Sam Hunt: Off the Road

1

THE START OF ANOTHER ADVENTURE

I spot Sam, parked up outside the Four Square in the main street of Kaiwaka in his dusty old gold Mazda 626. The car and its famous contents would be almost invisible in this small-town Northland spot were it not for the bold racing-style ‘04’ painted on the Mazda’s front doors. Sam doesn’t get out to greet me as he sees my car approaching, but pulls out of his park and turns onto a backroad out of town, me on his tail as he boots his elderly car up into low hills and rolling farmland.

Each time, meeting up with my old friend still feels like the start of another adventure, probably because usually it is. Anything could happen and often it does.

Sam cuts a sharp right off the road, whips through a farm gate and on we drive for a good stretch, up and down over rolling land, eventually pulling up outside a farmhouse where Sam unravels from his car and strides over to greet me with a hug. As always, it’s like grappling with a tall, amiable bear.

Five hours, a longish lunch and a certain amount of fun later, we’re twenty kilometres away, upstairs in Sam’s house – which is a house that’s all upstairs anyway – and we are very well oiled indeed, discussing the meaning of life, which we both reckon we’ve been close to discovering, though never quite at the same time.

Around thirty years ago, I wrote a book about Sam, who was then, as the saying goes, in his prime, as was I, four years younger, which is still the situation. The book was called Angel Gear: On the road with Sam Hunt and it was the start of something that hasn’t ended yet. Well, not just yet, though the road bit might be over. For Sam anyway.

We’re talking about doing a new book, some sort of follow-up to that other one, based on a series of conversations with a little more focus than our usual conversations. And, as is the way with these things, the moment you talk about writing a book is the moment the book starts. There are no edges. It’s all joined up. It’s all the same song.

Sam, straightaway taking the situation to technological extremes, thinks I should immediately be recording everything we say. ‘For the record,’ he mutters mysteriously, though that might be the three bottles of red wine talking. It’s hard to say. I’m operating under handicap myself.

‘I thought I’d just take notes,’ I tell him. I’ve had a few beers by now.

‘You’ll be too drunk,’ he says. It could feel like he doesn’t trust me, but of course he does. Who else could he trust? There’s almost no one else left, though there is his little circle of good local friends in these parts and there is also Hugh Rennie, QC, Sam’s old barrister friend, who has kept irons in and out of fires over the years for Sam. It’s good to have a pal who’s a lawyer. And it’s good to have a pal who’s a poet, though it’s a great deal more challenging.

‘Well I’m not recording this meeting,’ I tell him, firmly I hope. ‘This meeting is just to talk about it, how we’ll do it.’

‘It’s too late. It’s already started,’ he says and, of course, he’s right. But we both get really hammered this time, countless joints shared, me on a string of strong craft beers, Sam on the rugged red wines, four bottles of the stuff down by half past five and Sam just about down with them.

‘It seems too early to collapse,’ I hear myself say and, perhaps in response, Sam revives, as he often still does when lesser mortals would be stiff on the floor. My only defence in these circumstances when, over-excited by the sum of our parts, we drink too much, is to avoid drinking the wine.

I don’t know how Sam survives the stuff. He currently favours rustic Chilean reds, ox-blood dark, half an inch of sediment at the bottom of the bottle. His lips turn blue from drinking it, and his teeth become alarmingly iridescent in the late-afternoon light.

We both make less and less sense till eventually we make no sense at all. But the only time we ever really made any practical sense together was when we were out on the road with a job to do, Sam performing, me attending to him with a chaotic confidence I might have picked up from him in the first place.

Off the road, all these years later, is a bit of a different deal. Back then, we were still doing some things for the first time, certainly for the first time together. And I was writing a book about it, which was a first time too.

Also, I didn’t really know Sam then, so we were going through all that, figuring out where we fitted with each other, if we fitted at all. And it’s not entirely an easy or a given thing to fit with Sam Hunt. He takes up a lot of space. He’s the centre of every scene. Rooms change when he’s in them, deflate when he leaves.

He’s unforgettable and a bit overwhelming. And, it almost goes without saying, poems fall from him like leaves from a tree, which in some ways is something he resembles. He once fancied himself a cabbage tree, though as I might have pointed out to him, a cabbage tree isn’t a tree at all, but a giant lily, and I felt Sam would not like to think of himself as a big flower, though in a way that’s just what he is.

