I'm Telling Everyone.

I'm supposed to be at a seminar at Trades Hall right now. But today was a long day at school - not particularly full on, just long, with lots of stuff going on - and so my boss suggested that if we didn't want to go, we didn't have to. Immediately my mind went to recovery mode and I started dreaming of lying in bed reading, brain ceasing to function altogether. But then someone suggested I come race my bike. And then I remembered how freaking good it feels to take all of the workday shit, that impossible war of attrition, that daily obligation, and just tear it out of your heart by force of sheer exertion. I haven't even rolled onto the track yet and already I'm stoked, listening to Boxcar, scoffing down food for fuel, forgetting about psychologists reports, Asperger's syndrome, suspension meetings, violence and graffiti and Oppositional Defiance Disorder and court dates and the Alternative Settings Review and weekly reports and goals and everything else. All of a sudden I'm a schoolboy on Christmas morning, and I'm going to open all the presents.

Whadya Mean?!

We here at Heavy Metal Monday did not watch the Olympic roace race.  We were at the pub.  Everything that is discussed from hereon-in is entirely speculation, myth, or lie.

So Cav didn't win.  Not only that, he was beaten by, to quote the British press, "a nobody".  Labelling Vinokourov a nobody is similar to calling Shakespeare 'some writer', Eddy Merkcx, a 'bit of alright on the bike', or Lance Armstrong ' a bit of a dick'.  It just means you know nothing about cycling or, you know, classic literature.

The British press are very different to the Australian press.  Where the Aus media, in the case of loss, usually bend over backward to make excuses for what was surely an inevitable loss given the circumstances, our mates over the pond seem to relish in almost exiling the offending athlete from the country, if they so much as look at anything other than the gold medal.  

So it is with Cav.  Sure, the British team perhaps weren't as dominant or as clever as they could have been, but they were beaten, not by a nobody but, rather, by a dude who has won the odd race here and there.  Let's not forget Vinokourov winning on the streets of Paris in the 2005 Tour, when Cav was probably still winning regional races, fuelled by god-knows how many Yorkshire puds.

I mean, I was baffled from the minute people started speculating about their assuredness of Cav's win.  I mean, there was a dirty great hill in the mix, and Cav doesn't exactly excel up the inclines.  This was not a sprinter's course but, rather, a classics course.  I'm surprised no one picked Vino for the win, given his reasonably good form, and penchant for pissing people off.

Not only that, but Cav decided, no doubt bitter he gave up the last year for a twenty somethingth place, to blame the Australian team for negative racing.  

I mean, I'm the first one to cry 'negative' in a club race.  But that's because negative racing is one of the best labels to cover the fact that none of us are any good.  By suggesting that a quashing of tactics was responsible for the loss, rather than no tactics at all, we all come out looking like cooler people.

The Australians weren't racing negatively.  They were trying to make sure GB (Great Britain, not Gorilla Biscuits.  Good band but) weren't in the break.  The reason for this is because, and here's the thing, they were 'trying to win'.  

Weird huh?

The only bit of the race I saw was Mickey Rogers cruising along in a lone break.  I fucking love Mickey from way back when, and was shattered when he crashed out of the Tour a few years back while in the virtual lead.  It's a shame he couldn't have had a proper crack but, you know, that's racing.

In some ways, Vino's win, is actually quite fitting.  He's one of those riders who, despite having done his time for doping scandals in the past, the public has decided to continue hating, while others like David Millar, are now loved.  Vino is retiring this year, and it seems a nice touch to his palmeres, before he goes out, in a spurt of EPO.

I, for one, don't care if he doped.  The benefit of the doubt now lies with his innocence, as it does with every other reformed rider, and the fact is he rode a damn clever race.  I also love an upset.  Cav winning would have had every smug British bastard holding a meat pie, gut hanging over their belts, singing God Save The Queen.  I like that a 'nobody' from 'some country over thataway' absolutely belted the dream team, and did so in fine form, by himself.  The way Vino always won.  Coming out of nowhere, comprehensively, and with zero fucks given.

And, you know, I rate that above some fat kid being led out by a guy with skinny ankles and a dude who looks like an alien.

Here are Gorilla Biscuits

He Ain't Here But He Sure Went Past.

Oh thank Christ, it's time for another Friday Roundup. I don't think I could manage to eke out another post all about what I did instead of watching the tour, or how I feel about riding my bike, or another single paragraph that begins with the first person singular. For once I'm writing a post that isn't about me. Or anyone else in particular.

