We are Hayabusa, and you're not

Hai from Hayabusa
Atsui, soo desu ne
Toire wa doko desu ka?
It’s third door on the left.
- Hayabusa, 2000

There once was a time when it was traditional for a son to follow his father into the family trade, be it carpentry, gravedigging, banking or international espionage. And in certain circles it probably still is, even though the profile of occupations has changed a lot since families were surnamed for their choice of employment – tailor, sailor, smith, cooper etc. The Jeff, for instance, was a farmer like the old man, and things went any more poorly for me I might be joining them, should they stop laughing at me long enough to put me on. Super Dave’s old man had been an engineer like him, just a different class (if it’s fair or accurate to say either Super Dave or his old man have any, which it probably isn’t.) Mad Mick’s father had been an absent, violent scumbag, but Uncle Doug had ably subbed in his place and they both still ran Mount Road MCs, so that basically qualified as following his elder into the family trade. Brady Priddle had been a cunt and his father sounded he’d been one too. Even Bethany had followed her father into teaching, so maybe it wasn’t a male-offspring-specific deal.

My mate Dan Maxwell, too, was supposed to follow his father into the family trade. His old man's trade, since you asked, was being a All Black. Bob ‘the Truck’ Maxwell had played prop for Otago and the ABs (as they are rather over-cutely and vomiferously tagged in the Shakies these days) in the late Sixties and early Seventies, and stood staunch and tall as a true legend of Otago rugby - at least among the old crusties and musties who remembered him by the late ‘90s, where we join this bit of the tale. By comparison, his lad was more mobile, a chunky number six-seven-eight plying his trade in the loose forwards instead of the front row, but like the old man was made captain of Otago Boys High’s first XV in his senior year and was already playing first grade club rugby in Dunedin before he’d left school.

It was a bloody good side, as OBHS First XVs usually were; packed to the rafters with kids who would go on to represent their country at youth and full international level. That usually was a portent of good things for the province and the nation. The late 1990s was a good period for the religion of blue-and-gold rugby, with Otago winning the National Provincial Championship in 1998, then providing the core of the Highlanders side which narrowly lost the Super 12 final a year later to the hated Crusaders from up the road in Canterbury. By then, Dan was studying at Otago Uni, was playing number eight for the star-studded Varsity A club side (for whom a bunch of Otago’s All Blacks played when they were in town, like Josh Kronfeld and Anton Oliver), was being mentioned in dispatches as the heir to the throne of Otago and All Black legend Taine Randell, and had been given the nickname ‘Tractor’ from the Scarfies (drunk students) on the terraces. Which made no sense at all given that he was smaller and more mobile than his ‘Truck’ of an old man, so if anything the nicknames should have been the other way around. Then again mightn’t have been the man-mountain his father had been, and still was (though with the added feature of a beer gut which generated its own gravity field) but Tractor at five foot ten was still over a hundred kegs, most of which was prime Taieri plains beef. He was, to put it respectfully, A Unit. You wouldn’t have run at him if you’d had the choice, and not many chose to.

Tractor made his provincial debut towards the end of Otago’s unsuccessful NPC defence of ’99, with Taine Randell away with the All Blacks on their even less successful mission to Bring Back Buck (oh hang on, that was the Wobbilies’ slogan wasn’t it?) He’d become a regular in the Otago B side by now, and had been named in the larger mid-week squad announcements for a couple of games, but hadn’t so much as had a run off the bench yet. And now here he was. Starting. At Carisbrook. Against the hated Cantabs. With a full-page colour interview on the back page of the Otago Daily Times announcing his arrival on the NPC stage, thirty years to the week since his old man’s debut. No pressure, son.

