Ummm so...

[Above: my bike above Purau Bay looking back over at Diamond Harbour]

To be honest I haven't even been thinking about this stupid blog for ages. I haven't even really been thinking about bikes much. I dunno if I've mentioned this here or not but we moved to Diamond Harbour last year. Which has been great. Mostly. Maybe I'll come back to that. Anyway the point I was going to make is that since moving out here and having quite a commute now to get to work, my bikes really have become 'work-horses' so to speak. Daily commuters. Daily riders. Which on one hand is cool, but on the other hand means that because I ride so much in the week now I don't get so excited by the idea of going for 'a ride' with the boys in the weekends. I'm also usually just trying to keep my bikes going, rather than giving a shit what they look like. And so I've been feeling like I don't have much interesting to say about motorcycling lately. Maybe that'll change again, I'm sure it will, but for now I'm sorta swamped in other things...

[Above: digging out under the deck behind our house in Diamond Harbour]

This fucking house! Moving out of the city was supposed to be relaxing. Well it has and hasn't been. It is beautiful over here as you can see from that photo up the top there. However we kinda really fucked up and bought a house on a hill that has no drainage. I mean literally NO drainage. No drains. I didn't even know what this meant until recently, but I sure do now. We had a proper legit building inspection done before we bought this place, but they somehow failed to point out that the house had serious storm-water leaking underneath, small under-runners basically, that had over time washed all the dirt away from around the piles. That's bad (just in case you don't know). Sooooo... discovering this, and the extent of it was somewhat demoralising and quickly took the shine off of our moving out of the city (although the city can totally get fucked regardless). Anyway, point being, with not much money left I had to figure out how to solve this fairly massive problem... which of course has meant doing most of the work, almost all of it actually, myself. So I've spent most of the summer digging. I've ripped up the large deck behind the house, dug and laid a feild drain 1.5m deep across the entire back of the section, dug out 1.5m deep behind the house to lay a drain there, dug out/removed the existing waste-water and sewer (which was leaking, probably since the earthquakes in 2011). I've built as retaining wall (thanks Joe!), put in sumps, new stormwater, waste water, connected everything up etc... but are currently waiting on good weather to waterproof (i.e. paint with bitumen sealer) the below ground section of the back of the house before we can put the final drain in there and back fill it all with tonnes and tonnes of gravel (which has to be wheelbarrowed up the hill by hand).

[Above: low retaining wall behind house, built mostly by Joe]

So yeah, asides from working my actual job, that's pretty much what I've been up to these last few months. Grim eh. Home ownership is for suckers. I miss renting and not giving a fuck. All I can see are problems around the house that need to be dealt with/fixed in the near future. Urgh. I do have a garage for the first time in my life though. That's cool. Although it's a total mess at the moment because of all the earthwork and drainlaying I've been doing. Oh, I've also been trying to chip away at building a band-room/recording studio at home...

[Above: small basement room I'm trying to turn into a band-room/studio]

This was actually largely WHY we bought THIS house. There's a separate studio/sleep-out type structure up behind the house where I'd thought we'd have the band room. However Nadine's sister moved out here with us and she's been living out there. So anyway there's a much smaller basement room that is largely concrete block and half underground, and so seemingly much easier to (to some extent) soundproof. It was freezing cold down there though and also sounded terrible, so I started by insulating and relining this room just after Xmas. That's done now, and it's carpeted, and it's heaps warmer and it sounds a lot better. I kinda fucked up though because I'd assumed there was insulation in the ceiling, and there's not. And so now I'm about to cut out the ceiling and fill it with soundproofing as well. It feels kind never-ending too, like the drains. And I just desperately wanna make some noise. Late at night preferably. And I guess now, after all this work, I'm not even sure it's gonna be soundproof enough for that. I really need to have guitars feeding back at 3am if I'm gonna be happy about life ok.

[Above: Carlton badged Kawaai S-170 'Hound Dog Taylor' guitar feeding back in band-room/studio]

You can't tell of course, but this guitar here is droning away really good. In the bandroom, but just before the really expensive 70s reissue carpet got put in (which Nadine insisted on, I woulda put any old thing in to be honest). I was doing this to test how much sound was getting out, and trying to imagine how annoyed I'd be if I was one of our neighbours. It's hard for me to imagine though because I find a guitar feeding back to be just about the most beautiful sound in the world? Cool looking guitar though eh? I bought this off Greg 'Guitar Store' Leaman... who just constantly buys stuff and sells it on... mostly to me it seems. I bought a couple of guitars off him recently that I thought would be 'wall hangers', decoration really, but when I get them I always end up spending money getting them to play nicer and sound good, actually these sounded amazing – surprisingly enough – when I got them. Hence wanting to get them playable I guess. I actually played this one, the 'Hound Dog' at the last ever Hex Waves gig a couple of months back (I won't get into that here!).

