The Germ & I
Category: Music

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It’s January 22 already...where has the year gone?
Category: Music

Damn. Twenty-one days into the new year already...feels like October is right around the corner! I am feeling more mortal than usual this month. However, there is more stirring here than just the brute passage of time. We're working on a rocking new CD and it is coming along nicely - four tracks are finished and you can hear them at my MySpace page. This will most likely be followed by some cool video footage and all sorts of other new stuff. The whole CD should be done by spring. A fall Australia-New Zealand tour is being put together - I can't wait for that...I long to once again look to the sky and see the sprawl of strange and alien stars. And sip a decent Lemon Lime & Bitters. Lots of new activities on the TV and film front - I've been writing music for Paramount TV and just finished a project arranging and playing on songs for Peer Music Publishing with my good buddy Jonny Blu. This month I play Cafe Cordiale up in Shakin' Oaks, splitting the bill with my wife, and a solo concert at Theatre 150 up in Ojai, CA. The next full band show will be at Ronny Mack's Barn Dance on Feb 5 at El Cid in Silverlake. After that, I'm on the road again, as the old song says...perhaps a little more gleefully than I would have. Still, it beats workin! See you out there.

Love, Bob

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Bob Malone in Keyboard Magazine
Category: Music

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Reef, Roos & Blues (& Kiwis Too) - Australia/New Zealand Tour 2007

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REEF, ROOS & BLUES - Part III (Heron Island)

Part III: Heron Island

fter a quick stop in Brisbane, where we had dinner with our Ozzie friend and genius/mathematician/rocket-scientist/mentally-Ill-Bob-Dylan-Fan John Lattanzio, we were off to Heron Island and the Great Barrier Reef. The Great Barrier Reef! Just the name alone invites you to daydream of adventure. It is the world's largest living organism – at over 1,200 miles in length, it can be seen from space and stretches along over one-third of the east coast of Australia – about 100 miles or so off shore.

There are 618 islands near the reef – most uninhabited – but Heron is the only one that is right on the reef itself. No vomitous boat-ride out to the reef every time you want to see it, on Heron you can take off your shoes, put on your shorty- shorts, and walk right out to the reef. But first, there was the matter of the 90-mile boat ride out the island. We were up at 4:30am, on a plane to the little industrial costal town of Gladstone by seven, and on the boat by 11:00.

In the months and weeks leading up to this part of the trip, I was imagining a post-gig tropical paradise island vacation. But now that I was here, the air was chilly, the skies overcast, the ocean choppy. All was depressingly different that I had pictured it. And Gladstone, the mainland jumping-off point, was a dreary smokestack town…not a palm tree in sight! Also, it was May in Australia, which meant that winter was coming. And indeed, Heron Island is at the very southernmost tip of the Barrier Reef, not really far enough north to be part of the Australian tropical zone. If you turn America upside down, so that it gets warmer as you go north, you will begin to get the picture. I had envisioned a trip to the Florida Keys, but we were in North Carolina.

Three hours later, we were on the island. The sky was still slate gray and a miserable drizzly rain fell on us. Still, I could already tell there was something magical about the place.

After checking into our rooms, we were given the island tour. The main building with the bar, pool and lounge. The restaurant building. The helipad. We quickly learned that this island belonged to the birds, and the people were just visiting their island. Everywhere you went, there were little Buff-Banded Rails, strutting around importantly, like they owned the place…which they basically did. This bird was also found in the dining room, and if you left your food unattended, you were liable to lose it to a rail. They were bold, unabashed food-pinchers, these birds. Also it was Short-Tailed Shearwater hatching season. Locally known as the Mutton Bird, there were fuzzy chicks all over the place, looking very confused and disoriented. You just wanted to pick the poor things up and swaddle them in a blanket and take them someplace safe. But of course, that was out of the question. They had been left alone by their parents to learn how to fend for themselves…or die trying. Lest they become the aviary version of the twenty-six year old guy that still lives with his parents.

I soon discovered there was really very little to do on Heron…and I mean that in a good way. Like most urban Americans in the early twenty-first century, I am faced with an incomprehensible array of things to do. My entertainment choices and diversions are never-ending. So myriad are my choices, in fact, that I often end up sitting stunned in front of the TV, paralyzed by indecision, channel surfing through the night, unable to commit to even a half hour television show.

