Goneville

by Nick Bollinger

  22

  GONEVILLE

  Whitewashed breeze-block walls. Sunlight pushing at the edges of a closed curtain. A half glass of water on a bedside table. An open suitcase on the floor, clothes spilling out. A bass guitar propped against a chair. Where am I? It would be easier to figure that out if these surroundings, or the gig we played last night, stood out from any other of these past two years.

  It had been a small crowd for a Friday, or was it a Thursday? A few customers had come as far as the door but backed away when confronted with the two-dollar cover charge. During the second set someone had shouted, ‘Can’t you play anything decent?’ Towards the end of the third set, after we ‘d been going almost three hours, a couple of girls had got up to dance to ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, the disco song. It’s always the disco song. A few guys had followed them on to the dancefloor and flung themselves around for the last few minutes of the set. When Rick announced the final song the boys slunk back to their beers and the girls said, ‘Whaddaya mean? We’ve only just got here. You can’t stop yet. Jeez, what a slack band.’

  Rick had thanked the crowd for coming and reminded them we ‘d be back the next night, and the bar manager had turned on the merciless fluoro lights to let everyone know it was eleven p.m. and time to go, wherever they liked, he didn’t care but they couldn’t stay here. And after a few more minutes, while people were draining their glasses and asking where the party was, he had switched on the siren to drive the last of them from the room. This was common practice in many of the bars we played. We would often have to suffer the tinnitus-inducing noise until we’d packed away our instruments.

  I pull back the flowery drapes and notice the bus is no longer in the forecourt, which means Rick has gone into town with some of the others in search of breakfast. I put on some clothes and go down the corridor to check the rest of the rooms. Rick’s door is locked, which confirms that he’s out. Same with Boyd’s and Martin’s. Peter and Mike are both still asleep.

  Unsure which direction leads to town, I set off on foot for nowhere in particular, down wide flat footpaths with grassy berms, past squat wooden houses with tiled roofs and neatly fenced front lawns. Did any of last night’s crowd go home to these places? It’s hard to picture those people in these houses. I pass three churches and two petrol stations, and the occasional car passes me, but I don’t see any faces and everywhere feels empty and abandoned. I walk for maybe half an hour and the houses get closer together, although I can’t tell whether I’m getting any nearer to breakfast. Another half a mile and the road becomes a bridge and soon I’m standing above a wide river with thick native bush along both banks. I am drawn, as though magnetised, to the steel railing. I lean over, look down into the deep olive-black water and have the crazy thought that everyone in this town just came here, jumped in and disappeared.

  It is two years since I boarded the Rough Justice bus and headed south on our first tour. In a fortnight we’ll be home in Wellington, but only for a few nights. Rick’s booked us another month on the road after that. Recently we were playing in Rotorua, in an old wooden hotel that had seen few refurbishments since it was built in the 1920s. We stayed in upstairs guest rooms with creaky single beds. The ground floor was a maze of corridors and bars. There was no stage in the lounge bar but we had found a couple of extra lights to illuminate our area of the floor so we weren’t looking too shabby. By nine p.m. a dozen people were seated shyly around the darker corners of the room as we worked through our rock and soul covers. We had recently added a Betty Wright song, ‘Clean Up Woman’, to the repertoire, and I loved dropping those deep bass notes into the pockets between Martin’s kick drum and the clickety guitar licks.

  In the break before the last set I took an aimless stroll around the hotel. In the corridor I could hear a muffled thrum. I followed the sound until I reached an internal door. It opened into the public bar. Suddenly I was in a big, brightly lit room, on the edge of a throng of people. There was an equal number of men and women and everyone was singing with joy and abandon. Among the tables and chairs, seated on a bar stool with a jug of beer on a high table in front of him, was a middle-aged Māori man strumming an acoustic guitar and leading the chorus: ‘Oh, hula, a-hula, a-hula to my ten guitars …’

  It’s not the only time lately I’ve wondered if our band is surplus to requirements. In Christchurch a hundred people had crammed into a brick and concrete warehouse where we were sharing a bill with a couple of newer groups. First up had been a punk trio, The Vauxhalls. Their songs were mostly their own, none lasted more than two minutes, and Edison would have envied their energy. Then it was our turn. We opened with ‘In the Midnight Hour’, a reliable R&B classic with honking saxophones that seldom failed to get crowds going, but after The Vauxhalls it sounded sombre and slow. The song that went down best that night was ‘Take Me to the River’. In the eighteen months since we learned this obscure Al Green song it had been covered on a hit album by the post-punk band Talking Heads, so now most people thought we were playing a Talking Heads tune.

