Hello all: this week’s post comes to you courtesy of my friend Eusabian, who wrote a couple of pieces during a trial run of this blog series. I read his piece on “A Pub with No Beer” and felt I couldn’t improve much on it (also, I’m a lazy bumpkin) so here it is, unvarnished and unedited. Hopefully you’ll like it!
6 September 1958
#1 for 1 week
written by Gordon Parsons
A Pub with No Beer, the 1958 song made famous by Australian country singer Slim Dusty (and in turn made him famous), is not a song I would have expected to find at the top of pop charts. Granted, my knowledge of pop music is so narrow my impression of it might as well be stereotypical. But even for 50s standards, the song is somewhat unmemorable. It’s got a title that exhibits a mild amount of absurdity just enough to get you interested, but is also soon forgotten once the song begins, as the breezy tune carries you away. If you play it in the background, it’d probably just sound like your typical country music. Slim Dusty’s bright, welcoming voice recalls a bit of John Denver, and the acoustic guitar arrangements set on a relaxed triple meter paints an idyllic picture of an evening by the campfire, where a balladeer would grab a guitar on a whim and start singing a tale of the lonesome days when there once was a pub with no beer. A pleasant song indeed, even though nothing really stands out.
Yet us deciding to kick start our blog with this song perhaps already gives away the fact that it holds some significance. Back when it was first released in 1958, in the blooming age of rock and roll, this laid-back, somewhat unassuming campfire ballad was in fact the first Australian single to break through a music industry previously dominated by American taste, and make it at the top of the national charts. Knocking out Sheb Wooley’s The Purple People Eater, it enjoyed a one-week reign before the crowd-pleasing rock and roll tune reclaimed its number one status and began its second six-week run. It would appear by chart performance that the song was washed away by the incoming waves of American pop after its short-lived victory, but A Pub with No Beer did leave its legacy both on local soil and abroad, inspiring two sequel songs (also written by Dusty), several foreign language covers, and in 2008, was included in the National Film and Sound Archive’s “Sounds of Australia” collection. It is also worth mentioning that at least in the late 1950s, the Australian charts have remained quite synchronized with its American and British counterparts, but A Pub with No Beer’s entry in the ranks was exclusively Australian, adding all the more significance to its local victory.
This makes me wonder: what is the special ingredient here? But a closer look at this song still doesn’t uncover much. This is the kind of song so relaxed it seems to resist analysis; you just want to waltz along to Slim Dusty’s smooth voice. Nor does it have much of a trajectory—its melody is cyclical and repetitive, a series of verses loosely strung together to effuse this consistent and unchanging air of tranquility. Lyrically, each verse highlights one of the many incidents that transpires in the pub without beer, and the list goes on and on. The picture it paints is still, relishing the present moment just like the way the simple tune of each verse is sung over and over again, without a care to head anywhere or build towards a narrative. Yet if you pull your head out of the music a bit and listen for the actual content, you might find an incongruity between the words we hear and the voice that’s singing them, something I personally find quite amusing. The guitar gently plays on, inviting us to sit back and relax as the balladeer walks us through the numerous tragedies that ensue because the pub has run out of beer. And, with vivid depictions of cringing dogs and emotional breakdowns mounting up, surely there is nothing more morbid and drear than that… But for now let’s all just sit around the campfire and enjoy the fun. As Dusty’s voice remains distant and carefree, the pub with no beer does feel like a distant, irrelevant past, “a lonesome away” from us after all.
And maybe this laid back, slightly irreverent style is what gives A Pub with No Beer its Australian taste. Compared to all the other American champions of the ARIA, there isn’t a part of the song that demands our instant attention, nor is there even a catchy refrain that creeps into our mind before we know it and stays in there for weeks to come. No, in a sea of stirring pop/rock tunes, A Pub with No Beer is just content with enjoying the moment. Sit back in your armchair and rock along the tune, or occasionally get tickled by its humour — however you like it, just so long as you’re have a good time.
Ratings:
| Chamois (and Eusabian) |
| 7 |
| Liz |
| 7 |
| AVERAGE (ROUNDED DOWN) |
| 7 |
END OF CHAPTER ONE
“ONE AT A TIME” WILL RETURN
One At A Time 
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