Dave Graney & The Coral Snakes - 7 August 2015

Dave Graney & The Coral Snakes

Memo Music Hall, St Kilda

Friday 7 August 2015

$30

Feelin’ Kinda Nostalgic

It takes something special to coax my brother Graeme to a gig on a Friday night - especially when he could be at home on the couch watching the Richmond v Adelaide game on TV. 

When I saw that Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes were reuniting to play their classic 1993 albun, Night of the Wolverine, I knew that Graeme would be interested. Even so, the step from 'intrigued' to 'making the effort to actually cross town to St Kilda to attend' is a steep one. As Dave himself observed, ‘you wanna be there, but you don’t wanna travel.’ And had either of us been aware of the clash with a crucial Richmond game, then it's quite likely he would not have committed. 

Still, the promise of after-work beers and one of his favourite bands digging into their back catalogue proved sufficient. When we met our friend Ralph at The Vineyard in St Kilda for a pre-show beer, talk immediately turned to what outfit Dave might sport for the performance. Graeme and I nominated velvet suits of varying hues, while Ralph thought a tasteful safari suit more likely.

In the end Ralph was closest for as the band emerged, it seemed Dave was wearing a tight, charcoal, safari onesie, teamed with a waist length jacket and a brimmed fedora. A classic look to accompany a classic album. 

Night of the Wolverine was released in 1993 and marked the beginning of a brief golden period for Graney. It was the first of four albums recorded by The Coral Snakes in a five year period that saw Graney crossover from indie survivor to mainstream curiosity and culminated with him winning best male artist at the fledgling ARIA Awards. At the time he insisted on referring to himself as 'King of Pop' – the honorific bestowed upon the most popular male singer in the 1970s version of the Australian music awards. For most people, the enduring memory of Dave Graney is the peacock feather outfit he wore to the awards ceremony.

Friday Night of the Wolverine

For this reunion show, Dave was accompanied on stage by long-time partner and drummer, Clare Moore, and other surviving Snakes, Robin Cassinder on keyboard and violin, and Rod Hayward on guitar, with Stu Thomas taking the bass in place of the original Andrew Picouleau.   

The problem or the advantage, depending on how you look at it, of album shows is that you know the playlist in advance. While this takes out the element of surprise, it does mean you can work out which song you're prepared to sacrifice for a bar or bathroom run. 

With Wolverine, it also means that the two best known songs, You're Just Too Hip, Baby and Night of the Wolverine come first and third respectively - so if you're just there for the hits, you can call it an early night and still make it home for the footy.    

Being what aficionados call a 'classic', however, means that 'Wolverine' is more than just the sum of its hits, and so a packed room enjoyed spirited and vibrant renditions of a great set of songs in album order. Tracks like I'm Just Havin' One of Those Lives, I Held The Cool Breeze and You Need To Suffer are all marked by a distinctive musical motif or lyrical flourish - Clare Moore's light backing vocal on 'Cool Breeze', Hayward's grungy blues guitar lick on 'Suffer' and the lyrical conceit of 'I'm Just Havin' One Of Those Lives'. 

One of my favourite tracks on the album is Three Dead Passengers In a Stolen Second Hand Ford. Propelled by Robin Cassinder playing pizzicato on violin, Graney narrates the story of a car accident near the border town of Keith. The song starts with the news of the tragedy and then delves behind the headline to give us some biographical detail of the three unfortunate victims, the personal elements lending poignancy to the song. The song’s country setting is illustrated by a soundtrack of acoustic guitar and violin, which lends the song the air of a bush ballad – but an updated version with mechanical wreckage. 

Graney's performance throughout the set is typically larger than life, his persona and gestures as suitable to the Memo Music Hall stage as they would be to Wembley or Madison Square Gardens. His shadow boxing moves, his little feints and attacks may not be convincing in a UFC cage fight setting, but work well here, showing him as the consummate showman, confident in his material and his performance.

The band played with an assuredness that belied the 'couple of rehearsals' Graney admitted to. He advocated a 'go with the vibe' approach, which seemed at odds with Moore's preferred method, as evidenced by her 'I hate the vibe' rebuttal. But the vibe was most definitely there, and even if it wasn't, we were drunk on nostalgia and beer by that stage so wouldn't have noticed. 

The first set concluded with the final two songs on the album; the epic second part of the title track, which proves that if you've got a riff that good, you should use it more than once, and the quiet, piano led epitaph of Out There (In The Night of Time). 

