Goneville

by Nick Bollinger

  I stayed in Manhattan with some of the musicians who had gone there with Red Mole. Now they had their own band, The Drongos. They were playing most nights but still living hand-to-mouth. When they didn’t have a gig they would sometimes busk around Times Square, which had helped them build a following. It occurred to me that in New Zealand musicians of their calibre would never consider playing in the streets. America was tough but the sheer quantity of music, and the way people seemed to take nourishment from it the way they took nourishment from food, was undeniable. I wondered how long it would be before music in New Zealand was as deeply rooted as it seemed to be there, how long before everyone was singing their own version of the same song.

  My friends from Rough Justice had flown in other directions. In 1980, following the demise of Rough Justice, Rick Bryant had moved to Auckland and joined a punchy five-piece band called Top Scientists, whose original R&B songs had enough in common with Elvis Costello and Graham Parker to have currency in the post-punk world. They played fast and tight and were popular in pubs. Sadly, like most of Rick’s bands up to that point, they were never captured on record.

  Within a couple of years Rick had teamed up with The Neighbours, a showband led by the irrepressible Sam Ford, with Trudi Green as one of the three lead singers. On the side he started an eleven-piece soul band called The Jive Bombers, which eventually became his most successful musical enterprise. It didn’t hurt that the hit movie The Blues Brothers had come out in 1980, introducing a new audience to the soul repertoire Rick had always loved to sing, and which Rough Justice had been fruitlessly trooping around the country. At one point The Jive Bombers held the attendance record at the Gluepot. Rick also reunited with Bill Lake, Andrew Delahunty, Geoff Rashbrooke and me in a revived, if very part-time, Windy City Strugglers.

  In early 2016 I visited Rick at the central Auckland warehouse that had been his home and rehearsal space for nearly twenty years. I wanted to ask a few questions about the Rough Justice days, to get some dates and facts right. Rick did his best to help but he was more interested in talking about the music he was making now, the gig he had coming up with the Jubilation Choir, and a recording he had been working on with The Jive Bombers. The atmosphere in his home was palpably the same as it had been when I first met him. There were musical instruments, fading band posters, crustacean-encrusted crockery, and thousands and thousands of books. A snaplock bag stuffed with pot sat on the table. But banana boxes and half-cleared shelves signalled changing times: rising rents were forcing him to move west, out of town, away from the community of musicians and urban bohemians by whom he was regarded as a doyen.

  As for Graeme Nesbitt, when he had got out of prison in 1978 he found pot had lost its allure but arranging happenings had not. He had been immediately employed by the Wellington City Council to start a programme of summer concerts in the city’s parks. This led to a full-time job managing an artists’ employment scheme. Several of my old North Terrace flatmates found work through Graeme as painters, performers and puppeteers. He went on to promote events for commercial radio stations. When his brother Rob asked him how he could bring himself to work for people who dispensed such dreadful music, Graeme said one had to remember commercial radio and music were two different things. He also worked as a contract tour manager, overseeing dozens upon dozens of tours, from The Clash to the Chinese Circus.

  Life at the higher end of the entertainment business provided Graeme with as much amusement as managing hapless Mammal ever had. A story he was fond of telling concerned the band Talking Heads. In 1984 Graeme had been hired by the promoter of the Sweetwaters South festival in Christchurch to assist the band, but at the hotel Talking Heads’ management had brushed him off, saying their American crew would take care of everything. Thus relieved of his duties, Graeme stood back and watched as the musicians and equipment were loaded on to the bus that would take them to the venue, with the American road manager counting Heads. As the bus drove off Graeme ducked into an adjacent tobacconist’s to buy a newspaper, where he was approached by David Byrne, Talking Heads’ leader, who asked in bewilderment, ‘Have you seen my band?’

  Graeme’s tour-managing skills extended to non-performing celebrities. He managed the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1986, and shepherded a party of rugby supporters on an All Blacks tour of Australia. He also found a new addiction: running. Every Sunday he would jog the thirty kilometres from his flat in Northland to his parents’ home in Upper Hutt to join the family for roast dinner. He would clock up a hundred kilometres a week. With a group of former inmates he started a team. They named it The Drug Runners.

