Remembering Greg Quill (18 April 1947-5 May 2013)
The Critic and The Producer
By Ian McFarlane © 2003
This article was originally published in RHYTHMS magazine, April 2003
It was one day in 1982 that singer / songwriter Greg Quill strummed a last chord on his guitar before putting it away in its case. Nothing unusual in that, it’s something he had done every day of his musical life up to that point.
What was unusual was that 18 years passed before he took that guitar out of its case again in order to play. During those 18 years he had established himself as one of Toronto’s leading music and arts journalists, having lived and worked in Canada since leaving Australia in 1975. During March this year, he was back touring the country with partner Kerryn Tolhurst promoting their new album, So Rudely Interrupted.
I caught up with Quill during the Melbourne leg and asked how he’s been enjoying the tour. “It’s been an absolute ball, more than we dared hope for,” he explained, barely able to conceal his enthusiasm. “You gotta understand that this whole enterprise has been a giant act of faith on Kerryn’s part, as well as mine. He’s more attuned to the Australian market because he comes back here regularly to produce other people and a couple of years ago he saw that there was an opportunity because the roots music infrastructure had grown independently, it didn’t depend entirely on radio airplay or record company promotion.
“He believed that we still had an audience and that if we came up with a bunch of new songs that met our own mature standards, meaning my ability to play them, we’d move to getting a release and organise a tour. Given the fact that I’m a critic and he’s a producer who exercises critical facilities all the time, we had fairly high standards but it came together piece by piece. It was a big thing for me to start playing again. When we met up again in Melbourne in 1999, over at Kerryn’s place, I was incredibly rusty. He really worked on my guitar playing and pushed me, eventually it all fell into place. In the intervening years he’s become a really good producer, he’s incredibly patient, committed and focused.”
Prior to his retirement from performing in 1982, Quill had been on the road for almost 15 years having started out on the NSW northern beaches folkie scene (he ran the folk club the Shack in Narrabeen during the late 60s). Between 1970 and 1974 he led the fondly remembered and highly regarded Country Radio, one of Australia’s pioneering country rock outfits. In 1975 he launched his solo career with the brilliant and criminally underrated album The Outlaw’s Reply. With the aid of a travel grant from the Australian Arts Council (under the auspices of the Whitlam government), Quill left for Canada at the end of that year. He struggled to keep bands on the road in Canada, returning only once to Australia, in 1978, in order to tour with Southern Cross (featuring Chris Stockley and Sam See).
In the meantime, Tolhurst, who had been a key member of Country Radio as well as the Dingoes, had never stopped playing. He’d co-written with Quill Country Radio’s biggest hits, ‘Wintersong’ and ‘Gypsy Queen’, and helped define their sound with his delightful mandolin and steel guitar playing. “I’ve always loved Kerryn’s playing,” says Quill. “From the first time we played together in a motel room in Melbourne, it was something we understood about each other. We’d listened to the same muse or something; we knew what each other was going to do next. It was very intuitive. It was like when we wrote songs together, we liked exactly the same changes. We improved each other’s songs in a way that made each other feel better about them. I always trusted his musical instincts, he had impeccable instincts from the time I met him. When he left Country Radio it was devastating to me. It wasn’t just the instrumentation because I replaced that, but it was that sensibility, that profound understanding. Our emotional radar was continually engaging. I missed that more than anything else.”
Tolhurst too had left Australia, in 1976 with the Dingoes, eventually finding his feet as a songwriter (Pat Benatar had a huge hit in 1988 with his song ‘All Fired Up’, a track he’d previously recorded with his band Rattling Sabres), sideman for hire and as a producer. In that role he’s worked with everyone from the Black Sorrows and the Pigram Brothers to Chris Wilson, Jeff Lang and Cindi Boste, as well as taking the reins for the new Quill Tolhurst album. He continues to divide his time between working in the US and Australia. With their partnership re-established, the album turned out so well that they booked that Australian tour, which has since delighted all those who caught gigs around the country. The album itself took 18 months of painstaking work to piece together.
