Hardly Strictly

Warren Hellman was a bit of a hillbilly. He played the banjo in a group with his friends, his fingers dancing over the strings like they’d each thrown down a quick fire whiskey. He loved that bluegrass music; the twang of the banjo and the zip and zaw of the fiddle.

Warren loved a party, and every year he gave a party for his friends. He knew a thing or two about parties, so he knew the best place was San Francisco. In the Golden Gate Park where the grassy fields and the eucalypts and the pine trees give the room to breathe and spin. Where people could come and lay on the grass in the autumn sunshine and drink and smoke and jig to the tunes.

Because Warren was a billionaire, it would be a big party and everyone would be invited. He was a generous billionaire too, not one of those greedy ones, so he couldn’t ask the people to pay anything. The word went out and the people would come. The hobos of the city would come and sell beer from eskies and the hippies would come and sell homemade hash cookies and the families would drive from the corners of the country to spread picnic rugs and eat crackers with dip and smile at each other and at other people too.

He called his party the Strictly Bluegrass Festival because that’s what he loved the most, but he knew that other people liked other things too and he was generous, so he changed it to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and let them all come. 

I found myself in the city of San Francisco early October so I took Warren up on his invitation and made my way to Golden Gate Park. Off the bus at Haight-Ashbury and along the winding path to the heart of the park. It was going to be a big party, because Warren had some famous friends coming. There was Emmylou Harris and Robert Plant, Gillian Welch and Steve Earle, M Ward and Connor Oberst, and a long list of fiddle-bending, harmonica-blowing, guitar-twirling maestros howling in from across the land.

On each of the three days there were almost as many people at the festival, as in the entire city – around a quarter of a million so they say. Because it was Warren’s party and we had been specially invited to come, everyone was well behaved and happy. We said Thank You Warren and we looked after each other, making sure there was room for everyone to sit and food and drinks all round.

After an earlier hiking accident I was getting around on crutches and people smiled encouragement and said “You’re rockin’ it brother” or “Dedicated to the bluegrass, that’s dedicated.” A security guard saw me weaving through the crowd and said “Whyn’t you go sit yo’self in the disabled area up the front theya?”

On a sunny afternoon I found myself metres from the stage as Gillian Welch wandered out with David Rawlings and said “Gee whilly-oh, it’s hot”, and I turned around to see if the thousands of people in the field behind me were as happy as I was. For an hour I heard those two voices created to sing together and two guitars playing side by side as one. I won’t forget it.  

The people danced and cheered, they laughed and ate and drank, they slept on picnic blankets and climbed trees. Around sundown the festival halted and they walked out into the San Francisco evening together. For three days it continued like this – the park breathed the people in by day and breathed them out again at night.

That was the last time Warren would be able to come to his own party, because he died last year. He was seventy seven. But he’d planned for something like that happening and the party will go on every autumn without him. The people will still say Thank You Warren. 

View from the back of the crowd (not my photo, borrowed from google)

The crutches got me this view. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

Freo Days, Part II

When I found the motivation to drag myself away from the couch on the verandah, it was usually to go to a gig. Ahhh, Freo gigs - how I miss you. 

I'd hop on the pushy and roll in the last light over the old traffic bridge. The golden sun sank into the ocean, leaving the black outline of the stacks of containers and mechanical dinosaurs at the port, and the train rattling by with a handful of straggling commuters on board, and the swirling Swan River below me all continuing their business in the darkening evening. 

Mojo's was the venue most nights. Bright on the outside, gloomy and dark on the inside, I leaned against a wall to watch the band. Barefooted Charlie Parr with his big grey beard and tangled grey hair played his frantic hillbilly tunes to a baying crowd. I saw local reggae dub maestros The Sunshine Brothers quite a few times, including one of the last nights before I left town. They joked with each other in between songs as though nobody was listening. 

Down opposite the abandoned Woolstores, with all the graffiti and where the kids skate all weekend, is Clancy's Fish Pub. Full of friendly vagrants and colourful eccentrics, you can't feel out of place there. Free gigs on Friday nights and a variety of tasty beers to drink and seafood to soak it up with. The T Shirts they sell say We put the beer of God  in you, and it could be true. 

Summer Sunday afternoons found me on the shady lawns of the Freo Art Centre. Free gig from two til four. People lay on picnic rugs sharing bowls of nuts and cold beer from the esky, gurgling toddlers escaped the half hearted grasp of dad to run around and dance up the front, the acoustic tunes floated up and around and into the trees and people smiled at each other. In my memory it was pretty much paradise. 

There were so many more venues - world music upstairs at Kulcha, where you can step outside to lurk on the balcony and watch the drunks stumble round on the main street below, indie tunes in the cramped Norfolk Basement, Gomez rocking at the Fly By Night Club, comfy retro lounges to sprawl in at the Little Creatures Loft (continuing the local knack for a catchy phrase with their slogan Open Up A Little), the Blues and Roots Festival in the park - oh the music flows richly in Freo. 

