Part 1 Bill Lake Interview 18/8/01

I conducted this interview at Bill Lake's home on 18/8/01. It is around 13,000 words long. I have divided the interview into three palatable sections and given a brief synopsis for each section. All notes and the interview transcription are as they appeared in 2001. Photos are more recent.

Part 1:

Includes some notes on my informant and his music and a small discography. The interview itself covers Bill’s early life, his discovery of Country Blues, the formation of the Melbourne group the Garden City Strugglers, his move to New Zealand and the formation of The Windy City Strugglers In New Zealand.

Bill Lake: Photo by Andy Morley-Hall

“Respect. Yeah I still think those people who played that music are among the greatest musicians I’ve ever heard, it's the most moving music still for me and it’s the thing that I can always rely on to move me in the music." 

Notes about the transcription

(If you want to skip to the interview jump forward a few paragraphs)

Generally we don’t consider, when we are reading an interview that the writer has subjectively manipulated the transcribed dialogue to aid readability. But, in true conversation many thoughts that are stated are not 100 % clear at all: dialogue does not generally form clear sentences, body language and tone of voice have a huge effect, and filler words or discourse markers (ahs, ums oohs etc.) are very common.

The version I have published here has been altered substantially from the original transcription I made which was transcribed in 2001 as part of the requirements for a musicology course at Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand. If anyone ever wants that original, it is available. Truthfully I feel that some interesting statements, perhaps from Bill's unconscious, were revealed in the sideslips, backtracks and blind alleyways of that original transcription.

I first met my informant when I started drumming with the Windy City Strugglers in 1998. At the time of the interview that band had almost finished the recording of the third Windy City Strugglers album, Snow on The Desert Rd (see brief discography below). Bill and I were therefore friends at the time. We were involved in a professional and creative way, but I certainly did not know everything about Bill's life. I think this was a good basis for the interview as Bill could relax in a way that he might not have normal been able to with a complete stranger.

Some background on Bill Lake

Bill Lake is an important figure in New Zealand music. He was born on the 30th August 1947 in Canberra Australia and moved to New Zealand in 1967. He has been a songwriter and blues musician in various forms for many years. Like many New Zealand musicians he is greatly respected by his peers but only known by a relatively small audience world-wide.

If you want to know where he is coming from as an artist I recommend his first solo album, Home Truths on the Red Rocks label (RRR001) or either of the Windy City Strugglers Albums available: the debut (EEL013) or On Top of the World (RRR002).

Bill is an unusually honest person and I think as the interview unfolds we see how this relates a little to his philosophical work. Since 1973, dissatisfied with the constraints of his philosophy masters on Ludwig Wittgenstein, he continued  privately studying the work of the philosopher. I think there is an interesting link between his philosophical studies and Bill's desire to be honest or to arrive at some kind of truth.

Bill is a very intelligent person. Sometimes as I looked at this friend of mine in his little one bedroom shed cooking on a camp cooker surrounded by hundreds of philosophical texts, the nervous fidget, the swept back receding hairline, I felt like I was speaking with some kind of reclusive academic. Bill has spent most of his 53 years dissecting life and discussing it in lyrical form or applying his observations to the work of his philosophical idol. Fascinatingly, as I compile this interview for this blog in 2018, I am almost the exact age that Bill was when I conducted the interview.

 Bill Lake in London October 2005:  Photo by Steve Cournane:
  

Discography at the time of the interview

 2001 Snow on the Desert Road Windy City Strugglers Red Rocks RRR004
1998 On Top Of The World Windy City Strugglers Red Rocks RRR002
1996  Home Truths Solo album. Red Rocks RRR001
1994  Windy City Strugglers, Windy City Strugglers Eelman EEL013
1988? We're In the Same Boat Brother with Rick Bryant Eelman EEL012?
1987 A Bop in The Ocean. The Living Daylights Eelman EEL 011
1985 Krazy Legs. The Pelicans Eelman EEL004
1983 Eight Duck Treasure. The Pelicans Eelman EEL002 

Interviewer Tell me about your musical beginning.

Alright, well I come from Australia. I grew up in a family who weren't musical, they weren't practitioners but they did listen to quite a lot. On the one hand the big classics like Beethoven and Mozart and a bit of Brahms and I do recall those things. One of the first tunes I learnt was Ode to Joy strangely enough but on the other hand they were kind of left wing people and they were interested in sort of folk music of a sort. One of the things, for instance Lonnie Donegan who is best known for novelty songs like Does Your Chewing Gum loose its Flavour, but his background was much more kind of ethnic than that. He sung a lot of Blues with a lot of Leadbelly's folksongs.

