‘Who are those guys?’ I wondered aloud. The song we were practising ground to a halt. Rick, deep inside the melody, kept singing until all the instruments had fallen silent, at which point he opened his eyes, looked momentarily confused, then saw what the rest of us were looking at. The men had reached the front door. ‘Fuck. The cops.’ He rushed out the back. Some of the band followed.
The knock came. It turned out the men were real-estate agents, assigned to look over the property. One asked what we were doing there. None of us could really say. After a few minutes Rick reappeared, composure regained, and explained we were there with the knowledge and permission of the owners and were keeping an eye on the place to ensure no undesirables took advantage of its apparent abandonment. They seemed to accept his story. Somewhere in the melee the mysterious guest fled. He was never seen again.
One evening after a rehearsal we went to Carmen’s Balcony, a strip club run by Wellington’s famous drag queen. I had never been to a strip club before and would have been unlikely to visit one on this or any other night if it hadn’t been that Midge Marsden’s Country Flyers were playing there. We scaled a set of stairs, paid the cover charge and arrived in a dim smoky room with large mirrors on crimson walls. It was as though I’d stepped off Victoria Street into pre-war Berlin.
The crowd was a combination of what I assumed were regulars - middle-aged guys in dirty suits, glamorously seedy types of indeterminate gender, night people - and others I might have seen at rock shows. Like the shared corridor between the bars of the Royal Tiger, it was a weird collision of subcultures, yet no one was made to feel unwelcome. Alcohol was quaffed from paper cups, filled on the sly from bottles in bags under tables. Cigarette smoke choked the air.
Soon the lights went down and a spotlight picked out on the raised stage a figure dressed in grubby white, with greased black hair, a pencil moustache and dark glasses. In a raw Kiwi accent he introduced himself as Neville Purvis ‘at your service’, master of ceremonies for Cabaret Capital Strut. He proceeded to give a droll account of his history as a small-time Hutt Valley crim. ‘I went to Taita College and Mount Crawford finishing school,’ he told us, Mount Crawford being Wellington’s infamous prison. After offering smatterings of street wisdom — ‘The Mark II Zephyr is the pinnacle of twentieth-century technology, you should see the size of the back seat, and that’s Neville on the level’ - he introduced a series of sketches. These included political satire (a woman wore a pig mask that bore an obvious resemblance to prime minister Robert Muldoon), musical interludes from the Flyers, poetic rants from Alan Brunton, fire-eating, and even a cameo by Carmen herself, singing the standard ‘Autumn Leaves’ in a tremulous baritone.
The nearest thing I’d experienced to this was a Blerta show, but there I had been just an onlooker. Here I was being watched by people as curious as I was to see who else belonged to this Wellington demi-monde. Neville Purvis, I later learned, was Arthur Baysting, a poet and songwriter, but the driving force behind the cabaret were Red Mole, a theatre troupe founded by Brunton, Sally Rodwell and Deborah Hunt. The relationship with Carmen had begun when Deborah and Sally, short of income, had approached her and offered to augment her strip shows with topless dancing and fire-eating. This had led to Red Mole being offered a Sunday night slot. Their show had quickly expanded to become the main attraction, ultimately running four nights a week. Each month it was completely revised. One season was themed around New Zealand in the 1950s. Another, on the ‘60s, was called Holyoake’s Children. Over the next few months Carmen’s Balcony became a regular haunt.
During breaks in Rough Justice rehearsals, if Rick wasn’t sharing his knowledge about the history of the Balkans or the novels of George Eliot, or on the phone arranging band bookings and other unspecified business, he would roll another joint and outline his plan for the band. He had given up his job at the university after being busted for pot. The university had been very tolerant, he said, but he hadn’t wanted to embarrass them any more. The band would be full-time and professional. He couldn’t offer us a wage but promised us an equal share of the earnings after expenses. Professionalism meant, among other things, a dress code. It wasn’t strict but he drew the line at sandals and brown corduroy. That left open the opportunities for flared denim, striped sailor shirts, brocaded waistcoats and other fashion crimes too awful to recall.
