Random Play by Graham Reid

For many years Brendan Smythe (of New Zealand on Air), the late and singular Dylan Taite (for whom I was sometimes, and to my bewilderment, mistaken) and I used to joke about who was the oldest of us at the Big Day Out.

I guess we felt like aged gentlemen in the company of 14-year olds in halter tops texting furiously while a highly paid band was sweating it out for their pleasure.

It wasn’t always like this however and for the first few years the BDO pulled a somewhat older demographic than we see today. Over time parents and adults realised that the BDO was not only safe for their kids, but they came off as the good guys for letting them go.

And of course the generations have also merged in a way that was almost unthinkable when I was a teenager. (Although my Dad and I did share an equal enthusiasm for With the Beatles, and that was when he was the age that I am now). At a BDO now it is not uncommon to see adults meeting their teenagers. A few BDOs ago I wrote a Herald article about me going because my sons’ band was playing. The witty headline was “Old Man’s Beard Must Go.”

And the BDO is a remarkably safe place. This year it was also a real step up in organisation, and by opening up the access/egress to the top stages the organisers freed up one of the most notorious and annoying bottlenecks.
Congratulations must go to Campbell Smith and his team for that.

I wonder when someone will click that women need more toilets and give over one of the male rooms, or set aside a special area of Portaloos for the ladies?

Promoters take a lot of crap sometimes (from me too, as in the previous posting here) but it is only fair to salute a job well done - although I have no idea what makes anyone want to do such things.

I did a few concerts way back and all I remember was financial heartache, mad phonecalls, and fear that no one would turn up. Ever since then I have consistently said promoters should be hugely rewarded. If they make a buck they will do it again, and that’s a good thing.

I am told there were very few arrests at this BDO and the only guy I saw being taken away by a couple of burly policemen looked like it was for his own good, he could barely stand. It sure wasn’t like that six or seven years ago. I remember interposing my body between a constable and young fan who was oblivious to the blow about to rain down.

And just a thought in passing: ASH might as well give up. When you are 14 or 15 and you can’t get a drink you’re symbol of being grown up is a cigarette. I was amused but slightly saddened by the number of young girls fagging it up -- and that’s from someone who has been an occasional smoker. The kids just looked silly, and it made them appear even younger oddly enough.

In an amusing aside, one of the gentlemen I was with had to show an ID to get a pass into the bar. I guess he showed the driver’s licence he’d for the past 30 years. I just pointed to my face and the woman my age behind the counter laughed and tagged me, no need for ID.

So I had a great day and I want to put on record my thanks to the generosity of fellow blogger David Slack who invited my wife and I to be his guests on a table in one of those upper rooms in the East Stand -- as he did last year.

As one who “worked” at previous BDOs -- rushing around to see bands, back to a laptop that invariably wouldn’t connect to the Herald, and using a cellphone that had no coverage in a stadium with a telecom company name -- a BDO was fun, but wearying.

I -- along with Russell Baillie, and in later years Rebecca Barry -- would sometimes miss bands we wanted to see because we were on a deadline or in a bunker typing away.

Last year was the first time I had just “been” to a BDO, just to go and see bands, stay as little or as long as I liked, and generally enjoy the day. Having the refuge that David offered in the East Stand both last year and this was a blessing, especially at my advanced age -- although other than in the middle of the day and for a short while around 5pm I was mostly in the fray.

I have to say while enjoyed this year I was not surprised by most things I saw, especially on the main stage. I came away from none of those acts thinking, “Dammit on Monday I’m gonna buy their album”. No surprise means a disappointment in a way.

It seemed to me also that prog-rock is quietly making a comeback too: bands don’t just bang out songs anymore but have some kind of over-arching concept and the lengthy songs to suit.

I look forward to seeing Yes doing the complete Tales From Topographic Oceans in years to come. Or their younger kin on some such elaborate and equally witless project.

