for granted

reintroducing G.W. McLennan

Grant McLennan, the lost pole of the first distance his art pop group the Go-Betweens ever traversed (across a classroom), has been a ghost for almost as long as I’ve known he exists. I’ve written here before about the discovery, falling in love with a band I’m still too in love with, too moved by, not to call my favorite. How their caption in a hit-or-miss record guide piqued my curiosity — if music doesn’t find you itself, you rely on eye-seizing covers, fantastic band names or album titles, effusive reviews, “yes! YES!” interviews, trusted connections, spellbound testimonies, and your own sense of what makes sense — and how it took an obituary to turn that curiosity into an imperative.

The guide’s description had alerted me to a dynamic that means a lot to me — a rock ‘n’ roll romance, not of the valentine kind (though the group paved lovers lanes in and out of their bubble), but that special, definition-resistant bond of two songwriters who have, in one way or another, learned they belong together. Often it arrives in a single, even fleeting instant. Not only it not necessarily apt to occur when instruments are in hand, or harmonies crowd a mic. It’s often a glance and a sentence, a spark off a room-temperature conversation that signals the miracle: my God, there you are. And there I am, in you. We don’t have to learn a new language; its fluent echoes are loud and clear.

In case you still don’t know about the Go-Betweens, I’ll start sketching. The towering ambition kiln Robert Forster, a restless Brisbanite, had little to his name as he stopped being a teenager, but an electric guitar counted among the artifacts. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, he knew he and rock ‘n’ roll (or his own bookish “pop” conception of same) were made for each other. But he couldn’t decide if he’d rather be in a teenbeat outfit in 1966 LA or in NYC with his new heroes at CBGB. An expressway to understanding Forster is recognizing that these were not, for him, warring impulses. He also knew he could work in his hefty library load, and weave in a few rays from his part of the globe.

Forster was one of those special people who was always going to be seven steps ahead of everyone around him, invisible though the gap might be for many. Part of knowing you’re a born creative is knowing that this identity will never be validated by anybody who isn’t already at your advanced station. It does get lonely, though, particularly in a town full of bands full of blokes quite uninterested in asserting themselves artistically or intellectually. Forster instinctively understood that his surest bet for a counterpart would not appear in the obvious place. And though he had to pull a few maneuvers to make it official, Grant entered Robert’s life without him looking, on some cosmic gust.

I’ve conversed or corresponded with Forster numerous times. While history suggests there were many Forsters I’ve yet to meet (and might not have got on very easily with), I can trace the line between the impossibly gracious elder statesman and the livewire who started all those fires. But Grant, vivid on the page as on record or in interviews, was only ever a legend to me. Accordingly, the shot is blurrier. This razor-sharp wit is the balladeer unafraid of sincerity’s furthest frontiers. This shy, brooding introvert is the band’s most open pair of arms. A sex symbol who put the “hopeless” in romantic, a sure shot hitmaker who had no wallet and no credit card — je est un autre, and all that.

Forster and McLennan were a little better at doing what the other could than Lennon and McCartney. Anyone who claims their voices are similar hasn’t put the time in, but each had a way with melody and discord, simplicity and complexity, received form and smashed form. If the similarity wasn’t as vital as the contrast, the bond wouldn’t have been what it was. But the balance can be uneasy — the distress at first finding your co-captain charting different courses along the same journey can feel like a bizarre form of betrayal. Forster spent as much time perplexed by, or even just missing, his friend as knowing him better than anyone, or using music as an excuse to connect, and invent.

Though he loved to drink and gab, Grant’s resting state was deeply vulnerable. All the songs that whisked his listeners back to the melancholy and “silent times in thought” of his earliest years so reliably communicate a deep wound, one whose origins might lie in his father’s death when he was just four. The weight of a sorrow nestled under his jacket like a newborn animal is typically counterbalanced by a wry or rueful tone. But Grant cared a great deal more about conveying the beauty of a thing than he did about sharpening or cooling it down. His lyrics evolved from the poetry he inevitably wrote — a blend of styles, romantic and ironic by unexpected turns, wistful as a rule.

