Another sad obit

This one totally out of the blue. The great Australian singer-songwriter Grant McLennan died Saturday in his sleep in Brisbane. He was 48.

I first came upon the Go-Betweens on a lengthy visit to Australia in I think 1985 or 1986. I first listened to "Cattle and Cane," perhaps his greatest song, on a cassette tape in a little Toyota driving across the very Queensland landscapes the song described. Which I thought was cool.

I saw the Go-Betweens play at the Tivoli Ballroom in Sydney that year, and they were rock stars. The show was rowdy, and the crowd absolutely adored them.

A couple years later I caught the band in New York, at one of those clubs uptown in the west 50s that hasn't had gigs for years. That show had a completely different vibe. Quiet, respectful, still adoring.

The two of them, McLennan and Robert Forster, had what seemed to me this just-successful-enough musical career. They maintained this perfect bohemian thing. Never celebrities, but always artists. Sweet spot. I may be wrong about that. They may have had serious money worries, or their families maybe kept pestering them for years to grow up and take on a profession. Or not. I have no idea. I just know that to me they were always a sort of role model for bohemians when they grow up.

I remember the summer of 1989. For whatever reasons my buddy Dave and I, both of us somewhat drifting transplants from the Midwest in those days, biked up from Brooklyn to Central Park pretty much every weekday, and I always packed my roommate's little yellow cassette player in my messenger bag. Every afternoon one of us would bike to the edge of the park to call our temp agency, Laury Girls, to see if there was any work coming up. There never was, pretty much for that entire summer. So we would buy Bud tall boys from the itinerant beer salesmen in the Sheep's Meadow, throw a frisbee around, and listen to Sixteen Lovers Lane. I can't remember even bringing another tape along. It was the soundtrack of that summer for me, and of virtually every summer after that. My wife and I have never stoppped listening to McLennan's and Forster's solo work and all the Go-Betweens albums.

Yesterday, before we got word of McLennan's death, we were impressed that our five-year-old son kept requesting the Go-Betweens in the car. That kid knows his music.