John Lennon

 I was doing a major service on a Mazda Cappella (for yea verily, I was a mechanic at the start of my working life). Milling about on a creeper with the car up on jack stands, ripping out its gearbox.  A senior apprentice and the foreman came over and stood there in silence with me gazing out at their steel-capped boots. I thought I was in trouble yet again.  But they just stood motionless, not even shuffling their feet.  Not calling me out from under the car.  Just making strange and muted sounds. Altogether ominous.

  Finally I relinquished my fears and doubts and slowly slid out from under the car. I looked up at these two very tough men and was struck by the fresh tear tracks.  Wocko - the senior apprentice - was still crying, in fact.  These were men who did not cry.  Not in public, not in private.

  I thought my mother had died.

 "What's up?"

  The foreman could barely get it out. "John Lennon's been shot.  He's dead."

  "Oh", was a far as I got before I too started crying, lying prostrate on that metal rolling board.

  I'd only taken up guitar in earnest a couple of years before that day and learning the music of The Beatles and Lennon and McCartney and Harrison was de riguer. But more than that, it was joy unbound. The solo on Aisumasen (by Dave Spinotta?) was one thing I was going to conquer. And those words...

  Before too long, so many unsavoury truths emerged.  Lennon's heroin problems, his predilection for physical and emotional abuse foisted upon everyone he ever loved or who loved him, his excesses and hedonistic and cavalier disregard for many things I've long since come to accept as sacred cows.

 But I contend, in spite of these terrible failings, that the one thing he taught me - even though I never knew the man - is that he TRIED.  He made efforts in public and private not necessarily to overcome his schisms, but to make the most and the best from his worst faults.  He himself would probably have denied that he even had any.  After all he was a deity from the age of twenty until his death at forty.  Deities don't take kindly to the display of their numerous and very public Achilles heels.

  But that's what I took from his life and works.  He was fucked but he often made good headway into not being fucked.  As a man, as a human being, as a critical and often contradictory thinker of some small renown, as a living entity.

  And like him, I don't care if I'm wrong or right in cherry picking in this regard.  In much the same way as I took the energy of punk and it's progeny and tried to use it to half-decent effect rather than proselytising the pointless violence.

  And I will always look for the people less perfect and less blessed in my life and try to steal wholesale the good accords and actions that they themselves perform and finally come to terms with - often against there own seemingly innate violent natures.

  It's not about perfection.  It's about the unfucking of all that's the more diminished in ourselves.

  Blind exaltation aside, I can think of few I respect in this regard, as much as I respect the violent and often misogynist and arrogant John Lennon.

 And I still haven't conquered that damned solo.

I'm Sorry.

Self-assuredness.

You've got to know yourself, man.
What "you've got to know yourself, man"?!
What a load of horseshit.
Let me tell you a simple truth. Nobody knows themselves. And what, on this solitary blue-green ball, would be the point of knowing yourself?
You don't think people get to where they are by the good graces of their self-awareness, do you? Really?
Fuck, man.  Who would want to anyway? Riddle me the fuck that one!
You think I or anyone else gets up in the morning and says, "Today is the day of my magnum opus.  My greatest song.  My greatest lyric.  My greatest good deed.  My greatest shot at philanthropy.  My greatest crime" (well, there are MANY who think this one).
Self belief is all, you scream, red-faced and all passion and piss and vinegar.
Well, my friend, tell that to ISIS, the Republicans, the Australian Liberal Party, fundamentalists and filibuster conservatives down through all time, the lesser poets who rail against a world filled with deafness, the lesser singers and musicians and artists who rail against a public filled with a certain war-weariness for the pedestrian and the thoughtless and the mechanised, the white collar criminals, the blue collar criminals, the criminals of the clergy, the public masturbators, the soul-wasted abstainers, the physically frail, the flagellants and the fucked-up.
See where self-belief has gotten THEM!
There's only one thing to do from my jaundiced perspective.
Stick around.
Just stick around.
Stay here on this little planet, bumbling through each day, stumbling over the wrong thing said and the wrong deed, the eons lost in procrastination and doubt, the hours and lifetimes lost in a lonely sepulcher just shy of being visible to the naked eye, stick around for the measured allowance of laughter and sex juice, and just be there for THE MOMENT.  Whatever your moment might be.
And then stick around for more until the moments spill - one into the next - until you can honestly say, "Now I have had a lifetime of moments."
And then stick around to reflect upon them, or crow and gloat about them.
And fuck up.
This is important.
Make lots and lots of mistakes.
Mistakes that you can say are only your own
because life has a funny way of making you aware that the more mistakes you make on your own, the less regrets you have as time passes.
Even if the resounding echoes of those mistakes haunt your guarded hours down through the years. No, my friend, I have no time for self-assuredness, self-confidence, self-belief.
Self love, certainly.  No one I know past the age of puberty seems to be exempt from that one.
But as for the pinnacles and zeniths and victories and triumphs, I must let them come as they will, if I'm to make any sense of them at all.
And I'd advise you to do the same, if you want to enjoy your life.
Or perhaps you really do know what you want out of life.  In which case, I am of absolutely no use to you.
P.S. We're moving back to Melbourne.

