It was so very sad to hear today of the death of an Australian musical legend.
I’ve met him on several occasions over the last twenty years.
It was probably 1990 (or maybe 1989) when I first witnessed his “magic” at the Barmera Country Music Festival in South Australia (I was living in Renmark at the time). The thing I remember most about that night was the way in which Jimmy Little could “capture” an audience with his gentle nature and honesty. There was a point, I remember, where he wasn’t so much “singing” as “whispering”, and he had the audience in the palm of his hands. I saw him on many occasions over the years, in both Sydney and Tamworth, in particular, where he demonstrated this gift once again,
Jimmy Little
There were several occasions since when I, in my capacity as a radio presenter, interviewed him. As an interview guest, he was always honest. Although some musicians will gild the lily and put things “on” to an extent, he never seemed to do that. He just answered your questions.
And who can forget the CD “Messenger”? It was an album which I’ve played many times, and which I brought out tonight to play. I have an autographed copy. The song “Randwick Bells” is one of my favourites because, again, of its honesty and authenticity.
I didn’t know what to expect from Lorna Luft who played last night in Sydney. I mean, I’d heard her CD, and I’d heard two radio interviews. I was expecting a kind of old fashioned broadway show, but beyond that I didn’t know what else to expect. I must admit, though, I thought the first half was a little mixed. There were moments of sheer joy, where she was totally in her element on stage, singing wonderfully and connecting strongly with the audience. And there were other moments when she sometimes struggled with the material. Sometimes the phrasing wasn’t quite right, and other times the key wasn’t really suited to her. But even when that was the case, she was able to save each song with a tremendous final note. “She’s great at those big notes”, I whispered to my friend Graeme who came along with me last night.
Lorna Luft in Sydney
In the second half, she re-emerged to re-create the stage show, “Songs My Mother Taught Me”, which, in her own words was about coming to grips with her tremendous musical legacy. As she related, at one point, you can’t go into a library and ask for a self-help book about how to behave as the daughter of a musical legend. For a long time she rebelled, telling us “I died my hair purple and hung out at Studio 54”. I also read somewhere the other day she performed as a backing vocalist on one of Blondie’s early albums. As her own children began to ask questions about their grandmother, Judy Garland, Lorna explained she began to come to grips with her demons.
The second half of the show recounts the story of Judy Garland, and along the way touches on three other important influences in her life, Dean Martin (Dean’s daughter is Lorna’s best friend), Sammy Davis Junior and Frank Sinatra (her godfather). There were some genuinely touching moments, and some wonderful anecdotes. My favourite anecdote was about when the family was living at the Savoy, and, arriving home one night she asked her mother why everyone placed their shoes outside their rooms at night. When Judy explained it was so they could be shined for the following day, Judy then had the idea of swapping the shoes. Lorna explained they swapped shoes over three floors. “But mamma, don’t you think we’ll get caught”, Lorna remembered. “Do you honestly think they’ll believe Judy Garland would do this?”, Lorna remembers her saying.
Clearly though, she has her mother in perspective. While there were no tales of the alcohol and drug abuse in the show, Lorna said. “Mamma spent money even when there was none”, with a tinge of sadness in her voice and on her face.
The second half of the show was tight, entertaining, and a really entertaining show.
It was an old-fashioned kind of entertainment in some ways. In stark contrast to some of the more introspective, almost shy peformances you often see on stage these days, Lorna (like Judy and Liza) really knows how to put on a show. Big, ballsy, brassy. It was no wonder the crowd jumped to its feet on more than one occasion, quite spontaneously.
Before the show we were told there was to be no flash photography due to the program being taped for replay on “Ovation” later this year. I can’t wait to see it back.
After the show, we caught the bus up the street to “The Sly Fox”, a mixed gay-straight-lesbian bar on Enmore Road. Last night it was mostly a lesbian crowd, and it was also karaoke night. Ironically, with about 15 lesbian women on stage preparing to sing Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman”, it was only the gay men in the bar (and some older women) who seemed to know the song word for word, with the younger women having to use the cheat sheet.
A similar situation happened when a group of young men got up to sing “Macho Man”. I loved the look on their faces when they suddenly realised they had to sing verses as well as choruses. Have you ever read the lyrics to the verses of “Macho Man”? Totally obscure and very difficult to sing along with. “They should have tried YMCA”, I said to Graeme at one point, “At least you can sing along to the verses too”.