He leaned heavily towards black music and so that was an early kind of experience of this kind of thing and then like all kids of my age I heard Rock and Roll when it first sort of hit, like Elvis Presley, a tiny bit of Little Richard, Buddy Holly. They're the ones I can sort of remember, but by the time I'd become a teenager, there was...it had gone into the well-known dead period in Rock and Roll. All the original firebrand type guys had sort of died or quietened down. What you were left was Bobby Darin and Bobby Vee and Bobby Vinton and hundreds of Bobbys and it was pretty dull and then on the other hand there were instrumental groups...

What year would that be?

That was late- ‘50s, ‘59, and ’60. On the other hand instrumental groups like the Shadows and the Ventures. I think in Australia there was more American music around. Out here I'm not sure if that was the case. Well anyway I heard quite a bit and took an interest in that sort of thing but I always had this kind of left wing, this folk music thing in the back of my mind and then somewhere around '64 my older brother (six years older) was at University and he was mixing with people who were listening to the very first Dylan album for instance and in fact he brought it home one night in the bedroom where I also slept.

How old were you then?

I was about fourteen and Joan Baez and a bit of that and he also had a contemporary, a good friend who was more into Blues and black music. He actually had Leadbelly albums and Lightning Hopkins albums and I remember a very seminal visit to Sydney one time when we stayed at his place and he just played all this stuff over and over again. Well he played it but he was used to it and I wasn't used to it and then I used to listen to these Lightning Hopkins albums and then go walking around the streets for hours, like with them, singing them to myself cause I loved it so much.

Would they be Folkways Recordings?

They were probably Prestige Blues. Prestige had this little subset of their, you know, sub label called Bluesville where they did a lot of Lightning Hopkins records. The Leadbelly was on Folkways yeah. And so I think that was the point where it really hit me, you know, that I loved this stuff and it was hard to get, it wasn't an easy thing.

What was it about it that you loved? Can you sort of say anything about what that would be?

I don't know. I just used to sing not particularly the words but the melody, the sort of melodic thing of it, and it's sad music I suppose and I just loved it. It got right inside my head and it got right to my musical centre, I suppose, right away. A lot of Blues fans seem to be like this you know. They sort of fool around with different kinds of music and sometimes they like something but they don't know why until they hear Blues and then they realise that it was the Blues in it that they liked: those notes and that way of phrasing things and the...it's the notes and the way of handling instruments you know; that very fluid sort of playing and very rhythmic as well. I've always been a pretty rhythmic player or interested in that.

Sure.

So that was a seminal thing and from then on it was really just a matter of me finding out how to get these records which was reasonably hard but there were more, there were a few shops in Australia that sold it and I was beginning to mail order records and it just sort of broadened out from there. I remember, I suppose another seminal one was, you see those recordings were like, well the old Folkways ones were from say the ‘40s and then the Lightening Hopkins ones were ‘50s, mid ‘50s recordings and then in America they got into this thing of re-issuing very old Blues from what's called Country Blues from the ‘20s and the early ‘30s and there was a record that really started that whole thing, This one on Folkways called The Country Blues. You know it's a re-issue of about sixteen Country Blues by all sorts of the great guys from that period and I ordered that and got it and I remember listening to that, sort of five or six times in a row (laughs) you know.

Really?

It was a revelation, it was very hard to understand cause it's really...

Would that be Son House?

He is one of them. He's not on that, oh I think he is actually; yeah I think he is on that record, but you know Robert Johnson is actually the latest of them. Blind Lemon Jefferson, people like that, Leroy Carr. I mean in fact now-days I would say it was a sort of fairly partial selection, it wasn't you know, there were certain people that I would class as among the greatest of those people that weren't on this record you know like Charley Patton for instance, the Mississippi Delta player. Anyway that was a big start and that was when I realised ooh there's all this stuff.  

When you heard that i.e. you heard this different Country Blues. What ways did it speak to you that were different?

Hard to say, well like I said it was harder to understand because Lightning Hopkins pretty well always plays in a swing feel it's something you can recognise cause a lot of Rock and Roll's like that. Jazz is like that in the same feel you know [1] do di do di do

It’s got the triplet rhythm?

(Bill is obviously oblivious to my query.) That sort of thing and a slower version of the same - so you know that was familiar enough in that respect. Leadbelly was a bit different cause he plays a lot; its all based around 2/4, really for him and that was maybe a bit harder to understand, but he was a incredibly driving player. I listen to him now and he's just such a rocker!

 But anyway, in these old guys you’ve got to remember that they came from an era, they learnt to play in an era before recordings for one thing and also before drums were really significant and they developed their own rhythms, you know, they do, they play, each of them. You can almost say that each of them has their own approach to a rhythm and even though you can say well that's a sort of a swing rhythm you know its very far cry from this rather standardised rhythm that, that you were used to by the time...

Jazz?

(Bill is oblivious again.) Lightning Hopkins come along.

