Oz Captain! My Captain!: An “Ode” to Midnight Oil &
An Interview with Midnight Oil’s Jim Moginie
From
the first rumblings of the opening riff--the brassy stomp of “Beds
Are Burning” (i.e., the now-famous duh, duh, du-u-uh!)--I
became stupid with goosebumps. My heart pounded like some long-extinct
herd. And for the first time in my rock-n-roll life, I felt my very
aliveness. That exhilaration. That sense of the possible that comes
from being completely and utterly in awe of something as simple
as guitar, bass, drum--and in this case, trombone--with fuck-you
vocals. Which, of course, is the hallmark of all great musical bombast:
it gets you high.
Essay & Interview by Matt Okie
Diesel and Dust Album Cover Photo Courtesy of www.midnightoil.com
Midnight Oil Band Photo Courtesy of www.midnightoil.com/Ken
Duncan
Jim Moginie Photo Courtesy of Sophie Howarth
Posted: September 19, 2008
1.
Five guys--a rock band--venture into the Central Australian outback...
Two years later, and some ten thousand-plus miles to the north and
east, an American kid ear-holes an incendiary, 4/4 sound that jolts
him something fierce. It’s a sound that, to him, points the
way to art not as high-fructose distraction, but as a tool for illumination,
engagement, and ultimately good.
2.
While “three chords and the truth”--U2-frontman Bono’s
lyrical term for protest rock--might not have sunk the Vietnam War
(Woodstock) or expunged African poverty (Live Aid, Live 8) or tempered
global warming (Live Earth), rock-n-roll does on occasion
sway hearts. Of course, when the music does move people, it usually
does so not in some bacchanal arena or amphitheater teeming
with noxious fumes and Neanderthal drunks, but in moments of solitude.
In a sub-compact on a lonely drive to work, the car stereo cranked.
In a one-room apartment on a friendless Friday night, headphones
blaring. This is when rock’s revelatory power reveals itself,
when guitar, bass, drum, and gutty tenor become like the voice of
God: a bluesy “burning bush” that inoculates the soul
against fascism--corporatism--Realpolitik--Orwell’s proverbial
“boot stamping on a human face--forever.”
I know because I owe my political education--my political coming-of-age,
if you will--to Aussie agitprop rockers, Midnight Oil.
My education began in 1988, in Louisiana, in a ninth grade history
class at Baton Rouge High School. It was mid-October, yet still
summer humid with short-sleeves all around. Just another U.S. high
school history classroom--green blackboard up front, red-white-and-blue
bunting up the wazoo, an American flag on a stick next to the sit-down!
stand-up! intercom, plus cardboard cut-outs of General Washington,
Honest Abe, Ronnie Reagan post-Bonzo and the Constitution
(sans Bill of Rights) push-pinned to bulletin boards. The room was
ubiquitous in almost every way, except for the location of the teacher’s
desk--that black sheet metal monstrosity--located in the extreme
back of the room, behind the thirty some-odd student desks, and
offered Mrs. B--- an almost panoptic vantage from which to spy on
students. Very Foucauldian, huh? Very authoritarian, yup? And very
un-Midnight Oil.
On that particular day, however, in the desk immediately to my
right, my friend Rob Israel--seemingly in a trance--sat hunched
over his Walkman.
I pointed to his cassette-player, a sort of shorthand for “Who
ya listening to?”
“Midnight Oil!” Rob said. Only he didn’t just
say it, more like he bellowed it, in this real crazy extra loud
headphone-deaf voice.
A few kids snickered.
“So-o-o good!” boomed Rob.
Behind me, this mulleted rocker-jock kid (Clint? Cody? Clydell?)
snorted derisively. Picking a strand of dog hair off the collar
of his Motley Crüe “Shout at the Devil” T-shirt,
Clint-Cody-Clydell went: “Midnight Oil--isn’t that the
band with the fruity bald singer? I’ve seen their video. Dude’s
nuts.”
He was referring, of course, to Peter Garrett, Midnight Oil’s
tall, gangly, shaven-domed frontman--a surf-head ex-lawyer from
Sydney who half-chanted, half-growled his band’s defiant lyrics,
flaunted free-form, Iggy Pop-style dance moves, championed Greenpeace,
nuclear disarmament, and the rights of Australia’s Indigenous
people--a man who during hair metal’s cock-flopping, T-and-A,
1980s-heyday must’ve appeared as the rock-n-roll Antichrist
to black T-shirted MTV aficionados from South Louisiana to New South
Wales.
