Goneville

by Nick Bollinger

  Hank came back from overseas. Angela went back to him for a while, then back to me, then up north, where her parents had gone to start a macadamia farm. I turned seventeen and didn’t really know what I was doing. Nor did I have anyone to advise me. Music seemed a good thing to hang on to.

  13

  THE WINDY CITY STRUGGLERS GO ELECTRIC

  A few months after my father died I got a call from Bill Lake. His acoustic jug band The Windy City Strugglers had decided to add electric instruments and needed a bass player. Bob Dylan going electric in 1965 had changed the cultural course of the twentieth century. The Windy City Strugglers doing the same thing a decade later would have little impact other than a minor increase in someone’s power bill, but it took me into the Royal Tiger Tavern.

  The Strugglers had started in 1968, soon after Bill arrived in Wellington from Australia, his birthplace, which he had left to avoid being called up for Vietnam. Obsessed with the blues of the Mississippi delta - recordings from the 1920s and ‘30s that had begun to be reissued by folkloric labels such as Folkways and Arhoolie - he had taught himself to play guitar, harmonica and mandolin in this arcane style: wiry, nervy, quietly intense, rather like Bill himself.

  Wellington already had its enclave of blues followers but most had come to the music via its English interpreters, of whom Eric Clapton was the most renowned. A few local sophisticates such as Colin Heath and Max Winnie knew the blues as a tributary of the folk and jazz they already played. But everyone who heard Bill instantly sensed an authenticity that was missing from the Clapton copyists. You could hear that his blues came from somewhere closer to the source. Even reissued records of early blues were hard to come by in New Zealand, and the original 78s were mythical, but Bill sounded almost as if he had stepped out of one of those shellac discs.

  The Strugglers had made their name playing at folk and blues festivals. ‘You’ve got that authentic shaky sound,’ Max Winnie had enthused to Geoff Rashbrooke, the band’s original mandolin and piano player, after their ramshackle debut at the 1968 Wellington Folk Festival. I had seen them at the Union Hall playing opening sets for Mammal. About half of Mammal seemed to be in the Strugglers as well. They would cluster centre stage, trying to aim their instruments in the general direction of whatever microphones were at hand. Bill’s acoustic guitar usually lacked a strap so to play it he would stand slightly hunched, with the instrument balanced tenuously on his knee. Rick Bryant stood upright, eyes shut tightly in concentration as he flailed at a washboard, an adapted laundry tool he struck percussively with thimbled fingers, keeping it aloft by poking one of its pronged ends perilously down the front of his jeans.

  By 1975 Bill’s delta blues purism had relaxed a little. He had dabbled in rock with bands such as Original Sin and Mammal, and come to appreciate what American groups like The Band and Little Feat were doing, using the blues as a foundation for contemporary songs. Adding electric guitars and bass to the Strugglers would give him a chance to explore similar territory, write his own material and get the group out of the folk clubs. Perhaps they could even earn a little money. The Strugglers at this point consisted of Bill, Geoff Rashbrooke, Andrew Delahunty and Steve Hunt. Rick was not currently with the group: he was in Witako Prison, serving eighteen months for cannabis possession.

  I had met Bill a few months earlier when a girl I knew from Onslow, older than me and at university, had brought him to a church hall where Last Gasp were playing out of tune to a few dozen friends. He had heard we did ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll, Hoochie Koo’. Would we mind if he joined us for that song, and was there a guitar he could use? Our rhythm guitarist was quickly relegated to tambourine.

  Now I was going to join Bill’s band. I was still a few years away from being legally allowed into licensed premises, but Bill said he thought I’d be all right as long as I stayed away from the bar. And maybe I should keep my head down during the breaks. As for my bass playing, that was hardly going to threaten the Strugglers’ authentic shakiness.

