Stand and Deliver!

A dust storm blowing in from South Australia and western New South Wales failed to make the news – despite eclipsing Broken Hill the previous afternoon – until it created an eerie early morning red haze when it reached Sydney. Before it eventually faded to a sepia tinge for most of the day, most people awoke to an extended orange coloured sunrise – and then had difficulty avoiding awesome, albeit disturbing, photos online. Which in time gave way to that bloody Kanye West meme. (‘Yo, Sydney, I’m gonna let you finish; but Mars/LA/Africa has better eerie colouring/poluted skies/all-enveloping dust storms…’.)

By the end of the day, news outlets were reporting that the dust clouds were stretching all the way to the Gold Coast and Brisbane. Meanwhile, Sydney’s air was 1500 times more polluted than usual.

I had intended on compiling my favourite photos from around the net – but the day got away from me. And they’re all over the place now, anyway. So I just picked a handful that are representative of a whole bunch.

Of course, the place to start is with an excellent YouTube clip of home video taken in suburban Broken Hill. If I were reporting about this on air or making a YouTube video of my own, I’d use Elvis Costello’s ‘Turning the Town Red’ and a couple of different versions of ‘Orange Coloured Sky’ (including the ridiculous Burt Ward version that Frank Zappa produced back in the late 60s) to orchestrate it. And, of course, anything from Dusty Springfield’s entire oeuvre. Oh, and how could I forget – seeing as I have a later re-issue of the 7-inch single pressed on red vinyl: ‘I See Red’ by Split Enz.

Rayneegirl’s YouTube clip of the dust storm in Broken Hill.

Lauren Jarrott’s photo of the same view of Neutral Bay, before and during the dust storm. From SMH.

Tom Hide’s excellent – but disturbing – photo of Luna Park, from his Flickr page. (How cool is the reflection in the puddle? All that’s missing is a Cyberman’s boot in the bottom left corner.)

St John’s Church, Parramatta, by Kevin Waterson, from the ABC702 breakfast radio blog.

A rather apt excerpt from a Little Britain sketch. (If it’s been particularly annoying, having that soundbite play automatically every time you’ve followed a link to more photos and then come back to this page, consider it the aural equivalent to the abrasive particles carried by high winds in the dust storm itself.)

ADDENDA

• Rachel, pointing out this weather is “a reminder that Australia is mainly desert and nature rules everday in every way”, sent me a link to rishian222’s cool slideshow. (The musical accompaniment is ‘Great Southern Land’ by Icehouse.)

• Some 24 hours after I posted this, Adrian Raschella closed his report on the ABC1 7pm News bulletin with the Little Britain ‘Fat Fighters’ sketch that ends with “Dust! Anbody…? No…? Dust…! Anybody…? No…?” Wonder where he got the idea for that.

It’s been on-line for a few days and, as all memes do, has reproduced itself all over the place: a new Radiohead song, apparently. Leaked. On YouTube. Not a film clip – just a still accompanying the music. But there are a multitude of stills accompanying the same soundfile, entitled ‘These Are My Twisted Words’, all over the internet now.

I’ve chosen to share the one posted by ‘Jonnyswhore’ because I quite like the still [s]he’s provided. I’d like to think it’s from the sessions for ‘Harry Patch (In Memory Of)’ – Radiohead’s most recent official release, in honour of the last known surviving British soldier to have fought in World War I.

I don’t quite know what to make of this newest, leaked song. The first few seconds sound like a different song entirely – different drum beat, different music – until a disco beat – not unlike John Paul Young’s ‘Love Is In The Air’ – barges in over the top. (Okay, what’s happening is the drummer is ‘counting the band in’ just after the tape’s started rolling, guitars already strummed – maybe with a bit of whammy bar action; that’s what it sounds like. The [programmed?] disco beat was probably added later.)

The opening lead guitar motif sounds reminiscent of The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn-era Floyd; the falling melody as well as the tone of the guitar suggest ‘Astronomy Domine’ to me.

At about 2 minutes 13 seconds in, the bass line is suddenly Frank Zappa’s ‘Ya Hozna’ from Them Or Us. About midway through the track, just when you want to start singing ‘National Anthem’ from Kid A over the top, the lyrics kick in. By this time, the drums don’t sound so obtrusive.

‘These Are My Twisted Words’ apparently first appeared as an MP3 file, embedded with the following info (courtesy of ateaseweb – I’m not sure if that’s ‘at ease web’ or ‘a tease web’ – via stereogum):

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiii
iiiiiii radiohead - these are my twisted words iiiiiii
iiiiiii iiiiiii
iiii artist.......radiohead iiii
iiii title........these are my twisted words iiii
iiii label........?????????? iiii
iiii cat.nr.......????????? iiii
iiii style........'dificult' iiii
iiii nr of tracks.1 iiii
iiii total length..5.32 iiii
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
iiii audio source.CD Advance iiii
iiii encoder......LAME 3.93 iiii
iiii quality......320kbps/44.1kHz/Joint Stereo iiii
iiii size.........12,70 MB iiii
iiii ripper.......sca[GG]er iiii
iiii rls.date.....2009-08-17 iiii
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
iiii i just wanted to reassure readers iiii
iiii that following representations iiii
iiii seeking confirmation iiii
iiii that before your very eyes iiii
iiii behind the wall of ice iiii
iiii that the box is not under threat iiii
iiii however they are set to remove iiii
iiii other boxes iiii
iiii in fact i have the list in front of me iiii
iiii i went to a briefing on their plans iiii
iiii and challenged them to tell me iiii
iiiii exactly what the cost would be iiiiiii
iiiiii iiiiiiii
iiiiiii they spoke in broad terms iiiiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiiii we're looking for: talented puppeteers iiiiiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiii worms, disgruntled executives, sacked flies iiiiiiiiii
iiiiiiii genres: doomcore, folktronica, ukf iiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

I hope it leads to a new album. I also hope this is a work-in-progress, that the finished version is different to this, making this one special. That’s if it’s authentic. I think it is: despite all the things the different bits remind me of, together they make a song that sounds like bona fide Radiohead to me. Judge for yourself.

