I’ve never been a prolific reader but occasionally I come across books that I can’t put down.
I first saw Lucinda Williams play in Melbourne in 1989 off the back of her landmark self-titled album. It was a gem of a show and she was ably supported by the late great Chris Wilson.
I’ve now seen Lucinda play another four times over the last 40 odd years and she never disappoints. Despite winning a few Grammys and voted ‘America’s Best Songwriter’ by Time Magazine, she is still relatively unknown in a commercial sense.
As you discover in her autobiography, ‘Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You’ she’s never been phased by the relative anonymity. Her song writing has more to do with integrity than selling records, although thankfully that has come at an increased rate as the years have passed.
Lucinda was destined to be an artist. Her father Miller Williams was a famous poet and literary academic who moved the family around a dozen or so locations with his work, and her mother Lucille was an excellent musician but suffered from mental illness and alcoholism. Together, Lucinda inherited the gift of music and words.
Her experiences through travel and her father’s values of fairness for all people shaped Lucinda’s thinking and determination to fight for what she believed in.
The book takes you through a fascinating life of setbacks, overcoming adversity, unrequited love, damaged relationships and great friendships forged on the road touring around the world constantly.
Much of this of course is captured in Lucinda’s lyrics. Her songs are deeply personal and the book reveals the background to many of them which is a delight for any Lucinda purist.
This is a fantastic read and you can feel Lucinda’s Southern drawl jumping off the page. To actually experience Lucinda’s voice you can order the talking book on line and have the legend read it to you!
She has just released her latest album, “Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart” to more critical acclaim. It’s a beauty and despite having recently had a stroke, her voice has simply evolved into something that’s a bit deeper but still as powerful.
If you’re new to Lucinda, I can highly recommend exploring this extraordinary artist’s back catalogue. This is her website:
https://www.lucindawilliams.com/hom
This is a delightful short video from the Seth Meyers Show, upon the release of the book:
Finally, it’s impossible to choose a favourite track but here’s just one from her Live in Austin DVD recorded in 1998:
From the sublime to the ridiculous is the only way to describe legendary Melbourne record producer Tony Cohen’s biography, ‘Half Deaf, Completely Mad’.
Tony, who sadly passed away in 2017, approached writer John Olson in 2013 to help him put together the book from an unfinished manuscript. John then set out interviewing the artists and Tony’s colleagues over a three year period, then collaborated with Tony to produce a book that is written in Tony’s voice.
What eventuated is a rollicking memoir of debauchery mixed with dedicated artistry from a misanthrope and very funny man.
Tony was kicked out of St Bedes College in Mentone at the age of 15. In a football obsessed city, he remembers the footy coming towards him in a school game accompanied by a horde of opposition players and he decided to leap the fence and run home.
He hated sport and school and was lucky that his dad knew someone who worked at Armstrongs, a prominent recording studio in the city. It would be the start of a remarkable career learning everything on the job using nothing other than instincts and rat cunning.
As a seventeen year old he was already an assistant producer on albums from Billy Thorpe and The Aztecs and an engineer on a Jim Keays album. Thorpe would send him to the bottle shop with a note because he was too young to buy booze.
Between 1974 and 2017, Tony would produce albums by many of the who’s who of Australian music, in particular independent artists.
The first time I heard of Tony was when he produced Hunters and Collectors first EP ‘World of Stone’. I was studying as a soldier at the RAAF Training Centre in Wagga Wagga and my like-minded punk friend Eddie and I, bought a copy.
When occasionally under the influence of a non-prescribed substance, we would turn off the lights in our barrack room and turn the volume up to eleven. It would blow us away and it would be the start of an odd relationship we would form with the band, but that’s another story.
Tony explains in detail his amazing relationships, good and bad, with Aussie independent music royalty. He worked for decades with Nick Cave and all his incantations, Tex Perkins and his incantations, Ed Kuepper and his incantations, The Go Betweens, Paul Kelly and many more. He also worked with international artists such as Magazine, Cat Stevens and The Gun Club.
What I didn’t understand in the book was the technical side of the recording process. Tony is very detailed with all of it and clearly passionate, but I’m clueless when it comes to that stuff. For anyone with an interest in sound engineering I have no doubt it’s a great insight.
Many rock biographies contain the inevitable use of drugs and the worshipping of their consumption which can become quite tedious after a while.
There’s no doubt this book highlights the biblical amount of drugs and alcohol taken by this foolish man, but jeez the stories are funny! Tony doesn’t condone the use and in fact regrets the scale of what he absorbed but it’s entirely written in self-deprecation.
His stories on the heroin trail touring with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds from the UK to Berlin to Iceland to New York is worth the price of the book alone. How they held it together is beyond me.
This is a man who was a self-confessed ‘clutz’ who stumbled into something he dearly loved and was really, really good at.
The book has included song recommendations as you get through each chapter. It’s a great idea and would make a nice CD compilation as well as a fitting tribute to a fascinating character who made mine and many other lives richer through his devotion to Aussie artists in particular.
This is a terrific interview on 3RRR with John Olson about the book and Tony’s legacy:
There are so many tracks to choose from but I’ll just add one classic from The Saints in 1984:
