Goneville

by Nick Bollinger

  There was one band I heard at the Union Hall more often than any other. I intuited that Mammal was the latest evolution of Simon and The Mammals, the band I had seen at the railway station. This was right: Simon Morris had left to form Tamburlaine.

  The first time I saw Mammal they were last in a five-band line-up and it was nearly midnight by the time they took the stage. The PA system was groaning with fatigue but they still looked and sounded like a band was supposed to. There were six of them. One guitarist was hunched, bearded and bespectacled, the other rail-thin and barefoot, with eyes lifted to heaven as though in a trance. The pianist pounded inaudibly on an upright, the bass player wore a beret and surveyed the room as though it were an art exhibition, and the drummer hammered his tom-toms with the concentration of a blacksmith at a forge.

  Their features were hard to distinguish, partly because of the coloured lights and partly because they were mostly covered with hair. All except for the singer. His name, I learned later, was Rick Bryant. With his short hair and stubbly beard he stood out among this ragtag assortment as he beat a tambourine against his thigh and sang in the kind of aching, rough-textured voice I thought belonged only to old black men from the American South.

  Over the next couple of years I would see Mammal at every opportunity. At first I had no idea where the musicians came from, or where they went when they left the Union Hall, but I gradually got to know their names and started to spot them around town. The barefoot guitarist was Robert Taylor. He had a cleaning job in a shoe shop I passed every day on my way to school and I’d see him pushing a floor polisher. The bearded owlish one was Bill Lake. Someone told me he had a philosophy degree. Tony Backhouse was the piano player. While his keyboard was frequently drowned out his voice always cut through, in high clear contrast to Rick’s rougher tone.

  For a while bass players and drummers came and went from Mammal, but the lasting combination was Mark Hornibrook, whose basslines seemed to have jumped straight from the grooves of a Tamla Motown record, and drummer Kerry Jacobson. Still in his teens, Kerry had only recently left Onslow College and was already the funkiest drummer in Wellington.

  As for Rick, seeing him singing in his bodgie uniform of denim jacket and black T-shirt, eyes scrunched tight, I tried to imagine where he might go in the daylight. I could picture him working on the wharves or a construction site, or standing in a police identity parade. One night my father, having asked the name of the band I was going out to hear, said, ‘Oh, Mammal. I work with a bloke who sings in that band. He’s a junior lecturer in the English department.’

  After that I began to see references to Mammal as a university band. An article about it in the Listener in October 1972 was headed ‘Dons of Rock’. Most of the musicians had been students at Victoria University when the group started a couple of years earlier. They had formed an alliance with Sam Hunt, a Wellington poet roughly their age, setting some of his lyrics to music and releasing an album that combined their singing with his readings. Their own songs were intricate, with meandering structures, elaborate harmonies and lines that lingered in the memory.

  I’ve been talking to the weather man and he says it’s got to

  change...

  There’s a whisper of hope in the heart of every man who’s hit

  the ground and stayed down too long...

  Hey fella, play nasty for me.

  They interspersed originals with a few carefully chosen covers. Once I saw them at the start of a march against the Vietnam War. As the protesters prepared to move off, the band launched into the Stones’ ‘Street Fighting Man’. It sounded like a call to arms. Most of their covers, though, were by black American artists -The Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight and The Pips. This was unusual for a bunch of Pākehā in the age of acid rock, but the songs made the most of the band’s uncommonly supple rhythm section and strong ensemble singing, especially the tender power of Rick’s voice.

  Listening to Mammal, and Rick in particular, helped shape my idea of what music could be and should be. It could tell a story and make you a part of the story. Rhythm was central: the beat had to move you from the inside out or it meant nothing. But more than anything, what mattered was the quality of the singing. I can only describe Rick’s singing as a kind of bruised longing. I began to wonder if this was what people meant when they talked about soul. It became a measure by which I began to judge everything I heard.

