The band practice didn’t happen yesterday, perhaps Thursday it will. It suits me, I was tired from all the driving on the weekend. Luckily I have a police cruiser, and it’s designed for long periods of sitting in it. Later today I have to go and pick up my Gretsch guitar from the tech who is giving it the once over. He’s changing the strings for me, something I hate doing. At this stage I prefer to pay someone to do that because I will fuck it up for sure.
I have a lot of music to get to. Songs that are half completed. Songs that are still in the embryonic stage, and songs that I just discovered that I had forgotten about. This is my world and it doesn’t involve many other people. I was watching a Harry Dean Stanton interview yesterday and they asked him what was his philosophy on life. He said “nothing, it’s all pre planned and written and I just go along with it. Everything just happens, nobody’s in charge. It’s just one big phantasmagoria.”
I did some shows with Harry Dean in Australia in 1990. He was kind of scary, but I liked his band and the music that they played, particularly the Mexican tunes. At the time I was working in a warehouse and so it was an attempt to break out of there. I can’t remember what happened after that tour but I think I started work on a solo album which became King of The Cross. I also started working for a record company (Massive) who were headquartered in North Sydney. This didn’t last long. I’m not made for the corporate life, let’s face it.
When that finished with that, I engineered myself a programming director’s job at a North Sydney community radio station. I correctly figured out that if you control the airtime and who’s on it, you control the whole thing. That was kind of fun for a while until certain people started objecting to some of the programming content. There was one woman who was the treasurer who would always be complaining about what the kids were doing on a Saturday afternoon.
She didn’t like their music, failing to see that as a community radio station, we had to have a place for everyone in the community. She was a right fucking miserable cow, and even tried to bilk me out of the over $1,000 commission that I had earned for some of the advertising I had sold for the station. She (among other things) didn’t like people saying “Tune in”, saying it “cheapened” the radio station. These are the kind of lunatics you have to deal with in volunteer organizations which is why I today avoid them like Ebola.
Good Day
Harry Dean in his last leading role – Lucky