March 2nd, 2025Big serving of Kelly’s Gravy
by Jeff Glorfeld
Christmas 2024 in the Glorfeld home was a subdued affair. My father, Bill, a room-filling character in life, died the previous February and this was our first Christmas without him, and my mother had recently moved into an assisted-living facility – what we in our young ignorance used to call an old folks home – and wasn’t adjusting well.
Nevertheless, Carol and I tried to have some fun with the holiday spirit – I put up strings of coloured lights outside, and we decorated a tree, a little potted pine.
We cooked a turkey and all the necessary side dishes, and made merry with my mum and brother, and Carol’s younger sister.
Another change this Christmas was in our gift giving. Apart from hanging stockings on the fireplace mantle, stuffed with geegaws and gimcracks and chocolates, we didn’t go overboard with presents. I must’ve been very good last year, though, because Santa (it was really Carol but I don’t want her to know I know it wasn’t really from Santa) surprised me with a copy of Paul Kelly’s book How to Make Gravy.
Published in 2010, I could’ve used it on my daily Kyneton to Melbourne round trip on the Bendigo V-Line – as entertainment and for the physical workout – my paperback edition weighs in at 568 pages, including photographs and the index.
Carol and I are Paul Kelly fans and not embarrassed to say so. In 1986 we’d settled into a flat in St Kilda and had discovered the thriving music scene in the pubs and clubs along the Esplanade and Fitzroy Street.
One of the first shows that really captured our hearts was Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls, at The Venue, the old Earls Court, showing every one of its decades as a bayside pleasure palace.
Kelly and his band had recently released their breakthrough album, Gossip, four vinyl sides, 24 songs, each one a well-polished gem. It was a band with the wind in its sails, a future so bright, they needed to wear sunglasses.
After that show we became a Paul Kelly version of Deadheads, travelling around Victoria to hear the magic.
It seemed unfortunate when the Coloured Girls became the Messengers, reportedly because non-Australians (Americans?) would not see the connection between the band’s name and lyrics in the Lou Reed song Walk On the Wild Side, but we were truly disappointed when Kelly broke up the band in the early 1990s.
We went to hear his new groups a few times but his legend outgrew pubs and clubs and we didn’t feel the love in the big theatres and stadiums.
In the book he talks about touring in the US, trying to become established in that massive, lucrative market. He describes having a day off in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2002, and taking a guided tour of the Stephen Foster Memorial, a museum devoted to the early American songwriter, author of such standards as Oh! Susanna, Camptown Races, Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair and Beautiful Dreamer.
“Touring is often a grind,” Kelly writes, “touring in America in particular – the absence of family, the endless interstates, the queues at airports, the incomprehensibility of the sports pages in the newspapers, the indifference of sound checks. But every once in a while, unbidden and unforeseen, a golden day or hour bowls up to you.”
Turns out, the Stephen Foster Memorial in Pittsburgh provided just such a golden day. When I unwrapped the book on Christmas day I declared that I wouldn’t sit down and read it from start to finish – it was too massive.
It seemed like a book that you’d open at random, or search out a time or place or person or song from the index and read what Kelly had to say.
A few days ago I looked up Steve Connolly, the older brother of one of my friends at The Age, Rohan Connolly, one of Australia’s foremost AFL journalists. Steve Connolly was the guitarist in Coloured Girls and Messengers and was one of the chief architects of their sound.
He went on to produce records for Archie Roach, Kev Carmody, and others, before his tragic death in 1995, from a heart infection.
Scattered among Kelly’s stories and reminiscences are lyrics to some of his songs. As a fan of his music, I’ve known that he’s as much a storyteller as a musician, and these lyrical interludes help the stories flow from one to the next.
It’s February now and, true to my prediction, the book has become a treasured companion in troubled and trying times. It sits on the corner of my desk, from where I can open it at random, and disappear into a world that’s real but somehow, from far away northern California, slightly magical.
I reckon I’ve still only read about half of it. On my weekly radio program, The Down Under Hour, on tiny community station 88.5FM, broadcasting from a studio in Round Mountain, with a tower on Hatchet Mountain, I often find myself reaching for Paul Kelly records.
They can be from the 1980s all the way into the 2000s, and I can always find something to fit the mood. My listeners think so too – I’ve had more good feedback about Paul Kelly’s music than any other artist.
I’ve just flipped open the book and found these lyrics to the song, Gathering Storm, from his 1995 album Deeper Water.
I rise up and turn on the light
Now it’s shining in my window
My walls are strong
My chimney’s smoking
God speed you in the gathering storm
After many happy years living in Victoria and working at The Age, journalist and former Wheatsheaf resident Jeff Glorfeld, and his wife Carol, went back to California, the land of his birth, where in the past seven years he has survived bushfires, snowstorms and drought. And Trump. And Covid. And Trump again. The cicadas and locusts didn’t arrive. Well, not yet.
