Rhythms Magazine November-December 2022 by rhythmsmag

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“A lot of weird stuff is happening. I wish it was a lot more peaceful for our kids and their

Marcus King

future, that’s what I wish for.”

Black Crowes

GEE WHIZ! IT’S

VIKA & LINDA

Eric Bibb Dan Warner Hussy Hicks A Day On The Green 500th

HISTORY

MICHAEL GOLDBERG INTERVIEWS GREIL MARCUS TULSA’S BOB DYLAN CENTER $15.00 inc GST NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE: 314

VALE IAN MCCAUSLAND 1

VIKA&LINDA

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19-TWENTY • allison russelL • THE BARNESTORMERS • beth hart THE BLACK SORROWS • BONNIE RAITT • BUDDY GUY the ﬁnal tour of australia THE CAT EMPIRE • CHAIN • CHRISTONE 'KINGFISH' INGRAM • Counting crows The doobie brothers 50th ANNIVERSARY TOUR • ELVIS COSTELLO & THE IMPOSTERS ERIC GALES • FEMI KUTI & THE POSITIVE FORCE • GANG OF YOUTHS GREENSKY BLUEGRASS • JACKSON BROWNE JASON ISBELL AND THE 400 UNIT • JOE BONAMASSA JOE CAMILLERI PRESENTS A STAR STUDDED TRIBUTE TO THE GREATS OF THE BLUES JON STEVENS • kaleo • KEB' MO' BAND • KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD LACHY DOLEY & THE HORNS OF CONVICTION • LARKIN POE • LP • LUCINDA WILLIAMS MARCUS KING • MAVIS STAPLES • MICHAEL FRANTI & SPEARHEAD nathaniel rateliff & THE night sweats • NIKKI HILL ROBERT GLASPER • ROCKWIZ LIVE • st paul & the broken bones The Soul Rebels & Friends with special guests Talib Kweli & GZA SOUTHERN AVENUE • SPINIFEX GUM feat. Marliya • STEVE EARLE TASH SULTANA • vintage trouble • XAVIER RUDD E EXCLUSIV

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SYDNEY THU 6 APRIL ENMORE THEATRE

LUCINDA WILLIAMS AND STEVE EARLE SYDNEY MON 3 APRIL ENMORE THEATRE

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MARCUS KING

and VINTAGE CULTURE

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LARKIN POE SYDNEY SUN 9 APRIL ENMORE THEATRE MELBOURNE MON 10 APRIL CROXTON BANDROOM

ELVIS COSTELLO & THE IMPOSTERS

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PRESENTS

Volume No. 314 November/December 2022

34 41

THE MAN FROM WACO

Brian Wise meets Charley Crockett, one of Americana’s hottest Americana stars, in Chattanooga.

THE BOB DYLAN CENTER

During his recent trip to America, Brian Wise met Steve Jenkins, Director of Tulsa’s fabulous new Bob Dylan Center.

HISTORY UPFRONT 07 10

The Word. The end of the year. By Brian Wise.

Bluesfest’s New Stage.

Bluesfest Harmony

Riding High.

18 20 21

Rhythms Sampler #21 Enjoy 30 tracks of great Australian

Xavier Rudd opens the new Bluesfest venue.

VALE IAN McCAUSLAND

Ian McFarlane pays tribute to one of Australia’s great artists, renowned for his posters and album covers.

COLUMNS Twang! By Denise Hylands.

Classic Album:

A Day On The Green Hits 500.

68 69

Back In The Day

Underwater Is Where The Action Is. Lost In The Shuffle: Hazel & Alice. By Keith Glass.

Nashville Skyline

71 72

Revered bluesman Eric Bibb will have his new album Riding out for Port Fairy. By Brian Wise.

The concert series notches up a landmark. By Jeff Jenkins.

Mick Thomas & The Roving Commissions’ new EP has some great interpretations.

Anne McCue checks out Jack Silverman and his band.

GHEE WHIZ! IT’S CHRISTMAS!

Vika and Linda are Australia’s favourite singing sisters and to top off several incredibly successful years they celebrate with a Christmas album and a memoir . By Jeff Jenkins.

CROWING ABOUT IT

The Black Crowes are touring here for the first time in decades celebrating the anniversary of the debut album Shake Your Moneymaker! Brian Wise talks to guitarist Rich Robinson.

HICKSVILLE

WARNER CORNER

66 67

Larkin Poe have a new album to showcase at Bluefest 2023. By Brian Wise.

FEATURES 26

GREIL MARCUS: THE INTERVIEW BY MICHAEL GOLDBERG

An epic conversation with the Dean of Rock Critics about his new Dylan book, the role of the critic and much more.

music. Only available to subscribers!

COVER STORY 22

Hussy Hicks, the dynamic duo of Leesa Gentz and Julz Parker are back out on an East Coast tour. By Chris Lambie.

Much-loved Melbourne singer-songwriter Dan Warner releases his first album in eight years. By Jeff Jenkins.

TOO FAR TO TURN BACK

Blues powerhouse Shemekiah Copeland releases another mighty album with some potent messages. By Brian Wise.

Musician Lachlan Rose from Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird. By Brian Wise.

Paul Simon’s Graceland. By Billy Pinnell.

33 1/3 Revelations: Fleetwood Mac’s Heroes Are Hard To

Find. By Martin Jones.

By Christopher Hollow.

You Won’t Hear This On The Radio: By Trevor J. Leeden.

Waitin’ Around To Die:

By Chris Familton.

Essential Americana.

REVIEWS 74

FEATURE ALBUM REVIEWS: Courtney Marie Andrews, Arctic Monkeys, Shaolin Astronauts, The Murlocs, Josh Batten, Carus Thompson and more.

84 87 88 89 90 91 92 94 96

GENERAL ALBUMS

97 98

Blues:

By Al Hensley.

World Music & Folk: By Tony Hillier. Jazz 1: By Tony Hillier. Jazz 2: By Des Cowley. Vinyl: By Steve Bell. Film: Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99. By Brian Wise. Books 1: Pauline Bailey’s Blues Portrait Vols 1-3. By Des Cowley. Books Too! Peter Ames Carlin’s Sonic Boom! By Stuart Coupe.

Festival Guide Get out your dancing gear. Hello & Goodbye By Sue Barrett. 5

CREDITS Managing Editor: Brian Wise Senior Contributor: Martin Jones Senior Contributors: Michael Goldberg / Stuart Coupe Design & Layout: Sally Syle - Sally’s Studio Accounts: Alicia Wise Website/Online Management: Robert Wise Proofreading: Gerald McNamara

CONTRIBUTORS Sue Barrett Steve Bell Nick Charles John Cornell Des Cowley Stuart Coupe Meg Crawford Brett Leigh Dicks Chris Familton Samuel J. Fell Keith Glass Megan Gnad Michael Goldberg (San Francisco) Al Hensley

Tony Hillier Christopher Hollow Denise Hylands Jeff Jenkins Martin Jones Chris Lambie Trevor J. Leeden Warwick McFadyen Ian McFarlane Anne McCue (Nashville) Billy Pinnell Jo Roberts Michael Smith Bernard Zuel

CONTACTS Advertising: admin@rhythms.com.au Festival Coverage Contact: denisetwang@hotmail.com Rates/Specs/Deadlines: bookings@rhythms.com.au Subscription Enquiries: subscriber@rhythms.com.au General Enquiries: admin@rhythms.com.au

SOCIALS Facebook: facebook.com/rhythms.magazine Twitter: twitter.com/rhythmsmag Instagram: instagram.com/rhythmsmagazine

PUBLISHER RHYTHMS MAGAZINE PTY LTD PO BOX 5060 HUGHESDALE VIC 3166 Printing: Spotpress Pty Ltd Distribution: Wrapaway 6

hat line struck me as I was watching Sam Beam, otherwise known as Iron & Wine, perform at the small Trans Pecos Festival in Marfa, Texas. Nearly one month into my first trip to the USA for three years I was thinking of home and how lucky we are here. A few days later we were in San Francisco confronted with the beauty of the city and the quality of the music at the Hardly Strictly bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park contrasted with the despair of the thousands of homeless people on the streets. It seemed that whatever problems we have here are within our power to solve. There’s nothing like travel to put your life into perspective. Of course, our thoughts also go out to all those who have been affected by the recent floods. Many of you will have the magazine delayed because of some extraordinary weather events and I hope you get the assistance you need and deserve. When you do receive this magazine, I hope that you enjoy what is contained within, including some epic long-form features that should occupy you for a few days and take your mind off any troubles. Somehow, I managed to spend almost all of the thirty days of my recent trip ignoring the news channels. It was a refreshing change. I got a lot of reading done at airports, on planes and when I wasn’t enjoying a gig or festival. I didn’t buy too many books because I was trying to travel light, and I have been using the Kindle sparingly. I did purchase How To Fail Successfully: Finding Your Creative Potential Through Mistakes and Challenges by Brandon Stosuy and How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy by Jenny O’Dell. Then I realised there was a theme there and began to worry. But I did also buy John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley:In Search of America (for about the fourth time) but at his house in Salinas, California. So, that got me back into the travel mode. I think I love travel exactly because it allows you to put everything aside for a while and the biggest decisions you have to make each day are where to go, what to see and what to eat. Friends will find it hard to believe but there was a time in my life when I would travel on my motorbike for months at a time with all my worldly possessions on board. Now I’d need a semi-trailer! Since the magazine went bimonthly there are at least a few weeks of freedom each cycle. (In the May/June 30th anniversary issue this year Des Cowley recalled how when we went to JazzFest in the ‘90s I would be stringing a telephone line along a balcony to connect to a modem so I could work on the magazine when it was a monthly).

Naturally enough, I was thinking a lot about the magazine when I was away. There’s a lot to think about these days when newsagents here seem to be going under rapidly or becoming lottery agents. I have been buoyed by the increasing number of subscribers that has meant that the magazine is managing to stay afloat despite the downturn in the entertainment industry. It is difficult now to find places in the USA stocking magazines. Airports were the only places I saw them; most bookstores stopped stocking them during Covid. I’ll put this depressing line of thought on the backburner for now. You’ll be pleased, or surprised, to know that I did come back all fired up and inspired thanks to a visit to the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. You can read my interview with the Director, Steve Jenkins, in this issue. You can also read Michael Goldberg’s epic interview with Greil Marcus who has written another great book about Dylan. I know that Dylan fans tend to go on ad infinitum about the man but if you visit the Dylan Center you might understand. I still recall the very first time that I heard Dylan and the effect it had on me. Millions of words have been written about him, his songs and his lyrics. His personal life remains largely shrouded in mystery. None of his musicians ever talk about him. He uses the media to sell his music, his artwork, his concerts and even his whisky but he is not a media celebrity. He doesn’t use the media to promote himself. I spent more than eight hours over two days in the Bob Dylan Center. I hope to go back one day soon. I was overawed by what Dylan has done and his music means even more to me now. But what I took away from the visit was something else. Even at the age of just twenty Dylan was incredibly self-assured; he knew what he wanted to do with his life, and I think everything from then on went to his plan. There is an outtake from the Pennebaker film, Don’t Look Back, about the British tour when Dylan was famously called Judas by an audience member and he was subject to endlessly tiresome and trite media conferences. Afterwards, sitting with friends at Albert Goldman’s discussing what happened and the attitude of the media, Dylan says clearly, prefacing his words with an expletive, “I’m just going to do what I want to do.” And he did. And so may we all! Until next time ….enjoy the music. Brian Wise Editor 7

From the Bob Dylan Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma

“But everything looks perfect from far away….” Sam Beam

First Lineup Announced ADG7 Korea ANGEL OLSEN USA AURORA Norway BAB L’ BLUZ Morocco/France BANGARRA DANCE THEATRE Australia BÉLA FLECK & ABIGAIL WASHBURN USA BILLY BRAGG UK BON IVER USA CIMAFUNK Cuba CONSTANTINOPLE Canada FLORENCE +THE MACHINE UK FOCO ALAIRE Mexico GAIA by LUKE JERRAM UK THE GARIFUNA COLLECTIVE Belize GENESIS OWUSU Australia GRATTE CIEL PLACE DES ANGES France JAGUAR UK JUSTIN ADAMS & MAURO DURANTE UK/Italy KEE’AHN Australia KEFAYA AND ELAHA SOROOR Afghanistan/UK/Italy THE LANGAN BAND Scotland MADELEINE PEYROUX USA MDOU MOCTAR Niger NAKHANE South Africa NIGHTMARES ON WAX UK PANDIT RONU MAJUMDAR & DR JAYANTHI KUMARESH India THE PROCLAIMERS Scotland RIPPLE EFFECT BAND Australia RIZWAN MUAZZAM QAWWALS Pakistan SAMPA THE GREAT Zambia SAN SALVADOR France SMALL ISLAND BIG SONG Various SOUL II SOUL UK YOUSSOU N’DOUR & LE SUPER ÉTOILE DE DAKAR Senegal ...and many more.

10–13 March 2023

Botanic Park /Tainmuntilla Adelaide womadelaide.com.au

2022 IT’S THE END OF THE YEAR Welcome to the Rhythms Sampler No.21 which will get you into the mood for summer with 30 great tracks of all-Australian talent.

If you are not a member of the Rhythms family, then you need to join to get this download card sampler with each issue. Please go to rhythms.com.au/subscribe and join us. (New print or print & digital subscribers in November/December will also receive the 30th anniversary CD). Thank you to all the musicians and record companies that have donated songs. Thank you also to all the subscribers who have made this possible.

This sampler is ONLY available to all print plus print & digital subscribers and is one of the benefits of being a supporter of Rhythms magazine. The other benefit is that you can help keep the magazine going into the future.

01. Brand New Man

Tex Perkins & The Fat Rubber Band The first single taken from forthcoming album Other World. “The song just came about so effortlessly that we were immediately inspired to keep writing,” says Tex of his writing and recording with Matt Walker.

07. Mona Lisa

15. 1000 Miles

08. Bluestone

16. Better Now

Minor Gold The debut single with superb, harmony driven indie-folk, touches lyrically on the fickle flame of friendship.

2023

Carus Thompson Terrific song from Thompson’s eighth solo album, Neon Folk. carusthompson.com

24. Precious Burden

Isabel Rumble First song from a forthcoming album from the extremely talented Hobartbased singer and songwriter. Produced by Luke Plumb. On iTunes.

Monique Clare A song from talented singer, songwriter and cello player Monique Clare. From the Sight album released late in 2022. moniqueclare.bandcamp.com/album/ sight

25. Paradise Girl

Josie Laver A song from the debut album Ride This Lullaby album from the rising country star. Available from Checked Label Services.

17. Running Out Of Time

Freya Josephine Hollick From: The Real World (Cheersquad Records & Tapes) Only recently released the new album is being acclaimed as one of the best of 2022. Recorded in Joshua Tree with Buick 6, Lucinda Williams’ band.

10. Gypsy Station Wagon

18. Geordie

Kallidad Incredible globe trotting acoustic trio with a track from their latest album To Hell And Back. Think an unearthly mix of flamenco, rock, metal, blues and live, in your face punk rock concert insanity. kallidad.bandcamp.com/album/to-helland-back

04. Every Moon Is Blue

Jen Mize & The Rough N’ Tumble Second song from the forthcoming album from Jen Mize and her roots/ Southern rock inspired outfit. Available on iTunes

02. Home and Broken Hearted Mick Thomas’ Roving Commission (Featuring Brooke Taylor) From: Back In The Day (Coolin’ Sounds) A Don Walker song that orginally appeared the first Cold Chisel album. From the great new 7-track minialbum.

03. Holdin’ On To The Ones You Love

Dan Warner From: Maybe…..Then (Independent) A beautiful song from the first album in 8 years from much-loved Melbourne singer-songwriter. Produced, engineered, mixed and mastered by Marcel Borrack and Tim Harvey.

05. Black On White

Joyce Prescher From: Out of My Mind (Cheersquad Records & Tapes) An album about losing yourself, your mind, a loved one, and then slowly piecing yourself back together to find your way back to yourself.

06. Wireless Hill

Golden Rail From: Songs From Empty Streets (Cheersquad Records & Tapes) The third album by Melbourne based indie-pop band The Golden Rail. The band has deep roots in the Perth jangle pop tradition and has garnered international acclaim for their previous albums.

Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird From: Smiles of Earth. (Double Drummer) Founded by charismatic, musically gifted singer-songwriter Lachlan Rose, their music is infectious, honest, eclectic and original.

09. Mustang

Don Hillman From the superb Daydreamin’ album from Victorian singer and songwriter. donhillman.bandcamp.com/album/ daydreamin-album

11. All Riled Up

12. One Day Too Many

Pacey King & Doley Latest song from the multi-talented trio of Shane Pacey, Sally King and Clayton Doley. paceykingdoley.bandcamp.com/album/ better-together

13. That Driving Beat

Greg Lyon & The Hip Operation (Featuring Jo Jo Smith ) Inspired cover of the Willie Mitchell song from the Byron Bay-based Lyon and his experienced and multi-talented band. greglyon.com.au

14. Everybody’s Talking

Alyce Platt Fred Neil cover from the Bain Douche album, a collection of reimagined songs from the likes of from Paul Kelly, The Beach Boys, The Cure and many others, all recorded in a highly creative and imaginative fashion during the COVID lockdown. Via MGM Distribution.

Loki Hines First single from the forthcoming Wildfire EP, produced by Brandon Dodd. Via MGM Distribution. Kellie Kane First single from the forthcoming Bill Chambers produced album Love & Loss. Available on iTunes.

Mason Hope First single from the collection of songs Stories From Kings Cross, an historical homage to Kings Cross during the heyday of the 70’s. Via iTunes.

26. Robocopter

27. High Cost

Duncan Phillips Latest song from Melbourne based singer songwriter from a new album due early in 2023. On iTunes

PJ O’Brien From track from the High Cost album from this Sydney-based blues and roots music singer and guitarist. pjobrien.bandcamp.com/album/highcost

20. Hay Plain

28. You May Run

19. One Way Ticket

Lynne Hazelton A multi-award winning Australian singer-songwriter and performer raised on the edge of the desert in WA.

21. Ruby

Michael Meeking Jeff Jenkins stated: “The Meeking might not inherit the earth, but he will impress with his passionate country rock.”

22. Run Me Down River

Misty Harlowe New song from Melbourne-based country blues singer and songwriter. Via iTunes.

23. I’ll Be Home

Paul Greene Terrific reworking of the Randy Newman classic. From the new Sounds Delicious album via MGM Distribution.

CJ Stranger A song from the forthcoming second album from the Blue Mountains-based singer, songwriter and guitarist. cjstranger.bandcamp.com/track/youmay-run

29. Cannonball

Richard Madden From song from powerful and inventive guitarist and roots music artist Richard Madden’s forthcoming live album, Get A Load Of This. richardmadden.bandcamp.com/album/ get-a-load-of-this

30. Another Song

Ray Jones New song from the extremely talented Western Australian-based singer and songwriter. Produced with Kerryn Tolhurst and from a forthcoming EP. Via iTunes.

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NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2022 RHYTHMS DOWNLOAD SAMPLER #21

“A lot of weird stuff is happening.

I wish it was ceful a lot more pea their for our kids and tI future, that’s wha wish for.”

Subscribe to Rhythms Print or Print & Digital today and we’ll send you our latest download sampler. New subscribers will also receive our exclusive 30th Anniversary CD Full Of Great Music ....

Marcus King Black Crowes Eric Bibb

GEE WHIZ! IT’S

Dan Warner

VIKA & LINDA

Hussy Hicks Green A Day On The

500th

AVAILABLE ONLY TO PRINT AND PRINT + DIGITAL SUBSCRIBERS GO TO: rhythms.com.au/subscribe

HISTORY

US S GREIL MARC ERG INTERVIEW DYLAN CENTER TULSA’S BOB CAUSLAND VALE IAN MC

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“A lot of weird stuff is happening. I wish it was a lot more peaceful for our kids and their

Marcus King

future, that’s what I wish for.”

Rhythms would love to shout some lucky subscribers to one of our favourite music festivals in 2023 and also give them a copy of Vika & Linda’s fabulous Ghee Whiz, It’s Christmas! album. Our very good friends at Bluesfest, Womadelaide and Port Fairy have come to the Christmas Party and given Santa the following goodies for our Christmas stocking: • A Two Day VIP Pass to the mighty Bluesfest 2023 near Byron Bay. • A Double weekend pass to the best world music event in Australia, Womadelaide 2023. • A Double weekend pass to the legendary Port Fairy Folk Festival 2023. But wait, there’s more. We couldn’t get steak knives but we’ve got something even better. Everyone who subscribes or resubscribes in November and December will receive a copy of Vika & Linda’s Ghee Whiz, It’s Christmas! Get in early and we’ll make sure you have it in time for Christmas. JUST GO TO: subscribe.rhythms.com.au

s u l p

...if you are already a subscriber but subscribe a friend, relative, acquaintance or someone you don’t even know we’ll put your name in the draw for festival passes as well! How good is that? Please note: If you are already a subscriber you can also resubscribe early to get in the draw. However, you don’t have to feel left out, we’ll have some special offers and free albums for you coming up in 2023!

Black Crowes

GEE WHIZ! IT’S

VIKA & LINDA

Eric Bibb Dan Warner Hussy Hicks A Day On The Green 500th

HISTORY

MICHAEL GOLDBERG INTERVIEWS GREIL MARCUS TULSA’S BOB DYLAN CENTER $15.00 inc GST NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE: 314

VALE IAN MCCAUSLAND 1

GO TO Y OUR NE MUSIC XT FESTIV AND EN AL ON US JOY VIK A & LI NDA’S CHRIST MAS AL BUM! If you are wondering why we are having a subscriber drive the answer is simple. We rely on your subscriptions for the bulk of our support and since COVID that has become even more important. You can keep Rhythms going (and save a whopping 28% off the newsstand price simply by becoming a subscriber). Deadline for subscriptions to enter is December 31, 2022. Festival pass winners announced online on January 1, 2023 at rhythms.com.au.

USI

W NE S

XAVIER RUDD

XAVIER RUDD OP ENS N EW

GREEN ROOM!

n Saturday November 26 Xavier Rudd plays his 88th and final show for 2022 when he opens The Green Room, a 1,500 + capacity venue on the Bluesfest site. Said Xavier, “It’s been a massive year and I’m stoked to play my final show on Bundjalung Country to finish things off. This new Green Room venue is gonna be great for the Byron area and I’m excited to launch this new space” Like a bird set free, Xavier Rudd’s made the most of a post – Covid world by doing what he loves most, touring. To support his latest album Jan Juc Moon, Xavier will have performed live on no less than 88 occasions in 2022. First up was the sold out 37 date Australian tour from May through July. That was followed up with a 50-date tour through Europe that began September 9 in Porto, Portugal and ends in Antwerp in Belgium November 10. By the time Xavier’s finished his European run he’ll have performed in Portugal, Spain, France, UK, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Belgium ……. talk about spreading his wings!! The Green Room was constructed and completed earlier this year on the very ground where all Bluesfest artists prepared themselves before hitting the Bluesfest stages. Said Peter Noble OAM. “People speak of hallowed ground. When it comes to music,

The Green Room stands on hallowed ground given the likes of Jack Johnson, Buddy Guy, Taj Mahal, Gypsy Kings, Jeff Beck, Bob Dylan, BB King, George Clinton, Leon Russell, Jethro Tull, ZZ Top, Gurrumul, Mavis Staples, Kasey Chambers, Little Feat, Trombone Shorty, Cold Chisel, John Fogerty, Crosby Stills and Nash, Earth Wind and Fire, The Pogues, YES, Ziggy Marley, Paul Simon, Robert Plant, Ben Harper, Santana, Iggy & The Stooges, Steve Miller Band, Rodriguez, Bonnie Raitt, Dropkick Murpheys, Jimmy Cliff, Rufus Wainwright, Lionel Richie, Dave Mathews Band, Doobie Brothers, Boz Skaggs, Zac Brown Band, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Angelique Kidjo, Xavier Rudd, John Butler, Kendrick Lamar, The National, Jackson Browne, Brian Wilson, Tom Jones, Patti Smith, Jimmy Buffett, Madness, Lauryn Hill, Tash Sultana, Sheryl Crow, Nile Rodgers, Morcheeba, The Teskey Brothers, Paul Kelly, Nora Jones, Baker Boy, Alanis Morissette, Midnight Oil, Crowded House, Amy

Shark, Kev Carmody, The Saboteurs …….. and literally hundreds more who have walked this ground since 2010” “And I’m absolutely delighted that Xavier Rudd will be the first artist to perform in The Green Room” Xavier Rudd’s special guest is Bobby Alu who’s currently on Xavier’s European tour. Tickets are available for this very special night from Friday Oct 21 exclusively through Moshtix. In other Bluesfest news, the festival announced six more acts in early October with more to be announced with this edition of the magazine. The new acts included Americana Award winner Allison Russell, along with The Counting Crows, The Doobie Brothers, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Nightsweats, St Paul & The Broken Bones and Vintage Trouble. 13

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Highway 61 Blues Music Tour Set for 2023!

as there ever been a road trip experience like the Highway 61 Blues Music Tour (New Orleans – Chicago)? Led by musician Jules Boult the Travelrite blues tour is set to fire up again in 2023. They call Highway 61 the ‘blues highway’. It was the road that took musicians from the cotton fields of the south to the cities of the north during the turbulent years of the 1930s and 1940s, electrifying the blues on the way and revolutionising popular music with influences of the rhythms and beats of Africa, Cuba, the Caribbean, the Bahamas, Jamaica and Europe with western instruments in the mix. Many great blues artists lived in towns along this road, including Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Bo Diddley, Bessie Smith, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and Son House. And many others have immortalised the highway in song, including Bob Dylan on 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited. The tour originates in New Orleans, the town that brought together so many different musical and cultural influences and seems to be pulsating in a constant state of party with playing, singing and dancing in the streets. There’s a joyous street-corner jazz cacophony of trombones, trumpets, saxophones and drums. Young and old are celebrating their unique musical history. The Mississippi River forms a big part of the southern Delta and it’s here that you can see and experience what life was like on cotton farms for African Americans, how their music became a celebration and way to liberty from the oppression of living on cotton farms. As you travel Highway 61 visiting many juke joints and honky tonks we meet and play with the blues musicians who live and work in the towns along the River. Much more than an observer, you can be part of the show! It is perhaps this aspect of the Blues Tour that is the most satisfying and insightful of blues music in the Delta. Highway 61 offers plenty of interesting points that we visit along the way, including famous blues museums such as the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale or the BB. King Museum in Indianola. Elvis Presley’s Graceland, Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Sun Studios and Al Green’s Gospel church in Memphis. Visit famous locations such as the ‘Cross Roads’ and Dockery Farms. The group visits a recording studio in Nashville to see how it all works and record our own song. The Highway 61 tour culminates in Chicago with the biggest and best blues festival in the US. It’s here in one of America’s most renowned cities that you can gain true perspective of the migration of one of the most unique and influential music genres to have evolved anywhere. Tour host Jules Boult, is a well regarded blues and jazz musician from Melbourne and has a lot of experience travelling Highway 61 and has organised the tour’s entertainment on all the tours since 2015. The groups have met and played with many local musicians including Will Smith from Preservation Hall in New Orleans, Terry ‘Harmonica’ Bean in Natchez, Deak Harp in Clarksdale, John Horton in Greenville and the Grammy winning Oakridge Boys in Nashville. Jam sessions are organised in places such as The Bombay Club in New Orleans, Walnut Street Bar in Greenville and Stevie Ray’s Blues Bar in Louisville. Tour members can join in the jam sessions which offer a chance to play with some of the best blues musicians.

Photo from visitmississippi.org

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In 2023 it will 8 years since the first Highway 61 Blues Music Tour of America. Visit bluestours.com.au to book or get more information, the tour brochure or view videos of the tour. Travelrite International/John Howie Music Tours – Ph. 1800 630 343

CYGNET FOLK FESTIVAL RETURNS The Cygnet Folk Festival will return in January 2023 for the first full weekend event since January 2020. The festival is one of the most popular and long-lived events of the Tasmanian summer calendar. Cygnet Folk Festival is a showcase of eclectic music genres featuring both Australian and international musicians, dance, poetry, masterclasses, events for kids; entertainment, food, wine, art and local handicrafts all set in the breathtaking scenery of Tasmania’s Huon Valley. As the festival celebrates the opening of international borders, they welcome back The Paul McKenna Band from Glasgow, The Jellyman’s Daughter from Edinburgh for their first visit, and the extraordinary voice and protest songs from Grace Petrie from Leicester. From over the ditch (AKA NZ), arrives the beautiful voice and playing of Holly Arrowsmith, as well as the duo Looking for Alaska, and it’s welcome back to festival darlings, Albi and the Wolves! Performer highlights of the weekend from around Australia are Pitjantjatjara man, Frank Yamma, Tibetan singing and playing from Tenzin Choegyal, and folk icon Eric Bogle. There will also be Sephardic and Sevdah songs from Saray Illuminado and remarkable duo harmonies from Lior and Domini, We Mavericks and Charm of Finches. Returning to Cygnet will be Lithuanian singers and dancers, The Lost Clog, festival favourites Fred Smith, the award-winning Michael Waugh, David Bridie, Lucy Wise, Liam Gerner with Luke Moller, Ruth Roshan and Tango Noir and many more! The full performer line-up and tickets at www.cygnetfolkfestival.org

able to have goals and musical collaborations during that period was a really huge help for our mental health.” Clues to the musical influences and preoccupations of Larkin Poe can be found in at least several of the songs on the new album. ‘Bad Spell’ is an ‘answer’ to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins ‘I Put A Spell On You’ and ‘Georgia Off My Mind’ has an obvious reference. “I wrote Bad Spell as a rock ‘n’ roll response,” explains Rebecca. “I’ve been a huge fan of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins for many, many years and the first time I heard ‘I Put a Spell on You’ - if you haven’t heard that song, go listen to it because it’ll run the chills up and down the back of your neck - I was transfixed by it and knew that I wanted to write a song that had spell in the title. I just had to be patient and wait until all the stars aligned such that I was able to write ‘Bad Spell’. We definitely are a bit more balls to the walls, like more rock ‘n’ rolly than the creepiness that is Screamin’ Jay.” “We were trying to be a bit clever,” says Rebecca of ‘Georgia Off My Mind’. “Songwriting can be a puzzle and I think that I really enjoyed writing this song. It typifies that transitional space I think a lot of people feel when you’re leaving something that you know and love with a lot of hope and optimism and it was about that move from Georgia back to Tennessee those six or seven years ago and just having stars in our eyes crossing the state line.” “As sisters, we feel that Blood Harmony is definitely something that applies to us,” says Rebecca on the title of the album “Down South, there’s a lot of different sayings for families that make music together, kith and kin. To have blood harmony is being able to sing with a certain tone and texture in a timbre that only family can get. We definitely feel fortunate to have that in our back pocket. We’ve been singing together since we were small children. So, it’s definitely something that we want to champion and continue to share. Sibling bands can actually have healthy working relationships and love one another, and we need to make that more of a common theme for sibling bands.”

hey say that there is nothing like the harmony of siblings, but they can add that in the case of a band such as Larkin Poe, there is also nothing like siblings playing together. After a sensational appearance at Bluesfest in 2019, Rebecca and Megan are returning with a new album on their own label and a renewed thirst for touring. “Oh my gosh, we’re so excited to come back. It’s been too long,” says Rebecca from her home in Nashville. “We were just beginning our relationship [with Australia] and then the pandemic just kind of shot everything to hell.” Blood Harmony was produced by the sisters and recorded at the home studio of Rebecca and her husband Texas-bred musician Tyler Bryant. Rebecca features on guitar and keyboards and Megan plays lap steel, resonator guitar and harmony vocals. The album also includes members of their longtime live band, including drummer Kevin McGowan and bassist Tarka Layman, who will also be touring with them. While Rebecca and Megan, now in their early 30s, began their music career playing bluegrass by the time they were out of their teens the Knoxville, Tennessee-born and Georgia-bred multi-instrumentalists had formed Larkin Poe (named after a distant family name related to Edgar Allen Poe). By 2014 they had released a debut album and played the Glastonbury Festival. Since 2015, the sisters have lived in Nashville itself and Rebecca says that ‘we love living here.’ “Being able to go out every night of the week and see premier music is definitely something we don’t take for granted and something that we love very much about this city,” she adds. Earlier this year they invited another longtime Nashville resident with a connection to Australia, Keith Urban, on stage when they were playing in London. “We became acquainted with Keith Urban, whom we adore,” explains Rebecca. “He is just a beautiful human and a beautiful artist. A couple of years ago and he had us out as a special guest on his world tour. So, we stayed in touch over the years, and we were headlining in London. He just so happened to be in the city. So, we texted him and asked if he’d want to come and jam on a tune and he’s like, ‘Absolutely.’ So, he just popped up and I think people were really surprised to see him jamming with us on stage for a multitude of reasons, but he really cut a rug and we’re just the biggest fans of Keith.” “Over the years, we’ve been incredibly fortunate to collaborate with some of our biggest heroes, starting with Elvis Costello - he has been a huge champion for us over the years and has taught us so much. We guested on a Billy Gibbons album during the pandemic, which was really special. He sent us the tracks and remotely we were able to collaborate, which really helped us stay sane during the pandemic. Just to be

By Brian Wise

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album Blood Harmony at Bluesfest and on tour.

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BLOOD ON THE TRACKS Rebecca and Megan Lovell will be showcasing their new

Blood Harmony is available now in all formats. Larkin Poe tour dates can be found at: bluesfesttouring.com.au 15

Ridin`

AUSTRALIA 2023

SOLO SHOWS // FEBRUARY FRI 3 SAT 4 SUN 5 THU 9 FRI 10 SAT 11 SUN 12 THU 16 FRI 17 SAT 18 SUN 19 TUE 21 WED 22 THU 23 FRI 24 SAT 25

NORTHERN REPUBLIC EUROA // STAR HOTEL YACKANDANDAH // CSU RIVERINA PLAYHOUSE WAGGA // STREET THEATRE CANBERRA // MILTON THEATRE MILTON // HERITAGE HOTEL BULLI // LIZOTTES NEWCASTLE NSW // BUNBURY ENTERTAINMENT CENTRE // ALBANY ENTERTAINMENT CENTRE // REGAL THEATRE PERTH // THE GOV ADELAIDE // MOOLOOLABA MUSIC // BYRON BAY THEATRE // C2 THEATRE TOWNSVILLE // TANK ARTS CAIRNS // OLD MUSEUM BRISBANE //

BAND SHOWS // MARCH

THU 2 FACTORY THEATRE SYDNEY // FRI 3 THORNBURY THEATRE // SAT 4 MEENIYAN HALL // SUN 5 CARAVAN - ARCHIES CREEK HOTEL // THU 9 MEMO MUSIC HALL ST KILDA // FRI 10 // SOLO // QUEENSCLIFF TOWN HALL // SAT 11 - SUN 12 PORT FAIRY FOLK FESTIVAL // THU 16 SWAN HILL PERFORMING ARTS CENTRE // FRI 17 CAPITAL THEATRE BENDIGO // SAT 18 - SUN 19 BLUE MOUNTAINS MUSIC FESTIVAL //

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ERIC BIBB READIES NEW ALBUM FOR PORT FAIRY By Brian Wise

year after the release of his album Dear America, a rumination on his home country, blues singer Eric Bibb is preparing a new album, Riding, to be released in time for his visit to the Port Fairy Folk Festival and other sold-out gigs around Australia. “I’m going to say it. It’s my best work yet,” confesses Bibb from his home in Sweden. “I’ve got a wonderful producer who I’ve been working with for years, Glen Scott, and we are just hitting our stride, really.” “I’m looking forward to coming there,” he adds. “It’s been a while and it’s been a while since I’ve been on tour. So, this is going to be a big moment for me.” “Dear America was my way of joining what I feel is a very necessary conversation going on around about how we’ve really arrived, where we’ve arrived collectively,” explains Bibb about his last album, which featured the great bassist Ron Carter as a guest. “We’re still facing a lot of tribalism, a lot of divide-and-conquer stuff going on out there. So, in some ways I’ve decided to take up the thread there, talk about historical events as a way of telling stories, true stories in some of the songs, that I hope will get people to start thinking about, as I said, how we’ve really arrived at where we’ve arrived. I think there’s a lack of focus on the historical story that’s led to where we are.” “It didn’t all begin yesterday, so I think the solutions we need are going to be found if we have a really honest look at our past. But it’s a groovy album,” says Bibb of his forthcoming release. “It’s a foot-thumping album. It’s one of my best albums in terms of groovy, funky music as well as some really poignant stories, I think.” Bibb had some hard hitting as well as poignant and powerful stories in the last album – songs such as ‘Emmett’s Ghost’, ‘White and Black’ and the title track ‘Dear America’ – are the stories on the new album of a different kind. Do they go back deeper into history? “Well, it’s funny,” he replies, “there’s some old songs on there, too. My dad used to sing that great song, called ‘500 Miles’, which began as a song called ‘900 Miles’. But ‘500 Miles’ became like a folk evergreen back in the day, and my dad had a wonderful version that inspired a really cool version. Otherwise, there’s a story of a man named John Howard Griffin, a journalist who back in the early ‘60s wrote a book called Black Like Me.” “Another such song is a song called ‘Tulsa Town’ about a massacre that took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma back in 1920, ‘21. So, it’s an album full of reflections.” I mention that Howard Griffin appears in a book that I have been reading: A Bomb in Every Issue, the story of the incredibly influential left-wing Ramparts magazine.

“That’s very interesting. I love the synchronicity,” says Bibb. “I remember Ramparts, but I would not have thought about it until you reminded me. That’s interesting that you were in Tulsa so recently, again. I love the synchronicity. Because I’m in touch with Nora Guthrie at the Guthrie Center. I’ve had a nice chat with her recently.” To continue the connection, Emmett Till, the subject of Bibb’s song on Dear America and Dylan’s 1962 song ‘The Death of Emmitt Till’ also features in the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa. “So, it’s all bubbling up and I’m really looking forward to sharing,” adds Bibb. “We’ll have it available in Australia first, so that’s going to be fun for my fans there to have a first peak at that album.” How does Bibb feel looking at his native America from the distance of his home for many years, Sweden. It must give him an interesting perspective. “Indeed, indeed, you’re absolutely right about it being a very productive kind of perspective,” he agrees. “I say that, because having been in the middle of it and experienced it upfront, just all the friction and the divisiveness that’s actually accelerating on some levels. From outside, it’s hard to understand how it could be so divisive right now. It’s hard to believe that there could be such a reluctance to get to the bottom of things and finally make some sense out of it, because I feel like there are some attitudes that just don’t make sense. So, I thought it was time to weigh in again. “I remember just not really being able to relax about anything. But what I’m noticing is that there’s a group of young people who seem to be very awake and interested in what’s going on, and then there seems to be a whole swath of people who really just don’t want to know it, who are just blindly taking sides. So, I’m happy to have a bit more of a clearheaded look at what’s going on because I’m not invested so to the degree that I would be if I was living there. But I have experienced all of that and I need to let people know what I think about it. “It’s a challenge because on the one hand, you want to be, as an artist, as a voice, a creative person, you want to be honest about what you comment on, and you don’t want to feel that you have to censor yourself. But on the other hand, it’s not my intention to add to the fray or to add to the divisiveness.” “So, I love singing love songs,” he concludes, “but I feel like I have to do one step further when it comes to what I say in my writing. I need to actually make a comment that I hope is not provocative, but I hope is inspiring.” Eric Bibb will be appearing at the Port Fairy Folk Festival. You can find tour dates at ericbibb.com 17

The much-loved festival turns 21 and celebrates its 500th show. By Jeff Jenkins

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MICK THOMAS’ ROVING COMMISSION PAY TRIBUTE TO FAVOURITES AND ANNOUNCE NATIONAL TOUR

The Saints’ Chris Bailey, Cold Chisel, Neil Young & Johnny Thunders saluted on new EP.

ick Thomas’ Roving Commission, the latest vehicle for the main man of Melbourne’s legendary Weddings Parties Anything (and, also featuring fellow Weddo Squeezebox Wally, and the Waifs› Ben Franz), have paid tribute to The Saints› late co-founder and frontman Chris Bailey with a new recording of ‘Shipwreck’, which originally appeared on The Saints’ 1988 album Prodigal Son. The track was the second to be released from the forthcoming Mick Thomas’ Roving Commission EP Back in the Day; the first was a stunning version of Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s Ragged Glory favourite ‘Days That Used To Be’. The release of the new EP coincides with a national tour in November and December. Mick has said of the new Saints cover: “Amidst all the high-profile industry people leaving us the past year Chris Bailey’s passing seemed to go almost unheralded. But for many of us he was a significant source of inspiration and someone I had looked to for guidance at various points in my career. People are always quick to celebrate the Saints role as punk rock pioneers, but I felt it was what he did after their initial arrival that made them (and him) so special. He refused to get bogged down in the pointless posturing of the commercial punk rock movement and was quick to move on to new styles and formats in his songwriting. “He just had a way of attacking a song that was so self-assured and confident, and original. ‘Shipwreck’ is a great example of his willingness to turn his hand to a new genre while still remaining true to his method. I’d always (erroneously) thought the song was too much like a Weddings, Parties song for me to warrant covering it but it was only as I started to learn it properly that I realised just how very different in writing style it is from anything I have ever written. “I love our recording of the tune if for nothing else, it was the very last song recorded in my back yard studio at Bent Street Northcote - where so many songs had been built through the past thirty years. Vale Corrugated Sounds and Bent Street - but more importantly, vale Chris Bailey.”

