Dragon's 1978 hit, Are You Old Enough?, like the Rolling Stones' Stray Cat Blues, (or in fact, a fair whack of the Stones' stuff) might have originally referred to teenage girls when it was first released but, 32 years on, its title has more to do with stamina in the rock business.
So says Todd Hunter, bass player of a group which, since its formation in New Zealand in 1972, has split up twice, seen 40 members come and go and buried three of its musicians, including Hunter's younger brother, Marc.
"Now that song, rather than being about young girls and the whole rock thing in the '70s, is about everything that has happened in the past 30 years."
Dragon's sole surviving founding member is one of two New Zealanders in the band, the other being singer Mark Williams, recruited in 2006 along with Canadian guitarist Bruce Reid and Australian drummer Pete Drummond.
"One night I was playing at a parent-teachers' night at my kid's school and one of the other parents was [Australian guitarist] Johnny Diesel," Hunter recalls.
"I was just the bass player and we spent all night playing all this different music, from swampy stuff to death metal. About halfway through that night, like a lightning bolt, I realised, 'this is what I do'. Then you are faced with the question of what to do; play blues on a Sunday afternoon? Well, I knew a bunch of songs that play themselves. It is so easy to get them together.
"I rang Mark Williams and asked him if he wanted to be in a band. We had done some stuff together early in the 1980s and he also sang a heart-wrenching version of Are You Old Enough? at Marc's funeral [in Sydney in 1998]. He was the obvious person. He has a very different energy to Marc but he is a great singer and a great guy."
Despite the numerous line-up changes over the years, Hunter says it doesn't matter who is playing the songs.
On some nights, particularly when a crowd is singing loudly, he feels the essence of those who contributed so much to the band, including drummer Neil Storey, who died of a drug overdose in 1976, and Paul Hewson, a key songwriter who also died of an overdose in 1985.
"The fact those guys put all that energy into writing them and playing them so many times ... that is something you tap into . . . we had a lot of deaths over a long period of time."
Marc's death, in 1998 at the age of 44 from smoking-related cancer, affected Hunter deeply.
"People would ask, 'are you the guy from Dragon?'. I'd say, `no'. I was really down on it. It was like some lurid airport novel I had read, but the down side was these people I knew had died."
Still, there is much to celebrate. In 2008, the band was inducted into the Aria Hall of Fame, recognition for a career that has included worldwide albums sales of more than two million and at least three top-10 songs: April Sun In Cuba reached No 2 on the Australian singles chart in 1977; Are You Old Enough? went No 1 the following year; and Rain made No 2 in 1983.
The band has also enjoyed chart success in New Zealand, Canada and Germany.
Though some might regard 1975 to 1979 as Dragon's zenith, Hunter is less enamoured with those heady days, which included lengthy tours of Europe and the United States.
"For me, they weren't the golden days at all. They were so wild, so out-of-control I wasn't having a good time at all.
"Bands in those days were really wild in a way they are not now. It broke up under its own weight," he says of the band's split on New Year's Eve, 1979.
"We were touring too much, sometimes playing two or three shows a day. It got mad. There were a lot of 'lifestyle' issues."
Singer Marc's behaviour was also becoming more and more erratic, to the detriment of both himself and the band, Hunter recalls.
On one occasion, late in 1978, Marc incited a crowd in Dallas, calling the Texans "faggots". Only later, as beer bottles, chairs and other missiles rained down, did he realise his bandmates had left the stage.
"It was so wild," Hunter chuckles.
"It was random and excruciatingly funny, but also terrible at the same time."
Tired of the city life, Hunter (59) now prefers to spend much of his time in his home in the countryside a couple of hours south of Sydney. He likens the surroundings, "very hilly and beautiful, deserted", to the King Country landscape in which he grew up.
"I go back into Sodom and Gomorrah at the weekends. As soon as you get to the outskirts of Sydney, you have to start driving completely differently."
He, wife Johanna Pigott and their three sons moved there in 1995, helped in part by the success of Australian singer John Farnham's late-'80s hit Age Of Reason, which the couple penned while Dragon was supporting Tina Turner on tour in Europe following its reformation in 1982.
"On that Tina Turner tour, at one stage we were doing festivals in Scandinavia and he was on the same leg and asked us to write him a song. It took a long time to get recorded ... it became a hit. It is very random, you know. But it was great. It allowed us to move out of the city and into the country."
The quieter life has helped Hunter focus on the soundtrack work he began in the early 1990s. Notable commissions include Australian television series Heartbreak High, for which Pigott wrote the screenplays, and Sesame Street.
"Sometimes I'd go a week without seeing anyone. One time, bushfires were rolling across the hills; I could see them getting closer and closer, but there was a deadline and I kept working. The fire brigade were saying 'you've got to go' and I told them, 'but they are waiting for this in New York'. Then the wind changed and it started raining.
"If you want a life in music you have to reinvent every couple of years, no matter what you're doing in this part of the world. That's great. It means you get into all facets of music, from producing records to writing songs to doing soundtrack work."
That production work goes back a long way and includes New Zealand punk band Toy Love's 1980 debut album.
"We did it in a big studio over here and we couldn't get it sounding rough enough. At that stage, studios had carpet all over the walls and you had these dinky little sounds. The band - and me - were very disappointed because they were a really wild band. We just couldn't get that on the record.
"It was the same with us. You'd play live and there would be this huge roaring cacophony; then you'd go into the studio and you'd sound like ... but that was just the time. Now you can stick a microphone into a computer and it sounds great."
Hunter faces another milestone next year - his 60th birthday. However, he's not planning anything big. In fact, despite having spent years in a hard-partying band, he hates parties.
"But that's the great thing about being in a band - you ignore your chronological age and make a hell of a racket. It keeps you young.
"You don't have to deal with all that stuff like calcifying because you are dealing with all this showbiz c ... It's so random."
• See them
Dragon plays at Sammy's, Dunedin, on Friday, August 13
