How Th' Dudes Got Started

Should you ask me to put a date on when Th' Dudes began, I'd point to a Saturday afternoon sometime early in the Auckland summer of 1975. If the past is a foreign country, then New Zealand in the 1970s was another fucking planet. When the world ended, the joke went, we'd be OK because everything here happened five years late.
We were isolated, protected colonials. We pledged unquestioning allegiance to Great Britain and played "God Save the Queen" in the cinemas at 11, 2, 5 and 8 every day except Sunday, when the country was shut. After the anthem and before the main feature there'd be a National Film Unit short about P Class locomotives or touring the central North Island by Austin Allegro. A Clockwork Orange carried an R20 certificate. Ulysses was screened to sexually segregated audiences, lest Joyce inflame the senses and cause spontaneous public coupling.
For entertainment that went beyond the local booze barn, the Ace of Clubs featured Diamond Lil and Marcus Craig. The Pink Pussycat had girls "in g-strings only" (according to the ads). His Majesty's Theatre (does your blood still boil when you see the carpark it became?) and the St James hosted shows "direct from the West End": local-girl-made-good Nyree Dawn Porter in Charlie Girl; Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett & Jonathon Miller reunited for Behind the Fridge; ooh-you-are-awful Danny La Rue and slapstick Norman Wisdom - though Wisdom did not prevail and went home after two nights of empty seats. The stage production of Hair came, and was put on trial for obscenity. Germaine Greer came, said "bullshit" in public, and was put on trial for obscenity. Our nanny justice system was determined to do the thinking for us. We could have been the laughing stock of the world, if only the world would notice us.
Tommy Adderly's club, Grandpa's, was nearing the end of its blues-wailin' life. The Inbetweens played at Aladdin's, Steampacket at Your Father's Mustache, Dalvanius at Cleopatra's out east in the shadow of Mount Wellington, on the edge of civilization. Woe betide you if you tried to get into any of these places wearing jeans, though if you said they were "dress jeans" you could get lucky. Draconian licensing laws meant many clubs - like Maurice Greer's Crofts in Airedale Street - served soft drinks only. It's hard to believe that grown adults would go out for an evening's entertainment without the chance of getting wildly pissed. There'd be a drop of the real stuff under the counter though, if you knew how to ask.
Television One and South Pacific Television, both state-owned but programmed to offer the pretence of competition, transmitted from 2pm daily and closed down well before midnight . Entire families would gather at 8pm each Saturday to watch the pinnacle of the week's broadcasting: Des O'Connor, Morecambe and Wise, the Seekers, the Two Ronnies, or the innocent and spectacularly popular Black and White Minstrel Show. Sunday nights provided a musical lifeline to the outside world as Dr Rock - Barry Jenkins - presented the Grunt Machine and Radio With Pictures, flashing us images of the birth of punk and the music video revolution two decades before MTV made it to these distant shores. The biggest selling colour television set on the market, the Philips K9, cost NZ$999, about twenty times the average weekly wage. There was no "reality" or "bloopers" tv, and the announcers just announced and the newsreaders just read news. Radio Hauraki - far superior to the NZBC's 1ZM - was the only radio station worth listening to. On Saturday mornings they had American Top 40 beaming in Dr John and Marvin Gaye with Casey Kasem exhorting us to keep our feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. There were no "classic hits" or "easy listening" or "news-talk" stations, and the disc jockeys played what they wanted to play, knew something about music, and didn't have the sense of humour of your average snickering 13 year old schoolboy.
A cafe was a place where stonking great portions of bacon and eggs and baked beans were piled on thick, buttered white toast and washed down with Choysa tea and instant coffee. A coffee lounge was slightly more refined and offered savouries and sandwiches and scones and lamingtons, with more Choysa tea and instant coffee. Fish and chips was the staple takeaway. McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken were rare and extravagent novelties, watched warily by the neighbourhood burger bar. The few restaurants around were for special occasions only: the Hungry Horse, Hagan's, El Matador, El Trovador. At the Tai Tung in Wyndham Street you had to book weeks in advance and could still wait an hour for your table. Local wine was thin and sweet: Cook's Chasseur, Blenheimer, Cold Duck, Marque Vue. Imported wine was scarce and expensive.
We drove Hillmans, Holdens, Fords and Austins. The occasional Toyota or battered Datsun drew curious glances. Buying a new car - perhaps an HQ Holden "with distinctive W-shaped front" - required something mysterious called "overseas funds". Panelbeaters flashed neon hammers and glittering sequinned signs. "Drive With Care Or You'll End Up Here", warned the wreckers at the top of Newton Road.
There were tariffs and controls on everything imported. In shops the range of goods was slim and the prices high. Clothes, furniture, appliances, electronics, hardware, toys: if you could get them at all they would cost you two, three, four times as much as in their country of origin. Things manufactured here by our protected industries were usually of poor quality, hence our still-persistent belief that offshore is better.
