THE OFF THE RECORD TOUR 2010 DETAILS

You can find all the details and the itinerary at:

OTR TRIP 2010

The first Jazz Fest line-up announcement is here:

Jazz Fest

Tim Rogers’ Ya-Ya’s Celebration Is Awesome!

Last night I saw one of the very best gigs of the year – and I’ve seen a hell of a lot of gigs in 2009. I travelled down to my favourite venue – the Meeniyan Town Hall – to see the first official public show for Tim Rogers’ Charlie’s Good Tonite: A Celebration Of Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out.

The show was absolutely awesome. If you haven’t got tickets to Saturday night’s show at The Corner (Friday is sold out) then make sure you get them now. You will not regret it.

It is difficult to convey just how good this show was without sounding over the top but it was at the least superlative and the best inspiring. Tim and The Monkey Men (drummer Ian Kitney, guitarists Davey Lane and Phil Gionfrido, bassist Ross McLennan and keyboardist Steve Hesketh) nailed the album perfectly, with just the right balance of homage and spontaneity.

Tim was the perfect front man for the job. He even wore the same t-shirt design that Mick had at Madison Square Garden back in 1969. He reprised the dialogue and added some of his own. I cannot imagine that anyone else in Australia could have done a better job. He swaggered, he swayed, he swigged (from a bottle of red wine), he shimmied and shook and he captured the attitude of the original album.

This was no mere covers band. It is all about feeling. It was as if the album was an entity in itself roaming across the decades until it found exactly the right band to possess. At times it was easy to believe that we were back in 1969 and in a parallel universe where the Rolling Stones never existed but where Tim Rogers & the Monkey Men were the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band!

Roll on Friday and Saturday!

Podcasting!!

Finally, there is a new Off The Record podcasting site. It is at otrrrr (just click on this link).

I reckon it looks good and it is certainly easy to use. Let me know what you think.

I have already uploaded the Tina Harrod and Al Green interviews, along with a podcast of a chat I had with Richard Neal, close friend of Rick Blanco. 

The Devil Made Him Do It!

I owe Max Crawdaddy an apology. He noticed my last post and felt it incumbent to explain to me that whatever happened prior to last week’s Son of Crawdaddy was the fault of none other than Leaping Larry L from All Over The Shop.

I can certainly appreciate his problem. So many times I have been in the situation where people have used powerful persuasive techniques to get me to stay at the pub. Lines like ‘want another drink?’ are difficult to argue; most often I never have an adequate answer.

Max explains that he was in exactly the same position. The silver-tongued Larry had lured him to the Lomond and plied him with beers. Unbeknownst to Max they are putting something into beer these days that addles your brain, stops you from thinking straight.

Tim Thorpe reckons that a mate of his says they are putting something in the beer to give you a headache. I agree with him. I noticed during our trip earlier this year that after a night at Fahey’s Irish pub some people  looked terrible the next day.

So Max, I apologise. Next time I see Larry I will chastise him for leading you astray.

The (Wine) Cellar of Sound

My voiceover man for the Cellar of Sound promo is none other than Triple R’s Max Crawdaddy who presents Son of Crawdaddy every Thursday evening between 10.00pm and midnight.

Last night Max provided one of my radio listening highlights of the year – if not the decade – when it sounded as if he had been down to the wine cellar instead of the cellar of sound.

A guest spot on All Over The Shop in the afternoon with Leapin’ Larry L had obviously lubricated Max’s tonsils, as he tiptoed his way through the English language like a nervous soldier through an Iraqi minefield. After a while I started to believe that English may in fact be Max’s second language. I must ask him about this.

I hung on every word, urging Max to finish each one and to string a few more together to complete entire sentences. It was a Herculean effort, that conjured up the image of a brain surgeon suddenly blinded prior to undertaking a delicate operation.

Though Max said that he was going to play music rather than talk, a spectacular back announce of close to 8 minutes proved that he is indeed a unique broadcaster. Not since the famous completely incoherent PBS announcer collapsed under the panel has there been a funnier two hours of radio.

