dave graney - Moodists-Coral Snakes-mistLY-FEARFUL WIGGINGS

dave graney - Moodists-Coral Snakes-mistLY-FEARFUL WIGGINGS
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About Me

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2023 book THERE HE GOES WITH HIS EYE OUT (lyrics 1980-2023) 2023 reissue Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes Night Of The Wolverine. Double vinyl release. 2023 ROCK album with Clare Moore IN A MISTLY . WORKSHY - 2017 memoir out on Affirm Press. Available at shows or via website. Moodists - Coral Snakes - mistLY. I don’t know what I am and don’t want to know any more than I already know. I aspire, in my music , to 40s B Movie (voice and presence) and wish I could play guitar like Dickey Betts, John Cippolina or Grant Green - but not in this lifetime, I know.

Sunday, May 27, 2012

New album , "you've been in my mind" due in June- meanwhile sag and bloom


This article appears in the May edition of the Melbourne Review. Demands of space led to  cuts and edits. Also the subject material could have wandered occasionally into areas of specificity that casual readers might have been offended by. This is the full whack....

I wanted a sound for my electric guitar but was a little cheesed at how everybody talks about the same shit in that area. I have attitudes that have been formed over the years that affected my approach.
Basically I’m a singer. For the first couple of decades as a performer I liked to stand there at the mic and sing. I didn’t want to be stuffing around with a guitar. In the Moodists, Steve Miller had a Fender twin and Mick Turner had a small Marshall combo. They were pretty intuitive as to what they played. Somehow we arranged our one chord boogies by ear.
I should also say the Moodists were operating in the post punk scene. Guitar heroes were few . These were ours. Johnny Thunders, Steve Jones, Keith Levene, Tom Verlaine, Robert Quine, Lou Reed, Poison Ivy, Bryan Gregory, Kid Congo, Rowland Howard.
Later, after the Moodists, I wanted to be a singer songwriter in a 70s kind of way as that was the music I was tuning into.  That’s what I’ve done ever since.  I wrote songs on an acoustic guitar but usually turned them over to my band, which pretty much always had a piano, bass, guitar and drums. The guitar was always pretty trebly and clean and played with the piano. Rod Hayward and Malcolm Ross in the Coral Snakes on guitars (always Fenders) and Louis Vause and Robin Casinader on keys. The guitar didn’t have to be the central part of the sound. We always had the vocals and the rhythm section front and square. Influences from r&b I guess. I had an acoustic guitar I bought from Robert Forster from the Go betweens. A Fender acoustic. Twenty pounds it cost me. Some time in the late 80s I started to do some acoustic shows. The beginning of the vogue for all things “unplugged” I guess. I bought some crappy Ovation style copy from Dean street in London. Scratched out some performances that way. It was just a  cheap way to get around.
Some time in the late 90s, after the Coral Snakes period, I started to play electric guitar. Got myself a Harmony semi acoustic .  I should say that during this period we had started to use a lot of harmony singing and of course the sound on stage had to be controlled a lot. The volume of the guitar is always an issue with lots of open mics around. So we were always wanting the guitar amp to be at a  lower volume.
I had started to think hard about textures and sound and production and wanted to get a small combo with no piano and clean sounding guitars. A beat group. Stuart Perera played guitar, a left handed solid  body Rickenbacker. He put it through a Laney combo and still does. Billy Miller played guitar with us as well. A strat through a  Roland Jazz Chorus. I liked it all pretty loose. I played a bit of guitar then one day I put it down and found that Bill and Stuart did not know how any of my songs actually went! We had been playing songs from that songbook for a couple of years! The band needed me to play the chords!
So I have kept playing the guitar and have brought  all these attitudes to the situation. Low volume, loud lead vocal, harmonies etc.
I am also by nature a contrarian and a cheapskate. If I had tens of thousands of dollars to throw about I would not buy a guitar and an amp, I would buy a  car or something. Fix something in my house.
When I was a kid I loved those dudes like Hound dog Taylor and they all had  the cheapest gear. Punk bands like the Buzzcocks proudly had Tesco (supermarket) guitars and the Subway Sect played Fender Squires.
I also always tune out when people start to rave about “warm valve sounds”. I know, from experience, that its all true but  there are other sounds.  I mean Neil Young and The Foo Fighters might record on tape and the like but they are millionaires. End of story.
The Moodists did a reunion gig in 2005 and the young new rock sound engineer was telling our guitarist, who had his own sound and was an original gangster, to “dial some mids in”. I had to tell the young cat that the ideal sound was not always Bon Jovi or Aerosmith, this was the sound we had. Steve turned all the treble on his amp up and there it was, that spindly, loud, reverbed out Fender twin sound. The kid put his earplugs in.