Fruit and vegetables though were big and cheap: Golden Delicious apples and Packham pears, plums and apricots from Marlborough and Hawke's Bay , oranges from Kerikeri, watermelons and crates of Golden Queen peaches from the Henderson orchards. Dairy products were cheap too of course: four cents for a pint of milk, twenty-five cents for a half pound of butter. All the best meat was sent to Mother England, but the leftovers were affordable and plentiful and many a suburban chest freezer held half a beast.
But better do your shopping before the weekend arrived. After 9 o'clock on Friday night there was nothing open but the corner dairy, selling goods at premium prices. Many people dreamed of owning a dairy for a few years and retiring on the profits. "A little goldmine", my dad said.
Businessmen wore locally-made Cambridge suits and Summit Viyella shirts. In summer office-workers, plain-clothes policemen and All Blacks in mufti switched to too-tight walk shorts and walk socks, a local fashion aberration that brought to mind hairy-legged sixth formers. Crimplene, seer-sucker and velour were big. Ladies' fashions filtered slowly south of the equator, arriving a season or two after their northern debut: the culotte, the trouser suit, the maxi dress. Hippies, beads, kaftans, incense and love oil thrived at Cook Street Market.
There was no fresh fruit juice, no low-fat milk, no flavoured milk, no soy milk. No energy drinks or smart drinks. No light beer, no boutique beer. No short blacks or flat whites. No one-day cricket, no Black Caps or All Whites or Silver Ferns, no aerobics, no sportswear-as-fashion, no sports-shoes-as-streetwear. No traffic jams. No video games, video players, or videos. No compact discs, DVDs, laser discs, or laser light shows. No fax machines or filofaxes, no cell-phones or phone cards. No personal computers or desktop computers or laptop computers or palmtop computers. No Internet, Intranet, World Wide Web, or email.
There was no GST, no CER, no ATM, no EFTPOS. If you wanted money for the weekend you had to remember to go to the bank and cash a cheque before 3pm on Friday. No one- or two-dollar coins, no fifty dollar notes. To buy foreign currency you had to present your passport and airline ticket as proof of travel.
There was no Prozac, no Viagra, no Ecstacy, no AIDS, no herpes.
No hole inthe ozone layer...
And on this balmy Saturday afternoon in late 1975, Dave Dobbyn, Peter Urlich, Peter "Nyolls" Coleman and I were gathered - as usual - in Nyolls's grandmother's basement in Greenlane. We were "getting a band together". Dave, Peter U and I had known each other since form one at Sacred Heart College in 1968, laughing at Milligan and Sellers and Cleese, passing notes in sex ed class, and blanking out the wretchedness of canings and new maths and Latin verbs with a love of music and a heightened sense of the absurd.
I'd come from England in 1966, aged 9. Wild colonial New Zealand was all a bit of a shock after the sandals and socks and shy reserve of the Old Country. I had trouble fitting in to this bare feet and beer jugs place. I did have a guitar though, and an older sister who - back in England - had exposed me early on in life to the wonders of pop music: the overwhelming magic of Beatlemania, the depravity of the Stones. Radio Caroline and Top of the Pops and Ready, Steady Go: I was hooked on the soundscape of the three-minute wonder. Tennis racquet as guitar? I was that cliché.
Peter Urlich was a living light entertainment show in himself. He could grease up the teachers yet still spit with the bad boys at the back of the class. And a sharp dresser: even then he was the sort of guy who could play a hard rugby match in a hurricane and still look like he'd come straight from the dry-cleaners via the hairdressers. Together we harboured a dream: that one day we'd be like Mick and Keef, or Bowie and Ronson, or Daltrey and Townshend.
I knew I was going to be friends with Dave on our first day at SHC. When he walked into class late, wearing a too-large hand-me-down uniform and a savage crewcut courtesy of his mother's kitchen shears, I recognised a fellow loner. I see him still: ginger on porcelain swaddled in a tent of navy blue. He was picked on and put upon all through school and found solace in his guitar. At lunch-time a sport-hating half dozen of us would gather in the hall or a music room, banging away on guitars. While the others were diddling around with Simon & Garfunkel, Dave would stonk into some riff-driven Neil Young. When Abbey Road was released and everyone was trying to plinkety-plink their way through "Here Comes the Sun" Dave impressed upon me the blackfoot boogie of "Come Together". He and I lived for the days when Mr Gannaway, the music master, brought his electric organ to class and played the Peddlars' "Girlie" with wah wah and everything. Together, Dave and I would jam for hours on endless Santana riffs. We'd yell "fuck the neighbours!" along with the Small Faces. We'd pound out the entire bridge of "Something in the Air" on an out of tune piano. There was never - praise be - a scrap of formal shape to his music; he's probably never read a chord chart in his life. If my guitar playing was ordered progression; his was a tumbling, swirling cloud.