After a couple of beers, we headed off home, having enjoyed our night of Lorna and Lesbians.
According to the audio tour, Peggy was an American heiress who came to live in Venice in her early twenties. With gazillions of dollars behind her, the audio tour explains, she needed to find a purpose in life. Aside from being married, and apparently shagging lots of other blokes which I’m sure could be a “purpose in life”. And so she began collecting contemporary artists: artists like Pollock and Kandinsky. She lived in the house where the museum now exists for over thirty years. And what a house! Located right on the waterfront, it was both spacious and had spectacular views. But aside from the views, the museum contains some of the most spectacular contemporary art of the twentieth century. I loved it.
And so when I saw a review in The Australian the other week of a new documentary film about her life story, I was very excited. A friend and I, who had also been to the museum, hit the Chauvel Cinema last night to see the film.
At the heart of the documentary was the discovery of some previously hidden recordings she had made, as part of a biography project. Over the top of these recordings was some wonderful archival footage.
“Having seen the documentary, I don’t think I really know her any better than when I visited the museum”, I told my friend as we left the cinema. “It’s like they couldn’t decide if the film was about her personal life or her art gallery”, my friend said, saying it failed to satisfy on either level. I agreed, it was interesting, though not stunningly amazing. There were no real “insights” for me which I hadn’t considered previously.
All of that said, the small cinema was close to full, and so there’s obviously a market for learning more about the life of a pretty amazing person.
I’m sure, one day, it will end up late at night on either SBS or ABC.
Jackson Pollock’s Paints at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Marino Marini’s The Angel of the City at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Damien and I went to Wine Australia today, a rather large boozefest at Darling Harbour and it was a really enjoyable experience on many levels. It wasn’t too crowded, no one was too drunk, and there was enough of a variety of things to do to make it a really enjoyable experience.
While Damien concentrated on getting to know a few regions, I was keen to try a few of the newer varieties being grown in Australia, including some of the Italian varieties including Pinot Grigio and Nebiolo as well as varieties like Riesling & Rose.
Highlights included the Pinot Gris by Ten Minutes By Tractor (tasty, though we thought their range was generally over-priced), the Buller Tokay (like toffee before it turns hard), and the Castagna Rose (just gorgeous, very drinkable). Also, Simon Gilbert from Mudgee has a new cheaper range under the label Acrobat which was quite good.
World’s biggest wine bottle
In addition, we were also impressed by Ravensworth, a company run by one of the winemakers at Clonakilla, near Canberra. He’s also doing non-traditional varieties including Marsanne and Sangiovese, which I think is a good thing. It was also nice to chat with him about our experiences visiting Canberra region wineries (including Clonakilla before it became famous!).
One of the highlights was running into a work colleague who gave me some “inside information” about a currently available (and relatively cheap) wine made from grapes normally supplied to the makers of Grange.
The wine, the 2004 Pillar Box Red Padthaway (Cab/Shiraz/Merlot) currently retails for about $10 or $11. It probably doesn’t stand out all that much, but when you go searching on the internet you find reviews like this one by the renowned critic, Robert Parker…
90 points Robert Parker: “A fabulous value, this 20,000 case blend assembled by renowned Barossa winemaker Chris Ringland, is composed of 57% Cabernet Sauvignon, 32% Shiraz and 11% Merlot, primaraly from young vines. Ringland has rarely worked with such huge quantities, but he has kept the wine in tank with a little exposure to American and French oak, bottled it unfined and unfiltered, and finished it with a screw cap. It boasts luscious black currant fruit intermixed with smoke, herbs, and cedar. Richly fruity, opulent, and medium to full-bodied, it is one of the great wine bargains of the world.”
So there you go…
I also ran into the brother of a friend from Perth, looking at him with some recognition, and then looking at the nametag ahead of saying… “are you so and so’s brother”.
Nice day. Note for next time though, get a Platinum Pass. For $150 you get entry to a range of things as well as 6 bottles of wine up to the value of $25 each. What a bargain.
We sometimes disagree, because he tends to see things in fairly black and white terms. He sometimes gets angry about things I couldn’t care less about, as I tend to see the world as fairly “grey”.
And yet on the issue of Facebook, it’s the issue of the “greyness” of it all, that’s causing me some concern at the moment, and which has made me decide, finally, this week to close down my Facebook account.
