MUSIC FROM "WHEN THE NIGHT DOES FALL"

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There aren't many songwriters who can claim that their main ideas find expression in writings of philosophy as well as music. In fact, this combination has been, if I can steal a line that doesn’t sound like his music, a long and winding road where Wayne Cristaudo felt that the philosophy was almost as many years in the making as his debut cd When the Night Does Fall, a rootsy album with a cast full of characters.

Then there is the woman whose beautiful face has turned it into a ravaged wasteland criss-crossed by all the lies she has told herself, and the outlaw about to be hanged, exactly for what we don’t know, but he certainly isn’t sorry about it. And in the midst of this the Little Prince makes a guest appearance to dispense the wisdom that a tiger doesn’t hurt a flower. On an album less full of flint and wastage this might seem twee, but here it serves to provide some relief. It’s not the only relief, there’s also that rather grand bosom (if the surrounding landscape is to be interpreted as a symbolic suggestion of proportionality), that emerges from the dress of his beloved, to lay his head to rest.

And there’s a boy feeding hungry ants, a little girl striving to touch the moon with a feather, and what he hopes is his dead friend’s floating numinous body. Finally death wins out, though not in a bad way. Love doesn’t seem to die, and the ghosts seem to be welcoming. ‘It’s quite ok’ he sings on another song where he thanks his dancing girl friends and drinking mates, ‘it’s just life passing away.’

This is music where love and hardship and death coexist without much of  the usual romantic drapery that would fool us into thinking that kisses stave off deathbeds forever (in fact for along time he was going to call the album deathbed and kisses), but thought it might be a little morbid. The music morbid? Well it  is tough, occasionally possibly harrowing, but it is more reflective than downer music, a readiness to accept death’s permanent presence rather than a juvenile pantomime about its virtues, or a childish denial of its reality.

"...I think only the very best philosophers are really thoughtful. But I do think there are many songwriters who are very thoughtful."

The word philosophical is a dangerously pretentious one to put too close to music, though Wayne doesn’t particularly think philosophy elevates anything. ‘Often philosophers are people who think they are thinking,’ he says. ‘I read philosophy all the time and I write on it, and I think only the very best philosophers are
really thoughtful. But I do think there are many songwriters who are very thoughtful.’ In Wayne’s case, his debut work of philosophy, though not his first book dealing with philosophy, Power, Love and Evil: Contribution to a Philosophy of the Damage came out a little more than six months before he started recording When the Night Does Fall. ‘Both the musical debut and the philosophical one coincide, and I was stumbling along in both forms of expression for a very, very long time. When I first realized how much I loved philosophy I was torn between that and music.

As an undergraduate student my studies suffered because I was playing – or for the most part - practicing in bands. I took a year off to try and get an original band together. A guitarist  and I (I played bass then) were very into what is now called progressive rock. We weren’t great musicians. But I think we both had a good ear for melody.  Though maybe not many others thought so, at least we couldn’t find people who would stick around. We also thought (what were we thinking?) that we couldn’t do music without a keyboard.

We knew a keyboard player, Sid we both thought was just the guy. He had played in one of Australia’s great unsung and little known  bands – Silas Farm. The guitarist and I were huge fans. They had split up and Sid, who is one of the co-producers as well as backing vocalists and the person responsible for midi keyboards on When the Night does Fall said he would join us if we learnt to play in time! He thought our stuff had potential but was too amorphous. Punk and new wave had just come in. The Saints – who we thought way back then were terrible (now I think they were great and that both Ed Kuepper and Chris Bailey are real talents) – had just made it big in Britain. And their practice room was just a mile or two from our place. But Sid wasn’t interested in us doing originals until we had to become a decent cabaret band and paid our dues.

I learnt to become a good funk bass player. But while we improved our musicianship as individuals –as a band we just stank. Sid wanted us to learn to sing, but we had little faith in ourselves – given what we sounded like then, this was probably a pretty sensible state of mind. Glenn, the guitarist, did like singing, and he copied Greg Lake, but it just didn’t work for doing cabaret. I tried to sound like a rusty gate, but I could never remember any words – and I still have a memory like a sieve for learning songs. As for Sid, I think without doubt he had the worst voice I had ever heard – ever. Of course he would dispute that to the death. But he trained it, and now I love the harmonies he does on the two songs he appears in on When the Night does Fall.