Kinda Sporty

Half time in the show coincided with the beginning of the third quarter in the football, so we headed into the adjoining RSL Gaming room to take in a bit of the game. Adelaide was getting on top of Richmond at the Adelaide Oval, so it might have been 1993 in the footy as well.  

The band returned for a second set of songs taken from subsequent Coral Snakes albums, including, You Wanna Be There, But You Don't Wanna Travel, The Stars, Baby, The Stars, I'm Goanna Release Your Soul, I'm Not Afraid to be Heavy and Rock n Roll Is Where I Hide with Hayward's classic angular guitar riff and Graney's autobiographical meditation on rock stardom. 

A suitably upbeat version of Feelin' Kinda Sporty as the encore sent us home 'feelin' kinda nostalgic' for the mid 90s, a time when the Coral Snakes were a regular live fixture and in our pre-children lives, we could go out on a Friday night and hide in rock and roll.

Encore: The Tigers lost.

Setlist

You're Just Too Hip, Baby

Mogambo

Night of the Wolverine

I'm Just Havin' One of Those Lives

I Held The Cool Breeze

I Remember You (You’re The Girl I Love)

Three Dead Passengers in a Stolen Second Hand Ford

That’s The Way It’s Gonna Be

Maggie Cassidy

You Need To Suffer

Night of the Wolverine 2

Out There (In The Night of Time)

- - - - - - - - - - -

You Wanna Be There, But You Don't Wanna Travel

The Stars, Baby, The Stars

I'm Goanna Release Your Soul

I'm Not Afraid to be Heavy

Rock n Roll Is Where I Hide

- - - - - - - - - - -

Feelin’ Kinda Sporty

Dave Graney – 2 May 2014

Dave Graney

The Worker’s Club, Fitzroy

Friday 2 May 2014

$14

Everything Is Legendary With Dave

There is only one Dave Graney, and yet at the same time there are so many. On my iPod I tend to sort my music by artist, which is usually fine except for musicians like Dave Graney who insist on recording under numerous guises. Finding a specific album can be difficult – on my artist playlist I have albums attributed to Dave Graney, Dave Graney ‘n’ the coral Snakes, Dave Graney & Clare Moore, Dave Graney & The Lurid Yellow Mist, dave graney and the mistLY, Dave Graney Show, Dave Graney with The Coral Snakes, The Lurid Yellow Mist (Featuring Dave Graney & Clare Moore) and Davey Graney with Clare Moore. He’s basically annexed the view on the small screen of my iPod, and that’s without me having anything digital by The White Buffalos or The Moodists.

And now he’s recorded another album, Fearful Wiggings, which is attributed to Dave Graney on the cd cover, but who knows what variation he might find for the digital version. To mark the release of the album, Dave is playing a show at the Worker’s Club Hotel in Fitzroy, and at $14 a ticket, it seemed churlish not to go. Dave always puts on a good show and it’s worth the price of admission just to see what he’s wearing.

Showtime is at 10pm and the room begins to fill on the dot with 100 or so 40 somethings as the band set up. Dave is looking resplendent as ever in what could be black leather, or plastic, or indeed pleather pants and jacket, topped off by a wide brimmed hat worn at a suitably rakish angle. 

The Soft ‘N’ Sexy Sound

The band eventually saunter on and take up instruments, and as they blink into the lights and fiddle about with leads Dave doesn’t so much launch into a song as tentatively broach it, as if he’s testing the water a little. Clare Moore, taking up a seat behind keyboards instead of drums looks up at him quizzically before eventually joining in.

Dave has always had evocative song titles, (No Pockets in a Jumpsuit, Three Dead Passengers in a Stolen Second-Hand Ford, My Schtick Weighs a Ton, I’m Not Afraid to be Heavy, You Wanna Be There, But You Don’t Wanna Travel) and he doesn’t like to waste them, because a number of his songs consist primarily of him repeating the title in different phrasings and intonations. His opener tonight is just such a number, A Woman Skinnies a Man Up, the meaning of which he emphasised by repeating the title. It’s a low-key opener to the show, but sets up a relaxed, laid back vibe. I later discover it also opens the new album.

Dave took a moment to explain that he’s going to play mainly songs from his new album and then throw in some odd oldies. That suits me, I like to hear artists road test their new material. Cover versions I can always take or leave. I’m not particularly interested in hearing songwriters of great originality churn out Kinks covers, especially if their own songs are better than those by The Kinks, which in my opinion they almost invariably would be. But there’s nothing like hearing a new song from a favourite performer for the first time – especially if the song goes on to be well-known. The Triffids road tested the material from Born Sandy Devotional for nearly 12 months before the album came out; Into My Arms was a regular in Nick Cave’s set list long before he released it. So I was thrilled when the first six songs Dave performed were all drawn from the new album.

