Listen to the music

I’D LIKE to think there’s a few common themes through my writing.

First is travel. My first road trip was at 2 weeks old from Townsville to Brisbane, and I’ve spent most of the next 42 years on a road somewhere around the world. Given the time and money, I would be off tomorrow on some of the world’s epic road trips: Singapore-London; the Trans-American; Cape to Cairo. Even with a lack of time or money, there’s always the lesser-known Canberra-Warwick trek, which includes a virtual solar system amongst other things.

The second is sport. I love playing sport, watching sport, talking sport. I’m not actually all that good at the playing sport part, although did manage to take 6/-15 in an English national league indoor cricket match once. And play Aussie rules for the Czech Republic in Vienna. But given both those call-ups happened in a bar the night before I wouldn’t read too much into either. Can watch and talk a bit of sport though: the last couple of years I’ve found a niche as a rowing commentator, calling races at this year’s Australian National Rowing Championships.

But the main theme? It’s music. Hell, I’m writing this while literally listening to The Doobie Brothers play Listen To The Music on the tv.

The whole thing probably kicked off on those early road trips. Dad’s military job meant we moved cities every 2–3 years, which involved bundling an ever-increasing tribe into a car and driving the thousands of kilometres between Townsville, Canberra, Brisbane, Toowoomba, Queanbeyan, Caboolture, and Strathpine. Throw in Dad’s family in Mildura and Mum’s in Caboolture, and there was rarely a year that didn’t involve a 1000+km road trip at some point.

The entertainment on those road trips? Dad’s mix tapes. This was the early 80s, so those early tapes would have been predominantly Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, possibly a bit of Paul Simon chucked in as well. I didn’t actually realise until well into my teens that the falsetto in Elton John’s Crocodile Rock wasn’t just Dad playing silly buggers while singing along with the volume turned up to 11.

Somewhere along the way Mr & Mrs John decided their oldest was a bit musical. At some point when I was 6 or so, they took me to a house in suburban The Gap and introduced me to Mrs Jackson, who became my first music teacher. She taught me the basics of piano, with the highlight a duet with Dad at an end-of-year recital for all her students.

The piano wasn’t without its difficulties. I don’t have the top joints of eight out of ten fingers, so I couldn’t get my fingers in the right places for some of the bigger interval chords. Oddly enough, despite five surgeries since that time and growing from a 1m midget to a reasonable-sized adult, those intervals have never really changed. The great thing about piano though is that you’ve got plenty of room for maneuvre, so we could change the chords without changing the song too much.

I continued with another Mrs Jackson when we moved to Toowoomba. The standard here seemed to be a lot higher, with the pieces expected of me increasingly technical. There were the theory exams every year or so as well, as well as the annual Toowoomba Eisteddfod where everyone was expected to play a solo and duet piece. In my second year there I also played as part of a trio, which we managed to win courtesy of the skills of the other two. Mum still insists I was good enough to go to the Queensland Conservatorium of Music; my problem was I never bonded with the music I was playing the way I did with the music from our road trips.

Or, say, with blues music.

We’re on a mission from God

I don’t think I’m on my own when I say my introduction to blues music was through The Blues Brothers. It is still my favourite movie of all time, with enough one-liners, car chases, and catchy music to bring a smile to anyone’s face. I have quite literally dragged myself out of a funk (and helped a friend out of theirs at least temporarily) by putting the movie on and bopping around the room.

I don’t remember how the movie became my favourite. There’s vague recollections of watching it again in my early teens and repeatedly asking which song was the main theme (how can you choose just one?!?), so I’d clearly seen it before then. It helped that while Jake and Elwood (John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd) were actors with some musical talent, the rest of the band had some serious chops. Steve “The Colonel” Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn were part of Booker T. & the M.G.’s, playing on Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay amongst other songs; while the rest can be heard on a number of blues and soul classics from over the years. Throw in the guest numbers from Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Cab Calloway, John Lee Hooker and Ray Charles, and you’ve got the perfect introduction to the genre.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the kind of music I was learning. We moved to Queanbeyan when I was 10, and while I started with another music teacher there, my grandmother’s illness back in Queensland meant a move back north 6 months later. With Grandma only having months to live I told Mum I didn’t want to play piano any more, and that was that. I finished my official piano-playing trying to learn Beethoven’s Für Elise, a beautiful piece in the right hands.