There’s a tough side too, though, because one of the other notable things that marks him out is that he has had to fight to be himself and he’s had to fight to stay himself, carry himself in a gidday world, defend himself and, quite a lot, hide himself.

Being highly, almost unnaturally, recognisable in a small country is one of those things that is a gift one day and a curse the next. The average New Zealander’s egalitarianism can be a pain in the arse sometimes, though Sam’s never averse to telling a passing pesterer to piss off, and probably in stronger terms than that.

And that doesn’t always make things better. I remember one time in a pub car park in Hamilton when it made things much worse, but I think we felt indestructible in those days. And, so far, we have been, though, as Sam likes to point out, it can’t last.

On the road, 1988

PICTURE: SHIRLEY GRACE

2

1988

(FROM ANGEL GEAR)

It’s 7.45 a.m., Tuesday 9 August. A misty morning with the hint of a big ghost of a sun behind. I rang Sam last night to ask him to meet me at the Hamilton Railway Station. He sounded ebullient. ‘Loves’ the new Dylan album (Down in the Groove). Hardly surprising.

‘It’ll take a lot of gentle persuasion to convince me,’ I tell him.

‘I’ve got plenty of gentle persuasion with me,’ he bellows back.

The taxi driver taking me to Auckland Railway Station is a fallen Marxist. ‘We’re all left to die in the gutter, while those fucking politicians . . .’ Thank Christ we’re not going all the way to the airport. Who needs it at this time of day? An hour later my train is snaking south, finally free of the endless ugly grip of South Auckland, cutting like an eel through the rolling green sea of farmland.

There’s good news in the paper – six hundred real estate agents have been made redundant in the last year. The Herald’s ‘100 Years Ago’ column has a piece on the exhumation of Beethoven’s remains, which reveals that after his death, in 1827, both his ears and aural cavities were removed so that someone could study the cause of his legendary deafness. They were each placed in a glass jar full of spirits of wine. The jars disappeared. Wonder where Beethoven’s ears are now?

Wonder what part of Sam Hunt someone might remove for future study?

‘We’ll be in Hamilton in an hour – an hour late,’ says the camp chappie with the drinks trolley. Oh well, time for a drink. Scotch and dry, bag of peanuts. Breakfast.

Five minutes later, a familiar voice emerges from the intercom. ‘Hamilton in five minutes.’

Must be on bloody commission.

10.45 a.m., Hamilton, and Sam towers above a small crowd of train greeters, resplendent in striped shirt, jeans and gummies, with his dog Minstrel at heel – vaguely. Big grin, big handshake and into the big black and dusty Chev Impala.

The Tamehere Town and Country Motel, our home away from home for the next five days, has big blue bedspreads and antique colour TVs. It’s on the edge of Hamilton. ‘We’re surrounded by stud farms,’ advises Sam meaningfully.

‘I’ve had an interesting virus,’ I offer.

Sam jerks around. ‘Separate smokes it is then,’ he declares.

Double the damage.

The phone rings. It’s a smooth-voiced type from Waikato radio station Kiwi FM. Claims Sam promised to do his breakfast show on Friday, 7 till 9 a.m.

Bugger that. I blather on a lot about ‘Sam’s voice’ and ‘busy day’. ‘But Michael, we can give you an hour, from eight.’

Sam’s due to perform at a Hamilton high school in 55 minutes. He’s ‘being alone’ next door, playing the new Schnell Fenster album at a thousand decibels.

The animal noises from the surrounding fields are almost louder. There are sheep over there having lambs . . . Nature every bloody where.

It’s 12.20, and we’re off to Melville High School, Sam rabbiting on about the new princess. Born, he tells me with the vigour that only the recipient of a QSM could muster, on the eighth hour of the eighth day of the eighth month of 1988.

Denis, the teacher who greets us, seems a decent sort, thirty-ish, with a beard. Confides, in the staff room, ‘I’d do something else, but no one pays this sort of money and gives me so many holidays.’

Other teachers sidle up – a thin, attractive, intense, middle-aged woman (she cried, Sam says later, during his performance).

It’s a strange room – men on one side, women on the other.

Chris, the sort of man who looks like he actually enjoys being a teacher, fumbles up to Sam, sits, puts down his snap-top lunchbox. The thin woman, like she’s playing the teacher to his pupil, orders him to tell us ‘the story about James K. Baxter’. Chris blushes unprettily and tells us a dull tale about having seen Baxter as a pupil and having worked on his maths throughout the poet’s reading.

Rebel without a pause.

