The Didjeri News, Portland's Didjeridu Newletter

September 1998 And interview with Peter Spoecker by Ed Drury

[Ed] Peter, let's start with the Whole Earth recording which resulted from an extensive tour of Australia in which you met both Aboriginal and non- Aboriginal Didjeridu artists. After hours of recording, mixing and listening to your field work, what kinds of preferences and insights regarding style did you arrive at? And most importantly, how did this experience influence your playing and performances?

[Peter] Well, my initial take on preferences was that I liked modern styles better than traditional Aboriginal styles. Some of the most technically and musically awesome didge playing I recorded (or ever heard period) was played by Aborigines, but playing contemporary styles rather than traditional. Check out Michael Ambyrum on the "Whole Earth Didgeridoo" CD. You can listen to that guy 10 times in a row and still have no clue how he's doing half of what he does or where he ever finds a chance to breathe at all. On top of that his rhythm and groove sense are awesome almost beyond the human spectrum. In comparison to the best contemporary didge styles (by white or Aboriginal players in Oz or anywhere else) I found traditional Aboriginal styles rather repetitive and boring and I found the singing mostly rather atonal and not really very musical. Over the last few years, however, I've listened to those old field recordings of really genuine traditional didge & singing performances many times and I've also tried to imitate the didge what they doo (doodah, doodah). Er, uh, please excuse that little bit of extemporaneous poetical creativity. Seriously, I'm beginning to believe that you have to be born into that culture and be trained for that sort of playing from very early childhood. Even a really heavy hitting Oz born white guy like Adam Plack only plays a style that's reminiscent of Arnhem Land Aboriginal now and then. His stuff is awesome, but it's not Aboriginal. The really sad thing is that in another generation there will probably be almost no more really great truly traditional Aboriginal didge players around. The young creative musically inclined Aborigines are all training to be rock stars. There are almost certainly HUNDREDS of Aboriginal rock bands in Oz!!! This I deduce from a great deal of personal experience. The aspects of Aboriginal culture that are being preserved (though changed in the process) are virtually only those that make a buck. Didge making and other sorts of handicrafts as well as Aboriginal paintings are active big time and the tourist bucks are big time too. Traditional didge playing doesn't have much economic potential, so it's on the way out, sad to say. Having listened to my recordings of truly traditional Aboriginal singing and didge, I've developed an awe and a deep aesthetic appreciation for that. The world will be a poorer place when the last of that is gone. There is a power and a goose bump raising "otherness" in that music that defies description, categorization, analysis or imitation. I think those of us not born to it can no more really grasp it than we can grasp the whole dream time mythology, no matter how many articles and what not we read and write about it from a considerable distance and a vast ignorance and a totally wrong sort of "reality" perspective. Sadly, that human majority that is not in tune with that and can't really grasp it includes most Aborigines as well now. Making a buck with items of "Aboriginal culture" is not quite the same as truly living in a stone age culture and living the ancient ways. Well, change is the most basic condition of the Universe and while many Aborigines are now taking pop/rock styles in fresh new directions influenced by their cultural heritage, people all over the world are taking the didge in fresh new directions. We lose some things, we gain some things. Well, I'm sure you had no notion that I'd put so many words into quite the direction I have, but I didn't either. As far as how all that recording and subsequent studio work affected my own playing and performances, the importance of the Oz experience could hardly be overstated. I learned so much there both in terms of concepts and technique that it's literally taken years to begin to assimilate it. I'm sure it will continue to leaven my evolving style for the rest of my life. I would go so far as to say that any really serious didge player MUST make the "pilgrimage" to Oz some time and spend as much time as he (or she) can in the didge intensive areas of Oz (Northern Territory and Northern Queensland, especially around Cairns). You just can't get it all from a distance. There are just so many didge players down there.

[Ed] I've kinda of developed is a view of you as something of a ethnomusicologist. If this is an unfair view or role to cast you, I'd be interested in hearing how....

