Larry Schwartz
“The man replied, `Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar”‘
from The Man With The Blue Guitar
AFTER decades on the road, singer-songwriter Chris Smither was looking for a new guitar. The one that appealed to him most, a particular blue-topped acoustic-electric number, reminded him of the lines above from Wallace Stevens, a celebrated American poet.
“For anyone who is interested in American literature, that’s a famous poem,” says Smither. “I remember thinking, `I could be the man with the blue guitar’. And now, to a large extent, I’ve become the man with the blue guitar. It’s startling how much it’s become identified with me.”
The Boston-based musician last played here two years ago. In his solo concerts he uses cannily placed microphones to amplify his resonant vocals, percussive finger-style guitar playing and the stomp of his boot heel. A simple package, and one that has won a strong following. His last CD,
the concert album Live As I’ll Ever Be, was snapped up by fans of his distinctive mix of blues and folk.
Smither (and his blue guitar) were in transit when he rang from Los Angeles airport en route to Australia. Since then, he’s been playing gigs at venues from Albany in WA to Upwey, on Melbourne’s outer eastern fringe. Evidently, he kind of likes it here.
“There’s something about Australia that appeals to me,” Smither says, “and part of it is it reminds me of the way America was when I was a kid. It’s very big and vast and in a way less burdened.”
Now in his late 50s, Smither spent his early childhood in New Orleans, where his father was professor of romance languages at Tulane University. The America he remembers from then was a smaller place – population 90 million, against today’s 290 million – but there’s little sense of
nostalgia.
“I think the US was barely starting to wake up out of a country bumpkin attitude,” he says. “It was the only major economic power that hadn’t been smashed to pieces by the war and I just saw the start of something that I still see to this day, and that is the sense that nothing else really
matters, only the US really matters.”
He had points of comparison. At 12, the family moved to Paris for a year. At 18, he spent a year in Mexico.
The ’60s and early ’70s held out to him the promise that Americans might take a stronger interest in other parts of the world, but now he believes not even travel has made them aware of the concerns of the locals in the places they visited.
“The older I got, the more I realised that in spite of a certain move in that direction during people in the US just weren’t that interested. Paris is full of American tourists and not one of them will even begin to speak a word of French. Not a word. And they become visibly annoyed if people
don’t understand their English.”
But now the world has come to America. Smither has lived in Boston since his mid-20s. He was at home on September 11, waiting to meet a department store delivery truck that was delivering a bed.
“I kept calling my wife,” he recalls. “I said she should come up and see the new bed. I went down and she was in the living room with the TV on and big tears rolling down her face and I said, `What on earth is going on?’ I turned around and looked at the TV just in time to see the second
plane flying into the north tower.”
He’s been working on new songs recently, songs that he says are somehow jazzier than any on his 10 albums to date. But he’s not expecting to write about the impact of the attacks. “Lots of people are rushing into print,” he says, “but I don’t hear a lot of people rushing onto record about it.
You run the risk of making hasty judgements.
“A journalist in Boston 13 days after the 11th asked me why nobody wrote topical songs any more given that here was this ready-made subject. Did I expect anybody to write them? I don’t feel any compulsion to. I’m not a topical songwriter anyway.”
Smither was speaking before this week’s bombing of Afghanistan. He was wary of the jingoism and patriotic fervor and, while in no way condoning the attacks on America, withering about his homeland’s insularity.
“Believe me, there is no lack of self-confidence,” he says. “If flag-waving yahoos are any indication of confidence we’ve got it to spare.
“What I really hope is that there will be a general awakening to the fact that you don’t have any oceans to protect you any more. You can’t afford to be isolationist and do what you consider (appropriate), running the world at a distance by push-button.
“Like it or not, you’ve got the biggest single economy in the world and there’s responsibility that goes with that to learn about the people that you’re affecting. Eventually, the people you’re affecting one way or the other, if you don’t pay attention to them, they’re going to come up and punch
you on the nose. And you don’t know why.
“Maybe they weren’t justified in doing it. But if you don’t understand why, then you don’t see it coming.
“I don’t think it was justified. But at the same time there’s a blindness which is not in the least bit helped by the asshole they elected President.”
The Sunday Age 14th of October 2001
Larry Schwartz Writer 