This week I’m letting Wes write the column, because it’s sort of about me, BG.
Who came up with the term, ‘Young Adults’?
Anybody putting their hand up? No one?
Yeah, well I don’t like it. It seems to be both sucking up to teenagers and condescending at the same time, and that’s not pretty. Glad nobody ever tried calling me a ‘young adult’. I would have given them a scowling they’d never forget.
How’d you like to be Greta Thunberg? Imagine how it must feel to have some toad pinch your cheek and declare, “Isn’t she adorable? So young and so committed!” Surely her being young is not the point. If she’s right it’s not because she’s young. And if the deniers are wrong it’s not because they are old.
Thunberg’s cold fury at the prospect of being handed a world baked in its jacket reminds me of some lines from a song by old fart Sting:
‘Blessed are the poor
for they shall inherit the earth.
Better to be poor than a fat man in the eye of a needle.’
As these words were spoken
I swear I heard the old man laughing
‘What good is a used-up world
And how could it be worth having?’
But sadly, the young don’t have all the answers. Personally, I find that a bummer because if they did it’d be a big relief just to hand things over to them.
No, there are some lessons they’ll just have to learn the hard way, like Bullgoose.
Bullgoose the younger had always been ‘musical’ and played in bands, but he sat bolt upright, then pronked about his bedroom like a springbok on Red Bull the day he first heard Jaco Pastorius play the bass.
Jimi Hendrix wasn’t such a big surprise, because guitarists had always been show-offs.
But bass players? Bass players were only expected to know three notes, five at a pinch. Here’s this bloke who seems to know more notes than anyone in the history of notes and he’s stringing them together faster than machine gun fire. And what? He’s ripped the frets off his bass’s fingerboard and he’s making that thing sing like Billie Holiday on her honeymoon.
Bullgoose’s mission became clear in a flash. He disappeared into the woodshed for months and didn’t emerge until he had some of Jaco’s tunes down. His hands were callused like a galley slave’s and his mates had forgotten he existed, but he now walked six inches taller and fully believed that Chuck Norris would bounce harmlessly off him, were he foolish enough to try anything on.
But he didn’t stop there. Oh no. He took his bass to the guitar shop.
“Hey, Man. How much to take the frets off?”
“Say what?”
“Can you remove all the frets? I’m doin’ some Jaco stuff.”
“Oh, you are, are you?” (Mona Lisa/Gollum smile)
“Yep.”
“Mmmm… I can do it, but you’ll have to completely change your fingering.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“How long until your next gig?”
“I’m taking a month off to get used to it.”
(Chuckle disguised as coughing fit) “A whole month, eh?”
“Yep.”
“OK, it’s your funeral. A hundred and fifty. Ready next Friday.”
“Hoo hoo hoo.”
Well, Bullgoose did actually manage to sort out the new fretless fingering, and by the end of that month he was hubristically hankering for his first gig back: a swank and lucrative club gig with a jazz quartet.
He swaggered into the Pottyvale Country Club and shook hands with the boys. The pianist, Freddo, introduced him to the drummer.
“Bullgoose, this is Derry Dickerson.”
Derry Dickerson? The Derry Dickerson? The man was a legend. He was going to play with Derry Dickerson! Wait. Did that mean he was on the way up, or was Derry on the way down? It was hard to know.
“Nice to meet you, Derro, sorry, Dicky, sorry, Mr Dickerson.” (He hates me already)
“Oh, and hey, Derry says some of the boys from Frank Ifield’s band might come down and sit in later.”
“Well, hey, yeah, nice.” Frank Ifield? Frank Ifield? Some yodelling crooner from back in the days when dinosaurs walked the earth. ‘I Remember You-hoooooooo!’ Backing band probably all played one-stringed banjos.
Well, the gig went off better than Bullgoose could have hoped to have prayed to have imagined to have dreamed. These cats were red hot and he had kept up with them. Derry had even grunted approvingly at him a couple of times. Oh, the swelling pride!
Late in the evening, while they were taking a break, two old blokes in dinner suits mooched in. I mean they were old. Forty-five or something. One was skinny and looked like he’d consumed nothing but tobacco for the last quarter century.
The other one looked like an overstuffed armchair. He sported a five-hair comb-over.
