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Reef, Roos & Blues
“I saw a Qantas flight come in while I was waiting for you.” She said. “I cried. I want to go back.” I knew how she felt. In my travels as a musician I have been lucky enough to visit many exotic and far-flung places (Japan, Italy, Belgium…Nebraska) but no place has ever quite gotten to me like Australia. Usually, when I get home, I’m glad to be home. Not that I love L.A. all that much, but I do love to sleep in my own bed, with the cats and the wife and my stuff. Home. There’s nothing like it. It wasn’t like that this time. This once-foreign land inhabits a permanent part of my heart.
We were determined to get on top of the jet-lag, and that meant staying up all day. We did an early check-in at the Four Seasons, and went up to our room. The view out the window of our room was a postcard brought to life. Sydney Harbor, the Opera House, the bridge. We tossed the bags, and headed out. The first thing we did was walk right into oncoming traffic. They drive on the left in OZ, a little leftover from their British-Colonial past. After pulling back just in time to not get flattened by a Fiat cargo van, we then noticed the handy “LOOK RIGHT” painted on the curb. Clearly we were not the first tourists to have a near-death experience upon arrival. We headed down George Street towards the harbor, stopping for coffee at the G’Day Café on the way – they say this is the most visited eatery in the whole country, on account of its location in uber-touristy “Rocks” area of Sydney. I discovered I had to be more specific about my coffee order than at home. The Aussies take their java cues from Italy, and as in Italy, coffee as we know it is “American style” and, also as in Italy, they think it tastes like bilge-water. I was faced with alien choices…flat white, flat black, tall short black. And of course your basic cappuccino, espresso, latte, etc. This all sounded great, but I was not able to make such complicated coffee choices until I had my coffee. A terrible chicken/egg dilemma. I took my chance with the flat white. It was a fine choice – we perked up (so to speak) immediately.
As we walked around the harbor area, I was taken aback by how much the architecture and weather and vibe on the street reminded me of, well…southern California. It was slightly different in a remote, otherworldly way, as if I were visiting Huntington Beach or Marina Del Rey as it might exist in an alternate universe. A universe where, mixed in among the usual park pigeons and seagulls, there were also strange hook-beaked ibis birds strutting about, and flocks of lorikeets chattering away in the trees. The people, however, were completely different. Open and friendly in a way you almost never see in US cities. I already knew it was going to be very hard to leave this place. We ate lunch at the historic Sydney Oyster Cove Bar, where we had our first taste of the very delicious Sydney Rock Oyster, and a plate of King Island cheeses. We would soon come to find out that the cheese plate is a big thing in Australia, and all the good cheese comes from tiny King Island, just off Tasmania. Also on the menu were “bugs” which are the local version of crayfish. We weren’t ready for that. At the table next to us were a couple of ladies who were at least in their 70s having a grand old time eating prawns and drinking champagne. One of them had just flown home from Indonesia. They seemed so much more alive and happy than older folks I see at home. I would see more and more of this as our time here went on. Maybe senior citizens in Oz are more valued in society, or spend less time wasting away in front of the television, or aren’t stuck into old-age homes to rot while their progeny work their own way into an early grave. Mostly they just don’t seem as beaten down with age, it’s there, but it is not, by krikey, going to get in the way! After lunch we bought a ticket for the ferry that would take us over to Darling Harbor and the Sydney Aquarium, which is known to be one of the finest in the world. We had a wonderful ride across to the other side of the harbor, and commenced with the viewing of native ocean fauna. Lots of sharks and poisonous jellyfish, of course. In general, a matchless variety of creatures that want to kill you. There are more ways to die in Australia than in any other country I can think of.
Feeling I was on a roll, good idea-wise, I boldly made plans for dinner – Phillip’s Foote. I’d read about it somewhere and really wanted to go. This is a place where you barbecue your own meat Aussie style. Or, if you want to get right down to it, American suburban style. The Aussies love their backyard barbecues just like all of us here who grew up in the great American postwar suburban sprawl. Phillip’s Foote brought the backyard barbecue to the city. Made me wish West Hollywood had a place like it. You go in through a cozy old-school bar to the back, which is an outdoor open-air area with barbecue pits and tables scattered around. All the way back is the counter where you pick out your meat. I got the rump – rump seems to be the favored cut of beef in Oz…it made me realize that I hadn’t seen a cut of meat in America called “rump” since I was a kid – probably because we’ve all become too squeamish to want to be reminded of what we’re actually eating. “Rump” is just a little too specific for us, isn’t it? I’m sure we’re still eating it, safely hidden behind a euphemism. We ordered our steaks and I commenced to cooking them on the grill. I fell into conversations with some other guys barbecuing…always guys. Guys cook meat on grills. Some things should remain sacred. This is one of those things. We conversed about a great many things relating to the grilling of meat, and at no time did anyone say “barbie” or “shrimp on the Barbie.” I’m pretty sure now that was made up by an American ad agency. There certainly were no blooming fucking onions in sight! Karen and I enjoyed meat and salad at our table, directly under a heat-lamp. It had been chilly all day. If you need to know how tired and extra-crispy we were, all you need to hear is the following conversation had by us, at our table, under the heat-lamp: Me: “Wow! It’s really nice out tonight!”
