Goneville

by Nick Bollinger

  At the Golden Dragon the band was assigned a minder with the nickname Money. Money found them accommodation in a brothel run by a pair of Indian brothers who rented beds at two dollars per night. ‘We discovered the meaning of his name two weeks later,’ Goodwin later wrote in a tour journal published in Hot Licks, ‘when we realised he’d managed to borrow at least ninety dollars from different members of the band without any sign of repayment.’

  Graeme found a local doctor who would prescribe generous amounts of Mandrax for insomnia and ephedrine for fatigue. This kept the party stoned for the duration of the visit, explaining the cryptic title of Goodwin’s Hot Licks piece, ‘Last Mandy in Nandi’. The band had stopped in Nadi, pronounced Nandi, for three days on the way home, although Goodwin made no mention of the drugs.

  Like the club-goers of Auckland, Golden Dragon’s clientele showed little interest in Dragon’s original material so the band played the same tired covers as they had at Granny’s, sharing the stage with Millie, a local drag queen who gave renditions of ‘Lovely Hula Hands’ in an operatic falsetto. When they were invited to play at a one-off event in a local hall, billed as The 1st Suva Rock Concert, band members were determined to air their original songs. The locals, though, were merely bemused by the prog rock. It was the opening act that received the standing ovation: in rented cowboy regalia, Nesbitt strummed an acoustic guitar and sang such country classics as ‘Hey, Good Lookin’’ and ‘Blackboard of My Heart’ to wild applause.

  Graeme Nesbitt went on to produce one of the best records Dragon would ever make. ‘Education’ was a song of Robert Taylor’s - a parting shot, perhaps, at the world of student rock (talking to my brother, educated fool) with a taut wiry guitar riff. It originally featured in the repertoire of Mammal, but once Robert joined Dragon Graeme picked it up as a single. With Robert singing lead, Marc Hunter was left to play congas, which Graeme lifted high in the mix to give the recording a funky, almost Little Feat feel. To Robert’s chagrin, after he left the smokefilled studio and went home, Graeme and whoever else was still around smoked another joint and decided the track sounded a bit slow. They sped up the tape for the final master. This may have enlivened the groove but it left Robert’s vocal sounding, he would tell me when I interviewed him, ‘like Joni Mitchell or a squirrel’.

  In late 1974, Dragon toured New Zealand to promote the single. They had crossed Cook Strait and were en route to Christchurch when their main vehicle, a bus, blew its engine. To repair it would cost thousands of dollars, money they didn’t have, but the cost of cancelling gigs in Christchurch and Dunedin would be even greater. Goodwin called Graeme, who came up with a solution: a bag full of buddha sticks.

  Goodwin now believes Graeme’s phone was being tapped. As soon as Graeme arrived in Christchurch with the contraband that could be sold to settle the group’s debts, the police were on his tail. The arrest was dramatic. Goodwin, who had collected him from the airport in the band’s Ford Transit, attempted to outrun the police and did so for several blocks. But before long he and Graeme were in Addington Prison, pending remand.

  Goodwin emailed me: ‘I was on my way to a gig, so wearing my red/pink ensemble with mascara of course, and had to endure stony stares from drooling inmates. But I had double helpings from the tranny Samoan giant cook! We were given protection cards by Mick the Murderer once it was established I could play some Rory Gallagher. Graeme and I used to meet every day in the exercise yard, or at church services, the only other time you could get out of the cell. His spirits were amazing. Boy, could he focus. He would have been a hero in the trenches or on the battlefield.’

