April 2012
33 posts
Altamont re-remembered
December 6th came and went with me driving through a pretty part of Australia, admiring the scenery, plodding along in the bus whilst trucks and cars zoomed past me on improbable missions at impermissible speeds. People just GOT to go fast, it’s in their DNA, but I am a ‘dawdler’ – wanna go fast get a Ferrari, wanna enjoy the scenery, drive along in a bus that’s happiest at seventy miles per hour,...
a thought
Parked in a field at the Strathbogie Outdoor Education Center in the middle of rural Australia attending the Entheogenesis Australis conference along with 500 or so other people with like-minded predelictions. We’re a herbacious lot with dreads and contentment very much in evidence. A chilly dawn greeted the sleeping campers and I listened to two birds calling to one another across the valley...
The 12 hour day:
There can be very few things that Winston Churchill and I would have ever agreed upon. My mother called him a ‘drunken warmonger’ to his face and I have considered him a proto fascist ever since he publicly proposed the gassing of dissident tribes in the Yemen in the 1920’s. One thing tho, surprisingly, we both came to the same conclusion about was the day being divided into 24 hours. Churchill,...
WHY ??
Born curious we are !! If everyone on the planet asked themselves “why?” about something or other a couple of times a day, which is a reasonable enough supposition, then that’s a total of 14 billion “why’s?” a day or to put it another way, 5110 Billion “why’s” a year !!! The problem is not the questions, the problems arise because of the answers we come up with. If only ten percent of...
The romantic.
Up before dawn and I fancy I can hear the shivering birds rustling their feathers as they wait to wake up. I sit in a friend’s garden listening to the sounds of empty trains speeding to the suburbs so that they might bring the wage slaves into the city on their return. In the distance a siren wails in answer to some poor soul’s troubles. A cat sighs it’s lonely-infant drone in the alley at the...
Boats babies and dreams.
An idyllic week has slipped through my unemployed fingers – I have written nothing. I’ve been helping to care for a sixteen week-old baby and I’ve been dreaming sailing dreams on Scotland Island.
Auggie, the baby, lives with his mother and father on the island. Mum’s an old friend and one of Australia’s most gifted songwriters. Dads away in Queensland getting something or other together and...
Me and the spiders.
I am sitting at my desk in a sweet little cabin on the hill above my friend’s house on Scotland Island, on the Pittwater about an hour north of Sydney Australia. Out the window the ferry plies its trade taking people across to the mainland, yachts slap about at their moorings and a grey day welcomes the night’s departure. It’s raining...
On Scotland Island.
A busy week will encompass such an enormity of sensations that one’s fair challenged to experience the simple truth of the finger nails growing. The brazen rush of events, the tumult of sensory disinformation – the very business of living can overwhelm the gladdest tyranny-of-self and leave the sensibilities diluted of feeling. And then, like an unexpected glade in an otherwise delusional forest,...
Leaving Korea
In the last hour before departure I’m a happy man. The bag’s packed; all I have to do is prepare my head for the next steps on the journey. I am leaving Korea after a spectacularly non-eventful forty-eight hours. Korea was closed. Literally. It was the Korean New Year national holiday, nothing was open. It was a miracle the hotel was open and with only a skeleton staff on duty. I couldn’t get a...
Rock in the age of carrier pigeons
A beautiful girl once asked me, “Sam, what was it like in rock and roll, before mobile phones and the internet, and all that shit?” and here’s what I replied.
Before the advent of mobile phones the biggest single problem in rock n roll was finding people. The Tour Manager’s constant nightmare, was “where’s the drummer” or “has the van (with the equipment) broken down?” I’d get up in the...
The tragedy of the Phillipines
Having been in Makati for three weeks, and having spent most of that time cooped up like a Philippine cockerel in my hotel room with no room to strut or crow; I decided I’d spend a day being a tourist. The national Gallery of Art, along with the National Museum of the Philippine People appealed to me, otherwise it was the Museum of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and that seemed singularly...
The uses and abuses of consciousness
Written last year (from my blog) and STILL relevant: A lot of young kids tragically die in car wrecks so consequently Australia has some of the most draconian laws when it comes to learning to drive. When you are sixteen you can apply for a provisional license and thereafter, before one can sit the driving test, one must do 200 hours of driving accompanied by an adult with a driving license –...