Rob fluttered his hand dismissively at Clint-Cody-Clydell, then
eyed me. “I’ll make you a tape!”
More snickering.
From the back of the room: the sharp smack of Mrs. B---’s
heel against the tile floor, the signal that “learning”
(a.k.a., note-taking) was about to begin.
“Pipe down!” she said.
3.
The next day in history class--the same class in which four months
later, I would be forced to watch the swearing-in of Bush 41 followed
by Reagan’s farewell as he saluted the nation and whirled
off in the Marine One “bat-copter” (my teacher Mrs.
B---with damp, mascara-smudged eyes)--my friend Rob Israel gave
me a little Maxell cassette dub of Midnight Oil’s Diesel
And Dust.
I couldn’t wait; the rest of the day, which included Algebra,
Biology, and German--Ach nein!--followed by a yellow bus
ride home in the shadow of the Mississippi River, was excruciating.
(If only we could preserve some of that youthful ardor and excitement,
you know, reduce it down to pill-form, save it for some darkly adult
day in the future when our hopes have abandoned us and the cubicle
has become like Folsom Prison without the Johnny Cash.)
But then, finally, there I was--alone in my middle-class bedroom--just
me, my eleventh-birthday-gift-from-my-folks Sears stereo, and a
lo-fi copy of Diesel And Dust. I popped the tape in the
deck, pressed play, and sprawled on my unmade bed.
From the first rumblings of the opening riff--the brassy stomp
of “Beds Are Burning” (i.e., the now-famous duh,
duh, du-u-uh!)--I became stupid with goosebumps. My heart pounded
like some long-extinct herd. And for the first time in my rock-n-roll
life, I felt my very aliveness. That exhilaration. That sense of
the possible that comes from being completely and utterly in awe
of something as simple as guitar, bass, drum--and in this case,
trombone--with fuck-you vocals. Which, of course, is the hallmark
of all great musical bombast: it gets you high.
Sure, I’d heard the song “Beds Are Burning” before,
but I’d never really heard it. Either I’d caught
it on the FM dial, between the blather of Top-Forty deejays and
radio ads for dollar-ninety-nine strip club steak lunches, or I’d
caught it on MTV, between music videos for bands whose lyricists
rhymed “squeeze” with “tease.” This time
was different, however, because minus all the media hoopla, Midnight
Oil was, at long last, audible. And I was stunned. Peter
Garrett’s street-preacher vocal delivery; Rob Hirst’s
athletic, quasi-punk beats; Peter Gifford’s--and later Bones
Hillman’s--sturdy grooves; Martin Rotsey’s heavy riffage;
and Jim Moginie’s maestro guitar and keyboard arrangements
(those soaring choruses!).
Five guys--a rock band--venture into the Central Australian outback,
and I am reborn as a staunch leftist. A progressive. A dyed-in-the-dick
Democrat. A lover of Steinbeck, Vonnegut, O’Brien, Chomsky,
and Zinn. A damn, dirty “libruhl.” Me, a kid
largely raised south of the Mason-Dixon line by parents who gleefully
punched ballots for Reagan (twice), Bush 41 (twice), Bob Dole, Bush
43 (twice), and will, no doubt, this fall “touch-screen”
for John McCain.
So what happened to me? The Oils happened.
Garrett belted lyrics like: “This land must change, or land
must burn.” Then on a high-school trip to London, I buy a
Blue Sky Mining cassette at the Tower Records in Trafalgar
Square. Then via MTV News, I catch clips of the band’s legendary
May 1990 Exxon Valdez flatbed-truck protest in Midtown--their
amps cranked to “11.” As a result, I purchase the entire
Midnight Oil back-catalog (the “blue album,” Head
Injuries, Bird Noises, Place Without A Postcard, 10 9 8…,
Red Sails In The Sunset, Species Deceases, even a few bootlegs).
Then I experience The Oils live in Atlanta (July 1990) and in St.
Louis (September 1993). At the ’93 St. Louis show, my girlfriend
and I use “Outbreak of Love” CD singles--the designated
backstage pass to the after-show autograph session--to meet the
band. I use my time to ask Peter Garrett about the town of Warburton,
Western Australia--Garrett declares it an unrivaled place to sleep
under the stars. I use my time to ask Peter Garrett about the town
of Warburton, Victoria --Garrett declares it an unrivaled place
to sleep under the stars. I also ask Jim Moginie if there’s
any validity to the 1990 Rolling Stone article which suggests
Garrett might someday exit the band to dedicate himself more fully
to politics and activism--Moginie thinks “probably not.”