  Goodwin was ultimately discharged and Graeme took the rap. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Goodwin recalled Graeme’s sentencing: ‘I still seek closure on Graeme. I have carried such angst scars since our bust in 74. What a drag…’

  He remembers the high times that preceded the fall: ‘Graeme was tripping the light fantastic ... he loved the nerve/success factor thing ... the bux meant zilch. He would take a dozen people to the best restaurant and pick up the tab, these are povo line musos etc. who normally lived on diets of brown rice, burgers and spuds ... He kind of attempted to infuse them all with a sense of style/taste. His farewell do at Macavity’s in Wellington was a screech ... Porn was screened, a kind of belated acid test with acid replaced by champers, buddha and good wine, the kitchen staff and others all hitting up speed balls in the dunnies ... Now Graeme is haunting me in a very affable way’

  12

  DEPARTURES

  At the end of 1974, aged sixteen, I sat my University Entrance exams, and without waiting for the results left school. A couple of weeks before Christmas my friend Dave and I went for a walk by the railway yards and within an hour we had jobs loading goods trains. Dave had been staying with us since school finished: he preferred my family to his own. All he would say about his home life was that his father worked in a bank and hated music. Now that Dave had an income he was planning to get a flat with a few of our friends. I could move in too if I liked.

  The flat was halfway up a steep hill from the city and ten minutes’ walk from the house in North Terrace where I had grown up and the rest of the family still lived. I figured I could always go home if I wanted. The rent was twenty dollars. Each week one of us would take it to the old copper-domed building on Lambton Quay that was the Public Trust Office and hand it to a teller seated behind a polished wooden counter.

  Five of us lived in the flat. As well as Dave and me, there were Hank, Matt and Michael. Hank was the first to have a girlfriend stay the night. Her name was Angela and I was in love with her. I had been ever since the first day she walked into our sixth form French class and so had half the other boys in the room. Angela wore black velvet jeans and had quick dark eyes. Her family had recently shifted from Auckland and she already had a boyfriend in the seventh form, a fey aesthete with a ponytail and a hand-knitted cap whom I hated on sight. It turned out she was interested in music. She said she and her boyfriend had some good records, which gave me something to talk to her about.

  One night I went to a party with a few friends and Angela was there. There was no sign of the boyfriend. She was just starting to tell me how they’d broken up when some older guys, ex-Onslow, appeared. I may as well have been invisible; they reeled towards her, asking with whisky breath what she was doing that night and who she was with. At that moment Angela and I took a half-step towards each other, my arm wrapping around her shoulder. She gently leaned in. For the first time the drunks noticed me and realised they had seen me before. ‘Is she your girlfriend?’ Are you going out with her?’ they asked in mocking, incredulous tones. Then to Angela, Are you with that guy?’ I don’t remember either of us replying. Nor could I figure out what to say to Angela after the men had stumbled off to test their charms on other women. I let go of her, but held on to the moment.

  Over the next few months I would see Angela, but only at school or parties. Although a few couples had formed within my circle of friends, mostly we moved in a pack. We‘d hear of a party somewhere, or someone’s parents would be away for the weekend, and a dozen of us would find our way there by train or on foot. Enough money would be scraped together to buy a carafe of wine.

  One night there was going be a Van Morrison concert on TV. Angela’s parents were out so we all repaired to her place to drink wine and watch Van. I’d been listening obsessively to Astral Weeks and staring endlessly at the double-exposed image on the cover. This had led me to envisage Van as a romantic dashing poet with flowing hair, so I was unprepared for what appeared on the screen. The man clutching the microphone and intoning those intense and mysterious incantations was short, slightly stout, and looked somewhat grouchy. He reminded me of Rick Bryant.

  After the programme we drank more wine, a few people rolled cigarettes, and Angela put on Court and Spark, a record she had just bought. I hadn’t heard much Joni Mitchell before. I thought of her as one of those strummy folk singers and had filed
her as ‘wet’, along with James Taylor. But this was different. There were horns and harmonies and skittering jazzy rhythms. The chords formed intricate pictures, and so did the words. Joni sang about love and its complications. There seemed to be a lot of men trailing through her songs, all offering her things. She wondered whether she really wanted any of the men. She was independent and strong, yet confessed to insecurities. In my mind, Angela and the voice in those Joni Mitchell songs became one.

  Before long Angela was going out with Hank. A few months passed and Hank’s parents offered him a trip to Europe, so I moved into his room, which was bigger than mine. He had left a box of stuff behind, among it spare guitar strings, a copy of Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train and a packet of condoms.

