LPH 791 - Bits (1965-2022)
1 hour ago
Sunday, 26 September 2010
An extract from Paul Kelly's introduction to 'How To Make Gravy'
In the middle of the journey of my life I found myself inside a tent of mirrors. Ahead lay a labour of trouble. All around, a thronging darkness. A deep slumber had caused me to stray, and to go forward was the only way back.
Six weeks previously, in October 2004, my manager Rob had rung to say the Spiegeltent was coming to Melbourne for the summer. Would I do some shows? I'd played in the tent before, at the Edinburgh Festival. Built by Belgians in 1920 of wood and canvas, and decorated with mirrors, velvet, brocade and leaded glass, it travels around the world hosting cabaret shows. Spiegel is Flemish for mirror, and the mirrors in the booths and on poles all around are the main feature, multiplying the audience in the intimate circular space. The staff like to tell you that Marlene Dietrich performed there back in the day. It's a fun place to play, fits around three hundred people. They walk in with a different kind of buzz, like children at the circus.
'They've suggested you put together a show you wouldn't do elsewhere,' said Rob. 'You know, an exclusive. They'll give you a few nights.'
I said I'd think about it, and not long afterwards found myself awake in the middle of the night with an idea fully formed in my brain: I know! I'll sing a hundred of my songs in alphabetical order over four nights. Twenty-five songs a night, each night a different song list. I called Rob the next morning before I had time to talk myself out of it, wrote a blurb for the Spiegeltent's program and started a list.
Preparing for and performing that first A–Z season was like running a marathon. I'd written close to three hundred songs in the decades since I started out, but had lost touch with many of them. I had to relearn words and chords as well as work on pared-back arrangements that would sound good without the colour and rhythm of a band. Some songs I had lost touch with due to natural attrition. I no longer had a connection to them, and couldn't sing them in a true way any more. Their faults outweighed their virtues. Clunky rhymes, false conceits, banal verses. They'd worked for me once, but, badly made, had long since worn out. Those songs wouldn't come back.
Others, however, had been neglected due to the performer's eternal problem – balancing the old and the new. Your audience have paid their money and want to hear their favourites. So inside you, two people are at war: the stern artist who wants to keep his art fresh, testing out new and obscure material, and the needy show-off who wants to get over right here, right now to the audience in front of him. To harness that hunger in the room and give it satisfaction. And so release yourself and them.
My strategy with the band had been to rotate the songs, the familiar and the unfamiliar. So we had a set each night that gave us a kick to play and also included enough songs to keep the audience happy. But over the course of a tour, a set would evolve that worked really well and we'd tend to stick to it, with only minor tinkering.
This meant that perfectly good songs weren't getting a run often enough. I was like the coach of a sporting team with a huge squad, relying too much on his stars, proven match-day winners. Meanwhile talented players languished on the bench, some for so long that they didn't turn up to training any more.
The decision to field four separate teams over four nights changed all that. By the end of the first season I realised I was onto something. The audiences had enjoyed these shows in a different way. They felt they were part of a game. Some came one night, some two or three, some all four. Those who'd come every night exchanged addresses with some of their fellow 'completists', previously strangers but now bonded as if they'd walked the Kokoda Trail together. Others said to me, 'Will you do it again? We came on night three but we'll pick another night next time.'
Next time? The last thing I wanted to think about was a next time as I headed home to lie down for a couple of days. But there was a next time. Then another and another. The memory feat became easier and my fingers began to know where to go without stumbling; I was no longer searching for old friends who'd dropped off the radar. I'd held a reunion and they'd all come, and now we were keeping in touch regularly. I'd found the gift that keeps on giving.
Right from the start, I realised the shows needed theatricalising, something to spruce up the doggedness of one man singing a list. So I decided to add some storytelling around the songs for variety, and not being a natural raconteur, wrote and memorised a script. Guests joined me onstage now and then, including my nephew Dan Kelly playing guitar. His role grew larger over time as I took the shows to other cities and countries. The performances were recorded with a view to releasing them eventually as a CD collection, and I began to imagine a book to go with it.
