The Miseducation of
otis.youth Part 5
By the late 1980’s everything was set. I had everything I’d ever wanted; a great
job, a car and the ability to see the world.
Only two things were out of reach both of which (a Bulldogs Premiership
and someone to share my life) were, in my mind, seemingly out of reach. It left me free to pursue my four passions
–collecting music, going to gigs, watching the Doggies and travelling – whilst
saving enough for a house deposit. And
so until roughly the end of the year 2000, I restlessly pursued all 4 passions. For all of that time I could be reliably
found hunting for music in shops throughout Melbourne and its suburbs each
Friday night, every Saturday morning or afternoon and, occasionally on Sundays.
(Sunday searches usually came about as a by-product of the Bulldogs playing on
that day or, more often than not, due to my going to Record Collectors fairs
that were always held on that day.) Often the search would be co-ordinated
during the winter months so my search would end near whatever venue the
Bulldogs was playing that weekend. Night times were spent attending gigs,
recovering from gigs I’d seen the previous night or playing the fruits of my
labours. It was during roughly 1991 that I finally convinced myself of the merits of the CD and that record companies and shops were phasing out vinyl records. It would have been at that same time that I stopped buying vinyl albums and pre-recorded cassettes. I purchased blank cassettes for taping albums from my friends, gigs off the radio and from, 1993 a select number of gigs I attended. (I ceased the latter practice years ago as it was hindering my enjoyment at the gig.) My belated and reluctant embrace of CDs initially caused my musical voyage to discovery to remain in dry dock for a year or two as I sort to obtain CD copies of my favourite acts such as Springsteen, Neil Young , Bob Dylan and The Stones in addition to new releases. By 1993 I was ready to expand again.
My first new foray was into jazz. The catalyst was a music stall at a weekend
shopping complex known as Pipeworks in outer suburban Thomastown almost
adjacent to the then start of the Hume Highway, the main driving route between
Melbourne and Sydney. For whatever
reason, that stall stocked an incredible selection of new jazz reissues at incredible
prices. It was from this one stall that
I bought the bulk of my Miles Davis collection, obtaining all of his key
Columbia albums including A Tribute To Jack Johnson, Kind Of Blue, In A Silent
Way, Porgy And Bess, On The Corner, etc for $10 each. As Davis usually recorded with the cream of
jazz players, I started to branch out and started to listen to acts such as
John Coltrane and Bill Evans. And from
there the fuse was lit and jazz albums were routinely added to my collection as
I came across them. The introduction of
the Rudy Van Gelder editions of the classic Blue Note albums from 1999 also led
to further explorations as these were, inexplicably, sold here at relatively
low process.
My Frank Zappa mania started in late 1997. The catalyst here was the JB store in
Camberwell where stumbled across a
mountain of incredibly cheaply priced copies of his second Beat The Boots box
set which contain officially released live bootleg albums originally released
illegally by other not associated with either him or his record company. (Although being completely pedantic, this was
actually his first Beat The Boots box set per se; as far as I understand Vol. I
never came in a box but was simply a batch of individual albums released under
that title.) Up until this time, all the
Zappa material I owned was limited to taped copies of Hot Rats and We’re Only
In It For The Money. The scale of the
material on this box set was such that by the end of 1998 I had hunted down
copies of practically every album in 0his entire catalogue.
A similar thing happened during 2000 when, once again at the
Camberwell JB, I bought a cheap copy of Dubwsie And Otherwise, a sampler of
reggae and dub tracks released from albums on reggae historian Steve Barrow’s
Blood & Fire label. After playing this album, I scurried back to my copies
of The Harder They Come Soundtrack, the one or two Bob Marley albums I owned
and the wealth of dub and reggae tracks on The Clash’s Sandinista! By the end of 2002 I had purchased copies
of practically the entire Blood & Fire catalogue released to that point and
expanded into the various Trojan box sets and thematic releases, material
recorded by Lee ‘Scratch during his Black Ark era, as much King Tubby dubs as
possible as well as many others.
