WHAT COMES TO MIND … THE REELS FORECAST
- 23 hours ago
- 5 min read
Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence.
Each time, he will dig out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenge me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical, but it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.
This week, The Reels, late of Dubbo, eventually everywhere, sometime in 1979.
_____________________
I see the bad moon rising. I see trouble on the way.
The dark doesn’t always look the same and it doesn’t always scare. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Rising offered a warning, sure: the hurricane a-blowing, the river overflowing, no doubt it was true that all this was “bound to take your life”. But the song in their hands also came with a chugging energy that might be mistaken for some kind of running towards the fire/moon momentum, or at least the idea that this certainly was to be avoided and it was entirely possible that you would do so.
When The Reels covered Bad Moon Rising, synthesised strings were the closest thing to momentum movers because drums were intermittent, a clarinet (I think) took the solo with grace and the tempo was slowed. Not slowed right down – this wasn’t a dirge – but no one was bouncing towards, or indeed away, from the trouble on the way. It was coming and Dave Mason was facing it with a degree of equanimity, like he’d seen it before, or had been readying himself for it.
That’s how The Reels always struck me: ready. Ready and very able.
Which doesn’t mean they weren’t buffeted, of course. You don’t come from Dubbo and into rough-as-guts beer halls and rock rooms in the late ‘70s with an attitude, and a wardrobe, that says love will find a way, that Bacharach and David are just fine next to Smoky Dawson, that K-Tel has as much a place as RM Williams, and instead of riding Smoky’s Flash you will be wielding a synth or two while bouncing around the stage like kids who’ve just been to a lolly shop, without copping some stormy weather.
Especially if you are more likely to play Stormy Weather than a sub-Billy Thorpe boogie or Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes than another Detroit copy. Them’s fighting words.
But from a distance, Mason and Craig Hooper, Karen Ansel and John Bliss, Paul Abrahams and Colin Newham, wore it with if not insouciance then certainly sturdy resistance. Like the dark wasn’t going to scare them. Like Bad Moon Rising wasn’t a warning, just an observation. I don’t know that I could be that sanguine.
Actually, I know I couldn’t be that sanguine. Not when that song turned into a kind of mantra for me that inverted – or maybe reverted – the point of it all. Not just John Fogerty’s 1969 song but their version of it: that mid-tempo, light but not flimsy, looking-over-the-horizon, I’m-trundling-through, take that I began to see as something heavier, a friendly warning which only lightly disguised fear. My fear.
When my first psychologist walked me through the spiral, the unravelling, and the crash that was my first, all-consuming depressive episode, she began with the how rather than the why. It mattered more at that stage to take away the terror that at 51, when everything in my life seemed settled, understood, held in, I had lost control of myself and might not get it back.
Keeping myself in hand, behind good baffles that didn’t just keep trouble out but didn’t let any of the trouble already in be seen or be judged, had been my strength I thought. My best defence. And here I was spilling out in uncontrolled tears and rising tides of every emotion everywhere all at once like some burst water main gushing wildly. She stemmed the gush, showed me I could make some attempt at regulating this, and then, sadly (for me at least, but not for her) left the job for an academic post with a “you can do it” pat on the back.
A year or so later, when some signs flashed, when I realised the spiral was happening again, the unravelling a tangible threat – close, but so far still a bit away – I started singing The Reels to myself. Not for me Churchill’s black dog metaphor or some Yves Klein colour tone, I saw trouble ahead, I saw a bad moon rising, I saw the dread underneath those words, and I started asking myself if I was stupid enough to try to weather it alone again.
Dave and friends weren’t a comfort as such, but they were a spur, firstly to recognise the (shit)storm approaching, then to get help now, not later when the wreckage would be strewn in the lives of people around me. And this time Psych #2 broke down the why, broke down my bluster and denials too, and worked me through exercises that were about building better interiors not more protective exteriors, drawing on the people who held me, not the people who never had.
And in there she also taught me the tools of proper forecasting so storm warnings were heard not deflected. After all, the nasty weather would be back, that much I knew for sure – you don’t get cured with this shit, you get better at handling it – but we’d all stand a better chance next time and the time after that if the bad moon got clocked in time.
When Stuart sent the photo above, I went back to something I wrote for the liner notes of a Reels reissue some time back, and some lines about how they were proper revolutionaries leapt out at me.
I wrote that “real insurrection, real change comes from those who emerge from within or insinuate themselves and chip away at attitudes and truths. They use the weapons and tools of the greater forces against them until the silliness of whatever was accepted thinking becomes self-evident. They draw in with the seemingly easy and quiet, the song that seems delicate and clear of subterfuge, and then sting with the late-arriving understanding. In other words, they get into the houses and the heads of people who wouldn’t normally go there. They snuck in everywhere, planted little time bombs of commentary and insurrection which detonated weeks, months, years later. That was real rebellion. That was The Reels”.
Well yeah, I think I was onto something with that back then. And now? Now those little time bombs have detonated? Now I don’t have to be scared. If I see a bad moon rising, I can draw on another Reels line: yours is the future, don’t run away.
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