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1 Wild Beat Overture

‘Rock’ meant SHOCK in Australia. It came crashing in like a wild-beat overture to a massive new morality – or rather immorality – play. It stirred complacent aldermen to apoplexy, sent the record industry into an uncontrollable spin – and produced a species of Australian never before observed – the ‘real mad’ popsters and their ‘real gone’ audiences of screaming young girls.1

Conventional rock music history would have us believe Johnny O’Keefe was the Australian initiator of rock music in Australia. In fact, what he did was far less innovative: he was one of a group of men and women who personified this particular strand of youth culture, and guided the Australian public’s understanding of rock ’n’ roll. The celebration, even deification, of O’Keefe continues in unusual places: vintage footage of an audience reacting to O’Keefe and his group the Dee Jays (O’Keefe said it stood for ‘doovenile jelinquents’²) as they perform ‘Shout’ has since 1987 led off every episode of Rage, ABC-TV’s long-running late-night video-clip show, while on the soundtrack Iggy Pop sings his version of O’Keefe’s ‘Real Wild Child’. O’Keefe, who is discussed comprehensively in the next chapter, has two major records in his legend. The first is his version of ‘Shout’, which Festival Records’ Ken Taylor remembered as:

the first record ever established on the popular market by TV alone. Every radio station banned it because it was a ‘screamer’ – an extremely noisy and (some station managers thought) offensive form of Rock and Roll. But by that time Johnny had been appearing on an ABC teenage television show called Six O’Clock Rock and TV had no inhibitions about ‘Shout’. It took off like a rocket.³

O’Keefe’s second iconic release was ‘Wild One’, a 1958 song he purportedly wrote but which has been more accurately attributed jointly to O’Keefe, John Greenan and Dave Owens.⁴ It was raucous, fun rubbish, but Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis were sufficiently taken by its vigour to record versions of it.⁵ Taylor remembered O’Keefe as ‘a cocky, square-cut, jaunty guy with an earnest air under his confident grin’⁶ and, intriguingly, as ‘a comet in the milky way of Australian pop stardom.’⁷ O’Keefe appears to have coerced Taylor into signing him to Festival by announcing that it had happened, though it is hard to imagine – particularly at a time when a typical recording contract was strongly in a record label’s favour – why Festival would have considered signing O’Keefe a risky move.⁸ O’Keefe had already established himself most effectively and lucratively as a rock and roll performer, jumping on a bandwagon at the same time that noted composer and pianist Percy Grainger, at the end of his rich and disturbing life, was predicting rock’s future via his forays into electronic instruments and ‘free music’.

In many respects Grainger’s output is peripheral to the story of late-20th century popular music. His life, however, is very relevant indeed: he was a popular international artist who made his reputation (and money) mostly as a performer rather than a composer; he showed – as so many Australians have since – that his Australianness, rather than being a handicap, gave him an awareness of international cultures and a unique perspective that was to his benefit. Additionally, but perhaps not unrelatedly, many aspects of Grainger’s character would be reflected in the attitudes and behaviour of popular Australian musicians of this period, particularly the penchant for outrageous public declarations and international re-making of the self. Though Grainger was an elderly man in the 1950s, he enjoyed rock music, which he experienced – appropriately – via films, and which he considered to be a branch of the type of modern music also exemplified by the experimental, electronically powered noise generators he helped to create.⁹ It is perhaps for this reason that Peter Duncan, in his film about Grainger, Passion, has the Grainger character (played by Richard Roxburgh) proclaim: ‘By the end of the 20th century people will be listening to African music . . . they’ll be dancing to African music’. Duncan’s Grainger also presciently claims that the future of music lies with ‘delicately controlled machines’, though he makes one claim too many when he adds that he would ‘one day invent’ them.¹⁰

The real Percy Grainger was born in 1882 in the Melbourne suburb of North Brighton,¹¹ the same general beachside area that 60 years later would nurture popular music talents like Keith Glass, Hans Poulsen and Ross Wilson, and some decades later Mick Turner. That Grainger was born into a family of bigots¹² was not particularly unusual; bigotry was par for the course at the time. His obsession with racial distinction¹³ (which included strong elements of Aryan romanticism), his refusal to kowtow to conventional attitudes to incest, and his delight in sadomasochism¹⁴ were unsavoury facets of a refracted display of extraordinary, creative, passionate spirit. His tendency towards vegetarianism,¹⁵ his passion for folk and ‘free’ music, his frankness and openness were among the more pleasant aspects of his complicated personality. A piano virtuoso, Grainger toured the world from an early age playing the works of others, transcribing and adapting traditional and classical works, and collecting folk music and tangible musical memorabilia.

