James's latest project is Songs for a Season at Ghost Town Bridge, a solo acoustic collection based around the fictional town of the album’s title. The songs are a stripped down set of tales told by a range of Ghost Town Bridge’s inhabitants.
James says, ‘They’re really song stories like old style narrative ballads – or maybe they’re a little like short prose stories. They’re a mixture of folk & blues & country rock. Some are sung & some are spoken. I just play acoustic guitar & sometimes mandolin. They’re mostly made up stories, although a couple are autobiographical. They’re sorrowful, often about loss & longing – & about getting lost & found & lost again - but I reckon they’re hopeful too & sometimes kind of funny.
Last winter I sat down a few days in my friends Simon & Oonagh’s kind & friendly lounge-room & played the songs into some microphones - & this is what came out.’
James Griffin is one of Australia's most highly regarded songwriters. The Black Sorrows had a top ten hit with Snake Skin Shoes , which James co-wrote with Joe Camilleri. And country music star, Lee Kernaghan's recording of Changi Banjo , which James co-wrote with Lee, won the Golden Guitar for Heritage Song of the Year at the 1999 Australian Country Music Awards.
James's previous release was Black Crow Road which critics described as having all the James Griffin hallmarks: poetic, vivid & finely crafted lyrics sung or semi spoken within simple, catchy & hypnotic musical settings. The music is created from an unusual synthesis of rock, folk, country & minimalist avant guard influences.Read an essay James wrote about his approach to live performance at that time.
In the 70s & 80s James was based in Sydney where he wrote songs, performed solo & played in the bands, The Agents and James Griffin & the Subterraneans. The Agents and the Subterraneans had independent chart successes with the singles, Suburbs of the Heart , Merciless Cinema , The Angel Run and The Blood of the Poet & with the albums, No Adjustment to the Face , The Immigrant Tango & A Cure For Snakebite . In 1985 The Immigrant Tango was voted into the top three mini albums of the years in readers' polls in both RAM and Rolling Stone.
From 1980 to 1986 James worked part time at Triple J FM playing records on the radio. In 1987 he released a solo album, True Love & the Many Meanings of Invisibility and the double spoken word album, The Land of a Thousand Dances: (A Rock n Roll Novel) He then relocated from Sydney to Melbourne where he continued performing and organising acoustic & spoken Word shows around the inner city.
As a freelance program maker James made arts programs for ABC Radio before being employed by ABC TV to work on the arts programs there. He became a producer on Sunday Afternoon with Peter Ross, an Editorial Producer on the book program, Between The Lines and then became the Producer and Presenter of The last Word, which evolved into Words with James Griffin.
In 1992 James performed a two-week theatrical season, at La Mama Theatre, of his spoken word album, The Land A Thousand Dances
In 1992 he also produced, for ABC Music, the folk song compilation, Going Home and Moon Over Melbourne , an album of songs about Melbourne, sung by Melbourne based artists including Paul Kelly, Jane Clifton, Stephen Cummings & James Reyne.
Going Home is a collection of folk ballads re-arranged by James and performed by a wide range of Australian artists including Doc Neeson, Paul Kelly, Shane Howard, Jane Clifton, Joe Camilleri, Paul Grabowsky, Tommy Emmanuel, James Reyne & David Bridie. Going Home is a timeless collection of Australian music, which James is planning to re-release soon. Some thoughts from James about his approach to live performance
Hi James here. Thanks for taking the time to get this far into my website. In 2004 I wrote this little essay in an attempt to describe to a festival director what I was aiming for in live performance at the time: a kind of autobiography in and around songs. It's not quite what I'm doing now but I'm hoping these thoughts about a song version of what the literary world calls ‘life writing' might be of interest to some other songwriters out there – so here we go:
Dear Sir,
In a nutshell, what I'm doing is singing & talking about my own life and experiences & how the songs have grown out of that - and also celebrating song writing as a means of expression and communication.