(Ah, irony.) Three years later, I’m watching Late Show
when David Letterman--apparently under the impression that Midnight
Oil is comprised of Native Australians and not European-Australians--refers
(rather racistly, I might add) to his evening’s musical guests
as “bushmen.” Then I experience The Oils in San Francisco
in October 1996 at the legendary Fillmore Theater--an intimate venue
made famous a quarter-century earlier by Creedence Clearwater Revival
and The Dead. It’s the greatest rock show of my life; I attend
alone, drain beaucoup pale ales, dance my ass off, and witness an
incendiary rendition of The Oils’s 1981 classic “Written
In The Heart.” Later, I buy The Real Thing and Redneck
Wonderland from a Net-based Aussie music retailer. Even later,
I’m bummed to find there’s no Austin, Dallas, or Houston
date for the U.S. leg of the band’s 2001 tour. (I will always
regret not road-trippin’ to Louisiana for the New Orleans
date.) And I am saddened when I awaken on Tuesday, December 3, 2002
to read on the CNN ticker: Peter Garrett quits Midnight Oil. It’s
unwanted news, like learning that a dear friend has passed.
So, like I wrote, The Oils happened to me.
And because of them--I write a hokey, albeit well-intentioned 11th
grade term paper about the plight of Indigenous people in Australia.
I travel to a reservation near Canyon de Chelly in Northern Arizona
to help herd and vaccinate sheep and protest destructive mining
practices on Navajo and Hopi lands. I become a journalist and try
my hand at good, old-fashioned, all-American, Upton Sinclair-style
muckraking. I write a lefty rock-n-roll novel (currently under consideration
at a small, indie press in Northern California). I sing “Stars
of Warburton” to my infant son Keegan as a nightly lullaby
for the first fifteen months of his life. I crank The Oils’s
track “Progress” on the drive over to the south Phoenix
neighborhood I’ve been assigned to canvass on behalf of Democratic
Presidential Candidate Barack Obama. True story: the instant I step
from my Japanese car, my clipboard in hand, a Confederate-flag-bandannaed
man--out walking his brutish pit bull--passes me on the sidewalk.
I steel myself, quietly recite the chorus to “Progress,”
and go door-to-door anyway.
Five guys--a rock band--venture into the Central Australian outback,
and I’m forever grateful.
4.
Matt Okie: In the song “Beds Are
Burning,” which peaked at #17 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100
chart in 1988, Midnight Oil argues that indigenous lands should
be ceded to Australia’s aboriginal citizens. In fact, Peter
Garrett sings: “It belongs to them/Let’s give it back.”
How incendiary a statement was it in the late 1980s--during the
peak of Thatcherism and Reaganism--for five white Australians to
declare their political support for Indigenous Australians?
Jim Moginie: Heartfelt more than incendiary. There
was a sense of hopelessness about the issue at the time. It felt
like screaming into a fog of indifference. When the album was ready
to be released, we were prepared to be shouted down by every closet
racist in the country. The issue of Aboriginal dispossession had
been effectively ignored up to that point. Aboriginals only got
the vote in the 1960s and a lot of the information about stolen
children hadn’t yet come to light. The ray of hope that sparked
us into action was the handing back of Uluru (Ayer’s Rock)
by the Labor government to the Mutijulu people, the traditional
owners, who then asked us to write a song for the film that was
being made about it. We wrote “Beds Are Burning,” “The
Dead Heart,” and a track called “We Shall Not Be Released.”
They chose “Dead Heart.” They invited us to play there,
and then a tour of the Western desert and the Top End was added.
We observed as young, white Australians the conditions out there,
the poverty, the petrol sniffing, the health problems, the art,
the deep culture, the dispossession, the respect the concept of
family has, the great sense of humour and strength of the people,
the natural beauty, all mixed up into a radicalizing experience.
We wrote about our impressions on the Diesel record, which came
out the next year. There was a definite snowball effect.
MO: I’ve read that the “chunka-chunka”
“Beds Are Burning” guitar riff (that in some ways hearkens
back to vintage Johnny Cash, i.e., “Folsom Prison Blues”)
is meant to emulate the sounds of vehicular travel across Western
Australia. Did you consciously set out to imitate the rhythms of
a road trip when you composed the music, or is this simply one of
those mythic stories that gets tagged to piece of great pop music
after the fact?