I’m not going to say what I liked or didn’t -- I have done that at View Auckland -- but only to observe that stadium rock shows have become much more gentle and sedate places in recent years.

There is a discussion thread about my last blog in which Simon Grigg among others also makes the same point about gigs in general.
Check out that discussion, nice to see people recall great and awful gigs/venues of old.

Finally there is new music at Elsewhere here, (Chris Knox, Norah Jones’ new one, Rahsaan Roland Kirk on a strange ballad and more). And for those with a long memory of rock culture I am adding to the My Back Pages section: this week Ocean Colour Scene and a very sad story.

Have a squiz.

For about 15 years I reviewed live concerts for the Herald. In reality what that glamorous-sounding job meant was that for two, sometimes three, and occasionally four nights in a row I’d go off to see some band, group, troupe or ensemble play to paying punters.

During this time I was also working the day job at the Herald. Over those years I was variously an entertainment writer interviewing Famous Folk and Cult Artists, then entertainment editor (and simultaneously books editor for a glorious year in which graphic novels got coverage), then a senior feature writer. And all that time I would go to concerts as well.

So after work I’d probably go to the pub or home, maybe eat something between fuelling myself in inappropriate ways for the night ahead, go to a smoky bar to see a band who usually came on around 11pm, and afterwards go back to the Herald office and write it up.

I’d get back home around 1am, not tired of course. So I’d sit around doing whatever was inappropriate, and the next day be back in the office for 9am.
It was a great life, but as you might guess came at some cost.

(For many years I would try to point out to bands that just because they were now not living with mum and didn’t have a day job, didn’t mean they should fug around until 11pm before ambling onstage for a sound check. Some of us had lives the next day.)

It was a helluva life -- and I mean that in both ways: I saw some of the best (and most indifferent, over-hyped or just plain dull) music in the world in those years.

I also don’t remember some of things I saw. I found a ticket stub at home the other day for Pulp (“Britpop at its Best” according to the Frontier Touring Company blurb) and frankly I don’t remember them at all.

This is not as bad as a former colleague who confessed to having interviewed a rather large opera singer and only afterwards did she remember she’d met this diva before. Quite how you forget a woman who was so large she got stuck in the revolving door of a Wellington hotel is somewhat of a mystery.

Anyway, as the song says, I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know . . .

But it was an interesting period of my life (I have even started writing the unexpurgated stories My Back Pages on my Elsewhere website here )

Oddly enough when I wasn’t doing this late night crawl -- and all the bars in between which that entailed -- I’d often go out and see bands play.
Many, many hundreds of bands here and abroad would be my guess.

So over the many years I did this -- and I had done it before it started at the Herald and have done a bit of it in the past five years -- I went to all kinds of venues: from seeing garage bands that John Baker promoted in a hall in Glenfield to CBGBs and Carnegie Hall.

I’m not saying this to brag (believe me, there was nothing to brag about seeing The Plague, a terrific skinhead outfit, play some downstairs dive very, very late one night) but there is point going to be made.
It is this.

I have started doing live reviews again for View Auckland and so I am back -- happily and with great enthusiasm -- doing what I used to do many years ago: going out late, watching musicians play, coming home and writing it up overnight. It is quite a rush.

But. And here comes the Big But.

Last week I saw three shows: M. Ward at the Dogs Bollix; Tenacious D at the Logan Concrete Centre; and Cirque du Soleil at the big top.
What struck me was how the paying public were treated at each.

M. Ward played to a densely packed -- some might say over-sold -- room which seemed to be utterly lacking in air-condition. If it was working . . . Well, it wasn’t working. It was uncomfortable and crowded, and given the nature of Ward’s melancholy style, a sit-down venue might have been more appropriate.
Frankly I’d love to know just how many that room is allowed to hold -- 280 I believe -- as opposed to how many it did on the night.

