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.

Sunday, June 18, 2023

Writing about recording Night Of The Wolverine in late 1992.

 



The following text is what I wrote about the period in late 1992 to early 1993 in my books 1001 Australian Nights and WORKSHY

1992. Lure of the Tropics came out at the same time as I Was the Hunter and I Was the Prey (which had been on the shelf at Fire Records in the UK for a couple of years In the meantime, with no bass player to anchor the sound and deliver the space, we did semi-acoustic turns, which we billed as Soft ‘n’ Sexy shows. We were reloading all the while. Unconsciously, I found a new way into singing and thinking about music. How to deliver it, what to stress and how to cruise. We had a notion to make a lyrical record. When it happened it happened quick.

This dark, earthbound period, full of wild dreams of flight and escape, had given me a brace of even more fantastic illusions. All the show business of Custer and Hickok and co led me to great places. Places to think on and step out into. My own eternal returning to Australia and then the Australias within that, country and city, artistic and brutal, gave me some weird notes to play around with.

Those downbeat South Australian towns like Penola and Keith and Bordertown had sung to me when I’d been living in London, never to return. “Exile is a rampart into the past.” I’d read that somewhere. Now these new songs ran fast and tight with fabled names like Wallace Beery and Ava Gardner and Terry Southern, along with those deadbeat, hopeless wide spots on the South Australian country roads.

I’d always had this kooky idea that I was following a trail. One thing leading to another. Stupid. In my hopped up showbiz Custer funk I’d read how he would lead his men into battle yelling, “Ride, you wolverines”. Then I was reading James Ellroy’s Blood on the Moon. I turned a page and there was one word in bold black: WOLVERINE. (The killer is juiced on speed and white jazz and chews his female corpses with a set of wolverine teeth).

I liked that word, “wolverine”. It was like a noun and an adjective. The word recurred a lot in early white jazz cosmology. I am nothing but white jazz. I also like those film titles like The Night of the Iguana and the less dramatic Night of the Lepus (a horror flick with giant rabbits). There was also The Night of the Hunter. And Night of the Living Baseheads, from Public Enemy. I had a fantasy life which was just out of reach, but which I was probably actually living, about a heroic, rootless player. Like someone out of Willie Nelson’s song Night Life. I wrote it up in a song called Night of the Wolverine.

 

Apparently, Lenny Bruce used to put black duct tape over the hotel room window as soon as he put his bags on the bed. He liked to live in a general night-time mode. When we recorded Night of the Wolverine, it went down in a day. We mixed it on another day or two. The band was hot, a real unit, and there was some drama and inspiration. Equals energy.

The song had three parts to it. It went down in real time to tape. No digital fingering or editing. I arranged it around a template from Lou Reed’s Street Hassle. It had an opening part, then a key change part spoken by another voice ( Lou asked Bruce Springsteen, I asked Tex Perkins). Then it came home hard with a driving returning and shifting section. The first part was a musician deep into the life. The player and the mover. I’d been there before with a song called Everything Flies Away. I was back, chewing at the scenery again. I loved that life but I couldn’t have it. Not that I thought, anyway. Then it moved into an underworld theme with “if I could‘ve stayed home”, another pulp reference to the writer Horace McCoy.

Then it was a return to Lenny Bruce, who once said that he was a bum and a loser as a showbiz comic because he could always make the band (who sat behind him, in the shadows) laugh, but not the people in the audience. He struck the notes the hipsters could hear but not the mugs, the punters.

Most rock musicians have to spend their time convincing people that they have some content of interest. I was the opposite. I knew I’d put everything I’d found on my trip into some sort of order and arrangement and it was all in the songs. The textures, the temper, the tempo. I wanted people to find it but I didn’t want to stand there looking like a goog. A heavy and self-important rabbit! I got in there and made paths so people could approach the stuff. The real stuff! It was loaded. And fizzing!

 

The album was mostly recorded in one day, with Tony Cohen at the desk. He had just come from a Cruel Sea album, which had followed a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album. He was pretty wrecked but made it to the session a mere five or six hours late. He was forgiven, as he was possessed of skills that no one else had. He had mad charisma and great ears. He wielded an editing razor to multi-track tape like a swashbuckling pirate. He had the mozz on people like us. We believed he was capable of real witchery. We were still recording onto tape and used it sparingly, having learned wisely from Stephen Cummings.

The album has a nice mellow tone to it, probably due to Tony’s ears still ringing from the two long, intense album sessions he’d completed before he walked into our room. The studio was initially AAV in South Melbourne, where so many great Australian albums had been recorded and also where I’d been hanging out with Billy Miller and Andrew Duffield. Then we moved to Atlantis, which was just up the road, in a side street that’s now underneath a part of Crown Casino. Clare and I walked home with the tapes, talking through the cobbled lanes of South Melbourne about how we’d made something really cool.

 

The album was released on Compact Disc but will be available at the shows on our Night Of The Wolverine 30th anniversary tour in a limited edition double gatefold sleeve vinyl edition.

 


 

Friday 28 July – The Street Theatre, Canberra ACT
Tickets


Saturday 29 July
– Blue Mountains Theatre, Springwood NSW
Tickets


Thursday 3 August
– The Factory Theatre, Marrickville NSW
Tickets


Friday 4 August
- The Imperial, Eumundi QLD
Tickets


Saturday 5 August
– The Old Museum, Brisbane QLD
Tickets

Sunday 6 August HOTA, Surfers Paradise QLD
Tickets


Friday 11 August
– The Royal Oak, Launceston TAS
Tickets


Saturday 12 August
– Gnomon Room, Ulverstone TAS
Tickets


Sunday 13 August
– The Palais Theatre, Franklin TAS
Tickets


Friday 18 August
– The Corner, Richmond VIC
Tickets


Saturday 19 August
- The Gov, Adelaide SA
Tickets


Friday 25 August
– The Heritage, Bulli NSW
Tickets


Saturday 26 August
– Drifter’s Wharf, Gosford NSW
Tickets 

 

THERE HE GOES WITH HIS EYE OUT.

BOOK.

Dave Graney Lyrics 1980-2023.

 


 



Everything from the Moodists to the latest albums and beyond. Includes  some descriptions of intent as to the song or music in question and also some notes as to production approaches and chords.

Book design is based on a classic French Éditions Gallimard NRF form of paperback. All text, no images. 374 pages.

Thanks to Simon Strong from Ekranoplans for help in editing and formatting.



 

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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