The Boomtown Rap

I watched a doco on TV recently on the erratic but – to my mind – much under-rated 60s UK band, The Small Faces. Their 1968 ‘concept’ album Ogden’s Nutgone Flake, a psychedelic rock classic, was one of the first albums I bought. I still treasure this unique work – for the great music, the warped and inspired narrative in “Unwinese” by Stanley Unwin, and the eccentric fold-out tobacco tin cover (in good nick, this album is now a prize collectors’ item fetching $300+ …but I’d never sell mine).

One of my favourite tracks is Song Of A Baker. Strange, but in all the times I’ve listened to this song, I’d never really pondered on the lyrics until the TV doco – even though I know them by heart: Read the rest…

Background
(Limited concentration span? Skip the background and go straight to the review under picture – see below)

Any cinematic recreation of 1969’s Woodstock music festival is destined to divide its audience – especially the baby boomers who might be expected to make up the main target demographic.

For those boomers who hold the event dear – and often possessively close – as the spectacular generation-defining culmination of all that was good and groovy about the 60s (and their youth), anything less than a reverent portrayal will be pelted with charges of blaspheme. Read the rest…

As you get older, you are less and less affected by news of the deaths of people known to you. It’s always a bit of a jolt, but having been around for well over half the average human life expectancy, I’ve reached a point of choice – get philosophical or get spooked. Not relishing the prospect of an existence even more haunted and death-obsessed than mine already is, I do my best to choose the former, but every so often a SIGNIFICANT death sits you back on your arse and you find yourself immersed in the dark stuff, almost as if any other choice is not yours to make.

Thus it was for me when news came through of the death of Ron Asheton, incendiary guitarist for legendary Detroit proto-punk band, The Stooges (second from left in this 1969 pic).

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

I was at the computer on the morning of January 7th. I routinely brought up the Sydney Morning Herald site (my default home page) for maybe the tenth time that day and there it was. I didn’t click on the headline at first. Not sure why. Didn’t want to acknowledge it, perhaps. Shock? Some sort of wilful disengagement? Doesn’t matter. Ron Asheton was dead. That mattered. Read the rest…

Saw an advance screening of a truly remarkable new Australian movie on Saturday: September.

Set in the Western Australian wheatbelt of 1968 (but actually filmed in Yass, near Canberra), the movie focuses on the friendship between two adolescent boys on a farm: Ed, who is the white son of a farmer, and Paddy, whose Aboriginal family is virtually “in service” to Ed’s father. These were the days in which Aboriginal farm workers were given shelter and food in exchange for their labour, but no wages. Paddy’s family lives in a shack across the field from the farmhouse.

Needless to say, the boys’ relationship is unusual in the social context of Australia of the 60s. Read the rest…

In my previous blog, I owned up to a foolish public declaration as a teenager that Creedence Clearwater Revival “shat on” The Beatles. That was essentially an adolescent rebel yell in the face of peer authority, clumsy and misdirected, but rooted in a perception that I consider legitimate to this day – that the masses are prone to stampeding. Such was the case with The Beatles. They could do no wrong. Every single was a smash hit, every album hailed a work of genius. The adulation, the mass approbation, was overwhelming and, it seemed, indiscriminate. Lennon’s wry observation at the peak of The Beatles’ fame that they were “more popular than Jesus” sparked outrage, but it wasn’t far off the mark. Read the rest…

One of the refrains of my childhood was my father’s 6-syllable sing-song admonition, “you’re anti-everything.” That wasn’t quite accurate, but I do have to admit to an inbuilt contrariness that asserts itself at the faintest whiff of hype or herd approbation of – well, just about anything. Read the rest…