  I could see the noncommittal expressions as the crowd took in our sound and appearance, trying to figure out what we represented and whether they had any use for it. At least Rick always made an impression. In his sleeveless jean jacket with the Rough Justice gang patch Janet had painted and sewn on the back, he could pass, if not for a punk, then as suitably anti-establishment. And Boyd, a snappy dresser since the days of his pink velvet pants, has taken to wearing seersucker suits. He inhabits a world and fashion sense of his own. But the rest of us, with our denim, long hair, occasional beard or moustache, may have stepped off the cover of a 1976 Doobie Brothers album, which in 1979 is not a good thing. I am twenty, no older than most of the punks and younger than some of them, yet I feel like a weary veteran.

  The bus, like the band, is becoming a symbol of a bygone age, a psychedelic relic alongside the air-conditioned coaches more successful bands tour in. Whenever the band earns any money, the bus suffers another breakdown and consumes it all. In Kaikoura we were stuck for three days as we waited for the arrival of a new differential. It was midwinter and with no budget for accommodation we had to stay aboard the bus, parked outside the local mechanic’s shop, playing cards in our sleeping bags. On another occasion our vehicle spluttered to a standstill on State Highway One, just out of Amberley. While we were wondering what to do, a farmer heading south stopped to see what the problem was. ‘So you’ll be wanting to get to Christchurch then?’ We arrived in Christchurch towed by a tractor, like a tattered float in an A&P show.

  Of the other bands that were on the road when Rough Justice started out, most have either broken through or broken up. Not long ago Hello Sailor, Th’ Dudes, Citizen Band and Street Talk were all playing the same provincial pubs as us, slipping in a few of their original songs among covers the crowds would recognise. Now they all have records out. Last year I’d seen Hello Sailor headlining at the Opera House in Wellington. Graham Brazier strode the stage as though marking out his territory, the audience’s attention feeding him like a drug. Since then the band have gone to Los Angeles, seeking success commensurate with their swagger. And the Red Mole Theatre Troupe have decamped to New York, taking some of the Country Flyers with them.

  As for Rough Justice, we have finally begun to get work in some of the Lion pubs. But the fact we are now welcome in these venues, once fiercely controlled by Richard Holden, is just another measure of how times have changed. The legendary Lion contracts that would once have given each member of the band a weekly wage no longer exist. Instead, we are booked for two or three nights a week for a percentage of the door take, leaving us no better off than we ever were.

  The campus circuit has also changed. It has ceased to be the door to a countercultural playground, with the kind of underground happenings Graeme Nesbitt once presided over. When we arrive to play at a student arts festival, the organisers who greet us look like commerce students. No one has a light show like Peter Frater’s any more. It’s
as if the worlds I had glimpsed at the beginning of the decade - the campus underground and the pub circuit - had been mirages in a desert, creations of light and imagination that vanished just as they seemed within reach.

  Janet has given up travelling with the band. She is preparing to go to art school and is back in Wellington working on her portfolio. We have acquired a longhaired, often shirtless roadie called Mal, who doubles as sound mixer and bus driver. It is useful to have another person who can deputise for Rick at the wheel and keep an ear on our temperamental sound system. Mal has added some duties of his own; they include each night introducing himself to as many of the women in the bar as possible.

