In 1968 I was the bass guitarist (not a very good
one, I regret to say) in a Wellington band called the Regency Set. I don’t remember
much about most gigs we played, but one that stuck in my memory was a Friday
night dance in the Khandallah Town Hall where we shared the bill with an outfit
called the Supernatural Blues Band.
It was, to put it mildly, an incongruous mix. We
wore jackets and ties and played a middle-of-the-road repertoire that erred on
the side of mature. (I was the youngest in the band by several years.) We got
plenty of bookings but no one would have called our music edgy. Build Me Up, Buttercup was about as
raunchy as we got.
The Supernatural Blues Band, on the other hand, wore
jeans and sneakers and looked slightly disreputable. They were an antipodean
extension of the British blues boom – think John Mayall, Eric Clapton and Peter
Green – that was then in full cultish cry.
To use an automotive analogy, if the Regency Set were a
bourgeois Hillman Hunter, the Supernatural Blues Band were a Ford twin-spinner
with a couple of missing hubcaps and primer paint on the mudguards.
The SBB had a bunch of fans who had come only to
hear them and who regarded us, when they acknowledged us at all, with eye-rolling
disdain. Whoever selected the bands for
the night either had a mischievous sense of humour or was trying to cover the
field. But as my musician brother recently reminded me, bizarre combinations
were not uncommon back then: Jimi Hendrix once shared a bill with the Monkees,
and the Rolling Stones toured New Zealand in 1965 with Roy Orbison.
Anyway, the point of this reminiscence (trust me,
I’m getting there) is that the star of the Supernatural Blues Band – who later
simplified their name to the Supernatural – was an uncommonly talented teenage lead guitarist and
singer named John O’Connor.
I vaguely recall that O’Connor was then still at
school, or perhaps I just made that up, but his playing was masterful. He had a
natural feel for the blues and coaxed sounds out of his Jansen Beatmaster guitar
(remember, those were the days when the import substitution policy made it
difficult to acquire a Fender or Gibson, and most guitarists had to make do
with inferior, locally-made lookalikes) that made it sound damned-near
respectable.
It didn’t surprise me that he went on to enjoy an
illustrious career in music, though he never acquired the reputation he
deserved. When I next heard him play, in a steamy and crowded Wellington club
called The Cabin during the mid-1970s, he was with the fondly remembered
Wellington funk band Redeye, whose members formed the core of an elite group that
provided backing on recording sessions – you can hear them on the Mark Williams
hits Yesterday Was Just the Beginning of
My Life and It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,
among others – and the TV shows Grunt
Machine and Ready to Roll.
A Google search indicates that in the ensuing
decades, O’Connor evolved into a player of consummate versatility and
professionalism, touring and recording not only with rock and blues luminaries
(BB King, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry) but also with Kiri Te Kanawa, Ron Goodwin and
the NZSO.
But it wasn’t until last Friday night, when the
Laura Collins Back Porch Blues Band played to a full Carterton Events Centre, that I
again heard him playing live. I’d heard the band before, albeit with a
different guitarist, and knew to expect a good show, but O’Connor’s virtuoso playing
added an exhilarating new dimension to their sound. I don’t think it’s an
exaggeration to describe him as world-class.
The soulful feel evident in the Khandallah Town Hall
more than a half a century ago is still there, in spades, but it’s combined
with dazzling flair and technical skill. (It probably helps that the Jansen Beatmaster
has been replaced by a semi-hollowbodied Gibson. For the benefit of guitar
nerds, it looked like an ES 336, although I couldn’t be sure from where I was
sitting at the back of the room.)
And my point in writing this is? Simply to indulge
in a bit of self-vindication. O’Connor mightily impressed me in 1968 and it was
a real pleasure to rediscover him in 2020, still playing his heart out.
In singling him out, I certainly don’t mean to downplay the contribution from the rest of the Back Porch Blues Band (who actually play a lot of other stuff besides blues). Keyboard player Wayne
Mason’s impressive mastery of the blues idiom, and especially of New Orleans-style
rolling boogie-woogie piano, may surprise those who remember him from the Waratahs
and (going back into the mists of antiquity) the Fourmyula. George Barris on
upright bass is another respected veteran with nothing to prove, although I did
wonder whether a bass guitar would have had sharper definition and cut-through.
Pete Cogswell is unobtrusive but rock-solid on drums and the exuberant Laura
Collins does much more than just sing, although she does that with power and
grit.
All in all, a tight band of redoubtable old hands
who still get an obvious charge out of
playing together, and who communicate that energy and enthusiasm to their
audience. Even without O’Connor, they were a great band; with him, they’re even
better.
