An Augie March Tour Diary

It doesn’t actually close this trashy little store. We keep finding something else to sell and some other venue we can plonk our mud hut down in and open for business. Two gigs today, one for TV, one for the people. It’s a FESTIVAL. I’ve never been to a festival myself and I must confess to a little thrill in the gut. I imagine the whole village turns out and there are burning effigies, piss art, street fucking and such. I’ve read about festivals, never been to one. Even though we’ll be playing the same set twice I imagine we’ll be so swept up in the swirling rites of the thing it won’t matter. I have keyed in my own personal program for atavism. This should be something else.

A DAY PASSES

Ow! That’s new. Where? O, right, here. Second fire alarm in a week. I begin to suspect somebody in the touring party but it’s hard to believe there’s anyone more full of malice than myself. Well it turns out it was just another group of bands playing one after another on a stage somewhere in Sydney. Someone made a lot of money or lost a lot of money and another bag of young balls went home pissed and just a tiny bit ripped off. I have to confess to a little thrill in the gut. I think it’s a tapeworm. Alright, this is the end of the dream, end of tour. I haven’t written a song for three months. I hate everything. Happy?

Except I’ve been contracted on for at least three paragraphs and even though I’m not getting paid there’s still a sense of obligation. If I was James Blunt I wouldn’t get out of bed for this.

GARBAGE TRUCK 7AM

The tour forces you to dream backwards. I guess the tour started in spirit if not actuality when Augie March made their debut appearance on Channel Ten’s Rove programme. If there weren’t bums on seats before that promotional activity there sure were afterwards. We followed this up with an 8am live to air on Nova at The Lounge in the city. Performing our massive hit single acoustically to a packed house of delirious office workers, school kids and the odd pisshead looking for a cap on his all nighter, we slew the bastards and even took Arj Barker’s prior spot out for a belting. Comedy’s one thing, but heartfelt balladry is the only salve for the savage beast of commercial radio. Sometimes it takes an excellent piece of terrific and literate songwriting to remind us, whether we’re cool or mainstream, that we’re all in this together. Shit, what else?

Somewhere in a plane over some desert on the way to Perth, that’s where 80 percent of this is getting written. What does the publication expect? What do they want? Should I arc up of a morning and commit the fresh detail? “Professional”. It’s been the term this tour, everything just so, all cogs in the Kafka machine oiled. So why is it that I find myself lugging back-fucking bits of gear at 3am every morning when I should be watching someone licking coke off a goldfish in a pink lit bar? Already as inflexible as a fresh dug carrot and just as likely to snap given the right inversion, this body takes a pounding in the name of soft rock.

MISSES WOODY ALLEN’S NEW FILM AND DRINKS TWO O’LEARY WALKER CHARDONNAYS COS HE HAS TO DO THIS ARTICLE

The thing with Perth is you get there, try to find something to do for eight hours and by the time you’re on stage it’s actually 1am back in Melbourne, around the time you should be getting back slaps and working the scraps off the skeleton of your support band’s eviscerated rider. And they’re an unforgiving lot too. Spoilt by so many success stories, (what do they put in the water over there? Sugar I’ll warrant) the West asks so much more of the tourist than the other bits of the continent. They expect you to be in their time zone, to put up with the otherworldly harshness of their sunlight, and then put on a competent show with functioning equipment, calibrated enthusiasm and undeserved encores. The hire amp was fucked, as were the 11 others our TM tried out at the hire joint which, in the words of the hire joint bloke, was “a bit embarrassing”. I ended up using the monitor guy’s boutique head with a box his mate made. Sure looked pretty, many thanks for saving us.

The Fly By Night is a cavernous ex-army drill shed with the best band room ever put together. Some gigs on this tour saw us hiding behind couches sipping warm cold filtered beer to the strains of the Alpha Males reluctantly belting out barely enough volume to topple the din of the audience. This one was all sandwiches at soundcheck, Xbox, kitchen, shower, full bar. I cried. The gig wasn’t the best. The next night went pretty well. They were actually the most forgiving crowd of the whole tour, bless ‘em.

The tour makes you walk on your hands. Things actually kicked off proper at the ANU Bar in Canberra. Driving from the airport with Autumn working its deathly fashion about the elms or maples or ashes or oaks, or whatever English trees spot the very Heathrow-esque passage from Billy Hughes Memorial to the centre of that bizarre overnight city, I remember thinking “Very pretty.” You may remark at this point that it isn’t only in song he makes good sentence. I’ve always been titillated by Canberra, always felt a different kick gliding into the gentle valley where it’s grey and white sprawl... sprawls. In Canberra you can get to imagining, given the absence of people from its streets at any time of the day or night, that it isn’t only the robotic bureaucracy hidden from sight in the squat white sixties multi-stories, shining torches through reams of red tape behind those black windows, but an entire population kept interior – hence the city’s perpetual hum, as of a giant underground silence generator: Ummmmm...

Yes, silence hums. Ten years of touring without earplugs and silence screams. Of course that was an early, silly impression, and Canberra thrives in its own unique way, the birthplace to heroes of Australian lit-rock Steve Kilbey and Peter Fenton, the home to such luminous and cultured establishments as the legendary Tilleys. And a more cultivated and comfortable venue you won’t find in any of the other capitals. They don’t have loud bands there anymore which is a shame and, I think, largely to do with our last couple of shows there that featured: 1) – an onstage meltdown of mythical depth, 2) – a hissy fit by yours truly over a misdirected lighting can, and 3) – whispered threats by our stage tech concerning a grand piano and what could be done with it if, as the proprietor insisted, it couldn’t be shifted from the stage.

