John Rowles "John Rowles" 1968

Seeing John Rowles play an intimate Sunday afternoon showcase at the Auckland casino feels like a privilege. Here’s the Māori boy from Kawerau, who for a brief moment became one of the world’s biggest ballad singers, back home playing not a large concert hall but a bar so small you could reach out and shake his hand. The crowd are enjoying themselves. His mate Winston Peters, another 60-something with unnaturally luxuriant hair, sits near the front, happy not to be the centre of attention. Rowles takes a long-stemmed red rose from a vase on stage and presents it to a woman in the audience. He takes another rose and calls up a loyal fan who has travelled from Queensland for this rare live show. The patter rolls off his tongue, testament to half a century of doing this stuff for a living on stages large and small around the world...

...The voice is still silky and powerful, his phrasing giving shape to the lines. The songs, all done thousands of times, stir memories.A couple of nights later he’s playing a couple of numbers in a showband tribute concert, to a mainly Māori audience. He’s followed by Dennis Marsh, who is outselling every other New Zealand act with his collections of country nostalgia. Rowles surges back on stage in the middle of one of Marsh’s numbers, grabs a microphone, sings a riff, cracks a joke, then disappears backstage laughing, the pretender put in his place. You don’t get to the top without a giant ego. In Kawerau, where Rowles was born on March 26, 1947, the choice of career was planting trees, cutting them down, or turning them into paper. It was when he was sacked for turning up late at the mill that Rowles decided a life in music offered more. He honed his guitar skills playing along to Chet Atkins and Shadows records, so he got some mates together to form an instrumental band, The Kawerau Shadows, and took on the Bay of Plenty circuit. He would slip over to Rotorua to see the showbands, where his ambition to become a singer was fired by seeing the likes of Rim D Paul with the Quin Tikis, Nuuki Waaka with the Deuces, and the Howard Morrison Quartet. “After one of these nights in Rotorua, I went home and said to Mum, ‘I’m going to Auckland to try my luck at some of the big city show bands playing guitar or singing’,” he says in his autobiography, If I Only Had Time. After spending Christmas of 1963 with his parents, he loaded up his Ford Prefect and headed north to Auckland where he auditioned to join The Chevronaires, the resident band at the Picasso club. A performance of ‘Guitar Boogie’ followed by a rendition of Elvis’s ‘One Night With You’ won him the gig, but it didn’t last long...to be continued - audioculture

trax:
01 By the Time I get to Phoenix 02 Domino 03 If I only had Time 04 It takes two 05 Lonely Street 06 Only you 07 Honey 08 Walk in the Sun 09 I really don't want to know 10 Do it 11 Love of the World 12 Dock of the Bay
…served by Gaius…