  After a while, more kids from Onslow started turning up at the Union Hall. Not everyone came for the music. I’d blunder into couples in dark corners with limbs entwined, or catch the scent of damp burning and see the glowing end of something that was being discreetly passed among a small group. Others would slip outside into the shadows of Mount Street Cemetery to drink Cold Duck or Lion Brown and grope each other among the gravestones.

  No one offered me dope but I made myself sick one day smoking tobacco in a pipe I’d taken from my father’s study. I was sick again a few weeks later after I drank half a carafe of wine at Peter McLuskie’s. But I never got drunk at the Union Hall. That would have seemed like sacrilege: after all, it was my place of worship. And I might have missed some of the music.

  Although I was beginning to suffer from occasional bouts of lovesickness, sex only existed somewhere between The Little Red Schoolbook and my imagination. One night at the Union Hall a girl from school said, ‘Come on, let’s dance.’ I got to my feet but it felt awkward and wrong. I loved the smell of her long brown hair and the sway of her cotton skirt. I wanted to get closer but I wanted to listen to the band too. How could I do both at the same time?

  ‘I really like the lead guitar part on this song,’ I said, shuffling slightly. She looked at me uncomprehendingly, closed her eyes, lifted her arms and carried on dancing - alone.

  Hidden track: ‘Play Nasty for Me’

  Recording is a type of sorcery that allows you to travel through time. It can bring back the breath of the dead, or transport you to a lost moment in adolescence, as I discovered in 2014 when a reel of tape came into my possession. The container — an old box with splitting sides and a peeling label on which ‘MAMMAL — LIVE (Nelson) Dec ‘74’ was scrawled in biro — felt magical in my hands. Inside was a shiny brown tape, wound a couple of inches thick around a brittle plastic spool.

  This artefact had belonged to Graeme Nesbitt. It was a recording of Mammal, a band of which he was sometimes referred to as manager. It captured them on a typical night away from their Wellington home, playing to an audience of ... well, who exactly? It’s hard to tell. There’s no applause. Nobody shouts, ‘Good evening, Nelson! Are you ready to rock?’ so we never know who might have shouted back.

  At one point a passing punter finds the microphone that’s being used to make the recording — I see it positioned on a solitary stand somewhere in the centre of an old wooden community hall — and, wrapping his entire mouth around its bell, issues a series of primal screams that for maybe twenty seconds almost entirely cancels out the sound of the band. Finally he roars out his only intelligible words, ‘MYYYY NAAAAME IIIIIS—’, at which point someone — I’m guessing Nesbitt — tears the mic away from him, and with it his identity. The band, now in the midst of a stratospheric instrumental, becomes audible again.

  I was not in the audience that night in Nelson and yet the sound was strangely and instantly familiar. It was a song I had last heard so long ago I had come to believe I had dreamed it, like the reunion of The Beatles I had watched from the side of the stage until the alarm clock woke me up. Or maybe I had misheard it, and the melody and lyric that had faded in and out of my memory for forty years were quite different from what had actually been sung. The truth is I had never been able to recall many of the words or even much of the tune. Mostly it was just a refrain I had heard at a rock show in the Union Hall one Friday night in my early teens: Play nasty for me... And here it was, on the tape.

  No wonder the memory was dreamlike. The song itself is a dream. It has its own dream logic in which on
e place can suddenly become another, and the most improbable group of characters can find themselves in the same story.

  It starts out as an old-time country song, a two-step dance tune in attempted four-part harmony. ‘Well I’m only the back door to the motel of your heart,’ groan the singers, tired and off-key, as though it’s three in the morning at the Goneville RSA and there are just two couples shuffling around the dancefloor, clinging to each other to stay upright, and a drunk sprawled out with his head in the bass drum, and the bar manager has told the band that if they want to get paid they’ve gotta play one more song but if it isn’t ‘Ten Guitars’ then it better be something everyone knows. It is neither, although it could be one of ten thousand country laments.

  Well you trampled on my feelings And you walked across my pride

  Now the maître d’ has drawn the drapes

  On the emptiness inside

  And the switchboard that connects your heart to mine

  Has broken down somewhere along the line

  And the old-time band ignores my heartfelt plea

  ‘Hey fella...

