Thursday 19 January 2016
The Critical Reader may be inclined to debate whether we need to start a Travelogue some three and a bit days out from the actual border departure, but it was nearly four and a bit.
I spent yesterday's morning walk mapping out an elegant four-episode exposition about matters relating to Hughesy's Springsteen-chasing excursion.
Something that would lead elegantly into the day by day detail that will kick in when I head off to Brisbane Airport for the transcontinental flight on Tuesday.
And I sat down to start it off yesterday morning to intending to kill two birds with one stone.
It wasn't just about the Travelogue.
I needed to check whether the laptop we bought before our previous trip to Perth some six and a half years ago had the capacity to handle when I was about to ask to do.
Madam, who'd been using it for much of the meantime, had her doubts but I was hopeful that I could use a limited set of software on the not quite decrepit machine.
The plan was to use Hughesy's Christmas present, a headset and microphone of the type familiar to switchboard operators and the like to dictate Travelogue content straight into Pages on the laptop.
You can, after all, speak almost as fast as you can think and you do it much more quickly than a hunt and peck typist can type.
Dictation seems the way to go, but dictating into a word processor requires a set of skills that need to be established, developed and practised.
So yesterday's exercise was aimed to determine the capabilities and start to hone the skills.
But it didn't happen.
It was soon apparent the laptop lacked the microprocessor grunt and the RAM capacity to run Pages with the latest version of Mac OS.
We've fixed that.
A phone call to the Apple Store means a shiny new MacBook Air is waiting for me when I get to Perth on Tuesday afternoon.
In the meantime, the skill development factor remains, and things nutted out on two mornings' walk will provide the content.
So, here we go.
I'm off, over the next month, on a road trip that will encompass nine Bruce Springsteen concerts in five cities.
It's something I never expected to happen, but, then again, you never know.
The campaign, if the campaign is the right word for moving towards setting up something you regard as extremely unlikely, began at the end of February 2014.
If I remember things correctly the final concert of the Australian leg of Springsteen's Tour Down Under was followed by a return to the north of the following morning.
My calendar app tells me I was home on Thursday, 27 February, having attended four shows in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Since Friday follows Thursday the same way as blood that follows a punch on the nose, and that particular Friday was the last day of the month we would have been heading off to the Old Retired Teachers' (ORTs) lunch.
I don't recall whether we met at the end of January, but everyone knew I had been away and why I have been away.
We had the predictable questions about the experience.
Two of those present were bemused by the fact that their son and daughter-in-law had flown from Townsville to Sydney, rented a car and taken themselves to the Springsteen concert in the Hunter Valley the previous Saturday.
Son and daughter-in-law are both teachers, and the Brisbane show would have entailed two days off work and associated issues.
Hughesy, of course, is retired, and known to do things like fly to Japan for four Elvis Costello concerts. I had also been to a bracket of five Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen concerts the year before.
So you could say I had form.
The predictable question was whether these extravagances we justified.
My response should come as no surprise.
Wednesday's concert, which had started with a Bee Gees cover (Staying Alive) was being rated in knowledgeable circles it Is possibly one of the best Springsteen concerts ever.
That's a big call, and I was still on a significant adrenaline high.
My response would have been that it was definitely worth it and that next time, come hell or high water, I was going to the lot.
The hell or high water may not have been explicitly stated, but was definitely implied.
And if that meant flying across the clock to Perth I would be flying across the Continent to Perth.
There was, I pointed out, an additional factor. Springsteen is a big enough name to sell it out reasonably sized venues in a capital city for more than one night.
I had just come back from a tour that had included two concerts in Perth, two in Adelaide, two in Melbourne and one in each of Sydney, Brisbane, Hanging Rock and the Hunter Valley.
Springsteen 's legendary three to three-and-a-half hour shows make it unlikely he will backup on successive nights.
Spring chickens might, but Bruce is no spring chicken, and while he's on stage, believe me, he works.
On that basis, a Springsteen tour with the possibility of two shows in most of Australia's capital cities meant a seemingly obsessive fan might be forced to spend four or five nights in Perth, and the same in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
That was an exciting prospect.
Not that I thought it was ever going to happen.
Bruce wasn't the back out here in 2015, and by 2016 the Australian dollars all against the greenback suggested future Springsteen tours were a dubious prospect. I figured Bruce's asking price, at an exchange rate well below parity, would have would-be promoters heading for the door.
September 2016, however, saw, first, rumours, and then the confirmation of an Australian tour at the start of 2016.
Once it was definite (I kept the speculation to myself) I took the news down to the other end of the Little House of Concrete expecting this would be the start of the proverbial protracted negotiations.
The somewhat surprising reaction from The Supervisor was "So, of course, you're going".
That conclusion was hard to argue with, and pretty much right on the money.
A glance at the tour itinerary revealed windows for second shows in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane so I said about booking accommodation and the flights that would get me back and forth across the Nullarbor.
Tickets for the initial round of shows went on sale, were duly purchased, and Hughesy sat down to wait for news of seconds. The next tranche included second shows in Perth and Brisbane, while a third added seconds to Sydney and Melbourne and a new show in the West.
At that point, some of the logic code unstuck since the new show in Perth would it be happening while I was making my way from Bowen to Brisbane.
But you can't have everything, and it's unreasonable to expect it.
Nine shows will have to do.
But why nine?
The answer to that question is two-pronged and double jointed.
First, every three hour Springsteen extravaganza is different. These days, Bruce never sets out to play the same show twice, and if it did happen to occur, it would have happened by accident or circumstantial coincidence rather than intent.
And not be on successive nights. Not even close.
The song matrix I use to remind me of what I've experienced at the seven Springsteen shows to date contains a tad under 190 performances spread around more than ninety separate entries.
Remarkably, comfortably more than half of those entries have a single performance beside them.
If that sounds a little vague, it depends on whether you count a full band rendition of Thunder Road or The Promised Land alongside a solo acoustic version (or vice versa).
And, with the word count heading past 1200 words, that's an appropriate point to knock this particular dictation exercise on the head.
Coming up:
Why nine? Part Two: Hughesy's Springsteen background.
Managing the adrenaline factor in the lead-up to Perth.
The North Queensland wet season and other relevant factors.
Getting there: Brisbane.
Getting there: Perth.
And, from there, day by day detail and nine concert reviews. Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment