Goneville

by Nick Bollinger

  Plans for this had been outlined to Craccum by the festival’s social controller, Malcolm Calder. It would be modelled on similar functions in America. Acid-rock and way-out blues would provide the base, supplemented by psychedelic lighting and a turned-on atmosphere. Instead of the usual ‘bleary, boozy, small-town-type dance’, the social programme would be enhanced by something with ‘depth and meaning in itself as well as entertainment value’.

  Whether the freak out lived up to Calder’s promise was a matter of contention. The Craccum reviewer Bill Mandle seemed simultaneously prudish and blasé. After complaining there had been ‘too many boobs’, he griped that the event ‘had all the respectability of a Herald editorial, without even the latter’s lurking sense of menace’. Mandle didn’t bother to name any of the bands or musicians who had played, merely describing the music as ‘a mannered wailing, lacking either the virtues or vices of pop or jazz’. The guy obviously knew how to enjoy himself. Summing up the festival as a whole, he asked rhetorically: ‘Anything sinister ... ? Probably too much pot - the transfusion from Victoria proving too much at times for the recently starved Aucklanders.’

  It is not recorded what Mandle thought of the 1969 festival, which was hosted by Otago University. A couple of busloads of students from Auckland made the long journey south, while a contingent from Wellington included Graeme Nesbitt and Rick Bryant. Rick was booked to play with The Windy City Strugglers. Graeme was attending as an observer: he had been appointed controller for the following year’s festival.

  Graeme’s vision for 1970 was to create the biggest freak out yet. It would be inspired by happenings overseas - Woodstock had taken place in upstate New York the August before - plus some homegrown pranksterism of his own. A special shipment of cannabis from overseas was arranged, and two students collected it from a visiting ship. A full-page ad in Salient showed Graeme Nesbitt in full Che Guevara get-up, eyeballing and pointing at the viewer like Uncle Sam. The text read: ‘I NEED YOU! 200 of you. I need students to answer phones, sell advertising, build bridges, dance naked, arrange deals and have a great time. Arts Festival and I need you.’

  08

  PETER F. AND THE LIGHTS

  As a serious young student of rock I would pore over any information I could find that might deepen my impression of a band or piece of music. Often that wasn’t much. On the back cover of Highway’s sole and self-titled album, in white type on bright purple, was a dedication to a list of people who had assisted the band in various ways. In 1971 I knew it by heart. The contributions noted were vague - ‘Steve the roadie’ ... ‘Gary the hassler’ ... ‘Alan who tried’ - as though to give any more detail would be to expose some secret. Or perhaps it was just that no one could remember. Some names conjured up glamorous images of people I imagined must be part of Highway’s retinue: ‘Hans and Aveleen’... ‘Roger and Anastasia’... ‘Siddhartha’. And then there was ‘Peter F. and the lights’. Peter Frater’s lights were legendary. Seeing his credit on the Highway cover, I realised the mind-bending projections I’d seen at the Union Hall must have been his handiwork.

  Four and a half decades later Frater, now well into seventies, is still working in concert production as stage-door keeper at Wellington’s Opera House and St James Theatre. When I meet him at a café in Island Bay he tells me that the music business never provided the means for a comfortable retirement, and its family-unfriendly hours have left him unattached and undomesticated. His eyebrows are anarchic and he wears his long hair tied back, as he has done since the days of Highway. He calls himself a Wellington cockney: he was born in the city and has stayed here all his life.

  ‘I always wanted to have an involvement with performance,’ he says. ‘I started off in high school Gilbert and Sullivan, the annual productions, and then I tried youth theatre, which was a very arty thing to be doing at the time. Basically I tried singing, dancing and acting and didn’t scratch the surface on those three, but I did have a talent for putting on events and an interest in technology.’

  Frater got involved with the Contemporary Arts Group, a cultural club at Victoria University that put on variety shows. At that point in the mid ‘60s, folk music was as hip as it got. Through the university folk scene he met Max Winnie and Graeme Nesbitt. In 1970 Nesbitt called on his services. He was determined to create the biggest scene yet and needed Peter’s help. Arts festivals had always included some music - along with poetry readings, drama productions, chess tournaments and oratory contests -but this year the music was to be the centrepiece. And the focus had shifted from folk and the occasional classical or jazz concert to the newly named rock.

  The high point - in every sense - would be a rock concert at Paramount Theatre, headlined by a new band Nesbitt had come across. Highway consisted of five Wellington musicians, all still in their teens or early twenties yet already with years of professional experience among them. Guitarist Phil Pritchard and bass player George Limbidis had just returned from stints with Sydney bands. Drummer Jim Lawrie had played with Pritchard at youth club dances around Wellington while still at school. Second guitarist George Barris had been in Auckland playing bass with Bruno Lawrence and Chris Seresin in Fresh Air, and Bruce Sontgen had sung with the then disbanded Tom Thumb.

  At first Highway played just for themselves, night after night behind the closed doors of a Lambton Quay rehearsal room. Money or even an audience were hardly in their thoughts. Rather than start by learning covers, like every previous band they had been in, Highway made original music from the outset. Organic compositions that started from a bluesy riff of Pritchard’s or a bassline of Limbidis’s grew into multi-part opuses that kept expanding as long as the musicians felt inspired. A single song might stretch to three-quarters of an hour, although no one was keeping track of the time.

  The festival was a success. Consciousnesses were altered, minds blown. It even turned a respectable profit. As Nesbitt had predicted, Highway’s Paramount debut had been the centrepiece. It had sold out, leaving queues outside unable to get in. A second show had been hastily arranged. Many people simply left the theatre, paid for the second show and filed back inside. The band was phenomenally tight, even compared to overseas blues-rock groups. More than that, there was something about Highway that perfectly matched the mood of the student crowd. It had broken free of music’s false restraints. If everyone followed the music, perhaps society’s restraints could be cast off as well.

  Peter Frater remembers it as an epiphany. That night at the Paramount he had set up and operated the lights. He hadn’t done anything fancy, merely splashed some colours around the stage. But Highway’s performance and the crowd’s reaction had got him thinking. From photographs and film clips he had formed an idea of the type of light shows bands were using overseas, and how such effects might be achieved. A couple of nights later he visited Highway at their rehearsal room and let them know what he had in mind.

  Soon afterwards, when Highway set out on a tour of university campuses, Frater accompanied them. He brought an assortment of lights, as well as movie, slide and overhead projectors. Someone else brought the pot. ‘We were evangelists,’ he says with a twinkle, and raises his hands like a preacher.

  When the band returned to Wellington, leaving in its wake a trail of stoned disciples, Frater brought his ever-expanding light show to Lucifer’s, the latest in a series of clubs catering to Wellington’s burgeoning counterculture. Lucifer’s had been set up in the loft of an old stable in central Wellington by Dave Day, a Highway fan and sometime carpet layer. Over the next nine months Highway played there frequently. Newspaper ads for Lucifer’s used coded language to let the freaks and hippies know this was their scene. ‘Especially for the cool people’ and ‘Lucifer’s for friendly peaceful people,’ the straplines ran. The venue was unlicensed but alcohol was hardly missed. Musician Chris Prowse, who went there often, told me, ‘Alcohol was considered uncool. We looked down on people who drank. We called them pissheads.’

  Sometimes Nesbitt would arrange w
hat he promoted with droll humour as a ‘joint venture’ between Lucifer’s and the University Blues Society: bands would play half the evening at the Union Hall and then move to Lucifer’s and continue until around dawn. One memorable evening someone dressed in a Tinkerbell costume and sporting a prominent five o’clock shadow unexpectedly descended via a hoist from the ceiling, throwing out fistfuls of hand-rolled joints.

  Meanwhile Frater continued to perfect his light show. ‘I used to make my own oil wheels,’ he says. ‘I didn’t come up with how to make the cassettes - someone else figured that out. You have to have two concentric cells, and he came up with the bright idea of using ball bearings so you could spin the things around. The electric motors were out of meters or timing devices.

