Bard to the Bone

Rip It Up, Issue 101, 1 December 1985, Page 14

Bard to the Bone

Russell Brown

Sam Hunt Raps Lyrically . . .

Sam Hunt smiles and lau£ fh He has a classic w' 1 ' , complexion. c **' ve tha 7 th y e s u * V - dVe that the capillaries, hav, .?.g long since pushed their way to the surface, have surrendered to circumstance and gracefully dried up, leathery and permanent. Sam Hunt looks like he couldn’t cut himself shaving vvith a machete. The frontage of Auckland's Travelodge is in no way like the frontage of Sam Hunt. Smooth, dark, impenetrable glass walls. Two single swinging doors flank a big revolving affair that doesn’t i entirely trustworthy it’s a kin* Grieap of’faith stepping into someth y OU cant see the other side of.

Leap I does; and after a buzz from the reception desk, Sam is waiting outside the lift on the eighth floor. From the moment of handshake he’s off and talking. Back at his room the tape recorder is on for five minutes before he pauses and asks; "Did you ask a question there?" I hadn't; hadn't had to.

"What would you like, a coffee ...?" he offers. "How about a little dash of whisky in it? I always find that helps."

He fetches a miniature bottle of Teachers' and unscrews the cap. And why not? After all, it’s five minutes past eleven ... Hunt has been in Auckland for two days promoting his new book of poems, Approaches To Paremata (he lives at Parernata on the Pauatahanui estuary, north of Wellington). Promotion essentially means doing interviews with as many people as possible. "I said to the woman down below, 'l’ve got a few interviews on today,' and she said 'Oh, are you going for a job?’ AUHAHAHAHA!” the laugh is startlingly long and loud, like it’s been crouched away for a few hours waiting for a burst. Brian Eno said the problem with doing interviews was that they gave the impression that you spent all your time thinking about yourself. "Well, in this case I do anyway, so it’s alright... and I'm sure if Brian Eno was being honest he'd say the same.”

Do you enjoy the promo side of things? Oh yeah, we have a good time. It’s not done too stupidly tune. When you put out a book, it's like putting out a record, it’s a time when things come together, a bit like christening a baby and I think christenings are important. It’s the same with touring as I approach my middle years, I'm lucky in that I can travel New Zealand at the pace I want to travel and I don’t have to work every night. I don’t like just going into a town, doing a

show and fucking off the next morning, because you miss out on the whole thing of what New Zealand's about. It’s about small towns New Zealand is a small town. People know each other that incredible intimacy. Sometimes it can get claustrophobic, but not for long. You can always get out into the hills I spend more and more of my time not necessarily alone, but with access to that kind of solitude. One tends not to go into the claustrophobic literary or intensely showbiz sort of thing. I keep clear of that because I've seen too many people go down the tube in the old business. It’s bloody sad, because people start believing in the bullshit. And that’s not what it’s all about.

Are you wary of becoming an industry "personality”? Oh yeah ... imagine doing a television series or something, that'd be the kiss of fucking death. I could no more do that than ... um ... um ... I was going to say fuck Muldoon! I had a strange dream about Muldoon a few nights ago ... in the dream he had long, very distinguished silver grey hair. And I said to hinY'You’re looking very distinguished," and he said “I’ve always told you I’m dis-

tinguisheh > ',' m an eider statesman." At which I woke up thinking fuck, I don’t want to be an elder statesman!

You and Gary McCormick seem to have parted ways in that respect he’s on TV and radio and so on. Oh yeah, we all move on ... Gary and I worked together and had many good times on the road and sometimes I miss those times. I think when we did what we did together it was a very supportive time for us both. He was incredibly supportive of me, because although I’ve got the road in my blood, I’d been off the road for two or three years after my son Tom was born. So he’s doing different things now and we’re very good friends. I only wish I saw more of him but he’s up in Auckland most of the time. But he is operating in a world which for my purposes I would tend to keep out of. I do the odd television thing, but only on a one-off basis. I mean I see enough of myself with old McGadsby or whatever his name is! I’m sick of it'

Your current press release puts it well when it says you “balance a very public and very personal life.” But you’re in the unusual position of having your private life fuel your public life. Which is fine. And to some extent the public life sometimes encroaches on the private but you sort that out pretty quickly. Some people have been saying there’s a lot of poems about loss in the book but over the last couple of years in terms of things close to me, they couldn’t have been much happier. I’ve got a woman I love

very much,, I've got a son I love very much and I’ve got an old dog I love very much, he's getting pretty old, but shit he’s good, Minstrel. He’s 15 isn’t he? 15, yes. He’s had quite a few 15th birthdays now though. He’s stopped notching it up on the cabbage tree. But to continue, it’s something that I know people have wondered about for themselves. I mean, with so many bluesmen there are a lot of good times, but one tends not to write about these much. Maybe the best songs are about a certain sense of distancing or loss ... but it’s not always loss sometimes it’s telling someone to fuck off.