The songs are mainly in the loungey vibe he made his own in the 90s, but softer and more intimate – some of them not much more than talking songs. Many of them have unusual phrasings, not unlike jazz compositions, such as How CanYou Get Out of London? Everything Was Legendary With Robert and Country Roads, Unwinding. His album We Woz Curious is probably the closest relative.

There’s a four piece line-up on this night with Dave on acoustic guitar, long-time band member Stu Thomas on electric guitar, Emily Jarrod on percussion, mainly shakers of various shapes and sizes, plus of course long-time partner and collaborator, Clare Moore, this time on keys instead of behind the kit.

I Will Always Have Been Here Before

Graney and Moore are names that are synonymous with each other, perhaps not with quite the same universal recognition as Lillee and Thompson or Simpson and his donkey, but nonetheless intertwined in Australian musical folklore. You can’t imagine having one without the other.

They have been playing together for nearly 35 years, starting in The Moodists. I wasn’t a particular fan of the Moodists – all rumbling bass and crashing drums and you couldn’t make out the words because, a) the music was so loud and b) Dave eewwwed and ahhhhed all the way through them. I saw The Moodists a number of times, as they always seemed to be supporting whatever band I was going to see. But as The Moodists morphed into the White Buffalos and then The Coral Snakes, the sound evolved, as did I, and it all eventually clicked for me.

After showcasing his latest material, Dave then went back to his very earliest, with Where the Trees Walk Downhill and another from the Moodists period, followed by tracks from the Coral Snakes days, including, I Was the Hunted and I Was the Prey, Bad for Each Other, You Wanna be There But You Don’t Wanna Travel and All Our Friends Were Stars. Each track was introduced with witty banter and sharp observations.

The encore gave us one of his most well-known songs, Night of the Wolverine, a request form a member of the audience, (“we’ve had a request, but we’ll play it anyway”), but it is always good to hear. Like Cave with The Mercy Seat or Elvis Costello with Watching The Detectives, he never plays it the same way twice.

At one point he removed his jacket and commented on the portrait of French poet Arthur Rimbaud that adorned his t-shirt, which admittedly I’d thought was a young Andy Warhol, although somehow I knew that was too obvious a pop culture reference for a Renaissance man like Dave. He then played Je Est Un Autre (I Am An Other) based on one of Rimbaud’s poems, and a fitting description of Dave who is both Dave and, as his many digital identities testify, many others.

At the conclusion of the gig Dave sat on the edge of the stage and I was one of a few who wandered over to say hello and buy a copy of the new album. It’s a good album, not ground breaking, or markedly different from his other material, a point he conceded during the show when he highlighted that like most singers, many of his songs were the same ones written in a slightly different way, but Dave Graney is nothing if not the best interpreter of Dave Graney.   

Set list

A Woman Skinnies a Man Up

Everything Was Legendary With Robert

How Can You Get Out of London?

Country Roads, Unwinding

Flower of the Earth

I’m the Stranger in Town

Where the Trees Walk Downhill

??

I Was the Hunter and I Was the Prey

Bad for Each Other

You Wanna Be There But You Don’t Wanna Travel

I Will Have Always Been Here Before

All Our Friends Were Stars

Je Est Un Autre

Night of the Wolverine

The Residents - 23 March 2016

The Residents

Croxton Park Hotel

Wednesday 23 March 2016

$56

The Eyeballs Have It

There is a long tradition of musicians and artists who have cloaked themselves in obscurity and deliberately hidden their faces or identities from the public – either because they want to focus attention on their art or simply because it’s a good gimmick. Or possibly because they realise how shallow we are and suspect that we wouldn’t buy their records or stream their radio waves if we were to see what they actually looked like. 

Sia is the most recent to mask her appearance, but before her front mullet there was Deadmou5 and before him The Knife, and before them Gorillaz, Pussy Riot, Insane Clown Posse, Daft Punk, Slipknot, TISM and Kiss.

Before any of these bands, however, there was The Residents. 

The Residents got together in San Francisco in the early1970s and have spent their entire career masked, most famously beneath gigantic eyeballs and top hats. Over that time they’ve released more than 40 albums of demented avante-garde music and unlike most of the other artists listed above, they’ve also kept their identities entirely secret for that time, which seems almost perverse in the age of celebrity and the ‘selfie’.

