Bruno, do you remember the Me and Gus stories, way before Barry Crump got keen, when a cow cocky was a bastard you met on gravelly roads? Recall the nights playing community halls, and days making a few records, only to break a few more? Ricky Mays Jazz Combo, Max Merritt & The Meteors,
Quincy Conserve, plus, the all-stars-road-show Blerta1, travelling Aotearoa, through khaki paddocks, down thistle blown highways in that diesel bus t seasonal rhythms you doubtless gathered, drummer extraordinaire, on your final journeying off Cape Reinga, the spirit freed to ride the rain you backed
the loner to the last, death the bottom line to stave off cancer. Bruno, you did that thing. R & B, jazzman, film star (didnt Jack Nicholson say get on over to Hollywood?) but you preferred back blocks, sought small towns, river shingle, the hollows of the land, and a home around Waimarama in the Hawkes Bay.
A shifting romantic, hoon & hangman, a real joker you played yourself sans bullshit in a heap of movies; The Wild Man, Ute, you leapt from life to art without a hitch; A Bridge To Nowhere, The Quiet Earth, how you loved women, warmth by the bus load, produced that classic my 12 inch, record of the blues.
1 Bruno Lawrences Electric Revelation and Travelling Apparition.
II
The Still Watches
I
Autumn tinsel floats gold on July leaves and up goes the memory flare. The carbon rod of winter burns low and the dark is a mammoth locked within ice. Watch the simultaneous reels of the seasons spinning before your eyes. A plane passes, and upsets the late sun to a shadow-print upon the wall. With barely a movement we come from the bleaker months to where the picture pans briefly, dissolves upon the softer ores of spring. Ah, but the Captains of Industry are wheeling! A building boom amongst the trees after the first few casual blossoms had fallen along suburban driveways. Observe the birds investing in the green shares of September. This side of the documentary we view in armchair safety, Our Planet: a well heeled cloud pads across the moons surface, under the vast drift-net of the night tuna boats swing light probes about the arresting waters another country claims. David Attenborough journeys through deserts to break the ancient limestone tablets, and proclaim that fossils are the visual memory of stone.
We observe in awe the Environmental Mysteries and ask, is the suns bald glare through the Glory Hole truly the pointing finger of God? Laurence Olivier puts on his final mask, looking deathly, Tell my friends that I miss them, and then fades from the ramparts. I name two from the camp of Good Attitude, builders of the beauty of this planet the givers, not takers who direct our gaze upward from the burning footlights of the closing century, toward the language of our Common Future.