And something that has absolutely nothing to do with me, apart from gaining my unequivocal endorsement, is the Captain Planet Alleycat. What a freaking great theme. I really hope folks dress up for this one. I didn't know the guys involved when they threw their last race, the Commuter Cup, but since then I've seen them around a bit, and they're all pretty rad individuals who are just stoked on riding bikes on the streets. This is guaranteed to be such a good time that I might even mosey on down. I might even race. The step-through on my front porch hasn't had a workout since the last Valentine's Day alleycat. It could be time to step out of retirement.

A long way off but a brilliant idea is the FOA Show n Shine. Sure, it's not happening til December, but that gives you just enough time to start ordering some shiny new parts off ebay, or get your sweet vintage frame resprayed, or polish up your teeth with Vaseline and tape your swimsuit to your butt. Keep your eyes peeled, because there's gonna be bling for miles.

Hey, apparently there's some big sporting event happening in London over the next two weeks, and it features some cycling. Someone asked me the other day if I was also going to keep an Olympic Diary that never talked about the Olympics. While that sounds like a pretty good read, there's no way in hell - as you could probably tell, by the end of the Tour all of my "I just rode around instead and it was a totally good time" style posts were totally used up. Instead I'm just going to hope someone tapes the track events and shares them with me. I'd stay up, but apparently they're all on between the hours of 1 and 4am, and dammit if I don't have work to do these days. However, if you're insistent on punishing yourself, a schedule of events is available here.

And that's probably about it for today. It's been a while, right, and when you stop looking outwards for events you don't see as many. I don't think I've done this before, but if you have anything you'd like included in the roundup - and yes, I do know how to include pictures - please get in contact with me at xthenewtimerx@gmail.com.

O-V-E-R-D-O-S-E.

I raced my bike the other day. It felt pretty good, then pretty bad, but not in the bad way. It felt pretty bad in the good way. I came off the track and went in desperate search of the bin with the open lid. I sat beside that bin for a good ten minutes, waiting for either the nausea to subside or to come to its logical conclusion. It opted for the former and I decided it was time to go home.

Fifteen minutes later, however, I was feeling fine again. That's usually when the fatigue starts kicking in, when I'm usually comatose in front of the computer screen. But there was no sign of it whatsoever. I was so stoked on this that I decided to ride my pub bike over to pizza. And I did. And it was rad. I was listening to Modest Mouse and singing as loud as I possibly could. I was sprinting for traffic lights and victory saluting like Peter Sagan when I made it. I was trackstanding at every red, bunny hopping every bump, from Separation to Arthurton to Blyth, one road with three names, knowing every crack in the road, every indentation, where to get out of the saddle for a climb and where the traffic is going to get a little fierce. That road joining Northcote to Brunswick, string tying the two former working-class suburbs together like they were mittens through your coatsleeves, independent but always connected through those secret lengths of yarn, and never lost in the snow. Listening to Modest Mouse and singing and getting romantic about streets and bikes and the cold damp down by the Merri Creek and the possibilities opening up before me. At that moment, I felt like I could do anything, and that if this good feeling stuck around for a little while, there was a good chance that I would.

And then, when I arrived at Pizza, Rolly told me that he and Tate had seen me. And then I felt silly.

They're Gonna Find Us.

The first tape I ever bought - yes, tape - was Soul Deep by Jimmy Barnes. Look, I know that Barnesy is cringeworthy, and his attempts at soul were even worse, but hell, I was twelve years old and I knew that these were songs with substance.



I avoided Percy Sledge for a long time, mostly due to "When A Man Loves A Woman" and a vague sensation that soul should be more bangin' than this, that without the big fat horn section and a pumping bass it was just elevator music. But there's this rad scene in This Is England where one of the guys is listening to Dark End Of The Street and really feeling it, and that changed my mind. Man, I reckon I bought like three new records after watching that movie.


Strangely, I never felt the same resistance to Otis, no matter how tender his ballads. This one, despite its questionable, non-edge subject matter, is one of my favourites. For me, nothing else sums up just how good it feels to stay up late with the person you love, talking about nothing at all, wasting time for no reason other than you're enjoying wasting it.



There's this scene in The Blues Brothers where they put a Sam and Dave tape into the deck, then start driving around as this song plays. It then segues into Hold On, I'm Coming, and before you know it they're driving through the mall. I love how Soothe Me kinda pretends to be a rave-up, but has this mellow guitar behind it - again, the lyrics and the music match perfectly.