  In the 1990s he went to live in Malaysia. Some of his friends said it was to get away from alcohol, on which he was becoming increasingly dependent. Based in Kuala Lumpur, he sobered up, resumed his academic career and taught English. He converted to Islam and married a presenter for Malaysia state television.

  The last time Rick spoke to his old mate was on the phone in 2000. Graeme had been diagnosed with cancer. They reminisced about high times and fallen comrades but Graeme soon sounded tired.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Rick admitted.

  ‘Why don’t you sing to me?’ Graeme said.

  Rick sang him a blues. Graeme died a month later, in June 2000. He was forty-nine.

  Around the time Graeme Nesbitt was released from jail, Richard Holden was promoted from Lion Breweries’ entertainment manager to be head of its export division, which more or less marked the end of his involvement with New Zealand music. Other events, however, kept growing. He waged a campaign to launch Steinlager on the international market, turning Lion’s export division into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Then he went to work for Australian rival Foster’s, insinuating the Aussie brand into the New Zealand market with sponsorship of such grand occasions as the Wellington Cup at Trentham Racecourse. The bacchanalian hospitality of his sponsor’s tent was legendary.

  He ran polo tournaments, hired fleets of helicopters, drove the latest Jaguars, commissioned specially bred roses, and became a designer of women’s frocks, winning Melbourne Cup raceday fashion contests several years in a row. He got the nickname Golden Holden. In 1998 he ran unsuccessfully for the Auckland mayoralty. He died in 2008, yet even at his funeral he continued to entertain, blowing kisses from a giant screen and thanking everyone for coming.

  And what became of the pub circuit he had created? In late 2014 I visited the offices of Lion Breweries in South Auckland to see if any records remained from the days when there were 300 musicians on the company payroll and Richard Holden was managing an annual entertainment budget of several million dollars. The company’s librarian, Edna Carson, was helpful but there was little on paper from Holden’s era. It seemed many files had been destroyed when the head office moved from Wellington to Auckland in the ‘80s.

  After Holden, Lion effectively gave up organising big tours by high-profile bands and left music promotion to the independents, who often used Lion pubs as venues. There continued to be a demand for entertainment in provincial taverns, but economics made small units preferred. In what remained of the Lion files I found press releases for dozens of imported entertainers, usually duos or soloists, contracted by Lion in the early ‘80s. The record was dismal. ‘Entertainer Tony Bee will do anything for a laugh,’ read one press release. ‘Some nights the forty-two-year-old singer-comedian might put on a wig and rabbit ears and play “Bright Eyes”. Tony, currently touring Lion Breweries pubs, has been pulling these sorts of stunts for about ten years, when he left his job as a steward with the British merchant navy...’

  Another reported: ‘Peter Morley had had enough of singing and playing the guitar by 1973 but now he’s back in the business and touring New Zealand, all because of an incident in a Welsh nightclub.’ And then there was this: ‘Scottish guitarist Buddy Martin came out of musical retirement to visit New Zealand for the first time. The opportunity of playing the pub circuit made him drop his business for a while and pick up his gui
tar again. He already admits he has fallen in love with New Zealand. The scenery is amazing and the people friendly.’

  Thinking about the campus underground and the pub circuit - the parallel empires Graeme Nesbitt and Richard Holden once presided over - I find myself comparing the two men. Nesbitt was not acquisitive. Other than a few books or musical instruments he appeared to have no interest in material things. Nor did he hold on to money: anything he made went straight into funding the next freak out. Holden led an opulent life with a three-storey Ponsonby villa, expensive cars and impeccably tailored suits. Yet in spite of their contrasting agendas, the two men seemed possessed by similar drives. Both were furiously energetic. Both were compelled to create the big event. And both died young, Nesbitt at forty-nine, Holden at sixty.

  There were only two and a half years between them in age. They grew up in the same place, Trentham in the Hutt Valley, although Holden had been sent away to live with his father on Motuihe Island a few years before the Nesbitts arrived from the Hokianga. Did they ever meet? No one I’ve spoken to can recall such an occasion. Yet in a country the size of New Zealand it is hard to imagine they didn’t.