That was a  reunion gig. I’d been putting out my own albums for more than 20 years in between Moodists shows. By now I had some other references for guitar sounds that I loved. Jerry Garcia, Jorma Kaukonen, John Cippolina, Ike Turner, Gatemouth Brown, Grant Green, Duane Allman, Ed King. Lots of people. American rock and jazz I guess.

So that’s where my attitude towards the sound I was looking for came in. I can’t wipe all that away from my sensibility. That’s how I ended up buying  $120 solid state Fender combo amp from ebay. It was covered in disgusting grey felt stuff. I had it replaced with Marshall tolex. (the hard black vinyl type material on those amps). Marshall people are not fender people. I was fooling with the material already. The amp had a  beautiful clean sound which is what I wanted. Only it was piercingly loud and trebley. The volume was at “1” and it was overpowering.
I became obsessed with building my own sound and scoured the online guitar forums on different subjects. Needless to say, guitar folk love to talk. All very subjective and persuasive to say the least. Also, all continually searching for their own sound or more properly, one somebody else had perfected.
My experiments led me to reach for a Sansamp, which is a pedal that came out in the 80s for studio and live use, which could approximate the sound of many different amps. Unlike the modern amp modelling pedals it was not a case of switching a button it was a pedal with many variations and combinations you could muck about with. I’d had one for twelve years and hadn’t ever really gotten to the end of it. I placed it into the effects loop of my amp. This was different to plugging it into the front. I did this because  I wanted to have the sansamp “Fender tone” effecting an actual Fender amp. I then replaced the speaker with a tech21 (the maker of Sansamps) speaker, more powerful than the amp itself. The logic being the speaker would be clean sounding to the infinite. (The overdrive channel of the amp being so metallic I was going to use an overdrive pedal).  So I had a  Fender amp and cab with tech21 in the loop and at the end.
Now I had to find the right combination and sequence to put my pedals . I was intending to play 12 sstring electric and had a “Janglebox” for compression and sparkle. The guitar went into this, then into an MXR Microamp. The Microamp gave it a bit more of a clean boost. If it was before the Janglebox its subtle effect was compressed too much and it affected the overdrive pedal which came after it. (The Janglebox and Microamp were to be “on” all the time).  I then had a “tonerider American classic” overdrive pedal for a dirty sound. Lastly there was another Tech21 pedal, an XXL overdrive. This was for total fuzzed distortion.

Having sequenced the pedals I had to work out which way to power them. The sansamp needed to be reliably “on”. When the batteries run out it is sudden, don’t want that to happen at a   gig. So I thought I’d get some power to the pedals. This involved a  bit of research and, eventually, three power plugs as the Sansamp and the Janglebox both require the power lead to be positively tipped. (one male and one female) All other pedals being usually negative tipped.
While looking into this I ventured once more into the world of online opinion and critiquing of the electric guitar experience. The language was pretty amazing- occasionally. I came across the terms “sag” and “”bloom”. Using a  valve amp, there is a  kind of power compression when a note is hit hard and the amp can’t respond straight away. Being valves, they behave differently to solid state circuits. The power “sags” and then gathers and “blooms”, becoming louder and more resonant. Sag and Bloom. Like a  couple of Jewish entertainment lawyers. I was reading this stuff and really almost getting it. Then I had to investigate power further as the Janglebox was very noisy being plugged into mains power. I learned that people preferred batteries in the studio for a better sound but mains power at gigs where reliability had to be uppermost. The sound was better with batteries. New batteries? Well with that question a new rabbit hole appeared when a fellow opined that the “sweetest” sound he’d ever heard was when he used batteries that were just about to run out. Carbon batteries too, whatever they were. I left the building at this stage, happy with the sound I had been able to chase down, ready to go and play and record. Guitar and combo amp still pretty much weighing in the same. Leaving them to all their endless talk.