If I knew the way ......
IF I KNEW THE WAY …… Much is now being made of the Grateful Dead’s business model as some kind of guide to contemporary industry, and I think this bears closer scrutiny (no pun intended). The very idea that the ‘corporate model’ of a rock and roll ‘collective’ has some relevance to a publicly listed company is on the face of it risible, BUT perhaps it possesses some merit. The question, what was...
free from the anxiety of failure
For the last thirty years (or so) I haven’t read novels, preferring instead to read works of non-fiction. In some respects my life has been lived as if it were a novel, with me as the author of inter-weaving plots and developments that have twisted and turned in arbitrary ways sometimes outside of my own control. I may well have thought myself the captain of the ship HMS Word, but it often...
Gold medal stoner
Michael Phelps the champion Olympic swimmer has reportedly been photographed smoking a bong! Tens of millions of people know what he was up to – he was getting high! He was exercising his perfectly legitimate right to the pursuit of happiness. He was smoking something (I presume) that grows in virtually every country on the planet – a weed. The human race has been smoking weed for centuries with...
we live in interesting times
“It is important to realize that ALL black markets are dangerous to the public health, damaging to the economy, corrupting to officials, and create a basis for crime”
Bear “Owsley” Stanley
The Grateful Dead were a legendary California band that went from being totally broke and playing for free in San Francisco parks to becoming multi-millionaires and one...
The Tour Manager Remembers: Europe ‘72
“All the musicians in the Grateful Dead loved playing for people who hadn’t heard their music before – a fresh ‘new’ audience represented a golden opportunity to “strut their stuff” musically, to blow a few proverbial minds, and to have a whole lot of fun.
The Grateful Dead had long dreamed of playing in Europe but because of the logistical problems involved and the cost of moving people and...
Fireworks
In most countries on New Years Eve the fireworks are in one place and the audience are in another – rather like in an outdoor theatre. Sydney has a world class example of this with the fireworks on the Harbor Bridge and barges parked nearby, whilst an audience of a million plus watches from every available vantage point all over the city. Things in Manila could not be any more...
Merry lunacy
Merry lunacy on the last day of the year with Makati City sounding like Beirut in 1976 – there are explosions going off everywhere (fireworks) and I thought poverty was ubiquitous here; man these people have got money to burn! I rose at three thirty a.m. to work on a chapter that has stubbornly been refusing to end and all was peace and quiet – perfect! The only sound was that of the...
Over Christmas
After the positive orgy of “peace and love and goodwill to all men” that Christmas ostensibly brought to the fore, the thought occurred to me that perhaps we should reverse things and have the ‘normal grind of day to day life’ for the few days of Christmas and extend the ‘Christmas ‘spirit’ to the rest of the year. Perhaps it would improve things. I for one am glad...
Christmas eve in the work house
‘twas Christmas eve in the work house …….
…… well it was where I was staying. In the ghost-green room where I am a guest called “Mr. Sam”; which I’ve grown to be quite fond of over the last couple of days; there was nothing better to do than write. Working on my book “Ibiza” seemed preferable to seeing the streets on a Saturday evening in Makati City. Apparently the place...
Makati City
I am sitting in an hotel room which would surely qualify for the “worst interior design” award were it in a Western country; but for an Asian hotel it’s not too bad. Any way, what I do I care what the room is like ? The floor is clean, the bed is hard, there’s soap in the shower, and I can plug my lap-top into the power supply which is working – this room is as close to heaven as...
Never happier
After days of rains it was pleasant to be able to sit outside in a friend’s garden and to encourage my lifting spirits with my ritual yawning to the dawn. The light duly arrived in a softened and chastened mode diffused by a grey wash of low cloud and the garden throbbed in its lush green fecundity. The lawn was splattered with grinning dandelions welcoming me.
The first flight of...
Innocence lost and regained
I am visiting Scotland Island (an hour north of Sydney) looking at the setting sun from a west-facing deck fifty feet from the water-line. Sail boats, like cattle in a field, face in the one shared direction the incoming tide and strain gently on their moorings. Three girls in short skirts and improbable heels wait for the water taxi to take them across to the mainland...
