Is That What You Did?

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 driving  persona 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 a  player. 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.

So I got this song together for ZIPPA DEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS?

The lyrics are pretty simple and go along these lines..

Is that what you did?

that thing that you’re doin’?

I heard about stuff you did but never seen this thing
is that what you did?

is that what you did?

is that it?
the man from the museum was passin’ through town

he said “I ain’t comin’ in unless I get it in print
that you’ll be doin’ what you did

is that what you did?

Is that what you did?
should I know?

I just gotta know
is that what you did?

this thing that you’re doin’?

is that it?
I just gotta know

Just a song from life - from experience. Like most of my lyrical work – pretty literal.

The music is G to A. Major chords and I would cast it as a “West Coast groove”.

We play it quite differently at every show and it appears in two versions on our album ZIPPADEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS?

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 20s  jazz) 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.

I went on and finished ONE MILLION YEARS DC which is out now.

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 were rock 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 second  album for the year. Probably about the 34^th or 35^th 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. 

YOU CAN'T HAVE YER BOOGIE! 

2019 shows

November 15th Dave Graney at the Music Lounge, Merrigong theatre Company, WOLLONGONG.
November 16th Dave Graney and Clare Moore at SOUNDS DELICIOUS in HUSKISSON, NSW.

November 17th - Dave Graney solo at Gasoline Pony, Marrickville, NSW.

Wednesday November 20th and Thursday November 21st - Dave Graney and Clare Moore at DUSTY ATTIC MUSIC LOUNGE in Lismore, NSW
Friday Nov 22nd - The Dust Temple, Currumbin
Saturday Nov 23rd - Pelican Playhouse, Grafton NSW. 

Thursday November 28th Dave Graney and the mistLY at Birds Basement jazz club in Melbourne.

Dec 20th Dave Graney and Clare Moore inducted into AMC SA Hall of Fame in Adelaide at the Jade Monkey.

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 show Feb 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 

www.davegraney.com/