Anyway there was a woman who was living with Sid (indeed she had to be rushed to hospital to have a baby delivered the night we were auditioning to play for a large chain of hotels) who we wanted to sing with us. She had a good voice. But stylistically it was like a silk dress on a bull dog. And apart from that, her and Glenn couldn’t stand each other.

Needless to say we didn’t crack the audition. Musically there was no coherence to our style – Sid wanted to do 50s rock revival and funk, me and Glenn were interested in rock, and we all thought we should do top 40 stuff because people wanted that. We basically tried to do anything to get work. And with the female vocalist out of action with the baby, we had no hope. We were thrown out of a club one night when we tried to pass ourselves as a disco band – I growled my way through the Humble Pie song Roadrunner and I Shot the Sheriff. On another occasion I threatened to take a punter outside and teach him some music lessons with my bass guitar because he said we were terrible. The worst thing is that I knew he was dead on. That night I had managed to break two strings on bass, while our other guitarist who was blind and who could not hear himself through the monitors played an entire lead solo a semi-tone out. In our prog days we might have pulled that off, but not in the land of MOR.

Around this time I had managed to believe a great deal of nonsense – I think in the 70s there were many temptations for young people full of confidence and drugs wanting to know the meaning of life, and  politics and shabby spirituality were pretty prevalent. Many in power today chose the former – you would be amazed how many people intellectuals though Maoism was the key to social transformation! I suppose I have to say that because I really believed some rubbish.

I joined an organization called Eckankar. And if you want to have a good laugh go and check out the history of that organization. A guy named Paul Twitchell ripped some stuff from Raj yoga, some stuff from scientology and allowed his imagination to fill in the dots while he tried to sell books by the truckload to put his young hottie of a wife in fast cars and off the catwalk clothes.

At the same time I was doing some serious philosophy – an odd match indeed – and learning ancient Greek. Eventually I realized that while something in me was hungry for altered states – and I am still fascinated by what for want of a better word, and without wanting to subscribe to any new age crackpot ‘I know the secrets of the universe system’ – that Eckankar was bollocks. Though I did have some very interesting ‘trips’ while I was in it. So it wasn’t all bad, just a scam. Anyway due to Eckankar and philosophy I thought this music I was playing was crap. I think I was also a bit of a pompous twerp as well and thought only classical music was good. That only showed how lost I was because a very interesting old guy who had been in Eckankar and who was a recovering alcoholic had taped some Doc Watson for me and I loved it, really loved it. And I think along with Leonard Cohen, who I played incessantly – even more than Van der Graaf Generator who I also liked a lot– and Dylan, I think those country/ bluegrass things seeped into my brain. Now I can listen to country – if it’s not overproduced – all day and night. Mickey Newbuy, Townes van Zandt, Gene and Guy Clark, and my present obsession Ronnie Lane are always in my cd player.

In any case, one night while we were playing in a rugby league club as I was more interested in watching the television that was on while we were playing I decided -  this is not my dream. I have to dump this and I want to study philosophy day and night. Which I then did. I went to Germany, learnt German, and the UK where I basically lived in a garret with my then wife and wrote  a Masters on Plato and Nietzsche which I submitted in Australia, then got a scholarship to another Australian university, then went back to Germany for a while to study philosophy, came back to Australia finished a PhD on metaphysics and political philosophy (my first book is a kind of plumbing manual for people interested in Descartes, Kant and Hegel).

Music had vanished from my life completely. And it was almost ten years before I started really listening to music again. In fact just as I finished my doctoral thesis I went and saw The Commitments and that was it. I decided to get a band together doing original material. Again I found it hard to get people. But eventually I had a band around me doing my material.

Until I left Australia to come and live in Hong Kong we three had been playing together for over ten years, with a kind of revolving door of support players until we hit on Eric Bouvet, the guitar player who was with us for our last five years in Adelaide.

Stan joined us when our previous drummer left us with keyboard player because they could not stand the attitude of our female singer. We played a few gigs, and spent a year working on a cd under the name One Strange Sunday.

The reason it took so long was because we had no idea of what we were doing and our ‘producer’ led us to believe he knew how to get the best out of us, when in fact, he squeezed the life out of the band, so that people who really loved our band – and there were a few, even though we hadn’t gigged much and the guitarists (myself and another guy) were pretty substandard.  In the end every song had to be mixed about ten times. I can’t bear to listen to it. I wrote all the songs and for years I used to think if we could just go back and put mute on 90 percent of the keyboards and lift the drums it could be improved - the drum mix is painfully terrible, but the keyboard player, who had some good ideas and talent, overplayed somewhat – no doubt due to his youthful exuberance. I had this fantasy for years, long after everyone except John, Stan and me had departed – the two singers, a keyboard player, and another guitarist and a sometime percussionist who took off with my girlfriend (which pained me terribly at the time, but given the sickness of my relationship with her I should have sent him cases of champagne and thanked him for taking my place in the psych ward.) 

