Tag Archives: Lotta Love

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Five Vinyl Records, Five Afternoons

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My sister-in-law Genevieve says that playing music at home adds a welcome layer. I subscribe to this notion and like the challenge of trying to find the right record for the right moment. A Sunday afternoon has different needs from Friday hot chips, post-pub. The dramatic context is king.

5. Van Morrison — Tupelo Honey

A twilight album which is when I popped it on Saturday, as the golden light descended into our garden. Tupelo Honey especially delivers just before or just following dinner. Nothing with salad, mind you. Roast potatoes, and not simply because Van is Irish.

Not a wintery album but one for the onset of spring or to luxuriate in during gentle autumnal afternoons. It’s a record with which to celebrate quiet and profound happiness.

The title track is appropriately honeyed with its languid, comforting melody and peaceful lyrics and vocals. It always blankets our home with warmth and calm. My only concern is that Ross from the sitcom Friends thought it the most romantic song ever. However, if Phoebe had made this claim…

4. Steely Dan — greatest hits

Is there gas in the car?
Yes, there’s gas in the car
I think the people down the hall know who you are

How great is the paranoia in these lyrics? Sung with urgency by Donald Fagen, Kid Charlemagne could be the Dan’s best short story. Here they use snippets of dialogue and a sketched plot but allow the audience to imagine the cinematic rest. It’s ridiculously breezy and is at once so 1970s but also timeless, especially the revered guitar solo. I played the album late in the afternoon but anytime works, except for breakfast, probably. Confession: in our home I may be the only fan.

3. The Yardbirds — Shapes of Things

Dear old friend Stephen bought this with me in 1984 when we were teenagers ravenous for music that was old and, I can see now, somewhat cantankerous. Was it from Allans or The Muses? Putting it on last weekend I said to Claire with mock boastfulness, in wondering where seventeen-year-old me went, ‘How cool were we?’

Seventeen. You wished you were cool, despaired that you weren’t, when actually, in that innocent, sweet way you were too young to recognise, you really were.

A double album, the vinyl itself is transparent, and its blues music is raucous and clattering. I played it at lunchtime on Saturday before Claire gardened and I tended the lawns. It reminded Claire of the songs her brothers blasted through their Magill home and later performed as The Bodgies. I do like a wailing harmonica. Next time, I’ll put on a paisley shirt, all orange and purple.

At school, many around us — maybe including Claire — viewed For Your Love as particularly horrible although this is likely because of my tuneless warbling.

2. Comes A Time — Neil Young

All cosy hues and dappled sunshine, this is drowsy and lovely. A Christmas gift from Trev, Lotta Love is a standout. Both Nicolette Larson and Courtney Barnett did excellent versions. Even the up-tempo and energetic Motorcycle Mama is kinda sleepy on the couch. Although it’s not on this album, Harvest Moon was a song we played at our wedding, its soaring triumph a matrimonial blessing.

It’s a crude dichotomy, but Neil can seem either furious with the world or blissfully at peace with it. Sunday, just after lunch, well suits his high tenor and soothing acoustic strumming. Provided no neighbourhood lawn mowers interfere.

1. A Hard Day’s Night — The Beatles

It took seven years from the birthday on which Claire gifted it to me to finish reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Having finally conquered those demanding 720 pages, my next literary challenge is the definitive Paul McCartney biography. So, with Macca and his youth buzzing in my brain, I dropped the needle on this Wednesday.

Aside from the famous opening guitar chord of the title track, If I Fell is among their finest songs. Paul and John share Everly Brothers-like vocals, and eight-year-old me remembers being bewitched by it while watching their cartoon show. I maintain that the very best way to spend half an hour is listening to a Beatles record.

 A Hard Day’s Night is the most effervescent of their albums. I played this as we had our dinner of whiting and tossed salad and I’m sure in the sixties neither foodstuff would ever have graced a Liverpudlian table.

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I only buy records from my past. The physical artefact holds the times and lives that are gone, and playing it offers a way of visiting our former selves. Spotify takes care of modern music, but without the physical connection. Holding an old record cover, examining its artwork, remembering where it came from, I can visit an innocent, younger self and say, ‘Nice to see you. You know, it’ll be alright.’