He went all right though, as he would have said in his usual understated, laconic way. He made yards up the middle all day, scored a try off the back of a five metre scrum and set up another from a lineout win in an unprecedented twenty-point rout of the northern invaders. Overnight, the Tractor went from minor campus celebrity to cult hero of the terraces. Even his taciturn old man slapped him on the back, said he’d made him prouder than any bastard living, and bought Dan handles of Speights until he threw up like Linda Blair in the Exorcist. It was one of the best moments he’d ever shared with the old fella. One of the last, too. Four days later Bob Maxwell died of a massive heart attack after – or maybe while, it was never established – being thrown from his quad-bike out the back of his farm on the Taieri Plain, south of Dunedin. His health hadn’t been good for a while – given the size of the bloke, it was hardly a news flash – but at least he’d seen the young fella go round in an Otago jersey before the curtain was drawn. For his part, the Tractor got drunk for a week and broke an Auckland lock’s jaw in a scrum eruption in his next game. The JAFA started it, you could ask anyone there. As the Tractor trudged off, red-carded from his second ever game for his province, sight smeared by mud and tears and knuckles split to the bone, the Scarfies on the drenched terraces stood as one (OK, so they were standing anyway, they were on the terraces after all) and deafened Carisbrook with the sheer volume of love they poured upon their new hero. Then pelted the JAFA bastard with beer cans, only some of which were empty, as he was carried off on a stretcher. The Tractor was having to do his mourning in public, and they loved him all the more for it.

Things settled down. Exams finished, the academic year and rugby season wound down, and most of the students – those who’d come to Otago from elsewhere in the country – went back from where they came to bludge around home for Christmas and sponge off their parents, as they usually did. And the Tractor bought a motorbike. Well, to be fair, he already had one. Always had, since learning to ride on chook chasers and the like on the farm as a young ‘un. He’d went for his full road licence as soon as the law allowed, ditching his road-learner CB250 Honda for a rat-arsed ex-Jap import Kawasaki ZX9R Ninja streetfighter (i.e. stripped out, no fairing, taped headlights, aftermarket bars, race pipes etc) the moment he was legally able. The power didn’t faze him; as far as he was concerned, it was the entire point. If anything he was keen for more – the Ninja was a bit peaky as a commuter, although bloody impressive as a weapon for getting up to Queenstown or Wanaka in licence-vaporizing time, and he figured something with a bit more low-down torque would be cool. Something like the new GSX1300R Hayabusa from Suzuki. He reckoned that should have a bit of low-down pull, being the most powerful production motorcycle ever made, as well as the fastest. His mates thought he was an arch-mentalist. His mother and sister put it down to aftershocks from the grieving process. He just thought it was a fucking awesome idea.

And he was in luck. After a few months of looking, he found a guy in Christchurch who was selling one, an early-release Japanese market one which he’d had brought in as a second-hand ‘grey’ import. In the three weeks the bloke had owned it, he’d dropped it five times, though all of which around the ‘burbs at fairly sedentary speed and none of which were too serious as he’d scared himself witless even getting it up as high as third gear, including flinging himself off the back of the thing at a set of lights, trying to pull a wheelie. The Tractor checked the frame for cracks and the block for leaks, pronounced himself happy (and the owner a softcock, but not to his face), cashed in part of his inheritance (much to his mother’s displeasure) and bought the thing. The insurance premium alone cost more than any of his previous bikes had done, but only the inherently weak worried about shit like that. He tested the Hayabusa’s high-speed credentials on the way back to Dunedin, on the straights between Ashburton and Timaru at a Red Bull-fuelled two in the morning. He saw two-fifty kph, briefly, before bottling it on account of wheel wobble, the downdraft from slaloming trucks, and a heightened awareness of his own mortality. But not before producing a grin that spread the width of his helmet visor.

Next day was the first preseason training session for the Highlanders’ Super 12 side, and his name had been among the Otago rookies announced for the train-on squad. This was a Big Deal, obviously. It was his chance to show his stuff and maybe get a professional contract. So he probably shouldn’t have spent most of the night thrashing a nuclear missile of a hypersports bike down State Highway One dodging semi-trailers. Some sleep would have been a good idea. It might have meant he wasn’t late for probably the most important training session of his rugby life. Ah well. This was where a two hundred horsepower hypersports bike made sense – if ever it did. He left black scorchmarks on the tarmac outside his Castle St flat – not that anyone would have noticed compared to the scorchmarks left by burning couches from previous street parties – and turned the right-straight-left into Dundas and then onto the one-way heading south into a pair of third gear sweepers, feeling the back end kick and protest over the patchy surface and squirm over the white lines, still damp from the morning rain. He had at least lifted, momentarily, at the red light onto Cumberland St to judge if any traffic was coming, before rocketing on through, picking the bike up early on exit to drive the horsepower through the meat of the fat rear tyre, in true Mick Doohan style. Two minutes until training began down at the Brook, six minutes ride away. Engage warp drive…