Thanks to John Brannan and Kip Williams

I came across an old notebook – about A6 in size, with a solid cover in a truly sickeningly bright shade of yellow. Only the first twenty or so pages are written on. It appears to be a kind of work book-cum-diary and, in addition to a school timetable, contains truly execrable poetry that can best be described as the kind of song lyrics written by a pretentious, geeky teenager. To wit:

Why do you hold back
And then stand upon my toes?
Against the fence, your [sic] too intense
To try and grasp my prose

The fact is, they are indeed the kind of song lyrics written by a pretentious, geeky teenager. I was that pretentious, geeky teenager, and they are my song lyrics, dating back from – for me, half a lifetime ago – January 1989. (The song went on to be called ‘A Bluer Shade of Deep’, the title at once inspired by both George Harrison’s ‘Deep Blue’ – originally the flipside of the ‘Bangla Desh’ single and now located at the tail end of the newly remastered Living in the Material World CD – and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ by Procol Harum. It was going to be part of a heavy concept album, to be entitled either From the Sublime to the Ridiculous – And Back Again! or, possibly, I Am My Own Phallic Symbol. It was brimful of self-righteous arrogance.)

More significant than the shit lyrics, written more than half a lifetime ago for me now, are the diary entries. This one is particularly meaningful:

On Monday 30th (of January) – the tail-end of the school holidays – my mates Noz and Damien have come over to watch a U2 video. I’ve played them something called ‘Telling…’, which I recall was a song, now lost, called ‘Telling It Like It Is’. (It was a thinly veiled personal attack on someone who I thought was behaving insincerely. Such things, as a geeky teenager, are worth turning into songs.) The ‘getting there Willy-baby’ reference is most likely some 3-unit English work, to be completed over the holidays, that was left to the absolute last moment – we were studying [Willy-baby] Shakespeare’s comedies, Twelfth Night and The Tempest

But more important than this, it seems the following day, January 31, 1989, is the auspicious day on which I appear to have “acquired” my first two Frank Zappa albums: Joe’s Garage Act 1 and Studio Tan. I actually remember buying them, at my favourite halfback book and record store, in Dee Why, on Howard Avenue. I guess there were no Beatles-related albums of interest that day. And I got right into it, clearly, having knocked off a quick sketch of Frankie himself, in ink. I can’t help marvelling at how my shit writing – the product of a St Kieran’s primary school education (pretty much everyone in my year from there still has crap handwriting) hasn’t changed at all in nearly twenty years.

I can’t believe I didn’t write about what my first two Zappa albums were like.

However, over the next couple of pages I note the acquisition of further albums – as if that was the most important thing I was doing at the time, that required preserving for posterity.

Even though his contract with EMI had expired and his albums were, once again, pretty much deleted,  you could still find the odd Frank Zappa album, brand new, on a shelf – old stock that had failed to sell. So I soon had a copy of Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention - European Version from a David Jones store. You used to be able to depend on the music sections of department stores for old gems that had spent quality time gathering dust in a store room. Sale time was particularly good to pick up deleted items at bargain prices – I once picked up a copy of the shaped picture disc single of the Rolling Stones’s ‘Brown Sugar’, with ‘Bitch’ on the flip side, for three dollars.

Mall Music, the shop I worked in over the summer holidays, had a copy of London Symphony Orchestra Volume II. It was on Zappa’s own Barking Pumpkin label, imported and distributed by an independent company called Avant Gard.

Somewhere in between or soon after those albums, I know I returned to that halfback book and record place to discover Overnite Sensation and Just Another Band From L.A. I remember running into my buddy Fiona Hastings that day. She was on her way to a funeral for the mother of a friend, at St Kevin’s Church at Dee Why.

I distinctly remember that Frank Zappa album number seven for me was the predominantly live Roxy & Elsewhere – it’s not annotated in the little yellow notebook but I recall finding it in the two-dollar rack at the Dee Why Loan Office, on my way to a meeting of the Warringah Shire Youth Council. Since it was a double album, it cost me $4. Another time, in that same pawnshop, on that same rack, I found a copy of George Harrison’s Concert for Bangla Desh, in its box, with the yummy full colour booklet. Three records. $6. The box had seen better days, but was still none too shabby. Records and booklet were still immaculate. But that’s another story.

From Roxy & Elsewhere, all the way up to last year’s Wazoo, (80-odd albums in all) it all gets a little fuzzy. Bought them all, but stopped writing it down each time.

But all that’s by-the-by.

The thing I love most in this note book is a stupid little drawing entitled Black Führer: an African American has a parted fringe and toothbrush moustache, a la Adolph Hitler. The parted afro was inspired by my own unruly hair, always a bitch to comb into anything but a duck’s ass, and to some extent, by Gene Wilder as he appears in Young Frankenstein.

Thoughtless racism or inspired, absurdist satire? I'll let you be the judge – although I think it’s probably a little bit of both.

Too weird.

I saw this scary photo of our nation’s treasurer and wanna-be Prime Minister, Peter Costello. Something wasn’t quite right…





And then I worked out what it was that was missing:





Now does it make sense? “Yes, yes, that’s right,” (as FZ might’ve said), Costello’s taking his photo op ideas from the original Mothers of Invention!

Zappa plays Zappa?

Taking on the music of Frank Zappa is a big ask, and even former members of his various line-ups have, in my humble opinion, fallen short of the mark when setting out to play together without Frank up front — but Frank Zappa did set the mark pretty high in the first place. Anyway, we are talking about Frank’s own sons, Dweezil and Ahmet, heading up the project.

I’ve heard Dweezil Zappa play guitar — not just his own music, but, as true Frank Zappa fans will also have heard him, on his dad’s records as well. Dweezil joined his dad on stage towards the end of Frank’s 1984 world tour. The live recording of ‘Sharleena’ appears on You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 3 and it’s awesome (An equally awesome studio version appears on Them Or Us). If anyone could or should be playing Frank Zappa’s solos, it’s Dweezil. And as for Ahmet, well, according to discussions I’ve read on fan forums, while Dweezil has inherited his dad’s musical chops and the serious, disciplined approach to playing music, Ahmet has inherited his dad’s sense of humour. And of course, they work so well together in their own band, Z. So if they’re leading a band of musicians that include some of the talented people that featured in line-ups of Frank Zappa’s band, it’s gonna be something for a Zappa fan — even a hardcore fanatic — to see.

