mascot

Hi from Mascot. I am getting an early Tiger flight - the first of the day actually - back to Melbourne from Sydney where I cam specifically to attend a wonderful musical event you see advertised above. Sound was great. Bands were spectacular. Venue was tremendous. Food was pretty good too! Drinks were reasonably cheap. Company was very fine.

I have to sort through a hundred really low-quality phone pics, to find you a handful of very low-quality phone pics. But that may not happen till I get back to Melbourne, and since I'm flying Tiger, I may not get back to Melbourne in one piece but many. If so, let it just be said that I had a very vivid and real last day on earth, thank you to all involved, and the new music discoveries of 13 Sept 2014 for me were spectacular, and I would also like to say, look: shizzle is shizzle, and even shizzletacular shizzle doesn't have to shizzle everyone's futz for all time. A bientot!

Too many people sayin' sorry these days. Don't be sorry. You did great to sell out.

 I was just thrilled by the ceiling in the Marrickville Bowling Club, as will be made clear by the following pics.

Below is Jane Grant with a young lady who, if I remember correctly, was called Ari (spelling? not sure). They were talking about the right age to have babies I think.

I don't know these people. They were at the bar. I was just taking this picture thinking, 'this is happening NOW'

This band is called Melon Melon Melon. The man in the short-sleeved shirt is Jack Lee, and while I have never met the woman on the right I believe she is Stephanie. The man in the middle I don't know. They were all great, but it was particularly good when Stephanie got on the drums, she is a great drummer.

 People getting food. Under the amazing ceiling.

The rest of the pictures are interesting to me but so ridiculously dark... I'll chuck a couple in just for, um, what might arguably be called 'interest's sake'.

These are, of course, people watching the band. There was a column to the side of the stage which had a mirror on it and from where I was standing this mirror gave a great insight into what people are like when they are in public, but are relatively unselfconscious and not aware they are visible front-on. I don't know if it's unethical to photograph them. What do you think?  (I took quite a few pics but most didn't turn out)

Below- Dick Diver, who were really great. The girl in the green dress with the brown jacket was way cool and with people she adored.

This guy in the Lobby Loyde t-shirt was singled out for discussion by a number of people. Great idea. I want one.

 Outside at the bowling club, late in the night.

Nature Prance: David Thomas' Solo Albums 1981-87

Man's Best Friend

‘Man’s Best Friend’ is the last track on Sound of the Sand, and it picks up immediately from its predecessor on the album, ‘Sloop John B’ – how that may have happened, I can’t imagine, unless perhaps the musicians jammed a new song while they were still thinking about ‘Sloop John B’ (except: it’s a different band!). If ‘Sloop John B’ was, as has been suggested, a band playing a backing track to a pre-recorded vocal, there’s even more to marvel at in the group’s decision to adapt and extend the musical themes of the first in the second. The other possibility – I don’t know how to put this to the test – is that ‘Man’s Best Friend’ is an attempt at ‘Sloop John B’ – i.e., that the Pedestrians tried (and, in Thomas’ estimation, failed) to provide a backing track for ‘Sloop John B’; instead, he created The Eggs to record that song, and used this track as a new song.

It begins jauntily, and quickly disintegrates despite Eddie Thornton’s continued reference back to the simple, happy, irresistible tune he’s playing almost completely separately from the other musicians (though Moxham has kind of, sort of, got his back). 

This song has an explanatory note on the original vinyl release: ‘This song does not endorse Self reliance. It merely notes a temporary relief that can be found in the doing of simple things.’ Of course, it is not my place to suggest David Thomas is not telling the truth here or anywhere, but it is almost incomprehensible to me that this is a song about the ‘doing of simple things’, for ‘temporary relief’ or otherwise. It is also difficult to see how this song is about ‘man’s best friend’, which typically of course is assumed to be the dog (not mentioned here even by inference). Thomas tells us instead that his feet ‘are My Special Friends’ (capitalization as per the lyrics on the sleeve). He adds that his feet ‘push me home/They ask no questions’. I suppose we would have to take one’s feet, therefore, as the ‘best friend’ of the title, ignoring the inconsistencies of number. Yet, of the 29 lines of the song, only he last five are concerned with the friendly feet; the remainder is a gripe about the invasive qualities of Thomas’ ‘Fabulous Past’.