Post script- now I need an ABY pedal to drive two amps


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Dave Graney and Clare Moore with Georgio "the dove" Valentino and Malcolm Ross

Dave Graney and Clare Moore with Robin Casinader - In Concert

ONE MILLION YEARS DC

Starts with a Kinksy groover sketching a 21st century populist tyrant who coasts in power on waves of public resentment at those on the lowest rungs of the ladder (He Was A Sore Winner). Sweeps across a sci fi terrain with nods to songs in the sand at the end of the world (Pop Ruins) and nods to the ties that bind in the underground communities (Comrade Of Pop and Where Did All The Freaks Go?). Songs about intense, long relationships, defunct technology that didn’t answer back, severe social status definition (I’m Not Just Any Nobody), people wandering through your mind as if it was a garage sale, the anxiety of the long running showman (wide open to the elements again) and ends with a song that’s “a little bit Merle Haggard and a little bit Samuel Beckett”. " Edith Grove! Powis Square! 56 Hope Road! Petrie Terrace!.. The Roxy! The Odeon! Apollo! Palais! Olympia! The Whisky! Detroit Grande!” Pop Ruins!"

ZIPPA DEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS?

ZIPPA DEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS? (The title comes from the chorus of “Song Of Life” ) is a classic rock’n’roll album. Classic if you lived through what has become known as ”the classic rock era” as it rolled out new and even broke onto the beachhead and morphed into punk. That’s the direction Dave Graney and Clare Moore have always been coming from. They have spent their lives schooled by and immersed in rock ‘n’ roll culture. Neither attended higher education and they dived in deep and kept swimming. From the Moodists through the Coral Snakes /White Buffaloes to the mistLY This is an album with their band, Dave Graney and the mistLY. Stuart Perera has played guitar with them since 1998 and Stu Thomas on bass since 2004. MARCH 2019 ZIPPA DEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS? 2019 album out on Compact Disc - available here via mail order...
If you are from outside of Australia and wish to purchase a Compact Disc copy of ZIPPA DEEDOO WHAT IS/WAS THAT/THIS? please use this button (different postage)

LETS GET TIGHT

FEARFUL WIGGINGS

2014 solo album from Dave Graney. *****"If I've learnt anything in my years of writing about music it's that if you are going to do anything of worth in this tough game, you better have your own thing. Today's generic is easily replaced by tomorrow's. And yet you need to be flexible, to follow wherever the songs demand. In the case of this, only the second credited as a solo album among 30 or so Graney releases, it's a curious yet welcoming lane he walks you down, with acoustic guitars, not much percussion, vibes, smooth sounds. At the end of it you feel like you've awoken from a strange yet pleasant summer's dream. As shot by Luis Bunuel. It ranges from off-kilter reveries (A Woman Skinnies Up a Man, The Old Docklands Wheel) through to the softly seductive (How Can You Get Out of London) and the downright arch (Look Into My Shades, Everything Is Great In The Beginning.) This is music that is neither folk, nor blues, nor country, but it's all Graney, somewhere out to the left field beyond Lee Hazlewood's raised eyebrow. It's astringent on the tongue but sweetens in the telling." Noel Mengel Brisbane Courier Mail

you've been in my mind

June 2012 super high energy pop rock album - blazing electric 12 strings - total 70s rock drive. Greatest yet! available via paypal - $20 pp

rock'n'roll is where I hide/- 2011 "vintage classics/ re recordings" on LIBERATION

SUPERMODIFIED - August 2010 remixed/re-sung/re-strung//remastered/replayed comp via PAYPAL

also available as a digital album

Knock yourself (2009)-first ever dg solo set-filthy electro r&b-available via Paypal- $20

available as a digital album too

We Wuz Curious (2008)-blazing R&B jazz pop album available via paypal-$20


UNAVAILABLE-COMPLETELY SOLD OUT!!!
AVAILABLE AS A DIGITAL album

Keepin' It Unreal-(2006)-minimalist/lyrical vibes, bass, 12 string set - CDs sold out - digital only

Hashish and Liquor (2005 double disc by Dave Graney and Clare Moore) available via Paypal $25


UNAVAILABLE-COMPLETELY SOLD OUT!!!
Single album HASHISH available as a digital release

Heroic Blues- "folk soul" set from 2002-Availableas a digital album via BandCamp


UNAVAILABLE ! Completely sold out!

It is written,baby-book released 1997- available $10 via paypal