Six Lane Highway
Damian Coen
Through Black Market Music
Order at <http://www.damiancoen.com>
REVIEW BY NORM DIXON
Australian blues and roots music fans are celebrating the return to recording of one of the cream of the NSW blues scene, Damian Coen, with the release of Six Lane Highway.
True to form, Coen's addictive good-time music is matched with some astute political and social observations, as well as the more traditional blues ruminations on the ups and downs of daily life.
Coen's accomplices are a who's who of the Sydney acoustic blues and roots music scene, including guitarists Damon Davies and Chris O'Connor, fiddler Marcus Holden and keyboards whiz Donny Hopkins. Many are alumni of various incarnations of Mic Conway's legendary bands (O'Connor, Holden, tuba/jug blower Carolyn "Cazbo" Johns and Adam Barnard on drums and washboard).
It's a few years since Coen's friendly vocals and captivating blues harp have been the main featured on tape/record/CD. He was a stalwart of the renowned Mudsteppers jug band (with Davies) and politically outspoken classic blues duo Red Belly Blues (with O'Connor) in the late 1980s and '90s. He assisted Davies on his terrific Ride This Train album back in 1995, and O'Connor's 2003 release. Coen spent time in the USA honing his blues skills with delta blues performer Paul Brasch (appearing on Brasch's 1998 Find My Way album on Burnside Records) before returning to Australia to resume his 18-year-plus musical symbiosis with the always entertaining Damon Davies.
Lyrically, Coen says, he has been influenced by "anyone who has had anything worthwhile to say since Woody Guthrie", including Australian writers "such as Paul Kelly, Archie Roach and even Midnight Oil... Of course, prior to Guthrie, there had been plenty of musical cultures and roots musicians who have used music to express the deeply personal and the socio-political. So, while Guthrie may have reshaped white folk music in the US, the seminal black folk blues singers already had lots to say that was worthy of expressing (and of course, probably much of it was never recorded)."
Musical influences Coen points to include the great American jug bands of the 1920s and '30s, blues singers like Big Bill Broonzy, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Robert Johnson and Memphis Minnie, and the country blues harmonica greats, like Will Shade, Sonny Boy Williamson I and II and Sonny Terry. "More recent interpreters of this tradition have also been influential, such as Ry Cooder, Bonnie Rait, John Hammond, Phil Wiggins and Rory McLeod", Coen adds.
These diverse influences converge with Coen's own take on the world to produce an album that combines blues, gospel, hillbilly and ballads into a wonderful musical journey through modern roots music.
The album's 14 songs were all written by Coen over the past 15 years. There are certainly some gems among them. "That's The Only Stuff We Play" is a good-time jug-band whinge about how pub capitalism is crushing the space for great live music in favour of lousy cover bands, karaoke and poker machines.
The jazzy "Sydney City Rag" pokes fun at the trials and tribulations of 21st century city life, with smog in our lungs and poop on our beaches, and our strange tendency to not only put up with it, but to celebrate it.
The environmental theme continues in the marvellous delta blues-style "I Heard the Sky Explode", which assails the destruction of the forests, pollution and the arms trade.
"Grease on the Government" is an accurate, if a little defeatist, assessment of the lengths that governments, cops and the corporate media will go to stifle dissent. The song is inspired by the ordeal of Tim Anderson, who was framed for the 1978 Hilton Hotel bombing.
One song that I would have liked to hear reprised is "Tell Me How About It", which appeared on a Red Belly Blues tape sometime in 1993. It dealt with the police killing of David Gundy and Aboriginal deaths in custody. In the light of recent events in Redfern, it would is as relevant as ever.
All in all, Six Lane Highway is a welcome addition to any activist's CD shelf. Coen is now based on the NSW south coast, but I'm sure, if the cause is right and you ask nicely, he might just play at the next benefit you're organising. He can be contacted via his web site at <http://www.damiancoen.com>.
From Green Left Weekly, March 10, 2004.
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