Holden’s ultimate answer to controlling the style of entertainment was to form bands himself. His first creation was The Distillery. He handpicked the line-up, dictated the musical style, chose the outfits, and gave the band a name that left little doubt who the master was. One of the musicians was a drummer I had first seen at the Union Hall. Paul Davies had played there with Tamburlaine, although he had got his start at school dances and church halls as a schoolboy in Rotorua.
In 2014, sitting in his apartment overlooking a leafy corner of the Auckland University campus, Davies told me about arriving in Wellington. He had enrolled at Victoria University. Stepping off the Cable Car in Kelburn, the provincial teenager saw the cathedral-like Hunter Building and felt as though he was at Oxford. Late for his first lecture, Philosophy 101, he nervously took the nearest place at a table where three other students were sitting. At the end of the class they introduced themselves: Rick Bryant, Bill Lake and Tony Backhouse. Before long Davies had joined Rick in one of the ever-changing line-ups of Rick and The Rockets. He went on to play with Tamburlaine as they evolved from their acoustic folk roots into a more traditional rock band, then with a dine-and-dance quartet who held a residency at The Woolshed, one of a growing number of licensed restaurants offering entertainment. It had long been his ambition to be able to write ‘musician’ on his tax return.
After a year at The Woolshed he got the call from Holden. ‘He rang me at home and asked if I could join. “Then get your drums,” he said, “put them in the car and come to Hamilton now. You’ll have to play tonight.”‘
That night The Distillery were backing Eddie Calvert, that strange reactionary English trumpet player. Also handpicked by Holden was Steve McDonald, a flamboyant career musician who had been the drummer in a band called Timberjack, which had enjoyed a national hit in 1970 with a curious satanic novelty, ‘Come to the Sabbat’. McDonald sat behind an impressive array of keyboards. The singer-guitarist was Peter Caulton, who had held a long residency at the Royal Oak Tavern and founded the Country Flyers before leaving them in the hands of Midge Marsden.
Davies remembers Caulton as ‘a kind of Titahi Bay surf club good-time boy. Told a few jokes, looked like a football player. A hard-case party boy.’ Steve McDonald boasted one of the first mellotrons in New Zealand. ‘You pressed a key and it had a bank of tapes. You could summon up the Vienna Boys’ Choir,’ Davies recalled. ‘It was a heavy thing. Three or four of us used to lug it around between gigs.
‘Richard made us wear dinner suits and dress like gangsters - homburgs, black and white shoes. There was a poster with a couple of us holding plastic machine guns, sitting on the bonnet of an old Packard with a couple of models. That was the image.’
One day Holden summoned the band to the Lion office in downtown Auckland. They were to wear full regalia: double-breasted satin lapels, bow ties and white platform shoes. He ordered them to walk down Queen Street, where he had arranged for a photographer from the Herald to snap them. ‘It was anathema to me but he did things like that,’ Davies said. ‘It was promotion. But we were on a pretty good salary. Employer: Lion Breweries. Vocation: musician.’
Eddie Calvert was just the first of many entertainers Davies would back during his Distillery stint. Others included Noel McKay, a ‘sixty-year-old female impersonator accompanied by his eighty-year-old wife Tess, and a guy called Terry who ran with the epithet Australia’s Mr Rock ‘n’ Roll, sort of a Jerry Lee Lewis piano-playing soundalike’.
But there were musical rewards, such as working with Ricky May. This virtuoso vocalist had played nightclubs around New Zealand - including a residency at Wellington’s Sorrento, with Bruno Lawrence on drums - before moving to Australia in 1962 when he was just nineteen. Holden brought May home in 1974 for a tour of the Lion circuit. ‘We had three hired Hillman Avengers,’ Davies remembers, ‘and Ricky always came with me. Somehow he’d got the impression that whatever town we were in I’d know somebody he could buy pot from.
‘We both loved jazz and we both liked Sinatra. I sort of grew up on jazz - my mother was a fan - so Ricky and I connected quite well. We’d play an opening piece, then anything could happen, anything at all. One night at the Lion Tavern while he was singing he came up and said into my ear, “Don’t you fucking know ‘Roll Over Beethoven’?” I said, “Of course I do.” “Well sing it!” He took over the drums and there I was, out front in a dinner suit and sandshoes. He was a bugger like that. But a brilliant musician.’