The following night at Tenacious D it was equally hot in that great bunker, and around 10.45 we wandered to the “lobby” to get a drink: beer, water, Coke, whatever. The bar was closed and we were rudely pointed to a Coke machine.
The security guy beside it said “Out of order, mate”.
So that was it, you couldn’t get a drink on a bloody hot night.

Things were very different at Cirque du Soleil. We couldn’t help but notice how polite ticket collectors, checkers and ushers were, saying “Hope you enjoy the show” and “Good evening”.
You could get a drink there -- beer was a whopping $8 a bottle, but at least you had the choice.

What this illustrates again is how patient the paying rock audiences are here -- and how they are prepared to put up with the second rate in a way that would be unacceptable in, say, the States.

I recall a few years ago some opera shouter came to town and sang at Western Springs. The middle-class, middle-aged and older audience was largely horrified at the facilities (or lack of) and there were angry letters to the paper for days afterwards. I had no sympathy: as someone who goes to rock gigs there I am used to the place. I’m used to discomforts to see the music of my choice. Whether I should be is the real question.

We also went to see U2 recently and afterwards it took a good 45 minutes to get out of the stadium and back to our car. I mentioned to my wife that the last time I had seen them it was in Phoenix, Arizona and my guess would be that the stadium emptied in about 10 minutes. Better access and egress.

You could also go out and buy drinks without long queues because they had so many outlets operating.

It seems to me that paying punters deserve better than crowded venues and poor service (if any).

The Big Day Out is notorious for its bottlenecks between stages, but this year we have been promised that will have been resolved.

It’ll be interesting to see if -- after more than a decade of the same obvious problem -- any real progress has been made.

I’m looking forward to the day when rock punters are treated as what they are: valued, paying customers deserving of respect.

There is a famous saying: Those who do not learn from history are condemned to keep watching it re-run on CNN. And that’s pretty much how I feel tonight after watching the current American president address his people and tell them that more of their sons and daughters were going to be sent to Iraq.

When this tragic war started many ordinary, intelligent people everywhere seemed to know the inevitable outcome better than those who had all the information, documents, reports and experts at their fingertips.

Really, it took no great work of mind to anticipate the civil war that is happening now (in all but name only) and how the invaders would get knee deep in the factionalism and be caught in the crossfire, crossfire in large measure of their own making.

I, like everyone I know, took no great comfort in being proven right on this. But unlike many of my friends and some international commentators, I never saw a direct analogy with Vietnam.

I was at university during those terrible years and so was engaged by the tragedy that was unfolding. And I don’t just mean for the Americans. It was hard to watch television news and see Vietnamese villagers -- no matter what their political persuasion -- being killed and dispossessed in such numbers.

I’ve been to beautiful and friendly and forgiving Vietnam a couple of times since -- in 95 I was there for the 20th celebrations/commemorations of the fall/liberation of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. Interesting as you might guess. I went to a bar called Apocalypse Now.

Among my many memories was that of a little boy playing in the street with a plastic gun making bang-bang noises. Make what you will of that, but I think about it quite a lot.

But the American involvement in Vietnam was very different to what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. In many ways the world is a more complex place today -- which is why we hardly need a man with simplistic solutions to be helming things.

But today for the first time I put aside all the nuances of those two different wars and could only think, I’ve been here before.

Call it a surge, call it commitment, call it whatever you like. I call sending over 20,000 more troops -- most of them only into Baghdad -- by the old name, “escalation“. Okay, it might only be short-term like they say (but would you believe these people?) but then so was the other escalation 40 years ago.

I don’t think -- at least I hope it won‘t happen -- that in six months or a year’s time another 50,000 will be committed so that “victory” can be assured. But today I just feel like I’ve heard all this before. And it was shit then, and it’s shit now.

Back in those days Creedence Clearwater Revival were churning out hit singles, among them Fortunate Son, Bad Moon Rising and Who’ll Stop The Rain which (sometimes obliquely) addressed what was happening to Americans at home and in Vietnam.