The EP expands upon the title song’s premise of looking in the rearview mirror of life with a batch of reinterpretations relating to the same theme. New versions of ‘Houses’ and ‘A Tired Old Hat’ shine fresh light on a couple of an undeservedly lost Thomas classics from the past decade. Apart from The Saints and Neil Young & Crazy Horse songs the covers include Cold Chisel’s ‘Home & Broken Hearted, featuring lead vocals from the Roving Commission’s newest member, Brooke Taylor, who also takes lead on Johnny Thunders’ 1978 ballad ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory.’ “Even though the whole theme of the EP seems to be about looking back, it’s really great to be doing it as a means to move forward,” Thomas laughs. “The whole album that we’ve done which is coming out next year is about people being focused on what came before. I was originally going to call the album Solastalgia - which is just a term I read in a book which refers to this existential recognition of being attached to a time and place that you can never really attain, like something that’s in the past - but then I found out that Missy Higgins already had an album called that! “But it just meant that I became really interested in songs that were about looking backwards to some degree, and I had some covers that I knew would fit around the theme, so it all came together really quickly and easily.” The recent announcement of the Back in The Day EP coincided with the announcement of Mick Thomas’ Roving Commission’s new partnership with esteemed Brisbane indie Coolin’ By Sound. The band have also announced a national tour for November/December which kicks off in Victoria early this month before heading to Canberra, NSW, Tasmania, South Australia and WA and finishing back in Victoria at Archies Creek on New Year’s Day. You can find all the Mick Thomas & Roving Commission dates and tickets at: mickthomas.com/shows

Jack Silverman (front) and band.

BY ANNE MCCUE

JACK SILVERMAN AT THE DIVE MOTEL

once had the good fortune to live in Fitzroy just off Brunswick Street and in walking distance to the Night Cat and the Rainbow Hotel - not to mention Punters and the various other cafes and bars that hosted live music. There was something every day of the week to hear and see on those golden afternoons and silvery nights. Even when the fog was so thick you could hardly see your own hand, we would go to the Rainbow Hotel to see Paul Williamson and his band on a Monday night. Wednesdays were Ross Hannaford’s reggae band which took you to those galactic dimensions of what was both possible and impossible to achieve on an electric guitar. These were real jams and the audience was a part of it because there was no stage and no star-barriers. Was there ever a better time or place to be? Well, the other night in Nashville, I went to The Dive Motel for the first time - why did it take me so long? - to see the Jack Silverman Quartet and I was transported back to those nights in Melbourne. It was the same kind of venue - band on the

floor - and the same kind of experience - a real jam. I think I had stayed away so long because I thought it was going to be some kind of super hipster experience but, actually, there was a lot more ‘dive’ aspect to the bar than I expected. It was a bit stuffy, with old 50s TVs playing The Midnight Special on silent. I needn’t have been afraid. Silverman is a texture-meister with a beautiful instinct for melody and a freedom for improvisation. There is no fear here and no formula. The band is sympatico. The age-old format of guitar, keyboard (sometimes baritone saxophone), bass and drums still has life in the hands of these musicians. The music was spacey, unexpected, textured, layered, surprising, soothing, compelling, familiar enough yet, at times, almost from another planet, like diving into a pool on an oppressive day or visiting an exotic country. That is to say, far removed from the usual run-of-the-mill gig. Amen. Jack Silverman’s most recent recording is Live At The 5 Spot (Centripetal Force Records.) When he lived in the Village, New York City he learnt jazz guitar from

both Leni Stern and Emily Remler (who tragically died from an overdose in Sydney on her visit to Australia in 1990.) Jack is not afraid of technology - running his guitar through a Micro Moog or using a looper during songs and between tunes so that there is always something aural going on. It’s more like listening to a kind of concept album than a song list. The band blends influences such as Thelonious Monk, Grateful Dead and John Barry into something new and gorgeous. In fact, their version of Theme From Midnight Cowboy was appropriately sumptuous and nostalgic. As I write this I am listening to Live At The 5 Spot which features three tracks of extended jams - Mixed Signals (9:32), Searchlight (10:02) and Cerulean (27:41) - the latter being a track Jack composed for the Nashville Ambient Ensemble, of which he is also a member. I will be delving into that group next, so watch this page! JackSilverman.com You can hear/purchase Live At The 5 Spot on Bandcamp. 21

Vika & Linda deliver their first Christmas album, an all-killer stocking-filler. 22 By Jeff Jenkins

23 Photo by Tania Jovanovic

“What a wonderful feeling, watching the ones we love having so much fun” – ‘That Spirit Of Christmas’ Vika & Linda love Christmas. And music has always been a big part of the Bull family’s Christmas Day, though their mum and dad have just one Christmas album – Judith Durham’s For Christmas With Love. But this year, the sisters decided it was time for something new on the turntable. The result is Gee Whiz, It’s Christmas! “We always wanted to make a Christmas album, it was talked about often,” Vika reveals to Rhythms. “But we didn’t want to put the obvious songs on there. We wanted songs you could dance to – get up and dance after lunch on Christmas Day.” “That was the brief,” Linda continues, “to have fun on Christmas Day – a joyous record.” If you’re expecting a Vika & Linda gospel Christmas set, or their take on ‘Silent Night’, ‘White Christmas’ or ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’, well, this is not that record. Instead, the sisters are tackling seasonal songs by the Ramones, Queen, Slade and Wizzard. But it’s not all glam rock. Vika & Linda do a couple of Bull family favourites – ‘Blue Christmas’, which Elvis recorded in 1957, and ‘Please Come Home For Christmas’, which was recorded by Willie Nelson, one of their Dad’s favourite singers. And the album features the sisters’ favourite traditional Christmas carol, ‘O Little Town Of Bethlehem’, which was written in the 1860s. And they pay tribute to their gospel roots, with the Staple Singers’ ‘Last Month Of The Year’ (featuring Linda’s daughter, Kiki, on backing vocals). Setting the scene is a modern Christmas classic, Vika & Linda’s version of Tom Petty’s ‘Christmas All Over Again’, a song that turns 30 this year. The original finished with Petty’s Christmas wish list: a new Rickenbacker guitar, two Fender Bassmans, a Chuck Berry songbook and a xylophone. What are Vika & Linda hoping for this Christmas? Vika: “A more peaceful world; it just seems to be in a hell of a mess at the moment and everyone’s so unsure. A lot of weird stuff is happening. I wish it was a lot more peaceful for our kids and their future, that’s what I wish for.” Linda: “I hope we have another Christmas with our parents and all our family together. They’re 24

getting older, so another one together would be great.” Gee Whiz was very much a team effort, with producer Cameron Bruce suggesting the Ramones’ riotous ‘Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight)’, while drummer Lachlan O’Kane proposed Ray Charles’ ‘That Spirit Of Christmas’, and Vika & Linda’s manager, Lisa Palermo, put forward the celebration of Santa, ‘(Everybody’s Waitin’ For) The Man With The Bag’, originally recorded by Kay Starr in 1950. Speaking of Mr Claus, the cover of the album shows the sisters in their Sunday best, having their photo taken with Santa at Doncaster Shoppingtown in 1972. Look closely and you’ll see that Santa is flanked by a box of RC drinks. “They weren’t big on presentation back then,” Vika laughs. “If it was our mother dressing that set, those boxes would have been wrapped in Christmas paper with tinsel on them.” Gee Whiz, It’s Christmas! – the title comes from the 1963 single by the Queen of Memphis Soul, Carla Thomas – caps a big year for the Bull sisters. In the Queen’s Birthday Honours, they were awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for their service to the performing arts. And they have also released a memoir, No Bull, which documents their journey from Doncaster, in suburban Melbourne, to the top of the charts. Like their music, the story is told by two voices, in perfect harmony. “We had no other siblings, so Vika has been my most constant companion from the moment I entered this world,” Linda writes. “Linda and I were opposites from the start,” Vika adds. “She’s always been a daddy’s girl, but I clung to mum. Linda is feminine and I’m more masculine. She is stubborn as a mule, while I’m more likely to go with the flow. I was a prem baby, who mum said was ‘no bigger than a pound of butter’. Linda came out 17 months later, nine pounds, breech, nearly killing our mother.” “While Vika is impulsive, I’m careful. I’m into details and she is not. Where she’s fiery, I’m peaceful. Vika has a sweet tooth, while I’m savoury all the way. She’s a great driver and I’m woeful. Vika sings high, while I sing low.” Vika called her younger sister “Miss Perfect”. It was not a term of endearment. “But I liked it,” Linda said. “The name had a nice ring to it.” Despite – or perhaps because of – their differences, Vika & Linda have become Australian music’s greatest sister act. They might still be “Donnie chicks”, but they sing like angels. As Paul Kelly noted when the sisters released their 2020 anthology, ‘Akilotoa, nothing beats siblings singing together. “They make the air beat in sync.” Even though Linda points out, “Let’s get this straight right now, Vika was (and still is) The Boss”, No Bull is the touching tale of sibling love. Whereas Noel Gallagher said of his brother, “Liam’s only got two problems – everything he says and everything he does”, Linda writes

about their sweet pre-show ritual. “Side stage, I’ll look Vik in the eye. We always give each other a nod or a little hand squeeze. It’s a private moment, tight and quiet. We have never said it aloud to each other, but I reckon we’re both reaching for the same thing: the sound that comes when we get it right, the one that rises from blood harmony, the sound we get from singing together since we were little kids.” Proof of this perfect blood harmony can be heard on the Christmas album, with the sisters’ take on Stevie Wonder’s seasonal song from 1966, ‘Someday At Christmas’. It’s a timeless message. “Someday at Christmas, men won’t be boys, playing with bombs like kids play with toys,” Vika sings, with Linda adding: “Someday at Christmas there’ll be no wars, when we have learned what Christmas is for.” Their voices blend beautifully together. As Tim Rogers remarked, “People often say it’s a gift from God to sing like that and it is a thing of wonder.” No Bull also switches seamlessly from sister to sister. The story is told in a simple, straightforward manner, capturing Vika and Linda’s often wicked sense of humour. Linda writes about learning to speak Tongan. “There were other phrases I loved, like ‘Si’i me’a fakahela mo’oni’, which sounds a lot like ‘Shit, fucking hell, I’m horny’. But the best one in my opinion is ‘Faka’ofa’ofa’. When pronounced in English, this sounds like ‘Fucka offa offa’, when it actually means beautiful.” Despite being amused by the language, the sisters are proud of their Tongan heritage (one of their biggest gigs was singing at the 75th birthday celebrations for King Tāufa‘āhau Tupou IV). Their mum, Siniva, came to Australia from Tonga as a nursing student in 1959. No Bull reveals that the White Australia policy prohibited “alien coloured immigrants”, so Siniva had to get special permission from the Australian and Tonga authorities. She planned to return home when her studies were done, but she met Austen “Aussie” Bull at the Sandringham Yacht Club and they were married three months later. “Mixed-race couples like our parents were not the norm in the ’60s, so Mum and Dad had to deal with a lot of racism when they were out in public in the early days of their marriage,” Vika explains in the book. Fifty-eight years later, Siniva and Aussie are still going strong. And they’re getting set to give that Judith Durham record a few more spins. But this year they have another album to add to the Christmas playlist. So, what’s Mr & Mrs Bull’s verdict? “Oh, boy,” Vika says. “Dad loved it. Mum, well, she thought it would be more traditional. She liked ‘Blue Christmas’, that was her favourite. She didn’t really like the rocking numbers as much, whereas Dad was like, ‘Yeah, I can get up and dance!’” And, gee whiz, isn’t that Christmas? What would Christmas Day be without a dispute over the soundtrack? Gee Whiz, It’s Christmas! is out now on Bloodlines. No Bull is published by Affirm Press.

Bloodlines. No Bull is published by Affirm Press.

CHRISTMAS ALL OVER AGAIN Linda: This was suggested by our manager, Lisa. It’s a great poppy Christmas song and we love Tom Petty. And the lyrics are just so great – Christmas is a rockin’ time. I WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS Vika: The perfect duet for us. Linda: I never knew that Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote this song, which is so great because we’re fans of their songwriting. This is a great tag-team song. I WISH IT COULD BE CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY Vika: We discussed whether we should include this song [by Wizzard] and the Slade song, but then we thought, bugger it, we’ll just wack ’em both on, because they’re both so great. THAT SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS Vika: The perfect song for Linda’s voice. Ray Charles can sing anything, and his version is so emotional, it just drew me in. MERRY CHRISTMAS (I DON’T WANT TO FIGHT TONIGHT) Linda: This Ramones song was so much fun to sing – we did the vocals together in the same booth. We didn’t want to overthink it. We just sang it and left it. PLEASE COME HOME FOR CHRISTMAS Vika: A much-covered song. But Willie Nelson’s version is best. The way he sings it is just so pure and heartfelt, and we tried to recapture that. Whenever we hear Willie sing, we just think of Dad, because it’s one of his favourite singers. BLUE CHRISTMAS Linda: Another very well-covered Christmas song, but this was the first one we wanted on the record, the first we both agreed on. There are different lyrics for this song. The Lumineers’ version is what we sing. MERRY XMAS EVERYBODY Linda: We weren’t big Slade fans growing up. Davey Lane put us on to this one. He said, “This is my Christmas song.” LAST MONTH OF THE YEAR Vika: We had to have a Staple Singers song on there. The way they sang the months of the year was the clincher for me. It sounds so hip and catchy. SOMEDAY AT CHRISTMAS Linda: I knew this would work well with Vika & I trading verses, building it up as it went along. THANK GOD IT’S CHRISTMAS Vika: That was my suggestion. I just love this song. I’m not sure if everyone was with me, because it’s hard to do a Queen song. Linda: We had to go in the opposite direction – no one can do what Queen does. So, we had to strip it back to bare bones and then build it up again. Vika holds back … until she can’t hold back anymore. O LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM Linda: We wanted at least one traditional song on the album, and this isn’t too religious. I just loved the poetry of the lyrics. (EVERYBODY’S WAITIN’ FOR) THE MAN WITH THE BAG Vika: Such a cheeky song, with lots of double meanings. Linda: This is one of my favourites – every time I hear it, it makes me wanna dance.

Photo by Lisa Businovski

GEE WHIZ, IT’S CHRISTMAS! Vika: We love Carla Thomas, and “Gee whiz” is such a great 25 expression. It really suited the vibe of the record.

n February 1989 America’s respected Musician Magazine had The Replacements on the cover declaring them The Last Best Band of the 80s. Only two years later that band broke up, but their rock ‘n’ roll mantle was picked up at least for the following decade by Chris and Rich Robinson and The Black Crowes. In fact, in an era that spawned grunge, the Robinson’s played straight ahead rock ‘n’ roll in the tradition of The Faces, The Rolling Stones, Humble Pie and other legendary outfits. The Black Crowes debut album Shake Your Moneymaker, which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2020 was steeped in classic rock and roll. There’s even a nod to Stax with a ripping version of Otis Redding’s ‘Too Hard To Handle.’ A music magazine headline at the end of the ‘90s might have seen The Black Crowes tagged as ‘the last great American rock and roll band of the century.’ Before various breakups the band released eight albums, toured internationally (with Jimmy Page on board for a few gigs) and ended up selling tens of millions of albums. You only have to listen to the most recent release from the Robinson brothers – the mini-album 1972 – to know exactly where they have come from – and where they are probably going. On it you will find faithful readings of classics such as The Stones’ ‘Rocks Off’, Rod Stewart’s ‘You Wear It Well,’ T-Rex’s ‘The Slider’ Little Feat’s ‘Easy To Slip’, Bowie’s ‘Moonage Daydream’ and The Temptations’ ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’. All the versions show the Robinson’s love of the music and are infused with the Black Crowes vibe. After several breaks, the Robinson’s are back together to continue the celebration of the 20th anniversary of Shake Your Moneymaker. We saw Chris here about six years ago with the Chris Robinson Brotherhood (featuring Neil Casal on guitar). Rich formed his own bands for a while, worked on other projects including recording with Patti Smith and playing with Bad Company, and released his own solo projects. But it is really in the Black Crowes where the brothers’ talents shine brightest. Guitarist Rich Robinson is in Germany when we catch up by Zoom to talk about the forthcoming Australian tour. Because he shares a birthday (May 24) with Bob Dylan I can’t help mentioning that I have just visited the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But Robinson has actually met Dylan. “We met him a couple of times. He’s amazing,” he says, “I think he’s an incredibly enigmatic and fascinating, and talented person.”

26 Rich Robinson and Chris Robinson, The Black Crowes.

By Brian Wise

I wonder if Rich and Chris listened to a lot of Dylan in their early years. It seems easy to tell some of the other musicians they listened to in their formative years. “Of course, we listened to a ton of Dylan, my Dad was a huge Dylan fan,” says Robinson, adding that Dylan’s son Jesse directed one of their videos for the album The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion. He adds that he also met Dylan when they were on the same bill with The Stones, at a recording studio and that they even share the same dentist! “We have these kind of random meetings,” he laughs. “We’ve stayed in the same hotel as him. Sometimes on our birthday, our shared birthday, he would run into my brother and say, ‘Tell your brother I said happy birthday.’ So, it was pretty amazing stuff man. But I loved all of Bob’s stuff, I mean, acoustic, electric. I mean, it was all so potent and brilliant, so it was an amazing thing.” I tell Robinson that there aren’t many people who can say, ‘I ran into Bob Dylan at the dentist.’ “I guess not,” he laughs. “It seemed pretty normal to us. We go like, ‘Hey, Bob.’ ‘Hey, Rich’.” Back to the music, and the 1972 mini-album, released earlier this year is confirmation of what a great rock ‘n’ Roll band The Black Crowes are. “It was one of those things that is an idea we liked and we thought, ‘Wow, that’s really cool.’ We love that era of music. Obviously, we love a lot of music, we love a lot of a lot of eras, but that era in particular was pretty phenomenal. Then you just look at the records that came out in 1972, I mean, think about it, Geez! Picking one was like, ‘Wow! What do we pick?’ “So, we decided to pick some songs that were kind of really in our wheelhouse, and some that maybe weren’t so much, and doing ‘The Slider’ or doing ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’, or doing ‘Moonage Daydream’, was more of like, ‘How can we kind of fit this in our sort sphere,’ so to speak. So, it was just really cool to be able to do it”. One of the undoubted highlights of 1972 is the version of Little Feat’s ‘Easy To Slip’, written by Lowell George and Martin Kibbee and originally recorded for the Sailin’ Shoes album. “There was no-one like Lowell,” says Robinson. “You think about it. There’s some unbelievable singers. You have Rod Stewart, you have Steve Marriott, you have Joe Cocker. There’s a group of those guys and they’re brilliant singers. Then you have brilliant

guitar players who can sing - like Jimi Hendrix - but then you have Lowell and Lowell does everything exceptional. Just listening to his voice, listening to those songs, listening to the way he plays guitar and how it just kind of floats on top of everything else, and that band is unbelievable. I mean, it’s crazy when you listen to that stuff. Always when I listen to it, it blows me away.” George also inspired so many musicians around him, such as Linda Ronstadt. “And Bonnie Raitt,” adds Robinson immediately. “I mean, he’s always been one of our favourites and his ability….. Just the sound of that record, the sound of his voice, but also lyrically what he’s singing about and that vulnerability. It’s just wrapped into this beautiful package. It’s really moving to me.” The Black Crowes EP or mini-album puts forward a fairly potent argument that 1972 was probably the best year for rock albums ever! And it was a natural that they’d do a Stones song, and they do a brilliant version of ‘Rocks Off’ (from Exile On Main Sreet). While the Robinsons are celebrating the anniversary of Shake Your Moneymaker! wouldn’t it be great if the Stones did the same sort of thing for one of their albums such as Exile. “That would have been really cool,” agrees Robinson. “Bands in that era were allowed to be more prolific. By the time we started in 1990, record labels really wouldn’t let you make records that much. They [the Stones] were making two records a year for at least through 1980 and it wasn’t until that sort of commercialism came into play, that they didn’t want to squash the life of one record by putting out another record, because there were record cycles. “During the course of Shake Your Moneymaker, Chris and I wrote two additional albums worth of material before we got to Southern Harmony. So, there’s two records that we could have released, that we couldn’t. We went in and made Southern Harmony and I took some of the songs we had written on tour and kind of rearranged them and wrote some different parts but for the most part Southern Harmony, we got off tour, Chris and I went in for a weekend and we wrote the whole thing. “A band like the Stones, I mean, what are you going to do? Beggars Banquet, Sticky Fingers, Exile On Main Street, Some Girls? Even Tattoo You? There’s so many kind of eras that would warrant that. That would be really tough to pull from, it’s amazing.” Thirty-two years ago Shake Your Moneymaker came after the Black Crowes were ‘discovered’ by George Drakoulias and signed to American Recordings. How important was that album

on reflection and what did it mean to the Robinsons’ careers? “It was the springboard for everything, it really was,” responds Robinson, “but I mean, I was a kid. I was 19 when I made that record, and I was 17 when I started writing it. So, we were babies, we didn’t know. I got my guitar for Christmas when I was 15 and then we immediately started a band because that’s just what you do. Our drummer was our cousin, he got some drums. We started playing around in the basement, we were way into punk rock at the time. We loved bands like The Cramps, or The Dead Kennedys, or Black Flag or X, and then all of a sudden we heard REM, and I remember it on the radio and it was Radio Free Europe. And it just hit me. It woke me up in a sense, that something like that, that beauty of that music that was still very Southern, because the South has brilliant things about it and not great things about it. There’s a complicated history, there’s a paradox, there’s all of these different things, but there’s also a really strong culture. But at the time, culturally, no-one was really tapping into the southern culture that we understood to be a far more beautiful culture, and artistic, a creative culture at least musically. It started that way when you had Little Richard, to Otis Redding, to Graham Parsons. Then really for a long-time southern music was represented by Skynyrd, and The Outlaws. Obviously, we loved the Allman Brothers, it was brilliant but what became Southern rock, never really spoke to us until we heard REM and we were like, ‘That’s our south!’ “That kind of pulled us into a whole different space to really go off into. We would go see REM every time they played and what was cool about them is that they would play a Velvet Underground song or an Aerosmith song, or they would play a Big Star song, constantly changing their set list. That kind of brought us back to where Chris and I came from - which is growing up in a household with my dad listening to The Byrds, Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills and Nash, and Sly Stone, and to Mose Allison to anything and everything in between, Joe Cocker, Mad Dogs And Englishmen. “Back then, I think people were rewarded for being unique, whereas now people are rewarded for the opposite of being unique, for conforming and sounding like everyone else. From that moment forward we were a rock ‘n’ roll band, because this rock ‘n’ roll umbrella is far bigger than anything else.” The Black Crowes are touring this month. 1972 is available on all platforms. 27

The dynamic duo of Leesa Gentz and Julz Parker are back out on an East Coast tour. By Chris Lambie

he opening night of a music festival is all about getting in, grabbing your drinks tickets and noting headliners’ play times. You notice a small stage to where punters are purposefully gravitating. Before you know it, you’ve discovered a new favourite act and have to fight for space at their next performances. That’s how I first got to know and love Hussy Hicks. I imagine the same process for many Bluesfest fans who have seen them climb ever closer to the top of the bill. The Blues and Roots core duo of Leesa Gentz (vocals, percussion) and Julz Parker (guitars/vocals) have been working their musical magic over the past decade and a half. With a swathe of recordings, awards, national and international tours under their belt, they’re not about to let adversity stop the creative flow. Coming off the cancelled plans of ‘pandemic time’, they faced further challenges from the devastating floods in their Northern Rivers base. They tell me, “We had packed the van with our basic stage gear in case the driveway got cut off. But everything else went under water. Our studio’s 3.2 m off the ground but the water went over the roof. We lost all our merch which is annoying. And losing all our vinyl is such a punch in the face because it’s such a beautiful thing and takes so long to make.” The pair made it to Europe not long after and as regular performers there over many years, they were fortunate to have some equipment stored there. Waiting for them since the cancellation of their 2020 visit. They finally got to show off music from their album of that year, Gather Up The People, plus new tracks from an upcoming EP. Ironically, the first single from the EP ‘Same Boat’ was released on the same day that Parker went to a stranded neighbour’s aid in floodwaters in a kayak. (Images can be seen online.) Gentz admits to mentally ‘hearing’ lyrics from the song at that moment. “When Julz paddled off over to his house, there was definitely a bit of ‘I’m paddling, I’m paddling…’ going on. The song was written in that really early lockdown period, about nothing specifically. But no matter where you were in your life, certainly as musical creators, we were all stuck in our houses and we weren’t allowed to go to our jobs. As a songwriter it’s good to kinda get it out.” Next track ‘Capitulation’ features the rhythm section of bass player Tracy Bassy and drummer Ali Foster. Parker’s signature guitar drives a lively riff-laden hook. Musically, they agree, “It’s a banger’. On the subject matter, “For probably the last five, six years even, we’ve been herded into these little groups - where we formulate our opinions based on what our friends think and what the algorithms tell us to think. We get so certain that we can’t even have debate with people without putting them in a different pile, politically or socially. It’s not healthy. I think we all learn by facing people on the opposite side of the opinion pool and learning why they have their beliefs.” In fact, Hussy Hicks are a band that appeals to just about every demographic. Audiences are typically a mix of millennials, baby boomers and

beyond. From homeowners to couch surfers. Fans of rootsy highenergy blues, rocking Country and all the best dance-friendly rhythms. “The old universal language thing. Being back out in the world again, there’s so much nuance in the human experience to be dived into that we missed out on, stuck on our [Covid] islands. Acclaimed as one of the best guitarists around, Parker cites early inspiration. “The Emmanuels, obviously. I was lucky to get to play in Phil’s band for a few years. So that was amazing for my guitar learning. Before that, my dad’s British blues collection. Peter Green, Eric Clapton, Rory Gallagher…and people I’d see on the live scene.” Gentz’s killer vocals reflect the wealth of influences she draws from, adding extra punch when Parker let fly with some serious shredding. “I grew up listening to all the music of the early 80s. Madonna, Pat Benatar… Then I started singing Country music. My parents were into Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash. I was singing with my sister - 90s American Country like Trisha Yearwood. In young adulthood I was introduced to soul - new soul and also Etta James, Billie Holliday. I fell in love with those distinct amazing voices. Now we listen to everything. Our tour car playlist is quite extensive!” Of the European tour, they are happy to report that there hadn’t been a bad gig. “They’ve all been great in their own way. Everything from

major festivals (Ireland’s Electric Picnic, L Fest in Wales, Madame Guitar in Italy) and a bunch of really cool little club shows. It is the first time we’ve been able to tour the 2020 album. So, between that and the new EP and some live favourites, there’s a lot in the set.” Their northern hemisphere fans hadn’t forgotten them. “Actually, someone requested ‘A Million Different Truths’ off the 2010 album last night. We gave them the long-term fan respect and had a crack at it. It’s been heart-warming to see people coming back.” After thousands of live performances over the years they agree, “The stage is our happy, comfortable place.” The latest song released from the EP is the deliciously down and dirty ‘I Am Not A Dog’. “My angry track”, Parker laughs. “Where all the frustrations come out. After all the restrictions and stuff, we tried to get through remaining as mentally well as possible. So it’s cool to let all the frustrations and built-up energy out on this track. Loud and grungy and a fun one to play live.” Gentz adds, “I play the toolbox in this song and at one of the festivals here, a bunch of people created this sort of toolbox dance. It was pretty funny so let’s see where that goes in the future.” Despite losing time and opportunity to pandemic restrictions and treasured instruments and furniture from their home and studio to

flooding, one creative endeavour was kept safe. The Hussy Hicks app - worked on with Luca Maran - offers music lovers tour dates, band insights and news PLUS three playable 8-bit video games, one for each song on the EP. Each game is tailored to match a song. For ‘Same Boat’, players control an inflatable boat of Hussy Hicks downstream escaping and avoiding a myriad of obstacles. The ‘Capitulation’ game is a choose-your-own-adventure road trip. There are over 100 narrative paths based on player choices, and 18 different endings offered, including a gig inside a dragon’s stomach! The third game sees the Hussy Hicks battling again their perfect antagonist and alter-egos, the Hussy Hacks. “People who like the app, love it and just lose their minds. Others say, ‘Just tell me when the record’s out’.” The Australian east coast tour will, as in Europe, be in full band mode. “Ali [Foster] flew over and our friend and collaborator Raphael [White] on bass.” (“We had him over from France when lockdown first hit so he was stuck with us.”) Following shows in Queensland and NSW, a second round of dates will take the band to Tassie and Victoria in early 2023. They expect the planned Lismore gig to be an emotional one. “The theatre copped it as bad as anyone in town. So, we’re passionate about playing an appropriate local show. It will be quite special.”

an Warner is proudly a Melbourne artist, so it’s a surprise to learn that much of his childhood was spent in Perth, where his dad worked as a sports journalist. “The funny thing about growing up in Perth in the ’70s was all that American music that was huge at the time – the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac – made so much sense,” Warner says. “It was all about the beach and being on the highway and summer. All that West Coast music made so much sense to our geography and I loved it.” While making his new album, Maybe, Then…, Warner discovered that Ashley Davies, the drummer in his band, The Night Parrots, grew up about a kilometre down the road, on Perth’s northern beaches. Warner sings about their childhoods in a song called ‘Summer Out Of Reach’. “Growing up there was so idyllic, so it’s a bit of a lament in some ways,” he admits. “It’s that summer we can never get back. But it’s also a celebration of the music.” Warner will never forget moving back to Melbourne: it felt cold and urban and dark. But he’s now very much a Melbourne artist. His old band, the Warner Brothers, even had a big single called ‘Stuck In Melbourne’. “I love being a Melbourne artist,” Warner says. He lived in New York at the start of the 2000s (which he writes about in ‘The Lady On The Water’). He enjoyed the experience, but it also taught him a valuable lesson. “I saw so much bad music overseas, so much leather pants New Jersey rock. It was just shithouse, and it’d be laughed at here. Melbourne crowds are hard. I realised that it’s about the work, not where you live. I don’t need to be in New York City to validate it. If I can get accolades in Melbourne, that’s more than enough.” Maybe, Then… was manufactured in Melbourne – it’s Warner’s first vinyl release – and he proudly plays the made-in-Melbourne Maton guitars. “I cannot speak more highly of that company and what they’ve done for me,” says Warner, who purchased his first Maton, a CW80, in the early ’80s. He now owns four Matons. “They don’t give me guitars,” he points out. “But whenever I need my guitars serviced or repaired, they just say, ‘Dan, bring them out, what do you need?’ As a working muso, that’s been absolutely gold to me.” Explaining the title, Warner says he didn’t want to make a lockdown album. “I wanted this to be a record of positivity and the title has a nice double meaning: maybe, then things will be better; maybe, then the world might have changed … It’s a phrase that’s open enough and it still feels positive. It’s not an apocalypse song. It feels like a summer record to me. “And maybe, then I’ll have a hit,” he smiles. Warner made the album with The Night Parrots (named after his 2008 album), featuring Marcel Borrack on guitars, lap steel, piano, percussion and backing vocals; Ash

Davies on drums; and Nathan Farrelly on bass and backing vocals. Borrack – a jack of all trades and master of many – also produced the record. Warner met Borrack when they were both signed to Mick Thomas’ Croxton Records. “We really connected, and from that point on, Marcel has produced all of my records. I trust him completely. He actually chooses all the songs. I wrote 25 songs and gave them all to him and just said, ‘You choose.’ And he produced them the way he wanted. If I did it, I’d do the same thing every time, and they’d all sound like it’s from the West Coast of America in 1975. Marcel can see more breadth in my music, and I love that.” The result is an intoxicating, eclectic record, heralded by the opening track and first single, ‘Every Moon Is Blue’. “That song announces that we’re going somewhere. It’s not jazz, not blues, not rock, but it’s got all of those elements. It’s a really good indication of the rest of the record.” Borrack is not Warner’s only fan. After hearing the new album, Ella Hooper was moved to write: “Dan creates vignettes that could be realised as Carver-esque short stories, but instead they’re beautiful songs.” “I have written short stories,” Warner reveals. “Believe it or not, I did go to university. I studied Creative Writing and my majors were in fiction writing and poetry writing.” His fiction teacher was Gerald Murnane, “the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of” (The New York Times), while Judith Rodriguez was his poetry teacher. “She would always say to me, ‘You know what, this would be a great song.’ My poetry always read like lyrics.” As well as the great American West Coast writers, Warner worshipped Don Walker, Richard Clapton and The Dingoes. “Those writers have been really great to me. People wouldn’t know this, but Don Walker has really encouraged my songwriting.” Another champion of Warner’s work was the late-great Maurice Frawley, a member of Paul Kelly and the Dots, who co-wrote ‘Look So Fine, Feel So Low’. Frawley’s band, Working Class Ringos, supported the Warner Brothers when they launched their first record at the Espy in St Kilda. “I just loved him, he was a character,” Warner says. Indeed, I recall having a beer with Warner many years ago, chatting about who should be in the ARIA Hall of Fame. “You know who should be in there,” he insisted, “Maurice Frawley. He’s a dead-set legend.” “He was encouraging but also competitive,” Warner reflects. “Whenever I saw him, he’d always say, ‘How ya going, Dan, got any songs? Any good? Tell you what, I’ve been writing some good ones.’ And I loved that about him.” Warner wants to honour Frawley’s work by playing his songs as part of an acoustic duo with Charlie Owen, who was a member of Working Class Ringos.

Warner also fondly remembers another great Melbourne musician, Paul Hester. The Crowded House drummer was a big fan of the Warner Brothers – he got them an agent and a producer, and his partner, Mardi, took the photos for the first album. “Hessie helped us make the transition from backyard mavericks into the music business.” He also got Warner a gig on Mick Molloy’s ill-fated late-night show on Channel Nine (“a televisual shitheap”, according to one critic). Warner’s appearance led to him becoming a talkback topic the following day. Many viewers noted that Warner had a sticker on his guitar (he still does), stating: “One Nation, Fuck Off”. “I remember saying [to the producers], ‘Do you want me to cover up the sticker?’ But they were like, ‘Nah, don’t worry about it.’” The 3AW switchboard was ablaze the next morning. “I was watching Channel Nine last night. I can’t believe there was this long-haired bloke there … you know what he had on his guitar, it was bloody disgusting!” “Thanks to Hessie, I became the subject of outrage,” Warner laughs. Soon after, Warner joined Hester’s band, The Largest Living Things. Warner was also a regular guest on Jon von Goes’ JVG Radio Method on Triple R for more than 20 years, presenting the Warner Corner segment where he covered a different song every week. Warner now hosts a summer show on the station, Ebb Tide, celebrating songwriting. And he also works as a producer on Spicks and Specks, a job he loves, “though it’s quite odd for me – I’d never be invited on the show because I’m just not famous enough”. Warner, a fanatical Collingwood supporter, has also worked on a number of AFL shows, including The Footy Show and The Marngrook Footy Show. “I’ve done a lot of live TV, which has taught me to be calm under pressure. I think I’m now a way better performer – not much would faze me. “Also, it’s good to use a different part of your creativity. I think it’s enabled me to be more expansive with my songwriting. This record is more adventurous.” Warner also believes he’s more relaxed and less worried. “Maybe I’m getting older, too,” he muses. “When you’re young, there’s so much expectation. You want to have a hit and if you don’t, you’re a failure. But then you realise it’s not really about that. It’s about doing good work.” If that’s the criterion, Maybe, Then… is a resounding success. Warner is now hoping he can replicate his Melbourne following nationwide. “I’m known in Melbourne, I’m considered a Melbourne guy,” he says. “My records do okay here and I get great support on community radio. But I’d like to expand that out to Australia a little bit more, so I can do a few more shows. And you never know, Ash and I might make a triumphant return to Perth. “I’d like to do that.” Maybe, Then… is out now via Bandcamp.

Maybe, Then… the much-loved Melbourne singer-songwriter releases his first album in eight years. By Jeff Jenkins

been really wonderful, fiddles, and it’s just been great.”

Shemekiah Copeland has released one of the most powerful albums of the year with some potent messages. By Brian Wise.

aughter of the late bluesman Johnny Copeland, now 43-year-old Shemekiah, has long since shrugged off her father’s shadow and established her own formidable reputation as one of the world’s most powerful singers. With eight Blues music awards, Grammy nominations and eleven studio albums to her name, Copeland is standing in nobody’s shadow! Was it inevitable that Shemekiah would go into the music industry given her father’s history? Was there any other thought of doing anything else? “I didn’t really want to go into the music business because the thought of doing what my father did and performing and all of that stuff at first really scared me,’ she says. “I had no idea how he could get up in front of all those people and just be so competent and amazing. So, I never thought I could do anything like that. So, for a long time, I thought I would be a psychiatrist or something like that. “It’s funny because I feel like I just got a calling. When I was about 15, it was inevitable because something just came over me, where I just was like, ‘Okay, this is what I’m going to do with my life.’ And it really did happen overnight.”

With nearly three decades in music Copeland has vast experience and has been expressing some powerful opinions that mirror what has been happening in America during her lifetime. Copeland’s last three albums - America’s Child (2018), Uncivil War (2020) and her most recent, Done Come Too Far (2022) contain unmistakable messages about Civil Rights and society in general. Surprisingly, perhaps given the fact that she was born in New York and her label Alligator is based in Chicago, Copeland made her most recent recordings in Nashville, a city better known for country music (of which there are several examples on the new album). Done Come Too Far (the title says it all) was produced, as were her previous two

albums, by renowned Nashville musician Will Kimbrough who also plays guitar and helps out on the songwriting. You can get a sense of the album’s weight on such songs as ‘Too Far To Be Gone’ (inspired by Sister Rosa Parkes and featuring Sonny Landreth on guitar), ‘The Talk’ (inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and featuring Charles Hodges from the Hi Rhythm section on B-3 organ), ‘Gullah Geechee’ (about slavery), ‘Dumb It Down’ (about the media), and ‘Pink Turns To Red’ (about gun violence) and the ‘Dolls Are Sleeping’ (about sexual abuse). There are, however, some lighter moments. The cajun-inflected ‘Fried Catfish and Bibles’ and the outright country song ‘I Fell In Love With A Honky’ on which Copeland channels her innerDolly Parton. There is also a cover of her father’s classic ‘Nobody But You’ and Ray Wylie Hubbard’s ‘Barefoot In Heaven.’ The title song, which sounds like it could have come from the pen of Pops Staples, also features Cedric Burnside as a guest. “Nashville just became the natural place to go because that’s where the producer was,” replies Copeland when I ask why she has recorded there in recent years, “and that’s where less expensive studios were, because there’s such an abundance of them and so many great musicians” “So, when I was recording with Oliver Wood, Will came in to play on one of the records and we just hit it off, because he was such a great musician, a sweetheart. And I was just like, ‘This guy is awesome and super talented’. We were looking to do something different. So, we thought, ‘Let’s work with Will’. He’s also an amazing songwriter. We really truly are the dream team, myself, Will Kimbrough, John Hahn [her manager]. We’re just so like-minded and have the same agenda. So, it makes it very easy to work with them for that reason. “And I’m just loving playing around with all this different instrumentation and bringing in all kinds of American roots sounds and everything in this music. It’s been so fun, banjos and African banjos, it’s

“Right before I had my little guy, I was very frustrated with the music business” reflects Shemekiah referring to her young son when I ask how the latest album completes a trilogy for her. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do but I always remembered Dr. John. My father always preached originality. I remember Dr. John saying to me, ‘Don’t try to conform to the music business, make the music business conform to you’. I just said, ‘There’s so many things that I want to say, that I want to put out here.’ I don’t just want to make albums. I want to make little pieces of art that someday my little guy will be proud of and say, ‘My mom did this. My mom said this.’ Something in me just changed. So, America’s Child happened. Then I just felt like, ‘Oh my God, I could have just continued that record on, but a record has to have an ending.’ Then Uncivil War happened and then, of course, all hell broke loose in the world in 2020. There was so much more to be said because of it. So, it just happened.” America’s Child and Uncivil War had some strong messages which continue in the latest album, Done Come Too Far, a title that would sit happily with Mavis and Pops Staples. “She’s a huge influence, her and Pops,” admits Shemekiah, “because they were saying things that needed to be said during their time. I really love that, and I appreciated that about them. I appreciated that. But what I really love about these albums, all three of them, is I feel like we are dealing with the issues because you need to deal with things in order for there to be change made. So, we’re dealing with things, but these albums are just so hopeful, that things can get better and change. That’s what I love.” “We’ve been through way too much to turn back now,” she adds. “We’ve got a whole lot more that we can do. I mean, we’re still fighting the same things that we’ve been fighting. It’s a shame. And, of course, there’s people with all different opinions. At some point, I feel like here, everybody stopped having conversations and just started fighting. I’m trying to bring back the conversations. From this conversation you’re going to get to know me better because that’s what naturally happens when you talk. But I think people are so hell bent on just fighting and getting their point across that they stop listening. We got to bring that back. “We have to get the communication back. I think there’s just so much anger. That’s because people stopped communicating and started getting on social media and

watching too much TV and stuff like that. I think about how blessed I am to have travelled all over this world and that I’ve been able to go out and meet people spend six weeks in a Muslim country, go all over Europe, go to Australia, I’ve been to Iraq and Kuwait - and it’s just amazing. Humans are amazing, once we get a chance and get to know them. So many people don’t get that opportunity. So, we need more togetherness.”