JM: Probably.
Having said that, there was a desire for simplicity and focus in
the camp at the time. [Of] the previous two records we had made,
we felt that Red Sails in the Sunset was perhaps a psychedelic
unfocused piece of work, and Species Deceases, a cyclonic
pub-rock-thrash--even though we loved them both. We were always
rebelling against our previous records. I think on this one simplicity
was the key.
There was a sixth sense that the music somehow fitted the landscape,
the Gunbarrel Highway was surveyed with a .303 rifle, dead straight
for hundreds of miles of corrugated, red-dirt road. Drive for hundreds
of miles on roads like that, and you do get hypnotized. Repetitive
music works better in cars over long distances. Like a good car
mix-tape, it makes the drive better. ZZ Top would work better than
say Duran Duran, to use 1980s examples. Australians are usually
big travelers because of the large distances between cities.
Rob [Hirst, Midnight Oil’s drummer] became very interested
in the idea of a driving beat. We’d used drum machines a bit
in the past. He’d always said in jest, “Machines play
so relaxed” (which Kraftwerk said anyway). But that feel,
played on the drums combined with the acoustic guitars (on which
the songs were written, on verandahs and around campfires) sounded
fresh, so we went with it.
MO: I’ve long considered “Warakurna”
perhaps the most beautiful and underrated track on Diesel and
Dust. To my mind anyway, the song mostly chronicles the poverty
and suffering of Indigenous Australians, then closes with a rather
pissed-off call for official political action to alleviate the situation
(see the lyric: “This land must change, or land must burn”).
If you would, please recount the 1986 Blackfella/Whitefella tour
experiences that led you to write “Warakurna.” Also,
for us non-Aussies, could you explain the lyric: “Not since
Lassiter was here/Black man’s got a lot to fear”?
JM: Warakurna was a blast. It’s close to
the WA [Western Australia] border and we drove there after a gig
at Docker River. The first thing you see coming in to the town is
a piece of space satellite junk that had fallen to earth like something
out of Star Wars. Then a hand-painted sign saying “Strict
Rules.” Then, a mountain of derelict car bodies. All set against
the most beautiful ochre/purple coloured hills you could imagine
that felt so weathered and ancient.
It was the second gig of the tour, and was scheduled just the day
before. Most of the people had left town for a football match in
Yuendumu, but we played anyway on the school verandah. A camel stormed
the stage. We camped on a riverbed and heard stories about how the
people there had been handed bread with poison on it by the whitefellas.
We were getting to know the guys in the Warumpi Band. It was the
first time I had heard the term “Europeans” used to
describe white people, of which I was one. And I believed it. Because
out on that land, with their deep culture and history, it really
felt like a country within another country, but somehow swept under
the carpet.
Harold Lasseter was a whitefella looking for gold. He claimed the
Western Desert contained a gold reef of infinite wealth. In the
1930s, he headed out there to find it, but was deep-sixed by the
harshness of the environment. He died out there looking. It was
a Raiders of The Lost Ark kind of deal, and some people
still reckon Lasseter’s reef exists.
The line simply says hypothetically that if he was right, Lasseter
posed a threat in terms of: more whites/more disease and alcohol/more
pressure to get off their land because of how valuable the ground
would be to white people. But back in the 1980s, and [even] now,
the threats to Aboriginal people are political in nature: money
for education, housing and health still come from our Washington,
namely Canberra.
MO: What effect, if any, do you think Midnight Oil’s
1986 Blackfella/Whitefella tour with The Warumpi Band (and the accompanying
ABC documentary) have on the psychology of Australia as a whole?
If my understanding is correct, it was--and still probably is--unheard
of for a white rock band to pair with a black rock band for a tour
of the aboriginal settlements that populate the interior of the
country: the Outback. Do you think the tour was, in effect, one
of the many “dominoes” that needed to fall in order
to eventually push the Australian government (in the form of Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd) to apologize for the atrocities committed against
the Aboriginal people?
JM: It’s hard to say what effect it had.
It certainly affected us. In my life, there feels like a before
and after the tour, like life was broken into two segments.
The record did unbelievably well, which is still surprising to me.
