was working towards being ready to host the Olympics Games in 2000. The Shack had been closed for around a decade and wouldn’t reopen until 2006. Clelia Adams was on the verge of moving out of Tamworth and heading for Mullumbimby on the northern NSW coast, where she would find her dream community and become a country music superstar, particularly in Europe. And Megan Hicks was a hit on the world storytelling circuit, her 1971 folk psych album, Maranatha, a collector’s item of real rarity, nothing but a background piece in her own tale.
As had been the case over the past 30 or more years, Orlando was still working hard at making a living in the real world. This time he was working in Pennant Hills [“the best paying job I ever had”], north-west of the city, while living in the somewhat cool, music-smeared inner western suburb of Annandale with its wide, tree-lined streets and older houses.
“I was divorced, on my own, and sharing a place in Annandale. But I loved living there because every Monday night we would go the the Excelsior Hotel in Surry Hills. It was there I met John Chesher. I’ve always been interested in singer/songwriters because I like to play with people who write their own stuff. That to me was better than joining a rock cover band, actually any cover band for that matter. After playing with Party With The Bear for years and travelling all over country NSW I had had enough of that whole cover thing. But I did enjoy it and it paid good money.
“John was from Calgary, Canada, and running a singer/songwriter night. I told him that I was just there to pick along with somebody. And he said ‘Oh, can you do a couple of songs’. And I said I knew a couple of covers of folkies and I had one or two original songs so I’d get up and play them. But I also told him what I really liked to do was play guitar with anybody – just back up guitar. So he said, “Well why don’t you get up with me. I open the show every night.
“Some nights, because the Excelsior is quite near Sydney University, we would have all the youngsters arrive and end up with 40 people wanting to get up and play. We’d start as early as 7pm because it took four hours to get everybody up there and we had to be finished by midnight. John liked to top and tail the evening, do the first 15-20 minutes and then a few songs at the end. We did that for nearly four years and became good friends and it’s because of him that I’m here.”
Ironically, John might be from Calgary but he doesn’t live there anymore. He lives in the Sydney suburb of Randwick with the Australian woman he married more than 30 years ago, has grown up children and is a grandfather too. Orlando and John are still collaborating today despite the 13,162 kilometres (give or take a kilometre or two) between them: “He just sent me one of his songs which he’s recording and he got me to do an overdub on it which I recorded on my digital audio workstation [DAW]. But I don’t know what is going to happen to it.” That has happened more than a few times in Orlando’s life.
Another Sydney-based musician Orlando worked with was Andrew Browne who he met through an old friend from The Shack days, Frankie Lee. She and the brilliant piccolo bass inventor and player, Jackie Orszaczky, were a couple for a while. Orszaczky, who passed away in 2008, is an important figure in Australian music and for more than 30 years was at the forefront of jazz/funk/blues/r’n’b fusion scene in Australia. He worked with Marcia Hines for four years in the mid-1970s, appears on her Marcia Shines album, wrote arrangements and orchestrations for The Whitlams, You Am I, Hoodoo Gurus,Tim Finn, Savage Garden, Grinspoon and Leonardo's Bride, and formed several important groups. His albums Devil’s Masquerade with the band, Syrius, and first solo LP, Beramiada are both vital works and sought after by collector's around the world. Orlando attended Frankie's wedding to Browne in New Zealand – the only time he has been there, played with him for five years and cut an album with him at John McConnell’s House of Hits analogue studio in Manly. McConnell’s house overlooked the famous Marineland, a major tourist attraction in its day that is now closed. He was also the sound engineer for Kevin Bennett and The Flood and many, many other acts over a stellar career stretching across three decades. “Andrew and I cut that album in John’s studio two weeks before I left for Calgary in April 2010,” he says. “I think some of the best playing I have ever done was on that album. I’m talking about playing some tasty leads on acoustic. Just two acoustic guitars and his vocals. That’s all it was. Unfortunately, Andrew didn’t release it because he wasn’t happy with the way his voice sounded on it.
“He later rerecorded the whole album. As far as what he was trying to do, the concept, it’s great. But to me it is just too out there. It’s not raw and natural like it was on the original. We couldn’t go back and rework it because I was in Calgary. Then, in subsequent years when I’ve come over to visit my children, we went into the studio and tried to do something but those sessions didn’t work out for me.” However, Orlando does have at least one great memory of his time with Browne. “We did a gig in Melbourne at the big agricultural show there. It was the year they wouldn’t let horses move around Australia because of a disease the horses had. We were there to entertain the staff at an after hours party at a particular bar. “Andrew got on stage with one of those toy horses with wheels on the back and was rolling around on stage with it. I’m not sure any farmer who saw it would have got the joke. It was a weird gig. I felt like we were the Blues Brothers. There we were doing all this original stuff and all the audience wanted was rock covers.”
