April 21, 2002 - Ruined Piano Concert. Elizabeth Street, Bayswater

 

PROGRAM FOR THE RUINED PIANO CONCERT AT 8 ELIZABETH ST, BAYSWATER

 

The Players: the Jefferson (Ruined Piano from Cue) and a devastated Gulbransen - ‘the Nathan’

 

I respectfully approached the Ruined Piano in the tractor shed at Nallan Sheep Station and took hold of the fall to lift it. It was so rotten that it came away in my hands. I shoved batteries into my Marantz recorder and slung microphones over the dusty rafters. As I played, ants appeared journeying in concentric circles on the front panel of the Jefferson (Chicago ’26). Golden haired Emmy, the eight year old daughter of the sheep station owners, April and Dave Petersen, came in out of the majestic heat and stood on the cool floor of the tractor shed to watching me. I knelt to pull back the bass strings and then release them - firing off huge arrows. The piano roared and groaned. After some minutes April came over and muffled Emmy’s ringleted head in her huge flowered dress, as though shielding her from an atrocity. I knew that April wanted to speak, was about to speak. I pointed frantically up to the Nanyo and the Sanyo microphones with my right hand, while trying to finish the performance with my left. Finally, she broke in - ‘Have you finished?’ And I had.

 

IMPRO on Jefferson Piano from the Nallan Tractor shed

 

During the drought that never ended at Nallan Sheep Station I confess to recording on the Ruined Piano at night. I’d hide in the freezing iron shed crouched under the piano waiting for Dave to go to bed. Straight after he’d stumbled back up the homestead steps I would drag up an oil drum, feel the broken teeth of the Jefferson under my fingers, then play con bravura con passione for the applause of millions of cicadas through the shivery shuddering graveyard shift.When our week was up I paid Nathan’s and my accomodation. Dave, having shot two hundred sheep that morning, with hundreds more dying out at remote windmills, was so drunk I could see through to the inside back of his skull. ‘That mad bastard you brought with you. The other night I was going to bed. I heard thunder, rushed out onto the verandah. The sky was clear full of fucking stars. You should shoot that maniac piano thumping bastard.’

 

JEFFERSON IMPRO

 

I GOODBYE THE NATHAN was the name we gave the piano that Nathan Crotty’s mother bought from the Salvation Army when Nathan began piano lessons with me. He was the quietest person I ever met. Completely without small talk, he almost never answered any question put to him. He came for one piano lesson. After a few minutes he said in a very low voice, “I’m not getting anything out of this.” Lost. I suggested that we do a free improvisation instead. Next week he turned up with a broken violin. After months of unflagging experimentation between us, he still referred to our improvisations as piano lessons.One day, on impulse we loaded his mother’s piano onto the back of a ute, then drove it up onto the top of Canterbury Court Carpark, a grey, baleful hulk that lorded it over a whole block of Northbridge. It had been built by a Dancing School instructor who drowned himself in his swimming pool after the consortium that had been involved in its construction went bust. The carpark’s twisted spiral of rough cast concrete was never completed. It’s rusting metal rods poked up into the wild sky.Because it had concrete cancer, it rained monstrous blocks down onto the cars parked illegally below. The City Council erected a barrier around the top of it to prevent these avalanches. Desperate folk, sundered by love, or sunk in debt, took advantage of the scaffold to leap to their death on Beaufort Street, hissing and roaring below.Nathan and I got the piano past the checkpoint and drove it to the top floor, where it was completely exposed to wind and sky. We played unprecedented duets, as businessmen climbing out of their Volvos, unable to take it in the monstrous fact of it, went back to their working concerns, to being worked by their concerns. Like those aboriginal people in Sydney Cove who looked up and saw, but couldn’t take in Captain James Cook’s ships coming towards them. Cook flew a flag. We gaffered a red gold and blue blanket to the low guard rail, to show to anyone who cared that an impro in progress. In progress?

I arrived in the dawn of a freezing winter morning. As I approached the piano and dragged off the canvas draped over it, I startled a young aboriginal boy, no more than six, who was curled in the bottom of the piano, wrapped in the red, blue and yellow blanket. We stared at each other - he looked so cold and sick to me. Neither of us knew what to do. There was a harsh cough behind me. I turned to see an aboriginal girl in her teen years. She coughed again, then went on coughing till I thought she’d die right there. I couldn’t stop staring as her face soaked over. She swallowed, then swallowed again. Finally got out words - “Hey man - watch me spit man”, as the kid seized his chance, and dashed for the stairs.

In those prelitigous times young students - sometimes only 8 years old, no more, would arrive at my house for their piano lesson. Jump in the car, I’d say, and I’d drive them to that nightmare monster shedding death. I’d have to inveigle them into the shrieking, shuddering lift that smelled of urine. It’d just make it to the roof. There, staggering around, swiped by the cold wind and the desolate sunset we’d finally settle down to entertain acre after acre of rusting roofs, a seagull hopelessly off course, and the odd steeplejack risking his life as he tried to fix the wooden overhang.

The piano weathered a winter on the roof. Water leaked through its canvas cover, and in time it began to shed its casing.Near the end it found a refuge at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts for Black Swan Theatre’s adaption for the stage of Randolph Stow’s Tourmaline. With four other old wrecks scattered about the sandy set, I played it to evoke the desert nights reeling with stars.I was working late on the Prelude to Act One (to be arbitrarily cut by the Producer the very next night). By midnight I was exhausted, bereft of ideas. I staggered into Northbridge’s cold, blinding light to get a last coffee. I came back to find I’d left the door open. Almost completely lost in the great central space of the darkened auditorium an old aboriginal man, wearing a long Salvation Army Greatcoat, tapped out a shivery plangy melody on the anvil of the Nathan. Security and the Police (in competition for who should be there first) crashed in, guns and nightsticks at ready. “Do you want to prefer charges sir?” The sergeant said. “No, definitely not. Best musical ideas I’ve got this year.” The old guy gave me a grin, then shuffled out, a Schweppes bottle sticking out of his left hand overcoat pocket.

A Hijacking

At the end of the Tourmaline production the producer arranged for the Ruined Pianos used in the production to be taken to Arts Storage in Belmont. A soon as I received the news, fearing I would never see or hear these five yammering, plangy hulks again, I immediately rang the piano removalist booked by Black Swan (he’s an old friend of mine), and asked him to bring the pianos to my place. The Nathan found its last resting place under the Cape Lilac in my backyard, where it weathered the seasons. One day, as I was enjoying a peaceful afternoon shit in my back veranda toilet I heard an immense thump, followed by a ringing sigh. The Nathan had collapsed forward onto the little path leading to it, elevated at last to the rank of devastated piano.

 

IMPRO ON the DEVASTATED NATHAN UNDER THE CAPE LILAC, STROKING AND PLUCKING ITS STRINGS, AND BEING ATTACKED BY HUGE MOSQUITOS. THIS LEADS INTO AN INTERLUDE CONSISTING OF ITS ‘ORIGINAL’ (1992) SOUND AND MUSIC, WHICH FILTERS THROUGH THE TREES AND UNDERGROWTH.

 

SAM PLAYS TRACK 5 OF CROW COUNTRY AND FADES IT OUT BY 3’16” BRIEF IMPRO ON JEFFERSON