I suppose I have been playing a lot of gigs. Well not heaps. But playing consistently I guess.

[Above: Poster for a gig we played last week. I liked this, not because of the way it looked, but because I designed the format to work on lamp-posts. No one really bothers putting up band posters anymore in Chch, mostly because you have to go through Phantom, and it costs, and it's not worth it. However I'd noticed no one was putting posters on lamp posts much. Not like they do in other cities. So anyway Lil 'Luke and I did a few runs of these suckers and I think it worked quite well. We didn't get in trouble, they were quiet 'visible', and they stayed up for ages.]

I've been playing mostly with Lil' Luke Shaw in/as The Opawa 45s, which has become a strangely schizophrenic sort of band, moving between slow lilting 50s instrumentals like Santo and Johnny's 'Sleepwalk', and then these long improvised 'jam' things, inspired I guess by things like early Velvet Underground, Spacemen 3, Jim Jarmusch's band Squrl, maybe a bit of Flying Saucer Attack. That sort of thing. Lil' Luke's doing his Hons at the moment and is research soundtracks/scores etc, so that's been a background to our move in this direction I suppose. We talk about guitars a lot. And amps. And effects... a bit. Trying to keep that last part in check. In fact I'm really liking the sound of my Gretsch straight into my new Vox AC30. Straight in. Pure tone. God listen to me! How embarrassingly dad rock or something.



Which reminds me – records. Making records. Another embarrassingly middle aged, middle class dude thing to do. Motorbikes, guitars, records, I'm a walking cliche. God it's so terrible isn't it. And yet I don't know what else to do. Or I don't see anything else worth doing, I guess is more to the point. I was going to talk about the records I'm working on at the moment here, but I can't be bothered and I think this has become very much long enough! What I was actually going to say here was that this is the stuff I want to be able to write about (thinking by writing). I know I've said it a few times in the history of this thing, but it was never supposed to be a motorcycle blog. It just turned into that. 'Head Full of Snakes' was something a started because it represented my state of mind, my anxiety about not being very good at staying focused, but somewhere where I could put all these things together and let the common threads between them emerge. Really only for my own purposes. And I guess I feel a little freer now because I can see that the blog's not getting the 'hits' it was when the magazine we started was getting so much press! That always made me feel like I had to just write about motorbikes here. But fuck that. And yes I've said that before. And yes I'm home sick and so have time for rants like this, but I thought I'd try and have a serious go at getting back to HFoS's roots over the next little while, and talk/write about some of this other shit that spirals around in my brain keeping me up at night and, no doubt, will one day kill me.

First Ilam Press Records Record

So looking back it was only a couple of posts ago really that I proposed I might do this thing called 'Ilam Press Records'. Well here's the first record... this is a lathe cut record made in an edition of 30 by Peter King Lathe Records down in Mt Somers here. The band is one I'm in with a guy from school, a kind of guitar duo 'matinee' band. Really we made this as a bit of a test case, and I have to say I like it. I think this short-run record thing could be good for me. I've sent another one to Peter King which we should get back soon, a Katabatic Wind one, so a very different sound, and also it'll be a 33rpm 12" record this time.

Press Article

Was cleaning off my desktop and thought I'd put THIS up on here. It's an article by Vicki Anderson which uses interviews with me, Chris (of QCR), Paddy Snowden and Kerry Swanson. It was done around the time of the last Smash Palace Motorcycle Show. I sorta talked about what I liked about motorbikes and how I got interested in them from when I was a kid. I dunno, it seems relevant?

Brit bikes doco

This is a really good 1hr BBC doco on British motorcycle culture. Really great to see something on motorcycles on the internet that is longer than 5 minutes, informative and watchable!

I was totally obsessed with the whole 50s/60s Rocker scene when as a teenager I got my first bike in the 1980s. Little did I know then that it (well cafe racers at least) would become such a big fad again now! It's nice to be reminded of what I liked about this stuff in the first place. I still think, despite being such easy hipster fodder, that the cafe racer is the ultimate motorcycle of the 20th century. Choppers get fucked!

Thanks Jimi for the link.

Article on 'Colors' magazine

Found this fairly informative write up on 'Colors Motorcycle Magazine' here today. It was a very short-lived (1970–71) thing and is really hard to find these days. I've cited this publication before in terms of precedents for Head Full Full of Snakes. In particular the use of color, the kind of dilettante compositional quality, but also the fact it was a very grass-roots publication that aimed to document something that wasn't going to be dealt with elsewhere, and was made by the people who it was also essentially aimed at... rather than a larger publishing company. It didn't last long but was, I believe, influential in 'Easyriders' being started, and obviously that became fairly huge (while turning into something quite different too, in my humble opinion!).