[Peter] Well, I don't know if I'm qualified to wear the title of "ethnomusicologist" since I've never taken a single music class or related anthropology class or studied this or any related field on my own either. I just seem to be a natural "professor" intellectual type without even trying. I was on my way toward being a college professor (biology) at UC Berkeley in 1965, but I gave up the Ph.D. in favor of the LSD. I gave that and all other mind altering substances up after a few years, but I never got back into the academic life, though people still think of me as a "professor" type.

[Ed] So perhaps we should go a different direction from academia?

[Peter] Well, I sort of answered that question already. It's not an issue of wanting or not wanting to travel down the ethnomusicology street. It's just that I barely know what the word means. My training in that field is truly zip all. Ever since as far back as high school I've favored alternate sorts of music rather than what all the other kids listened to, but I never made an intellectual study of it. I loved all those wonderful folk singers of the fifties and early sixties: Pete Seeger and the Weavers, the Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary, and the countless black folks doing super cool "home spun" music. Remember Robert Johnson? I was also very much into flamenco & classical guitar and went to all the big time concerts (Segovia, Mario Escudero, Sabicas, etc.) I even got to watch Carmen Amaya dance not 10 feet from me during the final years of her career at an LA restaurant that featured world class flamenco acts. For several years Mario Escudero, one of the world's best flamenco solo guitarists used to play in the lounge of a high end Mexican restaurant in the LA area and I'd go there about once a week average. Sometimes a carload or two of serious flamenco enthusiasts would go together. When we'd come in Mario would just beam and really crank up the performance level. It was obviously always a big thrill to him to have genuine audiences rather than just people talking and getting drunk and really not paying much attention to the "background music".
One time as a group of us was leaving close to closing time he followed us out "serenading" us with his guitar mariachi style. I was equally enthused about East Indian music and rarely missed Ali Akbar Khan, Bismillah Khan, Ravi Shankar, etc. if they were performing somewhere. During the mid sixties in Berkeley, I naturally got into the total explosion of creative directions that music was taking then. I went to performances by Jimi Hendrix, the Jefferson airplane (who I saw before they got the least bit famous), Country Joe and the Fish (as a funky jug band and the famous rock band), Janis Joplin, the Doors and countless lesser known but equally talented and creative music acts. Those were some intense days music wise and lots of other ways. During that time I even managed to get a scholarship to attend tabla classes at the Ali Akbar Khan school of Indian music. I got the scholarship based on a tape of my flamenco guitar playing after not having touched the guitar for years. Tabla playing, however, didn't turn out to be my thing. I've at least dabbled with numerous instruments, but the didge is the only one that really took. Before the didge, I was heavily into electronic music and I was a true pioneer in the field of computer controlled electronic music. For a long time I spent more time with a soldering iron and figuring out how to modify and create circuits to do things the primitive equipment available at the time couldn't do than I spent actually doing music. Once I got started with didge, it became pretty clear that that was really my "music dharma" this life time.

[Ed] One thing I've been quite interested in the past few years is the regional differences between styles of Didjeridu. In the earlier work done by researchers such as Profs Jones, Moyle, Elkin and West, much had been written about such stylistic differences. Not so much in current discussions in which for example, all traditional playing seems to focus on Yolgnu for example. In your experience in Australia, did you notice differences in playing technique from area to area or are these beginning to blur with cross-influences between traditional players? And if some element of an older regional style are still evident, how would you describe them at the time of your field work which was more recent than say Dr. West who first recorded David Blanasi in 1962?

[Peter] Well, here's another one that's really ethnomusicology. I found so few Aboriginal players playing a traditional style of any kind that I never got a basis for comparisons at all. The most interesting Aboriginal players I met and recorded definitely didn't play traditional styles.
Practically the only traditional style playing I heard was at commercial dance or dance/theater performances. This stuff all sounded pretty much the same to me and mostly not particularly interesting. Since these folks travel quite a bit doing their performances there's no telling where their playing style actually originated. I didn't make any effort to research this issue at all. Anyone wanting to research this sort of stuff in Oz nowadays would have a pretty frustrating time of it. Getting permits to get into Aboriginal areas is a super major hassle and you need one for each place you want to go to. Moreover, finding traditional players is just not that easy period. Just like any of the other non-commercializable aspects of Aboriginal culture, traditional didge playing is a dying art. Now if you wanted to do some research on Aboriginal rock bands, you'd have no trouble collecting tons of information!!!! I was not particularly into doing the sort of ethnomusicological research you're asking about anyway. The "professor" thing is all illusion, I'm afraid.

