It’s been a busy few days around these parts: catch-ups with friends (amazing), busy days at work (fun) and lots of last things to get done before the school year finishes in EIGHT MORE DAYS.  So apologies RRs* for going AWOL….

Two weeks ago, we had Unit One in tears when I suggested he do a practice-run of the song he was due to play at his end of year drum recital (Is it a recital when it is kids smashing the crap out of a set of skins?).  We have not heard one single skerrick of practice all year, and believe me, with the size of our house and the type of songs he learns, I’d know if he was playing.  Let’s just say it is not Vivaldi.  So far, I’m told he doesn’t need to practice because he “learns it all in my lessons”.  The lessons go for half an hour.  Per week.  Sounds suspiciously like that old “I did all my maths homework on the way home on the bus” chestnut.  Anyway, I said “give me a run through” and he cried.  Because, shock of shocks, he couldn’t remember it.

It’s funny, he’s been the type of kid who hasn’t really had to work very hard for anything so far.  He’s naturally good at most things, has a great memory, and could read fluently at four years old.  This means there have been no hard-won battles to learn sight words or times tables, no trial and error, no striving for success.  So of course he wanted me to call the drum teacher and get him out of the concert. Or change songs to something he already knew.

Ummm, NO.

In the interests of making a point (and being right in the process- my two fave things) we made him practice that song three times every night for the next nine nights, and guess what?  He learnt it.  He bashed those drums as hard as he could and he did a great job. Not perfect but great.

You see, the reason why he didn’t want to practice it was because he couldn’t do it perfectly the first time.  He was concerned, because even though it looks like an easy song, he says it’s quite difficult. I suspect when you’re a kid who has had things come easily, you don’t have resilience or determination in your repertoire.  Maybe persistence isn’t something you’re born with, but something you have to practice, just like your drumming.  So we entered tenacity training.  And it worked (Of course it did, did I mention I’m always right?).  He did the song, and by the look on his face, and the chatter in the car afterwards, the victory tasted sweeter for being something he’d worked on and worked out.  Thunderous applause.

Crank up the volume, sit back and get Thunderstruck

PS Please click the link- he’s collecting views and I promised I’d blog up the numbers for him….

* Regular Readers

She often felt like she was from another time, or should have been, such was the sensation of subluxation from her schoolmates. They loved Madonna and Bon Jovi: their wrists encircled in rubber bracelets, their fists aloft and clenching to ‘Living on a Prayer / Like a Prayer’.  She only wanted to listen to bands that were dead or should have been.  They only wanted to listen to songs bursting with life and promise.

And then she found Dylan.

He was squashed flat between Duran Duran and Electric Light Orchestra in the woodgrain-finish Pioneer stereo cabinet. A thin film of dust gave cover-art Bob a hazy look, yet something about his arrogant profile made her take that record out of its sleeve and place the needle in the groove.

The next five hours were lost to her.

She listened to that nasal whine and that keening harmonica over and over until she felt the thin membranes of her ears might burst with the pain and the burden of the poetry, of a society past.  Passed and past, yet somehow matching everything she sensed was right and wrong with the society of now.  And once she knew these things she could not unknown them.  Subluxation became dislocation.  And so it goes.

It was 1985, and in that when, context could not be gleaned with the whizz of a mouse, so she had gather background and perspective from people of actual flesh.  Their memories were unreliable and insufficient for the immersion she required.  She wanted to be subterranean, not sprinkled.  She wanted to feel it all.

She longed to stand, shoulders strong, singing ‘I Shall Be Released’ or ‘Masters of War’ and force her voice to be heard.

She longed to lie, bodies supple, serenaded by ‘If Not For You; or ‘Just Like A Woman’, and allow her heart to be heard.

The years rolled by, and Ah-Ha were replaced Wa Wa Nee, and still nobody was listening, nobody noticed. She screeched ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’ at the top of her lungs as they danced on the ceiling, followed by the Locomotion.

Every dribble of drivel propelled her further into earnest righteousness, until she thought she could never love the world again. Bob joined in on ‘We are the World’ and she wished the Cold War would end, and end it all.

Then one day she met a melancholy boy. They united, in Dylan, and in all ways. They slept on the cold city concrete to get the best seats possible. Someone bought a guitar, and someone else a blues harp, and the eerie sounds bounced off their urban campground as they pretended they were disenfranchised, bundled as they were, in duck-down sleeping bags from Paddy Palin and Ray’s Tent City.  They were in love with ideology and each other, in that order.

By the time the tour started, there were cracks in their philosophy, and by the night of the show, they were chasms. They were as interested in each other, as Dylan was in his audience.  He looked at his boots and his guitar as if they fascinated him. They looked at each other as if they didn’t.

