We have had a very intense time of total music immersion over the last while. There was our residency at the Jazz Lab which was a wonderful experience. A great room in Brunswick run by the people who had Bennetts lane as Melbournes premiere jazz club in the city for decades. They had a backline available and we used very few mics, playing at a low volume. Clare took her vibes in for some of the dates and we went through a lot of material.
On the second week we had some logistical issues as we had been booked to do a tv date which will be broadcast in 2020 with the Coral Snakes. This involved us learning some tunes from a certain pop decade and casting them within our "sound". Rod Hayward really stepped up for this project and we rehearsed one day then filmed it and then high tailed it across town to the Jazz lab.
That night was also pretty amazing because a man who has been attending our shows and aware of our music since the early 80s days of the Moodists beckoned me to his table after we played and gestured toward a guitar case, saying that he had an instrument which had been gathering dust in his office for a few years and that he'd like me to have it..
I was very taken aback and couldn't accept it but he insisted and after a few awkward moments I got used to the idea.
A beautiful early 2000s Japanes remake of a D'Angelico New Yorker. I have never had such a gorgeous instrument. Such art deco stylings!
Thank you so much Ron and Pam!
We then moved on to a weekend of duo shows up in Brisbane at the Junk Bar. Such a great venue, wish there were more of them around the country. We hired a set of vibes from a local player and made show.
I also ran into one of my oldest friends David Edwards who I went to Catholic primary school and high school with in Mt Gambier. He and his wife Julie are among my oldest and best friends.
We returned to Melbourne and commenced learning a rehearsing a lot of material with Harry Howard and Edwina Preston to perform as the NDE - backing band for Kid Congo. I felt bad taking Pink Monkey Bird bass player Kiki's gig and apologized via social media and he gave his blessing so I was happier.
Here we are at rehearsal and Clare is wearing Kids cape.
We rehearsed without Kid at first and then a couple of times when he arrived. We played at the launch of Doug Gailbraiths book on Kim Salmon at the Memo Music Hall. We did a set with the mistLY and Kim played a fantastic set with the Surrealists (Stu Thomas and Phill Collings). This is my favourite era of Kims music - everything post Scientists. They played a blazing set which included several new songs that Kim is releasing on a seven inch soon. One of the longest running friendships among our peers. Kim, Clare and I go way back to being fellow artists on the early Au Go Go records through to being label mates on Universal in the 90s and playing in his madcap heavy metal orchestra SALMON in the 2000's and recording the two Darling Downs albums at our studio and Clare doing keys and vibes on THE BUSINESS in the late 90s. A real inspiration.
We also all played at River Rocks in Geelong. They only had ORANGE amps which confused Kid and Harry (and me). The audience looked like truckers and they wanted to Rock. Great to see Geelong come out for some music.
The last show was a packed out Wednesday night at the Curtin Band Room. Many faces appeared at this gig such as Anita Lane who took this excellent photo of myself and Clare from side of stage.
Playing
with Kid Congo was a wonderful experience. he is a great bandleader in
the style of Count Basie. By that I mean no angst and lots of room for
peoples personailities. (A favourite story of Count Basie is when he was
asked how he'd like to be remembered. A very long pause and then...
"Nice guy!" Also, when they tried to get every jazz musician in NYC together for one photo one MORNING in Harlem, he said "my guys don't stop pukin' before noon!")
It
is also amazing to see teh cross generational pull of teh music he has
been involved in. All over the world people go nuts for the Cramps and
the Gun Club. A secret portal to rock'n'roll power.
Phillip Berry also made the scene. She awlways makes us up the ante in the posing stakes.
The very next day Clare and I got into our van and drove toward Wollongong where we played in a beautiful room in the Town Hall called the Music Lounge. As 70s teens who loved the comedic figure Norman Gunston and Auntie Jack we were honoured to feature in "Whats On In Wollongong" in the paper.
We went for a walk the next day and ran into Dave Kettley from the New Christs/Radio Birdman who took us to a nice waterfront cafe for some java.
