SOME musicians slog for years without a big break, while others seem to have success thrust on them almost overnight.
WA blues guitar hero Dave Hole is one of a few to experience both sides, working hard at pub level around the State for two decades before sudden and by then unexpected success in the US, followed by Europe.
Speaking from his Darlington home, Hole said he almost fell out of bed when he was contacted by US magazine Guitar Player at 3am regarding his self-funded 1990 debut album Short Fuse Blues.
“I had forgotten that I had even sent it because I didn’t like to waste copies by sending them out,” Hole said.
“Things opened up from there and that whole period – the first year after I made the first recording – was like I had died and gone to heaven.
“I appreciated it after having slogged around pubs for 20 years, having a lot of fun and enjoying it, but having no overseas success, and then suddenly having a record contract in America and touring there.”
With critics raving about his slide guitar playing and a growing new fan base, Hole found his new stardom took him some time to get used to.
“Before, we used to travel around in an old van, and if we were travelling up to the northwest to do some shows in the mining towns, we would find whatever accommodation we could,” he said.
“It was all very rough and ready, but here we were staying in nice hotels and flying and having hospitality riders backstage – all things that we had never had.”
Hole said the biggest crowd he ever played to was about 150,000 at a festival in the Netherlands, but in typically down-to-earth fashion, he worried that some people might have not been able to hear him well enough.
“To me, it was like a sea of people, and even though there were big speaker arrays all around the square, you had to wonder how well people could hear down the back,” he said.
Hole first encountered the blues as a budding guitarist in the 60s, but found blues records hard to come by in Perth, which was much more isolated from the global music scene at the time.
“You would really have to try to just piece together what you could from, say, the liner notes on the back of an album that would mention another blues artist, and we would then go into the record shop and try and get one of their records, which the shop invariably wouldn’t have,” he said.
“But we could have ordered them in, and about two months later we would get our copy of whatever it was.
“In this day of instant gratification where you can go on the internet and get something immediately, it’s hard for people to realise but it was special to wait for these things and when you got them, you valued them, and usually played them to death.”
Dave Hole will play at the West Coast Blues ’n’ Roots Festival at Fremantle Park on March 28.