Safe As Milk

There’s this Frank Zappa album called Hot Rats. On it there’s a song called Willie the Pimp . Don Van Vliet (as Captain Beefheart) sings that song. It was recorded in 1969. A year later Captain Beefheart (and His Magic Band) released the now legendary masterpiece, Trout Mask Replica, produced by Zappa for his Straight label. Langdon Winner, writing in Rolling Stone at the time, hailed Trout Mask Replica as "the most important and most astonishing work of art ever to appear as a phonograph record". This story is about lore, myth, allegory, or, in simple terms, legend: the legend of Don Van Vliet. Legend has it that Van Vliet wrote the album’s twenty-eight songs in eight and a half hours on a piano, then spent the next year teaching them to his Magic Band.

Winner wrote, somewhat prophetically, that, "although it is a masterpiece, it will probably be many years before American audiences catch up to the things that happen on this totally amazing record". Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, is another to hail Trout Mask Replica as the "greatest" album he’s ever heard. "I played Trout Mask for my blues-loving friends", he says, "and we’d sit around saying, Wow, if this is how great pop music is in 1969, just think what it will be like in 1984! Of course we didn’t realise this was the best album of 1984".
Yet the album was a commercial disaster at the time of its release.

Rock journalist, Lillian Roxon, put it most succinctly, stating that Trout Mask Replica "was one of the most critically acclaimed financial disasters in the history of recording". Undeterred, Van Vliet, as Beefheart, recorded a further ten albums, including the 1975 Bongo Fury with Frank Zappa, before finally retiring as a musician in 1982. He told the New Musical Express, "I’m definitely finished with the rock star scene - although I never thought of myself as a rock star for a minute. Many people tried to turn me into one but I fooled ‘em".

These days he’s fooling them again. His new art form is paint on canvas, he’s successful, and, to prove it, a mini-retrospective exhibition of forty of his works, titled Stand Up To Be Discontinued , recently toured a number of museums in Europe, including the Bielefelder Kunstverein in Germany, and the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery in England. Curated by Andreas Beaugrand, Director of the Bielefelder Kunstverein, the exhibition included many paintings from private collections which were on public display for the first time.

According to David Breuer of the Brighton Museum, Van Vliet "is now one of the most collected of living artists, having carved a growing reputation as one of the finest contemporary expressionist artists". The Brighton exhibition also featured photographs of Van Vliet by the film-maker, Anton Corbijn, now a close friend of Van Vliet’s. Corbijn is one of a number of collectors who own several Van Vliets, and remains in regular contact with his friend. He has also just completed a short film, Some Yo Yo Stuff: Don Van Vliet - an observation of his observations.

"Don Van Vliet is an elusive artist, both geographically and intellectually", says Corbijn. "The short film piece I have done on Don doesn’t tell you where he lives or give away too much about the "whys", but it does draw you closer to him and his world, without ever invading or losing a certain mystery or respect. I was really nervous when I asked him", Corbijn admits, "because I didn’t want to abuse the friendship, but he said he’d been waiting for me to ask! There’s so much power in him, and it doesn’t get around, despite the fact that he’s a successful painter now, and with a great gallery. He’s living a lot more comfortably off his paintings than he did off his music. But his music is still so influential with young bands, and people want to see what he’s up to."

Don Van Vliet launched his professional career as an artist just three years after calling it quits as a musician, with a one - person exhibition at the Michael Werner Gallery, Cologne, in 1985. He was forty-four. Werner had taken on Van Vliet following high recommendations from fellow artists , Julian Schnabel and A.R. Penck. Penck found Van Vliet’s work, "images of the demonic animality", oscillating "between classical seriousness and a detached ironic view of the ego’s dependence upon instincts" to be "very American, very Western and very modern". He even wrote a poem about the "captain", Fur Don Van Vliet :

There are so many demons
The captain paints a painting
The painting is very good
He is a good painter
The demons are getting clearer
They are dying
The captain smokes a cigar

Since 1985 the cigar-smoking captain has mounted some fifteen one-person exhibitions in Europe and the USA, including London’s prestigious Waddington Galleries and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Yet Captain Beefheart fans will have been aware of the art of Don Van Vliet since around 1970, when it first appeared on the back cover of Lick My Decals Off, Baby, the follow-up album to Trout Mask Replica. The following year, the back cover of The Spotlight Kid featured Van Vliet’s neo-expressionistic caricatures of members of his Magic Band. And in 1972, Rolling Stone reproduced a line-drawing of Van Vliet’s in its "Letters to the Editor" column.