I don't care how unhappy he was at the time - Marvin Gaye's work for Motown was killer. It was when he went on to writing his own music that things went horribly horribly wrong. Sure, Let's Get It On is a pretty sexy song, but fuck, What's Going On is nothing short of terrible. I don't care how historically significant it was, it's just a bad song. I've often thought of getting "Can I Get A Witness" tattooed on me, especially in light of this Constantines song, but haven't quite figured out where or how just yet. 



Yeah, I've certainly sung this one at the top of my lungs, riding my bike through these streets in the middle of the night.

Hemispheres.

The 2012 Tour De France.

That's my dad's old copy of Catcher in the Rye just there. He's the one who coloured in Salinger's name, who filled all the gaps in the lettering, who wrote his name roughly the same size as the author. Inside, in red pen, is written "Roo Bailey". The red pen makes sense, because he has red hair, but I've never heard him called Roo. His brothers and all the folks from Woomelang - his home town - all call him Blue, due to the aforementioned follicular affliction and their penchant for irony. Occasionally, when my own brothers and I are up there, we are referred to as Blue's kids.

Sometimes, around Stawell, where my folks settled and where I was born and bred, my dad gets called Bails. Michael, the older of my two younger brothers is often called that too, perhaps a result of staying involved with the Stawell Footy Club, where nicknames are almost mandatory. It's a name Steve and I mercifully avoided, though I was once or twice called "Young Bails."

Mostly, however, he's known just as Ron - which is, incidentally, his name. I've called him by his name ever since I was about fourteen. He's always hated me doing so - he reckons it makes him look like a stepfather. Given I don't extend the same informality to my ma, he may have a point. I don't know why I started doing it - probably just my teenage tendency to niggle, the same impulse that drove me to refer to my brothers by their Spanish names, Seve and Miguel. No one in my family speaks Spanish, and we have no Spanish heritage (apart from maybe when the Moors went over to Ireland, but that's really too far back to count). I just started doing it because the whim took me one day, and then stuck to it.

This "Roo" at the front of my copy of Catcher, however, confuses me, mostly because it's a part of my dad's life that I don't know. I've spent thirtythree years with the guy and there are still stories he hasn't told me, either through neglect, unwillingness or forgetting. That's unsettling, in a lot of ways. Most of the stories I know about him I only know through his brothers, and they're the tales of bawdy mockery that brothers specialize in - drinking too much, driving too fast, raising hell. While they're still important stories, they lack substance, they aren't the stories that we use to construct who we are.

So last night I tried to call my dad. He and Ma are away on some grey nomad style excursion into the Australian countryside, huge SUV towing their caravan into red dirt landscapes. I don't really know why I wanted to call. Even when I do chat to him, it's only usually some cursory small talk before he hands me off to my Ma. He's from one of those red dirt landscapes himself, and even though he's a teacher, serious conversations about personal matters don't come easy to him. We talk about the football, the weather, people we both know. But last night I couldn't even do that - wherever he is at the moment isn't receiving any mobile signal.

So I was thinking a lot about dads today. Even if he hasn't told me everything, mine has always been there, will always be there. But a quick look through the list of recent Tour de France winners reveals a lot of absent fathers. Cadel's dad was still in his life, sure, but lived three quarters of the way across the country. When the guy started getting serious about cycling it was just him and his mum in the tiny pockets of Eltham or Montmorency not yet gentrified. Lance's dad was famously absent, even if he did attempt contact once or twice (yeah, ok, I wasn't paying that close attention to "It's Not About The Bike."). And now, just today, perhaps desperate for an Australian angle, the press drags out the stories about Wiggins' dad, drunk and defeated and ultimately dead in a bar somewhere. I'm certain there's no causal link, probably not even a direct correlation. I also don't know anything about Contador's dad, Sastre's dad, Andy Schleck's dad. It may not mean anything at all. It is, however, an interesting thing to note. I wonder if Wiggins ever wishes he could call his dad up and ask him some awkward questions. I wonder if he ever resents the story being told, his family taking on all of this added importance now he's won the biggest prize in cycling. I wonder if he looks in the mirror, like I do sometimes, and see the bags under his eyes, the flecks of red in his beard, the wrinkles in the forehead, and know exactly where they came from.