What’s the effect of living these experiences once, and then again every time you read the poem? It’s good for me. A lot of people seem to write poems and put them in books and the poem sort of stops there and dies. Whereas with my poems, I’m like the parent who didn’t send the kids off to boarding school even though the pressure was on to do so. So my kids are still around me, waking me up and disturbing me and making my life an absolute misery, AUHAHAHAO And a fair amount of delight. So the poems are with me, they’re part of my entourage... or I’m part of their entourage. I don’t like the idea of boarding schools I mean, I know often there’s no choice, for people in the country and things like that. But I don’t like the idea of that. For me, parenthood is a mystery, a fuckin' magical mystery tour. It astonishes me all the time and I love it.

Oddly enough, in this book there’s not really a poem directly about Tom, but he’s always there. I think there’s a couple of poems about Sarah, but if you wrote directly from life they’d be almost nine-tenths in a way. But it doesn’t always work out like that. It’s what I was trying to explain to somebody yesterday, who didn’t quite understand it, this question of irony, y’know, that you write from different angles. You’re not always stating the obvious thing there. Some people don’t understand that. They accuse Keith Richards of being a certain thing because he’s written a certain Stones song, and as he’s pointed out, that’s only part of him over there, it’s come from there. People read things literally, two-dimensional people and they fuck you round, they fuck poetry around too.

So what’s it like when someone comes in and starts analysing your poems? Like the child psychologist coming in? Yeah. It is interesting though. What I’m interested in is the person who makes the poem happen, tells the poem but that sort of thing, a good poem will stand up to it. And the other thing is, every person responds in a different way to a poern. That’s why I’m being very careful with this

thing we're trying around home, experimenting with videos of a few poems, because I don't want to put a barbed wire fence around it. I’d scrap the idea of videos if that started to happen. But the analysis stuff, good analysis is exciting and I know poems I’ve read about and gotten lots of other insights into, but that can never for me equal the first rush of a poem; the poetic rush in this case, for all our smack friends out there

... but very similar, not unlike the rush of smack, or the rush of orgasm. And nothing can equal that, not all the analysis in the world.

You’re often labelled as anti-academic ... Yes, but I'm not. What I’m anti is when poems aren't given the space that they demand. Because poetry for a long time seemed to almost be the preserve of the educated few up on the hill. When Dylan brought out Highway 61 Revisited, in 1966, for me at a party on the North Shore, lying drunk in a house on Castor Bay beach and listening to the songs pounding out, suddenly there was this poetry. And for me, that day a few bookcases fell off the wall. And poems tumbled out, all over the place. I knew from my own background that poems didn't have to be that way, but here was something that other people were listentngto too. Then a few years went by and Van Morrison left Them and started working on his own and coming up with songs like ‘Madame George’ and ‘T.B. Sheets’ and, again, faaark. And then in later years you come across things like Richard Strauss’s four last songs, which have always been around, but who ever thought of the poetry of them? And I think that the day Highway 61 came out university English departments experienced a major fuckin’ earth tremor, because they were threatened. Poetry was coming back on the streets it had withdrawn 400 years ago when they invented printing presses and poetry entered the universities. And it wasn't taught in schools, because it was an elitist thing, the preserve of elocution teachers and other cocksuckers like that... don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying all speech teachers are cocksuckers, but that general sort of cocksucking mentality. But we’re getting away from the question. So it's good that despite the hangover of 400 years of believing that poetry belongs in books, poetry is out on the streets. And people who live out on the streets have always known that and I’ve always known that, but it’s good that it’s happening in a big way. New Zealand musicians are starting to drift back to New Zealand I know of quite a few good, big names, like Fane Flaws in Sydney. I think it’s a good place. I saw on TV the other day Paul Reeves being invested as Governor

General and I thought, shit, this is a different day from when some boring arsehole like Keith Holyoake was up there pounding on a kauri stump calling himself a statesman. So the state of the nation's okay by you? Yeah, I think New Zealand’s in a very healthy state of mind. I mean, I know a lot of people have got a lot of problems like the farmers; no subsidies any more boys, we’re just going to pay you what it’s worth. I’ve always wanted to get paid what it was worth for what I do. I mean, you can’t expect subsidies. I’ve never wanted grants had a few rewards and they’ve been gratefully received, but I’ve never been one of those peo-

pie who feels that the world owes me a living. And a lot of writers do think that. So they have these scholarships and things like that, but I’ve always worked more on a street level, I don’t want awards like that. I’m lucky to have both sides a lot of writers are very private people who obviously couldn’t go out and tell their stuff. But I’m able to do that, I’m very fortunate. I can sing for my supper and make sure I get my supper when I’ve sung.

