A brief history of Weta's Calling On: 'There was a lot of hate'
Aaron Tokona's howling Kiwi rock classic has quite a history behind it...
For the 20th anniversary of Weta’s debut album Geographica, I wrote this piece about why the Kiwi rockers split shortly after its release, and how the band’s remaining members are coping after the death of front man Aaron Tokona. But I heard some amazing stories about Calling On, Weta’s biggest song, that didn’t quite make the cut. So I’m going to run them here, unedited, in all their glory. Let’s go…
Before we get started, it’s worth refreshing your memory. Have a listen, once again, to Calling On, Weta’s contribution to the New Zealand rock n roll hall of fame. It’s a huge song, one that, even 20 years on, still sounds stunning.
Calling On builds for two minutes and a half minutes before erupting into one of the most exquisite, head-banging, get-out-your-air-guitar pieces of rock nirvana ever created by a Kiwi band.
Here is the early noughties video, which is full of sharp hair cuts, shipping containers, black jeans and sunglasses…
See? It’s still good, right? Did you jump up onto a table at some point? Were you yelling that chorus at your neighbours over the fence? Did you smash something?
Me too.
Many people only know Calling On after it exploded on alt-rock radio stations like Channel Z and The Dot. It came out as the first single for Weta’s debut album Geographica, sometime near the end of 2000.
But Calling On had been a staple of Weta’s frenetic live shows for several years by that point. It was the song that built them a rabid fan base around Wellington, helping them emerge from the Shihad-sized shadow that followed the band around, and it remains the song Weta are still most widely known for.
Along with Got the Ju, Let It Go and Snapshot, it’s one of the many highlights of Geographica, which has been remastered for its 20th anniversary re-release today.
What many people don’t know about Calling On is that the Weta song everyone knows, loves, nods their head along to, and pushes the accelerator pedal just a little harder for when it comes on the car radio, is actually a mistake.
I’ll let Clinton den Heyer, Weta’s drummer, tell the story about the first day he and the rest of Weta entered Melbourne studio SingSing in early 2000 to record it.
“I was utterly terrified about that first day of drum tracking - which is when we recorded Calling On. It was the first take that ended up making it onto the record. For the whole second verse, my bass drum is one bar out, through the whole thing. It’s this massive mistake in the second verse, yet actually it works really well that those two verses are different.”
It’s a mistake! That cracks me up. Only den Heyer’s fellow drum nerds would probably ever be able to tell.
But that’s not the only surprising thing about Calling On. When I interviewed den Heyer and Aaron Tokona’s brother, Weta bassist Clinton ‘Tookie’ Tokona, over Zoom recently, they told me that the build up to the song’s eruption, something that seems so perfectly timed, was never rehearsed or choreographed.
It was all done impromptu, on the day. Here’s den Heyer again…
“The build up was never formulated. It’s not 16 bars. I tried to get Aaron to stick it into 16 or 32 bars so I knew how much effort I had to make, and he flatly refused. So every time we played that song, and every time we played it live, Aaron was turning around going, ‘Come on, can you give it some more? I’m not going till you give it some more!’ In the recording studio, that was exactly the same thing. That whole section was literally jammed. It was only going to drop when Aaron was ready for it to drop.”
That meant that on a good day, when everyone in Weta was getting along, Calling On would become the seamless, flawless, epic climax of their live show that night.
But, on other occasions, it was also a way of working out whatever problems that were going on within the band. Obviously there were a few of those: Weta broke up shortly after Geographica’s release, and only briefly reformed for a short reunion tour in 2008 before folding again.
Here’s an amazing exchange between den Heyer and Tookie about what it was like playing Calling On when there was tension within the band…
Tookie: “Sometimes, Aaron might not have been in a very good mood … maybe (we) were fighting, or something was going on that day. If that conflict was there, you can hear it in that build up. If we were on, if we were all having a good day, then that part in that particular song was going to be amazing.”
Den Heyer: “I think the conflict made it really, really good as well.”
Tookie: “There was a lot of hate there sometimes.”
Den Heyer: “Sometimes I’d be just like, ‘Fuck you! I can go fucking louder! All you can do is turn your amp up. I’m actually hitting these things. So fuck you!’”
Tookie: “You’d turn around and go, ‘Oh, here we go.’”
In their early touring days, Weta saved Calling On for the last song of the night. But as they grew more confident, they’d start using it as the second or third song of the set as a bit of a throat clearer. Even though it was a solid vocal work out for Aaron, the rest of the band found it a great way to lock into gear, and lose themselves in the music.
But it didn’t always go so well. Here’s den Heyer again…
“One time we were playing at the Powerstation in Auckland and it was early in our career. We were doing that build up (for Calling On) and there were these three women who had come up and were standing right in front of Tookie. I could see they were absolutely enamored. Tookie had his eyes closed and was just losing himself in that dynamic. One of them managed to jump on stage and went to kiss Tookie. He opened his eyes, saw this woman in front of him, freaked out and and stepped backwards, almost into the mixing desk side of stage, which meant he would have fallen six feet onto a concrete floor, wiped out half of our equipment, and probably injured our other guy.”
That, says den Heyer, was the point though: to jam the hell out of it. Sometimes Calling On’s build-up would go on for ages, whipping the crowd into a frenzy. I only saw Weta play a couple of times, and I wish I’d seen them more, but seeing them play Calling On at Galatos on that 2008 reunion tour sure stands out as being one hell of a moment.
There were plenty of moments like that for den Heyer and Tookie too, and with a vinyl reissue of Geographica hitting the shops today, and new single So Far, So Close doing well on radio and in the charts, they’re the things that are reminding them of the fun they had in that band.
Den Heyer: “The point of that part of the song was that we always lost ourselves in it. Some of the best live moments that we had were at a sold out town hall when we were doing that build up. We were able to let off a lot of steam in a really celebratory way. There was nothing like being on stage, just jamming.”
The remastered, 20th anniversary of Weta’s Geographica is available for streaming, and on vinyl for the first time, from today.
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Really good article - Thanks! Hell(en) B.