I am not sure what this is. It might have something to do with the reverence expressed by many, even in the early 1980s, for the mid-to-late 70s Pere Ubu of ‘Final Solution’, ’30 Seconds Over Tokyo’, and Dub Housing. This was the searing, scorching, disturbing Pere Ubu which many yearned for – rather than the ultra-weird Pere Ubu of Art of Walking (and they certainly weren’t hankering for the soft, contemplative, naïve Pere Ubu of Song of the Bailing Man, either).

It should also be noted that the Pere Ubu song ‘The Fabulous Sequel (Have Shoes, Will Walk)’ on New Picnic Time references both the concept of ‘fabulousness’ and walking/feet. Presumably in both cases the idea of the ‘fabulous’ is to be taken not in the common sense of ‘amazing, wonderful’ but in the sense of ‘pertaining to fable’.

I mentioned previously that Mayo Thompson plays on this song; he performs on the accordion, an instrument in which I suspect he was not necessarily well versed (the relatively recent Red Krayola album Introduction also features accordion prominently – not played by Thompson). While ‘Man’s Best Friend’ is not about a dog (and Thompson does not receive a writing credit on this song) Thompson’s main songwriting contribution to Song of the Bailing Man, ‘The Use of a Dog’, probably is. But this is a connection that undoubtedly does not need to be made, as it is surely irrelevant.

In sum then, The Sound of the Sand is a fascinating, but only partially successful album. It is, no doubt, an attempt to establish Thomas as a solo artist, with an emphasis placed much more heavily on his vocal and lyrical capacities than on the experimental interests of a band (most particularly, recording studio experiments, such as were increasingly the province of Pere Ubu by the time of The Art of Walking). Almost all of the songs on Sound of the Sand are hypothetically replicable by a live band (I assume Thomas did play some shows to promote this album, with a full rock band of some description. A browse through the Hearpen releases pages show a distinct lack of Thomas live material from the 1980s however. It does, though, reveal three tracks of unissued outtakes from Sound of the Sand which will have to be examined in a separate post - http://www.hearpen.com/hr141.html).

Sound of the Sand is the difficult process of one individual breaking with the past (fabulous or otherwise) to carve a new future. As I have mentioned previously, it presents a number of facets and possibilities, and while it was the next Thomas studio album which was called Variations on a Theme this is actually a far more fractured and segmented series of ‘variations’ than that record.

I mentioned in my discussion of ‘The Birds are Good Ideas’ that Sound of the Sand is not a solo album, In fact in certain respects it’s a Rough Trade records supergroup, just like The Red Crayola’s Kangaroo album from the same year. Just as one might wonder what Thomas was planning to make of his career – as mentioned, he was still a young man and one with considerable credibility as an artist (a credibility which of course he retains to this day) – one might also wonder what his record label had planned, if anything, to make of the 1980s. The Smiths were just around the corner; they would alter the fortunes and focus of the label forever. Thomas’ drawing on the English alternative scene of the early 70s (Henry Cow) and the considerable talents of the journeyman guitarist Richard Thompson (Fairport Convention, etc) was, if not a backwards step, at least a declaration of intent. The future beckoned.  

