Goneville

by Nick Bollinger

  20

  SHOWDOWN AT THE SPECTRUM BAR

  Whenever Rough Justice were back in Wellington our favourite place to play was a café above Courtenay Place called the Last Resort. We had to lug our heavy equipment up a steep flight of stairs, and the fee was dependent on the door take, but it was the rare venue where we were not forced to negotiate with angry alcoholic publicans and drunk dissatisfied customers, or tortured with a siren at the end of the evening. We had a dressing room. We got free Cona coffee, and carrot cake with cream.

  The reason the Last Resort was musician-friendly was simple: it was run by musicians. Clinton Brown, the bass player for Rockinghorse, had launched the venue in 1978 after his band experienced problems with publicans. Just two years earlier Rockinghorse had been the best group in New Zealand, with an award to prove it. RATA, the Recording Arts Talent Awards, had been introduced in 1973 to replace the Loxene Golden Disc Awards, a national institution since the 1960s. Rockinghorse had won in November 1975 for their single ‘Through the Southern Moonlight’. The award had been presented to them by visiting British-based American rocker Suzi Quatro, dressed in her customary leathers, in an afternoon ceremony at Television New Zealand’s Lower Hutt studios. After the formalities, the champagne had started flowing and the members of Rockinghorse, chuffed with their success, had partaken freely. It was early evening before someone remembered the band had a booking that night.

  The gig was at the Spectrum Bar. Rockinghorse often played there when they weren’t busy at the EMI recording studios. In the past year, as well as recording an album of their own and the aforementioned hit, they had provided the backing on records by Mark Williams, Prince Tui Teka and The Yandall Sisters, all popular Māori and Samoan singers who were among the country’s biggest-selling recording acts. They had also toured nationally, mostly on the Lion Breweries circuit. There can’t have been a harder-working band in the country But it had not escaped the musicians’ notice that for all their efforts none of them were getting rich. The breweries, meanwhile, were prospering.

  Rockinghorse were known for their tight country-rock groove and warm harmonies. Not surprisingly, their performance at Spectrum that night was less polished than usual. The band was a drunken mess, and at the end of the night the bar manager, Brian Foster, told them so. Emboldened by bubbly, singer Carl Evensen reminded him they were the best band in the country with a RATA to prove it, and told him what he could do with his gig. Next morning the bass player, Clinton Brown, was woken by a call from Alan Galbraith, house producer for EMI. He’d just got off the phone with Richard Holden, who had rung to inform him that Rockinghorse were banned from the Breweries circuit and would not be welcome in any Lion venue again. The message was clear: bands had to know their place. Rockinghorse might be the best but Lion was the biggest.

  For a while Rockinghorse tried to brazen out the blacklisting. They still had the EMI contract, and the RATA had to be good for something. In April 1976 they released their second album, Grand Affaire, but over the following months the reality of their situation dawned on them. There were only a few places they could play: the occasional school ball, the even more occasional rock festival, and a few taverns not operated by Lion. But the golden age of EMI was coming to an end, with an increasingly commercial and competitive radio market turning its back on locally recorded music. Rockinghorse would not make another record.

  Starved of gigs but inspired by a visit to Charley Gray’s Island of Real, Clinton Brown concluded that the only way to achieve autonomy was to start his own venue, so with his friend Kerry Simpson, who had worked in real estate and had a small amount of capital to invest, he opened the aptly named Last Resort. A rejuvenated Rockinghorse played the first night. Recent addition Steve Garden - one of the original Rough Justice members whom Rick had left at the roadside - had a lot to do with it. Garden’s drumming and Brown’s basslines locked into a rolling groove. Guitarist Kevin Bayley was similarly inspired, snapping and twanging, especially on great songs of his own like ‘Julia’ and ‘Danny’s Blues’. It was as though someone had left the gate open and the horse had bolted.