  ‘Then there was another type using a couple of bits of slide glass, sprinkling on some effervescent salts and a couple of drops of coloured oil, whacking them together. Add the heat of the lamp - they were the great explosions. It was messy and there had to be at least one person on each projector. In the end I probably had about a dozen up and running. I could do a whole hall. I used to use 16-mm film as well. Another thing was to get an overhead projector and get a handful of crawling live insects - wetas, slaters - and throw them on the platter.

  ‘It was pretty labour-intensive,’ he continues, ‘probably about half a dozen people. And there were always things like the motors would stop or the lamp would blow. Getting shocks. Something would be working, suddenly it would stop, someone would touch it, there’d be a flash and a puff of smoke and someone yelling “Fuck!”‘

  I wondered about the ultraviolet lights and bright tunnels of sheets. ‘That was just old theatrical hokum,’ he says. ‘Ultraviolet had been around for years. You got a white sheet and washed it in Lux soap flakes, you got the cloth loaded up with the soap, and the soap had a brightening agent in it. That’s the trick -brightening agents act amazingly under ultraviolet light. If you looked into the light your head started to go ...’ He mimes a brain exploding, and grins.

  Highway didn’t stick around Wellington for long. By the time I started going to the Union Hall they were in Australia, where they soon fell apart. But I did see them play once. It was at a hippie wedding on a spring afternoon in the garden of a crumbling Wellington villa. I had tagged along with friends who attended an alternative school where the barefooted bride was a teacher. The band played outdoors and I was spellbound. It was a crucial step towards a world of music that, over the next two or three years, I would study intently at close range.

  09

  INCREASING SOPHISTICATION

  There was another place where bands played. It was the pub, and you had to be twenty to get in. Even if I’d been old enough I might still have been turned away on account of the way I looked, as would most of the crowd I mingled with at the Union Hall. Signs at the entrances to the lounge bars where the bands played read ‘Neat Dress Essential’ and surly bouncers enforced the policy. Whatever music was being made in those pubs, it seemed to be for a different New Zealand.

  Until the late 1960s the pubs rarely had music at all: they closed by six in the evening, well before the hour at which drink and song normally exercise their mutual attraction. It had been that way since 1917 when, under pressure from the powerful temperance movement, wartime regulations were introduced to curtail hotel licensing hours. It was presumably felt it would be unseemly for people in the home country to drink up large while their countrymen were dying by the thousands in trenches in France and Belgium.

  After the war the regulations were left in place for fifty years, but if they were supposed to curb the excesses of Kiwi drinkers they had the opposite effect. In a phenomenon that became known as the six o’clock swill, men (and they were all men) would hit the bars at the end of the working day and try to consume as much liquor as possible before the publican turfed them out at six. I have a memory of sitting in our Ford Prefect in Molesworth Street as a preschooler, waiting for my mother who had gone into a dairy to get something for dinner, and seeing a tide of men dressed in grey surging from the front doors of a building with darkened windows. The way the men spilling across the footpath and into the street were stumbling and shouting made me want to slide down the seat and hide on the floor.

  ‘What are those men doing?’ I asked my mother when she returned. ‘It’s all right, darling,’ she said, ‘they’ve just come out of the pub.’

  A year or two later I got a glimpse of what went on behind those doors. I’d been out for the afternoon with Dad, and now a friend of Dad’s and the friend’s young daughter were giving us a lift home. The car stopped. ‘Wait here, we’ll only be a few minutes,’ Dad’s friend said. The two men disappeared inside a dark-windowed building. The minutes grew longer. The girl, who was a little older than me, got sick of playing ‘I Spy’ and decided to scare me. ‘You know,’ she said, in a whisper that carried a terrifying authority, ‘some men never come out of those places.’

  In a flash I was out of the car and in through the door of the hotel, pushing my way through the crowd of men, looking for my father. I found him standing near the bar. He carried me back to the car and assured me he would definitely be coming out of the place very soon, and we would be going home — where, if I was good, maybe I could listen to some of my Beatles records before bed.

