A Southern rock music pioneer
Back in 1990, as New Zealand prepared to host the Commonwealth Games, Toyota New Zealand decided to take on the Kiwi motoring press in a track and field contest at Auckland’s Mt Smart Stadium.
The occasion started well enough for Toyota, with skinny and long-legged marketing types cleaning out the journalists in most of the track events. But then it was time for field - and into the limelight strode a big bugger from Christchurch called Dave Moore.
He was a Welshman who’d recently taken over the motoring role at The Press, and nobody knew much about him. They soon did. Turned out that in his younger days he had been a nationally ranked athlete in the UK, and he proceeded to win every event that involved throwing something – discus, javelin, and shot.
As a result, the media won that fun contest between the motor industry and the journos, with Dave the larger-than-life character at the centre of it all.
For the next 27 years, Dave remained larger than life, at the very epicentre of New Zealand motoring journalism – a man with encyclopaedic knowledge, boundless enthusiasm for motoring, strongly opinionated, and playing a crucial role in establishing the credibility and news value this form of journalism enjoys today.
But on Wednesday, May 31, tragedy struck – Dave died suddenly while attending a new vehicle launch in Central Otago.
I wasn’t there when Dave died. He’d been down in Wanaka attending the introduction of a new Audi. He’d been in top form at dinner the previous evening, in his usual fashion regaling everyone with his opinions on the state of the motor industry and the vehicle the subject of the launch.
The plan had to drive the new Audi at a nearby racetrack. He’d just ordered breakfast when he suddenly collapsed, and could not be revived. Audi NZ promptly cancelled the rest of the event.
The news quickly reverberated around New Zealand. I was in Auckland with another group of writers at another motoring event, when Dave’s death became known. Then the telephone calls began, mostly from the motor industry itself. Was this true? Had the legendary Dave Moore died? The tributes stared flowing.
The New Zealand motor industry has just lost a legend, was how Motor Industry Association chairman Glynn Tulloch put it. Nice words, those. They certainly eased the way for one of my most difficult assignments – to prepare an obituary on my old mate Dave, who had been a close friend and a part of my journalism life for close to three decades.
‘‘Dave’s motoring knowledge was encyclopaedic,’’ said Tulloch, who is group general manager of European Motor Distributors. ’’He also had a passion for good journalism and correct grammar. I knew that whenever Dave was around, I had to make sure my grammar and punctuation were correct.’’
Motor industry veteran John Manley, the managing director of Nissan NZ and a former Motor Indust4ry Association president, fondly remembers events attended by Dave Moore and other long-time motoring journalists such as Brian Cowan of Christchurch and Auckland’s Allan Dick and Al Sloane.
‘‘Those guys used to regale you with outstanding tales,’’ he recalls. ‘‘But I always also admired Dave for his totally unbiased motor vehicle reviews. They were always reasoned and well thought out – whether he thought the product to be good or otherwise.’’
Welsh-born Dave Moore emigrated to New Zealand in the late 1970s and was employed as a design artist and copywriter with the Christchurch Star, and at that stage he began to move into motoring journalism – writing about cars on a freelance basis for the Star and local community newspapers.
The 1986, he was appointed creative director at The Press, where he was heavily involved in the newspaper’s editorial redesign in 1988. A year later he assumed responsibility for motoring, and was formally appointed motoring editor in 1992. This eventually morphed into group motoring editor with Fairfax New Zealand, a role he maintained until he left in 2015.
Dave’s professional excellence resulted in his winning numerous motoring journalism awards – he won 15 of the old Qantas Awards and was a finalist three times, he won 27 so-called Henry Awards that were sponsored by Ford, and he twice won the journalism category in the AA Automotive Excellence Awards.
Dave was very proud of his achievements – almost as proud as he was of his family. He’d met his Christchurch-born wife Patricia while she was doing her OE in the United Kingdom, and he loved her to bits. He was also very proud of his children, son Sam and daughter Billie, who are forging high-profile careers in their chosen professions.