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The Eighth Caller Through — The Cars, Neil Young, and Goanna

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Aside from Derek and Clive, Caddyshack, and late capitalism, old mucker Lukey and I natter and laugh about music. He played drums in 90’s Adelaide bands Imelda’s Shoes and Fuge. I remember my late-night excitement at hearing him keeping time on a song Richard Kingsmill introduced on Triple J. At 10pm on a Tuesday, it was fame by association.

Last Christmas, Lukey dropped off a stack of old vinyl — hefty, musty, and packed with sentimental promise.

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The Cars – Greatest Hits

I recall Shake It Up as a mood-lifter, and I’m sure the Grand Prix night of 1986 when Chrisso, Lukey, and I were in Nick’s unhinged Honda on the Freeling straight, there was plenty of brotherly love. Doubtless, The Cars roared out the open windows of that hatch-back as we hurtled past the darkened barley.

Can you imagine how many Triple Tracks of The Cars were rolled out on SA-FM across the 80s? If I had an icy-cold can of coke for each one then, well, I’d be diabetic and dead. I connect this Boston band with adolescent summers and oddly enough being in cars — like Nick’s Honda — rushing to the cricket, the drive-in, the beach at Port Willunga.

The songs are mostly upbeat with guitars and robotic Roland synths. Although I’ve made no deep investigation, the lyrics were the usual love’s good or love might be good or love’s a mess formula. Yes, mostly empty but we were nineteen, music didn’t need to be apocalyptic and Dylanesque. Solemn examinations of the human condition optional.

Uh well dance all night and whirl your hair
Make the night cats stop and stare
Dance all night go to work
Do the move with quirky jerk

Given The Cars drove, err, in a tight lane, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s all the same song, but I like Just What I Needed, You Might Think, and My Best Friend’s Girl.

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Comes A Time – Neil Young

The muted tone of the sleeve triggers a memory of a TDK C-90 tape, though I can’t remember who dubbed it for me. I was fourteen — an age when life arrives without notice. Side 2 could’ve been Glass Houses by Billy Joel. How does music find us?

Unlike his noise-guitar work with Crazy Horse, this is mostly quiet — occasionally country, but entirely Sunday afternoon.

Lotta Love is a favourite song from it. He sings in a fragile, upper-register voice that threatens to fray into a whine. But doesn’t. Nicolette Larson provides harmony vocals on it and across the album. She covered it soon after and it became her signature song. Melburnian Courtney Barnett did a worthy version too.

The title track, Peace Of Mind, and Four Strong Winds are other standouts.

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Spirit Of Place – Goanna

Arriving during the summer I turned sixteen, whenever I flick across my car radio at the lights and the urgent drums of Solid Rock pound through the speakers, I’m instantly back in hot and hilly Kapunda.

It was among the first pricks to my conscience regarding the harm caused to Australia’s original inhabitants. The satirical use of marketplace warned me that money could be more important than people.

Out here nothin’ changes
Not in a hurry anyway
You can feel the endlessness
With the comin’ of the light of day
You’re talkin’ ’bout a chosen place
You wanna sell it in a marketplace, well
Well, just a minute now

I haven’t dropped the needle on it since I had nut-brown hair, so I’m gladly startled by its warmth. Burnt country and ragged outsiders hang in the melodies. I partly expected it to feel dated, but the songs and the storytelling are timeless. Shane Howard’s vocals are gracefully commanding, all woodsmoke and Kimberley sunsets.

Razor’s Edge, On the Platform, and Four Weeks Gone are my top picks.

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Thanks, Lukey, for rocketing by in the DeLorean/ Black Thunder to drop off my prize pack. I must’ve been the eighth caller through to Vinny and Cameron on SA-FM’s Morning Zoo. Vinyl isn’t just a nostalgia machine — the needle, the hiss and crackle come first, and then the music — and for a heartbeat, it isn’t the past at all. It’s right now — the way it found us in the first place.