I've written a lot about change over the past three weeks, and the process of getting used to it. I'm pretty sure I even wrote that change is constant. But that's only true for the future. Despite the best efforts of the revisionist historians - me included - the past is fixed. Our interpretation of it may change, our knowledge of it may change, the facts we are aware of may change, and our understanding of it may change, but what's done cannot be undone. My dad will always be my dad, even if he once had a nickname I don't understand. Wiggins' dad will always be his dad. And now, Wiggins will always have won the yellow jersey at the Tour de France. Even if he is later found to have cheated, he will have always crossed the line three and a bit minutes ahead of the next fastest guy. Whatever else happens in his life, he will always have won.

Sing Sha La La La La.

Stage 20 - Rambouillet to Champs Elysees.

You Can Have It All.

Stage 19 - Bonneval to Chatres (ITT)

Again, I find myself staring at the screen, unsure of how to start this post. In the 21 days of the tour - yeah, I count the rest days - so much has changed that I barely recognize the folks who lined up at the start. I only catch a little of the TT - enough to pass judgement on the hotness of the bikes, and to note that a significant number of the riders are covered in bandages. They're battered and bruised and just trying to make it back to Paris. They're the guys who were never GC contenders, who were there with a specific job to do, like fetch the bottles, make pace at the front, lead out a sprint, get in a breakaway. Some of them were able to do it, some of them were not. Some of them will go home with a little extra cash, their chop from a teammate who won a stage or collected a couple of KOM points here and there. Some of them will have gained valuable publicity for the team by spending all day busting their guts off the front. But most of them will be returning home empty handed, their teams and jobs and careers in question for next year. Fuck, I wonder how that feels. And then, to add insult to injury, with one stage to go before Paris, before coasting into town for a final giant criterium around the Champs d'Elysees, they make them ride a time trial. The fucking race of truth, riders out their on their own, their solitary pain on open display. Yeah, that would suck, suck so hard it almost seems deliberate. The second last stage is a cruel trick on the domestique from Cofidis and Christian Prudhomme is a bastard.

Your Heart.

Stage 18 - Blagnac to Brive-la-Gaillarde.

"You don't look so good," I tell Jen Jen.
"What do you mean?" She asks, slightly offended.
"Well, you've looked better. You look like you need some sleep. You look all disheveled and stuff."
"God, you're right, look at my hair!"
"Trust me," I go on, digging in deeper. "Your hair is the least of your worries." Pretty soon afterwards she tells me she is kinda tempted to punch me in the nose. I agree that I probably deserve it. But later, as she steps out onto High St, I capture her for Instagram posterity. That's the picture above. It's like Instagram has filtered out all the stress and workweek blues and attrition and just left her standing there on the side of the road, looking alive and brilliant. I take back all that I said.

But I'm not looking too crash hot either. The first week back at work has been rough, the early mornings a shock to the system. There are black rings under my bloodshot eyes, my skin is pallid under the yellow streetlamp glow, and I'm clumsier than usual. A quiet night is order. I text Kate about the Bombers / Geelong game on TV tonight and she tells me she'll be watching it with Rolly at hers. That sounds like something I could handle.

The game, however, fails to live up to its hype. Geelong are checking the Bombers close, ensuring the guys in red and black are always second to the ball, outmarked and outrun and outclassed. The score blows out in the first quarter, then comes back a little in the second, but by the third the result is a foregone conclusion. I suggest that I'd rather watch Gabriel Gate than the final quarter, but we leave it on, not paying attention, talking about everything else. When the final siren sounds we flip the channel and continue in the same vein - there is movement on the television, flashing lights and colours, but no one is paying it any mind.

A long time ago I remember reading some book on Taoism that suggested that conversations that you don't remember the content of are the best kinds of conversations. When you amble from topic to topic aimlessly, no intent or argument, wandering through stories and observations and making each other laugh without effort. I don't know why Lao Tzu thought that this particular kind of conversation was the best kind - probably something to do with the uncarved block, or being like the river, or something like that - but tonight fit the bill perfectly. I don't remember what we talked about. I just remember talking, laughing, enjoying being in the company of good people. I remember being tired, rubbing my eyes, but not wanting to go to sleep. I remember thinking that things were pretty damn good.

And then, about ten seconds before the end of the stage, I remember Mark Cavendish launching into a sprint that captured everyone's attention, flowing around the outside of the breakaway from five hundred metres out, gapping the field and charging across the line like the raging river. For a fraction of a minute we are all stoked on the tour again, the punchy little guy reminding us that this is why we stay up so damn late every night through July, why we torture our bodies with sleep deprivation, why we put up with three hours of a breakaway being reeled back in, stupid commentary and bike dorks and self-appointed experts pontificating about a sport that they hate and disdain for the rest of the year. Because every now and then someone does something that defies our expectation, that leaves us standing there gasping at the extent of human achievement, of physical capability, of what a guy can do on a bike.