On day two, we made a trip to the famous Taronga Zoo where we got to see all the creatures that made Australia famous. The very first thing we came to was an enclosure where you could walk along a path while wallabies (think of a small kangaroo) cavorted uncaged all around you. Immediately upon entering, one crossed right in front of us, and Karen nearly burst into tears of delight. I’m sure that to the locals, this was like seeing a few deer in your backyard, but to us, it was unbearably exotic. After a full tour of the native fauna, we got in line for the de-rigeur koala bear photo, which, I believe, is required by law for all tourists.
Dinner that night was at a very swanky joint right on the harbor called Quay (pronounced “Key,” as I think I pointed out before). I called down to the front desk to have them make the reservation and they were so happy I pronounced it right I thought she was going to pay for our dinner herself. The food and view were exquisite; we could hardly believe our good fortune. And the trip had barely just begun. That night, as I was dozing off, I heard a faint booming…not quite loud car stereo booming, more like fireworks. But how could that be? I got out of bed and looked out the window. A fireworks display was lighting the sky over Sydney harbor, flanked on either side by that unmistakable bridge and the opera house – as glorious a scene as you could possibly imagine. Why? I have no idea. It was just a plain old Sunday night, as far as I knew. I tried to wake Karen so she could see, but she was having none of it. So it became my secret moment. I looked on in wonder, and felt as if no one but me was seeing those lights in the sky. On our third and final day in Sydney, we visited the amazing Royal Botanical Gardens, kind of the Central Park of Sydney. It was a magical place. We strolled the grounds for hours, had lunch under giant eucalyptus trees filled with flying foxes, visited a hothouse full of exotic Aussie tropical plants. At one point we found ourselves surrounded by a flock of sulfur-crested cockatoos. This is the big white parrot you see for sale in the pet store here in the States for two grand. In Australia it is just another wild bird. They call them “Cockies.” Mostly people complain about them eating the wooden siding off of their houses. Karen was delighted and managed to get a handful of the corn kernels people were feeding the birds. A couple of them sat right on her arms while getting their treat. At one point, she nearly got her finger taken off…pet store birds, these were not.
We had been invited to dinner by Baiba James, who manages and books Aussie blues pianist Jan Preston – the “Queen of Boogie Woogie,” who was also playing the festival. Baiba and her partner Geoff picked us up at the hotel and we met Jan at a funky hole-in-the-wall African food joint called Le Kilimanjaro. This was in the Newtown section of Sydney – hangout of hipsters and college students and musicians. A place we surely would not have seen if we had just been there as tourists. The owner of the restaurant was a good friend of Baiba and Jeff, so we got the special treatment. The food was unbelievable – and cheap too! The five of us fell easily into conversation. It was like we had all been friends for years…this sort of thing is the best part of being on the road. I’ve made wonderful friends all over the world. People who make me feel at home wherever I am. It is truly a gift. After dinner we headed over to Jan’s place to play some tunes on her Yamaha grand. We ended up playing for quite a long time – separately and together. It’s so rare that piano players get to meet each other, let alone play together. Jan, in many ways, reminded me a lot of, well…me. All the same piano-player neuroses were on display. It’s like we shared a secret language that all the others did not understand, and we immediately began to communicate while the others looked on, mystified and amused. There are a few other piano-pounders I have this kind of relationship with – Wade Preston. Arthur Migliazza. Ann Rabson…we are all members of the same tribe. Separate even from the other musicians we know.