The Distillery was not the last alcohol-themed band on the Breweries’ roster. Over the next two years the circuit would see names such as Auckland group Beam (as in Jim Beam bourbon) and Pilsener, a six-piece combo from the Rhondda Valley in South Wales, renamed by Holden to promote Lion’s latest lager.
By the mid 70s Richard Holden was managing an entertainment budget upwards of two million a year, roughly $22 million in today’s money. As well as providing our younger patrons with the best musical entertainment there is available, we are assisting to foster professional music in this country,’ Lion’s general manager, John Macfarlane, announced in Brewnews, the company’s bimonthly publication. ‘For the first time we are offering a secure and continuing opportunity for professional groups, who no longer have to concern themselves with trying to fit in part-time outside employment with their musical commitments.’
Holden’s approach didn’t always win him friends, particularly among the other booking agents. Mike Corless had started out in the late ‘60s as a drummer in Hawke’s Bay before founding a series of agencies that would keep him in the music business for more than four decades. These days he is wiry, greying and goateed, with a twinkle in his eye and rock ‘n’ roll teeth.
‘I can’t remember anything, Nick,’ he says. ‘I’m hopeless. But come on, you can jog my memory.’ We are sitting in St Kevins Arcade on Auckland’s Karangahape Road waiting for coffee. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘how did you get started in the management business?’
‘It started with ten o’clock closing,’ he says. ‘People like Bobby Davis, Ray Woolf, Bunny Walters, all the television stars who used to work the cabarets started working the pubs. I started Topline Entertainment in Hastings. We were booking them to come and play with a local band. They would have to rehearse first of all, then work the pubs for two or three nights. There were a lot of bands in Hastings, a lot of Māori bands that were really good.’
Provincial resistance to cover charges eventually drove Corless to Auckland, where he and Bobby Davis started Davco Promotions. Their biggest act was Māori Volcanics, a six-piece show band who had spent most of the ‘60s touring internationally, from Vegas to Vietnam. The band had a flawless stage show that incorporated standards, soul tunes and comedy, and was the launch pad for the career of the great comedian Billy T. James. Corless sought venues for the Volcanics that were outside the Lion circuit, sometimes having to build stage and sound systems from scratch.
Holden competed aggressively. ‘First we were up against these Filipino show bands,’ Corless remembers. ‘They were really good - slick and tight and together. But when the Volcanics came in he tried to take over the whole scene, going to Australia and bringing back bands like The Māori Hi-Five.’
The much-loved Volcanics drew good crowds to the biggest non-Lion venues Corless could find: Pakuranga’s White Horse Inn, North Shore’s Thunderbird Valley Inn, Hastings’ Mayfair Hotel, and Broderick Inn in Johnsonville, where they recorded a live album in 1975. But Holden held the trump card. Most of the pubs big enough to host bands of the Volcanics’ stature were Lion-owned. He banned Davco’s acts from them.
17
ON THE BUS
On a bright blue day the Rough Justice bus lumbered off the ferry and lurched south, down the Kaikoura coast, mountains towering to the right, waves breaking to the left. For the two months we’d been rehearsing, our touring vehicle had remained stationary on the slope outside Rick’s house, along with his various dead cars. I hadn’t been even sure it had an engine. Now, loaded with mus
ical equipment and personal luggage, it was rumbling along at a steady 40 kilometres an hour, taking us on our first outing, a five-week tour of the South Island.
In practical terms a bus is a good way of getting six or seven musicians, their gear, crew and hangers-on from one gig to the next. It can double as a dressing room when the venue doesn’t have one, or a bunkroom when accommodation is scarce. But a bus means more than that. The prototype was the bus that Ken Kesey, the American novelist turned acid-evangelist, bought in 1964 after selling the film rights to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He had it decorated with psychedelic designs, filled it with the friends and followers he called his Merry Pranksters, plus a supply of LSD, which was still legal at the time, and set out from California. The destination sign read FURTHUR, although the journey was actually a round trip via New York, which Tom Wolfe would chronicle in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Following Kesey’s example, house trucks and technicolour motorhomes started popping up all over the world, including in New Zealand. Blerta and Mammal had buses. A bus made a statement. The bands who played local residencies then packed their gear into Hillman Avengers and drove back to their homes in the suburbs were just day trippers, weekend rock ’n’ rollers. A bus signified a commitment not just to making music but to the whole philosophy of freedom and defiance that went with it.