  Play nasty for me’

  On that last line something unexpected happens. There is a scream, a howl of electricity from centre stage, and the RSA is suddenly a psychedelic ballroom. Robert Taylor, Mammal’s lead guitarist, is playing nasty. His Stratocaster screams in torment, while somewhere in the background the refrain continues, now a raucous affirmation:

  Play nasty for me!

  The sleepy country song was just a bluff. The band is wide awake and firing riffs like rockets. And yet this part of the song turns out to be also a bluff. It gives way to a wistful melody sung in half-time:

  Homer standing by the plough

  He’d go home but he don’t know how

  Homer? Now what is Homer doing here? This song, in its first three minutes, has already insisted it won’t be tethered to the verse—chorus structure of the typical pop song but can and will go anywhere. Now the appearance of the old Greek bard is suggesting not merely a detour but an odyssey. This is borne out over the next twenty-five minutes as this single song journeys through surf music, heavy metal, space jazz, bucolic folk, always trying to get home to that refrain:

  Play nasty for me!

  In 1974 ‘Play nasty for me’ was more than just a memorable hook in a strange song. It was a pop-cultural joke that the audience that Nelson night would surely have smiled at. Play Misty for Me, a film that starred Clint Eastwood and also marked his debut as a director, had recently screened in New Zealand picture theatres. It told the story of a disc jockey stalked by an unhinged fan who obsessively requests the old Errol Garner tune ‘Misty’. Working musicians in New Zealand could relate to the disc jockey: they were often subjected as to such demands from drunken audience members. Steve Hemmens, Mammal’s first bass player, told me about the night a man wielding a bottle strode up to the bandstand, stood so close they could smell his alcoholic breath, and demanded, ‘Play “Help!” or you’ll need it.’

  Back in the Nelson hall, ‘Play Nasty for Me’ fills with characters who might be refugees from Bob Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’. Homer meets Surfer Joe as Mammal drummer Kerry Jacobson strikes up a pounding tom-tom beat straight off a Surfaris’ single, while somewhere a trumpet begins to play ‘Oh Mein Papa’, as though a bewildered Eddie Calvert has stumbled into the hall and, not realising he is on the wrong stage, whipped out his horn and launched into his 1954 hit.

  Calvert was an English trumpet player and all-round entertainer whose successful career had been eclipsed in the 1960s by the rise of pop groups such as The Beatles. But the beat boom wasn’t his only bugbear. He was also a vocal opponent of Harold Wilson, Britain’s Labour prime minister. By the end of the decade he had decamped to South Africa, where he recorded a version of the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’, retitled ‘Amazing Race’ in tribute to Ian Smith’s racist Rhodesian government. Around the time of this odious ode, Calvert was hired by Richard Holden, New Zealand Breweries’ entertainment manager, to undertake a national tour. He would perform exclusively in taverns booked by Holden.

  On the recording it is Mark Hornibrook, Mammal’s bass player and former National Youth Orchestra trumpeter, who is blowing the horn, but the fact Calvert was touring the country just when Mammal were traipsing through the backblocks is one of those coincidences on which the surreal world of ‘Play Nasty for Me’ is built.

  We then hear a singer, probably Tony Backhouse, joining the chorus of ‘Oh Mein Papa’ in a full fruity tenor, like a drunken Eddie Fisher, whose vocal version of the same song had been a hit just a year before Calvert’s. Eventually the two Eddies realise they are in the wrong song, the wrong city, the wrong universe, and head for the exit as Robert Taylor launches into a twanging riff reminiscent of Dick Dale, King of the Surf Guitar, which he concludes with a long scrape down the E-string, aimed at driving these interlopers out the door. Things gradually settle into a circular sequence of chords as Taylor solos, now using his wah-wah pedal to lend his notes a snarling tone that says, ‘Fuck off, and don’t come back!’

