With Powderfinger calling time on their 21-year career last week, DAVE GRANEY ponders that old rock chestnut: is it better to burn out than fade away?

Duke Ellington led his big band around the US and the world for roughly 45 years – from Harlem at the Cotton Club to riding on trains and buses to all kinds of ballrooms and hotels all around America.

Generally there were 16 in the band. Sixteen of the best, the greatest, the most talented of their times. It wasn’t like a blues and roots festival where everybody is asked to “leave your ego at the door”. They knew they were good and they had to fight to get a seat in the band. Duke Ellington apparently never fired anybody, if he wanted another player, he just sat them next to a person playing the same instrument and let the situation sort itself out.

At the start of each show there would be a wild fanfare where everybody was told to play a note. Any note. If a new guy came in on somebody's note he was told to step off. “Get off my fuckin’ note,” was the cry. They played and travelled all the time. Apparently some players went decades without talking other members of the troupe. It was a coveted gig to be in that band. Of course, they weren’t beholden to any kind of record industry, though they did release discs from the ’20s to the ’70s. They went from a young, hot dance act to a heritage act to living legend status. They went through troughs and peaks and rode it all out on the bandstand. Duke Ellington did all kinds of themed and concept albums and experimented during lean times with solo piano albums and small band setups. 45 years!

In Melbourne you can catch Spectrum playing most weeks of the year. Mike Rudd and Bill Putt have played together since 1968 or so. First with Spectrum, which played shows wherever people did before pub rock was invented, and then they reversed the band’s name to become, simultaneously, The Incredible Murtceps, to play music of a more dance/rave-up nature in different situations. They mutated into Ariel and The Heaters and W.H.Y. and then back to Spectrum. Somewhere in the late ’80s they stopped playing and studied musical techniques before coming back to play their music with nylon string guitars only. Now they embrace their entire history and play their incredible music to people all around Melbourne.

“The whole life of the band goes through your mind as you get back into that other dimension through the music you shared. It’s like a ghost life that you could have still been travelling."

Don’t you love people who go at their own speed rather than the illusory scammed pace of the pop world? You know the furious passing parade of novelty after novelty. Isn’t it great when you see acts or people change into other things and find new audiences? I mean as opposed to trying to hold onto the same mob gaze for much too long.

Alan Vega and Martin Rev took a break from Suicide for a decade or more and quietly came back as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

Steely Dan the same. Though they made such a sleek, silky, expensive, highly toned and sheened music that even the critic Julie Burchill, at the height of UK punk rock critical hyperbole, encouraged people to “clamber up and try to take a look” at the colossal greatness of their music. I agree. You know why? They adored and revered Duke Ellington!

I loved seeing Radio Birdman take their own story and legend and get back together to tour in 1996. Why not? Its not the easiest thing in the world to put a band back together. Well, in some ways it is but in others, it’s very difficult. Birdman came back together again and did a new album. I saw them on that tour as well. It was great seeing the tension as they brought out the new material. It took a lot of guts. The difficult part of a band getting back together is of course that everybody has grown out of it. That’s usually why they split up in the first place.

Our band, The Moodists, got back together for some shows in 2003 and 2005. The rehearsals were amazing. the gigs were better than any we played in the past. There was no real demand for us to do it; unfinished business was the main drive for us. It was tough to do though. Physically demanding and emotionally pretty hard to take. It’s like an accident. The whole life of the band goes through your mind as you get back into that other dimension through the music you shared. It’s like a ghost life that you could have still been travelling. You think. For a second. And then another song comes along and everybody finds the changes again. Minute shifts in tempo and dynamics. You played so many gigs together it’s like you’ve come through some fog of war to this other, newly strange place. Your heart gets smashed over again. Of course, you can’t stay back in that group again. Can you?

