Passing the acid test
They only ever made one album, took ‘‘a boat-load’’ of LSD and left their Auckland band house a smoking ruin. Grant Smithies ponders the wild career of 70s Auckland acid rock band, Space Farm.
It was downright biblical. There was so much rain, you might reasonably expect a bearded bloke to float past in an ark and start gathering animals, two-by-two.
‘‘We got really smashed by those floods,’’ recalls New Zealand musician Billy Williams, who has lived in Australia’s Northern Rivers region for decades now, up where New South Wales fades into Queensland.
‘‘It was horrendous! The flood waters went right through this house. Some master tapes I recorded for the BBC in England are somewhere up in the Tweed River now…’’
But Williams survived. He’s back in his fixed-up home, and sounds pretty philosophical about what is, after all, just the latest episode in a life with no shortage of drama.
‘‘I can’t complain. These things happen. All my life, I’ve been fortunate, but I always found that the harder I worked, the more fortunate I got.’’
You may not have heard of Billy Williams, but take my word for it: this man is a legend. Now 66, he was a member of several key New Zealand bands of the 70s, among them Space Farm, Ticket and Blerta.
Space Farm only ever released one album, a self-titled 1972 LP with an eye-frying psychedelic cover, the music fuelled by industrial strength LSD.
It’s an album much sought by overseas collectors: an original LP copy was auctioned online recently with a starting price of $2000.
Reissued last month on vinyl, the album captured a wild time in New Zealand’s cultural history. You listen to it and you think… Really? We sounded like this in the early 70s?
The music is raw, reckless, exciting, with searing guitar and lyrics about gypsies, spaceships and, you know… love, man.
And the story behind the album involves mad shenanigans galore, including sudden religious conversions, a disastrous bonfire of books, a flash house reduced to smoking ruins in Herne Bay.
‘‘Yeah, that record’s part of history, alright,’’ says Williams, who’s delighted about the reissue. ‘‘It really captures what was going back then, in that things were pretty wild and free. Unfortunately, New Zealand seems a lot more conservative these days.’’
He pauses, as if considering how honest he should be with some snooping journalist. And then he decides, well, it was 45 years ago, so what the hell?
‘‘To be honest, we were pretty outof-it, man. We took a boat-load of acid, on a really regular basis. That record was the sound of us trying to share a good thing. We recorded the whole thing in just a few days. It was a s...load of fun doing it, um… apparently’’
Apparently? That’s hilarious. Williams admits he barely recalls the recording sessions.
‘‘I just remember it was very quick, because Eldred (Stebbing, studio owner) was cracking the whip. He was like a headmaster; there was no mucking around. He was a businessman, keen to record us because we were from the upper echelons of New Zealand musicians at that time, and he was counting on the underground subculture around us to buy the album.’’
Born in Mount Maunganui, Space Farm’s singer-guitarist Harvey Mann was a veteran of earlier blues-rock bands, The Underdogs and The Brew.
So skilful was his plank-spankery that local fans appropriated the famous ‘‘Clapton is God’’ graffiti of 1960s London in his honour, painting ‘‘Mann is God’’ on walls around Auckland.
This home-grown guitar hero formed Space Farm in 1971 with Glen Absolum on drums and Williams playing bass. Part-timer Bob Gillett chimed in here and there on saxophone.
Where most bands of the day tried to faithfully recreate their records on stage, Space Farm favoured extended improvisation under a freaky psychedelic light show.
‘‘When we played live, the place was packed with young people embracing change,’’ recalls Williams. ‘‘They wanted to get free of the shackles of conventional living and break away from the expectations of their parents, and the music we were making helped them feel like they were doing that.’’
The burgeoning underground subculture of the early 70s is well described in new liner notes written for the reissue by journalist, Nick Bollinger.
Entitled Space Farm: An Experiment in Chemistry, Bollinger’s essay conjures the splendid image of a series of unstable compounds thrown together in a beaker then heated up with the Bunsen Burner of rock’n’roll.
Beer versus LSD. Long-haired hippies versus mainstream straights. Rugby versus rock. Young versus old. A half-arsed national Christianity versus drug-assisted dabbling in Buddhism, Hare Krishna, astrology.
‘‘It was a time of change and experimentation,’’ writes Bollinger. ‘‘Not just in music, but also in society, as young New Zealanders in growing numbers began to question the prevailing culture of rugby, racing and beer, the country’s involvement in foreign wars, and the values of earlier generations. Some sought political change, others looked for alternatives in drugs and spiritual beliefs. For such seekers, Space Farm provided the ideal soundtrack.’’
Listening to that Space Farm record now, 45 years later, it’s quite a trip.
Inspired by Jimi Hendrix, Chinese opera, Indian classical music and the blues, Mann wails out his cosmic lyrics and sprays gleaming riffs over every available surface, the whole shebang driven forward by Absolum’s crisp drums and fat basslines from Williams.
The sound pans violently from speaker to speaker, an effect much loved by acid-rock bands of the day. A phaser removes then re-applies high frequencies as if the guitar is moving through a series of railway tunnels strapped to a train. A distortion unit covers extended lead breaks in a layer of furry fuzz.