(Realising my mistake) Yeah Oh...Ok alright.

Anyway, so you know that takes a while to understand but I think it's always made me aware of rhythms that are not the standard, you know that are created just by the way you play the guitar particularly or whatever instrument it is, you know, things that don't fit the sort of normal categories of rhythm, I suppose. I guess that was subliminal, I wasn't conscious of all that then, I just sort of listened to it and kind of struggled to...but I liked it, I mean it still had that Blues and it was extremely intense. It was sort of...

When you first heard that country record. It felt kind of... You knew it was Blues but it was kind of a bit weird almost?

Yeah it wasn't like familiar. I mean Lightning Hopkins, I guess felt familiar because there were elements that I knew already but with this stuff, a lot of it wasn't really very familiar at all and they were virtuoso instrumentalists and really strong singers, very powerful. I mean a lot of them are street singers and there was no amplification so they had to sing loud and clear and they played at parties and so on and they were just great singers and there was all this stuff laid out. Then I just went through this, well I began to play, the minute I got hold of a guitar I managed, I was trying to play like that you know and of course it was beyond my ability at that time. It took me a very long time to be able to play in the...

How did you learn? Did you teach yourself?

I just taught... I just listened to the records and tried to do what they were doing and you naturally gravitate to the easiest things, like I remember there's this song by Leadbelly called Good Morning Blues which has that classic, its actually the sort of boogie pattern for a piano it's actually[2]  don di don di don. I latched onto that and I could sort of understand that, I learnt...

Did you learn from any books or just, just straight off by ear?

No, I think I learnt, yeah its all pretty much by ear. I mean I think I learned some basic chords out of a book but the chords didn't seem to be the part of it really.

Was there anybody you could go and sort of play with or were you by yourself?

By myself, yeah for quite a while. My father tried, paid for me to go to a lesson (laughs) with a jazz guitarist and he listened to me play and said, “What kind of music do you like?” And I said “Oh blues, you know Lightning Hopkins and things like that,” and he kind of went on with the lesson but he said to my father “Oh well I can't really...”

Not interested?

“I can't really tell this guy any thing, you know” (laughs). Well because that guy played jazz and it was, I didn't want to play jazz I didn't want to play all those chords, those funny chords.

Interviewer laughs (a running joke between us about jazz).

So he had nothing, he knew that he wasn't gonna be able to teach me anything.

Interviewer laughs again.

So anyway that was it and I just went on learning things and I didn't get very far. I was also learning rock things like Apache. Every kid in those days learnt the Shadows, Apache and Wipeout, this Surf Instrumental.

Sure.

Yeah, because they were easy and they were good and I learned a few of those like I learned Ode to Joy just as a little piece. I wasn't intending to play in public. It was all just kind of for my own pleasure really and the next landmark would be that I joined...I started a jug band, a little three piece band that played jug band music, jug band music being a sort of sub-species of Blues, but particularly it’s played by a group, it’s a band, it’s band music and its dance music mostly and it was done in the ‘20s and ‘30s and so it’s got a lot of Blues but it's also sort of fun. There's a lot of fun music in it and the fact that its not a solitary person playing, playing amazing guitar or something, it's a whole bunch of guys and you know none of them have to be particularly wonderful to be able produce a sound so we did that: that was the Garden City Strugglers.

Melbourne?

In Canberra that was the Garden City Strugglers, the first band I was ever in that went along and we weren't very good but you know I learnt. I was actually not playing much guitar then. I played mandolin, harmonica, sang a bit and there was a guy who played, who was very good on sort of chord guitar and kazoo and things like that and sang, so I was sort of the ornamental bloke and the other guy played jug and that was all. And then I came over here, to New Zealand in 1967 and I hooked up with Rick Bryant at the beginning of that.

Mammal?[3]

Oh no, earlier, it was a sort of an electric R and B band, kind of playing Stones music and Pretty Things and Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley - just a whole lot of stuff, not very well, but with a lot of verve. I especially, was really terrible then playing electric guitar. It didn't help that I didn't have a good guitar, but even so I was dreadful and the other guys were better (drinks wine). 

Anyway, so that went along, and then roughly the same, oh the next year I started another band. We called it the Windy City Strugglers and it followed that tradition but we were much... By then I was very serious about Country Blues and I... Though there were jug bands in NZ they tended to emphasise the sort of good time, have a bit of fun and a bit of novelty kind of aspect to the thing and I thought this music deserves better really you know. It’s actually, these are, some of them, the jug bands and a lot of the Country Blues can be played as a sort of group thing and you want to get, try and get that intensity into it and the good playing as well you know. You wanna be able to play well, so we...

What is it? I'm interested in that. What is it that they were sort of lacking for you?

What those bands that were...?

