Go-Betweens
Grant McLennan R.I.P.

In memory of Grant McLennan

He was raised up in a house of women
In a city of heat that gave its children
Faith in the fable of coral and fish
Taught them the world is something to miss" ("Unkind and Unwise", from "Spring Hill Fair")

It was the end of 1984, almost twenty-two years ago, when I listened for the first time to "Unkind and Unwise". A solitary summer of sunlit distances and warm winds opened in the midst of one of the rainiest winters I can remember. I had already heard about the Go-Betweens from my “indie” music expert friends, I had overheard them casually, but only then did I listen to an entire long-playing album (they were still called that), "Spring Hill Fair", and only then did I learn that they were Australian, and this somehow reconciled for me those “unending spaces.” I discovered that there was another musical world in the Antipodes, where the leaden gothic aesthetics of the early Eighties seemed as if they had never existed, and where a melancholic and discreet poetry reigned supreme.
From there I would move on to "Before Hollywood", the album that had made them known beyond their ocean. In the cover images Grant McLennan was the boy precociously grown up, silhouetted, with a pensive gaze. I would listen to "Cattle and Cane", and that mirage of memory would instantly become familiar to me, the image of that “schoolboy coming home/ through fields of cane/ to a house of tin and timber/ And in the sky/ a rain of falling cinders”. I too had my fields back then, before the window, and I too, like him, had just discovered “a bigger brighter world/ A world of books/ and silent times in thought”, from which I returned home every time.
And then I would come to know "Dusty In Here", an elegy softly sung of regret and disillusioned waiting, of the unspoken words that opened up before every verse:

"Like a ghost
A ghost of something old
It’s cold and dusty in here
It’s in your hand
It sits just like a glove
The finger traces the lines of love"

Imperceptibly Grant, the melancholy boy a little older than his age, became my “rock star”: precisely because nothing was more alien to his character than any kind of romanticism or decadent aestheticism. Just a shy smile, just those eyes that looked a bit nearsighted into indefinite distances. So, between one move and another, while I was trying to gather the scraps of my memory, those album cover notes, those vinyl sheets loaded with personal messages for me and for everyone I knew, would emerge each time, those bags I could not leave on the ground.
And I would keep Grant's verses as a talisman, when they seemed to follow the same painful paths of my coming of age. In the rooms of my adult life echoed the sense of home and estrangement of his love songs so mature, so complex and not very consoling. Like "Quiet Heart", suspended between absolute intimacy and the feeling of irreparable loss ("The heater’s on/ The windows are thin/ I’m trying hard to keep this warmth in/ I turn to her/ She’s sound asleep/ Some place I don’t know/ Doesn’t matter how far you’ve come/ You’ve always got further to go"). Like "Was There Anything I Could Do?", which evokes a woman from whom one feels abyssally distant, and yet somehow one cannot help but continue to love (“I can’t say that I blame her / People don’t know what they want / If you spend your whole life looking behind you / You can’t see what’s up front”).
And does it matter or not having written the best song title in history, "Bye Bye Pride"? Having said how love tramples pride underfoot, having described it while it is leaving, putting on shoes and heading towards the open sea?
Because coming of age, the "watershed", the shadow line of maturity, was the underlying motif, the obsession of the melancholic boy:

"You’ve got to take the moon from the trees
You’ve got to hide it in your room
You’ve got to hold it ‘til it burns
You’ve got to make it easy come, easy go"

I thought of David McComb from the Triffids, as soon as I heard the news. He too died so early and in such an unglamorous way. He too so desperately gentlemanly, literate and romantic. By now I can no longer hear about Australia without anger, the land that loses its poets so carelessly.
The truth is that I can't forgive Grant McLennan for leaving just now, now that I was sure I had found the Go-Betweens walking on my same path again, after so many years I had believed they belonged to my (past). He and Robert Forster, lost in their myth as students and solitary critics, lost in respected and gray solo careers, as befits that kind of icon for the "happy few". And yet suddenly they had come back to dangerously delve too much into my own business, and I to rejoice in their unwelcome presence now that my rooms had changed again, and the old records that had followed me were still seeking company.
In "Heart and Home" Grant wanted to save a love, he said “I don’t want to be a guest”, and his bright fear somehow gave me courage. And somehow I kept crying every time listening to the refrain of "Mrs. Morgan", “She never wanted to see the rain”. And lately I was peering into Grant's dark melancholy, besieged again by other reckonings. "Boundary rider" now anguishes and consoles me like a testament, and you know how it always is in hindsight: “So you reach for things / You’re never satisfied / You’re running down the years”. 
No, I can't forgive him, and I don't know if I ever will, for leaving just now, and in that manner. It's true, even in death he wasn't anything like a rock star. He was happy, they say, he was in a period of great creativity. He fell asleep, they say, awaiting a party Saturday night. He left on tiptoe, with the same shy and hospitable smile as always, without causing a disturbance. But it's always too much like a rock star to die without closing your books and without imitating yourself, without savoring the memory of the good old days in the words of others. It's too much like a rock star to fall asleep, find yourself in the middle of an old house among the reeds, choose to remain forever a prisoner in your dream.
I can't resign myself to the fact that the remaining songs are all that is left, that there will be no new ones to follow us between one luggage and another. That we will have to write them ourselves, hoping some verse has been caught on this side.
Yet I know they are right, “The first time you left home on your own, I knew / A little bit of you is gone when you do / But Caroline and I, well we grew, that’s true” ("Caroline And I", from "Bright Yellow, Bright Orange"). Yes, he has left. Yes, we have grown.

"I didn’t know anyone
Could be so lonesome
Didn’t know a heart could be tied up and held for ransom
‘Til you take your shoes and go outside
Stride over stride
Walk to that tide
Because the door is open wide"
("Bye Bye Pride", from "Talulah")