Tractor had long ago come to the conclusion that Dunedin drivers were grievous crap. They didn’t indicate, they didn’t look, they didn’t understand the give way laws, and they drove like thumbless fucking monkeys. So, being a biker and having his health in question every time he ventured out amongst the Great Unwashed, he’d long since learned to predict and anticipate stupid people doing stupid things. Like the scene he was approaching at warp speed quite-a-bit. Bus pulling out of stop. Thumbless monkey in suspiciously-battered old Toyota Starlet trying to decide whether to give way to bus or not. Like Clubber Lang, Tractor’s prediction was PAIN, mainly for himself. Unless he went wayyyy right – both lanes went southbound, SH1 was split into two for the length of Dunedin City, running along parallel streets from the motorway at the north end to the one which began at the south – and hoped the Starlet didn’t do so first.

Bus pulls out. Brakelights on the Starlet; she’s giving way. It had to be a ‘she’; they almost always were. Tractor wasn’t a misogynist, just a realist. Then, no brakelights, and the tinny little shitbox suddenly surges, pulling into the right lane as the bus occupies the left. No indicators, obviously, but the Tractor had pretty much predicted as such and wound the throttle even harder, zeroing-in on that shimmering Hayabusa-size gap between Starlet and guttering (normally occupied by parked tourists visiting the Cadbury factory) which was about to emerge just as soon as the Starlet got up to speed. Any second now.

Except, for reasons known only to the thumbless monkey at the wheel, she clamped the brakes on and stopped cold, right in the path of the accelerating Hayabusa. And was far too busy hitting the horn to realise, until it was too late, that she was about to be used as an unplanned jump ramp by Tractor Knievel.

In order - because these things are important, it's why the crash investigation boys from over the road at Dunedin Central Police Station spent so long over the mess - the Tractor went over the bars, into the back of the Starlet, into clear sky, into the back of the bus, into the ground. Then was cleaned up by his own bike which had followed him along the same patch over the top of the little hatchback, the rear of which now looked like a Coke can that had been stood on by a Kodiak bear. Just to make sure the point was made, he was finally run over by the thumbless monkey in the Starlet.

So ended Tractor’s prospects of a Highlanders contract for the forthcoming Super 12 season.

He spent a month in Dunedin Hospital being realigned like a wrecked race car being straightened on a jig – the bike wasn’t quite so salvageable, though at least insurance covered the damage, despite the insurance company trying to claim he’d been at fault on account of them being inveterate cunts – and spent several weeks laid up in bed at home. In a minor positive the girl from the Starlet turned out to be deeply apologetic for ending the career of the terrace cult hero – Sarah had been on the terraces herself most games – and went on to prove that while her driving may have been crap, her bedside manner was exemplary. And she was an excellent shag as well. Which was nice, considering he wasn’t really in a position to go out meeting girls in his position (which was on his back, mostly.)

As it turned out, the crash did more than end his prospects for a Highlanders contract that year. It ended his rugby career entirely... but not in the way you might have thought. To pass the time in convalescence while he wasn’t moping about his rugby career ending, in between the welcome distraction of being ‘looked after’ by Sarah, his flatmate Bear gathered his mates to chip in and buy him a guitar, an old acoustic. Probably so he’d stop nicking Bear’s axe when he was out in the surf. He usually borrowed Bear’s because while Bear was a very large gentleman indeed – Tractor had met him while bludging in the Thirsty Thirds for Varsity in first year, Bear had been playing lock and had the towering John Eales physique to back it up – he was unfailingly generous with his stuff, whereas their other flatmate Hollywood was a precious little bitch when it came to his belongings, particularly his guitars. Plural.

