Des Cowley says that reading Kelly's 'mongrel memoir' is like looking into his soul.
How to Make Gravy: A-Z
By Paul Kelly
Mid-way through How to Make Gravy, Paul Kelly writes: "Most songs are rough-hewn things. You knock them together with this and that, like the old bitsers you made as a kid - go-karts to get you through the holiday". The same could be said of his new book, a big, baggy monster thrown together from things at hand - memory, family history, songs, conversations, travel, letters, books and stories. It's a big rough-hewn thing, what the French anthropoligist Claude Levi-Strauss might have had in mind when he coined the term bricolage.
Kelly's introduction gives us the background. In 2004, he was asked to perform a series of concerts at the Spiegeltent in Melbourne. Tossing around ideas, he came up with the idea of performing 100 of his songs, in alphabetical order, over four nights. As the songs were performed in 'stripped down' fashion, he began spinning yarns to fill the evenings. The concept was a success, and he's gone on to perform it since, also offering free downloads of the live songs. He began putting the stories down on paper, writing about each song, and eventually, it grew into this 500 plus page book. I suspect no-one was more surprised than Kelly himself.
But there is so much more to Gravy than an explication of his songs or music. Kelly obviously found the structure - or lack of it - liberating. The randomness of the A-Z arrangement gave him permission to head down alleys and by-ways, rather than sticking to any main narrative thread. There's no beginning, middle and end here, as a more conventional autobiography might demand, but instead a storytelling that is more in keeping with life's random, jumbled patterns.
The songs themselves act as a springboard to memory - where they might have been written, what he was reading or listening to at the time, the people in his life, the places he visited, where he was on life's journey. Kelly talks about certain of his songs as being 'circle' songs - a progression of chords cycling in the same order all the way through. The complexity comes with the verses and choruses sung over the chords. With its repeated motif of letters of the alphabet, I like to think of Gravy as a 'circle' book.
A few random examples: travelling by train across the Nullarbor, playing joyful music with Remy Ongala and a group of throat singers from Tuva ('Careless'); the saga of grandparents, Nonna and Nonno ('I Close My Eyes and Think of You'); recording the Lantana soundtrack for Director Ray Lawler ('Everything's Turning to White'); forgotten Aboriginal heroes ('Jandamarra / Pigeon'); the art of making mixed tapes ('I'd rather go blind'); driving from Kununnurra to Derby in 2007 ('Queenie and Rover'). While some songs elicit little more than half a dozen lines, others, such as 'Treaty', about Mandawuy Yunupingu, run upwards of a dozen pages.
There's a surprising honesty to be found in these recollections, particularly with regard to Kelly's immediate family, his wives and partners, his friends. And while he doesn't necessarily have a bad word to say about anyone, he is generous and candid about his own inner life, his frailties and doubts, his emotional core. He doesn't hold back from telling us about his flirtation with heroin, his occasional fear of feeling like a fraud, his blatent theft of other songwriters' lyrics or melodies when composing his own songs.
What comes across most tellingly, is Kelly's heightened response to the world around him, so often hidden behind his laconic and taciturn public image. The world comes rushing in at him, its sounds and images. He weeps before a Rembrandt painting in London, he drives through the desert in Arizona pondering a Raymond Carver story, he tours the UK to the point where 'every fucking city feels the same'. And it all comes out in song and in words. In How to Make Gravy, he conjures landscapes, cities, paintings, poetry, friends present and friends gone.
As is befitting of a musician who once recorded an album of bluegrass music and an album of experimental dub in the same month, Kelly's ears are attuned to all sorts of eclectic music. He writes passionately and lucidly about fellow songwriters and musicians, providing us with lists of his favourite first lines, memorable titles. He is influenced by everything that has come before him, plundering freely the wellspring of stories and poetry, from Homer, the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, the romantic poets, through to Dylan and Morrissey. When it comes to writing his own songs, Kelly admits to carrying around isolated lines and phrases for years, awaiting their mates. Or a melody, awaiting a story. Sometimes, less commonly, a song will arrive as a gift, fully formed. But there's no magic solution; if there was, as he says, he'd write one every day.
Robert Forster has said that Kelly's most overlooked talent is his singing. Kelly writes of how his grandmother, an opera singer, tried to give him lessons, so that his voice would resonate in his head. But Kelly already knew that his voice came from elsewhere: "from the ground, from dirt, from swamps, from hollers and moans, from crying, keening, pleading, screaming, from cajoling and conversation - seeking not purity, rounded tones or full phrasing, but grain and dirt". Like shards of memory unearthed, Kelly brings that same ethos, "grain and dirt", to his memoir.
How to Make Gravy
deservedly has the feel of a publishing event. Kelly's publisher, Penguin, has gone all out, producing a stikingly handsome volume. The book, like the original A-Z performances, is divided into 'four nights' of songs, with Kelly's lyrics - a nice touch - printed in blue at the start of each chapter. To co-incide with the publication, an 8 CD box set has also been released, containing 105 songs, recorded live during the A-Z shows, that mirror the book's contents. Then there's the combined book and CD deluxe box set - in Kelly's words, a "book for the ears as well as the eyes. A book that sings and talks and plays". The experience of reading these stories, while listening to the songs, is like looking through a window into Kelly's soul.
The great American poet Walt Whitman, in his 'Song of Myself' wrote: 'I contain multitudes'. In the same way, Paul Kelly, in his 'mongrel' memoir, has shown himself possessed of a similar boundless, restless energy of spirit. Kelly asks of himself: "Was I writing an ideosyncratic history of music, a work diary, or a hymn to dead friends?" All that and more, as he flings out his words into Homer's wine dark sea.