From their first album in 1974, Meet The Residents, that poked fun at The Beatles, to The Third Reich ‘N’ Roll, a brilliant deconstruction of the history of pop music that should be considered alongside David Bowie’s Pin Ups and Nick Cave’s Kicking Against The Pricks as one of the great covers albums, through to Eskimo, their exploration of Inuit music and culture, and their American composer series, The Residents were truly the first post-modern rock band – commenting on and actively undermining the medium as they operated within it. Very ‘meta’ as the kids would say now, well at least the pretentious ones would.

My favourite Residents albums are Duck Stab, Eskimo, Mark of the Mole and The Commercial Album – the latter an album of 40 one-minute songs for which they bought advertising time on radio and television so they could obtain airplay.

And here they were, The Residents at The Croxton Park Hotel of all places. It may not carry the political and sociological significance of The Rolling Stones playing Havana, as also occurred this week, but The Residents playing in Thornbury is equally novel, and far easier to get to.

They’re here under the auspices of the Byron Bay Bluesfest. I’m not sure in which permutation of blues The Residents might be said to operate, unless you take the long view that all rock music and its offshoots stem from the blues, but to me it would be like Rammstein playing the Melbourne Jazz Festival.

The Residents have toured Australia and Melbourne twice before; in 1986 they played the Seaview Ballroom as part of their 13^th anniversary tour and in 2005 they played The Forum as part of an experimental music festival. On both occasions I was there with my friend Ralph.

It was Ralph who introduced me to the sound of The Residents. As teenagers our group of friends would gather regularly at each other’s houses and play records. Ralph had several Residents albums, possibly because their record label was Ralph Records, and we all got into them to one degree or another. For this gig Ralph and I were joined by Judy, who had been among the original crew in Ralph’s bedroom listening to Residents albums, as well as John and Bryan. This was a seated show but we took some stools on the side to give us an elevated view.

Rndy, Chuck and Rico

Randy rocks out

I was at the bar getting some drinks when the band came on stage. The barman hadn’t looked up as the music started. However, when the first words rang out a look of genuine bemusement crossed his face when he registered the singer wearing a white tuxedo coat over a sculpted body suit, rabbit mask with horns and black and white chequered Speedos. I was a little taken aback myself.

The Residents now play as a trio and go by the names of Randy, Chuck and Bob, although as ‘Randy’ explained, ‘Chuck’ has retired and it is actually ‘Rico’ on keyboards and sequencer. Given no one knows the real identities of the band members, it’s surprising that they don’t simply enlist someone else to fill in; it’s not like anyone would know.

Appropriately, given we were approaching Good Friday, they opened with Rabbit Habit. After which ‘Randy’ removed his rabbit mask to reveal his old man mask - a bald pate with long white hair at the back and sides. He looked a bit like Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In fact the whole set looked a bit Rocky Horror and I was half expecting to hear Time Warp.

‘Rico’ on keyboards and computer was wearing a top with black and white vertical stripes and pants with with black and white horizontal stripes, while ‘Bob’ on guitar wore a white tux. Both wore skull masks from which sprung white ropey hair. No giant eyeballs yet, but surely later.

The show is called ‘Shadowland - Part 3 of the Randy Chuck and Bob Trilogy.’ I have to confess I‘m unfamiliar with parts 1 and 2, and being The Residents, there is no gurantee that such prequels ever existed. If they did, the tours never came to these parts. As ‘Randy’ explained however, part 1 was about ghosts and death, part 2 dealt with love and sex, while Shadowland, part 3, is about birth and rebirth. “So life in reverse” he added.

Shadowland

Bob hiding behind a mask and the speaker stack

The show featured songs from across the full span of their 40-year career, but even though I have more than 20 Residents albums, my most recent purchase was God In Three Persons from 1988. As such I was familiar with only half their set – and some of that only because I listened to the live recording of Shadowland on the day of the show.

The show they’ve brought to Australia differs slightly from the live recording and they played more songs from the 1980s period than I was necessarily expecting. Even so, musically the show was somewhat limited and unvaried. Regardless of which buttons ‘Rico’ pushed and irrespective of which knobs he twiddled, the sound he generated didn’t vary significantly from a sort of rhythmic jungle clanging with keyboard overlay. Meanwhile ‘Bob’ wrung an almost constant Keith Levene type noise from his guitar. It was good, but there was not much in the way of variety. ‘Randy’ was also adding some electronic elements to the general soundscape and filtered his voice through various effects to get different vocal sounds and timbres. When he wasn’t singing he lumbered around the stage like a chimpanzee, swinging his arms about like someone with physical Tourettes. Not particularly elegant, but then given his get up that was clearly not his intention.

