Dial Connecticut

Going through a stack of old backup CDs and rifling through lyrics from christ knows when.  This one must have been mid-90s. I got hung up on the name of the state for some reason. I may yet get around to recording some music for it, just to annoy myself and everyone around me.
"Dial Connecticut.
Lay me down and hope to keep
Some small madness in my sleep
For to guide these days of victory
Knock me out and pour me fire
In a cheap shot at desire
And a way to make more flyer points.
Kick the crap out of the dream
Watch your hopes melt like ice cream
In a puddle called reality
Winding all the way and back
Over seas and rocks of crack
To the land of full lipped smiles.
In a heartbeat you abrade
Everything that you once saved
By the gun beneath the bar
Slap the pussy magnets down
Exiled to another town
Till you turn into the minotaur.
Type the bat piss on the screen
Where it clearly looks obscene
Call your parents ‘round to read it all.
You have broken all your clothes
You’ve got nowhere else to go
And you’re eating off the sidewalk.
Wield your tiny plastic sword
Fill the stab wounds with your words
As you waltz upon the funeral pyre
Rate the incest of your thoughts
Give out everything you’ve bought
To the old rockstar’s retirement home.
If it isn’t you it’s me
Check your bank account for free
With the drug-free village racketeer.
All the sets are white and pure
But you’re standing there unsure
If you’ll ever see the sun again.
Tell your loved one’s you’re insane
They can help you take the blame
When you bring home your first million.
Live the gilt-edged, glad-wrapped life
Take your neighbour for a wife
And we’ll see how well it suits our needs.
Scratch that nineteen year old itch
While you lay there getting rich
And remember who your friends are
When you’re down beside the pool
Filled with alcohol and fuel
Keep the matches near for safety’s sake.
Over dialogue and dance
This recycled, tired romance
All the travel agents want your fame.
Soft of voice and heart of mould
Swimming endless rooms of gold
With the hired assassins at the door.
Old Bugattis in the garage
As you take on the barrage
Of the flatt’ry & photographers.
With this new song in your head.
There’s a library left unread
In a house built by contented slaves.
You don’t need to run no more
While you’re stretched out on the floor
As your loved ones dial Connecticut."

April 25th, 2015.

Anyone who read my little Facebook blurb the other day on Georg - the former Hitler Youth member, must surely see that I have a complex view of who and what we are. As living, historical entities. As nations. As tribes and as individuals.
I tend to exercise my passive aggression each year around this time by maintaining the beer palace mantra of 'Lest we forget? We already fucking have!". I promise not to trot that one out today for the sake of retaining at least a few friendships.
I grew up steeped in the vestiges of war - from the exalted and sublime to the laughingly tragic. Together with a number of friends, my whole youth was geared towards joining the army after I left school, so that I might not only follow in the footsteps of the family heroes but more importantly remove the tarnish of my own kin who were not so very self-sacrificing. All of this, however, was not to be. It was on that fateful day at the army medical I learned something hitherto unknown to me or anyone else in my family which was, I was born profoundly deaf in my right ear. My world collapsed in those moments on Castlereagh Street.
My father was acknowledged by the the people of Leichhardt and the wider community as a coward and opportunist (albeit a very charismatic one, it appears) throughout WW2. His brothers, by contrast, were volunteers in the 9th which served so famously at Tobruk and elsewhere. My mother's brother was a coast watcher who was later captured by the Japanese army in New Guinea and subjected to horrific and inhuman depredation. Yet another uncle would put away more dexamphetamine as a navigator on PBY Catalinas out of Rathmines and forward bases, than any drug pig I've known on Civvy Street. Bear in mind that they were all no older than the age of twenty three by war's end. Jesus fuck, I was still trying to get laid and wasted at twenty three. Weren't you?
So... This day... It was Winston's idea and to all intents and purposes it should have worked. It was bold, it was a potential war-shortener. You know what? I want to digress for a minute. I hear people call it the Battle of Gallipoli. It was a fucking campaign. It wasn't over in a day. It was over eight fucking months in a hell that not even the devil's own could have devised. Eight months.
Why am I writing this? I suppose I want to know - need to know - what it is we must not forget? Were Ypres and Passchendaele more significant to the fundament of being the nation we are today? I believe the answer is yes. And I believe that I could win that argument hand's down.
Gallipoli was as much bloodloss and heartache for every British boy as son of Australia who fought for those scant miles too. It seems to me that the only thing that we must not forget is that Australian should hate the British. And the British should hate their own. And nobody should take combat orders from anyone who hasn't fired a shot in the last three decades which was so often the case on that shoreline. But if hate is the salient legacy, then I'm in favour of forgetting. Our involvement with seemingly every conflict after Korea (50-53) belies all good intent that had gone before and makes a mockery of those hallowed words that burn beneath the flame that should never go out.
Is this my advocacy for war? Don't be fucking daft. All sentient things war. I don't like it. You don't like it. But all living things war. I have unbound and open respect for friends who have served and serve yet in the ADF. I think they didn't 'join to kill'. Not most of the peers my age anyway. Perhaps they too did it for the most unfathomable yet meaningful of reasons. Is all this sour grapes from a failed wannabe solider? No. Almost all my ex-mil friends immediately became hippies, waxheads and tree-huggers of one kind or another. I got there first without the terror of the parade grounds tedium. Win.
Do I think we can rise above our base natures? For the most part, yes. Something infinitely better, more vibrant and alive - and life affirming, holding more and deeper promise invariably comes out of working together with the swords to ploughshares approach. Something that transcends flags and borders, commercialised memories and worn-down memes.
Uncle Bob, I'd raise a glass to your ghost. But you gave the bottle away. And so did I. So let the bullshit stop here.
For the rest of you, thanks for coming to amateur hour.

