Midnight Oil in the Garden of Good and Evil

"I'm on the way to Evergreen University now with a .44 Magnum. I am gonna execute as many people on that campus as I can get ahold of…You communist, scumbag town. I'm going to murder as many people on that campus as I can.” Thus read the transcript of the phone call that resulted in the indefinite shutdown of my workplace. A few hours later, I texted my sister a photo of the Canadian flag wavering at border control with the words, “Guess where I am?”

“Wuss,” she responded.

I wrote back LOL but I was mad. The thing is, I am not afraid of America. I am just disgusted by it. The attack on the Portland Metro, 45s stance on Paris, that most recent bombing in Afghanistan, you name it, it’s vile. Sometimes you get so sad about things you just have to give yourself permission to do anything to cheer yourself up. This was a four star emergency, meaning it was immune to kitten memes, pints of ice cream, expensive haircuts and even massages. I looked online at local events. Nothing. Then I widened my search. I didn’t really think there was a band out there that would be special enough to lighten my mood, but my longstanding rock critic luck held. If there is a single band in existence whom you should go see on the day that the US literally declares war on planet earth, it is Midnight Oil. And they were playing a mere four hours away from me, in Vancouver B.C.

Last time we met, Midnight Oil and me, I was sitting on a log in a field smack dab in the middle of Germany, bleeding. It was at a festival in some random field there and they were headlining. I was on a story for Spin with the Pixies, and I’d just lost everything I owned – wallet, visa, car keys, rental car, you name it. Plus, and this was the kicker, I’d just started my period.

In retrospect it makes me laugh to think how downhearted I was at the moment. Remember how Bruce once sang, “One day we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny”? He was right about that, and a good thing, since that was often my mantra in those days. Eventually I pulled myself together, but the main thing I recall about sitting on that log was that, while I was freaking out inside, the song “Beds Are Burning” by Midnight Oil was being belted into the brightly lit sky, filling it up with that booming opening chord sequence – Bom Bom Bom -- and I thought the world was coming to an end. 

Of course it didn’t. It continued, as did I, and pretty soon I was happily on the bus with the Pixies and a tampon, making our way through Austria…but that’s a story for another day. Meanwhile, I told myself, whenever I hear Midnight Oil, for the rest of my life, I will think of this night in Germany, the worst night of my life. 

Flash forward some twenty odd years. Now we really are on the edge of history and the memory of that night no longer holds any terrors for me whatsoever. Far worse things have happened to me since. And say what you will about the awfulness of now, the advent of the internet has really made doing a rock ‘n roll runner – ‘going walkabout,’ they’d say in Australia -- a lot easier. After I decided I needed to flee America, it was the work of a few minutes to buy a concert ticket online, book into an AirBNB, buy a tank of gas and set off. 

Six hours later I was walking through the gorgeous vistas of Stanley Park on the edge of Boundary Bay, looking for the Malkin Bowl, an enclosure next to the Stanley Park Pavilion.

I sat on the veranda of this place and relaxed for the first time in days. Then I texted Isabelle. “I am sitting here in Vancouver having fish and chips and a gin and tonic awaiting Midnight Oil.”

Isabelle: “I am standing at the counter of my kitchen eating a Cost-Co chopped salad.” Sad faced emoji. That’s American life for you, I thought, meanly. 

Stanley Park Pavilion. Venue is out back.

Presently I went into the enclosure, and they didn’t even check my backpack or pat me down. It was an oddly balmy night, and the venue was enclosed by giant redwoods that seemed to have their tops blown off by lightening, just the kind of image I associate with Midnight Oil. It was crowded, but not uncomfortable, and I found a place to sit on the grass near one of the numerous pairs of greying men, all of whom offered me space on their ground sheets. (An observation: Midnight Oil seems to appeal to the kind of 40 or 50 year old man who wants to go see them with his best college buddy rather than his wife.)  And then the show began, and I was plunged into their whole deal again, and just in time, for there is no doubt that Midnight Oil have a number of songs that suit the situation we find ourselves in today. 

Now, you could look at that fact pessimistically, like, 20 years and nothing’s changed, or you could, as I chose to do last Friday, look on hearing them as a moment of relief and solidarity, as a closing of our ranks. Instead of saddening me, it reminded me of that sense, in 1991, that our tribe was in the ascendant, and we were about to throw down. We did throw down, and in some ways we won. Midnight Oil’s singer, Peter Garrett, for example, wound up as Australia’s Minister for the Environment and if that’s not winning, what is?

the river runs red

Hours earlier, back at the border control, the dopey homeland security guy had asked me what kind of music Midnight Oil played, and I drew a blank. Punk? New Wave? Classic Rock?  Australian Eco-warrior music? “They sing songs about climate change,” I finally said, only that isn’t exactly true: when Midnight Oil ruled the planet (headlining OVER David Bowie at that festival in Germany for instance) climate change hadn’t been invented. Nevertheless, they wrote songs about saving the rain forest and giving land back to indigenous peoples, and considering the environment and stopping planetary destruction. 

