As Legend Would Have It...
Barb and Craig at the MCT, Willy and Waylon at Little River…
Outside the impending Winter was presenting itself with full force as the front bar of the MCT started to get busy. It’s a nice cosy place to be on a day like the Sunday just gone. I had just flown in from Tasmania that morning and was grizzling to a friend that I’d been up at 6.00AM in the dark to drive nearly an hour from Deloraine to Launceston airport in the frosty Tasmanian fog. He laughed and said did I realise that this is the sort of thing that some people do every day of their lives - get up in the dark and cold to drive to work? I sheepishly conceded he was right and resolved to go about the day in a far more cheerful manner. Yes, as the song says, there’s work to do…
Week number four and the shows at the Tavern just seem to be running under their own steam - mostly due to the willingness of the crowd to go with whichever part of the back catalogue is relevant to the players who are on the bill that day. Barb Waters and Craig Pilkington represent quite a wide range of possibilities in this regard as Barb has been present on any number of recordings by the Weddings and the Sure Thing and Craig has worked on a stack of stuff from Dust on My Shoes and the Liberation Blue acoustic series (Anythings, Sure Things, Other Things) onwards. The two songs here are ones they both played on together which seems fitting.
(Pic by Graham Stockfeld)
In regard to the song Maltby Bypass there have been a number of people who have questioned the veracity of my story regarding Johnny Cash getting his photo taken somewhere along the Geelong/Melbourne Road. But the thing is, it’s my story. One I read late one night online that claimed Johnny Cash had his photo taken en-route to Geelong, somewhere around the Little River railway station. And looking at the pic on the cover of American Recordings at the very least you’d have to concede the vegetation does seem like something you would find in southern Australia. Not to mention the dogs - the Australian cattle dogs that in the original account I read, were called Sin and Redemption (true). And I think the far-fetched nature of the whole story is what gives it the seal of approval. Basically you couldn’t make this shit up. Or at least I couldn’t. And so the story that I read online stands up and the rest of the facts are easily quantifiable.
Interestingly enough the contradictory claims I have had to field have nearly all chosen to locate the photo in a given critic’s home state. The email I received from South Australia had Johnny Cash on the way to Whyalla, the one from Western Australia had him heading down to play in Bunbury - you get the idea.
I recently finished a hefty biography of author Lawrence Durrell given me by a friend and there seemed to be plenty of examples in it where the man himself was ‘economical with the truth’ in regard to his own life story. Initially I found these passages a little off-putting and deflating but ultimately I think it best to concede that he was all about creating a picture of himself to present to the world. His work generally was an intricate and interwoven type of autobiography and I don’t think there is a whole to be gained from running some sort of peer reviewed spell check over his life. Well perhaps just a bit. After all that is why you might read an autobiography in the first place. But I think it best to start with the artwork - the books themselves.
When I introduced Maltby Bypass last Sunday at the Tavern Craig Pilkington suggested I should begin the monologue with the words as legend would have it. Which I think is rather a nice way of saying that the story itself is the important thing. The story someone wrote on the internet. The story I tell in the song
And this pic proves everything I’ve been saying!
(Full size hi-res downloadable A3 version available for the paid subscribers).
The story I tell in Forgot She Was Beautiful is 100% fabricated. It’s one I concocted on a long drive with Darren Hanlon but it might as well be as true as the one for Maltby Bypass. I think the advice given to budding writers ‘just write about what you know’ is a dangerous one. Just because a narration is written in the first person tense doesn’t mean the person singing it has to have experienced what the song talks about. If that was a hard and fast rule you’d lose a major proportion of popular song. Does the fact John Fogarty wasn’t Born on the Bijou make the song any less potent? Did Chuck Berry’s coffee coloured Cadillac even exist? Did Maybellene? It’s nice when the stars align and the story you own is one worth telling but there’s plenty that don’t. It is not much of a confession I have never tasted human flesh but still mange to sing A Tale They Won’t Believe pretty convincingly on a regular basis. As legend would have it indeed.
There’s a couple more ripping recordings from last Sunday I should have mixed and up in the Top Paddock by the weekend. It’s nice to hear Barb singing on Rising Sun which is a song we wrote together and then have a song by Rob Vella - the guy who inspired it in the first place. Stay tuned. Sign up.
Maltby Bypass - with Barb Waters and Craig Pilkington live at the MCT
Forgot She Was Beautiful - with Barb Waters and Craig Pilkington live at the MCT