Grainger’s attitude to his own more conventional compositions (the most famous of which is the jaunty and faintly revolting ‘Country Gardens’) seem to summon up within him the kind of language often used by the more dramatic rock star: for instance, his statement, late in life, that:

The object of my music is not to entertain, but to agonize – to make mankind think of the agony of young men forced to kill each other against their will & all other thwartments and torturings of the young.¹⁶

Similarly, and once again evoking passion as a prime motivator, Grainger ‘believed and preached the idea that mere technical skill and excellence were barriers to fine performances.’¹⁷ He also sought to blur distinctions between ‘serious’ and popular musics, often incorporating ragtime or folk tunes into his concert repertoire. Teaching at New York University in 1932, he invited Duke Ellington and his band to perform for a class.¹⁸ One of his NYU students was Bernard Herrmann, later to become Hollywood’s greatest mid-20th-century film soundtrack composer.¹⁹

His biographer John Bird tells us that some of Grainger’s ideas were ‘so crass and mulishly stupid as to make his friends and colleagues want to run and hide with embarrassment.’²⁰ However, his much laboured over, but sadly underdeveloped, ‘free music’ was in many ways his boldest and most intriguing contribution to Australian music. According to Bird:

The roots of Grainger’s Free Music . . . went back to his childhood, the rolling hills of South Australia which he saw from the train that took him from Melbourne to Adelaide, the water which lapped at the sides of the rowing boat in Albert Park lake and, above all, the sounds of the wind as it howled through the telegraph wires on the Australian country roads. Often he thought to himself that just as the sounds and shapes of nature knew no arbitrary scales or metres so there should be no reason why in its search for full emotional expressiveness music should not enjoy a similar freedom. Just as a painter could move from one colour to another by either a gradual blending of tints or an abrupt transition, so should a composer be able to move from one note to another by a gliding tone as well as by a leap if he so wished . . .²¹

Grainger’s interest in music made by telegraph wires found reflection in Alan Lamb’s field recordings of such sounds in the Australian outback in the 60s, then in the piano wire music made by New Zealander Alastair Galbraith and American Matt De Gennaro in the 1990s. Grainger wrote that his free music would be ‘more soulrevealing, more melodious, more truly tender and lovely than any music yet’; he was also excited by the idea that, through it, ‘Australian musical life can be freed from the absurdities, falseness, ignorance & good-for-nothingness that plagues European & American musical life.’²²

Grainger worked on free music from 1945 onwards, via a number of carefully constructed ‘pretty machines.’ They employed all kinds of cast-off junk, including cotton reels, children’s toy records, carpet rolls, a vacuum cleaner, strong brown paper and string. He gave them deliberately silly names, such as ‘the Crumb-catcher and Drain Protector Disc’ and ‘the Cross-Grainger Double-decker Kangaroo-pouch Flying Disc Paper Graph Model for Synchronizing and Playing 8 Oscillators’.²³ Though Grainger was intrigued by sound that was generated purely electronically, his machines were distinct from what we would now understand as synthesizers. The Cross-Grainger Kangaroo-pouch system, for instance:

consisted of two huge vertically mounted carpet rolls around which had been wound two strips of strong coloured paper whose specially cut “hill-and-dale” upper contours corresponded to the pitch and dynamic needs of the music. The two carpet rolls, graphically termed by the inventors the “Feeder” and “Eater” revolving turrets, took the rolls of “hill-and-dale” paper through two metal cages wherein mechanical means were provided to track the undulations and activate the pitch and volume of eight oscillators.²⁴

In the late 1950s, as Professor Loughlin, Ormond Professor of Music at the University of Melbourne, was professing the controversial opinion that ‘the higher forms of music, rock ’n’ roll not forgotten . . . occupy their own necessary niche in the musical world,’²⁵ the Grainger Museum was still being developed – a work in progress since 1938 – in its specially constructed quarters.

There is no direct evidence that Grainger’s example inspired Australians to explore their own forms of national pop or experimental or electronic music, or for that matter their own tonal compositions. Nevertheless it should be noted that in 1956 the national news and comment magazine The Bulletin could make jokes about ‘“Waltzing Matilda” being played in rock ’n’ roll time by Billy Bong and his Jumbucks’²⁶ at the same time as – relatively seriously – it evoked bizarre imagery of the ordinary middle-aged man working on his home-made noise generator to create an ‘electronic symphony composition’²⁷, thus implying this was a respectable suburban hobby for Australians, and one recognisable to its readers.