I became a Zappaholic in late adolescence. It must have been during the summer holidays before my final year of high school, as 1988 was turning into 1989. I was haunting one of my favourite second hand record shops, one of those suburban ‘half back’ book and record exchanges staffed by old ladies. They’d have shelves and shelves of Mills & Boon and other such ‘literature’. As a younger kid I used to go there for comics. By the time I was buying records, the comics shelf had given way to pornography, and nobody who could actually afford those shiny discs of digital sound would have been hawking them for cash just yet. At the time I would have actually been there for Beatles stuff, so it must have been a slow Beatles week; there was nothing Beatle related. What I did find were two Frank Zappa albums. At the time I had never heard a Frank Zappa album, but a canny guy who’d worked in a record shop with me had once advised me that if I ever see anything by Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart in a second hand record shop, I should grab it; that stuff was hard to find. So I figured, what the hey! and I bought both albums.

One was called Joe’s Garage, and had a photo of Zappa on the cover. Even though I’d never listened to him before, I knew what he looked like: he was the weird guy at the back of big, alphabetised, rock anthologies, who had weird facial hair and kids with strange names. On the cover of this record, Zappa was in black face, posing with a mop, like he was the lowly grease monkey who had to clean up after the mechanics at the garage featured in the album’s title. (Although the album ended up having nothing to do with that sort of garage; the garage, “over by the Dodge”, happens to be where Joe and his band rehearse.)

I put the record on and was greeted with a creepy, sinister voice calling itself ‘The Central Scrutinizer’. It was too weird. I had to take it off before anyone else in the house heard it, and try the other record.

The other record was called Studio Tan and featured particularly child-like cover artwork. Side one was one long track that went for twenty minutes. I dropped the needle on the vinyl and was greeted with something even weirder than the opening of Joe’s Garage. I took that off quick smart and returned to Joe’s Garage. Joe’s Garage was a bizarre concept album, like a musical, set around a conspiracy theory about - oh, it’s too involved to get into here. ‘The Adventures of Greggery Peccary’, which is side one of Studio Tan, was a bizarre fairy-tale set to music. But the song that grabbed me most was a throw-away pop ditty on side two called ‘Lemme Take You To The Beach’ which had lyrics like “You are dandy/Eat A Candy/May I kiss you?/Or maybe I’ll just hold your handy". Throughout both albums, Zappa seemed to like to mix between passionate solos with rapid passages of unusual time groupings playing against the beat and sheer silliness. It always threw you, as a listener.

To document my development as a fully-fledged Zappa fanatic would take more space and time than I have, certainly more than you want to dedicate to reading about it. However, for the rest of my schooling and my university degree, I managed to acquire pretty much the entire Zappa oeuvre on vinyl and, as it was being re-released, on CD as well.

Listening through the scurrilous lyrics, beyond the satire and vituperation, the musicianship was awesome, embodying the entire range of musical genre. As Zappa had undertaken a tour in 1988, I was holding out for another Aussie tour - but it was not to be. Frank Zappa passed away just after I completed my Arts degree (in a way he’ll always represent that a time of my youth that I’m virtually tranported back too every time I listen to an album). And so the idea of seeing Frank’s sons, Dweezil and Ahmet, leading a band that includes musicians who played with Frank Zappa, performing Frank Zappa songs, is a special kind of heaven.

In the year following Frank Zappa’s death, I was on the editorial team of Honi Soit, my uni's student paper. To follow is the obituary that I wrote for the first issue. It barely touches the surface; it doesn’t do Frank Zappa the composer justice; I was a far less experienced writer who took himself far too seriously. I have only tweaked it slightly for grammar.

Frank Zappa
December 21 1940 to December 3 1993

During Orientation Week one year, on the lawn in front of the Main Quad where all of the University of Sydney's Clubs and Societies vie for new members from amongst the student body, I found myself at the ‘Alternative Music Club’ [1] marquee, where a girl with pink hair and a pierced tongue performed her inculcatory spiel about the kind of music that ‘Alternative Music Club’ members listened to. “You know,” she said, “artists who don’t receive much mainstream commercial radio airplay, like Morrissey, R.E.M., Sonic Youth…”

“What about Frank Zappa?” I asked her.

“Who?” she said.

I guess you can’t be much more alternative than that.

Very occasional radio play has meant that few people have heard Zappa’s music. For most, Frank Zappa was that weird American musician residing at the back of rock encyclopaedias; the guy frequently bearing an unkempt mane, and always, the funny facial hair. (Simpsons creator  Matt Groening insists that the facial hair is “way cool”, and that “as soon as Bart Simpson is able to shave he’ll have a little moustache and goatee just like Zappa’s.”) However, during a career that lasted almost thirty years, Zappa had officially released over sixty albums [2], and nearly ten times that number reached the market illegally as ‘bootlegs’. [3]

While the epithet ‘post modern’ has been used to label all sorts of artistic entities engendering slight obscurity and evading generic pigeon-holing, Frank Zappa was the musician to whom it best applied. His work was (and remains) a universe inhabited by recurring motifs frequently referring back, pre-empting forwards and implying sideways to other elements within that universe. The cross-referencing, Zappa insisted, was fully intentional from his career's inception. In 1974 he stated: “there is, and always has een a conscious control of thematic and structural elements flowing through each album, live performance, and interview; the basic blueprints were executed in 1962-1963. Preliminary experimentation took place in early and mid 1964. Construction… began in late 1964. Work is still in progress.”

Musically, Zappa’s work embraced and transcended virtually every genre and form known, usually for the purpose of parody. Listener expectations were constantly thwarted. His tightly-rehearsed ensemble of musicians (known for most of its first decade as ‘The Mothers of Invention’ or merely ‘The Mothers’) was able to execute the complex performances that Zappa conducted. “There are cues used on stage like twirling my fingers as if I’m piddling with a Rasta braid on the right side of my head - that means: ‘Play reggae’… If I wanted something played ‘heavy metal’, I put both hands on my crotch and do ‘Big Balls’… The band understands what the norms and ‘expected mannerisms’ are for these different musical styles, and will instantly ‘translate’ a song into that musical ‘dialect’.” As well as contemporary rock and jazz, Zappa wrote ad conducted orchestral music which similarly subverted and entertained.