I went back to my show notes, put them next to the song lyrics and let my mind brew. I wanted to find a key I could turn, to feel a little click that would set me writing in a new way. Over time I found a series of keys, some to big rooms, some to little rooms, some to dark cupboards. Many days I was locked out of the house altogether.
Before too long a mongrel beast emerged. Was I writing an idiosyncratic history of music, a work diary or a hymn to dead friends? There were lists, letters, quotes, confessions, essays and road stories. Could I get them all to fit? Could I make the architecture sing? And what kind of megalomaniac would assume that setting his lyrics down and writing commentary around them – a kind of Midrash – would be interesting to others?
Just your everyday writer kind of megalomaniac, I suppose. The kind that says, Homer sang of heroes and so shall I. Of all the good people who travelled with me, who shared the dark hours and sweet moments, my twentieth- and 21st-century chums whom the gods neither helped nor hindered, I'll sing. Of those who helped me make the sounds I couldn't make on my own, the sounds that make me swoon, I'll sing. Of those I never met who sang to me across space and time, I'll sing. And hope my song becomes a charnel house, a place for those not yet born to visit, where my companions and I will remain strewn among each other, long after our days are done.
The kind of dreamer who hopes to make a new kind of book for new machines. A book for the ears as well as the eyes. A book that sings and talks and plays.
The kind of dreamer who hopes to make a new kind of book for new machines. A book for the ears as well as the eyes. A book that sings and talks and plays.
The kind of man who, appalled at his poor memory, throughout his life and in the middle of his life – though who's to say it's the middle? – kept putting out a net to catch scraps from the rushing river on its way to the wine dark sea.
Why The 100 Club Must Be Saved
The Cavern went years ago, the Hacienda is now posh flats- ironically bearing the same name- while the Astoria is going to be some sort of shopping precinct. Our city centres are becoming sanitised and scrubbed. Those grubby corners where popular culture gets made are disappearing.
One by one, we are losing the iconic venues.
So what, you may ask. Why should we care? In this modern download age of zippy-fast communication these places have had their time, haven't they? But they are never just buildings. They are steeped in the dust and grime of history.
The latest victim of the relentless profit drive in 21st century UK is London's 100 Club, which is under threat of closure. One of the longest running venues in the world, it started putting live gigs on in 1942.
It was formally a jazz club and the place where, in the autumn of 1976, the key punk festival took place that saw the coming of age for the movement that would be so influential in British pop culture. Over two days The Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, The Damned and The Clash played their breakout shows and Siouxsie And The Banshees played their first gig.
Since then the 100 Club has hosted so many cool gigs. It was the London venue for the second wave of punk, a Metallica warm-up, Rolling Stones secret shows and the Horrors' breakout gig. It was the venue of one of the key early Oasis shows. Gallows have played there many times.
I've played there myself and loved its sense of history and sense of occasion and the iconic logo on the wall behind the stage. So many bands, so many styles, are all part of its continuing diverse tradition. The club's unique ambience has survived many different eras of music, in a way that the serial new venues geared solely for profit never can never match.
The 100 Club, though - described by Aerosmith's Joe Perry as "the finest rock'n'roll club in the world" - is talking of shutting by Christmas because of a soaring rates bill and a high rent. Instead of helping small business or cultural landmarks, modern UK seems intent on crushing them in the relentless drive for profit.
Maybe this time with the surge in internet-driven people power, we can do something about this. We can't let these faceless profiteers keep on stealing our culture.
There are, of course campaigns to keep it open. Facebook is full of them. They may work. This could also be an opportunity for the Bertie Wooster-lite mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to actually do something for the rock'n'roll he pays lip service to.