Done Come Too Far is available on Alligator records through Only Blues Music.

Talking of communication there is a song on the album called ‘The Talk’, which deals with the Black Lives Matter issue. “My little guy is five,” says Shemekiah. “He’ll be six Christmas Eve and I constantly tell him, ‘Discipline’s going to save your life one day.’ I haven’t necessarily had the talk, my husband and I, but I remind him. Change needs to happen.” On an even more serious side, ‘The Dolls Are Sleeping’ is a really powerful song dealing with sexual abuse. “I mean, it’s a situation, a very uncomfortable one,” says Copeland, “that a lot of people, men and women, have experienced. I talk to more and more people who have experienced it and it makes me so sad, but it’s happened so much.” “I think it is difficult because you want to put things out in a way that people can take any information and accept it,” she replies when I ask if it was difficult to write about the subject. “I mean, it’s always tough with things like that.” On ‘Dumb It Down’ she sings, ‘To move on up, you’ve got to dumb it down’, perhaps referring to the media (and maybe the music industry). “We’re living in this reality TV world, where the most popular people are reality TV stars,” says Copeland. “That’s not good.” The final track on Done Come Too Far is ‘Nobody But You’, written by Shemekiah’s father, the late Johnny Copeland, who encouraged her to join him on stage when she was in her early teens. “He was an amazing,” she says. “My dad wrote like a country artist, sang like a gospel preacher, and played guitar like a blues man. So, he was just an incredible artist and I miss him so much. I want to continue to do some of his songs, so he’s never forgotten. My dad was super present, even though he was touring often. Thank God for my mom and my big brother. But he was present. He was always calling. He was always checking in. When he was home, he was very present. But it was awesome growing up with music in the house all the time. I had music just all the time in the house. It was wonderful.”

Photo by Taylor Grace 34

THE MAN FROM

Charley Crockett is one of Americana’s fastest rising stars, but his overnight success has taken ten years. By Brian Wise

istening to Charley Crockett sing is like being taken back fifty or so years in a musical time machine. Hear this rich baritone with its slight Texan twang and it’s easy to believe that Crockett could have been a major country music star in another era as well. His latest album The Man From Waco, recorded with his backing band The Blue Drifters, is a blend of classic country with a voice that connects to a modern audience. It quickly scooted to No.1 on the America charts. As it is, there is no doubt that Charley Crockett is a star in the current Americana firmament. If certain other stars align it seems he is headed for even bigger things. But any success Crockett enjoys is based on a couple of decades honing his craft around the world, shifting from blues to country and exploring his influences. Whatever time he might have wasted finding himself he has made up for by releasing eleven albums since 2015, with at least three under an alter ego Lil’ G.L. including a tribute to his late friend songwriter James Hand. It was either good luck or bad luck, depending which way you look at it, that I even got to talk to Charley Crockett on my recent visit to Chattanooga’s Moon River Festival. He was scheduled to play as a headliner on the final night of the festival, held in Coolidge Park down by the Chattanooga River. [Willie Nelson had recruited him for Farm Aid along with Lukas Nelson, the Dave Matthews Band, Sheryl Crow, John Mellencamp and others in two weeks’ time]. Time was tight and the imposition of an Australian writer and broadcaster was seeming a little too much. That is until massive storm clouds started to roll in and the festival grounds were evacuated, and festival acts were postponed. A text message later and a rendezvous was organized in Crockett’s dressing room in the theatre across the road from the festival site. From the start, Charley Crockett is disarming. He looks like a musician and when he talks you can’t help being

reminded of Elvis Presley in that he is so polite and charming. The voice draws you in as he tells his story of how he was born in San Benito, Texas, (the same town as Freddy Fender), grew up tough to a single mother in nearby Los Fresnos, lived during several summers with an uncle in New Orleans and then travelled the world before settling in California, running close to the edge and finally pursuing his music fulltime. One suspects that if Charley did get into any trouble, as he has claimed, that he would be able to charm his way out of it! The Man From Waco was produced by Texas musician Bruce Robison, and recorded at The Bunker, his recording studio near Lockhart outside of Austin. Loosely a concept album, it was inspired by Crockett’s friend James Hand (who was from Waco but died two years ago). The most notable aspect of the album’s theme is really the locations and people it namechecks: Waco, Atlanta, Odessa, Trinity River, Tom Turkey (based on a Bob Dylan song), July Jackson. In many ways it is a classic country album – not the sort of country you might hear on mainstream so-called country radio in the USA these days. This is real country in the tradition of Willie, Waylon, Johnny, Dolly and Loretta. The songs float over the pedal steel elegantly. Listen to ‘I’m Just A Clown’, ‘Black Sedan’, ‘Name On The Billboard’ these are No.1 hits in some other much

fairer dimension. So, what sort of things was Crockett listening to in his childhood and youth? Obviously, when he went to New Orleans there would’ve been a lot of that sort of music there from the bars and the clubs that seeped into his system. “Most definitely,” he agrees. “My uncle listened to all that stuff. He listened to a lot of big bands. My mama listened to a lot of really great American classic stuff from Bob Dylan to Billie Holiday, Carole King, everything in between. She was very, very, very eclectic. In south Texas, you are listening to entirely Tejano music, some country music, but Tejano more specifically, which is as country as it gets. Then, of course, I was born in the ‘80s and raised in the ‘90s, and you can’t escape mainstream pop radio in the US of A, and that gets in you a little bit too. Then when I went out on the street I was able to wash myself clean with that a little bit. “I heard it said about Hank Williams this way - and I believe the same goes for me - for some people, music is a career of last resort. I say that because as an itinerant, as a drifter, I was living hand to mouth, and I was a young man and I could sleep on hard rock floors and I could stay up all night and sleep in the park in the daytime. In that way, I thought I could do it that way forever. In New York City, I did it the hard way, the really hard way: playing in parks, then on busy street corners. Those street corners were loud. They drove me down in the subway and then I played on the subway platforms. From there, I ended up playing with other musicians inside subway cars in New York City. It’s where I got my first taste of the music business when I got signed to a pop record deal down there. “But how I got to Europe was through playing all around New York City…..I met a guy from Denmark, a jazz singer by the name of Benjamin. Over the course of a year or two, Benjamin would come back and forth from Denmark to New York City. >>> 35 35

“Sometimes I like to say I was born in Texas, but I came to life on the street in Paris, France.”

Photo by Lyza Renee >>> And we struck up a friendship. Well, eventually he ended up bringing me over there to Copenhagen and I played the jazz and blues clubs and the folk clubs and stuff. Short story long, I got tired of Denmark after two or three months and with my heritage and my mama’s love for France, I decided I was dead set on going to Paris. I ended up falling into street culture in that neighbourhood. Sometimes I like to say I was born in Texas, but I came to life on the street in Paris, France.” Last year Crockett was named Emerging Artist of the Year at the Americana Honors & Awards, which is kind of ironic seeing he’d released about nine albums by then but it was a nice recognition. When did the music turn from the blues-oriented style to country music? “Well, I’m a folk singer,” answers Crockett. “If you were to really get down to the nitty gritty, I’m a folk singer, and folk music is blues and country. Everybody has a little bit different ideas, sometimes a very big difference in ideas of what that is. So, we call it country now. But I believe in most of the records that I’ve made, if you listen through all of them, mostly you’re going to hear a mix of those styles. You’re going to hear blues, country, folk, soul, traditional jazz on every record. That’s just me shining through.” One of the most interesting songs on The Man From Waco is ‘Tom Turkey’, is actually based on a demo by Bob Dylan for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. “Well, I was listening to the old session tapes, those outtakes from when he was 36

working on that Sam Peckinpah flick you’re referring to,” explains Crockett, “and I came across this little two-verse sketch, which is what mostly that whole session is. There’s very few complete songs. ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ would be the one that was most recognisable. “I’d always heard that Bob Dylan loves Billy the Kid, and I’ve become really fascinated by him too, because what we do for a living, it’s kind of a magic trick to get away with the circus life. You start feeling like you’re on the run, no matter how you cut it down, man. I just thought, ‘Man, these two verses are amazing. I’m going to finish this song.’ I probably would’ve never tried that years ago when I was first cutting my teeth on Dylan’s songs. I learned how to accompany myself and write songs primarily from Dylan when I was a teenager, first starting out on the street. “But now at this age, I thought I’d try my hand at it. The worst that could happen is they would tell me no. So, I went ahead and did it. On the tapes, when he’s actually recording, he’s telling the engineer in the control room in the window there. He’s saying, ‘Yeah, man, this one’s going to be called ‘Tom Turkey’ or ‘Tom Turkey Number Two’. I love that title, ‘Tom Turkey’. It’s an expression kind of in the old west of America of almost like a straw man or something. But it didn’t get titled that. It got titled as ‘Billy 4’, which I never knew that. But I decided that I was going to title it ‘Tom Turkey’ and had written a chorus and a verse for it. Lo and behold, however, it happened, old Bobby Dylan I guess approved it somehow or the other

and let me put it out. I didn’t expect that to happen. Like I said, I thought I’d try my hand at it, but I didn’t think that they’d let it fly. So, I’m very fortunate.” Has he had any feedback from Dylan at all? “Well, like I said, he didn’t say no,” laughs Crockett. (I guess that’s feedback in itself, isn’t it?). So, who is he Man from Waco? “He’s a fictional character,” explains Crockett. “He’s a figment of my imagination. Now, there’s plenty of people that have given me inspiration to write a story like that and make a whole record out of it, and one of those men would be James Hand, a guy who was born right there and grew up in the small town of Tokio, West, Texas, just a couple exits down the highway from where Willie Nelson is from in Abbott, Texas. “When you talk about country music, the reason that I love country music is I feel like there’s a lot of different kinds of it. But the thread that ties it all together for me is the storytelling. I don’t consider myself a good storyteller, but I am a student of that. I’m trying to tell those stories in a way that would do some justice to the people that came before me. And yeah, I just wanted to tell a Wild West story.” Is it based on his life? “Well, what do they say? Fiction is thinly veiled truth,” laughs Crockett. “Sometimes the truth is more fantastic than a lie could ever be. A life well lived is. You can’t make that up. I dare you to try.” The Man From Waco is available now.

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On a tour where Young was challenging his audience with an album’s worth of new material, perhaps with this song he was insisting one has to follow their vision, no matter the cost. Certainly, he was saying there’s more to life than money – something he certainly knew by then. “‘Don’t Be Denied’ has a lot to do with Danny, I think,” Young told McDonough. “…I think that’s the first major life-and-death event that really affected me in what I was trying to do… you kinda reassess yourself as to what you’re doing – because you realize that life is so impermanent. So, you wanna do the best youO can lylyyou’re here, to say whatever the nwhile liali’s n yourself.” rawanna O fuck say. Express ’s a Auitsistyou a On this version however, he reprieves the fourth verse, the one about business men coming to hear the “golden sound.” And the chorus, which at times during the tour he would scream: “Don’t be denied/ Don’t be denied/ Don’t be denied /No no, don’t be denied.” “Well, all that glitters isn’t gold/ I guess you’ve heard the story told/ But I’m a pauper in a naked disguise/ A millionaire through a business man’s eyes/ Oh friend of mine/ Don’t be denied.” >> The lyrics tell a version of Young’s story. Growing up in Canada, his father leaving when he was a young boy, beat up at school, dreams of stardom, leaving Canada for Hollywood, courted by “business men” who came to hear “the golden sound.” The key verse is the fifth one, especially coming as it did after the success of Harvest. Neil Young writing to himself, writing to his dead friend, writing to every wannabe rock star.

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Photo by Lester Cohen/Getty Images. Courtesy of Bob Dylan Center®

The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma,

contains 100,000 items and is the most revealing look at his artistry to date. Brian Wise spoke to Steve Jenkins, the Center’s Director.

By Brian Wise (Photos by Brian Wise unless otherwise indicated)

“He was the new Dylan before there were new Dylans.” “Here’s a guy who, whatever you think of him…….has just fearlessly, pursued….. the muse or whatever it is, his inspiration, his drive to create, to tell stories.” - Steve Jenkins

SELF PORTAIT CONTINUES OVER PAGE 39 39

t is appropriate that the Bob Dylan Center is located adjacent to the Woody Guthrie Center in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. But apart from the musical connection you might wonder why Dylan’s archives are housed here when he was born in Duluth, Minnesota, lived in New York during his formative years and now resides in Los Angeles. In 2016, those archives, numbering 100,000 items, were acquired by the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa for around $20 million (with the Kaiser foundation later buying out the university’s share). Designed by the Seattle-based firm Olson Kundig, the 29,000 square foot facility was set up for another $10 million in the former industrial building and it houses items created and owned by Dylan over seven decades. There are handwritten lyric manuscripts, previously unreleased recordings, his leather jacket from the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, never-before-seen film performances, musical instruments, rare and unseen photographs, visual art, and other items. The entrance is even graced by a wrought iron piece welded by Dylan himself. Of course, not all the items in the archive are on display and scholars are able to access much more in the library, but only through appointment. There are also rotating displays and when we visited the Center in September there was a gallery featuring the photography of Jerry Schat berg, the filmmaker and photographer who shot the cover of Dylan’s 1966 album Blonde on Blonde (and by the way Dylan insisted that the out of focus shot was used). It is a spectacular museum and not just for Dylan fans. Here is a chronicle of our lives from the last half of the last century through to the present days as seen through the perspective of Dylan’s work. I have to say that I walked away after two visits not only in awe of Dylan’s talent and accomplishments but also absolutely inspired. (But that’s another story).

Steve Jenkins. Photo by Brian Wise

Earlier this year Steve Jenkins was named Director of the Bob Dylan Center. A life-long Dylan fan he has held leadership positions at various nonprofits around San Francisco area including the University of California Press and the San Francisco Film Society/San Francisco International Film Festival. He has also served as the editor-in-chief of Artweek and has contributed hundreds of articles to publications including New York, Detour and Publishers Weekly as well as writing and editing books including City Slivers and Fresh Kills: The Films of Gordon Matta-Clark and Model Culture: James Casebere: Photographs. Steve moved to Tulsa with his partner (and their dog) and describes being director of the BDC as his ‘dream job.’ I spoke to Jenkins in his first-floor office, having spent six hours the previous day exploring the Center. You are not originally from Tulsa. You are from San Francisco. So, maybe we can start by you telling us how you managed to get what you’ve described as a ‘dream job’. I had spent the last 35 plus years in San Francisco. Having grown up in Los Angeles, moved up to Berkeley for college, and then I stayed as a happily transplanted Northern Californian for all these years. But I started to hear about what was brewing here in Tulsa with the acquisition of the Bob Dylan Archive in 2016. So, I’d been aware of this project for a number of years. My understanding was that a Center was going to be built to house this incredible collection, this archive of a hundred thousand, give or take, objects and artifacts, and never dreamed initially that there’d be a role for me in any way, but I was fascinated as a lifelong Dylanologist and major fan. Sure enough, as this project developed, I was tracking it from afar. I got to know some of the folks involved in getting everything together here and in acquiring the archive. There’s an incredible philanthropic force in town called the George Kaiser Family Foundation that’s

done so much good in Tulsa, including the opening of the Woody Guthrie Center, going on almost 10 years ago. Now here with the Bob Dylan Center. So, I made myself known as an interested party. Following many months of conversation, I was thrilled to get an offer to come and be the Director of the Center. Packed up and moved. Here I am, a happily transplanted Tulsan. You had a lot of experience in San Francisco working with non-profit organizations and community-oriented organizations, but it sounds to me like you stalked this job. You had it in mind that this is a job you wanted. Well, look, I’m a lifelong Dylan fan as I mentioned. I was an adventurous listener, even as a young kid. I benefited from having grown up in a family where music was really valued highly and we all, from early ages, had our own stereos in our own rooms and would make weekly trips to the record store. I had a mom who was very hip to great music. So, I grew up hearing Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and The Beatles, of course, and Dylan was always in the mix. As I grew up a bit and got into my teenage years, friends and I discovered Dylan really around the time that Infidels came out in 1983. I remember that being a key purchase for me and just absolutely loving that record and pouring over the lyrics and figuring out who this Joker Man figure is that Dylan’s talking about. From there on in, I just of course kept buying each new record, seeing him in concert whenever I could, delving into the Sixties work, which is just so mind blowing, at whatever age you discover it. Dylan has always been there as a very strong presence and pointed me in the direction of so much other music that I love. Along the way, I carved out a so-called career and nonprofit arts within The Bay area. We did museum work and curating a lot around photography, which is big interest, got into the film festival world. That’s a huge area of

Photo by Lester Cohen/Getty Images. Courtesy of Bob Dylan Center®

interest for me, both experimental film and narrative and documentary. Everything added up apparently to making me, as I say, the well qualified lucky guy who got the call to come and help steward the Dylan archives here at the Bob Dylan Center. It’s interesting, you say he discovered Bob’s music through Infidels, because that is not a period that was very highly thought of by critics, but there are some fantastic songs on those so-called ‘Christian’ albums. They were, I think, unfairly criticised when they were released. Well, yes. It’s, I think, purposefully titled Infidels, because it really announced what seemed to be the end of that so-called born again, period. You had the trilogy of albums preceding it, Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love. I think… the message was suddenly so surprising and shocking to longtime listeners. What is this? Dylan’s embracing mainstream religion. He’s proselytizing. I don’t want to be preached at. I want ambiguity. I want uncertainty. Or going back even further, I want direct social statement and protest music. The born-again trilogy was none of those things. It seemed to really be espousing a particular world of view, a particular religion. I think because of the hubbub around that the music did get ignored. But ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ certainly, I think, made it onto the radio in those years. The next two records I think were largely overlooked. If you go back now, I would say Shot of Love in particular is really strong. I’ve been listening a lot during this summer heat in Tulsa, which can be pretty intense, to the lovely song ‘In The Summertime’, which cools things down, both temperature wise and just maybe in temperament. So, there’s a lot of wonderful stuff there. Infidels though, I think show Dylan embracing a different side of things and dealing a little more head on with matters of politics, matters of the heart. I guess I was the

Photo by Lester Cohen/Getty Images. Courtesy of Bob Dylan Center®

Photo by Lester Cohen/Getty Images. Courtesy of Bob Dylan Center® right age. I think I turned 16 then and it just spoke to me. Now in this job you, being a Dylan fan and aware of the fanaticism of some Dylan followers, would be aware of this extra responsibility on you, wouldn’t you? Did that weigh heavily, or did you embrace it? You would’ve got a lot of feedback. I think it’s something that all of us on staff are very aware of: that this is a figure that a lot of people worldwide feel very, very strongly about. Feel they have strong personal connections to, even if it’s a onesided relationship, as all these relationships with the various musicians and our personal pantheons are. We spend a lot of time thinking about a handful of figures, be it Dylan, be it, I’ll name a couple of my others: Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, Paul Weller. We feel as if we know so much about these artists, they have spoken so directly to us through their music. They are blissfully unaware of our particular existence. In Dylan’s case though, of course there’s a whole cadre of folks who are really close into Dylan’s studies. There are symposia, there are departments at universities, there are more shelves of books by and about Dylan than we even have room for currently and many more being added to the shelves.

There are the collectors who are very important to us. There are the folks who were sneaking in tape recorders and cameras to shows who at the time were committing misdemeanors who are now somewhat embraced retroactively as heroes, because these are folks who manage to capture often in quite good quality, recordings of shows, which otherwise would’ve been lost to history and just mere lists of dates and venues. But now we’ve got, thanks to their skill at getting around security guards, really wonderful footage. So yes, they all have strong opinions as we do on staff and that as it should be, we should care deeply about this. If there’s good natured argument around the meaning of this or that, or why did we include one artifact and not another, why did we choose ‘Not Dark Yet’, and ‘The Man In Me’ is two of the six songs that we go deep into on the first floor gallery, instead of ‘All Along The Watchtower’ and ‘My Back Pages’, whatever it might be. You’d pick your favorite. So, everyone in this Dylan world has their strong opinions but ultimately, we are united in our eternal fascination with this multifaceted artist. Now I wrote that this center was beyond my most fervent expectations. It’s amazing. While we might not know as much about Dylan, the person, because he manages to keep his private life very much to himself. This is a complete revelation about his work. There’s an array of material here that is just incredible. Was it all set up when you arrived or how much work did you have to do setting the whole thing up and sorting through it? Well, first of all, I agree. I mean there’s material here from the archives that nobody really knew existed. The vast bulk that was being kept by Dylan, rather secretively, as he has done so much. He gives so much through his work and his art to us over 60 plus years. But you’re right, of course, he has maintained his privacy. He’s maintained a mystique, I think unlike any other contemporary artists, we know everything about everyone now. >>> 41 41

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>>> I know much more about Johnny Depp and his divorce proceedings than I ever really wanted to, as one recent example. Dylan has side stepped all of that, which I think just adds to the fascination and the mystique. In any case, the archival materials arrived in 2016. I, of course, came late to the party. So, I’ve been doing my catch up in my six months that I’ve been here, but it’s really my colleagues, very notably Mark Davidson, who’s our really brilliant Director and Curator of the Archives. It’s Mark who knows these materials inside and out. He had the pleasure and the daunting honor of unboxing materials and discovering just what had been accumulating and what Dylan and his camp decided could be acquired by us. So, Mark had the pleasure of discovering, say the Blood [On The Tracks] notebooks. These are the rare Holy Grail, if you will: pocketbooks in which Dylan was keeping and developing the lyrics and the songs that made up the Blood On The Tracks album for 1975. So, when I arrived, much on the material was in place. There had been many, many smart folks making really informed, well thought through decisions around the best possible way to display the materials. I found myself among a very sympatico group, because this is very much a curatorial approach that made sense to me. We’re really focusing on Dylan’s creativity. Here’s a guy who, whatever you think of him, I think everyone can agree. He has just fearlessly, pursued - I don’t know if he uses the term, the muse or whatever it is - his inspiration, his drive to create, to tell stories, to communicate, seemingly without worrying too much about if the audience says thanks. If he loses a few along the way, so be it. Subsequent generations seem to continue to discover him. We’re focusing on that. How has this figure, this artist done what he’s done to such a high degree of quality, not to mention quantity, for so long? So, you’ve got handwritten manuscripts where you see words and entire stands as, or versus crossed out and replaced. I mentioned ‘Jokerman’ earlier and we have 10 different versions of the ‘Jokerman’ lyric, as Dylan was developing it. Of course, that ended up as the first track on Infidels. Then he goes on the David Letterman show and plays ‘Jokerman’ with a totally different band, in a totally different style, keeping the material fresh for himself, going back. He doesn’t look back, to coin the phrase from the famous Pennebaker documentary. He doesn’t look back, although he does to look at those songs, listen to them again and refashion them, often in totally different time signatures or in a completely different style may be a rocker becomes a country we be, or a ballad becomes a charged-up punk infused guitar, heavy version, whatever it might be. So, he’s constantly refashioning himself in his work. We’re really trying to foreground that aspect of his artistry here.

You mentioned Dylan doggedly pursuing his art and his creativity. Jerry Schatzberg is talking about how, when they came back from the British tour in, what was it? 65. They went to Albert Grossman’s house at Gramercy Park and Dylan was sitting there and - I won’t repeat what he said about the critics in the audience - he just said, “I’m going to do what I want to do.” He must have only been what, 24 or 25. And that’s amazing.

It sure is to not buckle under the pressure that he was under at the time. He was the new Dylan before there were new Dylans. He’s the original new Dylan that every critic and so many listeners were just putting the weight of the world on his shoulders to be the spokesperson for a generation, a mantle that he always refused to take on. He realised very early on, I think in those heady tours, through the UK that are documented so vividly in Pennebaker’s, Don’t Look Back, just how much fame could really mess with you. And we see it time and time again, over the years with artists of a particular sensibility that are thrust into the limelight and we all as listeners, - I’m not removing myself from this tendency - you project yourself and your desires and your own, maybe, thwarted ambition onto these figures that are just so impressive because of their artistry. They speak to you in a certain way.

But this is a guy who never signed up to be the spokesman of his generation. So, I think he bowed out from some of that. Look, the motorcycle accident that took place. I’m not saying that was predetermined or anything, accidents are accidents, but when he looked back, he said he maybe was looking for a way out or just a need to slow down for a while. So, he did retreat from the limelight and hole up with Robbie Robertson and The Band and did the wonderful Basement Tapes material. It was a fruitful time and I think probably wise of him to back away from the glare of the paparazzi and the inquiries of the press, although he toyed with them very brilliantly, I think, and threw a lot of questions back in their faces. But yes, to your original point, when has he not just done his own thing? Including Christmas In The Heart, if you will, the confounding album of seasonal songs. He keeps surprising us. Look in the midst of the hardcore COVID lockdown, out of nowhere comes ‘Murder Most Foul’ that he releases. ‘Oh, here’s a little something I put together that I thought folks might like to hear.’ Well, yes, we were quite taken just for a moment there. I felt like monoculture has come back because everyone I knew stopped what they were doing to listen to ‘Murder Most Foul’, and then this brilliant, Rough and Rowdy Ways record, the Shadow Kingdom broadcast in mid 2021, the so called Never Ending Tour, 80 some dates a year and still there’s a whole slew of European shows coming up. Yes. Doggedly pursuing his own vision - and we were just so thankful that’s the case. Looking at some of this footage of Bob, when he was 20 years of age, it struck me yesterday, how mature he was for a 20-yearold - up there performing so confidently, so assured of himself. It’s amazing when you get a chance to spend a few hours watching that footage. It’s so striking, still. I’m here every day, all day and when I go home, I’m usually putting on more Dylan and it just never ceases to amaze me. I’m often struck by particular things here at the center. If I walk through our ‘Multitudes’ film presentation, which is an immersive film where you’re really put into the times, the place has even the mindset of Dylan at key moments in his life and career. So, much striking footage there. >>>

>>> I hear the opening lines of ‘Desolation Row’. They’re selling tickets to the hanging.’ It just stops me in my tracks every time. And there he was even a few years older than some of the footage where we see him really as a 20 and 21 year old. But you’re absolutely right. That self-possession, that certainty, at least as it appears, as it comes across, it just mesmerises you as a listener and a viewer with the good old ‘three chords and the truth’ strumming on the acoustic and maybe with a blast of the harmonica, the power of that, as I imagine it must have been upon its first unveiling, seems not to have abated one year older. You hear the tone and timber of his voice. You hear the way he’s using language, the cadences, all of it. It seems timeless. There are a couple of Australian connections here in the center. There’s the address and phone number of Adrian Rawlins (a poet who lived in Melbourne) from the Bob’s wallet. Then there’s Emma Swift on Elvis Costello’s Jukebox. You could probably almost do a whole section on Bob Dylan’s Australian Tour of 1966! Well, one other is up on the second-floor cinema, which contains a 45-minute program of film and video of Dylan at various points. We’ve got this absolutely barnstorming version of ‘When the Night Comes Falling From The Sky’, which got a little bit lost

in ‘80s production on the Empire Burlesque record. But then he took that to the stage with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, on that great tour, which I was lucky enough to see in Los Angeles. The Gillian Armstrong film? Yes, she did a great job, and we are looking to get all of that footage restored. I would love to have Armstrong out here at some point to present that material and talk about what that filming must have been like. So, there’s another Australian connection for you. We’re getting close to, I think about 20 different countries of we’ve had visitors from all 50 states of the U.S. here through the doors already….So, people were finding all kinds of ‘Easter eggs’, if you will, that tie them back to their own origins and their own origin story around Dylan. One of my favorite Dylan songs is one he never officially released on a studio album, Red River Shore, a song that I love. If I wanted to study that and find out about it, you have a library there. Could I make a booking to come and have a look through the archives and see what I can find it about the writing of that song? Scholars and academics and journalists are welcome to apply to access the archive. We’ve had folks even while we were off before the center was officially opened and the archives have been living in another part of town over near the Gilcreace Museum here in Tulsa. We’ve had a number of scholars

and academics come through and utilising the materials in the archive to further their own books and articles and documents refilmed. So, those opportunities exist through a carefully vetted process and white gloves are mandatory.

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THE WHOLE WORLD IN A

Photo by Michael Goldberg

A An Interview with Critic Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan, His New Dylan Book, the Role of the Critic and Much More. By Michael Goldberg

reil Marcus writing or talking about Bob Dylan is the holy grail. He is the leading authority on Dylan, and the best known and most respected rock critic in the U.S. (and probably the world). His first in-depth book about rock music, Mystery Train (the title coming from one of Elvis’ Sun Records recordings), published in 1975, established him as a leading authority on rock music, and his stature has only grown since then. David Cantwell wrote in a December 2015 profile of Marcus published in the New Yorker, that nearly as soon as Mystery Train was published it was “short-listed as ‘the best’ or ‘the finest’ or ‘most compelling’ book ever written about popular music…”

After the book was first published, Frank Rich wrote in the Village Voice, “Mystery Train is determinedly and proudly in the tradition of such ground-breaking works of American cultural criticism as Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature and F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (the first two of which Marcus draws from in his work); as his predecessors sought to understand Poe’s nightmares or the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in terms of our most substantial national myths, so Marcus attempts to place such songs as Randy Newman’s “Sail Away,” The Band’s “Across the Great Divide,” and Elvis Presley’s early efforts for Sam Phillips at Sun Records into the same broad cultural context.” Although Mystery Train might have seemed to some to be about a handful of musicians— Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley—the book is about much more than that. As Marcus states in the intro, the book is “an attempt to broaden the context in which the music is heard; to deal with rock ’n’ roll not as youth culture, or counterculture, but simply as American culture. … [These musicians] share unique musical and public personalities, enough ambition to make even their failures interesting, and a lack of critical commentary extensive or committed enough to do their work justice. In their music and in their careers, they share a range and a depth that seem to crystalize naturally in visions and versions of America: its possibilities, limits, openings, traps. Their stories are hardly the whole story, but they can tell us how much the story matters.” This was the beginning of where Greil Marcus would go for the next 47 years, finding America, and so much more, within a handful of songs, sometimes a single song. Born during the summer of 1945 in San Francisco, Marcus grew up in Menlo Park, a suburb south of the city; he attended U.C. Berkeley, where he earned an undergraduate degree in American studies. He saw Bob Dylan for the first time in 1963, when Joan Baez brought the determinedly scruffy singer/songwriter onstage at a show that took place in “a field in New Jersey.” One of the songs Dylan sang that day was “With God on Our Side” and, as Marcus told me during our interview, he was “absolutely stunned.” It was the beginning of an obsession with Dylan and his music.

In 1968 Marcus wrote a review of an album by the Who, and, unsolicited, sent it to Rolling Stone, the rock magazine that had begun a year earlier; two weeks later it was published in the record reviews section. Soon he was on-staff and spent six months as Rolling Stone’s record reviews editor; he lost the job due to a dispute with publisher/ editor-in-chief Jann Wenner over Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait; Marcus infamously began his review of the album this way: “What is this shit?” Over the years Marcus wrote for Creem, the Village Voice, New West, Artforum, Interview, Wire, Salon, The Believer and many other publications including the New York Times and the New Yorker. He has written 19 books and edited another six. Perhaps his most remarkable book (and a favourite of mine) is Lipstick Traces, which he spent nine years researching and writing; as Andy Beckett wrote in The Independent, “Lipstick Traces began as a book about the Sex Pistols; then expanded crazily back in time to Paris in 1968, Dada in 1917, the French Revolution, and ultimately to libertarian heresies in the Middle Ages. Marcus found himself writing ‘a secret history of the 20th century,’ a search for the origins and story of the nihilistic impulse that the Sex Pistols had stumbled upon.” Marcus wrote a monthly column, “Real Life Rock,” for New West magazine from 1978 to 1983; that column combined an essay with a top ten at the end. Three years later, Marcus was asked to take the top ten and turn it into a 700-word column for the Village Voice, which he titled, “Real Life Rock Top Ten.” The column “had room for anything,” Marcus wrote in his introduction to “Real Life Rock,” a book that collects every column he wrote from 1986 through September 2014 (a second book, “More Real Life Rock,” was published earlier this year), “music, movies, fiction, critical theory, ads, television shows, remarks overheard waiting in line, news items, contributions from correspondents… treating the column as a forum or a good site for gossip, or the everyday conversation it has always wanted to be.” Over time, the “Real Life Rock Top Ten” moved to Salon, The Believer, Interview, Rolling Stone and some other publications. Most recently, Marcus wrote it for The Los Angeles Review of Books, where it was published until February 2022; he was about to move it to Substack when he became ill; he has been recovering for many months and the future of the column was up in the air when I spoke to him in mid-September. >>> 47

>>> His most recent book, Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs (Yale University Press), was published on October 11, 2022. It’s the fourth book Marcus has written about Dylan, the others being The Old Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, and Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings, 19682010. Additionally, a third of his book Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations is devoted to Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” Folk Music is unlike any other book about Bob Dylan, and other than Dylan’s own memoir, Chronicles, it gets as close as may be possible to who Dylan the singer, songwriter, recording artist and performer is, and what can be found within his recorded songs, and sometimes many different versions of the same song as performed in concert. As Marcus discusses the seven songs of the book’s title, he turns up numerous details about Dylan including recordings that I was unaware of, and that you may be unaware of as well. For instance, he discusses the 31 live performances of “Jim Jones” that Dylan did during 1993 (which one of Marcus’ readers had burned onto three CDs and sent to him); how the way Dylan performs “Jim Jones” changes from night to night, and how he eventually finds his way deep into the song. “And then, on February 9, still in London, it’s all there,” Marcus writes. “Though in the previous nights the song could drag on for nearly seven minutes, here it’s barely five, yet it seems to unfold more slowly—and that’s because for the first time there is a sense of a story being told, of something present to unfold.” 48

One footnote explores a rehearsal session with Dylan, Keith Richards and Ron Wood that took place shortly before they performed at Live Aid in 1985. That session, which could be heard on YouTube at the time I wrote this, finds the three men jamming on “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and the old Appalachian song, “Little Maggie.” They talk among themselves, apparently unhindered by any thought that their conversation and jam session would eventually be made public. Marcus quotes the music critic Paul Nelson: “Dylan’s talent evoked such an intense degree of personal participation from both his admirers and detractors that he could not be permitted so much as a random action. Hungry for a sign, the world used to follow him around, just waiting for him to drop a cigarette butt. When he did they’d sift through the remains, looking for significance. The scary part is they’d find it—and it really would be significant.” And then Marcus writes: “So, this is a book of cigarette butts.” It’s also a book packed with often-novel ideas. Every page seems to reveal something new, a fresh way of considering Dylan or one of his songs, or a song he sang, or a song that influenced him. In the “Jim Jones” chapter, Marcus tells us quite a bit about the folk singer/historian Mike Seeger (Pete Seeger’s brother) and how in the early ’60s Dylan tried for a while to play the old folk songs Seeger played as good as Seeger but decided that was pointless. “He [Mike Seeger] played them as good as it was possible to play them…” Marcus quotes Dylan writing in Chronicles. “The thought occurred to me that I’d have to write my own folk songs, ones Mike didn’t know.” And then Marcus writes: “And so he did; that is Bob Dylan’s practical biography. He rewrote the songbook and then the book took on a new shape and all the credited sources that might have been printed on the title page disappeared until only one was left…” I’ve known Greil Marcus since the late ’70s, when he was writing for New West (and, at the request of an editor there to whom I had pitched a profile of the Flamin’ Groovies, I called him up to make sure he wasn’t planning to write about the Groovies; he wasn’t). Since then, we’ve stayed in occasional contact; I consider him a friend. He wrote the foreword to my upcoming book, Addicted To Noise: The Music Writings of Michael Goldberg (Backbeat Books). I’ve read nearly all of Marcus’ books, and Folk Music is brilliant. He told me he thinks it’s his best, and I agree with him. I met with Marcus on September 16, 2022, at his home on a quiet, tree-shaded street in Oakland, not far from the borderline

that separates Oakland from Berkeley. We talked for an hour and a half in his basement office, which, as might be expected, contains shelves of CDs, DVDs, records and books. A hardbound copy of “Folk Music,” which was not yet available at the time of our conversation, was close at hand. He was wearing a black sweater, jeans and his round tortoise shell glasses.

Michael Goldberg: You’ve previously written three books about Bob Dylan. Why did you want to write a fourth book about him? Greil Marcus: Well, I didn’t. I thought the idea of me writing another book about Bob Dylan was ridiculous and pointless. You can only write so many books about one figure before becoming sort of a self-parody. That was my attitude a few years ago. And then I was approached by the person who runs the Yale Jewish Lives series. And that’s a series that’s been going on for quite a number of years and it’s been really successful. They find an author to write about some significant Jewish figure and write a short biography that is new and different and called for because the writer has an original perspective. That’s the concept. So, they’ll do Albert Einstein. David Ben-Gurion. These very eminent figures. And then they start going further afield. Maybe Sarah Bernhardt. All kinds of people and it really opens up. And so, I was asked to do a book on Dylan as a Jewish life. And these books have sold well, they’ve been reviewed well, there are people who follow the series and buy them all. So, it really has a following.