Undoubtedly, the highlight for Orlando in this, his final decade in Sydney, was the original Country Radio reunion shows with Greg Quill and Chris Blanchflower at The Shack and The Excelsior Hotel on July 4 and 5, 2009, respectively. “People were lining up outside The Shack; they were turning people away. They didn’t make a big fuss about him appearing, and instead included him as one of the three acts they normally put on each night. It was a real reunion – Chris Blanchflower and I were both there.
“There are some songs [The Killing Heart and Back This Way] from that night on You Tube. We did the song, Fleetwood Plain, the way we did it originally, not the way it was revamped in later years on other albums that he produced. A really funny thing happened. As we were starting off the beginning of Fleetwood Plain, somebody in the audience got up and walked out, and Greg stopped playing, and, of course, Blanchflower was eyeing them off. Everybody just cracked up. You can see it in the video.”
It would be the last time Orlando played with Greg. “I hoped that once I moved here that we could play together some more and he did end up doing another Australian tour [of 15 dates with Toronto singer/songwriter, Jon Brooks, in January and February 2011] but he didn’t ask me to play on that one. It wasn’t meant to be but Greg and I stayed in touch right up until a few days before he died [on May 5, 2013]. I was shocked and surprised when I found out.
“He told his wife he was going to bed and having a lie down. He never woke up again. Greg died from complications due to pneumonia and sleep apnea. He lived life hard but he was the most beautiful writer and it was great honour to know and play with him.
“I went to his celebration of life in Toronto which was attended by more than 100 people – 50 per cent of whom knew nothing about his music career and only knew him as a writer and publisher.
“The bass player from The Dingoes, John Bois, was there. He and I stayed at the same place because Greg had moved from Toronto to Hamilton and bought this beautiful old mansion which he was in the process of restoring with his wife, Ellen. They lived there with their daughter, Kaya, and his grandson. Ellen was one of the co-ordinators of the three-day free Canadian music event, Festival of Friends.”
In April 2010, the hard-working, eminently adaptable, sideman found himself in Calgary seeking new musical horizons. Moving overseas is daunting at any stage of your life but when you are 60 years old it can be overwhelming. However, for Orlando Agostino it seems to have been just one more journey in a life full of them.
“When I got here I didn’t know anybody but I started looking up venues and there was this little vegetarian restaurant that I went to play some songs at. I thought ‘I’ll get up and play two or three songs, a cover and a couple of originals’. Anyway, I met these two young guys who wrote all-original songs and were looking for a bass player. I said ‘I can play a bit of bass but I’m not really a bass player’ and they said ‘ Well bring a guitar then’, so I grabbed my Telecaster and my Stratocaster and showed up at this rehearsal.
"These guys, Evan Freeman and Paul Gettis, were only in their late 20s and I’d just turned 60. So we had a jam and formed a band called Home. And then I met a third guy, Carl Ayer, who plays drums and he and I are still good friends – they are still in their 30s; he’s closer to 40 – and every Friday night for the last five years or so we ran a singer/songwriter night at a local coffee shop.
"Sadly, one of the boys, Paul Gettis, passed away two years ago, he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]. None of us really knew about it. We have a Self-Titled EP that is available on Bandcamp. It’s different. Since then Evan, who is the singer and multi-instrumentalist, has gone on to form a new band but we still get together and play." As it turned out, Home was just the beginning. Orlando was hanging out in his buddy Steve Wright’s shop, Vintage Music, in Calgary, when local singer/songwriter, Craig Moreau, walked in.
Moreau, liked Agostino, has lived. He has been a roadie, bartender, farmer, cowhand, truck driver, stuntman, actor, carpenter, mechanic and a postal worker. He travelled for 10 years on the rodeo circuit and even spent time in California learning how to surf.
He cut his debut album, Every Now And Then, to critical acclaim in 2000, while his second offering, 2014’s The Daredevil Kid, was even better. Recorded in Austin, Texas, with Mark Hallman at Congress House Studios it features the noted US country music artist, Kevin Welch, who has recorded five singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts and released eight studio albums.
