September 2012
1 post
Unworthy thoughts
Today I had THE most unworthy thoughts about my ex. The new man in her life is going to jump out of an airplane and she’s going to be watching - well I hope he lands at her feet in one piece (and alive) because that was NOT what I thought a few hours ago. I dislike that I am riddled with envy and jealousy and the weakest purile resentments BUT I LIKE that I confront these feelings, taste...
August 2012
5 posts
The light from long-dead stars
I live in a cabin in the hills in that stretch of country that constitutes the hinterland of Byron Bay. The cabin is based upon a Tahitian design and has a large glass window beside which I have positioned my bed. I can lay in bed and look directly out the window at the dizzy panoply of a trillion stars in a sky that is as sparkling as that found at night in the dessert far from human habitation....
the balance restored
It’s midnight on Tuesday evening in Sydney. I am sitting along in front of the embers of a dying fire in perfect peace and quiet after a lovely evening with friends. All of the emotional turmoil of the last months seems as nothing as I stare contentedly into the depths of the glowing coals - how fraught and ‘busy’ the ‘inner workings’ of the mind can become; how...
time for a re-think
The Australian swimming team has not done very well at the Olympics - to use a strange phrase “they tanked”. Meaning the pressure of expectations (their own and others) got to them and they weren’t in the right ‘frame of mind’ to swim competitively. Have a look at their coaches and the sports psychologists around them, LISTEN to the ‘sage words of wisdom’...
Taken for a ride
TAKEN FOR A RIDE - TRUE CONFESSIONS of a ‘COPTERPHOBE I got in a helicopter two days before Altamont loaded with the Dead’s PA speakers, outside their rehearsal space in Novato, right by the heliport. It went 20 feet into the air and came crashing back to earth with a spectacular thump. It was overloaded and I almost had a heart attack and narrowly missed being crushed by the speakers...
Remembering Jerry Garcia
In remembering this very complex man I would (of course) like to do justice to (firstly) his musical memory. For me no other guitar player has EVER come close to Jerry. It wasn’t a matter of his technique (there were more technically gifted players) but rather what (through his music) he managed to ‘do with my head’ when he played. Garcia was a master alchemist of ‘musical...
July 2012
3 posts
on the beach
This morning I got in the bus and had to drive in the dark to my favourite beach at New Brighton - the next beach north from Byron Bay.In the pitch dark just before dawn I made my way to the beach and sat beside the Pacific Ocean and thought about a million things, not least the span of my own life across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. I was born (1943) in the midst of the...
the olympics
A few hours before the opening of the London Olympic games of 2012 I wish to remember the Olympic games of 1936 in Berlin. It was at these games in Berlin that the ‘tradition’ of the Olympic torch was first invented by the Nazi Regime. The torch was carried from Mount Olympus in Greece to the games and the Olympic flame was lit for the duration of the games – this Nazi invented piece of Olympic...
another day in Paradise
This morning I did something I usually NEVER do - I turned the radio on and listened to the news. Various items about the world economy and then a piece about how applications for gun permits had shot up in Colorado following the slaughter of the innocents at the Batman movie. May I say this. America seems to be gripped by an endless cycle of gun-related violence and with each demented episode...
June 2012
2 posts
the perils of Paradise
The bus is empty with everything stashed in my cabins and put away “ship-shape and Bristol fashion” and she drives like a young colt now a couple of hundred books have been removed, along with clothes and tools and camping gear and Gawd knows what else.
Even living in a bus the urge to accumulate weaves its insidious black magic. I was astounded to discover that I had eleven pairs of trousers,...
Nomad no more
After several years of living in a bus, wandering wherever my fancy dictated, I have made the decision to get ‘settled’ and to live in one place where each day I would great the dawn from the same position on this beautiful earth. Providence and dear friends have directed me to the Byron Bay hinterland of Northern New South Wales in Australia - a special version of Paradise. Today (as the saying...
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...
April 2010
1 post
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...