Where would we be playing? The universities were where the more experimental and original bands could still find an audience. Bruce Kirkland, Graeme Nesbitt’s successor at the Student Arts Council, had refined the university touring circuit. Hippie happenings had evolved into well-organised rock tours. An extensive campus tour had been vital in the launching of Split Enz. Now Split Enz were in Britain on the brink of international fame. But we had doubts. Would the students of 77 have any use for our vintage rhythm and blues? And even if they did, the occasional university hop or campus tour could not support six full-time musicians.
There were two ways most working musicians could make a living. One was to secure a residency in a nightclub or restaurant. That door was closed to Rough Justice. Our repertoire was too esoteric for the nightclubs, which favoured covers of the Top 20, and we were certainly no dine-and-dance act.
The other way was to tour the pubs. This often meant dealing with grouchy publicans with permanent hangovers, who saw musicians as a necessary evil and told them so. However, a few venues were more welcoming. One was The Cabana in Napier. Frequented by sailors and ship-girls, it was managed by Charlie, a bottle-blonde matriarch who would greet musicians with a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other, feed them three-course meals, and be always the last to leave the house bar after the post-gig party.
The Cabana was independently owned, but most pubs belonged to one of the two giant breweries, Dominion and Lion. One evening Rough Justice made a reconnaissance visit to the Lion Tavern on Wellington’s Molesworth Street, where we hoped we would soon get a gig. If the Royal Tiger was an outpost of Lion Breweries’ operations, this was their central headquarters. It had been designed by the company’s architecture department in a style known as ‘brutalist’, a word coined in the ‘50s by British architects Alison and Peter Smithson, who adapted it from ‘beton brut’, a phrase used by Le Corbusier: beton for concrete, brut for rough or unrefined.
I’m beginning to see that ‘brut’ represents more than just the rawness of the two-storey fortress as I contemplate the grim bald bouncer guarding the door at the top of the first tier of concrete steps. I am still a year shy of the legal age to enter pubs, but the bouncer is more concerned about Stephen’s flared denim trousers.
‘No jeans,’ he states firmly.
‘But the sign says no black jeans,’ Stephen reasons. ‘These are dark blue, and anyway they are dress jeans.’
The bouncer grunts, but he is already conducting a wardrobe inspection of the next customers in the queue so we hurry up the remaining steps to the Spectrum Bar. Inside, the light is low, the air a smoky fug, the carpet sticky with beer. Raised voices battle the sound of a five-piece band, Fragments of Time, which is playing in front of a painted backdrop of swirling oranges and browns. Originally called Father Time, the band have recently renamed themselves after a membership reshuffle, and in a few weeks will rebrand themselves yet again as Mi-Sex. In this final guise they will find Australasian fame, with a string of hit singles and albums. Tonight, though, they are still a pub band, one of many currently making their living on the Lion Breweries’ circuit.
Their set consists mainly of covers. Their animated performance makes up for the static lighting. Their singer Steve Gilpin, a winner of television’s New Faces competition, wears dark glasses and has the confident stance of a stadium rock star, although he is playing to only 150 people. Bass player Don Martin does balletic things with his hands, while guitarist Kevin Stanton performs full-body gymnastics. At one point Stanton does a cartwheel on the cramped stage, navigating with an apparent sixth sense the jungle of obstacles - pointed micr
ophone stands, uncoiled cables, sharp-edged cymbals and glowing amplifiers.
‘You should have seen him last night,’ I overhear one of the band’s crew say. ‘He was doing that, off his head on acid.’
Rough Justice might not be able to compete with that kind of showmanship, but is there a place for well-intentioned tributes to our R&B heroes on the pub circuit? That decision is in one man’s hands.
16
NOT THE MUSICAL GENIUS BUSINESS’
People who encountered Richard Holden always remarked on his hands. ‘The size of mutton hams,’ was how one journalist described them. Another compared them to dinner plates, and yet another to ‘twin kilos of corned silverside’. And it was not just his hands. Holden was, said impresario Alan Smythe, ‘larger than life, with a frame and countenance to match’ and ‘one of life’s great gargantuan, Rabelaisian characters’.
