Bill Direen was one of the true geniuses in Flying Nun's formative years.
He is also an accomplished writer and poet, and was recently lured back from Paris to accept the 2010 Frank Sargeson Fellowship in Auckland.
Direen has edited the current issue of the longstanding New Zealand literary magazine Landfall, an issue devoted to music.
When the call came from him late last year to write something, I naturally assumed he meant fiction, and hurled myself into a maelstrom of fictional thought.
I sent the 1500-word result to my resident Central Otago literary barometer in Oturehua, because he had written for Landfall before.
He would know.
Brian replied that it was OK, in parts.
I didn't get where I am today by being OK in parts, so I coolly set fire to it in a tin drum.
Landfall #219 is a good one, the essays by George D. Henderson and Bruce Russell especially, and to my chagrin, I see most have written non-fiction.
Phwoarr! I could have done that with both typing fingers tied around my head twice.
I would have written about the first record I ever owned - Show Me The Way To Go Home by Frank Crummit.
I didn't buy it - it was a cylinder 78 that came out when I was minus 18 - but as it had been consigned to the attic in our Cairnhill St house in Maori Hill, which also happened to be my bedroom, along with an ancient cylinder record machine, it became the first record I ever owned.
And I needed this record desperately, because my neighbour Murray Gray had told me monkeys lived in our roof, which was accessed through a full-sized door, no lock, in the attic wall.
I lay quaking in bed every night with the light on waiting for the monkeys to attack, my only real defence being Show Me The Way To Go Home by Frank Crummit at maximum volume.
It's funny how you remember songs from your childhood.
I had always remembered this one as a drunken drawling thing which would later explain why I liked singers who sounded drunken and drawling, like '60s electric Bob Dylan.
But when I finally found a copy of the song on the web last weekend, it was a jaunty little ukulele piece that went much faster than I remembered.
Mind you, it does slow down, as the little drink Frank had just an hour ago goes right to his head, and Frank is definitely drunk by the end.
But yes, I'd like to hear Dylan sing a slow version of this with The Band at the Royal Albert Hall in 1966 with a head full of lysergic acid, now that would be a record.
Crummit released a lot of unusual songs like this in the 1920s and early 1930s, and he wrote many of them himself.
He had a witheringly fine grasp of the English tongue, as evidenced by There's No One With Endurance Like The Man Who Sells Insurance.
He came up with the forerunner for a hundred thousand country songs when he released I Learned About Women From Her, and he also recorded what could arguably be regarded as the finest etymological title in popular music with the sublime What Kind Of A Noise Annoys An Oyster? The monkeys never attacked.
I couldn't get much volume out of that old Edison cylinder machine, but it must have been enough to induce retreat.
I used to lie with my ear close to the speaker, just like I would later lie in bed in our next house, ear pressed to a tiny Pye bedside mantle radio, trying to find songs as drunken and drawling, as good as Show Me The Way To Go Home.
The next line of this song is, I'm tired and I want to go to bed.
I was never tired, the time when other people want to go to bed was always the best time to listen.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