Those hands would never be mine though.

Where is love?
Does it fall from skies above?
Is it underneath the willow tree
That I’ve been dreaming of?

Mum was still determined to keep me in music. In grade 7 I participated in a Tournament of the Minds competition, where my major contribution was to change the words of The Firm’s Star Trekkin’ (itself a piss-take of Star Trek) into Moon Trekkin’, because, you know, we were on the moon for this competition. Turned out both Mum and the teacher were impressed by a clear, loud voice, and in grade 8 had me doing singing lessons.

This has always struck me as curious timing. I was 12 by this point, which meant it wasn’t going to be all that long before the angelic voice dropped an octave or so. And anyway, I still wasn’t playing sport — who wants to spend their nights singing and later acting when there’s (bad) sport to be played? One solo performance of Where Is Love? from Oliver later, and a two-year singing career was done too.

I did start playing trombone at school around this time though. I’d always been told it would be a good fit given my hands, although that suggested a level of practice that I was never going to keep up. There was the initial issue of trombones not being easily transported on a bicycle each day, then the follow-up of my brothers comparing my beginner trombone noises with those that come out of your bottom. So I never practiced at home, somehow ended up in the school band, and “peaked” at the state titles when I couldn’t blow the right note in the warm-ups.

And eight years after I’d first sat down at a piano at The Gap, I stopped learning music.

It’s a shame that I never continued with music after high school, although I daresay I’m not on my own there. While I still love music, I simply don’t have the self-discipline to continually sit down and practice to get up to the level I’d want to perform again. Excluding, of course, random karaoke sessions where everyone’s drunk and out for a good time. Even then it’s annoying not being able to hit notes like I used to, although multiple screamed versions of Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On A Prayer at the Red Garter in Florence probably didn’t help either.

A man walks down the street
He says, “Why am I soft in the middle, now?
Why am I soft in the middle?
The rest of my life is so hard

A few years later I found myself sitting at an impressive-looking control panel with about 50 different knobs and dials laid out in front of me. Above that was a computer screen, two cd players to the left, sound-proofing all around and a microphone hidden behind some more sound-proofing. This small room in a Canberra radio station would be my job for the next few months and my re-introduction to the music of my youth.

That job — which paid the grand total of $5 an hour — was to record selected tracks off cd’s onto our whiz-bang computer system at a consistent volume. This would allow announcers to cue up multiple songs and ads without having to run backwards and forwards to the cd room each time.

Suited me — I was getting paid to listen to music!

The station had built up quite a music collection back in the 80s and early 90s. There were a number of all-time classic albums in the collection, including Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors, Paul Simon’s Graceland, and The Beatles’ Let It Be. While I didn’t pick the music we were uploading (and quite vehemently disagreed with some of the older choices), it was still a musical education of sorts to spend the summer in that small room, reacquainting myself with some old friends.

Not that we used the songs all that much. Not long after finishing the project — and finally getting the keys to what songs got uploaded — we switched to a jazz format on the grounds that the bloke spruiking it would be able to sell advertising a lot better than we were. Then a couple of months after that the board made the decision to close the whole place down. This was incredibly sad for those of us working there, although it did mean there was suddenly hundreds of classic cd’s available to buy for about $1-$2 each.

So I did exactly that. And while hundreds of cd’s are quite cumbersome to carry around, an iPod is not. When I bought my first iPod in 2005 I suddenly had all my music in one place, which came in very handy when in 2006 I found myself working for a tour company in Europe and in need of music to keep staff and passengers happy.

Which is how Dad’s music from the early 80s ended up annoying/creating memories for numerous European tour bus drivers in the mid 2000s.

Back to the travel theme again…