Australian defence
Time for my trans-Pacific friends in America to get a map out and have a look at where Australia is – yes ! That’s us, that huge blob of an island way down south there, just below Indonesia. Can’t find Indonesia, look for Vietnam. Can’t find Vietnam, look for Korea or China. Or Japan. We’re due south of Japan/Korea/China and just about everyone else. To the south of Australia the only thing...
December 6th - the anniversary of Altamont
December 6th came and went with me driving through a pretty part of Australia, admiring the scenery, plodding along in the bus whilst trucks and cars zoomed past me on improbable missions at impermissible speeds. People just GOT to go fast, it’s in their DNA, but I am a ‘dawdler’ – wanna go fast get a Ferrari, wanna enjoy the scenery, drive along in a bus that’s happiest at seventy miles per hour,...
Entheogenesis
Parked in a field at the Strathbogie Outdoor Education Center in the middle of rural Australia attending the Entheogenesis Australis conference along with 500 or so other people with like-minded predelictions. We’re a herbacious lot with dreads and contentment very much in evidence. A chilly dawn greeted the sleeping campers and I listened to two birds calling to one another across the valley...
Bali
I am in Bali - the island of the Gods. A short break before I go to America and Canada and Europe on a promotional tour for my book. I have come to Bali to re-charge my batteries - to re-connect with the ‘spiritual center’ and to get a tattoo ! Here there is a man (Leon) who is a Master artist - one whom I trust to put marks on my body that will be there until the day I die. On my chest,...
Competition vs cooperation - the conundrum
The orgy of consumption, that greets the end of the Thanksgiving holiday in America and accelerates seamlessly as Christmas approaches, seems to me a peculiar beast. I have never in my life been to a store when a ‘sale’ is on, never been into a Wall-mart, never been in McDonalds, and I avoid shopping centers like I avoid the plague. The closest I usually get to a shopping mall is to sit outside in...
The uses and abuses of consciousness
A lot of young kids tragically die in car wrecks so consequently
Australia has some of the most draconian laws when it comes to learning to drive. When you are sixteen you can apply for a provisional license and thereafter, before one can sit the driving test, one must do 200 hours of driving accompanied by an adult with a driving license – ten hours of this learning to be conducted at night. As...
Love in Vain
“The greatest rock and roll band in the world” has reached the apogee of fifty years playing together in the music business. This deserves congratulations as long marriages deserve congratulations, though for myself when I contemplate rock and roll ‘marriages’ of such inordinate length I sometimes wonder about the relative balance of pain and gain. It can’t all have been smooth sailing, and we...
If I knew the way ......
Much is now being made of the Grateful Dead’s business model as some kind of guide to contemporary industry, and I think this bears closer scrutiny (no pun intended). The very idea that the ‘corporate model’ of a rock and roll ‘collective’ has some relevance to a publicly listed company is on the face of it risible, BUT perhaps it possesses some merit. The question, what was it that made the...
The ghosts of Brisbane
Today’s dawn seemed indecisive to me as if the sun had reluctantly crawled from beneath the blanket of the night sky. The leaden light of dead distant stars had been unable to penetrate a thick cloud cover and from the deck where I sat the indistinct outline of the trees in the street below me I fancied resembled giant ferns in some primordial forest. I sensed the place where I was awakening to...
I am iSam
It’s been a heck of a two weeks ! It started out driving to Byron Bay from Sydney (for the Blues Fest) and ended up in Seattle in the United States. That’s a total of about three thousand miles of driving, and fifteen thousand miles of flying and a whole slew of wonderful music en route ! It’s a fortunate life that I lead and I enjoy sharing it, so I guess I had better...
March 2010
3 posts
in a cabin in the woods
Sometimes it is necessary for a “decent interval” to have elapsed before one can write meaningfully about historic events, especially if those events have intersected with one’s own life in a dramatic fashion. In my case this “decent interval” has extended to some forty years. That period of time has seen the period of which I write (the Sixties and its counter...
the birthday blog
Yesterday I was sixty seven. One of those strange ages lost somewhere between the polarities of sixty five and seventy - “neither fish nor good fried herring” as my long departed grandmother would have mordantly observed had she been around to witness the event. It was appropriate that my sixty seventh should have occurred on a Wednesday - a day I have always felt to be marooned...
the life of a writer
Writing is a solitary craft. The life of a writer is a solitary life. It doesn’t have to be so, but I write here of myself and my own experience. My own privileged and self-centred life has landed me just prior to my sixty-seventh birthday in a position which could (perhaps) be described as “in the world but not OF the world”. I imagine that it is a position somewhat analogous...