[Ed] This was a somewhat pointed question as I've seen a kind of reductionist approach to the topic of traditional style where the most popular style is touted to be "traditional" with perhaps less aggressive styles of Western Arnhem Land being dismissed. Another , in my opinion, shame of the modern era. I wonder if these traditions will be the first "casualties" of this 'westernization' of Didjeridu performance standards.

[Peter] I think you can reduce the whole issue very simply. What makes a buck will survive and the rest won't. This is the ultimate form of democracy in action. You vote for what you want with your wallet. I think in any case that the real excitement with didge is what us enthusiastic "newcomers" are doing with playing and didge making. The Aborigines have had their 50,000 years of it and are probably glad to let us have a go at it now while they discover the thrills of forming rock bands. Some of these are really great too. I love a rock act with Aboriginal lyrics in the songs and with a didge for rhythmic accents. Incidentally of all the Aboriginal rock bands I've heard, I'd put Yothu Yindi in the bottom third. They were just the first and carved out a big place for themselves commercially. Sort of similar to the American pop music scene isn't it? The guys making the biggest bucks aren't necessarily the most creative musicians, just the guys that were in the right place at the right time with the right marketing punch behind them.

[Ed] This would be a good point to discuss your compilation of the Whole Earth recording. How did you get the idea to send out review copies to select the final tracks? I'd also be interested in hearing about the track sequences, how you decided on the line up once you had set the tracks which would ultimately be on the finished product.

[Peter]Well, as I worked on that project it somehow ended up bigger and bigger. There was just so much cool stuff I couldn't bear not to have represented and putting it all together was just so much fun. Finally there ended up being way more than enough for two CD's and I decided to make it a 2 CD volume (like the USA project really will be). However, a friend of mine (not a didge player or even a didge fan especially) urged me to reconsider and just include the absolute best cuts in a single CD. He was so adamant about this that I started to consider it. The problem was, I liked all the cuts and after all that work how should I decide what to eliminate, so he suggested letting a few people (including him) listen to everything. Well, I did that, and no consensus emerged about what to get rid of and what to keep. What did emerge was the fact that not everybody liked every cut. Some people really hated some cuts. That's when I decided that getting a lot more feedback was really important. I didn't want any cuts that anybody hated, no matter how much I might like those cuts. I still thought in terms of 2 CD's, but let as many listeners as I could find decide what to get rid of. As I found more listeners to evaluate I discovered that there were quite a few cuts that some people really disliked a lot, even though some other people liked these same cuts. On the other hand it began to emerge that some cuts got pretty high ratings by nearly everyone. That's when I decided that I would make a really big effort to get as many evaluators as possible and let these evaluations be the basis of doing exactly what my friend suggested; namely just do one CD of the stuff that people like best. This turned out to be a very fortunate decision. It ended up taking an incredible THREE MONTHS to get enough evaluations that I felt confident with the results, but the time and money spent for that were absolutely worth it. Out of the original 150 minutes or so I ended up with 63 minutes that was really solid in terms of people's responses. Subsequently, the sort of feedback I've gotten from people on the finished album has been simply unbelievable. Quite a few people have told me that "Whole Earth Didgeridoo" is their all time favorite didge album. This would definitely not have been the case if I had included everything I had to begin with. The whole experience didn't give me a clue how to bypass the evaluation process in the future either. I don't have much of a handle at all on what people are apt to give highest or lowest ratings for. It's most interesting that some cuts get rated very high by everybody, some get rated in the middle by everybody, some at the bottom by everybody and some cuts get top ratings by some people and middle or bottom by others. The only way to get an album with nothing but cuts that almost everyone will like a lot is to produce about twice the amount of material you need and then get as many evaluations as possible to reduce this to one album. For USA I have about 4 hours worth of material that I could use and that I'm personally quite pleased with, but it'll be cut down to 2 CD's. This is a very expensive and time consuming way to do things and the evaluation procedure itself is also time consuming and a bit expensive, but now that I know it's actually possible to do it, I want to produce nothing but albums with an absolutely maximum amount of appeal. Marketing any sort of independent music is extremely challenging and there's a lot of other people competing for relatively few bucks. Didge music especially is really a rather small niche market. I figure I'd much rather just keep producing albums that are perceived as really outstanding and let them hopefully sort of float to the top rather than put a really huge amount of time and money into marketing in order to grab a little share of the bucks. I don't much enjoy the business and marketing aspects of my work and I hope that having nothing but excellent albums will cut down a little on the marketing effort I need to make.
As for how to decide on the order of tracks on a CD, I don't really have any formula for that. I basically try to keep the pace pretty varied, rather than grouping pieces of a similar nature and I usually use a relatively slow and peaceful piece as the last cut on a CD. Once I have a CD done, I make a few copies to send to a smaller number of people for final evaluation on the total feel and if the track order is OK. Last time no one had any suggestions about changes they felt were necessary at that stage.