Part two I guess I haven’t really gotten around to mentioning this yet, but our reason for being in Australia was not play tourist in Sydney, but because I was booked to play for four days at the Blues on Broadbeach Music Festival. For years, I had been getting airplay on various Australian radio stations, but all attempts travel down under and play live had been thwarted. Eventually, a very helpful radio guy supplied me with a list of Australian blues festivals, and I got to work, shamelessly soliciting. The result: here I was, flying to Brisbane Australia, all expenses paid! It all started with one email, sent at two in the morning. Pretty amazing, when you stop to think about it. The festival sent a car and driver, and we were whisked in high style from the airport for the one-hour drive to the Gold Coast, where the festival was happening. Our driver was Jeoff – a real Aussie if there ever was one. On the way down, he gave us various tips on speaking Oz. “How’d ya scrub up?” is what you ask someone the morning after a hard night of drinking. And “Good on ya!” which is the delightful Aussie version of “good for you!” or “you rock!” And that being called a bastard is a good thing, provided there’s an adjective preceding it. As in “funny bastard!” or “crazy bastard” or “queer bastard” – which is not to be confused with “queer,” which is of course something else entirely. However, plain old “bastard” means, well…bastard. During the ride I was again struck by how much what I was seeing along the road reminded me of America. The same Home Depots and K Marts and TGI Fridays. No Outback Steakhouse, however – we were not successful in selling a watered-down parody of Australia back to the Ozzies. As we got near the Gold Coast area, theme parks began to appear – one was kind of a dinner show/circus/theme park hybrid called the “Outback Spectacular,” which reminded me that even for most Australians, the Outback is a mysterious faraway place. We really could have been anywhere…except we were driving on the wrong side of the road, of course. It saddened me to think that our aggressively homogenized suburban chain-store and parking lot landscape had spread even to this faraway land. Because you know the Australians didn’t invent this shit. This one is all on us. Soon enough, we reached our destination. The Gold Coast is a major resort area, very much the Miami Beach of Oz. It is a land of pristine white sand beaches, pastel high-rise hotels, bungalows and boats lining inland canals. This wasn’t going to be a gig, it was going to be a vacation! We arrived at the Sofitel Goldcoast and the rock star treatment began immediately. I was met by the delightful Joy, from Broadbeach Marketing, who welcomed me warmly and explained that if I needed anything…anything at all, she would provide it. Then I was introduced to Adam, the hotel manager, who promised to be at beck and call at all hours. I hadn’t even played a note yet, and already I could say without hesitation that this was the best gig I ever did!
I was contracted to play four shows, all within walking distance of the hotel: a private party for the donors and other bigwigs that made the festival possible, a show at the local shopping mall (somebody get me Tiffany’s manager on the phone!), a set on the outdoor mainstage, and a gig at Conrad Jupiter’s Casino. On paper, it looked like an entire “Behind the Music” career trajectory all in one weekend. From his humble beginnings playing small parties and shopping malls, to his meteoric rise to fame playing to thousands on festival stages around the world, to his tragic decline on the casino circuit, through it all Bob Malone has… The shopping mall was attached to the hotel, and during the two days we were in town before I had to play there, we passed through the place many times on our way in and out. Deep in the bowels of the place, there sat a grand piano, surrounded by a shoe store, a rug shop, and a women’s plus-sizes outlet. Every time I passed by the piano, I was overcome by a great stomach-churning spasm of dread and foreboding. After the second or third time by, I declared a moratorium on sniggering comments from my wife about shopping mall gigs. It became “The Gig That Dare Not Speak Its Name.” I simply could not believe I had agreed to do this. Finally, the day came. Showtime was in the afternoon, around 2, so at 1:00, I went down there to see if it was time to sound check. The piano was there, as always, but that was it…no PA, no sound guy, no chairs for the audience. They did tell me that chairs would be set up, so I wouldn’t just be sitting there playing and singing while people trundled by, on their way from Spencer Gifts to the fucking 12-Plex. I hurried back to the room, and called the promoter to tell her what was up. “No worries, I’ll take care of it” she said. That is what I like to hear! And is there a better Australian phrase than “no worries”? I think not. A half hour later, I tried again, and there was the P.A. system…sort of. It was a single speaker, and a microphone, and the guy from the mall. He was a great guy, really friendly, extremely helpful…but he had no clue about how to run that PA. I did an end run around the prima-donna fit I felt coming on, and became one with my new mantra: “No worries! No dramas!” After all, I was in Australia, at the beach, on vacation, and getting paid for it – what was there really to be upset about? Then, about ten minutes before I was supposed to start playing, a crowd started forming – a good crowd – filling the whole area around the piano. People standing, people sitting on the floor, people sitting on benches. I could not believe it. And then I realized – it was in the program! This wasn’t just some gig in a mall, it was part of the festival. All over town, there were slick little booklets listing all of the blues fest shows, and this, of course, was one of them. All that worrying for nothing. Sometimes I am such an ass. Well, I beat that piano and shouted into that microphone for two and a half hours, and enjoyed every second of it. The crowd was great to play to! And considering that nobody had a comfortable seat, they were possessed of an astounding attention-span. I kept expecting the standers to wander away after a few songs, but they never did. During the break, I met Harry Miller for the first time. He was there with a video camera and wanted to know if it was OK to shoot. As the days went on, I realized that everybody in the Oz blues scene knew Harry. He is famous for his house concerts and sausage sizzle. “You’re nobody til you’ve played at my house, mate!” He was joking, but I am pretty much nobody in the grand scheme of things, so I secretly figured that playing his house could only help. I’ll be doing the gig next year!
