dave graney - Moodists-Coral Snakes-mistLY-FEARFUL WIGGINGS

dave graney - Moodists-Coral Snakes-mistLY-FEARFUL WIGGINGS
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About Me

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2023 book THERE HE GOES WITH HIS EYE OUT (lyrics 1980-2023) 2023 reissue Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes Night Of The Wolverine. Double vinyl release. 2023 ROCK album with Clare Moore IN A MISTLY . WORKSHY - 2017 memoir out on Affirm Press. Available at shows or via website. Moodists - Coral Snakes - mistLY. I don’t know what I am and don’t want to know any more than I already know. I aspire, in my music , to 40s B Movie (voice and presence) and wish I could play guitar like Dickey Betts, John Cippolina or Grant Green - but not in this lifetime, I know.

Wednesday, November 21, 2018

an article I have in the latest issue of the Adelaide Review

WHEN THE WEIRD CAN'T GET GOING.

Where can people go to get weird? We used to have Kings Cross but even the gangsters have realized that dope and sex pale to insignificance when considered in relation to real estate .
Maybe now that sex, dope and gambling are right there in everybody’s computers and phones; right in their homes or at least in the palms of their hands in the back of a taxi or bus; maybe, they don’t need to go anywhere to get weird?

Perhaps they/we need a place to go to straighten out then. Just as good. “Love and hate are both horns on the same goat!” yelled Kirk Douglas in the epic movie, “The Vikings”.

I’m in showbusiness. I know show people. If they’re any good, they’re completely off the scale of freakiness. It goes with the territory. You can only wander onto your own stage. You have to have gone off for a piss and a look around early on. Some of these show people are in hiding, ones I see pretty regularly. Some mightn’t have “made show” in years. They’re still show people. Nobody ever asks us how anything works. Things like the gig economy. We watched them jump off the cliff.
Show people, at best – carny folk. Watch your stuff! Can you believe there is actual talk about “having conversations” about mental illness in the music scene? Have they not heard of the blues? Blue notes? Blue Note itself? one of the greatest jazz labels of all time? Syd Barrett? Roky Erikson? Bud Powell? Charlie Parker? Hank Williams? Thelonius Monk? Sandy Denny? Judy Garland? Judee Sill? Laura Nyro? Billy Holliday? Nick Drake? Joe Meek? Jim Morrison? Brian Jones? Tragic, thrilling villains, clowns  and gods, all of them.

William Burroughs wrote about a place called Johnson in one of his later books.
In this world of shabby rooming houses, furtive gray figures in dark suits, hop joints and chili parlors the Johnson Family took shape as a code of conduct. To say someone is a Johnson means he keeps his word and honours his obligations. He's a good man to have on your team. He is not a malicious, snooping, interfering self righteous trouble making person. - The Place of Dead Roads (1983)

He was writing about retired show people, all coming to one town when they finally hung up their tired old scams. That’d be nice.

Burroughs last series of books were great to read as they came out in the 80s. He seemed to be squaring up his entire written narrative with an 18th century novel (Cities Of the Red Night), and then 19th (The Place Of Dead Roads) and 20th century (The Western Lands) narratives. What a character Burroughs was! Can you imagine him being present in todays thin and super sensitive public realm? He’d have to be introduced and defined to the bored and uninterested audience as it paraded by, scrolling the world on their screens. What would they choose to better see him by? What narrow window to better frame him? His drug of choice? His having murdered his first wife? Him being an heir to the Burroughs adding machine accounts? His description of women as being “a curse” or “two hole freaks”?
Perhaps he’d just finally break into a sweat and pull out his guns and start shooting apparent media workers as they camped outside his small town window? That’d be something everybody could understand.

What an everyday world it seemed, that could contain a presence like Burroughs. And his British counterpart JG Ballard with his typewriter and gin and tonics in suburban Shepparton, outside London, writing the world up in even more thrilling , cold, sleek and beguiling veins of living possibilities. They wrote of “sexual homecomings”, languages being viruses from outer space, diseases in time, manias and every kind of sex unimaginable. Their words inspired several rock bands names as well, in Burroughs case, as the term “Heavy Metal” itself and many movies. There is a very well understood 21st Century adejective – Ballardian -  which is shorthand for a whole cultural moment. And its never really describing anything nice.

Those two were wise to danger and over exposure and kept their powder dry and its threatening power sharp for the duration of their times on earth. Characters like Hunter S Thompson and Tom Wolfe had some fierce windows of heat for a while but each was easily swallowed by the very world they set out to describe. It turned back on them like a stormy twister and sucked them in and off something shocking.

Michelle Houllebecq is a twenty first century man of words who could be said to be of comparable stature. He seems to be able write of things that then eventuate in images on tv and telephone screens and newspaper opinion pieces. They walk off the page and off the set, quickly.

Its hard for writers or players to be superbad nowadays though. How could you be worse than any of the political figures and their mobs in power in the USA or the UK or Australia. I mean, even if you had access to all sorts of drugs that could blitz your brain or glam your eyes or give you the general whim whams AND a crew of people to catch you when you fell and mop your brow as you encountered intense swells in the aether, these people would be sure to harsh your buzz. Their sheer shittiness has sharp and tangy cut through. They would sober you up. And there’s nowhere you could go to get weird? Isn’t that the saddest thing? This is where I’m leaving you readers. In the shitdom. The fouled lattitudes. When the weird can’t get going cos the going can’t get weird.