I talked to Tim Shadbolt a couple of months ago and he was quite frank that in today’s economic climate he wouldn’t have been afforded the luxury of being a young radical. Do you think you’d still be a young poet if you were starting out today? "Yes I do, in my case. Obviously that applies to myself, but to quote that famous John Clare line, a poet is born, not made. Whereas you could say an activist is made rather than born, in the sense that he or she reacts to a poltical issue of the day or something like that. But with the parents that I had and the same sort of background, I suspect

I’d have done what I do. It would obviously be shaped by the place I was in and the sort of society and so on. So, yes, poets are born not made. That’s not necessarily saying I’m a poet let other people decide about that. I’ll just continue to write poems that’s my job. How do you feel about the fact that most people know a lot more of you and Minstrel than they ever will of one of your poems? If the image or the impression of the person takes over... what the hell. And the other thing is that a lot of poems or odd lines from poems do stick in peoples’ heads. And I get this all the time, it’s one of the most genuine bits of feedback that I do get. Someone comes up it happened yesterday evening, this woman who said she doesn't know any poems apart from the one I wrote for a barmaid in Wellington, called 'Words For Tina! And she’s got it on the wall at home. And she asked how was Minstrel, but she knew a few lines. Obviously not everybody’s like that, but what the hell, if Minstrel and I occupy a certain space in peoples’ imaginings that’s fine. For example, Spencer Russell, the manager of the Reserve Bank. I don’t know anything about the economy, but he's got a certain style, which I admire ...

He’s got a great name ... He has got a great name, you can say it both ways round. You can say 'Hunt Sam’ but it’s not quite the same.

We talked about irony before do you ever indulge in self-parody? No. I’ve got enough people doing it for me! Ahahahaha! Every New Zealand town has a Sam Hunt impersonator I can tell you, I’ve been there, I’ve listened to them! Some of them are good. The worst was in Twizel. The other nice thing is there’s a Sam Hunt in the Chathams he’d be well worth an interview. He’ll tell you about fishing and a few other things. I met him a few years back, when I went to the Chathams. When I got back, on the front page of the Dominion, there was a photo of both of us beaming and the camera and the caption was “Sam Hunt beside himself.’’ Muldoon went over on the same plane and he only made page seven! Would you agree that at present there doesn’t seem to be an identifiable youth literature not in the sense there has been at times in the past?

No, I suppose there’s not really is there? But then again, I think they’ll look back on 1985 and say some shit-hot things were happening. One of the things Karyn Hay gave me for Christmas last year and I really love them, the Verlaines’ 10 O'Clock in the Afternoon ... good title too really fucks up those two-dimensional thinkers. I think

it’s often hard to appreciate what’s going on at the time. Say a poet's producing work and he may have a bad patch and people say “Oh, he’s gone to the fuckin’ dogs, that one.” Baxter was a good example of that at the time a lot of Baxter’s work was coming out he was getting a lot of criticism, some real knife jobs from critics. But then when his work was able to be looked at in retrospect, you could pick up his collected poems and flick from there to there and that may be 20 years difference between those two poems and all the deadwood’s been cut out by that time, so it’s often hard at this time. But I love that’s happening in this country, in the music, in the poetry and in the politics.

I know that at the Verlaines’ end of things a lot of younger bands do seem to have taken on a real New Zealand identity. Yeah, well it’s come upon them. They're not striving for it. They’re not doing this boring cry of the New Zealand poets of the 1930 s well sometimes it was great, but that thing of looking for the New Zealand identity, I mean, that’s emerged, you don’t try and put that on yourself, it’s like trying to make a statesman of yourself, or a poet of yourself. And I think the New Zealand identity is so strong I feel very strongly when I’m out of the country. Actually, I remember Denis Glover, not long before he died, he was made a guest of the Soviet Union. And he’d always been pretty critical of what was going on, sarcastic old bastard, but he was away from New Zealand for two months in Russia, flew back via Singapore, got on the Air NZ plane at Singapore and some New Zealander on the plane said "Gooday mate,” and Denis said he burst into tears. He was missing that thing that’s a country’s identity. That's not meant in a nationalistic sense like marching in goose-step or something. But there’s so much good stuff happening here Keri Hulme is an obvious example. Look at Janet Frame, she’s producing another novel every year and they’re just getting better and better she’s writing at white heat. And I’m awestruck that I’m around when these great things are written.

Sam Hunt is a doddle of an interview; loquacious and friendly, if not quite succint. Not so much acting the part as simply being it. The oratory hangs between adressing attention to the questions and charging off on favourite tangents. He’d been holding court at the public bar down the road the previous night, now he was off to do a radio interview. Me, I headed for the local to scribble out an intro for the story and wash the words down for good measure. Fair made m’day ...

11 . . . I think that the day Bob Dylan's Highway 61 came out university English departments experienced a major earth tremor, because they were threatened. Poetry was coming back on the streets. . . "

" . . . I think they'll look back on 1985 and say

some shit-hot things were happening. One of the things Karyn Hay gave me for Christmas last year and I really love them, the

Verlaines' 10 O'Clock in the Afternoon ."