“We paid for it all ourselves,” Quill reveals. “We didn’t have any backing and it was done when we could beg, borrow or trade studio time. We got some studio time in New York and Toronto, but most of it was done on Kerryn’s portable A-DAT machine. It’s about as big as a small suitcase. He just travels around with it and he’s really good at editing and recording on the fly, that’s another of his incredible talents. We started out by matching up bits and pieces of lyrics and melodies and he’d record a bed track, whether he was in New York, Melbourne or Broome. These were only meant to be guide tracks but we ended up using every one of them when we started adding other parts. They were so good, the groove was so solid and the conceptualisation of the song was so strong we decided that we could never risk losing it by trying to replicate it again in the studio, so we just built on these bed tracks.”
The album features a delicate yet buoyant acoustic sound. All the same, many of the songs are built around minor key arrangements, with the lyrics to ‘Back This Way’, ‘The Killing Heart’, ‘Always to the Light’ and ‘Come to Me’ displaying a yearning sense of nostalgia. Hence the album is tinged with a great deal of melancholy.
“Yes it is,” Quill agrees, “But it didn’t occur to us until after we’d finished. I think in every song, well at least eight of them there is mention of ‘home’. They’re all songs about separation and reconciliation and finding a way home. Not necessarily physical, but spiritual and metaphysical homes. So there is a very melancholy tone to it, but that’s okay because melancholy and wistfulness were also a big part of Country Radio too.” One old Country Radio song they revisited on the album was ‘Fleetwood Plain’. “We wanted somehow to trace a line from the present to the past without making it too obvious. I’ve always liked that song… there’s a line in ‘Always to the Light’, ‘I can’t forget how it all began’, and so ‘Fleetwood Plain’ is where it all began for me. That was the first song I ever recorded and it was the first song that I was really proud of, the first song that allowed me to think that I could be a songwriter.”
‘The Boys of Narrabeen’ (featuring the Pigram Brothers on harmonies) is a song rooted in the classic folkie / bush ballad narrative tradition. In it Quill pays tribute to the spirit of courage displayed by his late father and his mates, war veterans who had become heroes of the surfing community around Narrabeen because they had endangered their lives whenever possible to save people’s lives. With its tale of bravery in the face of adversity (a boat crew stays out all night in a cyclone to help rescue people lost at sea) it’s a rousing song that concludes in the first light of dawn with the rescuers riding down the face of a 40 foot wave to safety.
Two songs, ‘Always to the Light’ and ‘Come to Me’ had almost ended up on the soundtrack to Phillip Noyce’s film Rabbit Proof Fence. “They were the first songs we’d recorded. The film’s executive producer David Elfick had asked us to write a couple of songs. He was really enthusiastic. We actually used a line from the script for the title ‘Always to the Light’, which was the instruction to the girls on how to get home, ‘always travel to the light’. We didn’t hear from him for a while, and in the meantime Kerryn had also worked up a whole suite of beautiful instrumental music for the film, of which ‘Jigalong’ we ended up using on the album. Then we heard back that Phillip Noyce had been talking to Peter Gabriel, so he got the gig. But that’s okay, it didn’t matter because we redid them and they turned out perfect for the album. I think ‘Always to the Light’ is the pivotal song on the album.”
The first show on the recent Australian tour was at the Port Fairy Folk Festival, during which they invited Chris Wilson up on stage to play the Chris Blanchflower harmonica parts for ‘Wintersong’. The set for the tour ranged from most of the songs off So Rudely Interrupted to Country Radio classics (the aforementioned ‘Wintersong’, ‘Gypsy Queen’, ‘Fleetwood Plain’), from ‘Almost Freedom’ off The Outlaw’s Reply to covers of John Prine’s ‘Speed of the Sound of Loneliness’ and John Stewart’s ‘July, You’re a Woman’. They were wonderfully relaxed affairs, with Quill’s warm and assured voice always complemented by Tolhurst’s sympathetic and astonishingly beautiful steel guitar, slide dobro and mandolin accompaniment. If you missed the gigs, search out the Quill Tolhurst album So Rudely Interrupted for an exquisite listening experience.