Nick ‘Hollywood’ Holland was a music student who took his music and himself very seriously indeed. He’d come to Otago not for the beers or the babes but for the music course, which was taught by various members of bands who’d cut their teeth amidst the ‘Dunedin Sound’ of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Apparently this was a seminal cult movement of NZ music, massively influential worldwide, which is why no bastard outside of NZ has ever heard of it. Hollywood was from an affluent private school in Auckland and was going to be a massive fuck-off rock star, end of discussion; the only thing shinier than his guitars was his teeth. He was arrogant, vain and insufferable, and those were his good points. Well OK the fact that he was usually swathed liberally in hot women was also a good point, and made him decent company at parties as he was a bit too self-involved to notice if you borrowed one or two of them for a quick roll in the hay (or the sharehouse laundry at least) while he wasn’t looking. The guitars he’d notice. Immediately.

Bear and Tractor had ended up with Hollywood as a flatmate because of Dion, aka D or D-Funk, years later Tenacious Dion, Electric Dion’s In Love (another obscure Electric Six reference for those collecting them) or just The Pacific Islands Contingent. D was part Fijian Indian, part Samoan, all gangsta. Even in the depths of a Dunedin winter, which made Farmadale look subtropical, D got about in baggy basketball shorts and a wardrobe full of NBA singlets – Kobe, Shaq, MJ, the usual suspects. If the weather really went south he might consider a beanie, or maybe even a hoodie if the snow was more than ankle-deep. He quoted thinkers like Chomsky, Kant and Zack de la Rocha, DJ’d at Bath Street under the alias D-Train, and played live drums while Rockin’ Tha Mic in a reggae-infused drum-‘n’-bass hiphop combo called Hardy Perennials, which was officially the weakest drug reference band title ever used. I’m not sure if marijuana is a hardy perennial, and I doubt they knew either. Hollywood had briefly joined them as a hired-gun axeman, but their styles hadn’t really meshed. There’s only so many ‘80s poodle metal solos you can fit into your average reggae-infused live dub set.

D and Bear had met in first year – they were on the same floor in their hall of residence, and had flatted together with a bunch of fellow floor escapees in second year. Bear was of a very rare breed indeed – an Australian who chose to live in New Zealand. His old man had worked in marketing for the XXXX Brewery in Queensland (to the extent any marketing was really necessary to get Queenslanders to buy XXXX), but when the Kiwis bought them up in the aftermarth of Alan Bond’s shit hitting the fan, he’d been moved sideways within the Lion Nathan empire from Castlemaine Perkins to work for NZ Breweries’ South Island brands, primarily based with Speights in Dunedin where the family settled in the mid ‘90s and where Bear finished his final years of high school. The family had returned to Australia thereafter – to be accurate, his old man was transferred to Auckland while his mother took his sisters and moved back to Australia, along with half his old man’s stuff, if you follow – but Bear felt at home in the Deep South, or as much as he’d ever felt at home anywhere, and decided to hang around and go to uni there.

Ironically, having been surrounded by beer throughout his youth, Bear couldn’t stand the stuff; his nickname spoke to his preference for Bundy Rum, which he must have been into long before he moved over, as the nickname predated his move to En Zed given that Bundy Rum wasn’t available in the Shakies. Appropriately, a bit like people grow to look like their partners, or their pets, Bear did somewhat resemble Bundy Bear from the TV ads – very tall, very blonde, very hairy. Bear (Christian Sorensen to his mother and the Internal Revenue Department) put it down to his Viking ancestry.

So Tractor spent weeks bashing away on his old acoustic during his crash rehab, writing songs, making up shit, and by the time he was upright again he was good enough with his tunes and his banter to be making appearances at student bars, flat parties and rugby club functions, playing songs and telling stories, still on crutches. Before too long he’d dragged Bear off the couch and onto the stool next to his – the Bear was happy to play rhythm, bass, whatever, so long as the drinks were cheap and the vibe was fun. It was a good gig. Plenty of laughs, plenty of drinks and hot-and-cold running girls.