Interview on Design Assembly

Here is an interview I just did for the folk at Design Assembly... in which I spill some beans about the whole Head Full of Snakes business...

designassembly.org.nz

(Photo: Self portrait of Stuart and me at the Ilam Press at about 2am in the morning while printing issue #3)

Pedro

About 3 weeks ago now my closest friend for the last 19 years passed away. It fucking sucked. Rest in peace buddy...

Local history

'Cornering in race at Brighton Racecourse'  [1910?]
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File Reference CCL PhotoCD 1, IMG0045

Doing some research at the Christchurch City Library Archives and found this! Thought given last weekend's events I'd better put it up here. I've heard about speedway events at New Brighton a long time ago, but this is the first 'evidence' I've seen. From what I've heard though it sounds like speedway went on for quite a while over there?

Cemetery Circuit Wanganui

Some of my friends went to Wanganui's legendary 'Cemetery Circuit' street racing today and saw Guy Martin ride. I stayed home and watched this instead.

Auckland Star 1960 (Hells Angels Auckland)

I've been stupidly busy lately and also we haven't had the internet on at our new house for the last month, but I'm hoping to get back to some sort of normality soon? I haven't even been riding much, which pretty much makes me feel like life ain't worth living! Anyway while I haven't been posting much here, I have been collecting various bits and pieces that I do want to put on here...

Since beginning this blog a bit over three years ago now one of the things I've become more and more interested in is the history of motorcycling culture in New Zealand, and of course (because it's played such a large role in that here) the evolution of the club/gang scene. I read Jarrod Gilbert's recent book 'Patched' earlier this year and that provides a fascinating account of the early years of the MC scene in NZ, and then the evolution into the more recognizable 'gangs' of the late 70s, 80s, and 90s

Accuracy aside this is an interesting article, largely because it is very different to most other reporting around these clubs at the time (especially internationally). That the reporter has actually visited and talked to the club stands out, as does his framing them in a very positive light – "... a force for good among lads who might otherwise drift into hooliganism and delinquency."
The article is from The Auckland Star, 1960... I can't actually remember where I found this article but it's been sitting here on my hard drive for a while now.

The 'Maori' motorcycle

"In a small North Taranaki coastal village there's a man who is busy recreating the machine behind one of New Zealand's great motorcycling mysteries"

This is an interesting article! Would love to pay this chap a visit on our next Nth Island tour...

Motorcamp 'Pink Room'

  Our new band Motorcamp (yes it's supposed to be funny for fucks sake) played at Tommy Chang's in Lyttelton last Saturday. This was our first song, thanks to Jimi for the vid. It's our version of the song from the 'pink room', the strip club scene in Firewalk With Me, the film by David Lynch. Hear the real one here. I thought Angelo Badalamenti wrote it but a lot of people say David Lynch did, so yeah whatever. I was having a bit of trouble with the guitar sound being first song and all, but you can't really tell cause I'm way over the other side there. Aaron and Tim are tight and on it as bloody usual!

First bikes

I stayed at mum's for a bit last week and dug out some old photos... this CB 175 was my first motorcycle, which I really only got cause I couldn't afford a car. Of course I became immediately obsessed with the whole thing, and spent a good couple of years riding this little thing way beyond it's abilities (meaning some quite long rides around the South Island)...

That's me on the left at about 17 I think. My friend, on the right, is David O'Keefe. Dave was a righteous chap who unfortunately caught meningitis and bloody died on a surfing trip in Aussie in the late '90s.

I quickly realised I needed a bigger bike, and although I really wanted something British – I'd already fallen in love with Triumphs, Nortons, and BSAs by this point mostly because I'd discovered 60s Rocker culture and cafe racers via various magazines – I couldn't afford a British bike. As a poor art school student at this point I bought the next best thing – a British racing green Honda CB 350.

This turned out to be an awesome bike actually, and really quite fast for it's size. These photos were taken when I bought it, and while I modified it a bit (drag bars and chopped down seat) I don't seem to have any photos of it like that. I actually crashed this bike, rear-ending some car in the rain when they hit their brakes for an orange light. (Interestingly enough these photos were taken in Lyttelton, where I have now lived for a quite a bit, and where I used to 'hang around' as a teenage hoodlum. We liked coming over here to watch the bike gangs line up outside the British Hotel!)

My next bike was an odd choice for me really – a bit embarrassing now? although we're talking very early 1990s here and I was only 19 or 20 so gimme a break – also, at the time, it was almost new and cost quite a bit. I put it entirely on my student loan (which had just been introduced by the government) as they didn't seem to care what you spent the money on (I also bought a ridiculously huge guitar amp and took a trip to Spain with my girlfriend!).