So, I sat down with the person who approached me and I said, “I don’t really see the point of this.” There have been dozens of Bob Dylan biographies. Some are good, most of them are terrible, most of the people who write them can’t write, some people do remarkable original research, some people cobble together what other people have said but all in all what it comes down to are there are certain stations of the cross that you have to account for. These various turning points in his career. And it’s been—there is a narrative,

there is a fixed story already that any biography would have to address and what’s the point. It’s been done; it’s been done to death. So, I said, “No, I’m not the right person, I don’t even think it’s a good idea.” But then I thought about it a little bit, and I thought, what if you organized it around a limited number of songs without any notion of what those songs would be. And you’d ask questions like, What sort of person would it be who could write these songs? And what do these songs tell you about the kind of person

needed to write them? So, you focus it all on the songs. You get to the question of who this person is and where he’s been and what he’s done without addressing that directly. You don’t go into private life. My talisman for this book was something he said in a short interview in USA Today, where he said, “Look, I’ve been married a bunch of times. I’ve never tried to hide that”—which isn’t really true but he’s talking, I’m not talking. He said, “I just don’t advertise my life,” which struck me as a very eloquent and lovely thing to say. >>>

Photo by John Shearer

>>> “I don’t advertise my life.” He said, “I write songs, I make records, I play on stage, that’s it. The rest is nobody’s business.” And I said, “Yeah, the rest is nobody’s business, certainly not my business.” It’s not something I’m interested in. I don’t care about Bob Dylan’s inner life. The only way you’re going to capture Bob Dylan’s inner life is in a novel like Don DeLillo wrote with Greater Jones Street. I’m not a novelist. That’s not my purview, that’s not my territory. So, I said, “This is a person who writes songs, who makes records, who plays on stage—those will be the parameters of the biography I’m going to write.” And when I focus on a given song, say it’s “Ain’t Talkin’” from 2006, I’m going to look at many, many live performances of that song to see how it changes, how it grows, how maybe he loses interest in it, how it begins to fade. Whatever it turns out to be. I’ll follow the performances and I’ll try to tell the story that they tell. And that will be a story of both the person who created the song, who is singing it, but also the song as a thing in itself, that makes certain demands, that asks to be sung more quietly or more loudly, whatever it might be in a given moment. So, I went back to the guy and I said, “What if I approach it this way?” And he let it slip that they had already commissioned a Dylan biography and it had been delivered and they rejected it. That’s a fairly unprofessional thing to do, to let that go. I was kind of taken aback by that. I said, “You got a book and you turned it down?” That’s very unusual for a publisher. They might say, “We have problems here. We’d like you to go back and look at that.” But it’s unusual for an author who has some reputation, which I assumed the person they had in mind had, to just be rejected. Then he let it slip who the person was. I later found out, looking at an earlier Jewish Lives book of Hank Greenberg the baseball player, that they had listed “Coming Soon: Bob Dylan by Ron Rosenbaum”. Ron Rosenbaum’s a very eminent journalist who has interviewed Dylan a number of times, did a Playboy interview with him in 1978, so that’s a very comprehensive interview and I thought, “You’ve got a book from Ron Rosenbaum, who I know very slightly, who’s a great journalist. How bad could it be?” Anyway, he liked my idea. He took it to the editorial board, but they were feeling so burned by whatever the problem had been that they didn’t want to take a chance on something odd. So, in December 2019 I was meeting with my publisher at Yale to talk about a book that I had coming out and he said, “What’s next, what are you going to do, what do you want to do?” I said, “There isn’t anything really.” But I told him this story that I just told you and I added more. I mean I had written up a 50

précis for the book—two, three pages—but it included the story of my grandparents and the 1933 San Jose lynching which he found just riveting. He said, “Whatever the Jewish Lives series does with Yale has nothing to do with what I do. I want to publish this book. I’ll just do it with Yale.” I said, “OK,” ’cause by then I didn’t want to give it up. I had an idea; I wanted to pursue it. So that’s how the book came about. It wasn’t that difficult to write. I did it kind of slowly for me and I knew when I finished it, it was good. It basically had no editing—I mean the copy edit took months and it was every single sentence scrutinized. The Yale copy editor I worked with is a real editor. I mean he fact-checks everything, he questions sentences, he makes fun of you, he writes emails where he’s basically throwing up his hands and saying, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” It’s a very contentious, wonderful process. And I knew, for what it’s worth, this is the best I can do now. I think it’s my best book. And it’s good to feel that way about a new book. But I know that I can’t write better than I did in this book. And I was surprised that at this age I could still do that. Goldberg: It’s interesting that you came 180 degrees around. You went from, there’s no point, to where you had this idea that there was something new that could be done. Marcus: Well, yeah. I managed to think of a way to tell the story without talking about “Dylan goes electric at Newport,” “Dylan becomes a born-again Christian”—I mean those things are mentioned in stray sentences, they’re not examined. I didn’t feel the responsibility to explain his life. And that’s why the book begins with a two-page chapter called “Biography,” where I simply run down the arc of his life up to this point and I felt in two pages you could really do that. You could say, here is a person who was born at a certain time, he did certain things, this is why we’re interested, that’s that. Goldberg: What’s so special about Bob Dylan? Marcus: Well, I’ve always said, I’ve always believed, that it’s the voice, it’s the inflection, it’s the way of dramatizing small things, enormous things, small things expand in the way he sings about them, enormous things like the meaning of life or the nature of freedom are brought down to earth in the way that he sings about those things. It goes back to the first time I ever saw him. In 1963 at a Joan Baez show in New Jersey, an open-air rotating stage show where she brings out this guy whose name I didn’t even catch and he sings two or three songs, one of which is “With God On Our Side” and I’m just absolutely stunned. He sings that song once and it’s like I’ve memorized the entire song, or rather, the entire song simply lodges itself

in my memory, I didn’t make any effort to memorize it, it’s just there. It has come across that directly and that powerfully because of the modesty and restraint and regret and cynicism he’s able to convey as he sings this song. It’s not a text, it’s not a statement, it’s an event, it’s an act. And anybody else could have sung that same song and have no effect at all. It is a set of propositions, it is an argument, so anybody can make that argument, but not anybody can make that argument come to life and make you feel like you’ve already lived out that song because you went to a public school and learned public school history, which is what that song is about. This is what we learn in school about the modern world. So that’s what’s so special. Yeah, he writes songs that nobody else could write. He did that in the early sixties, he’s still doing it today. There’s no question about that. He has a purchase on the world. He’s able to play with the world with its fears, with its desires, with terror and fulfillment and gratification. All those things come into play. But were Bob Dylan to die tomorrow and make no more records and sing no more songs, his legacy would continue and people would continue to sing his songs and record them but they would lose one, two, three dimensions. They would be tributes, they would be footnotes, they would not be capable of bringing something new into the world, which is what he does. I mean I said I was surprised that at my age I could write as well as I think I have in this book.

But Bob Dylan, in 2020, when he was 79, puts out “Murder Most Foul,” which is not like anything anyone has ever heard from him before in any way, and it becomes—and who knows how Billboard calculates these things these days because it was never released as an object until it became part of the Rough and Rowdy Ways album, but it wasn’t released as a single—but it became the number one single in the country, simply by the number of hits it got on his website and then all the other places where it

immediately popped up. Anyway, you can tell I’m very loquacious so stop me if you want to ’cause I can go on forever about anything. Goldberg: Early on in the book you write that because “in the songs he sings Dylan can make anyone’s life his own, it calls the whole notion of biography or even biographical significance into question.” Can you elaborate? Marcus: Yeah. Let’s put it this way. [San Francisco Chronicle movie critic] Mick LaSalle, who I think is a truly great critic, and he is the most incisive critic I know, he can say so much, he can make a complex argument in a very few sentences. And so, he’s talking about the Johnny Cash bio-flick of a number of years ago [“Walk the Line”] where Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny Cash. It really is a tremendous performance, a real inhabiting. You get the feeling about two-thirds of the way through that Joaquin Phoenix feels like he really is Johnny Cash. I don’t mean that we think he is; he thinks he is.

And Mick LaSalle says, the problem with the movie just has to do with the limits of the biographical film. There are real severe limits there. They boil things down to a simple notion of causation. I’m saying this in much more words than Mick did. He says, Are Ray Charles and Johnny Cash both great artists because their brothers died? Is that what really warped them and impelled them to live a larger life than most people do? And he said, Yeah, sure, that makes sense. And then he says, But of course not. That has nothing to do with it. You don’t find causation. It doesn’t work that way. So, you aren’t going to find causation if you are alive to the rhythms of life. You cannot say that this incident in Bob Dylan’s life, this trauma, this decision, this break, whatever it might be, is the reason he was able to write with such stark and shocking imagery in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”— “I saw ladders covered with water…” Ladders covered with water? What does that mean? I mean it doesn’t mean anything, but it’s a fearsome image

Emmett Till, who Bob Dylan wrote about in his song, “The Death of Emmett Till.” The song was recorded several times by Dylan in the early ‘60s.

and that’s what it’s meant to be. And is it because Bob Dylan only had one younger brother instead of sisters and brothers all over the place that he wrote that song? Of course not. It has nothing to do with that. And has nothing to do with his inner life. It has nothing to do with him lying awake at night reliving some mean thing his father once said to him and suddenly these verses came out. It could have happened that way. Who knows? Who cares? You know?

The creative act is a mystery even to the person to whom it happens. I mean Dylan once said, he’s talking to Robert Hilburn about writing “Like a Rolling Stone,” and he said, “It’s like a ghost came and gave me that song. I didn’t write it. It was just given to me.” Well, any person who’s ever been involved in creative activity knows that feeling. That’s simply part of the creative process where things—if you’re a singer, if you’re a painter, if you’re a writer—things appear on the canvas, something comes out of your mouth, something appears on the page and you think, “Where did that come from?” I didn’t conceptualize that. I didn’t work that sentence out. I didn’t even think of it. It just showed up. Who wrote that? I didn’t write that. Everybody knows that feeling. So, you weren’t going to find a source for that other than the creative process itself. I mean Dylan himself has often said, “You have to put yourself in a semi-conscious mode, you have to put yourself almost in a trance state so can receive these external messages that tell you what you’re doing and how you should do it. You have to put yourself in a state of being open and receptive”. In order to write this book, I read one biography, which is my favourite Dylan biography, which I’ve read before by Howard Sounes called Down the Highway. I think it’s the most interesting and original and unburdened of the biographies that I’ve seen and might be the only one I’ve read all the way through other than Anthony Scaduto’s Dylan that came out in 1972. >>> 51

>>> And then I read every book I could find collecting interviews with Dylan. And I read them through, and I made notes, but I pretty much absorbed pretty much everything Bob Dylan said about anything. So, I had this reserve of his own understanding of his own work at hand. And along with listening, that’s really all I needed. Goldberg: This is a really interesting thing you wrote. “The engine of his songs is empathy: the desire and ability to enter other lives, even to restage and re-enact the dynamic others have played out, in search of different endings.” Was that just obvious to you? Have you always felt that way about the songs he writes and sings? Marcus: I had felt that way, but I didn’t conceptualize it until I read him say, “I can see myself in others.” He said that at a press conference in Rome in 2002. So that’s a long ways into his life and into his career. But even when he was first in Greenwich Village and he’s hanging around the Folk Center that Izzy Young has and he’s getting his mail there and he’s trying out instruments and looking up old sheet music, you know, learning, ’cause it’s like a library, it is a center of knowledge. And everybody else is coming by and they’re swapping songs and whatever they do. And he talks to Izzy Young, who makes notes on this. He says, “You know I just had this great idea. I’m going to write a song about Emmett Till.” Now that’s interesting. Emmett Till was lynched in 1955 and here it is, 1961, and people are still very focused on Emmett Till as an event that’s happening in the moment even though it’s six years in the past. He says, “I’m going to write a song about Emmett Till in the first person and I’m going to pretend I am him.” In other words, he’s going to sing, he’s going to be Emmett Till down in Money, Mississippi, he’s going to be Emmett Till while he’s being beaten to death, he’s going to be Emmett Till after he’s dead and still thinking about what happened to me and what is this about. You can begin to imagine what an interesting song maybe that might be, which he never did write. He wrote a song about Emmett Till, about a terrible thing that happened down in Mississippi, but it was a straight third person narrative. What an interesting idea. And then he says I’m writing a song about the death of Robert Johnson, this is after he first hears Robert Johnson in 1961, he’s never heard of him before, most people hadn’t at that point. And I thought, maybe he’s going to write a first-person song about Robert Johnson too. What an interesting idea. That’s what he finally ends up doing with “Murder Most Foul,” where he’s singing out of the mind of JFK, after he’s been shot for the first time. After he’s taken the first bullet but isn’t dead yet. And he’s thinking, “What’s going on? What’s happening? Do you know who I am? 52

It’s just incredible that it takes him all those years to fulfill that fantasy of a song, from Emmett Till to JFK, from the least powerful person in the United States to the most powerful person in the United States and both of them subject to being killed at any moment at any time. Just amazing. So, I always thought—I never heard “Like a Rolling Stone” as this spiteful putdown of some obnoxious rich girl who needed to be put in her place. Now I know lots of people have heard this as just that. I never heard it that way. It just never communicated to me that way. It was always somebody saying, “You’re in trouble. You need help. You don’t understand what’s going on. Other people might have a better idea of what’s going to happen to you and if you listen to them, you might be better off.” It’s not about any specific person, it’s just about anybody who suddenly finds themselves with the ground beneath their feet has disappeared and they’re floundering and there’s no connection that can be made and everything that you ever relied on has betrayed you, what are you going to do? How does it feel? It feels terrifying and by the end of the song it feels absolutely liberating. That’s what the song is about to me. So, it is a song about empathy. Dylan himself said, “I was trying to save somebody from drowning.” And, well, OK, even if he didn’t say that you can hear that. But, like I said, I read through all these interviews. Hundreds of different kinds of interviews and I followed Dylan’s cues. In a way I let him tell the story. Not just quoting from [Dylan’s memoir] Chronicles, which I tried to do as little as possible, but it was difficult because the book is so alive, so ridden, it is just as rich in its imagery as his songs. That party at the beginning of the book. The grand Greenwich Village party that he walks the reader into. There’s so and so and here’s this person and here’s that person and I remember reading it, this is too good to be true. This is 20 different parties over three years and they’re parties Dylan went to and parties that he heard about and he’s all putting them into this one fantastic set piece. I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe it was one party but that’s how it came across to me and it was more wonderful to me that it was in a sense fiction than if it had simply been a report on this great party I got to go to. Who knows? Goldberg: What do you hope people will get from reading the book? Marcus: I hope they have fun reading it. I don’t have ambitions for my books. I don’t want them to teach people anything. I don’t want people to come away feeling different about themselves. I think life is interesting and it’s the writer’s job to make it more interesting than it might otherwise appear to be. And if people have fun reading it, if they

find it interesting, then they will find other things in their life more interesting. Not necessarily a Bob Dylan song. One of the truest things about influence, about effect that a creative work has on another person was said by Bob Rosenthal, who was Allen Ginsberg’s secretary for 20 years. There was a book [The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later] that came out a number of years ago, and it brought together god knows how many writers to write about “Howl,” the Ginsberg poem, and just about every single thing in that book begins with, “The first time I read ‘Howl’ I realized I had to be a poet or I had to be a novelist, I had to be this creative person, I had to give voice to what was in me and give it to the world” and it was just unbearable, the pompousness and the pretentiousness of this and at the very end, Bob Rosenthal addresses this. He says, “People are always saying, ‘Oh, I read “Howl” and I was supposed to go to law school, or I was supposed to go into my father’s plumbing business and I realized no, I’m a poet. I have things to say. And so, I became a poet.’” And he said, “If the poem is liberating, that really is a very narrow view of what it might do. Maybe it’s that poem that made you become a lawyer, or for that matter, a good plumber. I mean, maybe people thought you were worthless, you were never going to amount to anything, you were just a lump of clay that no one ever bothered to mould into anything. And you read that poem and you said, ‘No, I’m going to go out and live in the world. And the way I’m going to do that is I’m going to go to law school. And I’m going to learn how the world works and I’m going to see what I can do to become part of that.’ That’s a great ambition. So instead of turning someone from the conformist, soulless life of becoming a lawyer as opposed to a poet, maybe this poem helps you become a lawyer.”

And I thought, that is so great, that is really wonderful. That is really an open spirit and it speaks for the narrow, the small souls that so many so-called poets carry around inside themselves. That is an expansive vision of life. That is not a shrunken vision of life. And so, you know, if people read an interesting book it will spark their interest in other things. Not necessarily having anything to do with what the book is about. I hope people read the book and get to the end and they say, “That was something. I’ve been somewhere reading this book. Now I can put it aside and maybe the day is 10% bigger than it would have been before.” Goldberg: What is the job of the critic and what value do critics bring to the work they are writing about? Marcus: Well, they’re able to dive into stuff that people care about without necessarily even knowing that they care about. Whether it’s a political speech, whether it’s a historical event taking place in our present, whether it’s a book or a movie or a song, a creative act in the world, and dive as deeply into that as they can. And say, This is what’s happening here, this is what might be happening here. The whole world can be found in this song, in this painting. You’re never going to get to the bottom of it but you can swim in it, you can make it define your world for a moment. And the reason other people don’t necessarily approach these things that way is because they’re busy. They’re doing other things. They have other kinds of jobs. They have other demands on their time. Whereas the critic, that is his or her job. That’s what they’re supposed to be doing. So, they can devote all their time to it and go as far as they can. You have critical events in your life, anybody does. The last time I was in Venice [Italy] I went to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, as I had done any number of times before. I stood in front of the Jackson Pollock painting “Alchemy” from 1947. I’d seen it before, but I’d never really looked at it. So, I walked up to this painting, which is as dense a Pollock painting as there exists on earth, and I walked up to it and I was drawn in by its gravity, by the weight of detail of paint on the canvas. And it began to seem, as random or as thrown as the paint might have been—here’s the yellow and here’s the red and slop here and slop there and all of my fingers, however it was made—everything in the painting began to seem intentional, began to seem composed or made. So, I said to myself, OK, I’m just going to look at one square inch of this painting—and it’s a big painting—and see what I see. So, I spent about half an hour looking at a square inch, and I realized it would take me my entire life, or maybe longer than I have, to see the whole painting, to look at the

whole painting. That not just the world, the universe was in this painting and the universe is unlimited. There’s no way you’re ever going to map the universe and find out everything that’s in it. It’s not going to happen and that’s because of human limitations and also because the universe is constantly creating new stars and new planets and you can’t keep up with it, and it’s racing away from itself, you’re never going to catch up with the universe unless it implodes and goes back to the one tiny bit of carbon that it started out as before the big bang. That’s what a critic does. A critic can say, I’m going to devote the next year of my life to looking at this painting or listening to this song and I’m going to see how far I can go with it. Other people have other things to do with their lives but they might find it interesting to follow someone else doing what they don’t have time to do in regards to something that has touched them too. Goldberg: Well, you do that. You’ve been doing that for quite a while. You certainly have been doing that since you started writing about certain songs and going really deep into them and you did that back in your Basement Tapes book. But my impression is most critics don’t do that. Marcus: Some people do, some people don’t. I don’t know why other people do what they do, why they don’t go farther or how they go so far. Again, going back to Mick LaSalle, he wrote a paragraph about Brokeback Mountain, and in that paragraph, and it wasn’t a long paragraph, was an explication of the ethos of what it means to be an American. That if you can’t say who you are then you’re not free and you’re supposed to be free in America, you’re supposed to have the right to say whatever you want to say and if you can’t do that, somehow you’re not an American. Is that your fault? Is that because someone has prohibited you from living a full life? Well, you have to think about those things. So, I think Mick has the ability to go absolutely down to the bottom and not necessarily have to write a whole book about it. I don’t know why other people do what they do. I know that some critics, like Tony Scott in the New York Times, can occasionally come up with a sentence or two sentences that illuminate a film and take it into the larger world. Just in a weekly review of something. He can leap out in a very few words, he can connect the occasion of somebody making a movie and releasing it and maybe you’re going to go see it, into something much more expansive and liberating and invigorating. Goldberg: You started writing about music but you were talking about many other things in the context of writing about music, particularly politics. Did you make a decision to become a critic?

Marcus: Well, no. I had written college papers about music and politics, music and America, music and the greater world. I started doing that when I was maybe a junior in college, probably in 1965. And then in 1967, late 1967, I noticed a bundle of newspapers outside Whelan’s Smoke Shop across from the Berkeley campus on Bancroft and I looked at it, something called Rolling Stone, and I pulled one up and I started looking through the pages and I could tell, just by looking at the design and what the stories were about, this was Jann Wenner, who I had met years before when we were both freshman at Cal. And I followed his career writing in the Daily Cal as Mr. Jones and writing in Ramparts and Sunday Ramparts, record reviews he had written and sort of polemical pieces he had written, I just knew this was Jann, it has his fingerprints on it.

And about a year later I went into Record City, which was a little record store on Telegraph just steps off of Bancroft, a little cavern of a place but full of stuff, and in the window they had an album called Magic Bus: The Who on Tour. And I thought, Oh my god, a Who live album, how great. This is what anybody who cared about the Who had been waiting for, for years. It was 1968, we first saw them the year before, but I’d been listening to their records since well before that. Oh fantastic, a Who live album! I go in, I buy it, I take it home I play it, it’s not a live album, it’s just a bunch of B-sides from singles and stuff they hadn’t bothered to release on albums because it wasn’t good enough. It’s just a bunch of throwaways and I felt ripped off and cheated and I began to think of all the random Who tracks that were out there like the 45 they put out when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were jailed for drug possession and they [The Who] wanted to keep their work before the public so they rerecorded Rolling Stones songs. All kinds of stuff. So, I put together—if they’re going to put together an album of random this and that, they could have done a whole lot better and here’s what they should have done. >>> 53

>>> And I wrote it up as a record review and I sent it into Rolling Stone and two weeks later I pick up the next issue and it’s there and a week after that I get a check for actual money, for $12.50, and I think, this is easy, this is fun, I should do this more often. And then I get attacked in the San Francisco Express Times as a naïve amateur who doesn’t understand the vagaries of record production and what a record company needs to do to keep an act before the public and they have to rush out product. This is by Paul Williams, the editor of Crawdaddy, the most eminent rock critic in the world, attacking me for the first piece I’ve ever published anywhere. That felt kind of weird.

But I realized, also, I wrote something and people read it. So, I started doing that and I became an editor at Rolling Stone and then I became part of the four-person editorial board that ran the magazine, for six months, until I got fired in 1970 and I was in graduate school all the time. I was planning to become a professor. And then in 1971 I was given the chance to teach the American Studies honors seminar for sophomores, a class I had taken in 1964, ’65 I guess, and it was the class that really did change my life, that really did open me up to the world I wanted to live in and investigate and write about always and I had great teachers, I had Mike Rogin and Larzer Ziff, Mike from Political Science, Larzer Ziff from English, this honor seminar was a bond between the students and the professors, it was all taking place during the Free Speech Movement, where everything you read and talked about was heightened, had an immediate relevance to your life. 54

So, I’m given the chance to teach this as a graduate student. They’ve never had a graduate student teach it before; it’s always been professors. I’m just thrilled, I’m honored, I’ve been knighted, I’m so proud of myself and I taught that seminar for a year and I was God awful, I was terrible, I was an awful teacher. I had no patience. A teacher without patience is not a teacher. And I realized that I could not do what I’d always thought I was going to do, I’m not going to become a professor, I can’t devote my life to doing something I’m not good at, that I’d be faking. So, I dropped out of graduate school, I didn’t get my PHD and at that point the only other thing I knew how to do with my life was write. So, I wrote Mystery Train.

Goldberg: What’s been the most challenging thing for you about being a writer and a critic? Marcus: Do you mean in general, in specific? Goldberg: If this doesn’t make sense as a question we can do something else… In looking back now, were there things that were challenging where you had to really look at what you were doing in a certain way or something you were doing was really hard? Marcus: No, it hasn’t been hard. When you’re writing and you’re just fixed on something, you can sit there for five or six hours and write constantly because you’re so interested in what you’re doing and what might come next and what might turn up as you write. You want to find out what that is. Some books have taken a long time. Lipstick Traces took nine years. The research only took about three, but after three years I had basically everything I was going to need to write that book, and understanding how to write it,

how to tell the story. There were a lot of sort of failed experiments but finally I figured it out. And at one point I got stuck but I got stuck because I was so fascinated, because the story was so big, that’s how it appeared to me, and I had to find some way to bring it down into human scale so that I could make it a story that would both make sense and be interesting. Learn what to leave out and how to do damage to the material, not be in awe of things people had done, but to look with something of a cynical or critical eye. Not let the people who I was writing about write the book. It’s what I think; it’s not what they think. That was difficult. It took me a long time. Here I am writing a book about the European avant-garde going back into the Middle Ages where a self-selected elite, the avant-garde, says, “We see the future, we understand what this is all about, nobody else does, and we have to put this knowledge into the world either surreptitiously or in the most loud and spectacular way possible, but we have to get the word out. We’re operating behind enemy lines but this is a matter of life and death, but we know the truth and the truth will save the world and it’s up to us to do that”. That was the ethos of the European avant-garde. There is nothing less American then that perspective on the world. America is built on—whatever the realities may be—the valorization of every individual, the right and the burden and the obligation of every person to say what they think, to affirm what they believe, to recognize the essential equality of all of us in any given community, whatever our level of education, whatever our background, however we appear to be. You have to recognize the humanity of every other person and you cannot presume that you’re better than anybody else or that anyone is better than you are. That’s the American ethos. That is an absolute contradiction of the European avant-garde ethos and here I am, Reagan has become president, and I’m fleeing to Europe, I’m fleeing hundreds of years into the past of Europe to live in a different world because I’m turning my back on America and America has turned its back on me by electing Reagan as president. That’s how I felt. That was the journey I was on. And it was sometimes painful and sometimes, often, confusing and I didn’t know what I was doing but it’s where I wanted to be. Now you can call that a challenge or you can say what a fucking paradise for a writer to be able to live in this other world and investigate it and even make sense of it and make it into a story that other people might find appealing and even life changing in some small way, opening them up to possibilities in their own life that they didn’t know were there. So, I don’t really think of that as a challenge. I think of that as a privilege.

Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo on cover. Goldberg: Getting back to Bob Dylan, In the book you quote Suze Rotolo: “Much time was spent in front of the mirror trying on one wrinkled article of clothing after another, until it all came together to look as if Bob had just gotten up and thrown something on. Image meant everything. Folk music was taking hold of a generation and it was important to get it right, including the look—be authentic, be cool, and have something to say.” Why did you include that in the book? What do you think that says about Dylan? Marcus: I think it says that he was thinking through everything he did all the time. Towards some greater goal. Which essentially, in Dylan’s case, meant not just being bigger than Elvis but also bigger than Thomas Jefferson, let’s say. People don’t have great careers without ambition, without fantasies. There’s a way in which the truest pop song there is, is, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” To acknowledge that. “Yeah, I want to rule the world. Maybe I’m not the right person, maybe I just want to damn the world, maybe that will do. Maybe I just want to celebrate the world. Now that’s pretty sappy. I think I want to speak for the world. People have great ambitions. Elvis did. Bob Dylan did. One of the great things that Elvis did was he showed people how big, big could be. Nobody had any idea before Elvis. The way in which teenagers screamed for Frank Sinatra as they screamed for Elvis. Sure, that had happened before. They screamed for Rudy Vallée. For that matter, they screamed for Al Jolson. But they didn’t divide the world in half, for and against. This is the end of civilization; this is the beginning of civilization. That’s what Elvis did. He divided the world in half. You had to take a side. You had to make a stand. You had to have an opinion. That was not true with Frank Sinatra. Or Rudy Vallée. That’s how big, big could be. And that’s the much-expanded arena where Bob Dylan was able to do his work.

And so yeah, if you’re going to come across as somebody who just got out of bed and was suddenly impelled to sing a song, to tell people how the world looked to you, you couldn’t look as if you’d spent weeks and weeks and weeks figuring out how to do that. It just had to come out. And Dylan’s very clear. He writes in Chronicles about going to the New York Public Library and reading newspapers on microfilm from the time of the Civil War. First, he wants to go read about this battle, then he starts to read all the advertisements and the advice to the lovelorn columns or whatever else is in the newspaper and getting a sense of this is a whole world, this is what was happening. The Civil War was being fought out on this battlefield and in this household but over here in this town it’s not even happening. Or in the pages of ‘how do I cure my grippe’ it’s not even happening. And so, he gets a sense of how these enormous historical events can upend the lives of millions of people and at the same time not touch those of others. How strange. How weird. And it makes him realize that he could sing a song about the end of the world, and maybe its redemption, like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and somehow find a way to tell people that everything is in jeopardy, that everything is up for grabs, that which way history will go has not been determined and partly it’s up to you and how you will understand your place in the world and what you might do about it. And in order to put that across in a given milieu, the milieu of folk music in New York City, you have to look a certain way, you have to have a certain attitude, you got to have a certain authenticity which is completely made up and constructed, in order to make your case. You’ve got to look the part in order to get people to listen to you and take you seriously. That’s what she’s saying. That was a complex statement of hers. Goldberg: You quote John Hiatt who says he was 13 years old, in the car with the radio on and his mom went into a drug store and then “Like a Rolling Stone” came on the radio. “I was certain when she came back out she wouldn’t recognize me. I felt like the song had changed me that much, just by hearing it.” Did you have that kind of experience when you first heard Dylan? Marcus: I never had that particular thought, but there was a time when I was 20 and “Like a Rolling Stone” came out, maybe over the next year, over the next two years, and I found myself listening to that song over and over again and I found ways to listen to it on headphones where I could tune out certain instruments and only listen to the piano or only listen to the guitar playing. I mean I could cognitively do that and hear the song in its parts, and it became endless and bottomless. I never got tired of listening to it, I never have. It always carries with it a sense

of event, of contingency, not of a finished product, not of a text, not of something that has been perfected, but of something that is happening as you listen, which means that it might not have happened. And all through that song you can hear that sense of contingency, that people are finding their way through the song in the dark. They don’t know where they’re going; they don’t know what’s going to happen when they get there or even if they ever are. That’s how it felt to me, that’s how the song felt to me.

And it was a shock when I finally got to listen to the whole recording session to find out that that was true. That by the time they get into the third verse when they’re recording the song in the studio and they’ve done god knows how many takes before and they’ve never gotten past the second verse. It breaks down, somebody makes a mistake, Dylan flubs a line, it just doesn’t feel right. Sometimes they don’t make it through the first verse, sometimes they make it all the way to the second verse and this is the first time that they get past the second verse and Dylan is singing and they’re following, they’re trying to play with him, but in their rehearsals they’ve never gotten to the third verse. They don’t know what’s happening in the third verse and Dylan is singing and then they get to the fourth verse, and they don’t know if there’s a fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth verse. There could be. Maybe they were going to go all day. Who knows? But there are only four verses and Dylan leads them out and they follow him out of the song and then they go back to trying to record it again and stopping again with the first verse. One more time making it all the way through but by then it’s a complete mess. And it just so happened that there was one take in this two-day recording session where the song had a body. This is the only take. And that means that they could have gone through these whole two days and never gotten to the third verse and finally said, you know, maybe we’ll go back to this sometime, but it’s just not happening. And so that song wouldn’t exist. >>> 55

>>> That sense of accident, that sense of grabbing onto the accident and saying, “No, this isn’t an accident, this is the way it was supposed to be, we just didn’t know that.” That is what I do as a critic. I look for those kinds of moments where something is happening that didn’t necessarily have to happen. It’s interesting, there’s a version of “Ain’t Talkin’” that isn’t nearly as good as the one that was released where all these lines from [the Roman poet] Ovid that Dylan weaves into his song aren’t there. They’re not there yet. And he realizes that something’s missing. Some spark, some sense of timelessness, the world’s end. “If I find my enemies ever sleeping, I’ll just slaughter them where they lie.” The song needs that. It needs a sense that more is at stake. Somebody is walking through the world and part of him doesn’t care if the world ends under his feet and part of him wants justice, wants revenge, and part of him is standing outside this drama and simply watching himself and other people move through it, as if everything is fated, as if nothing could affect the ultimate outcome. And you watch that with a sense of cynicism and despair, but also maybe a sense that this is what life is. It is beyond our control. And so, the song is a rumination over that. I knew when I first heard that song, I just knew, the song came to me, as a critic, as a writer, I’m never going to get to the bottom of this song and this song is always going to be mocking me saying you don’t know, you can’t hear, you don’t understand and you know how much is here and you’re seduced by this song but you’re never going to get it, not really. And so, for years I wrote around it and I circled it and I wanted to do that and with this book I thought, well I’m just going to give it everything I’ve got. Not to solve the mystery of the song or to decode its puzzle or anything like that, because it is a lived experience. I wanted to see how deeply and broadly I could live in this song, as if it were the world. So that’s play, that’s fun. That’s not a challenge. It is a challenge, but once I gave up on the idea that I could ever meet it, then I’m just having fun.

Goldberg: You wrote about “Blowin’ in the Wind,” that it was the song you liked least 56

on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, you thought it was obvious and then, later, a point came where you had a very different take on the song and you spend 80 pages or so talking about that. You express your opinions very strongly over the years. You once wrote that the Beatles singing “Money,” a song they didn’t write, was the best thing they’d done of their early recordings. Obviously, a lot of people would have a different opinion. Do you ever feel like, “Maybe I’m wrong about this song that I have this opinion about.” To make a statement like that - this is the best song the Beatles did at this point in time…….. Marcus: Sure. Everybody can be wrong. But what does that mean to be wrong. What you should really wish for is the ability to be open to hearing or seeing or understanding something in a way that you didn’t before, rather than to hold onto your own opinion as if to change it or have it changed for you somehow brings your integrity into question. No, I didn’t like “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I thought it was pious. I thought it was condescending. I thought it was boring. I thought it was everything you didn’t want a song to be when I was 20, when I was 18, when I was 30, when I was 40, whatever it was. And I didn’t ever think about it as something that was interesting. And then I was asked to write an afterword to an illustrated book of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The lyrics on the page and somebody doing pictures to illustrate the lyrics. It’s a kids’ book. It’s a little kid’s book. And so, I’m asked to do this and I agree to do it because the pay was really good and I could use the money so that’s why I did it. So, then I thought, “What am I going to write about this?” And I began to think, “Ok, this is a book for six-year-olds. If I were six years old and I was hearing this song, what might I think? What might it say to me?” And hearing it and trying to listen to it that way opened the song up for me and completely changed it. And made it come across in any given performance—by Dylan, by other people, by Dylan over the years, over many, many, many years—it just became an endless universe.

There was so much to say, so much to write about, so much to hear. And I don’t think it was because I was wrong before. I don’t know that I was wrong before. That was my honest reaction to that particular happenstance in the world. But then I was able to hear it differently, and to hear it differently from the beginning to the end. And hear why the song is so rich for Dylan. He is able to continue to sing it in radically different ways and have it become, not a reference to the past. If he sings it on this Election Day or that Election Day. It’s interesting how often he sings that song when he’s performing a concert on the day of an election. It’s like an election sermon in the Puritan sense, when Puritan preachers would give a sermon about the nature of the community on the day that electors to govern the community were selected. What are we really choosing? What burden is upon us? What will be the consequences of our right choice and our wrong choice? What is our true mission? Who is going to fulfill this mission, who is going to fall short? It is performed and presented that way. I was there. I was in Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota in 2008 and it’s on everybody’s mind, that’s all anybody is thinking about as they’re sitting listening to Dylan play and he ends by saying, “I was born in a world of darkness in 1941 and I grew up under the atomic bomb and I’ve lived my entire life in darkness but I think things are going to change now.” Using Obama’s campaign slogan. And he timed the concert. This was done very intentionally. He timed the concert so it would end five minutes before ten o’clock. And it was ten o’clock when the networks were going to be able to call the election because the polls had closed all over. And we file out of the auditorium and we’re in the anteroom of Northrop Auditorium where there’s this giant TV screen that has been set up. And everybody’s there. Thousands of people from Northrop are jammed into this anteroom staring at this TV screen. He had ended the show so the audience would have time to file out and see the election called. It was all set up that way. He wasn’t going to stop a half an hour early; he wasn’t going to go five minutes too long. So that event became part of the concert and vice versa. And I did something—I was so shocked. I was standing next to one of my students ’cause I was teaching at the University of Minnesota at that time and she happened to be there too and I was standing next to her and when they called the election for Obama, I hugged her. And then I thought, “I’m a teacher, I’m hugging a student. I can’t do that. This is terrible.” And I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I got carried away. You could have been anybody.” She said, “I know, I know.” I’m the kind of teacher who never sees a student without the door open. I couldn’t be

Photo by Myriam Santos

more scrupulous about that and I thought, “Oh, this is so terrible.” But it was just an impulse of joy. Goldberg: You were so moved. Marcus: Yeah, sure. Goldberg: You quote Mavis Staples: “How could he write ‘How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?’ That is what my father went through. He was the one who wasn’t called a man. So how, where is he coming from? White people don’t have hard times—that was my thinking back then because I was a kid, too. What he was writing was inspirational… It’s the same as gospel. He was writing truth.” And what she said is kind of in that film with Malcolm X and Sam Cooke—fictionalized. She seemed to think that was an amazing thing that he could write that. That he could think to write that. Marcus: Well, that’s what the book is about. The book is about his ability, his instinct, his need to see himself in others. To live out other people’s lives in his imagination. And to write a song like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which is about racial injustice and everybody knew it was about racial injustice, you didn’t need to have anybody explain to you that this was a song about, from, to the Civil Rights Movement, when nothing of the sort is mentioned in the song except “How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man” maybe. Except Bob Dylan says, “No, that just came from ‘John Henry’”— “Man ain’t nothin’ but a man.” We’re all the same; we’re all equal in our personhood, to the degree that it flowers, to the degree that it withers. The song has no specific reference in it at all. Can be about anything; can be about nothing. Except no one has ever misunderstood it. No one ever didn’t get what the song was about. And yet it’s bigger than that, it’s more open than that. Which is why it can still be sung. Generations after people don’t even know what the Civil Rights Movement was. Don’t know the phrase. Don’t understand why people capitalize it. So sure. Mavis Staples hears that song and she’s saying, “How does he know me? How does he know my father?” “How many roads must a man walk down?” Did he ever walk down that road? No! But he was able to imagine himself walking down that road and understand how it would feel. What it would be about. And she’s saying, like other people have said, “How did he see me?” This is what, in “One Night in Miami,” that Kemp Powers play, that great film where Malcolm X is saying to Sam Cooke, “Here’s this white boy from Minnesota who is able to give voice to something that you can’t. How does that happen? How is this white kid from Minnesota able to express what we’re all going through and what our movement

Mavis Staples on “Blowin’ in the Wind”: “That is what my father went through…” is about better than you can? Maybe even (unspoken), maybe even better than I can?” Now this is all fiction, it’s all made up, but it’s a wonderful thing to make this into an historical even where two Black men are confronting themselves over a Bob Dylan song. How fantastic. How unlikely. How real. And the fact is, it has its real-world analogy, pretty much at the same time, where Huey Newton and Bobby Seale are drawing up the Black Panthers manifesto while playing “Ballad of a Thin Man” over and over and over again. And Huey Newton is posing holding a copy of Highway 61 on his chest, saying this is what it’s all about for me. Goldberg: Could you imagine yourself writing one more book about Dylan? Marcus: God, I hope not. No, no! You know, at this point I’m 77. I’ve spent the entire year sick. I’ve had three surgeries. I’m recovering now and I don’t know how far to being my old self I’m going to get to be. So just the idea of writing another book about anything is not something I want to think about right now. I haven’t written anything for publication, I haven’t written anything but emails this entire year. The idea that I could just stop writing. The idea—I love to drink. It’s one of the great pleasures in my life. The idea that I could not drink for six months because the whole notion of it was repulsive, because I was so sick. That I could just give up alcohol without a second thought and it would no longer be part of my life—that’s what happened. Gone. So, who knows? I don’t know what the rest of my life is going to be like. How much of it is left. Or who I’m going to be in it. I don’t know any of this. But no, I don’t think I’ll write another book about Bob Dylan. He has a different attitude, obviously. He announces a new tour, the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, which was announced as something that was going to run through 2024. That’s a long way from now for an old

person. And I thought that was wonderfully audacious. Not to say, “I’ll still be alive in 2024,” but to say, “I’m still going to be on the road for 100 days out of the year and I’m going to do shows that are going to be terrible and disappointing and other shows that people are never going to forget.” Who knows? You never know what the chemistry of any given night is going to be. And you don’t. You don’t know. You can’t control it. You can’t walk out onto a stage and say, “I’m going to give the best performance of my life.” It just doesn’t work that way. You can give the worst performance of your life regardless of how hard you’re trying. You just don’t know. Goldberg: That performing for people is such a driving force for him that it’s the Never Ending Tour. Marcus: Well, he doesn’t need the money, so you got to figure, this is his life. This is him living his life. This is the high point; this is the challenge. “Can I do a good show even if I don’t want to. Why is it that I do a bad show when I want with all my being to do a good show?” When you don’t know what’s going to happen, night to night, and sometimes you don’t care and sometimes you care desperately. Credit: Writer and photographer Michael Goldberg has been interviewing and photographing musicians since he was 17. He was a senior writer at Rolling Stone magazine for a decade. His writing has appeared in Esquire, New Musical Express, Creem, DownBeat, New York Rocker, Trouser Press, Musician, New West, Vibe, New Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. He has had three novels published: True Love Scars, The Flowers Lied, and Untitled. In May 2022, Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey was published. Addicted To Noise: The Music Writings of Michael Goldberg was published on November 1, 2022. 57

Ian ‘the other Macca’ McFarlane pays tribute to Australia’s greatest rock’n’roll graphic designer, the late Ian ‘Macca’ McCausland. With thanks to Dia Taylor, Otis McCausland, James Anfuso. Images courtesy of Ian McFarlane Collection, the McCausland Family, James Anfuso.

VALE IAN ‘MACCA’ MCCAUSLAND - THE CONSUMMATE DESIGNER AND ILLUSTRATOR (31 March 1944 - 9 August 2022)

“Home is where the heart is / Closer all the while / Silver capsule in the night / Reeling in the miles / Heading back home, heading back home” (‘Heading Back Home’ by Ian McCausland, 1995) During one fraught week in August 2022, the Australian music community lost Judith Durham, Olivia Newton-John, Archie Roach and Ian ‘Macca’ McCausland. Anyone’s death is always sad news but this was quite extraordinary. There are more connections here than at first seems obvious but for now I want to pay tribute to my friend Macca.

Ian ‘Macca’ McCausland was a graphic designer, illustrator (foremost in air brush art) and musician who gave more to the story of Australian rock music than can ever be repaid. I believe that he captured the essence, identity and framework of Aussie rock music more so than any other designer of the age. He can rightly be regarded as a national treasure.

I first saw Macca’s artwork in the mid-1970s when, as a music obsessed teenager, I became enthralled with his numerous album covers. I first met him in the mid-1990s at the Continental in Prahran and got to know him better after the launch of Ed. Nimmervoll’s book Under The Covers: The Music Graphics Of Ian McCausland, Graeme Webber & Steve Malpass (1999).

He began his career in the 1960s, was most prominent throughout the 1970s and continued to create amazing art up to the mid-2010s when his failing eyesight began to curtail his chosen pursuits.