Unlike Rabelais, the Renaissance monk and scholar who wrote the bawdy, extravagant novels Gargantua and Pantagruel, Holden was of humble origin. Born in 1948, he was two years old when his parents separated. After this he and his twin brother Alistair lived with their mother, first in Trentham, then in a state house in Naenae. When they were eleven their mother packed them off to Motuihe Island in the Hauraki Gulf, where their father ran a navy canteen. They hadn’t been there long when they received a telegram: ‘Don’t come back, it’s your father’s turn now.’
Schools and books held little interest for the young Richard. By fifteen he had left school, unqualified, and was dressing windows for Wiseman’s electrical goods store in Auckland’s Queen Street. On the weekends he would help a friend who was converting an old picture theatre in Milford into a ballroom. Once the Surfside Ballroom opened, he was kept busy at the weekend dances, blowing up balloons and operating the spotlight.
In 1970 he brought his puff and panache to Wellington, taking a job as Lion Breweries’ display and merchandising manager. Based in the corporation’s offices in Molesworth Street, he dressed windows of taverns and dance floors of lounge bars. When Quinn’s Post Hotel in Upper Hutt ran a nine-week talent quest, he had the stage painted magenta and the house piano purple. By the time the Lion Tavern opened the following year, with its live music venue the Spectrum Bar, Richard Holden had been promoted to national entertainment manager.
The first band he contracted was Triangle, centred on the piano playing and bravura singing of Dennis O’Brien. Then came Tapestry, a slick covers band fronted by brothers Dave and Wayne Feehan, whose high quavering voices provided a simulacrum of The Bee Gees. These groups were soon succeeded by The Quincy Conserve, a tight septet led by a short tough taskmaster with an intense reedy voice, who had played professionally since his early teens, toured the Pacific with showbands, studied arrangement at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music, and went by the name of Malcolm Hayman. He had been lured back to New Zealand in 1967 by his mother, who had claimed to be on her deathbed, and formed the Quincys in time to cash in on the craze for jazz-tinged brassy rock bands such as Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears.
The Quincys were extremely professional, quick to master new material, and some of them had sight-reading chops. They could back anyone, from teen pop performer Mr Lee Grant to jazz virtuoso Ricky May. They appeared on TV pop shows and children’s programmes, and were the house band at Wellington’s HMV studios, providing backup on records by middle-of-the-road singers such as Craig Scott and Suzanne, as well as making records under their own name. Hayman didn’t write songs but he was canny in his choice of covers. ‘Alright in the City’ and ‘Aire of Good Feeling’, originally by Sonny Charles and The Ides of March respectively, were unknown compositions from overseas that the Quincys successfully turned into national hits.
Their best record, though, was a rare Quincys’ original. In 1969 Bruno Lawrence had returned to Wellington from a stint in Australia. Urgently needing a gig to support his wife and young children, he had finagled his way into the band. Lawrence’s free spirit and Hayman’s staunch disciplinarianism were never going to be a good fit, and it all came spectacularly undone in front of a watching nation during a live telecast of the Loxene Golden Disc Awards. A drunk and manic Bruno, on crutches after an accident, upstaged Hayman with an arresting mime routine. Mocking the fact the band were playing to a pre-recorded track, he waved his sticks wildly through the air, rarely making contact with his drums. He later invited the director general of the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation to ‘kiss my crutch’. But this was not before he had written Hayman the brilliant ‘Ride the Rain’, a national hit that maximised the Quincys’ strengths with brassy fanfares, jazzy breakdowns, a ferocious wah-wah guitar solo and a subtly trippy lyric.
The Quincys had held a longstanding residency at Wellington’s Downtown Club. Managed by Roy and Joy Young, who also ran a late-night Café, Casablanca, the club was open from eight ‘til late, Thursday to Sunday, and was packed on weekends. Situated by the waterfront, it was a magnet to visiting sailors. It was not licensed - liquor licences being almost impossible for nightclubs to obtain - so alcohol was smuggled in and discreetly added to cups of Coke. The Quincys played up to five sets a night, and were paid a weekly salary of $55 each.