It is interesting to note that even around this time Van Vliet considered himself first a painter, then a writer, and lastly a musician. "Most people don’t know this, but I was painting throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s - I never showed my work then because I didn’t feel like it", he says. However, David Breuer recalls a Van Vliet exhibition in Liverpool in 1972, "15 very large canvasses, and they all sold". In his own estimate, by that year, Van Vliet says he had in reserve 15,000 poems, 40 plays, 10 novels, 600 paintings, and dozens of albums of the length and quality of Trout Mask Replica.

Bill Brown, an Australian who found himself in the right place at the right time, worked briefly as Tour Manager for Captain Beefheart in 1975. He remembers Van Vliet as a "prolific writer". "In cafes, motel rooms and the like, he’d be writing on napkins, little pieces of paper, that sort of thing. He kept a portfolio of poems, drawings, little ideas for paintings". Brown describes Van Vliet as an "inspired person", "tangential", with "bright blue eyes" and an "intense gaze". His most vivid memory of Van Vliet is as a "gonzo poet", yet he expresses no surprise that Van Vliet is now a successful painter.

Dave DiMartino, former editor of Cream magazine also remembers first meeting Van Vliet around that time. The occasion was an interview for the magazine. "He asked if I’d mind him drawing", DiMartino recalls. "He just took his pad and drew things left and right. He asked me if there was anything I wanted him to draw. He drew me about 4 or 5 pictures with a No. 2 pencil, and wrote some poetry on each of them. I was thrilled beyond belief. These were works by Captain Beefheart. So I saved them. Now, on the basis of his art, I sit here and say, wow, I’m glad I have these. There is probably some value to be had in this, at least in terms of a rock music fan. Now I’m sitting here thinking, my goodness, 50 or 100 years from now, these drawings will have some meaning I know nothing about. To me they have more to do with a couple of guys sitting around a table, drinking some beer, talking about rock n’ roll".

By 1978, Van Vliet’s art had become an key element of Captain Beefheart albums, moving from back to front cover, with one writer even suggesting that "some pictures of the period are reproduced on the covers of the records almost as if to illustrate the content". The front cover of Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) , for example, featured Green Tom, one of Van Vliet’s most evocative figurative works, suggestive of the voodoo-like, Mardi Gras gaity to be experienced by listening to the vinyl inside. The album cover had become his own private art gallery. In 1978, when asked by an interviewer forZigZag Magazine (the title of which was taken from a Captain Beefheart song, ZigZag Wanderer) whether he was still painting, Van Vliet’s response was to simply hand the interviewer an invitation to an exhibition opening.

Don Van Vliet began life as an artist as a child prodigy, sculpting zoo animals out of wet soap, and actually made regular television appearances doing just that, while Portuguese sculptor, Augustonio Rodriguez, looked on. At age thirteen he won a scholarship to study art in Europe, but was stopped by his parents from taking it up. "My parents told me all artists were queers. They moved me to the desert, first to Mojave and then to Lancaster". It was here that he met Zappa.

In 1959 he enrolled as an art major at the Antelope Valley Junior College, but quit soon after in disgust. He went to work, first as a commercial artist, and then as a manager of a local shoe shop chain. "I built that chain into a growing, thriving concern", he recalls. "Then as a kind of art statement I quit right in the middle of the Christmas rush leaving the whole thing in chaos".

Legend has it that Van Vliet invented the name Captain Beefheart to honour his uncle Alan, an exhibitionist, who, every time he went to the toilet knowing his girlfriend was nearby, would leave the door open while urinating, caress his member and mutter, "What a beauty this is, it’s like a big, fine beef heart". In 1963 Van Vliet together with Frank Zappa wrote a film script and accompanying sound-track titled Captain Beefheart Meets the Grunt People. The film never eventuated, but, as Jessica Rutherford, Director of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, points out, "the name and persona of Captain Beefheart was adopted by Don Van Vliet to launch an extraordinarily fertile and innovative assault on popular music preconceptions of the 1960s and ‘70s".
By 1965, Van Vliet as Beefheart had recorded the timeless Safe As Milk album.
According to Jessica Rutherford, Safe As Milk, along with Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby , "stand as landmarks of psychedelic extremism and, in retrospect, can be seen as musical counterpoints to the American abstract expressionist tradition of the previous generation." And she is not the only person to thrust the cross of Pollock et al., on to Van Vliet’s shoulders. Fred Hoffman, in whose Santa Monica gallery Van Vliet exhibited in 1990, wrote in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue:
"Reference to the Abstract Expressionist Era is neither casual nor
gratuitous. On the contrary, it is made deliberately, with the full
knowledge that it is a heavy burden for an emerging artist to bare the
cross of such highly revered figures as Pollock, DeKooning, Tobey.....
Nonetheless, Van Vliet’s paintings and drawings warrant the
association because of their shared artistic intentions and subsequent
approaches to picture making."