But on Heron Island, the choices were limited, and therefore, all were to be appreciated. My attention span lengthened immediately. I could spend hours with a book. Or strolling on the beach. Or contemplating the sky. Meals were to be savored, not inhaled. I was certainly a better husband. My full attention could be lavishly aimed at my wife. And that is how it should be. Life is short, and to find one's true love is rare.

We took bird walks and reef walks. We spent each morning snorkeling in the shallows at high tide. We shared the water with baby lemon sharks who had come in looking for small fish to eat. We swam with a juvenile green sea turtle that we followed for most of an hour as he grazed the underwater fields of turtle grass. We floated one morning in wonder as a vast flock of rays glided by us like a mirage.

In the evening, everyone on the island gathered around the pool and in the main hall for conversation and games and drinks. The building this gathering takes place in was once a turtle cannery. Luckily for the turtles, the Australian Turtle Soup Company went out of business shortly after opening, and by the thirties, the place was a resort.

The main even every evening was the sunset. There is little I have experienced that is finer than watching the sun slowly fall into the ocean beyond the wooden gantry just off Heron Island. One night it occurred to me that we were here all because I had gathered up the email addresses of some Australian blues festival bookers and sent letters out into the cyber void in a 3 a.m. frenzy of productivity, hoping something would happen. I could have just as easily not done it. An exhilarating and frightening thought.

One afternoon, we met a wonderful couple from New York – Howie and Karen Landsman. Howie, it turned out, grew up in New Jersey and was a big fan of New Orleans music. Amazed, I found myself on an island of Australia talking about The Meters, and Professor Longhair, and the Neville Brothers and countless other great Crescent City music makers with a guy with the same accent as me. Who'd have thought?

We ate breakfast, lunch and dinner with the Buff-Banded Rails in the main (and only) dining room. A gigantic buffet was always on hand. And we feasted mightily. I was constantly amazed to be there.

One particularly amazing member of the island staff was Jason Elliott. He led reef walks, stargazing excursions, and snorkeling trips. A fascinating and funny character, his knowledge of astronomy and marine biology were extensive, yet he was trained in neither. One day he took us out to the reef at low tide and showed us myriad signs of life in the shallow water that we would have unwittingly trampled right by had he not been there to point it out. My wife, a big fan of the crab…yes, the crab, pointed out to Jason her disappointment that there seemed to be no crabs on the island. He said "What do you mean, no crabs? They're everywhere!" Then, genie-like, he rubbed a nearby clump of grass and out shot a tiny green Turtle Weed Crab, who proceeded to play dead in Karen's hand. She was as delighted as a girl could be. I heard her squeal from some distance away. I myself was preoccupied with the extremely deadly and aggressive cone snails that were making their way across the sand. Australia, it is always good to remember, is a potentially deadly sort of paradise.

Our final day on the island, we went diving for the first time. Lessons in the pool at 8 a.m., diving on the reef by eleven. No time to get cold feet. It was the way to go. Our dive instructor took us each by the arm and led us into an undersea paradise like we had never experienced. It all ended way too soon. I had always enjoyed snorkeling, but this was something else entirely. Kind of like how I had always been content to play for fifty or a hundred people in a club until I had experienced my first theatre crowd. There is nothing quite so life changing as the first time you feel that comber of applause from four or five thousand people wash over you.

And then, all too soon, we were on our way home. The last thing we saw before leaving the island was a magnificent eagle ray breaching the water like some mystical phantom from the depths. It was something you would never believe had you not seen it with your own eyes.

We stayed one last night in Brisbane, enjoying Aussie steaks and lemon lime and bitters at the rip-roaring Brekky Creek Hotel with our new friends Jerry and Carmen (by the way: in Australia, a hotel is a bar, and "brekky" means breakfast…also, "pokies" means poker, wombats are "wombies." You get the idea).  

Then we flew home.

And like I said before, this once foreign land inhabits a permanent part of my heart. We will be back again.

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REEF, ROOS & BLUES - Part II (Blues on Broadbeach)
Category: Travel and Places

Part II: Blues on Broadbeach

I guess I haven't really gotten around to mentioning this yet, but our reason for being in Australia was not play tourist in Sydney, but because I was booked to play for four days at the Blues on Broadbeach Music Festival. For years, I had been getting airplay on various Australian radio stations, but all attempts travel down under and play live had been thwarted. Eventually, a very helpful radio guy supplied me with a list of Australian blues festivals, and I got to work, shamelessly soliciting. The result: here I was, flying to Brisbane Australia, all expenses paid! It all started with one email, sent at two in the morning. Pretty amazing, when you stop to think about it.