  One night a high squeal begins in one of the stage monitors. As it grows in intensity I look towards the mixing desk in the middle of the room, expecting to see Mal hunched over the faders, furiously seeking out the offending frequency, but his seat is empty. As the feedback increases to an ear-splitting howl, I spot a familiar head of shoulder-length hair at the back of the room. It’s Mal, an arm draped around a female shoulder. ‘Mal!’ Rick summons sternly into his mic. It seems to take a few moments for Mal to recognise his name, by which time members of the audience are clasping their hands to their ears. Mal glances towards the bandstand, gives a cheery wave, mouths encouragement - ‘Sounding great!’ - and returns to the matter at hand.

  The musical line-up has been growing too. Dennis Mason, who had played in The Quincy Conserve, has joined on saxophone, which means we now have a horn section. We have also recruited Tony Backhouse, formerly of Mammal, with his stratospheric vocals and quirky original songs. One of these songs requires us to sing the inscrutable chorus ‘Maybe the Goneville line is down’.

  As usual, Rick calculates that these additions will, at some unspecified point in the future, increase our earning power. While Tony’s excellent but challenging material draws a generally blank response from the provincial crowds, it wins us a touch of critical credibility in the cities. But he is only passing through. Fane Flaws, who has been in Blerta, is incubating a new band that will wrap his love of Zappa and psychedelic Beatles in the New Wave trappings of Blondie, Devo and Elvis Costello, and will include Tony, along with Bruno Lawrence. Fane has already thought of a name, The Crocodiles, and had a vision in which he has seen it on a Top 20 playlist alongside a song title, ‘Tears’. Soon he and Arthur Baysting will get around to writing the song. Tony has warned us he ’ll be leaving Rough Justice towards the end of the year to work on The Crocodiles’ first album.

  Rough Justice hasn’t made any records. With the exception of a few proven commercial hitmakers, or persuasive visionaries such as Fane Flaws, the doors of the record companies are closed to local bands, especially now the sales tax is so high and the radio stations are beginning to import their playlists and programmers from overseas. What’s more, we are still essentially a covers band, even if the covers we play are only the songs we love, not necessarily the ones pub crowds want to hear.

  There is no obvious way for the group to advance itself, yet Rick hardly seems bothered as long as the bus is overloaded with band gear, the petrol gauge shows half a tank, and we are on a state highway headed for another gig. The road, I realise, is where Rick is happiest. On the road, time is suspended. There is no one to hold you to account. You are always on your way somewhere. But I start to imagine I’ll look out one day from the window of the bus and find the road has run out, that we have driven into the middle of nowhere and there is no way back.

  I carry on walking until I am at the other side of the bridge, getting closer to what must be the centre of this provincial New Zealand town with the name I can’t remember but think of as Goneville. I don’t want breakfast. I want to go home.

  23

  OF THE BUS

  As it turned out I wasn’t the only one thinking about getting off the bus. Mike had been making plans to go to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music to study jazz. Boyd and Martin were entertaining similar thoughts. Peter had fallen in love with a Swiss Italian woman and was considering a move to Europe. Tony would be leaving soon to become a full-time Crocodile. We discussed our plans over pitiful coffees in a Whangarei tea room one afternoon between the soundcheck and the gig. Rick was back at the venue, still tinkering with the sound system.

  There was probably no such thing as a good time to tell Rick we were all leaving, but there couldn’t have been a worse one than just before that night’s show. After Mike broke the news, Rick sang the entire set without making eye contact with any of us. He didn’t leave us stranded at the roadside like the previous line-up, but the next day he drove the entire 800 kilometres back to Wellington in stoned silence.

  We still had a few bookings left to honour. I feared these nights would be as bleak as the one in Whangarei. Yet without the endless road in front of us, making music unexpectedly became fun again. Knowing these were the last times I’d ever play those basslines behind Rick’s voice, every note felt finite, and more powerful for it. After ignoring us for two years, the Wellington commercial radio station 2ZM made Rough Justice its Band of the Month. That gave us a couple of days of free studio time, and we recorded four originals. We would be leaving our handprint on the cave wall of Kiwi rock.

