ROLL UP -- ROLL UP - ITS THE TRAVELING R&R SHOW

I'd make a lousy journalist. They can file stories between bomb landings and offices filled with the terror of deadlines. While I am on tour, even with a group of meditators, it is impossible for my mind to develop a piece of writing that requires extended thought. A part of my brain, as it it should be, is always attentive to the next walk, or meal or when to pick up the blackfellas. Even when I am not on tour I am too new to this writing game to be able to produce anything without the most diligent attentiveness.

My friend and meditation facilitator Paul Wilson is conducting the current tour and has taken The Electronic Swagman idea to heart. Paul is equal part mediation guru, a best selling author and an entrepreneur. He also plays in a rock and roll band so he can't be all bad. Paul sees my future career path a lot clearer than I do.

To him there is no doubt that I should perform as a traveling story-teller in small towns around Australia. He might be right. It would be fun huh!

So in the tradition of the SWAGGERS being the first to sample new stuff, lets give it a go!


ROLL UP ... ROLL UP LADIES & GENTLEMEN - TONIGHT ONLY - JUST FOR YOU FOLKS - SOME SNIPPETS OF THE ROCK & ROCK YEARS FROM HIS UPCOMING BOOK

THE ELECTRONIC SWAGMAN

Extract from Chapter 19 - Rock & Roll
Towards the end of my rock era, I was walking along Military Road on a stinking hot Sydney day and across the street sighted drummer Brent Eccles. In the midday sun he wore tight jeans, black T-shirt, a leather jacket, long hair and pop star boots. Grow up I thought and caught my own reflection; tight jeans, black T-shirt, a leather jacket, long hair and pop star boots. And you too! It’s a good story and true, but change, as it usually does, flowed from a more fundamental source, desperation. I ended up burnt to an emotional crisp and was bloody lucky not have to been so physically. It is with exhausted relief that I look back now, rather than nostalgia.
 
So here are two rock and roll stories to take us out ladies and gentlemen, both true, polar opposites, like halves of a vice holding a paradox.
 
The band’s last song in Boulder, Colorado. The Angels, or Angel City as we were known in America, had blown the main act, the Kinks, off stage. In the Rocky Mountain high country of Bob Denver the tough sound of Australian Rock had worked. Me out in the front of house operating the lighting, or the dregs that the Kinks lighting guy left. With the classic Angel’s song Marseilles in its death throes, the crowd, guitar and drums building to an ecstatic climax. From the rear of the colosseum someone threw a Frisbee. A great throw curving perfectly on the intended passage to the stage, a majestic arc that visits the entire left side of the massive stadium. The rhythm guitarist, John Brewster saw it coming, I saw it coming, the crowd started to see it coming. I called a follow spot to pick it up, and the guy was good, catching its mid-air flight path . . . It couldn’t be happening but we knew it was . . . everyone knew . . . rockers, band, security guards . . . the musical crescendo was almost peaking . . . five more frenetic bars to go . . . the whirling satellite veering in towards John . . . John stepping up to the microphone for his characteristic GOOD NIGHT BOULDER as his hand played down hard on the final chord then continued to full height and a perfect catch of the frisbee. ROCK and ROLL! Boulder Colorado went insane, I was already insane and the band were beside themselves.
 
Here’s the other. My passage to right here, right now, is littered with young men dead well before their time. It was like an undeclared war for which we volunteered. Perhaps there are a group of men who will always seek that edge, crave it, risk life itself, just to survive. You have not met Jeff Meriweather and even now his memory casts a pall over the rock years for me. Jeff was young, talented and handsome. Where I had no technical skills, Jeff was a master craftsman. He worked as a kid in a lighting company, got his first gigs, became the industry’s second pop star roadie [after me]. He lit the band Misex, started touring with international bands, all by his early twenties. His beautiful girlfriend did a centerfold in Penthouse while he was in America, and Jeff hung himself, the passion he had for lighting transferred to the pain he felt at her public exposure. Each year, once or twice at least, I think of all those years he could have had.
 
I pull the troopy to a halt. Under the blue sky the horizon is down to my bootstraps. A boomerang would fly clean and true, like a frisbee. Tommie is wondering why we have stopped in the middle of nowhere, absolute nowhere. A couple of half dead mulga trees are all the life that is evident. I put on the Divinyls and turn it up so loud that the outback is filled with sound.
 
VALE to Jeff and to all the others. One more gig, singing you out in my mind with Christie Amplett on stage.
 
Life can be lonely . . . life can be very sad . . . life can be something you wish you never had . . . yeah yeah . . . yeah yeah . . . as the band starts to leave the stage, instrument by instrument, until it is just Chrissie, alone in the centre, under a single spot, letting her hair swing left and right, rocking like a child . . .  yeah . . . yeah . . . yeah . . . yeah! . . . and the lights fade to black.

Raymond