The unlikely Clash fan (another Tory music fan who doesn't listen to the lyrics?) has a chance to do something for the culture of the city. The rest of us need to stand up and be counted. We don't all want to live in a plastic corporate culture.
John Robb @'NME'
I also hope it gets saved as I fell down drunk behind the bar worked there for a number of years back in the early eighties...
Is Video Killing the Concert Vibe?
James Franco brings 'Howl' to life, aurally
Photo: Aaron Tveit, left, as Peter Orlovsky and James Franco, right, as Allen Ginsberg in "Howl." Credit: Oscilloscope Laboratories
This weekend, "Howl" opens in New York and San Francisco. It's the story of Allen Ginsberg, his iconic beat poem and the legal battle that followed its publication. The movie, written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, opens in Los Angeles on Oct. 1.
KPCC's Alex Cohen talked to filmmakers Epstein and Friedman about casting James Franco as Ginsberg and their work at bringing the writer to life on screen. "He had a personal connection to the beats," Epstein said.
In a nice use of radio, the piece includes Franco reading "Howl" as Ginsberg. "I imagined it that James Franco probably spent a lot of time in the studio just focusing on the sound, the voice, creating this poem," Cohen said. "Bringing it to life."
"He did indeed do all of that," Epstein said."But in fact that was the last layer of the work we did together."
How much does Franco sound like Ginsberg? The earliest recordings of Ginsberg reading "Howl" are from 1956, the year the poem was published. In this MP3, from the Ginsberg archive at the University of Pennsylvania, he reads all three parts.
At the time it was published, the poem's sexual content was expected to be controversial -- when Lawrence Ferlinghetti published it, the ACLU assured him it would defend him on 1st Amendment grounds, and he was arrested and tried in 1957.
Later, Ginsberg would become a kind of spokesperson -- for the beats, for open homosexuality, for alternative religious practices, for drugs -- but in the earliest recordings, he was a poet with only the first inklings of what his role might mean.
It's that pre-headline Ginsberg that you can hear in the early MP3, and it sounds like, from Franco's reading, that it is that Ginsberg that the actor is evoking. He's pretty close. At the Poetry Foundation, D.A. Powell asked the filmmakers, "Is Franco lip-synching Ginsberg?" No, they replied, but they find it "wonderful" that people think he is.
Carolyn Kellogg @'LA Times'
REpost: William S. Burroughs & David Bowie: (The Rolling Stone Interview February 1974)
Beat Godfather Meets Glitter MainmanRolling Stone
February 28, 1974
by Craig Copetas
February 28, 1974
by Craig Copetas
...Burroughs: Politics of sound.
Bowie: Yes. We have kind of got that now. It has very loosely shaped itself into the politics of sound. The fact that you can now subdivide rock into different categories was something that you couldn't do ten years ago. But now I can reel off at least ten sounds that represent a kind of person rather than a type of music. The critics like being critics, and most of them wish they were rock-and-roll stars. But when they classify they are talking about people not music. It's a whole political thing.
Burroughs: Like infrasound, the sound below the level of hearing. Below 16 MHz. Turned up full blast it can knock down walls for 30 miles. You can walk into the French patent office and buy the patent for 40p. The machine itself can be made very cheaply from things you could find in a junk yard.
Bowie: Like black noise. I wonder if there is a sound that can put things back together? There was a band experimenting with stuff like that; they reckon they could make a whole audience shake.
Burroughs: They have riot-control noise based on these soundwaves now. But you could have music with infrasound, you wouldn't necessarily have to kill the audience.
Bowie: Just maim them.
Burroughs: The weapon of the Wild Boys is a Bowie knife, an 18-inch bowie knife, did you know that?
Bowie: An 18-inch bowie knife.... you don't do things by halves, do you? No, I didn't know that was their weapon. The name Bowie just appealed to me when I was younger. I was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was 16 years old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all that.
Burroughs: Well, it cuts both ways, you know, double-edged on the end...
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