Time to go . . .

In the school hall, the big motto above Sam’s head reads ‘To Serve and to Work’. There are 250 giggly kids. Shocked and amused by what is suddenly standing before them, they’re virtually cheering from the first poem, ‘Coming to it’.

Three kids down at the front gate

wait for the school bus;

fog hung low down the valley,

the house in sore need of paint,

the bright washing on the line,

a Van Morrison morning . . .

Sam asks if there are any questions – ‘You know, like Who cuts yer hair? Just chuck up a hand or chuck up.’

The kids roar with laughter.

Denis and his team are diligently counting heads.

The poems flow from the poet, who is all waving arms, nodding head and tapping feet . . .

The girls giggle at ‘Wavesong’, the lines about slipping off ‘your tiny bikini’. ‘Words for Tina’, a new one, ‘Spider Song’ and a royal baby announcement. ‘I’m going to have a baby soon,’ says Sam. ‘Don’t know when . . .’

Susie asks, ‘Have you made much money?’

‘Good question,’ replies Sam, and he attacks the old poet-in-garret theory. ‘I don’t do free concerts. No Telethon . . .’

Then ‘For the taking’ (‘I’ll leave out the line I can’t say in schools,’ says Sam).

Mark asks, ‘Who do you focus your poems on?’

Sam: ‘Me.’

‘Are you against taking drugs?’

Sam: ‘I’m human.Yes, at times I take them. But you’ve got to be careful what you take. I’m not going to stand up here like a preacher and say, I had a good time, you can’t. But I wouldn’t go near heroin, cocaine, LSD, glue. Don’t be pressured into it. Aldous Huxley was my uncle.’

And he bows out with his benediction (borrowed from Bob Dylan), ‘Forever young’.

Soon we’re back on the road, Minstrel snoozing on the back seat.

‘That was lovely back there,’ murmurs the poet through a smoke.

3

THEY CALLED YOU A TREASURE

My publisher is awfully interested in me writing a new book about the nearly thirty years that have passed since the now slightly notorious and long-out-of-print Angel Gear was published. Sam and I have always been wary of another book, circling the idea occasionally, usually deciding we’d better not, citing reasons of friendship, but the publisher has been so keen and persistent this time that we stopped circling and talked about it.

‘Are they really interested?’ Sam asked me.

‘It’s worse than that,’ I told him. ‘They called you a treasure.’

‘A treasure?’

‘Yep.’

‘Well, I suppose I must be then.’

‘This is where the tragedy starts,’ I told him.

Sam has long reckoned he lost a lot of good gigs all those years ago thanks to Angel Gear and its sometimes-vivid depictions of the travails and challenges of the touring life. ‘The schools weren’t so keen on me after that,’ he says, still, after all the intervening years, making me feel slightly like it’s my fault.

Which it might be, I suppose. Sam’s mother, Betty, always said it was my fault: the leading-astray that is, though I couldn’t believe she meant it and, knowing her, she probably didn’t. She told me, after Angel Gear came out, that while she didn’t approve of the liberal use of the word ‘fuck’ in it, she loved the book and thought it caught something of the essence of her little boy. In several ways, it was Betty Hunt who built Sam Hunt, a man now casually referred to as a national treasure. While I was being told to shut up and finish my vegetables in far-off Invercargill, Betty was telling Sam poems in their house by the sea in Milford, on Auckland’s North Shore, as if poems were part of daily conversation. And, in the Hunt household, they often actually were.

The other person who had a major poetic impact on young Sam Hunt was his grandfather, Betty’s father Harry Bosworth, a wild and eccentric old bugger who’d been a reporter at my old newspaper, the Auckland Star, fired and rehired many times for booze-enhanced misbehaviour and over-imaginative reportage.

From the age of about twelve, Sam chose to get to know his grandfather better, travelling by country bus up to where he lived in his later years, in an old house north of Whangarei with flowers in jam jars and only a horse for company. ‘The horse used to come into the house,’ Sam remembers.

The bath was full of apricot wine Grandpa Boz was making and Sam would come home to Milford quite whiffy from lack of bathing. But he loved it up there, old Harry spouting poems from memory. A phenomenal memory, says Sam.

Like daughter Betty, Harry liked the old poets, many of whom Sam loves too. A particular favourite of Harry’s was A.E. Housman, and Sam can drop him into conversation should something of his seem appropriate.

With rue my heart is laden

For golden friends I had,

For many a rose-lipt maiden

And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too