Tracks of My Mind

I’ve recently been outed for being old beyond my years—in the Australian, no less—and I am starting to worry that it might be true. It’s like discovering you’ve got bad breath. Why didn’t my friends tell me?

A sure sign you’re getting old is when you start complaining that popular music isn’t what it used to be. I started talking like this in the late 1970s, so I’ve been ageing for a very long time now. In the past I’ve tried really hard not to be a dinosaur, but I’ve now decided to give up. I am old, and I have old opinions. You can all just get over it.

Being able to sing or play an instrument seems to be an optional extra in popular music these days. Physical beauty is the primary prerequisite for today’s pop star—musical talent is quite helpful, but not essential. Innovation and creativity are niche attributes that appeal to distinct subcultures, but aren’t to be let loose on an unsuspecting general public.

Okay, I know I’m exaggerating. There are plenty of fantastic new artists around whose musicianship and talent are unquestionable (give me a few minutes and I will name some). But I still can’t shake the feeling that I was lucky enough to spend my youth in a period of intense cultural creativity broadly equivalent to the Renaissance. Such periods only come along every now and then, maybe once every four or five hundred years. Perhaps we have since relapsed to the mundane norm and are now destined to muddle through for a few more centuries.

I grew up in a musical family. My mum was a fabulous sing-along pianist, who could improvise almost anything on the piano at a party. My dad attended a private school for a few years on a choir scholarship, of all things. He sang in the church choir four times a week, and his parents didn’t have to pay fees. My sisters both play the piano, and one plays the flute. I have nephews who are very talented jazz musicians. One’s doing music at Monash, and the other is doing a PhD in artificial intelligence at Swinburne. How scary is that?

I was forced to start learning the piano when I was six years old. I complied reluctantly, as it wasn’t a very cool thing to do in early 1960s Orbost. Now I’m glad I stuck it out, though—my only serious indulgence since I left politics has been to buy myself a beautiful second-hand Kawai baby grand. My old Ronisch upright was a sturdy performer but grand pianos make mediocre players sound good, which is quite helpful when I am tackling Beethoven sonatas and Bach fugues.

Growing up in East Gippsland with grandparents in Melbourne meant lots of lengthy car trips and we would sing all the way. I acquired a strong repertoire of old songs from my father. If you ever want someone to perform songs like ‘There is a Tavern in the Town’, ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’, ‘The Twelve Apostles’, ‘Harry Was a Bolshie’, ‘Kiss Me Goodnight Sergeant Major’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ or ‘The Minstrel Boy’ at a party, I’m your man.

I also picked up the choir habit as a teenager in the choir at St Paul’s Cathedral in Sale and as a founding member of the Victorian Trade Union Choir. I can still belt out quite a number of Anglican hymns with feeling and, hopefully, some subtlety and nuance. Few rock’n’roll anthems can compete with hymns like ‘The Pilgrim Song’, ‘Jerusalem’, and ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’. As the church had a near monopoly on popular music for centuries, I guess that’s not particularly surprising.

I can also sing a reasonable range of leftie songs such as the ‘Internationale’, ‘The Red Flag’, and a fair few Irish revolutionary songs for good measure. It’s as Tom Lehrer famously sang: ‘… he may have won all the battles, but we had all the good songs’.

My popular musical awakening occurred in the mid sixties. I can recall the emergence of the Beatles, and the Seekers was a universal phenomenon in country Victoria at the time. I watched Dick Williams’ Hit Parade on the ABC and listened to my parents’ handful of records on the radiogram. One stayed with me, a compilation of Australian songs called Our Kinda Country. Filled with great songs from the Seekers, Frank Ifield, Jay Justin, Slim Dusty and others, this album imprinted a musical country hick streak in me that I’ve never quite outgrown. I’ve been waiting for more than forty years to publicly perform my version of Chad Morgan’s ‘The Fatal Wedding’, complete with towelling hat and funny teeth. I suppose my adoring public will just have to wait a little longer.

Movies played an important role in my musical awakening. I can still sing the songs, and even recite some of the dialogue, from Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music and Oliver. There are few songs more beautiful than ‘Feed the Birds’ and ‘Edelweiss’. I still get a shiver down my spine listening to the haunting theme music from Lawrence of Arabia and the brooding menace of ‘Sanctus’ from If, my two favourite movies of all time.

