You rarely get to see a new musical movement forming up close. When one arrives, the immediate past quickly becomes perfunctory and diminished, lost in the unfolding moment., the new possibilities, and the activity and success that follow. But that’s what happened before my eyes as John Baker shuffled new projects in his converted panel beater’s workshop residence in Kingdon Street in Auckland’s inner-city suburb of Newmarket in early 1994, or just around the corner off Broadway in his second storey office.
Chants R&B and, at right, Axel Grinders
Baker had already fronted Auckland garage rock revivalists The Psycho Daizies on multiple tours and, ironically, given his penchant for unearthing lost musical gems, recorded a still unreleased single, ‘Fast Food’, when we first met. Trailing along in his frenetic wake, I met Michael Simons, an architecture student from Tauranga, who’d go on to create the Fast Food garage rock website and record label. He later formed The Cthulus, who play and record their own spooky, propulsive brand of garage surf instrumentals.
Baker was most likely the man who passed along the contact address for John Segovia, whose Axel Grinders are highlighted below. Did I get the Les Richards interview from Baker? This revealed his group, Cincinnati Underground, covering and recording The MC5’s rama-lama-lama ‘Kick Out The Jams’ at Auckland’s Astor Studios in 1970, paid for by none other than all-round entertainer Max Cryer. It was the still elusive holy grail of New Zealand garage rock. I must have: where else would I have got it?
Baker put together the Wild Things compilations of freshly unearthed 1960s Kiwi garage punk, psych-punk, and psych-pop. These echoed similarly successful exhumations of 1960s American, Australian and British music. Pretty soon they were followed by every other country where the 1960s beat, R&B and psych music project bug had bitten. The Wild Things compilations revealed the depth and strength of our period groups and singers, and their geographical origins within the country. Over time, Baker’s focus expanded to early New Zealand rock’n’roll and pioneering punk rock, although the lens always remained the same.
In the years to come, the overseas groups Baker brought to New Zealand included the unknown Dead Moon and pre-fame The White Stripes, who he tour-managed in the early arc of their international success. The comprehensive local tours he organised for rising garage rock groups such as Nothing At All!, as well as reunion shows of our own 1960s and early punk groups, lit up many a night. The past was always present in the contemporary groups enabled by Baker. He favoured the classicist strand of rock’n’roll, where primacy and authenticity ruled and the personal was political, bucking the strictly sequential critical reading of evolving new music, which usually held sway.
With New Zealand’s garage rock lineage fully revealed, the contemporary response emerged in venues like the Frisbee Lounge on Symonds Street, an old BNZ bank, home to Frisbee Studios run by Baker’s friend Bob Frisbee, who had capture many of the new songs on tape. There you would see Baker’s musical brood onstage and in the audience. Other local scenes soon emerged in Hamilton, Christchurch and Wellington.
When The D4 and The Datsuns finally took New Zealand’s garage rock to the world in the early 2000s, they found like-minded souls out there, and having been well-schooled already, more than held their own live and on record.
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Chants R&B – One Two Brown Eyes (1967)
Tempted by Melbourne’s vibrant city-wide dance and club scene, Chants R&B left their subterranean back-street lair, the Stage Door club in Hereford Lane, Christchurch, in late 1966, to cross the Tasman, where New Zealand groups were never short of work. Stepping out first just before Christmas at The Catcher, the quartet became regulars on the Victoria capital’s stages in the new year at The Penthouse, Claxton, Opus, Pinocchio’s, MOE, The Surfrider and Blaise’s. April 1967 was an especially hectic month with return appearances and new dates at Eleanor Rigby and the Avenue in Frankston. Amidst the all the new activity, the classic Chants R&B core of Mike Rudd, Matt Croke and Trevor Courtney, with new bass player Neil Young, captured a molten version of Them’s ‘One Two Brown Eyes’ with a soulful cut of ‘My Girl’ slated for flipside of the prospective single, which never arrived. It would be a few decades before John Baker unearthed a tape of ‘One Two Brown Eyes’ for inclusion on his 1995 Stage Door Witchdoctors compilation, showcasing a recording that was every bit the equal of Chants R&B’s powerhouse takes on ‘I’m Your Witchdoctor’, ‘Neighbour Neighbour’ and ‘Mystic Eyes’.
