THE GENESIS OF ‘GENIUS’.
2002 was the 50th anniversary of ‘I GOTTA WOMAN’ and my best friend Richard Morgan gave me a terrific bio on Ray by John Lyndon “Ray Charles: Man and Music”. I decided that I MUST form a 14th pce Ray Charles cover band SHAKE YOUR TAIL FEATHER BIG BAND. (Call it epiphany… revelation… I had a mission and nothing was going to stop me). I got Tim ‘The General’ Blamey pretty mu
ch straight out of VCA to write charts for free and we rehearsed above Flemington RSL for months and I basically paid everyone in pizza.
2003 We eventually settled on a line up for SHAKE YA TAIL FEATHER BIG BAND including Andy Burns (piano) and Judy Crozier, Kerry Maher, Tim and his brother Jez on sax and Bryan Chetcuti on lead trumpet as well a maddening but inevitable procession of fill – ins… By then I’d listened to pretty much everything Ray had ever recorded while I drove cabs and wrote what eventually became GENIUS, about Ray’s life and music. I’d read that Taylor Hackford was working on a biopic and I decided I must do something live …
On the first anniversary of Ray’s passing in 2005 we debuted the first version of GENIUS. In my stubbornness to commemorate the date I ignored the fact that it was the Queen’s birthday holiday weekend… and basically our friends and family turned up and Pat Donovan from The Age who was very kind… it was heartbreaking but I did know that it could be done. In 2008 I won $125,000 on the Rich List by naming 15 British Prime Ministers…. Then they axed the bloody show… so I didn’t get paid… Then thank gods they did put the ep on air and I got paid. In 2009 I spent half that windfall on GENIUS for 15 nights at Collins St Baptist Church for the Fringe Festival….by then there was a 10 pce choir, 9pce band and 3 girls and 2 lead male singers….and an incredibly talented actor Chris Kirby… The critics loved us... and everybody who saw us loved us but …. I ran out of money, steam, just overstretched to hell… I once described it as calving a beautiful baby whale and then being too exhausted to feed it… I went back to uni and finished a degree at Latrobe Media Studies/Politics. But always in the back of my mind was an itch to do ‘GENIUS’ again… For 4 years I tried to sell ‘GENIUS’ to EVERYBODY…. I’ve been turned down more times than a hotel bed.
3rd times the charm right? At the start of this year I came back to Collins St Baptist Church to light a candle for my sister Jodie and was quite overwhelmed by the warm memories everyone still had of the 3 week season of GENIUS 6 years earlier!!!...They asked me what I’d been doing since GENIUS etc …
And I suddenly realized… it’s actually incredibly refreshing to be around people who have no idea who Kanye or the Kardashians are…
Simon Carey Holt and I sat down on the beautiful Verandah café pretty much nutted out a 2 month deal June July over coffee a couple of weeks ago…
Chris Kirby and I are working on updating the sermon…
Jeff Duff’s ready and raring to go
And we’ve even persuaded Wylie Miller to take 2 months off from his terrible life on cruise ships to rejoin the original gang.
