For some it is a spoon . . .

'10 More Years', Shangri-La Records, Various Artists Compilation, 1998, CD.

For others, like me, a record or CD. I bought this as a sonic souvenir, one of several, of my trip to Memphis. Don't worry, I also bought some mindless Elvis paraphernalia and am very proud of the souvenir tourist photo, still on our fridge, of me and my girlfriend, Cass, standing in front of a fake Graceland backdrop.

10 More Years: Shangri-La Records 1989-98 is a compilation of highlights from Memphis indie rock label Shangri-La's first ten years. As indie rock comps go, it's not too bad. Listening to it, however, reminds me of my troubled relationship with indie rock. So much of it sounds the same - is it the most utilitarian of genres? I guess it is the sprawling American heartland offspring of the punk rock ideal.

Memphis is a small town with an incredibly huge music history. Sort of like Uruguay in the World Cup. W.C. Handy, Sun Records, Al Green, Big Star to name but a few who have contributed to the great legacy Memphis provides to contemporary music. So where to fit indie rock in the scheme of this town's capital M, capital H, Music History. Well, of course, there is no need to fit it in anywhere.

Being a relatively small city with a small music scene, it is perhaps understandable that a lot of these bands - The Grifters, the Hot Monkey, Simple Ones - sound alike. I actually really like The Grifters and "Radio City Suicide" (not found on this comp) from their 'Ain't My Lookout' album is a phenomenal example of detuned guitar, loud-soft dynamic, grunge pop from the mid-90s. Up there with Superchunk's "Slack Motherfucker" in my books. But there is a sameness to this stuff that turned me off indie rock awhile back when. A couple of tracks on here have a bluesier bent in keeping with the rich Memphis blues tradition.

What you do consistently hear, loud and fuzzy (not too clear), is the Alex Chilton influence. Not so much the pristine first two Big Star albums but the fucked-upedness of '3rd' or 'Sister Lovers' or whatever it's called and his subsequent solo albums. It's a willful sloppiness that marks so much of the enervated output of American indie rock: it's a marker gene in the slacker DNA. It makes you wear work boots even though the most work you ever do is go to the fridge to get another beer. It gives you just enough philosophy to sit around and realise life's screwed up, but not enough to get up and do anything about it.

Ok, calm down, enough of the Christian bootcamp rhetoric. Just put those Rollins Band records away.

That's better.

I'm glad I bought this Shangri-La compilation though. It's a little piece of a town I really loved, along with the cheesy Elvis souvenirs and the printed postcard from Al Green thanking me for turning up to church (even though he was in NY at the time - major bummer) and the Sun Records t-shirt that has faded from black to bottle green.

At least I can listen to a CD: what the hell do you do with a souvenir spoon?

Minor Excursions

Last post was a minor diversion: had to share the joy. Back to the alphabetical grind with the next post.

Mining for the Coptic Mother Lode

Once upon a time op shops provided a reasonable return for the intrepid record collector. In recent years, this return has turned from stream to trickle to drip: Acker Bilk, Mrs Mills, and James Last clog up dusty crates, anything worthwhile shopped out by hipsters (not I, surely!) and curious teens.

Sure there are plenty of classical records in among the Klaus Wunderlich and James Galway but I haven't totally embraced the classics quite yet. So I had pretty much given up on op shops as a source of music nourishment.

I wasn't even going to bother checking. My friend George and I took a day trip to Pakenham, an outer suburb/country town, 60km or so south-east of Melbourne. After stopping for deep-fried, sugar coated jam donuts at a roadside donut van, we came across the first op shop. My donut sugar hit encouraged me to peruse the records. Andre Kostelanetz, 20 Piano Honky Tonk Classics, Richard Clayderman, my fingers automatically flicked quicker and quicker.

Hang on, Labelle 'Nightbirds' - an early disco-soul classic produced by Allen Toussaint - for a $1, in perfectly good condition. Not incredibly rare but something I've wanted to hear since reading Peter Shapiro's 'Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco' - and for $1.

