Chuck’s Karked it. (from our music critic Quentin Cockburn)

Chuck walked the walk.

I HATE Don Maclean.

He’s probably a nice bloke, but if you were a kid growing up in the seventies, you were destined to hear Don Maclean’s ‘Bye bye Miss American Pie’, ad nauseum. Got to the stage it was a bit of toss-up to whom I hated the most. Andrew effing Lloyd Webber, or that smarmy saccharine Yank, who banged on about ‘chevy’s, levy’s and the day the music died’. He was wrong. Dead wrong. The music died yesterday, bout 2 in the morning. That’s when Chuck karked it. He was at home, in Missouri, and unlike his mates on the other used of the river he died of natural causes.

That’s a feat worth celebrating in itself.

Well he’s dead. This is where chronologists will say “ze music hat gefallen am dieses uhr”. And a straight line, as exact as the one that marked the end of the dinosaur era, will run from one end of the page to the other.

The Who

Can I add for added emphasis: Carole King. HATED her also. “Tapestry” was the most boring album of all time. As bad, as Cat Stevens. Living rooms right across the suburbs were doomed to the wailing of Stevens and King as they gouged pimply adenoidal introspection for all it was worth. A loathsome era of schlock rock, cock rock and muzak. Thank god Punk put it to death. Until music was taken over by the mega corporates to be syndicated and marketed as the pure shit the public is fed on their i-pads and i-phones. There was a glimmer of hope before the onset of disco, and there are two great live albums of the early 70’s. One, Chuck Berry’s ‘Live in London’, which contained that gem of word association; ‘My ding a ling’, and the other, possibly the greatest rock album ever, The Who’s ‘Live at Leeds’.

You can take your levies, your pissy little teenage crushes and you’re luke-warm over saccharine ‘Tea for the Tiller Man” and thrown them where they belong. The Who rocked, and Chuck Berry proved he was a God. Simple, unpretentious grinding rock, and if ever there an anthem that stood the test of time, it was “Johnny B Goode”.

Johnny captured the imagination of not just one, but two and three generations until stifled by the metric certainty of Naplan and Atar. Johnny spoke the truth. That it was enough to learn to do something really well. And do it with passion. Johnny had a passion for guitar.
Plain and simple.

And though, “ he never learnt to read or write a book so well, he could play his guitar just like a ringing a bell”.

But, (dear reader) let’s not forget Little Richard, who pioneered ‘shoe piano’.

So for all you defectives out there, for all you curriculum managers, education bureaucrats, and all you snotty, snivelling anglican public school music teachers and school orchestra conductors who still have a penchant for Lloyd effing Webber and Benjamin effin Britten, Chuck Nailed, it. Play with passion. Play your life with passion. Grind those hips in a free expression of joy, enthusiasm and pure unadulterated human sexuality. Onya Chuck!

Learn an instrument. If you can’t play, write poetry, scribble, and talk to people. That’s living! We’ve learnt a lot from you Chuck, and now you’re dead we only have Donald Trump to make us laugh. And that’s a very poor return.