The 13th Floor: Where Music Lives
Words: Russell Brown
Photography: Blink Ltd.
Marty Duda has been collecting records since he was a nine year-old kid in rural Pennsylvania. It started as a way to get out of swimming lessons, he says, and it helped that his father ran a jukebox company. He's been obsessed with music ever since. But it didn't become his day job until he retired.
What Marty does with his days now happens behind a discrete door in Symonds Street. It's the home of The 13th Floor, the music website he launched in 2011. It publishes record and concert reviews, interviews and live performances and, along with its YouTube channel, earns around 100,000 views a month.
The building houses a tiny TV studio (you might recognise the backdrop from a certain current affairs show of years past), an edit suite. On the website you can see performances and interviews from both fledgling local acts - Aldous Harding was an early visitor in 2014- and touring internationals.
It's also home to about 25,000 records and another 6,000 DVDs and cassettes - the fruits of a lifetime of music fandom. For the young Marty, it was the music of the 1950s that first triggered his passion, and then a trip to visit his English grandparents in 1972 blew it all up.
"That was the summer when David Bowie went ballistic," he recalls. "So I watched 'Starman' on Top of the Pops."
He came home "obsessed" with Bowie and Mott the Hoople, and it was inevitable that when he went to college in Brockport, New York, he was going to get involved in the college's radio station. It was there that he got to interview the people whose records he was collecting - most notably, Patti Smith, for the release of her debut album, Horses. He still has the photograph of the pair of them together.
That seminal moment looped back to become part of the launch of the 13th Floor's latest initiative late last year: Sound Thinking, Marty's joint podcast with the venerable music writer Graham Reid, "where decades of music journalism meet an hour of unfiltered conversation". For the first episode, the pair brought in singer Dianne Swann for a conversation to mark the 50th anniversary of Horses. Since then, the weekly podcast has ranged widely, covering music from home and abroad.
After college, the call to music only got stronger for Marty. He took a part-time job at a radio station and "a real job" at a local TV station, in Rochester, New York, which gave Marty his own TV show, After Hours, to produce. In 1981, the show recorded and broadcast the only surviving live video of Ozzy Osbourne performing with Randy Rhoads, less than a year before the guitarist was killed in a plane crash. You can see the Ozzy clips on YouTube, along with the unrepentantly weird ("you have been warned") TV ads Marty made for The House of Guitars, Rochester's famous musical instrument and record store. He also managed a band, Uncle Sam ("kind of a precursor to Guns N' Roses but better"), and ran his own record label. But it was freelance TV editing work that paid the bills, and which would eventually bring him all the way to New Zealand.
"By 1993, I was almost 40 and I'd kind of done everything I was going to do in Rochester," he recalls. "So my wife and I came here for a holiday, rented a caravan, the whole bit."
A friend who worked for HBO in America tipped him off about a potential opportunity in New Zealand, at Sky Television. But before he could go to Sky and ask about work, he visited Rip It Up editor Murray Cammick ("the first person I met in New Zealand") on a tip from the infamous record producer Kim Fowley. Murray sent him to Real Groovy Records, "where they were playing one of my CDs on the sound system". He met longtime store employee Grant McAllum, who immediately introduced him to music journalist Nick Bollinger, "and then I'm getting interviewed by Nick Bollinger. So that was my first day in New Zealand."
Sky, as it turned out, wanted his services, so the Duda family packed up and moved to New Zealand that year. "The best decision I ever made," he says. Whatever the day job, music was still central to his life - he began writing record reviews for Rip It Up and took up a gig as the weekly music commentator on RNZ National.
By 2010, Marty was single again, and tired of the onerous drive to Sky's Mount Wellington base from the Henderson Valley, where the family had originally settled. He wanted to move into town, and the first place that caught his eye was a flat in Uptown, near Cheapskates. He never got to see inside the flat, but he did take the lease on an adjacent space - a former children's clothing factory with a vast main room dominated by a striking domed ceiling. In 2011, that room at 206 Symonds Street became the first home of The 13th Floor - and also a popular space for hire.
"We had weddings, we had naked dinners, we had concerts, whatever anybody would pay for. TV crews for interviews. It got very well known, but the rent just wasn't sustainable," especially after Marty took redundancy at Sky. He needed a better deal on rent, and he didn't have to go far for it. A chance meeting with a couple who remembered the music trivia nights he had run with his daughter Kira led to a tenancy in the building they owned at number 243, right across the road.
"I think this area is the best," says Marty. "It's not right in the city but it's not out in the boonies, and it's not suburban. It's pretty urban. The Powerstation's right here, Roundhead Studios are right here. Even the best sports bar with the best chicken wings (Shapiro's) is right across the street!"
The Uptown location also means Marty can usually walk to the three or four shows (and as many film screenings) he sees each week. If he needs to go further afield, well, there's the Gold Card.
"I'm 70 now, and I love the Gold Card," he says. "And I don't get tired. I don't even get hungover any more!"
And from there, we're into more rock 'n' roll stories. Like, for instance, the time he was one of the few people to see David Bowie up in court on a cannabis charge. It's a great story.
But you might have to listen to the podcast for that one.
The 13th Floor
Phone: 021 138 1009
Website: 13thfloor.co.nz
Instagram: @13thfloor
