How long have you been a ‘musician’?

All my life, friend, all my life.

I grew up around music being played on the stereo. I never really thought this was unusual until I realized that not everyone had radios. Most people I have spoken to lately grew up surrounded by animals. I guess I was lucky. That’s a guess. Dad used to wake the family up with Meatloaf cooking fried rice without a shirt on. One of my other mates used to wake up being licked by a zebra. I’m pretty sure I know which one I would prefer.

So I suppose, to answer your question I have been a musician from the first moments in the womb. Mum always sang a lot. She was a singing store assistant selling vacuums so I know the songs from the musical Dirt really well.

All of us brothers were forced to take piano. I hated it then but love it now. Kind of like smoking. You can’t be a proper musician without being hooked on nicotine. Well, not the kind of muso I aspire to be.

Muso. Sounds like Draino don’t you reckon? You get about as much respect as a muso as a house wife gives to Draino, you know what I mean? It’s not like Lawyer, or Doctor. Muso. Equates with badly paid hippy scunge ripe for being ripped off. That’s why the big record companies pay their musos in smack. It’s easier that way.

So I played piano from 4. Been playing that thing for 26 friggin years, dog. Beginning of a penniless obsession. I have spent more money and time on music than Genghis Khan spent killing. Heavy.

At 9 my Dad bought me a trombone. Didn’t know what it was. I wanted a saxaphone. Again, I am happy that he bought it. Meant I could play Bat out of Hell from hotel rooftops at 3 in the morning. Gave me a certain slant on things. Taught me how to slide up and down my notes. Gave me big lungs too. Man, you really need to blow that thing. When I was a kid I was always the one chosen to blow on the fire to get it going. True. It’s nice. Kind of like breathing notes.

How many instruments do you play?

Anything I get my hands on. Drums if I can. Synths. Harp. Didge. Bass. Basically once you learn the language you can apply it to other instruments, see. And it is a language, dude, full of Minors, Majors, Distended 5ths, Sharps, Flats, half notes, semi-brieves, minums, quints, beats and bangs.

Piano, guitar and bone mostly. Although I had my own studio for many years and learnt how to program strings…ethnic instruments… programming gives you all the instruments of the world at your fingertips. I used to call it my dungeon, because I sincerely had problems leaving it. Sometimes I’d go 3 days straight putting down what was in my head. Kind of like a Korean kid playing computer games until he dies. Except I didn’t die. Not that I know of, anyway.

How does it feel having this kind of obsession?

A little bit on the outside really. You constantly got a tune in your head. If you write music then you are truly screwed, because you walk around half the time humming or whistling or mouthing new lyrics. You can’t help it. It’s something that just comes to you.

It’s like your creator has stuck a needle deep into your head, and every now and then he’ll get out something that looks like a beer bong and stick the end of the funnel into the syringe and pour some melody down, and BAM it hits. You never know when its’ going to hit, but when it does you feel high. You start writing out or playing what you are hearing. You could sit down and try to write, but usually the needle ain’t full. It usually hits when you least expect it, and you’ve got to get drunk cause that’s an interesting way to deal with it. It brings on the high. Or stoned. That kind of cuddles up to the hit and makes you write until it’s finished… and a tune might not be finished for a long time. That’s why musos generally are substance users. They get this natural buzz from somewhere which fills their head with symphonies and this separates us from the rest of you mob who never get it. So to deal with it, we just sit in a corner with our keyboard or guitar and get drunk… or play. It doesn’t bother me.

So what is it like to be muso?

Different. I’m a loner because of it. I can spend days on my own with music. It’s like a conversation with the bloke who put the needle in my arm. My muse. I’m just ‘iccking’ it.

I don’t know what God James Blunt gets dealt by though. That dude is seriously getting dealt the wrong card.

What’s your life like?

Unorthodox. I mean with music there isn’t a ladder to climb, you know? Not like your accountant who gets a cadetship, enters a firm, works his way through the promotions, finally reaches partner, then gets sacked on a downsize and finds out that he’s counted everybody else’s dough for 40 years for the memory of a few dirty weekends. That’s a mass generalization, but you know what I’m saying...