The festival sent a car and driver, and we were whisked in high style from the airport for the one-hour drive to the Gold Coast, where the festival was happening. Our driver was Jeoff – a real Aussie if there ever was one. On the way down, he gave us various tips on speaking Oz. "How'd ya scrub up?" is what you ask someone the morning after a hard night of drinking. And "Good on ya!" which is the delightful Aussie version of "good for you!" or "you rock!" And that being called a bastard is a good thing, provided there's an adjective preceding it. As in "funny bastard!" or "crazy bastard" or "queer bastard" – which is not to be confused with "queer," which is of course something else entirely. However, plain old "bastard" means, well…bastard.

During the ride I was again struck by how much what I was seeing along the road reminded me of America. The same Home Depots and K Marts and TGI Fridays. No Outback Steakhouse, however – we were not successful in selling a watered-down parody of Australia back to the Ozzies. As we got near the Gold Coast area, theme parks began to appear – one was kind of a dinner show/circus/theme park hybrid called the "Outback Spectacular," which reminded me that even for most Australians, the Outback is a mysterious faraway place.

We really could have been anywhere…except we were driving on the wrong side of the road, of course. It saddened me to think that our aggressively homogenized suburban chain-store and parking lot landscape had spread even to this faraway land. Because you know the Australians didn't invent this shit. This one is all on us.

Soon enough, we reached our destination. The Gold Coast is a major resort area, very much the Miami Beach of Oz. It is a land of pristine white sand beaches, pastel high-rise hotels, bungalows and boats lining inland canals. This wasn't going to be a gig, it was going to be a vacation!

We arrived at the Sofitel Goldcoast and the rock star treatment began immediately. I was met by the delightful Joy, from Broadbeach Marketing, who welcomed me warmly and explained that if I needed anything…anything at all, she would provide it. Then I was introduced to Adam, the hotel manager, who promised to be at beck and call at all hours. I hadn't even played a note yet, and already I could say without hesitation that this was the best gig I ever did!

Back up at the oceanfront view room (complete with complimentary champagne and cheese-plate), Karen articulated what I had already been thinking. If we hadn't already been married, and Karen was a chick I had recently met and was trying to impress, that incident in the hotel lobby would have most definitely gotten me laid. In fact, it seemed to have put Karen back in touch with the leather and long hair Sunset Strip Rock & Roll groupie chick that I know is still inside her. She perhaps viewed me in a whole different way.

My first task upon arrival, however, was not to get laid, it was to do a phone-interview with Gerry Blain – AKA "Chillblain" of "Chillblain's Port & Cornflakes," a blues show on Noosa Public Radio. He was covering the blues fest on his show and had been playing my CDs for a while, so we were going to do an interview. The phone in our room was a sleek little wireless unit – nothing about it screamed "prohibitively expensive per-minute hotel phone charges" like a standard hotel phone usually does, so I heedlessly picked up the phone, settled into the balcony chair with the idyllic view of the beach, and dialed Gerry. There was even a rainbow out there, room charges were the furthest thing from my mind. Well, two hours later and forevermore, that became known as the "Hundred Dollar Radio Interview." It was worth it, though – Gerry and I were on the phone for nearly two hours, and became friends in the process. I'd say only about twenty minutes of the conversation actually made it onto the radio – the rest was just a pleasant shooting of the shit.

I was contracted to play four shows, all within walking distance of the hotel: a private party for the donors and other bigwigs that made the festival possible, a show at the local shopping mall (somebody get me Tiffany's manager on the phone!), a set on the outdoor mainstage, and a gig at Conrad Jupiter's Casino. On paper, it looked like an entire "Behind the Music" career trajectory all in one weekend. From his humble beginnings playing small parties and shopping malls, to his meteoric rise to fame playing to thousands on festival stages around the world, to his tragic decline on the casino circuit, through it all Bob Malone has…

The shopping mall was attached to the hotel, and during the two days we were in town before I had to play there, we passed through the place many times on our way in and out. Deep in the bowels of the place, there sat a grand piano, surrounded by a shoe store, a rug shop, and a women's plus-sizes outlet. Every time I passed by the piano, I was overcome by a great stomach-churning spasm of dread and foreboding. After the second or third time by, I declared a moratorium on sniggering comments from my wife about shopping mall gigs. It became "The Gig That Dare Not Speak Its Name." I simply could not believe I had agreed to do this.