Late in 1972 Richard Holden lured the group away with a promise of better pay, shorter hours, smarter dressing rooms and legal booze. The Downtown Club never recovered from the loss of the Quincys and the arrival of legislation allowing pubs to stay open until ten o’clock. By the end of the year it had been rechristened the Downtown Disco Club and had replaced live music with a disc jockey. ‘Jet Set Top D.J. Paul Mack Plus! Plus! Plus! PULSATING LIGHTING EFFECTS’ screamed the Evening Post listing. Such novelties failed to reverse the venue’s fortunes and it closed, to be reborn in 1973 as Ziggy’s and run by a cooperative cashing in, with some success, on the glam rock fad.
At the Spectrum Bar, the Quincys played their own sets of brassy covers, and most weeks backed a visiting star. New Faces supplied a lot of the guests. Singers Dean Waretini and Steve Gilpin were frequently backed by the Quincys, as were other TV celebrities such as Ray Woolf and Rob Guest. At a time when New Zealand had only one television channel, all viewers saw the same thing so these artists were familiar and drew big crowds.
New and refurbished taverns were opening up all over the country, with music the magnet they hoped would lure the drinkers. Holden explained to the New Zealand Herald: ‘People do not want just to sit and drink a jug of beer. They want to be entertained. If they are not being entertained they stay away.’
Richard Holden had firm ideas about how musicians should conduct themselves, both on stage and off. I recently learned about the Holden rulebook from a woman called Jackie Matthews, whose acquaintance I made through a Facebook group concerned with the history of Wellington’s nightlife. Back then Jackie was engaged to Malcolm Hayman, and she remembers Holden yelling at musicians to behave themselves, be on time and do the job properly.
Holden sent Hayman and Matthews on a tour of the taverns to set up and fine-tune the sound systems. ‘It was like a huge honeymoon,’ Matthews told me. ‘He paid for our accommodation, all our travel, everything. I came back pregnant so I said, “Okay Richard, you were the cause of this so I’m going to name my baby Richard.”‘
With the bars set up for entertainment, Holden’s next task was to find bands. There were hundreds of local outfits on offer but few met his criteria. ‘We have to get away from the idea of four guys getting together and forming a group just because they like each other, and instead get guys who are getting together to do a job,’ he told the Herald. ‘Musicians have to realise they are a product that can be sold.’
Auckland-based Tommy Ferguson’s Goodtime Band filled the brief (‘features a girl saxophone player,’ honked the press release) and were offered a two-year contract. But work on the circuit eluded a university band such as Mammal, who did not style themselves as a product. Holden evidently did not regard them as something he could sell. When music journalist John Dix, briefly emplo
yed to assist with promotion at the Lion Tavern, suggested Holden try out the campus stars, Holden scoffed, ‘You can’t book Mammal. Their audience drinks orange juice and we need to sell beer.’
It is unlikely Holden would have liked Mammal’s repertoire any more than he approved of their audience’s drinking habits. To Herald columnist John Berry he said: ‘There has been a tendency for musicians to play for themselves instead of the customers. There has been some good original music but a lot of original rubbish. They will have to realise that we’re not in the musical genius business. We’ re in the entertainment business.’
The Quincys were the rare band who met Holden’s stringent standards, but the number of Lion venues around the country was growing rapidly and the Quincys couldn’t be in all of them at once. Sometimes they would go out of town for a weekend and play at one or other of the refurbished taverns, but they were usually occupied in Molesworth Street, backing entertainers and playing their own sets.
Holden found part of the solution offshore. Since the Second World War and the American occupation, the Philippines had been famous for producing well-drilled bands that could provide flawless facsimiles of popular records. Soon Holden was arranging work visas for Filipino performers such as The Constellations and Royal Flush, tuxedoed show bands who would spend six months or more touring the Lion circuit.
From Los Angeles came a band purporting to be The Ink Spots. In 1967 a US federal judge had ruled that as so many groups had purloined the name it had become public domain and was free for anyone to use. At the time there were up to a hundred different Ink Spots line-ups touring the world. Holden’s Ink Spots were led by a man named George Holmes and included no original members.
Holden would also go to London to audition prospective acts, inviting them to take tea with him at the Dorchester. He later boasted that ‘some were so cowed by the snootiness of the place they lowered their asking price’.
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