The songs came in album clumps interspersed with short films projected onto a large spherical orb (an eyeball?) at the back of the stage. The films were confessional monologues from masked speakers, amusing vignettes that broke up the somewhat claustrophic music.

After performing tracks from relatively recent albums, by which I mean this century, The Bunny Boy and Freak Show, they played selections from Duck Stab, including one of their undeniable classics, Constantinople. The audience, mainly males in their late 40s and early 50s, started to loosen up at this point and some of us were even singing along to the song’s nursery rhyme refrain, “Here I come Constantinople, Here I come Constantinople, I am coming Constaninople, here I come.”

After a film called The Diver, during which ‘Randy’ tried to catch the bubbles projected onto the screen, they even played some extended and reinterpreted versions of tracks from The Commercial Album; Easter Woman, My Second Wife and Loss of Innocence. These songs were greeted with whoops of recognition from the audience and there was even one guy up dancing.

After the percussive piano and whining guitar of Hard and Tenderly from God in Three Persons they played Ship of Fools from Mark of The Mole, concluding the show with the salutary observation…

“All our lives we love illusion,

Neatly caught between confusion,

And the need to know we are alive”

…which may or may not sum up the nature of existence, but which certainly captures the experience of listening to The Residents.

Randy and Rico/Chuck

Even though Ralph told me there would be no eyeballs (he had watched the show on YouTube), I was still hoping they would make an appearance for the encore. For brand marketing purposes if nothing else. But no, not so much as a costume change, unless you count the bass drum Randy had strapped across his chest when they re-emerged.

They performed Mourning Glories which Ralph whispered to me was from Not Available, and Fourty-Four No More, and then with a wave of their gloved hands and a nod of their masked heads, they disappeared back into the obscurity from which they’d so briefly emerged.

It was an engaging stage show, even if the music didn’t contain quite the same nuance and variety as their records, and the short films were cryptic and entertaining. What any of it had to do with birth and rebirth is anyone’s guess, and would take more analysis than I’m prepared to give it. A more immediate and intriguing question for many in attendance was why there was no merch stand?

We thought about waiting by the stage door to see if we could catch them unmasked as they emerged, but decided instead to repair to the lounge for a drink. There was once a small cottage industry of inquiry dedicated to finding out exactly who The Residents were. There was even a rumour that they were in fact The Beatles, reinvented as a post-deconstructuralist multi-media art collective, but I’m pretty sure it was The Residents who started that one.

For me the greatest achievement of their obscurity is that it has outlasted curiosity. These days it’s probably not that difficult to find out their real identities, but I doubt that most of their fans particularly care anymore, and probably wouldn’t even want to find out anyway. When Kiss took off their makeup, their fans were so horrified they shunned the new look and the accompanying record, and the band had to immediately powder up again for the next tour. I suspect the same thing would happen with The Residents. While they’re in costume they remain the perennial weird musical pranksters, but once they take off their masks and we realise they’re just crotchety old 60 somethings, like us, all the mystique and magic will evaporate and we’ll lose interest. Until then, I’ve got my old record collection to rediscover.

The set list below is my best guess based on the songs I recognised, the titles Ralph whispered to me as they played them, the live Shadowland recording and the set list from their recent show in London, as published on setlist.fm.com

Setlist

Rabbit Habit

Fever Dream

Golden Guy

The Butcher - film

Herman the Human Mole

Harry the Head

Benny the Bouncing Bump

The Libertine - film

They are the meat

Caring

Is He Really Bringing Roses?

The Garbage Man - film

Blue Rosebuds

Weightlifting Lulu

Constantinople

The Diver - film

Easter woman

My Second Wife

Loss of Innocence

The Model’s Mother - film

Hard and Tenderly

Ship of Fools

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Mourning Glories

44 No More

Tweedy - 20 March 2016

Tweedy

Meeniyan Town Hall, Meeniyan

Sunday 20 March 2016

$90

We Are Family

Tweedy & Son - Jeff and Spencer on stage
at Meeniyan

The name ‘Meeniyan’ is supposedly derived from the Aboriginal word meaning ‘moon behind the trees over the water,’ which apart from sounding like the title of a David Sylvian instrumental piece, seems like a lot of information to pack into one word. In a way this suits the small regional town that carries the name because, musically at least, it too contains more than you might expect.

