I need that song and I need it now – Addendum

In those days prior to Shazam, or in fact the internet in general, there was no easy way to work out exactly which album a particular song that you heard on the radio was located on. When you listened to radio stations such as 3RRR, which often played quite obscure songs, unless you caught the back announcement, you could be left completely in the dark as to what the amazing song you just heard actually was. Feelings of “I need to hear that again now” would often go completely unfulfilled. One morning, circa mid to late-80s, while driving in to uni, I heard a fabulous version of I Can’t Give You Anything But Love sung by Ella Fitzgerald. I knew the song and I knew some of Ella’s material, but this version had me marvelling at the true genius of the great woman. After singing the first verse or two in her own luxurious voice, she proceeded to sing the next in the voice of Marilyn Monroe, expertly mimicking her tone and word enunciation. I was spellbound, but what came next just lifted me into the stratosphere. For the final part of the song, Ella sang in the voice and style of Louis Armstrong, so expertly that you could have sworn that it was a duet. I thought it was one of the most amazing things that I’d ever heard and so began my quest to find the album on which this song resided. I didn’t really know anybody who was into this sort of music to ask and so just started looking in record shops, mostly of the second-hand variety. It became a ritual. Newly found second-hand record shop, flick through the jazz albums under F to see if it was there. I saw loads of Fitzgerald albums, but couldn’t find one that had this particular song. After a couple of unsuccessful years, I was wondering if my quest would be forever fruitless.

In 1989, I had my first trip to California. An eleven week work related training jaunt on full expenses, complete with a car and comfortable serviced apartment at the Residence Inn. It was a pretty deluxe intro to the US. And a new abundance of second-hand record stores in which to search. On flicking through the records hopefully in one such store, there it was. Ella Fitzgerald Live. Track 12. Paydirt! I was so excited and rushed to the counter to purchase it, sharing the story of my long quest to the bemused record shop owner. He could understand my passion and we had a bit of a chat about all things Ella. I took the album excitedly back to my temporary abode knowing that I had a couple of months to go before I’d be back home and have the opportunity to slip it on to my turntable and fulfil my desire. But for now, I was just satisfied that at last it was in my possession.

1989 was also the year of a very large earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area. I had been in a class in Santa Clara when it occurred and had the full adrenaline fuelled experience of feeling an entire building wobble around like a bowl of jelly. Quite exhilarating if you were naïve enough and didn’t have the images in your head of fallen down bridges, crushed cars and massive fires in the Marina district that all came to me later. On getting back to the Residence Inn, I found that the manager, Kelly, had purchased a whole lot of pizzas and beers for the guests to share, to help everybody absorb what had occurred that day. I spent a bit of time talking to her that evening and as a long term guest at the place, got to know her quite well over the coming weeks. As I was staying there over Halloween, she invited me to come to a Halloween party with her and her friends; an invitation which I gratefully accepted. When she came to pick me up on that evening from my apartment, I invited her in for a pre-party drink and we comfortably chatted about all sorts of things. I told her of my crazy quest for the Ella Fitzgerald song and the fact that amazingly I’d found it in a local record store in San Jose a week or so earlier. With that I brought over the album to show her and her face dropped. “This is my father’s record”, she said. “Errrghhhh… what?”, I think I probably replied, a bit stunned. “Look, that’s his name written in the top corner, in his handwriting”, she told me. And sure enough, the name "Mitchell" (I seem to recall), was handwritten at the top right, somewhat disfiguring the album cover in a manner of which I didn’t approve, but certainly identifying it undeniably in a unique way. He used to write his name at the top of all his albums she told me. His entire record collection had apparently been stolen as part of a break-in some months earlier and to make things worse, her father had died about a year ago. The records had been one of the only things the family had had as a reminder of his life and his passionate love of music, and that was now gone. This record that I had found in the second-hand store was the only one whose whereabouts were now known. “Can I please have it?” she asked. Well… FUCK! What to do? On the one hand, this emotional (and quite lovely) young woman was standing in front of me with pleading eyes. And on the other, I had searched high and low across the planet for this record and had only just found it. I hadn’t even had a chance to listen to it yet. So I said to her… in my own pleading way… “Kelly. You want this record as a reminder of your father. To put on a shelf so that you can look at it from time to time. And I understand that. But you don’t even want to listen to it. I, on the other hand, am desperate to listen to it. (I held back from saying, “as your father would have wanted”.) So, sorry, I can’t give it to you now. However, I know that I’ll be coming back to California at some stage, and I promise that I’ll bring it back with me then and you can have it then”. She seemed happy enough with this solution, but I guess, what else could she do? She was dealing with somebody who put their own insatiable need to hear a song above the sentimentality of a girl needing to be consoled about her recently dead father. Nevertheless, I knew that I would be good for my word, even if she was perhaps slightly unsure.

