Famous Blue Raincoat
by Many years ago, when my hair was longer and my clothes were shabbier, I played guitar in a Sydney-based rock band. We never come to anything more than a few years worth of gigs and a deeply closeted aspiration to take the radio charts by storm. We never did. A lack of talent intervened, but it was damn fun while it lasted. Anyway, at one point during this debauched period of my life, I had a friend who was the frontman for the exotically named, Blue Apples of The Moon. He had an unusually resonant baritone and a penchant for writing epic music. One day he handed me a demo cassette with a batch of his new songs on it. I took it to work with me the next day, whacked it into my Sony Walkman, and immediately swooned amongst the lulling tones and fretfully beautiful lyrics of this Leonard Cohen classic. I was gobsmacked. Totally mesmerised. And having never heard it before, I presumed that my friend — this humble frontman of a bizarrely named rock band — had just penned the greatest song of our generation. For about eight minutes and seventeen seconds, I was convinced he was genius. That was until one of my workmates pointed out that it was actually a Leonard Cohen masterpiece, one of many. It turns out that my friend’s demos were on the other side of the cassette. And they were pretty average. But hell, anything would be after this unholy precedent.
Tagged: classic songs
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