Is This Not Paris? CD: Part 6 – The launch

Written by John | Published on November 11, 2009

We’d played at the launch of the King Street Rock’n’Roll Walk etc Podcast at the Vanguard for the City of Sydney in late September. From that I’d managed to book the band into the venue for our own launch.

It wasn’t smooth sailing though. John Cass who runs the venue must have a memory like an elephant. I’d done a solo show there back in 2004 on a slow Sunday night and drawn a crowd of about 10 payers. Was I the same John Kennedy?, he wanted to know. “Well erm yes. But this CD launch will be something completely different.” I got the date but I was told that if I didn’t pull a crowd of at least 70 payers, “I’d never work in this town again!” No, he didn’t actually say that. I was informed through the bookers at Century Venues that if I didn’t hit that magic 70 mark the $2 fee that the venue would take off every ticket would increase to $5 so that the venue could cover its costs.

I like a challenge, So in the weeks ahead of the gig street pole posters were arranged. I started spamming all those people unfortunate to be on my mailing list. And I hustled up all the free promo I could get. Vinnie Ramone on Outpost on 2SER was very supportive. As was Jay Katz and the team on Naked City on Fbi. I tried to tap into Richard Glover’s ABC 702 mega drive audience but at the 11th hour his producer declined to have us on. “Richard is a big fan of the band” she told me. Obviously not that big a fan!

With all promo avenues exhausted, I could only wait and see who would turn up on the night.

Just before Perry Keyes went on stage to open the show at 9pm the crowd (and yes it was a crowd) was starting to vibe up. A cheer went up when I entered the room. I looked round to see if someone famous had come in behind me but soon realized that the cheering was for me. The uncomfortable sense of pride decreased somewhat when I saw that it was mainly family members and friends doing the cheering. Perry, in semi-acoustic mode, backed only by Johnny Gauci on keyboard treated the room to a solid set of finely observed stories of lives lived in Sydney’s inner suburbs.

The band took to the stage and opened with the first two songs from the the new Is This Not Paris? CD – Robert Mitchum/ Ramblin’ Man and Lonely Eye. The 68 Comeback Special was in fine form. A bit rough at the edges but ready to rock, and roll as required. After doing lots of Inner West pub gigs to raise some cash to pay for recording the album, playing at the Vanguard to a sit down audience was a little strange. At those gigs there was usually no door charge so people would feel free to talk all the way through the set. Another thing I’ve noticed about those gigs is that the fee for 3 sets of music hasn’t changed since I came down from Brisbane and started playing gigs in Sydney in 1982. It’s like a Wagon Wheel. “Still the same old price.”

But, I digress. We could see the audience at the Vanguard and they were looking straight back at us and listening to the music. A very unusual situation. But we rose the occasion and I must say, we rocked ‘em all night long. Well for about 90 mins anyway. The highlight of the set for me was our gospel number, Better Days. My backing vocalist, the boys in the band otherwise known as the Ordinaires, were joined by the talented Megan Heyward. The guys have been occasionally supplying backing vocals on this song for the last year. But with Megan’s help it really took the roof off the place this time round.

I got some great feedback when I went up to the CD sales stand after the gig. A lot of it was directed at me and Jeff of the many stringed instruments. I made a note to tell Peter, Smithy and Glen later that the band’s sound is like a building. You might not see the foundations but without them the building will fall down.

So the CD is well and truly launched. If you were there, we thank you for your support. If you weren’t, we hope to see you next time.
“Thank you and goodnight!”

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Is This Not Paris? CD: Part 5 – The CD soft launch

Written by John | Published on September 22, 2009

A story in 5 or more parts.

Part 5 – The Soft Launch

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The King Street Podcast

http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/AboutSydney/VisitorGuidesInformation/HistoricalWalkingTours.asp

The same day in May that I signed the publishing deal with Fogsongs, I’d attended a meeting with the City of Sydney to discuss the launch of their King Street podcast; or “The King St and Enmore Rd Chapter of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Walk of Fame ‘n’ Shame” to give it its official name. An old friend of mine, Ashley Russell, had produced the podcast for the Sydney Council and he was promoting the idea that my band play at the podcast launch party.

Months passed and after a few months of waiting and hoping it all came together. The launch would take place at the Vanguard on King Street. I’d arranged that the night would also be the launch for my band’s new CD. In the end the City decided to make the podcast launch an invitation only event. So that kind of killed the CD launch idea. But it was still going to be a great opportunity to showcase the songs from the new CD to an audience of media people and Inner West movers and shakers. I was also keen to follow up on my idea to give a copy of the new CD to each of the guests on the night.

Jeff and I were going to fly up to Brisbane the weekend before the Vanguard show to do some gigs that I’d booked months before. I wanted to be able to sell the new CD at those shows so that gave me a deadline to rush toward to get the CD back from the factory. We picked up the boxes of CDs from the Foghorn office and proudly inspected the CD package. It all seemed fine and I started to show the CD to friends later that night. It was only then that someone noticed that the lyric booklet pages had been stapled in the wrong order.
The next day frantic emails went back and forward between me and Marshall from Foghorn and the CD factory. Eventually they promised to fix the problem in time for the podcast launch date the next Wednesday. I took a bunch of those CDs with the mis-stapled booklets with me to Brisbane to sell at the shows there. I reckon that the people that bought the CDs have now got themselves a bone fide collectors item.

