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Pickett - the story Ritchie Francis Pickett Introduction When asked in a radio interview during the 1990s
what he would do differently were he able to live his life again, Kiwi country music tearaway Ritchie Pickett
proclaimed he would "take more photos". It was also an
attempt to get away from the perception of Pickett as the piano-thumping wild man of Kiwi
music. "I played mostly guitar. It was deliberate to stay away from the piano
dink-da-dink da-dink da-dink, and just show that I write, cos most people perceive me as
being a hard-out piano player." Mind you, its an image Pickett hadnt
been slow in cultivating over many years of live work. The performance always betrayed the
fact, but he said hes very seldom comfortable live. "Probably because you
dont get the audience you want. You have to have an audience waiting to hear you do
something. Quite a lot of my audiences will put up with my material and my ballads waiting
for the piano thumping." Live album The Wicked
Piano Pumpin’ Pickett, released in 2004, put him firmly back behind the piano for a collection of the choice
cuts from his previous albums, including a tender reworking of Gone For Water’s standout
Yes, We’ll Leave the Lights On, and a handful of unreleased songs.
It seemed he had become more at ease with the
piano-thumping image, while his audiences were a lot more accepting of his wonderful original
country ballads than he gave them credit for. But perhaps echoing the earlier confession of
seldom feeling comfortable playing live, he said rather than being released, the live album
actually "escaped". The fact is Pickett, born February 16 1955, was one
of New Zealands most prolific writers, who filled the years between 1984s Gone
For Water and 1998s All Strung Out In A Bunch bringing projects to the
verge of recording only to see the chance slip away. He said although he considered it a country album,
All Strung Out In A Bunch was not a follow-up to Ritchie Pickett and the
Inlaws landmark Gone For Water LP. "The follow-up album for Gone For
Water was recorded, demoed with the Inlaws, and I thought it was a good album. But we
never got to finish it, the band exploded before then." Pickett rated it better than
the groups debut. "It was more focused, more a band thing. Gone For Water
was more me."
All Strung Out In A Bunch was recorded at the
Zoo studio in Hamilton and Incubator in Auckland. One track was recorded on a cassette
player "years and years ago". "Its got some classic country
stylings. 3am Hamilton Sunday Morning is one of the best country songs Ive
written. Thats a true story about walking home drunk. All the street names and
everything was just as it goes in the song as I walked home. Down to the old drunk telling
me about the war." Pickett also labelled some of the material weird.
"Thanks For The Reefer, Ross is probably my favourite. Thats a really
weird song. Thats got that 5/8 feel at the start and I play trumpet over the
start." Some of the weird ones were left off in a farming
down from 16 to 10 tracks. "Some were inappropriate, not for me but for people who
heard the album. The overview was it sort of moved too far away from country." Early Years It was country music that first touched the life
of Ritchie Pickett in 1950s and 60s Morrinsville, New Zealand. "Hank Williams
is the core of everything for me. I firmly believe that Hank Williams was as much blues as
he was country as he was rock and roll. Yknow, he was a complete being: songwriting,
performance, everything. He was a rocker." Picketts earliest musical experiences were
jam sessions around the piano of cousin Jack Pickett with the Pickett family band. Young
Ritchie played a home-made snare drum and kept his eyes glued to the influential cousin
Jacks dancing fingers. At age 11, his first band, The Lymit, played at
the Morrinsville Marching Girls end of year wind-up. It was the first in a lifetime
of gigs, although back then the repertoire was strictly covers. "A lot of it was
Beach Boys cos, as our voices hadnt broken, it was just natural, we could do the
high harmonies." By the end of the 1960s he was in a heavy metal
band called Cunus Lupus, but it was old-time rock and roll and George Lucas 1973
film American Graffiti that initiated Picketts breakout to a national