The next days show was a house concert to about 40 people in Nowra. So well organized by a musician called Paul Greene who got the sound together and cooked a three course meal and seated everybody as his three year old daughter ran all about his legs at the same time. It was a really nice experience, rooms like this are usually for pretty generic roots artists and we really bring a tangy, fruity game to proceedings. We are losing all the worries about people wanting us to play familiar material as we find people dig it as long as you present it right and play well.
Clare returned to Melbourne to play at Reservoir Stomp with her band the Routines, who are led by the enigmatic Jane Dust and feature Emily Jarett and Will (Wam) Hindmarsh (aka Twinkledigitz) from Go Go Sapien.
I stayed in NSW and travelled to play a solo show at the Gasoline Pony in Marickville. I played two sets from 5pm and the room was fantastic. Many old friends came out for the sold out gig.
I drove to Melbourne (12 hours) the next day and had a day of rest (watched a Harold and Kumar movie) before we flew to the Gold Coast and hired a car to play for two nights in Lismore. This town is usually dealing with rising river levels and had a tremendous flood from which it is still recovering in 2017. Now this semi tropical beautiful green area is on fire! Climate change of course, Smoky air all around.
We played two nights in a wonderful room called the Dusty Attic. the green rom at the back was even bigger and beter and perhaps they'll expand into it.
Playing shows you meet people who have crossed paths - kind of - in the past in many different ways.
I met this woman who was a child when her parents helped my sister Marianne and her husband Ian build their house on property they bought near the national forest in Timboon.
We drove to Currumbin near the Gold Coast. Fatigue was setting in and just dealing with an hour time difference between these two states was proving difficult. The Gold Coast has always been problematic to play in. This venue was amazing, a Grand Designs kind of converted series of warehouses run by really lovely people and it was full. My audience is pretty unique , vintage people but a lot of blue collar men. People like me I guess! The sound in this place was perfect for our duo. A highlight of the set was a little house dog called Minty venturing onto the stage and stopping to have a staring contest with me before the applause frightened him off.
We had to drive to Grafton in NSW the next day, a trip that should take three hours. Fires were all around though and the main highway was closed so it looked as if we'd have to drive around the fire, taking seven hours in all. To get back to Melbourne after that would require a gig and then getting up to drive at 4am to get to the airport. Luckily the highway opened but it was still 80ks all the way and the smoke in the air was terrible. Hot, humid and smoky.
The show in Grafton was in a delightful volunteer run community theatre. This was sold out also. We again played two sets and met some really great people. (The place had been suggested by Marty Williams - another ex Mt Gambier high school friend)
Thanks to everybody who came and to all the people creating interesting and unique performing experiences in regional Australia!
Dave Graney and Clare Moore are honoured to have been chosen to be inducted into the Adelaide Music Club SA MUSIC HALL OF FAME Dec 20th at the Jade in Adelaide. There will be a duo performance after the formal proceedings. Tickets here.
Sometimes I presume too
much. I presume things about people and the extent of their interests in things
or their interest in general.
I’ve always been a
musician and have been interested and obsessed with music people and music
lives. Techniques of playing, recording, projecting and questions like “what is
a success?” or “what is a career?”
This is problematic when
having to release music into the wider world. Because it's wide open now, baby. And flat as a tack. And then the question of whether to
reproduce it exactly or treat it as a piece that is your own context or the
context of the chaotic stream of pop music. (And you might know I consider it
to be working in Pop Ruins.)
So we had our time in the
Moodists – which was mostly spent in the UK and Europe and had distinct periods
of development with itself. We were one of the earliest releases on Au Go Go
Records out of Melbourne. We played at the farewell Melbourne gigs of the Go
Betweens and the Laughing Clowns and the last Australian gigs of the Birthday Party (whom we’d seen develop from the four piece Boys Next Door onwards). We
played with the Scientists and knew the Triffids when they first came to
Melbourne from Perth in 1982. That’s our kind of groundwater. Clare Moore and
myself. before that we’d known lives in South Australia and Adelaide.