The Spelling Mistakes – Hate Me, Hate Me (1980)
Warwick Hitler’s angry, paranoid (and possibly tongue-in-cheek) Detroit punker ‘Hate Me, Hate Me’ was one of the first four songs The Spelling Mistakes captured in early December 1979 with Steve Crane at Mascot Studios in Auckland. A new version was tucked away on the flipside of their top-drawer Top 30 power-pop chart hit, ‘Feels So Good’, released in June 1980, a pointed reminder of a group with strong punk roots in The Atrocities and The Aliens.
Get a load of the cool scuzz lyrics: “Put my head down the toilet / And pull the chain / You can piss in my ear / You can wash my brain.”
Brilliant. No wonder John Baker coaxed them back for two jammed-to-the-gills reunion shows at @Luna in March 1998, the first in a series of well-received performances. Punters that first weekend received a free CD, We Still Hate The Spelling Mistakes, collecting up the band’s period live and studio recordings. Michael Simons’ Fast Food Records soon expanded the idea to a double CD released in 2003, Epileptic Apocalypse 1979-1999, which included more recent live and studio captures.
The Henchmen – I Got a Right (1982)
“The only Sydney-style STOOGES devotees to be found in New Zealand,” The Dead Kennedys’ frontman, Jello Biafra, wrote of West Auckland Detroit-style punks The Henchmen in the American punk journal, Maximum Rocknroll, in early 1984, after hearing their first single. Biafra then compared the equally fierce flipside, ‘Rock n Roll Attack’, to Ohio garage punks The Dead Boys. Released first in 1982 on the group’s indie label, Cadaver Records, ‘I Got A Right’, as Jello discerned, brought a head-down, hard-rocking power and anarchic edge that few New Zealand groups could then muster. Iggy and The Stooges had originally inked the song in for their 1973 glam-punk masterpiece, Raw Power, but it didn’t make the final cut. A live version was issued by RCA Victor in 1978.
The Axel Grinders – Joe Orton’s Wedding (1988)
John Segovia and Andrew “Prole” Brice’s urgent garage rocker, ‘Joe Orton’s Wedding’, was first recorded by The McGoohans as ‘Joe Orton’ for their 1985 album, The McGoohan Touch. Segovia’s The Axel Grinders then took the tune into Christchurch’s Audio Access studio in early December 1988 for their own version. Prole’s lyric was about Orton, the gay English writer murdered by his jealous lover, Kenneth Halliwell, in August 1967, and subsequently committed suicide. It worked on several levels as a simple lover’s plea and darker declaration of love gone mad. “If I can’t have you, I don’t want nobody else,” the opening lines were sung with a snarl by Segovia. The backing – from Rita Le Quesne, Phil Ascott and, on one of his best-recorded drum tracks, Duane Zarakov. was clean, yet powerful. The finished recording first appeared on a small-run Zarakov-assembled 1989 tape, Come Together, and then in the mid-1990s on the barely seen Axel Grinders CD compilation, Kill Them Twice. The D4’s equally storming version appeared on their extended 2002 CD release of Get Loose.
Nothing At All! – Get Some (1995)
Honed onstage by the North Shore trio of bass player Dion Palmer, guitarist Tony Brockwell and drummer Paul Foster over a band life that included multiple national tours and countless Auckland shows, ‘Get Some’ is a raucous, tuneful guitar rave-up with a lyrical hook that digs deep. Andrew Moore’s playful video puts the icing on the cake. This surely is the template for The D4, the garage rock quartet where Palmer shifted to guitar and found a strong writing partnership with fellow guitarist Jimmy Christmas and a powerful rhythm section in Beaver Pooley and Vaughan Williams.