We were a circus. God certainly works in wondrous ways because immediately after the CD was done the lineup was shattered, and I had 500 copies of a cd I thought was rubbish. Years later a cleaner put me out of my misery. She threw out the box that was sitting in the corner of my office at work which contained the remaining 450 CDs. I think the musical God had decided that was one little effort which should not smudge too much air.

As all this was happening my academic career had been going along as wayward a path as my music. It had got off to an auspicious  start when I was appointed to teach Australian politics –even though I hadn’t applied for that job, but for another one, in political theory, in that department. So I had to go and teach stuff I knew nothing about. It was the pedagogical  equivalent of doing Humble Pie in the disco. I didn’t get kicked out, though.  I managed to publish a few things, but basically I didn’t know what I  really thought. And I think one reason the university is such rubbish today is that a lot of young people who know next to nothing have to write books and papers to get jobs. It’s not that some aren’t smart, but I think in the most important areas of life, experience is the only thing that matters.
"I think in the most important areas of life, experience is the only thing that matters."
And knowing what Aristotle or Marx said is not a substitute for experience. Fortunately for me – though it didn’t seem so fortunate at the time – my life hit a wall very early in my academic career. And instead of going onto endlessly churn out philosophical papers I lost my faith in academic endeavours, in much the same way as I had lost my faith in playing in a covers band.

Around that time I left my first wife. I was like a brain divorced from all my emotions. The only thing grounding me was music and songwriting. I found the kind of philosophy  had spent so much time on was lifeless and useless. And academic moralizing and politics of the sort that is ubiquitous in Arts faculties I thought of as a mixture of lifeless abstraction, naivety and fraudulence. But I didn’t have a clue what else I could do. I stayed on teaching, with my life bumbling along. At the same time I came across a thinker who has continued to remain important to me, a German sociologist Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy – in fact I have almost completed a rather large book on him and his adversarial friend, the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig.

Just after the One Strange Sunday CD was completed I had the brainchild of trying to combine my music with some sort of written tribute to Rosenstock-Huessy ( obviously Rosenstock the successor to Woodstock). The idea was vague, but it was a desperately hopeful attempt to integrate the parts of me that were pulling in such separate directions.

My academic life looked as if it had come to a complete halt and while I was writing songs and had moved into the role of a singer with the band – John and I would share vocal duties, as neither of us could endure too much of either ourselves or the other singing.

Fortunately my academic career was re-jolted when a guy who has become a very good friend of mine suggested we write a book together. It was very quick, and it is a bit of a mess – the stylistic gaps makes the book an odd creature, and the lack of editing makes it an embarrassment. At the time my friend and I were so angered by university sanctimony that we come across as pretty right wing. But really I don’t think either fit on the right of politics – though we accept the market is a social reality that serves a certain purpose, even if not perfectly or even adequately for some of the time and some things, which in some loony landscapes makes one right wing. Neither of us trust politicians (Bob, my friend the coauthor was an MP for the Australian Labout Party) or business people anymore than each other, and it was more of a rant against orthodox thinking in our particular environment. If I had been in the business world I would, I’m sure, have started quoting Marx to make my point against their orthodoxies.

While the book sold nothing and got no reviews, it at least got me disciplined again with my academic work. And after a long break from philosophy I strayed back into philosophy. I even changed Departments. But this time I had a sense of what I thought really mattered. And it all came back to my experience. I had been a state of pretty bad depression, and, in my case, depression helped. I had a very strong sense of the importance of pain as a way of learning and I came to appreciate that love was not an abstract concept but was all about energy. I also realized that there were two cultural worlds – one that was full of people reflecting on and judging things, the other involved people expressing things. It was in the later one that people sang and spoke and wrote about love and evil, at least in a more directly experiential way. And I really liked this. And I dragged John West the bass player who was also an academic into teaching a subject with me called Power, Love and Evil. It was not unlike the situation in the band – I would write a song and with John’s help it would improve. And I don’t think I have ever enjoyed being a teacher so much as when John and I used to teach that subject. Most students also knew something pretty special was going on in that class. And I think it was a combination of the development of a different kind of thinking plus the real love between friends that John and I have which gave the class room a sense that here some magic was being made. In fact, we also felt the same way about the band. At one stage we even thought of writing the book together, but John had other tasks to pursue.

