Vanishing act - Paul Kelly

Vanishing act

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/13/1120934299541.html

By Michael Dwyer
July 15, 2005

Paul Kelly

Why Paul Kelly thinks the music of his youth has plenty in common with punk.
Paul Kelly slips the double vinyl album from its plastic sleeve and opens the gatefold cover. He smiles a distant smile. "There's Woody (Guthrie)," he says after a while. "There's Hank (Williams), Buddy Holly ..."

He doesn't remark on his younger self in the collage of faces adorning his classic album of '86, Gossip. It's almost like he isn't there. He drinks in heroes, friends and memories for a minute, closes the cover, writes the fan's name at the top and hesitates. "Good luck," he writes at last, "Paul Kelly."

Thanks. Anyone proposing to retrace the great Australian songwriter's journey so far probably needs it. Never an open book, Kelly has been slowly disappearing between the lines of his songs for years, a vanishing act that reaches another misty peak with Foggy Highway.

It's his second bluegrass album, following his '99 collaboration with Uncle Bill, Smoke, and it's no accident the two titles share an allusion to the veils that sometimes obscure reality from perception. "I was gonna call this one Fog," he says with a grin.

A compact figure in a big, black leather coat, Kelly is an affable if concise conversationalist who generally prefers not to meet the press. For years, he's expressed himself better through open letters to fans and media.

In his latest letter, he's expansive about what attracted him to bluegrass as a teenager. He was struck by the keening voices and strange melancholy of the Stanley Brothers and Dock Boggs, he writes, but moreover by the apparent distance between singer and song. These people "sang in voices distinctly their own but often from fantastical points of view," he writes. "Dick Justice sang from inside the head of a little bird that had witnessed a murder.

"Twentieth century singers sang as doomed 18th-century ship captains, 19th-century outlaws, ghosts or moles in the ground. Rock and pop music, a more self-expressive form where the song was usually about the singer, seemed quite limited to me in comparison."

When Kelly made his first Countdown appearance with the Dots 25 years ago, it was with pop's unambiguous first-person pronoun to the fore - even if his first Top 40 title, (I Wanna Be Like) Billy Baxter, offers an amusing indication of his escapist tendencies in hindsight.

Then as now, he held dear the more mysterious music he'd heard in the folk clubs of Adelaide and the country pubs in the foothills above Perth. Or, as he notes more poetically in his letter, "the country of pop was where I took up residence, but like an immigrant I always held onto those first songs, the dark, unruly hymns of home".

"When I was 19, 20, learning guitar, I was mainly learning folk songs and country songs," he recollects today. "Bluegrass songs would often prick my ears 'cause they seemed to come from somewhere so alien.

"I don't go to a lot of bluegrass festivals but I know it sees itself as being a bit outside of mainstream country. From what I know about the way it was born and developed, there seems to be a lot of parallels to punk music. When bluegrass first hit, jaws were dropping because they played so fast. Punk was like that too. I find it fascinating 'cause it's very raw but it takes a lot of skill to play."

Hence the Stormwater Boys, the band of sharp-pickers Kelly assembled for Foggy Highway. Their harmonies and musicianship are striking from the off, but the album's unique atmosphere is due at least as much to the author's stories. He acknowledges he selected his old songs and tailored his new ones to fit a certain mood, roughly in keeping with the album's title.

"The thing that really struck me when I saw (Joel and Ethan Coen's bluegrass-soaked movie) O Brother Where Art Thou? was that nearly all the songs had a yearning for another place," he says.

"Religion is big part of it but it's not always couched in religious terms. Big Rock Candy Mountain is a fantasy about a place where the cops have wooden legs; 'I'm weary, let me rest'; I'll Fly Away ... so much of that music springs from this longing for another place apart from this hardscrabble life."

It's tempting to conclude that Kelly uses the bluegrass tradition to pursue a similar yearning, the better to leave behind his own somewhat reticent persona for the attitudes and identities of fictitious characters. He recalls the first time he successfully shed his own skin to sing from a woman's point of view as a turning point in his work.

"When I wrote Sweet Guy, I was doing it with the Coloured Girls but I was trying to give it away to female singers I knew. It was (that band's late guitarist) Steve Connolly who convinced me to sing it myself, 'cause he had a lot of folk music in his background, too. It felt a bit odd at first, but once I'd done that song I knew I could do it again."