I took to visiting him regularly and calling him on the phone just for a chat. He really was one of the most humble, friendly and loveliest blokes I’ve ever known. I’d ask him all sorts of questions about his career. >>> 59

>>> He was never one to big-note himself or make out how important he was: he didn’t have to, he just was. He told me about his friendship with Gulliver Smith, photographer Graeme Webber and Mushroom Records founder Michael Gudinski; about hanging out with Keith Richards in Sydney when The Rolling Stones toured Australia in 1973 (Keith’s helpful piece of advice that day was “rub it on your gums...”); he told me about his love of music in general. I’d ask him if he kept much in the way of his original artwork and he explained that most of what he created at Mushroom was eventually thrown out of the store room to make way for other stuff. He was genuine when he said that he’d moved on to other things. What an incredible archive that would be these days! His son Otis has told me that he’s kept some of the original art, so that was a relief to hear. When he launched his art website (ianmccauslandart.com, I wrote the Introduction, so it seems relevant to reproduce my words here:

Chain Toward the Blues LP

“The best graphic designers and illustrators present a unique and easily recognisable style. Melbourne-based illustrator Ian McCausland is one such individual. His illustrations and designs for albums by Little River Band, the Aztecs, Spectrum, Daddy Cool, Chain, Skyhooks, Company Caine, Matt Taylor and Carson plus his work as Art Director for the Mushroom label (in particular the triple LP gatefold release of The Great Australian Rock Festival Sunbury 1973) kept him at the forefront of the Australian rock music industry throughout the 1970s. In the days of the LP sleeve, essentially he was the designer of choice when you wanted a quality product. “Mushroom Records head Michael Gudinski is quoted in Under The Covers by Ed. Nimmervoll (Electronic Pictures, 1998) as saying, ‘Ian McCausland started Mushroom Art. He was Mushroom Art. He drew it, he looked it, he lived it. I thought he was peerless. There wasn’t anyone else near him, especially for the type of music Mushroom was about at the time. He was a master of airbrushing’.

Company Caine Product LP cover-1975 reissue

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“It was that quality which the Rolling Stones were also able to tap into. Ian had been designing posters for local bands and gigs since the late 1960s, and when the Stones announced an Australian tour for early 1973, promoter Paul Dainty commissioned him to do the poster. The iconic image of a jet airplane winging its way into the open lips and massive tongue of the famous Rolling Stones logo over a stylised relief map of Australia captured the sense of the tour’s importance with absolute perfection. Dainty, the Stones’ manager Peter Rudge and their stage designer Chip Monck were impressed, immediately asking Ian to do one for the New Zealand leg of the tour. The Australian tour poster is Ian’s most important claim to international fame and original copies are among the most sought-after items by Stones fans and rock’n’roll memorabilia collectors alike. “Ian may have rubbed shoulders with rock’n’roll royalty, yet he remains one of life’s gentlemen and a true music fan. His career started in the early 1960s when he sang with Melbourne groups The Strangers and Little Gulliver & the Children (for

whom he also played guitar). He was also a backup vocalist and featured artist on Melbourne TV pop series The Go!! Show. All the same, design and illustration were his forte and he applied his music knowledge to his role as Art Director for seminal music paper Go-Set. He actually won a Who / Small Faces poster competition in order to get the gig. Subsequently, his work for early ’70s underground papers The Digger and Planet (in addition to his famous series of dope comix) led to his role as Art Director at Mushroom. “Ian is quoted in Under The Covers: ‘I was very influenced by San Francisco’s psychedelic Fillmore posters, Robert Crumb and Kelly of Mouse Studios’. His work retains that same timeless sense of rock history, of capturing the essence of the performer’s music in his imagery and style. This is Ian McCausland’s life’s pursuit – embrace it as part of Australia’s rock’n’roll heritage.”

MACCA THE MUSICIAN That’s a basic introduction, so firstly I’ll delve deeper into his music career: as a teenager obsessed with rock’n’roll in the early 1960s, Macca formed The Lincolns with his high school mates. They did birthday parties and teenage dances around his suburb of Glenroy. The big Melbourne band of the day, The Strangers, caught his attention and he started singing a couple of sets a night with them around the thriving Melbourne suburban rock dance scene. This was the era when dances at Town Halls were the places to be on Friday and Saturday nights. You could see The Strangers, Colin Cook, Betty McQuade, Johnny Chester and The Chessmen, The Thunderbirds, The Premiers, The Bluejays etc. With the emergence of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and all the other British Beat bands of the day, the local scene was transformed irrevocably. Jazz musician Horrie Dargie saw the need for a dedicated teen music formatted TV show and subsequently, with the establishment of a new channel in Melbourne during 1964, ATV-O, he was able to launch The Go!! Show that August to great success. The Strangers were installed as the resident backing band, appearing on something like 130 episodes until 1967. The producers also launched the Go!! label. Just about every popular Australian solo artist and band signed to other labels appeared on the show: Ronnie Burns, Normie Rowe, Billy Thorpe, Marcie Jones, Lynne Randell, Olivia Newton-John, The Loved Ones, The Master’s Apprentices... you get the picture. Having been part of The Strangers vocal line-up, this also led to Macca’s role as a solo artist on the show, doing covers of Top 40 hits. As he explained to David Laing (I Like Your Old Stuff), “I only had four appearances on the show. First up I did Chuck Berry’s ‘Dear Dad’, followed by Billy Joe Royal’s ‘Down In The Boondocks’, Cliff Richard’s ‘Theme For A Dream’ (with Pat Carroll and Olivia Newton-John beside me) and Bob Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.” As vocalist with The Rondells, he toured Victoria with Bobby & Laurie and The Easybeats. His mate Gulliver Smith (who had also sung with The Strangers and The Thunderbirds) then formed an

Mushroom Records poster 1973 R&B band, installing Macca as rhythm guitarist, backing vocalist and harmonica player. Smith had been playing around with stage names with which to launch his solo career. Originally, he was Little Otis (after Otis Redding) before settling on Little Gulliver. Thus, the band was Little Gulliver and the Children. They issued one self-titled EP on W&G Records in 1966; Macca sang the bass parts on the track ‘I Was Bewitched’. They appeared at all the Melbourne discotheques of the day, such as the Thumpin’ Tum and The Biting Eye, but when the band folded at the end of 1966 Smith headed to Sydney. As 1967 dawned so did the psychedelic era. Naturally, being an eccentric character to begin with, Smith became involved in this burgeoning underground psychedelic scene. He invited Macca up to Sydney to join a psychedelic soul/R&B band he was forming, Dr Kandy’s Third Eye. As Macca explained to me, after a few rehearsals he felt out of his depth with this new sound and took his leave. Besides, as a 22-year-old he was already married with a young child. He had to support his young family and to make a living he turned his attention back to his art career. Macca reflected on his friendship with Gulliver when he told me: “I first met Gulliver in about 1964 and we became good friends. Gully and I were very in tune with each other. He already had a great record collection of all these black American blues and R&B singers. It was everything from Sleepy John Estes to James Brown. And that’s where Gully got his inspiration from initially. “Gully was like a white bluesman, even in the mid-’60s. He could do an impromptu blues song with this great rave and it would be completely off the cuff. Whether it made sense or not didn’t really matter. Later on, we used to listen to Frank Zappa and The Mothers and that kind of avant-garde / rock / jazz sound was also an influence on him. “That first time I met Gully was interesting to say the least. I was singing a couple of sets with The Strangers at the Essendon Plaza. They were one of the best bands in Melbourne at the time and they had this regular Friday night gig. On this particular night, the Sharpies were causing

Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs Poster 1972 trouble, there were fights breaking out everywhere with the mods. “So, this big Sharpie called Charlie, who was the king of the Carlton Sharps said to the promoter, ‘Oi, if you don’t let our mate sing, the whole place will go up!’ And so, his mate was Gulliver Smith. Gully was originally from Carlton and, reluctantly on his part, he’d been adopted by the local gang and they wanted him to sing. So, Gully sang a few songs, like a Larry Williams song or two, and I thought ‘gee, he’s a pretty good singer’. And so, I started talking to him and we forged a lifelong friendship out of that crazy night. “This was around the time that The Beatles and The Stones had started to take off and the whole local music scene was changing. Everyone wanted to sound like them, but Gully already had his own unique sound and style based around his love of the black blues guys. He decided to call himself Little Gulliver because he wanted his name to sound black, like Little Johnny Taylor or Little Richard. He thought it was a cool name.

“Gully might have been ambitious but he wasn’t a driven person, he just loved his music. After Little Gulliver and The Children had split up Gully decided to move up to Sydney. This was in early 1967 and he rang me up and asked me to go up to Sydney to join this new band he’d formed, Dr. Kandy’s Third Eye. I only lasted a few weeks in the rehearsal stage; I had a young family to support and I eventually came back down to Melbourne when I was offered the job as Art Director for GoSet. “Dr. Kandy’s Third Eye turned out to be a really great band. Gully had recruited sax players like Mal Capewell and Zane Hudson, who he called Zane Tootsville. So, he had that kind of Frank Zappa / Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band vibe going on there. “Gully stayed in Sydney for a few years. He was such a great singer, so charismatic. By the time he joined Company Caine, he wasn’t that young kid anymore. He’d matured and changed; drugs had started to come into it. >>> 61

Molly Meldrum, Michael Gudinski, and Macca - courtesy of the McCausland Family >>> But I thought Company Caine was an important band, a real standout on the Melbourne scene. Musically they were fantastic, really adventurous. It suited Gully to have such a great band to sing with.” He left the music to the professionals until the 1990s when he formed country rock band Chicken DeVille. As he put it, “We played at country themed suburban pubs and rural Victorian venues (anywhere with a mechanical bull) for four years before we broke up.” As well as playing covers, Macca wrote a few songs for the band; at his funeral we heard his songs ‘So Far So Good’, ‘Can’t Stop My Heart’ and ‘Heading Back Home’.

MACCA THE ARTIST After leaving high school, Macca worked as an illustrator and designer for Studio Services. His first notable rock’n’roll artwork achievement was when he submitted a poster for a competition run by Go-Set magazine, advertising the upcoming Who / Small Faces / Paul Jones tour of Australia (January 1968). His poster won and he was later installed as Art Director for the magazine. At that time Go-Set was the country’s foremost pop paper and his role in presenting a commercial format for music fans was pivotal. He left Go-Set around 1970 when publisher Philip Fraser launched The Digger, a radical, politically motivated broadsheet that tackled subjects such as the Vietnam war, abortion and pornography.

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It reflected the rise of the counterculture and the anti-Vietnam movement, in particular, when the Moratorium marches around the country combined student protest with rock music. As Art Director, Macca once again played a significant role in the look of the day. It was here that he created his series of dope comix, heavily influenced by the likes of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton who had created The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers in 1968. Under the pen name of ‘McCosmic’

he created a comical representation of the stereotypical dope smoking hippie, Ace, and his pals on their never-ending search for the perfect high and their hilarious efforts to avoid getting busted by the fuzz. He gave these strips titles such as: The Official Drug Addict Test; Highway Hi-Jinx; Down On Karmic Farm; A Quiet Day In The Country; Tee-Vee Jeebies; Strangers In The Night; School’s Out!; Country Capers; Outfoxing The Ferret; The Hungries; Guru To You Too; Just Cruisin’; Walkin’ Sideways; Footy Fever; Way Out West; and Porn Scorn. Around that time head shops had started to open up, stocking drug paraphernalia and so all this fed into the youth culture divide between the ‘heads’ and the ‘straights’. Macca had the idea of combining these dope cartoons in a book called Ace And His Adventures In The ’70s to sell in the head shops. He did a full colour illustration for the front cover but never got around to completing the project. Some of the strips were later compiled in the likes of The Wild & Woolley Comix Book (1977), Cobber Comix (1978) and Down Underground Comix (1983). Macca has always been honest about his personal inspirations in the art world. As well as Crumb and Shelton, mentioned about, he has also cited the likes of Alton Kelly, Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson and others from the San Francisco psychedelic scene of the 1960s, Milton Glaser (Bob Dylan poster), Heinz Edelman (who drew The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine) and, closer to home, NZ artists Chris Grosz and Reg Mombasa with his art for Mental As Anything and Mambo. In 1971 two young music promoters, Michael Gudinski and Ray Evans, launched music paper Daily Planet (later Planet) with Macca as Art Director. Ostensibly set up as counter-cultural competition to Go-Set magazine, it was also a way for them to promote their bands and booking agency, the Australian Entertainment Exchange (AEE). They set up office in an old house in South Yarra and as he explained to David Laing, “It was very hippie, lots of marijuana and teenage runaways crashing there. >>>

Daddy Cool and Syrius at Montsalvat

Skyhooks 1976-Courtesy of James Anfuso Collection

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>>> I worked laying out the paper in the kitchen down the back where the electric stove provided heat as well as red-hot coils for spotting hash. I worked with some great people who enjoyed the fun times.” They included David ‘Dr. Pepper’ Pepperell, Jen Jewel Brown, photographer David Porter (Jacques L’Affrique), Lee Dillow and Terry Cleary. Macca had also continued creating poster artwork for various bands, and some of his early poster art included pieces for Gulliver Smith, Company Caine, Daddy Cool and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs (‘Most People I Know Think That I’m Crazy’). He was also the go-to guy for the best album cover art of the day. In 1971 to 1972 alone he created iconic covers for The Aztecs’ The Hoax Is Over and Live! At Sunbury, Chain’s Toward The Blues and Live Again, Carson’s Blown, Company Caine’s A Product Of A Broken Reality and Spectrum’s Milesago. In addition, he provided the cartoon Daddy Cool shown on the front cover

of their debut Daddy Who? Daddy Cool!, the inner gatefold comic strip for their Sex, Dope, Rock ’n’ Roll: Teenage Heaven album and the intricate, fold out design for the D.C.E.P. Macca had the knack for treating each piece of artwork as individual projects, choosing an illustration style and technique that suited the piece. He’d use pencils, ink, airbrush, collage, scraperboard or sculpture to get the result he wanted. A Product Of A Broken Reality is a great example of setting up a diorama to create the final effect. Macca explained that he was disappointed with the original photo used because it was out of focus. He told me: “I liked the art for A Product of A Broken Reality. Instead of my normal mode of illustration, I did something different by constructing a scale model, or a sort of diorama. The inspiration came about because Gully had explored that technological aspect, it was the early computer age, and he liked my idea that Company Caine was an electronic machine pumping out this new age message, a brand-new sound. So that was the little model with the big mouth and the musical note coming out. And the audience was the ping-pong balls bouncing around and whether they got the message or not, it didn’t matter. “When Company Caine got back together in 1975, Keith Glass and David Pepperell re-released the album under the banner Rock Masterworks. I re-did the cover because the photo for the original was slightly out of focus and I was always disappointed about that. For the new cover I used a different shot from the same session and made the image smaller so that it looked sharper and you could take the whole thing in with one glance.” By 1972 Planet had slid by and Gudinski and Evans set up Mushroom Records with Macca as Art Director. He was responsible for creating the look of Mushroom and he rose to the occasion with the first release, the expansive, triple LP The Great Australian Rock Festival Sunbury 1973. Modelled on the original Woodstock triple LP, it had never been attempted before in Australia so Macca had to work out how a tri-fold jacket with three inner sleeves and a poster could possibly work. It remains a stunning artefact. His many other covers for Mushroom are just as legendary: Matt Taylor’s Straight As A Die (1973) and Music (1974), The Dingoes’ The Dingoes (1974), Stars’ Land Of Fortune (1979), Skyhooks’ Straight In A Gay Gay World (1976), The Skyhooks Tapes (1977) and Guilty Until Proven Insane (1979), Ayers Rock’s Beyond (1976), Various Artists A-Reefer-Derci! (1976) and Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons’ Screaming Targets (1979). Throughout this time he also did freelance work for other companies, such as EMI (Little River Band’s After Hours, 1976, using the pseudonym Preston Foster) and Epic/Portrait (Dragon’s O Zambezi, 1978).

Rub It On Your Gums 64

For Music, which featured his rendering of a kookaburra, he took inspiration from nature. “Matt wanted a rural feel but basically left it up to me. I was living in Ferntree Gully with a lot of kookaburras around. Two of them had actually drowned in the swimming pool in the back yard so I buried them in the garden. Later on, I was digging in the yard and unearthed their heads and beaks. I was just fascinated with the construction

of them. I’ve always had an interest in birds. I’ve got hundreds of drawings of birds I’ve done for my own pleasure, not commissioned things. I welcomed the chance to use the kookaburra as the main image on Matt’s cover. I justified it by saying that was as Australian as you could get, a kookaburra singing an Australian song in the bush.” He also admired the artwork coming out of the British design group Hipgnosis, so his late 1970s work reflected that. For example, Guilty Until Proven Insane was inspired by the robots on the cover of Black Sabbath’s 1976 album Technical Ecstasy, designed by George Hardie and illustrated by Colin Elgie. Macca was a master at creating logos, not only for the Mushroom label itself but also for GoSet, The Digger, Chain, Madder Lake, Matt Taylor, Skyhooks, the Renée Geyer Band and most famously Little River Band. His LRB logo on velvet green background depicted an elegant platypus swimming through the letter V, and it has come to be recognised on the international stage. Later on, he created logos for Wheatley Bros. Entertainment, the Frontier Touring Company and an internationally flavoured series for Dean Markley Guitar Strings. After a decade or so at the forefront of Mushroom, Macca moved on to the corporate world of advertising. One of my favourites of his advertising posters was for Levi Jeans, “We’re gonna scare the pants off ya!”, which depicted a cartoon Frankenstein monster in Levis, surrounded by the Werewolf, Dracula, the Wicked Witch and the Mad Scientist with assorted rats, spiders, lizards and frogs scuttling around a graveyard. So, we’ve jumped ahead here but let’s not forget his iconic artwork for The Rolling Stones’ 1973 Australian tour. Macca didn’t create the Stones’ tongue logo for the Australian tour poster (as has sometimes been suggested) but his great skill was incorporating it into the overall design. The Stones and their fans loved it of course. Trying to get hold of an original poster now is next to impossible, but when they do come on to the market expect to pay top dollar. He also did the tour poster for the New Zealand leg, which this time depicted a kiwi bird poking its long beak at the tongue logo on the ground. The Australian tour poster was originally folded and stapled inside the concert programme. There are stories of multiple copies of said poster discarded after the Melbourne concert (at Kooyong Tennis centre) and filling up the gutters along Glenferrie Road. If you were lucky you got hold of an unfolded copy because a small number were reserved for local record shops; when you bought a Stones record you were given a copy of the unfolded tour poster. Just how many of these posters still exist is impossible to determine. Not that Macca paid it much mind, of course; rarity or collector value was never in his mind set. The Stones kept him in mind, because he was commissioned to do a concept rough for their next album, Goat’s Head Soup. As he explained in Under The Covers: “Charlie Watts was the one who had his finger on the pulse artistically. He had briefed me in Sydney

Who Small Faces 1968 Poster after being impressed by my tour posters. They wanted me to do a cover for their next album, Goat’s Head Soup. They’d recorded it in Jamaica and wanted that sort of vibe for the cover, so I came up with this idea of a fighting cock with spurs. I thought it was a very nice visual package. I sent the rough off and never heard anything more about it. Then I was contacted by Paul Dainty’s office again to say that my cover had been lost or was at the London office but no-one had ever seen it so no decision was ever made about it and they’d gone ahead with the David Bailey photographic cover. I don’t know what the real story was. Maybe it was just misplaced, since they contacted me again to submit a cover for Love You Live. Because of the design I did for Goat’s Head Soup I was thinking roosters already, but this time I went the other way and made it cuter. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in it. I know it was completely the wrong image. They ended up using Andy Warhol. Not a bad move really.” The intended Love You Live image is cute indeed: a strutting rooster Mick Jagger, wearing leather chaps, sings into a microphone, while rows of hens go wild in the chook house stalls.

LATER WORK During the early 2000s, Macca retrained in the field of computer graphics and created a new series of rock posters. They included: Skyhooks, Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons, The Dingoes, Spectrum,

Chain, Daddy Cool, Little River Band and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs. Some were based around his earlier designs but The Dingoes one, in particular, had a distinctive twist. It showed an abandoned farm shed and you had to look very closely to realise that the various bits of wood, posts, corrugated iron and old tyres spelled out the letters of the band’s name. Macca’s hand was still in demand and he created artwork for commissions from Frontier Touring (The Rolling Stones at Hanging Rock, 2014), Warner Music (Boogie: Australian Blues R&B And Heavy Rock From The ’70s, Silver Roads: Australian Country Rock & Singer Songwriters of the ’70s, The Glory Days Of Aussie Pub Rock Vol. 1 and Vol 2); Spectrum (Breathing Space CD), Starman Books (Rockin Australia: 50 Years of Concert Posters 19572007, compiled by James Anfuso) and Renegade Films (RockWiz Salutes The Bowl, 2010, on which he collaborated with his friend and fellow artist Chris Grosz). There are probably many more stories to be told but I’ll leave it there. I’m honoured to have known Macca and to have been his friend. He certainly enriched my life. As his funeral notice stated: “Ian passed away peacefully at the Geelong Hospital 9 August 2022. Loved and loving husband of Melitta. Much loved father of Brigitte and Otis. Proud G.D. of Dia, Elke and Oscar. Father-in-law and friend to Shaun, Silvana and Jodie. Rest in Peace. Legend.” 65

By Denise Hylands

nother year of music is quickly coming to an end. Where did that year go? We lost one of the best recently, vale Loretta Lynn. One of the greatest of country music. An incredibly influential country singer songwriter who’s rag to riches story was the foundation of her career as the coal miners daughter from Butcher Holler. She wrote songs for and about women that were taboo and banned in their day. She was outspoken, admired and paved the way for many. A legend of country music. The Americana Awards happened back in September with an incredible line up of performers and winners on display. I wasn’t there but enjoyed watching from home as so many of many favourites performed or were honoured like Lyle Lovett, Chris Isaak, Buddy Miller, Lucinda Williams, and many more. Extremely special to have the Emerging Act of the Year winner Sierra Ferrell here in Australia for the Out On The Weekend festival and an Australian Tour. Definitely the touring highlight of the year. If you didn’t catch Ferrell and band, make sure you do next time around, and I’m sure there’ll be a next time sometime soon. Billy Strings was also a winner at the Americana Awards scoring the Artist of the Year award, as well as a Grammy for Bluegrass Album of the Year. His latest release is titled Me/And/Dad, and as implied, yes an album with his dad, Terry Barber. Reflecting on the project, Strings shares, “As long as I can remember, I wanted to make a record with my dad. I’ve been burning up and down the highways the last 12 years, and as time slips away, you start thinking, ‘I need to make time.’ It’s been a bucket list thing for me, something I’ve been afraid I wouldn’t find the time to do. And that scared me; not doing this record scared me.” Joining Strings and his dad are Ron & Rob McCoury, Mike Bub, Michael Cleveland, Jerry Douglas, Jason Carter and his mum Debra Barber. The last burst of albums for the year are coming out just about now and one for the best of list will have to be the new album from Melissa Carper Ramblin’ Soul. So many of us discovered her with the release of Daddy’s Country Gold. Carper is the real deal, tipping her hat to the country sounds of times gone by, while reviving them for now. She is one of the most authentic and engaging country performers around. Make sure you check it out, you won’t be disappointed. Tyler Childers has taken it one step or is that two steps further with a triple album release for his latest album Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven? An experimental release featuring the same eight songs on each of the three albums performed as Hallelujah, Jubilee and Joyful versions. An ambitious release from this Kentucky native presenting his talents and influences spanning country, bluegrass, soul, gospel and socially conscious folk. Margo Price has released a memoir Maybe We’ll Make. It’s a memoir of loss, motherhood, and the search for artistic freedom in the midst of the agony experienced by so many aspiring musicians: bad gigs and long tours, rejection and sexual harassment, too much drinking and barely enough money to live on. Price, refused to break, and turned her lowest moments into the classic country songs that eventually comprised the debut album that launched her career. Price also releases her new album Strays out this November. Talking about memoirs, Lucinda Williams will be releasing a book telling her story in April next year.

Sierra Ferrell: Touring highlight of the year so far! One to look forward to. Live Forever: A Tribute to Billy Joe Shaver is one of the latest tribute albums that brings together and all star cast paying homage to the great song writing of Shaver. His songs of life were real and raw and were covered by many artists from Willie to Waylon, to Elvis and Cash. Billy Joe’s influence on some of the greatest artists is what has inspired a whole new cast to sing his songs, Willie Nelson, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Margo Price, are amongst them.

Here are some new releases I highly recommend to check out…oh but there are so many more. Alex Williams - Waging Peace Town Mountain - Lines In The Levee Charley Crockett - The Man from Waco The Cactus Blossoms - If Not For You (Bob Dylan Songs Vo. 1) Arlo McKinley - This Mess We’re In Nikki Lane - Denim & Diamonds Freya Josephine Hollick - The Real World Courtney Marie Andrews - Loose Future Billy Strings - Me/And/Dad First Aid Kit - Palomino Seth Avett - Seth Avett Sings Greg Brown Caitlin Rose - Cazimi Jim Lauderdale - Game Changer Looking forward to what the twang tunes the new year brings… happy new year y’all…

By Brian Wise

LACHLAN ROSE

The musician behind Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird

achlan Rose is not Cousin Tony. In fact, apparently there is no one named Tony at all in the line-up of Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird. Which is awkward because I keep wanting to refer to Lachlan as Tony! It is not quite in the tradition many bands which take an outside moniker - such as Jethro Tull, Lynyrd Skynyrd et al – because the inspiration here was two disparate movies. “In my childhood my favourite thing in the world was Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” explains Rose, who also spends his time teaching creative writing. “I think the absurdity, but the cleverness of those people just spoke to me in a way that I’m still sort of picking apart. But I knew at a very young age that I wanted to start something later in life and give it a similar name. I love that idea of this fictional character having this world. In their case it was the Flying Circus, in our case it’s the Brand New Firebird, some sort of creation, or like Frankenstein’s monster. “But in the case of Monty Python, I just remember so vividly trying to think in my boyish mind, who was Monty Python? And he could always look different and the Flying Circus could always look different and that’s why they, in my mind, created so many iterations. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, and it was just this circus that could keep spitting out ideas. I loved it for that and I was always looking for a name. I had a good English teacher that showed me American Beauty when I was about 14 or 15 and it ends with this great monologue about the things that really stick with you at the end of your life and they’re not the things you expect, they’re just the everyday kind of textural memories, like your grandma’s hands and lying on your back at Boy Scout camp……”and the first time I saw my cousin Tony’s brand new Firebird” [he says quoting Kevin Spacey’s speech in the film].

“I just heard it and said it in my head and I thought, well, that’s it. I don’t know what I’m going to create later in life, but that’s going to be what it’s called. It was a combination of this, it was a little bit absurd, but it was big and it could allow for anything. In the context of the film it’s actually got a lot of heart. So, I want my music to be a lot of things and I always have and that just seemed like a great umbrella term for all of it. As ridiculous as it is, it’s something that I’ve never regretted and I actually think I grow to love it more and more.” Smiles of Earth, the debut album, certainly has a distinctive sound, driven by a horn section and reaching into areas near the intersection of Bill Callahan and Americana. Produced by Rose and Stephen Charles, recorded at The Aviary in Abbotsford, Melbourne and with engineer Matthew Neighbour (The Avalanches) the album has a remarkably warm and mature sound for a relatively new band. Rose, who sings and plays guitar and keyboards, ran a performance space event a few years back which led him to meet other musicians who eventually became members of his own group. Francesca Gonzales played the keytar, sang and wrote songs. “I just knew that she was a part of it straight away,” says Rose, “and she turned out to be quite a big fan of the songs I was writing already.” Nick Reid, the drummer also makes music under the name Kitsch Kitchen. Bass player is Matthew Hayes, who is steeped in the Melbourne jazz and new jazz, R&B scene. Peter Simonsen plays guitar “and has a pretty iconic moustache and iconic short shorts” (he’s from Central Queensland). Oliver Whitehead is now full-time touring saxophone player. Smiles of Earth is not only eclectic, it is so diverse that it is difficult to pin down. What were the sort of things that Rose was

brought up on, or that he listened to and that might have worked their way into the sound. “Funnily, I was playing Roxy Music yesterday,” he replies, “and that’s one of the influences to me that’s so obvious that I don’t often stop to think about it. But, arguably, my favorite song in the world is ‘Mother of Pearl’ by Roxy Music, which has this classic piano rock ballad feel to it. I think a lot of that, Roxy Music and David Bowie in particular, were artists that I grew up on, or certainly in my teens and they were more piano based rock songs. I’ve always played guitar as well but piano’s always been my main instrument for songwriting and I love that slightly glam, slightly theatrical approach to songwriting. But I was listening to ‘When This Is Over’, which was the first single off Smiles of Earth, and I thought, God, I’ve never even mentioned Mother of Pearl, but it’s so similar in its energy. So, that was a big one for me. Another one that’s influenced this record quite strongly from my teen years was Antony and the Johnsons, for the same reason. Then on the more zany side, I think later in my twenties I got into Primal Scream in a big way. Their album, Screamadelica just totally, unapologetically just leaps from genre to genre, each song, but they do it so boldly that that almost becomes a staple approach to their songwriting or something. So, there’s this weird cohesiveness to what they’re doing, even though it’s exploring all of these different genres. So, I’d say they were some of the big three or four.” On the other hand, a song like ‘Bluestone’ has an obvious country influence as well. “Totally,” agrees Rose. “Country and folk has always been such a daily part of my music listening. It’s kind of like what I was saying about Roxy Music, I think that sometimes those things are so ingrained in my life I don’t even pause to think about them. But Jackson C. Frank and Blaze Foley, Townes Van Zandt, they’ve always been really important songwriters to me.” 67

By Billy Pinnell

PAUL SIMON

GRACELAND F

or Paul Simon the mid 1980’s was a challenging time professionally and personally. Recently reconciled with partner Art Garfunkel the two embarked on a tour that would conclude, once again, in acrimony.

Being on the road forced Simon to neglect his current album Hearts And Bones, a commercial failure. At the same time he’d received a gift from a friend which set him on the road towards what many people believe to be his masterpiece. The gift was a bootleg tape from a township in South Africa - Gumboots: Accordion Jive Hits No.2 - which he played continuously in his car. The music he heard would provide the inspiration for his Graceland album. Simon admitted he had nothing to lose when he took recording engineer Roy Halee to Johannesburg to record tracks with local musicians that could possibly be the basis for a batch of new songs. These jams went for ten, fifteen, thirty minutes, no song structures, just a raw, earthiness and an infectious groove. After months of these sessions were recorded Halee and Simon returned to New York with the tapes excited by what they had achieved already and in Simon’s case an incentive to write the best songs possible to fit this extraordinary music. While South African rhythms dominate the music adding a unique flavour the songs actually fuse South African elements with American pop. A good example is the album’s opening song ‘Boy In The Bubble’ which could be about escaping our ‘bubble’ and embracing other cultures, it begins with an accordion before morphing into a danceable pop song. Ditto the song ‘Graceland’ (Elvis Presley’s home) which celebrates American music, the Mississippi Delta the home of the blues while 68

sung over an infectious rhythm of fretless bass and guitar that has little in common with Charley Patton or Robert Johnson. The Everly Brothers add their backing vocals on the fadeout. ‘Gumboots’ the first song Simon heard on his bootleg tape is the style of music favoured by mine and railroad workers in South Africa, gumboots are heavy boots they wear at work. Backed by The Boyoyo Boys it’s another accordion based song that triggered Simon’s initial interest in the sound of Soweto. ‘Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes’ unlike most of the other songs was recorded entirely in New York. It opens with a verse in Zulu sung a cappella by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. West African singer Youssou N’dour a star in his own country also contributes. The lyrics for ‘You Can Call Me Al’ a kind of South African funk / dance groove had their origins at a party Simon and his wife Peggy hosted during which they met composer Pierre Boulez. On leaving he called Simon ‘Al’ and the hostess ‘Betty’. ‘Homeless’ co-written with Joseph Shabalala the leader of Ladysmith Black Mambazo is sung entirely a cappella. Recorded at Abbey Road Studios, the lyrics alternate between Zulu and English. The haunting chorus ‘we are homeless...moonlight is sleeping on a midnight lake’ is a metaphor for the political dispossession of the black South African majority that prevailed during apartheid. The musicians playing on ‘Crazy Love’ are part of a band called Stimela who had released several hits on local South African charts. ‘Under African Skies’ is enhanced by Linda Ronstadt’s contribution. The final track - ‘All Around The World Or The Myth Of Fingerprints’ - recorded with Los Lobos is the album’s most controversial track. According to the band’s saxophonist Steve Berlin, “Simon stole the song from Los Lobos giving us no songwriting credit.”

By Martin Jones

FLEETWOOD MAC

HEROES ARE HARD TO FIND Reprise

ny record store owner will tell you they could sell a crate of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Greatest Hits every month. I can tell you no one ever walks in and asks for Heroes Are Hard to Find (or Future Games or Penguin or Bare Trees for that matter). And critics don’t seem to grant it much gravitas in the Mac canon. However, it’s an intriguing document of a band in transition and, more importantly, rich with great songs. ‘Angel’ and ‘Silver Heels’ are among Bob Welch’s finest moments. Heroes Are Hard to Find is significant as the last of the pre-Stevie Nicks/Lindsey Buckingham albums, and the final Mac album for Bob Welch. And Welch went out with a bang, writing seven of the album’s 11 songs, a number of which he would revisit regularly throughout his career. ‘Angel’ is a timeless highlight, straddling the dark blues jam feels of the band’s history and a thoroughly modern understated Grateful Dead psychedelia. It fades into being on the album as though catching the band mid jam, a bubbling cauldron of lurching rhythm and swirling guitars and organs. Welch’s guitar playing is lyrical and sweet and his “Angel, I really wanna see you” as barbed a hook as you’ll find. Lyrics like “I’ve got a sweet lot of plans that have come to nothing, And a life that’s in need of a good repair,” are

both professionally and personally revealing. Welch had been through a bunch of turmoil in Fleetwood Mac by this time, including his infamous clashes with Danny Kirwan, and the “Fake Mac” saga which saw the band take over its own management and relocate to Los Angeles with Welch as the sole guitarist. Welch resigned from the band soon after the release of Heroes… ‘Silver Heels’ is just a great upbeat pop song with powerful chord changes and big melodies reminiscent of a Leon Russell composition in which Welch sings, “If I could sing like Paul McCartney and get funky like Etta James, I’d never change, I’d never change”. Indeed, Welch’s New Orleans R&B influences bubble to surface all over the place, ‘Born Enchanter’ like a Toussaint tribute that sings about being a “born enchanter down in the City of Dreams.” Heroes Are Hard to Find was the first Mac album to be recorded in Los Angeles and there are signs of what was to come. Christine McVie’s title track is all sunny groove, horns and melody and ‘Come a Little Bit Closer’ is a strings-and-all Carole King ballad complete with Sneaky Pete Kleinow on pedal steel. Neither would sound out of place on Rumours. Meanwhile, ‘She’s Changing Me’ is part Byrds/part Beach Boys with twanging guitars (not sure why they didn’t get Sneaky Pete

on that one) and swooping harmonies and album closer ‘Safe Harbour’ sounds inspired by the Pacific Ocean, like an outtake from Pet Sounds. Recording engineer was Bob Hughes who had worked with Sneaky Pete’s band The Flying Burrito Brothers, as well as Billy Joel, Bob Lind, Bill Withers and Fleetwood Mac on Bare Trees. One of the great things about Heroes Are Hard to Find is all the simmering weirdness below the brighter pop (which the slightly bizarre cover portrait of Fleetwood and his daughter by Herbie Worthington reflects). Second song in, ‘Coming Home’ opens with some Doors-like satanic rambling about destroying you before erupting into an ominous groove and a Peter Green-ode guitar motif, like a more sinister ‘Albatross’. Another fantastic Welch creation (‘Coming Home’, not ‘Albatross’). And then Welch gets into shameless conspiracy theory on ‘Bermuda Triangle’. Not such a fantastic Welch creation. Though Heroes was moderately successful for the band, giving them their first US Top 40 Album, it was nothing compared to what was around the corner. Buckingham and Nicks turned up to the next recording sessions with ‘Monday Morning’ and ‘Rhiannon’ respectively, Fleetwood Mac went to Number One and everyone promptly forgot about the preceding ten years. 69

By Christopher Hollow SURPRISE CHEF

EDUCATION & RECREATION Big Crown

Both big screen cinema and small screen television shows have inspired some cool band names over the years – everything from Mogwai to My Bloody Valentine to Mudhoney. Maybe it says something about Millennials that they’re now taking naming inspiration from reality TV rather than vintage films. Enter Melbourne instrumental combo, Surprise Chef, christened after the short-lived, early 21st Century cooking show where chef Aristos would invite himself into your house, raid your fridge, then whip up a culinary delight (impressively, the band have previously namechecked a song, ‘Flip Shelton’, after the show’s original co-host). The aesthetic is very Coburg (pictures of Merri Creek, jasmine flowers in spring bloom, songs named after the No. 1 tram line) and if you’re looking for a ballpark act, maybe Portland, Oregon’s Pell Mell or LA’s Maston, or, at a stretch, the Beastie Boys funky forays into instrumentals as collected on The In Sound From Way Out! Is there a ‘challenge ingredient’ like using Coca-Cola as a marinade? Not really. This is well put together, very tasteful, very enjoyable. DARK CANYON

DARK CANYON Nudie

Eyes squint to the blinding sun, lips are cracked and parched, a 70

vulture circles. If you were stuck deep inside a spaghetti western, being played by someone like Cameron Mitchell, Katy Jurado or Lee Van Cleef, Dark Canyons would provide the perfect soundtrack. It’s a loving homage to Ennio Morricone – there are open chords, harmonica, strings, mariachi trumpets, wordless operatic vocals and Alessandro Alessandroni-style whistling, and that’s just on the first single, ‘Bullets’. Throw in Jew’s harp, train sounds and twangy high lonesome guitar lines and it’s kinda laughable how many western motifs (‘Pray for Rain’), themes (‘Through the Badlands’), tropes (‘Ride You Bastards!’), archetypes (‘Dead Man Rides Again’), devices (‘Hunting Party’), elements (‘Snake in the Grass’), concepts (‘Old Blood Runs Thick’) and cliches (‘Rite of Passage’) are contained within these Dark Canyons. This is alright with me, though, I love westerns, and I can enjoy this music both cynically and with pure pleasure. There’s even a version of the old Brit number, ‘A Taste of Honey’, to close things out as we ride into the sun.

Chapman (Blondie/The Knack/ Suzi Quatro). Here, the title track is a nod to those Chapmanproduced tracks like ‘Don’t Talk to Me About Love’ and ‘Love to Stay’, and it’s an absolute delight. ‘Sleep’ is a trip-hop style number while ‘Colour of My Dreams’ appears to be a real raison d’etre song for Clare Grogan. ‘The temptation sometimes to fade away, it overwhelms me,’ she sings. ‘But believe me I’m here to stay.’ Grogan’s voice was always like a mischievous kid had sucked too much helium, but it has matured and settled somewhat. But, one thing that hasn’t changed, she still radiates pure joy. I mean, she radiated joy in Gregory’s Girl, the 1980 comingof-age film that had a huge influence on early 80s youth. She radiated joy as Lister’s unrequited love, Kristine Z. Kochanski, in Red Dwarf, (she was also the unrequited love inspiration for Spandau Ballet’s megahit ‘True’) and she radiates joy here.

ALTERED IMAGES

Aurora

STARRY EYED AND LAUGHING

LOVE | SONG

MASCARA STREAKZ Cooking Vinyl

This is super exciting, the resurrection of Altered Images, the early 80s UK punk pop band that only released three records (all fabulous) back in the day. You might remember them from massive hits like ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘I Could Be Happy’. They just happened to be one of my very favourite bands growing up. So, Mascara Streakz picks up some 39 years later from one of my alltime best-loved albums, 1983’s vastly underrated Bite, which was half helmed by famed Bowie/ Bolan/Dean & Britta main man Tony Visconti, half by Australia’s second greatest producer, Mike

Always a band out of its time, UK’s Starry Eyed and Laughing released a couple of smart but wildly anachronistic albums in the mid-70s that were full of Rickenbacker 12-string guitars and other OTT Byrdsy/Bob Dylan touches (eg. the band name for starters, they also did straight rips on ‘Chimes of Freedom’, ‘He Was a Friend of Mine’ and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’). Their debut record did have a pair of cracking original numbers, ‘Lady Came from The South’ and ‘Never Say Too Late’, that still stand up. Cut to 2022 and SE&L have reformed and released a fabulous tribute album, Love | Song, where they take on tunes by the likes of Spirit (‘Nature’s Way’), Moby Grape

(‘It’s a Beautiful Day, Today’), Lesley Duncan (‘Love Song’), Leonard Cohen (‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’) and an amazing version of ‘American Dreamer’, the Gene Clark song originally used in not one, but two Dennis Hopper films from the 70s (American Dreamer and The Farmer). The biggest surprise is a cover of Justin Timberlake’s ‘What Goes Around…Comes Around’, which is given the antediluvian treatment and rendered as a Big Star/Flamin’ Groovies power pop anthem. So out to be in. CHRIS FORSYTH

EVOLUTION HERE WE COME No Quarter

This is American intensity meeting German ingenuity. As a guitarist, Chris Forsyth is the synthesis of Peter Green’s cosmic blues energy melded to the punk awareness of Television’s Richard Lloyd, whilst being experimental enough to appreciate Amon Düül II. In the past, the Philadelphia local has also done some nice Neil Young covers, including an inspired ‘Don’t Be Denied’. Evolution is mostly a hard-edged instrumental record; ‘Experimental & Professional’ does what it says on the tin – combining a chugging Billy Gibbons like boogie with enough blips, bloops, and bleeps to keep it interesting over eight minutes. ‘Heaven For a Few’ takes a more melodic approach but still manages some eccentric sonic flourishes while ‘Long Beach Idyll’, a song which originally came out on an album called The Island that Forsyth did with Koen Holtkamp back in 2015, showcases flute. Forsyth does takes to the mic for ‘You’re Going to Need Somebody’, the Richard & Linda Thompson song from 1979s Sunnyvista, that also features the Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn on backing vocals.