Timbuktu Days, Part III

On the morning of festival day there was an exodus from Timbuktu. I negotiated a ride in the back of a truck out to Essakane, where it would all happen. It’s two hours from Timbuktu, further into the desert. My feet hung over the edge of the flatbed truck and they were whipped by low scrubby grass which grew in tussocks in our path. The track soon turned to sand and we cruised up and around dunes on the way to Essakane.

The place had an air of chaos. There were loose-robed Tuaregs riding camels here and there, the rugs and halters of the camels brightly decorated in coloured woven fabric. The riders sat on wooden seats and rested their feet comfortably at the camels’ neck.  A more modern variety of Tuareg was criss-crossing the site at breakneck speed in dusty landcruisers. Tents made of canvas and hessian were set up in rows, selling food, locally made jewellery, clothing, fabrics and artwork. I noticed one stall selling decorated swords and shields.

Tuaregs are no strangers to conflict; armed with broadswords and daggers they put up a fierce resistance to French colonisation early last century. And since independence there have been uprisings, as they have fought for recognition and justice for their nomadic way of life.

This festival is their celebration. The stage was at the base of a tall, curved dune, providing a natural amphitheatre. I sat at the top to take it all in. The aroma of spicy food wafted on the air, and I wandered amongst the softly lit tents in search of a meal. Inside crouched Berber men pouring glass after glass of sweet green tea, and women stirring large pots of hot food. I was beckoned in to one and was served a bowl of cous cous and spicy goat meat. 

As darkness fell, fires were lit in drums and the music began. The festival is a showcase for Tuareg music and there were traditional chants and dances. The stage was crowded with groups of twenty singers, swaying and clapping as they sang. There was also music from across Mali, Africa and around the world - blues, hip hop and jazz. Ouma Sangare’s bewitching voice, Toumani Diabate delicately plucking his kora – the African harp whose lilting notes drifted with the wood smoke into the night sky -  and Afel Boucomb appeared, but most anticipated was Tinariwen.

Comprised of former rebel soldiers trained by Colonel Gadaffi, the members of Tinariwen have traded their guns for guitars, and these desert poets have now captured imaginations across the world. With vocals switching between rapid-fire spoken word, harmonised haunting wails, and call and response between male and female singers, their music speaks of the struggle of the Tuaregs. Their battle for survival in harsh desert lands where they are oppressed from all sides but do not give up their spirit of resistance. Tinariwen do it all – they fight, they philosophise and they make music that breathes like wind in the dunes. The loping beat of their rhythmic electric blues is said to be based on the gait of a camel walking.  The night exploded in light and dancing.

At three I went to bed – a mosquito net hung from a branch with my sleeping bag rolled out on the sand beneath. At four the harmattan began blowing. It penetrated tents, bringing fine gritty sand into eyes, mouths and noses. People emerged in the morning brushing the sand from their hair and face, but with the wind still blowing, it was pointless. In a daze they walked around bent against the wind, turbans wrapped around heads, eyes squinted and wondering if this is what the end of the world looked like. It was grey and miserable and there was nowhere to hide. The wind blew until mid afternoon, when it finally eased. The night sky, when it came, was speckled with stars, the air was still and everyone was ready to celebrate the final night of the festival.

With the recent death of local legend Ali Farka Toure, the patron of the festival was now Habib Koite. He took to the stage with his band Bamada and played his joyous Malian griot music, with the talking drum and the harmonica, the balafon and the calabash, and the beautiful vocal harmonies brining the night to life again. The drums were beaten and the playful notes of the balafon (West African xylophone) rang out and the crowd responded with cheers and smiles. Atop a Saharan sand dune, beneath a glowing sky we danced to this music of the earth; a vibrant collection of people blown in from all corners of the globe to this desert enclave lit up in the African night.    

2007

Tinariwen

Habib Koite

Timbuktu Days, Part II

The buildings of Timbuktu were made of the very earth on which they stood – low, flat-roofed mud dwellings with open doorways giving a glimpse of the dark and cool within.  The streets were sand, and there was a sandy grey haze in the air.

The mosques stood tall and proud. They were spiked with wooden struts, used as steps for the re-coating of mud after the annual rains.

Here and there were large domed tents with goats ambling around. The nomadic Tuaregs used these as their homes while in the city, in between trips into the desert. The Tuaregs, in their distinctive blue robes, are nomadic desert people whose territory crosses the borders of Mali, Niger and Algeria. They walked the streets, or sat in their tents drinking sweet green tea. Some rode camels.

The African City of Gold is more humble than it was during the fifteenth century when it was a centre for Islamic scholarship -of the 100,000 population, a quarter were scholars. A mystical city, it lured European explorers many of whom died in their attempts to reach it. The Scottish Gordon Laing was the first to make it, but was murdered two days after leaving the city in 1826. The Frenchman Rene-Auguste Caillie disguised himself as an Arab to reach the city in 1828, and returned to Europe to claim the prize offered by the Geographical Society of Paris. 

At the time of my visit there were plenty of westerners around, more than usual because the Festival au Desert was on in a few days and lovers of African blues were arriving for the show.

I suspect the entire city was transformed by the coming of the festival. I arrived in Timbuktu four days before it began, in time to observe the build up of mayhem.

