East Of Eden’s Gate

Zoo Freaks, the Crew just dropped the needle on Billy Thorpe's "East Of Eden's Gate," and if you have been riding with THE ZOO you already know this one does not sit still. It opens like a late highway, love and hate running the same red light, the world turning under the tires. Somewhere east of Eden's gate, Thorpe sings, we ran a light at love and hate. Day breaks on broken stones of time. A shattered road stretches back toward paradise, and love is standing there flashing like a sign. Gravity might hold you while the planet spins, but only love can keep your feet on the ground. By the last verse he is riding a moon-age dark, something powerful coming up that same road and breaking the barriers of fear. Sanity can name the feeling. Only love can tell you what is real. That is not a bar-band shrug. That is a man who had already written a whole science-fiction record and was still trying to get the human part right.

A lot of American ears met this song on Children Of The Sun... Revisited, the 1987 set that borrowed the name of Thorpe's 1979 concept album and closed with "East Of Eden's Gate." The track itself belongs to the 1982 album of the same name, cut for Pasha with Spencer Proffer producing alongside Thorpe. Earl Slick is on guitar, Frankie Banali on drums, Jimmy Johnson on bass. Kerrang! heard a tremendously atmospheric record in those grooves, power and restraint sitting so close it felt claustrophobic, and still said there was plenty in there to lift you out of the chair. Fans who lived with the vinyl still pair the title song with "Dogs Of War" and wish the rest of the world had caught up. On the Revisited album it sits at the end of five songs from the original sun-children record plus newer material, which is why the Crew can play it in the same breath as that whole cosmic chapter without pretending the catalog is simpler than it is.

The chapter started at a party. Proffer, who produced Children Of The Sun at Pasha Music House in Hollywood, later told interviewers he and Thorpe were both outer-space fanatics. They got talking about Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the question the movie leaves hanging: the visitors made contact, and then what? They got bored with the room, went back to Proffer's house, picked up guitars, and with a little good smoke built a story about a friendly race from another galaxy watching Earthlings tear themselves apart. They named that race the Children of the Sun. Proffer remembered finishing the seven-minute title song around dawn, with the Afghanistan conflict sitting in the back of the lyric as a real-world argument. Thorpe told a radio interviewer the album was spontaneous. He and Proffer had come in to make a fairly conventional record, cut that one song, and Thorpe said they had a real story on their hands. Session hands Leland Sklar and Alvin Taylor gave it a floor you could feel in your ribs. American rock radio took the title track and kept it. Sales reports over the years have run from half a million copies to claims past a million, and the original mix spent decades hard to find outside a scarce Australian CD, which is why the true believers treated it like headphones-only contraband.

Thorpe carried that space story onto the road with laser-lit planetarium shows, the kind of night where the ceiling stopped being a ceiling. He also admitted, while he was out promoting Children Of The Sun in 1979, that he had never liked his own voice and could not stand seeing himself on television. A journalist caught him in Malibu that September rolling up in a green Mustang convertible with a vanity plate that read AZTEC. The insecurity and the swagger lived in the same car. "East Of Eden's Gate" feels like the later page of that same notebook: less starship, more two people trying to stay honest while the wheels keep turning.

William Richard Thorpe did not start in Hollywood. He was born in Manchester, England, on March 29, 1946, and the family emigrated to Australia in 1955, settling in Brisbane. On his own site he used to say life really began when he heard "Under the Bridges of Paris" on the radio at three or four and could not get enough of any music after that. In 1956, in a tiny church hall on the edge of Brisbane, he played his first gig. A booking agent, Gwen Iliffe, heard a boy bellowing a Hank Williams tune out behind his parents' shop on Fegan Drive in Moorooka and put him on Queensland television. For a while he worked as Little Rock Allen, stock whip and all, and toured with the country shows. By seventeen he had moved to Sydney, just as the Beatles were breaking, and auditioned into a gig at Surf City in Kings Cross with an instrumental band that became Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs.

Their cover of "Poison Ivy" held the Beatles off the top of the Sydney charts during the Fab Four's Australian tour, and Thorpe got invited up to the hotel to meet them. "Over the Rainbow," "Twilight Time," and a run of other singles followed. He hosted the national television show It's All Happening, scored a stack of hits, then watched the show get cancelled and the pop crowd move on. A bankruptcy and a stretch on the cabaret circuit nearly finished that first life. He was headed for England in late 1968, took some Melbourne gigs for the fare, and never left. The blues and hard-rock rooms down there got him, Lobby Loyde pushed the Aztecs into a heavier gear, and "Most People I Know Think That I'm Crazy" became the national anthem of that second act. Sunbury and the Myer Music Bowl nights, one of them drawing a crowd people still argue was around two hundred thousand, made him the loudest man in Australian rock. He later said he wrote his Kings Cross memoir after a 60 Minutes piece got the old stories wrong, and after throat surgery left him with thirty stitches and three months of silence. The characters came out on the page because he could not say them.

He packed for the United States in the mid-1970s, built the sci-fi records with Proffer, talked for a while about a band with Mick Fleetwood, then went home. He was getting ready to take a newer, more world-music project back out when a heart attack killed him in Sydney on February 28, 2007. He was sixty. The estate still keeps the porch light on. The official Facebook page, run in his name and still posting under the old sign-off "Keep Rockin," is the door that actually opens: Billy Thorpe on Facebook. Family posts, Sunbury plaque photos, and studio stories from the Children Of The Sun band live there. The long-listed official website, billythorpe.com.au, will not load in a modern browser, an SSL mismatch and a dead response, so the Crew is not sending you there. No official Instagram or X account for Thorpe or the estate checked out as his, and the name on those networks belongs to other people, so those stay off this page. Dedicated fan pages beyond that Facebook porch are thin. The Australian rock-era groups trade Aztecs stories, but they are not his house.

If you want the rest of the freeform ride, the deep cuts and the backstories the Crew builds the nights around, you are already in the right room at THE ZOO. Thorpe once said a good song exists whether or not anybody is waiting for it. "East Of Eden's Gate" is one of those. We ran the light. The wheels are still turning. Only love gets the last word.