It was given a green light all around the globe, like the keys to
a city. It surprises me now that a record by a bunch of whitefellas
from Sydney about the problems of indigenous people in Australia
could be a hit worldwide. That isn’t supposed to happen. But
it turned out that people got it, maybe it was the poetry of the
landscape in the videos we did, the focus of the sound of the record
producer Warne Livesey brought to it, the fact “Beds”
was on it, or that we meant what we said, along with the fact we
could cut it live and had toured constantly for years before it
got on MTV.
In terms of awareness, the Oils had good radar for an issue. Not
in a cynical way, but in the way that at certain times in history,
people invent the same thing at the same time in different countries,
like Newton and Leibniz invented the calculus. Maybe there’s
a word for it, some things are just “in the water.”
We always had good instincts that way. Pete especially. I like to
think we were part of the debate, perhaps we made people think about
something they hadn’t thought about before and dance at the
same time.
MO: In a 1991 speech, ex-California governor and one-time
U.S. presidential candidate Jerry Brown (who was famously name-checked
and labeled a “Zen Fascist” in The Dead Kennedy’s
song “California Über Alles”) seemed to plagiarize
the Diesel and Dust track “The Dead Heart”
in a speech when he said: “We carry in our hearts the true
country / And that cannot be stolen.” What was your reaction
to having the band’s ideas co-opted by a U.S. politician?
JM: No feelings at all really. I mean, where is
he now?
I think songs can be twisted by anyone at anytime for their own
purposes, or quoted out of context. How many times have we heard
songs sold to multinationals to sell products?
MO: The Oils have always seemed to have a love-hate relationship
with the United States. (And, in my opinion, rightly so.) For example,
the Diesel and Dust track “Sell My Soul” contains
the lyric: “America’s great now / If you don’t
talk back.” The implication is, of course, that the U.S. government
likes its allies servile. Is this the message then of “Sell
My Soul”--that Australians should fight to preserve those
aspects of their culture that have yet to fall under the influence
of the American Empire? Also, in the lyric “I don’t
wanna sell my soul to him,” who or what is the metaphorical
him? Is it the United States as “devil”?
JM: In the early days of the band, there was that
young man’s sense of “kicking against the pricks,”
which sometimes is aimed at no one in particular, or everyone at
the same time. Later on, Pete especially became much more about
engagement...putting together two opposites at a conference table
to hammer out a result, which is more constructive than “us
vs. them.” That’s the politics of adulthood.
In terms of trade, Australia has always had an uphill battle because
of our distance from the big market places of the world. We used
to be part of the EU, but got kicked out of that when the walls
went up there. The alliance with the U.S. has become critical to
our survival.
The song deals with that. Alison Anderson who worked at Papunya
council says, “Aboriginal people won’t sell out for
a dollar’” in the doco [i.e., documentary] on the DVD,
and we could all learn from that.
I think we ended up loving America, but the first times we played
there we were kind of blown out of the water by the size of it,
the politics of Reagan and the nuclear stuff, and the thirty different
types of milk in the supermarket aisle. In Australia, you’d
get just one if you were lucky.
MO: In my opinion, Diesel and Dust is an absolute
classic rock album; it’s right up there with Exile On
Main St., Green River, Who’s Next,
London Calling, The Joshua Tree, etc. Was there
ever a moment during the recording of Diesel and Dust with
producer Warne Livesey where you and/or the other band members were
like, “Whoa!”? Was there ever a recognition that the
recording sessions were birthing something grand and gorgeous that
would make the band an international phenomenon?
JM: No, not really. We recorded in a very small
studio on the north side of Sydney Harbour. It was like an office.
It felt like office hours. I know we spent a hell of a lot of time
dissecting the songs, rearranging them and ejecting them, playing
them live and getting them right. The lyrics were about something,
not faux-Americana or getting pissed. It was a strong and focused
record. Warne, our producer who walked in cold, probably had a better
view of it than we did. He said it was full of singles when he heard
the demos. We thought he was joking, but he was right.
It did connect, it just shows you that when you have something to
say, give it a good beat, concentrate on melody and arrangements,
it can go places. I still believe that, even though the band had
set itself up around the world with 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
and previous albums and tours, and we had something to prove, the
subject matter and the conviction behind it allowed it rites of
passage onto the world’s stage. Some people I know say its
success was more about the karma of standing up for people who are
dispossessed than the songs themselves.
But the songs were strong, and the album can just be listened to
on that level.
Let the historians decide.
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