Gregg Allman, whose soulful vocals made the Allman Brothers Band one of rock’s top acts in the 1970s with songs such as Whipping Post, in a career also marred by tragedy and drug abuse, died last month at the age of 69, his official website said.
‘‘It is with deep sadness that we announce that Gregg Allman, a founding member of The Allman Brothers Band, passed away peacefully at his home in Savannah, Georgia,’’ it said.
Drummer Butch Trucks, another founding member of the band, died aged 60 on January 24. The Allman Brothers Band was started in Macon, Georgia, US, in the late 1960s by Allman and older brother Duane, who became the band’s guiding force and one of rock’s most revered guitarists before he was killed in a motorcycle accident at age 24.
In its heyday, the band was a staple on radio stations and released albums ranked among the best in rock history.
Allman was the band’s lead singer, keyboardist and a key songwriter as it put out a string of hits. He wrote several of them - It’s Not My Cross to Bear, Midnight Rider, Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More and Melissa - while others were renditions of old blues songs, including One Way Out and Statesboro Blues.
The band was an early progenitor of what became known as Southern rock. In addition to blues, the band also was known for its crystal guitar harmonies between Duane and Dickey Betts, jazz influences and a free-wheeling approach that sometimes led to 20-minute songs. Rising above it all was Allman’s voice.
‘‘My southern-rock heart is breaking,’’ music star Melissa Etheridge said on her Twitter feed.
Country music great Charlie Daniels said on Twitter: ‘‘Gregg Allman had a feeling for the blues very few ever have, hard to believe that magnificent voice is stilled forever.’’
Allman and Duane spent their early childhood in their birthplace, Nashville, Tennessee, listening to a blues radio station.
After their father was killed by a hitch-hiker, their mother moved them to Daytona Beach, Florida.
The brothers showed little interest in school but were passionate about music and often fought over the $20 guitar that Allman had bought at Sears.
‘‘Duane and I caught it like an illness,’’ Allman told Southern Living magazine.
‘‘We didn’t eat, we didn’t sleep, we didn’t think about anything except music.’’
As teenagers, they began playing a series of bands, including racially integrated ones, a rarity at the time in the South. When they first went on the road in 1965 with a band named the Allman Joys, the name was borrowed from a popular candy bar called Almond Joy.
After unfulfilling experiences with the music industry in Los Angeles, Allman and Duane ended up in Macon, Georgia - hometown of Little Richard and Otis Redding - in 1969 and brought together the Allman Brothers Band.
They were a scruffy-looking, denim-clad assemblage and Allman stood out with his long golden-blond hair. The band members developed a family-style relationship, bonding while hanging out at Macon’s Rose Hill cemetery, with Duane in what Allman said was the father role.
The band’s first three albums - including At Fillmore East, considered a ground-breaking live recording at the time - made them stars but, shortly after that, Duane had his fatal crash in 1971.
The rest of the band was stricken but carried on and put out another well-regarded album, Eat a Peach. Then 13 months after Duane’s death, bassist Berry Oakley was killed in a similar motorcycle accident in Macon only a few blocks from where Duane had been killed. They were buried next to each other in Rose Hill.
The band carried on but fell into the trap of rock star excess. Drugs became so prevalent that the first time they entered their new private plane, they were greeted by the words ‘‘Welcome Allman Brothers’’ spelled out in cocaine on the bar, Allman wrote in his memoir, My Cross to Bear.
By the mid-1970s the cloud over the band grew darker as Allman became a heroin addict and Betts assumed leadership. When Allman’s valet, Scooter Herring, was arrested for drug dealing in 1976, Allman, then married to singer-actress Cher, accepted immunity and testified to a grand jury against the man who acquired drugs for him.
What had once been a familial group split up over what was seen as Allman’s betrayal. He would go on to a solo career, as well as taking part in reformations of the Allman Brothers before bringing down the curtain on the group in 2014 with a four-hour show in New York that included original members Trucks and Jai Johanny Johanson.
The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 but Allman said in his book that he was too drunk to enjoy it.