Back in Sydney the week started relatively quietly. All I had to do was let the factory do its job and it would be alright on the night. The night came. The soundcheck was completed. The doors were about to open. And guess what? That’s right. No CDs! After some mad phone calls, the CDs arrived at the eleventh hour. (Well it was 5pm actually.) With the help of the guys in the band we were able to get the CDs into the showbags provided by the City of Sydney just before crowd started to drift in.

Now the night wasn’t really about us. There were speeches about the King Street podcast hosted by another friend, Alastair Walton from the SCC. (It’s good to have friends.) Councillor John McInerny and Greg Kahdoorie from the Newtown Entertainment Precinct spoke about the importance of promoting local culture and how that would help stimulate trade for local businesses. Despite these interruptions we did manage to have a good time and celebrated the arrival of our new CD. We’d been able to invite a bunch of friends and with the booze flowing freely, we played a solid show of my Inner West classics and showcase new songs from the new album.

A highlight of the set for me were performing Motel Satellite; the song written by a guy from San Francisco called Pat Johnson who’d I’d met in Berlin. Another was having Megan Heyward join us for the first time to do the duet on the CD title track, Is This Not Paris?

The live set ended but the show wasn’t over. Ashley’s partner in podcast production, Hugh Liney, had arranged to have some of my early video clips show on the big screen at the back of the stage. King Street and Miracle (in Marrickville) were screened showing me and some early Love Gone Wrong lineups proudly sporting full heads of hair. Ahh the glory days!

It was good to have our partners with us. “It’s a long way to the shop”, as they say, so it was a great opportunity to celebrate the event with those that have supported us through some cold and lonely nights at the Cooks River Motor Boat Club. Old friends like ex-bassist Steve Broughton and fellow inner suburban troubadour Perry Keyes were there too. Steve got to hear the song Tiki Woronora live for the first time at the show. It’s a surf instrumental that was inspired by his Tiki Hut behind his home on the Woronora River where we used to rehearse and sample Steve’s excellent home brew. Speaking of surf tunes, I had a good chat with Toby Creswell who had the indie hit, Cool in the Tube, back in the day with his band Surfside Six. I’d last spoken to him waaaaay back in 1987 in an interview when he was editor of the Australian edition of Rolling Stone magazine.

I rolled slowly home afterwards down King Street in the surprisingly warm late winter’s night enjoying the moment. I was still in the honeymoon period of the CD release process. It’s a time when you can live in hope. When you can dream that this release will make a dent in the cultural landscape until you’re smacked in the face by the cold, hard reality of commercial failure. Again.

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Is This Not Paris? CD: Part 3 -The deal

Written by John | Published on September 21, 2009

By February 2009, with the mixing done, it was time to try and find a deal. I asked a few friends for suggestions of indie labels that they could recommend and sent out about 15 unmastered copies of the album. The weeks passed. The silence was deafening. Some labels did get back to me with positive responses but stated that they were very much part time ventures and had a full release schedule already planned for the year. Others told me that there just wasn’t any money in releasing indie records anymore. If the record was good, someone would upload it onto the internet for punters to download for free. So if it was good it would be stolen.

And if people didn’t want to steal your songs, it probably meant that they were no good anyway.

I did have some luck when I contacted the Foghorn label in Sydney. They’d only put out self financed releases from the artists who were signed to their publishing arm Fogsongs. But they were interested in doing a publishing deal with me on the new album songs and a selection of my older place specific tunes like King Street and Miracle (in Marrickville). The deal would include advances that would allow me to remix and polish a couple of key tracks and to master the recordings ready for CD manufacture. The sessions for these remixes took place in Damien Gerard Studios in Balmain.

Parallel to this I’d been interviewed for the King Street Rock n Roll Walk of Fame podcast that was being produced for the Sydney City Council. I was talking to the SCC about performing at the podcast launch at the Vanguard in King Street. So I pitched the idea that I could launch my CD at the same show and give my new album away to the invited guests. It was agreed that the performance fee would help cover the manufacturing costs of the CD.

So I was able to go back to some labels that had show some interest with what amounted to guaranteed “sales” of 200 CDs. What a scam! I got Black Market Music in Melbourne interested and we stated to talk turkey. It ended up looking like they would come in as the distributor and I would have to act as my own label. Now things got really complicated. Because there are a number of cover versions on the album, AMCOS, the Australian music copyright agency would make me pay a fee per CD copy made for the right to use other artists songs. And here’s the twist, because I now had a publishing deal, I’d have to pay for the right to use my own songs! At this point Foghorn stepped in and with the help of the SCC podcast launch gig fee, I was able to do a record deal with them with Black Market handling the distribution.

So after over a year, the quick follow up album was ready for release. Blind optimism and pig headed determination along with the help of friends have pushed the CD out into the light of day. This release has been like a walk in the park compared to an earlier release, Fiction Facing Facts, that had taken four years and four labels in four different countries to get out. But this still felt like I was starting over from the beginning.

