Larry Schwartz
HE’D CLAMBER over big rolls of lino. She’d lift him up onto the counter, and say: “Go on, sing them a song. Sing him a song”.
Chris Wilson remembers the days his mother would take him to a hardware store in Richmond.
“And I’d sing them a song and they’d give me a broken toy or something. But she always encouraged that. She loved it.”
He’s known joy and sadness in recent years. Bouyed by the birth of his first child, Fennessy, now two, he feels “partly that it’s my responsibility to surround him with music”. But he’s been rocked by the death of his mother. “She was my ally,” the singer, songwriter and blues-harp player says.
“She didn’t like everything that I ever did, but I could always count on her to be honest and to back me up. And when she died, I was terribly distressed, of course. I loved her. Loved her dearly.”
He sits there, a big man with close-cropped hair, disconsolate in shorts, singlet and thongs. So much has happened in recent years. He still seems bewildered by it all. The illness from which his father has since recovered, the birth of his son, the diagnosis of his own diabetes.
His mother’s death is just one reason for the six-year break since his last album of original material.
“I just dried up for a long time,” he says. “A lot of things happened to me in that period. And that took me a long time to sort all of that out.
“I got writer’s block. I thought to myself, ‘Can I still do this?’ and then I thought, I’m going to have to. So I just started to try, try, try, try, try. And after that period of extracting teeth, it just came easier. It was a relief to know that I could still write something.”
It’s years since Rolling Stone hailed him as “one of Australia’s most important talents”. At 42, the western suburbs high school teacher hasn’t quit his day job yet. Now on six months’ leave, he has taught English, media studies, music and other subjects in Sunshine and Braybrook.
“When I first started, I didn’t think that I’d be teaching that long,” says Wilson, who has an extraordinary 22-track, double-album out this week. “Twenty years later I’m still doing it.” Students are sometimes curious. But he says: “It doesn’t change my relationship with them. I have tended
to be reasonably strict in the classroom.”
Long Weekend reflects his fascination with country, blues, rock, gospel and other music loosely tagged “roots”.
Mushroom’s first studio double since Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girl’s Gossip on which he played harmonica in 1986, Weekend is a long-awaited return since his last album of original songs, Landlocked, in 1992.
He has spoken of being “12,000 miles from the source” and acknowledges being inspired by the likes of blues harp legends, Little Walter and Sony Boy Williamson II since taking up the harmonica in his ‘teens. But his mentors were local musicians. He mentions guitarist Steve Connolly,
country singer A. P. Johnson (for whom he has written a track on the new album), Matt Taylor, Broderick Smith, Greg Quill, Mick Fagan, The Paramount Trio.
Wilson remembers his elation after seeing Billy Thorpe and Carson at the Myer Music Bowl in the early 1970s. “I can distinctly remember lying in the bath that night and just desperately hanging on to this sound that I heard.”
He hasn’t lost it. Wilson enthuses over a performance by guitarists Maurice Frawley and Chris Dyson at the Prince of Wales just a week ago to launch an album guitarist, songwriter and producer, Steve Connolly had recorded shortly before his death in 1995. “At the end of the night, (they)
got up and they did this song and it just rocked and they were just playing off each other and I felt my heart just lift, you know.”
Others’ hearts will have lifted over the years to hear the ubiquitous Wilson’s play solo, with his band, Crown of Thorns, or backing artists from Paul Kelly to Chris Bailey.
He aspires to a music “as truthful and on the dollar as it can be”. And that’s what he delivers on the intense double album, on which he sees a symmetry between “two instrumentals, two gospellish ones, two spoken words, two that were about Australian rock history, two that were sort of
about mortality and death.”
The song Desperado celebrates a friend, the hard-drinking A. P. Johnson, who died about two years ago. “He was quite famous around Fitzroy. When he died, every larrikin and ratbag turned up the funeral service.”
In Hand Becomes Fist he deals with Aboriginal land rights, not through storytelling as some contemporaries have done, but “quite baldly. It must be addressed. The indigenous people of this country will have no rights at all – Not only to their detriment but our own.”
There’s a song about the Sunbury Festival of 1973 and one in which he describes a religious experience Little Richard had after seeing Sputnik in low orbit across the night sky in Australia in 1957. “He took it as a sign from God that he had to give up his ways and take up the ministry.
“And he took off his rings and he threw them either into Sydney Harbor, which is what I heard initially, or the Goulburn River. Apparently people tried to jump in after them.”
Wilson was raised in Alphington, in the western suburbs.
Don’t give up your day job? “I think that I come from a background that has said that to a point,” he says. “And I appreciated that because I had a day job, I could pursue these other things.”
His father worked as a foreman at a butter and cheese factory and at a paper mill. His was a florist and a receptionist. They worked hard to make sure neither he nor his brother lacked for anything. “It might not be the flashest, or the biggest, or the most expensive but it was always what was
required”.
He credits his mother with instilling an early affection for music. “She loved music and she sang and when she was young she tried dancing.”
The Age, 06th of March 1998
Larry Schwartz Writer 