The ground shared by classical and rock music was a burning source of animated conversation and waving hands whenever I met these two people back in the 1970s, Norton, a music student at Otago University, in Records Records, pretty much every day, and Green, in his own store, possibly called the Music Place, my memory is becoming increasingly feeble, a tiny shop the size of two phone boxes in Palmerston.
It isn't hard to find classical melodies in pop and rock music.
Warren Green found all of these plagiarisms and unashamed inspirations, and began holding afternoons in Palmerston wherein interested musicologists would sit attentively and listen, clutching exhausting pamphleted explanations written by Green.
I was often invited, but to my discredit, I never attended a single session.
Sadly, very few people actually went, single figures only.
Green became the Rev Green on Sundays, he was a lay preacher, so when Jesus Christ Superstar came out, with its cookpot of pop, classical and religion, he was beside himself.
When I reviewed the album in my Evening Star column as being largely tosh, populist pap even, he became even more beside himself and wrote a vehement letter to the newspaper calling for my excommunication.
They kept me on, thank the Lord, and Green still smiled as broadly as ever when I next made my mandatory stop at his Palmerston store.
Chris Norton was one of those very few who went up for Green's musical afternoons.
Norton was a fine pianist and composer back then.
I recall going to his house one evening and, after being played all sorts of classical pieces to try and make me more educated - high horns in Messiaen, that kind of thing - he played me some of his own music, dazzlingly incomprehensible skiing trips up and down the piano.
I left his house drained on every occasion.
Years later, we decided our son should learn the piano.
His teacher told us the trendy instruction stuff to get was Microjazz, by Christopher Norton, a series of books with funky little beats and pop melodies, FUN music, so much better than the John Thomson red books the generations before had all yawned through.
Yep, same Christopher Norton.
Our son hated the piano but liked playing Microjazz, his love of music shown when, playing pool in the same room that housed the piano, he would leap from the table and play a burst of Microjazz to discombobulate his opponent.
Christopher Norton had clearly found the missing link in making the piano accessible and filled with joy for otherwise disinterested little boys.
Now you can look London-based Christopher Norton up in Wikipedia and have your eyes stretched wide by his publishing achievements, his unprecedented sales figures and the frequent use of the word million.
No snake under the unwillingness-to-learn rock has not been stirred by Norton's stick.
He has books and instruction primers on everything.
But Microjazz remains the foundation stone of his success, a merging of different styles to create a form of music designed for mass popularity.
Will the unique merging of a classical orchestra, the soprano beauty of opera diva Anna Leese and the often roughly hewn Dunedin Sound records, sounding, as Dave Dobbyn once said, as though they had been recorded in a toilet, reach and charm new ears on Saturday night with Tally Ho?
All of us associated with this three-years-long project think it will.
Mike Chunn once said none of the Dunedin bands or writers would even get into the car park of an American record company.
He was wrong.
Our rock music writers since 1980 now enjoy global acclaim, and have created a whole musical movement which has Dunedin in its name.
The spirit of Warren Green and Christopher Norton will both be there on Saturday night.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