They’d probably have been content to stay as a vocal/acoustic duo, pulling a few hundred bucks a weekend for turning up in pub corners and regaling the punters, but the Otago Uni Student Association band comp was looming, Hollywood had been kicked out of his latest band for being a showboating tosser, and wanted revenge. He’d finally decided the boys had developed their act to the point where it was worth his while letting them play with him, or so he explained it to them. Bear and Tractor, not unreasonably, told him to fuck off. Then Hollywood outlined the Generous Cash Cash Cash Prizes on offer, and suddenly the lads found themselves in a manky basement rehearsal space holding musical instruments with Hollywood barking at them to play in key with his singing, for fuck’s sake.

Eventually D, who’d volunteered his services on skins, drew the short straw to break it to Hollywood that the reason noone could play in key with his vocals was that his vocals were in a key as yet uncharacterized by musicology. In short, while his guitar playing was stellar, his singing was fucking woeful. Hollywood took this in the generous spirit it was intended – storming off and sulking for two days – before he finally listened to an unmastered playback of his vocals, realised he made strangling cats sound operatic, and reluctantly handed the lead vocals, and thus nominal charge of the band, to terrace cult hero Dan ‘Tractor’ Maxwell. Which any idiot with half a clue would have done straight away, given that the Tractor’s profile was such they could have entered the same act three times with different wigs and blocked out the entire podium for themselves.

As it was, Hollywood Tractors (the least shithouse name any of them could come up with at short notice) finished first, pursued solely by daylight. All they needed now was a name which wasn’t complete spank. That came when one of the ODT’s junior photographers – a mate of Tractor’s from high school at Otago Boys – presented him with a huge framed photo of his mashed motorbike lying in the middle of the road, as an ironic 21st present. The lad had a black sense of humour. As did Tractor and the boys; the band was summarily renamed Hayabusa, and the photo became their first album cover, released on the back of winning the national Battle Of The Bands Final in Auckland, and their breakthrough singles Heat Exchanger and Alpha Bitch bursting onto the airwaves, along with a fairly handy splash of controversy; they managed to incite a bloody turf war between the self-promoting feminist academics of the land over whether being referred to as an ‘alpha bitch’ was misogynist or empowering.

All of that basically meant by the time Tractor’s injury rehab was at a level where he could have thought about resuming training for rugby, Hayabusa had developed to the point where being a rock star had overtaken being an All Black as the Most Awesomest Career Option Evaarrrrrrr.

I first heard Hayabusa on Triple J in late 2000 – it would have been on the road between somewhere and somewhere else for our More Arse Than Class tour, and it would have been Alpha Bitch, the J’s picked it up and ran with it fairly enthusiastically. It’s pretty easy to admit I fucking loved their stuff straight off. It was the sort of dirty, nasty, garage-punk-infused rock which always kicked me in the guts and made me grin, the stuff I’d have had the Gasket play every day of the week if the boys had listened to me. Didn’t hurt that they had a sense of humour – you wouldn’t say they were as overtly piss-taking as we were, nor were they as eclectic in style as we were (and became more and more as time went on), but they were a proper, old-school, blood-and-thunder rock and roll band. I saw them live supporting the Hellacopters (read ‘blowing the doors off the Hellacopters’, which takes some serious fucking doing) at a show on the Gold Coast at the end of the year and badgered Richie to dust the cobwebs off his chequebook and sign them up to Exocet. He didn’t, and regrets it to this day. They signed to seminal New Zealand indie label Flying Nun instead, home of the Dunedin Sound in the ‘80s, and they and labelmates the D4 went off and creased punters’ eardrums worldwide, at the leading edge of the New Rock Revolution (with the Strokes, Hives, Vines, White Stripes, Datsuns et al). We met them at South by Southwest in Austin in 2001, where we’d both somehow blagged our way onto our respective nations’ invitee lists. We’d ended up playing adjoining sets at a tiny red-brick club called Emo’s Alternative Lounge – no floppy peroxided fringes in sight - and hit it off big time. Eventually we got to tour with them later that year with the inaugural Anzac Cultural Exchange Program visiting both sides of the Tasman. We usually got on well with other bands, but we buddied up with Hayabusa particularly well, based on our common interests of drinking, things with engines, not wanting to play beside deusexmachina ever again (they’d made that fucking mistake themselves), more drinking, playing big fuck-off riffs unnecessarily loudly, and over and above all of the above, girls. Like us, all their best and most popular songs were about sex – Heat Exchanger, Alpha Bitch, Sticky Wicket, Cold Shower, Designated Wingman, Transvision Tramp (an ode to late-80s Brit sexpot Wendy James) – though they did have a bit of a thing for two-word titles, just as Shihad tended to favour one. Hayabusa also had a theme song, like our I Wanna Be Angus Young – their was called We Are Hayabusa (And You’re Not) and was half in pidgeon Japanese, on account of their immediate success in that part of the world based on naming their band after the Japanese peregrine falcon (and a fairly quick motorbike also named as such). We had to follow them at Fuji Rock in ’02; they’d just released their thermonuclear second album Skunk Works and were absolutely unstoppable. I don’t recommend trying it at home. Or at Fuji Rock for that matter. At least the Japanese punters were too polite to boo us off the stage. When they were on form, there wasn’t a band alive that could match the ’Busa, whether on stage or in the bar. Didn't stop us trying, of course...