I discovered rock music in a big way when I got to boarding school at the beginning of 1968. There wasn’t much else to do: listening to the radio was one of the few pleasures we were allowed occasionally. The tidal wave of youth rebellion reflected in the popular music of the time was a powerful tonic for early teenage boys like me, incarcerated in an almost Dickensian institution.

In the first couple of years, it was all about the Beatles. My first two albums were Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road. Like several of my compatriots, I shelled out scarce pocket money to buy singles such as ‘Something’ and ‘Let It Be’ before I had even heard them.

One or two subversives resisted the dominance of the Beatles and worshipped the Rolling Stones. Then Creedence Clearwater Revival suddenly became very fashionable. I liked them all, but I remained very much in the Beatles camp.

Then an event took place that became the signature of a generation: Woodstock. Like countless teenagers around the world, I was blown away by the Woodstock triple album and movie. The incredible performances of Ten Years After, the Who, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Country Joe McDonald and Crosby Stills and Nash were imprinted on my psyche. At the peak of the war in Vietnam, with Australia slowly starting to shake off the shackles of the stultifying social norms of the 1950s, Woodstock was a potent symbol of dissent for a kid locked away in a country boarding school. One kid in my year at the boarding house had a tape recorder and a cassette of the album. We played it over and over.

I drank it all up. I read Go-Set every week and then started buying more subversive publications such as Digger, Planet and Nation Review. I’ve still got a small collection of these magazines, which are no doubt collector’s items of sorts. I also took to watching GTK on the ABC; an innovative rock show that played great clips of live performances.

As I moved into my later teens, my musical tastes began to diversify a little. In 1970 I made a small choice that was to mark my musical orientation for a long time. Two softer songs from new performers were doing well on the charts, and I liked both. I only had enough money to buy one single, and I vacillated: ‘Your Song’ or ‘Fire and Rain’? Elton John or James Taylor?

Eventually I bought ‘Your Song’. I quickly became a devoted Elton John fan. I bought everything he produced. I am still the proud owner of an immaculate copy of his very first, totally obscure and very ordinary album, Empty Sky, which predated ‘Your Song’. His output up to the autobiographical album Captain Fantastic and The Browndirt Cowboy is an amazing collection of musical and compositional virtuosity. I’ve seen him live numerous times, and I play some of his great early songs on the piano. I’ll never forget seeing Elton John and Billy Joel play dueling pianos for more than twenty minutes at an MCG concert years ago. The level of musical skill of two supposedly run-of-the-mill pop stars was absolutely breathtaking.

After his mid-career split with Bernie Taupin, Elton John produced a lot of rubbish for many years. He tacitly acknowledged this in his concerts, which were still dominated by the great songs from the early to mid seventies. Only one recent album, The Captain and the Kid, bears comparison with his great works such as Tumbleweed Connection and Honky Chateau. His jazz piano on The House Fell Down is worth getting the album for alone.

Some of the tracks on these early albums are even better than the great Elton John singles of this era. ‘Burn Down the Mission’, ‘Country Comfort’, ‘Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters’ and ‘Curtains’ are all great songs. I first heard ‘Burn Down the Mission’, which is more than seven minutes long, on Graham Berry’s album show on 3XY, which was on every Sunday night. No singles were played, and genuine music fans got the chance to hear some of the better album tracks. Unfortunately this approach wasn’t that commercial, so these days all we get is stations such as Classic Rock playing the same Led Zeppelin and Midnight Oil songs over and over again.

Gradually my musical interests diversified, and I got into bands such as Cream, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, the Doors and Deep Purple. One band in particular came to the fore: Pink Floyd. After hearing my cousin’s imported edition of Meddle, the Beatles were soon dethroned as my favourite band. My early university years coincided with Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. While Lou Reed, the Doors and Leonard Cohen also figured prominently, Pink Floyd was the ultimate degenerate student hovel band. Wish You Were Here is still my favourite album of all time.

During my first year at university, I was flicking through albums at Suttons, a large record store at the bottom of Elizabeth Street in Melbourne. I came across an album containing a song called ‘Mr Tanner’, so naturally I had a listen. I liked what I heard, so I bought the album.