abbotsford market

I went to Abbotsford Market on the weekend, sorry it took me a while to tell you all about it. The first thing that struck me was the bourgeois nature of the stallholders’ (I assume) parked cars which you can see here. The second thing was the smallness and the reasonableness and the interestingness of most of the stalls. True to form I bought mainly junk and records, by which I mean, two Albert Ayler CDs one of which (I’ve only listened to one) is a-ma-zing. I also bought a small stable (by which I mean, a model of one; ‘it looks handmade’ said the man, who mustn’t have had his Weeties yet, of course it was friggin’ handmade, what a bizarre comment) a tea pot and two mugs that might have been once the property of Fred and Betty Flintstone, they look very rough-hewn and stoney. (If you will indulge me in an irrelevant aside, or indulge me indulging myself etc, I remember The Flintstones as the first show I ever saw on what was then known as Channel 0, it later became Channel 10, it was at the Curtains’ house opposite Princes Park in Kew, I felt, though I am not sure if this was true, that we were not allowed to watch Channel 0 at our house, maybe we just couldn’t receive it, but my father was very embittered by Reg Ansett’s promise to fill Channel 0 with quality programming, a promise he did not live up to, let me tell you). There was also a coffee stall (ground coffee), a sausage sizzle, plants, soy candles, and these nice blankety-shawly things that in truth I don’t know what the use was. All in all, it was diverting but hardly essential, as they say.

I also went to Coburg trash and treasure but I have even less to say about THAT.

Nature Prance: David Thomas' solo albums 1981-87

Sloop John B

As mentioned, The Sound of the Sand, though credited to The Pedestrians, also features three other ‘bands’ – The Golden Palominos, The Eggs and The Trees. ‘Sloop John B’ is by The Eggs: Thomas, Chris Cutler, Thornton and Ravenstine. Interestingly (or not) this band is also credited in the sleevenotes with playing on ‘I Didn’t Have A Very Good Time’, a song that actually does not appear on the record, but which was released as a (transparent, silk-screened) one-sided single at the same time (I have seen suggestion elsewhere that this single came free with Winter Comes Home). Whether the song was considered a downer (not impossible) or there was no room on the 45 rpm 12” album, is… just is….

It was probably an appropriate move to lose ‘I Didn’t Have a Very Good Time’ from the album, as it is not actually a great song (and also – here once again we run into problems – ends with Thomas singing a snatch of ‘Moon River’, which might perhaps have required a royalty payment or at very least, copyright clearance. That Cutler then opted to release it on a very limited edition one-sided single on his Re: label indicates though does not prove recognition of this as an issue).

More internet reading has suggested to me, firstly, that Thomas’ ‘Sloop John B’ is a Beach Boys cover. It isn’t; it’s a traditional West Indian song the Beach Boys also covered. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloop_John_B) tells me that The Beach Boys’ version was the first to use the line ‘this is the worst trip I’ve ever been on’ in place of ‘…since I’ve been born’, and Thomas sings that, but generally speaking this rendition is close to irreconcileable with the Beach Boys’ one as possible. He makes deliberate deviations from the Beach Boys’ version, too: ‘I feel so broke up’, for instance, becomes ‘I feel so broke down’. Also, for reasons unfathomable, Brian Wilson took the line in earlier versions about the ‘people’s trunk’ and turned it into the ‘captain’s trunk’; Thomas makes this into ‘the captain’s bunk’.

I have read, too, that this is the same version of ‘Sloop John B’ that was found on the b-side of the aforementioned David Thomas 12” single Vocal Performances (thanks for that description!), recorded a capella on cassette in a London hotel room; but with additional overdubs. I don’t have a copy of this release to hand, but my memory tells me of some differences* – for instance, the Sound of the Sand version includes some distorted, slowed down (or backwards?) tape manipulation towards the end, perhaps little more than tacit acknowledgement of the band’s genius in fitting their playing to a pre-existing and very individual vocal. Since I am talking about Thomas as a featured, solo singer, here seems as good a place as any to note the fairly pedestrian (ahem) cover art, by Martyn Lambert, to the album – a microphone, on a stand, on the beach, some people playing in the distance. Why?! As with the (presumably) last-minute removal of ‘I Didn’t Have a Very Good Time’, there seems to have been some ad hoc surgery done on this cover, too – there is a photo credit, but no photo.

The Beach Boys’ ‘Sloop John B’ is an unreasonably uptempo song, given the trauma and misery it details. Thomas’ version is sea-sick and feels far more true. Chris Cutler, in particular – making his debut as a Thomas collaborator, a partnership that would last for the rest of the decade including the recasting of the Wooden Birds as the late-80s Pere Ubu – demonstrates his expressive talent herein. 