Time's The Revelator.

Stage 17 - Bagneres-de-Luchon to Peyragudes.

"I can no longer keep a journal. My life erases everything I write."
 - Robert Kroetsch.

Last night I felt as bad about cycling as I've ever felt before. Driving home from an hour's worth of medium paced motorpacing with Cam, feeling the fatigue seeping from my throat into my brain, slow fog rising, I decided that I was quitting cycling, that I was going to sell all my bikes, that all my dreams were false. Gillian Welch was on the stereo, and when I pulled up to the house I sat in the car and waited for the song to finish. For about fifteen minutes.

When I went into the house James and his mate were leaving. "Hurley was just here!" James exclaimed, "he asked me if I had a 49 (tooth chainring), then said something about racing a Madison tonight." For some reason this made my day. The fog started burning away. I grabbed my pub bike and rolled down to the track.

There were a bunch of folks I used to train with down there. I hadn't seen any of them since January. Some of them had gone from strength to strength, some of them hadn't touched a bike for months, most of them in varying states of disrepair. We sat in the infield and talked shit. When the Madison started Gav Sittampalam and I wandered up into the stands to get a better view. The racing was scrappy, two teams dominant and the rest making up the numbers. It wasn't great racing, but, as Gav pointed out, both of us were sitting there wishing like all hell we could be out there.

Eventually the cold got too much for us, the results beyond a doubt, and we left. I rode home shivering, sprinting from the lights to stay warm. Somehow the fatigue hadn't taken root. Somehow I'd danced up against it and not fallen in. Fifteen minutes later I was on the couch reading A Man Without A Country, the heater blasting against my legs and a cup of tea in my hand.

Sometimes, both in my line of work and in my personal life, I get to hang out with pretty clever folks. Generally I think I've got this life - and my own personality - pretty sorted out, but occasionally one of these clever folks says something that resonates louder than I expect. A couple of days ago someone said to me that "It's not the thinking that will fix things. It's the time passing." That's a difficult one for me - I tend to want to barge in and figure stuff out. But last night I took it all in. I stopped thinking and let time pass. I didn't watch the tour. I went to bed.

When I woke up, I felt a little better.

Myths Wrongly Interpreted.

Stage 16 - Pau to Bagneres-de-Luchon.

I can't quite collect my thoughts on this one. I wanted to talk about change, about how change is a constant, perhaps the only constant, that what we think is permanent is just change moving slower than we perceive. But then I also wanted to talk about the night that I took the picture above. So maybe I'll start with that.

It was the night of the Dirty Deeds Prologue, 2012. Earlier that evening I'd posted on Facebook that I hadn't felt this good since Christmas Eve of 1998. Man, that was a night. I grew up in Stawell, a tiny town in the country that everyone leaves as soon as they finish school. But on Christmas Eve, everyone comes back to celebrate with their families. As a consequence, on Christmas Eve everyone ends up at the pub.

It's a long time ago now, so my memories are once again reduced to flashes, still pictures that I do my best to piece together. I'd recently fallen in with Angela Dufty, and she had tied her dreadlocks back into a ponytail with a bright red ribbon. My exgirlfriend Nadya Miller was there with her new boyfriend, and we'd all agreed to sing Fairytale of New York at midnight, but when the hour came we were happily songjacked by Happy Xmas (War is Over), which more folks seemed to know the words to. For some reason I climbed on to Dougie Burkhalter's back, and he carried me across the packed bar. It was noisy, the bar was packed, and I felt like I was in love with everyone there, the town itself, the night sky. At the end of the evening Angela and I walked outside, perhaps walked home, kept singing through the empty streets. And the next day it was Christmas, and everything was different.

The evening of the Prologue is more recent, so I remember it a little better. And, looking back over Facebook, it's easy to follow the trail that was blazed that evening. What I didn't put on the internet, however, was sitting in Jen Jen's kitchen, buzzing from coffee and hip hop and anticipation, and telling her that I had a feeling about the night ahead, and that I hadn't felt like this since that Christmas Eve fourteen years ago. "I'm not sure how," I urgently told her, "but after tonight, everything is going to be different. Something is going to happen tonight. Something big."