Van Vliet himself names only one Abstract Expressionist as an influence, that being Franz Kline. "I like the way Franz Kline handles space", says Van Vliet. "It’s pretty easy to breathe in the space he creates". This influence becomes obvious when comparing Van Vliet’s later works, such as Gorillacrowor Boneless Spirit to his earlier figurative works which owe much more allegiance to German expressionism. Yet, as with his music, Van Vliet the painter conforms to no style or school. "He hasn’t ever really made a compromise in the presentation of his art, and that’s what appeals to his fans, both as a musician and a fine artist", says David Breuer.
"Art history plays quite a big part in his art, the same way as with his music. Although it was entirely new, different and startling for its time, you could still hear a lot of the influences that towards making it, notably blues, R&B and free jazz. It’s what he did with those influences that made it new. The same applies to his art. There is a definite historic perspective, which is the Abstract Expressionism of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Krasner, Pollock, and particularly Franz Kline are big subliminal influences on the way Van Vliet presents his art. In a sense his art could be said to be rather old -fashioned in the sense that it is definitely sticking oil on canvas."

Karsten Ohrt, Director of the Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, which hosted the Van Vliet exhibition in Odense, Denmark, also acknowledges the influence of Kline, as well as Nolde and DeKooning, but is quick to point out that "there is a whole cult thing about Van Vliet and Beefheart. As an art historian, when I look at these paintings, I can feel that it is a musician that has done these paintings. They are filled with movement, with rhythm. The way he works with his brush on the canvas is filled with rhythm. It’s obvious that this is a gifted musician you are looking at."

Ohrt finds Van Vliet’s way of working with canvas "very unorthodox".
"He uses open canvasses. He has great spaces of white paint. There is the great contrast between the filled and the empty. He paints his canvasses white and then puts his figures into that white, so as the white stands in sharp contrast to the colours."

Van Vliet himself says that "I don’t paint according to any hard-and-fast rules. I just explode. What I try to do is turn myself inside out on canvas, to freeze the moment so that the person seeing it can observe what I froze. Vegetation inspires me, but I like the desert too". He describes his paintings as "making the sounds of shadows breathing on themselves. I don’t listen to music when I’m painting. It’s completely quiet, and there’s only the music that’s playing in my head. There’s always music in my head, I can’t turn it off. Maybe I wouldn’t want to turn it off."

Yet it was a very resentful and disillusioned Van Vliet who, as Captain Beefheart, quit the music business in disgust in 1982. At that point it seemed that the music had been turned off. "For my whole life they’ve repeated to me that I was a genius. They said the same about my sculptures, slapping me on the back. But in the meantime they’ve also taught the public that my music is too difficult to listen to". For Karsten Ohrt, the blue-black female figure inCrepe and Black Lamps (1985) represents Don Van Vliet’s view of the world of rock. "Her face is heavily lined and distorted like a mask concealing dark powers. Her entire being conveys a mixture of uncontrolled hatred and paralysed dread."

Perhaps heeding his own advice that "it’s not worth melting into the bullshit to find out what the bull ate", Van Vliet now lives a reclusive life in the small Northern Californian town of Trinidad, where he is happy to deal with his "comet" career as a painter. Described by one writer as a "West Coast hermit", he does not welcome intrusion. "The art world is providing a better life for me than music did", says Van Vliet. "It helps not having to deal with fans, and I’m much better off now. I’m just up here painting every day and getting beaten up by my cats. Painting is a colour straitjacket, and I look forward to putting it on in the morning. I prefer painting to music because I can spend a whole day on a canvas and then cancel it. Painting over has a nice feeling. It’s all just from the paintbrush to the canvas. And the paint doesn’t say anything. It just allows me to make mistakes."

But the question remains, if he hadn’t been Captain Beefheart, would he be this successful as a painter. Van Vliet himself answered this question in 1969, long before it was even being posed. Disillusioned with the response to Trout Mask Replica, he told one writer that he was thinking of giving up rock n’ roll to go into another field. "He told me that he was at least as good an abstract painter as De Kooning", recalls rock journalist, Miles.

Fred Hoffman acknowledges that his 1990 exhibition of Van Vliet’s work was well attended, probably split 50-50 between fans of Van Vliet’s art and his music. "I’m also interested in him as a musician, but I wasn’t really coming from the perspective of the phenomenon of this crossover. That wasn’t my intention in doing the show, although I knew it would bring out an audience. I had a genuine interest in his art."

Michael Werner admits that Van Vliet’s former persona creates quite a problem. "Many people know his name as a musician. It’s very hard to make a career as a painter, and that’s a big obstacle". Yet Werner seems to have little trouble in selling Van Vliet’s work for anywhere up to $US 35,000. And those who do buy, interestingly buy more than one. Anton Corbijn owns a number of pictures, as does Julian Schnabel. Matt Groening owns quite a few pictures, as do the Saatchis. "Very few of the music lovers buy his paintings because most of them don’t have the money", says Werner, who thinks most of the people buying his paintings look upon Van Vliet as a "young artist". "I think this is the right way of putting it", Werner adds, " a young artist needs a ten-year time frame to start a career."

