At the back, on the riser, sits Kerry Jacobson. It is at most a couple of months since I last saw him playing Bee Gees and Average White Band covers with Tapestry in a Wellington nightclub, his main gig since the breakup of Mammal, but in the meantime he has been transformed almost beyond recognition. His hair has been bleached and dyed electric orange, razored short at the sides and styled into spikes. He looks like a sickly kid brother of Ziggy Stardust. And like the others he has lost weight. These are not the ponderous prog-rockers with their long pretentious songs I used to hear at the Union Hall. Their new songs are as lean as they are. They are unlike any New Zealand band I have ever seen.
Between songs Marc Hunter leers at the audience. They have a new album coming out soon, he says, and he hopes we like the songs we are hearing from it, although it is apparent from his sneering tone that he couldn’t care less whether we do or not. He has a scarf tied around his skinny waist and sashays like a drag queen. At one point he produces a riding crop and waves it about, a sinister suggestion of an S&M act.
The pace lets up only once, for a new song called ‘Sunshine’. In spite of its bright title, ‘Sunshine’ is a melancholy piece with a mournful chorus, which the four in the front line sing in powerful harmony. After maybe forty-five minutes on stage they launch into a furious finale of ‘White Light/White Heat’, Lou Reed’s intravenous drug anthem, and then walk off. By now half the audience has already left, driven out by the merciless volume. Those still there mill about like stunned survivors of an accident. I look for Bill but he’s nowhere to be found.
I’m not quite sure what I’ve just experienced, but as I walk with my flatmates back up the steps and zigzags to Kelburn I find myself saying, ‘It looked like an advertisement for heroin.’ I don’t know what I mean. Maybe I’m repeating something I’ve heard someone else say. It just sounds right.
It is eighteen months before Dragon return again. By then they are the top band in Australia, with a string of hit singles. But their time at the top will be short-lived. Marc Hunter is fired when his addiction spirals out of control. In late 1984 Paul Hewson, the brilliant songwriter, quits and returns to New Zealand. A few weeks later he dies of an overdose.
Nearly forty years after that night I visit Rod Bryant at his home in the Wellington hills. We kneel on his living-room floor, surrounded by the contents of a cardboard box he has kept in his garage: photos, newspaper cuttings, press releases. There is a poster for the Town Hall concert. Does he remember it? ‘Hell, yeah. Everyone was at that one. Cops. Terry Clark.’ Clark would become infamous as the murderous ringleader of the Mr Asia syndicate, as documented in numerous books and television programmes. Back then, though, only people into drugs knew of him. In 1980 he was convicted in Britain for contracting the murder of Marty Johnstone, the dealer known as ‘Mr Asia’, with whom he had been in partnership. He died in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight in 1983, supposedly of natural causes. Clark is believed to have been responsible for the murders of up to a dozen members of the drug ring. One was Greg Ollard, Dragon’s ‘benefactor’ from the band’s early days in Sydney, who disappeared in 1978.
What was really going on that night? It wasn’t just a concert, was it? Rod chuckles and shakes his head. ‘No, it wasn’t just a bloody concert, you’re right.’ He pauses and glances at a photograph staring up at us from among the paper clippings. Graeme is bright-eyed and smiling enigmatically, as if at some secret the rest of us are just figuring out. ‘It was ... broader theatre. It was Graeme saying, “Look at this. This is what we have created.”‘
Medley: ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’/’Sunshine’
Johnny Devlin was New Zealand’s first rock ‘n’ roll star. From 1958 he gave Kiwi teenagers their own surrogate Elvis. They came to his shows and screamed. His band were the Devils, and he was the Satin Satan. The fans tore the blue satin shirt from his back.
Johnny came from Gonville, a name that seemed to echo Elvis Presley’s plea at the start of his epochal 1954 recording ‘Milkcow Blues Boogie’ for his band to ‘get real gone’. That Gonville is a working-class suburb on the edge of Whanganui takes nothing away from the rock ‘n’ roll poetry of its name, but I’ve always pictured it as Goneville, a different place entirely. It’s where you come from if you’re real gone. And perhaps it’s where you go to when you’re gone as well.