Like all artists, all people, the Go-Betweens at first came into their own, together and apart, by acting like the figures they admired — New Wave film directors, New Wave pop stars. Grant was never as ravenous for success as Forster, but as he took solace in films and books, he knew he would somehow make his living there. Cinematic auteur and poet-in-poverty careers were entertained as one would masters degrees — which is the more pragmatic choice? The short story is that Grant’s age (too young) provided an unexpected gap before film school, and in the window, Forster convinced Grant to join his band, then helped him with the first step: teaching him to play an instrument.

Forster can thus claim authorial credit on Grant McLennan’s career as a pop star. Yet as he’s acknowledged many times, he couldn’t have conceived what he was helping to unleash. While the college-paper film review and fascinating poems in Volume 1 of G Stands for Go-Betweens abound with promise and sound some like the man we know, it was the process of adapting his communicative mechanism to the wordless language of music by which Grant’s expressive palette bloomed. Only music could truly convey the sheer ardor for the elements shot through his poetry (“swift pearls of rain sting as steam gathers around you like ice”) — reflected in Forster’s “striped sunlight” visions.

If we accept the guitar, which has a more limited range and requires greater force and strain than the diagrammatic piano, as the building block of rock music, then the bass is even more elemental. You typically play one note at a time, and adhere to the secret shapes that give your guitar its voice. Be it electric or acoustic, it’s the most ungainly-sounding rock instrument on its own, and the one whose removal from the blend kills the balance quickest. In those old days, it suited Grant perfectly. He played ballast so well to his camera-hungry partner not so much because he was less comfortable with attention (in fact, he craved it too), but because he saw the power and value of “artful, reserved second banana” types, and in a pop band you pick your type. Yet Grant could also wrestle his bass into a weapon, and he quickly spotted the sparkle of the treasure trove of luminescent melodies inside it — at one note at a time, the bass is all melody.

“There was melody, there was harmony, there was sweet Cherie, but it was melody he loved most of all,” Forster nails in “It Ain’t Easy” — the lynchpin of The Evangelist, the first post-Go-Betweens record. (With its rescued McLennan music from the never-to-be-heard-on-earth tenth album, it goes between the sound of the late group and a solo style which had closed its distance from his partner.) Grant was no mere bassist; from dizzying counterpoint to judicious space, his fluency began to exceed the scope of his instrument, to where by 1984 he needed two extra strings. But he had too much to say — and sing — to take second billing. McLennan the musician hadn’t existed when he first met Forster; McLennan the genius did. Soon enough, the musician was a genius.

You love the rough first edition of Grant the singer-songwriter the same way you love the refined one. His voice was the group’s most welcoming sonic signature (Robert’s is enticing); it’s easier on the dynamics and sly theatrics of his wily counterpart, although Grant is better at hitting the notes. But it has an earnestness that enhances its natural warmth and sweet, thinned-out timbre, an earnestness it doesn’t take long to notice is completely unfeigned, even through the irony. In Smudge’s “I Don’t Want to Be Grant McLennan”, cute proof of the Go-Betweens’ underground legend, the Robert-idolizing upstarts’ big dart is “I didn’t know a person could show off this much emotion”. I offer a correction: you didn’t know a person could show off this much emotion without also injuring their sense of humor, their poetic prowess, their uncanny sense of composure.

The howl of pain in Grant’s work before Before Hollywood, the band’s breakthrough, is rattling but not scary — just honest, and so sad. That howl would reemerge, when the band variegated a revitalized affection for pop with exorcistic exercises like “Someone Else’s Wife”: “there’s a fine line between love and despair.” Grant was that line, and his sense of loss carried a bitterness as acrid as anyone’s. If it spilled out, you had to steer clear, for both of your sakes. But people cherished Grant for his wit, the twinkle in his lovely eyes, the courtliness in his modernity-bucking manner, that tender voice, and a massive, unquiet heart this all reflected. Oh, and for the role he was born to play: the brightest beam in the striped sunlight sound. You see, melody loved G.W. right back.