David Breuer agrees with Werner but believes that, without the Beefheart pedigree, it would be more difficult to promote Van Vliet the artist. "Don Van Vliet as a practising artist has only been working for just over a decade, and, in that sense, he’s a new young artist. That would make it harder to get an audience for difficult contemporary abstract expressionist art by a young artist. His art is difficult in the same way that his music could be said to be difficult. It’s entirely the presentation of a personal and interior artistic vision. It’s essentially the product of one man’s imagination."

David Heale is an ardent Beefheart fan, who, on first viewing Van Vliet’s exhibition at London’s Waddington Galleries in 1986, expressed "disappointment" because "everything seemed so slight". However a subsequent viewing changed his mind. "That which at first looked naive gave way to the wild and sometimes menacing nature of the subject matter", he wrote. "Even sparse scenes were given a hard edge by the uncompromising way in which they were actually painted. paint freely applied, frenzied brush marks complimented by soft washes of colour. the effect could be as sensuous as it could be brutal."
Langdon Winner wrote that "in the world of Captain Beefheart the extraordinary is the rule. Stories about his life and art have taken on the character of legend". Nothing’s changed, except the name. He was born Don Vliet and added the "Van", some say, in homage to his other great influence, Vincent Van Gogh. "I’ve seen Van Gogh’s that were no bigger than baby-size, and they were just outrageous", says Van Vliet. David Breuer enjoys this "immediate, emotional and intuitive response."

Yet the legend is in danger. There are persistent rumours that the Captain is not well. Those who have heard his home-recorded recitation of poetry on the CD included in the Stand Up To Be Discontinued exhibition catalogue have walked away shocked. His voice is weak, hesitant. "Everyone who listens to the CD will be heartbroken by the sound of his voice", admits David Breuer. "It’s certainly true that, even if he wanted to make music again, I don’t think he’d be in a position physically to do so."

Diedrich Diederichsen, in his catalogue essay, Captain Beefheart , muses over such a comeback. "The return of such great and unfulfilled figures of the 1960s such as Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop, shows that its possible - even in rock music conditions - to come back to a project decades after it was begun and complete it. A new Magic Band would be a joy to us all". Yet we know that the Captain has gone. Don Van Vliet is the project for completion, the subject of art, not rock, magazines, his art a joy for us all. As he once told a Danish journalist, "it makes me itch to think of myself as Captain Beefheart, I don’t even have a paddle."

Darling It Hurts

Sunset Warmun East Kimberley

Easter 1978, I remember Good Friday was wet. Bruce, Bill and I were hanging out to see a hot new band called The High Rise Bombers we’d read about in The Age. 

Good Friday was a pretty nothing day back then.  Channel 7 was doing it’s Royal Children’s Hospital Appeal and that was about it.  Nothing was open, but there had been a small change in the law, and a few places were allowed to open at midnight.  Café Paradiso in Carlton was one, that’s where the Bombers were playing.

We had our own band, The Male Models, myself on bass, Bruce Dickenson (not Iron Maiden Bruce) on rhythm guitar and Bill Hay on extraordinary stage presence and vocals.  Bill was an artist, a young painter, and he loved his rock n’ roll.

Bruce and Bill had written some great songs, “Black and White Transmission” (“you say you come in colours, but you don’t, you don’t, you don’t……..black and white transmission”), “Shopping”, and the classic “Vasoline and Rubber Gloves.”

We’d rehearse at Bill’s place in Blessington Street one night a week,  amidst the pile of used pizza boxes, VB bottles and cigarette butts, but were still to perform live. Seeing The High Rise Bombers that night made us chafe at the bit. What a band!!!!!

A bloke in a leather jacket seemed to be the front man, Paul Kelly from Adelaide and a blond bloke on guitar, Martin Armiger, was real cool.  They were doing their own songs, had a brass section which included Sally Ford, and were fantastic. They lasted less than a year, but are now one of those bands that eveybody you talk to says they saw, even if they didn’t.

Following the demise of the Bombers Martin Armiger joined up with Stephen Cummings in Sports, Chris Dyson worked with Paul Kelly for a while in The Dots and Paul himself of course went on to become really famous as Paul Kelly the great Australian songwriter and performer. 

He’s just published his 576-page ‘mongrel’ memoir, “How to Make Gravy”, which you can buy from his website store along with an 8 CD Box Set, all for $125 bucks. He has written some truly great songs, like “Darling It Hurts” and “Maralinga (Rainy Land)”, all about Yami Lester, one of my heroes. 