Whiskey Girl

Dick Wagner.

I learned over the weekend that I lost another longstanding hero back in July besides Brett Jacobson. When I was a kid learning guitar, I used to catch the bus into the city and go to Palings Music on Pitt Street. I'd slink upstairs to the sheet music section and look at Elvis Costello and Clash and Alice Cooper songbooks. The latter were (and remain) a brilliant source of unique voicings and amazing compositions, primarily because Cooper's guitarist at the time was Dick Wagner. Wagner also happened to be a superb composer and brilliant lyricist (he wrote Cooper's 'Only Women Bleed' which Cooper only marginally altered). And it was his chords that made it to the books.
I taught myself to mnemonically remember the strange shapes that Wagner played until finally I could play most of the stuff between Welcome to my Nightmare up until about DaDa. The amount of store employees who used to come and watch this gawpy kid standing there, eyes closed and frowning furiously trying to memorise those shapes, only to have me buy nothing (I seriously couldn't afford those books hence the memory thing). Then I'd race home and play my cheapy nylon stringed guitar until they sounded vaguely like the songs.

That's all I wanted to say on it.

But if you are a budding guitarist or you're a player of some experience, or perhaps you've just hit a plateau with your technique, then I urge you to seek out those original Alice Cooper songbooks and hear and learn the magic of Dick Wager's arrangements.

I never wrote those songs.

Scribbles from Blayney.

Today was the Day of the Snake and Spider.
Wedged between the cattle paddocks and the rock quarry is a small block of land I'd called Copperhead Alley. So named because I'd seen a one meter Copperhead snake lazing on the hot road.
Today we had to spend some time pottering around this particular block and I had no idea how portentous my quip would be. Within an hour, five of us almost stepped on Copperheads, as well as a big Red Belly and a large Brown snake. And then there was the big old gum tree in the middle of it all, riddled with Tree Funnelwebs.
Tonight, after the storm, only the lingering fragrance of petrichor and cattle piss remains.
But tomorrow...

    ******

Dogfights the likes of which I never thought I'd see, today. A beautiful big falcon or kite - soft pearlescent bronze in the afternoon light. It must have been close to twenty inches in full span. Took out the raven first. Followed by some noisy miners, two galahs and a crimson rosella that happened to get caught in the crossfire.
Fuck not with the falcon, I did learn.

     *****

We were going to do so much this year.
This year of your 50th birthday.
But we started the thing as nearly broken and dispirited souls and didn't get too much past that before you left this world.
We laughed about taking a '68 Riviera Targa or a '71 Camaro, flying in to LAX and heading wherever the fuck we wanted, leaving our women and loved ones behind as we laughingly sought out the ghosts of our corrupted and imaginary youth.
So, Jake, this night I'm hoping against hope that I will close my eyes in this little cabin in this little town and I will dream big dreams.
Of desert mesas and movie stars. Of rednecks and socialites. Of friendly, slow-drawl farmers and car salesmen with unnaturally white smiles. Of racists northern or southern whose whole outlook is transformed by the off the cuff remarks from us two strange antipodeans. Of shy and wary bible belt folk stuck between their combine harvesters and their Millers Lite. Of musicians who can't play enough notes or tragically too many with any degree of proficiency, or more importantly, love. Of the learned and the unlearned from Van Nuys all the way over and up to the coast of Maine. Of the smile, the leg or the fading tattoo that once meant something to someone, somewhere between Portland and Pensacola. Of the hapless who find fortune and the paragons who seek ruin. Of rain-soaked redwoods and rocket ships. And may the dream be pleasurably slow. All the hours in this world, if you please.
Tonight I hope you come into my dreams and back into my life that we might share some careless laughter just this one more time.

That whole entourage thing...

  The following may seem trite to most but it's something that crosses my mind from time to time.  If nothing else it genuinely sheds light on the profound depths of my shallowness.