I've been singing songs of my own composition to audiences since the mid 1970s. I started out on my own with an acoustic guitar and in the 1980's I formed the Sydney based bands, The Agents and James Griffin & the Subterraneans. The lyrics / stories of my songs were always at the centre of the music. I've performed in venues of all shapes and sizes all over Australia from folk clubs in coffee shops & pubs to the Sydney Entertainment Centre where the Subterraneans supported, on different occasions, Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello & T-Bone Burnett. In recent years I've done only occasional live shows but songs I've written have been recorded by The Black Sorrows and by Lee Kernaghan.
The Black Crow Road album is my re-entry into recording and performing. I've now come full circle back to performing solo with the acoustic guitar. My current show is based partly on songs from the new CD and partly on older material.
Sometimes I sing whole songs and sometimes fragments. The practice of singing only excerpts from some songs is liberating. It keeps the performance moving & allows me to cover much more ground than if I simply performed 10 songs as set pieces. Usually I decide which song or story I'll start with & which I'll end with, have some planned for in between & then just start the show & see where it goes
Let's say I start with Suburbs of the Heart - which is on the new album, spoken over music. Sometimes I just recite it as a poem:
Falling out of aircraft On compulsory swimming pools Geometric shopping centres Mums & Dads & schools This is where it happens There is no second start Existence from a distance In the suburbs of the heart
Where re-runs follow re-runs & relations reappear Crawling from the wreckage Of a thousand packaged tours & dogs bite & neighbours fight & rumours stop & start & nature strips are poisoned In the suburbs of the heart
Where supermarket complexes Make interesting friends & weddings follow funerals Follow the long weekend & taxis cruise the avenues & parties never start & private fears are souvenired In the suburbs of the heart
Where the check out girls used to check you out & leave you in the dark In the back seat at the drive-in Where the P-plate drivers used to park Reconstructing love affairs You wonder, 'is this art?' & it's pornographic postcards From the suburbs of the heart
Where no one is making money Well at least no one I've met I used to think it funny When I was drinking to forget & No-one gives a flying fuck What time the future starts In one armed bandit boulevards In the suburbs of the heart
Where heroes never fail you Where heroes don't exist & days go by like husbands with an absent minded kiss & the hostess with the mostest Who is too polite by far Kills the conversation In the suburbs of the heart
& the phantom FJ Holdens Cruise the freeway & the dance Like Elvis Presley monuments To a Rock & Roll romance & no one plays the jukebox Records never chart & the last twin-carbied Falcon Drives away from the suburbs of the heart
Cradled in the loving grace Of every known appliance Permanent amnesia Is a form of self-reliance We wait for things to happen Relations fall apart Existence from a distance In the suburbs of the heart
& speaking of the suburbs, in 1978 I wrote a song called Australia's just a Suburb of the USA - which was then a sort of punk song - an ironic take on our susceptibility to American popular culture. 25 years later it sometimes seems that nothing much has changed. Of course, we're not supposed to smoke cigarettes any more - & John Wayne is no longer with us - but his spirit lives on. Verse 3 goes:
The highways are covered by Mexican bandits The guards are taking my name My television set is a tactical weapon & my bedroom is nuclear range Out in the garden the armies are massing They've started napalming my hedge The tanks in the driveway are worrying the neighbours & the general is raiding my fridge But that's all right, that's OK Australia's just a suburb of the USA
& staying just a while longer in those parts of the city where dogs bite & neighbours fight, once, when I was at the Bondi Lifesaver, a notorious Rock music venue in Sydney, I received a heavily bruised & blackened eye & considerable damage to the left side of my face for the crime of talking to a girl. The song is called King Hit - which is, of course, slang for when someone takes you by surprise & punches you out when you're not looking. Of course I'd still have ended up on the floor, even if I had been looking. It's in the manner of The Angels, one of my favourite bands who, if not playing at the time, could have been. (Actually, I think it was Cold Chisel)
Well well well it's the football man With the blonde moustache and the Toohey's can Checking out the chick with the Playboy walk He can't understand why she won't talk. It's a King Hit King Hit It's a King Hit Can't you see? He couldn't fuck her so her had to hit me
Having been punched out I guess it's time to take time out & go home. I grew up in the country, in Corryong, in North East Victoria, up near the Snowy Mountains. Changi Banjo , which Lee Kernaghan recorded, is based on men I knew when I was a child there in the 1960s. Changi was a notorious Japanese prison camp in WW2.