I used to smile whenever I drove through Darlinghurst and saw the sign, “Darling It Hurts”, in the apartment window, thinking it was a homage to the song.  But I now discover the sign was there long before Paul wrote the song, and the homage is the other way round, a tribute to Toby Zoates.

Paul Kelly’s memoir is an easy read, full of interesting and funny anecdotal tales, like when Michael Gudinski rang him in late 2008 and asked; ‘How do you think Leonard Cohen would go?’ Or even where the title, “How to Make Gravy”, comes from.   

The High Rise Bombers don’t rate much of a mention, less than a full page in fact: “The High Rise Bombers lasted only nine months – too many chiefs – but, strangely, seemed to get more famous once we’d broken up. My main memory of being in the band is people in the crowd yelling ‘Play Faster!’”

Perhaps that’s just it, he doesn’t remember. 

But there are two historic photographs of the band reproduced in the book. That seems to make the band special. And on the very next page are two photographs of the “final resting places of Queenie McKenzie and Rover Thomas, in a bush cemetery in the East Kimberley.” Special too!

Jackey Coyle and I get a mention, on pages 368-9, all about the sunny afternoon Paul and his manager Bill Cullen called in to the Warmun Art Centre in the Kimberley on their way to Derby in August 2007.  We were managing the Centre at that stage.

The album Stolen Apples had just come out, featuring the song “The Ballad of Queenie and Rover”, all about the two deceased Indigenous artists. Paul was interested in seeing their country.

As Paul tells it, Jackey and I showed them round, the Art Centre, the Roadhouse, the cemetry.  I’ll let you read his story, but that was and is the only time I’ve ever actually met him. Jackey had her photo taken with him and some of the artists and ended up being in Rolling Stone. Life’s journey, huh!!  

Oh, by the way, Bill, Bruce and I never yelled out ‘Play Faster!’

Paul Kelly with Patrick Mung Mung and Betty Carrington at Warmun

Every Picture Tells A Story

My friend Steve Baird recently posted this pic up on Facebook and it brought back all sorts of memories for me. 

PART ONE

I guess it could be titled “Rock Stars at Play”, although Chain were never really “rock stars” as such. 

The picture was taken sometime in early 1971, most probably in a park in South Caufield and features the Northcote Road Country Club “cricket” team.

In the back row (from left to right) are Arthur (Carson’s roadie, can’t remember his surname, or perhaps I never knew it), Barry Sullivan, Barry Harvey (Big and Little Goose), Phil Manning, George Kaufman (also working with Carson at the time), Graeme Rothwell, Jiva (Chain’s roadie) and yours truly (yeah, check out the hair).

Matt Taylor was living with his partner, Toni, in Northcote Road, Armadale (not far from where I went to Primary School and my father played bowls) hence the name of this particular team.  His two housemates, Pete and Dave, are in the front row, along with “Sleepy” Greg Lawrie (from Carson) and Matt himself.

Jiva was my mentor and still is.

I was working as his “assistant” (for the princely sum of 10 bucks a gig).  As you can see, he’s holding a camera but not actually taking the picture. He was just getting into photography and it’s most probably his partner Rhonda Parker using another camera who snapped the picture.

When Rhonda snapped the picture I’d not long been back in Melbourne, after spending some months living in a house in Paddington, Brisbane with Rhonda and her friend, Helen Korn.

The girls were kind to me, I was working one day a week as a gardner there, earning $8 and sleeping on their lounge-room floor. We’d met at Monash University and were all running away from broken hearts.

One Friday night I suggested we jump in my FJ and go down to Fortitude Valley to see the “new” Chain, who were in the process of reforming. 

I’d seen the previous incarnation with Warren Morgan and Glyn Mason a few times earlier that year in Sydney and thought they were fantastic. 

Now the Gooses had returned to home soil and were rehearsing the new band with Phil Manning still on guitar and his old mate Matt Taylor singing and playing harmonica. 

Along for the ride was faithful roadie, Jiva, quoted on the cover of “Chain Live” as saying: “It was always such a pleasure to keep them supplied.”  If you listen very closely to Phil Manning's closing credits on "Chaser", you'll hear him thank Jiva for keeping the band supplied with "ooblie-dooblies".  Then you'll hear Jiva laugh.  That was Jiva!! 

I needed a job and thought “Roadie, why not?” so, after seeing the band for a second time, I nervously walked up to Phil Manning and said, “Hey, have you got  a job?”

Well, it didn’t happen straight away. But the long and short of it is that Jiva fell in love with Rhonda (and she him), came round to the Paddington house lots, brought a couple of his favourite albums (which became mine and still are today), Muddy Waters “Fathers and Sons” and Ginger Baker’s Airforce, as well as "Chain Live", and one day in late October announced that Chain were ready to return to Melbourne and would I like to come and be his assistant.  Would I!!!!!!!