Meenyian is a small rural town in Victoria, approximately 125 kms south east of Melbourne, with a population of less than 800 people, so it’s not the sort of place you’d normally expect to see blues legends, indie rock icons and alt country hipsters. Yet Meeniyan has hosted more major Australian and international artists than towns 100 times its size.

Perhaps it is not so unusual that singers like Paul Kelly, Megan Washington and Dan Sultan would visit, after all, they live in Australia. Less likely however, is the procession of well credentialed American musicians who have trod the boards of the Meeniyan Town Hall; including Martha Wainwright, Calexico, Mavis Staples, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Justin Townes Earle, Cat Power, Neko Case and Jason Isbell, just to name a few. That’s not a bad lineup for a town with one strip of shops. Most of those acts bypass Canberra, the nation’s capital, when they tour, but make a point of stopping in at Meeniyan.

Meeniyan Town Hall 

Why they visit is another question. The Town Hall may sound grand, but it is no architectural wonder. It is the old Mechanics Institute Hall, essentially your standard rural community hall with a stage at one end and a window through to the kitchen where you might expect to see representatives of the CWA boiling the urn and buttering scones. Clearly someone at Lyrebird Arts Council, who runs the music program, has a thing for Americana based on the acts that perform there, but there must be smething else to attract these artists – proximity to Wilson’s Prom, a farm stay and home cooked country meal? It’s unlikely that the usual muso enticements of hookers and blow come into it.

What attracted us was Tweedy, as in Jeff Tweedy of Wilco with his son Spencer on drums playing songs from their album Sukierare. I took the 2.5 hour drive with friends John and Brenton and we were meeting five or six others there as well.

It’s a great set up. No tickets are scanned; you just show the email they sent you when you booked. There are candlelit tables covered in red and white gingham tablecloths, and it’s BYO food and drink. As we walked in people were unpacking picnics from Eskies and uncorking bottles they bought at the bottle shop over the road. You can even order pizza from the local pizzeria and they deliver it to the hall for you. We’d stopped in at the Mirboo North Brewery about 30km out of Meeniyan and picked up some Gippsland Gold Pale Ale to see us through the night.

The album Sukierae is a sprawling double disc set named after the wife and mother, respectively, of Jeff and Spencer Tweedy. They recorded it for her while she was being treated for lymphoma. She is in the audience this night, Jeff Tweedy announced at one point, so hopefully that means she has recovered.

The first half of the show featured material from the album, opening with gentle country tinged songs, Hazel and Fake Fur Coat. They lifted the tempo with Diamond Light Pt. 1 that features Spencer on drums and bass player Darin Gray in rumbling duet. Gray stands at the lip of the stage, legs wide apart, holding his chin out defiantly and nodding his head in time with his own rhythm.

Darin Gray on bass

The sound in the venue is good and our table is up near the front so we have an excellent view. There are some beautiful songs on Sukierae, in particular Summer Noon, intimate and personal songs with lilting melodies that sit well in this country setting. Jeff Tweedy’s voice has a weathered, plaintive tone that is supported by backing vocalist Sima Cunningham.

The band is rounded out by Sima’s brother Liam on guitar and keyboards and Jim Elkington on guitar. The combination of father and son Tweedy plus brother and sister Cunningham, who went to school with Liam, lend the band a Partridge Family feel, just without anyone quite as spunky as David Cassidy.

Tweedy introduces New Moon as one of several waltzes they’ll be playing, and true to his word, they follow up a few songs later with Wait For Love that includes a whistling interlude. Single Low Key and the heartfelt Nobody Dies Anymore round out the first half as the band disappear, leaving Jeff Tweedy alone on stage for a solo set.

His opening solo gambit is the classic I Am Trying To Break Your Heart from Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot followed by One Wing.

Long time fans are treated to an Uncle Tupelo song, New Madrid, followed by Remember The Mountain Bed from the Woody Guthrie Mermaid Ave series.

For most of the Wilco fans in the audience, Jeff Tweedy’s solo set was probably the highlight of the night. He even fielded a few requests and started Hate It Here before having to seek lyrical prompts from the guy who requested it. Given this opening, the audience member continued singing from his seat until Tweedy had to say, “I’ll take it from here.”