Flick, Bert Kampfaert, flick, stop. Glenn Gould 'The Little Bach Book', still in plastic wrap. Gould is a renowned pianist and Bach interpreter. And Brian Wilson loves Bach. Brian Wilson is God (you've been warned). And Gould looks a little demented on the back cover - for a $1. I was regaining the old excitement. Maybe someone in Pakenham or Nar Nar Goon with a cool record collection had died! I couldn't believe my luck!

My fingers tingled, my flicking once again had purpose.

Winifred Atwell was surely a man in a wig. Flick. When will the pan pipes make a comeback? Flick. Engelbert Humperdinck, what a hunk of a man. Flick. Tom Jones, I've got this one. Flick.

Then, in big weird font across a black outer space background 'MOOG' and just beneath, in orange 70s digital style font 'The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman'. On the cover Dick Hyman and photo negative clones of Dick float eerily on the moon's surface. Dick and his clones have just exited their explorer mooncraft. It's a disconcerting cover that reminds me of pre-perspective painting.

The liner notes on the back start with: "The Startling Sounds of the Brave New Music World! . . . singular, synthesized composition that heralds the future art of Sound-Expansion!"

I know the name Dick Hyman. He's one of those space-age bachelor pad guys. Hang on, doesn't he have something to do with Woody Allen? Is it the same guy? George thinks this particular record might even fetch a few bucks on Ebay. Whatever the case, this also looks too good to pass up at $1.

I paid my $3 for three records with the wonderfully awful feeling of ripping off a charity organisation.

We reached Main St and immediately spotted two more op shops. By now I was quietly optimistic - not expecting a rare batch of 70s psych records from Uzbekistan but hopeful of something better than Don Lane records. We moved boxes of disjointed dolls, haggard teddy bears and forgotten board games and started excavating.

Boz Scaggs 'Silk Degrees' - this is a party record. Always scuffed and scratched, you can smell Bundy & Coke in its grooves. Go ahead, smell it. Why would you not blast 'Lido Shuffle' at 2am to annoy neighbours who have just called the cops? I've held off buying this on CD because I remain eternally convinced I will find a decent op shop copy for a $1 one day. Today's not that day.

Slim pickings here. Though I do pick up a Big Sound compilation of late 70s American power-pop featuring Memphis' truly forgotten power pop idol, Van Duren. This guy came along after Big Star and released two (I think) albums of anthemic, nerdy, guitar rock in the late 70s. Excellent find for 50 cents and Marc Bell (Marky Ramone) plays on one track.

Next place we walked into didn't look promising. The records are sprawled near the front door. They look tatty and diseased. They're selling nice looking lemons for $1 per bag though. I'm here, so I may as well look.

I flick rapidly to the very last records. What's this? Plain sleeves and the writing on the labels is in Arabic except for some small print about the Institute for Coptic Studies. There's about 10 of these records. I have no idea what Coptic music sounds like. I know the Copts are based in Egypt and are one of the oldest Christian communities in existence. Plus there's a few of what look like Egyptian and Lebanese pop records from the 60s.

Armful of Coptic relics and middle-eastern pop oddities, I compose myself and approach the counter. I can't let this 10-year-old counter-girl know how potentially great these records might be: act nonchalant, like buying Coptic liturgy records is something people do everyday. Bread, milk, paper and a Coptic liturgy record, please.

"I'll get my Mum."

Oh shit. Mum would have to know how cool Coptic records are, at the very least she's going to look at my Western shirt and think "city hipster" and charge Ebay rates.

Play it cool, man.

"The records are 50 cents."

$6.50 later plus $2 for my two bags of lemons and we're outta there. We listen to the radio on the trip home, but all George and I can think about is the tantalising prospect of listening to the mysterious sounds of Coptic liturgy records.

Stupid Honky Can't Help It!