So now I was two gigs into the festival week, and it still felt like a vacation. It was a unique experience. Usually, if I’ve gone somewhere to play music, no matter how idyllic the setting, it is nothing like being on vacation. You are working – fun as this particular job may be. But here – Karen was with me, we were staying at a resort hotel at the beach, we were being treated like paying customers…and my next show wasn’t until tomorrow. We spent the morning walking along the white sand beach, looking for shells. “That’s because you both have OCD!” Karen’s mom once said, when told of our shared interest in Conchology (she was right, of course). Later on, we cruised down to the next town along the coast – Surfers Paradise. “Surfers” to the natives. Didn’t like it as well as Broadbeach, it was mostly tacky t-shirt shops, mediocre restaurants, and strip joints…nothing we hadn’t seen in Venice Beach or Lauderdale. If we were still twenty-something years old, we would have loved it. Today was also Karen’s birthday, and I got her just what she wanted: the Night Tour of Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary. Joy at Broadbeach Marketing set it all up for us, as promised. All we had to do was wait for the driver to pick us up.
The one we held was…uh…how do I put this? Cute. Karen cooed over the little reptile like it was a fuzzy newborn kitten. Given the chance, it would have chewed her face off. Shortly after, we watched close up as a beautiful white owl disemboweled and ate a live rat. It started by biting off the head, after that, the internal organs and intestines really began to fly. The zookeeper and the other Ozzies in the crowd were completely unfazed by this. Amused, in fact. We tourists were not handling it quite so well. I had noticed by now that Australians are not nearly as squeamish about blood and guts as we Americans. Even before the rat-eviscerating owl, I had noticed this. Several times on TV we had seen an anti-drunk driving PSA featuring a drunk driver taking out a woman on a sidewalk. They then panned between the mangled corpse laying on the ground and the guy holding up the woman’s blood-covered baby. We had to see it another two times before we really could believe we’d seen it at all. They never would have gotten away with this at home! I think most Americans would stop eating meat if they had to kill the animal themselves. But if your average Aussie suddenly found himself without access to plastic-wrapped supermarket meat, I think he could still go ahead and cut himself some rump and throw it on the Barbie still twitching. Well, I couldn’t even get a sound out of the thing. This is an instrument so primitive that the player does all of the work. A trumpet or a saxophone employs centuries of technology that result in a design so refined that that tube of metal is relatively easy to blow into and produce a sound. With the didgeridoo, you are on your own, pal! Technological advances on this one stopped right around the time the Romans were digging the foundation for the Coliseum. I walked away with a whole new admiration for that Aboriginal kid playing the music for the show. Back at the room, it was late and we were starving. We ordered room service…something that will never cease to feel decadent to me. We ordered a couple of burgers, but they were nothing like anything we’d ever seen before. Sure, there was the standard roll and ground cow – but also beets, and a fried egg! I have to admit, I dug the burger with the sunny side up egg on it. Not the beets, however. When you get beets in anything, all you can taste is the beets. Karen’s reaction was the opposite – she pulled the egg off with a cry of disgust, but as soon as we got back to L.A., she asked me to got to the store and get some sliced beets…for her burger. “It reminds me of Australia” she said with great longing. We flipped on the TV, and stumbled upon a music video and song so awful, that it blew right past plain-old bad and moved confidently into the realm of the bizarre. Clearly an old favorite Aussie hit from the disco era, one of those inexplicable songs that manages to be huge everywhere in the world but the States, it was called “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie.” The tune was sung by a couple of ‘luded-out, blue-eyeshadowed Eurotrash chicks that called themselves Baccara. We stared in disbelief. This was awful even by 1977-polyester-disco-too-high-on-blow-to-know-how-bad-your-record-is standards. Rick Dees doing “Disco Duck” was timeless high art compared to this. With every second that went by, I was gaining a whole new appreciation of the artistic nuances of the Village People. Baccara were visionaries, however. Long before it was understood or socially acceptable, they pioneered a style now known as “Karaoke Singing.” They sounded like
And they weren’t even that hot.
The crowd went nuts for it, and after the show there was much love and camaraderie. Then Jan headed out for her second show of the day in another venue. I haven’t seen her since. I hope we meet again, and make music together again, it was one of the great pleasures of my life.