There isn’t a music industry. It’s just something you do. I started out playing in school orchestras and choirs, the usual. Through that I played in a jazz band and we played gigs at weddings, formals… I thought: ‘How wonderful. I’m being paid to sing, sink free piss and pick up chicks in dancing gowns.’ Probably wore thin on the folks who hired me, though. I didn’t really think about that. And then I started seeing rock gigs in pubs. My flat mate was a groupie of Mother Hubbard (Alex Lloyd’s old band in the mid 90’s) and I used to go along and watch those cats play. They rocked. And picked up chicks, And were given free piss! And I remember saying to my flat mate at a gig at the Bridge in Rozelle: ‘I want to do that!’ And she said: ‘You can!’

That was it. Jazz didn’t seem to do it for me anymore. I was singing everybody else’s songs! I wanted to write, you know, ‘express myself’. And that was before Alex changed his name to Lloyd and cornered the Australian market and forgot about me and talking to me about Russian Movies. But that was another time.

So it became an obsession of expression. And once I signalled to the Big G upstairs my motives, he stuck the needle in my arm you know. I used to skip my lectures and hide away in a small room with a pot of coffee and some ciggies and listen to Tom Waits. I probably wrote a song a week, just experimenting. Teaching myself the guitar. I was a romantic. I used to write poetry to every girl I kissed and then play them a song in the morning.

I foolishly went overseas with only a didge. When I was in London I had to spend half my savings on a guitar (cause I couldn’t do without, the whole addiction thing)… I lived on rice for the rest of my travels. But wrote some interesting tunes. I ended up busking a lot with a bloke I called Lucky Steve. He introduced me to Neil Young before I forgot about him and my wife had to reintroduce my self to him again. And I ended up playing in a small bar in Edingburgh regularly. I remember doing a whole heap of Doors covers and my own weird compositions. At the time I was firmly obsessed with Jeff Buckley. Who wasn’t?

So a lot of my early stuff was mostly using a lot of falsetto. I remember one night I played a set, and I got off and one guy came up to me and said ‘you are absolute shit’. Then another older man came up to me and said I was really interesting and sounded a lot like Tim Buckley. I didn’t even know who Jeff’s father was then.

It was my first introduction to the schizo critix you can come across. Some people love my stuff (my mum)… others really hate it… (record companies). That all comes with the territory, although it does really wear down your soul to hack it.

Like when you write a song, put it down, and show it to someone and they say: ‘yeah whatever’. That’s like sticking a bone in your throat. Like you feel you have slaved over something for days only to have such hopeless dismissal. But then I found earphones. I think my music sounds so much better in earphones. You got to really listen. It’s not like music like Jet, that you put on the stereo and drink beer to. It’s like story telling… it’s needs a certain closeness.

Which bands have you been in?

When I got back from travelling a mate from school called me up and said we should start a band. And there it was. We had actually begun when we were 14 at his family house in the country. Singing Van Diemen’s Land and Crowded House tunes. But his family house was now in Jersey Road Paddington. So that was the name of the Band: Jersey Road.  We recruited a mate’s girlfriend for drumming duties and one of her mates for bass. Funnily enough he is now the godfather of my child and introduced me to my now wife. That’s what happens to those who venture out to be rock stars, mate!

We headed for the country and borrowed a house for a week of rehearsals and there it was: a band. Started gigging and lucky for us had plenty of twenty-somethings with cash to support the pubs on a Tuesday and Wednesday night. The agency who seemed to control all the gigs at the time kept on telling us our Friday night was coming. We rocked. Matt (the guitarist) and I would always fantasize about being U2. We wrote reams of the stuff. Rock love songs. Looking back on it now, and having booked venues myself, I realize we had something good. But I simply wasn’t 100% into rock. My jazz background wanted funk. And my voice wanted folk, not competing with 2 guitars. Jersey Road came to an unfortunate end. I think it was responsible for the end of a few dreams. The drummer and bass player went on to play punk metal, and Matt became a stockbroker writing ballads in his spare time. I bought a studio with a mate and proceeded to write and record.

Have you released anything?

