I remember the kitchen table.

I’m about seven. We—Mum and Dad and my sister, Jill— were visiting people at their Yorke Peninsula shack. I don’t recall the afternoon’s crabbing but gathering later about a table in the childhood-hot evening. On it were long necks of Southwark while a black and white tele flickered against the fibro. The adults bashed the crimson crabs and busted open the tepid claws.

I could smell vinegar.

This table was Formica and from the 60’s—today doubtless worth a minor fortune with its chrome trim and retro mint top.

Just like the elegantly vintage tables now out the back of The Wheaty, Adelaide’s finest music pub. A large floor lamp’s on the side of the stage—turned off and quiet. Bulbous, orange lightshades dangle from the ceiling, evoking Disco Inferno and its eleven-minute polyester frenzy. Galvanised iron clads the northern wall. The space represents as a twilight Sunday backyard crossed with a 70’s lounge room.

I can almost smell fondue.

Pizza (pepperoni) from the food van and craft beers are our prelude. Their website boasts there’s, ‘no skinny lagers or low-carb blands.’

We’re here for Dave Graney and Clare Moore.

*

The funniest nominal group in music is at the end of this verse. Using the head noun: cowboy it employs pre-modifiers in an amusing string of adjectives. It’s central to Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Where I Hide—a narrative song that’s part stand-up routine, part wish fulfilment.  

Anyway
People started to talk
Started to talk about this
Legendary mysterious loudmouth invisible rock singer cowboy

*

I’m rereading Catcher in the Rye and tonight’s music conjures Salinger. Short stories in sonic form. Graney loves intertextuality—his song Warren Oates nods to Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia—and I make my own connections.

Holden Caulfield’s narration comes to mind

He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was “The Secret Goldfish.” It was about this little kid that wouldn’t let anybody look at his goldfish because he’d bought it with his own money. It killed me.

*

Irony works best on Thursdays.

Certainly not Mondays. Fittingly, we are at The Wheaty on a Thursday, Valentine’s Day eve. Our musical host, Dave Graney doesn’t weaponize irony, he seduces us with it.

How does his appearance amplify this? A dinner suit winking to the safari style. Moustache channelling the pencilled elegance of Clark Gable.

Completing the mythic persona, the hat.

Every so often his voice drifts to Sprechgesang— the German term for half-sung, half-spoken delivery. This elevates the irony.

Once, Graney woke up and immediately thought about how the American band Wilco can’t itself wonder vaguely about Wilco when he inescapably does. Is this American cultural hegemony? We then hear Wilco Got No Wilco.

Festival favourites – out of shape guys in denim
Happy to be home – happy to be there
Romans! Legionnaires!
We saw the white sails

Between songs he muses, ‘I have many guitars.’ Dave then turns to his wife Clare, behind her drum kit, and says, ‘Clare’s playing her B drum kit. The A kit’s home in the studio.’  

Turning to the bassist, he asks, ‘Is this your A bass?’ Then, pre-emptively, with a flourish that borders the reverential and the sardonic: ‘It’s his John Cougar Mellencamp bass.’

*

Black Statesman ‘73

Caprice.

Leaded.

The thrilling opening of Feelin’ Kinda Sporty is a triumph of nostalgic parochialism. It’s as Australian as Skyhooks. Or Gough. Or begrudging affection for the Gold Coast.

Is Graney applauding that this marque gulped leaded (super) petrol? I hope so. I bet he once drove a lumpen V8.

What a car.

*

Out the back of The Wheaty we have an evening of wry storytelling. But it’s also an invitation—to view our prickly world through Graney’s secluded and exceptional window.

His lyrics suggest imagist poetry which originated a century ago: lean, distilled, potent.

Its famed example is Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro. This two-line couplet captures a scene of bustling commuters waiting on a train platform:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd

Petals on a wet, black bough

*

Tonight, there are no girl meets boy stories. But there’s affection of a different, uncommon kind. Commemorations of the minor and minuscule. We take excursions into Graney’s head and its sometimes lurid, always lush, jungle.

The second song of the encore is Night of the Wolverine, featuring this cinematic pan. Memoir or fiction? It doesn’t matter.

Free beer and chicken man, and hotel rooms
Hired cars, alligator boots
A scarf over the lampshade
Black tape over the window

Graney’s music chaperones us to places humid and strange—where the ceiling fan’s revolving slowly, ice clinks in a frosty tumbler, and irony is a welcome, surprising seductress.