The D4 – Exit To The City (2001)
Choosing a single song by The D4 is hard. Their string of hard, tuneful singles, ‘Come On!’, ‘Party’, ‘Get Loose’, ‘Rock n Roll Motherfucker’, and ‘What I Want’, all had it going on, and both their albums and the B-sides of their singles were stacked with quality, hi-octane recordings. New Zealand groups had rarely rocked this hard and direct before. In recent years, our louder groups always had a discursive twist. The D4’s long-overdue foot-to-the-floor, no apologies rock’n’roll dispensed with all that, and got straight to the heart of the matter. No more so than on ‘Exit To The City’, their insanely tuneful ode to jumping in the van, picking up your mates, and heading out for the night. You can almost see the North Shore boys barrelling off the Auckland harbour bridge onto the Shelly Beach Road or Fanshawe Street turnoff into the heart of the city. The simple and effective single-camera video has the full band playing in the back of a moving van, a dangerous dose of fun, just like the music.
The Datsuns – Harmonic Generator (2002)
The New Zealand garage-rock disease was an infectious and widespread one. The Datsuns roots were in the Waikato region in Cambridge and Hamilton, but their heads inhabited a similar, hard and tuneful garage-rock space to their Auckland counterparts. I love that they took this simple but effective mono riff (all they needed) into Mickie Most’s RAK Studio in London, home of many pop chart hits, to record, and had it mixed at The Kinks’ Konk Studios in the same city.
The Rock and Roll Machine – She Got Oh! (2002)
Was Auckland’s sprawling North Shore the ground central for Aotearoa’s garage-rock revival? The Rock and Roll Machine – a Stoogey trio with Matt Stroobant on guitar and singing, Karin Canzek (bass, vocals) and Paul Robertson (later Slavetrader), then Rich Mixture (ex-Psycho Daizies and Shaft) on drums – are another tick in the yes box. Surviving from 1999 to 2006, The Rock and Roll Machine were a regular feature on the Queen City live scene, going on before many like-minded groups, such as Dead Moon, The White Stripes, Guitar Wolf and MC5. They toured Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom and released five vinyl singles: an issue, Stroobant pointed out, when most of your fans didn’t have record players. Then finally a farewell CD album, Creatures of The Night, was released on The Datsuns’ label, Hellsquad, in 2006.
The early singles were all raucous, raw-edged rockers like ‘Rock and Roll Disease’ (released on John Baker’s Zerox Records and recorded by Vaughan and Dion from The D4 at Frisbee Studios in 2000), ‘Psycho’ (2001), ‘Primitive Man’ (2002) and ‘Creatures of the Night’ (2006). They had another gear as well, exhibited on the slow, prowling ‘She Got Oh!’, captured in pure analogue at Liam Watson’s famed Toerag Studios in London in 2002, and released by French label Pitshark.
Slavetrader – The People’s Party (2003)
The New Zealand garage-rock revival often had a scuzzy metallic edge to its rock, as Slavetrader’s rebellious ode to bucking the status quo showed only too well. There’s a touch of Aerosmith’s Steve Perry in the video for ‘Walk This Way’ in guitarist Matt Alien breaking through an office wall to the sound of The People’s party in Chris Stapp’s video then freeing a desk-bound Camilla Martin (the bFM DJ and TV host) from her boring job and an overbearing boss played by Matt Heath. Slavetrader released two singles and an EP on Fast Food Records, from which ‘The People’s Party’ was plucked. The group revolved around a core of guitarist and vocalist Matt Alien (Matthew Johnstone) and James Jett (bass), and evolved from Christchurch’s Hi-Tone Destroyers. Other members included Paul Halford (guitar) and Paul Robertson (drums).
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