I liked to be a standup
singer. Like Jim Morrison. No guitar. I wrote songs but didn’t really have an
instrument or think about performing with one.
Then there was London
life and starting up thinking about being some kind of “Elektra singer
songwriter”- by which I mean an east Coast American flavoured urban guy with a great
band. Fred Neil. Lou Reed solo. Tim Rose. 1987. That’s what I wanted to do and
so we started calling our band the Coral Snakes I London. We ended up back in
Australia and started the White Buffaloes and then another Coral Snakes. We had
the most public exposure I’ll ever have and I got bored with that standing up
and singing and making elaborate panto rock moves.
I lost the idea of the
Coral Snakes – mainly due to not expressing myself with the band or one member
not coping with being in a band within an “industry” situation - and just
chucked it all in at the end of 1997 and had an idea for a different band where
it was smaller and more like that Fred Neil sound. Drums, bass, guitars and
songs. (Years later I heard it perfectly on a Lou Reed bootleg of his first
solo tour with a band just as Transformer was coming out. It has since been released as a CD called AMERICAN POET. He was still playing
guitar and less focused on drivingpersona over the room).
My attitude for
presenting music live was always also influenced by listening to the Doors
Absolutely Live so much when I was a kid. They never tried to reproduce things
exactly – they were really different arenas for them.
I’m writing all this as
a roundabout way of talking about being aplayer. Maybe its also being an Australian player. Dealing with
expectations of an audience.
There are bands like the
Hoodoo Gurus who play like a machine, every song perfectly reproduced. I really
respect them and think they are great. Their audience loves it too. I have seen
them only a few times and they probably do things to stretch out their frame of
being Hoodoo Gurus a little bit here and there. A song in the set for a rave up
I guess. But mainly they just DELIVER IT.
Our approach – especially
post Coral Snakes – has been to continually recast songs in different ways.
Different tempos, different instrumentation and textures. And to play as much as we wanted and to never really worry about hiding out or playing ONE BIG show ONCE A YEAR. We play because we like to. We have been quite
careful to the idea that people want to hear certain songs. I often ask people
to tell me what they came along to hear and do my best to play it. I know the
songs that got out to people and they took to heart and I like all the songs
we’ve done post Moodists. I love doing older songs, they’re a real part of my
constant inner flux.
Still, people do come up
and say they heard about us years ago and have been meaning to come see us and
“that stuff you were doing, Is that What you did?” Sometimes this has happened
when we were doing shows with no amplification, no mics, totally acoustic. That
was specifically the narrative show Point Blank. I had some inlaws come to that
gig and it was one of the weirdest, most concentrated long stories a person could
see and hear. It wasn’t a medley of hits, it was a standalone thing.
I started writing this in
a hot feeling of frustration about getting our music out to peoples attention
in a world with such an atomized music culture that was once so public. When we
began it was a massive- but quite free wheeling – mainstream and a shadowing
stream of alternate voices that had roots going back to the earliest days of
recording. Folk music of the 50s and 60s is full of parodies of the lameness of
popular songs. And listen to any black American records and you come across
adult themes and summonings of adult worlds – sex, betrayal, guilt, violence –
that just didn’t make it to the hit parade. A true alternate world. Same with
roughhouse country music, there was always a true, alternate side happening
there. And jazz with its many rebellions, reformations and shifts in attitude
and character. You can approach jazz from the outside and from the present and
not bother yourself with annoying context and just limit yourself to Bebop or –
like they did in the pre Rolling Stones Britain of the early 60s –insist that
that was an aberration and limit yourself only to New Orleans/ Storyville
Dixieland. People are still like that.
I love it all. 20s Louis
Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke and Duke Ellington through to the pre Bebop small
bands (such fast tempos and all about dancing) through the arch but equally hot
era of Bird and Dizz and the cool of Miles and the West Coast scene. I have a
fetish for 70s/80s QUIET STORM jazz with Grover Washington Jnr and Earl Klugh.