The 5.6.7.8's, 'Can't Help It!', Au Go Go Records, 1991, CD

One of the most exhilarating movie experiences I've had in the last few years (and I haven't had many) was Kill Bill. I was a qualified Tarantino fan up to that point. I liked Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction but they both had a blustering quality that seemed to act as a smokescreen to any real humanity. I know saying that misses the point about artifice and construction and homage and blah blah but I like a little heart in my films.

It wasn't so much that RD and PF had no heart, the heart was there but heavily obscured by cleverness and tricks. So Jackie Brown was a revelation: particularly Tarantino's handling of the potential love affair between Pam Grier's title character and Robert Forster's bail bondsman. Tarantino's soundtrack choices were impeccable as usual and the soft 70s soul used to connect Jackie Brown and Max Cherry accentuated the almost-but-not-quite nature of their romance.

Which, in a round about way, brings me to The 5.6.7.8's.

My girlfriend was in Europe at the time. I took the opportunity to go on an old-fashioned road trip with a good friend. Part of the trip involved visiting his Mum, a beautiful woman with a gift for making great Hungarian food, for a few days in Surfer's Paradise.

Surfer's Paradise is on the Gold Coast, one of the fastest growing SLAs (statistical local areas) in Australia. It's an ever-expanding Legoland of shopping malls and housing estates. I think Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, CA: 'there is no there there'. Something to that effect. The Gold Coast is similar but probably warmer and sunnier. Bridget Fonda's surfer girl from Jackie Brown forever saunters in bikini top and wrap-around skirt between the shopping mall and beach on the Gold Coast.

We're Melbourne guys. The skin on my stomach was now a large, aggressive blister after an ill-advised sunbaking session. We drove aimlessly up and down the main strip in our little red VW Golf hire car. We began to feel like retirees waiting to die. This was after just two days.

By the third day we were scouring for menswear bargains at outlet stores.

Thankfully, our local mall, Harbour Town, had a cinema complex. We looked wrong amid the clumps of teenagers in surfwear - criminally wrong. We had probably picked a kid-friendly session but it appeared that adults on the Gold Coast didn't watch movies. They shopped for homewares and real estate.

Two or so hours later we walked out of Kill Bill and looked at each other as if we had just seen a burning bush in the desert. The numbing stupor of our Gold Coast surrounds retreated and life was now a kinetic explosion of sight and sound. We saw Kill Bill again the next day.

A small part of the Kill Bill experience was seeing The 5.6.7.8's perform in a nightclub scene. I had seen them live a couple of times and seeing them on screen in walloping Dolby surround connected me to the film in some small way. It was exciting they were part of something so incredible. It was like having a team to barrack for.

The 5.6.7.8's Can't Help It! is a compilation of their early 7" singles. I don't listen to it much. 7" singles are concentrated packets of rock'n'roll designed for jukebox listening and a whole CD can get a little tiring. But in one-two punch bursts it still sounds great. It's interesting to listen to changes in the band's sound from the '86 cuts to the '91 stuff. It's hard to go past 'Ah-So!' and the Wanda Jackson inspired 'Let's Have A Party', both from the three-piece '91 recordings.

The real 5.6.7.8's experience is a live one: a great band to get drunk and sweaty with. I remember when their singles started appearing in the Au Go Go record shop singles rack next to all the grunge gloop Sub Pop churned out. It was a revelation for my stupid honky mind that Japanese women could rock'n'roll as well, and better, than stinky long-haired beefbrains from obscure north-west American timber towns. Among all the rehashed Black Sabbath riffs and quiet-loud song dynamics, The 5.6.7.8's spun their particularly Japanese take on the Gospel According to Lux & Ivy.

My first reversal

Last post I said I would review my records in a random manner instead of the originally envisaged alphabetical order. Flip-flop. I'm back to alphabetical: ZZ Top, Zeke and John Zorn will just have to wait a few years. I need the structure. Something deep in my Germanic make-up dictates this need. Otherwise I'll be off in the Black Forest, reciting epic odes to nature and whatever else you end up doing when structure und discipline is abandoned.

