I don't want to badmouth my own country but a year on from the massive bushfires, there are days where you just draw a deep sigh.
When one reflects on everything that happened in Australian politics in the last decade, you're left with a profound sense of lost time. It's all time that could have been spent on doing things better - certainly better than the internecine party-politic-infighting that was a feature of the decade. If the ALP burnt itself out on the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd imbroglio, the Liberal Party regaled with no less than a Turnbull-Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison turn of leadership spills. 6 Prime Minsters in the decade shows the country was in political strife, most over the issue of Climate Change.
Needless to say the decade was punctuated by an exclamation mark in the massive bushfires last summer and still there is no indication the culture wars over Global Warming has come to an end. There were many villains in the story, but if there was one traitor to this country that deserves special mention, it must be Andrew Robb who sold out this country from his position in government and now receives a fat salary from our burgeoning enemy China.
All that said, our country lurches on without a policy or apology. just bumbling around trying to find a fig leaf to put over the glaringly obvious absence of a credible climate policy. Again, I won't go into the idiocy of the situation we find ourselves, but it has to beside that making the future precarious through the misapplication of partisan politics is the height of stupidity. As such, it is inescapable to understand that the government we have is a execrable mess.
So, what exactly is this luckiness we credit ourselves when we must live with such stupidity that undercuts that luck?
It's weird that this comes out the week after the US elections but, it wasn't planned that way. It's a happy coincidence - and honestly, I'm okay with Biden winning. If anything the shit referred to in the song is more in line with the 4 year misrule of the Trump Administration which ignored all the warnings about Climate Change. Indeed, I'm really talking about the 2019 Australian election where the Morrison Government was returned, only to promptly ignore expert warnings about the drought and the catastrophic summer weather that led to the massive fires up and down the east coast.
I mean, what were people thinking really? In the olden days I would've come on tooth's blog and vented but of course nobody is persuaded by some blog telling them they are fuckheads for voting in a conservative government that doesn't believe in Global Warming. Instead, they pretty much need to lose their farms and houses to 40m tall walls of fire roaming the landscape, burning everything to the ground.
As such the only thing left for me is to write a song about it and stick it out there, commemorating the abject stupidity of the electorate that opted to return this miserable, intellectually stunted, execrable government to office. For indeed they are shit and this is what they voted for. It's a sobering feeling every election to find that at least 48% of your fellow countrymen are willing to burn the planet to make a buck and think that is the most important thing, followed by cutting deficits (or some other piece of economic nonsense). It's amazing how they win more often than not and give us the shit we need not ought to have had.
The planet's headed deeper into climate crisis and there's the Adani mine going ahead in Queensland. They're doing all kinds of shady things and they will stoop to anything to silence those who are opposed to this catastrophic mine going ahead.
Honestly, there's really no symptom of the evil of crony capitalism in this world than the people who make excuses for this mine to go ahead. It makes no economic sense, the company gets subsidies it doesn't deserve and there's no discernible good in digging up more coal to be burnt. The best form of carbon sequestration is not to dig up the stuff to be burnt at all.
Hence the need for this song. Seriously, fuck these people.
I've been trying to write something about Eddie for some days as you know.
I wish it were as simple assuming up career highlights and noting his impact on the playing of rock guitar and then emote some grief. It would be like that if his life and times and career were like any other musician, but that's not quite true. And even with the dimension fo grief, I find it hard to express what exactly that we can articulate about a man who was fighting a losing battle against throat cancer while continuing to smoke. It's hard.
Yet I'd like to start there. When famous people die and their careers are done, you can look upon their works and measure up their careers. With Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison, you know they were mid-flight when the folly of overdosing removed them service, so to speak. You can't quite say the same thing about Eddie Van Halen. It's been apparent since the double live album of 2015 that there might not be any more new albums coming from the band. 2012's 'A Different Kind of Truth' was in effect the final statement from a career that spanned 12 studio albums and 2 double live discs. His entire oeuvre was in the rear mirror as he lay dying. And even though 65 is much too young, it is hard to imagine there was going to be anything he would do to revolutionise guitar playing once more.
Perhaps the coming years we will get releases from the vault of materials he was recording in disown private comforts at his own studio. For now, we are left with the 12 studio albums and 2 live albums. There is an almost symmetry in that the 12 albums can be split into 6 with David Lee Roth and 5 with Sammy Hagar, with the lone album with Gary Cherone. There is a live album each with Hagar and Roth respectively, and if their Sydney concert was anything to go by, there would be in the vaults somewhere a concert video with Cherone.
The point is, he wasn't exactly felled, mid-career like the 27 club - and we are much better off for it. It was a full and vibrant career made up mostly of high points and a few dud songs. If you were a kid in the 'burbs wishing upon a career as a rock star, you couldn't draw it up much better. If you add in his impact on the playing style, which is still reverberating through the guitar playing community, and his place in the history of rock guitar, it was a splendid career. And we are grateful he came along.
So Vale, to the King of Rock Guitar.
That Moment We First Heard Eruption
Being in Australia, my first encounter was rather late. Back in early 1982, for us, Heavy Metal was still a peculiar sub-sub-genre of Hard Rock which was a sub-genre of Rock which had finally broken through to the mainstream with the advent FM Radio in Australia. The guy who introduced me to Van Halen was this guy who would later be known as 'Sandy' Vahadani in this band. At the time I was getting a lot of input in the schoolyard from various friends wanting me to listen to this that and the other thing - of course that's kind of how I got into most of the bands I still love and cherish.
Sandy was always armed with Heavy Metal magazines of artists giving interviews in their spandex pants, posing and preening like wankers-from-outer-space. Sandy wanted to be one but he didn't exactly look the part. He flung me a cassette of Van Halen 1. He prodded the cover notes written in his loopy-jagged cursive with his hairy muscular index finger and said "make sure you listen to this, man". Dutifully, I took the thing home and listened that evening and it promptly blew my mind.
I had had experiences with records blowing my mind, but nothing sounded quite like Van Halen. You could hear the boundaries of rock guitar being redefined. If the goal posts were moving by feet with every great rock album, the goal posts had suddenly moved to the horizon with the advent of Van Halen.
This was, to borrow a phrase from Ted Templeman who produced their early albums, a generational talent. To this day I can say with 100% confidence nothing has shattered and re-defined the boundaries of music quite like 'Van Halen I' with 'Eruption' as its piece de resistance. I've heard impressive, amazing, jaw-dropping players since but none of them have mapped an entire continent of playing like Eddie Van Halen did.