BY KEITH GLASS

HAZEL & ALICE Rounder 0027 (1973)

In the 60’s/70’s/80’s major record labels worldwide maintained a massive album release schedule. Only a comparatively few artists scored a hit, others became ‘cult’ classics. Beyond that exists an underbelly of almost totally ignored work, (much never reissued) that time has been kind to. This is a page for the crate diggers. Some years ago, whilst driving across the American heartland I was listening to a Satellite radio interview with Wynonna Judd and suddenly it all made sense. The mother/daughter duo The Judds that so impacted Country music with their unique rootsy yet modern sound spent their early years of musical hibernation/isolation listening to one album, Hazel & Alice. This 1973 Rounder label self-titled release is actually the third album by the duo but the most stark and focused (the first two on Folkways have been re-issued on vinyl, alas this seminal work not so far). On release it was a minor sensation, at least amongst folk circles, leading to many critics naming Hazel & Alice as the first female Bluegrass artists. For sure this was a male dominated genre but family groups, as in the case of The Stonemans and The Sullivan’s mixed genres with fine musical ability and have been largely under appreciated. Hazel & Alice injected a roots sound more akin to what The Carter Family had displayed starting in the late 1920’s. In the still stark rural 50’s and 60’s many of The Carter’s songs had become standards. Artist such as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger worked through their influence, and all were stepping-stones for

Hazel & Alice. Seeger’s brother Mike actually plays on this album and often performed live with the duo. In fact, he was instrumental in them meeting in the first place when ‘the other’ Seeger sought to find more depth to the folk music ‘craze’ than “strummy renditions of Greensleeves and Cock Robin” (to quote Alice’s notes). Hazel Dickens was born in rural West Virginia whilst Alice Gerrard came from the much more urban Seattle, Washington but together their sound was at once ‘old timey’ but also akin to the new vibrant Bluegrass scene found around the folk clubs and bars of Baltimore and Washington DC. Thus, the duo found live work with their no posturing, plain, direct and honest songs. In fact, as Alice mentions in the extensive liner notes this third album was a fairly radical departure in terms of the two women’s development as songwriters with the entire second side being devoted to their own material. Titles such as ‘Custom Made Woman Blues’ and ‘Don’t Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There’ set the tone and the determination to keep it all down home and real. Elsewhere on the album there are some traditional pieces (‘A Few More Years Shall Roll’) the mighty Carter Family classic ‘Hello Stranger’, plus a contribution from another composer/vocalist who can tug the heart strings – namely Wilma Lee Cooper with her song ‘Tomorrow I’ll Be Gone’. Wilma along with her husband Stoney kept it real throughout a long career. For Hazel & Alice there were more adventures, but this album was without doubt their finest moment. This is music of the age, for the ages and without a use by date. Country and to a lesser extent Bluegrass music have seen a lot of changes through the years but when a near 50-year-old album can still seem as fresh as the days it was made and along the path it took be so influential in the long haul to be announced ‘seminal’ - then something special is at hand. As Alice Gerrard mentions in the liner notes ‘this record is some of the music that we like and have done over the years. It’s also the result of good friendship, lots of changes…a mutual esthetic, perseverance and knowing we love the music.” 71

By Trevor J. Leeden SCONE CASH PLAYERS

SANCTUARY

LEE FIELDS

SANCTUARY Sundazed/Redeye/Planet

SENTIMENTAL FOOL Daptone/Redeye/Planet

Waves of mellotron interwoven with trippy flourishes of flute can only mean one thing – PROG ROCK. The Kansas quartet had paid obvious attention to the stentorian sound of Yes, ELP and Jethro Tull before recording their eponymous 1971 opus; indeed, the Yes comparison carries through to a stunning cover of ‘Time And A Word’, replete with layers of vocal harmonies. Edgar Winter’s ‘Winter’s Dream’ receives an inspired 20-minute workover (it is prog after all!), and the four bonus live tracks simmer with soul and gospel undertones - and just a hint of the pomposity the genre demands. Ian Anderson would approve.

If there ever was a perfect label for Lee Fields then surely it’s the Daptone imprint; where better for arguably the finest retro-soul man on the planet to reside? Two decades on from recording two singles for the fledgling label, Fields unleashes possibly the finest album of his storied career. Whether he’s channelling James Brown, Otis Redding, Sam & Dave or Bobby Bland, Fields delves the depths of soulful emotions, from down-on-knees testifying through plaintive ballads to the raw power of brass-fuelled stompers. Members of the Menahan Street Band, having pumped out high octane riffs for Charles Bradley and Sharon Jones in the past, now provide similar stellar support for Fields.

Hammond B3 maestro Adam Scone’s impossibly hip combo draws upon the services of Daptone stablemate Neil Sugarman’s tenor sax, Seattle based guitarist Jabrille “Jimmy James” Williams, Dap-Kings drumming supremo Brian Wolfe, and L.A. based Afro-Latin percussionist Caitlin Moss. Inspired by musical detours to Sao Paulo (Brooklin), their fourth album is an intoxicating melange of deep-funk and psychedelic Brazilian soul-jazz grooves, a joyous outpouring of sensual Jimmy Smith meets Sergio Mendes vibes. A whiff of samba, a dash of bossa nova, some Brazil ’66 inspired backing vocals and Scone’s screaming organ combine into a tsunami of cosmic ebullience; YEAH BABY!

As much an historical document as a (2disc) record, this collection of acetates, radio and television appearances, and publishing demos provides a fascinating insight into the Jewish cowgirl’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to become a honky-tonk queen in the late 1950’s. She rubbed shoulders with Wanda Jackson as an early pioneer of rockabilly and was even crowned National Rodeo Queen (“judged on looks, personality and riding ability”). Blessed with a wonderfully distinctive voice, her sliding doors moment came when Decca overlooked her for stablemate Patsy Cline to record ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’; the rest is history, encapsulated in this fine country collection.

CECIL ALEXANDER

NIKKI LANE

FREDDY KING

KYLE HAMLETT DUO

INTRODUCING Heartcore/Redeye/Planet

DENIM & DIAMONDS New West/Redeye/Planet

TEXAS OIL: THE COMPLETE FEDERAL & EL-BEE SIDES Soul Jam

TAPE DIAMONDS Arrowhawk/Redeye/Planet

The debut recording from the gifted Berklee College of Music alumnus is quite a calling card. His mellifluous guitar technique resonates beautifully in a trio format offset by the similarly precocious talents of young New Yorkers Steve Crammer (drums) and Will Gorman (organ), both of whom are given ample scope to stretch out. Across a selection of originals and tasteful covers (Coltrane, Hathaway, Ellington), Alexander evokes the melodic artistry of Grant Green, Lee Ritenour and George Benson. One suspects Cecil Alexander won’t need introductions much longer in mainstream jazz circles. 72

With Queens of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme filling production duties, it’s not surprising that Lane’s first album in five years bears an undeniably harder edge. Backed by members of QOTSA and the Arctic Monkeys, Lane operates between outlaw country (Matthew Pynn’s pedal steel is still prominent) and gritty guitar fuelled indie rock. Whilst Lane may intend to deliver a middle finger to traditional country tropes, there’s no hiding the country timbre of her voice, particularly when the alt-rock backing is wound back.

This superb 2-disc compilation brings all 42 of the Texas Cannonball’s recordings from 1956-1962 (prior to changing his spelling to Freddie). As one of the (unrelated) “Three Kings Of The Blues Guitar” (along with Albert and B.B.), Freddy’s crisp, clean picking style has influenced generations of electric blues guitarists, particularly British and European guitarists including Eric Clapton and Peter Green. King was especially renowned for his instrumentals, recording 30 during this period including his signature ‘Hide Away’, ‘I’m Tore Down’, ‘The Stumble’, and ‘San-Ho-Zay’; brilliant stuff.

Luke Schneider can feel a little hard done by that he gets no naming credit in this duo, given his sonorous Emmons pedal steel is what lifts singer-songwriter Hamlett’s folky lo-fi tunes to a near-sublime level. Hamlett’s vocal phrasing and finger picking evokes memories of Bert Jansch, but it’s the weeping pedal steel that adds all the colour and texture to a set of hazy, ambient country airs, the exception being a standout Piedmont Blues interpretation of The Smiths’ ‘Death Of A Disco Dancer’. Elsewhere, there are sonic resemblances to the atmospheric country recordings of Bill Frisell.

BROOKLYN TO BROOKLIN Daptone/Redeye/Planet

MIMI ROMAN

FIRST OF THE BROOKLYN COWGIRLS Sundazed/Redeye/Planet

By Chris Familton

ESSENTIAL AMERICANA ALBUMS Gram Parsons – Grievous Angel (1974)

ram Parsons is something of a golden inter-connector, a conduit between the worlds of country music and rock ’n’ roll. You can add folk music to the mix too, given his late teen years as a member of the Shilohs in South Carolina. Through the International Submarine Band, the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons coalesced the various strands of roots music into the prototype of what we now call Americana music. In his own words he described it as “Cosmic American Music”. Parsons was something of a latecomer to country music, only really falling under its spell when he discovered Merle Haggard while at Harvard University in the mid ‘60s. It clearly had an impact on him, shifting his musical sensibilities and widening his musical abilities. As a result, he would pass the baton on to others, including reigniting Keith Richards’ interest in country music when the two of them became firm friends.

The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968) and The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin (1969) are absolute landmarks of country rock, and they were the albums that gave Parsons the experience and confidence to step out under his own name with his two solo studio albums – GP (1973) and Grievous Angel. Parsons’ first solo record was undeniably strong, featuring classic songs such as ‘A Song for You’ and ‘She’, and importantly, introducing Emmylou Harris as a backing singer. The success of their musical chemistry on that album, and on-stage, led to Harris being credited with lead vocals on Grievous Angel and as a songwriter on the devastating ‘In My Hour of Darkness’. That decision to share the spotlight was crucial in elevating the album to the deserved status it now commands. The sound of their voices beautifully contrasting and harmonising, adding a depth and sensitivity that Parsons hadn’t previously reached on his recordings. Grievous Angel is far from your standard singer-songwriter collection. There are songs from Parsons’ mid-60s folksinger days (‘Brass Buttons’), ‘Hickory Wind’ had already been recorded with The Byrds, the lyrics of ‘Return of the Grievous Angel’ were by the Boston poet Thomas Brown, ‘I Can’t Dance’ was a Tom T. Hall classic and the mid-album medley of The Louvin Brothers’ ‘Cash on the Barrelhead’ and Parsons’s ‘Hickory Wind’ was a fake live recording with canned applause. Though it may have been a sign of the scarcity of original material at the time it also showed Parsons’ magpie tendencies, drawing from all corners to corral his own style, embedding himself in a greatest hits compilation in his mind. There are five songs in particular that are moments of pure genius on the album. Opening with ‘Return of the Grievous Angel’ Parsons sets the scene alongside Harris in a timeless Johnny and June country sway, complete with violin, pedal steel and the guitar of James

Burton. The pair sing about the open roads and returning to the arms of a loved one, the song containing the immortal lines “Out with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels, and a good saloon in every single town”. ‘Hearts on Fire’ dials into a 60s feel with unflinching lyrics about a dead relationship, the magic coming in the way the pair sing with a sweet, sad melancholy, belying the weight of lines such as “My love has turned to hatred, sleep escapes me still, God, please take this heart of mine ‘cause if you don’t the devil will.” ‘Brass Buttons’ has timeless classic written all over it. That intro piano melody, the heartache of the pedal steel and the sweet and soulful vocal delivery of Parsons. In it he presents vividly intimate details about the memory of a lover departed. It’s a delicate and perfectly composed song, one of Parsons’s finest and one that would be given a new lease of life with The Lemonheads’ excellent cover in 1990. ‘Love Hurts’ isn’t a Parsons song, it was written by Boudleaux Bryant and previously recorded by The Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison before Parsons and Harris put their stamp on it, stripping it of its pomp and overt drama and dialling into the soul and tenderness of the song. It clearly made a big impact on Harris as it became a staple of her live set, and she would go on to re-record it twice for later solo albums. The last song on the album, ‘In My Hour of Darkness’, is another towering highlight. Credited to both Parsons and Harris, it takes the record back to an authentic, almost hymnal honky tonk place where it’s hard, in hindsight, to separate the events that were about to unfold, from the in-memoriam/farewell styled lyrics, particularly of the middle verse: “Another young man safely strummed his silver string guitar, and he played to people everywhere Some say he was a star, but he was just a country boy. His simple songs confess, and the music he had in him, so very few possess.” It was only a matter of weeks before Parsons would depart this mortal coil, dying of a morphine and alcohol overdose at the Joshua Tree Inn in California at just 26 years of age In the wake of Parsons’s death, his widow Gretchen reportedly removed Harris from the front cover of the album (which was originally credited to “Gram Parsons with Emmylou Harris” and featured a photograph of the two of them) and relegated her to a credit on the back cover. In doing so she also changed the album title from Parsons’s intended Sleepless Nights. Grievous Angel was released posthumously a few months after Gram Parsons’s death, in early 1974. 73

By Brian Wise

MARCUS KING

YOUNG BLOOD American Records/Republic

hen Marcus King first visited us with his band for Bluesfest 2019 he was a twenty-three-year-old riding high, with three albums in the previous four years and acclaimed as the next big thing of the blues. The Greenville, North Carolina native couldn’t have been happier. King visited us with his band mates in the Bluesfest Q&A tent and wowed people with an impromptu acapella performance of several songs and if people hadn’t been convinced he was destined for stardom before that it sealed the deal. But as often happens in life, things didn’t quite go the way that everyone thought they would. In 2020, King released El Dorado, his debut solo album with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach in the production seat. While that garnered a Grammy nomination things started to fall apart for King. Dealing with a broken relationship - and possibly issues raised by a meteoric rise – he found himself dealing with mental health issues such as bouts of mania and depression and drug and alcohol abuse. By the time he came to record his latest album Young Blood with Auerbach, the young guitarist thought it might be the last one he would ever make. He was fast approaching that age when so many of his heroes had checked out. He couldn’t help but think of Jimi Hendrix and one of his favourite players who left at the even earlier age of twenty-five: Free’s revered guitarist Paul Kossoff. In fact, Young Blood is redolent of the influence of British rockers such as Free and Led Zeppelin and is easily King’s hardest rocking album to date. You only have to check some of the song titles to get an inkling of what might have been happening in King’s life over recent years: ‘It’s Too Late’, ‘Lie Lie Lie’, ‘Rescue Me’, ‘Pain’, ‘Blood On The Tracks’ (not a reference to Dylan) or ‘Blues Worse Than I Ever Had.’ Though the songs might seem personal not all of them are penned by King alone. This time he has branched out by collaborating with Auerbach and songwriting legends Angelo Petraglia and Desmond Child (who have written for the Kings of Leon and Aerosmith). When I catch up by Zoom to talk to King, I am in Nashville where he is due to play a week after I leave and he is at The Beacon Theater in New York, deep into a US tour that will take him to the end of the year and then to Europe in March before he joins us here. He is surprisingly frank about what he has been through, telling me that by talking about it he hopes he can help other people. “It’s been kind of a whirlwind, man. There was a lot going on, that’s for sure,” replies King when I remind him of his first visit to Australia and the fact that a lot has happened in the intervening years. “So, we’re really thrilled to be back and to see you guys again.” “It’s really been catching a great reception from the crowd,” he says about the new album. “The audiences here in the States have been reacting to it really wildly, so we’re hoping to get back down to y’all and have a similar reaction. Australians have always treated us just like our hometown loved ones. Y’all are really similar to Rednecks is what we call them in the States, and that’s what our family all is Rednecks.” “So, I just released a record and before that, I got engaged to a wonderful woman and before that, I was on a bit of a rough patch,” explains King about the recent past. “I was on a bit of a dark period. There was a lot of substance abuse and a lot of alcohol abuse. It was a really dark period, but it was also a very creative period. Then before that, there was a really big breakup that happened, and then before

that, there was a quarantine that happened at the tail end of a fouryear relationship that just kind of brought everything to a head. “All my past transgressions and all her transgressions all kind of met in the middle into this huge clash of psychological torment that was just being trapped in a house with someone that you realised you don’t love anymore and come to terms with that. Then before that, I think that was around the last time I saw you.” So, how did King manage to get through this dark period of his young life? “I mean, having good friends who are often collaborators, whether it’d be my band or whether it’d be someone like Dan Auerbach,” he explains. “He’s like family to me, but he’s also a creative collaborator in the sense that he’s a wonderful producer and writer. I was able to both confide in him as a friend, and we were also then able to write about it simultaneously. So, that was really important to have around me at that time.” It’s great that King is able to talk about his problems publicly because a lot of people bottle these things up, his revelations might help other people. “I mean, it’s my aim and my hope that my experience can help people,” he agrees, “and it helps me to be able to talk about it and to sing about it and play about it. It’s a therapeutic thing. So, if other people can catch a little bit of relief, then that’s what I’m here to do.” How did the great guitarist Paul Kossoff enter the picture for King? “It was more of just these signs that I would kind of get from the universe where I’d hear the band Free wherever I was, department stores, elevators,” he explains. “I’d hear them on television programs I was watching, and it wouldn’t just be like ‘All Right Now’ or any of the hits. It’d be deeper cut stuff like ‘Wishing Well’ or ‘Oh I Wept’ or ‘Walk In My Shadow’ rather. It’s been these tunes that I always loved, but you don’t really hear them on radio very often. So, I just thought it was really foreboding. “Then, I started reading into Kossoff because I knew he passed away young. I was 25 at the time I did the record and he was 25 when he passed away and he was living a pretty similar lifestyle to me. So, it felt pretty foreboding, a little terrifying. Now, I realise that it was just a warning sign rather than a guarantee.”

“I started reading into Kossoff……I was 25 at the time I did the record and he was 25 when he passed away and he was living a pretty similar lifestyle to me. So, it felt pretty foreboding, a little terrifying…” “He tweeted about me and my team, which really, really blows me away because Paul Rodgers is my favorite rock and roll singer, only second to Robert Plant, I’d have to say, and James Dewar [Robin Trower’s band].” says King when I ask if he has had any contact with Free’s singer. “I mean I’ve got a lot of favourite rock and roll singers, but Paul Rodgers is in that top five for sure. I hope we’ll get together with him soon as well.” The other key component in Young Blood is Auerbach’s production. The Black Keys’ guitarist reached out to King in 2018 interested in his singing. King flew directly to Nashville. “The rest, as they say, is history,” he says. “Not to mention the accolades that that record received, but how effortless it was to work with him,” says King of recording the first solo album. “That led me to wanting to do another record with him, but also there being a two-year period where we weren’t really working on anything, he and I just became good friends. He became a mentor on and off the stage or in and out of the studio and he became a really good friend. The dark period I was going through, that’s really the only producer I would’ve wanted to work with that closely because we had that comfortability as kind of a familial vibe almost.” Of course, Young Blood is a classic blues title, isn’t it? King has a simple explanation of how he came to use it. “Well, speaking of the Beacon Theater, I came across that title in my mind just because my dear friend and mentor, Jai Johanny Johanson, Jaimoe aka, from the Allman Brothers Band, he’s called me Young

Blood since I’ve known him like the past nearly a decade. He’s always called me Young Blood, and I thought what better of a way to title this album that kind of closes the first chapter of my career, which is the first decade, 15 to 25. “I wanted this album to kind of encapsulate that whole first chapter, and that’s what Jaimoe called me. So, I said, ‘Let’s call it Young Blood.’ Then, on the back of the gatefold, you could see a motorcycle with the Young Blood name cycle on the back of it. Dan and I kind of serendipitously purchased a motorcycle before we started the record, so it’s just a lot of things like that just fell into place and same goes for the recording of the record. Everything just fell right into place perfectly.” There’s a real harder edge to this album and, along with Free, there’s a bit of a Led Zeppelin vibe on some of the tracks as well. “This record was a product of a lot of things and one of those things being I was just refamiliarising myself with all these blues, rock and roll records that I loved growing up, the first three Zeppelin records, Robin Trower’s Bridge of Sighs, the first few Free records. What else? First few ZZ Top records, Sabbath records. I was just listening to all this stuff and Grand Funk Railroad’s Life and James Gang. I was listening to all these trio records because I wanted to capture some inspiration. The way my brain works and the way my musical mind works is that once it kind of gets in my brain, it just kind of seeps out in these different ways, but it’s never really an intentional thing. It’s more of a subconscious release if it gets in it just want to come back out one way or another.” 75

By Brian Wise

BRAND NEW OLD TIME MUSIC MELISSA CARPER

RAMBLIN’ SOUL Love Police Records

The album Daddy’s Country Gold emerged last year as if from another dimension, somewhere back in the Appalachians in a long gone past. The album’s creator Melissa Carper had an authenticity that is rare these days. Though she was raised in Nebraska, nowhere near the Smoky Mountains, and played in her parents’ family band their record collection included Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley and Jimmie Rodgers. You can probably spot those influences in her recordings but you can add singers who influenced her such as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole and Lead Belly – all of whom she discovered when she was at college. After travelling around in a 1980 Dodge van, getting as far as New Orleans, Carper landed in Eureka Springs, Arkansas for a few years and played in an outfit called The Maybelles. Then she moved to Austin, formed a trio she dubbed The Carper Family (an obvious reference there) before rambling again across to Nashville. She had recorded the album Arkansas Bound in Texas and had a duo album out with Rebecca Patek, Brand New Old Time Songs. In 2020, Carper headed with friends back to Texas to settle in Bastrop, near Austin. [There are songs about her van and Texas on the new album]. “It’s a lot of moving. I’m getting tired of it,” laughs Carper when we catch up at her publicist’s house in East Nashville during Americana. “I’m ready to settle down. We think we should have our Texas home and our Nashville home. If we have a few homes all over the place, that would be just perfect.” The actual recording sessions for her two most recent albums took place in Nashville with co-producers Andrija Tokic (St. Paul & The Broken Bones, Hurray For The Riff Raff) and Dennis Crouch (The Time Jumpers) at Tokic’s analog paradise The Bomb Shelter in Nashville. For her new album, Carper decided to use the same crew, including Chris Scruggs (who also plays with Marty Stuart) plus a few others. The title song ‘Ramblin’ Soul’ could be the theme song for Carper’s past few years. “I did write that one actually, when I was in the car traveling,” she says. “I was traveling from Arkansas back down to Texas and I realised how much that the rambling around and traveling and seeing my friends in different places and was such a big part of my inspiration behind my songs. Actually, we hadn’t done much traveling since the beginning of 2020 and then I was finally driving around and finally getting out a little bit. I was so happy to be on the road again. And so that’s the inspiration behind that song.” “I put a handful of tunes on there about traveling around, rambling around,” she admits. “And I knew I wanted the Ramblin’ Soul album to have a different feel, not be just the country and the jazz. And I’ve 76

written several songs that fall more in the R&B or early rock-and-roll sort of sound. So, I wanted to put some of those on there and mix that in the mix too.” Of course, when she was young Carper listened to the original Rambling Man in Hank Williams who featured prominently in her parents’ collection. “The rambling man. Yeah,” she agrees. “I think all musicians have to do a lot of traveling around and it’s weird. I have a love-hate relationship with it because it’s a balance you need to strike. Because when I’m home too much, I start itching to get out there. But then when I’m traveling too much, I just need to get back home.” Ramblin’ Soul also features a co-write with friend and bandmate Gina Gallina, a song penned by friend and frequent collaborator Brennen Leigh (who we saw as a guest with Asleep At The Wheel); a reimagined classic from folk pioneer Odetta; along with the ten Carper originals. The album expands on the musical palette of Daddy’s Country Gold and “ventures into blues, early rock and roll, and old school soul, along with Carper’s signature styles of country, western swing, and jazz.” “In Arkansas, I felt like I was exposed to a lot of old-time music and that was new for me,” explains Carper. “Even though I’d listened to a lot of old country, the old-time music I hadn’t listened to yet, so that was good. Arkansas was good for that kind of influence for me. Then moving down to New Orleans, of course, and all the Dixieland jazz down there. I feel like I’ve been influenced by every place that I live, the music scene that’s going on.” Carper’s previous albums have had some interesting songs titles – ‘Don’t Let the Aliens Take Him Away’ and ‘Christian Girlfriend’ – and Ramblin’ Soul has ‘Zen Buddha.’ “I wrote that when I was living down in Austin and I felt like it was something that maybe Elvis Presley would have sang back in his time,” explains Carper. “I guess the storyline behind that is that I had just started meditating. I just started trying to do that in my life, so that’s how that concept worked its way into the song. I just feel like I was becoming more spiritual in my life and in my path and I realised that I needed to quiet my mind down in order to be able to get, I don’t know, to become closer to God or to get that closer connection that I wanted with nature. And as most people probably do, I have a very busy mind and there’s constant chatter going on in there. So, I started taking some classes in meditation and I realized that’s what I needed.”

By Brett Leigh Dicks

DAVE JOHNSON’S TRIP DOWN

INEQUALITY BOULEVARD DAVE JOHNSON

INEQUALITY BOULEVARD Independent

he current socio-political climate has given us all plenty to contemplate. Having long channelled his empathic social awareness into song, Fremantle-based musician Dave Johnson’s latest musical statement – INEQUALITY BLVD - could have gone any number of different ways. “It’s no secret the past few years have been tough going for a lot of people,” Johnson told Rhythms Magazine has he clutched a coffee on Fremantle’s cappuccino strip. “And on top of a pandemic and people losing work, all the other concerns we were facing as a community and society were compounding. “I started tackling different issues – like immigration, economic disparity, and youth detention – in the songs I was writing. But I figured people had been through enough already, so I didn’t want to hit them over the head with this stuff. There are definitely things happening all around us that need to be discussed so I wanted to throw out my thoughts and hear what other people reckon.” As empathetic as the conversation the singer-songwriter, multiinstrumentalist, and producer is having across his new album, it’s also a conversation of consequence. Recorded at Sundown Studios on the outskirts of his hometown, the album offers a stinging critique of the social and economic realities that result from vested interests, market forces, and short-term politic thinking. But INEQUALITY BLVD also walks a tender path, introducing listeners to an array of characters all struggling to stay afloat in an increasingly, blindly narcissistic, and dangerous world. “Each of the songs on the album have a pretty strong point to make so having chosen to write them I’m now throwing them out there,” Johnson explained. “I’m not a social scientist or politician and ultimately, they’re just songs, but it’s my hope that through this conversation we can at least take a small step forward. “You just need to look at the juvenile justice system for example. It’s just not working and it’s going to take a lot of community discussion to allow money to flow through to services that do work. Health issues are getting confused with economic issues which are getting confused with justice issues and that’s what the song “Inequality Boulevard” looks at.

These are conversations we really need to have.” The discussions the album seeks to raise come from firsthand experience. In addition to starting a singing group at a local homeless shelter - which evolved into the lauded Starlight Hotel Choir - Johnson also teaches music at a juvenile detention centre to some of the most troubled and traumatised kids in Western Australia. He has seen what injecting positivity into troubled lives can do. “Learning an instrument in prison provides something of an oasis for those kids,” Johnson said. “They’re being thrown into a pretty difficult environment in which to survive so to have a creative outlet and a means for expression is a very positive thing. It’s a pretty powerful tool and being part of that is an amazing experience.” A stalwart of the west coast music scene, Johnson arrived in Perth in the late 1980s. Having previously undertaken a degree in biochemistry in Victoria, he decided to follow his musical aspirations and busked his way around the country. After arriving in the west, it didn’t take long for Fremantle to seep into his psyche. “I found my people,” Johnson said with a laugh. “Fremantle has always had a great creative culture and is a very accepting place - that continues today. I was getting around at the time by hitchhiking and busking and there’s no better place to be a busker than Fremantle. But what I love most about Fremantle is the people. It’s a caring community that votes pretty well and that comes across in its culture.” Fremantle also has a great affinity for music. From the buskers that line the streets on weekends to the likes of Kevin Parker and John Butler, the port city offers a rich and diverse music culture, something that served Johnson well when it came time to record the album. With guidance from co-producer Elliot Smith, INEQUALITY BLVD sees Johnson channelling raw emotion and insightful storytelling into a groove-laden acoustic alchemy. The eight-track recording features a who’s who of Western Australian musical elite. With Johnson on acoustic guitar, vocals, mandolin, and cittern, the recording includes the talents of Tony Bourke (The Waifs/ Eskimo Joe) on piano, Ben Franz (The Waifs/Mick Thomas) on upright bass, Luke Dux (The Kill Devil Hills/ThornBird) on electric guitar, Ian Simpson (Paul Kelly/Slim Dusty) on banjo, Phoebe Corke (Tijuana Cartel/Hussy Hicks) on violin, and Elliot Smith (Dave Brewer/The Waifs) on drums. The enthusiasm with which this esteemed cast of players embraced and orchestrated Johnson’s songs reflects the passion with which they were crafted. Be it issues like juvenile justice, economic disparity, or climate change, Johnson has long believed in the power of music to shift the status quo into a kinder, fairer society. Art, music, and culture have always offered a poignant mirror of the times and INEQUALITY BLVD encourages us all to take a long, hard look into that mirror. 77

By Tony Hillier SHAOLIN AFRONAUTS

THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE OF BEING Freestyle Records

hose who caught the comeback show from local heroes Shaolin Afronauts that closed Stage 3 on the opening night of WOMADelaide 2022 back in March would have heard a band very much back in the groove after an extended hiatus. However, in retrospect, that performance — as tasty as it undoubtedly was — was but an entrée compared to the banquet offered by the 11-piece ensemble in its 5-piece box set The Fundamental Nature Of Being. A truly world-class recording, this ambitiously wideranging and impeccably packaged release may well prove to be the band’s passport to some of the finest international jazz festivals, after a domestic tour later this year. The musical smorgasbord will assuredly reward multi return sittings, although not every album in its five offerings is guaranteed to please everyone. As the Afronauts’ founder and driving force, Ross McHenry, who fulfills the roles of musical director, bass player, producer and primary composer, explains: “It’s been designed as a single listening arc across five albums over five hours but it also functions as a single listening experience if you’re just listening to the albums individually.” Those fans locked into the Afro-accented side of the Afronauts’ kaleidoscopic music — the signature sound during their nigh-15 years existence — will find richest pickings in the first couple of sets, which are more dance oriented. Afrobeat is the prevalent influence in the opening track of Set 1, ‘Broken Flowers’ setting the pattern with frenetic horns and relentless groove redolent of the original style engineered by multi-instrumentalist Fela Kuti and his right-hand-man, drummer Tony Allen,

back in 1970s’ Nigeria. ‘Abyssinian Suite’, on the other hand, features the swirling organ and diminished 12-tone scale that gives Ethio-jazz its distinctive sound. ‘Shakedown’ has a contrasting Congolese soukous base, topped with a terrific trumpet solo, prior to cooling down for a dramatic mid-track change of pace, then regathering intensity. ‘Dust’ features a down and dirty jazz-rock guitar solo that would do justice to shredders such as Joe Satriani and Steve Vai. A twangier guitar break inhabits the dark and mysterious ‘Valley of the Crucible’, along with an intense soprano sax solo. Soprano sizzles with be-bop attitude in ‘Way of the Long Death’, while a retro keyboard sound underpins ‘Rumba Cyclique’ beneath rumbling electric bass. The opening set finishes with ‘Sands of Time’, set up over a twangy guitar ostinato. Ethio-jazz vibe and barking horns are the key drivers in ‘The Simien Fox’, which starts Set 2 in style, and the carnival-esque ‘High Noises’ follows in full-on Afrobeat mode. Tempo and intensity subsides with ‘Bebe Lorraine’ and ‘Inside the Flame Burns Brightly Still’, the latter featuring fine flute and trumpet breaks. In keeping with the title, the mesmeric 10-minute set highlight, ‘Recollection’, starts with reflective retro keys before horn pushes in tandem with guitar, bass and drums masterfully build momentum, before slackening off in the final couple of minutes. ‘Sugar John’ hits a sweet and funky soul groove, which never lets up. ‘Morning Song’, which kicks off Set 3, exhibits a haunting Middle Eastern lilt and displays excellent piano as it moves from meditative ambience to jazzy agitation and back, leading into the ultra-busy ‘Sun Spiral’. The 3-piece suite ‘Inner Working Outer Being’ that constitutes the remainder of the set runs the gamut from minimalist to maximal, from mainstream to avant-garde jazz. The 4-part Fundamental Nature Of Being suite that aptly occupies the whole of Set 4 starts with a 12-minute work that’s vaguely reminiscent of some of Sun Ra Arkestra’s or the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s galactic inspired escapades of yore, followed by some

free-form indulgence. The final two sections comprise a predominantly piano and sax/ clarinet duet and a final cut that starts in cruise mode before ascending to a frenetic finalé. Another 4-piece suite ‘Reflections’ lives up to its title in Set 5, with an ethereal and esoteric electronic synthesis to the fore that will undoubtedly challenge some listeners. Recorded over just five days, the five sets also draw upon the band’s rich influence of 1970s’ South African music, psych-rock and soul, while exploring the transatlantic sonic intersection between the 1960s electronic avant-garde and spiritual jazz. As McHenry emphasises: “Free and partially directed improvisation is employed as a central component of the compositions, with the tracks acting as frameworks for the collective musical enterprise that has developed over the ensemble’s near 15 years together.” With such an awesome array of influences allied to their collective chops and unquenchable thirst for adventure, the Afronauts — steered by McHenry’s inspired arrangements and those of his co-pilots and fellow composers, guitarists Dylan Marshall and Locky Ridge — go where no Australian band has been before. • A strictly limited 5-LP box set of The Fundamental Nature Of Being, with a deluxe booklet of extended liner notes, has been released, but each individual album is available for singular purchase in CD and digital formats.

By Ian McFarlane

THE MURLOCS Rapscallion (ATO Records)

elbourne-based garage rockers The Murlocs (originally formed in Geelong) have been active for close to 12 years now. Rapscallion is their sixth album. A remarkable achievement in itself, considering the possible limitations of the raw and energetic, fuzz guitar laden nature of their music. No, I’m not condemning their garage rock / blues rock roots or the band itself... this is a very enjoyable album. Since 2012 they’ve also issued two EPs and a dozen singles. The point is: in that time, they’ve surmounted their limitations and made an album of sophisticated garage blues rock. “Sophisticated”? – correct! Or “sophisto-garage” as I put it to singer / harmonica player Ambrose Kenny-Smith. “Great, I can dig that!” he says. “I think as we’ve gotten older, we have matured as a band. We still like our 60s influences like The Yardbirds and Them; listening to Van Morrison sing still makes my spine tingle. With Rapscallion we’ve moved into the 70s so I wanted that big rock sound, but I was looking for that happy medium so as not to be too polished. We are still a garage band at heart.” Mainstays Kenny-Smith, Callum Shortal (guitar) and Matt Blach (drums), plus current bass player Cook Craig, are in it for the long haul. Kenny-Smith and Craig are also part of the wildly eccentric King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard, yet they’ve managed to retain their own Murlocs identity. There’s lots of energy here, the music ranging from those garagey tropes to driving heavy psych, jangle pop blues to folk rock ballads. All up, a very convincing package. Shortal came up with the music and Kenny-Smith the lyrics. If not a strict concept album as such, Rapscallion is a broad character-based album that flows in sequence. We follow the protagonist, the Rapscallion (he’s never given a personal name) as he navigates his way through life, from running away from home, to questioning his own sanity, to meeting like-minded souls, to spinning into a life of crime to his final redemp-

tion as a form of coming of age. It’s digging deep into the soul as a kind of coping mechanism, like a modern-day parable, a Rake’s Progress for 21st century. Or how ’bout Olivier Twist meets The Gangs of New York? Kenny-Smith continues: “I was reflecting on my early life and some of the crazy situations I found myself in, all these character-building moments that I’m so grateful for. So, when Callum came up with these great demos, they were the perfect forum to start writing the lyrics. As a song writer I put myself into the character’s shoes, singing from his point of view. For the first half he’s on his own, second guessing his choices, wondering whether he’ll complete his mission, to find his true path. “He meets a bunch of fellow rapscallions under a bridge, down by the docklands, so he’s now running with a gang he can belong to. He meets the larger-than-life Royal Vagabond, the leader of the gang. They rob a milk bar, shots are fired. He falls in love with Peggy May, a junkie who’s controlled by the nefarious Wickr Man. Peggy May overdoses and the whole chapter closes when he rides off into the sunset.” There are no deep and meaningful messages here, neither lessons to be learnt nor any sense of accusation to be applied. It’s a simple observational tale of one young man’s quest for identity. With song titles such as ‘Bellarine Ballerina’, ‘Living Under A Rock’, ‘Bobbing And Weaving’, ‘Compus Mentis’, ‘Virgin Criminal’, ‘The Wickr Man’ (like Bob Dylan meets with The Easybeats) and ‘Growing Pains’ the signposts are laid out for the listener, yet the whole thing is still open ended enough so that you can draw your own conclusions of events if so desired. That’s quite an achievement for a song writer / storyteller and Kenny-Smith has come through with the goods. 79

By Michael Smith

JOSHUA BATTEN

LEARN TO LIVE AGAIN Independent

hink about how you coped with two years’ worth of pandemic uncertainty and rolling lockdowns? While there were as many coping mechanisms as people, writers at least had the luxury of having dealt with long periods of isolation anyway, as they went about the business of creating. We know how tough it was for musicians and performers, but what about people who find whatever normal life is a struggle without the added uncertainties of pandemics and lockdowns. That’s what singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Joshua Batten found the inspiration for in his extraordinary opus Learn to Live Again. “Before this I was going to do an album of songs about travelling and being on the road. When I finished writing my last album (2020’s The City Within) I took a brief holiday to Europe to be with my family, in terms of my brother, and wrote a couple of songs out of that trip and thought I was going to write some more songs based around that, and of course we all went into lockdown and it felt like I was stuck in this time loop. At first, I was like I’m not going to write a COVID album, a lockdown album, but as time went on, I realised that there was an angle that wasn’t being explored by a lot of the media and that was the effect on neuro-diverse people. “So I just started writing these songs that dealt with the various aspects, and when the opportunity came up for those government grants (through Creative Victoria) I realised that what I had was the makings of a concept record, and I’ve always wanted to make a concept record, a tribute to the prog artists I grew up listening to and been so enamoured with, while still maintaining my own style.” By allowing himself the freedom to work outside the usual singersongwriter palette of musical choices and embrace his inner “progrocker”, instead of an intensely introspective record that could easily have become claustrophobic, in Learn to Live Again has created a vast, panoramic album that engenders a real optimism even as it takes the listener through the internal turmoils he faced. And he managed to weave the two songs he’d written for travel album, ‘Everybody’s Story’, looking at Rome, and ‘Oh Britannia’, his observations on London, sounding jauntily Gilbert O’Sullivanesque. “That was really meant as a pastiche of British Invasion,” he admits. “I first got into classic rock I guess through the Beatles and Queen. Those were my very influences. That song actually came early into lockdown. I had my Rome song, but I wasn’t sure what to do about London. I came up with this chord progression that at first, I thought was going to be a love song but then Dad was talking about going to Hamley’s in London and we went there. I’d forgotten about that but when I came up with this jaunty, Beatlesque chord progression, I thought I’d go all in and make it a true ode to my childhood and now, in the context of the album, those two songs really represent how the way that things used to be wasn’t exactly perfect in itself. Once you take off the rose-coloured glasses, it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.”