  Ironically, by the time Last Resort opened, the Lion pubs would probably have been ready to receive Rockinghorse again. The two main protagonists in the Spectrum Bar showdown had moved on. Evensen left Rockinghorse in 1978, around the time Holden took on a new role as Lion’s head of exports. Holden’s departure could be seen as symbolic. The era of the salaried showbands that he had overseen was gradually drawing to a close as the number of bands bringing original music into pubs - and getting away with it - was growing.

  Back in the mid ’70s a few groups had tried, with some success, to present their own material. Dunedin’s Mother Goose had done well in the South Island, particularly at Shoreline Hotel in their hometown and Aranui Hotel in Christchurch, with a brand of vaudeville rock that involved elaborate dress-ups: each member of the all-male band had his own persona - ballerina, mouse, sailor, pixie, baby, bee. But within a year of their formation Mother Goose had decamped to Australia.

  Ragnarok, Think and Schtung — from Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington respectively - had all tested varieties of prog on pub-goers. Yet even with two albums of ambitious originals, Ragnarok had been forced by popular demand to augment their own material with Led Zeppelin and Peter Frampton covers, while Think’s set included an entire side of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. These forward-thinking groups soon retreated to the more welcoming world of campus and small theatre concerts before being defeated by sheer economics.

  It was around the same time that Hello Sailor started playing the pubs. At first the only gig they could find was a Monday night at Kiwi Tavern, across the road from the Auckland University campus. Their first trip out of town, booked by Mike Corless, took them to Tokoroa’s Trees Tavern and Napier’s Leopard Inn. They too peppered their set with well-known covers -Steely Dan and Thin Lizzy songs — but their hearts were in their increasingly convincing originals. By the time Rough Justice got on the road with our eclectic set of R&B covers, Corless was at last starting to get some traction with this new breed of original rock group, drawing the kind of numbers that paid off. Meanwhile, former drawcards of the pub circuit such as The Constellations and Māori Volcanics were heading overseas: they could make better money in places like Australia’s Gold Coast.

  New Zealand’s live music scene was changing, but where Rough Justice might fit into the new order barely crossed our minds. We were just trying to survive from gig to gig, wondering whether our next meal would be pig’s head or carrot cake.

  21

  PUNKS AND INDEPENDENTS

  It’s nearly forty years now since Charley Gray burst into Rough Justice’s crash pad, barking about how someone had covered up his posters. His voice still has the same abrasive timbre and his sentences issue forth in rapid staccato bursts, like paradiddles on a snare drum. ‘A lot of people don’t seem to like me,’ he says, and glares, as though challenging me to side with them. But as he tells his story in a Ponsonby Road café it strikes me there is something admirable, even noble, about this sprightly silver-haired septuagenarian. Almost sixty years after he entered the business he is as enthusiastic as ever about music, despite having little material wealth to show for a life of passion.

  Charley had been a drummer for almost twenty years when he opened Island of Real in 1977; he still practises drums four to five hours a day. His first professional gig was with Howard Morrison, three months of one-nighters from North Cape to Bluff, but his real love was jazz. From 1962 to 1964 he was in London, playing in the experimental jazz scene. By the mid 70s he was back in Auckland, working as a warehouseman to support his wife, Anne, and their three children. One night he splashed out and took Anne to dinner at La Boheme, Auckland’s oldest and most upmarket restaurant. ‘We ate beautiful food and watched beautiful people and we ‘d never really done anything like that before, and I just thought, this is a whole different lifestyle. I came from a working-class background.
In fact my father’s only advice to me as father to son was, “You’re working class, don’t ever forget it. You vote Labour, that’s it.” I thought, different bloody lifestyle and we ‘re down below it. We needed to do something to break out of the poverty thing.’

  Charley and Anne found an empty printing factory in downtown Auckland, and with $3,000 borrowed from Charley’s sister the couple fitted it out as a performance café. It opened in early 1977. The front half was for food and coffee; the filled rolls were legendary. The performance area was at the back, curtained off. Initially the Island of Real Café focused on fringe theatrical events. ‘I liked doing experimental things,’ Charley tells me. ‘It just appealed. I had this fantasy of a groovy type of venue with a stage and some lights, where people could do unusual stuff and we could make enough money to have a holiday once a year. I think we managed that once.’