Tapping As A Way of Life
There are many great guitar players - but there really is only one player who defined the guitar sound for a generation. The cultural power of Eddie transcended rock. It permeated the whole attitude of what it meant to be a guitar player. His playing demonstrated that everything matters. Technique matters; Intent matters; feel for the material matters; your understanding of the music you are playing matters; your equipment matters; the very coils of wire in your pickups around what kind of magnets matters; the voltage going into your tube amplifier matters. And when you summed up the total of all the things that mattered, guitar playing mattered, like never before.
When I was working my summer job at Dickson's Music in Chatswood around 1984-1985, every kid coming in to check out guitars was attempting to emulate Van Halen's two-handed tapping technique. There has been much spilled ink about the origins of the technique and whether Eddie Van Halen really did 'invent' it, but needless to say he was the man who made it part of the vernacular of guitar playing in the 1980s onwards, and it cannot be understated.
In 1985, the fictional Marty McFly was tapping on his electric guitar in 'Back to the Future' and even tortures his father with a cassette recording labelled 'Edward Van Halen'. The sequels of overtones and howls of feedback melding into a cacophony of true 1980s Guitar-isme. And at that point the whole Van Halen thing was coopted into a schtick. It marks a denouement in the moment of all rock music where Hollywood abducted the power and turned it into a culture nicknack. All the same, in one of the best movies of all time, there is a deeply embedded imprint of Eddie Van Halen - the moment we can understand the cultural significance of that playing style.
RIP Eddie Van Halen - you will always be an inspiration to every kid who picks up an electric guitar.
I feel I ought to write something briefly about the passing of Eddie Van Halen. The outpouring of grief is palpable around the world. Unlikely people have come forward to offer up their condolences - like the Cabinet Secretary of the Government of Japan who says he is the same age as Eddie and feels the loss deeply. We're all devastated by the loss, but I've felt for a long while now that this day would come, sooner or later.
Maybe it was the photo he shared from his treatment in Switzerland where he looked like a shrivelled gnome. It was sad and a horrible indicator that he was losing that battle. After all, who goes to expensive specialists in Switzerland except those in desperate straits or the incurably crazy?
As such I find myself feeling a weird blank sorrow more than a mordant grief or gargantuan attack of sadness. He wasn't well for a long while now - we should have known it was bad.
May he rest in peace.
I'll try and post something a bit more detailed later in the week.
Bad Decisions Writ Large
This is a song about the stupid decision to proceed with the Adani Mine. In times like this where forests around the world are going up in flames, it seems cavalier-stupid to want to continue digging up ever more fossil fuels to satisfy an imaginary need that won't be of use even in 5years' time.
When I was a kid I asked my economist father if they put all the money in the world in one place and divided it up with everybody on the planet (I must have been a nascent communist), whether would all be reasonably well off or not. My father replied there wasn't such wealth in the world to make everybody well off, let alone wealthy. We would all get about a month's pay and then the money would be spent.
Of course, that's a long time ago and since then we've learned through such things as the Panama Papers that global wealth locked up and hidden away from the prying eyes of tax offices of various governments is such that it would make us all rather well off, if not wealthy, if redistributed globally. Thomas Piketty's big book essentially underlined how this terrible state came to be.
The drain of wealth out of nations via Tax Haven has got to be one of the worst injustices going around. The fact that that capital largely does not work - i.e. put to good use in building factories and towards production and instead sits around on government bonds and debt structures around the world exacerbates the various injustices threefold: once for the tax not paid, once for the misapplication of capital, and once again for the lack of debt forgiveness that condemns the third world to its third world existence. You know, those world vision starving kids and all that, is a side effect of this money sitting on all those bonds. You gotta laugh when the charities come knocking on your door, that they expect piling up your $5 will somehow counteract the mountain of bonds.
While I don't believe in a radical redistribution wealth like I did when I was 5, I do sort of think the least the billionaire classes can do is pay their fucking fair share of taxes.
The updated interface fro Blogger has proven to be a deterrent. It's actually quite annoying endless user-friendly than the old one. I'll try and get on top of it and come back more often but ... you know how things can get. Your out of time to do things.
I've got this new song out. You should check it out.
n. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.
The moon, is barren. Its emotions austere. It is not surprising it has the desire to care less about things. It may even be that it has already reached the absolute zero of caring as it orbits this planet.
Our consciousness is not that different to that of animals. We think our ability to articulate words and therefore convey meaning makes us so different from animals but this is a misconception of what our conscious mind consists. The 'I' we place as the 0 - 0 coordinate is a construct that enables to decide on fairly simple things like what one might want to eat or when one might want to go to the toilet. Most offer biological functions come through this filter and manifest themselves in our minds. And to that extent we are no different to the cat that miaows demanding to be let out of the house or the dog that barks at passing cars in annoyance and boredom.
With that said, it's wort considering this word today:
n. the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.
We need to drill down deeper into what we think we are and where we think we exist. The space time we perceive is a lot more motile and defiant towards any meaning we place on it. You may be better off to strip away the abstractions and feel your way into the wind like wolves.
The totality of your life is impossible to communicate. I always laugh when I watch some TV show or movie where the conflict revolves around a character withholding information about themselves. The other party berates the character as being dishonest, and make the charge that such dishonesty leads to communication breakdown or worse still, a termination of trust.
What never seems to be discussed in such instances is the impossibility of conveying one's entire truth in pith dialogue that even a middle-American yokel can understand with bite-size chunks of wisdom sprinkled in. So for that purpose we have to explore this word here:
n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it—whether through envy or pity or simple foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.
That's some problematic stuff right there for any character on screen that has to convey their way-out-there truth. Like "I'm Batman", or "I love you" or "I eat snails for breakfast".
Sometimes, you just ca't put it into words. That's just the truth of the matter.
n. sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out, that you’ll dutifully pass on the joke of being alive without ever learning the punchline—the name of the beneficiary of all human struggle, the sum of the final payout of every investment ever made in the future—which may not suit your sense of humor anyway and will probably involve how many people it takes to change a lightbulb.
Clive James who knew he was dying of cancer let out his own ellipsis around the time of the end of season 2 of 'Game of Thrones'. His lament was that he would not live to see how it would all end on that TV series. He expressed some embarrassment that man of his age would be so caught up in the kind fiction that had dragons in it, but he needn't have worried - it's not as if his own poetry was terribly profound or deeply meaningful. Lucky for him, he outlasted the last season and saw it all end. I don't know what he thought of the end, whether he was with all the people that complained about it, to whether maybe he was exhausted by the narrative, he accepted for what it was.