Everything's Turning to White, sung from the point of view of a shell-shocked wife in a short story by Raymond Carver, was easier by virtue of its more folky structure, Kelly says. Soon his audience was accustomed to the range of disguises that make his songs so much larger than his own slight and grizzled form.

Think of the prison inmate writing home for Christmas in How To Make Gravy, for example, or the bereft refugee in detention in Emotional.

The Billy Leach tent boxer in Rally Round the Drum is one of several old characters who reappear on Foggy Highway. Perhaps the most spellbinding is They Thought I Was Asleep, told from the point of view of a child in the back of a car, deeply shaken by the sound of his parents sobbing.

"I don't know what mum's crying about," the writer shrugs, "and I don't know if everything was all right in the end. Mick Albeck, the fiddle player, was funny 'cause he was asking, 'What did happen?' I had to say, 'I'm sorry, I don't know'."

With its roots in Bible Belt American folk and its occasional southern gothic overtones, Foggy Highway shares some common ground with another great Australian storyteller. Nick Cave, though, for all his brilliant dramatic devices, still has trouble extricating his songs from accusations of autobiography.

He openly lamented as much in the wake of his No More Shall We Part album of '01: "I find it a failure in my songwriting," he said, "that the songs can't exist without people immediately thinking, 'Oh shit, what's happened here? The Sorrowful Wife? Things are going wrong in his marriage!'"

Cave added: "The songs that I like of other people's, that really touch me, they're usually ones that sound as if they're about something that's true; a truth that reveals something about the artist."

Kelly thinks about this for a moment.

"You can tell a story that resonates with you, even though it's not your story," he says.
"That way you sing it with truth, perhaps. People don't tell the truth about themselves anyway, so who's to say when they write a song about breaking up with their wife that you're hearing the truth?"

As for his own vanishing act, Kelly thinks it may be due to a smaller stage presence to begin with. "I think Nick's much more of a performer and I don't think I am," he says. "He's fervent and he's passionate when he sings, so people will think 'Oh, it must be about him'.

"I tend to be a bit more detached, maybe. I'm not a natural performer. I've got better at it just through doing it a lot and gaining confidence, but I only became a performer because I'd written things and the best way of getting them out there was to sing them myself."

For the first time, his elusive streak extends to abdicating all instruments to his band on Foggy Highway, but rest assured he'll emerge from the mist when he hits home state stages next week.

"I still don't have very good technique for bluegrass," he insists, "'cause on a guitar you've really got to nail those alternating bass lines and stuff like that, so that's why I didn't play on the record.

"I'll play live, though, 'cause I can get away with that."

Hi, lonesome!
A lightning-fast history of bluegrass:

1939 - High-harmonising hillbilly Bill Monroe names his Blue Grass Boys after his "bluegrass state" of Kentucky. Mandolin, fiddle, banjo, guitar and bass soon to be reclassified as lethal instruments.

1946 - North Carolina banjo player Earl Scruggs ups the pace with a new, triple-fingered picking style.

1948 - Old Boys Scruggs and Lester Flatt form the Foggy Mountain Boys.

1954 - Elvis Presley cuts Monroe's Blue Moon of Kentucky as first Sun Records B-side.

1962 - Flatt and Scruggs' Ballad of Jed Clampett graces US TV comedy The Beverly Hillbillies.

1967 - Flatt and Scruggs' Foggy Mountain Breakdown makes bank-robbing fun in Bonnie & Clyde.

1972 - Eric Weissberg's and Steve Mandel's Dueling Banjos appears in Deliverance; becomes international shorthand for "Uh-oh, inbred yokels".

1980s - Former Scruggs and Ralph Stanley sideman Ricky Scaggs spearheads new Nashville traditionalist movement.

2001 - O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack shifts millions worldwide, great news for old timers (including the Stanley Brothers) and alleged "newgrass" players (including Alison Krauss).

2004 - Gillian Welch almost sparks mob lynching when a hapless Melbourne fan makes a floorboard creak during a performance.

Paul Kelly and the Stormwater Boys play the Palais in Hepburn Springs on Wednesday and the Athenaeum on Thursday and Friday. Foggy Highway is out through EMI.