In the land of the dumb, the one syllable man is king!

The Sydney Festival

You have to feel jealous of Sydney-siders when they can put together an annual Arts Festival that includes a great music program – much better than anything we have had in Melbourne in the past decade. The first ever Australian appearance of Al Green, as well as Marianne Faithfull, David Johansen etc (in Hal Willner’s Rogues Gallery), plus a few inspired choices of lesser known but terrific acts like Medeski Martin & Wood and Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears.

Read all about it at Rhythms.

This continues an innovative tradition that has seen them bring out Lou Reed for Berlin and the Leonard Cohen tribute concert of two years ago.

Bluesfest 2010. First Line-Up Announcement!

First Bluesfest Announcement: Crowded House, Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, Lyle Lovett, Dr John & The Lower 911, Lil’ Band O’ Gold, The Flatlanders, Peter Green, Derek Trucks & Susan Tedeschi, Justin Townes Earle, Renee Geyer, Old Crow Medicine Show, Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express, Bela Fleck’s African Project with Oumou Sangare, Orquestra Buena Vista Social Club, The Avett Brothers, Roger Hodgson from Supertramp, Gipsy Kings, Orquestra Buena Vista Social Club, RockWiz, Jimmy Barnes, Al DiMeola, Gogol Bordello, Joe Bonamassa, Robert Gordon & The Gang They Couldn’t Hang, Fat Freddy’s Drop, Jessica Mauboy, Newton Faulkner and The Swell Season.

Early bird tickets are available now: www.bluesfest.com.au

Hey Hey, I’m Home

Last Thursday when I was driving to Eugene via the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum I listened to an hour of talkback on NPR about the now infamous Hey Hey It’s Saturday skit. (The only other news item I heard about Australia in the time I was away concerned the limit of a slab of beer person per day at Bathurst. The NPR hosts were pretty amused about that one).

There was a three-way link up between NPR, the BBC and ABC in Sydney. It might surprise you to learn that a lot of people in the USA and the UK think Australia is a racist country. The treatment of the Aborigines was a subject that emerged often as local ABC host Rod Quinn tried to assert that the bad old days have long gone.

Of course, this is the crux of the matter. We might think that we are no longer racist but others have a different perception and this is the thing that the Hey Hey host, cast and producers completely fail to understand. Twenty years ago when there was no internet or YouTube the skit might have drawn some local comment but in an international marketplace when a tree falls in the forest everyone hears it. The villains of the piece are the producers of the show who let the skit go to air. What were they thinking? As soon as I heard about it in America I couldn’t believe that it went to air. My immediate thought was that it was racist at worst, regardless of whether some of those taking part were of Indian descent, and offensive at the least.

My recent visit to the BB King Museum where I saw clips of the Amos and Andy show brought home to me just how offensive the blackface routine can be to African-Americans. One imagines that seeing the Hey Hey skit would have brought back horrid memories for some. But you do not have to have visited Mississippi to be aware that the skit was potentially offensive, if not downright racist (and there is a difference).

Even a cursory acquaintance with current standards would have been an alert in itself. But the Hey Hey crew thrived over the years on cheap shots, making fun of people and using lowest common denominator humour (in much the same way that The Footy Show does these days). The current breakfast host on 774 could have distinguished himself by agreeing with Harry Connick Jr about the value of the skit – but he didn’t, because he cannot seem to treat anything seriously. (Is that why he was taken off air during the bushfires?). And there is no point trying to justify it on air afterwards with talkback – like the King of the Jungle joke punchline goes, ‘if you don’t know, you just don’t know.’

Having got that off my chest, I have to add that one of the reasons I hated Harry Connick Jr’s shows when he was in Australia with his New Orleans band in the early 90s – the one that played at The Continental – was that he had an African-American musician, whose name I cannot recall, who I felt was demeaned by the show (in ways that reminded me of Amos and Andy). I reacted poorly to seeing this musician having to act the clown – even if it was by his own choice. That was a personal reaction, everyone else loved the show that I found so painful.