There are voices from musicians raised again of course, but oddly enough -- and with eloquent simplicity which linked the Vietnam memorial in Washington with a Biblical image -- John Fogerty of CCR captured exactly how I’m feeling right now on his most recent solo album.

“ Did you hear ‘em talkin’ ‘bout it on the radio
Did you stop to read the writing at The Wall
Did that voice inside you say,
I’ve heard it all before.
It’s like deja-vu all over again ”

Near my keyboard I have a wry quote by the American novelist Sholem Asch: “It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say”

Which in part explains why it has been a month since I last posted here. But only in part.

It wasn’t as if there was nothing to say, it was more that after we came back from (the much under-rated) Norfolk Island I picked up the paper day after day and was -- in the words of a charming Chinese author I heard speak recently -- “dumb-shocked“.

The lunatics had overtaken the asylum -- and they had decided, of all the options possible, to ban billboards from the CBD. Clearly these people hadn’t spent much time considering what kind of ugly architecture was behind them.

While we were sunning ourselves on Norfolk’s sole accessible but beautiful beach it seems Don Brash burst into tears and was replaced by John Key, who newspapers and television decided it was time to profile in depth and tell us just who he was. I’m still no wiser.

Frankly I don’t trust the guy one bit. He looks and sounds like a man with enormous ambition but no ideology. Ah, but he did come from a state house, right? And “my wife’s Chinese”?

I have been dumb-shocked at the way his rise to the leadership of the Nats has been manufactured.

Then the media got into that end of year windup: we were told somewhat breathlessly on television one night that police had breath-tested four times as many drivers than usual. Hmm, now could that be because they had stopped thousands on the Friday night before Christmas? I’d be dumb-shocked if they hadn’t found dozens over the limit on that night.

Then we got the one where retailers say their end-of-year takings are going to be down and they are hoping for a last minute rush. Which inevitably comes. And they know it will because it happens every year. That’s a Big Story alright.

Then we get told that 2006 had been a record for . . . Well, you name it: retail spending, more cars on the road, credit card transactions and so on. I guess that’s what happens when a population grows. I’d be dumb-shocked if we were “trending down” as the politicos say.

So it wasn’t that I didn’t have something to say about all these things -- and Iraq, the trial of Saddam, events in the Pacific and much more -- it was just that I was too dumb-shocked by the absurdity of most of this that . . . Well, I couldn’t be arsed really. I preferred to shout at the television in the company of my long-suffering wife.

So Christmas crept up on us, we did the usual round of Christmas parties (including one with our builders whom we are finally farewelling from our now-repaired leaky building) and then in that last week did a swag of shopping just to make retailers and survey-takers happy.

At this time we inevitably look back on the year just gone and, despite me living and working in a building site, it hasn’t been a bad one. We got about a bit which was the idea when I went freelancing two years ago: in 2006 we went to Paeroa for a weekend (it rained), then Cable Bay in Northland for a few days (it poured and there was a seven hour power cut) and to Rarotonga (it rained all week).

We spent a terrific fortnight on the West Coast where people were genuinely friendly and not one made a comment about Auckland (other a guy who said something mildly sympathetic).

I went to Canada for 10 days (wonderful), the Outback for five parched days (a place that earns the overworked adjective “awesome”) and then we had that week on picturesque and historically fascinating Norfolk Island.

Okay, we might have had to add $70,000 to our mortgage because of the leaky building, but today the sun is shining, we have a new barbecue in our small garden, and my office is back in order. Auckland roads are quiet and I'm loving my city.

I have edited a book, and just about finished my second travel book (my first, Postcards From Elsewhere, won the 2006 Whitcoulls Travel Book of the Year, and is available through Public Address, a good holiday read actually). I have been invited to consider pulling together another.

These are all good things.

