Features
Book Review: Graney's ‘1001 Australian Nights’
By René Schaefer
Dave Graney’s new memoir ‘1001 Australian Nights’ is a rare and valuable aberration in Australia’s pop cultural landscape, writes RENÉ SCHAEFER.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] This is a heroic book. It’s not the kind of memoir you ever read from an Australian artist, let alone a musician. Dave Graney steadfastly maintains a belief in himself and the inherent worth of his dream, no matter how much he is wracked with doubt, no matter how much the world tells him to shut up, no matter how soul-destroying the business of communication, no matter how dismissive our culture really is. As a cultural aggregate we Australians don’t generally embrace this kind of self-confidence and independence of thought. It’s almost shocking to our treasured sense of ordinariness. This makes 1001 Australian Nights a rare and valuable aberration.
Hardboiled in tone, part one of Graney’s magnum opus reads like an extension of his lyrics, which often blend seamlessly into the disjointed and impressionistic narrative. Recollection of actual events takes a back seat to an all-pervasive interior monologue that perfectly mirrors Graney’s observational detachment from even the most intensely lived moments of his life. What shines through is his inherent intelligence, adaptability to circumstances, and will to be nothing less than an original. That’s what it boils down to – hardcore action, one man’s ability to think on his feet, to chop and change and fight his way out of traps, dead ends and garbage heaps, like Doc and Carol MacCoy in Jim Thompson’s novel The Getaway (a metaphor employed by Graney himself).
In the process he dismisses most of what has passed for pop culture since the mid-1980s, and you can’t help but agree with him – it’s all so shallow and manufactured and driven by the gods of mammon. Graney, in contrast, is the secret agent, the fly in the ointment, infiltrating behind enemy lines, with his wife Clare Moore as second in command, to set bombs under bridges and weaken the foundations of the edifice of pop.
Ultimately, he knows that his mission is doomed to failure, but like a true hero, he goes ahead and does the job anyway – not for personal glory, but because he believes in the cause. And this cause is the utopian promise of a world of cool (the only world worth living in), as promised by the likes of his formative influences: Alan Vega, The Cramps, James M Cain, Raymond Chandler, etc. It’s a world that is hardboiled and perfect, where everyone is dressed to the nines and never utters anything mundane, a world which is hip (as in the antithesis of square).
Basically, he fights to bring a fiction into reality. No wonder this was never going to work. Yet, in his way, Graney succeeds, striking a blow for individualists everywhere, who not only inhabit their own reality, but insist on skirmishing with the outside world – just because it’s there and they believe it needs a kick up its bloated, complacent arse every once in a while. In his own way, Graney is trying to do for others what punk did for him in his teens – to open a window on another way of living and offer some kind of escape, some kind of alternative to conformity and the living death of normalcy.
The bare bones of the story he tells are the quintessential rock’n’roll myth: the loner coming from the impoverished rural backwater (Mount Gambier), fighting his way up to get a taste of success, before subsiding again into obscurity following the inevitable disillusionment. But this story is different. Unlike your average delusional rock star, Graney is lucid and funny and self-aware enough to capture every nuance of irony that is to be found in living out these cliches. In his hands the narrative is rescued by virtue of his penetrating cynicism and inability to buy into his own conceits. The conflict takes place as much internally as it does in the spot-lit world of minor fame.
It is this aloofness that made a lot of rock fans and critics in the ’90s distrust Graney, especially at a time when it was still de rigeur to buy into the myths of authenticity and sincerity perpetuated by those with a vested interest in propping up a declining post-grunge industry and its moth-eaten 1960s cultural currency. What is surprising is how explicitly Graney has dealt with these themes throughout his career. Still, it’s a discourse largely confined to the margins of pop culture, noticed only by those few who actually pay attention to the lyrics in semi-popular music.
For all his detachment and irony though, Dave Graney is 100 percent serious about his art. In stark contrast to today’s indie careerists and ephemeral hipsters, for whom music is nothing but a lifestyle accessory or a succession of passing fads and poses, Graney came from a generation for whom music was still a life-or-death affair (often quite literally).
After such a brilliantly sustained opening salvo in part one of 1001 Australian Nights, it initially appears that our fearless commander is pulling a swifty on us in the second half of the book, “There’ll Be No Comin’ Home”. The latter section, written over the last decade or so, consists of a seemingly random collection of musings, spruced-up road diaries and quasi-reviews of his musical peers. But what initially seems like padding to jack up the word-count of his tome, turns out to function on another level entirely. If part one was hard-boiled and to some degree a meta-narrative of the life of an artist, part two examines the minutiae of the reality of the constantly gigging career musician – in itself an entirely archaic notion.
“Unlike your average delusional rock star, Graney is lucid and funny and self-aware enough to capture every nuance of irony that is to be found in living out these clichés.”
Like one of the absurd characters in an Andrei Tarkovsky movie, locked in a loop of repetitive ritual, our hero is compelled to retrace his steps over and over. It’s not every week one can be on tour opening for the Bad Seeds in theatres across Europe. The reality is a never ending slog through the Australian hinterland in a Tarago, playing in the same decaying country towns year after year, to crowds of only slightly varying degrees of indifference.
This is Dave Graney in post-mainstream fame mode, demystifying the process while clinging onto his dream. Here the life of the artist is stripped bare of any illusory glamour or highbrow ambition. It’s all bad roadside diner food, incompetent sound techs and the constant struggle to rise above adversity. Graney labours under no illusion – ours is not a country that mollycoddles its artists. Instead, like his inspiration Buffalo Bill, Graney has to re-live his heroic adventures in a circus sideshow tent, competing with the freaks and geeks, getting up on stage again every night to remind the gawking rubes that once he was indeed a fearless and brilliant military campaigner.
This is true heroism – the ability to play yourself day after day, to keep giving the people what they don’t really want, nor particularly need. It is the realisation that in the end the artist has to be an entertainer, no matter how far his original intentions were from such a mundane diminution of the creative act. Yes, the hero has to act, and re-enact, and embrace the craft of doing so. This is the truth, and ultimately the point, of Graney’s heroic life on the plains. “Deal with it,” he tells those who might follow in his footsteps. Because dealing with it is what he does every day.
READ: An extract from Graney’s ‘1001 Australian Nights’.
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