Category: [RIP]

RIP Norbert

Good rest, pupper. Didn’t know exactly how old he was, but I saw him on Threads recently and was impressed to discover he was still with us, though clearly elderly (he passed just short of his 16th birthday)… alas, I also saw about him going to the vet’s with kidney problems the other day and had a feeling that his time wasn’t long (though not as short as it turned out to be). Of indeterminate if not actually confused breed, Norbert spent most of his little life as a therapy dog at a children’s hospital, making things better for a lot of people, and that’s something worth celebrating. An Exceptionally Good Boy.

RIP Garth

Garth Hudson, second from right in the above photo of The Band, has left us at the age of 87. I was surprised to discover he was actually the last surviving member; either I’d forgotten that Robbie Robertson passed in 2023 or somehow I never got that news. I always loved the story that he only joined The Band on condition that they buy him a new organ and take him on as their “instructor” so that his parents would think he had a real job instead of just hanging out with some rock’n’roll band. Great player, great beard, even better forehead.

Happy 50th, “Double Jay”

It’s 50 years today since the entity now called Triple J began life, and the entity now called Double J has dusted off “the first day of Triple J”, sic, and is replaying it throughout the day… just been rather amused to hear the DJ admit they were having trouble rounding up enough Australian artists for their first day, which I suppose is less of a problem now (and grumbling too about how many months it took some records to appear in Australia after their international release). Kind of impressed they actually recorded the first day and kept it all this time… but listening back to it now it feels very strange (not just because it’s in glorious AM mono). Graham Berry just announced that later in the evening they’d have some live Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd plus Cheech & Chong and Ravi Shankar. And look at the playlist! Opening with “You Just Like Me Cos I’m Good in Bed” was a fairly controversial act, I know, but… Rolling Stones 2nd? Paul McCartney 3rd? Leo Sayer 4th? Led Zeppelin a couple of tracks later? Beatles, Deep Purple, Bad Company, Elton John, Maria Muldaur, Van Morrison, Rod Stewart, CSN, Santana, “La Grange” by ZZ Top, “Radar Love” by Golden Earring, Steely Dan, JOHN FUCKING DENVER, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” by BTO, “China Grove” by the Doobie Brothers, Tim Buckley… Portsmouth Sinfonia is probably the most radical choice so far, that Cheech & Chong “Mr Dope America” skit wouldn’t have passed on commercial radio… But really, how much of this would you think of as “youth radio” or “alternative” now?

And yet I suppose it must have been in 1975, which I daresay shows how much has changed over 50 years… I mean, those four specific songs just embody more of the Triple M classic rock ethos than they do anything, but I don’t suppose they felt that way at the time (not least because Triple M didn’t actually exist yet, but you know what I mean). And a few years later 2JJ would give Cold Chisel’s “Khe Sanh” a boost when other stations wouldn’t touch it. Now it seems like a veritable Triple M anthem. Have things just changed so much that it’s now almost inconceivable (for me anyway) that this was, you know, alternative then? The kids must’ve been different in 1975 and so must the music, and when I listen to this sort of thing now I’m doing so with years of knowledge of the music that came after it… Radio Birdman hadn’t yet started the Oxford Funhouse scene. A little bit over two years later we got the first Saints album. Must’ve been unimaginable on January 19th 1975. I don’t know, I don’t really have any coherent thoughts about this (you may have noticed). It’s just been intriguing to realise just how must of a foreign country the past can be.

Of course, the day is darkened a little by the passing of Arnold Frolows a few days ago…

