WHO SAID WHAT?: CAMERON PAINE
A collated summary from the documentary series 'Mick Geyer: Music Guru'
Cameron Paine has been a volunteer & sound engineer with PBS-FM since the station was a mere idea in the mid-1970s.
WHAT CAMERON PAINE SAID
Documentary #1: Making Connections
G'day. I'm Cameron Paine. Mick Geyer .. interesting bloke, I've been giving a bit of thought to when I met him, early 80s is probably best I can get. Mick was editing the then PBS magazine and one of the things I was doing for PBS at the time was providing some fairly meagre information technology resources, and we put in a, what we will laughingly refer to as a desktop publishing system for producing the magazine and there was some reason why I was called in to assist him to do something and we worked through that problem and I guess, as they say, the rest is history. We became good mates and over the years on and off spent a lot of time together.
Mick loved to interview people. I think initially that passion came out of providing material for the magazine, but Mick also loved the sound of his own voice, and so he would talk with people for hours. And it wasn't a question and answer session, it was more a rambling conversation. He loved to try and capture it all on tape and then he'd go through and pick the bits that were of interest for whatever the project was out of it.
I do remember one occasion when he got very, very excited, I think it was probably the first or maybe the second time that Hank Rollins came to Melbourne to play. Mick rang me up and said "I'm going to interview Hank. Can you come and give me a hand?" That struck me as being a little odd, but I said 'yeah, okay, whatever'. So I brought a couple of mics and a tape recorder and several hours of cassette tape and we used every bit of the cassette tape though that I'd brought along. And I realised why Mick wanted me there. It was probably something he could have coped with himself, but because he already must have had an idea of how wide ranging the conversation was going to be, he figured that there would be multiple tape changes during the process. So I suspect I was sort of the safety net to make sure the wheels kept rolling so he could get on with his conversation. And I'd have to say, I've done many interviews from a production point of view in my time at PBS, and this was the most amazing thing that I was ever a witness to. They struck up an instant rapport. I dont believe they'd ever met before. Perhaps they'd corresponded, but they certainly struck up an instant rapport and talked about... just all sorts of stuff.
Documentary #2: The PBS Years
I used to listen to him on the radio a lot. I thought he did amazing, amazing shows, and I don't know whether he spent hours researching or he just pulled this stuff out of his arse, but he always delivered it with such, I don't know, his style was so laconic, it was just like, it would just role off his tongue. And we're a community radio station and I mean I've done a little bit of time in front of the microphone myself and it's hard yakka. And Mick used to just sort of, like often he'd just start talking without his microphone on, so he didn't really engage with the technology, but in terms of sitting and talking knowledgeably about someone, or knowledgeably with someone, this didn't seem to faze him at all.
Documentary #3: The Educator
I think anyone who's known Mick, other than fleetingly, will have been the recipient of a 'Mick Geyer compilation cassette'. And they're extraordinary things, I mean at their most stripped away, it's simply a car tape, but Mick talks to people through those collections and I suspect a lot of the time he spent with me exploring my notions of politics and society and the arts and stuff like that, was actually milking out ideas for how he could build compilations. Now I know there are hundreds of people who have received these cassettes.
A lot of people would never have seen Mick Geyer in a band room, other than the artists - and he finds a chair in a corner and he usually crosses his legs by putting his right foot on his left knee and he will sit there usually with a newspaper of some description, whether it's a street rag that he picks up or a copy of The Age that he always seemed to have tucked away in his jacket pocket. And he'll sit there just quietly ignoring, or apparently ignoring, what's going on in the room until somebody strikes up a conversation with him and by the end of the night he'll have 12 or 14 people clustered around the chair that he's sitting in, yakking away.
