Then I noticed that the sun was beaming in, lighting the board and warming my hands.
It was that kind of warming sun you get in Melbourne this time of year - after the gloomy desperation of winter but before the vindictive burn of summer.
It felt good, the moment felt good, life felt good.
There's no traffic.
The phone doesn't ring.
This time of year you get to see the sunsets and Melbourne, like most cities, is much, much prettier in a sunset.
You have no 'next thing' to get to.
So you can take your time driving home, driving with the window down and the music up.
And this is the magic of Kelly’s stuff, isn’t it?
Our lives – all of us – track along, filled with times and events and things and stuff and interactions and conversations and arguments and sights, sounds and smells.
Most of us, the overwhelming majority, don’t notice these points along our personal timelines. They’re not notable, they just are.
Paul Kelly notices them, though.
I do think, though, that it created – through some weird group alchemy – a minor bond between all of us that were there.
It’s not a strong connection like you hear other people (footballers, often) talk about, but more like a soft shadow burnt into part of our histories.
A shadow that’s fading over time as our lives move on and change and become more complex and compressed.
This is the antithesis of corporate music drafted in committee and recorded by disinterested observers.
Meaning and emotion drip from every note, chord, riff, drum fill, cymbal tap and vocal quiver. And that meaning is clear:
To love is to be vulnerable; and sometimes that vulnerability means you’ll get hurt.
People will let you down, and you won’t always understand why.
And by doing so through gardening – where failure is much more common than success, where time and mother nature dictate the outcome much more than anything you do, where failure is obvious but temporary – helped ensure that what confidence I was rebuilding was rooted in humility, not hubris.
I think it’s a rite of passage for people now to say that “when we were kids, Triple J was way better.”
Which is weird, because in my case it was way better…!
Or, more accurately, the songs they were playing when my ears started opening up have stuck with me, embedding them with more meaning and weight than otherwise would have been the case.
Today, it’s still a helluva song.
But back then, in 1999, it was at the tip of the spear puncturing Australian music’s bogan habits.
Not for Mr Lee power chords and smashing pots. His voice is thin, nasal and reedy, but utterly confident and bracing as it dances along that melody.
One guy started running around with a lampshade on his head, another found a string of fairy lights to throw over his shoulders. Only to be stunned to learn that they’d stop glowing once he ran beyond the range of the lead.
The juggling was a highlight, though the unexpectedly low ceilings quickly turned the bottles being juggled into projectiles, raining down on the juggler in a haze of effervescence and regret.
A few of the group had everyone laughing with outrageous stories. Some people who were formerly strangers became more...familiar than expected.
