Reelin’ in the Years
I’m listening to ‘Texas Flood’ by Stevie Ray Vaughan, not one he wrote but one of many he made his own. He was a small boy with a violent drunk for a father and a brother who could play the guitar very well, but it must have been only a matter of time before his big brother Jimmie realised that little Stevie really was a prodigy.
There’s a story that Jimmie asked Albert King, the reigning blues god then, if the fourteen-year-old Stevie could jam with him. Albert was a man of great physical size with hands as big as mops. He looked the boy over and said ‘sure’, not something he usually said to skinny white kids.
Stevie was something else even then and he impressed Albert. They became friends. Stevie could always rise to the occasion. Not long before SRV died at thirty-five, he got clean and was better than ever, if that was possible. He only had five or so years of freedom from drugs. After a gig he switched seats on a helicopter with Eric Clapton on a foggy night, and the pilot couldn’t get them over the ridge. He died instantly with all the others on the chopper. The deaths were put down to pilot error
When Stevie’s on my speaker, he’s alive and he’s my age, pale and sweaty in his fancy cowboy hats and his Cuban heels for a bit of height. Someone once wrote that listening to Stevie’s song ‘Riviera Paradise’, was like watching Nureyev dance. And that doesn’t even count his version of Jimi Hendrix’ s ‘Little Wing’, ‘Lenny’ which he wrote for his first wife ‘Lenora and the old blues song, ‘Things I won’t do again’. I only discovered him recently, better late than never.
New Order still gives me elements of Ian Curtis in their jerky ebullient melodies. I think of Joy Division with sadness and gratitude. I played it constantly when I was very depressed, until I could play no more. I had to get up to play the album ‘Closer’ again and again and after twenty or so times, I’d had enough and looked out the window and saw sky and trucks roaring up and down Curzon Street, North Melbourne where we lived. And yet after Ian, New Order managed to make these joyous songs with sad lyrics, like ‘Dreams Never End’ and ‘Ceremony.’ They must have been about Ian. People can complete the circle if they can heal, they can come back to life.
As a young woman it was Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Dylan who made me love music. It was never just the music with them, the writing counted too. I think I learned to write by listening to Joni. Dylan, in ‘It’s Not Dark Yet’ is about the dark and he never spares you, never pretends. ‘Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain, behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain.’ Dylan also said without the words there would be no music, they were always the reason.
My father was a music lover with two records: the ‘1812 Overture’ by Tchaikovsky and a Beethoven Symphony no 9. He’d get drunk most nights but some nights the music came out and the red velvet radiogram was in for it and the small house shook. He cranked the music as high as it would go and god help you if you moved or didn’t look enthralled. Wriggling was totally out. These nights usually ended in tears. To little kids it sounded like a cacophony and was a form of torture. Classical music still makes me sweat.
Music was strictly his. He called Frank Sinatra the Chairman of the Board which I found insufferable but wisely shut up about that. When I was about fourteen, he came home early and caught me leaning against the radiogram listening to Cat Stevens, ‘Tea for the Tillerman’. I thought I was a goner. But he just ruffled my hair and said, ‘Isn’t music lovely sometimes?’ A good day lasts a lifetime. Well, I took the escape and got off to the bedroom. As we grew, music belonged to us. To all of us. When Dad died, we forgot music for the funeral and I grabbed a cassette from my car, it was Cat Stevens, and we played ‘The Wind’ and it seemed to suit him somehow. ‘Things that I used to do’ might have been better.’ Steely Dan’s ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ would have worked too. Anyway speaking about parents, happy mother’s day to all mums. What would the world be like without you?
By sixteen I was working on weekends and Friday nights in the shoe shop. I blew all my money on concerts. Took the green bus to festival hall to see Creedence, Joe Cocker and Mad Dogs and Englishmen with Leon Russell. Getting the bus home with your mates, our ears ringing through the dark night and everyone still shouting about what we’d seen, was a bond that is probably still within us all. We had seen another world, but we’d heard the future.