On the issue of Facebook, The Best Judge recently wrote…
After about a week and the thirty-seventh “virtual beer”, “virtual pet” and “virtual gift” I received, I wanted to rip my friends apart limb from limb. I’d started to despise people I genuinely cared about in real life. After the twentieth time I’d been asked to do a quiz and then send it on to “20 of your friends,” I thought “why are you people torturing me?!?!”
I don’t really care about the poking and the gifts and all the virtual things, because I know you can turn that stuff off.
But yeah, I’m going to close down my Facebook account, nonetheless.
Nothing’s happened. No dramas. No late night drunken status update that I’ve come to regret.
I’ve just come to a conclusion it’s not the right social network for me. Good for many people, but not for me.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m really grateful for many things that Facebook has allowed to occur. I love, for example, the way in which it’s allowed me to make contact with people from my past, and the way in which it’s allowed me to keep up to date with people both intimately on the periphery of my day to day existence. I love knowing about when someone has a cough or a cold. Or when someone has had a relationship bust-up. I also often use it to contact people for work purposes.
My feelings have always been that it’s a much “deeper” social media experience than many of the others on offer. You get to share photographs, ideas, and connect with others who you know and (perhaps) feel strongly for. It’s not about your job (Linked In), and it’s not about the witty riposte (Twitter).
But I’m increasingly concerned about the way in which the lines between public and private information have been blurred.
I’ve concluded I like the privacy of email, and the openness of a blog, Twitter and Buzz. I like the way in which you know how much information you’re sharing with the world.
Sharing information isn’t an issue for me. For many years I was on the radio, and was always sharing bits and pieces of my life with those listening. I also share an awful lot of information about myself with the world through my blog. Every day I write something about my life. That said, I almost never write about work, and I never talk about friends except in a fairly general sense.
The sharing I do via my blog, though, is always on my terms. I think fairly carefully about how much I want the world to know.
Facebook on the other hand is more grey. What exactly is Facebook? Is it email? Is it a web-page? Is it both things and more? Or is it something new?
I have a nervous feeling about Facebook. I worry they’re sharing information I don’t want shared. I never write anything on Facebook that I wouldn’t want the rest of the world to see. I never write anything I feel like I would regret.
Rather, it’s the connections with friends, family and workmates. I don’t like the idea Facebook will misuse these connections to advertise and direct-market, and thus, to exploit those connections. It’s a philosophical concern, more than a personal one.
I admit, when arguments have been put forward about privacy issues and so on, I’ve always been quite a defender of Facebook, arguing you only share as much as you want to.
Even though I think Google has its own set of “issues”, I actually trust them a little more with the information I’ve shared with them. It’s kinda irrational, I know, because Google has access, via gmail, to far more intimate information including passwords, emails to family and friends and so on.
Sure, they kinda stuffed up the early days of Buzz with the default being to share information with everyone. They quickly learned from that experience and the default is now to share only with people you choose to. Facebook, on the other hand, seems to have gone with sharing information to a few, to sharing information with many.
I’m not going to do it overnight. I’m going to give my friends a few days notice, so that if our main point of contact is Facebook, we find an alternative means of communication. So if we’re Facebook friends, from now on, please contact me via Buzz, Twitter and my blog (where I’m sharing information knowingly with the world), or via email (where I’m choosing to keep it private).
It’s over twenty years since I last visited Bourke in Western NSW. To be precise, it was March 3, 2000, and my visit there co-incided with a visit by Queen Elizabeth II.
I was working for ABC Radio presenting the NSW Regional Drive Show, and the visit by the Queen to the outback town was a noteworthy event worth covering.
I had a connection with the town, having lived there for a couple of years in the late 1980s.
My producer, Jennifer was also originally from Bourke. Her parents owned the Outback Motel, so we had somewhere cheap/free to stay. We had also both worked at the local radio station, 2WEB, so we had somewhere to broadcast from.
And of course we had great connections with the town. To be honest, it’s probably one of the most memorable moments of my radio career.
Hungerford Field Day 1988
After a twenty year break, I’m super excited to be making a return visit. It’ll be great to see how the town looks these days, and to re-connect with some people I only speak to now on Facebook.
For a few weeks now, my friend Sue and I have been planning a road-trip around NSW. We both feel like we’re in need of a holiday, and an 11-day trip visiting Orange, Mudgee, Dubbo, Bourke, Parkes, Griffith and Canberra (with some side-trips to other interesting towns) is what we’ve settled on.
