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30,000 copies, ‘compared with some rockers’ sales of 500’, before ‘city radio’ would deign to play what was seen as a superseded form – country pop.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.
‘Why don’t you teach her “Botany Bay”?’ said Ruth, sticking her head round the door.
‘I don’t know it.’
‘You’ve been culturally imperialised.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I bet I have more fun than you do.’
– Helen Garner, ‘Other People’s Children’ (1980)1
To those who were born in the middle decades of the 20th century and immersed in Western culture and pop music, the coming of British groups such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles seem to have made 1960 and 1965 as distinct from one another as desert and jungle. Just as the early to mid 1970s are often characterised as a period in which bored teenagers sat around waiting for punk to ‘break’, the early 1960s are generally seen – even by people who lived through those years – as a time of musical and even social stasis. This is a subjective view; it holds sway because history is written by the winners – rock and rollers, in this case, rather than those who followed other types of music. Certainly, Western popular music of the early 60s owes much more to a white European tradition than to an African-American one, and it therefore often sounds far more pallid, low-key, pedestrian and ‘sing-song’ to 21st-century ears than the music that came after mid-decade. Advances in recording and reproduction served to sharpen this distinction. Ultimately, we can only hear the past strained through the sieve of the present, and the thin gruel which results in this case is not always easy to stomach. Most of us – as well as those who did the choosing for our canon – are coming from a very different aesthetic position. The first hundred pages of Bob Stanley’s excellent overview of British pop, Yeah Yeah Yeah, demonstrate this many times over.
Rock and roll – whenever it began and whatever it ultimately is – had briefly come to the fore in the mid 1950s, of course, but at that time it seemed to most listeners merely an extremist novelty. Along with its