The Brag

Concrete Blonde
Still Bloodletting
Mike Gee

Nearly two decades ago, Concrete Blonde frontwoman Johnette Napolitano and I spoke for nearly 90 minutes about her alien abduction experience. It was a story that eventually ran worldwide – and when we revisited the topic in 2002, she told me, “Eight million people can’t be making up the same thing. That’s too many people to call crazy liars. It’s about getting the truth out there.” Later in the same interview, we were talking politics. “We have 100 million cable channels, and crap on every one of them. I don’t have a TV anymore… If I saw that plane fly into that building one more time I was going to lose it.”

That’s Napolitano for you. Now 53, she has five acres of desert in Joshua Tree, California, where she’s a gallery artist, working with discarded and reclaimed materials. And Concrete Blonde are back together for a third time. The first bout ran from 1982-1995, round two from 2001-2004 – and by 2006 it was all over, apparently for good. Johnette left this farewell message on the Concrete Blonde website: “Thanks to everyone who heard and believed in the music. Music lives on. Keep listening. Keep believing, keep dreaming. Like a ripple, the music moves and travels and finds you. Drive to the music, Make love to the music, cry to the music. That’s why we made it. Long after we’re gone the music will still be there …” But on the 20th anniversary of the band’s most celebrated and remarkable album Bloodletting, popular demand has demanded that, as the tour is titled, ‘The Vampires Rise’.

Johnette is her usual talkative self today, hardly pausing for breath. “I’m older and I’m wiser enough now to know there’s no point in being wiser!” she says. “So, yes, we’re back again. We didn’t plan on it. It’s not like I sit around with an alarm clock going, ‘It’s 20 years since Bloodletting’.” Turns out she actually had no idea that the album’s smash hit single ‘Joey’ was already two decades old. “It’s been strange year,” she tells me. “My dad died a year ago, and he’d have said go and do it.”

It’s not like Johnette hasn’t been keeping herself musically busy. “I never stop playing,” she tells me. She’s released two solo albums since the band split, and has done some film work too – including vocals on the score for Australian film West, and music on Candy as well. “So for Jim [James Mankey, guitarist] and I, it was like, ‘Should we do this?’ We talk all the time. What we asked ourselves was, ‘Is it worth it? Are we going to have a good time?’ We went out in North America, and wow, it was great, everybody was incredibly excited. So then it was like, ‘Fuck, let’s go to Australia’.

“Mankey and I have been around a long time and we respect what we’ve done – so we’re not going to do it if it loses anything. We’re also musicians; we’re lazy, we like to sit around and smoke pot. There’s no point being a musician if you can’t do what you want.”
Johnette tells me that one of the best things about doing these shows are the kids that come with their parents to the gigs. “They’re 18 years old!” she exclaims. “I can’t remember being with my parents around music. My dad was into outlaw music and the Rat Pack, Johnny Cash. What I’ve found though is that I have a spectrum musically that I didn’t appreciate before. And as you get older, you realise you know some shit. Usually it’s kids that do it for people – I don’t have any kids, but my dogs think it’s good that I can open a can of food … I’m like a God to them.”

Johnette tells me that there’s no new record on the way for Concrete Blonde. Of course they thought about it, but the answer was ‘No.’ Johnette says she and Mankey respect each other on a level they didn’t before, and while they like the idea of doing something new, maybe some singles some time, the notion of a whole album over a year…? “I don’t feel like either one of us has to do that,” she says.

The set list for the ‘Vampires’ tour was put together the old-fashioned way – by watching YouTube and working out from the number of views what were the most popular songs. “Playing the whole Bloodletting album from beginning to end over and over again was not a consideration – by the third show I’m pretty sure I would rather have killed myself. So we worked it on the most views, saw we had a lot of hits, and went out and played them. It’s a great set, and people went nuts.”

Johnette seems happy in this do-it-yourself-if-you-want media world. No need for a record company; publish and make available your own music on the Internet. It’s all there, if you want it. “It separates people out,” she says. “It asks questions of you: Do you wanna be an artist? Do you wanna be a rock star? Can you support yourself doing what you like to do? I consider myself tremendously successful at being able to do that. Whether living in the desert on five acres is successful or not…” she says, before pausing. “It is to me.”

That Mexican moon is still shining brightly.

Who: Concrete Blonde
Where: The Enmore Theatre
When: Thursday October 21