Day 19 of this experiment and by now I think I’ve revealed a
bit about the range of my musical interests.
As today has been a slow listening day – basically today’s listening was
completed as I wrote this – I’d thought I’d make a start on my musical
autobiography.
Chapter 1Listening to music has always been integral to my being and, to use what I hope will be the worst cliché I’ll employ during the year, has formed the backdrop to my life. Indeed the earliest memory I have in my life involves my mother, a sister and The Beatles’ Penny Lane as background music. I would have preferred Strawberry Fields Forever but I was at the mercy of Australian radio and my memory.
My passion for music was unquestionably inherited from my
father. He immigrated to Australia as a single
man during the 1950s as an assisted migrant from Mediterranean Europe. Under the terms of that migration scheme he
was obliged to stay in Australian for a minimum of two years to pay off his
Government financed passage. That same conservative
Government then rewarded him by denying his earlier qualifications as a
carpenter and condemned him to a life of factory work.
Dad was very much a rocker in those bachelor days and
dressed the part whilst not slaving away in the factory. He was a fan of Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison,
Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and others but probably his greatest love was
Johnny Cash. The only album I can ever
remember his having purchased in the 1960s or 1970s was an Australian only greatest
hits compilation called Johnny Cash 1970. The cover showed the Man In Black
with guitar slung over his shoulder striding towards the camera in the middle
of a railroad track. The Johnny Cash TV
Show was shown on Australian TV and we watched it whenever it ran. I’ve since bought the compilation album and
DVD of that show and suspect that by watching it I was introduced to a number
of his guests including Neil Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Derek And
The Dominoes which, of course, meant Eric Clapton.
My father also slipped his love of live music into my
genes. During his initial two year
stint, he attended as many gigs of the legends passing though Melbourne as he
could. This meant going to Festival Hall
in North Melbourne, then the city’s largest indoor entertainment and concert
venue probably to see one of the travelling package shows put together by the
famed promoter Lee Gordon. Dad’s memory
wasn’t able to reconstruct the specifics of any one show but was adamant he saw
Orbison, Vincent and inevitably, Cash as well as the cream of what passed for
Aussie rockers at the time.
In time Dad’s taste ossified to just these acts augmented by
an appreciation of country music. Johnny
Cash was the catalyst here but he also developed a taste for the country
stylings of Jerry Lee Lewis and eventually Willie Nelson. Decades later, he could always be counted on to
be in the audience for any gig by The Highwaymen. I didn’t go with him to those shows but we
did go and see Cash in what turned out to be his last Australian tour
accompanied by Kris Kristofferson, a show that single handledly changed by
previously indifferent views about the latter.
We were jinxed when it came to Nelson’s solo shows, purchasing tickets
to gigs that were eventually cancelled.
(To this day, I still haven’t seen the great man live.) The only aspect
of my father’s life in music that didn’t rub off on me was his actually playing
music, even if he only hit drum or clashed cymbals in bands playing the music
from his homeland.
When Dad met his initial immigration requirements, he
returned home, married my mother and brought her out. I’ve inherited many things from my mother
(some might say too much) but musical appreciation was not one of them. The only act she liked for which I have even
a grudging appreciation was Tom Jones. (And,
once again, I remember watching the Tom Jones TV show as a kid.) She also loved
Englebert Humperdinck, Neil Diamond (to whom I’m always maintained a wary
distance, even today) and these days, the Dutch violinist, Andre Rieu.
But my musical beef with my Mother is not about her musical
taste. (I learnt my lesson about
respecting other people’s tastes which don’t confirm to my own about ten years
ago, but that’s a tale for another day.)
It is that she seemed to me to have absolutely no awareness whatsoever
about any act other than those she or my father liked. To be fair, I could make the same comment
about my father, but in my mind he had the excuse of not being able to listen
much owing to the long hours (including much overtime) spent in noisy
factories. Although my Mother was also
busy raising my siblings and I, she at least had access to radios and TV during
the day to intrude on her consciousness. Two examples illustrate this. I remember asking her a question in the mid-70s
about the comeback of Bob Dylan. This
was the first she had heard of him. A
couple of years ago, she somehow managed to ignore all of the media stories and
hype associated with the impending sale and record sell outs associated with
the AC/DC Black Ice tour. Her attention
was only drawn to it weeks later through an Australian 60 Minutes profile of
the band and, struck by the inarticulate nature of the Young brothers and Brian
Johnson’s accent, asked me whether I’d
heard of them. And even then she
couldn’t remember the band’s name.