We didn't sing that night, but we danced, and when we dance, the night belongs to us. The Prologue was, of course, a cycling event, so folks were at the bar still wearing their Sidis. We held hands with girls wearing padded gloves and bumped into dudes in lycra. It was cold, and when we stepped outside we could see ourselves breathing. We talked and yelled and called on the band for one more song, one more song. We arrived battered and bruised, scarred from bike crashes and too many late nights and too much coffee or beer or worse, and left with our hearts bursting out of our chests, the taste of blood in our mouths, in love with everyone there, these people, this city, the night sky. And the next day, when we woke up, everything was different. 

That's the thing about change, though. It's constant. Everything is always different. All that matters is the magnitude, whether the platonic shift is gradual or dramatic, a slow edging across the sea or an earthquake. Whether or not something was big. And that's something only time will tell.
 

Oh I Cantered Out Here, Now I'm Galloping Back.

From Dave Hogan.

You should probably put the kettle on, there’s some slow burners in today’s La Musique Mercredi.

 When Brendan and I spent a couple of years at High School together, I don’t think we could have been more different; he the long-haired trouble maker, me the skinny dingus with the red hair and glasses. Brendan obviously tread a path into punk, while by the time I made it to university I was the dorky indie kid stuck in an Engineering faculty. So it was with a little surprise that we both recently realised our music tastes have at least a hint of cross-over.

 During my uni days, way back when, I used to go and see a lot of live music. My friend Nat hosted Local and/or General on RRR, and I used to listen to it religiously. I found some old tapes when I moved house recently with songs I’d taped off the show; live in-studio performances by bands like Sandro, Little General and 2 Litre Dolby. I’d love to be able to post some videos from those guys up here, especially of Little General and the phenomenally precise drumming of David Kneale, but do you know how hard it is to search youtube for clips of a little Melbourne band called Little General. 

(EDIT - Thanks to Jolan, I just discovered bandcamp.com, which miraculously has a couple of Little General tracks. Go here, and listen to the first track if youcan'ttakeajokegetthefuckoutofmyhouse, and if you like that, listen to the third song, Ron Pearlman. The basketball nerd in me especially loves Ron Pearlman, because it samples 70s NBA star Daryl Dawkins talking about his turbo sexophonic delight dunk.)

 I’d traipse to gigs all over town, happily on my own, but more happily with my buddy Bec. She’s my wife now. We shared our first kiss at a Gersey gig at the Empress. I saw Gersey play a lot, would let myself get lost amongst the slow progression of their songs, letting the sound wash over me as though I was in one of those slow motion movie scenes of people swimming under water. I’d get hypnotised by Danny Tulen’s simple 4-4 drumming, to the point that I when I first sat at a drum kit a few years later I could bash out a whole bunch of Gersey songs without thinking.

  

Back in about ’98, years before Bec and I got together, we caught the train back up to my parents’ place in Ballarat on a Thursday night with Cronky to see Not From There play at 21 Arms, one of the dodgy local nightclubs (why they weren’t playing at the Bridgey I’ve no idea). Before the show, the only people in the place were us three, and the three guys from the band. We had a chat with Heinz, the singer, a few other folks turned up, and then they played to all of 12 people. They were fucking amazing. For my parents, I was still trying to support the pretence that I attended lectures, given that this was reasonably early in my first year of uni, so we got a 7am train the next morning back to Melbourne so I could pretend to go to my 8.30am lecture. 

 There were two other bands that I saw play a lot around that time at the end of the 90’s / start of the 2000’s. The first was pre-shrunk, they of the two-bass-guitar-one-drummer set-up. Brilliant, talented musicians, producing sounds and song structures I’d never heard before, with a ridiculously tight live sound. If they were playing in Melbourne, or Ballarat (this time at the Bridgey thankfully), I was there.

 

 Going to all these pre-shunk gigs, I became friendly with the band’s manager, Doug, who runs Rare Records. He got me onto another band he was managing at the time, The Grand Silent System. Once again, my young impressionable ears were blown away by the musicianship and amazing live shows these guys put on. I’m not sure how well their prog-rock sound has dated, but their live shows were phenomenal. The somewhat serious, self-indulgent prog sound was balanced by Jova (singer) and Cabsy (guitarist) spending most of the show taking the piss out of themselves. Cabsy had a particularly foul mouth, and the first time I saw them play, at the Laundry sometime in early 2000, Cabsy was typically dropping f-bombs everywhere. Between songs he apologised; “we play a lot of all ages gigs back home in the La Trobe Valley, and I normally have to bite my tongue at those shows” Pause…….. “ we don’t have to play to them cunts no more.” 