  The first Windy City Strugglers’ gig I played was at the Royal Tiger and had come via Bill’s friend Midge Marsden. I had listened to Marsden’s Blues Is News programme on the radio. His band, Country Flyers, had been packing out the tavern’s lounge bar several nights a week for eighteen months. The Flyers had a line-up that included, at various times, a number of musicians I’d seen in the psychedelic rock shows at the Union Hall. Bass player Neil Hannan had been in Olibet, drummer Jim Lawrie in Highway and Bud Hooper - Lawrie’s successor in the Flyers - in Billy T.K.’s Powerhouse. There was nothing psychedelic about the Flyers though. They played in the bare house lighting of the Tiger and their music was essentially country, a genre associated with the most conservative side of American culture. From the little I’d heard, country music’s message seemed to be we don’t smoke no marijuana, stand by your man, and it’s America, love it or leave it. The typical country music fan was a shotgun-wielding redneck straight out of Easy Rider. But by the ‘70s, country’s conservatism was being subverted by such American bands as The Byrds, Grateful Dead and The Flying Burrito Brothers, who parcelled up anti-establishment messages in songs that had the traditional melodies, high lonesome harmonies and clean twanging guitars of classic country.

  The Flyers picked up on this style and gave it a local twist. They were all excellent musicians and Midge Marsden was a gracious, gregarious front man, but the star was a young lefthanded guitarist called Richard Kennedy, who was seventeen when he joined the band in 1974. During the night he would perform several showstoppers. He localised the R&B standard ‘It Should Have Been Me’, changing the line about a bowl of chilli to a packet of fish and chips. And he gave a nod to New Zealand’s rural sector by closing each set with a note-perfect picking of the theme from television’s Country Calendar. The Flyers made the ultimate pub music: good-humoured, instantly familiar, simple in essence yet played by virtuosi.

  By the end of 1975 the Flyers had become so popular the publican was complaining. The crowds made it almost impossible to get to the bar. Some nights standing room was at such a premium there were people hanging off the railings at the side of the stairs that led to the upstairs area where the bands performed. If the publican wanted entertainment that attracted fewer people, the Strugglers were just the band for the job.

  The arrival of music at the Royal Tiger had coincided with the closure in 1973 of the Duke of Edinburgh, a hotel at the corner of Manners and Willis Streets that had through the ‘60s been the meeting place of Wellington’s students, intellectuals and fringe-dwellers. If you were walking from the university into the city, taking a shortcut down the precipitous Allenby Terrace steps to emerge from the gothic shadow of St Mary of the Angels, the Duke was right in front of you, and once inside it could be hard to leave.

  The Duke never had music but musicians often drank there. It was the setting of a pivotal scene in the 1969 film Tank Busters, in which an assortment of students, dropouts, criminals and musicians - typical Duke dwellers in other words - discussed the viability of robbing a safe at the university. The film was directed by future Blerta member Geoff Murphy and marked the feature film debut of Bruno Lawrence. Like Rick Bryant and Bill Lake, Lawrence and Murphy were regulars at the Duke. It was a place where drugs, mainly pot and acid, could be bought. James K. Baxter would wander in with a poem or a sermon. Rick was introduced there to the famed British author Anthony Burgess, and to the controversial Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing.

  With the Duke empty and awaiting demolition, some of the regulars had migrated to the Royal Tiger. Opened in 1971 and trumpeted by Lion Breweries as another triumph of its architectural department, the concrete-block and timber-beam tavern soon acquired an atmosphere of lawlessness, like a saloon on the edge of the Wild West. It consisted of two bars - a lounge and a public bar - and a bottle store. While the lounge was colonised by Duke refugees and other bohemians, the public bar became the haunt of bikers and gang members. Entrances to the two bars were on opposite sides of the building. Ho
wever, the two clienteles, each in their own way outlaws from mainstream society, shared the toilets. Patched gang members and student hippies would find themselves eyeball to eyeball in the narrow corridor, or standing next to each other at the urinals. Both bars saw the occasional altercation. One night, when Bill Lake had been sitting in with the Flyers, a fight broke out. Someone grabbed Bill’s Stratocaster - whether as a shield or weapon it was hard to tell - and by the time Bill retrieved it the instrument was a splintered wreck. However, there was never any conflict reported between the two distinct subcultures that occupied the respective bars.