Having had a sly dig at Rolf Harris, our friend Manny shouted out for Two Little Boys, but sadly Tweedy didn’t oblige. Instead he rendered further requests redundant by closing with fan favourites Passenger Side, I’m the Man Who Loves You that he dedicated to his wife, and A Shot in the Arm.

The band rejoined Jeff Tweedy for an encore of cover versions, including Mavis Staples’ Only the Lord Knows, Neil Young’s The Losing End and Woody Guthrie’s California Stars.

A standing ovation brought them back for one more, and they added their voice to Bowie tribute season, playing Five Years. Tweedy said they’d never performed the song before, which was perhaps evident when he fluffed a few of the lines, but really, when the world is about to end, as it is in the song, we won’t hold that against him.

The moon was well above the trees and over the water as we embarked on the drive home. John had a Wilco mix going in the car and we sung our way back down the South Gippo Highway and were home by 1am.

Encore – I’m glad we saw Tweedy in Meeniyan, but fans that opted for the Melbourne show at The Recital Centre got a special treat when Courtney Barnett joined band for the final encore, performing Bowie’s Queen Bitch.

Setlist

Hazel

Fake Fur Coat

Diamond Light Pt. 1

Flowering

Summer Noon

World Away

New Moon

High As Hello

Wait For Love

Love Like a Wire – cover

Low Key

Nobody Dies Anymore

- - - - - - - - - -

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart

One Wing

New Madrid

Remember The Mountain Bed

Hummingbird

Spiders

Hate it Here

Jesus Etc

Radio King

Passenger Side

I’m the Man Who Loves You

A Shot in the Arm

- - - - - - - - - - -

Only the Lord Knows and He Ain’t You

The Losing End

California Stars

- - - - - - - - - -

Five Years

Patti Smith’s Horses – 18 October 2015

Patti Smith’s Horses - Adalita, Courtney Barnett, Jen Cloher, Gareth Liddiard

Melbourne Town Hall

Sunday 18 October 2015

$33.15

Hobby Horses

The live album show, in which an artist performs one of their classic albums live in its entirety, is now commonplace.  But if you don’t happen to have an album that wears the ‘classic’ mantel, then don’t worry, just perform someone else’s classic album. As part of the Melbourne Festival, Jen Cloher has put together a line-up to perform Patti Smith’s debut album, Horses to celebrate its 40^th anniversary.

The idea, Cloher explained in interviews to promote the event, came after a series of concerts in which local artists performed classic Beatles albums – The White Album, Rubber Soul and Revolver. She thought it would be a good idea to celebrate a classic album by a female artist. She’s right; it is a good idea, and if you don’t have what it takes to tackle Pussyfoot or Pat Wilson’s Bop Girl, then Patti Smith’s Horses is a good place to start.

The songs on Horses are not conventional, in that they don’t follow a verse-chorus-verse type structure, and in typical Patti Smith style, there are epic nine-minute songs, monologues and moments of free-form poetry. It’s not so much that her songs go off on a tangent; they start on one and then veer off further in unexplored terrain.

For an album that opens with a cover version of sorts, Patti’s take on Van Morrison’s Gloria, it seems like an unusually difficult album to cover, so the choice of singers was always going to be critical to the chances of success.

Here, Cloher chose exceptionally well. Her own most recent album, In Blood Memory, shows that she can match both Smith’s brash guitar approach as well as her bold singing style. Plus, her wispy-edged haircut is reminiscent of Smith’s in Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous cover portrait. Likewise, Adalita; Australia’s first lady of rock, could cover a Danni Minogue song and make it sound good. Then there’s Courtney Barnett, the ‘it’ girl of Australian indie music, and also, as it happens, of Cloher’s heart. On paper her deadpan style doesn’t necessarily seem a natural fit for Smith’s songs, but she does bring attitude and more helpfully perhaps, a sizeable audience. The inspired choice is the inclusion of Gareth Liddiard, lead singer of The Drones, whose own songs rattle and ramble, spurt and snarl in a manner reminiscent of Smith’s. If Patti Smith has a male heir, it is possibly Liddiard.

I met my friend Jason out the front before the show. I was only 11 years old when Horses was released in 1975 so it’s not an album I grew up with, but knowing my taste, Jason, who is a few years older, introduced me to Smith’s Easter and Horses albums in my mid-teens. And in the mid to late 90s I saw Patti Smith perform at The Palais.

The Melbourne Town Hall with its massive pipe organ seems like a grand venue for this venture, but I’ve been here before for gigs and the sound is less than ideal for rock music. The stage is nice and high though, so short-asses like me can stand back a bit and still see quite easily.

