Hay maker

Colin Hay is one man at work

by Don Fluckinger

How do you go from selling millions of records to playing solo acoustic shows at the Sit 'N Bull in Maynard? It's long story, but, not surprisingly, it involves a couple bumbling major labels and a songwriter who, despite being mistreated by the big boys of the record industry, refuses to pack it in. Instead he starts his own label and keeps going.

Currently on his first solo acoustic tour of the United States is Colin Hay, former lead singer of Men at Work and a solo artist who has recorded five albums on his own since the last Men at Work studio album, which was released in 1985. Still plugging away -- he recently realeased Transcendental Highway -- Hay's riding two popular musical trends with his latest shows: the '80s revival and the "unplugged" style. In concert he performs Men at Work hits as well as his own material.

"I enjoy playing solo; I've been doing it for a long time," says the Scottish-born Hay, who started Men at Work in 1979 as an acoustic two-guitar/vocal duo with Ron Strykert in Melbourne, Australia. "Of course, I'd rather play with a band, especially because a lot of the songs on the records are recorded with different instrumentation; so it would be a lot of fun to take a band out on the road, which indeed I'm still planning to do. If I can get some action on the album, I'll put something together, perhaps later in the year."

Transcendental Highway (Lazy Eye/Farren Music America) features a mix of solo acoustic tunes and several recorded with a full band, including Chad Fischer (Lazlo Bane) and pianist Robbie Kilgore (Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton) and bassist Dan Rothschild, who produced Better Than Ezra.

It would seem that his new songs -- with themes dealing with heavy topics like domestic violence ("Let Freedom Ring") and a murderer's remorse ("Death Row Conversation") -- would be a creative about-face for the guy most of us remember singing lead in tunes like "Overkill" and "Who Can It Be Now." In fact, says Hay, it's not.

Think, he says, about some of the tunes they did: "It's a Mistake," with its wild MTV video, used humor to convey the then-very-real possibility of nuclear annihilation. Even "Down Under," which many of us still know by heart, was written by Hay as he watched his native Australia being plundered by profiteers.

"That includes stripping indigenous culture, stripping forests, destroying coastal regions so they end up looking like second-rate Miamis and so forth," Hay says. "In the chorus of the song, `where men plunder,' that's what that was supposed to mean. And that's what it means to me. But at the end of the day it ends up being a beer-drinking song. It's okay, I don't have a problem with that; but what I'm trying to point out is the fact that there really isn't that much difference between what I'm writing now and what I was writing then."

Men at Work took a wild ride to fame. Their 1983 debut, Business as Usual, sold 10 million records in the United States alone and the band pulled down multiple Grammys. The follow-up, Cargo, sold half as many copies. After the commercial bust Two Hearts was released in 1985, the band broke up. Still signed with Sony Records for a while, Hay recorded the Looking for Jack solo album, which was deleted from the label's catalogue while songs from it were still getting airplay.

"That was a very, very frustrating period for me, knowing that people were playing my record but you couldn't go into a store and buy it because the record company, in their wisdom, had decided to render it out of print," says Hay, who asked to be released from Sony when MCA Records offered him a contract, ultimately another bad marriage. "I would never again, I think, do a deal where I sold my masters. So that would make it almost impossible for me to get a record deal with a major label, because that's what they want."

A few years ago Hay and sax/flute/ keyboard player Greg Ham toured as Men at Work, and the "greatest hits live" Brazil CD resulted. They licensed the disc to Sony competitor BMG for release in Brazil; coveting the rights, Sony cut a deal to distribute it in the rest of the world. Greg Ham and Hay still get together a few times a year to play Men at Work gigs but as yet are not planning to record new material. At the moment, Hay's concentrating on his solo material, released on his own Lazy Eye Records.

"It feels good -- it feels free; I feel quite unbridled about everything I'm doing," Hay says. "I have no desire to be on a major label. If a major label came along and said to me . . . `We really want to do something with you,' I guess you'd have to look at it. But I don't see that happening, and the idea of being on a major label -- there's nothing really that exciting about it."

Colin Hay plays at 9 p.m. on April 29 at the Sit 'N Bull Pub in Maynard. Tickets are $10. Call (978) 897-7232.