By now, pretty much everyone with access to a news service knows what's been going on here in Victoria, Australia. People are dead and homes are destroyed. It's a textbook example of SRS BZNZ.
Watching the news and seeing the death and destruction was getting depressing - so I present, with the intention of injecting a little levity into this dreadful situation, (and with the utmost respect for all those who have lost their homes, possessions, pets, livelihoods and loved ones), the first ever Monday Mix List: Songs About Fire.
Franz Ferdinand - This Fire
Talking Heads - Burning Down The House
Deep Purple - Smoke On The Water
Nirvana - Lake of Fire
Johnny Cash - Ring Of Fire
Jessica Mauboy - Burn
The Prodigy - Firestarter
James Taylor - Fire and Rain
The Doors - Light My Fire
The Bloodhound Gang - Fire Water Burn
Sinead O'Connor - Fire On Babylon
John Farnham - Burn For You
Ben Harper - Burn To Shine
Jerry Lee Lewis - Great Balls Of Fire
Lastly, the last month or so, the Country Fire Association and the Victorian Government ran an ad encouraging folks to prepare for bushfire. The song they used was Flame Trees by Cold Chisel - artfully fading out the vocals just before the line "...and there's nothing else can set fire to this town", presumably in the hopes that nobody would notice. Unfortunately, basically everyone in Australia knows that song, so it wasn't a great decision. Nice one, Victorian Government.
Here's the ad:
And for comparison, here's the original song:
If you want to donate to help the bushfire relief efforts, please visit the Australian Red Cross. Thanks for your generosity.
They were strange days, the early 2000’s. It was a time where people flew passenger jets into buildings, where nations went to war on the back of a bit of hearsay and some blurry aerial photos, where it was beginning to seem like anyone could be blown to smithereens at any second, and where what was truth in Monday’s paper turned out to be a lie in Wednesday’s. But this wasn’t some Orwellian dystopia. This was the brave new world we were living in. Our governments were doing things that many of us disagreed with, and for some reason, we kept re-electing them.
It made for great songwriting inspiration. People were angry and confused, and popular culture was reflecting that. Ani diFranco wrote Self Evident in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the USA. The Dixie Chicks got themselves into hot water over a comment made at a show in London. All over the world people marched on their houses of government, protesting their nation's involvement in the Iraq Invasion, singing peace songs made famous by Cat Stevens and John Lennon. Everything old was new again. Those old enough to remember the Vietnam War would have noticed striking similarities - both with the impetus for war and the mobilisation to protest.
In 2004, Fat Mike of NOFX launched the Rock Against Bush project, and Lindsay McDougall of Frenzal Rhomb produced the Rock Against Howard compilation album, both aimed at mobilising young voters into overturning the right-leaning governments of the day. When George W. Bush used the Foo Fighters' Times Like These as his campaign song that same year, Dave Grohl did his nut and joined the John Kerry campaign. Despite a great deal of effort, both George W. Bush and John Howard were re-elected, Bush for his second term and Howard for his fourth (and final) term.
After George Bush was re-elected in 2004, the dissent kicked up a notch. Green Day's concept album American Idiot had been released shortly before the US election, but found a new relevancy in the days following. It seemed to be based on an unbending faith in the power of rock and roll to hold back the darkness. It became a rallying point for thousands of young people, many of whom had never heard protest music before hearing American Idiot.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Kanye West alleged that George Bush didn't care about black people. In the space of 9 days in April and May of 2006, Neil Young wrote and recorded the Living With War album. Like his classic protest song Ohio, it was put together very quickly in response to a current event. Green Day and U2 teamed up for a cover of the classic Skids track The Saints Are Coming, which featured a video of re-imagined news footage, wherein US forces in Iraq were redeployed to provide humanitarian aid to New Orleans. Even people who'd never delved into protest music in their entire careers were suddenly compelled to address their concerns - pop star Pink teamed up with the Indigo Girls and surprised everyone with her song Dear Mr President.
It seemed everyone had something to say.
In 2007, Australia had another Federal election - except this time, we voted out John Howard and his centre-right Coalition, and voted in Kevin Rudd, leader of the centre-left Labor Party. Kevin Rudd's first positive actions as Australian Prime Minister, only hours after being sworn in, was to sign the Kyoto Protocol and then in February 2008, apologise to the Indigenous Stolen Generation. And suddenly, it felt like our beds were smouldering, not burning. Australia had entered a new period of social reconciliation.
In 2008, the US electoral juggernaut took off again, culminating in the election and 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama, the first African-American President of the USA. His first positive action was to order the closure of the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay.
No longer were the youth of the USA Rocking Against Bush...and whether or not George Bush cared about black people didn't matter anymore. All over the world government was changing, and people were feeling optimistic about that change.
I wonder, therefore, are we entering a time of relative peace? Where protest music has no place - because there is nothing to protest against? Remember the musical wasteland of the 90's? Things were pretty good then - the worst of it was probably Bill Clinton getting a gobby from a young intern. We were Mmmbop-ing, Wannabe-ing and wondering Could It Be Magic?all over the place. Sure, we had pretty good music aside from all those radio friendly unit shifters, but it was just some old guff about country houses, bittersweet symphonies and driving around in an unroadworthy car.
Optimism doesn't breed protest - are we destined for another decade of bland rubbish?