On the music front, my songs which had sounded like poor covers on the CD were starting to get a sound. John had come up with some great bass lines, and he and Stan really cooked something special  up in the rhythm section – as for Eric and I, we were using a lot of grungey guitars – very 90s. It still wasn’t settled, and it was slow. And everytime we tried to record we sounded like a turd. But when we taped ourselves on a cheap cassette player and listened to it in Stan’s second hand Fiat – Stan by the way is enormous, his girth was nearly as big as the Fiat itself – we felt we had something really great. To everyone else it sounded worse than a turd. But we could hear through it and we felt if we could just sell Stan and the Fiat with the cassette and package some of our imagination in there, they would get it too.

And some did. We hadn’t gigged for a couple of years after Stan was pissed when a gig we did in a pub was disastrous – the publican had asked us to turn it down so drink orders could be heard. It was a shambles. But Stan had found a huge old abandoned building which, after tracking down the owner, he had subleted to artists, while retaining a huge room for the band, which we had covered with red carpet from the State Parliament and black curtains. And we had an invitation only gig there - the last five or so years that may have been our only gig – but all 25 people at that gig seemed to really like what were doing and thought something really good might come from us. By this time we called ourselves Making Monday, but John and Eric never liked the name (it was meant to be part of a progression of the days of the week following on from Strange Sunday) we never settled on a name. Typical, really, of our pace.

We played in this red room once a week for seven or eight year, sometimes with some lengthy breaks of a few months. One time Stan even decided that we all just stank too much and he wanted to do his jazz thing and just wear his slippers the other nights of the week, so he quit. With the fiat gone the music never sounded the same. But he couldn’t stay away when we showed him some new songs. In spite of no gigs and no prospects except death and aging,  we believed if we could only capture those moments when we succeeded in summoning that extra player, the band spirit, that dancing monster which appeared on good night which was our sound we would definitely find an audience.

During this time we had also purchased an 8 track and later I had won a prize which enabled me to get a lap top and some music software. But we couldn’t work the stuff. Eventually we asked Sid to come and help us. We had remained in touch in spite of lengthy breaks from each other and in spite of living in different parts of the country. He did this a few times, but his very busy schedule made it difficult for him to get time to mix and master the material, and our recording of it, plus the fact he is not a fulltime sound engineer, meant that it stalled and spluttered with not terribly great results when something was done.

If my working and creative life was split by my desire to get something done with music which was going at a pace that would be too optimistic and charitable to compare to the robust directedness of  a snail, my emotional life was a complete carnival of the grotesque. Let’s just say it gave me plenty of material, but it also fractured my energy.
"I got married twice (one valid, one ‘invalid’ – that little fiasco has made its way into the law books)..."
I got married twice (one valid, one ‘invalid’ – that little fiasco has made its way into the law books) and I can only say that my 40s were emotionally very unsatisfying, and a real reflection of my lack of discernment when it came to women, something I believe I have rectified as I have learnt a little maturity. It was toward the end of my last marriage that I started writing material very different from what I had done with John and Stan. I think it was when I heard Townes van Zandt one day, pulled the car over to the side of road to drink in the images of Marie that I was really inspired to take my music into a more countryish direction. I don’t really know how to describe my music. People keep throwing different names at me who I am supposed to sound like, but I know there is something dry and rustic in there – some desert and dust and smoke and open skies and some road heading off somewhere at sunset, and lots of different people. My next album is going to be lusher – sort of in the style of Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Blue. After that I also want to do an album in the vein of Dante’s Divine Comedy, only I get to sleep with Beatrice and she is more than one girl, but there will be  lot of people from hell, purgatory and heaven whose loves and character will form the basis of the songs.

 I started working on what has since become When the Night originally with Sid in 2004-5. We took about six weeks drawn out over two years to make a recording, but at the end of it, I knew it was not right. That was a year after I came to Hong Kong. My life turned around when I came to Hong Kong. I went from living on the edge of a master card from pay to pay, due to a court case that cost me far more than I had, and a gambling ex-wife who wanted to put in the slot machine anything that the lawyers didn’t get their hands on (more great material) to having a job which not only got me out of debt, but  allowed me enough money to pay for great musicians, as well as a brilliant sound engineer (Pete Scherr) and masterer (that genius Don Bartley, bless him, who doesn’t charge the earth for his wizadry.)