I imagine the giant photo-portrait of Sarah Bernhardt in the band room still glowers over petulant jazz tinklers and moody torch singers today, but never with such ferocity and man-hate as it did last time Augies did Tilleys. Anyway this time around we had a massive hit single and we had to play the ANU bar. Last time we were at the ANU we played Yo La Tengo at cricket and kicked their painfully indie-cred arses. Then they kicked ours all over the stage. This time it was our turn to kick our arses.

Note, (of little interest): Strange Bird was conceived in Canberra. City of crows and smack. Have you been to the Yallah Roadhouse? I have. And Rosina’s Pizza Pasta in Newcastle? Deserted souls. But wait... nup. It’s a tour, the gig went pretty well. What gig?

“The month of May... is miserable in Melbourne... You get a very melancholy light as a result of all that cold water welling up in Bass Strait, and even when there is warmth in the sunshine there is something in the light that chills the heart.” Peter Carey – My Life as a Fake.

How to approach, tackle and finally subdue the slouching inconstant beast that is the Melbourne audience? After slogs to Ballarat and Belgrave and back the previous two nights, the first of our Melbourne shows we faced down with red eyes and booze. As it turned out we had nothing to worry about, it was another crowd full of new faces who, while for the best part of the performance they worked their jaws more than their ears, at least had the spirit in them to make for a rowdy atmosphere. The Alphas responded accordingly and set about their task of seeking out the converted and sucking in the new blood. Pretty effective. I resolved to do the same and scanned the laptop for feel good material with which to open proceedings. No dice, so a jagged shitfight followed by a jaunty little rumination on ending your days prostrate by a log. Cheers all round somehow.

Word went around that there were to be some big names in the audience for night two and for once the rumours were with grounds. Australian greats Paul Kelly and Dave Graney were in attendance alongside, if you can believe it, Living Colour and their entourage. Now you can tear a building down but you can’t erase a memory. They stayed for the encore, too. What’s you favourite colour, baby? Living Colour! Nobody can explain that.

68 GIGS LATER

This nonsense from somewhere over the Pacific. In a fug of flu drugs and other peoples odours. This particular dream starts to end in the land of the long white cloud or somewhere within said cloud after twenty three gigs and a whole lot of rotting in the huge cracks between this bit of doing and that. New Zealand is hotel room, two conferences and somebody else’s gig – did you know? Why didn’t you tell me?

Tonight as I lay aching on my bed, suffering like only a man can when he’s struck down by the dreadful bug (I tried to reason it was muscle mass), groaning in that small pitiful manner you might associate with mobile trauma units in war telemovies, our massive hit single announced the ad break accompanied by vision of Gary Sinise gunning for microbes and carpet stains in the S&M clubs and apartments of The Big Apple. It could have been the fever but I suddenly had a sense that everything we’d been doing for the past decade was going to lead to this kind of flaccid nadir, a spit of any number of spits on the fast deteriorating windscreen of our creative minibus. Not even a storm but a drizzle of flubby, membranous, pissy baubles of what goes for accomplishment in this game. Let’s say it was the fever. And too many Shred mags.

GET YOUR COX OFF

This particular dream will maybe end at the Four Seasons hotel in Sydney where along with Dan Luscombe and Dan Kelly I’ll perform a faithful rendition of “Cattle and Cane” accompanied by large screen images of Grant McLennan, rest in peace, to an audience including Sally McLennan and Lindy Morrison at the annual APRA awards evening. I will think of my brother trying to sell The Go-Betweens on me and me resisting even though I liked it, like just about every band he foisted on me. And I will think of Grant after the last of the Brisbane Zoo gigs, how he came to Ric’s Bar and danced with the rest of us, gave me a hug and told me to remember what it is we’re all supposed to be doing. And I will think of driving to Tweed Heads two days later and hearing the Radio National newsreader mispronounce his name and for an instant believing there must, by some coincidence, be a dead songwriter called Grant McLellan.

SOMEBODY ELSE’S DREAM

A young man dies of a heart attack on the rugby field. Twenty of his friends come to the Newtown and we do our sorriest with all the willingness to do our best. A young couple come back stage and show photos of their gorgeous four year old girl who, before she was killed in a car accident, would ask for “There is No Such Place” to go to sleep by every night. Her mum has a walking stick. They’re only kids themselves. We get asked to do weddings and funerals. I’m glad the Alpha Males are on this tour.

“And all the places I have been, and why you were not there.” – Townes Van Zandt

And you get home and you have to explain why you can’t move and all that the world contains is on the television and you’re sorry and at least you’re getting closer to making a crust and yes you’re drinking too much and it’s making you coarse and who ever thought you would end up like this?

The long hauls might make you start to think some things are more important than other things, or that the dream, having apparently more juice than its counterpart, has better motivation. You can see where that’s become the case with people in the game you kind of know. Except it’s usually when the hero of the dream has been born for it, or born into it. In our case we’ve just been looking at the scenery for too long and driven off the rough and on to the beaten path. It’s time to put this touring nonsense to bed and go bush for the only thing that matters when you’re a living songwriter, albeit a sick one.

“IT’S ALL GOOD,” AS THOSE FUCKWITS SAY

This dream ends here, in Nagambie, where I’m making a new album of I don’t know what. I must confess to a little thrill in the gut. It was the hardest and best of tours thanks to everyone else who doesn’t have a double degree in whinging. There was more laughter than sighing, by a long mile, and way more good playing than bad. Thanks to Dan Kelly and the Alpha Males, our Beautiful Crew and some of the best audiences on the planet. But who wants to read about how well things went? For that matter who wants to read interviews or listen to songs about how yip-dee-doo a songwriter’s life is? James Blunt didn’t get where he is by...

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