Forster has made much of his “pure pop” early music — “Lee Remick” and all that, ba ba ba ba ba — before he tumbled into a post-punk thicket and kept some of the burrs in his wardrobe. But the switchblade the less comely, rather better “Karen” flashes is on the tip of his cheek-concealed tongue on the A-side. Contrariwise, Grant’s scrappy Send Me a Lullaby tracks are absolutely serious: the promise or threat of love, not even a lost or found love, amplified into life-or-death. McLennan shapes up his voice and his method nearly overnight on record — all of a sudden it’s 1982, his singing is confident and tempered, its brutality under control (“Hammer the Hammer”), a lack of restraint totally reversed. And in a sound that’s always mixed a little cane sugar into its broken glass, McLennan’s melodies start leaping out and up, so far they could kiss the moon.

The famous breakthrough, so well-traveled Bono is a fan, is “Cattle and Cane”. A case can be made for it as the definitive Go-Betweens track (though, given their two heads, the designation is impolitic). Lindy Morrison wasn’t too fond of holding back, but the intricacy of her drum parts, designed to accommodate outsider-artist songwriters, was never on better or more understated display than doubling as the railway tick through “Cane”’s evocative field scenes and 11/4,-sort-of meter. Robert’s ethereal guitar carries a similar message — the rest of the trio supporting their stalwart bassist — and his “a reply” spoken-word section is a wholly unique brand of climactic. You’ve never heard anything quite like this, and you’ve never heard anything quite like Grant: his poetry, his pain, his melodies, his memories. God, his presence — so intense, yet so delicate.

The best iteration of the group had two more members, and held together for just one LP, a great one the quintet can’t agree is great. Still, the Go-Betweens would never be as unified as they were on Before Hollywood again. They made cohesive albums (Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express, 16 Lovers Lane, Oceans Apart), but on Hollywood the core trio, the “two wimps and a witch”, sound like they all share a life-sustaining vine. Morrison and McLennan had never quite seen eye to eye anyway — in case you didn’t know, she and Forster were a couple, meaning Forster had two aspiring soul mates in his art project’s ranks. Their tension and their tenderness, not to mention their wild ambition, kept them in a ready, steady flux, barreling in one direction: forward, now.

I happen to think few albums by anyone are as stellar as the follow-up, Spring Hill Fair, the “difficult third” one. But it’s also something of an exquisite corpse, partly from an undesirable production situation, and partly because its two voices are practicing self-definition against one another, Grant now secure at Robert’s level. With its eiderdown approach, gimlet POV, deference to classic pop tricks, and ultimate message (men are mostly terrible, but true love can still elude their cruelty), Robert couldn’t have written “Bachelor Kisses”, any more than Grant could’ve written “Draining the Pool for You”. G.W. always had a gleam and a tear in his eye: that’s the formula, whatever the context. These are the first pink glimmers of a poet drawn to a pop unmitigated by the art part.

We hear, through his most soulfully beautiful songs — “Apology Accepted”, unable to break from a hanging-tension IV to a liberating V, or “Bye Bye Pride”, an airtight case for the oboe as rock instrument, or “The Devil’s Eye”, which everyone should play for their lover before they board a plane alone — his somehow-concordant contradictory traits elevating each other. A courtly sincerity fit the reverence he felt for melody, the same reverence that kept him reaching as far down that honey well as he could fit his arm, while grit and dissonance disappeared from his music. He favored easy, tidy pop structures in which he could just feel, unbound, but never forgot he invited you along. His humor and intelligence let you trust him on the journey deep into naked emotion. He plucked his melodies like shells off blue-sky beaches, finding joy and love in each.

It was the Apartments’ Peter Walsh who got me thinking, as I prodded him about his recent “Death Would Be My Best Career Move” — few songwriters reckon with death as profoundly as Peter, which isn’t quite the same as getting the better of it — that we live in a world where a disquieting majority are unaware of Grant’s achievements. The outrage was always justified, that someone who wrote pop songs so perfect should fail to light the public’s match. But punk was for the theorists and pop was for the heroes, and the Go-Betweens postdated the era of entry-level pop heroes. Grant was so down to earth for someone whose charm was said to be otherworldly: a shooting star, not a superstar. Even punk broke in ‘91, but they couldn’t sell the world on G.W. McLennan.