The southern stretch of State Highway One is quiet. We have been driving for miles without seeing another vehicle. Rick is at the wheel, muttering something partway between the commentary of a tour bus driver and an internal monologue. ‘You can get fucking good crayfish just up here at the right time of year. In fact it might be worth stopping,’ he says, as we pass through the little settlement of Rakautara. Janet is sitting up front beside him. The rest of us are sprawled at the back on mattresses covering our equipment. Someone with a battery-operated cassette player puts on a Miles Davis album but the sound from the small speakers is drowned out by the bellowing of the engine. It doesn’t feel as though I’m on my way to work, but rather setting out on a holiday with an unusual but congenial new family.
Our first gig is at a tavern operated by Dominion Breweries in Timaru. Lion also has a tavern here; we read in the Timaru Herald that Pilsener, Holden’s Welsh band, are playing there that night. The tavern management puts us up in an old single-storey brick house. Evidence of the bands that have stayed here before us can be found in felt marker on the bathroom walls. One group, Skylord, have shown extra class by having their logo designed and printed on a sticker. One of these is stuck to the inside of the toilet bowl. There are cigarette burns on the tables and windowsills, and a single-bar heater in the living room, which we cluster around to write the evening’s set list. We each have our own bedroom, which I will soon discover is not something you can always count on.
That night, for the first time, we try out our set on a paying audience. It’s a small crowd: it seems most Timaruvians have gone to see Pilsener. We race nervously from song to song, as though pausing for more than a beat may force us to engage in closer communication with our audience. I look at Rick. He has sweat running down his forehead, his neck and the back of his shirt, and his eyes are scrunched shut. Peter is playing lovely lyrical lines on his guitar, although at one point he turns around, kicks his amplifier and yells at it unintelligibly, a ritual I will see enacted many times over the next two and a half years.
Returning to the house at the end of the night, another ritual is initiated: the post-gig post-mortem. Who counted that song in at the wrong tempo? Weren’t the stops in this song supposed to be in the third verse, not the second? Which was the song that got them up dancing and what made them sit down again?
The second night goes a little better. Our nerves have settled and the crowd has grown. The tiled dance area, marked out in flashing fairy lights, fills during the final set. Christchurch, a few nights later, is better still. There are people in the crowd who remember Rick from Mammal days and have come especially to hear him sing. Someone compliments us on our tricky arrangement of ‘I Heard It through the Grapevine’, which we’ve modelled on the Gladys Knight version, rather than the better-known one by Marvin Gaye.
We move on to Ashburton, Dunedin, Invercargill. Sometimes in the bus I sit up front beside Rick and take in one of his endlessly digressive lectures. He starts telling me about the soul singer Joe Tex. This leads into an analysis of Tolstoy and winds up with the history of the New Zealand labour movement. It feels as though I have stayed at university, although it’s hard to say what paper I have enrolled in.
Rick also instructs me about drugs. His attitude to pot is self-evident and I’m starting to suspect his use of the drug partly accounts for his free-associative tutorial style, but he is by no means an advocate of wholesale drug use. He was wary of LSD for a long time, he tells me, and still advises taking it only under the most ‘copacetic’ conditions. The things he can remember doing on Mandrax are apparently too embarrassing to share. He pauses, then emits one of his customary chortles. He turns serious at the subject of heroin. It is lethal and destructive, he says. Anyone who sells it is evil, anyone who takes it is committing suicide, and in his band it is strictly forbidden.