But if my record collecting was manic, it would have been my
devotion to the live gig that would have had me committed for observation. According to my figures, I attended 18 gigs
in 1987, 33 in 1988, 43 in 1989 and a whopping 468 between 1990 and the end of
2000. Each year my objective was to
attend at least a gig a week and for three years (1991-1993 inclusive) topped
that target.
Even my two backpacking trips in 1990 and 1998 fed into this
pattern of behaviour. In every major
city I visited, I tried to ensure that I found their major record shops for
inspection visits. This led to some
great memories involving record shops; an afternoon in the various 2nd
hand establishments in Soho London, having a lengthy discussion with a clerk at
a Tower Records store in Greenwich Village NYC wanting the dope on the latest
Australian underground acts coming through, purchasing a taped copy of the
awesome Rolling Stones live bootleg Nasty Music from a street vendor in NYC,
discovering huge sections in Copenhagen’s record stores devoted to the works of
John Farnham, having to ascend a rickety fire escape to an absolutely brilliant
NYC black music store where I’d been reliably informed I could obtain a copy of
Prince’s Black Album (this was before it was officially released). And
then there’s been the gigs; attending a music festival in Belgium, seeing The
Waterboys in a tent on Finsbury Park, London, arriving in The Hague on opening
night of the White Sea Jazz Festival to find a number of great acts giving free
live public performances all over town, seeing Jeff Beck and The Big Town
Playboys in a Munich club as well as seeing The Stones in Rome and Prince in
Rome and Nice.
My 1990 trip also had one unintended consequence. It was early September and I had arrived in
Cardiff, Wales. After seeing all of the
main sites, I decided to site in a park, enjoy the sun and read something. I went into a newsagent and saw a music
magazine on sale called Q and another called Select. I purchased both (which I still have today),
and enjoyed the next few hours in the sun.
The experience trigged off a new development in my musical evolution as
these magazines became my new guiding forces.
I continued to buy Select, produced by the New Musical Express, until it
closed a few years later. I stayed with
Q right until their most recent editorial change that has positioned it more or
less as a top 40 type of magazine.
Today, my main guide is Mojo which is supplemented by Uncut whenever
they produce a decent covermount CD.
The first breaks of this behaviour came when I finally
obtained a mortgage and moved into my own home.
By then, the start of the millennium, the music environment had started
to change. The internet had been
embraced and the illegal downloading of albums though sites such as Napster had
begun. Record shops started to disappear
and the major department stores such as Myers, Target, K-Mart, all a great
source for obtaining cheap copies of new releases, started to reduce the amount
of recorded music they were willing to sell.
The music on sale had started to change as well and not
necessarily for the better. Grunge had
flamed out, dancehall had made reggae relatively uninteresting and American
black music had begun its devolution towards the relatively bland caterwauling
of its divas todays. The rise of Eminem,
although brilliant himself, had convinced many white men that they could rap
(when most can’t) popularising the form whilst neutering it at the same time
and diverting these fans away from the thought of playing rock music.
Back home, live music venues were dying, most of the classic
Australian rock acts had either disbanded or were playing as a form of heritage
act and the cost of concert tickets started to go through the roof. Very few major rock acts were coming through;
if anything most of the new acts were skewed towards rap or dance music. Although I didn’t realise it immediately I
had begun to feel disinterested in the local scene. Having a mortgage saw me feeling the need to
cut back on my gig going, but this was more than a financial matter now. The
turning point turned out to be 7 March 2004.
Not having convinced any one to come, with me I was alone at the Corner Hotel
waiting for Wire to get on stage. I
looked around the audience and noticed that everyone there was around my age
and had a partner. I started to question
whether this was fun anymore but, thanks to an absolutely inspired performance
by Wire, truly one of the best gigs I’d ever seen, was able to put it aside for
the moment. Little did I know at the
time, but a mere 6 months previously, I’d met a woman called “M”………
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