I Drew This

I used to be quite the entertainer. I grew up in both a family that was fairly musical and a community that had a lot of amateur theatre groups. I guess it was inevitable that I would get caught up in it all.

I started my life in music as a drummer. Our music teacher was the guy who wrote the Kleenex jingle. One day, when I was in about grade three, he was assigned the task of giving us each an instrument to learn. He bought in this amazing, new electronic device, which was probably some midi system that ran through a keyboard but was pretty space-age back then in the early 1980s. He was basically showing it off and surreptitiously testing us all to see who among us had rhythm.

He handed me this little footswitch kind of thing and told me to hold it in my hand. He played some music and told me to push it, squeeze it, whatever, on every fourth beat, in time with the drum-machine beat that was going. Apparently my timing was very good indeed and based on that result I was designated a drummer.

I enjoyed the drums and when I was 13, mum and dad bought me a kit for my birthday. My girlfriend in year 8 had a family band that played bad country music. her brother was the drummer but when he got a job as a chef, I was asked to fill in on any gigs that he couldn’t make. So at the age of 14 or so, I was playing professional gigs at clubs, mostly in the Riverland. We even entered a couple of talent quests (and by that I mean “country music awards” – they were no Tamworth but were kind of a big deal among the country musos) with varying success, including at least one first place in the band section.

It was bad country music but the experience was probably a good influence on me, as it got me into music, not just drumming. I picked up the guitar and pretty much taught myself. Though being in an isolated town, our musical choices and influences were somewhat limited, I did manage to get into Hunters & Collectors, V.Spy V.Spy and the ubiquitous INXS. But there was also The Eagles and Billy Joel which, in retrospect, seemed somehow inescapable in a town with only one radio station. Of course, there was that Violent Femmes stage in about year 11. But that’s the law when you’re that age. We all go through it.

So my turntable blared out Hotel California and Harry’s Reasons? more than my parents could probably bear and they were fairly easy to play and that’s how I learnt my fancy fretwork. Later, I discovered Ry Cooder, Stevie Winwood, Clapton and even started listening to Cold Chisel, poring over Mossy’s solos and trying to learn them note-for-note. Oh, and the Beatles… of course.

fter high school, I kept playing live with a friend at a few pubs in town but sort of gave it away when the interest in community radio took over. I had discovered Billy Bragg, Stone Temple Pilot and Pearl Jam and it was easier to sit in a small room once a week and force your limited musical tastes on others than it was to bust your gut in a room full of boozers with more severely limited taste who would threaten to punch you if you didn’t play American Pie. Radio offered us an audience (albeit one not much bigger than a crowded night at the pub) who actually wanted to hear the stuff we were playing. They were no doubt as bored as we were.

The guitar became something I only picked up in the privacy of home. I had fun with a friend four-tracking and writing silly songs about coffee machines and vacuum cleaners (I was big into TMBG by this stage) and the idea of writing a song saying ‘I love you’ seemed arbitrary, rather dull and desperately unimaginative.

Since I moved to Adelaide, I haven’t really had an audience of more than a few people and I don’t really like playing for people. It all seems to contrived. That said, a friend and I have been saying for about five years now that we’re going to start a band. I do want it to happen but only if it’s anonymous and on our terms. I don’t really want my friends going to see me because I just don’t think I’m that good anymore; I’ve just been out of practice for way too long.

We visited some friends of the weekend. He has a music room in his yard. He’s borrowing some fancy 16-track mixer/hard drive recording arrangement. Nice. He set it up and I fiddled about and laid down a couple of tracks of some old blues standards and a Beatles song. I was halfway through the last one when C & everyone came out of the house and saw me sitting with the guitar and the mic and kind of had that patronising “awww… he’s playing the guitar and singing” look on their face, like I was some little kid sitting on his fire engine wearing a fire helmet and posing while dad took a photo.

It was probably completely imagined on my part but that’s just how I feel when I play in front of people.

On the way home, C asked me “Why did you play Blackbird? You always play that.”

The answer is that I have a pretty limited repertoire these days and it’s the one song that’s easy to play, unaccompanied without a pick.

Don’t really know how the band thing will pan out…