To find out more about the man who had been responsible for much of the soundtrack to my teenage years, I am driving towards Upper Hutt. Graeme Nesbitt lived here as a teenager. His father Robert, now in his nineties, still lives here, as does Rob, the eldest of Graeme’s three younger brothers. I have arranged to meet Rob at Classic Cycles, the workshop where he prepares and repairs vintage motorcycles for racing. ‘I’ll take you to meet Dad,’ he had barked down the phone. ‘Since Mum died you can talk to him about anything you like. I tell him Graeme kept the New Zealand music industry going by selling pot and he just laughs.’
From State Highway Two on a misty Sunday morning, the Hutt Valley looks still and peaceful, a scattering of silent suburbs across a pretty floodplain. And yet when I think of the Hutt I remember violence. My Onslow days were haunted by legends of Hutt Valley gangs storming into Wellington on weekends, looking for schoolboys to beat up.
And then there had been my first professional gig. By the time I’d been at Onslow for a couple of years my attempts to learn the bass had led to my joining a series of school bands with ever-changing names and line-ups. The most ambitious of these had answered a newspaper ad that invited groups to audition for a ‘Teenage Dance’. Surprisingly, we got the gig and found ourselves one Saturday night in a vast concrete gymnasium in the Hutt Valley suburb of Taita. There were two other bands.
One was a local outfit that played lacklustre covers of current hits (their best song was ‘Helen Wheels’ by Paul McCartney and Wings). Their singer had brought along a three-foot polystyrene phallus, which he occasionally picked up and waved around on stage. The other band was fronted by three Mā ori cousins from Ruatoki, an isolated village in Urewera Valley, where English was still a second language, if spoken at all. They played a version of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ that scorched like a blowtorch.
As the lights dimmed and Hutt Valley teenagers began to fill the hall, it became apparent the crowd was dividing along territorial lines, one tribe gathering along the left-hand wall, the other along the right. I never found out whether the division represented different schools or warring neighbourhoods but violence seemed inevitable. We were on first. We sat backstage with the other bands and discussed strategies for survival.
‘When they start fighting, you keep playing. And if they get onstage, whatever you do, don’t stop,’ one of the Māori guitarists said.
‘So that’s what you’d do?’ I asked nervously.
‘No,’ he said. He grinned. ‘I’d hit ‘em. Don’t you try that though. Just keep playing. We’ll keep ‘em off the stage.’
Sure enough, our first note was the cue for the fighting to begin. The stage lights made it hard to see what was going on, but looking up from the fretboard, where I was shakily fingering the bassline to ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Hoochie Coo’, I was aware of movement that didn’t seem like dancing. There were shouts and the quick flash of glass.
We didn’t play well, although fear enlivened our normally sluggish tempos. In the end only Boyd, our stylish saxophone player who was dressed for the occasion in pink velvet trousers, incurred injury. Crossing the hall after our performance, he was butted in the head by a Huttite who was heard to mutter, almost apologetically, ‘You can’t dress like that in the Hutt, mate.’
In Upper Hutt I pull into a petrol station and ask the attendant for directions to Ward Street. ‘You a writer?’ he asks, and I wonder what it is that has telegraphed so clearly my identity and purpose. Is it something I’m wearing? It turns out he knows the Nesbitts. Rob had mentioned someone was coming up from Wellington to talk to him.
I find Rob in his workshop. There are disassembled bikes in corners, engines on benches, wheels suspended from rafters, miscellaneous parts stacked floor to ceiling on shelves. Everything is silver, dulled with oil. Rob is big, bearded and ponytailed, arms blue with tattoos, a textbook biker. His voice rumbles like a Norton engine. I recognise him as one of the bouncers I’ve been seeing at concerts since the days of the Union Hall. He tells me he usually works security with his two younger brothers, Bruce and Greg. Once, after a ZZ Top show in Auckland, the three of them were invited to a party in a downtown nightclub. Somehow they managed to commandeer a limousine. When they disembarked outside the club, a girl rushed up and kissed Greg, thanking him for a great concert. Inside, another woman embraced Rob. ‘So where are you guys from?’ she asked. ‘Ah, Upper Hutt.’ She was confused. ‘But you’re from Texas though, right?’ ‘Nah, we’re from Taita.’