Documentary #4: The Private Man
I never saw him do much reading, but clearly he must have read prodigious amounts. And just even sitting in his living room and running your eye down the titles in the book cases and most of them were well thumbed, but I never sprung him sitting in an armchair and reading a book, or seeing books scattered around the room clearly being read. But, certainly the books were full of notes, little notes that he'd written to himself, perhaps to remind him of things. If you got on a subject and you challenged his authority on it and he was in his own space he would go to a bookshelf and pull something down and open it up at a page, apparently randomly and hand it to you and, oh my god, there's an authority underscoring what he's had just said! And you sort of always got the sense that he'd steered the conversation in that direction, but no, I joke. Clearly he had an extraordinary memory and he hated being caught out on something and would go to extraordinary lengths to prove to you that you were wrong. Personally I found that an endearing characteristic, it sounds like it might be a negative attribute, but not at all, it was, by calling your own bluff and then showing you. And it wasn't done in a way to elevate himself, it was to educate you, to share something that he'd discovered, that he thought was particularly precious, with someone else.
I recorded some stuff for Lisa Miller quite some years ago and Mick, maybe around about '98, I don't know whether the term is managing, because Mick's not a great manager and Lisa's not a woman who'll be managed, but let's just say they had a professional relationship. Mick was responsible for a tour that Lisa did with The Cruel Sea, and so he invited me to do the sound on that tour. That tour was actually fantastic in the sense that Mick's stated aim was to convince me that Bob Dylan was a living God! We couldn't leave town for some reason until the evening of the day before. And so I rolled around to Mick's place in a hire car to pick him up and drive to northern NSW and he said "oh, just a second I've gotta do something". He was fossicking around in his, what we'll call his study where there's records strewn everywhere and cassettes and notes and stuff like that. I thought "Oh yeah, car tapes, that's cool".
And then there was a phone call, and I'm looking at my watch (thinking) "we've gotta get out of here" and, you could tell by his manner this was a person he was familiar with and that this was going to be a lazy 15 or 20 minute phone call. Anyway I wasn't really listening to the conversation but if you're in a room with a person who is having a conversation it washes over you. Anyway I worked out that he was talking to Nick Cave, and in Nick Cave's eulogy to Mick he talks about their relationship in terms of him reaching what I'll call writers block, not his words, but you know reaching a point in whatever he's working on, and picking up the phone and ringing Mick. Well, I was on the other end of one of those conversations and so I can attest to the veracity of Nick's statements in his lovely eulogy, and I can also attest to the fact that Mick Geyer when confronted with a friend who was posing that sort of a problem to him, would become oblivious to anything else going on in his life. Suffice to say the conversation eventually ended, Mick grabbed up his bag of cassettes and we jumped in the car and literally drove all night and most of the next day to get to the gig. Guess what cassettes we listened to all the way? I reckon I listened to 400 Bob Dylan songs, and it wasn't Bob Dylan performing his songs, so he didn't torture me with Bob Dylan's voice and guitar playing and harmonica all the way. He had some amazing artists doing songs that I perhaps even didn't recognise as Bob Dylan songs, but I remained unconvinced at the end of the drive.
Mick had a real thing for Nina Simone, as an artist, I hasten to add, and I think probably one of the most exciting moments of his latter years was meeting her and doing one of those interviews. He was just so excited, he wrote me a letter saying, "wow I'm going to do this thing" and when he came back to Australia he was so excited about the potential of the material he had. I don't think that excitement ever saw it's way into the material being used for anything.
He used to tell me stories about his time spent, I gather in his early 20's, as a window washer on one of those gantry things that go up and down the outside of buildings. And I just wonder if, he seemed to have a knack of being able to make money by doing things that were not particularly intellectually demanding, and I think it was a deliberate strategy and I think it paid the rent and it gave him plenty of time to think about stuff.
One of the things we liked about each other is that, we could walk out of a pub at two o'clock in the morning, having been at each other like terriers for two hours, and would encounter each other three weeks later, three months later and would return almost to the sentence that we had broken off the previous conversation. And so he was a great mate, because he was always a low maintenance mate and I trust that he saw me much the same way. Regrettably that worked against me towards the end of his life, because I was unaware that he was ill. It would've been nice to say goodbye, thank him for what he's given me.