Entertainment was Zappa’s main task. This end was achieved through use of subject matter that basically lambasted dominant culture and counter-culture, very often as a form of social anthropology: what people did, how they did it and who they did it to. He insisted that  “contemporary history is going to be retained on records more accurately than it is in books”. During the late 60s, hippies bore the brunt of Zappa’s saturnine wit. The 70s saw him pour scorn and derision upon decadent rock-star sexuality, sexuality sublimated into the ‘better, louder, faster’ guitar solo and the constant pursuit of compliant groupies. Censorship, religious fundamentalism and sexual impropriety — or rather, hypocrisy with regard to the particular sexual impropriety of televangelists and Republicans — received Zappa’s attention during the 80s. He pursued his cause to the extent of registering voters at his concerts during his 1988 Broadway the Hard Way tour. Illness precluded his own presidential bid during the 1992 United States elections.

Often criticised was Zappa's vigour and zeal when dealing with topics of a “glandular” nature. His opinion to the end was that ‘sex looks silly’. “Let’s face it,” he said, “even if it feels good, it looks silly”. Yet, as entertainment, he felt that all work could be reduced to this tenet: “Is it possible to laugh while fucking? I think yes.”

Frank Zappa developed prostate cancer, and although detected some time during the early 90s, it was kept secret. The only official public reference made was the insistence that ‘the press’ had diagnosed him as a sufferer. Zappa himself claimed to be quite well most of the time. He continued to work up to sixteen hours a day in his home studio, composing, recording and remixing his music, only taking time off every so often when he felt ‘really bad’. However, an aversion to flying, owing to severe discomfort, and the more frequent press-leaks of the true severity of his condition seemed to make it apparent that the end was night. His latest album, The Yellow Shark, consisting of orchestral pieces performed by the Ensemble Modern, had been out barely a month before news was released that Zappa had died. On December 6 1993 it was announced that he had already been interred, having passed away two days earlier. Zappa is survived by wife and company administrator Gail, and by children Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet Rodon and Diva. His stunning oeuvre has been left in good order. Most of his back catalogue has been re-released on CD and new work is ready for imminent, posthumous release.

Human foible may now emit a collective sigh of relief. Its greatest detractor, one of this century’s most original and significant composers and the most alternative of musicians, is no more.

1. This particular club no longer exists.
2. Album number 74 was recently released: a surround-sound DVD-A entitled QuAUDIOPHILIAc.
3. Zappa bootlegs outnumbering legitimate releases ten-to-one is most likely a conservative estimate.

Nearly a decade ago now, I cut my teeth writing about music in the student paper at my university. A year later I was employed as staff editor of that university’s union. To allay boredom and balance out the less fun work (that is, the bits that weren’t about cinema, comedy, music or other forms of popular culture) I found myself writing the odd review or conducting the odd interview for that year’s editors of the student paper. The routine was usually as follows: dinner and a smoke late in the evening, a listen, and then a bit of ‘gonzo’ journalism (which I was in the process of re-naming ‘Dombo’ journalism; I even adapted the ‘gonzo’ dagger-cum-letter opener that would appear in the front pages of Hunter S. Thompson tomes… sick, huh! But it’s crazier than that – before I took to signing everything with the slightly tilted ‘Dombo’ logo, I used to use the pseudonym ‘[Secret] Nigel di Weird’. The explanation would take far too long so either lie awake at night if you have to or just forget about it.)

I read these now and don’t cringe as much as I thought I would, but I can’t help noticing how the recurring themes appear to be youth, rutting and alliteration. Life was so much simpler then!

Morphine
Yes
Rykodisc/Festival

Sexy?

Hold on.

Morphine is essentially a rhythm section, but more testosterone-laden than most, for the saxophone is not just a saxophone, it is a baritone sax. And the bass is no mere bass, but a two-stringed slide bass. Remember what Zappa had to say about bass and sax? “Bass is balls and a sax plays sleaze…”, so multiply that one to the power of however many you’d think John Laws must have to make his voice that low, and you have the basic essence of Morphine.

Opening track ‘Honey White’ is frantic and urgent, beginning with saxophone trills and then a relentless sax riff, often with squealing overtones squeezed out to accentuate the frenetic nature of this track. The sort of urban American fables with a moral,, the likes of which Dylan, Petty or Springsteen could only construct with a lot more words. Morphine create the mise-en-scene with minimal arrangement and laconic lyrics. The understatement works to excellent effect.

The tension in the opening motif ‘Whisper’ is produced by sliding very close intervals on the two-string bass. The sax breathes unlaboured passion throughout. The only problem encountered, really, is the lack of melodic invention; some tracks are too minimalist for their own good. ‘Yes’ the song, for example, invokes a resounding ‘no’. Not enough words, or enough good ones, at any rate (and let’s face it, ‘rate’ is what this is all about) to counter monotony in the melody. That’s not to say there aren’t some real gems. ‘Jury’, with its breathy narration, a la Robbie Robertson’s ‘Somewhere Down the Crazy River’. ‘Sharks’ with the saxophonic squawking and rapid bass twanging, and ‘Super Sex’, with its stream of consciousness lyrics building and building until its release, are ones that you’ll need a cigarette after.

But if you want to grab the metaphor by the short ’n’ curlies, ‘Free Love’ is the act; the baritone sax has never been more Laws-like, the bass squeals its glissandos not caring that it is caught in flagrante delicto. And the cigarette after is ‘Gone For Good’. Its theme is departure and resilience after the fact. The only ‘ballad’ on the album, it features an acoustic guitar.

Sexy? Yeah, in that depraved, musk-scented moose-rutting-until-there-ain’t-no-energy-left sort of way. A ‘beer ’n’ mull before foreplay and keepin’ yer boots on while yer doin’ it’ sort of album if ever there was one.

Silverchair
Frogstomp
Murmur/Sony

A Froggy would a-wooing go…

Silverchair are at that difficult age: too old to be cute and too young to be sexy. Decked out in big dacks and backwards caps, image is everything; isn’t that why an amphibian gazes out at us from the cover of Frogstomp? The frog: cute, in the traditional sense of ‘ugly but interesting’, is that testosterone-laden deep-voiced creature so symbolic of adolescence.

And fittingly, from the first fabulously fulsome flatulence of the distorted ‘ugg-ugg’ ugly bass guitar riff that launches opening track ‘Israeli’s Son’, the listener is thrust headlong into the throng of surging, lunging grunge. The tightness of this trio belies their short time together; Daniel Johns’s voice is mature beyond its age. What gives the band away as pit-faced precocious pretenders whose pitiful posturings are the equivalent of perpetrating pub-entry under false pretenses with pilfered proof-of-age is the lyrically lacking songs such as ‘Suicidal Dream’ and ‘Mad Men’. Pure juvenilia.