When Francis Fukuyama wrote the book 'The End of History', it seemed eminently premature to declare not just because I was still young but because there were clearly lots of people still about from whence history would be made. The end of history necessarily comes when there is a last man standing, watching the devastated horror of the extinction of all living things, with nobody to read how it all happened.
Yet if the likes of Tacitus or Suetonius or Thucydides felt ellipsism it is not surprising nor is it something to be pitied. Have great empathy for their ellipsism. There is a desire to see out how things turn out. It is what keeps us tuned in and turned on to all the events that unfold around us. Perhaps it i the first human condition that takes place when one balances one's own mortality with the absolute of time.
It's hard to get things right the first time. If you sit down to do a recording, Take 1 is never right. Take 2 sometimes is just right, but Take 1 being the golden Take is very rare. And so in conversations, where there are no opportunities to perfect the discourse, you don't quite get things out the way you want to, and this leads to this weird process of dissecting one's own thoughts in endless internal dialogue afterwards.
n. a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head—a crisp analysis, a cathartic dialogue, a devastating comeback—which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage where you can connect more deeply with people than in the small ball of everyday life, which is a frustratingly cautious game of change-up pitches, sacrifice bunts, and intentional walks.
Which all makes it sound rather jolly. Life also has a way of eluding the jolly.
Imagine a life. A person gets out at the beginning and gets run over by a freak bus. They leave the front door one morning, and this random crazy bus rides up on to the sidewalk and takes them out.
He survives, but he is messed up - he will never be who he was going to be for the rest of his life.
Then he eventually gets up form his hospital bed and wonders what the hell is going on and what the hell just happened - but there is no answer. So they are doomed to question what the hell happened to them as they left the door to their house. Was that the wrong decision? Yet everybody else leaves home at the start of the day. Was it that the wasn't looking carefully enough? Perhaps he reacted too slowly and the bus ran him over. Or perhaps it was the driver's fault and not his own, but he feels like he needs to shoulder some of the responsibility.
And so he talks to himself endlessly, in a sad bid to unravel the mystery of how his life was altered irrevocably. That, is his jouska.
This COVID-19 pandemic situation has nudged me back towards reading books. So it seems appropriate that the word we're hijacking for song titles is vellichor.
n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.
The most recent book I read is about the many diasporas of humanity out of Africa. It seems long ago - probably about 60,000 years ago that we left Africa as Homo Sapiens. Judging by how lacking in wisdom humanity is, clearly that time has not gone towards accumulating a whole wisdom.
I realise as I write this entry that my habit of reading books gave way to a habit of producing music.It is ironic somewhat that one goes from a phase of life where there is nothing one can do to produce what they want to produce and so one must spend time devouring texts to enrich one's mind; and then to a phase of life where one has the means of production so it is incumbent upon one to keep producing as much as one can using all the available time at hand.
All the same I would like to go back to reading in equal measure. It's not that I have stopped liking the producing part, it is just that I do miss spending time with books. Reading is great - even the reading of somewhat-crappy-books.
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
I am guessing that, with all this social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, "other people" is starting to seem like an abstract idea. It's kind of getting that way with me. My friends are becoming voices down a phone line or messages on social media. It's a little daunting to think I won't be grabbing a bite to eat with my old buddies at our favourite haunts for at last 6 months, and god only knows if our favourite haunts would even be in business 6 months down the track.
The wider picture of course is that our ancestors survives the bubonic plague and other epidemics and pandemics. Even our grandparents and great grandparents survived the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919; although in writing that, it seems important that it did go on longer than a year with that particular pandemic. You take a moment to contemplate those lives and their losses, and their suffering and well, that's even more cause for sonder.
When I as working on this one, it didn't really occur to method I would be putting it out during a global pandemic. That is the nature of time. You only get to live the history that comes to you.
We were warned about a pandemic. We just didn't seem to factor it into our thinking, even with all the fiction that warned us of what it might be like in the 21st Century. This is not quite Bocaccio's Decameron or Albert Camus' plague, or even Love in the time of Cholera. It's more a prosaic confrontation with ethereality that toilet paper is valued more highly than most other things in the supermarket when it comes to our consumerist society.
For a start, it's April Fools. It's going to be a few days before Nodus Tollens is going to come out. I figure it might be an opportune moment to talk about this instrumental cover I did.
The original is of course the snobby, The Police on their Synchronicity album. It used to be the last track on the LP released in Australia, but later iterations and the CD version features 'Murder by Numbers' as an extra bonus track that comes after 'Tea in The Sahara'. I like 'Murder by Numbers' but one thing it is not, is a closing track for me. It creates more confusion than anything. If the Police didn't think it was worth putting on the original release, I kind wondered if it really belongs at the end of a very unified album without it.
Rick Beato has a nice video about how wonderful 'Murder by Numbers' is but really, one must ask, does it really belong on Synchronicity? And if so, does it belong as the last track?
What's interesting about this song is how the intro section is a C#minor vamp kind of thing which then slides into the verse which is built around F#minor and A, and the Chorus is a disarming I-IV-V sequence in E which resolves back at the C#minor. There's an almost mathematical beauty in how the bits fit together while disguising the E major feel of the chorus right through the intro and verse. Sting works very hard to hide the dirty secret that the song has a happy I-IV-V chorus until it lands on your lap like a delightful surprise. Who writes exquisite songs like this any more?
Rick Beato was also talking about Paul McCartney and Sting as seemingly the only two people who write modal songs, and nobody else seems to do it. It's getting to be a lost art.
With all that said... This is a bit of fun cover. I never feel up to singing Police songs, but I always like playing them on guitar and bass, so it seems inevitable I'd play a cover of something by them at some point. This version features my Telecaster, and my PJ bass. It's a very Fender kind of recording.
I've got an album of instrumentals coming out. It's more stuff in the vein of 'Neurotronic' where I let the synths and modulators go spastic and then figured out how to play guitars and bass and drums against it. It's not like there is any high falutin' concept beyond trying to make the seemingly atonal fold back into something that resembles guitar rock.
'Nodus Tollens' is the name the album. The term Nodus Tollens apparently means "the realisation that the plot of your life doesn't make any sense to you any more." I figure a lot of things could be said about such a statement. Maybe I'll wait until I get into it track by track once the damn thing gets its release.
