Conway Savage - The Honky Tonk On The Hill.

 

Conway Savage and Nick Danyi (sax in the Feral Dinosaurs) at our wedding in Adelaide in 1985. 

 

Conway Savage at our wedding with his then partner, Miriam White (sister to Jim).

Conway Savage  , who played with myself  and Clare Moore all through 1989 and a lot of 1990 with Dave Graney and the White Buffaloes - including the recording of MY LIFE ON THE PLAINS - sadly died just yesterday. He had been true friends of ours since the early 80s. Really early days, scratching out some chords and trying for licks in Melbourne. We loved him in the Feral Dinosaurs and the incredible Dave Last and the Legendary Boy Kings. (He'd been in earlier bands than that but he never talked about them , just as we never talked about our first bands. Getting into shape as a player took time for us all. The early days were both a fight and a fright .....)   

 

Conway at a FROGGA machine in at SING SING studios in Richmond , 1989 when we recorded MY LIFE ON THE PLAINS with producer PHIL VINALL. Cans of VB were ubiquitous in the Melbourne scene then. No craft beer jive - no foreign muck - just MELBOURNE BEER! IN A CAN!

The White Buffaloes were a great band and we just hit on a unique sound. Mostly my songs but covers I chose from Gene Clarke, Fred Neil, Gram Parsons, Doug Sahm, Buffy Saint Marie, the Charlatans and Conways own arrangement of "The Streets Of Laredo" (which I sang) . Nobody else was doing anything close to us then. Kind of buckskin country rock but touched with psychedelia from both sides of the Atlantic. Before Alt Country was a word on some PR assistants lips. 

He started to do his own shows at the time too, very downbeat ballads mixed with crazed rockabilly raveups. We all loved Jerry Lee and George Jones. He'd pretty much destroy his funny old half mechanical electric piano doing a  show stopper called "Honky Tonk On The Hill". He'd kick everything over and walk off. A great period in Melbourne music. He also loved Randy Travis and Guy Clark and had a  peculiar all protein diet. Lots of eggs and chicken wings. And beer and red wine and weed. 

art by Dave Western

Clare and I had arrived back in Melbourne after being away for five or six years and thought we could put a holiday band together. It wasn't meant to last so long or to produce an actual album but it did just that. Conway brought Rod Hayward along to a rehearsal and we played with Rod from 1988 until the end of 1997. We also play occasionally with him to this day. 

pic Wayne O Farrell, White Buffaloes, Melbourne 1989.

Early on Clare had also worked  with Conway in one of those stints in the public service we all did to get some coin in our lives. It was in the tax department in the early 80s. Conway was an assessor as he'd finished High School (Unlike Clare who was a dropout) The country didn't go broke! Nobody died!

David Palliser (then in the People With Chairs Up Their Noses with Jim White, Mark Barry  and Jim Shugg) , Conway and Miriam.

He also played cricket well into his twenties and on the occasions I saw him playing in park games at parties, he enjoyed working on his technique more than trying to hit everything for six.  

 

 He left us to join Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1990 but kept producing his own music all the way. He seemed to break through to a beautiful new lighthearted tone with a  series of EPs in the last decade. Titles like Quicky For Ducky and Pussys Bow. He was working in a unique organ, guitar and electric piano trio with Robert Tickner and Amanda Fox.

He always kept it real and tight with those friends from early days in Melbourne. Bruce Kane (Boy Kings and future director of the tv show RECOVERY)  and Amanda Fox were in Honeymoon in Green (who might have had Conway in them for a short time) along with Andrew Crowder and Shane Walsh (RIP- also of the Boy Kings and Tex, Don and Charlie) . A lot of them came from the Victorian places he'd grown up in. Terang, Orbost, Fish Creek, Port Albert, Marlo. His parents ran pubs in some of those towns. He had three older brothers, Frank, Charlie and Geordie and his sister Meredith. He leaves behind his daughter Grace, who came from Conway and Dinah.