By now it is apparent that I first became aware of music
during the 1960s. However, I was only
dimly aware of the seismic shifts in music that occurred during that
decade. I was aware of The Beatles (well
who wasn’t) reinforced by the massive media coverage they received as well as a
cartoon series that used their songs. At
the time, I couldn’t discern much of a difference between them and another band
with a television show, The Monkees. I
was aware that both bands were funny and the TV shows reinforced their
music. I was completely unaware of the
nature of The Beatles more adventurous stuff from Rubber Soul and Revolver onward
(as well as The Monkees movie Head); the only tracks I can remember hearing as
a child were the early tracks and inoffensive later material such as Penny
Lane, Oh Bla Di Oh Bla, Hey Jude and Let It Be.
This was the template for the sort of music I remember
hearing during that period. Favourite
childhood tracks included The Twilights’ Needle In A Haystack, Cash’s Ring Of
Fire and Tony Orlando And Dawn’s Knock Three Times. Basically most of what I remember hearing was
the type of music played or mimed on television’s Bandstand; inoffensive music
for the supposedly easily offended. The
only live music I heard were the wedding reception type bands that played at
the social club dances to which my parents periodically dragged the family. The scarring continues and, with the sole
exception of a wonderful band I heard at a reception in Warsaw a few years back, even
today I break out into a cold sweat at the thought of a wedding reception. Fortunately “M” feIt the same way too and we
had a DJ spin records at our reception.
So, for the greater
part of the 60’s and the first couple of years of the 70’s, I was ignorant
about The Rolling Stones, Dylan, The Kinks, The Who, The Doors, the
Haight-Ashbury scene, the Syd Barrett era Pink
Floyd, Fairport Convention and the English folkies, Stax Records, Jimi Hendrix, Woodstock ….you get the picture. I wasn’t even aware of Elvis’ musical origins. To me he was someone that cropped up on
weekend movies who could sing a bit.
But the realisation about the greatest thing about the 60s
musically speaking came much later in life.
With the benefit of hindsight, I was able to appreciate that I had the
chance to absorb a lot of this music either as it developed or not that long
afterwards. Leaving aside blues and
jazz, most of the music I came to love dated only from the previous
decade. It meant that by the time I got
to gig going age, my date of birth presented the perfect opportunity to experience
as many of the originators of the music as I could afford. It also meant that that I’ve been able to
experience some of the greatest acts of all time at their height of their
powers usually just after releasing their signature releases. Some that come to mind include Talking Heads
on the Stop Making Sense tour, Primal Scream touring Screamadelica and XTMNTR,
U2s debut, Rattle and Hum, ZooTV and 360 degree tours, Metallica’s tour
supporting the Black album, My Bloody Valentine supporting Loveless, Nirvana as
Nevermind hit the top of the US charts, Radiohead with OK Computer, Sonic Youth
with Daydream Nation and Dirty and numerous Big Days Out.
If I was born a couple of decades later and still developed
the same tastes, so much of what I have seen would have been denied. As it is the roll call of great artists that
I’ve seen who are no longer around or bands that can no longer be reformed
because key members are long gone is staggering – among them such names as
James Brown, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Johnny Cash, Frank Sinatra, Stevie Ray
Vaughn, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Kurt Cobain from Nirvana, Johnny/Joey and Dee Dee Ramone, Bo Diddley, Richard
Wright from Pink Floyd, Graeme ‘Shirley’ Strahan of Skyhooks, Lux Interior from
The Cramps, Jeff Buckley, Billy Thorpe, Lobby Lloyde, R. L Burnside, Joe
Strummer of The Clash, Marc Hunter of Dragon, Mark Sandman from Morphine, Chris
Whitley, most of the original Rose Tattoo, Alex Chilton, Grant McLennan of The
Go-Betweens, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, Tim Hemmesley of God and The
Powdermonkeys, Rowland S. Howard, Mark Linkous who was Sparklehorse among others.