The way Batten then links those two songs with the broader theme of the album is really clever. In perhaps the third “movement”, ‘The Deep End’, of perhaps the core song on Learn to Live Again, ‘Existential Guardian’, he repeats two lines from ‘Oh, Britannia’: “Sink a little underneath the skin/ All the mystery has disappeared within”. “Yeah, ‘cause it’s very much an existential journey,” he explains. “I really like that idea of returning to motifs and through-lines that go through all the classic concept albums like Tommy and The Wall, and some of the newer stuff from guys like Neil Morse. So, there is a parallel where, in ‘Britannia’ it’s about stripping away the childhood fantasies and nostalgia, and much later on taking everything back to its core and acknowledging the obvious, acknowledging what’s staring me in the face.” The journey, the concept on which the musical grandeur of the 14 songs that make up Learn To Live Again is explicitly spelt out on the back cover – ‘Part 1 – Distress’, ‘Part 2 – Depression’, ‘Part 3 – Assessment’, and ‘Part 4 – Acceptance’ – but, as I say, when you hear the record, the journey is made joyous rather than arduous, the concept accessible to every one of us through the musicality of its delivery. The achievement is even more remarkable for the fact that Batten sang all the lead vocals, played all the acoustic and electric guitars, much of the piano and other bits of keyboard work and the percussion – and after lockdown was finally lifted called in a few of his friends to embellish the beds he’d recorded at home in his producer Sean O’Sullivan’s studio, beginning with his regular drummer Jesse Bates and then Daryl Braithwaite’s bass player Jason Vorherr. Among others Sarah Morse and Sarah Busuttil added cello and violin respectively, Vorherr provided the core of the backing vocals and keyboards player Richard Allison, who gigs around the place with Genesis tribute band Entangled sprinkled his wizardry across the album. “Part four – Acceptance – has three dots over it,” Batten points out, “because at the time I finished writing I didn’t know when we were going to come out of lockdown or if there was going to be a world after COVID – nobody did. At that point I was still going on hope and that’s why the final song on the album is ‘The End Is Not the End’, which is more about accepting yourself and going forward in your beliefs rather than just getting back out into the world. When things opened up at the start of this year there was still a lot of trepidation and hesitation about going out and doing the things we used to do, especially in the winter. There was a sense of internal lockdown we need to escape from as much as the external one. That’s a wall they need to tear down as well. So, I really wanted to tear down the barriers of neuro-diversity. Yes, we all went through this same experience with similar emotions, but it’s how you deal with those emotions that affect your mental health in the long run.”

By Michael Smith

CARUS THOMPSON

NEON FOLK Independent

erth-based singer-songwriter Carus Thompson has always written about what he’s seen, heard or read, but when, like the rest of us, he was obliged to forget about touring for a couple of years and isolate, he found himself diving far deeper into what he was seeing, hearing and reading. The result is perhaps his most complete album to date, Neon Folk, his eighth studio album. Social commentary has always been a big part of who I am,” Carus explains. “I’ve written a lot of songs for refugees or about Indigenous rights and I still wanted to follow that path I guess, but it was much more complicated issues. That’s kind of the role of art I think, to ask questions, certainly of authority, and sometimes those questions there’s aren’t easy answers for – you don’t have to have the answers but you can ask the questions. This whole record was done in 2020 and 2021 in Melbourne so it was a really, really intense time, and for something like nine months of that time my wife and kids were in WA and I couldn’t get over to them, so there’s an intensity that comes from kind of space, and there’s a beauty in that kind of intensity too. But it really does make you think about life and what’s important.” While Neon Folk was recorded in Perth with fellow singer-songwriter Nathan Gaunt, though lockdown demanded the initial work was done over the Internet, beginning with Thompson sending him a demo of the second song he wrote for the album, ‘Tequila’. “And then we kind of found this trip of, like, David Gray goes to Nashville,” he laughs. “Then you kind of start writing in that mode and you also start looking for other bits and pieces you’ve got sitting around that fit that vibe. He had a big influence on it actually, Nathan, so we cowrote a lot of songs together, and he really comes from more of the real pop approach, really pushing melodies. We managed to find these little gaps – I’d jump on a plane and come over and we’d go three days hammer and tongs in the studio and I’d go back to Melbourne, so we had three sessions. He’s kind of playing everything; I’m playing acoustic guitar and vocals.” The “Nashville” moments on Neon Folk are opening song ‘1000 Miles’ and ‘Pretty Dress’. “Yeah, yeah,” Thompson admits, “he really wanted to do that kind of slick, modern, Nashville country, ‘cause Nathan spent a lot of time touring America, I spent a lot of time touring Europe, but

“

we’re big alt.country fans and love that Americana style of music. But I’m a massive, massive David Gray fan. I think if you listen to a record like White Ladder, I remember reading an interview with him where he said that there’s a kind of spirit in that record that comes through, and it’s those kinds of things in albums that you can’t quite put your finger on, all you can do is go in and just try and go into making something creative with all your heart – and can involve a bit of bravery – but then hopefully that x factor, that spirit, comes through, and it feels to me like this record’s got that spirit in it, which I’m really proud of.” Thompson certainly sees himself within the tradition of Australian singer-songwriters like Mick Thomas, Paul Kelly and Shane Howard – in fact a German record company asked him to record an album of Australian singer-songwriter covers, titled simply Cover Tapes, recorded live in Tube Temple Studios in Solingen, Germany in 2008 that included not only songs by those three but also Neil Murray, Don Walker, Tim Rogers and Kev Carmody, all socially conscious songwriters. “One thing that was full-on about that period in Melbourne,” Thompson continues, “was a lot of people that previously didn’t understand engagement politics did, and I think that’s a positive. It certainly made me understand people who previously I might not have understood, from different perspectives. ‘Young Mother’ for instance is about a young woman who was arrested in Ballarat in her pyjamas in front of her kids and put in handcuffs. She was due for an ultra-sound within two hours and this was fairly early on in the pandemic, there were restrictions and she put something on Facebook, that’s all it was, and she was arrested on this new charge of incitement, and I was really moved by that – I thought that’s just not right. That’s not the way to do things. Anyway I shared her story and I was amazed at how many people said she deserved it. It was a real moment where I just felt that’s not right, and I can only write about what I feel, so I did, and in the end I feel I was proved right because she finally had her day in court and it was thrown out. The Court thought that was authority over-stepping. So there’s a moment of reflection for us as a society, and that what the song is kind of asking – ‘how much power do you give to authority?’” As harrowing as the message in ‘Young Mother’ might be, Thompson delivers it with a sympathy and lyricism that draws in the listener, the vindication arriving in the second half of the song as it devolves into a beautiful series of tumbling vocal lines. Another quietly devastating story is wrapped up in ‘Daniel’. “I did some study during that time, ‘cause I was also doing some teaching, and came across this guy called Dr Michael White, who’s passed away now but he’d developed this kind of therapy called Narrative Therapy, which is used by psychologists all around the world now. It’s about the power of positive stories. I came across him because they use Narrative Therapy with a lot of prisoners, trying to bring out the positive stories inside them. Not everyone’s all bad, not everyone’s all good, and you bring out the beauty of that – and I guess that’s what the record’s about as well – and I came across this essay he wrote about helping this boy called Daniel and I was just moved by it. “That’s the thing with this record. It’s got these kinds of big political statements or social commentary but I think everyone can understand what it is to have a child who is misunderstood or to be that child who’s misunderstood, to be in that family where things are just difficult. When I first came up with it I must admit it made me cry! It’s a story that’s unfortunately all around the world it’s universal.” Of course, Neon Folk isn’t all social commentary. ‘Mexico Smile’ is a song Thompson wrote for his daughter, all melodic acoustic McCartney – “Two records before this,” he chuckles, “I wrote a song for my son and as anyone who has kids knows, you’ve got to get two of everything.” 81

By Bernard Zuel ARCTIC MONKEYS

THE CAR Domino

t the first peak of the career of Sheffield’s Arctic Monkeys in 2008, singer and songwriter, Alex Turner, took what seemed like the most unlikely alternative route from the band’s energised “new wave of guitar rock” fare that had already made for two number one albums. It was his first warning shot, the first indication that we might end up here, with The Car. Releasing an album under the name The Last Shadow Puppets with newish bosom buddy Miles Kane, packed with songs which recalled the orchestrated pomp and particular circumstance of late ‘60s and early ‘70s dramatic pop music, Turner was prone to name-dropping inspirations like Scott Walker and John Barry. As enthusiastic as they were, and as entertaining as it was, both of them had really just dipped their toes into the catalogue and their attentions would soon be caught elsewhere. But Turner’s appetite for deviation was whet. By the time 2018’s Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino took the Monkeys literally and figuratively into space rock and lunar cabaret (or weird shit and grandpa pop as its detractors might have it), positing them as the band you might find playing at Douglas Adams’ restaurant at the end of the universe, they had experimented with the addition of desert jams, glam, more string arrangements and zip-fresh powered pop; shifted from inward-facing performers to solid backers of a now flamboyant front man; and Turner’s lyrics had long abandoned the pointillist observations of everyday life for something equally wordy but more opaque, often funny but with more ambiguous targets. At the same time, even though they were consistently strong selling albums, it did feel as if for the long-time US-based Turner there was no certainty interest would be retained in the band form, or at least this band, while some thought the ultimate perverse reversal might see him making a snappy bit of guitar pop next time. Just to put a middle finger up. Or, you know, please those who had been pining for the olden times. Everyone was wrong. Again. Rather than step away from the band, Turner reconvened drummer Matt Helders, bass player Nick O’Malley and guitarist Jamie Cook. Instead of backing away from the lunar cabaret, The Car goes even further into its strings-and-drama possibilities, offering in addition Curtis Mayfield wah-wah guitar and higher range, and some Denmark Street delicacy and theatrics. And where there could be street patter and sharply defined commentary, Turner retains his interest in portraying detailed yet semi-obscured characters, often sardonically, occasionally sympathetically, observed

in their dances around lies they tell themselves and others, impressions they try to make, and motivations which seem elusive to us. The verdict? A (slightly qualified) winner: the songs and sound rich and fascinating; the lyrics an intellectual adventure, whose flaws are in their not always graspable emotion. But then I thought Tranquillity Base… a fascinating exercise, still play that first Shadow Puppets, and I can get my jumpy pop/rock elsewhere, so I may not be everyone’s most reliable adviser. For me, There’d Better Be A Mirrorball, sets the standard immediately. Turner, in the guise of an all too aware, so well attired, suitor whose surface is creamily smooth but whose centre is hollow, is set against a background of a low-key evening band slowly being absorbed into a Lee Hazlewood arrangement of sweetness with a hint of menace that keeps hinting it may turn. There’s something of that in Jet Skis On The Moot – which is more soul balladry bent around a country flame – the suggestion here being sultriness, but there is a slight queasiness through it all that keeps back desire. And even more of it in Body Paint though here the song progresses from early ‘60s Bobby Darin to late ‘60s Paul McCartney to mid-‘70s David Bowie in just under five minutes.

By Bernard Zuel COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS

LOOSE FUTURE Fat Possum

ne of the best things about Linda Ronstadt – other than her voice, her voice, her ear for a good song no matter its origins, and, yes, her voice – was how she could sound so at ease, and consequently make the music around her feel as if it too carried the pleasure of simply being. And by that I don’t mean everything sounding “up”, which is another thing altogether, but rather that in her best recordings it felt as if everything flowed rather than being directed, so that songs happy, urgent, sad, needy or whatever, appeared natural and unbound by anything other than our understanding of that song. (If this sounds like gibberish, just put on one of her records.) As a latecomer to her for reasons more boring than long to go into (let’s just say territorial teenage boy fans can make stupid decisions), for too long I had airily dismissed this vocal facility in combination with the sheer attractiveness of the voice itself, as falling short of whatever stupid boy fans think of as serious or important. Thankfully I did grow up and Linda Ronstadt albums can be found in second hand stores. I’ve been giving Ronstadt a bit of thought recently as the new Courtney Marie Andrews album has somewhat stealthily, or at least quietly, been asserting its place in this hectic period of new releases when it might otherwise just disappear in the backwash. After a series of albums at the more bruised and hoping-to-recover end of country music’s alt. edge, strong on the ballads, questioning of power and willing to bare much, this is the most Ronstadt of records for many reasons. And that can only be a good thing whether you are competing with Taylor Swift, Arctic Monkeys and Genesis Owusu, or not. Loose Future is an album that feels lighter than Andrews’ previous records, lyrically and musically: more forgiving of herself and nimbler

in its settings. More able to create something like ‘Let Her Go’ which feels simultaneously thick with intent and as gentle as a breeze. And she sounds so good, not a million miles from LR herself, whether at the top of a register in the dancing-on-the-wind ‘Satellite’ or lower and slightly tremulous in the wanting-to-believe hesitation of ‘Change My Mind’. There is a sense of joy in the blended guitars and the graceful strings of ‘Thinking’ On You’ just as much as there is in its ‘Hungry Heart’-like drum start, and even as Andrews sings of an empty bed and frying pan, photos no substitute for the real thing, the pleasure in the anticipation of the next time they are face-to-face, makes everything buoyant enough. Even the almost florid climax of ‘Me & Jerry’, that feels like it might run away from her as the voices and instruments spiral ever upwards like some country gospel overload, manages to throw optimism forward. She doesn’t just want to believe; she is going to. It may be a loose one, but it is a future. Which isn’t to say the breakup and its emotional battering which suffused her last record, the Grammy-nominated Old Flowers, has been magicked away. In the point-and-strum ‘On The Line’, a hunched over Andrews compares the way we “cover-up each truth with a void” with the way the couple in the room above her are “having sex with the TV up to drown out the noise”. She has “gotten used to moving on” but yet admits giving her ex “the satisfaction of knowing I still care” even though the calls come only when it’s [their] love on the line”. But ‘On The Line’, just like the more accusatory (and more pedal steelinfluenced) ‘You Do What You Want’, doesn’t feel weighed down. Some things are going to take a while yet to figure or forgive, or forget, but Andrews is on the way, treading lightly emotionally, musically, vocally. 83

ALBUMS: General ALL INDIA RADIO

THE GENERATOR OF ALL INFINITY Spectra

Melbourne-based “Cosmic sonic architects” All India Radio have been riding the outer reaches of Post-Rock Ambient Space Rock since 1999. That’s a lot of genre descriptors in one sentence but it means there can be no confusion over their chosen path. Guitarist / sampler guy Martin Kennedy has been steering the group since inception. If you need further proof of his modus operandi, this album combines his passion for Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, Hawkwind, Jean Michel Jarre, science fiction movie soundtracks and many points beyond the horizon. I can hear additional stimuli from the likes of Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze and other German electronic pioneers and that’s a fine thing by me. The Generator Of All Infinity is album #30 – if I’m counting correctly – and that includes archival, live and remix sets plus various collaborations. (And we haven’t even got into his collaborative work with Steve Kilbey, but that’s for another review.) The overall epic infusion of so many elements may seem daunting at first but if you break it down to its constituent parts, and then reorient your senses it’s a very listenable experience, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. There are 17 tracks, ranging from 30 second bursts to four and a half minutes in duration so you never feel like time is dragging by. The melodies throughout 84

are gorgeous and engaging. It’s notably keyboard heavy and much of the music wafts by on spectral webs of sound (the multi-part ‘Transmission’, ‘The Landing’, ‘Space Jazz’). Yet it’s not all downtempo chill out either because several tracks (‘Full Of Stars’, ‘Jupiter 26’) feature thunderous drums and there are dense layers of fuzz guitar riffing (‘Wolves Of Orion’, ‘The Generator Of All Infinity’) which will have fans of psychedelia salivating. It’s tricky to pick out favourites but the likes of ‘Full Of Stars’, ‘Jupiter 26’, ‘The New Age’, the title track and the elegiac ‘Doomsday Machine’ take you on that outer body journey. You’re aboard an attack ship off the shoulder of Orion and space is the place. Or as Tangerine Dream once wrote: “this album is dedicated to all people who feel obliged to space”. IAN MCFARLANE BLACK JESUS EXPERIENCE

GOOD EVENING BLACK BUDDHA AGOGO Records

Fronted by Ethiopian-born singer Enushu Taye, who arrived in Melbourne via Cairo in 1996, the 12-piece Black Jesus Experience draw heavily on the fusion of jazz and funk with the traditional sounds of Ethiopian music that emerged in the African nation in the late ‘60s early ‘70s. And what a wonderfully heady fusion it is in this, their seventh album, which this time brings in the sounds of Indigenous Australia to the tracks ‘E150’ ‘Tears of the Ancestors’, courtesy the

didgeridoo of Sean Ryan. The jazz element is delivered by the evergreen piano swirls of the venerable Bob Sedergreen, with Peter Harper on tenor saxophone and Ian Dixon on trumpet and flugelhorn providing the power brass section. For the most part Enushu sings in her mother tongue, Amharic, giving Good Evening Black Buddha a real World Music authenticity. You don’t really need to know what she’s singing about – her hypnotic voice is joy enough, the song titles providing some idea of the theme at the core of each song. That and, to some extent, the hip-hop rhyming of MC Mista Monk aka Liam Monkhouse. As has happened throughout the rest of the world, hip-hop became a part of Ethiopian music in the early noughties, and while I’ll never really warm to it, I can appreciate Monkhouse’s talents and in context it all works, particularly as spoken-word on ‘Tears of the Ancestors’, so… Also joining the eXperience on this album are singers VidaSunshyne and Gracie Sinclair, and without physical liner notes I can’t definitively point to their contributions, but ‘Spirits of the Land’, ‘Extinction’ and ‘On the Couch’ (the latter Gracie, surely, Enushu the Amharic riposte) are sung in English, so… The subtle/supple grooves really are quite irresistibly mesmeric, delivered with panache by guitarist Zac Lister, bass player Richard Rose, drummer James Davies and percussionist Kahan Harper, while Ethiopian lyre or kraar and masinko (a single-stringed bowed lute) virtuoso Endalkachew Yenehun (on ‘Shirabey’, ‘Oromo’ and ‘Iron Bark’) and guitarist Larry Crestani, Crestani with occasional flourishes on the “kraartar”, his own modification of the kraar on ‘Road to Now’ add to the authenticity. MICHAEL SMITH

KEVIN BORICH

LEGACY 1973-1981 Make Music Not War

It wouldn’t be overstating the case to say that Kevin Borich has always given the people what they want. As one of the Australian music scene’s most tireless touring acts, he has played to appreciative audiences in every pub venue, concert hall, outdoor stage and out-ofthe-way dive across the land. His brand of incendiary, guitardriven blues rock and boogie still enthrals audiences to this day, and for that extra tang he’s never taken his eye off pop rock accessibility. Borich has now compiled Legacy 1973-1981, a whopping 3-CD set of 46 tracks from across his solo career. Vol. 1 is ‘Hot’, Vol. 2 is ‘Chill’ and Vol 3 is ‘Live’. You get tracks from Celebration!, Lonely One, Angels Hand, Shy Boys Shy Girls, Live At The Big Kahuna and One Night Jamm plus the DVD Live At The Basement. He’s predominantly worked live as a three-piece so right off the bat a lot of his work was based around the Jimi Hendrix Experience template, but that’s a pretty fine basis all things considered. Just to pick one album out, the debut Kevin Borich Express LP Celebration!, from 1977, was flashy, powerful and bluesy hard rock featuring a beefy, accessible production sound and plenty of style and fireworks in the guitar department. Here you get ‘Snowball King’’, (funky blues rock), ‘Goin’ Somewhere’ (a galloping rocker with precise axework and an energetic rhythm), ‘Mon Ami’ (light, funky and melodic with added percussion, flute and sax), ‘Goin’

ALBUMS: General Down Town’ (kicking off with train whistle slide and chugging drum rolls before morphing into a ferocious blues spiced rocker) and ‘Rainbows’ (ethereal guitar and a dramatic atmosphere). One could quibble about the lack here of the title track itself, the powerhouse guitar dizz-buster on the record, but when you get a dazzling, 10-minute live version instead this set ticks all the right boxes. (Legacy 1973-1981 is available to order on-line from www. kevinborich.com.au) IAN MCFARLANE BERT JANSCH

BERT AT THE BBC Earth Recordings

concerts including both his first and last BBC shows. It traces a path through appearances on BBC shows Guitar Club, Top Gear, Night Ride, the Cambridge Folk Festival, Freak Zone and Round Midnight, as well shows hosted by Bob Harris, Tom Robinson, Jools Holland and Mark Radcliffe. There are performances with Mary Hopkin, Lindisfarne’s Rod Clements, Danny Thompson, Jacqui McShee, John Renbourn, Ralph McTell and many more, none diminish Jansch’s extraordinary fingerpicking artistry. Revered and cited as an inspiration by the likes of Jimmy Page, Neil Young, Paul Simon and any number of contemporary folk artists, Bert At The BBC is a magnificent exclamation mark to one of the 20th century’s giants of contemporary music. Listen to “Angie” (Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, BBC Radio Scotland 2004, track 112), it says it all. TREVOR J. LEEDEN TOMMY McLAIN

I RAN DOWN EVERY DREAM Yep Roc/Redeye/Planet

Whichever way you dice it, Jansch was that rarest of beasts during his lifetime, a genuine living legend unrivalled in his chosen field. Since his death in 2011, his canon of studio albums as a solo performer (and with fusion supergroup Pentangle) has understandably been revisited and reissued in numerous “enhanced” formats. What has remained an untapped reservoir of his oeuvre, until now, is the enormous body of live music he recorded for the BBC. Meticulously curated by Jansch’s authorised biographer Colin Harper, the 147 tracks are spread across eight discs, complemented by the 40-page book with contributions from Jools Holland, Johnny Marr, and Bernard Butler amongst others. Spanning his entire career from 1966-2009, there are rarities and previously unreleased tracks, studio sessions, live-on-air performances, and complete

“Step right ladies and gentlemen, step this way!” exhorts Tommy at the start of “The Greatest Show On Hurt”, and it’s sage advice, for what unfolds on his first album since 1979 is a sheer delight. One of the founding fathers of Swamp Pop, that peculiar musical style unique to the Acadian prairies of South Louisiana, the octogenarian sounds his age, which just happens to be a significant plus for the legendary balladeer. Throughout the album, there are cameos from some serious

heavyweight fans of McLain, starting with Nick Lowe who co-wrote the aforementioned “Greatest Show…”. The track is bolstered by Louisiana luminaries Ivan Neville, Cajun accordian maestro Steve Riley, and the great Warren Storm in his last recording prior to his untimely passing. Elvis Costello co-wrote the title track with McLain, added some atmospheric backing vocals, and donated “My hidden Heart”, the murder ballad being unfamiliar territory for McLain. Several career touchstone songs have been revisited; Bobby Charles’ sublime “I Hope” is faultless, “Before I Grow Old” gets a delightful makeover, and an unexpected highlight is “If You Don’t Love Me”, a 70’s hit for Freddy Fender written by McLain. Van Dyke Parks is a surprise contributor, his arrangement leaving an indelible imprint on the Randy Newmanesque “California”. The glue holding the project together deserves special mention. C.C. Adcock is the force behind the legendary swamp pop supergroup Lil’ Band O’ Gold, Louisiana’s resident King Of Cool, with an attitude and presence that Keith Richards can only aspire to. As producer, he has got to the heart of McLain’s poignant songs and extracted out of Tommy the performance of his career. I Ran Down Every Dream is the story of Tommy McLain, the feel-good story of the year, and it sounds just GREAT! TREVOR J.LEEDEN THEE SACRED SOULS

THEE SACRED SOULS Daptone/Redeye/Planet

You’ve got to hand it to Gabriel Roth and the Daptone hierarchy, they can spot the gold-plated needle in the largest of haystacks. When Queens’ wondrous sweet-sounding rocksteady harmonisers The Frightnrs lost their lead singer and shut up (corner)shop, Roth turned his attention to the West Coast where heaven-sent vocalist Josh Lane, bassist Sal Samano and drummer Alex Garcia were waiting for their big break. Throughout the pandemic the trio released no less than five singles before now releasing their eponymous debut, an infectious union of retro 60’s sweet soul with the sounds of 70’s Philly soul, heightened by Roth’s lush arrangements and analogue production; it is utterly intoxicating. Just as The Frightnrs was built around Dan Klein’s stellar vocal gymnastics and a rock-solid rhythm section, it is Josh Lane’s silky, falsetto encrusted tenor voice that soars over Garcia and Samano’s rhythm dynamics. Augmented by guitar, keyboards and backing vocals, and with the mighty Daptone Horns for company, the twelve songs wind their way from saccharine to slinky. Album opener (and lead single) “Can I Call You Rose” is a crooning showcase of what lies ahead, Garcia’s taut snare propels “Weak For Your Love” behind Lane’s soaring falsetto, the wonderfully dramatic “Sorrow For Tomorrow” temporarily eschews brass for resonating guitar and organ, “For Now” channels Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions, and one suspects Smokey Robinson would surely approve of the intoxicating “Lady Love”. The San Diego trio’s weightless harmonies and warmly restrained rhythms don’t fit the Daptone template, but that point of difference is their strength – and Gabe Roth’s genius. TREVOR J. LEEDEN 85

ALBUMS: General VICTORIANA GAYE

HAPPY ABDUCTION Independent

Victoriana Gaye – Vicki Philipp and her husband, Jeff Raglus – have been remarkably consistent, releasing six quality albums over the past decade. Their latest release, Happy Abduction, a collection of vital indie folk, celebrates the joy of losing yourself in the moment. “Suddenly singing, but for no good reason,” Philipp declares in the title track, which opens the record. “Now we are dancing, but there was no music.” Raglus earned his reputation as a horn player with The Black Sorrows and Bachelors From Prague, but for the most part, the horns take a backseat here as the focus is on Philipp’s expressive voice, which reminds of Shawn Colvin, while musically the record often veers into deliciously dark territory, the terrain of acts such as Tex Perkins and Ron S. Peno. Produced by Shane O’Mara, this is a classic singer-songwriter record – “I only drive the old roads,” Philipp is happy to admit. That said, there are some delightful detours along the way. The third-last song is called ‘The Last Song’. It’s that kind of record. And the duo is not afraid to allow each song to stretch out and tell its own story, with six of the 10 tracks running for more than five minutes. Indeed, ‘Tell Me A Story’ is like an album in one song. Clocking in at nearly eight minutes, the 2.25-minute instrumental intro, with its hypnotic, shimmering guitars, is worth the price of admission alone. As Philipp sings in ‘Sooner or Later’, “close your eyes and go with the flow”. It’s good advice. Happy Abduction is immensely rewarding. JEFF JENKINS 86

VAN WALKER & THE FERRITERS

GREETINGS FROM NEWTOWN GEELONG

INDEPENDENT That lyrical rascal Van Walker is at it again. Hot on the heels of standout solo release Ghosting and a Swedish Magazines ‘Best of…’, he channels his inner Celt with a stand-up bunch of fellow minstrels. The Ferriters are named after Irish folk hero Pearce Ferriter. With fiddler Greg Field, drummer Michael Barclay (Coloured Girls/Weddings Parties Anything), Dan Musil on dobro, Seamus Hoare (bass and harmonica), Maree Dertien (accordion) plus eminent guests galore, GFNG makes for a fine craic.

Like any good session at your local, there’s laughter, righteous outrage, doleful regret, a wink, a tear and a knowing grin shared as the selection rolls out. Steve Gibson penned ‘Drinking Too Much’ joins the batch of Walker originals, including ‘Heart of the Minstrel’ (co-written with Thomas Moore). For Bob Dylan’s ‘Paths of Victory’, the Bellarine bard adds a few words of his own. From a brief spoken word intro, we’re jolted into a stomping reverie with ‘King of the Irish Rebels’. Many a song title speaks for itself, broaching subjects the songwriter is known to relate to. ‘Hungover Again’ is not drawn merely from the imagination.

The poignant ‘Brother’ suggests evolving ups and downs of the relationships between collaborative siblings. Even if it were bereft of lyrics, the dark atmospheric blues of ‘Devil’s Hole Hotel’ gets under the skin. A welcoming pub where shadows sway just outside the door. The setting is Gippsland but the ghosts of Erin float over the waters. The players could be running on Fosters or Guinness, the orange and the green or the green and gold. From reeling to rocking, the tracks stroll a path from The Pogues to The Dubliners. Walker’s charming, crusty vocals seal the deal. Tis a beautiful thing. CHRIS LAMBIE

ALBUMS: Blues BY AL HENSLEY DEMETRIA TAYLOR

SHEMEKIA COPELAND

SILENT PARTNERS

THE MCNAMARR PROJECT

DOIN’ WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO DO

DONE COME TOO FAR

CHANGING TIMES

RUN WITH ME

It’s been 11 years since Demetria Taylor, youngest daughter of fabled Chicago blues guitarist Eddie Taylor, released her debut album Bad Girl for Delmark Records. This long-awaited follow-up strikes a balance between traditional Chicago blues and modern R&B similar to the output from Jackson, Mississippi’s Malaco label. An independent-minded woman determined to follow her own star, Taylor was groomed by her dad and singer-songwriter mother Vera to be steadfast in her ambitions while keeping true to her roots. She honours her father’s legacy singing his ‘83 Highway’, weighs in with her mother’s ‘Blues Early This Morning’, and pays tribute to her late brother Eddie Jr. performing his ‘Welfare Blues’. Forging ahead with her own sound, Taylor recruited exceptional contemporary Chicago blues guitarist Mike Wheeler and distinguished bassist Larry Williams to lead her band. Also a formidable song-writing team, Wheeler and Williams contributed half of the material heard here, punctuated by infectious funkified rhythms. Taylor includes two of her own originals and puts her own stamp on Magic Sam’s ‘You Belong To Me’. Hometown blues chanteuse Deitra Farr and guitarist Billy Flynn make guest appearances, up-and-coming six-stringer Carlos Showers contributing his significant talents as well.

Since her return to Alligator Records with 2015’s Outskirts Of Love after a couple of CDs on the Telarc imprint, Shemekia Copeland’s releases have shown a decided shift away from the sassy Koko Taylor-inspired blues and horn-laden R&B of her early catalogue for the label. Daughter of late Texas blues titan Johnny Clyde Copeland, the powerhouse vocalist’s new album continues narratives that began unfolding on 2018’s America’s Child and 2020’s Uncivil War confronting racism, hate, and injustices against many of her fellow African-American people. Most of her material is penned by manager/producer John Hahn and guitarist/ producer Will Kimbrough and recorded in Nashville, hence the trend towards a more guitarfuelled Americana sound. One of the greatest blues singers of her generation, Copeland even sings a pure honky-tonk song with soul and conviction.. Louisiana’s Sonny Landreth on scorching slide guitar, Creole zydeco musician Cedric Watson on fiddle and African gourd banjo, and percussionist Washboard Chaz appear as guests along with Mississippi hill country guitarists Kenny Brown and Cedric Burnside. Highlights include ‘Gullah Geechee’, an historic tale performed as a pre-blues era work song, and Copeland’s father’s ‘Nobody But You’.

If pedigree was a prerequisite for playing real-deal blues this band has it in spades. Individually, band members have resumes boasting decades playing sidemen to the likes of B.B. King, Albert King, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Otis Clay, Denise LaSalle, Johnnie Taylor, Matt ‘Guitar’ Murphy and a host of other heavyweights. This debut album on Little Village Foundation for the band comprising drummer/ vocalist Tony Coleman, bassist/ vocalist Russell Jackson and guitarist/vocalist Jonathan Ellison is not their first release. In 1989 while playing in Austin, Texas, Coleman and Jackson released an album as the Silent Partners Blues Band with guitarist/vocalist Mel Brown. On the new recording each member contributes and sings three self-penned songs, the only non-original being a cover of the B.B. King staple ‘Never Make Your Move Too Soon’ with new lyrics by Coleman. Together with astonishing instrumental interplay that slices across the beat, their voices all sound similar, each bearing that innate soulfulness that effortlessly buttresses the phrasing and delivery of the song. Sizzling shuffles and slow blues, hard-driving funk and the retro R&B vibe of ‘Road To Love’ are embellished by producer Jim Pugh’s keys, Kid Andersen’s guitar and Lisa Leuschner Andersen’s backing vocals.

Both John McNamara and Andrea Marr have long established solo careers as blues and R&B artists charting albums at home in Australia and in the US. Coming together in 2018, they released their debut album Holla & Moan as The McNaMarr Project the following year to international acclaim. Three years later the duo are back with a follow-up release that testifies they are no flash-in-the-pan. Backed by a talented band of first-call Aussie musicians on guitar, keys, bass, drums and horns, lead guitarist/vocalist McNamara and the equally strong and gospel bred voice of Marr ferociously deliver a nine-song original set of soul blues that climaxes in a powerful medley of Otis Redding’s ‘These Arms Of Mine’, Etta James’ ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ and Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’. Their style lies somewhere between Womack & Womack and Ike & Tina Turner peppered with soul-charged lashes of Same & Dave as they reinvent the old-school blues/ R&B sounds of Chess, Stax, Hi, and Motown Records. Fat and funky grooves proliferate between the incendiary blues shuffle opener ‘Save It Till I See You’ and the sanctified gospel fervour of ‘You’re The Reason’.

Delmark

Alligator/Only Blues Music

Little Village

Planet Co./MGM Distribution

ALBUMS: World Music Folk BY TONY HILLIER ARIFA DANUBIAN VOYAGE O-Tone Music

This thematic fifth album from a multi-national, multi-instrumental Amsterdam-based quartet flows as freely as the Danube, Europe’s second longest river and the source of the band’s current inspiration. Arifa’s strength is in the quality of its arrangements and the artistry and ethnic diversity of the players, who boast Bulgarian, Hungarian, German and Turkish ancestry. Their everchanging soundscapes create a magnificent melange of world music, folk, classical and jazz that’s strong in melody and rich in rhythm. The title track is a journey in itself, one that extends from melancholy to buoyancy in just over seven minutes, with flighty kaval (a chromatic end-blown flute) at the helm, bolstered by robust percussion. More racy tracks such as ‘Thracian Horses’ and ‘Troublemaker’ ride on the back of some seriously good jazz piano playing and a strong dumbek (goblet drum) pulse. Mellow cello mesmerises in the kaleidoscopic ‘Mesembria’, along with kaval. ‘Rhodopian Tales’ is edgier. ‘Odessa’ is darker till, accentuated by powerful undercurrents. ‘Golondrina’, a slow burner, gathers impressive momentum. SO LONG SEVEN ONLY ELEPHANTS KNOW HER NAME Independent

So Long Seven is a superlative Canadian septet that plays a classy mix of global music, 88

blending folk, jazz, classical and blues influences. Indian tabla percussion, impeccably played by Ravi Naimpally, underpins the majority of tracks, one of which, the beautiful ballad ‘Mara’, features the exquisite Hindustani singing of Samidha Joglekar. Three tracks, including the flamenco-infused standout ‘Frolic Of The Monsoon Frogs’, feature the band’s expert string section, and strong arrangements from lead violinist/producer William Lamoureux. Five-string and gourd banjoist Tim Posgate gets a wellmerited turn in the spotlight in tandem with Lamoureux in the atmospheric Americana flavoured ‘World Now’. Neil Hendry’s deft guitar work haunts ‘Ghost Ocean’. The fiddle dominated title track revives memories of the Penguin Café Orchestra. All up, SLS’s album is a perfect salve for these troubled global times. JON BODEN, SETH LAKEMAN & CO SEA SONG SESSIONS Topic/Planet

There is no stronger interpreter of maritime songs in the British Isles than singer, fiddler and guitarist extraordinaire Jon Boden, who helmed the folkrock dreadnought Bellowhead to unparalleled success for a dozen years. The UK’s longestrunning trad-folk imprimatur Topic enjoys similar status when it comes to shanties and the like, so the label’s collaboration with Boden and four other English folk-singing luminaries in the Sea Song Sessions pretty well guarantees success. The notional group leader certainly hits the target in a rousing jaw harp and fiddle-driven reading of ‘Fire Marengo’ and a sensitive rendition of the ‘Salvation Army Band Girl’. Leading West Country folk muso Seth Lakeman gets the set off to a cracking start with a suitably robust take of ‘The Rambling Sailor’ and is later equally

compelling in a haunting version of the sad and spooky ballad ‘The Lady and the Lantern’. Emily Portman’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Row Me Over’ and the music hall-oriented ‘Some Old Salty’ are similarly spot on. Jack Rutter’s strong North Country accent lends a different lilt to ‘Man o’War’. ANGELINE MORRISON THE SORROW SONGS Topic/Planet

Singer-songwriter and academic Angeline Morrison has created an album educed from old narratives that highlight the experiences and suffering endured by people of colour from the British African diaspora since the days of Roman occupation. As such, The Sorrow Songs fills a void in the English folk music canon and can be termed as an important, possibly unique, project. While a tad on the dry side, the songs are offset to a degree by the sincerity of the singer/instigator, who’s of African descent, and the subtle strings arrangements fashioned by producer Eliza Carthy. The moving opening story of the ‘Unknown African Boy’ is predicated on one of many Transatlantic slave ships wrecked over centuries past in stormy seas off England’s south west coast, where Morrison, a descendant of enslaved African people, is based. Highlights also include ‘Mad-Haired Moll O’bedlam’, an atmospheric song about a black Londoner featuring shimmering violin, and ‘The Beautiful Spotted Black Boy’, which has more of a music hall than trad folk feel. The songs are interspersed by short narrative interludes. VRÏ ISLAIS A GENIR Bendigedig The Welsh have long excelled in the realm of harmony singing, as VRï ‘s follow-up album to a lauded 2019 debut release attests.

Following in the footprints of its predecessor and of other Welsh language singing bands of recent years such as 9Bach and Mabon, the male trio’s Islais a genir (‘a sung whisper’) delves deeper into the fascinating but little known ‘broken history’ of Welsh traditional music — a complex relationship between the chapel and the people. With their trademark powerful harmonies, VRï harness a wild energy offset with a sense of fun that by means undermines the delicate sensibility of their classical training.

Their unique soundscapes reinterpret long lost music written for harp but here painstakingly remoulded for fiddle, with the addition of cello. The new album features a fine female singer Beth Celyn, whose vocals embellish several tracks. JAMES KEELAGHAN SECOND-HAND Borealis Records

The songs on leading Canadian troubadour James Keelaghan’s eleventh solo album are at odds, subject-wise, with the JUNO Award-winning artist’s soft baritone easy listening-styled delivery. That may be because the new set, which includes co-writes with a handful of compatriot songwriters, tackles a number of concerning topical issues. For example, a sad number titled ‘Before The Morning Sun’, about a prisoner awaiting the gallows and the country-oriented ‘Just A Letter’, which is predicated on the life story of a friend who was the victim of an assault.