  At the end of 1975 Robert Muldoon, a hard-line conservative, was elected prime minister and immediately began pushing new legislation that would increase police powers, particularly to break up gatherings of gangs. His attitude to the emerging Māori protest movement was dismissive and his approach to race relations insensitive, but in 1976 he agreed to meet with members of Black Power. Some commentators believed he was looking for genuine solutions to gang violence and unemployment. Others have suggested he had fantasies of cultivating a private army.

  The venue was the public bar of the Royal Tiger. Between twenty and thirty Black Power members showed up. Sociologist Jarrod Gilbert has suggested that ‘Muldoon being a short man, it is possible the hotel’s management did not know the prime minister was present because members of the gang obscured him.’ Whether this is true, it is recorded that the management stopped serving alcohol and called the cops, who didn’t believe the prime minister was present until he emerged from the pack and asked them what they wanted. ‘Despite the fact that the group was causing no trouble,’ Gilbert writes, ‘Muldoon and the Black Power members moved on from the tavern and adjourned to a gang address to finish their discussion and drinks.’

  If they had been looking for illegal activities, the police would have had more luck in the vicinity of the lounge bar. The punters there did not necessarily favour beer as their intoxicant of choice. Many arrived stoned and were content to dampen their droughty mouths with orange juice, drifting out to one of the nearby alleyways between sets for a few more lungfuls.

  Marijuana was now easy to come by but what had once been shared, given away or sold for minimal profit by evangelists such as Graeme Nesbitt was becoming a lucrative business. One of my flatmates discovered a dairy halfway between our flat and the university where, if you knew the appropriate password, the cashier would sell you what looked like fossilised kebabs from under the counter. These buddha sticks were two-millimetre packets of dried marijuana buds wrapped around a bamboo skewer. We didn’t yet know they were being imported from Thailand by a syndicate of New Zealand-based cannabis dealers, soon to be christened by the media the ‘Mr Asia Drug Ring’.

  The syndicate was moving into harder drugs, and you didn’t have to look far to see the results. A regular at the Tiger was a guy a few years older than me. Pale and thin with long dark hair, he usually sat alone at a corner table. Someone called him Neil. I thought he looked a bit like The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards and admired his gift for stillness. He would stare intently at the edge of his table, sometimes for an entire set, as though there was a performance going on there that only he could see. One day I heard he had been found slumped in another bar, dead of a heroin overdose.

  It was around this time, too, that I last saw Bruce, with whom I had consorted in Onslow’s Glass Box. He came into the Tiger one night with a group of mates, noticed me on the bandstand, and gave me a nod and a wicked grin. A few weeks later I heard that he too had overdosed and died.

  The lounge bar of the Tiger had two sections: a downstairs area that you entered from the street, and a mezzanine with its own bar, which was reached via an internal staircase. Bands usually played on the mezzanine but the Strugglers never got further than the bottom of the stairs. Unlike the rest of us, Geoff, a stubborn traditionalist, had refused to go electric so our gear included a steel-framed upright piano, slightly out of tune and very heavy. None of us was particularly practical or physically robust, and we endured such anguish getting the instrument into a van in Kelburn and then across town to the Tiger that, after stopping for breath just inside the doors of the lounge bar, we couldn’t summon the strength to lift it again. We simply set up the rest of our rickety equipment around it.

  As it turned out, our piano-moving marathon had been pretty much a waste of time, as the acoustic keyboard could barely be heard above the amplified guitars. One night, though, downtown Wellington was hit with a power outage. As the Tiger plunged into darkness the only thing audible was the tinkling of Geoff’s piano keys.

  14

  BROADER THEATRE

  Wellington Town Hall, Sunday, November 14, 1976. This is where the big names play. It’s where Igor Stravinsky conducted the Symphony Orchestra in 1961; where - before I was old enough, although I longed to be there - Wellington teenagers screamed and cried for The Beatles. It is where, in my thirteenth year, I studied B.B. King as he caressed Lucille, his Gibson 335 guitar, and preached his elegant blues, and where, more recently, Stewart Macpherson, a concert promoter, blocked a side entrance and ordered me to get out and stay out, after I almost succeeded in slipping through without a ticket to see Lou Reed. It is where on my eighteenth birthday I’d sat in the balcony, gazing down in wonder as Lowell George rode a silver train of slide guitar over the southern railway rhythms of his band Little Feat.