Yes. When is it coming it out anyway?
This album was supposed to come out on the 29th March 2020 but there was a mix up with the Distributor and so here we are in limbo. It might take a week for it to getup.With the COVID-19 situation going, it might take even longer but you wonder how hard it could be to mount a digital release. It's not like I'm pressing these albums.
After 2 years of doing these digital releases, something wonderful happened. Somebody actually downloaded one of my tracks paying real money for it - all US$0.99 of it. Hey I'd like to encourage that here so whoever it was, kudos to you! Everybody should learn from this person's good behaviour. If you're reading this blog, come on, you know you like this stuff well enough.
It's certainly disorienting to be talking about hanging at bars until closing time in an era when pubs and bars are all closed by state order in a bid to stifle the Coronavirus spreading. I mean who'd a thunk it, whereby all the drinking holes in all the world are closed thanks to this damn virus. What will happen to that famous line in Casablanca wherein Rick Blaine (played by Humphrey Bogart of course) intones in a demeanour best described as glum:
"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."
Yup. That line doesn't feel the same in this exact day and age where you can't hang out until they throw you out.
I'm not much a drinker to begin with. My policy is one-and-done on any given night. I'm not a teetotaller because I found out Adolf Hitler was one, but I can be pretty close to being one for very long stretches. I as once pulled over for random breath testing in the mid-90s and was asked when my last drink was by the police officer. My reply was "I think 1987..."
Which is to say the periods that I did hang out 'til I was thrown out were fairly brief. And truth be told by the time I was being thrown out at closing time, I was pretty sober because I was a one-and-done guy. I was genuinely there for the drunk-and-sorry company. The best and worst of all that is to say I'm probably not cut out to be an alcoholic; but as the other songs in this series might indicate I could very well be addicted to other bad behaviours.
In closing out this series of songs, I have to say the album didn't work out the way I thought it would. I wanted to do a more reflective, slow-moving, lyric-driven, thoughtful kind of blues album. Instead I've written about stupid sex secrets of travellers and swingers and teenage nymphos. Nothing ever goes to plan and with this song, I have the feeling I've just fallen back on my natural thing where I zip along at 145bpm or so. There's a bigger gulf between the way one envisages one's music and actually how it plays out when it comes out of you. If I had a reason to be blue about closing out this album, I guess it would be just that: I wish that I'd gotten further away from my own natural inclinations than I did.
If a guy could magically become a Lothario, a Casanova, a Don Juan or Don Draper, would a red blooded male turn it down? I think it would take a lot of shunted libido and strange refractions in the persona before a guy could confidently say 'no'. We're all suckers for a bit of a good time. In turn, when you get into the limerence of a new relationship and all you do is fuck, you enter a brain space where you may as well be a zombie. You become fuck-headed.
In my own moments of being fuckheaded, I've made drastically bad decisions in my life which I can only attribute to the absence of proper perspective and judgment that comes from being fuckheaded. You're like a zombie, devoid of a brain and so you make stupid decisions - but you tell yourself afterwards the fucking was great, so the losses accrued from the bad decision are worth it.
It's like your whole reality is warped by the experience of too much sex. You don't know where the line is because you cross over it ever so quietly and when you do, you're crossing it by concentrating on something else entirely. Judgments about one's own life are impaired severely at such junctures. You ask yourself afterwards why in the hell you didn't see the problems coming. You don't because pussy has a way of distorting reality. So you have to understand this: if you have a friend who is going through the limerence that comes with love and is getting laid really well, it is best not to ask them very important questions with consequences. A Lothario, a Casanova, a Don Juan or Don Draper is not a good arbiter of sane life decisions by dint of being on the wrong side of the line.
The thing about life and lyrics is that you run out of things to write about your own life. I ran out of things to write about my life and love life at that, a very longtime ago. I don't mean to boast but, I've written a lot of songs my time and written a bunch of short stories in my time, and lord only knows I've written a shit tonne of blog posts over here too. It's natural that you pick the low hanging fruit of your life pretty damn clean, somewhere along in your creative life. It's just something that happens in a creative life.
You don't have to be Picasso or Paul Klee to want to re-invent the way you approach things from first principles, and unless you are Titian who never bored of painting similar kinds of portraits, you do go looking for different subjects and topics to address. You can't keep going over the same terrain repeating yourself - unless you're a bluesman. Then it's de rigeur.
One of the reasons I ran out love songs to write is because at some point I settled down and stopped lusting after the next pretty face that came along. That too is life. You can't keep riding on the testosterone, getting into romantic scraps in search of ever more love songs. Or just any old relationship-related songs for that matter. It's often better to go all Paul McCartney and pick song titles and stories out of newspapers. Not to mention the fact that love, as portrayed in pop songs is more akin to mental illness than actual love, but that is sort of another topic for another day.
All that said, you do luck out sometimes.
My musical acquaintance Paul regaled me with the story of two old blokes on a bus wherein the conversation revolved around wanting to have one last fuck before they shuffled off their portal coil. I was in a bus and this woman loudly proclaimed in a phone conversation - which she forced everybody to listen to on the bus - that she would like to get laid just one more time with the guy she slept with the night before. And then there was this teenage girl who is always talking way too loud on the bus wondering out loud if she will ever have sex again, after she dumped her boyfriend.
Sometimes life gifts you three verses, jus like that. You'd be a mug not to write it down into a song.
Years ago a guy with a heavy-duty surname went missing. Turned out he went to a swingers party without a partner and it got him killed. Turns out you need to bring a partner to a Swingers' party because if you don't you probably just end up with blokes, and that's not exactly the desired outcome. You're meant to be fucking each others wives/girlfriends/spouses, so you have to bring a partner or you can't participate.
The rule sounds fair but I wonder if not bringing a partner really is punishable by death. It seems rather extreme for a club exercising its membership rules.
That happened way back in January 2010, just over a decade ago. The actual killing happened over the Australia Day long weekend and I remember this because a guy called Benjamin Fulford predicted that a Rockefeller would be killed in late 2009, and well, this guy's surname was Rockefeller.
Does one put much provenance into things like that? One probably shouldn't.
Still, Benjamin Fulford also predicted that Pope Benedict XVI would resign, probably about 18 months before it happened, and that was freaky too because no Pope had resigned in nearly 600 years. So how did he know? He probably has good sources. Therefore, one could be led to wonder if the murder of one swinging dude was or wasn't part of some conspiracy theory fantasy - one does not know. I certainly don't but you have to take note when symbols line up.