  I want to say something brief about fame and how our relationship with it has changed. These days everyone knows someone who's had a brush with it, at some point or another. But social media has altered the face of fame, possibly irrevocably. We probably have famous friends or even heroes and heroines that we follow on FB or Twitter but the specific nature I'm thinking of deals with generational fame.

  See, when I was  kid, we all said, "I want to be like so and so."  In my case, I wanted to sing like Stevie Wright or Steve Marriott or Sean Bonniwell, Alice Cooper or Eric Burdon.  Cooper being the odd man out here because the others are what we now loosely call white boy soul. But we wouldn't sing like that.  We'd merely get rollicking drunk on our parents cheap liquor and try to imbue ourselves with their spirit while we attempted to belt out Sky Pilot Or The Eagle Never Hunts the Fly or In My Mind's Eye or Reflected or St Louis.

  Where was I going with all this?  Oh yeah!  Social media.  Well, now on FB, I can leave a question for a favourite guitarist from a favourite 60s band and he'll cheerfully get back to me within 24 hours. And just now, a famous hero's wife (who in her own right is a celebrated soul so perhaps I should say I feel no small pride in being a Tweet buddy with a famous lawyer who has a rocker husband) started following me on Twitter. Don't get me wrong.  It isn't a simple nostalgic parlour trick.  This happens as much with contemporary celebrities (and/or their admin and interns) as with artists from decades gone.

  Part of the whole thing back then was  the unattainability.  The untouchableness. They made their fortune out of that mystique. They were and are exactly as the tabloids herald them - STARS!  I mean many of these people owned jet liners for Christ's  sake. Seriously! And now they are just mortal as the winter of our disco tents closes in.

  But the part I like, the thing I love the most about this modern world is that though it would appear the stars have arced, fallen and crashed back to earth, our hearts are lifted still by their not at all stellar and even all too human toil.

Bring it...

The Sparrows.

It was big. Very big and blackbrown. Is there any other kind in Sydney?
I'm sitting on the tiled verandah floor in Canon Street, Stanmore. Just smoking and staring at the afternoon light playing out over the roofs of Leichhardt. - This is a few years ago, now.
It scuttled along the tiles, looking busy. Or guilty. Both, maybe. As these things do.
The two sparrows were on it before I could give it much thought. Attacking. Attacking. Damn, they were angry little monsters.
One leg. Two - three legs. This thing wasn't going anywhere now.
The 'roach is limping and they stop pecking at it. Tilt their heads and stare. A small chirrup from one and four more sparrows show up.
They don't care about me. About the small cloud of smoke.
Jumping over my stretched, crossed legs with impunity.
I should have reached out and squashed it then but I'm lazy by nature, in spite of my best intentions.
All six set in on that little warrior. Sometimes pecking. Sometimes stopping, heads tilted to admire their own handiwork. Singing gaily among themselves now.
They took their time.
And by the time I finished the small cigar, all that remained was precisely one leg and one small and dark wing.
The Greeks were fooling themselves.
Those little bastards weren't avian Charons sent down to take the living across the Styx.
Those little bastards are just like the rest of us.

Flight reaction.

How?

How DO you exalt the ordinary?  The banal?  The average? The also rans of our lives?
How do you give, to all and everything that gives to you on a daily basis, the moments of immortality their accords?
The roads. Pitted or newly tarmac'ed. The weeds. The power lines and all that the modern forests of life throw up around us?
The sun from  these days of global warming.  These end times in which we mill about, helpless and happy.
The power sub-stations. The discarded and fractured lenticular plastic signs, The wrappers, of course. The crushed and empty and unloved cans. The flowers that the dying and disappearing bees won't even consider touching.

How do we put the wet, juicy pussy, the hard cock and the wiggling arse into the streetlight?
The houses up for sale. The detritus and discard of a billion carelessly manicured lawns. All that has seen its day. All that has been put out for recycling. All that has been put out. The street signs. Even the air, heavy with the smell of burning brakes and honeysuckle.
The crockery left under a tree for purposes beyond imagining or caring.
The vistas of us.
Everything made and all things binary that no one and nothing will know of once we are gone.
The shell of the cicada.

How do we revel in the foolish and the tedium?  Kiss Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Nietzsche and Celine, Bukowski and Strummer, McGowan, Camus and Pollack.  Kiss them gently on the cheek, take your hands off their shoulders, look them in the eye and tell them that
though they weren't wrong, they weren't right either.

Wasteland.