Once in a very infrequent while, you find yourself confronted with a piece of information so disjointed, so out of synch with the way you intuitively understand the world to be, that for a brief moment the world spins off its axis and you don’t know which way is up. Then you look again and, making sure that what you just read is still there, ie, you didn’t hallucinate it, you begin the process of letting your brain take it in, and assimilating it into the fabric of what you thought you knew.
So it was a few days after Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ concert in Canberra (a couple of months ago now), when one of my work colleagues sent me an email link to a short piece about Welch taken from the Melbourne Age. Okay, I thought, some kind of concert review or other item of interest about the tour. I started reading. Apparently Gillian and Dave had ventured to country Victoria to play a show or two. So far so good. All of a sudden I went slightly woozy: one of those places was the Meeniyan hall. What?? I read back over what I had just read. It made no sense. (Even now, it still makes no sense. I have trawled the Internet for an explanation of how it could have come about, but am none the wiser.) How could two of the saviours of modern music finish up there?
Meeniyan. It’s no Byron Bay. Or Daylesford. Or Meredith. Heck, it’s no Fish Creek, for that matter. It’s just a nothing town on the highway, half way between the farm I grew up on and Leongatha, the nearest town of any decent size. No offence to the people who live there, by the way, at least one of whom was one of my best friends at Fish Creek Kindergarten. Also, and this is of no small significance, my mum and dad are both buried there, in a lovely lawn cemetery on a hill surrounded by giant cypress trees. Nevertheless, Meeniyan is no place for American musicians of considerable international standing to wash up, even for one night. Unlike the towns listed above, it has not thus far undergone the transformation to some kind of cultural outpost necessary to avoid stagnation and death.
Well anyway, on a six-degrees-of-separation level, it goes like this: I spent much of 2004 absorbing the music of the two-headed beast that calls itself Gillian Welch into my bloodstream; out of the blue, they get the Profile treatment in the New Yorker, a magazine that, over the last decade, has become a rather unhealthy obsession of mine; unexpectedly, I got the chance to see them play live in Canberra; then they go and play in a town near where I grew up; the town where my parents are buried; a town which it makes no sense for them to play. It’s all a bit, um, creepy, isn’t it?