Anyway, I decided I would take the news story at face value rather than indulge the conspiracy theory bit, and wrote a song about a guy who wants to go to a swingers' party but his spouse won't agree to go. I figured that was enough weirdness for one song without the ramification of a world conspiracy where Rockefeller's and Rothschilds are plotting to reduce the world population through bio-engineered pandemics. I mean it might be what's going on with SARS, MERS, and COVID-19, but on an album called Blues Balls, the swingers party is enough, no?
I have a friend who tells me that his libido is below average except when he travels. Ordinarily he's tame as a neutered cat; but when he's on the road for work or vacation, he says all he can think about is sex. I asked him how big the gap was and he stretched out his arms. I kind of take his word for it.
He says he turns into one of those fiends that just stares at the rear of stewardesses as they lean over and serve drinks and wonders what kind of underwear they're wearing. He says by the time he checks into the hotel and crashes on the bed with jet-lag, all he wants to do is score with a hooker. I've often listened to his stories of risky encounters in foreign cities and wondered how the hell they really go - if they're as 'rewarding' as he makes them out to be.
I imagine that that being removed from the structure of his everyday life feeds into this sudden surge of testosterone he experiences, but other than that, I'm short of an explanation as to why the testosterone flows in such a manner. Everybody is different.
I myself am indifferent to travel. The charms of foreign places, cultures artefacts and people are lost on me. If the language is not English or Japanese I can't really cope with the sound of foreign tongues on the TV. A place like Italy is fascinating with its history and art but it is off-set by just how lousy getting around can be. I'm probably one of those joyless assholes that don't like the south of France. Getting horny on the road is about as appealing as losing a passport on the road.
Anyway, my friend gets a giggle out of the Frank Zappa routine where the Russian Concierge tells Frank's band members they can't bring a hooker into the prestigious hotel. As such I thought it might be fun to at least riff on that with the lyrics.
In the end Donald Trump got impeached and somewhat more amazingly, partisan politics ensured nothing happened to him. It's the nadir of democracy in a country that likes to boast it has the oldest one going and likes to impose democracy on others forcibly.
At this point in time we just have to accept the fact that maybe American Democracy has changed forever in such a way as to let the unaccountable just do whatever the hell they like without ever being held to any account.
It's enough to make anybody blue so I thought hey, that's a good enough reason to write about Donald Trump's presidency. I did draw some inspiration from Frank Zappa who wrote a tune called 'Dickie's Such An Asshole' during the height of the Watergate Scandal. It seemed appropriate to blast a dishonest President, and let's face it, Frank Zappa's not around to do it for us.
In some ays Watergate didn't mean a whole lot in of itself, given that nothing from the Watergate compares to the Russian electorate fiddling scandal. Watergate was just the teaser for something worse to come.
Instead of being a full-stop, it paved the way for a succession of ever devolving Republican Presidencies, punctuated by Democrat Presidents who were too lenient with the oligarchs of America. The succession of Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, Trump is pretty abysmal, and enough to destroy an eloquent and respected America. Each outhouse Republicans were less eloquent than the previous, less logical, less coherent than their predecessors. It got to the point we wondered if things could possibly get any worse than George W Bush, but ... hey, look, they elected Donald Trump.
Having never owned a pink Cadillac or lived with somebody in America's fly-over-land, you can safely surmise the story in the song is fiction.
If I did own a Caddie, I would like to have owned one with big fins like the one Don Draper drives in the earlier seasons, the light blue 1962 Coupe DeVille. The 1965 Coupe DeVille he gives away in late season 7 is also appealing. That said, I'm not really all that big on American cars in general, yet somehow Cadillacs have had a way of entering songs. I've been trying to work in other brand names for a while but Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Plymouth don't quite have the same vibe.
I do want to write a song that features a 1972 Pontiac Firebird and play my Gibson Firebird on it, but nothing concrete has materialised around that concept. One of these days I'll get there. It's hard to write a song about pony cars that's actually a better song than 'Mustang Sally' so I don't try. 'Mercury Blues' is a great song I might even try and cover one day.
In other news... I ran into an ex the other day. It was sort of embarrassing because it was so long ago. The lesson I drew from the awkward encounter was that things happen for a reason. Sometimes when you break up you get all hung up for all the things that you'd have been with that person. Well, one of the things that happens is people get old and ... you know... less good-looking. It's easier not to regret the old, lost loves when you realise that they fucked up and disintegrated for good reasons - whatever those reasons might be - and life just goes on in a downward trajectory for everybody. It just doesn't matter in the face of entropy.
Sometimes you gotta realise the heartbreak is bad because on top of everything else, you were just in love with love.
For a while back in the 90s I was living in Neutral Bay where all the beautiful people lived. I was cash poor in a Yuppie suburb. I think I struggled with this fact a lot. I wrote songs about the people I was surrounded by that I didn't relate to, some of them awful as hell and others, well... What can you say about people you don't really know but simply meet in the car park beneath the argument block?
All you candy is imagine their life. Except you have so few clues just by looking at them. And so I had this really blank, nondescript notion-not even a solid idea - about these people. They are an immaculate couple that got around in a black BMW sedan that was always polished shiny. They wore matching reflective sunglasses made by some famous brand and if you didn't know any better they looked like clothes horses from a department store catalogue.
At the same time I was reading and re-reading Takeshi Kaikoh's book 'Into a Black Sun' and of course the opening epigraph is a quote from Heidegger wherein Heidegger says "the future will be a shining darkness." Indeed the Japanese title of the book translates as 'The Shining Darkness"(which goes to show the translator Cecilia Segawa Siegle totally missed the point of the book when they re-titled it - and I mean it Cecilia!).
I was meditating on what the shining darkness looked like and I thought I could see it on the Silver screen at the movie theatres That the future would be these moving images in the dark, glorious bits of fiction that tangentially took off from reality. Or they would be incandescent lights in the night or fluorescent tubes lighting up in the night streets like scenes from 'Blade Runner'. It was all kind of abstract given how doomed the world looked in 1964 to Kaikoh as he watched the Vietnam War unfold. Or maybe the shining darkness was the reflection of the world in the reflective sunnies worn by Yuppies as they drove by in their BMW.
If you're wondering what that means, it means the future is now and we're living out the logical ramification of past failures of humanity. The Shining Darkness that Heidegger reference points to is world of petit bourgeoisie life, and easy consumerism bankrupting the the world, depleting resources and destroying the environment.