Hold it fellas, let’s get real, real gone for a change, huh?
Johnny borrowed Elvis’s entreaty to kick off his first record, ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’. You can hear him mimicking Elvis’s words with just a trace of a Kiwi accent. ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ was written and recorded by a New Orleans singer, Lloyd Price, in 1952. Elvis released a cover in 1957. Johnny’s version, recorded a year later, was effectively a cover of Elvis’s cover, but it had a primitive power of its own. It wasn’t cut in a commercial studio but in Jive Centre, an Auckland nightclub where Johnny held a residency, on home-made equipment. The sound is clattering and uncontrolled; the echo effect is said to have been achieved by placing a microphone in the toilet.
Like hundreds of early rock ‘n’ roll songs, ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ relies on a triplet figure played on a piano, and this circles through a simple set of changes. Led by Cockney pianist Don Turner, Johnny’s backing band starts out at a languid walk, but after the singer stops them to issue Elvis’s command they relaunch at twice the speed. The musicians may be accomplished jazzers moonlighting as rockers but the sound they make is rough and exciting.
By the 1970s the piano triplet was an archaism, used mostly to evoke nostalgia. It featured prominently in Ringo Starr’s hit cover of the old rock ‘n’ roll song ‘You’re Sixteen’, and chimed through the soundtrack of the 1973 coming-of-age film American Graffiti. Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention had made Cruising with Ruben and the Jets, a homage to ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll, with Zappa referring on the sleeve, with mocking affection, to ‘redundant piano triplets’.
Those triplets are the building blocks of Paul Hewson’s ‘Sunshine’, the title song from Dragon’s 1977 album, their first Australian long-player. However, the mood captured is not a longing for the past. It’s something more complicated than that, and sadder.
‘Sunshine’ starts out at roughly the same tempo as Devlin’s ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ — before he has exhorted the fellas to get gone — and maintains that slumberous pace right through to the fade. From the opening bars, which pianist Hewson plays alone, there is something working against the song’s title. Though every four-bar measure contains twenty-four eighth-notes — the standard triplet equation — the first two bars divide those triplets unevenly, so that bar one seems to be a beat short while the next bar has too many. It stumbles with grace.
Then there’s the melody. Songs about sunshine are supposed to sound sunny. Hum a few bars of ‘You Are My Sunshine’, ‘Walking on Sunshine’ or ‘Here comes the Sun’ and compare them to this melancholy tune. This is a melody that forecasts rain.
The paradox deepens when Marc Hunter steps to the mic, and in a voice cracking with fatigue begins to sing Hewson’s lyric: I’m leaving Broadway, no day or night, just colours shining, shining down on me. The lines suggest an ageing Judy Garland contemplating the falling curtain at the twilight of her career, only the Broadway in this song isn’t Garland’s Broadway in New York, New York, the city that never sleeps. It’s the seedy corridor through inner-city Sydney where the members of Dragon lived, and one died, as they began their conquest of the Australian pop world.
There’s a pause at the end of the verse before the rest of the band join Hunter in harmony for this strangely equivocal chorus:
I’m in the sunshine
I’m wasting time
I’m in the spotlight
I’m out of time
Those lines pose a riddle I’m not sure anyone could answer, except maybe Hunter or Paul Hewson and they are both dead. Is the sunshine another name for the spotlight, or is it the opposite — day to the spotlight’s night? We’ve already been told in the verse th
at there is no day or night on the stage, just colours. And if the singer is wasting time in the daylight, on the stage he is out of time. Does he mean outside of time, as in the vast timelessness of space, where Plato believed the truth resided? Or does he mean rhythmically out of step, a reference to the irregular beat that tries to trip him at the start of every verse line? Or is it that he has perhaps seen his own time running out? That last possibility becomes stronger in the next verse, which is freighted with fatalism.