The group famously returned* from bleak 1980s London, where they’d paid their dues, to their Australian homeland right before their most celebrated album, 16 Lovers Lane, their bright-eyed exodus having turned into a weary-eyed victory. With white beaches and vast azure skies, the environment had an effect on the Go-Betweens’ most radiant release to date — literally solar-powered, in a sense. And let’s make no bones about it: though the two writers’ songs had never talked to each other as volubly as these, each album would tend to find the pair in separate moods. One would drive the central feel; the other would color, or complicate, the margins. It was a crucial part of their magic.

Such was the case with LP #6. A vibrant culmination of the pop he’d been inching ever closer to, Grant shines incandescently throughout 16 Lovers Lane. He’s content in love, with enchanting multi-instrumentalist Amanda Brown, for the only time in life and on record. “Lucky in love, that’s how life ends,” he’d once ambivalently sung — expecting rain, but also that no finished kiss would be his last. His partner’s songs are downbeat and elegiac, if hopeful. The complementary tones almost reflected how each felt about the latest Go-Betweens album. There was a sheen here — expert and atmospheric, not arbitrary and avaricious like on Spring Hill Fair — of which Robert felt a bit suspicious.

The Go-Betweens’ breakup was sudden and dramatic. Forster and McLennan held on to their friendship till the end, but the reason bands are made for twentysomethings is that love takes even harder commitment. Grant, at least, had managed to combine the two at this point. But Robert, long split from Lindy, was tiring of the status quo. They privately agreed to dissolve the group. In a miscalculation no party may ever be able to explain, the two seem to have expected their bandmates would readily accept this. In an instant, Grant found the musician who’d helped fully open his heart throughout 16 Lovers Lane fleeing their home, never to return. This wound would never entirely heal.

Yet the loss seems to have, at least at first, compelled a unique burst of action. Grant was a professional musician, with a professional’s platform. And though the efforts to break through with 16 Lovers Lane had been unambiguously unsuccessful, they’d still offered a taste of the possibilities. Grant’s lyrics were surreal and devotedly poetic, but also quite playful, and his voice was so naturally friendly. His longtime partner started his solo career with predictable eccentricity, issuing Danger in the Past, a timeless alt-folk masterpiece: chiaroscuro against a mountainside, ghost guitars in its caverns. But Grant wondered if conformity even required compromise, the way he wrote pop songs.

JACKALS! readers know that this writer is no skeptic of big, juicy radio candy. It’s part of why Spring Hill Fair persuaded me at first brush, though Fair is a long way from, say, Kylie Minogue. So is Watershed, McLennan’s Dave Dobbyn-produced debut, an album my longtime old flame and I adored more than anyone else I’ll ever meet. But when it comes to the massive, gated machine beat and unrelenting synthesizer pulse of “When Word Gets Around”, it’s not hard to understand why a number of fans were thrown by Grant’s opening bow. As arena-rock goes, it’s a little ersatz, yet subversive it’s not. It’s the kind of thing you turn all the way up hurtling down a road toward a sunrise. Grant is in that car, doing well over 90 miles an hour, his faith in the future untarnished gold.

It’s a strange but true tale: Watershed really was my gateway to the Go-Betweens. I had to catch up to their brilliance, but I’d come to love their melodies most of all. The only record on which a Go-Between hits you repeatedly over the head with his melodies is Watershed. Nothing is quite as winsome or expedient as “Haven’t I Been a Fool” (a tall order), yet the trendy, spruced-up sound Dobbyn subjects every song to is lustrous and arresting. The first six songs, every one of which name-drops the moon, are flawlessly luminous, while those who wrinkle their noses at “Putting the Wheels Back On” need to reread Sontag on camp, or self-soothe with the triumphant closing acoustic ballads.

And here is where I’ll dare to compare our man to a somewhat more successful singer-songwriter whom I believe is on a similar mission. Consider the Taylor Swift: startling emotional resonance; breathless, contagious melodies; an unshakeable preference for blindingly obvious chord changes; a natural fondness for the sound and feel of words. All of that is solo Grant to a tee. (Grant was better-read, gratifyingly less conventional, and much nicer.) When Swift’s exuberance and aptitude unite, which is weirdly often, the effect is so much more universal than it should be, a sum inexplicably far beyond its parts. All of this to say — this is a world in which Grant could’ve been a radio titan.