I love labels like Blue Note, Verve, CTI, Fantasy (despite how they treated
John Fogerty from Creedence), ECM, Impulse, Riverside and the great 60s
Australian reissue imprint (mainly 20sjazz) called SWAGGIE. Instrumental music is my main interest, other than
70s soft rock, 70s prog and Andy Williams albums.
So this is the kind of
inner flux from whence these two albums of 2019 have come. Pretty wide and fast
flowing stream. We have been playing shows in different venues including
venturing into jazz clubs. We’ve always resisted doing that as there are so few
jazz venues and they should be for jazz musicians but we just liked the way you
could present music in there. I loved the way music sounds in clubs like that.
Mostly just vocals mics and small amps. The Jazz lab and Birds Basement is coming up Nov 28th. This Birds Basement room is one of Melbournes best jazz clubs and we are treating it as a launch for ONE MILLION YEARS DC. I encourage you to come along. Its not a rock club. Its deluxe. Its at 11 SINGERS LANE MELBOURNE 3000. https://birdsbasement.com/
There is community radio
which has been great. The ABC has the Music Show on Radio National which we
have never been on…. Double J which is an alternate digital version of Triple J
(ostensibly it’s ghost) and local radio. The local ABC is very varied and most
approachable outside of Melbourne and Sydney. (In Melbourne and especially
Sydney they are terrified of offending their audience and also come under the
most scrutiny form the Liberal/ National Party Government and its think tank
IPA who want to close it all down so as to give Rupert Murdoch a more even
playing field) (On a recent visit to the ABC in Melbourne it was weird to see how the people who work there are forced to "hot desk". It all looked like an experimental showroom for an idealized, efficient modern office. No trace of humans really belonging there at all. No desks with in/out trays or any stickers or items of personl belonging. An on air person was sitting with a laptop at a place where guests wait to appear on radio. Some weird workplace philosophy an outside thought contractor must have dreamed up in the Michelle Guthrie - hand of Murdoch- era.) On the whole they do a great job but the whole operation has pretty much shrunk to being a news and talk outlet.
Commercial radio? I
follow a fellow from that world on twitter and he actually tweets when they are
about to play some AC/DC or Guns n Roses “in the next hour”. (I was amazed to
learn that the rotund right wing Dark Sky News personality Paul Murray was given
his first soapbox at Triple M. I also think he was tossed the gig buy a
former head of the network who _ I heard from someone who sat though it - at some point in the 2000’s gathered all of
Australia’s music publishers and labels together to tell them Australian music
was terrible- except for INXS and that his network would never get behind any
of it – unless INXS got back together…. ).
Mainstream print media? With
the demise of actual music papers at some point – in favour of the street press
which were funded all through the 90s by record companies buying full page ads
in them so they could be free but which now are funded by rehearsal room bands
buying ads because that’s what a band does – there were music columns in papers
like the Age and the Herald Sun. These were incredibly popular and influential.
Places where political and sports writers could unbutton and write reviews and
do interviews. They had staff! I remember being so impressed at all the
photographers and the ambience inside the old Herald Sun building. All gone.
Until recently the Herald Sun had one great guy doing music work who was always
out at shows and talking things up. And old school cracker. There used to be an
entertainment writer in each state. Eventually he was syndicated as they got
rid of all the others and then he was gone himself. Now a freelance. Welcome to
our world, comrade?
The Age was the same and
they seemed to ditch the whole paper in favour of their real estate section and
then dropped the Age brand to Fairfax and are now of course owned by Channel 9,
the “rival” to Murdoch and run by ex Liberal treasurer the Roly Poly neck Peter
prick Costello.
When people wrote for
music magazines they spoke to a music culture, an interested room. People
writing for daily papers wrote for a disinterested room. It was different.
Mostly poor but it was something.
Now those freelance
writers have to pitch stories for themselves to what remains of these
mastheads. Mainly digital remnants which thrive on clickbait but which still
charge classic media era prices for advertising when their readership is so
small they shed staff all week and work out how to become a weekly.