There’s no regrets
My case is closed
Lost man found his road in the end
And the last petal leaves the rose
After this there are no more vocal verses, just two different bridges, and with the first comes an unexpected burst of defiance. Hunter, suddenly revived, sounds as though his fate might not be predetermined after all. Elevator take me high, take me to the street, he cries, as the band strike power chords behind him. He’s climbing out of the earth, escaping the grave, only the elevator leaves him at street level (which, after all, is where he has asked to be taken), right back where his burdens began. And this is where we find him again in the final bridge, talking to a cigarette-smoking ballerina — like him, a creature of the Broadway night — who can offer no solace, only this statement of resignation to the fleeting and impermanent nature of existence:
Boy, the world is just a stairway
How can I understand
When my world turns to sand?
But this isn’t Broadway. Hunter, Hewson, the ballerina, they are all in Goneville.
And what about the boy who left Gonville for a life of rock ‘n’ roll? By the end of the ‘50s Johnny Devlin had moved to Australia, where he would sustain, into the next decade, a mid-level career as an antipodean rocker. When The Beatles toured Australasia in 1964 at the height of Beatlemania, Johnny returned to New Zealand as the band’s opening act. He had a suit made especially for the occasion: imitation leather, shiny black, with sparking diamante buttons. At The Beatles’ first press conference, Paul McCartney was asked a question about what was fashionable in rock ‘n’ roll nowadays. ‘Leather?’ said McCartney. ‘No. Leather’s out.’
15
PREPARATIONS
By the autumn of 1977 I was in Rough Justice and attending my first rehearsals. Unlike Rick’s earlier band Mammal, Rough Justice didn’t include any songwriters so we were restricted to playing covers. That seemed okay: most professional bands on the circuit did other people’s material. Local radios were thumping out the disco beat of KC and The Sunshine Band’s ‘I’m Your Boogie Man’ and Rose Royce’s ‘Car Wash’, or oozing the creamy concoctions of The Eagles’ Hotel California and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, but we didn’t learn anything by these groups. Rick’s selections were mostly ‘60s rhythm and blues standards — B.B. King’s ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, Otis Redding’s ‘Dock of the Bay’, James Brown’s ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’. I loved to hear him sing songs like these. Playing their basslines made me feel like I was laying the foundation stones of a cathedral. We also learned an Al Green song I suggested, ‘Take Me to the River’. A track from one of his albums, it was not well known but had a wonderful bassline and a lyric that seemed to conflate baptism and sex, and Rick sang it with all the gravity I’d expected.
We also mastered a couple of fairly recent songs - Thelma Houston’s disco hit ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ and Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Wish’ - and a few by The Rolling Stones, hoping these might be enough to satisfy an audience wanting to hear something familiar. But mostly we designed our repertoire to please ourselves.
By now I had met the other musicians Rick had enlisted. Peter Kennedy, our lead guitarist, was the elder brother of Richard Kennedy, the spectacular southpaw from Country Flyers. He was thin, straw-haired, extremely pale, and looked hardly strong enough to lift a guitar, let alone play one. On our first meeting he gave me a tentative handshake and a pleasant smile. Rick had told me confidentially he was taking a gamble hiring him. While Rick was in prison, Peter had begun taking heroin. He had developed a reputation for unreliability and hadn’t gigged in two years. Now he was off smack and trying to stay straight. Rick hoped the responsibility of a regular gig would keep him that way.
Peter and Rick were good friends and had known each other since the late ‘60s, when they had been both flatmates and bandmates. I listened as they reminded each other of the various occasions their flat had been raided by the drug squad. ‘Remember,’ Peter said. ‘You were in your room and called out, “Hide the stash, Peter, I think the cops are coming.” But the cops were already in the house. One of them found me upstairs and asked, “Are you Peter? Your mate says to hide the stash. He thinks the cops are coming.”‘ Both hooted at the memory. Rick’s head tilted back, his eyes scrunched up, and his throat emitted the long staccato chortle I quickly learnt was an indication something had gone either very right or very wrong.