There are, of course, artists who are so connected to powerful forces in what is described as the music business, or are so rich, that they can go at their own speed. They have “people” and are enmeshed in logistical plans and operations and synced up to machines that need each other to operate at all. People like Neil Young for instance. Made guys. Half machines themselves. Synthetics! Folkie cyborgs! He came up with that daggy line about “better to burn out than to fade away”. That was when he was tryin’ to be all new wave and hanging out with DEVO.

There is, of course, that act from the states who were persuaded to get back together and tour Australia about five years ago. They had to travel in a Tarago each, individually, so hard to bear was the company of any other comrade. That’s grim in some ways but pretty fantastic in others. Like Kirk Douglas said in that old Viking movie, "Love and hate are both horns on the same goat!" People loved their music so much it didn’t belong to the band any more. The band could meet around the songs and play them and then split. Every night. Probably was painful too but its also hard for a player to get a break so they must have enjoyed that. The remuneration I mean.

Then there’s John Fogerty from Creedence who felt so burned by old publishing arrangements he refused to play any of his old songs for years. He couldn’t bear to earn the dollars for the other alleged party. Eventually he got out on the road and played the tunes because, even though he didn’t own them, they were his. FOREVER! Also they were some of the greatest chooglin’ three-minute wonders ever put down to tape and blasted through the radios of the western world and people wanted them again too. It all exists outside the business again. In a folk memory kind of way. And then one day we'll all be dead and those songs will still choogle on.

I’m glad Led Zeppelin couldn’t get back together. Them Crooked Vultures were a great event on disc and on the stage.

Van Morrison did Astral Weeks with the original band last year and released the whole concert not long after. I NEVER WANT TO HEAR THAT! The original session and album is shrouded in so much mystery and fearful, whispered hearsay that no PR company or “business” could ever, ever create again.

There are artists who seem to delight in trashing their past work. They mightn’t mean to but they do. That funny way Lou Reed sings the old Velvets tracks, for instance. I first heard him on the Rock’n’Roll Animal live album back in the ’70s anyway. He was probably doing it then too. Go ahead! They’re his songs!

“Don’t you love people who go at their own speed rather than the illusory scammed pace of the pop world?”

Of course, it was wonderful to hear the Smile album from Brian Wilson being played in concert by a band of studio and bandstand pros. I still have a cassette Epic Soundtracks made for me where he had painstakingly put together, from various bootlegs and other traded tapes, what was supposed to have been the best possible representation of what that album could have been. This is back when it was a cult to like the Beach Boys. Before CDs and the mad reissue/director’s cut bonanza. It was all unobtainable stuff. People dreamed on it. Dreamed it back to life. How amazed would a music freak like that have been to actually see Brian Wilson with a crack band playing that stuff?

I also had the good fortune to see Arthur Lee play the material from Forever Changes twice. The first was in a small pub in London where he was just getting together with the band that would stay with him for the remainder of his career. Then, after his ridiculous stint in jail, I saw him do it again at the Corner in Melbourne. the room was full of people who had dreamed on those sounds for years. It was a private kind of music. Not anything that had ever been on the radio or put through any kind of public spaces. It was occult. The sighs and cheers when he walked on as the guitarist played the first ringing notes of ‘Alone Again Or’ were incredible!

The Dictators also played at the Corner. They were a band who were, for me, forever New York 1975-77. I was amazed at their presence in 2003. They had a total “gang” vibe about them. Still! They fired at will, old and new material. It all sounded great. And their guitarist was an Original Gangster! It was great to see and hear someone who’d been there when they made the first power chord hit one.

There was also the most recent summer festival season, which saw a cavalcade of acts who struck a chord with people in the ’90s. The Pixies, Dinosaur Jr and Pavement. All over Melbourne it was great to hear people saying how amazing The Cruel Sea were. That is a band with such a great, highly developed group sound. They were dynamite in their day and I would encourage them to play again and again. They got together before the music business knew an act like them could exist, and it’s great they’ve outlived that business too.

So I’m all for bands staying together. At their own speed. And also getting back together. I’m a live and let live type o’ guy.