A Man and His Music
In one of the best episodes of the beloved The Young Ones, Rick is taking on some conservative old people and declares that ‘The only reason you don’t understand our music is because you don’t like it!’
It’s how I feel, especially now that he has a new book out, about Nick Cave. He was the cover star of a recent edition of The Monthly, looking as happy as someone who’s eaten a bad oyster. Along with the Les Patterson drool, and the Peter Costello smirk, the Nick Cave glower is as Australian as … well, growing up in Warracknabeal, gateway to Nhill.
Don’t get me wrong. Nick Cave is not your bog-standard rock star. His oeuvre is quite startling. As the creator (probably in seven days) and central focus of The Boys Next Door in the late seventies, he was always several light years ahead of his Melbourne new wave contemporaries. Then came The Birthday Party. They exemplified a convict streak of powder-keg aggression that has permeated many Australian bands over the years. If labelling the genre, you might call it ‘No poofters’ rock. The Brit music weekly New Musical Express once memorably described The Birthday Party as ‘Australia’s revenge for Harold Larwood.’
The overriding problem I have with Nick Cave is that he can’t sing. The voice wavers between a bark, and a cough, and a stifled cry of pain, all of which are never quite in tune. He recently mutilated ‘The Carnival Is Over’, a beautiful song, and a number-one hit for The Seekers in 1966. The original benefits from the white-bread sweetness of Judith Durham’s voice, which only compounds Cave’s ugly act of musical vandalism.
You wonder whether Cave’s fuelled-up Christianity, seemingly as much a source of conflict in his world as in that of Graham Greene, or that Judas guy, doesn’t have in it an element of that dentist in Seinfeld who converted to Judaism for the jokes. Any laffs in Cave’s dense sturm und drang are well concealed. Grim is fine. Disturbing is fine too but I feel that he goes a scowl too far.
So, anyway, I can’t listen to Nick but he’s not a stand-alone example. I don’t get on well with many of the artists who intelligent music buffs are supposed to embrace.
Bob Dylan – predictably, perhaps – is a figure I have a certain cognitive dissonance about. My lack of interest in Bob Dylan was absolute until I saw Don’t Look Back, the fly-on-the-wall doco of his 1965 English tour, during which he horrified bohemian folk purists with his electronical pop music. He was especially sarcastic and narcissistic at the time; a razor-sharp, sun-shaded dude, readied for a day of condescending right after he’d brushed his teeth in the morning. But I only own one Dylan album … The Essential Bob Dylan, which, to Zimmerman acolytes, must make me a philistine of heroic proportions. Can anyone out there, though, actually say that they get off on Dylan’s harmonica? Can anyone say that halfway through a Dylan song, they’re thinking, ‘Wow, here comes the harmonica!’ Well?
Deep down, I’m fairly superficial, and that’s hindered me as far as mining the depths of high-cred music. Leonard Cohen doing Leonard Cohen bores me. It’s just all so fucking tasteful. (See also Serge Gainsbourg and Scott Walker.) I like The Jesus and Mary Chain’s version of ‘Tower of Song’ more than any records of Lenny’s performed by Lenny.
Here are some more people I’m either lukewarm about or openly bored by. Joni Mitchell. I fought in the punk wars (and the Tasmanian battles too, which were especially nasty) of 1977–1978, so maybe the aversion therapy worked too well. Also, is it possible to write a more appalling line than the one in ‘California’ ‘I’m gonna see the folks I dig /I’ll even kiss a sunset pig’? Never trust a hippie, is the best advice I was ever given. Van Morrison is, too, an absentee in my record collection. Van tunes were a staple for Tassie cover bands that I had to suffer in the eighties, so a lifetime prejudice was fired up right there.
I think the more rootsy and folkloric music is – there are several hundred new post-modern alt-country groups being lauded presently – the more I feel it’s all being taken too seriously. Neil Young is a treat when he plays noisy songs with long Neil Young-esque guitar solos. But an album like Tonight’s The Night, supposedly elegiac and haunting, is, to my mind, the sound of Neil Young nursing a hangover and not wanting anything played loudly because he’s got a headache. That goes for Lou Reed’s Berlin too.
