We had between us several Jimi Hendrix albums, which we agreed were great, but consensus was not always reached so easily. I recall the gentle music of James Taylor causing an unexpected eruption when Andy, who had bought Sweet Baby James, tried to put it on Martin’s turntable. Pronouncing it ‘wet’, Martin wrenched the record from the machine and flung it like a Frisbee across the room.
Occasionally something subterranean would enter our circle, snuck from the collection of an older brother or sister. That was how I first encountered Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. With its hushed and unfamiliar sounds - double bass, vibraphone, flute, violins, flamenco guitar - and a voice, which might be in ecstasy or pain, asking me mystifying, mind-tangling questions, the whole album was as magical as it was impenetrable, a glimpse behind a door into an adult world.
It was all boys in our group that first year, partly because none of us were bold enough to ask any girls to join us, or thought any would want to (although we thought a lot about girls), and partly because so many older, more sophisticated boys seemed to have their attention. Sometimes on a Friday night, when the shops stayed open until nine, we would go into town. We didn’t have much buying power, just a little pocket money from our parents or cash earned from paper rounds, but we found cheap ways to entertain ourselves.
Between Lambton Quay and Cuba Street there were half a dozen places that sold records - Record Specialists, Kirkcaldies, DIC, Lamphouse, World Records, Vanvi. We’d stop at each one. Kirkcaldies and DIC, both department stores, had listening rooms furnished with chairs and good stereo speakers. These were surely intended for middle-aged aesthetes who might want to compare Kleiber’s version of Beethoven’s Fifth with Karajan’s, but we could usually convince an elderly sales assistant to let us sample something from the bin labelled ‘Popular’. We would crowd in, some seated, some sprawled on the floor, close the door and blast the booth with Black Sabbath or The Rolling Stones.
Eventually the assistant would appear around the door and ask if we would be buying the record. It was a signal: our time was up. We would move on to the music stores. One of us would haul a guitar down from a high rack and try out the few chords we knew while the rest huddled around to watch. The staff would tolerate us for a while, but when I found a Hammond organ in Begg’s Music Store plugged in and asking to be played, my primitive attempt at boogie-woogie was halted in the middle of a bar, and I found myself grabbed by the collar and carried to the front door of the shop, where the store manager dropped me into the street.
One place no one seemed to mind us hanging around was the Resistance Bookshop. It was on the second floor of an old wooden villa in Willis Street, above The Merchant Adventurers of Narnia, a clothing shop run by longhaired guys in their mid twenties whose girlfriends wore Indian skirts. Resistance Bookshop sold political literature, books by beat poets, radical magazines, The Whole Earth Catalogue and golden badges featuring Mao Tse-tung. It was where I first saw The Little Red Schoolbook. Written by a pair of Danish schoolteachers, this was like an instruction manual for the kind of teenagers we thought we might be. It informed us that schoolchildren had a right not to be bored by their teachers, LSD trips lasted for eight or nine hours, and girls could masturbate. We learned the book had been banned in Britain and might soon be banned here too, so we consumed its contents with urgency, sitting for hours on the shop’s worn-out armchairs, where horsehair tufts poked through the fabric.
Walking home through town we caught glimpses of another, forbidden world. There were pubs like the Royal Oak, the Speakeasy, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Carlton and the Grand, their windows frosted, light and noise blazing from within. On the streets were characters who seemed to come out only after dark: a middle-aged Māori with black slicked-back hair and a blue satin jacket with ELVIS spelt out in sequins on the back; and Carmen, Wellington’s famous transvestite, her bouffant wig bedecked with roses, pearl earrings dangling down to her massive bosom, and a retinue of queens trailing in her wake. One night we stood and watched a band playing old rock ‘n’ roll songs in the foyer of the Roxy Cinema. The bass player wore an expression of bored cool. I was impressed by his technique for checking his wristwatch mid-song without taking his fingers off the fretboard.
