ALMOST SATURDAY NIGHT (PART 1).. It's complex what can go through a performer's mind in the playing of a short song. An amazing amount of information - like the Persian fable of the man who dips his head in a bowl of water and lives a lifetime in an instant, before shaking his head and opening his eyes in astonishment to find he is right back where he started two seconds (or twenty five years) ago. It's phenomenal just where you can go in four minutes. Time becomes relative and the normal seconds and hours that we use as measurement become inadequate. So many performers will tell you that the great shows seem to take about five minutes while the grinding two brackets in a country pub where nobody is listening and the CUB clock is staring the performer in the face seem to run for hours and hours. Surely the clock is broken you keep saying to yourself. Normally ten songs is forty five minutes, but tonight I am up to song number seven and barely twenty minutes has passed... It's early November '09 as I write and, as it has been for most of the last 20 years I am well into planning for a December national tour of the Australian capital cities. The shows are booked, the posters have been designed and the advertising is just about to start in earnest. Metaphorically, for me it's pretty much Almost Saturday Night. Why Almost Saturday Night? Well basically because that is the name of the John Fogerty song we were closing the Sure Thing shows with when we were on tour earlier this year. It was an album tour to promote the CD Spin! Spin! Spin! and we had Anna Burley along to strengthen the band's vocal attack and we wanted a song we could basically all sing a lot on - and that was the one that fitted the bill. We did it most of the shows - always as the last song of an encore. The idea to do it had probably begun in Hobart when the Weddings, Parties, Anything reformation of 2008 had seen us share the bill at the Great Southern Blues and Roots Festival with non other than John Fogerty himself. He was absolutely amazing that night and the band had finished a back stage discussion (argument) in time to catch the last forty minutes of Mr Fogerty and his ensemble before they were whisked to the airport where their private plane awaited them. Ahh, we all shook our heads as he drove off (as Mr Knopfler would say) - that's the way you do it... I don't think he actually performed this particular song that night but the show did get Michael Barclay mumbling that there must be one of his songs we could credibly perform in one or other of the numerous line-ups we seem to be involved in. And then a year later the two of us found ourselves driving across Germany listening to a live bootleg of Rockpile and sure enough Almost Saturday Night was on there and wouldn't it just be a complete cracker to do sometime and so that was how the decision came about. The reason I say it is such a cracker of a song to play is that because it is just such a beautiful song to sing. And the word sing - as in the verb, to sing - is particularly significant here as the past three or four years I have been doing a fair bit of co-writing with a lot of reasonably professional country type artist/ writers and that's a sort of quasi technical term they use a lot. It 'sings' really well they might say of a phrase in a song. I think they mean it rolls off the tongue, that it is physically enjoyable to sing. It's a kind of state a lot of writers in the commercial songwriting world aspire to, and while a lot of songs might never get there, the one thing they are pretty much all trying to avoid is the opposite effect where some sings really badly - meaning it is tough to wrap your vocals around. Where the natural syllables of the words have their emphasis in all the wrong places. And while this is all fine, if it's the only criteria you use then you run the grave danger of writing songs that are ultimately nice sounding drivel. I think one of the reasons for this is that when a song is tough to sing it becomes idiosyncratic and potentially particular to an actual singer then the chance of selling the song in the market place becomes diminished. Can you imagine a publisher trying to hawk a Jonathon Richman song, or something off Lucinda Williams later records? These songs live because of the way the writers breathe life into them with their performance - often in spite of any apparent clumsiness in the way they 'sing'. But when I think of Almost Saturday Night I think we have an example where an abstracted meaning and an uncanny comfort of linguistic execution actually make an intriguing pair. In simple, it's a rocking song to sing naturally and for me (at least) it makes sense. But how does it make sense? The lyrics read as follows: Outside my window I can hear the radio And I know that motor wagon gettin' ready to fly 'Cause it's almost Saturday night! Bye-bye tomorrow Jodie's gone to the rodeo And you know some good old boy's gettin' ready to ride 'Cause it's