Postcard from Fremantle

Ten minutes after sitting down with Dom Mariani in a Fremantle café to talk about the songs he wanted to contribute to this 20th anniversary issue of Salt, the storm hit, the worst in 50 years, like some kind of prehistoric deluge.

I’d just driven back from Toodyay, two hours inland, where the landscape on the western side of town was blackened from recent bushfires and, to the east, bleached from the long summer’s drought, the longest they’d had up there for as far back as anyone could remember. Everywhere you walked, the dry earth crackled under your feet as loud as a gun shot.

I’d been in Toodyay to see John Kinsella about a book we’re working on together (based on the life of local bushranger Moondyne Joe) and it was at his request that I’d arranged to meet Dom later that afternoon to get the songs. Back in Fremantle, the once big and empty sky was the colour of primeval mud. A cosmic sound & lights crew was staging a rehearsal for the end of the world as flooding rose knee-deep in some parts of town within minutes of the storm erupting.

Maybe the dramatic change in the weather was a sign the heavens didn’t want to be reminded of a time when John, invariably drug-fucked, had been a regular at Dom’s gigs around Fremantle with his band The Stems. Back then, 25 years or so ago, John was a train wreck bound for hell, and at Stems gigs he made no effort to conceal it. As often as not he’d get kicked out for pissing everyone off by jumping up on stage while the band was in full swing, only to return the following night to wreak more havoc.

But if Dom remembered any of that, he was gracious enough not to mention it.

Besides, when it comes to reminiscing, Dom’s always had the attitude of a remix artist for whom the past exists not to be preserved, but renewed.

It’s this attitude that drew him back to the recording studio recently to reinterpret some of his best known songs, performed originally with The Stems, The Someloves, DM3, and The Majestic Kelp. Dom’s chosen two of these (both of them from his DM3 days) for Salt: ‘Just Like Nancy (Girl in Boots)’ and ‘Take It All’. They appear on his forthcoming solo album (recorded with many long-time friends), the appropriately titled Rewind and Play, due out with Liberation in June.

Dom first recorded ‘Just Like Nancy’ with DM3 in 1999 when it appeared on an EP of the same name and thereafter on DM3’s final album, Garage Sale Vol. 2: Italian Style (2003). ‘Take It All’ is a song he wrote for DM3’s 1993 debut album, One Time Two Times Three Red Light.

Throughout the nineties, DM3 toured extensively in the US and Europe to growing critical acclaim and increasing numbers of adoring fans. Indulging their love of Big Star-style power pop with an occasional nod to the cheesy melodrama of The Shangri-Las, the band — and Dom Mariani in particular — garnered many tributes. Goldmine in the US called Dom ‘one of the top 5 pop titans of the past decade’, and The Trouser Press Guide to ’90s Rock explained why: ‘Dazzling guitars, delicious melodies and hooks, hooks, hooks are the order of the day’!

A darling of the underground music press, Dom also enjoys an off-the-scale ‘cool’ rating among fellow musicians, especially guitarists. The E Street Band’s Steve Van Zandt, for instance, invited The Stems to reform for the prestigious Little Steven’s Underground Garage Festival in New York in 2004, where the bill included the likes of The New York Dolls and The Stooges.

Yet for all the accolades he continues to receive, Dom remains disarmingly unassuming. What others regard as a back catalogue of glorious pop songs, he sees as preliminary research on the way to making the perfect record.

It’s a pleasure to be able to showcase some of that research in Salt.

Two Songs

Play Girl in Boots (Just Like Nancy) (7.5 MB)

Play Take it All (? MB)