[Ed] Whole Earth is a beautiful CD. So now it's on to the USA project. Having done Whole Earth, you must have had some clear ideas about how you would do the USA project. What have you got up your sleeve for this one?

[Peter] Well, of course, the big thing I learned with the Whole Earth project was that public feedback is essential if I want the final product to be as good as possible, so this time I'm in the midst of an even more extensive evaluation process. The didge list has made this pretty easy (if everyone I've sent eval. CD's to follows up with a timely evaluation). The other big improvement with USA over Whole Earth is that I didn't have to work with field recordings. I'm simply not using anything on USA that wasn't recorded perfectly. Otherwise, the USA project was more a process of ongoing evolution rather than the result of any clear ideas of how I would do the project. For one thing, it's already taken about twice as long as I ever expected because the various contributors took so long to get around to sending me something. During all this waiting several of us that work together all the time kept doing more stuff and finally I had so much really great material and so much variety on hand that I realized it had to be a 2 CD album. That was not part of the original plan. The delays were really super beneficial for the project because during all that time my own conceptual evolution and improving playing skills got incorporated into the growing project and by giving people all the time they needed without pressuring them with a deadline they came through with some really wonderful submissions for the project. I had to keep changing my concept of just what the project would be on the fly as more submissions came in and this constant evolution resulted in something really wonderful that no one could have planned in advance. Even the cover never could have gotten done quickly. The total amount of work that went into the cover picture (making and painting all those didges) was probably about equivalent to the amount of work that a sane person would normally put into an entire album project. Sanity be damned!!! We all had a great time and the album will speak for itself whether or not all that work was worth it. I would say that the most important things that I'm learning overall about album production is not to take my plans too seriously; let things evolve as they want and don't take deadlines seriously either. Better to make it better than quicker. I'm also finding that incorporating other people into projects is always a good idea. It naturally creates logistics problems and sometimes other problems as well, but overall it's definitely worth while. The whole always ends up much more than the sum of its parts. In summary: KEEP THE PLANS LOOSE AND GO WITH THE FLOW. Everybody has more fun that way and I'm sure that the USA project will vindicate that approach every possible way.

[Ed] The cover art for USA project is very inventive. Your looking a lot like Uncle Sam in that one, Peter. How did you get the idea to make didjs in the shape of letters to spell out the title? And how on earth did you make them all?