  One night Angela came around. It was already late and before long everyone else had gone to bed. We talked and I went to put on some music. I’d decided to play Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan’s new album. I’d been a Dylan fan since school and loved Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, but his recent albums had seemed strangely toothless. This new record, though, showed him rejuvenated, aching and raging with love for someone beyond his reach.

  I was close to dropping the tone arm on ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ when it occurred to me that Dylan’s rage might be a bit much for the quiet intimacy of the occasion. I opted instead for a Phoebe Snow record I knew Angela liked. Eventually I asked where she was staying the night and she said she guessed in Hank’s room. If she felt any guilt about sharing her boyfriend’s old bed with me she didn’t say so, and she laughed when I got up to rummage in the dark through his box of ephemera for the condoms.

  Not long after that I got a letter from Hank. He was having a good time, he said. Parties in England were just the same as in New Zealand: someone always ended up playing Exile on Main Street. He’d bought new albums by Grateful Dead and Bonnie Raitt and thought I’d like them. He also said something cryptic about watching out for naked women in his old room. I still wasn’t sure Angela and I were actually going out though, and she seemed to prefer it that way. I’d ring her at home and her mother would say she had gone away for the weekend, she didn’t know where. A line from Court and Spark went through my head: We love our loving, but not like we love our freedom.

  In our flat in the middle of winter you got out of bed only when you had to. Dave left before dawn, walking down the hill to the mess of mud and concrete where he was now employed as a labourer on construction of the new motorway. Matt and I had also worked there until the foreman caught us leaning on our shovels. He fired us but that was okay: the eighty dollars in my final pay packet could keep me going for a couple of months.

  One morning at around 8.30, Matt’s sister, down from Coromandel with her incense and crunchy granola, burst into my room and woke me. ‘I’m sorry Nick, but there’s a girl on the phone who says she needs to talk to you. She sounds a bit upset.’ It was my fourteen-year-old sister Thomasin. Her voice was very clear and she was speaking in short sentences which seemed to shatter as soon as they left the receiver. Dad has died. He’s had a heart attack and died. Just now. Mum’s not here. You have to come. I was trying to put her words back together in some way that made sense as I stepped out the door. I think somebody called to me, ‘Is everything okay?’ and I might have answered, ‘I don’t think so’ but it’s hard to know whether any words came out. I felt like I was moving and frozen at the same time.

  When I got to the house the front door was hanging open, as though someone had just left. Thomasin and my younger brother Tim were waiting for me in the hallway. Dad had woken them in the night in pain. They had sat with him as he lay in bed. He told them he thought it was his heart. By early morning he was worse and asked them to call the doctor. Mum was away and they hadn’t been able to get hold of her.

  I don’t know how long we stood there, three confused kids, or how much time elapsed before I went into the bedroom. I had no idea what I’d find but I didn’t expect to see a doctor leaning over the bed. I could see my father’s shoulder and his silvery hair, but the doctor hadn’t seen me and I didn’t want to startle him so I backed silently out of the room. One of us must have rung Dennis, a family friend, because before long he was there. Mum turned up after that.

  The last time I had seen Dad had been about a week before. I’d popped home for some reason. We hadn’t talked for long. He might have asked if I was happy, I’m not sure. What I remember was his asking whether I noticed anything different about him? I looked. I could see his hair had grown greyer and he hadn’t been to the barber for a while. But that wasn’t it. Same horn-rimmed glasses, gentle blue jersey.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve given up smoking.’ The pipe he had puffed on almost constantly for as long as I could remember had gone.

  ‘ Was that hard to do?’ I asked, surprised. I knew how addictive tobacco was supposed to be, and had listened to some of my mates, sixteen, seventeen years old, grumbling like codgers about their nicotine habits as they licked their papers and rummaged in their packets of Drum.

  He thought about it for a moment. ‘No,’ he said softly. I didn’t ask any more questions.

