Award-winning music writer Nick Bollinger explores how New Zealand life was transformed by the '60s and '70s counterculture in his new book Jumping Sundays.
Nick Bollinger appears at the Auckland Writers Festival on 25 August and Word Christchurch on 4 September.
Photo: Supplied
Jumping Sundays takes its title from the weekly gatherings of young hippies and radicals that took place in Auckland's Albert Park in the late '60s and early '70s.
Before this, Myers Park had been the only public space in the city where people could legally gather to play music and give speeches but the crowd grew too big, Bollinger says, even reaching 10,000 people at one point.
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Born in 1958, Bollinger experienced the "tail end" of the counterculture movement, first glimpsing it via the increasingly experimental music of The Beatles and other bands singing about social change.
The Beatles were great transmitters of information and " first responders" to 1960s counterculture, he says.
Just two years earlier after visiting New Zealand "in matching suits and singing 'She Loves You'", the English pop heroes turned psychedelic with tracks like 'Tomorrow Never Knows' from the 1966 album Revolver.
"They'd gone on an incredible journey and in an incredibly short space of time. ['Tomorrow Never Knows'] is the song that sort of epitomises it."
New Zealand's '60s and '70s youth counterculture was really about defying the values of the previous generation, Bollinger says.
"It was a pretty grey place, New Zealand. In some ways, they just wanted to liven it up… but it was also questioning the morals of the previous generation.
"You had this nuclear threat hanging over the world, the potential to destroy the planet, and I think there was a lot of blame thrust on the pre-boomer generation for that. They were questioned on every front… it was a period of questioning."
It's important to note that young people were quite comfortably placed at the time, though, with jobs readily available and much easier access to university, Bollinger says.
"Their parents who had gone through the austerity of the war years, made a lot of sacrifices and wanted the best for their kids. And their kids turned around and, to a large extent, rejected what they were being offered.
"The conditions were ideal and a lot of exploration was done, both inward and outward, I think."
For Bollinger, the 1969 song 'Something in The Air', by British band Thunderclap Newman, accurately captures the era's spirit of change.
"You can't really tell whether it's bloody revolution in the streets with guns [they're singing about] – there's hints of that – but you also sense there's a kind of revolution of the mind that they're talking about, as well."
After Woodstock, many New Zealand music festivals tried to create an atmosphere of "turned-on utopia", Bollinger says, but tensions with New Zealand's prevailing "rugby-racing-beer" culture often surfaced.
The Great Ngāruawāhia Music Festival - held over three days in January 1973 - was our first really successful one, he says.
"20,000 people turned up, put up their tents in paddocks and really did have a really peaceable weekend.'"
It was a beautiful, sunny day when the alternative band BLERTA performed and their singer Corben Simpson stripped off onstage.
"He started shedding his clothes until he was completely naked… he was actually arrested and charged with indecent exposure once he left the stage.
"There was something symbolic about his act of nudity in that public environment."
Simpson's 1973 song 'Running to the Sea' could be the New Zealand theme song of the time, Bollinger says.
That same year – 1973 – a global recession was looming, though, and suddenly it wasn't quite so easy for young people to be carefree.
Nick Bollinger Photo: Robert Cross
"By the mid-70s, the first of the Baby Boomers, the people born in '45, '46, were turning 30 and a lot of them had their own families by then and were starting to work out what they had to do to survive in the world."
Bollinger, who was just 18 when he went on the road with the band Rough Justice, only realised later that the security of his own upbringing helped him keep his head.
In his desire to be one of the young people "taking a stand and trying to change the world" he had moral support from his parents, who had rebelled against their own religious upbringings.
Bollinger says he feels "fortunate and also atypical" to have parents who made sense to him.
"I was really not that interested in drugs. I had a pretty good sense of self-preservation and there were things I wanted to do, I realised.
"I was exploring the world, like any young person does, but I did feel I had this security of knowing that my family cared."
Rough Justice on their first trip to Auckland in 1977. Left to right: Steve Jessup, Peter Kennedy, Rick Bryant, Simon Page, Nick Bollinger, Martin Highland - Photo: Murray Cammick
Related:
The sounds of Aotearoa's counter-culture
Nick Bollinger reads his award-winning 2016 memoir Goneville
Nick Bollinger talks to Kim Hill about 'Goneville'