Pere Ubu had already recorded original songs under titles of famous ‘standards’ – ‘Sentimental Journey’, for instance, and ‘Drinking Wine (Spodyody)’. The group did covers – their version of the Seeds’ ‘Pushing Too Hard’ is justifiably legendary – but their records had only contained originals (unless you want to push the definition and describe ‘Life Stinks’ as a Peter Laughner cover; but Laughner had once been a member of the band, of course). This is, in a manner of speaking, the ‘real’ song. Thomas has fairly recently suggested that his work with Pere Ubu ‘exists within the world of pop music,’ thus:

So yes, we’re a pop band. We approach pop music as if it was blues music. Now in blues music, or most any folk music, lots of songs areinterconnected. People just lift things from other guys and put it in theirsongs, it’s a communal experience. Well I steal things but I tell the personI’m stealing from, I’m honest about it. So Pere Ubu exists within the world of pop music.

Cutler, easily one of the best drummers of his generation and one of the most dazzlingly experimental of any generation, is a star of this ‘Sloop John B’. The other is Eddie Thornton, who creates (?) (or at least conveys) a lively nautical trumpet figure which takes the track out. It’s a whole retake of the song, and Thornton’s own Jamaican roots perhaps give him the clearest right of all participants to pull this track – a Caribbean ballad – back away from the Beach Boys. The effortless way in which he achieves this tends to make one wonder why he is not noted, himself, as a songwriter but rather as a versatile accompanist (not that that’s not a wonderful thing to be). The one interview I have managed to locate online with Thornton doesn’t mention the Sound of the Sand at all, but it does confirm that Thornton is a committed Christian, which may have given him some added connection with Thomas at this time, though that’s just extrapolating.

I will write about this further in a few weeks, but I note also that the Variations on a Theme album also features the same riff in one song… as does the song which follows ‘Sloop John B’ on this album, ‘Man’s Best Friend’.  Perhaps even at this early stage, Thomas was already stealing from himself.

*Update 21 September 2014, I had a chance to compare the two versions, and I have to say that the Vocal Performances version sounds substantially different, to the degree that it's almost certainly a different performance altogether. It also has background noise and perhaps even tape edits; why would Thomas insist a band record to his cassette-recorded vocal which would in any case have to be edited and reworked to fit the new song? That said, the back sleeve of Vocal Performances most decisively claims that 'A copy of that performance was overdubbed with drums and trumpet and appears on the album, "The Sound of the Sand & Other Songs of the Pedestrian" by David Thomas and the Pedestrians." The copy released here is a direct reproduction of the original acapella [sic] performance but edited.' So who am I to disagree. 

Nature Prance: David Thomas' solo albums 1981-1987

Confuse Did

‘Confuse Did’, like ‘Crush This Horn, Part 2’ which precedes it, is a Thomas/Fier song, and aside from the fact that it (finally!) breaks with the tradition of the breather in the first minute (it does come to a standstill at 1:40), it sits comfortably with its predecessor in the tracklisting.

The song begins with Thomas warbling in a bizarre falsetto: ‘what do you do with the wreck of a car? What do you do with a long gray hairpin?’ The questions continue with Thomas’ voice distorted and multitracked (?) asking further questions.

On the Winter Comes Home album, and the Vocal Performances12” single which I think preceded it I think as both a recording and a release, Thomas makes much of the notion that he might be a professor lecturing to a class; this is particularly effective in the ‘vocal performance’ of the Pere Ubu song ‘Petrified’ (in which, I believe, he even takes on the guise of a member of the audience to address himself as ‘Professor Thomas’. Thomas’ parents, I gather, were academics.