‘Pure Massacre’ lives up to its name, though: an aural assault whose lyric-to-noise ratio favours the less listener-friendly side of the equation. The use of devices such as a false ending on ‘Leave Me Out’, like the tempo change on ‘Faultline’, are false sophistication, but the band pulls it off. On the other hand, ‘Shade’ painfully consists of barely more than one note. Johns’s habit of ‘mooing’ suspended fourths and ninths from previous or subsequent chords enables all the songs to be liked or disliked virtually as one. After all, every frog looks pretty much like any other.

And yet, the frog as metaphor is priceless: silverchair embody that place in adolescence where going down to the stream to gather tadpoles with boys abruptly gives way to going down to the stream to disseminate tadpoles with girls. This album is one that many adolescents will try to ‘lose it’ to, and many post-adolescents will attempt to recapture it with.

Have fun.

Two days a week I work in a ‘High Fidelity’ kind of store, called Egg Records. Yesterday, while I’m tidying up the ‘soul’ section, I see, out of the corner of my eye, a little old man holding a Zappa album. It’s a copy of Absolutely Free, a first US pressing on the Verve label, and I'm pretty excited; we've got $50 (Australian) on it; that’s a nice one-off sale to make, and, more interestingly, although hardcore fans are willing to make such a purchase, such fans rarely happen to be little old men.

A little while later, the old man comes up to the counter holding a record in each hand. He brings the Zappa album forward and drawls, in an old man kind of drawl, “this one says ‘Absolutely Free’.”

“I'm sorry, Sir,” I reply, as straight-faced and polite as possible, “that is in fact the title of the album.” I point to the price tag, to show him as I tell him that it actually says ‘fifty dollars’.

So he hands the record to me. He doesn't want it at that price. He only wants it if it is absolutely free. 

“What about this one?” he drawls, proffering the record in his other hand. It turns out to be a Tom Waits album… the one called… (wait for it)… Small Change!

Before he can whip out some pocket shrapnel, I let him know that once again, ‘Small Change’ is the album title, so rather than forty-five cents, or thrupence, or whatever jangly combination happens to reside his coin pocket, the price, as stated on the price tag, is seventeen dollars.

I guess I’m just glad he hadn’t tried to purchase a copy of that live charity album that the Oxbridge mafia comedians like the Pythons, the Goodies, Peter Cook and Alan Bennett recorded for Amnesty International in the mid-70s. 

Its cover says ‘A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick)’!

One of my favourite Aussie television moments involves Norman Gunston providing on-the-spot reports from a Logie Awards presentation from the late 80s. Child actor Rebecca Smart had appeared with Bryan Brown in the miniseries The Shiralee in 1989, and she was up for the ‘Best Actress in a Mini Series’ Logie. As she trod the red carpet upon arrival, Gunston stopped her to ask her to show us how she’d cry if she didn’t win the Logie she’d been nominated for. Then he enquired, “and if you don’t win, will you say that the girl who did win went ‘bye-byes’ with the judges?” She was about twelve years old at the time. Pretty funny stuff.

The Norman Gunston character first appeared on a legendary Australian comedy show, The Aunty Jack Show, which featured Grahame Bond as Aunty Jack. ‘She’ wore a dress, glasses, a big moustache and boxing gloves, and she rode a motorcycle. In addition to playing a character called ‘Kid Eager’, Garry McDonald was Norman Gunston, a ‘roving reporter’ who presented a show called What’s On In Wollongong on local television. Some bright spark recognised the potential in this character, and he was offered a tonight show of his own on ABC television in the mid-70s (at a time, it turns out, when John Laws was one of the people considered to host such a show!) Somewhere along the line, he was christened with the sobriquet ‘The Little Aussie Bleeder’. The name borrows from the term ‘little Aussie battler’ – used to describe any good bloke who, in the face of adversity, keeps his wits about him and does a good job without dropping his bundle or whinging or whining (watch any classic Australian cinema or recent filmed comedy and see that, traditionally, the Australian spirit is built as a result of being beaten physically and figuratively by the great powers that be, be they the government, other countries, the unforgiving land, or multinatural corporations) – and ‘bleeder’, an insult that seems to originate with haemophiliacs, but is applied to Gunston as a result of his shaving nicks.

Sadly, the Norman Gunston character was put to bed after an aborted ‘come back series’ in 1993. Suffering, at the time, from anxiety disorder, McDonald didn’t have the opportunity to hit his stride with the character again. However, between his own show in the mid-70s, and his aborted show in the early 90s, Norman Gunston became an Aussie television institution, doing what he did best – mickey-taking interviews and reports – on various occasions and for various shows. I remember him telling Gene Simmons, of band KISS that, at seven inches, he didn’t have the longest tongue; Norman had a relative with a bizarre disorder of the skin of his under-arms, and part of the treatment was having to keep them moist with his own saliva. As a result, this relative’s tongue had stretched to eleven inches. And interviewing Boy George of Culture Club, Gunston pointed out that he had an uncommon first name; the only other place he’d ever heard of anyone being called ‘Boy’ was in Tarzan films. Mr George took this with customary lack of humour.

The remarkable thing about Norman Gunston and his 1993 demise is that, by that stage, Garry McDonald had already made another of his screen characters popular amongst comedy lovers. Acting opposite Ruth Cracknell in a brilliant sitcom entitled Mother & Son, McDonald played Arthur Beare, a beleaguered and wimpy, divorced son living under the thumb of his exploitative mother. Written by Geoffrey Atherden and directed by Geoff Portmann, Mother & Son enjoyed six seasons over ten years and was winning awards up to its final season in 1994. Garry McDonald had effectively provided two of the most enduring comic characters of Australian television.

The following interview was conducted in honour of the fact that both The Gunston Tapes – a ‘best of’ compilation of the original Norman Gunston Show featuring brilliantly ridiculous interviews and a few sketches that haven’t quite aged as well – and the first season ofMother & Son are being released on DVD. I figure that I’d be one of the few people who would be able to furnish such an interview with excerpts from the Aunty Jack album, not to mention FZ:OZ, the live Zappa album (recorded in 1975 and released in 2002) that Norman Gunston guested on. When I made reference to the latter, Garry McDonald was a little bit embarrassed; during the course of his live cameo on stage at the Hordern Pavilion with Zappa and his band, Gunston perpetrated a politically incorrect gag that, nearly thirty years down the track, is most cringe-worthy. Don’t get hung up about it. Get off on the fine harmonica playing instead.