 I tried to write about Conway in my book, 1001 Australian Nights...

It was a short walk across to one of the performance tents but a sudden shower brought sheets of rain toward us, sideways. Everybody huddled in even tighter.Clammy folk! . There were annoying people holding onto their positions with deck chairs, reading books. (To be fair, last years festival was apparently 40 degrees and the stages were outdoors. More of a folk festival scene.) Conway Savage sits on stage left, facing in with an electric piano, an ashtray and a bottle of red, Robbie stands dead centre with an electric guitar and Amanda Fox sits on stage right, facing in, with an organ and an accordion. It is a great sound they have and they were the main act I wanted to see. The two keys and the guitar playing alternately, rhythm and bass runs as well as chords sat so well together. It is also an unpredictable sound which makes them an experience whenever they play. Conway sings on and off mic, drifting in and out of your hearing. More like a jazz band than anything else. Conway is also, jarringly, a very country guy. He is tough and wiry and kooky in a George Jones/ Hank Williams kind of way. Upbeat and unpredictable. In short, he is a real Bad Seed. To this end he displays flashes of personality in a scene which can be a bit of a museum display. (Please leave personality at the door) He tells people to amuse themselves while he pours a drink and then talks of the instability of his piano and the stage, rather than the lyrics of the next song. He is a wildman. It was stellar.

A week later we saw Conway and his posse again, we were keen to catch them in a club. It is a cool venue, upstairs, with a lot of space and a good stage. Conway adds some drama by falling backwards from the said stage before beginning. (Mistaking a cloth hanging curtain which goes the length of the stage, for a wall). He seems to hurt himself but springs to his feet and yells "nobody saw that!"

It is a great sound. Bass and drums would ruin it. A perfect sound. The feels of the songs are very varied, some being so light hearted and upbeat. In one lilting tune with a rocksteady/ska beat Conway sings "let the good times roll" and smiles. He is in the ZONE to be getting away with some of that stuff! Really, they have something going on and Conways enjoying himself so much. He started playing solo gigs back in 88/89 when he was in the Boy Kings and also playing with us in the White Buffaloes. He was all hopped up on Randy Travis and Jerry Lee Lewis back then. Wild, rollicking songs like "honky tonk on the hill" and "honky tonk road" as well as great arrangements of songs in the public domain like " the steets of Laredo" and "fair and tender ladies". He then ran away with the Bad Seeds but all the while he's been sitting in rooms somewhere, practicing his licks and going over and over old and new songs. He must have recorded three or four albums ( as well as being a full time Bad Seeds) in the ensuing years so his material is aged single malt stuff. His demeanour onstage is also 190 proof country. He is unpredictable and unmediated. Squares could take offence, or get bamboozled, or come along for the ride. He has a funny kind of "hey people!" way of relating talking about his songs, sometimes into the mic and mostly off mic and makes great play of lighting cigarettes and putting a harmonica around his neck. People laugh as he mumbles and drawls, he keeps it up until one line too far, then, to the silent breathing, he asks "where's the laughs now?" and trills a few notes. He really is a honky tonk man and is beyond that kind of city appropriation of country music for its gauche and exotic trappings and surreal formalities that springs up every ten years or so. Tall and stringy with flecks of grey in his hair, he is the real deal. The honkytonk on the hill he once wrote and sang about himself. His accompanists, Amanda and Robert are perfectly poised and alive to the playfulness of his songs. They hear him and anticipate and can match him. They are old friends and have really found something rich in the current setup. It works. The songs are short but strangely meandering and willful all at once. Ephemeral and light.

 We saw him at a party in March. Chris Walsh's birthday. He was quite positive that he had survived his brain tumour and treatment and was talking about coming to our studio to record. Then we heard nothing until last month. The bad news was that hed gone into a rapid decline. We got to see him a few times. His sister Meredith and her partner Dean took incredible care of Conway in his last months. Right up to the end.