It took me two years to get back to California on another work sponsored trip, and I was indeed good for my word. I called up Kelly and presented her with the long lost album as a bit of a surprise, thinking that she would have expected me to have forgotten about my promise. She was rapt. And I felt very satisfied that it made her so happy. For me…well I knew that I would miss having this record in my collection. But at least in the previous two years, while the record was in my possession, I had managed to stumble across the song on CD. So, I too was rapt. And more than a bit relieved that my altruistic gesture wouldn’t deny me of a song that I truly truly needed.

I need that song and I need it now

I’ve loved music for as long as I can remember. Often to complete obsession. There are times when I feel the need to hear a specific song so badly that if I can’t listen to it immediately several times over, I completely lose the ability to function. Like a heroin addict that can’t go on without their hit. These days, thanks to the power of the internet, instant relief is almost always on hand. But it was not always so.

From an early age I’d loved a selection of the songs that were on records that my parents used to play when they had friends coming over for dinner. They’d stack up the regular albums on to the multi-disk record player in the TV-radiogram unit and Nat and I would get to listen to a smattering of songs before it was time for us to head off to bed. The soundtracks to Hair, Fiddler On The Roof and Paint Your Wagon. A collection of Burt Bacharach’s Greatest Hits which introduced me to Dionne Warwick’s sublime version of Walk On By. I likewise fell for songs that I would hear periodically on the radio from the back seat of the car. But I think that my addiction to music probably truly started in earnest in primary school when I first became exposed to songs to which I didn’t have any access. When the recess or lunch bell rang signifying that it was time to go back in for class, a favourite song of one of the grade six kids would play over the tannoy. The song duty was rotated daily among the kids who had records to bring in to school. This introduced me to Suzi Quatro, my first ever rock n roll crush. There was something about Can The Can that did something to me that I couldn’t quite explain. It surged through my whole body and gave me a feeling of excitement that I'd never really felt before. I guess it was partly sexual awakening as I’d just started to discover the attraction of girls (girl germs now curiously seemed something desirous to receive rather than something to run from). But it was deeper even than that. I just couldn’t get the song out of my head but had no ability to hear it other than hope that it would play again at school the next day. I’d wait all lunchtime just hoping to hear the song. Or if I knew who was doing the music selection, almost beg them to put it on. When I discovered that these songs I yearned for could be purchased on record, I was on a pocket money rate of twenty cents per week, with an occasional cash injection of a few bucks for a birthday perhaps. Eventually I was able to save up the $4.99 to buy my first album at Brashs, Explosive Hits ‘74, which contained a number of the songs that I needed at that time. Devil Gate Drive, Billy Don’t Be A Hero, Hooked On A Feeling, Evie Part 1 (I didn’t even know there were two other parts to this anthem at that stage) and various other songs that I could love and listen to as much as I wanted. I took my hard saved two dollars twenty-five to buy my first single, William Shakespeare’s Can’t Stop Myself From Loving You but somehow walked away confused, instead holding the nowhere near as good My Little Angel. The Brashs sales guy had given me the wrong record and I was a bit too inexperienced to realise that I should take it back and swap it for the correct one. I was silently devastated. I also couldn’t work out how come singles were so expensive compared to the awesome Greatest Hits albums that had so many great songs on them.

Eventually my parents bought a portable radio-cassette player/recorder to which I had access and with that my listening capabilities changed. Now I could sit by the radio for hours, cassette paused, just waiting for a specific song to be played on 3XY that I could record and then listen to at will. I remember waiting days to get Meatloaf’s Bat Out Of Hell, many years before his song butchering performance at the AFL Grand Final. It was hardly immediate, but between occasional record purchases when I could afford them and songs recorded off the radio, I was in business. I was in Year 11 when Get The Knack was released and I still had no money. I wanted to hear My Sharona so badly that I nicked the album from Myers at Doncaster. Just walked out nonchalantly with it under my jumper and then raced home on the bus to play it over and over again.

As well as those songs that I today consider a bit daggy, but still have a nostalgic love for, I became introduced to music that set me on a different path. One day when I was around 12 or so, mum and dad took us to spend the day with their friends the Haugs. I guess Chris was two or three years older than me, and after a few games of cricket out the front, we left the younger kids, my sister Nat and his younger brother Ian, and went into his room where he played me music that I’d never heard before. I was probably flattered that this older kid was happy to hang out with me and introduce me to stuff that he liked. Simon and Garfunkle’s Sound Of Silence and Scarborough Fair came wafting out of his stereo and immediately had me in their spell. Followed by Neil Young songs such as Old Man and Sugar Mountain, the latter that I just couldn’t get out of my head. Neil’s discordant but oddly infectious voice coupled with the strangest chord progression I’d ever heard. This was something new. Something seemingly of greater substance than songs to which I’d previously been exposed. I only ever met Chris a couple of times, but it’s fair to say that he had a profound impact on my life, one that I’m grateful for to this day. Life is funny and years later on when I again met his younger brother Ian, who magically enough had become a member of The Church (a later love), I related to him this story of my time decades earlier with his older brother. He identified completely, saying that Chris was also responsible for his love of Neil Young, to the extent that his band ended up being named from the Neil Young song Powderfinger.