I like this clip particularly as it’s a song they never recorded or released, which kind of gives you a hint as to how good they were, unless you don’t like prog in which case you may as well scroll down. Me, I loved this shit. 

  

But once uni ended and the real world came calling, local gigs were few and far between. Bec and I lived in Edinburgh for a few years, where I came across Scotland’s Uncle John and Whitelock. They had a grim blues-rock sound dripping with the swampy stench of a Scottish bog,  but unfortunately we only managed to see them once before they announced they were splitting up. A final show in Edinburgh beckoned, we got there nice and early, around 9-ish, to make sure we could get in. The venue was tiny and by the time we arrived it was full, with people literally hanging from the rafters. And yes, I do actually mean literally. I couldn’t find any decent live clips of these guys, but there was one song from the album There Is Nothing Else floating around on youtube. It’s a cracker.

  

In 2008, we spent Christmas and New Years in New York. The next clip isn’t from a show we saw there, but from a guy we saw when we got back. We had tickets to All Tomorrow’s Parties up at Mt Buller for the day after we flew home. We left New York in a blizzard, and our flight was delayed by 45 minutes while they de-iced the wings. We landed in San Francisco about the same time that our connecting flight to Sydney was due to leave. The connecting flight was at the other end of the airport, and we ran through the lounges as fast as we could, desperately hanging onto our coats and carry-on bags full of vinyl we’d bought in New York (that shit was heavy). We got to the gate around 10.30pm, about 5 minutes after the plane was due to leave. The plane was still sitting there, the entry tunnel thing still connected. But the lounge gate was empty and dark, with not a United Airlines staff member to be seen. After much frantic calling, we booked a flight that would get us to Melbourne the fastest, and after a night at a cheap airport motel ended up heading from San Francisco to LA the next morning, where we sat around for 7 hours before boarding a flight direct back to Melbourne, rather than through Sydney as per our original flight. We sent an email to our friends picking us up from the airport to let them know the score, but with no US dollars left we couldn’t stay on the internet long, and had no idea if they’d receive it or if they’d be at the airport a day early wondering where the fuck we were.

 We had no idea where our bags were, presumably they had made the original flight from San Fran to Sydney. We landed in Melbourne the day the festival was starting. Baggage claim made us wait until all the bags from our flight had been unloaded onto the carousel before we could fill in a claim. We finally got out of the airport, stressed and tired with only the clothes on our back, to find our friends Steve and Charlotte patiently waiting for us. Back home to Northcote for a quick shower and to grab whatever clothes we could, before driving up to Mt Buller. Now, Steve didn’t really drive (it was amazing he made it to the airport to pick us up) and Charlotte was French and couldn’t drive in Australia. So I sucked down a can of coke, jumped behind the wheel  of our car and sped towards Mansfield.

 We made it to the festival car park in the early afternoon, something like 40 hours after we’d left our friend’s apartment in New York, and waited half an hour for a bus to take us into the festival itself. We found our chalet, dumped our gear, and trotted up the hill to the stage. With only 2/3 of tickets sold, there was plenty of room. We grabbed a beer, and sat down on the hill. About 2 minutes later, onto the stage walked Bill Callahan, Mick Turner and Jim White. I think my head nearly exploded. Bill started playing his guitar, with that slow, repetitive pluck, and I laid back on the grass and looked up at a blue sky painted with fluffy white clouds. I was completely overcome by a combination of euphoria, joy, fatigue and almighty relief, and I floated up to those clouds grinning from ear to ear. I can count on one hand the times in my life when I’ve felt better than I did at that moment. Hell, I can list them; when I kissed Bec the first time, when I married Bec, and when my two daughters were born. That’s it. 

 

  

And lastly, here’s Dirty Three at their emotion-charged best. I was going to post a clip from their 2004 set at Meredith. You know, the one with the storm. But if you’re reading this, it’s a pretty good bet that either 1 – you were there, or 2 – you’re sick of hearing about how amazing it was. Instead, I’m going to post a clip from possibly the greatest television show in Australian history. Where else but Recovery would you get a live performance like this on television, complete with Warren Ellis’ brutal introduction. Perfect for a dusty Saturday morning, no?

 

Mary Smiles, But She's Watching Me.

Rest Day.

“At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it."
-Albert Camus; The Outsider.

I haven't read The Outsider in a long time - indeed, I think I last read it in highschool or thereabouts. My copy was stolen from the English Storeroom at Stawell Secondary College, a treasure trove of classic literature that was never stocked in the library shelves or given a place on VCE reading lists, from where I stole a whole stack of novels, plays and collections of poems. As such, a considerable number of my books are tainted by someone else's highlighter marks, annotated by strange handwriting, the dark shade of thumbprints on significant pages or passages.

In French the novel is known as L'Etranger, which is a much better name, far more ambiguous in meaning, and avoiding the inevitable confusion with the also much studied novel The Outsiders. I didn't know this for a long time, however, and when I was sitting in a Canadian Literature class a long time ago and the Quebecois professor started referring to the book by its French name - and pronoucing Meursault correctly - I had no idea of what he was talking about. If my memory serves me correctly, I asked the girl next to me what was going on, and went on to date her for almost six years.

I forgot about the book for a long time after that, but the quote above stuck with me. It's echoed in a line from a Springsteen song - "You get used to anything; sooner or later just becomes your life" - that indirectly convinced me to flip my wheel over from freewheel to fixed, which in turn led me to start racing alleycats, then start racing track, then continue to get deeper and deeper into the whole scene. I often thought of it again when I was on the Cannonball Run - the infamous 6 day singlespeed / fixed journey from Sydney to Melbourne via the coast - when by the third day we knew little other than waking up, riding, eating, drinking and sleeping.

And I wonder if that's where the riders are right now. The cruellest blow of the tour is that you have to ride on your rest day, even if only to tick the legs over for three or four hours. Two weeks in and your body has adapted, and if it doesn't receive the same treatment every day, it will start to shut down. So even today, when there's no racing, riders will have to wake up, get a massage, ride, eat, drink and sleep. Even if their bodies are battered and bruised from two weeks of incomparable suffering, if their hearts are no longer able to fully recover, if their stomachs haven't been able to absorb enough nutrients and their bodies, in desperate need of fuel, have started eating away at their muscles. They'll still be out on the bike, staring at the bike in front of them, tapping away at the pedals. It's just how their lives are now.

We Sang Our Hearts Out.

Stage 15 - Samatan to Pau.


Ok, ok, that was some laziness right there, both in terms of content and metaphor. But as you can see, yesterday was kinda rough. I'm back at school now, and turning up to the first day on next to no sleep, even less food and absolutely no preparation whatsoever wasn't the best of ideas. The only blessing was that due to working in a specialist setting I didn't actually have to teach any students, just run a couple of meetings. On the way home from one of those meetings - in Mill Park - I started to wonder about my ability to operate a motor vehicle. Heading back along Plenty Road my eyes kept shutting on me, blinks that lasted just a little too long. Eventually I pulled into Bundoora Park and crawled into the back seat, falling fast asleep for a little over half an hour. When I returned my boss noted that it had been a particularly long meeting. I agreed.

I napped again when I got home, but it still wasn't enough. Jamesy seemed in a similar mood. Billy Bragg was on the stereo. It was a bad scene. We needed, as I told facebook, a decent cup of tea and some PMA. So we invited Sime over and put on the kettle. Things were on the up and up. Sleep deprived I always end up looking for symbols when there are none, and got stuck on the Irish Breakfast I was about to sip away. This lead to Requiem for the Croppies, and a lazy bow drawn between BMC / Liquidgas attempting the impossible as the Irish before them had done, trying to take down the English behemoth far advanced in both number and technology. The more I thought about it today, however, the more I liked it. Cadel has been creative in his attacks, has drawn together unlikely alliances, has retreated to the hedges when necessary. But, like the rebels before him, when it comes to a hill the oppressors have him covered.

When Sime arrived I was in my bedroom talking to Sarah K on Skype. We weren't really talking about too much, just chatting in the way that old friends do. It was 9.30am in Newfoundland and she had just woken up. I could see the summer sun pouring in through her window, bright white glare in the corner of the screen, and I start to regret not going to visit her. When I come out of the bedroom, however, all of those regrets disappear. He's chatting to James about nothing in particular, it's equal parts hilarious and ridiculous, and I'm reminded that this is what my time off has been like: hanging out with some of the best people in the world, sitting around talking shit, enjoying the hell out of this life, life like a song, like a movie, like a TV series that you love and don't ever want to end. Life that you don't need to take a holiday from.

Raised On Songs And Stories.

Stage 14 - Limoux to Foix.

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley -
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp -
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching - on the hike -
We found new tactics happening each day:
We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until, on Vinegar Hill, the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August the barley grew up out of our grave. 

- Seamus Heaney, Requiem for the Croppies.