audience. "I met a guy who was going to university in Hamilton, Glen White, and we
formed a rock and roll revival band. When the movie American Graffiti came out we
were on the road as Graffiti by then." Often teamed up with Tom Sharplin, Graffiti would
play every day of the year except Good Friday and Christmas Day. They would spend Monday
to Saturday in one pub, and drive to the next on Sunday. Crowds of 200 werent
uncommon for Monday nights, building up to 600 or so by Friday. "In those days it was
entertainment, and now youve got videos. You didnt have the electronic medium
we have now." Graffiti ground to a halt and Pickett joined
South Aucklands Hot Ash, fronted by the songwriting talent of Rod McCauley. The band
put out a few singles before Pickett was sent packing after a massive backstage fight. After drummer Johnny Drinkwater introduced him to
the New York Dolls, Pickett re-formed Graffiti but it was a far cry from the original
concept. "We put on make-up and dresses and teased our hair. It was generally very
relaxing to be able to dress up a bit. Wed get hassled and beaten up quite a bit by
the truck drivers who all thought we were faggots, couldnt understand how I knew
what the rugby score was." Songwriting Pickett was by now starting to flex his writing
muscles after the short stint with McCauley in Hot Ash, and the efforts were infiltrating
Graffitis song list. But the band was more into living the rock and roll lifestyle
so Pickett jumped at the chance to join legendary New Zealand heavy metal/prog rock band
Think. "Think was a good band, great writing. That
was Alan Badger and Phil Whitehead, Don Mills, Neville Jess. Thats where I learnt
how to write. I learnt there were no rules." Thinks We'll Give You A Buzz
album on Atlantic Records still fills Pickett with pride when he thinks of his songwriting
credit revolving on the turntable beneath the Atlantic moniker. The keyboard skills of Don Mills were also
inspiring. "Between Don Mills and Jack Pickett, that was the hands-on actual
thing." Pickett was primarily Thinks singer who played the occasional guitar.
"Basically, I was just a fuckin good dancer." A tour stop in Napier brought a Think tale of
Spinal Tap proportions when Pickett bought a carton of sherbet and, after devouring three
quarters of a preserving jar, was rushed to the doctor "literally fizzing at the
butt". Crossing the Ditch Think won the New Zealand Battle of the Bands and
the Grunt Machine songwriting contest, and part of their prize was passage to Australia
and two gold microphones. The band and entourage ended up stranded on the
wharves of Sydney waiting for Atlantics Australian representative to meet them.
"Wed sold up everything, moved to Australia, had nowhere to live, expecting
this record company to come and whisk us away to our palatial mansions. They didnt
want to know about us."
The companys New Zealand head at the time,
Tim Murdoch, suggested they got down to Bondi and found themselves a rich woman. So much
for record company support. Before they could, Pickett was kicked out of Think for being
too country. "Id heard Elvis Costello, and I
realised the song was alive. Him, Graham Parker and the Sex Pistols really turned my head
around, put me back in touch with songs. Pop music was joyous again instead of being
the guitar player is going to do a 20-minute solo followed by a 20-minute solo by
the keyboard player. Elvis Costello showed me you could be tough and still be
sensitive." He sent for New Zealand musicians to cross the
Tasman and join his new band, Snuff, although the music was becoming less and less
important than the next score. "I got tied up at the same time with some very
unsavoury characters in the New Zealand and Australian underworld, which eventually led me
to being invalided to Waikato Hospital." It was 1981, his career had seized up in
a haze of substance abuse, he was riddled with cancer, and his acquaintances were
dying in increasingly suspicious circumstances. "I literally woke up in Waikato
Hospital and couldnt remember the last three or four years," Pickett says. He was diagnosed with liver cancer, and claims
the substance abuse probably saved his life because it slowed the disease. "That time
was so fuelled with abuse that the actual cancer just took a back seat. "I was just so lucky that I got out of that.