Rick had also found a piano player called Simon who was about the same age as me, with a silver stud through his nose and shoulder-length blond hair that he frequently flicked back from his eyes. I was dismayed to learn his preference was for arty white English groups such as 10cc and Supertramp: what Rick sang best, and what I wanted to play, were deep R&B songs.
Rick was still looking for a drummer so I suggested Martin Highland, my friend from school. Soon he was part of the band as well, along with another of our Onslow gang, Stephen Jessup. Although Stephen was primarily a guitarist, the idea that he doubled on saxophone and had a bus driver’s licence appealed to Rick. And then there was Janet Clouston. We didn’t have a manager, sound mixer, lighting designer, wardrobe assistant, roadie, door person or any of the other extra-musical operatives a professional band usually carried in its retinue. Janet’s role seemed to include all these things and more.
We started rehearsing in the house next door to Rick’s, which happened to be empty. For reasons I never fully grasped, Rick had a key. We would assemble in the house every day, late morning, set up in the unfurnished living room and rehearse until late afternoon.
Rick’s cannabis consumption was the stuff of legend. When I was still at school I had heard a whisper that the Mammal singer was a big pot-head, maybe even a dealer. Since then I’d had the opportunity to try pot a few times. Initially I had felt no effect. When friends grinned and grew glassy-eyed after a few puffs, I was convinced they were putting it on. But one night a few of us shared a joint as we walked from downtown up to Kelburn and I suddenly saw what they had been grinning about. The streets, the city, the whole world had become bright and cartoon-like. We were characters in a comic strip. I noticed a parking meter, mounted on a solid steel bar, lying at the side of the road. It had been put there deliberately for us to find. Don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters! We could read each other’s minds. Between the three of us we managed to lift it off the ground. It weighed a ton and yet was weightless. We laughed and sang, ‘Everybody must get stoned!’ as we carried it, without any need for discussion, to the top of vertiginous Everton Terrace where we lived.
Since then I had discovered that sound, like vision, could seem more detailed and absorbing on pot; it could be good for listening to music, especially if I was trying to zone in on the bass parts. But I had never met anyone who smoked like Rick. When he didn’t have a joint in his mouth he’d be rolling the next one from a grubby plastic bag of plant matter that he carried down the front of his trousers. The first time he offered me a joint I accepted. ‘By the way,’ he cautioned, ‘this is one-puff stuff.’
I drew deeply and passed it to Martin, who declined and handed it on to Stephen. Rick counted in the song we were working on. It may have been ‘Back Stabbers’ by The O’Jays, although after a few bars I really had no idea. I had completely lost track of which part of the tune we were playing, the verse or the chorus, or even what the song was. My fingers were strange pink tendrils with minds of their own, moving on the rubbery strings of my bass. It was fascinating to observe them bu
t I didn’t know whether I was in control, or whether the notes they were making were even in the same key as the rest of the band’s. I had to sit down. As there were no chairs I simply slid to the floor in front of my speaker box and slumped there, inert. No one seemed to notice.
Over the weeks that we rehearsed, the music started to come together. Peter was clearly a superb musician. He drew a bright biting tone from his guitar, a bit like Frank Zappa’s sound on Weasels Ripped My Flesh, and employed a sense of the surreal. When Rick suggested we needed a two-bar phrase to cue the ending of an Aretha Franklin song, Peter played the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth. It fitted perfectly. The rest of us diligently swotted our soul records, trying our best to replicate the originals.
Sometimes neighbours or passers-by would wander in to the house, attracted by the sounds. Usually they would listen for a while, offer some mild encouragement and leave, but one visitor made himself at home. No one knew who he was or how to get rid of him. Rick, who was often uncomfortable in the presence of strangers, seemed particularly agitated. I realised the stranger’s presence was inhibiting him from having his customary smoke. The visitor had been there perhaps half an hour, having seated himself in the only chair, lit a cigarette and helped himself to somebody’s beer, when I noticed through the window a couple of men in suits walking purposefully up the zigzag path.
Goneville Page 10