Writing about music, someone who may or may not have been Frank Zappa remarked*, is like dancing about architecture.
You could probably throw in plenty of seemingly incompatible forms of expression to make the same point, but there are, indisputably, reasons why people might be moved to express their reaction to some form of artistic endeavour in the realms of another.
So writing about music might be like dancing about architecture, but there are reasons why people will do it.
Take, for instance, Hughesy's reaction to a newly acquired album or musical event.
The first thing that comes into play here is a fading memory. I'll review a concert or similar experience while it's fresh in my mind because that's the best chance I have to remember what happened. Simple, straightforward, and largely intended for an audience of one some time down the track when I want to revisit the experience.
With a new album things are slightly different, but the principle remains the same.
I want to record my reaction to this particular piece of work, at least partly so I can fit it into an artist's canon, but it goes a little further than that.
Forty-something years ago (he typed, listening to Galactic's Ya-Ka-May for the third time) the arrival of new product from someone Hughesy and his peers deemed musically significant would have been followed by repeated plays and intense scrutiny of anything relevant in the pages of NME, Melody Maker, Sounds, Rolling Stone, Creem and whatever other relevant music periodicals we'd managed to lay our hands on and fairly lengthy discussion as the item in question played through.
Reactions to a new album were, in other words, shaped by the interaction of a variety of sources, tastes and opinions, but once things progressed into what I've termed The Wilderness Years those factors gradually dropped off.
Things improved markedly once we moved into The Internet Years, and these days there's a wealth of information out there and easily accessible. What I'm lacking at the moment is someone to discuss it with.
For a while it looked like Community Radio might do that, and Hughesy's failure to return to the airwaves is the result of the failure of the airwaves to turn up people who wanted to talk music.
So it's reached a point where I have to figure these things out for myself, and the lack of a pile of handy reference material (a la the piles of back copies of those periodicals I used to rely on) means I've had to work out a new approach to these matters.
It took a while, but I've now got the situation where I can play a new album in full go to whoah sequence around a dozen times before it starts to head into the heady territory of Hughesy's Top 1500 Most Played, which is an exercise in shuffle mode and takes the sequential bit out of the equation. As things go through those first dozen plays I've got my own reactions tapped out, along with a fair chunk of cut and paste action from various on line sources that fill the same role as the piles of periodicals previously mentioned.
Somewhere between play #2 and play #12 that data file will coalesce into the entry you'll find in these pages or lurking under the appropriate time frame in Album Notes.
The difference comes down, in most cases, to how much detail I'm inclined to go into, and you'll also find people like Mr Costello with a summary page under Albums, largely because Secret, Profane & Sugar Cane fits on one line in the navigation bar where Elvis Costello and the album title doesn't.
And this page, apart from the desire to clarify some of these issues, needs to exist because otherwise there'd be nothing here but (to quote one of Mr Zappa's acolytes on We're Only In It For The Money) blank empty space.
*I'm talking the original source of the remark here. It's the sort of one-liner that tends to get repeated extensively by point-making smart-arses.
Over on the original Music pages you’d have found all the reviews dumped in together under the one heading, a situation that worked quite well back when I was starting off.
These days, however, we’re back to buying new music, and I’ve bought quite a bit of it, so reviews of concerts and video material is likely to get lost in the flood.
In the interests of keeping the Navigation Bar over on the left uncluttered, I’ve hived the content off into Albums (longer pieces) and Album Notes (shorter pieces to fit into the bi-monthly newsletter format), Concerts or Video and DVD.
Here’s a listing of what you’ll find under the relevant headings, complete with clickable links.
Concerts:
Leonard Cohen Brisbane 2010
Ry Cooder & Nick Lowe Brisbane 2009
Elvis Costello Brisbane 2009 Sydney 2011
Drum Tao Mackay 2008
Harry Manx Proserpine 2008
Robert Randolph & The Family Band Sydney 2011 (opened for Tedeschi Trucks Band)
Tedeschi Trucks Band Sydney 2011
Randy Newman & the Queensland Symphony Orchestra Brisbane 2011
Video and DVD:
Allman Brothers Band (via Moogis)
United Palace Theatre New York 11 March 2010 12 March 2010 13 March 2010 15 March 2010 16 March 2010 18 March 2010 19 March 2010 20 March 2010
Beacon Theatre New York 10 March 2011 11 March 2011 12 March 2011 14 March 2011 15 March 2011 17 March 2011 18 March 2011 19 March 2011 21 March 2011 22 March 2011 24 March 2011 25 March 2011 26 March 2011
Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll
The Stax/Volt Revue Live in Norway 1967
Wanee Festival (via Moogis) 17 April 2010 18 April 2010