Rick may smoke as much pot as all of Bob Marley’s Wailers put together, but although he generously offers it to us no one else has anything like his capacity or enthusiasm for it. The truth is, we members of Rough Justice are not the decadent stereotypes our appearance might suggest. On days off between gigs we go sightseeing in the bus. This carries its own risks. One day, crossing Christchurch’s Port Hills and negotiating the narrow coastal road to Akaroa, we encounter torrential rain. Bets are taken on which misfortune will claim the bus first: falling rocks or washed-out roads. Or perhaps Stephen, who is driving, will fail to navigate one of the endless bends and plunge us all into the bay? Somehow we make it back alive.
In Dunedin we take a winding road to the clifftops above St Clair with the engine belching fumes and overheating. At the steepest part the steaming vehicle refuses to go any further so we get out and walk the final distance to the ruins of Cargill’s Castle. Here, stepping on to a non-existent floor, I grab a wooden beam just in time to stop falling several metres into a concrete pit.
Outside in the long grass, Stephen is practising handstands, something I have known him to do ever since we were at school. We would be walking along a street and I’d suddenly realise I was talking to a pair of shoes while Stephen’s head was bobbing upside down, a few inches above the pavement. This time, he has done a vertical flip and is moving backwards, grinning at us. Janet is the first to see that the gentle meadow ends abruptly at the edge of a cliff, which is now just behind him. She lunges and grabs him as he’s about to plummet 150 metres into the Pacific Ocean.
We are safer exploring the provincial junk shops, where Janet finds clothes and naïve art and Rick buys books, musical instruments and crockery decorated with crustaceans. He advises me on second-hand record buys. ‘That’s a fucking great album you won’t see very often,’ he confirms as I invest my last seven dollars in a double LP of Howlin’ Wolf. Martin has brought a portable record player. We set it up in our motel, and the profound groove and plantation holler of ‘Moaning in the Moonlight’ rings through the corridors until someone, deaf to genius, threatens to call the manager.
Back in Wellington, our first hometown gig is also our introduction to Hello Sailor, for whom we open at a Victoria University dance. They have come from Auckland and are playing in the capital for the first time. Formed in 1974 on the top floor of Dragon’s Ponsonby flat, ‘Mandrax Mansion’, Hello Sailor has a frontline of former jug band musician Graham Brazier, sometime Beam guitarist Harry Lyon and his old schoolmate Dave McArtney. They aren’t prog: they have neither the chops nor the inclination for that. Instead they draw on the fundamentals of twin-guitar rock ‘n’ roll - Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground - while adding some of the louche artiness of Roxy Music and David Bowie. By this time they have refined the
ir cool to an icy perfection. Close in age, and with connections reaching back to childhood, they have that sense of common identity and purpose characteristic of great bands. Like The Beatles or Stones, they obviously belong together.
As for Rough Justice, our set has gained some polish over the five weeks in the South Island, but performing in our hometown for the first time has given us a renewed case of nerves. Rick sings with his usual authority but there is something about our accompaniment that seems the opposite of the spontaneous joy I have heard in great rock and soul records. We seem studied and formal. Perhaps it is because, other than Rick and Peter, we are a band of beginners, students in the school of rock whom Rick has generously taken under his tutelage. But if Rick is our tutor, I am beginning to see that he too regards the music as a study course: at the end of each gig he gives his performance a mark out of ten. Hello Sailor are, in contrast, the bad boys at the back of the room — leering, smirking, ignoring the lesson, then effortlessly getting the top mark. Afterwards someone tells me that Brazier and McArtney have been asking where they can get some heroin. Over the next year we will run into Sailor at venues around the country.
Once we arrive for a weekend at Bell Block Tavern in New Plymouth as they are loading out. They are coming to the end of a tour promoted by a rum importer, and look roadsick. Graham Brazier staggers over to our bus carrying a crate of the sponsor’s product. ‘Take it, please,’ he groans theatrically. ‘It’s already turned us all into alcoholics.’
18
ENCOUNTERS
Th’ Dudes were younger, with even more swagger than Hello Sailor. Rough Justice became aware of them on our first trip to Auckland. We had pulled into Ponsonby around midnight, tired and slightly stupefied by a combination of pot and engine fumes. But before we could head to our accommodation - a flat rented by some other Wellington musicians who had offered us a few mattresses on the floor - we had a job to do.
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