Side A

Adalita channels her inner Patti
photo: theaureview.com

The show began without fanfare; Adalita walked out and kick started things with Smith’s classic opening line, “Jesus died for someone’s sins, but not mine.” Perhaps that was fanfare enough. Adalita was magnificent; she prowled the stage and spat out the song with gusto and Smith-like menace.

Next up was Barnett who took the stage to great acclaim to perform Redondo Beach. Without her customary guitar, she hunched her shoulders and remained at the mike stand for the reggae tinged number. It was an understated rendition by Barnett who seemed conscious not to hog the limelight.

Even before the show it was inevitable that Liddiard would take Birdland with its intense atmospheric sound, literary pretensions and irascible spitting lyrics. It might even be a Drones song. Like Adalita on Gloria, he absolutely nailed it.

The band consisted mainly of Drones from what I could tell – Dan Luscombe was on guitar and Steve Hesketh on keyboards and I think the drummer might have been Jen Sholakis from Cloher’s band. While the supporting cast remained in the shadows, the spotlight remained on the respective singers.

Courtney Barnett relaxes at Redondo Beach
photo: theaureview.com

Side B

Adalita was back to rip through the anthemic Free Money to round out Side A, before Jen Cloher made her first appearance to sing Kimberly. As Jason commented, Cloher’s reading was more of an impression than an interpretation, but it is perhaps a sign of her generosity that she took this song, which is, arguably, the weakest, or least remarkable song on the album. It was like being drawn to sing Maxwell’s Silver Hammer in an Abbey Road tribute show, without even having the benefit of an all-in “Bang! Bang!” sing-a-long moment.

After Barnett sang Break it Up, this time her demeanour more exuberant to match the boisterous song and it’s big chorus, Cloher returned for a redemptive and show stealing version of the epic nine minute title track Horses. Obviously relishing the opportunity to sing an undeniable rock classic, she injected everything she had into her performance, suggesting that she had deliberately underplayed her hand during Kimberly so that she could channel all effort and emotion into this one song. As the lyrics exhort, she did the watuzzi, the Boney Maroney and much more, even sprinting a couple of laps of around the stage perimeter.

Jen Cloher "It goes like this, goes like this..."
photo: theaureview.com

After her remarkable rendition, Liddiard’s final song, Elegie was always going to be a bit of a low key let down. That’s not a criticism – that’s the role the song assumes on the album as well.

For the encore they played My Generation, which was the B-side to Gloria and a bonus track on the cd version of the album. Given the audience was made up of an equal mix of people who would have known the album from its first incarnation, as well as people from the Coutney Barnett musical epoch, it was hard to know which generation they were referring to. Perhaps that was the point…all rock fans are pilgrims to Patti Smith. In keeping with Smith’s recording, it was a ragged and raucous reading that degenerated into all three women shouting the song’s refrain into the mike, Barnett writhing on the ground, while Liddiard expunged feedback from his guitar. I’d have preferred Because The Night or Rock N Roll Nigger, but I suppose they had to stick to the script, and if nothing else, it made for a suitably destructive ending. Still, would it have killed them to get Daryl Braithewaite up for his version of Horses?

Aside from the Town Hall’s muddy sound and overpriced warm beer, the only problem with the gig was the lack of fanfare or any sort of communication with the audience. I know it is very rock ‘n’ roll to eschew such niceties, and you don’t necessarily need Bert Newton as MC, but someone to introduce the singers and the band would have been nice.

Even so, at approximately $30, this represented exceptional value, even if the whole thing only went for an hour. If a stage musical of Patti Smith’s life is ever put together, a la Johnny Cash, ABBA and Queen, Adalita or Jen Cloher would be perfect in the lead role. And at the rate it is selling, perhaps for next year’s festival Jen Cloher could put together an all-star cast to pay tribute to partner Coutney Barnett’s debut album, Sometimes I Sit and think and Sometimes I Just Sit – it’s already reached classic staus.

Set list

Gloria – performed by Adalita

Redondo Bech – performed by Courtney Barnett

Birdland – performed by Gareth Liddiard

Free Money – performed by Adalita

Kimberley – performed by Jen Cloher

Break It Up – performed by Courtney Barnett

Land – performed by Jen Cloher

Elegie – performed by Garth Liddiard

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My Generation – performed by Adalita, Courtney Barnett, Jen Cloher, Gareth Liddiard