The Other Al
Al went off to a better place today. To the no place maybe.
Cousin Barry called couple minutes after he passed, shortly after 3pm. I went over and sat with him at the bedside, door closed, low light, just the 2/3 of us for a couple hours.
Barry was brilliant, full of feeling & fine reminiscence. Damn beautiful.
No pain throughout in this case, all well-managed. The Filipinas & Indians were delightful. They were not proper nurses, but that native inner feeling was precious. One Oz gal attendant apparently cried when Baz told her Al wasn't going to make it through the day. Baz knew he said. No one told him. Remarkable kinda guy. Very striking.
Sad. But a release. Baz talked to him about Robert Johnson's Crossroads. Gotta get offa the freight train.
.
Salam/shanti
P
....
Re: The Other Al
Yep. That’s it.
Really very fitting end. He wasn’t for it any more. No point.
Nothing ugly. Not even the shrunken body and parchment face there with us on the bed. I had my foot up on the corner of the footboard listening to Baz. Smooth. Baz enjoyed the receptive ear.
Fine farewell.
Salam/shanti
P
G. and I had had another Alan pass the year before. This Al G. had not really known, although he had been properly struck by him at a couple of meetings. By the solitariness he noticed and perhaps some understanding he could not himself become acquainted with a man like that.
Late night there was no energy to tell more. G. had needed to be told, however, not have the matter left over for the next day. We had talked about the situation in Carlton over dinner a few days before.
Cousin Baz was a godsend, as he had been when it became necessary to move Al outta the back bungalow at Bab’s shortly before the departure for overseas. Barry had immediately accepted him at his Werribee house, no rent involved.
Much of their past had emerged over the years, especially during that transition period at Baz’s in Werribee. Yesterday at the bedside other elements were added.
For some reason the dope featured, arising from the music probably. The dope and music went together. Al had always advocated dope for raising writing too to another level.
Before the discovery of Robert Johnson there had been others in the line. The Doobie Brothers. (Doobie was slang for dope in the neighbourhood where the brothers came from.) The Shadows from the UK might have come before the Doobies. One of this pair had been pure instrumental.
The Shadows’ “Apache” song or instrumental piece was an early marker; they were a British band. Carlos Santana, who had been born in a Mexican village, Baz said, had been the only guitarist in the early days over there who could play Apache.
Big Joe Williams lived in a caravan, carried a long-barrelled colt it may have been from the war and a switchblade. I’ve got the soul of a hobo, he said, in song no doubt. A white you might guess.
From Big Joe and Woody Guthrie it had been a short step to jumping the freight trains near the bridge over the Maribyrnong River and riding a few mile into the North Melbourne yards, one notable mishap resulting in a badly cut knee for Al when he mistimed his jump.
Muddy Waters had come from the Stones. The Beatles in their earliest period too had been notable, surprisingly for these Blues guys as they turned out more fully formed. Neither of them, Baz nor Al, had liked Jagger; they never got on that bandwagon, so didn’t need to get off when the Tory faker was exposed.
Prior to leaving for the home Robert Johnson had been given a play on YouTube. Nothing again in it for this unatuned listener. Baz explained the line about jumping the freight train was from another song, not in fact Crossroads.
The boys had played with Al’s older brother Rob and the Willy guy Peter Vincent on bass. Baz lead and Al the drummer. They had played at Baz’s place in Footscray and then later Al’s in Newport. Early stage for the drumming a 44 gallon oil drum had been adapted, the lid and handle on top serving for some kind of special effect. By the time they were done with music-making the lid of the drum had thinned to a wafer.
The first meeting with Al had taken place in his early forties after his pancreas operation, long after those music days. Late late nights in the bungalow at Bab’s Al’s guitar came out muted from the back bedroom, the staccato plucking through an amp producing strange, enticing rhythms.
The Nursing Home staff had let us sit undisturbed in the darkened room, Barry leaning forward in the lounge chair in the corner by the window. Earlier he must have brought the chair close. The Friday before when Baz had called, thinking the time then may have been narrowing, he had been found close by a doped Al in the common room holding his hand.
On the phone yesterday afternoon Baz had choked telling of the passing. Strangely, Baz had not informed his brother Tony of the death of their cousin. Tony, the oldest of the two pair of brothers, had in fact been the source of the musical awakening, playing records for Baz which were later shared with Al and Rob. One night in their shared bedroom at Footscray Tone had read Baz a passage from Dharma Bums, the Neale Cassidy book, Baz had called it. The signal opening that was to lead to decades of exploration for Al, works discovered that never made it into the official cultural canon. Before Al Playboy had been dismissed as pure titillation.
Al had never mastered cursive script at school before he was expelled in the junior grades and Barry’s writing was similarly unformed.
They were a remarkable group the Ellis boys, with their particular Welsh, Jewish and Aboriginal heritage at least partly.