And when she said to the man on her right, “Aren’t you Mark Seymour” he despised her for not knowing it was his brother Nick.  “Still trying to be indi”, he said.  She looked at him blankly.  He wanted to slap the blankness away.

Dylan finished his droning, and stumbled off.

He handed her a book and strode off.

It was a book of Dylan lyrics and she knew the song he meant for her. It Ain’t Me Babe

Got a favourite break-up song?

She saved up all her pay every week for what seemed like her whole lifetime, and maybe it was. A thirty five dollar ticket takes some saving, when you work two and a half hours a week and you get paid three dollars an hour. But it was the Oils at Kooyong, and she was allowed to go. Without parents.

She cajoled three friends into loving Midnight Oil too, and so her Mum got them tickets from Bass on her Bankcard, and they were going. Actually going.

It was early Summer, and a rare Melbourne night of moist warm air.  The breeze tickled her skin, smelling faintly of Reef Oil and Australis perfume.

She wasn’t allowed to catch the train by herself, so her Dad drove them all the way across that precarious Westgate, and as close to the stadium as he could get. Traffic was bumper to bumper for what seemed like hours; cars and cars and cars of parents emptied out their kids and scuttled over the tram tracks, taking U-turns back to suburbia until it was time for pick-up.  Landmarks were checked and checked again so that everyone was clear on where to meet up in case they were cleaved.  If mobile phones existed in that then, they would have only been in ‘A View to a Kill’.

Finally she was released into the twilight and into the other-world that is the show.

She was proudly wearing the t-shirt that came free in the Armistice Day EP, as it marked her as true. It didn’t matter that it was her Dad’s record (and, by rights, his t-shirt), or that the album was before her time, she relished the looks from other knowing ones as they clocked the shirt.  No brand new, still smelling of paint, “Species Deceases” shirt for her.

From Rob Hirst’s first drum beats, to the final scream of ‘Hercules’ she was all theirs. Screaming at the first bars of each song as she recognised the track. Heart thumping, as Peter clutched the mic and bent his half-mad, preying mantis body into contorted, spastic flailings.  Not singing: yelling, every line to every song.  Together.  Sweat coursing from all their bodies, jumping and jerking individuals were lost as they became one crazed organism.

Together like this they knew they could do anything. Be anything.

Peter cried, from his soles and soul; “Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees” and it was true and he was right and they shouted it to the world. They knew they would never change and that they would change the world. That they would never be afraid to “take the hardest line”.

When the music was over, they stood around for a moment, blinking, separating, and becoming individuals again. Heads down and slightly blush as the sweat on their t-shirts dried to salty lines, and she wondered if she would ever feel such passion and power again.

She spotted her Dad and they slammed the doors.

“How was it?”

“Good.”

Too personal to share. Too big to describe. So she boxed it away, with all of the other memories she hoarded and lorded over, keeping them just for herself. Keeping them for good.

Still now, sometimes, late at night, she sings the words of anthems gone by, takes out one of the boxes of her mind, and shivers, shivers at the strange power of youth.

What was your first concert?

My twitter is has gone cray-cray with all the talk of Miley and her performance with Robin at the VMAs.  To keep up with what the young people were talking about, I went and had a look, feeling a bit pervy as I clicked around YouTube to find the whole performance.  I expected to be shocked.

Now I know the song is awful, and the lyrics aren’t something I’m comfortable with any reasonable human singing along to, but in watching Miley’s contribution, I failed to be appalled.  I have seen various commentators suggesting Miley has lost respect for herself in parading around on her “nude-coloured” bikini (sounds so much more risqué when you hear it’s nude-coloured rather than beige, doesn’t it?).

I heard that Brooke Shields (who played her onscreen Mom in HM) had tweeted that Miley was “a bit desperate”.  Desperate for what Brooke?  Fame?  Attention?  To break away from being a syrupy Disney creation?  It’s show-business Brooke, surely fame and attention are the point of it… I don’t think she was desperate for whatever is in Robin Thicke’s horrid, too-tight, stripy pants.

One commentator even suggested that Miley should have toned it down out of reverence for Robin’s “lovely wife”. WHAT?  This is the man who sings Blurred Lines.  (I’m not even going to quote it here, lest there are people eating their dinner.)

I am just befuddled as to why so much of the spotlight is on Miley, and what kind of image she is portraying to her legion of young fans, rather than why there’s a creepy guy in a clown suit, looking like he’s trying to cop a feel of a girl young enough to be his daughter, whilst smiling, and singing glibly about rape.