Didgeridoo USA

[Peter]Well, remember that I mentioned that even the cover would never have been so interesting if I had insisted on railroading the whole project through on my schedule? The way that cover concept happened is that I initially had the idea of having a variety of didges with flag theme decorations. For years I've been making didges out of quite an assortment of common as well as extremely unusual and exotic materials and I also put a message out to the list that I was looking for unique USA flag theme didges that people might consider making for the album cover. Mike Spencer-Harty made that far out bendy one to my right out of paper mache. Mike is from Wales (which I only noticed after several email exchanges), not the USA, but we're presenting that didge on the cover as a sort of peace offering for anyone on either side that might still be harboring hard feelings about that little misunderstanding when those rash American patriots declared their independence from the mother country. Tim Whittemore made the didge on the extreme right out of Pepsi-Cola cans. Isn't it a beauty? Barry Hall made the one I'm playing that spells "USA". It's made out of clay and I painted the flag designs. Barry has been one of the all around most enthusiastic supporters of the project. He did a really GREAT album contribution using only clay instruments that he made (including a couple of VERY strange "didgey" ones). He calls the piece "Clay USA". Cool, eh? Between working on the album contribution and working on the super special USA didge and traveling back and forth between his home and Europe for his work all the time Barry was not one of my fastest contributors. Just the didge making phase took about a month or so. The USA shape was his own idea and what an idea it was!! That got me really turned onto doing a major didge production effort so I'd have a bunch of really trippy USA flag theme didges for the cover. Then I got the idea for the letters spelling DIDGERIDOO. I knew I'd never be able to make them on a computer to match the character of the USA clay didge so closely. I thought about this for days. Lucky that all that procrastination from the contributors gave me so much time to think and evolve new concepts for both the album and the cover, eh? Anyway, what I finally hit on was to make those letters out of styrofoam, the kind you can get at any building supply place; panels of ceiling insulation. Of course making and painting those letters was pretty time consuming, but not really as bad as you might think. Styrofoam is incredibly fast and easy to shape with just hand held coarse sand paper. The back of the CD (tray card) will show these same didges, minus the lettering and minus the artist credits and each didge will have a number with it to clearly identify it. There will be a listing of what each didge is made of and who made it. Also, most of those didges have album cuts done with them. These album cuts (sometimes just short cuts to demonstrate a particular didge) will also be identified on the tray card. I think people will be very curious to know how all those very different and very exotic didges sound. They'll easily be able to match an album track with a cover didge. This concept also evolved over time and I think it represents a major cool attractive feature to the whole presentation. The USA is not only the home of a lot of very creative didge playing and didge production concepts, but also creative didge making. This album covers all the angles in a very thorough and comprehensive fashion.

[Ed] I took part in the evaluation process for the Whole Earth project and I noticed some differences this time around. First of all, the anonymity. The first time you sent track titles and artist bios. Also most or all the tracks were excerpts of longer work, each just a couple of minutes long. This made it easier to get through the process of grading them but I wonder if you could elaborate on your thinking on this one vs the last evaluation process?