A writer I reached out to
when ZIPPA DEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS? came out gave me this reading of my
standing in the stock market of clickbait musician stories for Australian
mainstream newspapers, “I think you are one of
those artists (-- - is another) who suffers, in terms of news coverage, for
being too prolific for your own good. Robert ------- puts an album out and it’s
something of an event; whereas you put out album number 33 and the collective
response is “It’s another Dave Graney album”, and it’s hard to get past that”.
I didn’t get back to him. I’d rather just do
a gig or do my own writing.
Double J did a story on the 90s and Big Day
Out which we played at in 94,95 and 97 (and perhaps a few other years too) but we exist in a strange dimension
where we can’t be seen in the present- and so much of the present is composed
of the past with anniversaries/iconic reissues/tributes etc - and also can’t be seen in
the past. Which means we can’t often be seen in the present. Which looks backwards so much. It’s a dead loop.
There are also often stories about female
musicians in Australian magazines and portals. Clare Moore is a notable absence in all of them. I mean the writing is generally poor and unbelievably condescending but thats the state of play. Here's another . Thats what I'm getting at here... This may seem like a litany of complaints but hey - I just
wanted to get it down. Musicians have to be allowed to gripe!
A film maker friend made
a documentary about a noted Australian band and got in touch with related music
community to do interviews. Most of the film consisted of these interviews.
People brought along their thoughts and spoke generously and were presented in
a situation dictated by the film maker. Nobody was paid. Later on, a mutual
friend who was one of the people interviewed was visiting the film maker and
during a long nights talking brought up the subject of how he’d drawn on that
particular music community and why didn’t he – for instance – use one or two
bits of music from any one of those people in any one of the quite well funded
and distributed films he had in production?Cue lots of handwringing about budgets and grants and commercial
considerations…. Have you ever noted the creativity of music in Amercian and
British long form television production? The Sopranos, Stranger Things , Extras
and the like. They add personal touches and tastes. They aren’t second guessing
what might scare the audience. They seek out under the radar sounds and grooves
to leaven the material. Because film often needs music to smooth out clunky
shifts in mood and tempo. That’s why a lot of Australian film has the same few
names doing soundtracks and if they have pop music its very broadly pitched. But, as another friend
has pointed out. Australian music has been much more of a gift to the world
than any other art form, especially film. Despite all the industrial parasites
and negative gearing that the business puts on us, we abide and get stuff out
there. And there are people who somehow find it. Our shows at the Junk
Bar in Brisbane were so enjoyable. Such lovely people came along and the Jamie
and Mia who run the room are the sorts the whole scene should look to. It is
always a great experience. We were talking with a friend afterwards who
mentioned another player who had been in their town (at another venue) recently and who was looking for
some cocaine. I stopped the talker and said ”hey! I don’t wanna know! Any
player who is out doing cocaine should actually be embarrassed! that is not for
us! That is sad! That shit is for boring business people and it just makes them
more boring!” I was very disappointed. We also did a tv
performance that will be shown next year as Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes. It
has been so great getting back together in recent years with Robin Casinader
and Rod Hayward to play. Such amazing players and nice people. This later
version of the band with myself and Clare Moore and Stu Thomas on bass has been
fantastic in the few festival type shows we’ve done since 2015. We got to know
Rod and Robin again. Robin did some shows in Melbourne
in September at the Open Studio. If you ever see that he is coming to town,
make it to his shows. He sings and plays keys and mellotron and is usually
accompanied by a viola or cello player. He draws on material going back to
Plays With Marionettes as well as the Wreckery and his soundtrack work for
QUEEN OF THE DAMNED and his work with HOOD and new compositions (all brilliant)
and also SALTY GIRLS which he wrote and sang for THE SOFT N SEXY SOUND.
I was in a junk shop just the other day and
saw a hardback book called the 110 best Australian albums. The authors wererock
music industry workers of varying periods. Mostly during the FAT years.
At one time or another they all worked out of reputable fronts. Not one
of our albums featured. Of the 110 that were there, of
course some were not bad and some were dreadful. It would have been hard
to
ignore our presence but these gentlemen found it easy.