The lyrics are very much of their era: inner-outer space travel, expanded consciousness, the need to ‘‘harmonise your mind’’ and so forth. You know… freedom, man.
But the playing is raw and vital enough for you to overlook the hippie lyrics. The singing, however, was another story for studio owner-Zodiac Records boss Stebbing.
On first release, the record didn’t sell as well as he’d hoped, which Stebbing blamed on Mann’s rough and ready vocal performances.
Just a few months after the album was released, Stebbing hired former Underdogs singer Murray Grindlay to re-record all the vocals, and a second version was released with ‘‘better singing’’.
But there’s something about the first version, with its unseemly hollaring and yelping, that better suits the album’s reckless spirit. I’m pleased to report that this reissue reverts to Mann’s original vocals.
‘‘There’s a lot of raw honesty in Harvey’s voice,’’ reckons Williams. ‘‘I mean, Harvey never claimed he could sing, but Bob Dylan can’t sing either, and Hendrix just monologued his lyrics, too. Harvey came from that school where it was more about the feeling than the notes being in tune.’’
‘‘When we played live, the place was packed with young people embracing change. They wanted to get free of the shackles of conventional living...’’ Billy Williams
The band took it as ‘‘a bit of an insult’’ when Stebbing overdubbed the vocal, but they had no power to stop it. ‘‘In those days, the record company called the shots, but the second vocals just didn’t have the same power to them, eh?’’
Agreed. And then, quite suddenly, the band was no more. After setting alight the Auckland live scene for a couple of years and getting a little of the madness of the era down on tape, Space Farm called it quits in 1973.
God intervened, you might say. Space Farm followed a familiar 60s/70s musical trajectory, the members graduating from psychedelic drugs to mystical Eastern religion.
Bollinger’s liner notes cite an Auckland newspaper report from May 1972: ‘‘Followers of the Hare Krishna cult, three of them converts from the Auckland pop group Space Farm, baffled Queen St shoppers yesterday by giving away fruit and flowers.’’
There’s a faded photo of Absolum and Mann, both shaven-headed, strumming blissfully on an acoustic guitar and tapping dinky little temple finger-cymbals.
‘‘Yeah, well, I wasn’t part of all that, really,’’ protests Williams. ‘‘Harvey and Glen said, ‘hey, we’re moving into the Hare Krishna temple’, but I still had too many earthly desires to take that spiritual path. I wanted to keep making loud rock music rather than sit around playing a sitar in a temple. So they went their way and I went mine.’’
Absolom and Mann would later form an even more cosmic Krishnaflavoured band called Living Force. Williams went on to Ticket, Blerta and a host of other bands in Australia and the United Kingdom.
These days, quite by chance, Mann lives just up the road from Williams in Queensland. They bump into each other from time to time and have a yarn about the old days.
‘‘You get a really good understanding of those times from listening to that record, eh. Our lyrics were pretty flowery, but there’s a lot of energy there, and it captures a side of New Zealand that’s gone now, when a lot of young people were trying to break away from their parents’ values. They weren’t very tolerant times, really. When Glen and Harvey started chanting in the street, older people would spit at them and tell them they belonged in a mental institution! Space Farm was fighting that sort of rigid thinking.’’
Williams was only a teenager when the record was made; a carefree young dude, loose as a goose.
‘‘We all lived together in a band house, and if people came around to visit us, they’d have to wait until we’d finished playing, or come back later. We took our music very seriously.’’
They were, he admits, a tad irresponsible. There was the little matter of burning down the band house in Herne Bay after an ill-advised book bonfire.
‘‘That was f ...... funny, actually. We took some acid one night, and all around the house were all these books on Krishna and Buddha and different ways to find your spiritual path. Then Harvey said ‘Ah, it’s all rubbish! We don’t need all these bl….y books!’ ‘‘
Mann, Absolom and Williams raced around wildly, collecting up books and piling them into the fireplace.
‘‘We tried to light them, but they wouldn’t catch fire, so we went up to the gas station up the road to get some petrol. We brought it back and splashed it into the fireplace. By this time, the acid was really coming on strong. Anyway, Glen lit a match and threw it in, and the whole fireplace went – WOOOF!’’
Williams is cracking up as he recalls the drug-fuelled mayhem.
‘‘This massive flame billowed up the wall, along the ceiling and caught the curtains on fire. Next minute the lounge suite’s away, and we’re completely freaking out! We ran around with buckets and kitchen pots of water and put it all out, but the adrenaline really pushed up the effects of the acid, so we piled into the van and drove up into the Waitakere Hills for this glorious full-moon night, and got on with the trip up there.’’
The band arrived back in the city around six the next morning. There were a couple of fire engines in their street. Turns out they’d made a crap job of putting out the fire.
‘‘We ran in and grabbed our instruments. The guitar cases were all blistered from the heat but the guitars themselves were OK. We got out of there and told the real estate people the next day that we’d accidentally burnt the place down.’’
Thinking back on it now, 45 years later, in his recently flooded house in northern New South Wales, Williams is amazed they all survived those wild years.
‘‘We were a bit freaked out by that incident, to be honest. We decided we should all become a bit more responsible after that incident, and we were, too. We made sure our next band house had no fireplace.’’