The moment was fleeting. While many tales from the era paint Grant as a wreck about Amanda, something had gotten into him around the time of Watershed. You can tell he really believed in this work, and he was right — at its best, it was exactly what he was after, pop as pure and joyous as he’d ever written, the sound of his very soul. Even the bitterest account of his broken heart that year, “Thought That I Was Over You” (from the sparsely rewarding Jack Frost, with the Church’s Steve Kilbey), is among the most fun and uplifting things he ever put to tape. But by round two, Fireboy, something had been extinguished. I’ve heard it in a pair of radio interviews with the same host, from 1991 and 1993: Grant having the time of his life, Grant drained and utterly miserable.

When Fireboy suffers, it’s by Dobbyn’s hand, not Grant’s. Some production styles age well even as they date, like Watershed’s crystalline, sun-on-tin sound. Fireboy feels a lot more self-consciously contemporary. But we love it for its fabulous singles — there’s nothing at all wrong with “Lighting Fires”, an improvement on “Was There Anything I Can Do?” with simmering organ, while “Surround Me” is a bit more guitar-generous than the Watershed pseudohits. We love it for the mournful epistle “The Dark Side of Town”, a standard in a perfect world. We love it for its rave-up, “Whose Side Are You On?”, the hardest he ever sang anything. We love it for its haunted acoustic ballads, of which “Riddle in the Rain”, which Dobbyn largely leaves alone, is the wrenching prize.

We do not love it for an eight-minute noir-tinged spoken-word indulgence called “The Pawnbroker” — picture “River of Money” if it didn’t work — though we’re sort of glad it exists now that he’s gone. It’s a pleasure to attend Grant’s words, simple images that come at you sideways and suddenly bloom and bleed with color and detail and feeling. I love that each of his four solo items is titled after water, fire, heat, light. Grant got so little time on this earth, but he obviously had a gift for appreciating it, for taking it in. Solo Grant finds new things to do with striped sunlight, as Robert plays with shadows.

His out-of-nowhere masterpiece, only one year and God (plus probably Robert) knows what kind of changes after Fireboy, was Horsebreaker Star. Someone once said of Elaine May, “ideas flew off her like lint”. The same could always be said of Grant McLennan and tunes. Provided they were produced sympathetically — by experts of comparable intellect who knew great musicians and how to record them — twenty-four of them in a row could only be pleasure elongated. Everything came together on Horsebreaker Star — there’s something august about Grant on his American record, a serenity that could just be pride in his art, but is highly encouraging for a fella you always worry about a bit, even as you’re in awe. He covers every angle, every genre, every last orphaned lyric.

Some remarked on the way this music hedged, a bit staid in spots, a bit rote at times. Grant was at this point fully committed to square-strummed popforms; his reliability at furnishing every song with a catchy, beautiful chorus hook was the reward and the miracle. Sure, he domesticated “The Ballad of Easy Rider” and allowed himself a very pretty instrumental, but there are victories of every stripe and shade: the celestial “Ice in Heaven”, the beleaguered “What Went Wrong”, the lilting “Late Afternoon in Early August”, the slicked-up “Girl in a Beret”, the doleful “Keep My Word”, the gutbucket “Head Over Heels” (a onetime 16 Lovers Lane contender), the ardent “Open My Eyes”, the steadfast “Put You Down”, the feminist “All Her Songs”, the desolate “No Peace in the Palace”, the plaintive, perfect “Hot Water”, and the enigmatic, majestic title track.

The sweetest highlight, however, was “Coming Up For Air”, which starts out “I know that I can get sentimental my friend”, then praises Forster for “those songs you sent”. The music is too stately to be sentimental per se, and its sentiment too sincere not to melt over: “will you pull me up?/drop a rope down the hole/coming up for air/playing that jazz called rock ‘n’ roll”. That last phrase is a classic classy touch, but this is the only time in song McLennan acknowledged a friendship that ultimately gave his life its shape and purpose. They could always come back to each other, with the ironclad rule that the guitars must come along as well — that was what they were there to do.