I’m not sure I could ever take Bruce Springsteen seriously after witnessing him rasp his half a verse in the video for the nauseating ‘We Are The World.’ You can’t really say no to the gig when someone asks you to sing to save starving kids, though. It would make you look like a total obstreperous c**t. In critical terms, the best Boss album is allegedly Nebraska. Elegiac, haunting, etc. But I prefer it when he and Clarence Clemons are trading riffs on ‘Rosalita’. Bruce also racks up a decent score on my personal cringe-o-meter for his ill-advised onstage dance with Courtney Cox at the end of the ‘Dancing In The Dark’ film clip. He looks like an over-enthusiastic high school kid trying to impress his date.
I’d like to think of myself as an ecumenical music fan, and also a sophisticated one. But John Coltrane … I just want someone to stop it. I can see that Miles Davis is brilliant, but in a record shop he’s just an alphabetical obstacle on my way to Deep Purple.
My most cherished bands, if I listed them, would be perceived by hoity-toity Cave men and Cave women as infra dig and immature. I have a ton of much-loved records that are ostensibly ‘cool’, from The Velvet Underground to The Doors, from The New York Dolls to Gang Of Four, to the epic Guy Sebastian, but I don’t see that there is any conflict in my fondness for both The Bay City Rollers and Big Star. The gulf in the emotional verisimilitude when you compare those bands is vast, but singing along is singing along.
Consider ABBA. I hate evangelical ABBAism, ABBA TV specials, ABBA bands, ABBA fans, and especially Mamma Mia! The Movie, which looked like it had been made by a Country Women’s Association entertainment committee. (Yes, I rented it, for proof.) But some of those ABBA tunes are magnificent. Elvis Costello has always been happy to display an ABBA fetish, and a crowd of other hipsters are similarly smitten. Young Brit band Kasabian programmed ‘Chiquitita’ on Rage last year.
I like The Bee Gees (their early stuff), the absurd bling of ELO, The Hollies, and, if I’m feeling extra cheese-resistant, Beatles songs sung by Ringo. And these are not guilty pleasures. Guilty pleasures for me include falling over drunk, looking down a girl’s cleavage, picking my nose, and witnessing the failures of some of my contemporaries. I have no guilt about my dedication to The Partridge Family, and am proud, as well, to declare my unusual attraction to David Cassidy.
What my record collection in the main says about me is that I am hopelessly white. My favourite hip-hop records are made by crackers like Eminem. I can’t help it. The Beastie Boys appeal to me because they sound like the funniest guys I went to high school with. (Maybe I respond to music made by Jews? Could David Lee Roth be related to Phillip Roth?) I can’t really rap Snoop Dogg’s stuff in the shower, or break into NWA’s ‘Fuck Tha Police’ if I get ticked off about the footy.
Eminem grew up in a trailer park and, strictly speaking, that makes him white trash. And because I grew up in Tasmania, hobnobbing with people who lived in houses that were made with upside-down weatherboard, surrounded by chicken pens, punctuated by the rusted hulks of EH Holdens and patrolled by innumerable quantities of dogs with fleas, I am white trash too. I have trash cred. Eminem is inarguably my homie, and, thus, I own most of his records. (Flavor Flav, I love you, but I am Capulet to your Montague.)
I bought all the Queen albums up until Freddie grew his moustache. You can’t get rock’n’roll much whiter than Queen. Well, okay, maybe Lynyrd Skynyrd were whiter, but that was more an Alabama-racist-idiot kind of white.
As you might have guessed by now, I’m not big on reggae either. I’ve heard lots of it, I particularly like the way it was the catalyst for ska and Two-Tone, and, indeed, the currently popular Grime. It’s just … I don’t really like reggae much. I’ll conclude with a quote from Doug Fieger, the guy from The Knack, who should have said he didn’t really like reggae much either instead of saying, ‘Of course I know about reggae. My dad listens to Harry Belafonte.’ Day-O …
Michael Witheford is a Melbourne-based writer and hack bass player, whose new band, The TV Set, debuts at the Marquis of Lorne in Fitzroy on Sunday 8th August from 6pm-8pm. He blogs sporadically at ‘Thought Crimes’.
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