Nyolls came to SHC from the Waikato in third form to work hard and pass exams, but when he wasn't studying or breaking both legs skiing he'd be sitting around with a bunch of guitar-strumming boarders, all plinking and tinkering away at Cat Stevens songs, easing the misery of life far from the farm. Despite Cat, Nyolls was sensible enough to realise - even at that early age - that the Guess Who could never be cool. And sensible enough to realise that becoming a doctor would most likely be a more prudent career choice than playing the bass guitar. He would eventually leave the band to explore his own personal Hippocratic frontier, and in his place we pulled in someone we'd had our eye on for a while. Peter White had been playing in bands for - ooh, ages. Over a year. And he'd even managed to grow a slight beard. He played a solid and melodic bass, like his heroes McCartney and Entwhistle. His Jewishness and deadpan humour were perfect foils for our arrogant, tight-arsed Catholicism. His high kicks alone could provoke hours of scoff and counter-scoff. The only thing really wrong was his name: we felt we couldn't have yet another Peter, so we shortened his middle name and - whether he liked it or not - made him Lez.
Anyway, this afternoon here we were with our Teisco and Jansen guitars and some fuse-blowing, shock-giving amps made by a bearded valve-nerd in Forest Hills. Also an endless supply of Krispie biscuits and L&P. A year out of school and still chemistry-class daydreaming of Fender Twin Reverbs and Telecaster basses, Shure microphones and JBL K120 speakers, Ludwig drums and WEM Copycats. The Stones and Little Feat and Ziggy Stardust. Playing at Madison Square Garden and the Hammersmith Odeon and the Marquee Club. Recording at Strawberry Studios and Mussel Shoals and Abbey Road and the Manor, produced and engineered by Glyn Johns and Ken Scott and George Martin and Bill Szymszyck. Day-glo posters, album liner notes, Creem and NME, Lester Bangs, Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent. Just for now though we'd settle for the sniff of a chance to get up and play at the Glendowie Tennis Club annual dance.
For some weeks we'd been honing a repertoire of other people's songs, the songs that had inspired us. Some of them we could play passably well, some were a shambolic lurch, and some would always remain beyond our ill-timed and out-of-tune grasp. No-one could say we weren't eclectic. We explored the rhythm and blues of Chuck Berry, the Stones, the James Gang and Little Feat. Funk from the Commodores and the Average White Band. The perfect pop of Mott the Hoople, Bowie and T-Rex. Wildly ambitious covers of 10CC and Steely Dan, trying to recreate on a Saturday afternoon with two guitars what Godley and Creme and Becker and Fagen had taken a year and several million dollars to achieve.
There was but one thing holding us back, we reckoned: we had no drummer. Today we'd advertised for one in the Herald. Three people answered.
The first guy was ancient - twenty-five at least - and wore the ubiquitous leather jacket of the aged. He pulled up in an Anglia van and unloaded case after case of Tama gear, which wasn't exactly Ludwig but there was a lot of it. Once he'd set it all up though, he played with a skippy little beat that reminded me of shiny suits and saxophone sections. He paradiddled and mummadaddad his way around the edges of the songs. He looked blank when we mentioned Keith Moon and Charlie Watts. Tama.
The next auditioner was more our own age and had at least heard of Ringo Starr and even the Prairie Prince, but his kit was a mish-mash of put-together parts. His pants, however, were fashionably high-waisted with huge flared legs. Peter counted in "Blue Suede Shoes". The guy got the stops OK, but when we hit the chorus it sounded like a split bag of King Edwards tumbling down the cellar stairs. We staggered on for a few more seconds. Strictly a play-in-the-bedroom man.
Finally a yellow Toyota Corolla station wagon reversed down the drive. A Japanese car was unusual in itself. Looked like it cost a few grand. Had a tow bar. Certainly a step up from my hundred dollar Humber 80. The driver had bad hair, neither short enough nor long enough, and bad jeans with creases in the front. Bruce, he said, and certainly looked like one. Bruce Hambling. He set up a Premier kit - about midway between Tama and Ludwig in our estimation - all polished and tidy.
We decided to skip "Blue Suede Shoes". Instead, Dave started the riff to "Alright Now". Bruce raised his meaty arms. Clenched in his carpenter fists were small tree trunks. The thick varnish on them glinted in the exotic half-light of the fly-spotted fluorescent over the pool table. Through an L&P-induced haze I watched as they hammered down towards drum and cymbal.
In the explosion on beat one of bar five, a new universe was created. I took on a dazed expression of bliss, like a tummy-scratched labrador. The music took shape and hovered over us with electrified, uncontrollable life. A heaving Frankenstein's monster of noise created from the darkest parts of our individual souls. I came close to almost believing there could possibly be a remote chance that there might be some sort of God somewhere.
Either that or I'd eaten too many Krispies.