If you’ve ever played the burning house game (you know the one, where you’re forced to choose what you would save if – heaven forbid – your house and all its contents were about to go up in smoke), then you’ll know most people save everyday things like family photos, jewellery, material possessions.
But if you take that notion and apply it to your all-time favourite music, the age-old game gets a little more interesting.
This was the concept behind Diesel’s latest album, Americana. “I knew I had to do this,” says the US-born Australian musician otherwise known as Mark Lizotte. “The time was right, so I just picked the songs and started to work out how I wanted to attack each one. I knew I had to whack this one out of the park.”
Americana doesn’t disappoint, taking on some of the most accomplished artists in modern music history including Buddy Holly, James Taylor, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen and the Man in Black himself, Johnny Cash.
“The first one I attacked was ‘Ring Of Fire’,” says Lizotte. “I had an idea while I was driving about how to make it my own. And while it’s still recognisable as the Johnny Cash song that everyone loves, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing it verbatim with a two-step drum or a mariachi trumpet horn – I needed to put my stamp on it.
“It was the same for ‘Fire And Rain’ by James Taylor. I wanted to take it away from that American folk thing and move it down south to Memphis and give it some soul. No-one told me the rules, no-one said you can’t mix and match. So I wanted to take artists, remove all their clothes, swap them over and dress them again.”
While Lizotte says he relished the opportunity to be wildly experimental, he admits to moments of self-doubt. “To be honest though, there were the niggly questions in my mind like, ‘Is that going to be OK? Is it going to be too weird?’ I was aware of what I was doing, but it just felt good – everyone in the studio was having fun, so I just went with it.”
The record, released this month, was a labour of love and a nod to Lizotte’s humble beginnings in Fall River, Massachusetts, during the late ’60s before his family emigrated to Perth in 1971. “Just before we started to record this album, I took some time off and started peeling back through the layers of my memory, right back to my first recollection of a song at the age of two, which was ‘The Circle Game’ by Joni Mitchell – that seemed like a good place to start,” he says.
“Growing up in a house with six other siblings all older than me was unforgettable, and they were all in their teens buying records, so I was just a baby listening to their amazing albums. If I was from a smaller family I probably wouldn’t have got to listen to them – it was an incredible music education.”
He remembers his brother telling him all about Springsteen’s ‘Born To Run’ after reading an article in Rolling Stone, and first hearing Tom Petty’s ‘Here Comes My Girl’. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow! He just hangs on to that one chord the entire song.’ That song is a study in itself – it’s my favourite song on the album.”
Lizotte says his early introduction to music had a profound effect on him growing up, and has driven his ambition to become one of our country’s most loved and accomplished musicians through sheer hard work and determination.
“The first live show I remember seeing was Bob Marley – I’ve still got the ticket stub actually!” he laughs. “That was around the same time my brothers and sisters started doing a very nice thing and started shelling out a few dollars for their little brother to get a ticket to the shows they were going to.
“Actually my first real rock show was The Doobie Brothers at the WACA in Perth. It was outdoors and I remember my brother being a little older than me. He had me on his shoulders, which is something they wouldn’t allow now, but I had to be on his shoulders for the whole gig, otherwise I wouldn’t have seen a damn thing. They did this thing that makes me laugh now – they had these pyrotechnics going off behind the amps. They had a big line of amps as all bands did, and two drummers, one on each side, that looked amazing.
“Then the pyros started smoking and I thought, ‘Oh my God, their amps are blowing up!’ Of course they weren’t, but my brother just went along with the gag. That day blew my mind. That kind of stuff really makes a huge impression on an eight-year-old. To me they weren’t human, they were superheroes up there, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
These days, Lizotte is a six-time ARIA Award winner and proud family man with two teenage daughters. He has been outspoken about the positive effect music can have on fragile young lives, but he openly admits he wasn’t always the model son.
“I do remember sometimes thinking my parents didn’t understand me and being a rambunctious little upstart, which was probably very frustrating. But I did feel the anguish that I should be out on my own, and I recall literally standing on the train tracks that led out of town thinking, ‘One day I’ll get out of here.’” He did, and the rest is history.
Americana is out now through Liberation. Catch Diesel withImogen Clark onSaturday September 3 at Factory Theatre.