In the mid-1970s, Frolows was delivering flowers around Sydney when the opportunity to interview for a role at the ABC’s brand-new youth radio station came up.
Marius Webb and Ron Moss had been tasked with building the station and they hired Frolows before its launch after a tip from Webb’s then secretary.
“Arnold joined Double J before it went to air, indeed, he was one of the first of its very first employees,” long-term colleague Stuart Matchett said at Frolows’s retirement party in 2014.
“He acquired much of the vinyl that made up the original music library. He programmed the music for many of the shows on Double J.” […]
Frolows began at the ABC in November 1974 as a research assistant in the Contemporary Radio Unit, before becoming a presenter and producer on the new 2JJ from July 1975.
His initial stint at the ABC was short, as he decamped overseas in 1977 where he took up other music-industry roles.
By 1981, Frolows was back in Australia and back on the station now known as triple j. He worked as a presenter and producer on various programs, including the Sunday night program, Ambience, which became a cult hit as it introduced audiences to downbeat, often hypnotic music rarely heard on other stations.
His role as music director became official in 1993, but this didn’t stop him from being on the tools. He served as the producer for Helen Razer and Mikey Robins’ triple j breakfast program in the 1990s and would appear on triple j programs presenting new music through the early 2000s. […]
Frolows left triple j in May of 2003. Before his departure, he’d been subject to a raft of commentary regarding his suitability for the role given his age. But he left the role of his own choosing, and never believed his age precluded him performing his job effectively.

I’d quit listening to the Js myself before that, and even more years have passed to the point where “youth radio” is comfortably ensconced in its middle age, but to give Arnold credit, his tenure as music director was better than Kingsmill’s seems to have been (at least if the annual Hottest 100 results are indicative). RIP to him. I bet a bunch of that music I was listening to while writing this came from him, too.

RIP David Lynch

David Lynch is gone, which news I must say surprised me less than it seems to have surprised some… I mean, the guy acknowledged just last year that he was fucked with emphysema from a lifetime of smoking to the point where he could barely breathe enough to walk across a room, and he went downhill from there; having to be evacuated during the fires currently wiping out Los Angeles seems to have triggered his final decline. To be perfectly honest, I was always a bit of a Lynch sceptic…

…and I wasn’t entirely alone in that, indeed I had some good company as you may see (full marks, obviously, to the marketing team behind the above ad, and I will concede that I enjoyed Lost Highway rather more on a second viewing some years later), but I do know I’m in a relative minority, judging by the outpouring of grief online. I’ll cop to that. I could never escape the feeling Lynch was one of those “surrealists” who succeeded in getting critics to describe his work that way so that he never had to justify it…

…and this is a problem I’ve always had with invoking surrealism, in that I think it potentially offers a sort of get out of critical jail free card for any old contrived nonsense. And yet, having said that, I will admit to feeling a sense of… sincerity, I suppose, is the word I mean, but I don’t quite know if that quite describes it. I’m not really sure. But, on that second viewing of Lost Highway I mentioned above, I also had a second viewing of Mulholland Dr. (it was a Cinemathque double bill at the Chauvel in the oughts), and I didn’t like that any more second time round but I did get the feeling of Lynch meaning this. However wilful it might be, it was also quite deliberate and Lynch was serious about it.

And maybe Lynch was just never my particular flavour of strange, cos I have liked an awful lot of strange stuff in my time. Maybe, if surrealism is about the irrational and the unconscious and all that, then so are one’s reactions to it… if a given “surrealist” work clicks for you then maybe there is no real reason you can give for that, maybe it’s just an instinctive thing. For example, I have no issues with Jean Cocteau’s films like I do with Lynch’s, and I don’t know that I can say why (and I actually DO recall liking Eraserhead, also for reasons I don’t know that I understand). Maybe some things just don’t work for me, even though they clearly do for a lot of others. It’s a me thing more than a him thing. In any case, one thing is clear from the discourse: he seems to have been a good guy and generally decent person, and people liked him with good reason. Makes a change from discovering your heroes are shit.

RIP Simon

And there goes another part of my childhood:

The veteran children’s television star Simon Townsend has died aged 79, shortly after being diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer.
The former newspaper and television journalist launched Simon Townsend’s Wonder World! on Channel Ten in 1979 with mascot Woodrow the bloodhound. The groundbreaking show made him a household name in the 1980s, delighting young audiences with magazine-style stories which covered a wide range of topics including mental health, bullying, grief, social justice and war.
He always signed off with “and remember, the world really is wonderful”.
Wonder World ran until 1987 clocking up almost 2,000 episodes, winning five Logie awards and stellar ratings for Ten. […]
He later found himself at odds with broadcasting authorities as he pushed to produce shows that never talked down to children.
“Simon often found himself in a stoush with Australian children’s television regulators, fighting to maintain his show’s boundary-pushing ethos and preserve his children’s TV rating,” his family said.