[Peter]Well, the reason I had credits the last time and that the cuts were full length was that those albums were intended to be finished versions. I was not only shipping them out for evaluation but also selling them at performances. It was only much later that I realized that the final product could not be anything like these two initial CD's. This time around I decided to go for an evaluation CD first from the beginning because that concept proved so extremely valuable for "Whole Earth". The reason for anonymity on the eval. CD is very simple. I don't want people's judgment to be influenced by who they were listening to. I think, in particular, people might be a little softer on me if they knew which were my cuts because they email the evaluations straight back to me and I can't help but know who did each evaluation. I'd much rather get slammed on some of my cuts and get rid of them than have the album be even a little less than best possible because anyone wanted to spare my feelings a bit. Last time around a lot of cuts (not just mine) got slammed very badly, even with notes like "hey this really bothers me to listen to" etc. THANK YOU ALL FOR BEING SO HONEST. It's what made the album so good. 150 minutes became 63. So far, Ed, yours is the only eval. done for USA. You may not remember the last one, but you apparently found this batch of selections vastly better than the last one. Your ratings were pretty much in line with others last time, so I'm optimistically figuring that this time the selections really are a whole lot better than last time overall. Naturally, I was especially gratified that a disproportionate number of my own individual pieces got top ratings from you. You hear your own stuff so much that you can't really ever know if it's any good or not without feedback from other people. The short excerpts rather than full length pieces is for the simple reasons of making it much easier for people to evaluate so many cuts (remember the 3 months process last time) and also one CD is cheaper to make and send out than two.
That's it for the stuff you asked about. There's some stuff that I think would be extremely interesting for people to know that you'd never hit on to ask about. I know that as a professional didger I'm nowhere near the top income wise, but I do believe I hold several other records. I'd bet anything that I have a greater range of different sorts of didge albums than anyone else ever. Counting USA I have 5 didge music albums that cover a huge stylistic and conceptual range and then there's the tutorial CD, but what really sets me apart in this regard is that I have the worlds most successful and widely distributed commercial didge sample CD/CD ROM. It was featured (with color picture) as part of full page ad in Keyboard magazine for over a year and it still gets into ads now and then (Big Fish Audio, the biggest producer of sample CD's). It also got a great "new product" review in Keyboard magazine. I've also gotten some incredible feedback from people using this CD. One guy in Germany recently emailed me with enthusiastic praise for the album, saying that he did a sound design package for one of the largest pop/rock radio stations in Europe using my didge samples very extensively. He said that the entire jingle package is extensively colored with my didge playing. There's been quite a lot of copies (for this type of CD that costs $100 for audio and $300 for CD ROM) sold and it's a sure bet that my samples are in any number of album projects, video programs, movies, etc. There's no way to ever gauge that accurately, but people don't spend that kind of money for a sample CD and then never use it for some commercial application. Between all the exposure that this sample CD has provided my playing and the extensive distribution of "Thunder Down Under", my collaboration with Brent Lewis (ethnic drums and didge) it's just conceivable that more people actually occasionally hear me than any other didge player in the world. Not in any fashion where they know who they're listening to and not in a way that makes me much money, but still it's a distinction of sorts. Another possible record I might have set is making didges out of more different sorts of material than anyone else. I've cut didge sticks in Oz and made that kind and also cut local agave for making agave didges. I've made didges out of carbon fiber/epoxy composites, Kevlar/epoxy composites and various sorts of fiberglass composites. Then there's my ram's horn didges, my modified Tibetan temple horn and didges of many shapes made out of different sorts of plastic pipe and didges made out of thin clear plastic made to be fluorescent light bulb protectors. I also made a glass didge once out of a burned out fluorescent light tube. I eventually dropped it and never made another one. Maybe that assortment isn't really a record, but it just might be. Another record that I'm just about positive about is that I must have made THE didge that more people have played than any in the world ever. When I traveled around in Oz on my bike through the most didge intensive areas I always had my very weird looking very very conspicuous ram's horn didge with me and I took every opportunity to play in public and jam with people and to visit didge shops, for hours at a time. I sometimes had people waiting in line to try that didge out and this went on for 4 months. I often played for tips at big crowded outdoor markets and would have people trying that didge out frequently for hours at a time. When I spent 3 days at the biggest Aboriginal cultural festival in Oz (the Barunga Festival in Arnhem Land, near Katherine) the number of Aborigines and white folks that just had to try it was simply unbelievable. I don't see how there could even be a remote close second for that particular record. It was just too unique a set of circumstances.

[Ed] Perhaps it's a good time to ask about your performing experiences?

[Peter] Uh well, my performance credits pretty much amount to zip all. I got to play on stage twice at the biggest Aboriginal culture festival in Oz (Barunga Festival '95 in Arnhem Land near Katherine) for thousands of full blooded Aborigines and lots of other people and it went over real well.

[Ed] Now this is something! Tell me everything. I want to know How your got the gig, What your feelings were going in, How you felt during and after.