Has it been worth the effort? Of course. I’ve got a strong ego and I’ve never really relied on anyone else to tell me that the music I make is good. Will it sell? Who knows? I hope there’ll be some people who’ll cherish it. But at the end of the day I’m making music for myself. And I’m already looking ahead and planning the next album.

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Is This Not Paris? CD: Part 2 -The recording

Written by John | Published on August 22, 2009

We hit Zen Studio in St Peters early in June 2008 – only a stone’s throw away from my beloved King Street to start the new album sessions. We had the idea that the songs we’d collected and written would form a kind of a concept album containing songs that were film soundtracks, should have been soundtracks or could still become soundtrack music. Along with new original songs, the album would contain covers of well known film soundtracks mashed with more obscure songs and covers of songs with a strong filmic sense that I’d picked up on my travels

around the globe. We even covered two of my own hits: Big Country and The Texan Thing, reinterpreting them as film soundtrack music. There are also new original spaghetti western and surf instrumentals.
In the first sessions we recorded 8 tracks and took them to the flat mix stage. We returned in November with Smithy, our new bass player, and recorded six more and rerecorded the track Motel Satellite.

We’d book a weekend session at the start of each of these two recording phases and go in with the whole band and try to get some bed tracks with great feels. Getting the drums and bass down was the priority. Peter Timmerman who’d played with me in the original line-up of Love Gone Wrong was able to give the songs a rock solid base with a good groove. The vocal and all the other instruments would be overdubbed later in subsequent weeks in evening sessions attended by just Jeff or myself. Jeff did some sessions working up tracks with layers of guitars, dobro, pedal steel and lap steel. Jeff’s playing gave the songs a stronger roots flavour than the band’s last release. I’d usually wait until the backing track was complete before recording the final vocal takes.

Motel Satellite was written by a guy from San Francisco called Pat Johnson who I’d met in Berlin in the ‘90’s. It’s a long brooding, romantic song that I’d been wanting to cover for a long time. We’d tried it out as a semi acoustic track in the first sessions in June but we couldn’t catch the spirit the song needed. We revisited it in the November sessions doing it as a full band with much improved results. The song was still looking for an extra texture. We’d had a Johnny Gauci come in to play some Hammond on the song in the early sessions and I thought I’d test Geoff Lee’s engineering skills by asking him to “fly” the organ part from the semi acoustic version into the new band version. Now the two versions were in the same key but there was no way that they would be in the same tempo. But with the bag of tricks that is Pro-tools, Geoff was able to massage the organ track into the new recording. The result in my own modest opinion is one of the best recordings I’ve made in my music career.

The title song, Is This Not Paris? also developed a life of its own. It started out as a kind of Australian Ballad of John and Yoko. But the inclusion of Megan Heyward on guest vocals helped transport Johnny Cash and June Carter’s Jackson to Newtown, Sydney via London and Paris. – wherever the bus routes meet, John Kennedy is there.

You could have said we had a shoelace budget but then we didn’t even have a shoelace. By late January 2009, the global economic crisis was hitting even indie bands like us and we had to wrap up the sessions before our meagre finances ran out.

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Is This Not Paris? CD: Part 1 – The concept

Written by John | Published on August 21, 2009

A story in 5 or more parts.

Part 1 – The Concept

Like a 422 bus on King Street, Newtown, where you wait for one for an hour for a bus and then 2 come along at the same time, I figured that I should hit the fans with a new album straight after the release of the Someone’s Dad CD in August 2007.

From late summer 2008, Jeff Pope and I had been getting together on a weekly basis at his place in Summer Hill to see if we could co-write some tunes. He’d played guitar in Sydney alt country rockers Deadwood ’76 but when he joined my band John Kennedy’s ’68 Comeback Special I was looking for a multi-instrumentalist and he was keen to develop his steel and dobro playing.

Jeff told me he had a song that he wanted to show me. Having written a few songs in my time, I was waiting to hear a chord progression, a melody and maybe some lyrics. He picked up his dobro and played a tasty little lick. Then he repeated it again. I waited for more. Then he repeated it again. That was it. Obviously Jeff and I had completely different ideas about what constituted a song. But it was a start. Lonely Eye, the first song we came up with, was based on that lick.

Over the weeks we kicked around ideas and one night I showed him a couple of obscure songs from indie songwriters that I’d picked up on my travels in the ‘90’s. One was called Robert Mitchum. It was written an instrumental by a German musician called Christoph (aka Justice) Hahn who I’d had an up and down friendship with when I lived in Berlin. I didn’t like most of his other songs but this tune was a simple but haunting piece. Maybe it was the fact that it had been used as the intro theme music for a local radio show called Roots that I used to listen to each week in Berlin, I don’t know. But it had certainly lodged itself. Jeff thought it was pretty cool too. When we got together the following week he played me Hank Williams’ Ramblin’ Man and pointed out how similar the two were in mood if not in tempo. We put down a rough demo of a mash up of the two that night. That was the first medley for the new CD and the piece that set the tone for much of the rest of the album.

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