To the Max..

home
rather than call the RACV, (only about 15 minutes away anyway), get a clothes
hanger, walk back and break into my van all by myself. I’ll remember to
park next to a criminal next time.

‘Never totally discount someone’s negative assessment of themselves’,
is probably not exactly what I once read or heard, but the thrust of it survives
my paraphrasing. And I reckon it’s as true as these kinds of aphorisms
can be, perhaps even a little more thoughtful than some. After all, who should
better know your flaws and weaknesses than yourself? The power of positive thinking
can only get you so far, and I seem to remember that God had to step in at some
point in the pioneering self-help book of the same name that I was pointedly
given as a hapless adolescent.
I’m a recognised procrastinator – as in ‘recognised’
by myself – but it’s not just my assessment. My mother knew it then and
my Choclatté barista has also twigged after watching me roll in to his
café day after day with zero to report. (I say ‘my barista’,
but of course I only drink tea these days).
Nevertheless, I can now report that the release of the third in the Breathing
Space series of EPs is imminent, and that, perhaps coincidentally, another
couple of career opportunities have unexpectedly presented themselves, as if
the Universe itself was endorsing the faintest of positive movements in the
sphere of Rudd. (There’s a lesson there).
My feelings are usually mixed when a new release is due, but this time amongst
the swirl of confusing emotions there’s a sense of achievement. I first
proposed writing a song for Max Merritt at Jimmie Sloggett’s 70th birthday
and I’m happy to say that a song (Soul Man) has evolved from
that glimmer of an intention and has since been recorded and installed as the
opening track on Breathing Space As Well.
Perhaps I should explain why I felt moved to dedicate a song to Max in the first
place. While I didn’t realise it at the time, my first encounter with
Max back in 1965 proved pivotal in my decision to move myself and the band (Chants
R&B) to Australia. I knew of Max of course – he was a Christchurch
legend – but he’d left Christchurch pretty early on in the piece
and I never got to see Max the rock ‘n’ roller as he was then in
situ, (and I wasn’t aware until Jimmie Sloggett told me recently
that Max had gone through a Shadows’ phase as well, which is somehow as
endearing as it is surprising).
Anyhow, by the time he visited Christchurch in 1965 he was based in Sydney and
the same Jimmie Sloggett had introduced him to Otis Redding’s album and
Max had had his soul epiphany. I think it must’ve been a Saturday afternoon,
(nothing much happened on a Sunday in Christchurch in those days apart from
the folk club), and I’m pretty sure it was at The Mecca (where Pete Nelson
and the Castaways had a long-standing residency) where I saw Max and the Meteors
for the first time. The photo taken by one of the local commercial photographers
(see pic below) shows my girlfriend (and wife-to-be) Helen and me;
she in her repertory uniform duffle coat and me luxuriously hirsute with a (visible)
goatee and a dashing hound’s-tooth suit, (undoubtedly a Borrie’s
Tailors’ commission), teamed with a pin through collar shirt replete
with skinny tie. Despite my never having any money, I had to be up with the
latest pop fashions and I was very fortunate to have Borrie (Les Sherlock) so
handy to The Stagedoor just on the other side of the Square. He was very
reasonably priced, but I’m sure quite a bit of business went his way as
a result of my fashionista tendencies.
Soul Man tells the story of that afternoon pretty accurately, but with
one major exception: I never actually spoke to Max that day; neither did he
speak to me. I did have quite a conversation with the genial Peter Williams,
(who popped up in the chart-topping The
Groove a few years later), but on that day I was rather over-awed by Max,
who so clearly controlled everything that was going on musically with an iron
fist and I chose not to approach him.
Apart from the possibility of basing ourselves in Australia, which hadn’t
occurred to me before that day and didn’t actually occur to me then, there
was one other major lesson I learned from Max that day. Here in Max and the
Meteors was living proof you could actually make a living as a band playing
the music you loved without necessarily being in the charts or even remotely
a household word.
Chants R&B‘s unchallenged residency at The Stagedoor had allowed us
to cultivate our crazily eclectic repertoire unfettered by the constraints of
reality, but when our own Max, Chants’ guitarist Max Kelly (Matt Croke)
was one day whisked back to Australia to be reprimanded and ultimately discharged
from his RAAF apprenticeship, my observations of Max and the Meteors that day
helped convince me that Chants R&B should follow Matt over to Australia
to try our luck there.
I’ve subsequently got to know Max a bit better over the years through
the Long Way To The Top tour and more recently at his Concert for Max and found
him to be a thorough gentleman, (although he doesn’t suffer fools gladly),
as well as remaining a man passionate about his music and getting it right.
I was elated when he agreed to put some of his gritty vocals on Soul Man
(courtesy of Colin Hay’s home studio in LA) and to hear that he was
enthusiastic about the song. Of course, I’ve also been very fortunate
to be aided and abetted on producing the track by long-time Meteors’ horn
man, Jimmie Sloggett, a more gracious man I’m sure I’ll never meet
and my first choice as sax player on Spectrum tracks. That man swings.

Mike as a ‘callow youth’
with his girlfriend Helen Burns