almost Saturday night! Gonna push all the clouds away Let the music have its way Let it steal my heart away And you know I'm goin'! Outside they're ringin' The night train is bringin' me home When you hear that locomotion get ready to ride 'Cause it's almost Saturday night! So after reading these flat words on the paper (or computer screen) we can ask where does the sense of the song jump in? And you know it's really hard to say, hard to make head or tail of it in any literal sense - which makes it so unlike the vast majority of songs I tend to write and sing. But somehow when you're singing it the words ring true and become for me, beautifully evocative. As I began this diatribe, it's amazing what can run through your mind, how fast the thoughts can travel, especially when you are layering up the sense of the song experience night after night - so you are not actually discovering new areas to journey to conceptually but rather building on the ones you have already visited. I think in many ways that is part of the euphoria of performing and part of the reason why it is possible to play the same songs night after night and not get sick of them. You're always building and revisiting the sense of the song and every show, rehearsal, review, on-stage incident applicable to that particular song become part of what goes through your head, part of the complex layered memory of the song itself. So here we go - Almost Saturday Night might take my thoughts somewhere like this: Out side my window I can hear the radio... I think this is beautifully filmic and evocative. It speaks of things to come. Of a young man doing his hair, getting ready for a big night. He can hear the radio and it's outside, not inside the house, and so the future of his night lies out there somewhere. And like in films the radio is clear and distinct and the song is audible and part of the soundtrack - not just background static. For me the song playing on the radio is actually Almost Saturday Night although obviously that doesn't make sense in any logical reading of the song. But the guy getting ready is not me but some well groomed chiseled modern movie cowboy - Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise or an even rangier Robbie Robertson in Carny. His clothes fit him well and there is a sense somewhere he hasn't been out for a while. Maybe Paul Kelly's Only Forty Miles to Saturday Night has jumped in somewhere and I am at numerous B & S Balls the Weddings performed at over the years and my concentration is in danger of being dashed by the harsh reality of playing music for a living in the Australia of the 80's and 90's. So I think fleetingly of the most memorable of these shows - New Year's Eve 1991 - at the Ettamogah Pub north of Brisbane. With WPA in dire financial trouble we had taken this early show opening for the Painters and Dockers knowing we could make it into Brisbane for a headline show at the showgrounds 'though we were really cutting it fine. The people running the gig were very disorganised and consequently had forgotten to procure any method of actually cooling the copious quantities of beer people had paid for with their all-inclusive tickets. So the show was late starting and the beer was pretty much warm anyway and we played and then packed up quickly and as we drove out the wasted couples were already starting to rut in the long grass and it felt nice to be getting out of there and leaving the Painters and Dockers to it. It was hot and I don't recall a lot of the second show except that there was some conflict with promoters once again (same people as the first show I think) and there was a stand off with the beer truck wanting cash before dropping off a load of grog and then Peter Hayes, the Weds manager, demanding half the fee before the band went on. And after the show walking off the stage and feeling relief at seeing Hayesy and the promoter counting out a small fortune on the bonnet of the hire car. Back to the song. And I know that motor wagon's getting ready to ride... Motor wagon? What in the hell is a motor wagon? I think perhaps this is one of the first areas of the song where he has really twisted the lyric to make it 'sing' comfortably. Perhaps 'Motor Wagon' doesn't actually exist but is a perversion, a combination of motor car and station wagon - although in America I think a station wagon is called something else and so maybe it is like the famous coolerator of Chuck Berry's Never Can Tell - maybe it's an invented word. (Although if you Google coolerator it seems that there was a primitive refrigeration unit that went by that name and so maybe it's the same for motor wagon (which has an equally archaic explanation from the late 1800's). So whether Chuck Berry or John Fogerty are making up fictitious products or re-inventing old ones to fit with the songs in question the result is the same in both cases - we know what they mean and the words just roll from the tongue. And it's almost Saturday Night...