The old man died in summer when the grass was dry & golden He was an open book to heaven & a mystery to his friends He was out on the veranda writing letters to his daughters When he heard the Curlews calling & he just put down his pen.
He was old when I knew him though he wasn't more than forty He'd done two years in Changi in the big Pacific war & his most prized possession was a little hand made banjo He created it from nothing while he watched his comrades fall
He would play that Changi Banjo made of tin With a broomstick for a fret board, two-inch nails to peg the strings The strap was his old webbing, it embraces him again & the bridge piece was the rising sun from off the slouch hat brim..
Maybe I'd then sing A Picture of Phar Lap.
Phar lap was a champion race horse during the Great Depression. His heroic performances on the track made him into national symbol of endurance & courage. The song is autobiographical & mainly about my father. All through my childhood there was a framed picture of Phar Lap on the kitchen wall. It had the caption; 'Phar Lap, the greatest racehorse Australia has known' under it. My grand father had cut it from a 1932 edition of the Sporting Globe, which published the image (a water colour by Daryl Lindsay) as a colour supplement. He hung it on the wall & there it stayed for 60 years!! I still have the picture with me here in Melbourne.
I had the chorus in my head for years not knowing what to do with it & then one day I realised I wanted to write about my father & about his generation who came up through the depression & World War 2 & how some of the important Australian symbols of greatness & hope, such as Phar Lap & the champion cricketer, Don Bradman are integral parts of who we are - & so the two ideas came together & the song was finally written. I wanted to place those figures in daily life where they continue to live on - as my father lives on in me.
I was born in the small town of Corryong It seems like a lifetime ago My father he just loved me dearly Gave up drinking when I was seven years old & he used to like a bet on the horses Just a dollar each way, win or lose & he used to smoke too much tobacco Well I guess it was his poison to choose
& I had a little cardboard Don Bradman Scored runs off an old ping-pong ball & I was brought up to remember the soldiers From the First & the Second World War & it's funny to think of a whole generation Their savings in an old coffee tin Sincerely believing that their circumstances could alter If a racehorse came in
I've got a picture of Phar Lap It hangs on my wall & it keeps all my troubles away It was cut from a magazine by my grandfather & it keeps me from waking up shaken up & slipping away
My father's name is Frank Griffin He's gone twenty years now & he's buried in Carlton I don't go up there as a rule I prefer to remember him rolling a cigarette & showing me how to cut wood It's fair to say most people loved him that knew him & he died much too young & it's sad To think that he never saw Bob Menzies' funeral Or Collingwood win the 1990 flag
Sometimes I take a train to Wodonga Hear his voice in the wheels on the rail Saying, 'Jamie, it's a hungry old country Out here where the gold rushes failed & sometimes of a Sunday me & Kate & the kids Get a tram to the Melbourne museum & we stand there & look at that great big red gelding & we wonder at the spirit revealed
I've got a picture of Phar Lap It hangs on my wall & it keeps all my troubles away It was cut from a magazine by my grandfather & it keeps me from waking up shaken up & slipping away
She Believes in Elvis is a little story about how hard it sometimes can be for women left alone in remote parts of Australia when their partners are no longer with them. It's about how we all need something to offer us solace in tragic times - & about how sometimes people can find strength in loneliness & then are able to offer comfort & support to others. The imagery in the second half of the song came partly after witnessing, in March 2003, the devastation left by that summer's bushfires in eastern Victoria, around Omeo.