[Peter] Well, to call the occasion a "gig" would be inflating it a bit. I was simply so conspicuous at that festival wandering all over the place with my huge weird looking ram's horn didge and jamming with everybody and letting so many people try the didge that when a stage was empty a few times they asked me to doo my thing, that's all. Didge was not generally a really big thing at this festival. There were hardly any didge players considering the number of people there (probably about 20000 during the 3 days). There was nearly around the clock Aboriginal rock bands, sometimes on more than one stage at a time and there were several singing/clapstick/dance/didge groups but not much in the way of anything really featuring didge per se. There was a didge contest that only got 11 entrants and I think only 1 was a full blooded Aborigine and the other one was a Caucasian looking boy that was in fact 1/4 Aborigine. The man got first prize and the boy second. There were 4 judges and each could award an entrant 0 to 10 points. 2 judges were Aborigines and 2 were white. I found out from a very upset white judge that the Aboriginal judges didn't give any of the white players more than a 1; mostly 0's. Anyway at the beginning of the contest they asked all 11 of us to hold our presentation down to a minute or so because we were just sort of a novelty act between the "real" stuff: ROCK AND ROLL AND MORE AND MORE AND MORE ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK. This was right in Arnhem land very close to some of the places where the most prized and famous Aboriginal didge makers do their thing and there were indeed didges for sale all over the place, but hardly any players. I managed to find a few people to record and plenty to jam with (especially some of the Aboriginal didgers working with the dancers), but considering the sea of Aboriginal people at this festival the didge presence was truly minuscule, and this in the heart of where it all started!!! Well, anyway with this nearly unbelievable scarcity of didge players I was quite a novelty with my conspicuous ram's horn didge, so I got to play on stage to pretty large predominantly black audiences and the reactions were really good. No one seemed very concerned that a white boy was in the middle of Arhem land playing the "wrong" sort of didge for a large Aboriginal audience. It was a bit intimidating at first, but once I got into it it was as if the audience wasn't even there. I played just fine and the folks really dug it and of course afterward I met lots more people to play with and who wanted to try the ram's horn. And you know what? The issue of whether it was real real real bad and offensive and horrible to call a non traditional didge a didgeridoo never even arose once. If it plays like a didgeridoo it's a didgeridoo and I think any full blooded Aborigine still having strong ties to his original land, language, and people would simply not be able to comprehend the concept of anyone conceivably caring about such a pointless semantic issue. The very word "didgeridoo" was made up by white settlers in the first place, so why would any Aborigine (or anybody period come down to it) care how a white man uses any word that white folks made up in the first place? Anyway my take on this issue everywhere I went was that the real Aborigines couldn't care less about this. What some of the many totally Caucasian looking (1/4 or 1/8 Aborigines) "Aborigines" raised in cities might think is another matter. These folks legally qualify for all Aboriginal rights and government handouts, etc. and they agitate for all sort of things that the real Aborigines in the settlements couldn't care less about and wouldn't even be paying any attention to or ever even find out about. I think much of what we here "know" about proper etiquette toward Aborigines is exaggerated and distorted versions of stuff that these city "Aborigines" made up and that in no way at all related to anything to do with actual Aboriginal etiquette or culture even before we added our own distortions to the original crap. I had lots of interactions, mostly really positive (I've got lots of this stuff documented in my soon to be completed website) with full booded Aborigines and my direct experiences just don't match any of the garbage about how "spiritual" Aborigines are or all this crap about Aboriginal etiquette and how careful you need to be about certain particular things. The ones I met were very simple and carefree people that were very open and accepting with me and laughing, jamming, and good times was what happened while some of the folks here were no doubt posting countless arguments back and forth on the list about "serious" issues of Aboriginal etiquette and what not.
Hum, well you didn't ask for any of that but ya got it anyway. But as a reward for sticking with me this far, here's another really cool performance credit. Once in Kakadu National Park I met an Aborigine that does tours into Arnhem Land for groups of tourist, involving 4 wheel drive, boat, and lots of walking and a few staged "cultural" activities. Part of that is a didge and dance presentation where the clients of the day get to have their faces painted and learn the dance pattern. The tour operator normally played the didge for that, but when he heard me he said I just had to come along on his next tour (free of charge, of course) and learn the simple didge pattern for the dance and play that day. He also insisted that I play my ram's horn instead of his traditional didge. It all happened just that way and even though it was just a tourist operation, getting into the hinterlands of Arnhem Land was very very cool and doing the didging for the dance was also lots of fun. The dancers had a laughing good time, the tourists loved the fact that they were getting to experience something a little different from the normal tour that day and, again, nobody seemed much bothered that a white boy was playing a "wrong" didgeridoo for an Aboriginal Dance presentation in the middle of Arnhen Land. Aha, here's the jackpot of all jackpots performance credit wise. I often busked at various markets and what not and almost always made pretty decent tips. One time I was doing the Thursday evening market (a HUGE affair with hundreds of vendors and many thousands of attendees) in Darwin. At one point a family of full blooded Aborigines (man, wife, 4 kids) stopped and listened for quite a while and then the man gave each child a few coins and every member of the family put a little money into my hat. I don't reckon I'll ever forget that experience!!! I doubt that any standing ovation in a big hall could match it. Not even close.