Grant McLennan - RIP

-- "Dusty in Here"

Haha, yeah, I was there too, great show. Shit, this is awful news, I'm heartbroken.

ABC-TV (Aus) evening news just reported his death as the 3rd or 4th story. Which was pleasantly surprising. Many viewers of a certain age probably stopped chewing their dinner, even if he wasn't a household name...

Put '16 Lovers Lane' on at work on Friday and listened to it all the way through - I rarely do that with any album these days. Very, very sad news indeed.

Not in every state! Didn't get a mention on ABC News down my way.

the go-betweens are one of those bands i love when i listen to them - but i don't listen to them enough. i was lucky enough to see them live, though, and i'm grateful for that.

this is genuinely terrible, upsetting, tragic news. RIP.

Thank you, Grant, for that and so much, much more.

I just can't believe it.

RIP.

I am devastated by the news of Grant Mclennan's death. He was one of the great songwriters of the past 25 years. "Cattle And Cane" is transcendence as song. "Boundary Rider" from their last album is just a good.

I hung out with Grant and Robert backstage in Vienna, about a year ago. He was in a positive, chatty mood. The club was packed and the show was WONDERFUL. The Go-betweens were back and as great as ever.

This is a cruel, cruel blow. This is absolutely not fair. The loss is immense. My heart aches for Robert.

And man, some of the great stories there:

i first met Grant in Los Angeles on their first trip out here in 85...instantly charmed, we became fast friends, along with Robert and the rest of the group.
He told me he was dying to try REAL mexican food for the first time, so he and Lindy hopped in my car and we headed for the best i could find. of course we had to stop for beer first and although i mentioned a certain law against opening and driving, we cracked a few and headed to santa monica.
at the table, he spied some EXTEMELY HOT peppers that they set out for the daring. i warned him against eating any. he ignored my warning and bit into one whole pepper, chewed for a while, and the sweat started pouring off his face...he went RED!!...smiled, guzzled some beer and then DID IT AGAIN...3 more times!! "we dont have anything like that down in australia" he said...!

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Grant worked in my record shop in the late 1970's in Toowong, He came in late one night after closing with a flagon of wine in his hand and said to me that he and Robert were thinking of recording two songs for a single. I said "Gee, do you you think that will work?"

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I recall late one night in 1981 Grant standing at the bar of the Queensland Institute of Technology (now QUT) Campus Club, one of the many live venues in Brisbane at that very lively time. My band had just played a not very memorable gig, but Grant strained to offer a compliment "I liked that Wire song (Outdoor Miner) you played". A more recent memory is of driving down Moray Street in New Farm and seeing Grant walking along the footpath. I slowed the car and offered him a ride. Grant jumped in and before I could establish where he was going we got to talking about the Bob Dylan concert that I'd seen a few nights before down on the beach at Ballina. Grant hadn't seen the show but he wanted to know what I thought. I recall him expressing disappointment that Dylan had stopped singing or even trying to sing. I remember saying "yes, you're right, but it didn't really trouble me because he looked just so into playing with his band". Grant then said "Could you see if he was shaking his leg, that's the real indicator you know ?" Before I could answer (and indeed I had seen the famous Dylan leg-shake), Grant indicated that we had travelled as far as he was going, thanked me for the lift, and was on his way again. Bon voyage.

They're playing Cattle and Cane on 6Music as I write this post...

McLennan was often considered to be the more pop-oriented half of the Go-Betweens' songwriting team, but his work is also often tinged with sadness and melancholy, most notably "Cattle and Cane", a haunting rumination on aging and memory, and "Dusty in Here", written for his late father.

McLennan also excelled at marrying breezy melodies to world-weary, evocative words, crafting cerebral tracks that exuded a delicate warmth and depth of humanity rare in three-minute pop songs. The best examples of which are "Bye Bye Pride", "Bachelor Kisses", "Right Here", and "Streets of Your Town". Among other compositions for which McLennan will be most fondly remembered are the Go-Betweens' "That Way", "The Wrong Road", "Dive for Your Memory", "Love Is a Sign", and "Finding You", and solo tracks "Put You Down" and "Simone & Perry".

By the way, I recommend re-reading as I just did Grant's and Robert's touching and witty song-by-song liner notes on the Anthology.

"Bye Bye Pride"
Cairns is a lazy, small town full of boats and cane fields. It is also unbearably hot. An old army officer once said to me that the heat took away his pride. He then sucked loudly on the straw in his gin and headed out to the first hole. I was his caddy so I followed him.
—G.M.

Hammer the Hammer
Too many late nights in St Kilda, Melbourne. An incomplete meditation on loneliness and violence, sometimes mistakenly thought to be about drugs. Recorded during a lull in the Birthday Party's "Junkyard" session. This was the last song we cut before moving to England. -GM

Bachelor Kisses
We came back from Christmas in New York having lost our record company somewhere along the way. I wrote this in immigration having been refused entry to the United Kingdom. The first person who heard the song was my sister. She said that Marianne Faithful should sing it. -GM

The Wrong Road
We lived in London for almost six years. I shared a dark flat with a painter and then a comedian. The painter was obsessed with grey. The comedian loved Tommy Cooper. This song fits somwhere between these two things. -GM

Cattle and Cane
Written in summer on a borrowed guitar in a Paddington bedroom, London. The other rooms were occupied by unconscious friends. The rhythm struck me as strange, the mood as beautiful and sad. The song came easily, was recorded quickly and still haunts me. -GM

Dusty in Here
This is a song about my father who died when I was four. -GM

Second-Hand Furniture
I had a dream about a divorced man who looked into a shop window and saw his old bed. I think it was snowing. The catalogue of objects was an ad lib. For some reason this song is popular in Stockholm. -GM

Don't Call Me Gone
I've always liked country music. This is a typical mix of pathos and sentimentality in the tradition of George Jones and Tammy Wynette. It comes close to pastiche but the Go Betweens seldom genre hop so this is what it is. -GM

http://karimamir.blogspot.com/2006/05/rip-grant-mclennan-youtube-tribute.html

Happily, east coast bands making a trek over to the UK (and back again) invariably stopped in Perth for a show or two, often in addition to any national tour they might happen to be on. Excellent news for fans of the Go-Betweens (and The Triffids).

Consequently, I was lucky enough to see them many, many times and they never disappointed. Memories of Grant plucking out the notes of Cattle & Cane under a single spotlight at the Shenton Park Hotel (also RIP) or of his and Amanda Brown's soaring harmonies in Bye Bye Pride or Streets of Your Town will be with me forever. His passing is such a terrible loss.

RIP G W McLennan

"The early line-up of the band that included Morrison, Forster, McLennan and his then partner Amanda Brown fragmented amid acrimony, but the four were reunited in Sydney several weeks ago where, said Morrison, they were able to resolve some of their differences."

Most definitely they had a low-rent Aussie Rumours-type psychodrama goin' on.

A strange day. I've had to concentrate on many other things, and I'm glad of that, but still...