The stage was in sight of the restaurant we had eaten at the night before, and we had been able to watch the show while we ate. One of the highlights was a blues band from New Zealand called Handsome Giants turned in an awesome set. I had met these guys two nights before when their piano
I headed for the CD tent, in case anyone wanted something signed, which quite a few people did. Including a quite flirtatious and good looking Sheila who wanted her t-shirt signed. All right…this night was getting better and better. Right about the time she was trying to steal a kiss to go along with her autograph, my wife appeared. “You know, if this was America, you wouldn’t just be asking to have your t-shirt signed, you’d be offering up some bare flesh!” She said. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I love show business! Afterwards, ravenous, we joined Gerry and Carmen for some excellent Chinese food. We conversed like we’d known each other for 20 years instead of two days. After dinner, we squeezed ourselves into an unspeakably loud, smoky and overcrowded tavern. The kind of place we had so outgrown about ten years ago. But Gerry insisted. “You have got to see this guy!” he enthused. “You won’t be disappointed!” The guy in question was one Hat Fitz. A bushy-black-bearded ex-alcoholic acoustic bottleneck blues guitar slinger from the wilds of Oz. So we crammed in near the stage, shoulder to shoulder, a claustrophobic’s worst nightmare. And waited. And waited. Karen finally bailed. I desperately wanted out, but I’d waited this long… Finally, the musicians made their way to the small stage. It was just Hat, seated with an old National guitar plugged into an ancient amplifier, and a drummer seated at a vintage, pre-rock & roll drum kit…giant bass drum, calfskin heads, the whole beyond-retro deal. Without fanfare, the music began. It was riveting. The most primal sound I’d ever heard. It got all the way inside of me, bypassing the brain and going directly to the heart and the loins. Every song had just one chord, full of menace, and a churning unrelenting beat. The lyrics were indecipherable in the loud musical maelstrom…and it didn’t matter. Words would have just gotten in the way. The crowd writhed and slithered and danced in headback, tranced-out speaking-in-tongues ecstasy. This is what the blues must have felt like when it was new. I thought. It what I imagine John Hooker or Son House or Bukka White might have sounded like when they were young and dangerous and playing the backwoods Mississippi Delta juke-joints where you had to puke twice and show your razor just to get in. Not what they sounded like on the recordings that are all that’s left of them now, great as they are, but how they sounded live and threatening and whisky-soaked, when their guitars meant to blow the roof of the shack, and the gin-drunk sharecroppers and hard-bitten laborers moved together on the dance floor like a wave. The way they sounded long before middle-class white kids like me discovered the blues. Yes, it was what the blues must have felt like when it was new, and dangerous, and unencumbered by history or tradition, or the inevitable sophistication and subsequent dilution that always enter the bloodstream of a musical form after it has been around for a long time. It made me want to howl at the moon, it made me want to stomp my feet right through the floorboards. At made me want to do something I would regret the next morning. It was magical. I woke up sick and my wife was gone. Well…the being sick part was unexpected, but not surprising – I always get sick when I leave the country…the fatigue of displacement. I knew my wife would be gone – she caught an early train up to Noosa (hometown of Gerry and Carmen, coincidentally), where she had a gig playing at a concert series in an outdoor park. I hauled my diminished self out of the bed and tried to make the best of the day. After a trip to the “Chemist” for some cold remedies, I headed out to the mainstage to hear the great slide guitarist Dave Hole. And a wonderful show it was! After that, I wandered, waiting for showtime. I was playing tonight at the lounge at Conrad Jupiter’s Casino. If you were sans auto, as I was, the way you got there was to take a monorail train from the hotel over the highway and right into the casino. Karen and I had cased the joint a couple of nights before. We’d done a little gambling, and lost. Except, of course, we were losing Australian money – which is colorful and exuberant, and has little clear plastic windows in it – so we felt no sting of loss as the slot machines swallowed the cash whole. It just didn’t seem like real money. American money just looks so much more serious…tells you all you need to know about our unfortunate priorities. We’d also checked out the casino lounge, where we had seen a kid with an acoustic guitar somewhere in the middle of his fourth set…murdering a few James Taylor and Jimmy Buffett tunes. But tonight, just like at the mall, a crowd quite unlike what you’d usually see in a place like this had gathered to see the show. So I got up there and made it happen. It was a fun show, but a little strange. The crowd was like a double exposure. The attentive blues loving festival goers layered over the regular lounge crowd (who were probably wondering what the hell I was doing in there). They all liked it, but for completely different reasons. The casino people were dancing and whooping and drinking and letting it rip, even if it was a Sunday night. The festival people were…well, they were whooping and drinking and letting it rip, too, but listening instead of dancing. While I crooned a serious ballad, getting deep for the listening faction, a couple of Japanese hookers, dressed in designer rags too small to even qualify as handkerchiefs, were dancing slow and nasty with each other, drumming up business. It was that kind of night. Karen came in from her gig about halfway through, as did Gerry and Carmen. And afterwards we headed to the 24-hour café for a late bite. Karen had wowed the crowd up in Noosa, and had done a live radio interview on the same station that Gerry broadcasts from. Didn’t cost her a hundred bucks, though. I think she should give me fifty, and we’ll call it even.