I must state here that we have made a dozen
albums that are equal and probably better than MOST of those listed. (And I
liked a lot of them)
I understand that even then these writers
would have been under intense pressure to create a coherent, easy, commercial narrative
for the book buying public and they would have been professional enough to
leave any expressions of personal taste or of any wild theorizing that strayed
outside of Australian publicly understood norms and forms. They knew where
their bread was buttered. These guys were polished hacks.
Guys! YOU CAN'T HAVE YOUR BOOGIE!
People who write about
music in that slack way where they are just making the scene and like to feel
on top of things. They can name the creatures in the forest. They know the
regulars. We’ve always been irregular to that sort of jobsworth. They need
howling idiots and sad bums with problems. Cliched rockers. Sad cases. I was asked if I
was busy. “Still doing the radio show?” The person asking used to be a professional
writer in the city I lve in and I said “Oh we have just put out our secondalbum for the year. Probably about the 34th
or 35th we’ve made.” They made a double take and said “what - Dave
Graney albums?” I had to count to ten and was feeling very Clint Eastwoodsian
and said “Well what other kind would they be?”
ONE MILLION YEARS DC has
a song on it called YOU CAN’T HAVE YOUR BOOGIE. It’s about people who think
they can buy everything. guitars, leather pants, licks, drugs, attitude. Rich,
empty people.
----- is an
internationally revered rock/indie/soul venue. Ideally your -----gig will be a ‘special event’ show for your
established band, an EP/LP launch or equivalent. You need to be confident of
pulling around 150-Plus Payers or this won’t work for anyone. We charge $13 on
the Door. Usually door-sales only and we provide the Door Girl. You take
$9 per payer (provided you are registered for GST otherwise it’s $8.18) between
8pm and 11pm. Please note ----- punters pay $10 ordinarily (i.e. when there's
no bands) and our experience is that over one-third of early Payers on band
nights have come to ----- as a destination-venue with no idea of the bands (so
our Door Deal is in fact very generous given our unique venue status). And you
split this $9 with your chosen support(s); three band line-ups are recommended.
Bands start at 9pm (earlier if you want) and must conclude at 11.30pm strictly.
At 11pm the Door reverts to $10 as usual and all proceeds then go to -----. We
prefer to supply our expert ----- FOH Sound guy (usually blah blah blah ) to
set-up and mix all 3 bands for just $180. Bands must finish by 11.30pm sharp
and have stage cleared before 12midnight. Our capacity is 230 Payers+ and we’re
open till 5am. ----- is famous for its generous Rider. ----- can provide expert
poster Design (& we print for inside -----) and some quality targeted
marketing including PR, street press advertising, PBS FM, blah blah blah
dot com and online via our website ----- TV plus our powerful and popular
FaceBook, Twitter, Instargram, etc. We normally pay within one week of
invoicing. Also, you’ll need to pre-disclose if you’ve got any other headline
shows in --------- two weeks either side of this Special Event show at ----- in
-----. The venue reserves the right to admit or refuse entry to whomever it chooses.
We’d love to have your band host a successful show at our Bar if you’re
confident you’ll pull 150 Payers with -----s support…
These guys knew it all. How to drink, how to sound. This was their code of conduct contract thing to any young band daring to bother them in their hard rocking eyrie. They were asking bands to play their room. To take on the privilege. To their audience. Which was not interested in anything but the room. This is the sort of talk from people who think they run the music scene. L. O. Fuckin L.
Feb 7th Dave Graney and Clare Moore play Hardys Bay Club, Central Coast NSW
Feb 9th Dave Graney and Clare Moore play Smiths in Canberra with Coral Snake Robin Casinader joining them on mellotron.
Feb 22nd , Mona Foma, Hobart 1pm showFeb 23rd , Longley, Tasmania
2pm show
Dave Graney solo dates in WA in February.
Thur 27 Feb - Freo Social, Fremantle WA Fri 28 Feb - The River Hotel, Margaret River WA Sat 29 Feb - The Prince Of Wales, Bunbury WA Sun 1 March - The Indi Bar, Scarborough WA