  I picture a scene. It is a late summer afternoon in the early 1970s. Sunlight is streaming through the windows of the Spectrum Bar, causing a smell of warm beer to rise from the carpet, which is still sticky from the venue’s christening the night before, at which Prime Minister Holyoake was in attendance. Graeme Nesbitt looks down at the loud purple and orange swirls and imagines what the patterns might do if he was tripping. A broad balding man in a pastel blue suit and bright red shirt with a huge pointed collar strides across the room towards him, a flute glass of champagne in each of his meaty hands. He proffers a glass to his longhaired guest, who is surveying the stage, the PA stack and the lighting rig.

  ‘So how many does the room hold?’ Nesbitt asks.

  ‘Well we could fit 300 of your hippies in here, no problem,’ Richard Holden says. ‘But what’s the point if they’re only going to drink orange juice?’

  ‘If you put LSD in the orange juice you could sell it for more than your godawful piss,’ Nesbitt says.

  They chuckle. ‘It’s a deal,’ says the man in the suit, but they know it isn’t. ‘You know, I won’t be in this pub game forever. Beer and bands, bands and beer. I’ve got other plans. Racehorses. Department stores. Frock designs. The mayoralty perhaps? I’m serious. What about you? There has to be more to life than babysitting varsity stoners.’

  ‘Sure, there are some big acts I’d like to tour. The Pope. I’m not joking. And I’m going to make Dragon the biggest band in Australasia. But look, I must be off. I’ve got a car boot full of buddha sticks to shift before I can pay Split Ends for tonight’s show up the hill.’

  And I’ve got Frankie Stevens doing the floor show here with the Quincys, and all this godawful piss to sell.’

  And what of the others? Peter Kennedy, Mike Gubb, Tony Backhouse and my schoolfriends Stephen Jessup, Martin Highland and Boyd have all continued to devote themselves to music of various kinds, in various parts of the world. But of all the people I encountered during my time with Rough Justice, the one I had wondered about most was Janet Clouston. After finishing art school in Auckland, she had moved to Australia. I wasn’t sure how she felt about her days with Rough Justice. The way I remembered it, she had always been working at least as hard as any of the musicians on stage, with little credit or reward.

  When I skyped her, Janet agreed this was probably the case, and seemed happy to hear it acknowledged, yet she recalled the days of the bus with laughter and affection. She reminded me of things I’d forgotten, such as an incident at a Greymouth motor camp. We had arrived under cover of darkness and the proprietor had seemed friendly enough as he gave us the keys to our cabins. But when the sun rose next morning to reveal the bus in all its painted glory he became irrational. Accusing us of harbouring stowaways, he ordered us off the property, but before we could leave he parked a trailerload of pig’s swill across the path of the bus, shouting, ‘It’s too late, I’ve called the police!’ The police had evidently had dealings with the hysterical motelier before. When they arrived they gently insisted he move the trailer.

  During our conversation I wondered out loud what had finally happened to the bus.

  ‘I sold it,’ Janet said.

  I was surprised.’ You sold it? But the bus was Rick’s, wasn’t it?

  ‘No, of course not,’ she laughed. ‘Rick never had any money. The bus was mine.’

  Coda:

  ‘Freedom St Marys’

  In 2015, after living in Auckland for nearly ten years, I returned to Wellington with a need to retrace the paths I’d trodden at different times in my life. I had felt this compulsion before after shorter absences but never so strongly. I went looking for the shortcuts I remembered from my postie days. I climbed the zigzag to the Thorndon house where Rough Justice used to rehearse, and I retraced the journey from my first flat to our family home in North Terrace, the route I had taken on the morning my father died.

  Tonight I’ve climbed the hill to Kelburn the way I used to on a Friday night in my early teens, when I was giddy with music after seeing bands at the Union Hall. Sometimes I’d stop by the old Skyline Tearooms at the top of the Cable Car, look down at the lights of the city and the black hole of the harbour, and hear the last band still playing in the distance. Tonight the wind has caught a handful of remembered beats and is blowing them in my direction. It’s Bruno. He’s drumming wildly, like the time I saw him splinter his sticks and smash his cymbals to the floor, with every beat still somehow falling in the perfect place. I recognise the song, ‘Freedom St Marys’. It’s the song that told me, more than any other, what this crazy music I was in love with was trying to do.

  Nobody ever told you it was going to be easy.

