Tales of the Unexpected (Golden Stains)

Toby and Suze usually accompany De Campo and I to our bush rock festivals, but no, not this time, not for Golden Plains. No big deal, right? Well I didn’t think it was, but their absence proved to have a deeply profound effect on the Unstoppable Forces psyche. We cried some. Squealed a bit. We came to the conclusion that without Tobe and Suze, all Golden Plains is, is dust in the wind. All it is, is dust in the wind (it is very windy there by the way and dusty too). We’ll probably go back.

Mentally I was a bit mental. My cynical attitude didn’t wash at all. Nor did my tolerance for freaks constantly jutting into my grill and staying there. The festering festival crowd seemed overly crowded to me this time even though it was significantly leaner than Merediths of yore. Somehow, everywhere I went, some obnoxious dildo was eating up my space, obliviously rubbing his legs next to mine on a picnic blanket, for inst, while piggishly making out with some girl, burying her face with his vulgar technique. The fact that you’re a shit in a burgundy velvet bathrobe is embarrassing to me. Please get out of my face. You are wearing a cocktail dress over a pair of jeans and you have a beard. Please move away from my vicinity urgently.

My cynicism did not suffer fools lightly. I was a magnet for acid-bent dildos and it continually harshened my marshmallow mellow. I really wasn’t prepared for this event. Just couldn’t get it together. I guess I am one of those Golden Plains’ casualties. Normally I am a bouncing ball, very energetic, I don’t know what happened I was completely flat all weekend. Maybe I was in the throes of some existential crisis. But really, who cares?

A week of carousing didn’t help. Tuesday night was Yo La Tengo, which was so good I got drunk. Thursday night we went and saw David Kilgour w Crayon Fields and Panel of Judges. It was electrifying and David’s band played ‘Point that Thing Somewhere Else’, which is like the Mt Everest of velvety guitar pop. I packed four days of work into four days, which was strenuous and harsh. My 33 1/3 Wowee Zowee proposal got rejected. Not that that hurt so much. Truth is my submission was very puerile, but it was an attempt to write something structured, which is new to me and so for the opportunity to do that, I am grateful.

To be fair the music at Golden Plains was generally awful. I don’t blame Yo La Tengo nor Eddy Current Suppression Ring. Those cats rule, as do a few others, but overall the line-up was a horrendous doggie-pile of genres that would require significant re-jig to make work more effectively. Lack of guitar pop was devastating and overwhelming influx of World Beat was jagged, jolting and buzz-killingly dire.

So we were held captive by Golden Plains all weekend. We could have never expected such an oppressive environment, but our tent did almost blow away! As the song goes life is a tale of unexpectedness (it doesn’t actually go like that, but it is a song by Toby Dutton. Man I’m looking forward to some live sets by Flywheel).

AVIS supplied the wheels for our weekend getaway. I hadn’t driven anywhere for six years. It was like I was navigating a cruise ship. We got stuck in the underground carpark for an hour trying to work out how the bloody thing operated! I got nervous and hot and the confined space made me very claustrophobic. I felt like Marcello in 8 ½ stuck in traffic in a dream. Once underway, the driving was easy. Always remember no matter what side of the road you're on, you (the driver) need to be in the middle hugging the dotted line of a two-laner. I was taught this by my ex-wife’s best friend, a Meyer shopgirl who fiendishly grew to despise me. She snubbed me on the tram once. I recall I had a ghostly pallor and I said I had glandular fever and she said well I am not surprised you look terrible.