In the early to mid 90’s, Glen and Bernardette Tucker, friends of my Mum and Dad, had a holiday house in Ocean Grove, on the Bellarine Peninsula. Every summer for a few years running, we (meaning my mother, father, sister and myself) went down to this house in Ocean Grove for a weekend. Glen Tucker was a cool guy. He was a musician, and a music teacher, and he had long black hair, and he looked a little bit like Jackson Browne, and he always had interesting things to say about music. He was real laid back as well, like he’d just smoked a joint. I could see, even at the age of nine or ten, why my Dad was friends with him – Glen was much cooler than my Dad was, but my Dad gained cool whenever he was with Glen; cool by association, rather than action. At any rate, Glen really loved The Eagles. So did my Dad, but Glen really loved them. He had all their albums and could play most of their songs on his guitar, and he was good. We used to sit in the backyard until all hours of the night with an open fire barbeque crackling away (even us kids – we were allowed to stay up late on trips away), and Glen would play records on the old battered record player he had out there. Occasionally he’d play songs on his guitar, but mostly we’d listen to albums and eat bits of sausage off the barbeque. One night, it must have been a Saturday night, we were all out there, and it was deliciously warm. The mosquito coils had been lit, and an enormous leg of lamb was roasting on the spit, and combined, they were giving off a most intoxicating smell of citronella blended with roast meat. Glen came out of the house holding Desperado.
I wasn’t sure if I’d heard it before; in the house I grew up in it was difficult to escape The Eagles entirely, as Dad often played them in the car, or if he was feeling in a particularly pensive mood, he’d turn the TV off and put the Hotel California album on. This was rare, as my Dad was quite a TV man. I remember days as a teenager when I’d be sitting in front of the hi-fi listening to something, and Dad would come home, plonk himself on the settee and turn the TV on, with not a thought towards the fact that I was sitting, listening to something in the exact same room. But occasionally, very occasionally, he’d choose an album over a pointless TV program.
Anyway, regardless of whether or not I’d heard it before, I’d NEVER seen the cover. What was up with that cover art, anyway? Four surly looking guys dressed up like cowboys with handlebar moustaches and weird hats, holding guns? Just looking at it gave me the chills, but when Glen put it on, it started crackling and popping the way old records do, which, at the time, I saw as kind of quaint and old-worldly. But when the guitar started up, and first mournful harmonica melody from Doolin-Dalton rang through, I was captivated.
As was usual through one of Glen’s listening sessions, we were treated to his occasional commentary on the album itself, the writers, what a particular track was about, or some such. Desperado, according to Glen, was a concept album. It was a story of the Wild West, the story of cowboys and brothels and card games and showdowns at high noon. It described the brevity of youth, the transitory nature of life, and the enduring nature of regret. An ambitious set, surely, Glen had said, but one that was ultimately successful.
I didn’t give much thought to Desperado after that initial experience. Over the years I heard a few tracks off it from time to time and correctly identified them as Desperado tracks, but I didn’t hear the album in it’s entirety for some time.
In late 2003, I found a cassette copy of Desperado in a box of old tapes that my aunt had (she told me I could have it – she preferred Dylan to The Eagles), and I put it on, plugged in my headphones and listened to it again. I have always preferred to listen to music through headphones; the sound is crisper and purer, they block out the external noise of people and television and shouting and just all the buzz that exists even in the quietest room. Desperado, even coming off an old cassette in an old cassette player, captivated me once more. The story it told, the time and place, and characters it evoked were so real, so tangible that I felt like I could reach out and touch them.
Some albums lose their appeal over time. We grow out of them, we get over them, something better comes along, they sound dated compared to the artists later work, whatever. There are a myriad reasons why albums lose their appeal. But Desperado, 30 years old, as it was, still felt fresh to me. Perhaps that was because I’d only heard it a few times in the intervening years since I’d first heard it, but even today it still enthrals me. It’s a celebration, a lament and a warning. It celebrates life and youth and dreams, laments the loss of those dreams and warns us of the ephemeral nature of existence.
The Doolin-Dalton/Desperado Reprise always carried me away the most. I think Don Henley was my favourite of the Eagles, purely because I liked his singing voice best. Around the time that I re-discovered Desperado, a boy from a nearby school had been murdered by another boy at the local train station. When I was in high school, we used to congregate there at the end of the day and hitch our skirts up so the boys would notice us. We’d gossip about school and teachers and boys, and we’d bitch about people we didn’t like. That station was the scene of many a youthful drama, but had never seen anything like what unfolded there in October 2003. It was his last day of year twelve, he was about to go out for drinks to celebrate with his friends, and begin his exams the following week. He was standing on the threshold between youth and adulthood, the very threshold that is the theme of the Desperado album. I didn’t know the boy, as he was a few years younger than me, but I know one of his best friends, and his senseless death really shook the community up. His death at Essendon Station was a growing up period for a lot of people, even those of us who didn’t know him or had finished school long before. We were all shocked that our stomping ground, a place we went to every day could be the scene of something so horrific. The Doolin-Dalton/Desperado Reprise seemed to describe what happened. I listened to it almost exclusively over the week of the boy’s death, and it was such a fitting eulogy – as I’ve said before, both a warning of the transient nature of this world, and a lament for youth lost.
“Now there’s no time left to borrow (Is there gonna be anything left) Only stardust (Maybe) Maybe tomorrow…”
“Desperado…”
That was Desperado. When I was young it made me yearn for adulthood, as an adult it makes me yearn for youth, and it describes, in loving detail what happens when the two collide. I never liked Westerns, but I love Desperado. I’d love to find an old copy of it on LP. There’s something about a cracking record that is just so real, so organic. It’s haunting beauty will always remind me of roasting lamb and citronella mosquito coils at Glen and Bernardette Tucker’s holiday house, in the times before youth became adulthood, and death became a part of life.
(Caution: this video is 35-some years old, and the sound quality isn't great, so turn up your speakers a little for better enjoyment)
By now, pretty much everyone with access to a news service knows what's been going on here in Victoria, Australia. People are dead and homes are destroyed. It's a textbook example of SRS BZNZ.