  Local bands don’t often play in this hall but tonight is a special occasion. Dragon have returned from Australia for a single concert. It’s strange that their only New Zealand show is in Wellington. Back when they were still based in this country they were considered an Auckland band. But tonight is a strange night. Graeme Nesbitt is just out of jail and has brought back to his hometown the band he had been trying to help when he obtained the drugs that led to his imprisonment. In the two years he has been inside a lot has changed. After he was put away, Dragon went to Australia. Perhaps if he had been around they would have heeded his advice: consolidate your New Zealand success, pay your debts and go to Europe, where a German record label has shown interest. Instead they found themselves in the sleaze pits of Sydney’s Kings Cross under the dubious influence of Greg Ollard, whom Graeme had known when they were both selling grass in Wellington but who was by then a major heroin supplier. Ollard hung around, slipping the band cash and smack.

  Entering the bright foyer of the Town Hall on this Sunday night, I know little if any of this. I’ve just seen the posters around town advertising Dragon’s return and am curious to see what a year and a half in Australia has done to the band. It’s a long time since I last heard Robert Taylor, the wonderful guitarist I used to catch often with Mammal. He is now Dragon’s star musician. Just a few weeks ago Kerry Jacobson, another ex-Mammal, flew in to join him. There was a dark reason behind Kerry’s sudden recruitment: Dragon’s drummer, Neil Storey, had died of a heroin overdose.

  The audience in the Town Hall is seated as if for a classical recital, which suits the opening act, Red Hot Peppers, a band of Auckland musicians with whom Graeme has had a long association. They have recently released an album, a rare achievement for a New Zealand group, and it’s lifted their profile. Their leader is Robbie Laven, a bearded, unsmiling figure who surrounds himself with instruments - flutes, mandolins, saxophones, guitars - all of which he plays at least competently and some spectacularly I had seen him in 1972 at the Union Hall in a very different setting - with a rock ‘n’ roll revival act called 1953 Memorial Society Rock ‘n’ Roll Band. The highlight that night had been a version of ‘Leader of the Pack’, during which Rob Nesbitt had ridden a motorcycle on to the stage and revved it loudly during the choruses. This evening’s performance is more sedate. The Peppers shuffle between swingy jazz tunes, bluesy numbers and country rock. Laven’s constant switching of instruments — often several times within a single song — is entertaining but the music is polite, never rocking hard or getting loud. It seems to lull the audience into a TV-style stupor.
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  After this there is an interval. Cigarettes are smoked in the foyer. It’s a cool crowd, lots of hair and denim. There are a few folkies who remember Laven and Taylor from university days. I see some familiar faces from the Royal Tiger, others from the Union Hall. I recognise Rod Bryant, Rick’s brother, who used to play harmonica in bands with Rick. He sometimes helps Graeme with gigs but has a day job as a journalist. Rick isn’t here - he’s still in prison. He was caught with a pound of cannabis, so he was done for dealing, although people who knew him said he could easily have smoked that much on his own.

  I run into Bill Lake and he has some news. He has just been talking to Robbie Laven, who has asked him to join the Red Hot Peppers. They have a tour booked and it will continue well into the New Year. This means regular work and a weekly wage. I offer encouragement, although it will mean the end of the Strugglers, at least for now.

  During the intermission, Laven’s arsenal of instruments is removed from the stage and replaced with a stark set of amplifiers, a simple electric piano and a drum kit on a high riser. The house lights fade to black. There’s a flurry of movement on the darkened stage and with a crashing chord the scene is suddenly bathed in bright light. The five-headed Dragon is in front of us, breathing fire.

  There is so much to take in that my senses go into shock. The music is extraordinarily loud. I recognise none of the songs. They seem so short there is hardly time to absorb their melodies, and each runs into the next without a pause. There is a physical power I’ve not witnessed before in any band, and the five musicians wield it like a weapon. But the most alarming thing is the way they look. Four of them - Robert Taylor, the Hunter brothers and pianist Paul Hewson - form an almost military row along the front of the stage. All are naturally tall and their height is exaggerated by the Cuban-heeled boots on which they totter precariously, as though the music is the only thing holding them up. They are rail thin.