  An early booking was expatriate Californian multimedia artist Frank Womble. ‘I was helping Anne out the front, the kids were watching, and they came running up and said, “Dad, he’s taking his clothes off!” I go and have a look and he’s bollock naked. I don’t know what he was doing; it was just part of the show.’

  Gradually, the bands started coming. After Th’ Dudes played there on several occasions they approached Charley about his becoming their manager. ‘I knocked them back a couple of times and my wife said to me, “Don’t be bloody silly, you could do great things for those guys and it would be good for you too.”‘

  For a band of aspiring stars fuelled by youthful arrogance, Charley was the ideal manager. Older, authoritative and ferocious, he acted as a buffer between Th’ Dudes and the rest of the world, enabling them to become the stars they already imagined they were. When a major summer festival offered the group a paltry $400, telling Charley that every other top band in the country was taking the same fee as the ‘exposure’ would be invaluable, he told them that, with Th’ Dudes’ third single currently at No. 1, the band hardly needed any more exposure. He immediately booked the Dunedin Town Hall and Th’ Dudes filled it to capacity, as they had every other venue along the way.

  He also battled the breweries. By 1978 the Gluepot -Dominion Breweries’ Ponsonby Club Hotel - was Auckland’s most celebrated rock venue. Bands like Street Talk, Hello Sailor, Th’ Dudes and even Rough Justice would draw capacity crowds. Charley proposed to the manager, Les Wilson, that he raise the two-dollar cover charge by 50 cents. When Wilson refused, arguing it would mean 50 cents less that customers would be spending across his bar, Th’ Dudes staged a boycott, shifting to the Station Hotel less than a kilometre away, where they drew upwards of 600 people a night.

  Th’ Dudes’ success represented the marriage of a band determined to be heard on its own terms and a giant industry whose goal was to keep people drinking beer, agendas that had often seemed irreconcilable in the past. The achievement was encapsulated with irony in one of their most successful songs. ‘Bliss’, an original by Dudes guitarists Dave Dobbyn and Ian Morris, had a pulsating riff and singalong chorus. It might have started out as a cynical parody of the drinking culture but it quickly became the ultimate drinking anthem. Decades later Drink yourself more bliss and the refrain Ya ya ya ya ya still echo in rugby stadiums.

  Charley Gray continued to host adventurous and original bands at Island of Real. Neither it nor Last Resort served alcohol: they couldn’t get a licence. In the early ‘60s - against the opposition of a powerful lobby that included Alcoholics Anonymous, the Salvation Army and the breweries - a handful of high-end restaurants had finally been granted the right to serve wine and beer, but the Licensing Control Commission had continued to maintain a strict set of conditions that these independent music venues were unable to meet.

  Clinton Brown tells me of the lengths to which he and Kerry Simpson went to try and get a limited licence for Last Resort. They invited the head of the Licensing Control Commission to lunch. It was a gorgeous day. Sunlight was streaming through the windows and Last Resort was looking its best. All they wanted, they explained to the commissioner, was to be able to sell a glass of wine or beer with meals. They weren’t interested in selling spirits. His reply was blunt. ‘First of all, you can’t get a licence like that. You’re either fully licensed or you’re not.’ He then checked out the premises - toilets, kitchen - and announced they would have to spend between $15,000 and $20,000 on refurbishments before a licence would be considered ‘and even then there’s no guarantee you’ll get one’.

  ‘The thought of spending twenty grand on spec was out of the question,’ Clinton says. ‘If we could have managed that it might have kept the business going. You couldn’t survive on orange juice, cakes and Cona coffee. That was the power the breweries had, of course. They didn’t want anyone else getting licences. All that power and money. We were just the little guys, trying to do our best.’