It was a two and a half hour drive up, and on the way, we told Jeoff about an incident we’d had. While wandering the festival grounds, we had run into a couple of good-natured guys who’d seen the show and wanted to talk, and they asked us where else we were going while we were in Oz. We said our next stop was Heron Island, up on the Great Barrier Reef. “Heron!” he said ominously. “Best be careful up there, mate. Watch out for the drop bears! They drop right out of the trees there and attack you!” As soon as the guy said “drop bears,” his friend started to smile slyly, as if to say “what a load of shit!” Karen, however, noticed none of this…she stepped right in it. “Drop bears! Wow! I haven’t heard of them – and we studied all the creature guides! Are there a lot of them on the island? You think we’ll see any?” At this point, they couldn’t contain themselves any longer, and burst out laughing. My wife was the first person they’d ever met who’d actually fallen for it. They were extremely amused. Considering all the years they’d been trying to find a sucker for this tale, I kind of felt good that we had made it happen for them. So of course, for the rest of the week, I busted Karen’s chops about the “drop bears.” When we told Jeoff about it, he was equally amused. “Yanks have been afraid of our drop bears since World War Two, mate!” While it was true we were now in shameless full-on camera-and-Bermuda shorts tourist mode, we were still traveling in rock star style – we were taking the limo to the zoo. And it felt damn good, too! Karen, still working off her upper middle class guilt, felt a little funny about the whole thing. I was having none of that…after ten years on the road the hard way, I had earned this ride.
Sadly still, as I write this, I have learned that Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter himself, has also died. Karen and I were very sad to hear the news. We have always loved Steve Irwin, and although every time you saw him, he was in some kind of near-death encounter, it just doesn’t seem possible that he could be gone. Still, as much as we humans will miss him, the crocodiles and gators and sharks and all the other fearful creatures in the world will miss him more. He taught us all to love them all. And for that reason alone, he has done the planet a great service. Later, souvenirs in hand, we walked out the front gate, past the crowds waiting for the bus, and jumped right into the back of the limo. A crowd of tourists waiting for the shuttle bus gawked and whispered. Call me shallow, call me vapid, call me self-absorbed…but I cannot lie – I loved it, and I can’t wait to do it again.
Part Three After a quick stop in Brisbane, where we had dinner with our Ozzie friend and genius/mathematician/ rocket-scientist/mentally-Ill- Bob-Dylan-Fan John Lattanzio, we were off to Heron Island and the Great Barrier Reef. The Great Barrier Reef! Just the name alone invites you to daydream of adventure. It is the world’s largest living organism – at over 1,200 miles in length, it can be seen from space and stretches along over one-third of the east coast of Australia – about 100 miles or so off shore.
In the months and weeks leading up to this part of the trip, I was imagining a post-gig tropical paradise island vacation. But now that I was here, the air was chilly, the skies overcast, the ocean choppy. All was depressingly different that I had pictured it. And Gladstone, the mainland jumping-off point, was a dreary smokestack town…not a palm tree in sight! Also, it was May in Australia, which meant that winter was coming. And indeed, Heron Island is at the very southernmost tip of the Barrier Reef, not really far enough north to be part of the Australian tropical zone. If you turn America upside down, so that it gets warmer as you go north, you will begin to get the picture. I had envisioned a trip to the Florida Keys, but we were in North Carolina. Three hours later, we were on the island. The sky was still slate gray and a miserable drizzly rain fell on us. Still, I could already tell there was something magical about the place. I soon discovered there was really very little to do on Heron…and I mean that in a good way. Like most urban Americans in the early twenty-first century, I am faced with an incomprehensible array of things to do. My entertainment choices and diversions are never-ending. So myriad are my choices, in fact, that I often end up sitting stunned in front of the TV, paralyzed by indecision, channel surfing through the night, unable to commit to even a half hour television show. But on Heron Island, the choices were limited, and therefore, all were to be appreciated. My attention span lengthened immediately. I could spend hours with a book. Or strolling on the beach. Or contemplating the sky. Meals were to be savored, not inhaled. I was certainly a better husband. My full attention could be lavishly aimed at my wife. And that is how it should be. Life is short, and to find one’s true love is rare. We took bird walks and reef walks. We spent each morning snorkeling in the shallows at high tide. We shared the water with baby lemon sharks who had come in looking for small fish to eat. We swam with a juvenile green sea turtle that we followed for most of an hour as he grazed the underwater fields of turtle grass. We floated one morning in wonder as a vast flock of rays glided by us like a mirage. In the evening, everyone on the island gathered around the pool and in the main hall for conversation and games and drinks. The building this gathering takes place in was once a turtle cannery. Luckily for the turtles, the Australian Turtle Soup Company went out of business shortly after opening, and by the thirties, the place was a resort. One afternoon, we met a wonderful couple from New York – Howie and Karen Landsman. Howie, it turned out, grew up in New Jersey and was a big fan of New Orleans music. Amazed, I found myself on an island of Australia talking about The Meters, and Professor Longhair, and the Neville Brothers and countless other great Crescent City music makers with a guy with the same accent as me. Who’d have thought? We ate breakfast, lunch and dinner with the Buff-Banded Rails in the main (and only) dining room. A gigantic buffet was always on hand. And we feasted mightily. I was constantly amazed to be there.