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Finally, the day came. Showtime was in the afternoon, around 2, so at 1:00, I went down there to see if it was time to sound check. The piano was there, as always, but that was it…no PA, no sound guy, no chairs for the audience. They did tell me that chairs would be set up, so I wouldn't just be sitting there playing and singing while people trundled by, on their way from Spencer Gifts to the fucking 12-Plex. I hurried back to the room, and called the promoter to tell her what was up. "No worries, I'll take care of it" she said. That is what I like to hear! And is there a better Australian phrase than "no worries"? I think not.

A half hour later, I tried again, and there was the P.A. system…sort of. It was a single speaker, and a microphone, and the guy from the mall. He was a great guy, really friendly, extremely helpful…but he had no clue about how to run that PA. I did an end run around the prima-donna fit I felt coming on, and became one with my new mantra: "No worries! No dramas!" After all, I was in Australia, at the beach, on vacation, and getting paid for it – what was there really to be upset about?

Then, about ten minutes before I was supposed to start playing, a crowd started forming – a good crowd – filling the whole area around the piano. People standing, people sitting on the floor, people sitting on benches. I could not believe it. And then I realized – it was in the program! This wasn't just some gig in a mall, it was part of the festival. All over town, there were slick little booklets listing all of the blues fest shows, and this, of course, was one of them. All that worrying for nothing.

Sometimes I am such an ass.

Well, I beat that piano and shouted into that microphone for two and a half hours, and enjoyed every second of it. The crowd was great to play to! And considering that nobody had a comfortable seat, they were possessed of an astounding attention-span. I kept expecting the standers to wander away after a few songs, but they never did.

During the break, I met Harry Miller for the first time. He was there with a video camera and wanted to know if it was OK to shoot. As the days went on, I realized that everybody in the Oz blues scene knew Harry. He is famous for his house concerts and sausage sizzle. "You're nobody til you've played at my house, mate!" He was joking, but I am pretty much nobody in the grand scheme of things, so I secretly figured that playing his house could only help. I'll be doing the gig next year!

Later that evening we met Gerry and his wife Carmen and Baiba and Joy and a whole table full of people from the festival booking office for dinner. We talked and laughed and ate for hours, and made new lifelong friends in the process. It was a wonderful night.

So now I was two gigs into the festival week, and it still felt like a vacation. It was a unique experience. Usually, if I've gone somewhere to play music, no matter how idyllic the setting, it is nothing like being on vacation. You are working – fun as this particular job may be. But here – Karen was with me, we were staying at a resort hotel at the beach, we were being treated like paying customers…and my next show wasn't until tomorrow.

We spent the morning walking along the white sand beach, looking for shells. "That's because you both have OCD!" Karen's mom once said, when told of our shared interest in Conchology (she was right, of course). Later on, we cruised down to the next town along the coast – Surfers Paradise. "Surfers" to the natives. Didn't like it as well as Broadbeach, it was mostly tacky t-shirt shops, mediocre restaurants, and strip joints…nothing we hadn't seen in Venice Beach or Lauderdale. If we were still twenty-something years old, we would have loved it.

Today was also Karen's birthday, and I got her just what she wanted: the Night Tour of Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary. Joy at Broadbeach Marketing set it all up for us, as promised. All we had to do was wait for the driver to pick us up.

Most Australian creatures are nocturnal, so this was a chance to see in action the Koalas, Wombats, and Tasmanian Devils et al that were asleep at the zoo in Sydney. Upon arrival, the very first thing they did was put a baby saltwater crocodile in our hands…mouth taped shut, of course. The "Saltie" is just about the deadliest, most aggressive critter in Oz. And this is a land of many deadly creatures. These guys will eat anything. At the Sydney Zoo we saw two baby salties, not more than eight inches long, viciously attack the zoo-keeper when he opened the door to feed them. They are apparently born with a taste for man-flesh.

The one we held was…uh…how do I put this? Cute. Karen cooed over the little reptile like it was a fuzzy newborn kitten. Given the chance, it would have chewed her face off.

Shortly after, we watched close up as a beautiful white owl disemboweled and ate a live rat. It started by biting off the head, after that, the internal organs and intestines really began to fly. The zookeeper and the other Ozzies in the crowd were completely unfazed by this. Amused, in fact. We tourists were not handling it quite so well.

I had noticed by now that Australians are not nearly as squeamish about blood and guts as we Americans. Even before the rat-eviscerating owl,