The interview was broadcast Saturday 5 June 2004. You can hear a podcast version of it here.

Soundbite: ‘Norman Gunston’s 2nd Dream’ – from The Auntyology (1972-1985), bonus disc accompanying the 1995 re-release of the Aunty Jack Sings Wollongong album on CD.

Met a man with a big cigar.
Said, ‘Come on, Mr Gunston,
Gonna make you a celebrity,’
Went into town on the 412 bus
And got the job.

So I went back home and
Made some toast and ate it.

I got the star-struck showbiz
Light the lights, hit the heights
What’s On In Wollongong blues.

GARRY McDONALD: When I was about 13 I think, I went to see a documentary that was a big hit called Mondo Cane, and there was a segment in it that struck me as terribly funny, was where they went back to Rudolph Valentino’s hom town: all the young men in the town hoped that they were going to be kind of ‘discovered’. They all became like Elvis: they all dressed like him and slicked their hair back… There was one guy they panned across, and he was like Norman Gunston – he had this extraordinary lower jaw, and he just looked terribly amusing, and that developed then with a school friend. Whenever we wanted to make fun of something we would slip into that character with the shot jaw.

And so when I did a tour with David Frost – I was doing some sketches with him – we had a run-in with an an air hostess and she actually had this lower protruding mandible. She gave David Frost a really hard time on this flight. So when the Aunty Jack Show was offered to me there was a character in it that didn’t have a name, and he used to do reports from Wollongong. I thought it would be very funny if I did him like this character that I’d always done and I would name him with the same name as this woman, just as an in-joke. I bumped into her many years later on a plane and she came up to me and she said, ‘you know a lot of people say that that character’s based on me…’. I mean, the name was so close.

Soundbite: ‘Wollongong the Brave’ – from theAunty Jack Sings Wollongong album.

Oh, Wollongong the Brave!

Lift up your hand
To an Illawarra land,
Of Dapto, Port Kembula and thee

What should I say?
Should I just say ‘G’day?’
Wollongong the Brave!

GARRY McDONALD: Norman had worked – this is really politically incorrect nowadays – but he worked for a television station called WOG4; he had a current affairs program on it called What Did You Do Today? and that was shot from his living room, and one of the guests he had on it was woman that he’d met on the bus – things like that. So apparently John O’Grady, who was working at the ABC at the time, saw that and thought you could do a whole talk show around this character. At the time they were talking about having their own tonight show and O’Grady pushed for this Norman Gunston character and the idea then was that I'd be the only fictional thing in it; everything else would be real. We wouldn’t script anything else. I’d know what I was going to say and hopefully I’d know what I was going to answer to people.

Demetrius Romeo: Did you have to script two lots of responses, depending on which way the interviewee went after you asked them a question?

GARRY McDONALD: Not really, no.

Demetrius Romeo: So in some ways you were just winging it a lot of the time.

GARRY McDONALD: If the interview was going well, you could ad lib; there was no problem there. But if it wasn’t going well, you kind of had to stick to what you’d worked out.

Demetrius Romeo: I’m just amazed at things like Keith Moon losing it and tipping a drink on you.

GARRY McDONALD: Oh, yes.

Demetrius Romeo: How do you prepare yourself for such a potential…

GARRY McDONALD: Well I didn’t know that was going to happen. I had been told by the BBC producer that we had then, that he’d lined him up and he’d agreed to do it, so I thought, ‘fine’. Well he just came out of that car firing. I mean, I couldn’t open my eyes – that was half a bottle of vodka that he poured all over me. It was pretty dangerous, really, but he was a mad man. And of course, the other thing is that you’re always thinking, I can’t lose this bit of footage. You’re desperate not to lose it.

You know, when I did Sally Struthers, I really thought that interview wsas a disaster. She couldn’t stop laughing.

Soundbite: Interview with Sally Struthers (star of the 70s sitcom All in the Family) – from the DVD The Gunston Tapes

Sally Struthers: I'm sorry, I don't want to embarrass you, but you ought to use an electric razor.
Norman Gunston: Yeah… I do!

Sally Struthers proceeds to wet herself.

Demetrius Romeo: Another person you clicked with was Frank Zappa. You even got up on stage with him on the ’76 Australian tour.

Soundbite: ‘The Torture Never Stops’ – from the Frank Zappa album FZ:OZ

Frank Zappa:: Ladies and gentlemen, Norman ‘Blind Lemon’ Gunston – the Little Aussie Bleeder!

Instrumental break ensues, featuring Norman Gunston’s harmonica solo.

Soundbite: ‘The Torture Never Stops’ – from the Frank Zappa album FZ:OZ

Instrumental break continues, featuring Norman Gunston’s harmonica solo.

GARRY McDONALD: Yeah, it’s interesting – I did a film… which I’d like to forget; I’ve done many that I’d like to forget! But I did a film with Pamela Stephenson, and she’d just seen Mother & Son and she said to me, ‘very good acting’. But what I find interesting with comedy, what a lot of people don’t realise, is that you do need to have a good comedy director and there aren’t a lot of comedy directors. I mean, comedy is a very specialised field, and there are not too many people who know how to direct it. Geoff Portmann – Mother & Son was like his baby. Atherden’s scripts were great, but Portmann just held the style together. When we ever did anything that was just funny for no reason, he wouldn’t allow it. Everything had to come out of the situation and the characters. And for me, it was a bit of a stretch, because I had only ever done Norman Gunston. I had never done a sitcom. I was playing it a bit broadly at first, I was thinking you had to signal a bit. And Portmann would just stand there looking at me with a dreadful look on his face all the time, and I’d go, ‘what? What?’ and he’d go, ‘you’re mugging!’

Soundbite: Excerpt from ‘The Funeral’ episode of Mother & Son, from the Mother & Son DVD.

Liz (Judy Morris): People don’t just die like that.
Arthur (Garry McDonald): What do they do, Liz? Make an announcement?
Liz: We’ve just been to a funeral.
Arthur: Oh, you think he should have died there and saved us a second trip?
Liz: People don’t just come home from a funeral and keel over in someone else’s living room.
Arthur: Maybe Uncle Tom doesn’t know that.
Liz: Well he should!

Demetrius Romeo: What’s the major difference?