In pursuit of further mysteries I became a card-carrying member of the library of the United States of America Information Service. An older student at Onslow had mentioned it had jazz records. I knew hardly anything about jazz but the names Charles Mingus and John Coltrane had been implanted in my mind because of references to them in an anthology of British beat poets called The Mersey Sound and I resolved to find out what they sounded like. I knew where to go: the library was housed in the United States Embassy, which I had once stood outside on a mobilisation.
Entering it felt like crossing enemy lines. I reported to a window made of bulletproof glass, where a receptionist asked me over an intercom that crackled like an old 78 record the purpose of my visit. The door beyond was guarded by an expressionless Marine, fully armed.
Finally I was granted entry. The door clicked open, then closed behind me, and I followed directions down a hallway to a room full of books and filing cabinets. I couldn’t see any LPs but I discovered a cabinet that contained a series of filing cards with album titles on them. I found a card with the name of a Mingus record and another by Coltrane and reported to the issues desk.
‘I’d like to borrow these,’ I said, offering the cards.
‘Would you? Are you a member?’ demanded the stern and terrifying librarian.
I wasn’t.
‘Name?’
I stammered an answer.
‘Max’s son or Conrad’s?’ she fired back.
How did she know my uncle and my father? Did the embassy keep files on them? Did they know I was against The War? Decades later, when a musician friend was telling me about his favourite aunt, it slowly dawned on me that she was the librarian - in reality a theatre-loving left-winger who had known my family through the small, closely woven Wellington arts community. Perhaps she had been keeping an eye on those warmad Americans.
The Mingus and Coltrane records had somehow infiltrated this bastion of imperialism. They strike me now as a kind of dissident art. The music was complex and challenging and took me years to comprehend. I also collected a tiny number of New Zealand albums. There was Human Instinct’s Stoned Guitar, featuring the mind-melting guitar of Billy Te Kahika, usually referred to as Billy TK and sometimes the Māori Hendrix. And there was the sole self-titled album of Highway, a band from Wellington. While these records delivered a respectable number of riffs per minute and sounded okay, even after Hendrix or the Stones, part of the attraction was price: they were cheap. Why local records retailed at half the price of international releases no one could adequately explain. There just seemed to be an unwritten law that Billy TK’s thunderous riffs and squally solos, although exciting, were only worth half as much as Hendrix’s.
Some of our group got hold of instruments and tried to scare music out of them. Andy impressed the rest of us by figuring out the guitar part to the first track off the Highway LP. A guy called Jeff, who had failed University Entrance and was repeating his sixth form year, had a bass guitar but couldn’t play it; he used it as a prop for his impressions of a lead guitarist, writhing in a mime of ecstasy on the floor of the maths room. When he lent me his bass for a weekend I managed to master half the riff of The Beatles’ ‘Day Tripper’ and a simple twelve-bar blues.
The so-called blues ‘revival’ - young white audiences listening for the first time to music that had been popular among black Americans for decades - had just swept through Britain and America. White rock stars such as Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones, with repertoires drawing heavily on the blues, were a gateway to the original black musicians; the ones still going strong found themselves, for the first time in their long careers, in front of predominantly white audiences.
In the early ‘70s New Zealand caught the aftershock of that explosion. Suddenly
B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, names I had heard mentioned mostly as an influence on the white blues stars, came to New Zealand. My Onslow enclave went to the concerts, where we were confronted with a startlingly different culture.
The first bluesman I saw was B.B. King at the Wellington Town Hall. The way he addressed us as ‘ladies and gentlemen’, the hair that looked as though it had been varnished into place, the matching suits and near military precision of his band, the formality of the show - all of it was a shock. I had seen hippies in a film about the 1969 Woodstock Festival and was imitating them by dressing as scruffily as I could get away with. I had participated in a student stop-work when the principal of Onslow, not as liberal-minded as our parents and some of our teachers, had ordered us to cut our hair. I was anti-authoritarian on principle. Yet here I was in the presence of a strict disciplinarian. In fact B.B. King’s performance had aspects of a school assembly, albeit one where the principal dealt in sexual innuendos and could make his guitar cry like a man in the deepest existential pain. It also had a gravity and dignity beyond anything I had ever witnessed.