ALBUMS: Jazz 1 BY TONY HILLIER KRISTIN BERARDI THE LIGHT AND THE DARK Earshift/MGM

Currently based in Switzerland, Kristin Berardi enhances her reputation as one of Australia’s finest female jazz vocalists with an album that brings to light both the beauty and injustices that occur in life. The theme extracts dynamic performances, not just from the singer, but also from her players. Young American pianist Miro Sprague’s solos are scintillating throughout and especially so in the edgy ‘He Was A Loaded Gun’. Canadian Ingrid Jensen’s long burn trumpet break in ‘A Lie’ builds to an impressive climax. Berardi’s singing is characteristically superb from go to whoa, peaking on an atmospheric ballad, ‘Slow Waltz’, that was inspired by the bluegrass/ country diva Alison Krauss.

grooves, this multicultural unit has cocked a snook at convention and perfected a hybrid style that makes them unique in the contemporary Oz band and jazz scenes. Swirling Ethiojazz admirably remains the core of their sound, represented here by tracks such as ‘Iron Bark’ that are delivered compellingly in her native tongue by Ethiopian/ Aussie singer Enushu Taye. Other standouts, ‘Extinction’, ‘On The Couch’, ‘Dark Matters’ and ‘Humble Pie’, are partly sung in Amharic alongside stylish raps from MC Liam Monkhouse, contributions from powerhouse singer VidaSunshyne and the crystallinevoiced Gracie Sinclair, stinging solos from veteran jazz pianist Bob Sedergreen and blasts of trumpet and saxophone. The Ethiopian kraar (lyre) and masinko (bowed lute) of Endalkachew Yenehun value adds. The arrangements extend from trio form to BJX’s full-on 14-piece polyrhythmic, polymetric and polytonal juggernaut and sixpiece horn charts. NEW YORK AFRO BOP ALLIANCE BIG BAND THE PAN AMERICAN NUTCRACKER SUITE Angelface Records

BLACK JESUS EXPERIENCE GOOD EVENING BLACK BUDDHA Agogo Records

Inspired by the intriguing story of the Black Buddha, Black Jesus eXperience’s seventh studio album is arguably the apotheosis of their recording career so far. The Melbourne collective’s style is in itself something of a paradox. By blending traditional Ethiopian song with 21st century jazz, funk, hip-hop and afrobeat-oriented

The Duke Ellington Orchestra may have come this way back in 1960, but drummer/MD Joe McCarthy’s 18-man New York Afro Bop Alliance Big Band offers a very different take on Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet score. A veritable multicultural potpourri, this new jazz reading of The Nutcracker Suite is built on Latin American, African, Asian and Middle Eastern rhythms. ‘March’, for example, opens with the famous snare drum part from Bolero before morphing into mambo. ‘Chinese Dance’ starts with Lion Dance drumming. Cha-

Cha rhythm meets 6/8 time in ’Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’. ‘Dance of the Reed Flutes’, on the other hand, has a Brazilian vibe and an amazing lead trumpet break. The arrangement for ‘Waltz of the Flowers’ carries a Venezuelan joropo groove. ‘Arabian Dance’ pirouettes on a pulsating alto saxophone solo. ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD & ADRIAN YOUNGE HENRY FRANKLIN Jazz Is Dead

There are few more industrious and inventive jazz musicians and producers plying their trade in the USA than Ali Shaheed Muhammad & Adrian Younge. The duo merits awards for its unswerving service in showcasing a cornucopia of artists who for one reason or another have faded from memory. Henry Franklin, whose profile has been elevated by the latest in the pair’s tongue-in-cheek named Jazz Is Dead series, is a case in point. The range of Franklin’s funky double bass playing, which evokes memories of the legendary Charles Mingus, is accentuated in Afroinfused tracks like ‘The Griot’ and ‘African Sun’ and in the Latin sizzler ‘Café Negro’. MONTY ALEXANDER LOVE NOTES Independent

Legendary Jamaican jazz pianist Monty Alexander endorses the old aphorism ‘it’s never too late’ by making his recording debut as a vocalist at the tail end of a career that’s yielded 70-odd albums as bandleader. The wonder is that the 78-year-old left it so long, given that he possesses an inordinately pleasant voice — one that’s tailormade for the 1950s-ish material he’s chosen to cover. Not that any song on Love Notes requires Kurt Elling-like gymnastics. Monty’s velvety vocal cords fit as snugly as fluffy slippers around a handful of standards from Nat King Cole’s repertoire and film faves such as ‘As Time Goes By’ and ‘Moon River’, the latter rendered with a gentle reggae lilt. His rendition of Caribbean folk classic ‘Island In The Sun’ is positively hymnal. A distinguished backing crew that includes George Benson, Ramsey Lewis, Joe Sample, Arturo Sandoval and the late Roy Hargrove lends expectedly exemplary support. ROXANA AMED UNÁNIME Independent

With her aptly-named new album, the talented Miami-based Argentinian singer Roxana Amed tackles compositions written by Central and South Americans in the company of some high flying instrumentalists, who include her bassist compatriot Pedro Aznar (known for his work with Pat Metheny), Cuban piano maestro Chucho Valdés, Spanish flamenco guitarist Niño Josele, Brazilian guitarist Chico Pinheiro, Colombian pianist Julio Reyes Copello, Peruvian percussionist Tony Succar and Venezuelan trumpeter Linda Briceño. The result is a cornucopia of classy Latin jazz that matches the quality of her excellent 2021 album Ontology. 89

ALBUMS: Jazz 2 BY DES COWLEY Shaun Rammers OPEN HOME Worry Not Independent, vinyl & digital release

Ashley Ballat and Stephen Magnusson Web Independent, digital release

Tyler Cooney Modern Ideal Independent, CD & digital release

Flora Carbo Arthur’s Walks Independent, digital release

Tenor saxophonist Shaun Rammers is part of an exciting new wave of Melbourne improvisors whose ranks include Reuben Lewis, Flora Carbo, Niran Dasika, Helen Svoboda, Theo Carbo, Isaac Gunnoo, Andrew Sargossi and others. What they share is an experimental ethos, an appetite for performing in creative spaces, and a supportive approach that fosters collaborative endeavour. Worry Not, performed with his quintet OPEN HOME, is Rammers’ second release, following on from 2017’s Live. In terms of composition and conception, it feels like a giant leap forward. The album opens with the ten-minute ‘Relax, Mind You’, ushered in with Rammers’ atonal squawks, recalling the extended techniques of artists like Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Braxton. As the music gathers pace, fuelled by the solid groove of Isaac Gunnoo’s bass, Rammers explodes from the gates, his burly solo full of raspy utterances, feints, and parries. ‘Slumpty Dumpty’, alternatively, is a brooding, nearcinematic piece, hinging on a jaunty, infectious rhythm played by Flora Carbo on bass clarinet. Lewis PierreHumbert’s pliant percussion propels ‘Follow Me’, an unwavering platform for Rammers’ take-no-prisoners solo, its fiery head of steam echoing the early free jazz of Archie Shepp. ‘Watch Them Fade Away’ is a feature for Harriett Allcroft’s vocals, which glide dreamily across Rammer’s sax refrain, before the piece erupts in a free-for-all wigout. The album closes with the title track, a deeply searching and lyrical song, harbouring a gentle message of hope. Worry Not proves a bold and adventurous statement by Rammers, announcing the arrival of a significant talent.

Web heralds a new voice on the Melbourne jazz scene. Trumpeter Ashley Ballat is a recent graduate of the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University, which provided her the opportunity to work with renowned players like Vijay Iyer, Terri Lynne Carrington, and Dave Douglas. For this, her debut album, she’s teamed up with Melbourne guitarist Stephen Magnusson, past winner of the National Jazz Awards at Wangaratta (and judge of the 2022 Awards). Together, Ballat and Magnusson have conceived a series of meditative, ambient soundscapes, intricately meshing trumpet and guitar, enriched by electronic overlays. Over the course of thirty-five minutes, and eight tracks, they explore a range of moods, emphasising ‘feel’ over virtuosity or prowess. The album’s opener ‘One’ finds Ballat pushing out a muted refrain, dark and foreboding, behind which Magnusson rachets up a squalling wall of electronic sound. ‘Endless’ features Magnusson on acoustic guitar, his every note ringing with crystal clarity, underpinning the stark quality of Ballat’s tone, as she improvises a haunting melody. On ‘Lullaby’, the album’s longest track, Ballat demonstrates supreme poise and control, injecting the piece with rare beauty, fragile and poignant. Magnusson shifts the mood on ‘Song for Rose’, ushering in a countrified twang, reminiscent of Bill Frisell. In its latter phase, the album heads for more experimental terrain, ending with ‘A Letter’, a dense whirling soundscape forged from electronics and spoken word. With its less is more approach, Web proves itself a deeply explorative work, reflecting the artistry of its makers.

Tyler Cooney is a Brisbane-based guitarist who, when it comes to jazz, relishes working in trio format. On this, his third album, he’s joined by Nick Quigley on bass and Tim Firth on drums. Right from the get-go, Cooney displays his obvious strengths: a warm tone that’s easy on the ear, an inventive and dexterous approach to soloing, and a crisp, uncluttered sound. Modern Ideal comes across as Cooney’s dialogue with modern jazz guitar history, containing as it does echoes of the mellow swing of Grant Green, the easy-going grooves of Kenny Burrell or Wes Montgomery. At the same time, Cooney proves capable of dipping back into the cool stylings of Jimmy Smith, or reaching forward to embrace the progressive trio music of John Scofield. While that might sound like a crowded playing field, there is a consistency and cohesiveness to be found across this hour-long album of original compositions, the sound of a tight-knit unit grooving in sync. Opener ‘Fleet of Foot’ is a laid-back piece that allows Cooney room to stretch out, as he solos elegantly across Firth’s inventive drumming. ‘Collision Dance’ picks up the pace, a fast-moving number that sees the trio locked in a tight shuffle, Cooney pushing forward flurries of notes, dancing in and around Quigley’s bass lines. The album’s title track is a leisurely, dream-like number, a summer idyll, mellow to the core. While not pushing any boundaries, Cooney’s album is full of virtuosity and clean grooves, steeped in the history of jazz guitar.

When I was growing up, a single meant two songs, an EP four songs, an album around 35-40 minutes of music. Later came CDs, providing up to an hour or more of music on a little shiny disc. In the digital realm, these assumptions have become meaningless. Saxophonist Adam Simmons’ live recording 100:25:1 runs to some thirty-hours. Flora Carbo’s new album Arthur’s Walks, on the other hand, runs to a mere 24-minutes. Perhaps the digital space has freed artists up to create albums with as much or as little music as the project demands, unhindered by time constraints. Alto saxophonist Carbo, in just a few brief years, has emerged as a vital force in Melbourne’s creative music scene. Arthur’s Walks arose out of the pandemic, inspired by Carbo’s daily walks, and her concurrent discovery of the eclectic music of Arthur Russell. It opens with a brief solo number, with Carbo multi-tracking herself on sax, clarinet, guitar. The following piece adds Jacob Hiser’s loping piano and Helen Svoboda’s bass, creating a jaunty rhythm over which Carbo’s alto gently meanders. The album song titles point to the various modes: ‘Little Jog’, ‘Amble’, ‘Wander’, ‘Hike’, ‘Daily Stroll’. Throughout, there is a shimmering quality to this music, combined with an intensity of focus and a sparsity that mirrors the quietude and contemplation of lockdown. Unfurling in a leisurely and unhurried manner, the music seems measured by the bodies’ natural rhythms. In brief, Arthur’s Walks is a micro-jewel that testifies to Carbo’s evolving vision.

ALBUMS: Vinyl BY STEVE BELL CRAIG FINN

NEIL YOUNG WITH CRAZY HORSE

THE AERIAL MAPS

Thirty Tigers

REPRISE/WARNER

Independent

One of the few drawbacks of the recent vinyl revolution has been that increased demand (for both new titles and reissues) has finally outpaced supply, with pressing plants all over the globe at full capacity resulting in vinyl often arriving months after an album’s digital release. Such is the case with the fifth solo album from US singer-songwriter Craig Finn, continuing his concurrent career alongside his usual hustle fronting beloved Brooklyn bar band The Hold Steady and providing an entirely different scope for his literate narrative vignettes. Near six-minute opener ‘Messing With The Settings’ sets the tone perfectly, a typical Finn tale of a decrepit couple down on their luck and using the minutiae of their dire experiences to provide a universal spin, his gentle spoken-word delivery adding a detached gravitas to proceedings. Next ’The Amarillo Kid’ is a character study of a gormless antagonist dragged slowly-butsurely into the drug trade, his plight afforded enormous empathy as the song rides atop a vaguely ‘80s-sounding bedrock. His backing band utilise subtle electronic flourishes as well as organic instrumentation and show great restraint on mid-tempo numbers like ‘Birthday’, ‘Never Any Horses’ and ‘Jessamine’, as well as allowing space on more restrained tracks like ‘The Year We Fell Behind’ and ‘Curtis & Shepard’. Towards the end ‘A Break From The Barrage’ is another six-minute spoken word epic, while ‘This Is What It Feels Like’ closes on a note of quiet redemption, a hint that there might be light at the end of the tunnel for these desperate characters. One of our finest contemporary storytellers still honing his musical approach with uniformly compelling results.

Legendary Canadian rocker Neil Young has been recently clearing out his vast vaults, and the latest forgotten treasure to find its way into the public domain is Toast, the long-lost “sad album” that he recorded in San Francisco back in 2001 with his trusty backing band Crazy Horse. The seven songs - all dealing with doomed relationships at that juncture where things are off the rails but the death knell has yet to be sounded were shelved back in the day for undisclosed reasons, with four of the tracks surfacing in different form on Young’s next album Are You Passionate? (2002) that he made with Memphis soul legends Booker T. & The M.G.’s as his musical foil. Unsurprisingly the Crazy Horse versions of those tracks - ‘Quit’, ‘Goin’ Home’, ‘How Ya Doin’? (which became ‘Mr Disappointment’) and ‘Boom Boom Boom’ (reimagined as ‘She’s A Healer’) - are more raucous and grungier than the relatively smooth recordings they became, although opener ‘Quit’ does have a soulful vibe not miles removed from its re-recorded self. For Young acolytes it’s the three previously unreleased tracks which carry the most heft, with ‘Standing In The Light Of Love’ featuring incendiary guitars which growl and weave, ’Timberline’ a hard-rocking track about a logger who loses both his job and faith in humanity and ‘Gathering Of Love’ a 10-minute banger featuring an epic guitar jam. Overall it’s not entirely imperative - especially if you already own Are You Passionate? - but there’s plenty to love for hardcore fans, and pressed onto 2-LP 180gm vinyl (using three sides with the fourth side etched) the fidelity is excellent even at its more ragged moments.

Wordsmith Adam Gibson has spent more than 20 years at the Australian music coalface in a succession of bands, but his most constant of these projects has been Sydney outfit The Aerial Maps which he formed back in 2008 alongside former The Hummingbirds frontman Simon Holmes (who tragically passed away back in 2017). Returning from a lengthy hiatus with their third album Intimate Hinterland, it’s entirely fitting that the current version of The Aerial Maps now features another former Hummingbird in guitarist/vocalist Alannah Russack - alongside guitarist Peter Fenton (of Crow fame), bassist Mark Hyland and longtime drummer Simon Gibson - who combine to offer beds of beautiful, refined music for Gibson to lay down his fascinating spokenword snapshots of Antipodean life. The first two tracks here concern affairs of the heart - ‘We All Need To Know There’s Someone Out The In The Night’ with its beautifullysung chorus and the gorgeous treatise on love ‘The Heart Isn’t Made For Earthquakes’ - while ‘Aurora Australis’ is a character study travelogue probing the pull of home from foreign shores and ‘Back In The North Country’ is based “up past the canefields” but is really a snapshot of a complex relationship. They throw in a charmingly wonky cover of The Go-Betweens’ ‘Surfing Magazines’, before the 10-minute epic ‘Definitive Return to Lighthouse Beach’ - Gibson’s third pass at this song, which dates right back to 2005 and Modern Giant’s ‘Heartbeat’ - pulls you in with its incredible insight to the Australian mindset and way of life. The album’s closing title track is another backwards-leaning epic, a beautifully existential treatise on time and memory, its meandering arrangement encapsulating everything special about this criminally-underrated Aussie outfit.

A LEGACY OF RENTALS

TOAST

INTIMATE HINTERLAND

By Brian Wise

TRAINWRECK: WOODSTOCK 99 Netflix

nyone who has been to a music festival in the past thirty years or so will be able to tell you that it is the experience that counts not just the music. No matter how good the line-up if the audience is not taken care of they can quickly become disaffected. Just look at what happened at Splendour in Byron Bay this year when the festival made the national television news headlines for probably the first time because rain drenched punters in flooded campgrounds are much more newsworthy than people enjoying themselves. Then again, for a few years into the early 2000’s Melbourne enjoyed a music festival in the city with a really high profile line-up (Bob Dylan, Ray Charles etc) but who wants to stand in a car park to watch your favourite act or listen to a band in a cavernous hall? It’s a delicate balancing act. Thankfully, most festivals in Australia get it right and punters are treated to conditions that are way better than in the days of the Sunbury Festival or the original Woodstock Festival in 1969. Woodstock 99, a three-part series, should be compulsory viewing for anyone who has even the slightest inkling that they might like to put on a public event of any sort; not because what happened at Woodstock ‘99 is likely to happen here but because it shows just how important it is to take care of the audience and how, if you put profit ahead of the punters and the music, how easily things can go wrong. Directed by Garret Price, Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage or retitled Trainwreck: Woodstock 99 for streaming services, the film tells the story of the ill-fated 30th anniversary of the famed festival. Five years earlier the same organisers - including Michael Lang (responsible for the 1969 event) and promoter John Scher - had staged a 25th anniversary show that could have been retitled Mudstock, not far from the original site. This featured mainly contemporary bands, some of the original 1969 performers and some, such as Bob Dylan, who didn’t make it to the original event. There were hints of what was to come in 1999: high ticket prices and thus tens of thousands too many people arriving without tickets, inadequate catering, poor security and bad weather. Fast forward to Woodstock 99, July 22-25, with the same organisers seemingly driven by the urge to ensure that the primary purpose of the event was to be a money-making proposition. They convinced the city council of the small town of Rome, in upstate New York, to allow them to use a nearby abandoned airforce base as a festival site. Miles of runways, a totally flat surface, aircraft hangars – a complete contrast of the original grassy amphitheatre site in Bethel, New York. Unlike the original and 25th anniversary events this time it wasn’t rain and mud that plagued concert goers but intense heat magnified by the miles of concrete runways and other areas. If the site wasn’t bad enough, the organisers conspired to add a few more incendiary items to the powder keg, apart from the high ticket price (again). There was almost no proper security (they hired students and inexperienced people some of whom sold their uniforms to punters). Catering companies were given the food and drink franchises and gouged the prices of the paltry supplies that did exist to ridiculous levels (water started at US$5 a bottle). Sanitation was poor, quickly leading to mass sickness. The event was also sold to pay-per-view TV and covered extensively by the MTV. Then there was the line-up of bands which, frankly, many of whom would have been a Rhythms reader’s worst nightmare: Limp Bizkit, Korn, Insane Clown Posse, Kid Rock, Wyclef Jean, Rage Against The Machine, Megadeath, Red Hot Chili Peppers. Sure, there were some more mainstream and roots music type artists - such as Willie Nelson, Los Lobos, Counting Crows, Brian Setzer, Dave Matthews, George

Clinton, Ben Lee (!), Elvis Costello, Jewel and Sheryl Crow (the latter two of whom were subjected to terrible insults) - but these were scattered at odd intervals. The hard rock bands, which were the very antithesis of the spirit and good vibes of the original event, had the high profile evening slots and whipped the increasingly disaffected audience into a frenzy of anger and frustration. The series episodes are titled How The F**k Did This Happen?, Kerosene. Match. Boom! and You Can’t Stop A Riot In The 90s. The tension builds and it is fairly obvious from the first episode what is going to happen. What is not so obvious is how distressing it is to watch the abuse, physical and verbal, to which women and young girls were subjected during the festival by a group of ‘frat boys’ who can only be described as sub-human. There is an argument made that the ensuing riots, the burning of the site, the fights and the anti-social behaviour and criminal acts (including rapes) were caused by the effect the conditions had on the psyche of the audience: a Lord of The Flies explanation. I don’t buy that. If we are going to accept that inhumane behaviour is inevitable, then we might as well give up now! But perhaps the truly shocking thing about this documentary is how the organisers – including Lang and Scher – seemed to be in complete denial about what went on even while it was happening. In interviews and press conferences neither of these two men were willing to accept any sort of blame when they were responsible for creating the conditions leading events to getting totally out of hand. Michael Lang who passed away in January this year talks in this documentary as if it is still 1969; however, the only conclusion one can reach about that original Woodstock festival is that its success and legend was a miracle given his organisational skills and it can be attributed to the spirit of the times and of those who attended.

By Des Cowley

Blues Portrait: A Profile of the Australian Blues Scene, volumes 1-3 By Pauline Bailey (self-published, p/b)

ike many, I came to blues music via a circuitous route. If you’d quizzed me about Willie Dixon’s classic ‘Spoonful’, I’d have cited Cream. Robert Johnson’s ‘Love in Vain’? Easy, Rolling Stones. It was Canned Heat who first introduced me to John Lee Hooker via Hooker n’ Heat. I recall Hooker’s voice and guitar on that record was so alien, I didn’t know what to make of it. But it proved enough to whet my appetite, and, like others before me, I set off in search of the roots of this music. Writer and visual artist Pauline Bailey confesses she loved music from an early age, her eclectic tastes eventually running to the raw sound of slide guitar and harmonica. Not unlike my own experiences, she first encountered blues via local acts like Billy Thorpe or Lobby Lloyd, or by listening to records by the Stones or Johnny Winter. Later, the more authentic blues of Chris Wilson and Southern Lightning motivated her to embark upon her own journey of discovery, diving deep into the blues catalogue. Bailey’s first venture into writing and publishing came about when she collaborated on musician Kim Volkman’s autobiography The Devil Won’t Take Charity (2017). The positive experience led her to conceive of an ambitious project to document Australian blues music, resulting in the present series of volumes. The significance of her work can’t be overestimated, given the overall paucity of books on the subject. All up, Bailey’s Blues Portrait runs to a whopping 1,000 pages, comprising firsthand accounts by some 130 musicians, most running to around 5-10 pages, along with photographs and brief career overviews. Bailey has cast her net widely, embracing those who play blues, as well as those inspired or influenced by blues music. While its focus is on Australian musicians, it does spotlight the occasional overseas act, such as Chuck Leavell or Nicolle ‘Nikki D’ Brown, who have toured here. A select checklist of names featured

in the first volume provides a snapshot of coverage: Ian Collard, Dave Hole, Kevin Borich, Fiona Boyes, Phil Manning, Lloyd Spiegel, Geoff Achison, Ross Wilson, Jeff Lang, Matt Taylor, Kerri Simpson, Ash Grunwald, Shane O’Mara, Chris Wilson. Bailey’s modus operandi for the first volume was to carry out face-to-face interviews, starting off with a prescribed set of questions, but allowing the conversation to roam, the equivalent of a fire-side chat. These were then transcribed and edited before being provided to interviewees for final edits and approval. The strength of this approach is that the endresult reflects the musicians’ own stories, told in their own words. It is a testament to Bailey’s project that only two of some hundred-andsixty musicians she approached declined to be involved. The onset of the pandemic, and subsequent lockdowns in 2020-2021, necessitated a shift in approach, and interviews for the second and third volumes were largely conducted by phone. One unexpected outcome is that these volumes broach the impacts of COVID upon local musicians. For many, the experience of gigs drying up, or enforced personal isolation, was a negative one; for others, such as Joe Camilleri, it “allowed time to stop and do something that I’ve always loved”, in this case playing the saxophone. With their density and heft, Bailey’s books are best considered reference works, to be dipped into, or taken down from the shelf as need arises. While her later volumes include a roster of significant names – Tim Rogers, Kerryn Tolhurst, Jeannie Lewis, Margaret Road Knight, Jim Conway, Kim Salmon, Russell Morris, Steve Tallis – they equally include many lesser-known figures, testifying

to her depth of coverage. As Jeff Lang notes in his introduction to the third volume, the book embraces many “younger performers who are each in their own way taking this music forward into the future”. Can we expect a further volume in the series? According to Bailey: “I still have a lot of artists I’d like to interview, including Buddy Knox and CW Stoneking, but I haven’t been able to connect with them yet, unfortunately… I’m currently working on Volume 4… stay tuned!” In the interim, post-lockdowns, she’s returned to her favourite Melbourne haunts: “The Catfish, The Rainbow, Way Out West, Memo, The Corner, The Forum, Lyrebird, George Lane, and the long-running Sunday Cherry Blues at the Cherry Bar.” In a nutshell, like any inveterate music-lover, she concedes she’ll go anywhere to see a blues band. To label these volumes a labour of love doesn’t do the project justice. Bailey has devoted several years of her life to documenting several generations of Australian blues and blues-related musicians, filling a much-needed gap in the record. The fact that Australian blues music developed decades after its US counterpart means that, within these pages, Bailey has been able to capture the voices of Australian pioneers of this music. In ten or twenty years, many of these voices will be silenced, ensuring her work is crucial to our understanding of the development of blues music in this country. Within a local context – and I know this sounds like a stretch – it’s analogous to an American counterpart taking down the words of Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, Lead Belly, or Ma Rainey. Kerri Simpson goes so far as to refer to her as ‘an Alan Lomax type figure’. Blues historians will undoubtedly owe Bailey a debt of gratitude.

Rhythms Books Too I

love this story. One day in 1967, Mo Ostin, who’d just been appointed label president at Warner Bros. Records, called his team together in Los Angeles and explained to them his vision and strategy for the label. It wasn’t what they were expecting to hear. Ostin’s instruction were for them and their artists to stop trying to make hit records. What was his alternative? It was a simple one. “Let’s just make good records, and we’ll turn those into hits,” was what Ostin told his staff. Sonic Boom is a marvellous book, a celebration and explanation of the golden days of record labels, that time when people who loved music as much as making a profit managed to exist in major record labels. Of course, some figures like that are still around but with each passing year their ranks become thinner. The book is subtitled The Impossible Rise Of Warner Bros. Records – From Jimi Hendrix To Fleetwood Mac To Madonna To Prince. Author Peter Ames Carlin is responsible for two terrific artist biographies – Homeward Bound: The Life Of Paul Simon, and Bruce, a superior look at the career of that Springsteen guy. Initially I wondered if I needed to read this. I questioned whether there would be anything that wasn’t dealt with in Stan Cornyn’s classic look at the company - Exploding: The Highs, Hits, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the Warner Music Group which was a racy, pacy examination of the label’s history. But with Mo Ostin’s passing (at 95 years of age) at the end of July this year I looked at it again, started it and immediately fell under its spell. Cornyn is of course a significant player in the story but after a quick encapsulation of the label’s evolution up to the 1950s Sonic Boom is a love letter to Ostin and the other principal figure in the company, Joe Smith, and the merry band of reprobates – artists and staff – they assembled and, in the process, became the dominant record label of their era. It’s about encouraging creativity, thinking outside the box, taking chances, not being afraid to fail, not talking down to an audience, and applying longevity to artists development.

By Stuart Coupe

In a way as I kept reading this I couldn’t stop thinking of Michael Gudinski and Mushroom Records - and wishing I still had the opportunity to ask Gudinski if he’d had dealings with Ostin, Smith and the other pivotal figures at Warners. If he hadn’t learnt from observing the way they did business it had clearly come to him by osmosis. Carlin does an incredible job of making the history of a business – an artistic business, sure – endlessly entertaining and tells the story with a warmth and poignancy that I found constantly affecting and moving. The author never gets bogged down in detail. He tells tales of artists and inspired figures who hovered around them. And of course, it couldn’t continue. The latter part of the book talks of power players, people who simply didn’t get what the label was about moving in and the great vision of Ostin and Smith being slowly eroded to the point where Warner Bros became indistinguishable from other major labels. But what a ride they had for decades. Carlin ends the book beautifully. He’s gone to visit Ostin – then aged 93 – and concludes: ‘Books about music shouldn’t have sad endings, not if the music is still playing somewhere in the world. And maybe no music ever dies. It takes to the air and stays aloft, a vibration on the breeze, a dream adrift, always ready to float into another set of ears and implant itself into another living spirit. That’s the great miracle of music, this invisible presence that can travel through walls, air, and time. And for everything they achieved at Warner Bros. Records during the Ostin era, for all the money they made, the awards they won, the parties they threw, and the ecstasies they traversed, they always kept their focus on the empty air. Always ready for magic to strike. And it did.” I wish I’d written that – and more importantly I wish I’d been around Warner Bros. Records in their golden days. And there’s a fervent wish that more of the ethos of those days will return to the business of nurturing and selling music. I’m probably dreaming – which is what Ostin and his cohorts did, and then they turned dreams – theirs and their artists’ into reality. 95

STUART COUPE PRESENTS

DON HILLMAN DAYDREAMIN’

LYNNE HAZELTON “WHEN THE RIVER RUNS FREE”

NO PROMISES THE RIVER

Daydreamin’ is new album by Surf Coast troubadour and songwriter, Don Hillman, in the great Australian songwriting tradition of Paul Kelly, Don Walker and Richard Clapton. Songs on the album resonate quintessential Australia – King Parrot Creek, Gypsy Station Wagon, Rollin Waves Forever. The country rock title track is a standout – daydreaming about being back down the coast. The 12 track album harnesses the mastery of Johnny Salerno on drums, Marcel Yammouni on bass and guitar, Bruce Haymes on keys, and Garrett Costigan on prodigious pedal steel. Olivia Nathan provides backing vocals, and Jeff Raglus, trumpet on three tracks. The album was recorded at Diamond Creek. Don continues to create his superb songs, and performs with his band, Don Hillman’s Secret Beach. The new Daydreamin’ album is now available on digital services, and on CD from donhillman.com

Be captivated by the blistering steel on rimshot ride from Aria winner Bill Chamber’s guitars, as he digs in to pick it out and eerily punctuate more desert poesy from Lynn Hazelton. Yet another red dirt ode for the road, with a catchy chorus from this steam country poetess, fresh off her new album Chasing Dragonflies. If you haven’t seen a dried-out lake, come awake after the fall, you will for sure in this song. You’ll not only feel it in the driving groove, but see it too, “the crawling creeks that are the veins in parched skin of dusty plains, bulging big and muscled mountains, jagged bony ranges south”. Get covered in prairie dust as you’re drawn in to sing for rain, for Kati Thanda - Lake Eyre, ‘when the river runs free’, again and again. lynnhazelton.com

After dipping their toes in the water with their debut album – Acoustic Sessions Vol.1, South Gippsland duo No Promises have now fully submerged themselves into their unique alt country sound with their second album - The River. Like their first album, this collection breaks the traditional genre boundaries, with each track taking you somewhere different to the one before. Prolific songwriters with a huge catalogue to choose from, The River is a collection of the best. Already spawning six supremely catchy singles - Ashes & Dust, Badlands, Odessa, the smouldering Paper Heart, Montgomery Rain and their latest single Coming Home. Their voices made for each other, with beautiful harmonies and fantastic guitar work, Eric and Janine will take you on a journey of emotions and life issues. No PROMISES will be touring around Victoria throughout the remainder of 2022 to promote The River which is due for release November 4th. nopromises.com.au

GREG LYON & THE HIP OPERATION OUT OF THE BLUE

MATT GLASS SLOW FIREWORKS

RICHARD MADDEN GET A LOAD OF THIS!

From out of the 2021 lockdown blues in Byron Bay comes this uplifting album - a blending of soul, country, jazz and R’n’B, featuring some of Australia’s finest musicians. Advance Album Praise From Kevin Bennett: “Borne of a deep connection to roots and countrysoul music, and a life experience steeped in myriad musical collaborations in studio and live performance, Greg is one of our most revered and ‘in demand’ session/live musicians (mostly bass) since the 70’s. He was also a member of our best known jazz fusion outfit, Crossfire, so to me, it seems only natural that he’d deliver an assortment of cool songs dripping with groove and heart’n’soul…… nothing ‘out of the blue’ about it! Out Of The Blue is a joyous trip through soulful, heartfelt originals and new takes on choice old faves like ‘Mind Your Own Business’ by Hank Williams, Van’s ‘Into The Mystic’ and a lovely reading of Elvis Presley’s ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love.’ With majestic playing throughout plus a supreme amount of FUNk! Oh, and by the way, he’s a hell of a singer.......out of the blue indeed!! greglyon.com.au

Crackling with wit and infectious melody Melbourne’s smouldering, cool, inner-urban contemporary folk savant, Matt Glass is a craftsman: writer, performer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer. Sparkling with hooky exuberance in his new EP, Slow Fireworks, a mission statement of Glass’s inner-city, pop-folk sensibility, his songs are unique in their impressionistic style - warmhearted and infectiously catchy snapshots of time, place, and feeling. Glass explores the complex landscape of contemporary relationships - writing from personal experiences as a father, son, lover and friend. In Slow Fireworks, Glass has fused traditional folk hooks with contemporary beats, creating a unique - yet readily accessible - sonic landscape. At times reminiscent of the genre-hopping folk wisdom of David Gray, Slow Fireworks was birthed during the bleak Melbourne winter lockdown of 2020, collaborating with producer Myles Mumford, who pitched in with the recording, mixing and drum programming. Glass is virtuosic, playing every instrument on the EP. mattglass.com.au

Further cementing his place as one of Australia’s premier guitarist, Richard Madden releases a new live album containing 14 tracks which features an all-star 10-piece band! The show was recorded at the Vanguard, Sydney for the launch of Richard’s debut album, ‘Force of Nature’ back in 2008. ‘I have always loved soul music so to play with a 10 piece ensemble was a dream and exciting, however due to scheduling conflicts, the whole band rehearsed separately and met for the first time on the night of the performance, it’s the sound from the driver’s seat, one chance, one shot, what a trip!’ The energy instilled in this performance is palpable and is a testament to the songs and musicianship on display. Available on CD along with a limited edition 34-page photo album featuring photos and memorabilia from the night making it the perfect companion to the 14-track album! richardmadden.com.au/music-merch/

From The Forthcoming Chasing Dragonflies Album

NOVEMBER Thursday November 3 - Sunday November 6 BENDIGO BLUES & ROOTS MUSIC FESTIVAL Bendigo, VIC bendigoblues.com Friday November 4 - Sunday November 6 AIRLIE BEACH FESTIVAL OF MUSIC Airlie Beach, QLD airliebeachfestivalofmusic.com.au Friday November 11 - Sunday November 13 HEALESVILLE MUSIC FESTIVAL Healesville, VIC healesvillemusicfestival.com.au November 16 – December 18 FESTIVAL OF SMALL HALLS Queensland festivalofsmallhalls.com Friday November 18 - Sunday November 20 BURRA COUNTRY MUSIC FESTIVAL Burra, SA burracountrymusicfestival.com Friday November 18 - Sunday November 20 AUSTRALIAN BLUES MUSIC FESTIVAL Goulburn, NSW australianbluesfestival.com Saturday November 19 HINTERLAND Red Hill, VIC https://www.hinterlandmf.com.au/2022/ Saturday November 19 – Sunday November 20 HARVEST ROCK Adelaide harvestrock.com

Saturday November 19 - Sunday November 20 MOUNTAINGRASS - FESTIVAL OF BLUEGRASS & OLD TIME MUSIC Beechworth, VIC mountaingrass.com.au

FEBRUARY

Sunday November 20 REGGAETOWN FESTIVAL, Kuranda Amphitheatre, QLD

February 24-26, 2023 MONA FOMA Hobart, TAS

Friday November 25 - Sunday November 27 QUEENSCLIFF MUSIC FESTIVAL Queenscliff, VIC qmf.net.au

MARCH

DECEMBER Saturday December 3 - Sunday December 4 MORNINGTON COUNTRY MUSIC FESTIVAL Mount Martha, VIC morningtoncountrymusicfestival.com.au Saturday December 3 CAPITOL COUNTRY Canberra, ACT capital-country.com.au Tuesday December 27 – Sunday January 1 WOODFORD FOLK FESTIVAL Woodford, QLD woodfordfolkfestival.com

JANUARY January 13 – January 15, 2023 CYGNET FOLK cygnetfolkfestival.org January 13 -22, 2023 TAMWORTH COUNTRY MUSIC FESTIVAL tcmf.com.au January 20-23, 2023 NEWSTEAD MUSIC FESTIVAL Newstead, VIC Newsteadlive.com January 27 - 29, 2023 THREDBO BLUES FESTIVAL thredbobluesw.com.au

February 17-19, 2023 MONA FOMA Launcestion, TAS

Friday March 10 – Monday March 13, 2023 WOMADELAIDE Womadelaide.com.au Friday March 10 – Monday March 13, 2023 PORT FAIRY FOLK FESTIVAL Pfff.com.au March 17-19, 2023 BLUE MOUNTAINS MUSIC FESTIVAL Bmmf.com.au Sunday March 5 – Monday March 13 BRUNSWICK MUSIC FESTIVAL Brunswickmusicfestival.com.au March 24-26, 2023 MORUYA BLUES & ROOTS Moruya, NSW moruyabluesandroots.com

APRIL Thursday April 6 – Monday April 10, 2023 BLUESFEST Tyagarah, NSW bluesfest.com.au April 6-10, 2023 NATIONAL FOLK FESTIVAL Canberra folkfestival.org.au April 21-23, 2023 THE GUMBALL Lower Belford, NSW dashville.com.au/gumball

97 97

Jenny Biddle

Jim Post

Judith Durham

Olivia Newton-John

Scaller

Sorcha Richardson

COMPILED BY SUE BARRETT

November, December and January are important months – socially, economically, spiritually. If you’re giving gifts, ideas include Rhythms subscriptions and music by Australian artists (direct from them or from your local record store). And with the COVID-19 pandemic continuing, you can help prevent a repeat of the shit-show of 12 months ago by choosing to wear a face mask, staying home when sick and doing COVID-smart things like meeting outdoors and having indoor spaces well-ventilated. The Australian-made P2 masks that I wear are manufactured by PPE Tech and AMD. And I buy silicone cord locks / stoppers online to get a better seal. Australian singer/songwriter Jenny Biddle (still living in Scotland) has online guitar and ukulele tutorials available as Patreon memberships. www.patreon.com/jennybiddle Ensemble Offspring’s Hatched Composer Showcase takes place on Sat 12 Nov 2022 at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. It will feature world premiers of new works by

…AND

Judith Durham (79), of The Seekers, died Victoria, Australia (Aug) English musician Tom Springfield (88), brother of Dusty and songwriter for The Seekers (‘I’ll Never Find Another You’, ‘A World of Our Own’, ‘The Carnival is Over’), died England (Aug) Margaret Ulrich (57), New Zealand born singer, died NSW, Australia (Aug) Australian music industry illustrator and author Ian McCausland (78), died Victoria, Australia (Aug) Darryl Hunt (72), bassist with The Pogues, died England (Aug) American jazz trumpeter and composer Jaimie Branch (39), died New York state, USA (Aug) Olivia Newton-John (73), Grammy-winning English-born Australian singer, died California, USA (Aug) 98

Lewis Mosley (NSW), Ceridwen McCooey (VIC), Andrea Guterres (NSW), Sean Quinn (VIC) and Alexander Voltz (QLD). www. ensembleoffspring.com/event American singer/songwriter BLÜ EYES’ debut EP, Healing Hurts, includes the song, ‘You’d Never Know’: Everyone said / You look fine from the outside / But in my mind I was upside down and screaming / What the hell is wrong with me / Tryna make it make sense / Makin my head spin / Now I pray to forget / Cuz I’m still here screamin /What the hell is wrong with me www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFss-JRIlEE&t=85s Golden Robot Global Entertainment Group’s newly launched Archangel Records “aims to support, uplift and nurture the talent of women in the music industry”. The current Archangel Records artists are: Ella Fence, Tough on Fridays, Scaller. www.archangel-records.com On his forthcoming album, Only the Strong Survive, Bruce Springsteen covers songs from the 1960s and 1970s, including ‘Turn Back the Hands of Time’, ‘Hey, Western Union Man’, ‘Someday We’ll Be Together’, ‘What Becomes of the Brokenhearted’. Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture has 52 retail catalogues from Ladyslipper Records Inc available online – it’s a treasure trove of

American singer and actress Helen Grayco (97), who was married to Spike Jones and who was the mother of recording engineer Leslie Ann Jones, died in Aug Keith Jamieson (74), Australian country singer, died QLD, Australia (Aug) American jazz musician Joey DeFrancesco (51), died Arizona, USA (Aug) Lamont Dozier (81), American musician and songwriter, died Arizona, USA (Aug) American drummer Jerry Allison (82), died Tennessee, USA (Aug) Sam Gooden (87), of The Impressions, died Tennessee, USA (Aug) Activist, musician and actor Uncle Jack Charles (79), died Victoria, Australia (Sept) Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (96), whose views became increasingly socially progressive and whose life included a lot of music, died Scotland (Sept) American drummer John Hartman (72), of The Doobies Brothers, died in Sept Jim Post (82), American singer/songwriter, died in Sept

information about female musicians. https:// repository.duke.edu/dc/ladyslipper New recordings include: Tom Chapin, Hold Our Ground; Anna Mullarkey, Falling; James Keelaghan, Second-Hand; Stillhouse Junkies, Small Towns; Kevin Borich, Legacy; Jennifer Berezan, Belonging; John McCutcheon, LEAP!; Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen, Hold On; Atwater-Donnelly, The Boat You Row; Future West, Who Will Forgive All My Sins; Russell Morris, The Dreams of Jack Chrome; Calum MacColl, About Time; Liz & Yvonne Kane, In Memory of Paddy Fahey; Israel Starr, Keepers of the Flame; Sorcha Richardson, Smiling Like an Idiot; Beth Nielsen Chapman, CrazyTown; Shelley Graff, For All the Womyn Among the new music books are: Bono, Surrender; Philip Furia & Laurie J Patterson, Poets of Tin Pan Alley; Margo Price, Maybe We’ll Make It; Paul Brady, Crazy Dreams; Jonathan Abrams, The Come Up: Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop; Jamie Anderson, Drive All Day; Lauron J Kehrer, Queer Voices in Hip Hop; Martin Hayes, Shared Notes; Gerald R Lishka, Art of Ballet Accompaniment; Angie McCartney, Ticket to Ride: Legendary Beatle Locations; Ted Kessler, Paper Cuts: How I Destroyed the British Music Press; Joan Armatrading, The Weakness in Me: Selected Lyrics English musician Paul Sartin (51), of Faustus, Bellowhead & Belshazzar’s Feast, died in Sept Gazi Mazharul Anwar (79), lyricist, film director, producer, screenwriter, died Bangladesh (Sept) American jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis (87), died Illinios, USA (Sept) Herschel Sizemore (87), American mandolinist, died in Virginia, USA (Sept) Drummer Paul Dufour, of English band The Libertines, died in Sept Sonny West (85), American songwriter and musician, died Oklahoma, USA (Sept) Scottish-born musician Hector Gilchrist (82), died in Sept Bob Martin (80), American singer/songwriter, died in Sept American composer, producer and drummer Anton Fier (66), of The Feelies, The Lounge Lizards and The Golden Palominos, died in Sept Ray Edenton (95), American musician who played guitar for Kitty Wells, Hank Snow, Patsy Cline, The Everly Brothers and many others, died Tennessee, USA (Sept)

the new album out now 100