But hey, if you're living in Neutral Bay getting around in a shiny BMW, maybe everything's working out just right for you.
Everybody has a psycho ex. Mine is particularly so. I don't want to elaborate on it too much but it got me thinking about the kinds of crazy you do meet along the way in life. Crazy people have a way of fucking you up in life. You don't see it coming because most people are rational so they cannot put crazy into their calculations. Thus when some crazy person unleashes hellfire of insanity in your life, you are not one to know just from how deep in hell the insanity comes, and where the hell it's all going.
One of my friends Darren who got divorced recently had the unique experience of getting together with three psychos in a row, before settling down to marry the fourth. Maybe he attracted crazy; maybe he picked crazy people subconsciously because he secretly enjoyed the drama; no matter, all these women combined to truly fuck up his life, one after the other after the other. Quite the costly exercise if you ask me.
The first time it happens, you sort of wonder what the hell is going on with your friend. The second time it happens you lament his bad luck. The third and fourth time you begin to see maybe he's just crashing by design. It's hard to tell with your friends - and really, if your friend is extra rational, it's even harder to see how these things come to be.
All that said, the taste that crazy leaves in everybody's mouth is different. When I reflect on my crazy girlfriend experience, I get a maudlin remorse of "what the fuck was I thinking?"
I don't know about other folks and their crazy-ex experience, but I think that is good enough reason to be the basis of a blues song.
Okay maybe I short-changed you all with the last entry. I did write it late at night. There's gotta be more to these stories right?
Here's something.
A long time ago I had this friend who was deeply in love with this girl he met at university. They also had another friend in the same faculty and the three of them would hang out regularly. The guy - Gary - was deeply love with Molly and Molly to all intents and purposes, was in love with Gary. They were like their own perfect couple living in their perfect bubble.
The third wheel was Gloria, and she was a funny sort who was never really in deep relationships with any man. She'd just sort of casually date guys and imply they had wild sex and then split up. Yet she kept hanging around Gary and Molly. Very odd.
Now, at some point Molly fell out of love with Gary. She didn't know it had happened until one day she thought she didn't feel the buzz of being in love. Instead, she found herself attracted to another guy in the faculty, Roderick. Try as she might she couldn't keep thoughts of Roderick out of her head; and so she confided in Gloria what to do. Gloria offered the strange advice that Molly had been going out with Gary long enough and that Gary had a "dependent personality" so maybe Molly should move on.
And so Molly told Gary she wanted to split up. It was a bolt out of the blue for Gary - who was afflicted with paranoia ever after then - but she didn't explain to Gary why. She instead made up this story about how she wasn't feeling like they were clicking any more and the pressure was too much. Gary being an intuitive kind of guy asked Molly if there was another man involved. Molly denied it vehemently, and swore to all that she held important there was nobody else.
Gary was shocked that Molly had stopped loving him, but he let her go. After all, what can a guy do about it if the woman says she wants out? Two weeks later he ran into Gloria and he explained what Molly had said. Gloria in turn explained her conversation with Molly, and how she had given guidance to Molly such that Molly should get out of the relationship. Gary asked Gloria why on earth she would give such fucked up advice. Gloria replied because she had long been attracted to Gary, and that Molly had been with Gary for quite a while now. If Molly had ceased to value Gary, then she should vacate the picture so that she could have her turn.
"So how'bout it?" she asked; and naturally Gary turned her down because the thought of being with a conniving woman like Gloria revolted him. Life's like that.
What bothered Gary the most about the whole sequence was Molly's lie that there as no other man involved. There clearly of was a man in the picture, and that's what precipitated the breakup. The lie essentially gutted Gary. That is why he asked me to write a song about it.
Gary's dead now. As one of my oldest friends, I really miss him. I guess this song is in memory of him and his suffering.
Just a moody little blues number for St Valentine's folly day.
Mine didn't go like this at all today. But I'm sure somebody had one of these so if you did... Let me just say it does get better. Hang in there.
The idea of doing a blues album as such came around because 'Spinal Apples' took me way out into the land of modal music and I couldn't even tell you what the key centre was in some of the songs in that set. Some of the suspended chords and dissonant juxtapositions were just too hard to describe- and this in turn left me with the feeling that I would really like to get back to doing something a bit more standard. That is to say i could see the appeal of building songs around I-IV-V chord changes and tried and tested formulae of the blue genre.
The only problem is, I'm not that much of a blues head. So not all of this stuff is going to sound like Chicago Blues or some regurgitated Eric Clapton/SRV/Allman Brothers sort of thing. I do draw a little bit on Hendrix and Zeppelin because one can't really shake off one's roots completely, but in most part this series of songs is my take on the blues as a complete outsider to the traditions.
That's all by-the-by.
The important bit for this song is that it's about being stuck on a bus, Now, a wise man somewhere said in a Manhattan lift, "nothing like riding the bus makes you reassess your life."
He's absolutely right. There's nothing like being on a bus stuck gridlock that makes you reassess existence itself. Now I could bend your ear about all the ills of the under-funding of public transportation in Australian cities and what have you but ultimately the blues is a music that comes from a very personal headspace. The main thing is the feeling of sitting in a bus, stuck in traffic, with you by yourself with your thoughts, reassessing the entirety of existence, the universe and everything.
When you find yourself in that moment, you've got Gridlock Blues.
We used to play this song as a gentler, lighter, almost pop kind of song. In the tiny following that we had, one of our regular audience member used to scream out and request this one. He even went and carved the title somewhere in his faculty. It's flattering but also a little absurd. Somewhere there is a piece of carved graffiti in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sydney wherein it is inscribed 'Plankton of Love'.
People would have walked by this thing and probably never stopped to wonder what the hell it was about. An insignificant cypher of something from another age.
"What the hell?" they might ask themselves. "What the hell is the 'Plankton of Love'?"
From all the previous entries one might be led to think we were a humourless bunch. All these seriously anguished songs about the injustices and the civil inadequacies of government and business, the ever impending doom of a consumerist society eating out the planet and crowding out the eco-system; these were the songs we wrote in earnest because we felt what we felt and what we felt had to be given some shape.
We didn't always take ourselves so seriously. Occasionally we indulged in nonsense lyrics.
Like this one. I really couldn't tell you what the hell we were thinking with this song.
Everybody has to have a ballad somewhere in their catalogue. This one's ours.