Their brother Graeme would never have been mistaken for a member of ZZ Top. When Rob takes me to his father’s home I notice on the wall a life-sized portrait in pastels of the four brothers, and am told it was painted in Borneo in the 1980s when they went there together to hunt tigers. In the picture Rob, Bruce and Greg look like the bikers they are. Graeme, cool and cleanshaven, might be a 1940s film star.
He was always different, Rob and his father agree. His gifts for language and literature had been recognised in primary school, when the family was living in rural Kohukohu in the Hokianga, where Robert Snr was postmaster. Advised by his teachers that the local school, Rawene District High, would not be able to extend him to his full potential, Graeme’s parents sent him to board in Whangarei - the nearest major town and a full day’s journey away on gravel roads - so he could attend Boys High.
While his brothers dreamed teenage dreams of motorcycles and mayhem, Graeme studied Latin, grew his hair long and got hooked on pop music. His interest in music had already kicked in at Kohukohu with The Lever Hit Parade and The Sunset Show on Radio 1ZB, and he had taken guitar lessons from George Sutherland, a teacher at Rawene High who was involved in national kapa haka competitions. In Whangarei he befriended Reggie Ruka, the leading local guitarist and singer. Graeme started following Reggie from gig to gig, picking up the basis of his repertoire. Sometimes he would head into Auckland to hear other live performers or for a big show like The Beatles’ 1964 descent on the Auckland Town Hall.
In 1965 Robert Snr took a job as an instructor in postal services and the family moved to Upper Hutt, where they were put up at Trentham Military Camp. Graeme’s room was an old laundry, about thirty feet long, where he could play music day or night without disturbing anyone. He filled it with musical instruments and equipment. His brothers recall him owning, and to some degree mastering, six- and twelve-string guitars, violin, saxophone and bass, but his preference, formed in part by the Māori singers he grew up amongst, was for folk and country songs, which he played on the guitar. At Upper Hutt College his friends included Ray Mercer, a guitarist who would later be a member of national hitmakers The Dedikation, and bass player Alastair Richardson, who would leave school to join and co-write most of the hits for The Fourmyula, New Zealand’s most successful recording band of the late 1960s.
With another classmate, Christine Klocek, he formed a duo, Los Pescadores, named for a song on an album by the Native American folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie. By the time they were out of school the pair, dressed in home-made ponchos, were performing regularly at Wellington coffee houses such as Monde Marie and Chez Paree. They even appeared on a children’s television programme. At school Graeme had faced suspension for refusing a haircut; now he looked like a cross between a flower child and a South American revolutionary, sporting beard, beret and a preference for purple. Starting at Victoria University in 1968 he became involved in the University Folk Club as both promoter and performer. When international folk stars such as Julie Felix and Peter, Paul and Mary toured he would help out any way he could.
It was around this time that Graeme’s path intersected with that of a fellow student and aspiring musician who would go on to become his flatmate, bandmate, cellmate and lifelong friend.
07
EVANGELISTS
Rick Bryant grew up on Wellington’s south coast and went to Rongotai College, where he developed the persona of a surly rebel. This masked an inherent shyness. The first time Rick agreed to sing in public he spent the previous
day in a state of terror. Once he got up on stage his fears did not depart, but he realised singing was the thing he had been put on Earth to do.
Rick’s musical tastes were already skewed towards black American music - blues, soul, gospel - and the more credible of its white interpreters. He had first sung in the mid 1960s with The Changing Ways, a band composed mainly of Onslow College students, but had left after a difference of opinion with their leader, Simon Morris, over the music of The Pretty Things. Rick admired the English rock band’s raw bluesy edge; Simon didn’t think their songs had any place in Changing Ways’ repertoire. Rick had gone on to sing with Gutbucket, a New Plymouth blues band that had recently relocated to Wellington, and Original Sin, a group that included Morris, along with a recent arrival from Australia, Bill Lake.