Dig my flowing locks? My girlfriend (Silvia Rico Lozano) and I rode this around around NZ one summer fully loaded with tent, sleeping bags, and all sorts of shit tied on. This last photo is of me just before leaving town, must have been '93 or '94.

Shortly after this my cousin, Matthew Woodley, got killed on his motorcycle. He was hit head on by a 15 year old drunk driver with no license. My parents pretty much made me get rid of the bike then and offered me a bunch of cash to buy a car. I bought a Holden Kingswood, which I then obsessed over for the next few years and blew thousands of dollars on! I didn't get another bike until about a decade later, and even then I kept it a secret from my parents for a while... 

Who's the good looking fella on page 70 of the latest of BikeRider?

Well that's Grant I guess. But there I go too, my 15 minutes (seconds?) of fame, and Hamish as well. This is an article Kerry wrote about our ride down to the Burt Munro racing in Invercargill last year (my pics here) and it's in the current issue of BikeRider magazine. It's a strange mag... actually maybe it's just very normal and I find that strange. Mostly it's full of horrific insect-looking bikes that I just can't stand, although there is a Suzuki 'Waterbus' featured and also a pretty cool old Matchless sidecar racing outfit, so it ain't all bad.

New Zealand MC 'calling cards'

 

Jesse Schrader sent me the link to these a little while back. They're all from Cam Stokes website here. I'd put some examples of the same thing from some American clubs/gangs up here last year (see em here), and Stuart and I had used these as a point of departure for our design of HFoS #1, most obviously the cover. They're interesting things these cards. I don't totally understand the point of them, are they like business cards? Seems strange when you're trying to essentially operate 'outside' the law, or 'undercover' in some way? Actually it has just occurred to me that when I joined the Norton Owners Club they sent me very similar cards. They had they same sorta line like "You have just met ______" and the bit there where you are supposed to out your own name. The point though with these cards is, I think, to help spread the word about the club and to maybe attract new members. Why would a 1% outsider club wanna do this? Maybe they just liked having cool cards... I can get that. Stuart and I made some for ourselves (see em here). I particularly like the Vikings one, although the Hell's Angels one with it's "You have just been seduced by..." is pretty good too. I'd never realised until seeing this stuff either, that the in the Highway 61 logo the skull is actually eating the road.

New films by D. Thomas Herkes

Three new films by my good pal D. Thomas Herkes, aka Jack Shit, and writer of our HFoS music column 'Sonic Shit!'

Nothing to do with motorcycles, but I reckon if you;re into old bikes you'll dig these trailers. Yours truly featuring as Dr Ivan Hanson in 'I Kill'.

Really wanna talk this guy into making a B-grade biker flick!

Now THAT'S graphic design!

Through a strange series of events that I won't bother boring myself with here I came across this today. And shit I really really like it. It reminds me a lot of those gang calling cards I've put on here before here, and which Stuart and I referenced with our own cards and with the cover of issue #1. I really dig the lo-fi economy of this sort of thing, and the suggestion that there's some code I don't quite understand – some voodoo and dark magic. It feels like you need to have been initiated to get this, which I think is very intriguing. I can't speak to the content as I haven't read it and I don't have any interest in poetry sorry. I actually can't stand poetry. I know that makes me a bit un-civilised, but there you go...

The National Grid @ RAMP Gallery

Here's some photos of Jonty and I (and Amy) putting up our show 'Design and Designers' in Hamilton over the weekend. We're now making issue #8 of The National Grid as a catalogue to this show. We have 2 weeks to get it to print!... and then I can get back to thinking about my bikes!

I've decided I'm definitely going to start a separate blog or Tumblr or something for my design related work/research. Talked to Jonty about us starting a National Grid one again (we actually ran one really briefly before making the publication together – it was a disaster though). So yeah from now on (well, from soon) HFoS will be just mostly motorcycle related. Although obviously I'll be looking at, and for, overlaps etc...

Busy... (TNG exhibition and HFoS award!?)

Been too busy to give much thought to any bikes at all lately because I'm working on an exhibition for the 'other' publication I make – The National Grid. The exhibition is called 'Design and Designers' and it opens in Hamilton at the RAMP Gallery this coming Monday at 5.30pm. Consider this an invite if you live in the area. The exhibition will feature a whole bunch of 'things' that have all been reproduced at some point in the publication. I did and interview about it on the Design Assembly website, so if you want to know more go here...

I think, later this year I will start another blog where I will collect my thoughts and research about graphic design. I don't think it works to thread it in here anymore. Sometimes it does, but largely it just seems to distinct and separate.

Oh and by the way Head Full of Snakes is a finalist in this years 'Best Design Awards'. Check it out here, and here's some photos to remind you what you missed out on if you didn't get a copy!? Next issue coming out later this year – promise!

I will, also, sadly be missing Bike Night tonight as I'm flying up to Hamilton today...