The Elsewhere website is rocketing along -- 1.2 million hits in the eight months I have been posting music there -- and although right now it has just some silly season stuff and my Best of Elsewhere picks in a week it will be getting “serious” again. The recipes are getting great feedback (ho ho) and thanks to all those who have sent complimentary or amusing e-mails about Windows on Elsewhere or the photo library.

In fact, thanks to everyone who wrote to me there, or made comments about postings here. All were appreciated, even the hate-mail from mad, ill-informed and vitriolic cyclists who strike me as about an inch away from being Nazis.

Anyway, feel free to check Elsewhere out here . And it costs you nothing to join the ever-expanding subscription list.

Hope you had a great Christmas and New Year. But don’t complain to me if you spent it damp and under canvas. I know more than I need to about living that way.

I’m expecting 2007 to be a good year for us. It’ll certainly be quieter and brighter without builders and tarpaulins.

I’d be dumb-shocked if it were otherwise.

So now the tumult and the shouting has died and what have we got: a discussion about who is going to fund the $385 million development of Eden Park for the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

But are there not some other questions here, and why have the once-vocal architects suddenly gone silent?

Here’s the thing: the plan for Eden Park involves a roofline that is 10-storeys high. Think about that, a 10-storey high building -- and a bloody big one at that -- in the middle of an established suburb where a three-storey building stands out?

Aside from the shade problems which have already been canvassed -- the Eden Park Trust Board initially said about 50 homes would be affected, now it seems it could be 200 -- does no one think that this is going to be a damn ugly building? Are any of the architects who wailed and trumpeted about the waterfront option stepping up to speak against this thing?

The television images which we have seen of the upgraded Eden Park have been those romantic aerial shots of the computer graphic stadium ablaze at night. It looks wonderful. Jeez, I’d vote for that.

But where is the artist’s impression from ground-level, say from Sandringham Road? Waters Road? What is this thing actually going to look like from the human viewpoint?

The Eden Park people once had a modest plan for upgrading the park, then they did as all such people do when they only talk amongst themselves, they got excited. And then they got excitable: they were fuelled by visions and enthusiasm, they decided on a “legacy” not just a rugby park.

Well, I’m not sure whether a 10-storey high stadium -- which will be kinda permanent, right? -- is such a crash-hot idea, let alone a “legacy“. A 10-storey anything in a residential suburb -- albeit one where there is a long-established venue like Eden Park -- is going to be more eyesore than legacy as these people envision it.

I look forward to hearing from the architects who were so vocal about the ugliness of that waterfront option. Does their current silence mean consent? Are they selective about what kind of brutal ugliness they can tolerate? Or are they just a bit puffed?

Maybe we could also just take a deep breath and stop presuming the $385 million upgrade as if this were a given, because that was Plan B -- actually about Plan D, the “legacy” option.

Okay, that is what the Trust Board is looking at -- but of course they would. There seems no need for the rest of us to necessarily buy that package. And after all, we’re the ones who, sooner or later, are going to have to pony up the cash.

And does anyone run an audit over how such figures were arrived at? There surely must be questions about a figure this huge.

Everyone knows that this is going to be a drain on ratepayers and anyone who says otherwise is a fibber, or deluded.

This stadium will be ugly, an intrusion, and more expensive than anyone is prepared to admit. The current resource consent hearing is starting to look like a rubber stamp because right now it seems everyone who had an opinion about the waterfront stadium has just packed up their ideas and ideologies and is thinking about Christmas.

Pity. It’ll cost us all in the end. Big time.

And aren’t you just a teeny bit curious about what advice, if any, that minister who has some kind of interest in Auckland issues -- the effectively mute Ms Tizard, isn’t it? -- has been giving her colleagues these past few months.

Hmmm.

Righto, apropos of nothing: I am off to Norfolk Island for a week so any suggestions on things to do there would be gratefully accepted. I hear it is “quiet”.
But for your listening pleasure in my absence I have posted new music here , some of it is kinda funny too.

And the bbq roast beef recipe is a beauty.