And then, all too soon, we were on our way home. The last thing we saw before leaving the island was a magnificent eagle ray breaching the water like some mystical phantom from the depths. It was something you would never believe had you not seen it with your own eyes.
Then we flew home. And like I said before, this once foreign land inhabits a permanent part of my heart. We will be back again. Bob Malone
© 2006 by Bob Malone
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We landed in Sydney at 7:30 AM on a Saturday. It was a fourteen hour flight. But it was really even longer than that. Somewhere over the Pacific, we crossed the International Date Line, and a whole day just vanished. We left L.A. on Thursday, and arrived on…Saturday. Through the magic of Ambien, we were able to snooze away eight hours of the flight. So it wasn’t too bad. 
Caffeine fix in hand, we commenced our tour of the waterfront area around Circular Quay (that’s pronounced “key” by the way). As was pretty much mandatory, we stopped to gaze at the famous 
It was late afternoon now, and we were flagging badly, and weary from the crowds. It was then that I spied the 
We closed out the night at the Four-Seasons hotel bar, which conveniently for me, was also a cigar-bar. I achieved stogie-nirvana with a wonderful 
Later we visited 
The place was a little bit tacky, but they sure had some great deadly creatures. Sharks, crocs, snakes, funnel web spiders. Tarantulas. We had already felt we’d gotten our money’s worth when we met the blue-ringed octopus, so the rest felt like a bonus.
Later on, we went over to the one historical site I had really wanted to see, the 
All I can say is – the place sure has come a long way! If I had to use one word to describe Australia’s colonial past, “squalid” would be that word. One of the most fascinating things I learned was that everybody who got sent here got one of three sentences: three years, seven years, or life. Most of it was for the crime of being poor. Here’s twenty-two year old Ian Jones, sentenced to life for stealing a loaf of bread. That sort of thing. And get this – the only reason the British started sending people down here at all is because we won the revolutionary war, and they had to stop sending all their criminals to Georgia and the Carolinas. 
Back up at the oceanfront view room (complete with complimentary champagne and cheese-plate), Karen articulated what I had already been thinking. If we hadn’t already been married, and Karen was a chick I had recently met and was trying to impress, that incident in the hotel lobby would have most definitely gotten me laid. In fact, it seemed to have put Karen back in touch with the leather and long hair Sunset Strip Rock & Roll groupie chick that I know is still inside her. She perhaps viewed me in a whole different way.
My first task upon arrival, however, was not to get laid, it was to do a phone-interview with Gerry Blain – AKA “Chillblain” of “Chillblain’s Port & Cornflakes,” a blues show on 
Later that evening we met Gerry and his wife Carmen and Baiba and Joy and a whole table full of people from the festival booking office for dinner. We talked and laughed and ate for hours, and made new lifelong friends in the process. It was a wonderful night.
Most Australian creatures are nocturnal, so this was a chance to see in action the Koalas, Wombats, and Tasmanian Devils et al that were asleep at the zoo in Sydney. Upon arrival, the very first thing they did was put a baby 
But it wasn’t all blood and guts – we fed kangaroos, met some koalas that were actually awake, and saw a traditional aboriginal dance show. During the course of the show, audience members were invited to try the 
The next day at noon, we were down at the Under The Sails stage to catch 
Finally, the night of my own mainstage set was upon me. The mall was great and all, but this the gig I came for! I was playing on the “Surf Parade” stage, which was right in the middle of the street. The street, of course, was blocked off for two blocks in either direction, and hundreds of chairs were set up in the road. A little bit surreal when you got a close look at it. 
player sat in at my first gig. They were great guys – the kind of dudes you always hope to be in a band with. And their piano guy could really play, and he was tall and blonde and young and thin and good-looking, too. If we were chicks, we would have had to claw each others eyes out. But since we were not, we bonded instead.