  Bruno was in his thirties. He had been a professional musician for more than a decade — in Australia with high-flying bands such as Max Merritt and The Meteors, in New Zealand with The Quincy Conserve, and wherever he could playing jazz — when he started Blerta with his brother-in-law Geoff Murphy, who played the trumpet. The rest of Blerta were younger, mostly refugees from the rock world. Jazz people often sniffed at rock, dismissed it as kids’ stuff, but to Bruno it offered the freedom jazz was supposed to have: from the predictable cabaret routines, the pub circuit, the cheesy collar-and-tie gigs.

  For Blerta, life was an improvisation. They would turn up in a town unannounced in their Day-Glo-spattered bus and look for somewhere to play, somewhere to stay. They were making it up as they went along. Nobody told anyone what to do or not do.

  Nobody ever told you, that’s the name of the game.

  ‘Freedom St Marys’ was Blerta’s manifesto. It was my favourite song of their live shows, the part where the band went into overdrive, but it is also the best record they ever made. Bruno had composed the song with the band’s brilliant young piano player, Chris Seresin. The body of the tune is a riff by Seresin, a repetitive series of two-note phrases played on an electric keyboard hooked up to a wah-wah pedal. The riff tumbles like a moving carriage along the high-speed railway line of Bruno’s drumming.

  To run with the wind and laugh with the sea, begins the second verse. It is a line of its time, the kind an author in a tie-dyed T-shirt might have written in a children’s book in 1972, the year the song was released, yet when Corben Simpson sings the words they rage. He pushes his voice higher and higher, beyond its natural limits. He gets even more strident in the next section, where Bruno’s lyrics confront the real situation. Born in freedom, dressed in chains, everybody loses, nobody gains. Kemp Tuirirangi’s guitar answers every phrase, making its own wild bid for freedom, but more than anything it is Bruno’s drumming that embodies the lyric. He explodes time. He halves the beat, then gleefully doubles it. He plays like an escaped convict who will never be caught. He has cast off the last chains of conformity. He is truly free, and daring the rest of the band to follow him.


  Nobody ever told you it was going to be easy.

  By the time I finished school Blerta was over. Geoff Murphy was to become a pioneer of New Zealand cinema, and Bruno would find his new métier as an actor in films such as Murphy’s Utu and The Quiet Earth and Roger Donaldson’s Smash Palace, and in an Australian television series, Frontline. His timing on screen was as natural and precise as it was behind the drums. He portrayed a surprising range of characters, yet for each he drew on some deep core of Bruno-ness. There was the widower Williamson in Utu, driven mad by grief; the scientist Zac Hobson in The Quiet Earth, alone in a world suddenly emptied of human life; Al Shaw in Smash Palace, a father turned fugitive. Each man was trapped by a terrible set of circumstances yet somehow found his way free, either through madness or imagination. Bruno’s performances drew on what he understood freedom to be.

  The only rules he trusted and lived by were his own.

  Although he kept playing drums in brief stints with pop bands such as The Crocodiles and occasional jazz gigs, Bruno seemed just as creative and happy in his new career. He died of cancer in June 1995. He had been taken ill while on an Australian film shoot in January and had returned to New Zealand. His tangi took place at Taupunga Marae, just up the road from Snoring Waters, the piece of land in the tiny Hawke’s Bay town of Waimārama that members of the Blerta clan had bought communally in the ‘70s. Most of the clan had since moved away, leaving just Bruno, his wife Veronica, any number of their five children, and the occasional grandchild. I drove up for the tangi with Bill Lake, who had known Bruno since the days of Mammal. Like a Blerta gig it was unorthodox, a mix of Māori, Pākehā, Ratana, Catholic and probably pagan rituals, presided over by Ronnie Smith, a jazz musician whom Bruno had played with in the 1960s and who was now a Ratana priest.

  As the numbers grew it became apparent just how many people loved Bruno, and how varied they were. As New Zealand’s Hollywood star Sam Neill read a tribute from Australia-based comedian John Clarke, a mourner was pointed out to me as a reformed safe-cracker, ‘a very good one’. Rick Bryant was there. As the sun went down I saw him with Ian Watkin heading away from the crowds, towards the middle of a paddock. Soon the only thing visible in the darkness was the glowing end of a smoldering object passing back and forth between them.