GARRY McDONALD: It’s got to seem natural, but it’s not. But it has to seem natural. It’sheightened. But it has to seem natural. It has much more energy than drama. It moves at a brisker pace but it’s also more energetic. And it has the ability to turn on an emotional sixpence, which is very funny. But also, it’s all driven by the subtext, but you must never play the subtext. Once you play the subtext, it’s not funny, and that’s actually soap opera acting. It’s the subtext that drives it, but you musn’t show the subtext. It’s the duplicity that’s funny.

Soundbite: Excerpt from ‘The Promotion’ episode of Mother & Son, from the Mother & Son DVD.

Arthur: I don’t understand, Mum. Why did you keep telling me to go?
Maggie (Ruth Cracknell): Because I didn’t want to be in the way, and because I’m your mother, and because I didn’t think for one minute that you would go.
Arthur: Oh, mum!
Maggie: I did the right thing, Arthur, I told you to go. Why couldn’t you do the right thing and say ‘no’? The sad part is, I thought I could trust you.

GARRY McDONALD: I guess I miss Mother & Son. Oh! I miss Ruth. But I don’t miss doing Norman.

Demetrius Romeo: Are you glad that you did them?

GARRY McDONALD: Oh, God yeah! I mean, I really look on the Mother & Son period as the best training ground. That was the best training ground.

Demetrius Romeo: Garry McDonald, thank you very much.

GARRY McDONALD: Pleasure!

Soundbite: Norman Gunston on harmonica jamming with Frank Zappa on guitar, from the end of Norman Gunston’s interview with Frank Zappa on The Gunston Tapes.

And here is the version of the interview written as narrative, for FilmInk. Obviously, there’ll be a witty title and hopefully a much stronger opening paragraph by the time it sees publication!

The rise of Norman Gunston is incredible. This legendary comic character of Aussie television, created and played by actor Garry McDonald, first appeared on the Aunty Jack Show in the early 70s. However, Garry says, the character first came into being after he saw the documentary Mondo Cane as a school kid.

“There was a segment where they went back to Rudolph Valentino’s home town. All the young men in the town hoped they were going to be discovered, so they dressed like Elvis and slicked their hair back.” One Elvis-wannabe stood out in particular. “He had this extraordinary lower jaw and he looked terribly amusing. That developed with a school friend: whenever we wanted to make fun of something, we would slip into that character with the shot jaw.”

When he was offered the role on the Aunty Jack Show, Garry relates, he created a character like the guy in the documentary, but crossed him with a stern stewardess – who had a similar “protruding mandible” – whom he had encountered while on tour with David Frost. Her name was the inspiration for ‘Norman Gunston’.

On Aunty Jack, Gunston presented the ‘What’s On In Wollongong’ segment. A subsequent one-off special had him hosting a current affairs program, ‘What Did You Do Today?’ featuring guests he’d met that afternoon on the bus. It was on the strength of such work that, when the ABC wanted to launch a new ‘tonight show’ in 1975, visionary John O’Grady pushed for the Norman Gunston character as host. “The idea then was that I would be the only fictional thing in it; everything else would be real,” Garry explains.

Norman Gunston delivered fantastic interviews, playing the innocent fool to disarm his interview subjects. The stars mostly played along – once they’d recovered from their initial bemusement. The notorious exception – despite assurances to the contrary – was The Who’s demon drummer Keith Moon, who abused Gunston and poured a drink over him. Aware that he couldn’t afford to lose the footage, the best McDonald could do was play along. “I’d been told by a BBC producer that Moon agreed to do the interview. But he just came out of that car firing. I mean, I couldn’t open my eyes; that was half a bottle of vodka that he’d poured all over me. It was pretty dangerous”.

Surprisingly, the most enduring clip from the ‘Norman Gunston Show’ – the interview with ‘All In The Family’ star Sally Struthers – would have been canned if McDonald had had his way. “I thought that interview was a disaster,” he confesses. “I looked at it and said, ‘we can’t put that to air, it’s self-indulgent’. Of course it’s one of our most famous interviews.”

In addition to Norman Gunston, Garry McDonald is responsible for another enduring and endearing character of Aussie comedy, Arthur Beare, who appeared opposite Ruth Cracknell’s Maggie Beare in Mother & Son. Running for ten years, Mother & Sun won awards right up until the end. McDonald puts this down to Geoff Portman’s directing. “Geoffrey Atherden’s scripts were great,” he says, “but Portman held the style together. If anyone did anything that was funny for no reason, he wouldn’t allow it. Everything had to come out of the situation and the characters.”

According to Garry McDonald, the role of Arthur in Mother & Son required “a bit of a stretch” because he’d never been in a sitcom before. “I was playing it a bit broadly at first,” he recalls. “Portman would just stand there looking at me with a dreadful look on his face, and I’d go, ‘What? What?’ and he’d go, ‘You’re mugging!’ He kept doing that until I stopped.” McDonald found Mother & Son to be a “great school of comedy” that taught him much about the art.

“A lot of drama actors think that you approach comedy like you approach drama,” Garry explains. “You don’t. It’s got to seem natural, but it’s not. It’s heightened. It has much more energy than drama. It moves at a brisker pace but it’s more energetic. It has the ability to turn on an emotional sixpence, which is very funny. But also, it’s driven by the subtext, but you must never play the subtext. It’s the duplicity that’s funny.”

While the Norman Gunston character was retired 1993, in part on account of McDonald’s anxiety disorder, Mother & Son ended its sixth and final season in 1994. Garry McDonald doesn’t miss either role – although, he admits, he does miss Ruth Cracknell. And he is grateful for having been able to play both characters, particularly Arthur Beare. “I really look on the Mother & Son period as the best training ground,” he says. “That was the best training ground.”

The Gunston Tapes and Volume One of Mother & Son are available from Village Roadshow

Last Sunday I was leafing through the music pages of one of the entertainment industry gossip compendiums that masquerades as a newspaper – (this is not a criticism; I read them for their entertainment gossip and I’d have no scruples to overcome were I ever given the opportunity to help them compile entertainment gossip in an on-going, professional capacity) – when I came across a little piece on Chad Wackerman.