It was here in Hong Kong that I met Manolete Mora, who, fatefully enough, had been on the job committee which employed me, and who having  heard some of my songs decided we should do them properly. He is a  terrific guitar player and percussionist and was invaluable for the project production, as well as his playing. I met the other guitarist, who had been with the Eurogliders, Guy LeClair, who unbeknown to me a the time was a friend of Mano, one night when I saw him playing guitar in a club. I asked would be interested in performing on a cd. And he told me he knew a great bass player who had a recording studio who didn’t normally take commercial projects but might just like the music. He did and that was Pete Scherr, the bass player and sound engineer. The songs on When the Night have been with me a long time. I think the most recent one was written four years ago, and two of them go back more than fifteen years. One of them began life as a poem written by my ‘invalid’ (not as in disabled but as in not legally married) wife, became rewritten completely by me for my next wife, and then rewritten after that liaison came to an end. Needless to say that’s the one about dying.

You know I have wanted to make an album since I was about 10 when me and a few guys first sat around a tape recorder making music without instruments. And now I have my debut album out in my fifties. It has appeared at the same time as the only book I have written which matters (also poor editing unfortunately) has come out. Now as I do this, I have no real desire at all for success (of course I’d love the money, the coke habit and the groupies – but my body couldn’t keep up with it), not least because this isn’t that kind of music, and it’s not that kind of story. It’s more a story of finding some integrity and integration in one’s own life. I know the music and the philosophy both work in the same direction now. I want to keep writing and making music, and there is a new album that is definitely going to happen if I don’t die in the next 12 months.

It’s also funny doing music this way, i.e. primarily recording and not caring about live performances. I couldn’t care if I never performed live. No one needs to see me do it, and I think the intimacy I want to conjure up is best in one’s own living room or bed room. I suppose I could charge people to come and watch me in my living room, say three of four at a time, but it sounds like hard work, and I could be working on my book while doing that. I think guys like me and Seasick Steve (who had a much tougher life than me as well as success of a sort) – i.e. old guys who had no success in their youth - are not untypical of what is happening now in music. I think there’s a lot of people who have loved music all their life who sing and play and have some great material and want to release it (release is a good word, it has more to do with the body and soul needs than making money).
"No one needs any recording company anymore to tell them they are good enough to make music and the affordability of recording is now in the expensive hobby league." No one needs any recording company anymore to tell them they are good enough to make music and the affordability of recording is now in the expensive hobby league – unfortunately universities still believe in all this quality control nonsense. Basically if people do what they love, and if they do it long enough there will be value in it.

I have no envy at all for those young wonders who either burnt up with their success or else struggled to find any kind of balance in their lives between their art and their loves and desires. In fact in my Comedy I have a song on this – for I feel a real affection for guys like Townes, Gene Clark, and Steve Marriot – who seem to have been enormously hurtful to those who loved them – and who really experienced failure as well as astonishing brilliance and great acclaim. Nor do I envy those who burnt so bright and who now keep striving, unsuccessfully, for a height they reached in their early manhood. Failure certainly has its own consolations, and one of them, if you don’t take it too personally, is that it is a card to try again. And then, after a while, you might realize that the love is the only thing matters and the music is just a symptom of that. At least that’s what I think.’

Wayne’s book Power, Love and Evil is languishing in the bowels of the Amazon hit parade, which ranks way down into the millions. He has a more commercial publisher interested in  a manuscript he has on a philosophy of love. The publisher wants some revisions, but first he has to finish his blockbuster on Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig, which is guaranteed to  be a sensation with those hundred or so people on earth who have read either of these guys. 'I'm thinking about Porsches, Ferraris and yachts with this one,' he says with a scary hint of manic need and greed. But, he concedes immediately, and with more sobriety, that he can’t see success corrupting him anywhere in the near future, so his sex and drug addiction prospects will have to be put on further hold.

He assures me though he is getting plenty of chiropractic work done, and he has been on a diet lately, just in case he is rocketed into fame unawares. He wants to be ready to enjoy it. His other ambition is  to complete a comic novel he has plotted and which he began a couple of years ago. “Like my album  this is going to be slow, but look out for Crossler’s List when it hits the bookstores. It will be a hoot.”