The cancer thing saved my life in more ways than one. It was a terrible treadmill. Lots of
people around me were killed and buried under airports." Hard Country After a botched operation which, more than 20
years later, still generated as many Ritchie is dead rumours as there were
Paul is dead ones, Pickett left hospital on crutches minus a third of a liver,
swapped substances and fell into hard country music. The piano saved his life. "Cos I
couldnt stand up and play the guitar, so I sat at the piano and started playing, and
just started getting into writing. It was all just country stuff. "During the 80s I swapped one form of
abuse for another." The day he got off crutches he hobbled to the bottle store and
bought a bottle of Scotch. For the next few years hed down a bottle or two a day. Morrinsville country identity Bernie Eva provided
another musical revelation for Pickett when he played him an entire Merle Haggard album
for the first time. Still recovering, Pickett was made New Zealand
Country Music Association musical director, became a regular on the final years of
TVs Thats Country and formed Ritchie Pickett and the Inlaws with Dave
Maybee. "I toured a lot with the Inlaws. Wed
get the people come along whod seen me on Thats Country. But Thats
Country wouldnt let me do any of those [original Inlaws] songs." As was the
shows policy, the artists performed what they were told and dressed as they were
told. "I didnt want to tuck my pants in my boots," Pickett laughed. "In fact, after Thats Country
had gone down and finished, I ran into [producer] Trevor Spitz somewhere and he came and
caught part of our show with the Inlaws. He said, Why werent you doing that on
Thats Country? I said, Well, you should know, I submitted the
songs. But they only ever took the covers. "I did some fuckin horrendous things
on TV in the 80s. I was just ashamed of myself. You did what you were told to get on
TV, cos if you got on TV you made more money." Thats Country host Ray Columbus
encouraged Picketts songwriting and set up an album deal for the Inlaws with RCA. At
a time when New Zealand country artists were bringing out insipid rehashes of the latest
Nashville pap, Columbus produced the Inlaws vibrant masterpiece Gone For Water.
But before the band could truly capitalise, the Inlaws blew up. The Jones Boys and beyond Pickett took another band to the brink of a
recording deal when he and bass guitarist Chris Gunn fronted the Jones Boys in the
mid-1980s. "Chris Gunn is a guy thats always been like a half-brother to me
musically. If wed been able to get what we had going in the 1980s, if wed been
able to put that in front of the public on a bigger scale... That was a good band, and he
and I complemented each other well. "We had the Jones Boys, which was a seven
piece, eight piece, with brass and girl singers, and we were doing some great stuff,
originals and stuff like that. Ross Sutton was gonna manage us. People wanted to record
us, but he said, No, youre not ready yet, and within a month hed
turned that band into a three piece with him on drums. He ignored all the recording and
turned those bands into cash cows. He didnt really care about the long term, and
drove a wedge between the players." Other bands came and went and Pickett kept up an
exhausting amount of live work through the country, either with his various line-ups or
with Tom Sharplin again, always about to release a new single or album. He never
had to take a day job but had "had some very supportive girlfriends and wives".
Through thick and thin, the music stayed constant. He said it was about soul, "which I think
country music is. Truth -- you can bare yourself to a certain extent. The essence of a
good country song is the honesty of it, like Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt or Merle Haggard. "You have nights when everything clicks and
goes right. In terms of writing, Im always striving and Im not sure what it is
for. Sometimes late at night with the neon light reflecting off the Trader Inn sign
outside my window, I get it right. I get it fuckin right." © 1998-2011 Glen Moffatt. All Rights Reserved.
February 16, 1955 – March 13, 2011
There were no regrets for this acclaimed New Zealand musician and songwriter who had cheated death on several occasions --
beaten cancer, walked away from car wrecks and survived life on the periphery of the deadly Mr Asia drug empire -- but
finally lost his battle with the bottle, passing away peacefully in his Cambridge home on March 13, 2011, at the age of 56.
He had rarely worked since 2007 when his internal organs protested
decades of hard living and put him in intensive care reportedly with just days to live. The fact he had been rushed
to hospital after collapsing over his piano mid-show made it all the more dramatic.
Again Pickett beat the odds on that occasion and a year later was back in the studio as
part of Waikato supergroup the Rattler, featuring former members of Knightshade and the Furys. The fruits
of those sessions were released mid-2009 on The Leaving, named for one of Pickett’s most beautiful
ballads.
It was to be the final part in a recording history that saw just five albums released over 35 years despite apparently several hundred
projects and demos shelved because Pickett did not deem the results satisfactory. The musicians and engineers involved
would often beg to differ.
The album added to a sporadic output dating back to Think’s We’ll Give You A Buzz in 1976,
and included 1998’s All Strung Out In A Bunch. In a 1998 interview, he called the latter his songwriting
calling card. "Its a scattering of different styles, a bit of everything. There is a common
thread through it, its Pasifikan funktry."
Photograph by Billy Lawry.