I was first aware of Chad Wackerman’s presence in Australia back in the mid-90s, when he was serving as the drummer for the house band on Roy & HG’s show Club Buggery on the ABC. As it happens, Chad had married an Australian, and after the pair had lived in Los Angeles for eight years, they decided to move to Australia. At the time, I was working weekends in a music shop and one of my duties was to field inquiries from hard-core Frank Zappa fans. The process of remastering and re-issuing Zappa’s back-catelogue (and a wonderful smattering of new releases) was continuing posthumously, but no local label had bought into the deal yet in Australia; everything had to be imported. Thus, as titles would come up for release, the hard-core fans who would come in wanting to place orders would be stonewalled by shop assistants who of course would not be able to find any mention of Zappa product in the local release schedules. At that time, Shock was the distribution company that would bring in European pressings on the Music For Nations imprint, right up until Festival in Australia struck a deal with Rykodisc in the late 90s. My job was to allay the fears of the hard-core fans: of course I knew what they were talking about; of course our shop would be getting copies of the album; of course we’d call them when the stock arrived. I got to know a lot of Zappa fans at that time, and naturally expected that they’d be as excited as I was to discover that Chad Wackerman, who had been Zappa’s longest-serving drummer, was now living in Australia. “Oh yeah, I know,” most of them would reply when I’d tell them. “He gave a drum clinic the weekend before last. He’s been here for a while.” They were clearly more hard-core than me.

The interview was broadcast Saturday 8 May.

Music: ‘No Time Like The Future’ (drum intro) by Chad Wackerman, from the album Legs Eleven

Demetrius Romeo: Chad, I won’t be the first person to make this observation; you have the perfect name – ‘Wackerman’ – to be a drummer. How did you come to the drums?

CHAD WACKERMAN: My father is a drummer and a music teacher. He teaches at a high school, has taught at a high school for thirty-five years now, in California. When I was a little kid, my dad would be practicing on the drums, and I just naturally gravitated towards the drums, towards what my father was doing.

Music: ‘No Time Like The Future’ (drum intro) by Chad Wackerman, from the album Legs Eleven

CHAD WACKERMAN: I played violin for a while in school as well, and a little bit of marimba, but that didn’t last too long; I was must further along with drumming.

Music: ‘St Etienne’ by Frank Zappa, from the album Jazz From Hell

Demetrius Romeo: A lot of people know of you through your work with Frank Zappa. What was it like playing with him?

CHAD WACKERMAN: Playing with Frank was amazing. It was an amazing learning experience. It encompassed so many different styles. It was like being in a rock ’n’ roll band, it was like being in a great jazz ensemble, it was like being in a chamber orchestra as well. He wrote a lot of music, to say the very least, and a lot of it was difficult, very detailed and complicated music, and I think a lot of it was very beautiful as well. He really knew what he wanted. His music was difficult, but if you were playing it, there was no problem. He spent a lot of time working on that music and he wanted to hear it played right. It was a great experience. It was a great, growing experience and it affected me in a huge way.

Music: ‘Tangara’ by Chad Wackerman, from the album Legs Eleven

Demetrius Romeo: You’ve just released a new album called Legs Eleven. Tell me a bit about it.

CHAD WACKERMAN: It features this great band that I have here, which is Leon Gaer on bass, James Muller on guitar and Daryl Pratt on vibraphone and electronics. I’m really, really proud of this record. It’s the second record that we’ve put out with this band, the first was called Scream, and it’s been five or six years since we’d done Scream, so the band has done a lot together; we’ve toured in Europe together.

Music: ‘Tangara’ by Chad Wackerman, from the album Legs Eleven

CHAD WACKERMAN: There’s just a tighter chemistry within the group now, and I think Legs Eleven really proves that. I’m really proud of their performances and proud of the compositions. It’s a mixture of band compositions and some short drum and percussion pieces mixed inbetween the band tunes, so it has quite a lot of contrast to it.

Music: ‘Field Of Mars’ by Chad Wackerman, from the album Legs Eleven

Demetrius Romeo: What’s it like leading a band from the drum stool?

CHAD WACKERMAN: Well, I find it a very natural thing. I don’t know if a lot of people don’t really this, but the drummer has a lot of control over the music, I think more than anyone else on the stage. If the drummer, for example, decides to give more energy to the last chorus that you’re playing, or to make a verse quieter, typically the band will follow you very directly. So you’re always kind of leading them anyway. You’re in the back, normally, you’re the sideman normally, but you have the most power over the band anyway, so it’s really a natural thing. It’s not unusual.

Music: ‘Tonight’ by Rachel Gaudry, from the (Chad Wackerman-produced) album Leaving Traces

Demetrius Romeo: You also produce other people, for example, you produced Rachel Gaudry’s first album. When push comes to shove, do you prefer playing someone’s band, playing in your own band, or producing someone else?

CHAD WACKERMAN: I enjoy all aspects of music, and producing can be really fun, if you get someone like Rachel who is really enjoyable. I produced Rachel, and Rachel is a really wonderful singer/songwriter. My approach to production is very organic, I guess… I’m always aware of not over-producing people, because I think you should find people with lots of talent and really let them do what they do and just surround them with the best kind of atmosphere that they need to really shine and show-off what they can do, and I’ve been lucky to have done that a few times.

Music: ‘Tonight’ by Rachel Gaudry, from the (Chad Wackerman-produced) album Leaving Traces

CHAD WACKERMAN: I don’t go for too much gimmickry, I don’t use too many loops or things like that because I think it really puts a date-stamp on it. If you hear a loop in ten years, you’re going to go, ‘oh, we know when this record was recorded’, but if you go back and even hear some of the great singer-songwriters from the 70s like James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, they’re still pretty much making records in the same way: live band, it’s all played by live musicians and it doesn’t sound dated. So I have more of that approach when I produce people.

Music: ‘Balancing Acts’ by Chad Wackerman, from the album Legs Eleven

Demetrius Romeo: Now you’re about to leave our country. What’s taking you away from us?

CHAD WACKERMAN: We’ve been here ten years, actually, and throughout the ten years, I’ve been having to travel quite a bit, usually doing three or four trips, out of the country, usually to Los Angeles, but sometimes on tours to Europe or Japan, tours of the US, or just for album work, and it’s getting to the point where it’s a bit crazy. We’ll be back here – we’re planning on a trip at least once a year, and I’m hoping to get the band together and do a tour at that time.

Music: ‘Balancing Acts’ by Chad Wackerman, from the album Legs Eleven

Demetrius Romeo: Chad Wackerman, thank you very much for your time.

CHAD WACKERMAN: Thank you very much, Dom.

Music: ‘Balancing Acts’ by Chad Wackerman, from the album Legs Eleven