GREG QUILL R.I.P. (18 April 1947-5 May 2013)
By Ian McFarlane © 2013
This article was originally published in RHYTHMS magazine
For the Australian music fanatic, it’s been a somewhat emotional time in recent months with the deaths of Chrissy Amphlett, Yunupingu, Kevin Peek and Greg Quill. I have to say that, on a personal note, the passing of Greg Quill has hit me the hardest. I first got to know Greg in March, 2003 when he toured Australia with Kerryn Tolhurst to promote their Quill Tolhurst album So Rudely Interrupted.
Greg and Kerryn had first performed together in 1972 as part of Country Radio, the highly regarded country-rock band whose hits ‘Gypsy Queen’ and ‘Wintersong’ still sound fresh and appealing today. Greg was one of the first local roots music practitioners who knew that to focus on the ‘song’ could be the key to longevity. He also managed to sustain a parallel career at the time as a features writer with Go-Set magazine.
As we were chatting away and I asked the guys to autograph various album covers – including Fleetwood Plain, Country Radio Live and his solo album The Outlaw’s Reply – I mentioned to Greg that I viewed him as a mentor in some ways for my own career as a music journalist. I presented him with a copy of my Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop (published in 1999) and he said, “wow, of course this is a fantastic book; so you’re Ian McFarlane!” With that he got me to sign my book for him. A couple of days later I spent further quality time interviewing him about his career and the recording of So Rudely Interrupted.
Greg had been living in Toronto, Canada since 1975 and having put his music career on hold in 1982, had established himself as a high profile entertainment columnist and staff member of the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper. In 1999 Kerryn encouraged Greg to get his guitar out again and revive his music career which eventually led to their 2003 album and tour.
In the article I wrote for Rhythms at the time, entitled ‘The Critic and the Producer’, Greg commented: “This whole enterprise has been a giant act of faith on Kerryn’s part, as well as mine. He’s more attuned to the Australian market because he comes back here regularly to produce other people and a couple of years ago he saw there was an opportunity because the roots music infrastructure had grown independently, it didn’t depend entirely on radio airplay or record company promotion. He believed that we still had an audience and that if we came up with a bunch of new songs we’d move to getting a release and organise a tour. Given that I’m a critic and he’s a producer who exercises critical facilities all the time, we had fairly high standards but it came together.”
Of course, as much as things have changed in the intervening ten years, there is still a demand for quality music as witness The Dingoes’ new album and successful tours of 2010. Having revived his music career, Greg went on to perform regularly on Canada’s roots music scene, both as a solo artist and with a loose collective dubbed the Usual Suspects. He also compiled and hosted the weekly roots music specialty program River of Song on Sirius Canada satellite radio. He returned to Australia in 2009 and again during 2011 when he was joined on stage by former Country Radio band mates Orlando Agostino and Chris Blanchflower.
I’d maintained only sporadic correspondence with Greg, but re-established contact via email this past April when there were plans in the wind to reissue the Country Radio back catalogue on CD. As I was quizzing him about his career with Country Radio, he could barely contain his enthusiasm and his lengthy recollections confirmed the importance of that time for him. He has never forgotten his early years touring Australia.
When I asked him how Country Radio had avoided the heavy blues rock sound that many Aussie bands of the day embraced, he confirmed they played what he’d learned by exploring the British and American folk / country universe. “We didn’t sound like anyone else but none of that was planned as such. The blues is a musicians’ art form, a place where you learn guitar licks, tone, timbre and groove. What interested me about the roots music I was listening to back then was the progress of the narrative song... words and melodies, not the mechanics of guitar. I think you can follow only one route or the other, not both.”
It was the last word I heard from Greg Quill, as not two weeks later he passed away suddenly from complications due to pneumonia and a recently diagnosed case of sleep apnoea. The Australian music industry has lost another inspirational musician and dedicated musicologist.