A cheap hotel gave me a mattress to put on the floor of their covered courtyard. I left my stuff and walked out to see what there was to see. Imposing mud mosques, carved wooden doors, an atmosphere of restrained excitement.

I was befriended by an enthusiastic local called Issa who was eager to tell me all about the city. He took me to his sand-floored house to drink tea. It was cool and dark inside and his little radio had African blues crackling out. Children wandered past the open doorway. Issa’s mum walked in and out giving me a dubious eye each time she passed - apparently she hadn’t got festival fever like Issa. Three teenage girls with large tubs of rice on their heads came in. One took off her tub to scoop some rice out for Issa’s mum, and the other two began dancing to the song on the radio. With tubs balanced neatly on their head they moved to the lilting music, spontaneous and unrestrained.

I spent hours on the flat roof of the hotel, looking down at the sandy streets. From three floors up I observed the tourists being pursued by salesmen; they were followed from their cars to their hotel, from the hotel to the bar. These days before the festival provided opportunity for the persistent businessman to make a years’ wages in a short time.

I saw Doug, another Australian I had met earlier in my travels. He told me how he’d been in the back of a truck driving into town when it occurred to him that this was no way to enter Timbuktu. He called out for the driver to stop, and jumping off with his bag he found a donkey laden with firewood, whose owner was willing to put Doug on top. So he entered the city on the back of a donkey.

With Issa and his friends we ate dinner at a makeshift restaurant on the street. There was an oil lamp on the table, and dishes of brochette, chips, salad and bread. Sharing a meal in the warm evening air, the lamp light flickering off our faces, shadows dancing on the wall behind us, people from opposite sides of the world laughing together... there was a lot to be thankful for. Afterwards we wandered the streets in the dark evening, looking for perhaps some music. We found instead a group of men watching a dubbed kung fu movie on a small tv on the street and we stood to watch with them.

Then a blackout. Lights out all over the town. Doug didn’t know how to find the place he was staying. It wasn’t a hotel, just a guy’s house and he had no name for it, only a picture on his digital camera. He showed some of the men who had been watching the kung fu, asking them if they knew where it was. They laughed, wondering how these foreigners survive in this world, but one of them recognised it and offered to take him there on his motorbike. Timbuktu days were full of the unexpected.  

2007

The music

One of my life’s great pleasures is listening to music on a roadtrip. Loud music on a long drive. I’ve spent enough time in a car without a working stereo to know what it’s like to drive in silence, and I believe that experience has made me appreciate the travelling tunes even more.

There’s something incredibly satisfying in putting on the right music for the right moment. Sometimes the song does more than suit the moment, it is a part of the moment, it creates it. There have been times when I’ve been driving and I’ve come upon a scene of startling impact – maybe the still coastline at dawn, or a dripping wet forest in the mist, or a long familiar street I haven’t driven down for years – and the music is there with me. I know that from that moment on whenever I hear that song I’ll be taken right back to this time and place, I’ll feel it, smell it and live it once more...

...in the sun cruising the dusty roads of South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula with wet salty hair after some long smooth waves at Granites, listening to that unmistakeable guitar sound of The Cruel Sea, Tex Perkins growling ‘my heart is a muscle and it pumps blood like a big old black steam train’, and I’m thinking about travelling the country and surfing unknown waves and camping under the stars by a crackling campfire, I was free, alive, on the loose in the world...

...long straight highways in the rain, as roadtrains howled past with a rumbling gust from their fiery depths, spitting spray onto the windscreen, listening to Bruce Springsteen’s dark smoky sounds on Nebraska as he sings about death row inmates and troubled Highway Patrolmen...

...driving down into Prevelly from Margaret River on a warm Autumn evening and the sun had just set and there was a band of apricot-orange on the horizon, lines of swell stretched away, there was a purple tinge in the air, and I’d just quit my job and left Freo and was moving across the country with all my worldly goods in the car with me and LCD Soundsystem were saying ‘look around you, you’re surrounded, it won’t get any better’ and I believed it.

On this journey I was moving towards a new chapter of life, and on the way I had been weaving between optimistic excitement at this new beginning, and pessimistic apprehension about my chances of finding happiness on the east coast, or anywhere. Some days it took just a simple song lyric to tip the balance one way or the other. A word or two could leave me hollow and shaking, or on the other hand the right song could have me smiling and tapping the steering wheel, singing along loudly and feeling that living this life is a damn fine thing to be doing today.

I’m reminded of a great book I read a while back, Vernon God Little, where the main character is similarly affected. Talking about listening to pop songs and the psychological impact it had on him, he says ‘...you get all boosted up, convinced you’re going to win in life, then the song’s over and you discover you fucken lost.’

 My music is precious to me, it helps shape my days, so when I misplaced a case full of twenty four of my favourite cds in Denmark in the south of WA, I didn’t hesitate in reporting it to the local police. The officer took my details and said she’d ring me if it showed up. She hasn’t called so far but the way I see it, the song hasn’t ended just yet so maybe I can still win.

Have you got a musical moment to share?