I arrived backstage with my backstage pass and sat in the hospitality tent, waiting to go on. A very loud band was on before me. Always a bad sign when you gotta go on solo. No matter how hard you hump it out there on a solo set – you can never beat the energy of a band. Although I have come very close. I intended to do it again tonight. 
I went on, and did a good set, and came off stage convinced I had bombed. I just couldn’t hear the crowd. I couldn’t feel the crowd. There was a fairly large gap between the edge of the stage and where the seating started, so everyone felt very distant. And the lights were in my eyes. I felt as if I were playing in a vacuum. 
Well, as soon as I emerged from backstage, the people started crowding around. They were ecstatic, they were moved, they wanted to shake my hand, the wanted autographs. I hadn’t bombed at all. I had, in fact, triumphed.
Now I ask you, when it comes wives, does it get any better than that? This extremely lucky guy thinks not. In the end, I signed both the shirt and a flat, taut, and tanned expanse of bare midriff. And Karen and I both got a kiss. 
The next morning, our trusty driver Jeoff picked us up at the hotel. Now that my musical duties were done, we shifted into high tourist gear…and around here, that meant one thing more than any other: Australia Zoo. Home of Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. Jeoff, like many other people we had met, had a few Steve Irwin stories to tell, he was a local boy from up north of Brisbane, and general consensus was that Steve was a good bloke. It was unlikely that we’d meet him today. But we sure would meet the crocks!
We did all the things people do at Australia Zoo – saw the croc show at the Crocoseum, patted (in Australia you don’t “pet,” you “pat”) the kangaroos at Roo Heaven. Visited with a variety of deadly reptiles. We watched a Cassowary eat. My wife, absolutely fascinated by this gigantic, prehistoric flightless bird, took fifty or sixtyphotos of it picking watermelon pieces out of a bowl of mixed fruit. I finally had to drag her away. I paid thirty bucks to be given a tour of the 
wombat enclosure, where I got to pat three of these strange marsupials. If you hadn’t figured it out before, you know officially know I’m a dork. We spent a good long time observing Harriet the Tortoise, who, at 176 years of age, was the world’s oldest living creature. Sadly, she died a couple of months later. 
There are 618 islands near the reef – most uninhabited – but Heron is the only one that is right on the reef itself. No vomitous boat-ride out to the reef every time you want to see it, on Heron you can take off your shoes, put on your shorty- shorts, and walk right out to the reef. But first, there was the matter of the 90-mile boat ride out the island. We were up at 4:30am, on a plane to the little industrial costal town of Gladstone by seven, and on the boat by 11:00. 
After checking into our rooms, we were given the island tour. The main building with the bar, pool and lounge. The restaurant building. The helipad. We quickly learned that this island belonged to the birds, and the people were just visiting their island. Everywhere you went, there were little 
place, looking very confused and disoriented. You just wanted to pick the poor things up and swaddle them in a blanket and take them someplace safe. But of course, that was out of the question. They had been left alone by their parents to learn how to fend for themselves…or die trying. Lest they become the aviary version of the twenty-six year old guy that still lives with his parents.
The main even every evening was the sunset. There is little I have experienced that is finer than watching the sun slowly fall into the ocean beyond the wooden gantry just off Heron Island. One night it occurred to me that we were here all because I had gathered up the email addresses of some Australian blues festival bookers and sent letters out into the cyber void in a 3 a.m. frenzy of productivity, hoping something would happen. I could have just as easily not done it. An exhilarating and frightening thought.
pointed out to Jason her disappointment that there seemed to be no crabs on the island. He said “What do you mean, no crabs? They’re everywhere!” Then, genie-like, he rubbed a nearby clump of grass and out shot a tiny green Turtle Weed Crab, who proceeded to play dead in Karen’s hand. She was as delighted as a girl could be. I heard her squeal from some distance away. I myself was preoccupied with the extremely deadly and aggressive cone snails that were making their way across the sand. Australia, it is always good to remember, is a potentially deadly sort of paradise.
Our final day on the island, we went diving for the first time. Lessons in the pool at 8 a.m., diving on the reef by eleven. No time to get cold feet. It was the way to go. Our dive instructor took us each by the arm and led us into an undersea paradise like we had never experienced. It all ended way too soon. I had always enjoyed snorkeling, but this was something else entirely. Kind of like how I had always been content to play for fifty or a hundred people in a club until I had experienced my first theatre crowd. There is nothing quite so life changing as the first time you feel that comber of applause from four or five thousand people wash over you. ![Intel(R) JPEG Library, version [2.0.14.46]](/images/writings/clip_image062.jpg)
We stayed one last night in Brisbane, enjoying Aussie steaks and lemon lime and bitters at the rip-roaring 