PART TWO

On the way back to Melbourne we all stopped off in Sydney, paid a visit to Festival Records in Pyrmont and recorded a couple of songs the band had been rehearsing in Brisbane, “Black and Blue” and “Lightning Ground”. 

Back in Melbourne Chain became part of the Michael Gudinski – Michael Browning run Consolidated Rock stable.  Gudinski and Browning didn’t have their own record labels yet, but they did decide to start their own rock magazine “(Daily) Planet.”

That’s where Rhonda’s picture was first published. She and Jiva worked on the editorial team. I was pleased as punch when it first appeared.

A few years later it was included on the Mushroom release, “A History of Chain” and I was immortalised forever. I would pull the record out at dinner parties. It does contain three of the best live tracks you’ll ever hear, recorded amidst the heat, dust, flies, watermelon pips and requited lust at Wallacia in January 1971. Shortly after that, the photograph was taken. 

Bit by bit I lost touch with most of my fellow subjects. My time with Chain ended, George Kaufman got me a gig with Blackfeather and I still remember the night Led Zeppelin came to see the band play at Chequers. My hair was longer than Robert Plant’s!!!

I don’t remember why, but soon after that George left the band and I took over.  Bad timing George, "Boppin’ the Blues" was about to become Number One.

I never really saw George again, but he became famous in a different realm.  I kept hearing whispers that he’d been in trouble with the law, but it’s only been in the Google age that I’ve been able to find out all.

George Kaufman became the “Armadale rapist”, and as Liz Porter points out in her fabulous book, "Written on the Skin: An Australian Forensic Casebook", George’s case became the first in Australia to be solved by the use of DNA.

Expecting to fly

The Hawks have imploded, and how.  No way out of this now.  They are in freefall and there is NO bottom. 

With two minutes to go in the game against the Saints two weeks ago they were in complete control.  A fantastic passage of play had seen Cyril involved all the way down the ground. He’d received, passed and received again some 40 metres out, straight in front, for him a bread and butter shot.  

This IS the sealer, 13 points up, and the dream is really alive.  Finals football in 2010 is now a certainty for the Hawks.  What a year.  This will be one of the greatest wins in the club’ s history, and certainly the greatest since Grand Final Day 2008.  

But something has happened, something eerily reminiscent of Dallas in November 1963.  Docklands has its own Texas School Book Depository, its own grassy knoll.  As Cyril runs in to kick he quickly looks to his left,  and, as if terrified by what he has just seen,  lets the ball leave his boot in despair. 

It’s a goal, but there is an umpire on the boundary line holding an orange flag.  Is that Lee Harvey Oswald I see?

The goal doesn’t count and St.Kilda have a free kick 50 metres down the ground. They get the ball to Riewoldt within range, but he kicks a behind.  Hawthorn lead by a goal with 90 seconds to go and have possession, but there is complete chaos everywhere.  Campbell Brown, bloodied on the bench, is screaming, terrified. He knows.  The game is gone.  And it is.

With 26 seconds left to go, there is a ball-up near the St.Kilda goal.  The Hawks, in total panic,  leave goal-side open and McEvoy kicks one. Scores level, siren goes, the unlosable is lost, and so is Hawthorn’s psyche. 

Grant Birchall it turns out is the offender, interchange infringement, stupid cunt!! Went over the line before he should. The Hawks try to cover it up, but simply put, they imlode.  And there is now no coming back.

An unwinnable game against the Power in Adelaide next week, and following that, the Swans in Sydney.  Can’t win that either.  Campbell Brown has broken Del Santo’s nose.  He gets two for that, out for both those.

Then Cyril inexplicably goes bananas against the Power, gets two reduced to one, but, even more inexplicably the Hawks appeal, and he gets the full two.  He’s out for the Melbourne game as well.  It’s like somebody (in Geelong maybe) has pointed the bone. Brent Guerra gets two from the Sydney game and it’s deckchairs all around. 

This is Titanic and she’s really going down. I can’t watch!!

On The Air (Again)

A couple of weeks back I had an offer I couldn’t refuse.  Helen Jennings asked me if I would like to fill in as presenter of her weekly radio program, Roots of Rhythm, on 3PBS-FM. I jumped at the chance to go back to my roots in radio, and present a Jazz and Blues-based music program. 

Over the past year I’ve been taking advantage of a couple of (the lesser-expensive) music download sites, Soudike and GoMusic, to expand not only my knowledge of Jazz and Blues music in general, but also my iPod music library in particular.

I guess I’ve had a pretty comprehensive knowledge of Blues music for many years now, my interest first ignited by the British bands who turned to Afro-American Blues in the early 1960s.  Just who was this Hooker guy that wrote ‘Boom Boom’, ‘Dimples’ and ‘Don’t Look Back’, this Reed guy who wrote ‘Big Boss Man’, this Dixon guy who wrote ‘Spoonful’ and ‘Little Red Rooster’, this Burnett guy who wrote ‘Smokestack Lightning’.’

