There isn’t always time in a week for me to write a new post, but luckily I have some that I wrote years ago, that haven’t been read by too many people, that I promise to use sparingly, and that can easily be polished up, improved with further research, and made relevant to my current obsessions. This autobiographical essay combines nicely with my glam ravings on Lou Reed and the Lennon-Spector alliance, to illustrate how the glam era, and the early metal and peak prog eras, were experienced by one young fan at the End of the Earth.
By Xmas of 1973 Watchdog were already Invercargill's premier rock group. At the end-of-year Town Hall concert, they blew my 15-year old self away - long hair & afro perms, electric guitars, wearing colourful Japanese silk capes that made them look like kick-boxers (though no-one then knew what a kick-boxer was) - they looked exotic and powerful - there's something about effeminate fashions that appears macho to teenage boys - as if only a stone-cold killer could dare to dress so girlishly in public. And they sounded powerful and skillful, like nothing I'd ever heard, as they kicked off with Get It On, following it (if not on that occasion, then on succeeding ones) with The Immigrant Song, Moonage Daydream, Gypsy, Smoke on the Water, Suffragette City, Jigsaw Puzzle Blues, Fairies Wear Boots (the once, for reasons that will become clear), Ziggy Stardust, Jeepster, What Is and What Should Never Be, Jean Genie. Their covers always sounded better than the originals, which in those days were often mastered and pressed locally by people who didn't understand the sounds involved, then played on the shittiest of record players.
In the years 1974-76 I often saw Watchdog play (truth be told, I doubt I missed a set outside of pubs, where I couldn't go). Most often at the YMCA, on one of two trestle stages on the basketball court, with a good hard rock and metal covers band (Butler) or an MOR covers band (Vision) for company.* I don't know whose idea these free, and as I remember trouble-free, all-ages Friday night gigs were, but whoever organized them deserves a medal for services to music and Invercargill's teenagers.
Soon, Watchdog did something unheard of in New Zealand. They got in a gifted keyboard player with a Hammond organ - this beast of an instrument, with its eerie-to-guttural tonal range, made Gypsy, Locomotive Breath and Smoke on the Water sound even better, but more was to come. Glam was proving to be a dead end - the genius of Bolan and Bowie paving the way for Glitter, Stardust and the Chin-Chap bubblegum acts. Progressive rock was becoming where it was "at" for real music lovers; Genesis (Foxtrot), Jethro Tull (Thick as a Brick), Yes (Tales from The Topographical Oceans), ELP (Brain Salad Surgery) made Led Zep's contemporary LP Houses of the Holy seem like a top 10 single (Actually, this was the Glam-influenced second coming of Prog-Rock: the first coming wore T-shirts and jeans a la the Floyd).
I understand no-one ever recorded Watchdog's Magnum Opus. I don't know what it was called, but it evolved into an album's length of Wagnerian riffs and delicate ballads (the dynamic and emotional ambition of this music was one reason why I loved it) with lyrics derived from Tolkien. Perhaps obvious now, in post-Rings NZ, but back then the sense of being one of the few to get "it" made me love them even more. Rock music had never evoked such emotions before, only "Ride of the Valkyrie" in my parents' small collection of 45's.