  Public bars were utilitarian places. All the licence-holder needed was a brew, a bowser and a barman. The range of beverages on offer was extremely limited. The main one was beer, poured from hoses into big glass jugs. As most of the pubs were controlled by one or other of the country’s two major beer companies, Dominion Breweries and New Zealand Breweries, there was no incentive to offer variety. Over the years these monopolists had bought up most of the smaller regional breweries around the country and absorbed them into their empires. (In 1977 New Zealand Breweries changed its name to Lion Breweries.)

  There were no tables or chairs. You could pack more drinkers in standing than seated so why waste space? Floors were concrete or tiled, much like you would find in a public toilet; all you needed was a hose to wash away the spilt beer, blood, piss and spew at closing time. Women were seldom seen. An Act had been passed in 1910 making it illegal to employ women in bars, apart from members of the licensee’s family and barmaids already employed the year before. Pubs rarely sold food. Who was going to waste precious drinking time eating? Anyway, The Wife would be waiting at home with meat and three veg on the table, ready for The Husband when he staggered through the door.

  It was ironic that this culture of desperate excess had resulted from the efforts of prohibitionists and temperance lobbyists, and doubly ironic that the restrictions benefited the makers and marketers of alcohol. As the bars were strictly functional, in much the same way as pigsties and milking sheds are, there was no need to make them attractive so the owners saved on furnishings, décor and maintenance. And with such a huge chunk of the sales concentrated into a single hour of the day - between five and six o’clock - staffing costs were kept to a minimum. When a change to the Act in 1961 made the employment of barmaids legal again, it offered yet another cost-saving option: hotel owners paid them less than barmen.

  Still, the return of the barmaids was a harbinger of change. With the growth of air travel, the disparity between New Zealand’s drinking laws and those of Europe and the United States was becoming more obvious. There were growing calls to revise the liquor laws. At the 1967 general election a referendum was held. It came out three-to-one in favour of reform.

  Licensing hours were extended to ten p.m. and the breweries were forced to rethink the nature of their establishments. To remain viable, pubs now needed to be places that attracted both men and women, offered a comprehensive night out, and provided food and entertainment. In Molesworth Street, on the site of the old Metropolitan Hotel where, as a child, I had first witnessed the swill, rose the brand new Lion Tavern, a two-storey concrete edifice with a private bar named Spectrum decked out for dancing. For a cover charge of 75 cents, fr
om Monday to Saturday you could enjoy live music interspersed with records played by DJs from seven to ten at night. On Saturdays there were free matinees. Peter Frater installed a light show, although nothing as mind-bending as his campus illuminations.

  ‘Kiwi’ Keith Holyoake, the prime minister, attended the opening with his daughter Keitha, and praised the new building as an ‘addition to the gaiety and increasing sophistication of our city’. The gaiety and sophistication went only so far. Each night at closing time the bar manager would switch on an ear-splitting siren to encourage patrons to swiftly vacate the premises.

  The Spectrum Bar was a model that would be replicated many times. In a real-life game of Monopoly, Dominion and Lion both began buying up and adapting hotels around the country. Sometimes an old hotel would be demolished and a new one built. Lion established its own architectural department.

  As most communities opposed public drinking in residential areas, the new taverns were usually sited some distance from town, often on a busy stretch of highway. Large car parks enabled drinkers to drive there and back. It was too far to walk. Anyway by night’s end many of them were barely able to stand.

  10

  GLAM ROCK AND FANTASMAG3RICAL HUGGLEMAFLOPS

  Like most New Zealanders, my first encounter with Alastair Riddell was in my own living room, in black and white. The tall androgynous figure with dark tresses, silver eyeshadow and white satin bell-bottoms, with a scarf trailing almost to the floor, pouted and preened his way through a song that seemed to be an ode to a drag queen. It was 1974 and Riddell was making his debut with his band Space Waltz on the nationally televised New Faces talent quest.