Miley jumped around, she twerked, she poked out her tongue in a weird way (which by the way is hard to do- try it now- kind of hurts, huh?), but I couldn’t really seem to get offended.  Maybe I’m getting old, maybe I’ve seen too much, but I couldn’t find much to be appalled at.  For me, the worst thing was all the galavanting around with that huge hand.  I kept on expecting her to break into the Coles “down, down, prices are down” jingle.  Perhaps those old Coles codgers could’ve jumped up on stage.  Now THAT would have been appalling.

Were you shocked and appalled?

Can you twerk?

I’m so cross.

We just had the television on, and I see that Channel 7 has a new advertisement, and the backing track is a Van Morrison song.  Not just any Van Morrison song, but a great Van Morrison song.

What has happened here?  Where are all the jingle writers?  Surely they haven’t all gone the way of Charlie Sheen on that show?  Why are they using the songs from the soundtrack of my life to advertise products?  I do not like it, advertising people, I do not like it one little bit.

I remember a few years ago (okay, it was ten years ago, but I’m old: time flies and all that) a friend of mine was getting married, and she chose a beautiful song by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, that was a mash up of Somewhere Over the Rainbow and What a Wonderful World, to walk down the aisle.  A few weeks before the wedding, it was on an ad for some kind of paint.  To her credit she ignored it, and went ahead with her plans.  And she was gorgeous.  We forgot about the paint.

Thing is, I can’t remember what that brand of paint was.  Because the song didn’t contain the product name.

So, advertising companies, I know you’re all reading my little blog, please take heed, and leave my songs alone. Get your own.

I do not want to see Specsavers using “Brown Eyed Girl”.   KIng of Knives, do not touch “The First Cut is the Deepest”.  Navman, leave “Are You Gonna Go My Way?” alone.   Brisbane tourism, “Funky Town” is not your theme.  Tewantin RSL, “Come As You Are” is not for you.  Kelvinator, leave “Cold Ethel” right where it is… Okay, that last one is a bit wrong. (But: Alice Cooper.)

And finally, talking of wedding songs, ours is featured on a mural on a wall of The Bohemian Bungalow in Eumundi.  I’ll forgive them this time, but only because they are awesome… (in lieu of free coffee* of course)

*This is not a sponsored post. I did not get free coffee.

 What songs are off-limits for you?

Who remembers the words to the Channel 9 News jingle “Brian Told Me”?

I work late a few nights a week, so on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, The Ashers tend to cut loose, and rock out a little.  Sometimes we use the vinyl, and other times we’re all techie and turn up the Apple TV, which hosts our music collection.

Liam drums to The White Stripes, or plays the uke to Funky Town.  Nathan does the groovy dancing, Coco runs around like a loon, and smashes head-first into the couch, and me?  Well, I’m the DJ with the 80s dance style. You know it; failing arms, white-man’s overbite.  Very, um, cool.

Songs are like smells for me.  They evoke a memory that is strong and pure. Three chords in, and I’m back to a time…

So let me tell you a true story:

Back in 2004 I was at the Byron Bay Blues Festival, half-way pregnant and starving. Always.Bloody.Starving.  I was standing out the front of the best pizza joint in the known world, waiting for a table.  A tall dude came loping along and tried to squeeze past my pendumen (pedulous abdomen).

Alas for him, he tried to go between me, and the gateway to food.  Not possible.  I pushed my protrusion forward and blocked his way.  I may have growled a little.  He kind of shuffled back, gave me a strange little look, and went around the other way.  Turns out he wasn’t trying to steal my spot, he was just moving through.  I smiled bovinely back at him, once the emergency was averted.  He smirked back, said “Hey,” and disappeared off down the street, and I like to think he was humming the beginnings of a little tune as he went.

Nath leaned in and whispered, “That was Michael Franti.”   I didn’t take much notice at the time, because: PIZZA.

I know what you’re thinking, “Oh my, Michael Franti wrote you a song.”  And yes, I suspect that is true.  Now before you start getting all confused with facts, and pesky things like that, check out the lyric:  “Bump into a person in the middle of the road, Look into their eyes and you suddenly know.” Amazing, right?  I’m only just recovering…

So that is what DJ Shadowcat will be playing ’round these parts tonight.  The song written for me when I was glowing and gorgeous and politely smiling at the lovely people of Byron Bay  when I may have tried to fight some big bloke for food.

It’s one of my favourite songs, and not only because it was written for me, but because it lifts my heart, every single time.  I wave my hands in the air, and jump like I have the pelvic floor of a twenty year old.  The Ashers all scream out the chorus together.  And of course we smile.  How can you not?   Michael Franti, you give good song.

Pump it up, think of someone you love, and rock out with us.

Say Hey… aka “I love you random grumpy pregnant chick”

Do you have a song that gets you every time?

How good is Michael Franti?