I can't tell jokes

But I can sing them

For today’s post, I wanted to start with a focus on a song from In My Life Top #500 Songs. I did a random pick and up with Gutboard Blues by the late Dave Calder. Dave was a great Kiwi songwriter and entertainer, who wrote a mix of songs about life in New Zealand. As a teenager, I used to perform some of his songs, including this one, which is the lament of a knife-hand at the freezing works.

In my early days, my parents used to take me to the Titirangi folk club. At the age of 7, I was there watching, fidgeting and listening, and at half-time, we kids had to hop in our sleeping bags on a stage in a hall that looked down on where people were performing. If we liked the songs, we would watch and listen, if we didn’t we would talk and get told off.

At the age of 9, I was performing there myself, playing the mandolin banjo, because my hands weren’t big enough for a full-sized guitar.

I liked to sing funny songs, that would make people laugh. Life was difficult for me at the age of 10. My parents had separated and for a good year before my father moved out there was a lot of tension in the air.

I often spent weeks staying at the home of radio DJ Peter Hill and his lovely wife, Manuela, overlooking the Manukau Harbour in French Bay. My parents had separated when I was 10 as I mentioned in Life is Simple When You’re Five. I stayed with various people as a respite from life at home. They were total strangers, and treated me well, giving me space when I needed it, and a ‘normal home life’ that I lacked.

Being a DJ, Peter had loads of records including some 78’s. One of a pile of records he gave me was a George Formby record with a couple of funny songs that I learned to perform. They had labels on them saying that playing them on the radio was prohibited. Not something you would normally hear from a 10-year-old at a folk club, but it really suited my mandolin banjo and I loved doing the break.

At 10 I was performing on the guitar. I started performing Dave Calder songs including Gutboard Blues, Bubonic Moan, and State House. I also sang harmony with my mother on the beautiful song, Out of Sight, Out of Mind from Dave Calder’s album, Seasons.

Around 15 or 16 I started writing my own humorous songs, something I have continued to this day. My latest song, which is half recorded, is called Off to Quarantine. Of course it’s a COVID19 song. Watch this space. If you subscribe to my Substack, you will be amongst the first people to hear it.

One of those songs was Telephone Card. I was going to make a music video of this. Maybe I will one day. It was inspired by the old days in Titirangi when there were 2 or 3 taxis in the village. My mother used to use one to get the groceries home because she couldn’t drive. My father gave her one lesson and as she got started, looked at a house and turned the steering wheel to track where her eyes were pointing, and would have crashed if my father hadn’t seized the wheel and pulled on the handbrake.

I don’t think my father was keen on her having the freedom to drive, perhaps giving her more independence, and he never gave her another lesson, convincing her that it would be too hard for her. It was more difficult back then when he owned bombs, that required doubling the clutch when changing gear, and having one foot on the brake and the accelerator and the other riding the clutch while on a hill waiting to turn on an intersection.

I have been a fan of blues music having been introduced to artists like Big Bill Broonzy probably before I could walk or talk. More on this in Please Turn the Record Over.

I had some tough times in my youth and I loved the raw nature of the blues. I also loved the guitar. The first guitar that I actually owned was a Dobro, which I bought with money I earned during school holidays, making switches for electric frying pans in a factory called Victor Enterprises in New Lynn, Auckland. There’s another story for the future.

Naturally, I started playing slide guitar. I wrote several blues, but people don’t just want to hear sad songs, so one day I was thinking about the rags to riches (and often back to rags) stories of famous blues artists that I loved, like Mississippi John Hurt.

Visiting his home in Avalon, Mississippi, and seeing the air conditioning unit on the side of his run-down ramshackle home, I had to write a song about a guy who wanted to sing the blues, but his father wanted him to ‘get a real job’.

Here’s my song Blues in an Air Conditioned Room.

When you perform solo sets, you need to be entertaining and that’s hard to do sometimes if you mostly write what the late Ralph Murphy said in a workshop I attended at the APRA conference in Melbourne, Australia, “Self Indulgent Singer-Songwriter Songs”. He had some great information for songwriters and I took much of his advice, making copious notes.

So thanks to people like Dave Calder, I learned to write songs that would make people chuckle and would mix those into my sets.

I’ll finish with a little anecdote about a story I will write in a future post. On a family trip driving around the South Island of New Zealand, we stopped in a little town on the West Coast called Reefton. We arrived at dusk and there was a wedding going on at the local pub where we stayed. It was the only place we could find that was open. It reminded me of a scene from The Deerhunter. If you subscribe, you will get that story in due course.

Anyway, I wrote a song called ‘What I like About Reefton’. I performed it in a set on one of the stages at the Auckland Rose Festival one year. I announced the song and then proceeded to play a sound on the guitar emulating the doppler effect. It was meant to sound like a car driving off into the distance, and it did. I didn’t need to explain it, but I did mention a few things in the intro, like the cockroaches that greeted us at the door to our hotel room.

The song lasted about 4 seconds and I thanked the audience. Some laughed.

A middle-aged woman seated in the front row got up, said loudly “That’s not very nice.” and left. Oh well, such is entertainment.

In fairness, Reefton is an interesting town and the people were hospitable, trusting and friendly. At the hotel, we were told “If you want a drink, help yourself and please put the money in the till.”

Reefton was a town that became famous in the days of the gold rush. It was the first town in New Zealand to get public electricity, even before London and New York. I used to joke that it was the first town to get electric streetlights, and “Will the last person to leave, please turn the lights out.”

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