Grant wasn’t happy for any consistent period after the end of the old Go-Betweens, but he’s a more tranquil, meditative Grant for the rest of his life from here, with that rasp in his voice and the baseball cap in the closet. His wardrobe maybe wasn’t the thing to measure his taste by, but he had the look of a man more comfortable in his skin than before, if also less electric with hope. Both Go-Betweens had some innate glamour to them, and just because Grant’s was a little earthbound or homegrown didn’t mean he couldn’t be as fetching as his melodies. Wayne Connolly took on a new batch in 1997 for his last solo album, In Your Bright Ray, which I used to find a little enervating. But the guitars are all soothing bloom, and the songs as plainly, simply beautiful as ever.

The complicated love illuminating his music in 1997 gave way to a deserted heart in 1998. Disappearing into a supergroup, à la Jack Frost, with F.O.C. (featuring future Go-Between Adele Pickvance), it seemed he could only think straight when his thoughts were their darkest; he’s as brittle as he’s ever sounded on its best song, a piano ballad called “Suicide at Home”. And then, in a surprising reversal of roles, he threw a rope up to Robert, and upon climbing out, declared he wanted to be a Go-Between again. Though it had blown up the first, historic go, the duo had been onto something back in 1990 — they had unfinished musical business with each other. Their songs always sounded better in tandem anyway, and they’d played a handful of acoustic shows as a duo, intermingling solo work. The reunion was the right way to greet a new century.

The Friends of Rachel Worth, Bright Yellow Bright Orange, and Oceans Apart were worthy new additions to a misstep-free discography. Though Grant’s songs on Rachel Worth are more tentative than Robert’s — never in the same frame of mind on one record — “Magic in Here” casts just the right reintroductory spell, and “The Clock” and “Goin’ Blind” reclaim that Renoir dazzle with ease. Then Bright Orange was Grant’s round to win, the old sunshine seeping back in through the blinds. “Old Mexico” — “you were so excited/but you weren’t invited”, a melancholic manifesto, set to music that sounds like a liberating epiphany — and the grand, graceful “Mrs. Morgan” are the pick hits. And the richly textured Oceans Apart, lifted up by the same guy who took Lovers Lane to a higher plane, once again proves how well a heavy production suits Grant’s songs.

Grant was always a poet, and always a folk musician, whatever clothes the executives decided best flattered his material. Yet placing him outside of pop insults his talents, suggests he somehow didn’t belong among those top-tier craftsmen and women. And yes, a sense of loss, of rejection, sent pained streaks of indigo through a bright yellow, bold blue sound. But Grant was as beautiful as his music is — a glimmering amethyst buried in an avalanche of aspirants and achievers whose true colors history will show. The thrill of his discovery awaits many an unsuspecting listener. And there’s new good news: on the 20th anniversary of Grant’s passing, last Wednesday, Needle Mythology’s Pete Paphides announced the impending vinyl remasters of Grant’s four solo albums.

I think of stray McLennan lines constantly; two felt key to what I’m trying to say here, dwelling on my favorite songwriter (don’t tell my #2!). The first is how Grant refers to himself, recounting a night he and Forster spent in mutual whimsy, “two actors full of wine”: “I’m the one with the scar”. A comet scar, to be sure — there’s ice in heaven, he knew before he left us. But Grant knew heartache on an intimate level, and it remains our great fortune that he never kept it in, and learned more than one way to convey it.

The second comes at the end of “Trapeze Boy”, a gossamer interlude on Jack Frost (the Snow Job record is worth playing, I must say). This is Mrs. Morgan’s initial appearance, before “Sea Breeze” and her eponymous song. In “Trapeze Boy”, her obituary triggers a memory I presume is fictitious — a circus owner’s wife, she’d visit Grant’s house each week for a card game his mother hosted; an opal collector, she’d give Grant opal chips she told him to save for a sweetheart. One day, Grant found Mrs. Morgan crying to his mother over a boy who fell from the trapeze, and died. The Morgans moved away, and only the opal chips, now scattered for other sweethearts, remained of his family friend.

Grant concludes:

It’s funny how someone you’ve never met manages to stay with you.

Let his eyes meet yours: there’s the glint; there’s the glisten. Now listen.

*sans invaluable bassist Robert Vickers