On the reverse side and even more importantly is due to my birth
date and musicians sufficiently young and willing to carry on their former
band’s legacy, I‘ve been able to experience
the next best option. Hence I’ve been privileged to see among others, Robert Plant
and Jimmy Page play Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney do The Beatles, Roger McGuinn revisiting
The Byrds catalogue, Joe Strummer doing The Clash, John Fogarty playing Credence,
Jonathon Richman covering Modern Lovers tunes, Henry Rollins playing Black Flag
and both Lou Reed and John Cale honouring their Velvet Underground heritage. I’ve
also been able to experience the first flush of reunion tours by acts that had
never toured Australia in their prime (such as The Sex Pistols, The Pixies, Pere
Ubu, Wire, The Stooges and 3/5ths of the MC5) or which had broken up before I
had a chance to see them (great examples here include Australian rock legends
The Masters Apprentices, The Easybeats, Radio Birdman and The Saints.) And then there are those acts that I had
given up on ever seeing either because they toured just once before I had
appreciated their talents (such as Randy Newman and Ry Cooder both surprise
visitors in the last couple of years) or who had just left it a long time before
their first tours (as was the case for Patti Smith, George Clinton, New Order
and Kraftwerk).
A major reason why I’ve been able to do this is because I’ve
also been lucky enough to have grown up in Melbourne, a city to which my father
arrived because it was where his immigration sponsor, a man from his home
village, lived. In the 1960s Melbourne was indisputably Australia’s musical
heart. At that time creative musicians were more or less required to flee
Sydney because musicians could only earn a living if they were prepared to
cover the hits of the day for the enjoyment primarily of American troops on
R&R from the horrors of Vietnam. Even
today the musical differences between Melbourne and Sydney are fairly
obvious. As I remember reading in the
first edition of the Australian Music Directory over 20 years ago, Melbourne’s
music has grown along and expanded from traditional 60’s roots whilst Sydney
has always been more prepared to take on and discard whatever happens to be the
prevailing musical trend. This was
appreciated by the acts that came from the then musical backwaters of Perth and
Brisbane, although for some curious reason largely unexplained, Adelaide
produced more than its fair share of acts.
Once in Melbourne, musicians were free to experiment musically, usually
in the wide variety of live venues that live on today albeit in a different range
of venues. Of course I knew none of this
at the time but once again it’s a strength that I’ve recognised purely with the
benefit of hindsight.
As I moved into latter primary and secondary school years both
my own and Melbourne’s musical landscape were to be dramatically altered by
exposure to essentially the same developments.
But this is for another day.
(60) Todd Rundgren – A Wizard, A True Star
I’d always thought that his two great works were
Something/Anything? And Hermit Of Mink Hollow.
This was one of a number of albums I placed on the iPod so that I could
review my decision whilst on an overseas holiday about having excluding them
from it. I never did get around to
playing this and finally did so today.
All I can now think is “What the hell was I thinking?”. The album is a tour du force and represents everything
that is great about this artist.
Singling out individual tracks would be a waste of time as each track
sort of builds on the other to create a whole that is definitely greater than
the sum of its parts. It is almost certainly his best album.
(61) The Strokes – First Impressions Of Earth
Their third album and definitely their best. I was originally very hesitant to buy this,
so disappointed was I in the crap that was served up on its predecessor, Room
On Fire. Ignoring that serious misfire,
this album is a quantum leap from their debut.
Possessing some of the best songs in their arsenal, notable the opening
three tracks You Only Live Once, Juice Box and Heart In A Cage, the length of
time since its release plus associated solo projects suggest that even the band
members might have difficulty following this up. My only complaint is the addition of two
totally unnecessary bonus tracks which add nothing to it and makes it slightly overstay
its welcome. Sometimes less, unlike today's post, is more.
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