The record was Short Stories by American singer-songwriter Harry Chapin. Because of the ultra-conservatism of Australian radio stations, he’s known in this country for one song: ‘Cats in the Cradle’. It’s a good song, but across a dozen or so albums he wrote better ones, including ‘Taxi’, ‘Sniper’, ‘A Better Place to Be’, ‘Where Are You Now Jane?’ and ‘Dogtown’. Chapin was renowned for telling stories in his songs, and he was also a dedicated political activist on the Left. I bought all his albums and in 1978 attended his only Melbourne concert, when I was lucky enough to meet him. I still have the ticket stub he signed for me. Sadly Chapin died at the age of thirty-eight.

Australian music was undergoing a renaissance in this period. I became a hard-core fan of Spectrum, which like Harry Chapin is remembered for only one song, ‘I’ll Be Gone’. Built around lead singer, guitarist and songwriter Mike Rudd, they reformed for a few gigs in a small venue in Brunswick Street in 1989. I managed to get to two of them. I’ve still got my copy of their sensational double album Milesago, but try as I might, I’ve never been able to find a copy of their first album, Spectrum: Part One. I do, however, have a copy of the first Master’s Apprentices album, which I bought for $2.50 at a small shop in Orbost several years after it was released in 1967. This era produced a number of great Australian bands including Chain, Skyhooks, Blackfeather and the Flying Circus.

My interest in Australian bands began to intensify in the later 1970s. The greatest of them all, Cold Chisel, exemplified the mood of the period, with Don Walker songs such as ‘Khe Sanh’ and ‘Star Hotel’ that have stood the test of time. I never quite made it to the Australian cricket team, but I have been known to belt out ‘Khe Sanh’ with a few mates very late at drunken parties on many occasions.

My political leanings naturally drew me to Midnight Oil in the 1980s, but I started to go a bit quirky and got right into a couple of local bands that shared most of their personnel, North 2 Alaskans and Pete Best’s Beatles. Built around Frank Savage, Johnny Topper, Gary Adams, Spencer Jones and occasionally Slim Whittle, these bands played a bizarre mix of covers and original songs satirising everything under the sun. You’ve probably never heard of it, but to me ‘Alamein Train’ is the ultimate suburban anthem.

In the later 1980s my allegiances shifted to Weddings Parties Anything, the main alternative contender for the title of greatest Aussie band of all time. WPA created a distinct sound and many great original songs that enabled them to dominate the Melbourne live music scene for many years. They incorporated Australia’s history and Melbourne’s landscape into their songs in a way that no-one else has equalled. A Melburnian automatically knows what the title of WPA song ‘Under the Clocks’ means.

I once suffered the indignity of having the black eye I had received slamdancing at a WPA gig written up in the Melbourne Herald. My union was involved in a nasty dispute with another union, and an industrial relations journalist was convinced that I had been thumped by the other union’s secretary. So I had to tell him the real story, which then appeared in the paper under the heading ‘33 going on 18’ or something along those lines.

Once I got into Parliament, my ability to pursue my musical interests waned dramatically, assisted by the arrival of small children. I still went to the occasional concert and bought the occasional CD, but I had other things to worry about. With a few colleagues who also played musical instruments, I played the piano late at night in the members’ bar at Parliament House. And even when I have got around to buying some music, it’s usually been to fill a gap in my collection from years gone by. Every now and then I have stumbled across a relatively new band that I like, such as the John Butler Trio, but usually I am reaching back into the dim distant past.

When it comes to music, I suspect becoming a prisoner of your youth is inevitable. Just as my father sang Second World War songs until he died, I aim to have ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ played at my funeral. Time is the critical ingredient in appreciating music—time to go to pub gigs and concerts, time to listen to the radio, time to chat idly with friends about it all. As I got older I had more money to spend on these things, but much less time to do them. I am sure there are plenty of fantastic artists out there now, notwithstanding the triumph of the visual over the musical, but I never seem to have the time to find them. The mass-produced stuff that is churned out on contemporary commercial radio stations is generally awful, but there was plenty of similar material in the 1970s too. I just ignored it.

If you want good music, you’ve got to go and look for it. Maybe I’ll just have to get my act together and get an iPod. Perhaps my problem isn’t the music: it might be the technology. If I could just get over the demise of vinyl records and the emergence of CDs I’d be set!

© Lindsay Tanner