  Musical worlds continue to collide and collapse into each other. Guitar menace dissolves into smooth Buffalo Springfield-style harmony, which is in turn overpowered by rock-a-boogie as someone begins to wail the white man’s blues, until the whole thing unwinds again into cacophony. Strings bend and squeal and a saxophone shrieks like a cat in heat. ‘It must be all them drugs they are taking,’ mutters what might be a bewildered onlooker but is in fact Rick Bryant. Hornibrook, now back on bass, lets his fingers wander abstractedly about the fretboard. Guitars chime and familiar chords start to emerge from the murk. It’s that old chorus again, although no one is singing it now. One of the guitars insinuates the ‘Play nasty’ riff and we’re back into the theme for a few bars. There’s another scream, a few more stanzas of four-part harmony, guitars again, with Taylor accelerating his solo until it soars. Someone starts playing the riff of The Beatles’ ‘Day Tripper’, which only spurs Taylor on. And then, with a final purgative howl, Bryant vomits out the chorus one last time.

  Iwantyoutoplaynastyformenastyformenastyforme

  yayayyayyarrrghhhh...

  In a heroic climax, Kerry Jacobson pummels his drums in a series of John Bonham-style ba-da-la-bump-ba-da-la-bumps and the song comes to an end, followed by ... nothing. Twenty years of popular music — if not the entire history of lyric poetry, from Homer to Lennon — have flashed past in twenty-five minutes and no one seems to have noticed. The silence that follows could almost be the story of New Zealand rock in the early ‘70s. While the Breweries circuit hosted covers acts, showbands and faded offshore entertainers such as Eddie Calvert, original groups were forced to create their own circuit: provincial halls, university campuses, unlicensed clubs, occasional festivals, street parties. Little of their music ever found its way on to disc.

  ‘Play Nasty for Me’ is sui generis, a singular, extraordinary piece of work. No record was ever released, no studio recording ever made. There is nowhere on the planet, other than a half-empty hall in Nelson that night in 1974, where you would have heard this. It was the age of the rock epic. British prog-rock groups such as Pink Floyd and Yes were creating suites that took up entire sides of albums, but ‘Play Nasty for Me’ had little in common with these. What it did resemble — slightly — was the early work of Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, full of collage and jump-cuts, or The Beatles, whose ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ packed a genre tour of folk, hard rock and doo-wop into three minutes. It was a dialectic of pop, pitched from a place at the bottom of the world, upside down in the middle of nowhere, so far off the map that normal rules didn’t apply. It could have happened only somewhere the stakes were so low that a band, suddenly realising it could do anything it liked because nobody was watching and nobody cared, grasped that freedom with the full strength of its imagination and created a work of art that would be almost forgotten for forty years.

  The tape seems to have ended. All is
silent except for the gentle swishing of the spool. Then, as if from the far end of a cave, can be heard shouts, shuffling, a few desultory claps. Who were these people? Did they know what they had witnessed? Rick Bryant mutters just off mic, ‘Goodnight. See you later. Thanks for sticking round,’ and the tape runs off its spool.

  06

  ‘YO CAN’T DRESS LIKE THAT IN THE HUTT’

  When I first saw Graeme Nesbitt on the Union Hall stage it took me a few moments to realise he was the same man I’d seen a couple of years earlier cutting the ribbon at the Railway Station. Standing in the spotlight, he appeared to be glowing. He was dressed all in white, but it wasn’t just the clothes or the light, or the way his long hair and dark beard gave him a Jesus look. Back then a lot of people looked like Jesus. Although I didn’t know it, the glowing man introducing the bands that night was the reason there were bands in the Union Hall.

  I had sensed that what I had been seeing were local variants of the happenings taking place in San Francisco, London or New York, which I had read about. But I was yet to appreciate that each happening had a quality of its own, partly shaped by the imaginations of the individuals involved, people like Graeme Nesbitt. Not only did Nesbitt organise almost all the rock concerts at the Union Hall between 1970 and 1974, he pioneered a performance circuit that provided a launch pad for a handful of New Zealand groups who dared to make their own music - at a time when to play anything other than cover versions of current hits normally rendered a band or solo musician unemployable.