FORTY YEARS A SLAVE … TO THE RHYTHM
- Bernard Zuel
- 7 hours ago
- 4 min read
YOU COULD CALL IT COINCIDENCE, I prefer serendipity. Of course it happened like this, I thought, how could it be otherwise?
I had spent an evening with my oldest friend, John, talking music and playing music, talking music and dissecting music, talking music and our fluctuating mental health, talking music and going over books and theatre and films (some of them not actually about music) and his PhD, talking music and parenting and, yes, talking music a bit more.
Naturally, I had learnt something more, marvelling again at his range of interests and knowledge, at his insight and ability to explain it to someone who can barely hold an instrument without making me feel completely stupid. In fact, sending me home feeling a little smarter, or at least better informed and ready to drop into a conversation in the future something like, “yes, as my friend, The Professor, said …”.
The clothes and hair (or shortage of it) and the timbre of the voices were different, this was the first time in months that we’d convened, not days apart as once would have been standard, and we had fully grown-up women – wisely, not present – to go home to instead of pine over and write lyrics about. But in almost every other way, from enthusiasm and delight in discovery to niggardly detailed examination and names taken for further study, to rock solid emotional support, this was a repetition – no, a continuation – of a conversation we’d been having, in person, over the phone, in dozens of homes, since we were 12. Never once being bored or running out of material, just time.
So it was in this afterglow that two days later I noticed a reference to the R.E.M. album, Fables Of The Reconstruction – not just a very fine record but a review of which was the first piece of music journalism I had ever had published – and thought, wait a second, wait a goddamn second.
I looked up its release date, which incidentally was pretty much the day my review was published in the music magazine, RAM, and bugger me, it was almost exactly 40 years to this week, to that night of music talk. I’ve been doing this for 40 years. Bloody hell.
And we’ve been doing this for nearly 50. Bloody marvellous. And utterly connected.
Writing about music came out of talking about music with John, just like my music knowledge and taste did. As well as the English inkies and occasionally American glossies, we had been devouring each issue of the local music magazine, RAM, for years, guided by its recommendations, alerted by its news, occasionally inflamed by its “wrong” calls.
We’d inhaled the work of Elly McDonald, Stuart Coupe and Clinton Walker, the sisters Brown and the brothers Stafford, eyed off the photos of Francine McDougall and Bob King, taken up the language and inflections – and occasionally the look, if we could – of some of our favourite writers (hello the coolest dude on keyboards, whether typewriter or organ, Frank Brunetti). And later we’d grumbled mightily at someone like Jon Casimir who was our just-out-of-school age with similar but far from identical taste, and not just in with the most in of in-crowds, but he had confidence in firm opinions and flair in talent I secretly knew I’d never match. The bastard.
Naturally, when John and I declared one day that we should stop bitching and envying and see if we could do it ourselves, and I tried my hand at a review of Everything But The Girl’s second album, @&)$$! Casimir had already filed one and been published. The bastard. (A decade later at the Sydney Morning Herald, I found that Jon, who of course beat me to the paper by several years, the bastard, was actually a lovely bloke, a complete music obsessive of course, and eventually a very good friend who made my youthful pettiness look even more childish. The bastard.)
John and I would both be published in RAM and elsewhere, our conversations now encompassing how to write as well as how to listen (though he soon veered to academia and a fascinating professional music career while I had only words, so journalism it had to be) and with freebies to bolster our own excessive purchases, we had a lot more music in our hands to debate and deconstruct and enjoy.
I was still trying to impress him, looking to add to my small number of introductions (Prince, The Smiths, Lucinda and Emmylou, later, Springsteen, Gillian Welch and Laura Marling) to match the many, many, many he had introduced to me (Talking Heads, PJ Harvey, Elvis Costello, Stravinsky, The Residents, Cheap Trick, Ed Kuepper, The Sports, Joanna Newsom, Miles Davis, Bill Callahan, The Roches … oh I could go on), shaping my opinions sometimes in concert, sometimes in tangent, sometimes in opposition to his.
Though even then it took years more before I could comfortably, confidently, express out loud a position that was markedly different to his. Not because he was precious, for he was anything but and welcomed any debate or insight, but because I, a grown-ass man with the confidence of an insecure 13-year-old, was. But eventually I could say “no this one really should be counted as yacht rock”. Yeah, the big boy pants!
So anyway, this 40th anniversary passed and I guess it should be some kind of flag, a music writing/music fan version of F1’s safety flag to slow things down maybe. To buy less, to talk less, to write less, to obsess less. Right?
Ha. As if.
I’ve got a couple of new records and John’s got a score, there’s been gigs and books, so we’ve got things to talk about. For a couple of decades yet I reckon.
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