British bluesman John Mayall looked more like someone you might see on a mobilisation. With his long hair and headband he could have been a groovy university lecturer, or someone’s older brother. He came to New Zealand several years in a row and our gang didn’t miss a concert. On one occasion his supporting act was an Auckland group called Split Ends. It seemed an odd choice: the band didn’t play blues or anything like it. Yet their music seemed in its own way as exotic as Mayall’s. It was certainly unlike anything on the radio at the time. Their songs alternately resembled vaudeville, Elizabethan classical, English folk music and occasionally - just a few bars here and there - pop songs.
Around this time we went to the concert chamber in the Town Hall to see a group called Blerta. We had seen their painted bus around town, and posters announcing: BLERTA IS COMING! Blerta wasn’t as much a band as a challenge to the accepted order. Musicians would wander on and off the stage so it was hard to tell how many people were in the group. Some were hairy young rockers with the regulation electric guitars. Others looked older and played what I thought of as jazz instruments - trumpet, saxophone and trombone. Seated at an electric piano, his eyes fixed on some point beyond the chamber’s walls, was Chris Seresin, a musician who looked only a only few years older than us yet commanded the keys with a startling intensity. The singer, Corben Simpson, had a voice that soared into the highest corners of the chamber’s vaulted ceilings. For the first part of the show he played a bass guitar but by the end he was dancing around the stage, his arms waving like a windmill.
The group combined catchy songs and long lyrical solos with instrumental jams that spiralled into chaos. Black and white Keystone Cops-style scenarios, filmed in recognisable locations around Wellington, played on a screen above the musicians. The films were silent but Ian Watkin, a bearded big-bellied man with a booming voice, stood among the band and improvised a narration. Sometimes one of the actors would wander on to the stage as though he had just stepped out of the screen.
At the centre of it all, behind a set of drums, sat Bruno Lawrence. I already knew who he was. Now, seeing him on stage, I realised why some people thought he was the best drummer in the country. He was the engine that powered the whole sound and determined when the music would change gear, shift into reverse, overtake, or leave the ground.
Bruno’s drums always seemed to be falling to bits. Even as he played he would be tightening lugs, repairing stands and reattaching cymbals, yet the rhythm never faltered. It pumped on through everything that happened, whether someone taking a saxophone solo, an actor attempting a tightrope walk, or images
flickering on the screen. Dark-eyed, with what remained of his thinning hair flapping about the sides of his face, Bruno seemed both utterly absorbed in his own playing and acutely aware of everything else that was going on. He was older than the others and clearly the leader. During the songs he would often appear to be issuing instructions. Sometimes he would hurl a drumstick at one of the members of the band. But he ‘d never drop a beat.
There were a few musical events we would not have been seen dead at. ‘THE GREATEST TEENAGE NIGHT OF THE YEAR!’ proclaimed an Evening Post ad for Creation, 1972 winners of the Golden Disc Award, playing at The Sheridan nightclub. The word ‘teenage’ was the first deterrent. Nor would we have been found at Oodles Coffee Shop where, ads promised, ‘Wayne Finch will be singing middle of the road music’
Occasionally, if a band sounded promising and there was no cover charge, we would venture to a café or restaurant that was advertising live music. At The Settlement, a continental-style café run by Harry Seresin, who was the father of Blerta’s Chris Seresin, we made two cups of percolated coffee last the length of three sets while we earnestly studied a band known as Olibet. The musicians looked uncomfortable at being closely scrutinised by a tableful of serious schoolboys while the winers and diners were taking little notice.
05
THE UNION HALL
It was Peter McLuskie who knew there was something happening at the university’s Union Hall and suggested we go along one Friday night. I wasn’t sure they’d let us in as we were only thirteen but Peter was an imposing presence in a greatcoat he’d found at the Love Shop, an exchange bazaar off Cuba Street, and I slipped through the door in his shadow. Once inside we found ourselves in a tunnel of white sheets lit by ultraviolet lamps that gave our teeth, the whites of our eyes and the dust on our trousers a radioactive glow. We stopped, stared at our hands and the particles of light that seemed to be exploding off the sheets, and laughed.