 Dec 2nd - Dave Graney and the mistLY playing a house party in Richmond.
Dec 4th Dave Graney and Clare Moore will be part of THE SONGROOM at the Northcote Social Club. A series of shows about songwriting and collaboration devised by THE BASICS. Graney and More are paired with RUDELY INTERRUPTED. To be filmed for a television show. Tickets here.

Dec 26th - Dave Graney and Clare Moore will be playing their annual BOXING DAY show at the Hotel Metro in Adelaide. 

January 3rd Dave Graney solo at MONA  in Hobart.
January 4th Dave Graney solo at the Homestead in Hobart.

January 24th Dave Graney and the mistLY will be playing at the Winnebago Lounge (Caravan Music Club)1 Victor Rd, Bentleigh East VIC Tickets here.
New Dave Graney memoir - WORKSHY out on Affirm press. Get it here.

 

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Dave Graney and Clare Moore with Georgio "the dove" Valentino and Malcolm Ross

Dave Graney and Clare Moore with Robin Casinader - In Concert

ONE MILLION YEARS DC

Starts with a Kinksy groover sketching a 21st century populist tyrant who coasts in power on waves of public resentment at those on the lowest rungs of the ladder (He Was A Sore Winner). Sweeps across a sci fi terrain with nods to songs in the sand at the end of the world (Pop Ruins) and nods to the ties that bind in the underground communities (Comrade Of Pop and Where Did All The Freaks Go?). Songs about intense, long relationships, defunct technology that didn’t answer back, severe social status definition (I’m Not Just Any Nobody), people wandering through your mind as if it was a garage sale, the anxiety of the long running showman (wide open to the elements again) and ends with a song that’s “a little bit Merle Haggard and a little bit Samuel Beckett”. " Edith Grove! Powis Square! 56 Hope Road! Petrie Terrace!.. The Roxy! The Odeon! Apollo! Palais! Olympia! The Whisky! Detroit Grande!” Pop Ruins!"

ZIPPA DEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS?

ZIPPA DEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS? (The title comes from the chorus of “Song Of Life” ) is a classic rock’n’roll album. Classic if you lived through what has become known as ”the classic rock era” as it rolled out new and even broke onto the beachhead and morphed into punk. That’s the direction Dave Graney and Clare Moore have always been coming from. They have spent their lives schooled by and immersed in rock ‘n’ roll culture. Neither attended higher education and they dived in deep and kept swimming. From the Moodists through the Coral Snakes /White Buffaloes to the mistLY This is an album with their band, Dave Graney and the mistLY. Stuart Perera has played guitar with them since 1998 and Stu Thomas on bass since 2004. MARCH 2019 ZIPPA DEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS? 2019 album out on Compact Disc - available here via mail order...
If you are from outside of Australia and wish to purchase a Compact Disc copy of ZIPPA DEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS? please use this button (different postage)

LETS GET TIGHT

FEARFUL WIGGINGS

2014 solo album from Dave Graney. *****"If I've learnt anything in my years of writing about music it's that if you are going to do anything of worth in this tough game, you better have your own thing. Today's generic is easily replaced by tomorrow's. And yet you need to be flexible, to follow wherever the songs demand. In the case of this, only the second credited as a solo album among 30 or so Graney releases, it's a curious yet welcoming lane he walks you down, with acoustic guitars, not much percussion, vibes, smooth sounds. At the end of it you feel like you've awoken from a strange yet pleasant summer's dream. As shot by Luis Bunuel. It ranges from off-kilter reveries (A Woman Skinnies Up a Man, The Old Docklands Wheel) through to the softly seductive (How Can You Get Out of London) and the downright arch (Look Into My Shades, Everything Is Great In The Beginning.) This is music that is neither folk, nor blues, nor country, but it's all Graney, somewhere out to the left field beyond Lee Hazlewood's raised eyebrow. It's astringent on the tongue but sweetens in the telling." Noel Mengel Brisbane Courier Mail

you've been in my mind

June 2012 super high energy pop rock album - blazing electric 12 strings - total 70s rock drive. Greatest yet! available via paypal - $20 pp

rock'n'roll is where I hide/- 2011 "vintage classics/ re recordings" on LIBERATION

SUPERMODIFIED - August 2010 remixed/re-sung/re-strung//remastered/replayed comp via PAYPAL

also available as a digital album

Knock yourself (2009)-first ever dg solo set-filthy electro r&b-available via Paypal- $20

available as a digital album too

We Wuz Curious (2008)-blazing R&B jazz pop album available via paypal-$20


UNAVAILABLE-COMPLETELY SOLD OUT!!!
AVAILABLE AS A DIGITAL album

Keepin' It Unreal-(2006)-minimalist/lyrical vibes, bass, 12 string set - CDs sold out - digital only

Hashish and Liquor (2005 double disc by Dave Graney and Clare Moore) available via Paypal $25


UNAVAILABLE-COMPLETELY SOLD OUT!!!
Single album HASHISH available as a digital release

Heroic Blues- "folk soul" set from 2002-Availableas a digital album via BandCamp


UNAVAILABLE ! Completely sold out!

It is written,baby-book released 1997- available $10 via paypal