I don’t suppose many other kids TV hosts in this country have been court-martialled, too; Townsend was famously a conscientious objector during the Vietnam bullshit long before he was on TV, and suffered accordingly. Also, he was famously a stroke survivor, though I didn’t know until today that he had his first one in 1976… so he was already a stroke survivor before Wonder World was a thing. It was quite a life, and another part of my own early life that’s gone…

RIP Richard Perry

Now here’s a man with a hell of a career. Seriously, just look at that list of production credits… great list of production clients—Tiny Tim, Captain Beefheart, Leo Sayer, Barbra Streisand, Nilsson, Fats Domino, Ringo Starr, a whole bunch more—and a stack of hit songs, plus an eight-year romantic relationship with Jane Fonda:

And somehow, despite all of that, until news broke of his death a few days ago, I’d never heard of the guy to the best of my knowledge. I suppose it’s good to be reminded sometimes of how little I actually know…

RIP Jimmy

Goodbye Mr Carter. I think that, in fairness, we can only describe his presidency as a mixed bag of some really good things but more kind of awful things, and a job he ultimately wasn’t really cut out for. Also in fairness, he did the best he could in the years that followed to make up for that. Hilariously, he also managed to outlive the writer of the above obit, with a note at the end advising the latter died in 2021, and from what I’ve seen on Bluesky this afternoon there’s at least two others in the same boat… I’ve known for years that news organisations have these prepared years in advance for particularly notable people, ever since this outstanding incident of 20+ years ago, so they can just roll them out when the subject pops their clogs; for the subject to live longer than their obituarist, though, is something I imagine is kind of rare. Anyway, RIP James Earl the younger; for all the things you got wrong, you’ll be remembered far better than any of your successors so far, especially Mushroom Cock.

RIP Vasco

I don’t suppose Mary Leunig is too bothered by the passing of her big brother somehow, given the abuse allegations she levelled against him years ago. To be honest, there was always something about Michael Leunig I never liked even though I could never pin down what, but his later antivaxxer statements were a kind of final straw, and whatever good he may have done and however I may have even agreed with some of his positions was kind of undone by that…

For example, here’s an item from 2015, so it’s not even from the Covid era when this bullshit really took off. And then there was this… interesting reaction to the SSM plebiscite in 2017:

This is actually the first I’m discovering this, and it’s… not endearing me any further to him, let’s put it that way. I also found him commenting in more detail here, where he seems to be trying to say that his problem is with the institution of marriage itself and he can’t understand why gay people want to engage in something so awful, but even so.

So yeah, never really a fan. Still, he was a cultural icon for a lot of years and a lot of people liked him even if I was always dubious, so I suppose I should acknowledge him leaving us, even unkindly…

Good night Clive

Clive Robertson has left the studio.

From his Talking Heads interview from a long time ago:

PETER THOMPSON: What are you interested in? Did you say want to say something through all of this?
CLIVE ROBERTSON: Um, I’d have to say the order of things especially at Channel 9, the order of news items. And if I said, “Look, this is really important”, I’d look at the camera and say, “This is a really important story” and set it up, and if it was an important story, then the audience think, “Oh this guy’s a good filter.” If you said, “Look, this is a silly item, I don’t know why we’re running it” and you run it and it is a silly item, you’ve got them. And it’s not a con. What that program did is different from most news programs is gave things what they really were worth.
PETER THOMPSON: But you were also by playing this role, undercutting the artifice what it is a lot of television.
CLIVE ROBERTSON: Oh, yeah, and did that go down well with the journalists? Have a guess Peter. “He’s ruling our station” and all that rubbish. I mean, we get a new item in at, say, 10.30 at night and I’d say, “By the way, you’ll see this at 6 o’clock tomorrow night” and they’ll say it’s the latest, “you know better”. “You can’t say things like that.” Well, you know, come on, so journalists are a bit thick as you know, Peter, you’ve worked with a few, they really are thick. I mean, they really should be sterilised.

I used to watch Clive back in the 80s when he was on commercial TV, because I was a slightly strange child drawn to programs that I wasn’t really old enough for. He may have been something of an influence on me. This is awfully sad.