Planning for this trip has kept me reasonably busy over the last few weeks.
It’s part of the reason why I haven’t blogged so much. Oh, and the fact that life right now isn’t all that interesting. I’ve been experiencing a bit of writer’s block. Every time I’ve started a blog post, I’ve thought “oh that’s boring”.
I guess part of it is working from home. I’ve settled into a bit of a rut, with a blurred line between work-life and home-life.
Mostly, I’ve been staying around my neighbourhood, Surry Hills. This is a bit of chalk graffiti created by a local man who often sleeps rough in a laneway near home. With the lockdown, it’s been a while since I’ve seen Matt. There has been a greater effort in NSW lately to find accommodtion for homeless people. Matt was back the other day for one night only, it seems, and left this reminder to us all.I’ve done a few social things here and there, including catching up with a good friend for a long lunch today, which started around 1.00pm, and finished closer to 6.00pm. We had lunch at a newish restaurant in the area called, “Henrietta’s” which specialises in chicken (as the name suggests). The food and service were excellent.We ended off lunch with a couple of drinks further down the road at a bar called “Rosie Campbells”. “What was this previously called?” we wondered for a while. It started with B. Oh, and for a while, it was called the “2000 Bar”. Eventually we remembered it was the “Bentley Bar”, having had a couple of different lives as nice restaurant, and before that as “seedy pub”. We’d been to both iterations. We chatted with someone passing by who told us the food was excellent, and so we’ll be back.
I also caught up with some friends over at Manly the other weekend. When we arrived at the pub for lunch, there was hardly anyone there. By later in the afternoon it was a little busier. But to give you an idea of how quiet things have been around Sydney, the Hungry Jacks at Manly was closed by seven o’clock on the Saturday night.
Also in the last few weeks I’ve made a couple of trips to the Southern Highland. I blogged about one of them the other week, and a week later I was back for the funeral of a former colleague.
I’m super-excited to be going to see some live theatre this week. I can’t remember what the play is called, or even what it’s about. All I know is I received an email from a nearby theatre company that announced the resumption of live plays, and so I booked it straight away.
You know how when you travel you end up with a pocket full of coins you can’t do anything with. The exchange bureaus won’t accept them, and of course you don’t feel as though you can throw them away (they’re money after all). In writing this, I’ve realised I could probably give them to the poor and needy, though you don’t often see too many of them at the airport when you’re leaving. So I’ve found myself with a suitcase weighed down with half a dozen varieties of coins from countries which don’t have the Euro.
It’s a shame we couldn’t have used them yesterday morning as David and I found ourself in a roadside cafe hoping for a coffee and croissant this morning. We discovered we only had about three or four Euros between us as we found ourselves on the roadside in a small village without an ATM. “Ten, twenty, thirty”, we counted, until finally we discovered we could afford a coffee each, but only small ones.
David and I were on our way to Fontevraud Abbey. Amongst its many claims to fames is that its said to be the final resting place for the likes of Richard The Lionheart. I absolutely loved the abbey. It had a great peacefulness about it, as you might expect, and I felt the integrity of the place had been maintained through the restoration process.
After a visit to the abbey, we got some much needed cash and found a place for lunch.
“They are English”, a loud Frenchman declared pointing to David and I at lunch. “No we’re not”, David told him defiantly pointing out that he was French and that I was Australian. Even though I don’t speak French I certainly picked up the references to eating kangaroos that littered his conversation with his wife (?) and the waitress. He’s the only French man so far I’ve found who has lived up to the under-deserved reputation of his countrymen for arrogance.
Lunch was good, though, as I enjoyed a traditional French beef dish with tagliatelle. It was a really nice meal and the perfect way to spend a reasonably wet Friday afternoon.
And tonight I’ve had an even more traditional/authentic dining experience staying with David at his mother’s place. She’s a great cook, and her garlic potatoes are known far and wide. She also really appreciated the fact that I loving trying out new foods. In contrast to David who thinks goats cheese belongs in the garage, I thought it was excellent, slightly melted and served on toast. His mother seemed to agree as we munched into it with ear to ear smiles. Does life get any better?
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What a delight to hear Jimmy Little’s version, having long enjoyed the song by Paul Kelly… it makes me want to hear more by Jimmy Little.
What a delight to hear Jimmy Little’s version, having long enjoyed the song by Paul Kelly… it makes me want to hear more by Jimmy Little.