'We were making music and living lives that demanded strings'
With time, you discover a certain homogeneity about the figures which have inspired you. Such homogeneity is comforting. It makes sense of the world and helps you be part of it. When Christopher Hitchens writes about his mother in the brilliant Hitch-22, it is this great advice which seems most prescient and hard-hitting: 'The biggest crime is to be boring'. Likewise, the closest that Robert Forster comes in Grant & I to the distillation of life's greatest lessons is when he makes the deceptively simple appeal of 'Don't be bland'. Now if only you would listen.
That Grant & I, Robert Forster's celebrated memoir, is such a great artistic achievement should not come as a surprise. The man is a full-fledged music writer who has written a fair amount of essays and reviews for various Australian publications (lovingly compiled in The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll from 2009). In fact, it would be true to say that Robert Forster writes this book the way he writes his songs. The lines are memorable, intelligent, charismatic. The lines stay with you.
Quite simply, Forster writes with great wit. His style is droll but never dry. There's a lot of emotional substance to Grant & I, and while my eyes carefully dissected those early pages about first books ('literature instilled a creative impulse not an academic one') and first records (John Fogerty was a childhood hero), it's the unassuming appearance of Grant McLennan after a drama class that resonates the most. Forster paints a poignant portrait of a life-long music partner, describing the charming detachment, the unabashed ways and the bohemian habit of lying at home in bed all morning, with cold milk and film magazines (Grant was a cinema connoisseur). The prose manages to be both beautiful and raw, poetic and precise. There is a great story about Grant driving the car for the first time and being genuinely surprised when it stopped at some point. As Robert puts it, 'he probably thought you could drive the car forever'. If you go into Grant & I looking for music stories, there are plenty of those. Continuous troubles with labels, recording sessions with Orange Juice, sharing a London apartment with Nick Cave, playing tennis with Dave McComb, etc. Most importantly, though, you will find fascinating tales of creative torment (didn't you always want to find out how on Earth he came up with "Draining the Pool for You"?) and even an odd songwriting master class ('you didn't need much instrumentation if you had interesting lyrics and hooky chord changes'). It's exciting to see that it was all there from the start, these shades of future songs, this desire to be both provocative and successful. All through the book, you can't but sense a certain undeniable consistency that only comes to the best of us. Quite a bit of luck, too, but mostly just wild desire and sheer songwriting talent.
Forster doesn't try to romanticise anything and he can be brutally honest on occasion (those Geoff Travis pages have a lot less glamour than some of Robert's dresses from the late 80s). But equally, there is little false modesty about the music. 'The Go-Betweens were a rare thing', he writes, quite truthfully, 'a faberge egg, and had to be treated as such'. But there is bitterness, too, and Forster can't suppress that sense of unfulfilled potential that always hovered about the band. Intelligent pop music. 'Striped sunlight sound'. Verlaine plus Byrne. As he asks, quite rhetorically, about a missed chance to break America, 'How do we sell this to Idaho?'
The beautiful lines abound. My favourite comes early in the book, and has to do with Robert's fixation with his looks: 'When I hold a hairdryer, it's the only thing that feels as natural in my hands as a guitar' (actually, there was an early dream of becoming a barber). Also, this: 'The Godots (an aborted idea for the band's name) - a band everyone's been waiting for'. And this: 'The months dragged on a cabin-fever diet of Brussel sprouts - the vegetable, like the work of Dickens, another thing I can never go back to'. Elsewhere, this gorgeous one-liner: 'Never hurry a woman applying makeup'. File alongside such well-recognised classics as 'Never love a man who has no sister'.
But running through the heart of this book there is a relationship of great love, frustration, intensity. 'We created the most romantic thing two heterosexual men can, a pop group'. It sounds both whimsical and deadly serious, and not any less so than when he compares Grant to a Chagall painting at the end of the book. And his spirit, 'blithe, blind, full of self-possession'. And those heartbreaking final pages, the most horrifying being the one which contains the description of an empty house following Grant's death. Bizarrely, it so happened that I was reading these pages on a bus, going out of town, just as Grant's "Threshold" started playing in my headphones. Could be a miracle. Could be a great work of art. But having finished this book, I think it was both.