Like Grainger, Ken Taylor found his inspiration at the cinema, albeit as a rock and roll entrepreneur rather than as a composer or performer. This, at least, was Taylor’s claim in his 1970 memoir Rock Generation. After seeing Blackboard Jungle, Taylor relates with sly, tabloidish humour, he felt like ‘a reluctant but overstimulated witness of a rape – which, come to think of it, I was.’²⁸

I almost shed a tear for poor, violated Miss Conventional Music. After such a treatment by Haley and his Comets, could she ever be the same again? I was certain that some remarkable children would be coming from her defloration – and my plans were already made to be doctor and midwife to them. THEY WOULD BE THE FIRSTBORN OF AUSTRALIA’S OWN AGE OF POP.²⁹

Similarly, Taylor (who was, it must be remembered, writing for a permissive late-60s audience) saw rock ’n’ roll as gender-bending:

What we actually experienced in the 1950s was the emergence of the male animal to seize his moment of glory from females in the eternal war of the sexes. Rock music was his weapon, his instrument. He used it ruthlessly to knock mid-twentieth century woman from her traditional role of Seductress. MAN became the coquette!³⁰

Grainger’s ethnic folk music collecting and his obsession with his own racial imprint find reflection not only in the work of later musicians and performers but also in the response they met internationally. Rolf Harris was an entertainer from the Perth suburb of Bassendean (he was known, indeed, as ‘the Boy from Bassendean’) who sought to support his pursuits as an artist by forays into show business in Britain in the early 1950s. ‘I don’t try to push it,’ he said twenty years later and surely tongue-in-cheek, ‘but my roots are all-Australian.’³¹ Over the next fifty years he was probably the best-known Australian in Britain, Kylie Minogue notwithstanding; he never lost his accent – indeed, it would have been a professional disaster for him if he had. Though he became better known later in life as a painter – and was ultimately defined by his 2014 trial and conviction as a serial sexual predator – he had several hit singles from the 1950s onwards. ‘Two Little Boys’ was a campy World War I–themed folk song, ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport,’ a jovial singalong, and ‘Jake the Peg’ a curiously dirty piece of (apparently) Dutch humour that involved Harris balancing on a life-sized third leg. He created his hit single ‘Sun Arise’ from a traditional Aboriginal song together with Harry Butler, an environmentalist who became famous in Australia as a television documentary presenter in the mid 1970s. There were two versions, one closer to the original; the song’s original producer, George Martin, persuaded Harris to write a middle eight.³² Harris later said:

“Play your didgeridoo, Blue . . . .”

“Tie that kangaroo down, lady, tie that kangaroo down!”

So many people think it is an old aboriginal song, and I could shake them, because anything less like an aboriginal song I can’t imagine. What actually happened was I met a chap called Ted Egan working for the aboriginal welfare department up at Gove in Arnhem Land, and we stayed with him on our last trip around Australia, he sang a lot of songs to me and this was one of them . . . He said it was a song that he had learnt from his Dad . . .³³

The list of Australians who made an impact on the international pop scene in the early days of rock and rock-influenced pop is extensive. However, from the perspective of the early 21st century, it would appear that too much effort was expended in the years following the 1950s – perhaps as individuals like Johnny O’Keefe attempted to reinvent themselves on the comeback trail, and books like Taylor’s Rock Generation were published – to make that decade seem like a vibrant and individualistic era in Australian music. If it was, and certainly there were some remarkably good musicians working in the field at this time, particularly those with a jazz background but also others with ‘hillbilly’ or country and western precedents, most recordings that survive from the period do not tend to show it. Perhaps this is merely an indication of the difficulties inherent in recording and the cautious nature of the industry at the time. Slim Dusty’s remark that ‘some of the engineers’ he worked with in the 1950s ‘were real bastards’³⁴ supports this notion.

In addition to O’Keefe, there are a few names that come to mind when people think of pre-60s rock and pop music in Australia. Clinton Walker and Peter Doyle have written about Les Welch, ‘Australia’s great anticipator of rock ’n’ roll’³⁵, whose first record was ‘Elevator Boogie Blues’³⁶ in 1949; six years later Welch recorded an EP, Saturday Night Fish Fry, which ‘blurred the genre boundaries’.³⁷ Welch was quoted in 1955 as saying that rock and roll was ‘the purest form of jazz – the real jazz . . . Actually it is nothing new – we have been recording and playing rock and roll for the past twelve years.’³⁸ Musicians like John ‘Catfish’ Purser, who joined O’Keefe’s group, had a jazz background; forty years later he described himself and his band as ‘just raw rock ’n’ roll people’.³⁹ John Sangster’s memoir Seeing the Rafters mentions his swing band the Mouldie Fygges⁴⁰ and the conviction of one of Sangster’s friends that jazz had given way to a ‘watered-down descendant’,⁴¹ swing, in 1929. Torres Strait Islander Vic Sabrino (born George Assang – a variation of this Chinese-derived surname was later given to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange through his adopted father) was, according to Clinton Walker, ‘the only man in Australia in the 1950s who could really sing the blues.’ Sabrino played with jazz musician Graeme Bell’s band.⁴² Other rock ’n’ roll groups with jazz forbears, such as the Thunderbirds, ‘packed out local dancehalls in Melbourne’ in the late 1950s.⁴³ The aforementioned Slim Dusty (born Gordon Kirkpatrick) had a major hit record in 1957 with ‘A Pub with No Beer’, written by Gordon Parsons but with lyrics unwittingly purloined from a poem published thirteen years previously.⁴⁴ Dusty relates in his memoir that the song sold 30,000 copies, ‘compared with some rockers’ sales of 500’, before ‘city radio’ would deign to play what was seen as a superseded form – country pop. The song was later a success in Britain and Ireland, and in parts of Canada affected, in a development coincidentally useful to Dusty, by a brewery strike.⁴⁵