He used to sing Love Me Tender In the one-horse-town hotel On Saturday nights when he wasn't driving interstate Now he's ten years overdue & the hotel is closing too But she still thinks of him as just a little bit late
Way out yonder in the back of the dusty back roads Where the rain never falls & the children play in the wheel ruts & stones & the lights coming over the hill They're blinding him still & the stars burn out & chill you to the bone
But what can I tell you except she believes in Elvis & on the mantelpiece his photograph grows more like the King each day She will comfort you Like the saints in the prayer book used to do She will pray for you & never fade away
The young men from the valleys & the little towns and farms Come calling & they're hoping Of course
But what can she possibly say To boys like this on their wedding day Who've been nowhere & done nothing More or less
& what can I tell you except she believes in Elvis & on the mantelpiece his photograph grows more like the King each day She will comfort you Like the saints in the prayer book used to do & pray for you & never fade away
She knows the shape and feel of loss & the taste of a prayer to a difficult god & the painful re-creation Of the soul re-made in stone
Where smoke & lightning congregate & the blackened skyline hollows you She's the mistress of her own rebirth & her breathing heart is in you
So she walks you to your vehicle In the dry grass by the temporal gate Should she be some shrine on the highway side Or touch your face in the dashboard light & leave you Mysteriously renewed
.& leave you mysteriously renewed
It's going back a bit in time, but I'd probably incorporate I Smoke Money into the show at some point. It's a comic piece about not smoking dope in the days when marihuana was thought to offer a path to enlightenment. Now of course it's just another addiction & money did, as I indicate in the song, become the drug of choice, particularly in the ‘80s. Part of the song describes living in Brisbane at a time when the drug squad would regularly descend upon houses where young people gathered. Stylistically it's what my friend Joe Camilleri describes as 'campfire rock'.
I'd sing a love song next & maybe perform a poem & at the moment, I'd probably end with Black Crow Road . I started writing Black Crow Road when the artist, Brett Whitely died - but I put it down until a couple of years ago a when a guitarist friend of mine died - & then this year I finished it while recording the rest of the album. I sang it in public for the first time at the Mildura writers' festival in July of 2003 & the audience cried - & I cried - & then I went back to Melbourne & recorded it in one take. It's about many things but in part it represents my efforts to evoke thoughts of mortality & mystery & to think about how sometimes we don't, in our culture at present, seem to value the creative impulse quite so much as we might.
I don't know how it happened
I was travelling light I was blinded on the freeway Slipping in & out of the car headlights The moon & the ocean They were begging me to drown I was thinking about perpetual motion I was thinking about heading back to town
But I was already on the crow road It's true to say I know that now On the black crow road Where the dead & the living still connect somehow
I don't know how to explain this now It was just a little dancing sideways step I opened my eyes to a hard blue sky & my childhood self in the driver's seat Familiar fingers on the steering wheel Like weathered branches or my father's hands Skeleton trees on a cold sky & out across the paddocks there's a windmill going round & round & round
On the crow road I dream myself hitch-hiking still
On the black crow road Driving in the shadow of the burial hill
& when I say I was travelling light I mean I was a prisoner of my own flight The muse & the beloved of my own song The life's work of my imagination
But on the crow road There is no time for self-regard On the black crow road Our little life is dust among the stars
It's easy to see where the metaphor lies In a black clad bird's unblinking eye Far too cunning for the trap or the gun & they call them a murder when there's more than one
Some of us believe that the dead travel with us Some of us do not believe They give no warning, they do not tell us Leave us wondering how to grieve
We can't understand when the living leave us Those who cannot carry on We offer the future but they don't believe us & the past is a reminder that they've lived too long
On the crow road Three undertakers on the telephone line On the black crow road The dirt road of silences & signs
What kind of Pilgrim's progress Could leave man so low? What kind of acquiescence Sets us apart along this stony road?
Hand us down that slide guitar' Sing the crows and the bones 'Who will tell the mysteries here Who will sing the ashes home?'
There's a heart of stone in the history here We do not care for the suffering soul '& what has become of the beautiful boy The gifted boy from years ago?' He left us here when he'd lived too long & all I can offer is this inadequate song
On the crow road I can hear the bottleneck slide On the black crow road Drifting down the darkening sky Drifting down the sheltering sky