The ballad was de rigeur in a set. Somewhere you had to slow right down and croon and strum out a song of professed love and devotion to some love interest. I didn't like this unspoken rule we inherited from other bands. Some bands did their ballads really well Cold Chisel's 'When the War is Over' is a wonderful ballad that fits seamlessly into their sonic landscape. Paul McCartney's 'My Love' in 'Rock Show' is like the pinnacle work where the slow number just reinforces the richness of his song writing.
Of course there's lot of temperament issues to do with this sort of thing. As I've written on many an occasion, I'm not great with love songs, partly because romanticism died in me pretty hard in my 20s. Life in its raw reality is pretty sobering, and once you sober up from love, you just never come back to it with the same abandon of a romantic. You judge your distance, and just how far you're willing to jump before you make your running jump. You don't give your heart away so some maniac can put it on a spit and eat it ("...what are you crazy?").
Ultimately, slowing down for a bit of romanticism just wasn't my temperament back then. All the same you end up writing one of these things pretty much in spite of one self because man does not rock out at 145bpm alone. We sing things we would not admit to in plain prose.
And somewhere deep in the heart, love resides in spite of all our hurt feelings (they say).
We live on a continent of drought and fires. That's the catch-cry of conservative politicians who always seem to get so much mileage from visiting affected areas and giving handshakes and hugs to the people whose lives have been crippled by the effects of droughts and fires. It's no exception today, same as it ever was in the 2000s, the 1990s, and the 1980s - just a little worse.
The astounding thing is that Climate Change was always a factor in each drought as they progressively got worse and longer. And each time a politician from the National Party would pipe up and say this was not the time to be talking about Climate Change, trying to hose down serious discussion about perhaps-maybe-possibly Australians having to radically re-orient how they interact with this continent. Nothing that could threaten our feeble self image could be allowed on the table for discussion.
This time with these droughts and fires, we heard Michael McCormack with the tried and tested "now-is-not-the-time..." rhetoric early in the bushfire crisis but he was quickly confronted by the reality that the combined terror of these drought and bushfires were unprecedented and firmly pointed a finger towards the impact of global Climate Change. He had to recant and he had to mention the unspeakable reality. It's a notable moment in Australian politics, long overdue.
It's a sad state of affairs for the Nationals because the one thing the National Party is supposed to be doing is siphoning off the fruits of government to unfairly help rural constituents, and yet the help they probably needed the most was to acknowledge reality for what it was. And each time there had been droughts and fires, and the issue got swept under the carpet, it passed the issue on to the next generation of politicians. The hand grenade got passed along and finally exploded in the face of Michael McCormack.
Heaven only knows how many farmers lost their farms waiting for the skies to open and for the drought to break when odds were, they would be waiting longer than the previous floods or be subjected to larger, ever more unthinkable fires. And you have to think about that moment when the farmers saw the black imported car driven by the bankers, coming to take their homes.
This is a song about that moment that kept happening all over, and somehow the rural constituency kept voting in the National Party.
There is no curing stupid except through death and disaster.
This song is about the jungle and the people who move beneath the canopy with their guns.
My generation didn't have a great cause. As ironic as the demographic Generation X is, part of the identity is the utter lack of conviction in protesting that existed in the mid-1980s. No Vietnam War protests for us. No great conflict in society to overcome except our own consumerist consent into the globalised neo-liberal ideology - which of course seduced us all with an array of consumer goods. Politics had been replaced by the aestheticisation of commodities. It has to be said it is in this vacuum of great causes that allowed the next generation of deplorable right wingers to creep their way back into the picture, but that is almost by-the-by.
And yet great evil was right there had we only looked and paid attention.
Perhaps it was a marketing move by the US Government that they stopped having overt acts of war headlined by their own troops. The era instead saw something more bizarre in the Iran-Contra affair where the US Government was implicated in smuggling guns into Central America to rebels to fight a proxy war against the leftist Sandinista government. When it all blew up, it seemed obvious that the Reagan Administration should take responsibility and be consigned to history, marched out of the White House. instead, they came up with the expression 'maintain the fiction' and carried on into the first term of George Bush Sr.
The funny thing was howAmerican society in general did not get up in arms about the Iran-Contra affair. It sort of made its way through the headlines but overall, the American population still maintains the fiction to this day that the US President was above all this criminality - and they let Reagan sail off into the sunset as if he were some great moral leader of the nation. And if American citizens weren't going to fight, why should the rest of the first world really care? That was the vibe.
All the same we thought that very apathy, was crap.
I guess it's appropriate to reflect back today in an era when US Republicans circled the wagons to protect their lame-duck law-breaking inept-as-fuck Prez Donald Trump to hark back to an age when Republicans did exactly the same thing in protecting Ronald Reagan. Evil shit is perpetrated by those in high offices all the time and they expect to get away with it at our expense ALL the time.
If nothing else as artists, we wanted answers so we were asking questions in our art.
And still, the questions continue.
There was an arcade game way back when by the name of Kiki Kaikai.
Kiki Kaikai is a Japanese expression meaning "Stranger-than-strange world". It's set in a kind of medieval Japan and involves a bunch of adventures trying to save the Daimyo (lord).
For about 3 weeks, our nascent band really go into it and we were throwing our coins into it like there was no tomorrow. The imagery was kind of absurd and the handicap of getting monkey on the back of your actor was indeed stranger than strange. It even seemed counter to vjedeo Christian beliefs that the protagonist had to try and save 'the Lord'.
Around that time I was reading a book about Kunlun, which is the basis of Shangri-La and also the place where Iron Fist goes as a child to learn his amazing Kung Fu. A legendary place that supposedly does not exist where everything is wonderful and hey, that's worth fighting for even with monkey on your back. Somehow the mysticism inherent in the Kunlun story made its way into the bridge of this song.
Our drummer then was Al, who was really in to the idea of "East Meets West", and thusly he was very motivated to go travelling in Asia. I think it might've been him that wanted a syncretic pan-Asian lyric as part of a conceptual unity for this song. I found it a stretch but when you're young, you're sort of scratching around for ideas to stitch together so you do it. Arcade game Medieval Japan with ghosts, monsters and monkeys, and Holy Lands in Chinese mysticism, all in the one song with no particular relationship to one another.
There's really not much more to it than that. Sometimes a song is a song is a song, just like Gertrude Stein's rose.
We had these premonitions of a terrible future where climate change would ruin everything and humanity would end up living in domes underground. It's largely crap and while the vision has been made into films and TV shows there's still no sign we're at such apocalyptic ends. That's not to say we won't end up there.