Of course I only have the records to go on. If we assume (as I do – perhaps erroneously) that the sequence of recordings goes Art of Walking, Sound of the Sand, Song of the Bailing Man, Vocal Performances, Winter Comes Home – that is, that Thomas’ separation from Pere Ubu as the band’s singer (i.e., a fifth of a band) to solo performer (that is, 100% of David Thomas) is a slow cleaving through which the singer gradually creates himself as an individual entity, then each of these releases does indeed mark a station in the changing pattern; it’s doubly interesting when this sequence ends, too, with Monster Walks the Winter Lake, because at that point Thomas reconvenes Pere Ubu but is himself resubsumed. He does not, as one might expect, use it as a shell, or a rebadged solo career in which he is controller; at least, participants insist this is not how it has run.

Thomas adds a bit of wry humour to the printed lyrics on the sleeve of the original album with the following appendix: words which don’t actually appear in the song (but arguably are presented on the sleeve as though they do):

‘The answers’, then, are ‘What do you do with the wreck of a car?’ – ‘Get rid of it’. ‘What do you do with a long, gray hairpin?’ – ‘Use it to burst that bubble’. ‘What do you do with a certain look?’ – ‘Put it under a rock.’ After that, the correlations seem (to me anyway) to fracture. Thomas then goes into a different set of ideas, whereby he links ‘Confuse Did’ to the previous track ‘Crush This Horn Part 2’ (‘the rock, again’) and then makes a link back to the previous Pere Ubu album and the track ‘Misery Goats’. The final lines are little more (I suspect) than a closing homily, though I note the following joke/aphorism from Bill Keane, the cartoonist responsible for the long-running Family Circus: ‘Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present.’

There is, in certain respects, a missing link in the discography above which may arguably be referenced here as well. The Red Crayola’s album Soldier Talk was released in 1979 and featured all members of Pere Ubu except Scott Krauss, a year before Mayo Thompson came to replace Tom Herman in Pere Ubu. The Red Crayola at this point was Mayo Thompson on vocals and guitar, and Jesse Chamberlain on drums. True to form on almost all Red Crayola records, while personnel is listed on the back of the LP, actual roles are not detailed. Tony Maimone told me many years ago that the basic tracks on the album were all recorded by the time the members of Pere Ubu came to record their parts (Thompson and Chamberlain had taken these songs on the road as a duo, prior to recording the album). David Thomas appears on two tracks, one (the title track) is the last on side one, the other is the first on side two (just as Thomas and Thompson’s duet on Art of Walking, ‘Loop’, is the first track on side two; like ‘Confuse Did’, incidentally, it is a series of obtuse questions). Soldier Talk was, of course, the absolute opposite of a solo album for David Thomas, whose role is small and limited only to repeating certain of Thompson’s lines, and who was not required to write lyrics. It may well have had some impact on his output, however. I would point to the well-known song on Soldier Talk, ‘An Opposition Spokesman’, which features the lines ‘This burning car indicates violence has only just subsided’ – that is to say, ‘what do you do with the wreck of a car?’ I would point also to the ‘Professor Thomas’ persona, and Pere Ubu’s (and Thomas’) much-critiqued forays into the highly simplistic, repetitious, sing-song, even childish; and ask whether this is a response to Thompson’s verbose, articulate, esoteric political intellectualism. It might be. It might also be something other than a negative response – and more a recognition that this field was being covered more than adequately by Thompson.

‘Confuse Did’, then, is closer to an impressionist ‘take’ on the idea of the popular ‘brain teaser’ or perhaps even low-key humorous writing. These questions, non-sequiteurs all, are phrased as one might pose a riddle based on a pun, perhaps as filler in a popular magazine or children’s column in a newspaper.

One more thing about the ‘answers’: The use of ‘CH’ initially confused me; it is probably meant to indicate ‘CHORUS’, though the instruction ‘CHORUS’, which appears in both the songs ‘Sound of the Sand’ and ‘Confuse Did’ itself, is spelt in full elsewhere. For a moment I thought perhaps ‘CH’ stood for ‘Crushed Horn’, but I got over that idea fairly quickly.

The final instrumental break of this song, particularly the slide guitar and bass, is a highlight of the album.