Bernie Griffen was a late bloomer. His first album, Everything So Far, didn’t come until he was 60. Griffen, who died at 72 earlier this month, might have been late to recording but music was the pulse of his life.
He brought hard-won experiences, fragility or gravitas to his small but respected catalogue of sometimes appealingly unpolished folk and alt-country songs for his bands the Grifters and Thin Men.
“I’d wanted to be a musician since I was a kid and played a lot of folk music in my teens,” he said in 2011. “But by the time I was 20 I just couldn’t do it any more. I felt too exposed.”
Griffen grew up Catholic in Wellington, sang in the church choir, picked up the acoustic guitar, and like many of his generation, was swept up by rock music.
He played in folk clubs, lost confidence but found drugs (“I always covered my fears with alcohol or narcotics”), served two terms in prison and in the mid-1970s left for Melbourne, where he played in bands. He then spent six years as a commercial fisherman off remote Karumba in northwest Queensland.
When he returned to New Zealand, he and friends established Progressive Music Studios in central Auckland and made music, notably with the appropriately named Pleasure Boys. However, drugs were still the prop.
His life turned around after meeting journalist Kirsten Warner, who became his life and musical partner.
“I cleaned up in 87 and a few years into my recovery started to write songs and doing the songwriter nights. I kept going until I felt better about myself. I had to stop listening to my own head, which was my destructive place.”
Griffen admired Neil Young, Woody Guthrie, the Band, John Lennon and numerous Americana artists for their honesty, a trait he valued. He didn’t spare himself in that regard. A decade ago, he spoke of being abused by a priest when young (obliquely referenced in the Thin Men’s Brechtian Burial Ground), and many songs on their 2018 album Doors Wide Open address mortality.
Griffen’s long career encompassed more than his own music: he established Sun Pacific Records; found an outlet for his enthusiasm at Auckland’s 95bFM with his long-running Sunday night Border Radio show championing local and alternative country artists; became a partner in Real Groovy’s distribution company Global Routes Music (which folded in 2008) and, as the music industry went into decline, was a prime mover behind establishing the Independent Music New Zealand organisation. He became its first chairman.
He organised the Gunslinger’s Ball concerts (“to give profile to people who didn’t have one, and have fun”) and was a tireless advocate for independent artists and labels. He knew about being a struggling outsider.
And he played, wrote and eventually recorded his own songs.
The Grifters never had a hit but 29 Diamonds, a raw tribute to the men lost in the Pike River tragedy, is timeless: “29 diamonds for a chunk of coal … the youngest one was 17, and as full of life as you’ve ever seen, 29 dead for a chunk of coal”.
Many of Griffen’s songs were cathartic, topical, dark and deeply personal. They were also honest, for which he was respected.
He suffered ill health (asthma, emphysema, stomach ulcers, a near-death experience on a 2016 flight to London) but his 2014 album was named Salvation because, “That’s the way I feel about music and my life to a large extent. I’ve been blessed.”
At the 2019 Taite Music Prize, then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern presented Griffen with the inaugural Independent Spirit Award recognising someone “who assists our musicians to grow and find their own unique pathways”.
Bernie Griffen did that, and more.
Online comments from scores of musicians, friends, fellow travellers and those who knew him only through radio all attest to the courage, self-deprecating humour, tenacity and talent of someone they called by his first name.
Warner, his partner of more than four decades, said: “My darling Bernie has gone, no more cheeky laughs!”