When Rick first saw Graeme sometime in 1968, the poncho did not make a good impression. Nor did the music. To Rick, the folk sounds favoured by Graeme were fey and effete, and he couldn’t resist mocking Los Pescadores for their outfits and faux Mexican name, which he would mispronounce variously as Los Disasteros, Los Pistachios and Los Pecorinos. But there was a lot Rick and Graeme had in common. For one thing, they were both ferociously academic. For another, they were both interested in drugs. During his first year as a student Rick had been offered a joint and found he liked it - a lot. Before long he was ensuring himself a cheap regular supply and supplementing his university bursary by selling it.
Graeme was doing the same. More outgoing than Rick, he also became something of a proselytiser for marijuana. In late 1969 he was appointed to a committee of the Victoria University Students Association to look into the question of legalisation. Under the existing law, the cultivation, possession, use and sale of the drug were illegal. The committee formed the opinion this had to change. It recommended controlled use of marijuana should be legalised.
The only member of the committee without a legal background, Graeme nevertheless became its spokesperson. ‘The older generation has a fear of being exposed by the younger generation,’ the Evening Post reported him saying in April 1970. ‘They escape truths about themselves ... While eager to retain their social stimulus, alcohol, they are vehemently opposed to the recognition of marijuana as the social stimulus of the young.’
He advocated ‘controlled use’. Marijuana should be available to those over the legal drinking age. People should be able to be convicted of being ‘stoned and disorderly’. To keep the drug out of the hands of peddlers and inhibit smuggling, it should be illegal to buy or sell it.
Convinced that fairness and social justice could be achieved more quickly if everyone smoked pot, Rick and Graeme saw themselves as evangelists. Before long they were flatting together in a three-storey house above Aro Valley. Through Wellington’s small enclave of cannabis users, Rick was soon offered other substances to buy and sell. Wary of LSD and fearful of hypodermic needles, he refused. Graeme, on the other hand, seemed willing to try anything. Rick was at home one night studying Chaucer when the phone rang. ‘Your mate has OD’d,’ the caller said. ‘You’d better come and get him.’
Rick hurried to a house in central Wellington, where he found Graeme conscious, but only just. The junkies with him advised Rick the way to keep him alive was to support his weight and keep him walking. Eventually he got Graeme home and went to bed, only to be woken at regular intervals throughout the night by the sound of his flatmate painfully retching out a window. Rick believes Graeme never used intravenous drugs again, although he remembers him taking LSD before attempting maths assignments. When Graeme slept - which he didn’t seem to do often - he would wear headphones, through which he would soothe his subconscious with reel-to-reel recordings copied from long-playing records of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
While Rick pursued his love of blues, Graeme continued to play folk and country music. He joined forces with folk singer Max Winnie, jazz bassist Colin Heath and harmonica player Andrew Delahunty as Country Deal; in 1971 the group appeared on the television talent quest Studio One, becoming finalists, and made an album, Max, Colin & Graeme with Andrew, for Kiwi Records. The album featured liner notes by Rick Bryant, and Graeme would become part of Rick’s next musical project, Rick and The Rockets. The psychedelic rock group’s brief but remarkable career included a summer residency at a bohemian café, Chez Eelco in Nelson, and a performance at the 1969 National Blues Convention in Auckland — of which more later.
Drugs and rock music were still very much minority pursuits but the counterculture was growing, particularly around university campuses. By the late 1960s, student newspapers had begun to take on the characteristics of the underground papers overseas. An issue of Salient ran a two-page article about the pros and cons of drug use. With text printed in purple against a chaotic red collage, the spread did a good job of simulating the effects of a hallucinogenic experience but was entirely illegible.
On other pages, between reprints of Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics, you could find in-depth discussions of the Vietnam War, the anti-nuclear movement, apartheid, contraception and sexual politics. Many of the radical figures afforded space in the pages of these student papers, and so effectively leading student opinion, were a generation older than the students. They included doctor and social critic Erich Geiringer and poet turned prophet James K. Baxter.
