I met Dave Graney in South Melbourne, between rehearsal and gig; he is as always immaculately, exquisitely and uniquely attired. We take a stroll down Clarendon Street looking for somewhere quiet to grab some calories and Do This Thing.

As we walk we’re chatting about the inner suburbs, architecture, the bar/pub/venue scene and all kinds of stuff. I ruin the mood of course, being shallow and stupid enough, when talking about a new bar, to make reference to “a Dave Graney style”. He cuts me off, seemingly offended by the implication that there is such a thing.

“I don’t think about style ever, not at all.” Wait a second.

This does not compute. What are you doing, Dave?

I’ve watched you morph over the years from dead-cool op-shop sixties suits to lurid pink crushed velvet and a porno moustache. Your current pencil mo looks like it takes more maintenance than the MCG pitch, and your shoes, man, are to die for.

When you fronted The White Buffaloes you looked like a Deadwood extra with a great tailor and access to running water. At the Conty one night you sang I’m Not Afraid To Be Heavy in a mesh singlet, leather pants and an Elvis wig.

And you don’t think about style?

I have to at least try and get near the bottom of this.

I ask him: “The White Buffaloes period, the long haired Buffalo Bill look and so on. I’m curious about the reinventions you’ve gone through over the years?”

“I haven’t done any reinvention, that was how I lived, it’s not fakery or anything. I was quite madly obsessed with that whole tone and pitch and I was quite lost in it.”

He found a Place, moved into it, and became both its custodian and its prisoner. Then, when it was time to find the next Place, he moved out and started playing those two roles all over again in somewhere else.

We talk briefly about history and it turns out that it’s the world’s more dramatic events that interest Dave. Looking at him, you’d think he’d be happiest drinking gin, racking up debts and inventing trousers with Beau Brummel, but no.

“I wouldn’t want to hang out with that crowd… The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, definitely. Brilliant times to be alive, more than any other. They told everyone to get fucked, they changed the calendar, killed the monarchy….”

“Also probably the Elizabethan period, people like Walter Raleigh, just a fucking genius character.. It was a smaller world, a shockingly short life you’d live. People were poisoned by everyday things, a very rough period.”

Those times demanded that you lived life to the full, because you really could die at any time. Life then wasn’t just about existing, it was about completely being, and it’s with this that I start to get what Dave is on about, and to understand what he means when he says he doesn’t think about style.

Listen to any of his music and he picks you up and takes you somewhere. It’s a place that he’s found somehow, in a book, or a movie, or a dream and he’s not just singing about it, he has become it.

It could be a hotel room, a truck stop, lying on the bonnet of his car in a sleepy country town or on stage with the Australian Doors Show, it doesn’t matter. He got there before you and he’s already devoured it and he’s living it. Come in, look around, sit down if you like, but don’t try to understand it on your own terms: this is Dave’s Place and whatever it was before he got there no longer exists.

For most of us, life is a series of journeys from one place to another, one existence to the next; the choices our parents made for us, and the choices we made for ourselves dictate where we are today. The Road is how we got from one identity to another; the trip is how we understand where and who we are, for now, and maybe even where we’re going after this.

Getting There is what we mortals do. Dave on the other hand, in all his music and his writing and his thinking, is about Being There.

Despite three decades on the road, his music doesn’t seem, to me at least, to be about the journey so much as the place he’s at in any given moment; rather than progress in a series of meandering lines, his music and his style quantum jump from one to the next.

Right now? He’s on a bit of a nostalgia kick. Not for the Good Ol’ Days of music, just a reflection on himself, his music, his bands and, dare I say it, his style. His memoir, 1001 Australian Nights, could’ve been just another “man, The Road is such a cruel mistress, things are falling apart and another sunrise is burning through my eyelids” rockstar exercise in whine/self-congratulation.

Instead, he’s delivered a vaguely chaotic and nervously confident series of vignettes about places and things that he has seen and been. It’s bewildering that a man who’s been playing so long remembers so many little details from so many venues and songs from so long ago.

There’s a very nice touch that bounces off the page on a regular basis: he only ever refers to Clare Moore, not the drummer, not the partner, not “Clare”.

“Kim Gordon is never ever referred to as Thurston Moore’s wife, it’s just a respect thing for Clare as far as I’m concerned.”

It’s not a memoir with a linear narrative; read it from start to finish or jump from one page to another at random, it won’t matter. Every page, every word comes direct from Dave; it’s up to you to figure out if he’s being so serious he’s funny or so funny he’s serious. Either way it’s a great read and one of Australian rock music’s funniest and best memoirs.

He’s also released what lesser musicians would call a “Best Of”. Rock n’ Roll Is Where I Hide is more of a redux, a collection of some of his well-known and loved earlier songs, most of them from the nineties, given a kick or a twist that either wasn’t possible or wasn’t imagined when they were first laid down.

The title track comes from one of the coolest ideas he ever had, indeed one of the coolest ideas anyone ever had, for a song. A secret agent has to disappear, go deep undercover, and finds the best hiding place imaginable is out front of a rock band, in character, under the lights.

Once on stage, people don’t know who you really are, can’t recognise the man behind the microphone because they only know what they’ve heard about you. They’ve heard you think you’re invisible so they stand there waiting for you to dematerialise right there in front of them, and before too long you start to believe it, too.

Is that what happened to Dave Graney at some stage? I don’t think so. The clothes and the attitude and, yes, Dave, I’m using that word again, the style may form some sort of shield, some sort of disguise, but none of it is just something he washes off at the end of the day. Appropriated or not, all that zhuzh is made of Dave, and Dave is made of it.

The temptation to lose his own self must have been there for a long time, but there’s a truth to him that no amount of fame or otherwise can squash. In the Nineties, when he was winning awards and The Coral Snakes and others were smashing the big venues and the charts, he still kept it real.

When invited to present ARIAs he addressed the musos in the room, not the sycophants and the money men: “I’d always ignore the teleprompter; I enjoyed making those people sweat.”

“No dead air though” he’s quick to point out “I was always a pro.”

—

Dave has a new album out through Liberation Records. Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Where I Hide is available from http://www.thedavegraneyshow.com/ and good music retailers.

Dave Graney’s new book ‘1001 Australian Nights’ is out now on Affirm Press. You can purchase the book at: http://www.thedavegraneyshow.com/ or anywhere else that sells fine literature.

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