It is always a fine line with these matters but Hey Hey’s producers didn’t even see the line they were overstepping.

Home – Monday October 12, 2009

It is strange being back at work, especially as the first thing I had to do was attend a staff meeting! That was surreal.

The flight home was great. I had an aisle seat and a spare seat next to me on what was otherwise a full plane. Maybe no-one wanted to sit near me? Slept most of the way across the Pacific.

I didn’t watch any of the movies but I could tell that at least two of them – one starring Sandra Bullock – were possibly amongst the worst movies of all time. One of them was so bad it was not even listed in the guide. Okay, I agree that the United Airlines entertainment system is appalling but it did encourage me to read when I was not dozing.

In Portland I got the Paul Shaffer autobiography that was plugged on the Letterman show last week and it is quite lively and entertaining. Some of the stories about Dylan are a treat. I know that some people find Shaffer annoying but I have seen him at Jazz Fest, so he cannot be all bad.

I am also finishing the lengthy Michael Crichton novel State Of Fear but it seems to have gone completely of f the rails. I have always thought his books were good ‘airport’ reads but this 2004 novel is like a long harangue. I now understand why the bookseller in Chiang Mai a few months ago said that Crichton had been ‘right wing’ because this book is full of data trying to disprove global warming.

Arrived in Sydney on time, left for Melbourne on time and then got delayed for 20 minutes waiting for a gate.

Welcome back to Melbourne’s Sunday morning traffic chaos!! Just the other day I was telling someone that the only bad thing about Melbourne is the traffic. I was correct. It took an hour to get home.

The two boxes and three parcels of books and CDs had arrived and so I have a plethora of music to play and things to talk about over the next few weeks. Look forward to being back on air this coming Saturday.

On The Road – Friday October 9

I left Eugene at 7.30am still buzzing from the Bob Dylan show last night. I am sure that Bob deliberately tailored this set to the university crowd because it seemed much more up tempo. The epic version of ‘Desolation Row’ was brilliant and even the re-arrangement worked well. ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’ was right up there too.

But the song that the kids loved was ‘Like A Rolling Stone,’ and there really hasn’t been another song that has quite captured the angst and bitterness of this classic. Even though Bob had changed the timing, the crowd sang along, especially for ‘how does it feel?’

Charlie Sexton seemed a little down in the mix tonight, compared to last night but you still got the sense of how he has re-energised the band. This is the fourth gig on this current 32-date tour and the band is starting to gel. In a few days time it will be a well-oiled machine. I am stil not sure how the musicians manage to keep such good time when Bob changes things around so much on some songs – but they do.

Occasionally, it has the potential to fall apart but that is what sets it apart from so many other slick, soulless shows. You never quite know what to expect and Bob will pull something out of the hat like ‘Desolation Row’ and floor you.

I had a great spot on the floor, standing maybe 20 rows from the front right in the middle. The sound was excellent considering it is an old basketball arena.

The walk to and from the concert revealed just how huge the University of Oregon campus is. There are almost 21,000 students here and 67% of them live on campus in the many halls of residence that sprout up everywhere. I saw one guy wearing an SAE fraterntiy t-shirt and discovered that it was founded back in 1915, apparently voted by many magazines (including Playboy) as best fraternity in the USA.

Yesterday afternoon I looked for a new suitcase but to no avail. Not a cheap one anyway. I did find one at Costco but you have to be a member. So I spent $20 and bought a small carry bag and a strap for my current dilapidated case. Hopefully, that will work.

This morning I was up at 6.30am, had the continental breakfast in the breakfast room and left at exactly 7.32am. My schedule did not allow for the fog which was quite thick in places for the first 50 miles or so.

The first part of the drive through the mountains and forests of Oregon was spectacular. I even stopped to take some photos, as opposed taking them while driving as I did on the way up. (I wouldn’t recommend this practise.)

Arrived at San Francisco airport at 6.00pm after a trip of ten and a half hours.