  If laws favouring the beer barons made it hard for these venues, the changing nature of the crowds wasn’t helping either. Punk had emerged as a cult movement in Britain some time during 1976, challenging the sense of entitlement displayed by many rock stars still around from the ‘60s. But it was a March 1977 episode of the local television current affairs programme Eyewitness that thrust punk into the eyeballs of New Zealand. Reporting from London, television journalist Dylan Taite presented an item that intercut video of the Sex Pistols’ incendiary ‘Anarchy in the UK’ with snippets of nihilistic rhetoric from an assortment of young British punks and, in a journalistic coup, an interview with Pistols’ frontman Johnny Rotten, conducted outside Buckingham Palace.

  Soon local punks began to appear. Not long after I had joined Rough Justice I bumped into a guy I had known at Onslow. There he had been a benign longhair. Now his hair was short and spiked, he was wearing stovepipe tartan trousers and spitting emphatically on the footpath at the ends of sentences. He told me he was starting a band. He was going to be the bass player.

  While Rough Justice were in the South Island on our first tour, punk had come to Wellington. The Scavengers and Suburban Reptiles, Auckland’s first two punk bands, had played a Students Arts Festival show at the Union Hall. My friends were still talking about it when we got back a week later. The Reptiles’ drummer had thrown a drumstick into the audience and hit a girl in the eye. Her boyfriend had jumped onstage and hit somebody with a guitar. It all sounded wild and chaotic. What had the music been like? A bit rough seemed to be the consensus, but no one could tell me much about it.

  As punk proliferated, its agenda varied from band to band. Some bands were overtly political and wrote earnest angry songs about society’s ills. Some were carnival anarchists. Some were essentially covers bands with a punk bias. In Auckland punk soon had its own venue, Zwines. In Wellington punks took over what had formerly been Chez Paree, one of the capital’s famous folk clubs, painted the walls black and renamed it The Mindshaft. A building behind Trades Hall, operating as Rock Theatre, would sometimes host punk acts too.

  Punk needed an enemy and found plenty. Sometimes that enemy was the existing music scene, which it saw as boring, elitist and - worst of all - run by hippies. Although Last Resort booked few punk bands, its reputation didn’t keep the punks away. Clinton Brown recalls the afternoon a local punk came to warn him that a minivan full of punks was on its way from Auckland with the express purpose of creating havoc in Wellington. ‘I thought, Jesus, we’ve only got one bouncer.’ The warning was timely. The punks turned up and roared through the door. ‘We had a bowl of cream on the counter for the coffee and a guy immediately grabbed it and started firing cream everywhere. They were cutting themselves. It was a nightmare.’

  Charley Gray remembers Anne once finding a young female punk systematically demolishing the toilet bowl with a hammer. It sometimes seemed the punks made no distinction between monopolist breweries and noble independents such as Clinton and Charley: all were representations of some vague oppressive ‘other’. But it’s not hard to see how exclusive and complacent the beard-and-flares brigade must have seemed.
Punk, by comparison, was a club to which anyone could belong.

  At a party not long ago I found myself describing the subject of this book to a man I had just met. Three or four years younger than me, he was slightly drunk, the stereo was loud and I wasn’t sure how well he could hear me, but he sprang to life at the mention of Last Resort.

  ‘That was the first live music venue I ever went to!’ he shouted. ‘I must have been fourteen or fifteen. My mates and I came in from the Hutt to see what this famous Wellington music scene was all about. What a disappointment. The cover charge was steep - at least five dollars - and the band was playing this very old-school rhythm and blues. A sea of flared denim. Some of them even had beards. There was a guy playing saxophone. God it was boring. They were called Rough Justice.’

  Ah yes, I think I remember that band,’ I deadpanned as he ranted on. A few weeks later he had gone back again, only this time the door charge was lower and the band unknown. Their name was The Ambitious Vegetables and they were his kind of group: young, bratty, irreverent, plenty of attitude.

  I thought of how, like him, my schoolmates and I had gone in search of music just a few years earlier. What we had found had been the sound of possibilities, of fighting back against the forces of the establishment, the beginning of something. That was what The Ambitious Vegetables had represented for this man. As for Rough Justice, a band that included one or more of the musicians who had blown my teenage mind: what did we represent in 1979?