But when it comes to Jazz, I’m a bit of a ‘Johnny-come-lately.’ In the 60s I have to admit I often sat and pondered the flip side of the single ‘I’m a Man’ by The Yardbirds, ‘I’m Not Talking’, and wondered who was this Allison guy who had written it. It was only some 25 or so years later when I heard the original that I realised it had its roots in Jazz. That was interesting! So ‘Parchman Farm’, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (with Eric Clapton) and Georgie Fame both did versions of that. 

Slowly, it was coming together for me.  Sometime in 1980s I found a vinyl copy of Mose Allison’s Western Man album in a second-hand shop in St.Kilda and thought I’d better buy that.  Ten or so years later I discovered Ornette Coleman.  But it wasn’t until I started listening to my wife Jackey’s very beaten up but still very playable vinyl copy of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew in 1999 that I really got it. 

Miles was and is the key.

I stayed with Bitches Brew for quite a while before venturing into some John Coltrane, via my friend, the artist Robert Hirschmann, whose work I’d been commissioned to write an article on for Asian Art News (published Volume 10 Number 6 November/December 2000).  I went forward to Jack Johnson, back to In a Silent Way, then back even further to the two great quintets and discovered Hank and Herbie, Mobley and Hancock.

Today I’m still learning, knowing I’ve still got a long way to go.

Here’s the playlist from my radio show, and some notes on each .

‘Watermelon Man’ by Herbie Hancock from Takin Off,  his first solo album which also features Dexter Gordon on sax (Blue Note 1962).  Thanks to Trevor Hoppen for turning me on to this one. The Manfred Mann version has always been a favourite.

‘Lonely Woman’ by Ornette Coleman from the classic Shape of Jazz to Come  (Atlantic 1959).  With the rhythm section of Charlie Haden on bass and Billy Higgins on drums, this is 4 minutes 59 seconds of sheer bliss. Billy incidentally also played on ‘Watermelon Man’. (And, if you can, check out Charlie Haden’s 22-minute version of ‘Lonely Woman’ from his The Private Collection album.)

‘Willow Weep for Me’ by  Wynton Kelly from Kelly Blue (Riverside 1959) and ‘Wine tone’ by Cannonball Adderley from Plus  (Riverside 1961).  Tracks from two members of the so-called Miles Davis first great Quintet brought together on the album Sides of Blue, released last year to celebrate the 50^th Anniversary of the release of Kind of Blue.

‘I’m Not Talking’’ by Mose Allison from The Word From Moose (Atlantic 1964), then ‘I’m Not Talking’’ by The Yardbirds from The Studio Sessions (Decal 1965).  I really wonder whose idea it was to record this, Jeff Beck or Keith Relf.

Next came a tribute bracket to one of my very favourites, Louis Jordan.  I started with the truly haunting ‘Something for Louis’ by Louis Jordan from I Believe in Music (Concord Jazz 1973). Recorded in Paris just a year before his death, the album features John Lee Hooker sideman Louis Myers on guitar and the great Fred Below on drums.

Then a couple of loving cover versions, ‘Caledonia’ by B.B King from his tribute to Louis, Let The Good Times Roll (MCA 1999) and ‘We the Cats (Shall Hep Ya)’ by Joe Jackson from Jumpin Jive (A & M 1981), the album which turned a whole new generation on to Louis Jordan.

‘I’m in an Awful Mood’ by Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson from Kidney Stew is Fine (Delmar 1969). ‘Cleanhead’ can come close to Louis Jordan on occasion, and on this album “Cleanhead’ has not only done that, he has T-Bone Walker on guitar.

Next came a thoughtful bit of segueing, ‘T-Bone Shuffle’ by Buddy Guy and Junior Wells from Play the Blues (ATCO 1972), an album some critics say is the best blues album ever recorded. I think it’s pretty good and it features Eric Clapton on guitar.  From there  I went to ‘Snatch It Back and Hold It’ by Junior Wells from his first album Hoodoo Man Blues (Delmar 1965), coincidentally also his first collaboration with Buddy Guy.

A couple of years after Junior recorded his original version, an Australian guy by the name of Matt Taylor came along and switched a couple of the words in the title around and created a home-grown Australian classic, ‘Grab a Snatch and Hold It’ by Chain from Towards the Blues (Festival 1971). When it comes to Australian Blues music, this album is as good as it gets.