Have I? No. It’s strange, but after writing all of this music and playing for this long I still haven’t got about to making it commercially viable. I don’t think music is a commercial thing. It’s a personal thing. If people hear my music and like it or relate to it, that is wonderful. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to make money out of it, but business ain’t where the soul is, and once you start doing something to make money the joy seems to fade. And without joy, music is nothing. Songs to me are like statements of emotion. Pieces that you can make to communicate to someone the frailty of an experience, or the depth of a view, or the thoughts that batter you whenever an emotion pops up. We are taught so much to knock those emotions on the head, particularly in a work setting, so music for me is a pure sort of emotion. If ever I am feeling overwhelmed by a feeling I can’t seem to get out of my head, I write music. I think that is its purpose. To convey emotion, and put it back to the people. An old Italian folk song will get a whole wedding up and dancing. Beethoven symphonies could have written out of sheer frustration at his circumstances in deafness or in love. Bono is like the opposite of Hitler. He writes songs to make whole stadiums feel high on goodness. A song like Beautiful Day could be considered the complete nemesis of Mein Kampf.

What happened after Jersey Road?

Writing, writing and more writing. I don’t think I will ever stop writing music. I ended up living with an old mate who I convinced to buy a bass guitar while I was staying with him in London. He came back and we began to write tunes and build a studio. Sarah (my wife) used to call it Homer’s Spice Rack. We were smoking so much that’s the way it looked.

There was a ghost in the house, and he lived in the kitchen. I was working in an auction house and I used to bring all kinds of shit home. I bought this beautiful old 1800’s pump organ for like 30 bucks and brought it back. We took it apart and it was never the same again… basically taught myself audio engineering, trying to get songs down… stopped performing, really. Just writing tunes. Again, it’s amazing how much dreaming goes on when you are writing music.

This ghost, who I communed with regularly, he always seemed to be up when I was, at 3 am recording rain, one time he literally put this tune into my head. I was doing  a remix for Fatboy Slim and I was in the kitchen and this melody just popped so strong into my mind. It was what I call The Russian Army March. To this day I have no idea what the tune is but it feels vaguely familiar, as if it actually was a march and this ghost just handed it to me. Very strange. And strong. It really freaked me out, actually. I showed it to my mates and they loved it, but again, there seems to be a grand difference between people loving your music and the music which is actually sold. It doesn’t really take away from the work, it just means it’s not sellable yet.

Another odd experience happened after I went to a fancy dress birthday party in the Kross. One of the best friends I have met through music and it was his brother’s birthday. He was actually going to play the tune (the march) at this guy’s party… but someone wouldn’t allow it. It started me on all kinds of things. Never, never take drugs at a fancy dress party… anyways it was in 2000 sometime, early, I think, and my mate is Jewish, and bless his soul, I have learnt a great deal from him… With me being brought up in what he may term as a WASP, we both kind of taught each other cultural clarity…  the party got very heavy at some stage… what with a grand Jewish gathering and the kind of Lebs who like to call the Cross their business… and I freaked out.  Walked out the back door and went to a mate whose place looks over Sydney and had this vision of like bombs going off over Sydney. This was way before any of the ‘terrorism’ was happening…. kind of at the end of the Clinton Sax and Sex peace period… I was very affected.

I went home and put down a song about all the shit that I hear going on between 2 peoples that can’t seem to find any kind of peace. I sampled Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech…. the song was called: Call It Love. Kind of Michael Hutchence-esque. I showed it to a few people and they said: ‘Luke, what war?’

And I was like… trust me on this one.

When September 11 happened I was managing The Cat and Fiddle in Balmain, Sydney. I always thought it was a privilege to do that gig. The mate who had bought the bass guitar bought a pub. I had half of the Channel 7 news crew drinking at my bar, and I was closing and pulling up kegs and watching the big screen and saw the 2nd plane go into the tower live. I ran out and switched on the TV and said, ‘Guys… you better look at this.’ Rex Reason had to zoom off and cover it from 5 am… we all at stayed on at the bar … next to the Channel 7 crew were a small group of backpackers from New York. They all went into medical shock …

Anyways… I had a major breakdown. All these visions I’d had and the song that I wrote suddenly made sense. So it’s like as I said before… music is powerful… it’s like magic… like that giant needled in your arms. Keith Richards said as much on his last tour. It’s the unexplainable.

Would I be keen to sell that? Probably not. It seems to cheapen the whole importance of it for me. I write pop but it is always kooky and always has some kind of message. Music is a moralizer of sorts. I ‘m not a moralist in any form… but I believe music is here because it validates us. And for me… music validates my life. I am hoping, now that I have a son, I’m going to wrap up all the songs I have written -I’m up to about 100- and wrap them in plastic and dig a big hole somewhere near an ancient tree and bury them… then draw a treasure map for him when he’s older, reading ‘… son, this is what your father was on the inside.’