And over the years, my urgent need to hear a specific song at a particular time has not waned. Often inspired by being at a gig where a song has leapt out and taken on a new life, demanding that I listen to it a thousand times on getting home (The Police’s Invisible Sun, Dire Straits’ Portobello Belle, Springsteen’s Badlands, Sinead O’Connor’s Red Football, The Cure’s M, Billy Bragg’s Accident Waiting To Happen, Massive Attack’s Safe From Harm, Died Pretty’s Final Twist, The Church’s Block, Psychedelic Furs’ The Ghost In You, Brian Eno & David Byrne’s Home, Nick Cave’s I Need You and in a recent blast back to the past, Paul McCartney’s I Feel Like Letting Go, among many many others). And now with the internet and YouTube, Spotify and all, songs are all readily available at will whenever you need them, Or at least so I thought.

About a dozen or so years ago, I had a compilation CD that I’d received free with a magazine and for a while I had it on permanent rotation in my car. I loved one song in particular, though having misplaced the cover, I didn’t know what it was called or even who sang it really. Laura somebody or other. But for a while there I listened to this song over and over again. Repeat playing it as soon as it had finished. Eventually the CD disappeared somewhere and with it this song that I really loved. I mourned its loss on several occasions. It was a song that I yearned to hear again periodically, but I didn’t even really know where to look to find it. That is, until recently. I have an upcoming trip to New York in a few weeks and I was having a look to see if there will be any gigs on whilst I’m there that I’d like to go to. The only one that leapt out at me was a performer named Laura Veirs. Was that her? It seemed to ring a bell. I trawled through the web looking at the names of all the songs on her albums to see if something twigged. But it didn’t. So I started playing the free 15 second samples from each of her albums of around that vintage. It sounded like her, so I felt like I was on the right track, in locating the track that I desired. And then… there it was. The beautifully sparse arrangement of finger-picked guitar and melancholy tune that somehow resonated so deeply with my soul. Song My Friends Taught Me, by Laura Veirs. I’m not one for Spotify really. It rips off musicians. Likewise, just listening to the song on YouTube. I immediately needed to own it again. I went to iTunes and on finding the album there I excitedly clicked “buy” only to see a message indicating that the album wasn’t available for sale in Australia. What??? I went to US iTunes, where it was available, but received a message saying that I had to purchase via the Australian store. I tried the Aussie store again only to once more see the message of unavailability. How about Google Play? Not available there at all. So I went to the source; Laura Veirs’ website. The album was listed in her online store as being available on vinyl, CD and electronic download. Excellent. I wanted to hear it now so thought I’d just do the MP3 version. I clicked on the purchase link after selecting the download version, but when I went to the checkout page, it had turned into the physical CD. That would take ages to ship to Australia and I need it NOWWWW!!!! For some reason, despite my several attempts, it wouldn't let me select the digital download. The vinyl copy was listed as coming with an instant download code, so I decided to buy that. But on purchasing the record, no link appeared as promised. So I emailed the record company, which is essentially Laura’s, containing pretty much only her releases. Is there a download link to be had as stated on the website or is it actually referring to a card inside the album that contains a download link? I feared the latter. In my email I explained that I needed the link now as I wouldn’t be receiving the record for some months when I could pick it up from my cousin Laurie in California, where I was having it delivered. My desperation was palpable. And a few days later when I finally received an email back, I saw that my request had been granted and a download link provided. Hooray! I excitedly downloaded the album, unzipped it and pressed play on the song that I’d been hanging out to hear. And there it was. I sat back with my eyes closed, blissfully drinking it in. At least, I was doing that until the sound cut out about half way through the song. No way!! I opened the file with a different media player and had the same result. I downloaded the album again and unzipped it. Still the same. And so, disappointedly, I sent another email to Laura’s record company, explaining my whole history with this song, and wondering aloud in print whether I was somehow cursed to not be able to obtain it no matter how hard I tried. Another couple of days passed. And then, finally, a return email with another download link and a thank you for bringing to their (her?) attention that the album wasn’t available on iTunes in Australia. That was news to them and they were sorting that out. I tried the new link they sent and opened the song with trepidation. What else could go wrong? Thankfully... nothing. I played it over and over a number of times, finally feeling sated. My withdrawal had been long, but now was just sweet relief. To show their appreciation, I was also offered a download of anything that I wanted from Laura’s catalogue of albums. I chose two of them, not wanting to be too greedy. So I guess it now seems like destiny that I should go and see Laura play live in New York whilst I’m there. Though the way things have been going, I won't be holding my breath on her playing that song.