  Over the next couple of days a lot of decisions were made and I had nothing to do with any of them. If my father could be alive one moment and dead the next, what could I do that would possibly make any difference to anything anyway? Someone from the university organised a memorial service. It was held in the Union Hall. A lot of Dad’s friends and colleagues made speeches. Mum didn’t speak. Nor did any of us kids. I don’t think anyone even asked us.

  That night there was a dance at Onslow, the school I had left six months before. Our band, which had acquired the name Last Gasp, had been booked to play. I remember someone asking if I still wanted to do it, having just lost my dad and all that. I couldn’t really say. This was all new territory. I don’t recall what we played that night, but I remember a crowd of friends showing up and dancing in front of the stage. At the end of the first set some of the band went outside for a cigarette but Angela grabbed my hand and took me to her family’s house, ten minutes away. Her parents must have seen me as I walked past the living room where they were watching television but they didn’t say anything. I followed her to her room. She closed the door and led me urgently to her bed.

  I remember that later, when our band had played its last set and the gear was packed away, Thomasin and lots of her friends and most of my flatmates went to someone’s parents’ place and drank ginger wine on the lawn in the dark, and somebody asked if this was a wake. Whisky was drunk, people were laughing and a few were being sick. I recall looking across the garden and seeing Dave sitting on his own. He looked like the saddest person I’d ever seen. Perhaps he sensed that with the loss of my father things were going to change at our home, which had been his refuge. If I could have seen myself, what would I have looked like? A boy stunned by grief, or giddy with sex and rock ‘n’ roll?

  My father’s death at forty-six was so sudden and unexpected it was as though a meteorite had crashed into our family. Where Con had stood there was now a crater. We, the survivors, picked ourselves up, slightly stunned, looked at each other, and as we had no visible injuries did our best to carry on.

  I can only imagine how my mother felt about not being at home the night Thomasin and Tim sat with our father as he lay dying. For her, the shock and loss were as great as for the rest of us, but there had been many nights over the previous five years that she hadn’t been home. She had a lover an hour’s drive up the coast, and sometimes spent a night or weekend with him. We all knew this, and Con seemed to accept it, if sadly. There was never any suggestion that our parents would break up and I’m not sure they even considered it. They had a genuine love and admiration for each other, and the family at North Terrace was at its heart nuclear and functional. At some point Mum said to me casually but with a note of relief that she thought Dad might have a girlfriend. I believe he had several in those last years, although he n
ever introduced them to us and never seemed far from home.

  A few months after my father died, my mother moved up the coast to live with her lover, Graham Cooper, taking Tim and our foster brother Tom with her. Graham would provide them with stability and a new home. Thomasin, who was still at school, stayed on at North Terrace and I moved back there to live with her and an assortment of our friends.

  The big old villa was transformed from a family home into a teenage flat. It wasn’t always easy to tell who was living there and who was just passing by. Sally, a girl whom Thomasin and I had known since we were kids, had recently finished school and she moved in with us. Thomasin started going out with a guy who rode a motorbike, had a large jar of unidentified pills that he had obtained during his job driving a chemist’s van and slept with a knife under his pillow. He moved in too. Another room was occupied by a quiet painter who would toil for days and nights behind the closed door. If it hadn’t been for the smell of turps and oil we’d have had no idea what he was up to. Occasionally he’d emerge with a fresh artwork and hang it on the living-room wall. Then he’d get drunk, decide the painting was no good, tear it off the wall and destroy it. The next day he would look sadly at the remains and become stricken with remorse, which was usually the cue for getting drunk again.

  Sometimes I’d wake up to find a stranger crashed out on the couch, or a guest making breakfast in the kitchen, or someone smoking hash over the stove. There were parties fuelled by pot and carafes of cheap wine. Exile on Main Street was on the stereo a lot. It was a life of freedom most teenagers could only fantasise about. My mother was working full-time at the Justice Department as well as looking after Tim, Tom and Graham, who was suffering from a long-term illness. Her life was difficult enough without having to keep an eye on us, but she seemed to have confidence in the ability of her children to make responsible decisions and steer their own lives.