“So Craig came in and said he’d just lost his lead guitarist, his nephew, Ben Tagseth, who played on the second album, Anyway, he was looking for somebody to replace him. Steve said ‘Ollie here isn’t a bad player, you should ask him’. So we met, started playing together and I’ve been working on his original material ever since. Although I didn’t get to play on The Daredevil Kid there is a promotional video of us miming a song off that album. “We used to perform a lot of those songs live so it’s six of one, half-a-dozen of another. I’m playing a slide guitar – pedal steel.
“His most recent album, A Different Kind of Train, has a picture of a train going across the prairies on the cover. It’s a famous painting by a local artist, Steve Coffey, which is worth about $10,000. I’m on about three or four of the songs. We recorded them at Leroy Stagger’s studio, Rebeltone Ranch in Lethbridge, which is just south of Calgary. Leroy has a lovely studio but he announced recently he is going to be moving soon.
“There’s a cover of an old Jean Ritchie song, The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore, on the album [and it’s damn good]. We did it in one take and recorded live on the floor. I remember my amplifier was under a staircase. You would call the album country music, he calls it Americana. “We released ‘Train’ in January 2019 but, apart from the album launch, only did one gig and I couldn’t do it because every year I like to go to the Salmon Roots and Blues Festival, in British Columbia, not so much as a participator but as an observer.
“Craig uploaded all three of his albums to a site called Digital Direct where they’ve had 10,000 to 12,000 hits. And this is in the UK and Europe. His album has been played in Australia by Eddie White on the Cosmic Cowboy Café show on 2RRR. He’s a huge fan of Craig’s. I was in the studio with Eddie a few years ago talking about Country Radio and about Craig. He’s world class; he really, really is. “He’s only in his 50s but he’s gone back to driving trucks for the post office to make a living as he’s married and has a teenage son. I think he feels he has to pull his weight and it’s been really difficult with this whole COVID-19 thing. He’s been classified as an essential services worker. Maybe we’ll resurrect the band once this is all over.”
A Different Kind Of Train is a fine album and a memorable journey. And the imagery is fitting when it comes to telling Orlando Agostino’s tale. In fact it’s the perfect bookend as the cover of the first album he appears on, Fleetwood Plain, depicts Country Radio – Quill, Agostino and Blanchflower – standing on railroad tracks in the Australian bush. Of course, along the way, there has been the odd slip up or two along the way including the most embarrassing thing he’s done in music.
“There was this famous footballer and he was going to an awards night. He was a bit of a singer and was going to play some music, and he wanted another guitarist to back him up, so somebody put him on to me,” Orlando says. “The afternoon he came to pick me up I was so nervous I actually left my guitar behind. I’d never done that before– and I’ve never done it since! So we left the house and were 20 minutes down the road, when I realised I didn’t have the guitar but it was too late to go back.
“Somehow or other, when we got there, somebody in the audience happened to have guitar in their car, so I borrowed a completely unfamiliar guitar and did the gig. It was the most embarrassing thing. I was in my late 50s when that happened. Mind you, when I left my house in Annandale and got in the car, none of them said ‘Oh where’s your guitar?’ But I thought afterwards it wasn’t their job to actually remind me to bring a guitar.”
Talking about guitars, he ends up giving me a virtual tour of his collection including the one he played at that reunion show over a decade ago. It’s beautiful. Rather like his life, rather like his story, I fancy. At 70, he can look back on some 55 years of making music, of doing what he thought was right, and of playing his way around the world. He has been the ultimate sideman and you feel there’s a few more gigs left in him yet. And, of course, he has a little bit of musical glory that will never die.
“I am the last surviving original member of Country Radio. When my time comes I’ll know I’ve had a very full life. I’ve met so many people and played with so many people and my greatest joy today is still to get together and jam with people – I’ve uploaded JamKazam app so I can do exactly that,” he says.
“I’ve already had one or two sessions with a couple of people which is very nice and one of the people I’ve wanted to play with is in Edmonton, that’s a good two or three-hour drive away, so it makes it a lot easier. Apparently, you can record the music as you are playing it, which is pretty cool.”
That’s where we leave Orlando Agostino, picking more perfect notes in the place they call Big Sky Country. And it isn’t hard to imagine Fleetwood Plain echoing across that vast land, just as it did in the Australian Never-Never.
All rights reserved. This story and the contents of this page – written and photographic – cannot be copied, reproduced, sampled or used in any way, shape or form without the express permission of the author, Mike Gee. CREDITS: Unless otherwise credited, photos by Mike Gee or supplied by Orlando Agostino.
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