A correction: I think Holly Valance is wearing cut-off denim shorts, not underpants, on the CD cover to which I referred in my last post. Apologies to Ms. Valance for any undue offence. We could now walk into a cafe together without fear of embarrassment.

Notes from a misspent youth

Music is everywhere now. When I was a kid it was precious. In my early teens I would get pocket money and judiciously (or not) blow it on a vinyl fix. I'd go to the city, an hour or so trip from where I lived, and hang around what I had discovered were the 'cool' record shops. How did I know these were the cool stores? From listening to community radio shows.

My first purchases though, before I got too cool for school, were things like Madonna's 'Like A Virgin' and Duran Duran's 'Seven and the Ragged Tiger'. Madonna's album was bought almost entirely based on its cover. She reminded me of some of my soccer buddies' saucy older sisters: pouty, smouldering, big-haired vixens with exotically Mediterranean surnames. I still sort of like Madonna's music even if I find her pretty hard-going (yeah, because I've spent so much time with her, like that camping trip where she stunk up the tent with her flatulence and sat around reading Arthur Hailey novels the whole time).

Sadly, I still pick up CDs graced by attractive or lascivious looking women. I can't walk past a Holly Valance CD without picking it up as if she will magically come to life before my very eyes in the record shop and walk out with me after I've purchased a budget-priced Todd Rundgren CD. We'd go to a cafe and then get embarrassed because all she's wearing is a silk bomber jacket and undies.

Duran Duran, well, I still like the 'Girls on Film' video, and have utmost respect for their Chic worship.

In case you haven't got the hint, this blog is about music. About how and why I spent so much time and money on it and what it means to me. I've got to the point where I feel the need to appraise this mysterious thing that has so held me in thrall. Sometimes I feel the spell is almost broke, but then I'll hear something truly marvellous that just makes me crank up the speakers and say 'jesus christ' (recently - Little Stevie Wonder 'Castles in the Sand).

I'm sticking to what I've got: my CD and vinyl collection (actually combined collection with my girlfriend). I was going to review everything alphabetically but the prospect of raving about ZZ Top seemed so far away that I decided against it. So, instead, it's going to be pretty much random. If I reviewed what I listened to on a daily basis, at the moment, it'd be a Steely Dan fan site. Though a Nabakovian infused review of 'Aja' probably isn't far away.

I'll try and mix it up. Erudite dissertations on Twin Lizzy's twin-axe attack, deep and passionate moans and groans about Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder, ill-informed stabs at making sense of Albert Ayler, and a fair amount of Royal Trux genuflecting.

A lot of my record buying was random. If it was suitably cheap and had a good review in a zine (how 90s) I trusted, I gave it a go. One of my favourite records, The Scene Is Now's 'Tonight We Ride' was bought because it had a cool cover (no scantily clad women) and was $5.

Some stuff I've got no idea why. An over-enthused review, hype, a desire for something different, have all led to purchases of questionable merit. That's another reason for this blog, I want to listen to some of the crap taking up valuable vase space in the lounge room.

I don't really care about what's cool anymore. I used to. A lot of things conspire against cool. You get older and you're less inclined to give a crap. All that postmodernist retro digging in the 80s and 90s basically made everything cool to someone at some level. I think we're all past ironic cool. The kids I see wearing Motley Crue revival gear seem reasonably earnest in their devotion. That they've been sold a dud and should be dressing like Diamond Dave and playing gesticulated 9/11th arpeggios with a Romanov twist ala Eddie Van Halen proves the world is indeed an evil and stupid place.

Ok, I promise this won't be a Motley Crue hate site. But, really, is there a dumber band in history? And by band, I include medieval definitions like "merry band of men", not just the modern history of rock definition, and when I say history, I mean in the cosmic Carl Sagan sort of all-encompassing space and time way.

I really can't stand Motley Crue.