  While we had been away on one of our tours, Tina and Sally and their friend Andrea had decided to form a band. They had watched us rehearse, and get gigs and even audiences. How hard could it be? One obstacle was a lack of instruments or equipment but they could always borrow ours. Andrea knew some chords. She tried them out on Stephen’s Stratocaster and quickly became a passable rhythm guitarist. I showed Tina a couple of basslines on my old Höfner and within days she was figuring out her own parts. They had heard about a schoolteacher from Hamilton who had recently moved to Wellington and was keen to sing, and asked her to join. Her name was Jenny Morris. Sally was the drummer. She had never played drums before but Bruno Lawrence offered her a lesson. One of the first songs in the repertoire of the Wide Mouthed Frogs (as they named themselves) was ‘Do the Blue Beat’, Dinah Lee’s big Australasian hit of the 1960s. Sally asked Bruno if he could show her what the drummer on the record was doing. Bruno said he should be able to: he’d played on the original.

  When they had half a dozen songs ready, The Wide Mouthed Frogs were ready to face the crowds. Rough Justice agreed to let them play an opening set at Rock Theatre in Vivian Street. They caused a storm. There were then few women in bands doing anything other than singing. Here, for the first time as far as most audiences were concerned, was a group of women doing it all -singing, playing, the lot. Their choice of covers was simple and appealing. There were no gratuitous solos; no song outstayed its welcome. They were funny, irreverent and loved being on the stage. When they opened for us again a few weeks later, the venue operators, sensing who the real drawcard was, reversed the billing in the newspaper ad. Now it was WIDE-MOUTHED FROGS -ALL GIRL BAND! ‘Rough Justice’ appeared in tiny type below.

  Soon the Frogs were off on a national tour. And they had a manager: Graeme Nesbitt. When Graeme was released from prison I had wondered whether he might take on the management of Rough Justice, but his appetite for bands in brightly painted buses seemed to have faded. In an ironic reversal, I would soon be at home in Wellington reading letters from the road by Tina and Sally.

  The Frogs seemed to be having a far more glamorous touring experience than Rough Justice ever had. Well this is the life, began one of Tina’s letters. Lying on our beds writing letters and watching colour TV, and drinking gins and tonics, mid-afternoon, feeling refreshed and wonderful after lying in the sun all afternoon and going for swims in the swimming pool directly outside the door...

  Sally wrote: A fun day in Gisborne on Sunday — did an outdoor concert with a couple of local bands and a really mad poet, and Bruno and his kids turned up having chartered an aeroplane to get there ... Graeme reckons it’s the best tour he’s ever been on.

  Rough Justice played our final gig at Rock Theatre on July 26, 1979. Arthur B
aysting, in his Neville Purvis guise, was MC. Bill Lake led The Windy City Strugglers in a typically shambolic set, and The Wide Mouthed Frogs performed an item they had worked up especially for the occasion:

  (To the tune of ‘The Sound of Music’)

  The hills are alive with the sound of Rough boys

  With songs they have sung

  For a thousand years

  Their songs fill our hearts

  With the sound of music

  We still want to sing every song we hear

  Farewell to Mike and Martin

  To Steve and Nick

  To Peter and Boyd and lastly farewell to Rick

  When he leaps in the air and trips and falls

  Over leads on the stage

  And knocks Martin’s drums, who stands up

  And walks off in a rage

  We go hear the Roughs when our hearts are lonely

  We know we will hear what we’ve heard before

  And we go see the Roughs when we want to practise

  And now we can’t any more

  We’ll miss their amps and their speakers, their drums and leads

  Their mikes and their horns

  Their P.A. and desk, but what will make us forlorn

  Is knowing the Roughs are no longer with us

  They who have done more than words can say

  Have been forced to disband due to personal problems

  And a lack of pay.

  Early one evening, not long before that farewell show, I had gone to collect some equipment I’d left at Willy’s Wine Bar, a subterranean pub in central Wellington where an after-work office crowd would sit around tables, talk loudly and ignore the musicians. As I descended the stairs I could hear a magnificent din above the chatter. It was a new band from Auckland. I hadn’t heard Toy Love before, although I’d met a few of them one night with Rough Justice at an Uncle’s takeaway bar on Karangahape Road, where we had stopped on our way home from respective gigs. One of them, who turned out to be bass player Paul Kean, had asked, ‘So which band are you?’