Unfortunately, Watchdog's covers act had been, quite deservedly, very well loved in Invercargill. What followed was every bit as dramatic as Bob Dylan going electric ("Judas!"), the Rites of Spring or the first Dadaist gigs. Except that it seemed endlessly protracted - the same battle was refought weekend after weekend. Watchdog always did 2 sets, one with 3 piece as before, one with 4 piece playing mostly originals, but that compromise cut no mustard with the V8-Freak hybrid audience. Picture me if you must, a 17 year old virgin, long hair and greatcoat (this being the 70s, I was otherwise dressed like Eric in "That 70s Show"), standing near the stage, wherever I could see and hear best, under sliding and rotating psychedelic oil slides beamed through hazy darkness to the wall beside the basketball hoops (you could smell the heated oil).** Moments of delicate beauty were torn with whistles, jeers, and cries of "Smoke on the Water!", despite the fact that they could always be relied on to evolve into moments of rock brutality to leave "Smoke on the Water" and its musically illiterate riff dead on the water, choking on cordite fumes.***
In 1970's Invercargill, the hegemony of Rugby, Racing and Beer had stretched a little to include the novelty of Glam, but felt threatened by the "progress" intended by Prog-Rock. As long as bisexuality was a camp drag act it could be treated as a joke, but Watchdog's keyboard player, who sang most of the new songs, was threateningly slight, his voice and manner effete, his lyrics fey, his dress and appearance genuinely effeminate. The whole package challenged the teenage boys who had learned to love Watchdog, and the band turned their hostility back on them, subtly; was the Tolkienist convention that allowed songs about fairies being subtly exploited, and if so was it being used to express sexuality, or just to mock an increasingly intolerant audience?
Watchdog, it is obvious to me now, were fighting in the Culture Wars - but that battle did not become overt until the 1981 Springbok Tour (which, in the book of many people, had less to do with oppression of SA’s Blacks than oppression of NZ's young adults). Watchdog were ahead of their time, and were also the very best exemplar of it. Nothing I've heard since beats them. Today's prog-rockers lack their discipline and sense of drama. Watchdog taught me some of the most important musical lessons, very early on: how well-earned popularity can become a curse, impeding development; how intolerant those who love you best can become; the importance of keeping a fickle audience in the passenger seat; that a true original can't help but burn bridges; most importantly, that a band who find their identity can stand together, alone against the world. Watchdog showed me an example of incredible courage (as this was Invercargill, it was physical courage, not just artistic), of unmistakable professionalism at all times (right down to their various atonal deconstructions of Smoke on the Water at their farewell performance), and, as they went back to their day jobs, their work and genius unrewarded, they showed me the true path of my future calling. All Hail: Watchdog!
Watchdog were: Tom Svehla (guitar/vocals), Tony Bennett (bass), Danny Bennett (drums), Peter O’Neill (organ/vocals). The last time I saw them, in 1976, they had a new guitarist with a guitar synth (a little white plastic table thing on a futuristic stand) and played a cover of Steely Dan’s Night By Night. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Watchdog reformed in 2015 for one show, which I will always regret missing.
footnote parade
* Butler were an all-Māori band originally from Rotorua who played all around New Zealand. The rhythm guitarist wore a black leather jumpsuit, played a black Gibson SG, wore a silver crucifix, and never smiled. They were at the serious metal end of the spectrum; I remember them playing Paranoid and Nantucket Sleigh Ride. At the other end, Vision were the house band from the White House Tavern in Lorneville, had both male and female singers, and played the more rocking pop hits like Long Train Running, Proud Mary and Something’s Burning.
** When the music neared a climax, a strobe light might be turned on, and indeed these events were called “strobes”, as in “are you going to the strobe tonight?”
** The phrase "heavy metal" had often been used by journalists to describe the battleships - the heavy armour and the big guns - of the worlds' great navies, long before the term (as used in the Periodic Table of the Elements) was used by Burroughs, or the words were applied to rock music by pseud rock critics who wanted readers to know they read Burroughs. This is the real meaning of "smoke and lightening/heavy metal thunder... fire all of my guns at once” in Born to be Wild. The first heavy metal bands had grown up reading the pulp literature of the world wars, and as boys had watched "Victory at Sea" on T.V.
Algorithmic tipster trip: “Raven Nor The Spirit” by Jex Thoth
that was wonderful George. I wonder if you remember Invercargill band Pretty Wicked Head & The Desparate Men ?
Ha, that sounds like them. The main man was an incredible singer songwriter with a wilful personality and a taste for hard drugs. He came on like Elvis crossed with George Clinton and he was a natural performer. Check out their song Monkey if you are able. “I met a man with wings on his shoulders, as cold as a meat locker chilling a beast , he showed me a scar where a woman had shot him, made love to my woman like she was his feast”