“There is enough,” they sang. They were like hippies…only not: their sound was a mixture of punk and new wave and roots rock, but with that special Australian thing thrown in that made it sound hard and shiny and brittle, like diamonds: like the chords had literally been mined out of the earth. They tapped their rhythms out on oil drums. The strummed their guitars like they’d been weaponized by a campfire. Their songs had aboriginal words in them, and place names, and people – Truganini, Warakurna, Warburton, Kosciusco – that were even more evocative of where they came from then the video images of blue sky and bright red desert that MTV made sure to show us: hot sun, dry brush, aridity, sweat. And all their music, I remembered as they played it for me, had that beautifully clean, stripped down guitar sound that Australian bands have: super resonant, presumably like the air there.

The minute a single one of those cold clean chords rang out it in the Vancouver night, it sent a chill through me, because I remembered how we used to say that it seemed like there were no bad bands in Australia, that they would hone their chops in the roadhouses of the outback ‘til they came over to America and killed it for us. 

still tall. still bald. still righteous.

You remember that? I sure do: the HooDoo Gurus, and You Am I, and the Saints. The Saints! And then there was the first big story for a national magazine that I ever wrote, which required a week on the road with INXS (wow, that was weird!) and walking in Golden Gate Park with the Celibate Rifles and one of them saying how happy he was to be smelling eucalyptus, so that I have always known what the smell of eucalyptus is, and oh, the Church! And the Go Betweens! And the TRIFFIDS! The majesty of those bands, it’s barely even speakable. Gold Afternoon Fix. Bye Bye Pride. Born Sandy Devotional. Bless all of them. Bless the Aussies, for being honest and staying true, for playing blistering, dense guitar and rock steady drums and those simple chord changes and the wide open vowels and the bell-like melodies and chiming harmonies of perfect voices and the manic stage presence and for tightening up every set to breaking point and just caring so goddamn much. 

And finally, for making me care so much again, to care enough to go to Vancouver…which frankly, on that particular evening, felt like escaping a penal colony for paradise.  Plus: begone was the spectre of the log in the German field – the spectre haunting Europe! -- replaced at long last by this happy, balmy night. O Canada! What can I say except, don’t ever change. It makes me want to give a toast; So:

To the bartender who lent me a charger. 

To the venue who didn’t search me.

To the 2 bald eagles who sat in the trees listening to the concert like they were in some goddamned Qantas commercial.

To the sun that didn’t go down.

To the jangling guitars.

To the treetops and the dusty earth, and the cleanly restrooms and the beer garden. To the girl who giggled with me in the ‘wash’ room over the idiocy of English toilet euphemisms:

(Me: ‘WASH room.”

Her: “BATH room”

Me: “REST room.”

Both of us, in unison: “LOOOOO. EWWWW!”)

To the Oilers, all of them, for their precise and beautiful harmonies on their songs, and because the sight of grown men throwing their heads back and opening their throats to the sky with absolute abandon never ceases to charm and  uplift me.

To the many, many men and women, safely pogoing and partying and singing “The Forgotten Years” in the pit, the first I’ve joined in many years. The hardest years, the wildest years, the desperate and divided years…these will not be forgotten years. Indeed they won’t.  And you know what else? One day we will look back, and even this will seem funny.

And finally, to Peter Garrett, for  still standing tall; for still being bald, for dancing like he does, for chiding the crowd, for mocking “the Dumpster” and reminding us that he is ‘an absolute zero’ the world over. And that the world is not, in fact, about to end, even in the face of its imminent total encirclement by the  gateless and destructive neoliberal grip of capitalism, the force that will in end probably destroy our planet. In 2009, Mark Fisher wrote, “Capitalism is what is left when all beliefs have collapsed and all that is left is the consumer spectator, trudging through the ruins.” But Midnight Oil’s show reminded me that all beliefs have not collapsed and that the ruins, such as they are, may have some pointy little edges left to them.

Oh and I wouldn’t call what we are doing “trudging” either. Yes, disaster is looming. The wreckage of our past is now lying at the feet of the angel of history and I am staring at it aghast. But…and this is what my past has given me, it is what bands like Midnight Oil do best, and it is why I will still drive 200 miles to participate in it…because the music sometimes stops the bleeding.

thanks Vancouver. Stay gold.