‘Blow in D’ was originally released as the flip side of Chain’s single ‘Judgement’ and was included on the 30^th Anniversary CD re-release of Towards the Blues. Having worked as Road Manager with the band in 1971, the song was always a live favourite of mine, as was ‘Dust My Broom’. This raunchy version was recorded live at the Wallacia Festival in January 1971 and can be found on History of Chain (Mushroom 1974).

I finished the program with a couple of personal favourites, ‘Going Up The Country’ by Taj Mahal from The Natchl Blues (Columbia 1968) and the truly haunting vocals of  ‘It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine’ by Blind Willie Johnson from The Complete Blind Willie Johnson (Columbia).  Recorded in 1927, it still raises every hair on my arm. Led Zeppelin paid tribute on Physical Graffiti.

Thanks for the opportunity, Helen, I’d love to do it again.

I'd like you to paint my portrait

Phil Vincent is 56 years of age and has lived with cerebral palsy since birth.  He has little use of his right arm and walks with incredible difficulty. “As a young child, I was called names,” he says. “I found this hurtful especially when I was called a ‘spastic.’  It made me feel as though I was different and not like other people.  In addition, people would sometimes stare and make remarks about my walking.”

The third of six children and the only sibling to suffer the disability, Phil says his parents were determined to give him every opportunity to have a proper education and were against the suggestion to place him in a workshop after he finished at D’Alton (Special School, as it was called in those days) in Hobart.  “Instead, I went to St. Virgil’s College for my secondary education,” he says. “I was treated well by students and teachers.  The one concession I was allowed was to leave five minutes early at the end of the day.  This was to avoid being knocked over by the students in the rush to get home!”

Phil Vincent has worked for the Australian Taxation Office in Hobart for more than 25 years, after initially studying to be a Catholic priest in Melbourne, the first person with a disability from Hobart to be accepted for such studies. He is an avid Essendon supporter and it was a friend’s suggestion that he look at a portrait of former Essendon great, James Hird, by Melbourne-based artist, Martin Tighe, that led Phil to contact Tighe and commission the artist to paint his portrait.

“My disability caused me to have a very poor self-image for many years, which eventually led to severe depression,” Vincent states.  “A friend of mine had read the article on Martin’s Tom Wills exhibition last October and sent me Martin’s web link.  He told me to make special note of the James Hird portrait. I was impressed with how well the portrait had captured James in action."  

"I’ve wanted to have my portrait done for many years now," Vincent emphasises, "so I took the opportunity of emailing Martin. It was the idea of nothing ventured, nothing gained. I told Martin I was a person with a disability and I wanted to challenge the concept of what defines the body beautiful. Not to be controversial but simply to say I’m a person with a disability and I’m OK with who I am.”

For Martin Tighe, an artist who delights in the macabre this was a rare challenge. In the past he has themed an exhibition of paintings around the famed disappearance of a group of young girls at Hanging Rock, as well as a series of paintings based on the life of the last person to be executed by the State, Ronald Ryan. “The character of Tom Wills interested me because he’s one of Australia’s tragic figures who stumbled over many of the obstacles which life presents”, says Tighe, “and I feel I do my best work in relation to a tragic story. Tom Wills was a man of vision and energy but the hook for me for the paintings was his tragic demise.”

Tighe describes his portrait of James Hird in a similar manner.  “It is a sombre painting,” he states.  “There is no distinction between the black of his Essendon guernsey and the black background, they merge into each other.  It’s a sombre image of someone who’s taking a pounding on a football field.  While he is six feet two and can take a great mark, his physique is quite light so he was certainly an attractive subject to paint.”

Tighe accepted the commission to paint Phil Vincent’s portrait based on telephone conversations between the two and some black and white photographs Vincent sent him.  It wasn’t until the two men met that Tighe actually realised the extent of the disability Vincent possessed.  “When Phil is walking his disability is much more obvious.  When he’s moving he becomes quite hunched over and it’s difficult for him,” Tighe states. “The person who walked through my front door was even more energetic than the person I’d been speaking with on the phone.  I was a little uncomfortable in how much of Phil’s disability I should portray, but I knew it had to be a very very strong likeness.”

Tighe need not have worried. “I was amazed at how well Martin has captured me,” Phil Vincent states upon viewing the completed portrait. “I use a walking stick to get around. And, as you can see in the portrait I’m holding my famous red cap (everyone who knows me will recognise that). Each time I look at the painting I discover something new. My initial reaction was that I thought my expression in the portrait was a little severe.  But now I’m comfortable with that.  And I don’t normally wear short sleeves, but the day Martin took the photographs to base the portrait on was particularly warm.  So that has worked to advantage as well in showing my affected arm.”

All images copyright Martin Tighe.

Full version of interview available below.

Mistah' s Birthday

It's Mistah's Birthday. He's 12. He had a BIG day yesterday at the Street Party for the Brunswick Music Festival. Boy he was admired. And you should have seen the young lady with the hula hoops!!