February 2010
2 posts
How to clean up our cities
UPDATE: “The Lynx Effect” on youtube, click here to watch!
I arrived back from Bali full of the joys of Spring even though I had just experienced the wet season. Two weeks in Paradise had lifted my heart, made me look at the world with fresh eyes, and equipped me for the journey of the next few weeks. I was really looking forward to getting together with the bus - my home - which...
Dead Heads Unite !
I am in Bali - the island of the Gods. A short break before I go to America and Canada and Europe on a promotional tour for my book. I have come to Bali to re-charge my batteries - to re-connect with the ‘spiritual center’ and to get a tattoo ! Here there is a man (Leon) who is a Master artist - one whom I trust to put marks on my body that will be there until the day I die. On...
January 2010
2 posts
Another blog!
Each morning at five o’clock I get up and make my way to the garden. I am in Petersham, an inner-west suburb of Sydney Australia, looking after my dear friend who has a broken leg. At six the first of a thousand planes will be landing at Sydney airport and flying low over the house on their landing-approach - there is this opportunity for one blissful hour of peace and tranquility before the...
there's life in the old blog yet!
With “other fish to fry” the poor old blog got side-lined for a while there. No puny excuses no “exit stage lines” no explanations just the simply reality. It refused to appear and I didn’t force it to. But like a comatose body with the apparent characteristics of a corpse one day as I considered its sad and immobile bulk it twitched, it sighed and farted, and then it...
October 2009
3 posts
Islands in the stream
Having returned to Australia from a wonderful month in Bali, I have begun that process which occurs after a holiday of assimilating the experience, analyzing the pleasures, and generally thinking about what happened. My month in Bali got me thinking about another island which I know and love, Ibiza; and I was struck by some of the similarities between the two places, between their experiences as...
Bali 2
Of course, just because one falls asleep in ‘paradise’ there is no automatic guarantee that one will awake in the same place, and so it was that on my first night in Bali I had some rather strange nocturnal experiences. The bed was hard and firm as an athletes muscles and draped in crisp white mosquito netting so that I felt as if I were in the tent of some desert potentate. I lay...
September 2009
5 posts
Bali
Since the beginnings of my wandering ways, when I was not yet a man, people have been telling me about Bali. A friend of my mothers went there immediately after the second World War and I remember him describing to us the Gamalan orchestras - I must have been around seven or eight years old. With the arrival of my teens and an insatiable wanderlust the people of my generation split from the...
Aftermath
The blog on the sad death of Brian Jones sure made some creatures come out of the woodwork ! As my old grannie used to say “set a sprat to catch a mackerel”. As a result of the blog I have been contacted by people from all over the world with all kinds of bizarre and strange theories about Brian’s death. Theories, theories, some barely believable, some monstrous - the death...
Who killed Brian Jones?
It is now forty years since Brian Jones’ demise, where (dependent upon one’s sources) he either drowned or was murdered. No-one that was around the Stones at the time and none of the Stones’ musicians, have ever offered a public opinion as to what happened to Brian. His death has been “shrouded in mystery” and characterised by police incompetence, an absurd and...
BRIAN JONES and a proper police investigation ?...
There have been press reports that the police have received some “new evidence” relating to the death of the legendary Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones. I was working with the Stones when Brian died and would like to have a short say about the whole horrible business of his death. First though, about the police investigation. The original police investigation was laughable, a...
Life’s Simple Pleasures
Driving from Melbourne to Canberra one passes an endless succession of highway signs advertising fuel and food. These signs are all over the main inter-state highways of Australia, just as they are similarly ubiquitous in America. The driving experience in both countries has become homogenised. Objectively there is little difference between the two places with oil and food provided by the same...
August 2009
4 posts
Is there ANYTHING worse than being late?
An over-extended week of being psycho-phamacologically challenged left me feeling confident that at the very least I could find my way to Melbourne’s Avalon Airport to collect a friend who was coming to town. I set off faithfully following the instructions of my trusty GPS navigator and marveled as left turns and right turns unfolded in front of me and I obeyed the clinically-toned words of the...