History.

He had the gentlest smile. And the saddest eyes.
Between mouthfuls of food in a picture-postcard cafe somewhere off the Konig Boudewijnlaan in a picture-postcard forgotten corner of the world he told me he had been a butcher since he was a boy.
His pride and joys were his Mercedes Benz and his son.
I was eating some kind of salad and pomme frites with mayonnaise from a large paper cone and he was relishing every mouthful of a cutlet. I hadn't had a bath in days. Maybe weeks. And he spoke English with a soft but unmistakable German accent.
The sky that day was kind. To us and everyone else in western Belgium and the waitress sat with us, fascinated by our respective stories. He turned on the charm in a way I've seldom seen even to this day. He could have had her on a plate as he regaled us with tales of life in Germany through the wild sixties and the austerity days that felt like lifetimes following the second world war.
And now, here he was, thinning hair and deep lines of a man who had seen much of life. He was impressed by my accentless German and my cheap rendition of Heine's Die Lorelei. I apologised for only ever having learned the first two verses but both he and the waitress were delighted beyond knowing. And we laughed into the afternoon.
Back then, in that place, the drink drive laws were very different and we must have knocked off two bottles of fine wine, to say nothing of the beers before the meal. My guitar was missing two strings so that ruled out a singalong and serenade of Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand. But the laughter was enough. The food, the laughter, her flashing hazel eyes, his soft voice. These things were enough for me.
The waitress (what was her name?!) was called back inside when the holidaying families started rolling in. But Georg and I took all the time in the world, saying nothing with profound and lasting ease.
By and by, Georg rose from the rough-hewn wooden bench and with a notable Teutonic grace belying the flood of alcohol we'd just put away, walked in and paid the bill.
Back in the quiet car we were wending our way north through the heart of Antwerp when he looked at me in a way that frankly weirded me out, then smiled straight ahead at the road in front of him.
"Is it a strange thing for a man to say to someone he has not long known that it has been a pleasure travelling with him, if only for a short while?"
"I guess not." The guitar fell to one side in the back seat with a muffled, hollow sound.
The traffic wasn't too bad but I could tell he was erring on the side of caution in case the city cops were about with their clumsy breath testers.
"I was in the Hitler Youth. Did I mention this?"
I looked at him.
"Yes. I was thirteen or a little bit older and they gave me a Mauser gun and put me together with a few other boys and old men I'd never known. It's funny because the town I grew up in was not very large but I always remember thinking, "Who are you people? I have never seen you before." But I never fired a single shot in anger. The Americans came not very long after and that was my illustrious life as a soldier come to an end. You are how old?"
"Twenty one. You should have given that woman your phone number." This made him laugh loudly. He laughed the length of a city block.
"And what would I have done with her at my age?"
I couldn't answer for him but from a twenty one year old's perspective, I was thinking the list would be endless.
"I will have to leave you up here at the start of the Bredabahn, my young friend. Where did you say you were heading?"
"Groningen."
"Yes. Up in Friesland. With some luck you will get a lift pretty much the full length. It's not that far." And added with a wink. "Even when one says it's just a country away, in kilometers, it doesn't work out so very far."
Then that long sideways look again.
"My son was around twenty one when he died. You look so much like him. You must forgive me. He died serving his conscription. Hit by a car on the base where he was stationed. Ah, here we are! You take care, Malcolm. Thank you for the finest day I've enjoyed in years."
"You too Georg. And the thanks are very much mine." I caught one last look at his sad and soulful face as I reached for the guitar.

Fortress

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.