I think it’s a nice idea. I don’t really hunger for success in this life… but I think it would be wonderful if it could happen post mortem. It means I wouldn’t be around to suffer the arrows from people who pretend to know fuck all about it when they are listeners. I guess what I am saying is be nice to the musician. They provide your life’s soundtrack. It didn’t come from nowhere.

Are you in a band now?

Yes. Of course. There is no period in the last 12 years where I have not been in a band.  When I was running the Cat with my friend I was also recording a great deal. And my friend offered to fund a 3 song EP to be released (again, the dream) and we worked with this producer who I found it extremely difficult to work with, to communicate with. We recorded under the name of Roohandupen, and it rocked. But it all seemed too pushed… too much work keeping in mind the market… music should be about doing what comes… it should not require a great deal of production (though this can be an element).

The short of it is that this seemed to fall by the wayside too. I have 200 CD’s still stashed under my bed for a day when it might be heard… but after all this time, I suppose I have become both a timid and carefree soul. I want my music to be out there, but I’m so scared of failure that I can’t bring myself to do it. I suppose I have grown used to the lack of success and have accepted music and writing as like my fifth limb, and fuck it… I am not writing for an audience. If you write for the audience you write for no-one. If you write for yourself you know what is true.

Did Kerouac write for his readers? Fuck no. He wrote for himself, and people finally found it interesting, and then he got the shits because people pigeon-holed him and held him responsible for beat. His message was to go out there and do it… don’t just sit back in your couch and read me. Live!

I’m just documenting my life… cause I think life is worth documenting. This is the way I feel about my music. I have like this dream of being quite old on my farm somewhere, and then having some knock on the door from someone young saying Mr Gerber, we are interested in your work. We think it has some worth. And I’ll say: Damn Dog, no shit? I find selling creative stuff offensive really. It’s like trying to sell your mum. I’d like to get a good price for it, but I know I am going to feel way bad about the transaction, you know?

What’s it like to be in a band?

Awesome. My current band is ‘The Bleeding Obvious’. Brian (fellow bandmate) says that we are a loose collective of incompetents. And I think there’s something in that. Mark (guitarist and singer for Sydney Punk Band ‘Atomicide’) coined the name. And I suppose we are about that. It seems there are a lot of solutions to problems that are bleeding obvious in the world. To be a fly on the wall you would think we are more philosophers than musicians. When we have a practice its more of a session you know… we often go down the coast to Stanwell Park for a weekend and drink, smoke, talk shit, and most importantly write and play songs. If you have ever seen the Chilli Pepper’s doco about the making of Blood Sugar Sex Magick you might understand. That scene where John Frusciante, such an awesome player, just before he lost his mind totally, is on a rooftop talking about what it is like to be a funky monk … a chilli pepper… how a band is based around more than music, that being a member of a living organism that shares a similar philosophy is inspiring. We’ve actually been together for 4 years… but what does being together mean? We all have a similar want to get together and do our shit.

We recently recorded a 4 track EP. We all have different projects… and anyways we are all very strong songwriters, so that’s what we are… a band of brothers whose craft is the craft of song writing. It’s like we have a play and bring a song to the table and then, we have discussed this, we try our best to get rid of our own egos for the play, listen to what each other has to say and contribute, argue a bit (of course) and then play for the benefit of the song. We are trying to do justice to our creations.

We have all come to the conclusion that we cannot really do this for money, but we can do this for other reasons, and if money comes along, then well and good… this means we could be getting together and recording and playing on each others songs till the day we die. This suits me. It takes out the ambition. If you got ambition… you can end up in some pretty tricky places. I watched a doco on Keith Moon the other night. The animal was a drumming freak… but it ended in sadness.

Music is my life, dude. And I am just happy to share that music with 2 mates and my brother (keyboards). It’s like instead of going to the pub with my workmates and talking shit… I go and hang in a room with my bandmates and do something sacred: the writing and playing of music.

Where do you see yourself in the future?

Writing, playing, recording, and becoming involved with Dispute Resolution. I am finally in my last year of a law degree and figure I have to do something to support my music habit.

Luke Gerber is a member of the Bleeding Obvious and a doting dad.
To date he has recorded 74 songs and wants to record another 50.
If you would like to hear any of his tunes, of his own and previous or current bands, please email: luke.gerber [at] gmail.com
He shall send you an mp3 of a song of your chosen mood or genre.