ROSS HANNAFORD AT THE GASLIGHT

Chris Crago brought Ross Hannaford to play her birthday straight through into the Too Much Fun That's News To Me genre at The Gaslight in Brompton, Adelaide, 13.07.13.  Ross played his blisteringly bittersweet best. I sometimes dream of the inside of his mind: I see a comic book of rock'n'roll; doo-wop and surf but then he'll open that big bass voice out and we get loveliness like Josephine or Tony Joe White-ish swamp. Or his own stuff or co-works like Weepin In My Joy, which is a beautiful soft monument that I dream of Rick Danko singing up high with The Band.  "I did a gig with him once," he said of Tony Joe, "and I sat with my back to the wall between him and me while he played. I could feel it going into me."  Dear Ross has soaked a lot of that sort of shit up.  Over 50 years he's created his own beautiful volcano of music from it all ... Man we had fun at The Gaslight : I blubbered like a little kid for four hours while Ross doodled and funked and burbled, plucking references from the entire rock canon, bar by bar, then cranking in with something that just flies straight out of him, as it should, not to mention the matching orange Bic Flick for a slide ... no-one else has played, or could, this stuff ... they haven't imagined it yet ... all photos copyright Milton Wordley ... click on the images to get em crisp ... and I'm sorry, Ross, but I'm gonna reach at least forty years back .