Flicking through editions from the time, you might think local rock music was having little impact on university life: alongside an occasional report of a classical concert or experimental performance, the music most frequently mentioned was folk. Untainted by commerce, associated with left-wing politics, and carrying a touch of hipness thanks to Bob Dylan, folk appealed to the idealistic and the high-minded. Folk clubs sprang up. Simon Morris, Bill Lake and Robert Taylor all made their campus debuts at folk concerts.
The bridge between the worlds of folk and rock was blues. Although blues experienced mild resistance from a few English traditionalists - the ones Rick Bryant called ‘the pound of fatty bacon and a pint of good ale brigade’ - folkies, by and large, recognised it as the authentic expression of an oppressed and disenfranchised people and therefore a form of folk, even if its local variant was being performed by middle-class bohemians whose experience of cotton fields and killing floors was inevitably limited.
Involved first with the University Folk Club, Graeme Nesbitt went on to establish the Victoria University Rock and Blues Society - having the word ‘blues’ in there gave the organisation a necessary veneer of respectability - and began to put on concerts in the Union Hall. These were unlike anything you’d experience if you went to see a band in a pub or in most of the city’s nightclubs. Although the music could be bluesy, it was seldom strictly blues. Like the underground and progressive rock shows of Britain and the US, there was a heavy emphasis on musicianship, the songs were long, and the bands were defiantly non-commercial.
Similar scenes were developing in other cities. Dunedin, too, had an underground rock institution, Otago University’s Blues Rock Club, which hosted local bands such as Lutha and Pussyfoot. In Christchurch, guitarist Eddie Hansen and Auckland drummer Rick Ball, both of whom had been in radio-friendly pop groups - The Revival and The Challenge, respectively -were developing their brand of psychedelic rock in Ticket, with a residency at a nightclub called Aubrey’s, a favourite haunt of American servicemen on R&R leave from Vietnam.
In Auckland, blues-rock had snuck on to campus through another quasi-respectable institution: poetry The campus poets were more militant and had an even more clearly defined agenda than the musicians. ‘Poetry was a practice run for a complete change of consciousness,’ poet Alan Brunton would recall in his 1997 memoir Years Ago Today. Brunton had left his hometown of Hamilton in the late 1960s looking for ‘a life of imagination’. He didn’t find it in Auckland University’s history department, where lecturer Michael Bassett summarised New Zealand history as ‘roads and bridges’, nor in the English department, where a senior tutor advised him to drop out while h
e could still get his fees refunded.
During a 1969 hitchhiking trip between Wellington and Auckland, Brunton and his friend Jim Stevenson formed what Brunton called the ‘paradigmatic model for the restitution of New Zealand in an alternative universe’. They declared: ‘The shift would begin with the Imagination and be at the hands of the Cultural Liberation Front. The CLF would infiltrate administrations through their weakest link, their cultural clubs and societies.’
Meetings of the CLF were held at Brunton’s home, 5 Boyle Crescent, Grafton, one of two neighbouring crash pads managed by James K. Baxter. Its first event was a concert in Auckland University’s Student Union Hall. It featured the Original Sun Blues Band, with poetry readings by Brunton, David Mitchell and Russell Haley, and a performance piece that involved all three poets, one reading aloud while another stood in a tin bathtub being soaped by the third. Several more such events followed until the university banned them.
In 1970 Graeme Nesbitt was elected Victoria University’s cultural affairs officer and appointed controller of the National Student Arts Festival, which it was Victoria’s turn to host. Until four years earlier the weekend festival had been run as an adjunct to the New Zealand Universities Winter Tournament, at which sports teams from the various universities competed and socialised and breweries did well. Nineteen sixty-six had seen the birth of the New Zealand Universities Arts Council as a standing committee of the University Students Association, with a brief to promote student cultural affairs at a national level. The arts festival was to be its prime focus.
Early festivals featured film, drama, poetry, chess, and classical, jazz and folk music. Anything resembling rock was confined to a ‘hop’ on the Saturday night. This began to change with the 1968 festival, which was held in Auckland. ‘Unlike previous Arts Festivals and Tournaments,’ the student newspaper Craccum reported, Auckland’s ... effort is to have no traditional hop. Instead there will be a Freak Out.’
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