Like pretty much everything in music after the end of 2003, I lost touch with where Hayabusa were at, but apparently where we took the exit marked ‘Oblivion’, they stayed on State Highway One with the throttle pinned, just as Tractor would have done had that doddering Starlet not intervened. Every album outsold its predecessor – possibly because unlike us they weren’t stupid enough to vomit them out with negligible gaps between them, so as to create interest in the market through going away for a bit – from 2000’s self-titled debut, to 2002’s Skunk Works, 2004’s epic Competition Proven (sounds more arrogant than it was – Bear found it on a random Wikipedia entry about some old NASCAR team) and 2006’s still-good-but-a-bit-too-processed West Coast Offense (even the spelling was Septic). The sound was indicative of the band themselves, who’d apparently been through the food processor themselves, with success now apparently indexing itself to the band’s collective sense of entitlement, self-importance, petulance and pharmaceutical intake. In places they even sounded frighteningly like Nickelback. Fark Nooooooooo.

At that point, Tractor wisely called a time-out – after his wife, the irrepressible Aroha, suggested he might want to pull finger and stop carrying on like a complete dickhead or he might find himself having seven bells slapped out of him by herself and her biggest, hairiest relatives, as a prelude to her and the kids leaving him – and it was decided to put Hayabusa on ice for twelve months, which became eighteen. Tenacious D, who’d never limited himself just to playing drums for Hayabusa, went full-scale into collaboration mode with a lot of what Hollywood derisively called his ‘Wellington trumpet band mates’ – dub bands of the like of Fat Freddy’s Drop, Black Seeds et al – as well as releasing an album of his own activist-themed hip-hop inspired by the reformation of Rage Against The Machine and titled, fairly unambiguously, Kickin Gainst Tha Pricks. Hollywood recorded a Joe Satriani style guitar-wank solo album which sold well among the usual demographic of long-haired showboating narcissists from high school rock bands, and swore and scowled his way through a lot of golf, lowering neither his handicap nor his blood pressure. Bear just fucked off and went backpacking around the world, guitar under one arm, surfboard under the other. Tractor rediscovered that he had a wife and two young kids, and decided to stop taking quite so many drugs. He cleaned up, stopped drinking, quit smoking, sorted his diet, cut out excess fat, took up cycling, playing squash and went back to working his guts out on the farm again to strengthen his fitness. This improved his quality of life immensely. For about six months, before he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

I had no job, no girl, and no way of paying my mortgage. Tractor had advanced metastatic cancer of the throat and lung. Needless to say, he won the argument as to who was having the shittier time of it. And no wonder why he sounded so fucking awful on the phone, either.