Col Joye came from a boxing background; he lived in the Sydney suburb of East Hills, and appropriately when he moved into musical performance it was originally to play hillbilly music, from where it seemed ‘a normal extension’ to go into rock ’n’ roll.⁴⁶ Col and his brother Kevin were actually named Jacobsen; their stage surname came about on the advice of a clairvoyant. They worked out a business plan for Col’s rock ’n’ roll career on the family kitchen table, made their own guitars and amplifiers, and played a sped up form of American country music. Col Joye, a ‘non-smoking, non-drinking, yet fun-loving individual,’⁴⁷ became renowned for ‘polychromatic showmanship’, including ‘that little shuffling jig-step of Col’s that actually comes from the shadow-sparring routine he used in his amateur boxing days.’⁴⁸ Like the Shadows, the Joy Boys made albums without Joye when they weren’t backing him.

Along with performing, the Jacobsens became tour bookers, inspired by the example of Lee Gordon.⁴⁹ Gordon was an American promoter who brought a number of well-known American stars to Australia in the late 1950s and early 60s – he has been referred to as ‘just the go-between Australia needed to connect’ with America⁵⁰ – as well as promoting a very limited amount of Australian talent (and recording at least one single of his own, a very strange, self-parodying piece entitled ‘She’s the Ginchiest’). It was Gordon who brought Little Richard to Australia; the star threw his jewellery into the Hunter River (not Sydney Harbour, as is often suggested), so frazzled was he by seeing Sputnik 1 in the night sky.⁵¹ Gordon also promoted acts such as the ‘Satin Satan’, New Zealander Johnny Devlin – ‘the next best thing to Elvis.’ Presley himself would never be seen in Australia; notoriously he refused to tour outside the USA.⁵² Stories abound regarding Gordon’s eccentricity: for example, the time when, believing he would soon die, he partied with a coffin in his flat.⁵³ Ken Taylor both celebrated and mourned Gordon in his 1970 memoir:

In his first dynamic years he had suave, smooth Italian good looks, a persuasive manner which won response from everyone he met and an enthusiasm that few artists or financiers could resist. Later he became withdrawn, rather gnome-like, taking risks with his health that characteristically matched the other great gambles of his life.⁵⁴

There are many stories of local performers being drafted into performing rock ’n’ roll just because it was the newest fad: some of them stayed in the scene, others moved into other fields or disappeared entirely. Bobby Bright sang at a basketball social at the age of thirteen under the potent influence of crème de menthe; the following week he appeared on Woody’s Teen Time. ‘I stayed at television and started working for a guy called Ivan Dayman running dances round Adelaide.’⁵⁵ Bright’s was just one of hundreds of stories of a happy accidental rise to fame and a performing career of varying value.

What all this indicates is that the rock’n’roll scene in Australia in the mid to late 1950s was confused, scattered and in many ways ineffectual. There were undoubtedly some important players in the music industry, and some of them – like Dayman, the Jacobsens, or even O’Keefe – would go on to play an entrepreneurial and/or performing role well beyond these early days. But what the late 1950s show most clearly is that time spent trying to pin down what the first rock ’n’ roll record in Australia was, or who the rock ’n’ roll icons of that decade were, is, in the overall scheme of things, time wasted. At this time, rock ’n’ roll was essentially just one form of popular music across the world, and a rather annoying, bratty one, at that. It was also viewed by many as a novelty form with a limited shelf life. Considering the simplistic and often inferior records produced under the rock ’n’ roll banner in these early days, such an assessment was actually reasonable. It was not until the early 60s that this amalgam of blues, rhythm and blues, skiffle and pop began to get experimental and interesting on a regular basis, and this was as true in Australia as anywhere else.

In January 1960, Australasian Post predicts the year ahead.