Auckland Folk Festivals Part 2 1974

When you have great music in a rainforest, it could get messy. It did.

I don’t know whose idea it was to go to the first official Auckland Folk Festival. I probably mentioned it, and seeing as it was a long weekend, someone decided to make it a school trip. I would have gone anyway, but this was even better.

Most of us packed into John’s Willys army Jeep, along with a massive tent and provisions for the 3 days. Some of the older guys, students, people who dated students, and people who just loved hanging around the Alternative School (some sadly for nefarious reasons which we won’t get into here) packed up their own vehicles, and we made a procession from Ponsonby to Moller’s Farm in Oratia.

For me, it was like going to one of my favourite haunts, where I had attended many parties with my Tititrangi friends. Each time I went, it reinvented itself, based on the type of people that were there.

My friend Bill Moller had made enhancements to the Barn. There were now extra toilets and showers. If you wanted a home for preservationists or preppers, this was it. I’m not sure what category you would put him in, but the late Barry Crump lived on a corner of the property for a time.

I don’t know why we hardly ever took photos back in the day, maybe it was just too expensive. I mean, at 16, I had left home, was living in a caravan, wagged school a couple of days a week to work at VH Farnsworth, where I got paid really well for doing labouring work that other people didn’t want to do, like cleaning ship’s bilges, or as a ‘lifter’ on a rubbish truck. So buying film, and paying for prints wasn’t always easy.

That summer I would have been wearing a blue Chinese jacket with knotty buttons, my favourite jeans (that a girlfriend eventually burned), which had patches on the patches to hold them together. They were really comfortable and warm in the evenings. I also had a purple hat, which belongs to a story for the future, about Papa Luigi, the guru, who spoke in Albert Park in a parody protest against fakes who conned and fleeced people, including some of my friends, who were searching for a deeper meaning to their lives. Subscribe to this Substack, and the story will appear one of these days. The shortened story was, even though I wasn’t for real, people started following me!

I remember, at the time, I was wearing a pair of super comfortable Mexican riding boots. My good friend Rowan gave me his old pair when I commented that I would love to own a pair like that. He had a new pair and wasn’t going to wear them again. They were awesome, cowboy patterns printed on solid leather. They had wooden soles with horseshoe-shaped metal tacked onto the heels. I wore them a lot back in those days.

This photo was published in Tim Jones and Ian Baker’s book, A Hard Won Freedom. That’s me in our school chapel at Auckland Alternative School in my purple hat, in 1974.

Luigi Cappel aka Papa Luigi at Auckland Alternative School

I had been to the first unofficial Auckland Folk Festival, four or so months earlier, which was great. This was going to be an experience.

“Gino, put that camera down and help put up the tent!”

When we arrived, we picked a spot for our army-style tent and looked at it for a while. These things mustn’t be rushed. Fortunately, there were a couple of adults who knew what to do, and they set about providing us with instructions, and sure enough, before too long, we had a solid square canvas tent, great ground cover, which would be needed a couple of days later, and we moved our gear in.

I had a guitar with me, as I always did, and it did the rounds of my schoolmates and friends. We wandered around the place and sat on the hills, playing, as people drove in from around the country for the Auckland Folk Festival, organised by Titirangi, Devonport and the Poles Apart Clubs.

Old friends, Chris and Pete

Musos don’t waste any time, and before you could say Pukeko in a Ponga Tree, there were clusters of tents, circling bonfires, where billies hung from tripods boiled water for the coffee. Circles of people, soon-to-be friends, were getting their instruments in tune with each other.

The circles were loosely based on genres of folk music and it was like a festival with many stages. I hadn’t yet turned 17 but had been in the folk scene since I was about 7 and performing from the age of 9, so I knew many of the people there. I knew at least one person in each group of 10-30 people, as well of course all of my schoolmates. I roved with my guitar from group to group.

There were bluegrass and country people like Frank Sillay. One of those who mastered the art of the introduction as well as being an excellent musician.

Pat and Colin Bowley were there along with Bev Young, tuning up their voices in one circle. I was hoping to find a video of them all performing together, but alas, nothing to be found. You can see Bev and Alan in this clip from a different festival, Whare Flats.

Keith Finlayson was in a circle I joined with Al Young, Bill and John Taylor which was a mix of all sorts of music.

Keith Finlayson at the Gisborne Folk Festival 1974

The key thing that brought us together was guitars and similar implements of destruction. We started going round in a circle and each introduced ourselves to anyone that didn’t know us and I was in my blues phase and trotted out some Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, probably something like Stranger Blues.

Keith got me a little excited, telling me he was heading to San Francisco to spend time with them and he asked me if I’d like to come along. He must have asked a lot of people because several people later told me he had invited them too.

Everyone joined in and I was having a ball. While there was the main stage, much of the festival was just groups of people jamming or listening to each other. There were loads of traditional songs with multi-part harmonies.

This was around the time when a friend loaned me a book of Country Blues guitar, which ultimately led me on a pilgrimage to Mississippi to hunt down the home of Mississippi John Hurt. That’s a story for another day.

The first day was great, but during the night the rain came down in buckets and Moller’s Farm turned into something that probably looked like Woodstock when the rain came down.

After this things got a bit messy. The circles of musicians had evacuated, and the barn was full of drenched people whose tents had collapsed. Their clothes steamed as they stood by the fire, which never went out, drying themselves and their clothes.

Not us though. This is where things got a bit hazy, well a lot hazy actually, because my boots weren’t the only things from Mexico. Someone had brought along some weed from that great country and we decided to inhale a little. Well next thing you know, who cared about the rain?

It reminds me a bit of Baba Ram Das, who I was reading at the time, all about being in the moment. He would say, “The sun is shining. Great! Let’s enjoy the sun.” or “It’s raining, let’s go out and enjoy the rain.” And we did.

It probably started with someone slipping and sliding in the mud by accident. Then someone decided that looked like fun. Next thing you know, we were all doing it, or at least some of the kids I was with. It was a warm day, a lot of the mud would wash out in the rain and the rest we could go in the showers with our clothes on to get the worst of it off.

I clearly remember walking back to our tent in the rain, laughing my head off, raising it to greet some people walking the other way, accidentally slipping in the mud (this time), laughing all the way, as the torrential rain continued to wash down Moller’s Farm, and my mind was floating on a Mexican cloud.

A couple of weeks later someone said that my parents had turned up at the festival for a little while, and had seen me covered head to toe in mud. I didn’t see them, and they never mentioned it. I asked them about it some years later and they didn’t recall it. Perhaps they didn’t recognise their son under all that mud. They didn’t know I was going to be there, so it may have been that they didn’t recognise me, out of context.

Well, the rain ended, and there was plenty more music. I got a taste for folk festivals and hitchhiked or travelled with friends to festivals all over the country. They included Gordonton, Hamilton, Raukawa Falls, Wellington, Nelson, and Christchurch. Each had its own flavour. Sometimes I slept in a tent, sometimes in a cabin, sometimes the music went on all night. They were great times, with great people and great music.

#AucklandFolkFestival #1974 #MollersFarm