By NOEL MURPHY
MOTOR City Music Festival headliner Joe Camilleri has been chained to the rock industry wheel longer than he cares to remember but, like a certain paint brand, he just keeps on keeping on.
In a game as tough as music, that’s a serious achievement but Camilleri’s strength is perhaps his great love for the uncertainty of music and his ability to morph, chameleon-like, into any of many genres.
It’s a happy knack born from his early days learning saxophone in the early 1960s. Music recordings were hard to come by and he devoured overseas vinyls he found in bargain bins at Coles department stores of the day.
He incorporated the licks and riffs into early bands he played with but soon learned much of the music he’d been learning was being slotted into all kinds of R&B, soul, reggae, country, blues and other grooves.
The music of American jazz alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy Junior changed Camilleri’s life, opening his eyes to all kinds of possibilities. The fact Melbourne’s inner-suburban Carlton hosted virtually no sax players worked to his advantage, too, he laughs today, five decades later.
While the hippies of the day were soaking up the acid rock of Hendrix, Camilleri was revelling into the blues of Paul Butterfield, finessing old jazz solos from the 1950s, soaking up Elmore James, John Coltrane, Hank Williams and Captain Beefheart.
The results of this musical upbringing of a kid from industrial seaside Altona now read like a soundtrack of Australia through the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s to the present.
The hits are familiar, of course – Shape I’m In, Hold on to Me, Harley and Rose, Chained to the Wheel, Never Let Me Go, Hit and Run and more.
Camilleri’s ever grateful for their success but suggests some were only ever half-written, but clearly best alone, and doubts he could write some of his hits if he had to set his mind to doing so.
“You take them when they come your way,” he says.
“That’s the difference between continuing to write a lot of songs and being true to the thing you love instead of chasing something you’ll never catch.
“I couldn’t write Hit and Run again if I tried…and it was only a half-written song but it was a really big thing for me. When I look at it, it’s not finished. Shape I’m In wasn’t finished. They were just moments – you try to do that and it’ll just fall over, it’s got to be a natural progression.
“I wrote Shape I’m In pushing my now-36-year-old daughter around South Melbourne. I remember singing it and thinking, ‘This is a good thing, I have to get home and put it down somewhere’.”
It’s a neat philosophy and practical approach that’s serve Camilleri well. But you still have to wonder if there’s not something else going on.
And maybe there is. At 67 years of age, Camilleri’s ebullient, energetic and a happy dad of five kids – including a three-year-old.
If that’s not going to help keep someone young, nothing will.