Yeah

I was in one for as while. I just felt that they were a bit... Basically they modelled themselves primarily on American white jug bands who were already...They'd, who'd already imbibed the same stuff that I was listening to: this old Country Blues and jug band music and made something of it and you know now I can look at them and say they were wonderful and they were very creative to do that but at the time I felt it was a bit second-hand and that I wanted to kind of take it back to that old stuff and really try to play like those old guys and not...I was pretty purist about it.

So they were actually trying to take a slightly opposite approach? They were thinking, I don't want to go back and do that too much like them. They wanted to try and make it their own?

Yeah, they weren’t as sort of purist as I was. They were all terrific fans of blues and some of them, those that are still going like Geoff Muldaur. He still plays pretty well only Blues you know, that's what his music is, that's the kind of people that came up at that time: people who became totally besotted with this music and have remained sort of with it ever since. You know, in a way you all broaden out and everything but I'd still basically say my style is Blues based and I always go back to that kind of stuff. Anyway, so that's what we were trying to do and we did, we learnt. I think we only had about two songs when we first played and they were what we thought of as pretty close renditions of really old blues, one was a piano and mandolin duet, Sloppy Drunk.[4]

Oh yes I know that one.

Yes we still do it and I found this guy Geoff Rashbrooke[5] who could actually play piano in a really primitive style that easily passed for country blues piano and he listened to the same stuff. He loved it too and I was very lucky there you know and we played that. That was our first gig; we just played these two songs; the other one was Newport News[6] and you know people liked it and we liked it, but we sort of realised fairly quick we needed some other people who could do some of the things better, like who could sing better for a start and we got Rick[7] to sing and that was great. Rick comes from a slightly different background. He hadn't... he liked country blues but because it wasn't as available here, and because also, I don't know; he was more of an R and B guy...

Geoff Rashbrooke playing in London October 2005: Photo by Steve Cournane 

Urban Blues?

Yeah, more urban, but he really loved it and he's learned all this stuff and sung really well and all that and then we had... we had quite a number of other people floating through the band but the core of it I guess was me and Geoff and Rick and you know the others were additional and we just gradually developed this repertoire and it was very authentic renditions of these old things. We weren't really interested in kind of remaking you know, I mean whenever people do this they end up doing something different without trying, because they're different people and they listen to different music and inevitably some of that comes into it and of course we were very limited compared to some of these guys we were trying to emulate but that was the game we were in and I, in particular, was a real purist for...I don't know... it just gradually...

Why do you think that was? I mean was it a sign of respect for you or...?

I'm a Virgo (laughs).

No honestly though, it's not just wanting to imitate is it? It is something else perhaps, I am just not quite sure what?

Respect. Yeah I still think those people who played that music are among the greatest musicians I’ve ever heard, it's the most moving music still for me and it’s the thing that I can always rely on to move me in the music. They were great players. Also, I guess there was a certain romance involved. These guys led these incredibly tough lives and lived in a really terrible environment sharecropping in the South and all that stuff. I think that kind of appealed to me. It wasn't like I thought I could be like that myself but I thought, you know the music seemed to come straight out of that, that environment, that sort of suffering and you know it seemed to make everything else look a bit pale I thought.

Yes indeed.

I mean I've heard things since that I always like: the Rolling Stones cause they had a sort of grittiness and a lot of energy and stuff and even though they couldn't do quite a lot of the stuff the old guys did they had a good go at it and eventually they created their own style which has been a big influence on me. They invented this completely new way of doing Rock and Roll using a lot of Blues techniques and things and it's really rhythmic and it’s got such drive and a feel that you can’t ignore. 

I mean the other side of this is that I've been in rock bands since the electric R and B band I'd got into with Rick. Then I was in Mammal and we played progressive sort of art-rock really because of various people who were in the band. It was a mixture of art rock that we wrote ourselves. Well Tony Backhouse mainly wrote it and on the other hand we did quite rootsy covers like we did a number of Stones’ songs, a number of songs by The Band and some soul covers like Heard it through the Grapevine and Temptations and that sort of thing, that sort of stuff that you played with...

Quite Souly?

Yeah, yeah (pours drink).

---

[1] Bill started to sing here, singing strangely enough not a swing rhythm but a true shuffle.

[2] Bill sings a very close approximation of a rock and roll hard pizzicato, a (pulled) double bass part.

[3] Mammal was a rock band in NZ, which included Bill and a number of musical luminaries from ‘70s rock.

[4] Sloppy Drunk is still part of Windy City Strugglers' repertoire in 2001.

[5]  Geoff Rashbrooke: original  of Windy City Strugglers and still in the band today. 

[6] Newport News is a song on the debut, eponymous Windy City Strugglers album CDEEL013.

[7] Rick Bryant still sings in the Windy City Strugglers today.