As we emerged from the tunnel into the main body of the hall a guitarist was playing alone on a balcony. In the darkness I could make out the silhouette of his gangly frame and flowing hair as he strummed a fierce rhythm on a small-bodied acoustic guitar and sang a Chuck Berry blues I recognised. On a stage below the balcony there was a band with a flute player and a drummer with a gigantic afro; the shadow on the white cloth behind him made his hair seem even bigger. The band performed unfamiliar songs and long instrumental jams while liquid blobs of colour bubbled and shapeshifted across their faces and instruments. Across a wall of the room and part of the ceiling, more colours were bursting like bombshells. Another wall appeared to be crawling with giant insects. This must be what tripping is like, I thought. There was no alcohol on sale and I don’t recall any drinking, but the sweet scent I remember drifting my way must have been marijuana.
When the music was over we followed the crowd to the adjacent Memorial Theatre, where a flickering assortment of music film clips issued from a faltering 16-mm projector. After midnight we stepped, saucer-eyed, back into the suburban night.
After that the Union Hall became a regular destination. I would keep an eye out for notices in Salient, the student newspaper my father brought home from the university. The events were supposed to be restricted to university students but no one ever asked for ID. The doors would open around eight at night but the music didn’t start until nine. Early comers would either mingle in the shadows or, like me, sit up close to the stage on the hard linoleum floor waiting for something to happen. Determined not to miss anything, I would often be there in time to catch the bands sound-checking. One night I watched in fascination as a musician I later came to know as Simon Morris tuned every instrument on the stage.
Once the show got underway people would get up and dance, sometimes in couples but often in the solo freestyle mode I’d observed in the Woodstock film. I’d maintain my cross-legged position on the ground until it became untenable, then go looking for an alternative vantage point. One night I found a small platform above the exit, just big enough to seat one or two people. After that I often climbed up there and gazed down like a gargoyle, eyes fixed on the musicians.
Over those two or three years I saw dozens of bands in the Union Hall. Arkestra. Asia Minor. Baby. Billy TK and The Powe
rhouse. Blerta. Blue Brick. Butler. Chum. The Country Flyers. Dragon. Farmyard. Highway. Karma. Mammal. 1953 Memorial Society Rock ‘n’ Roll Band. Olibet. Rockinghorse. Saratoga. Space Farm. Split Ends. Storm. Tamburlaine. Taylor. Ticket. Triangle. Truck. Tapestry. The Windy City Strugglers. There were others whose names I have forgotten or never knew. A few went on to become internationally famous. Dragon and Split Ends - soon to be renamed Split Enz - would find huge success in Australia and beyond. Some of the musicians would become my friends and mentors. Many would vanish into oblivion.
The first band that made a deep impression on me was Tamburlaine. I had got used to the overwhelming volume of most bands, and the way electric guitars and drums seemed to swallow up whatever sound the singer was making, leaving the melody and lyrics sounding like a fly trapped in a glass. (I later learned that this was largely due to the limitations of the PA systems, which were not as sophisticated as they are today.) Tamburlaine didn’t suffer from this problem. For a start they had no electric guitars, just several acoustic ones, which they would augment at various times with mandolin or piano. And instead of the typical thundering drummer they had a percussionist, Mark
Hansen, who tapped softly on an assortment of bells, bongos and hand drums.
But the most prominent feature was their singing. Simon Morris, Steve Robinson and Denis Leong, who between them played the various stringed instruments, all had strong voices, which were especially effective when combined in harmony. They did note-perfect versions of ‘Your Move’ by Yes, and The Moody Blues’ ‘Legend of a Mind’, songs I already knew and liked. But I was even more impressed by the songs I didn’t know, which turned out to be ones they had written themselves. Denis Leong had one called ‘Pass a Piece of Paper’ that might have been Crosby, Stills and Nash on a good day. Simon Morris’s ‘The Raven and the Nightingale’ was as authentically rustic as an old English folk ballad.
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