In any case, cheesy Sci-Fi fodder was our bread and butter so we had this little number we whipped out when we wanted to be 'down and heavy' during our sets. We had a drummer who used to milk the half-time and double-time changes like he was playing for Zeppelin, and that made for tremendous fun.
It's hard to say why we had such apocalyptic visions but I do remember seeing the distant horizon to the west at dusk when crossing the Gladesville Bridge one night on our way home from rehearsals. There had been bushfires and the smoke had created a layer of green light in-between the twilight inkblot black-blue and the ding twilight orange over the horizon. It was an eerie sight which stuck in my mind.
Now that Australia's up in flames it seems incredibly quaint now that such an ephemeral inkling of an image made its way into this song. It really was there for a brief moment and by the time we had crossed the bridge it was gone.
When I quit (*ahem*) Med School, my chief band mate was distressed. I was traumatised over other things so I couldn't tell at the time but he was distressed that I'd gone and flushed down a whole career that other people would dream about. He was shocked in a way that ran completely tangential to my own feelings about the situation, as to make conversations about it with him very stilted and strange.
To be frank, nobody got it. It's a bit like that song 'Too Many People' by Paul McCartney on Ram where he sings
That was your first mistake
You took your lucky break and broke it in two
Now what can be done for you?
You broke it in two
You're not supposed do that shit but I was actually at the end of my tether with the faculty and my conversations with the faculty about my state of mind and engagement with them had reached a nadir. When you throw in a bad breakup and then betrayal by friends in the faculty that destroys your faith in people, you kind of have to shut things down and have a deep think.
While I was having my deep think we kept jamming and my chief band mate wrote out the words to what became this song. I think it was an expression of him trying to wrap his head around my predicament. It was like a protest song, but the protest was deeply personal. There was no Vietnam War going on, and the renewed military adventurism of the USA was still some time ahead. The world was still largely at peace, even if the Cold War was stifling and the USSR still had some credibility as the counterpart to the charade. History, was in a lull.
You can't really undo your fuck ups. I don't regret quitting Med School at all, but the fuck ups that happen, you kind of have to own. You convince yourself it's all for the better, that you're headed to a city of gold. It's probably crap, but to fight through the terrible moments, you have to muster up courage somehow.
And so you go looking for your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
It's not exactly the way things worked out.
Back in the day we had this little ditty that we had written about being on the dole and going up to the local DSS office - the precursor to the modern day Centrelink - to hand in the form in exchange for unemployment benefit payments. It's long ago and from the era when Australia had such things as recessions and economic downturns and 17% youth unemployment. It was a certain way of life. It certainly was grungy and presaged Nirvana and all that grungiest alienation. Nobody thinks at the time it lasts for ever but I know some cases where it's gone on for a long time. Should one judge? Depends on how wedded you are to capitalism and neo-liberalism, I imagine. If you can make it last, maybe that's an eminently epicurean way of life? Not everybody's built for this capitalist, dog-gets-mortgage sort of world.
Anyway, Chatswood was the centre of this kind of stupid existence being a NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) and just living an indolent lifestyle. It wasn't exactly me, but there were people in our orbit living that dope-smoke-filled life of the indolent ne'er-do-well, living in mum's basement, turning it into an orc's den and just skating along on this thin ice of government and social largesse. The easy consumerism of Chatswood was sort of enticing as well as laughable. Hence the original song, which, this is not that song.
Fast forward a few decades and I found myself working in Chatswood and of course everything has materially changed. It's simply not the town in which I grew up any longer. It's very alien and exotic. I can see some of the structures but they are buried in the mass of newfangled developments that have doubtless helped commerce but not so much the culture.
Okay, I complain because I'm a being obtuse. But this song, I assure you, is not.
In the wake of 'Blade Runner', we were really into the writings of Philip K. Dick. Before the internet, information took a long time to circulate the world, and even then was all very uneven. You kind of had to hunt down books, read them, lend them and then discuss them. It's a far cry from the instantaneous superfluous opinion generation in the era of YouTube and Facebook.
We were particularly drawn to this book 'A Scanner Darkly' which depicted a near future where the drug culture kind of permeated everything and nobody seemed to be quite straight. The 1970s counter-culture vibe of the book stood in stark contrast to the protestations of a Reagan USA. And so we set out writing this song which largely describes the psychotic elements the book.
Had we been inundated with everybody's bloody opinions about Philip K. Dick like we are today with any particular topic on the internet, we may not have embarked on such a venture. We even added in gags of our own. I guess you had to be there to understand the dynamic.
In the 2000s, Robert Linklater made his rather interesting film based on the book and of course we were surprised that he chose to concentrate on the other details that we didn't put in the song. Maybe Barris was miscast. Maybe Charles Freck was miscast. Winona Ryder as Donna most certainly seemed miscast. It's a fun movie but we had already experienced the transmogrification of trying to make sense the book and then explaining it in another medium.
Anyway, this song comes from a time way before the internet made everything so overly explained.
Happy New Year peeps. Hey Happy New Decade even.
Okay, we're all sad in Australia what with the terrible apocalyptic bushfires which were neither unforeseeable nor unpredicted. The government was warned. Scomo the Denialist PM was fully warned by everybody with a brain this was going to be a killer summer for bushfires. And what happens? Exactly what was predicted. What can you do with that kind of obstinacy that has so much caused death and destruction? And guess what? We voted them back in. We are such suckers for punishment.
The screams of Koalas are burnt into my ear and I'm very unhappy about our politicians, even more so than normal.
Might not be the best time to reflect on one's misspent youth, but this whole album 'Monstrous Gaussian Regression' is exactly that kind of venture. These are the songs that have been rattling around inside my head for decades and have kept me tied up on some level. Without doing these I can't get past my own history, so to speak.
They're songs from the band Satellite City which was the band I was knocking around in back in the late 1980s. Somehow through a process of attrition, I ended up being the custodian of the intellectual property, mostly though dint of remembering them, and holding on to old cassette tapes. Yes, it's that kind of archival thing.
The drawback being the repository of this ancient music is that you have to do something with it, and really, I couldn't not do them, given that I now had the means of production. Until you get this out of your system, it just goes around and around in your head. You can't imagine what that's like but when you have like a whole band's catalog in your head, it can drive you bananas not to get it out.
I mean, this is it, the emotional record of how I chased dreams right over the edge.
Don't try this at home, as they say.
