Billy J. Kramer, Del Shannon and The Beatles

The way I remembered it, the first Beatles songs I ever heard - before I’d even heard of The Beatles - were Do You Want To Know A Secret by Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas and From Me To You by Del Shannon. Both songs were on Australian radio around June 1963.

I first heard Billy J. Kramer's Do You Want To Know A Secret in the middle of the night, around 3.00 am, when I'd got up to fix a snack and had pulled in some distant Top 40 station on the kitchen radio, turned down low so I wouldn't wake up the folks. The station might've been 2SM, from Sydney, one of those stations that used to come in only after dusk.

I liked it in the same way I liked other melodic pop songs of the early 60s: George Hamilton's Abilene, The Everlys' So Sad, or Joe Brown's That's What Love Will Do.

I had no idea that Do You Want To Know A Secret originated with an approaching cultural hurricane, The Beatles.

I’ve always had this picture of myself, alone in the late-night kitchen and hearing - through the static and fade-outs of a distant station - a first breeze, a faint stirring of something greater, still unimagined.

This was a few months before the summer vacation of '63-'64, when Beatlemania would hit us properly, when I Want To Hold Your Hand and I Saw Her Standing There would be all over the radio. The Beatles wouldn’t really enter my consciousness until the Australian Spring of 1963.

Back in the winter, when I’d heard Del Shannon's version of From Me To You on 3DB, the announcer - Barry Ferber - had made it sound as if this was just another Del Shannon gem, and he’d added, "There's also a version of that out by Britain's Beagles."


Beagles? As in Donald Duck comics, the Beagle Boys? Ferber probably did say Beatles and I misheard him, but it gave me a picture of some eccentric English band who wore black eye masks and shirts with prison numbers.

Thing is, it didn't matter, because this was a Del Shannon record and, Beagles or Beatles or whatever, who would care if they covered one of Del's records?

Before the British Invasion, Del Shannon was already one of the greats, always on the radio, always coming up with pure, enjoyable pop, song after song: Hats Off To Larry, Two Kinds Of Teardrops, Swiss Maid.... and has Runaway ever not been on the radio since 1961?

We used to sing Here she comes (here she comes) from Little Town Flirt when we saw our English teacher, Miss Phillips, coming down the walkway. Even into 1964, the Year of Beatlemania, Del's churning versions of oldies like Handy Man and Do You Want To Dance added new life to them, updated them for the moment.

So I also liked to think that Del Shannon, with his cover of From Me To You, was a messenger who reached me with distant news of what was to come.

The other day, though, when I checked the Melbourne charts for 1963, I realised that my idea about Del’s cover version overshadowing the original was a mistake.

In fact, The Beatles’ From Me To You must have been the better-known version in Melbourne, entering the charts in May and eventually peaking at #4. There is no trace of Del Shannon’s version in the Melbourne charts. (It did chart in Sydney and Adelaide in June, alongside The Beatles. Billy J. Kramer charted in Brisbane and Adelaide, also in June.)

What’s more, The Beatles’ Please Please Me had already charted in Melbourne the previous month. It only got to #29, so maybe I wasn’t the only one it failed to make a huge impression on.

And I guess your memories of music are of what made an impression on you, of what you noticed at the time, and that might not be reliable music history. I must have heard the Beatles around April or May ’63, and some kids around me were actually going out and buying their singles, but until about September I wasn’t taking any notice.

It does turn out that Del Shannon's From Me To You was the first US cover of a Beatles song, and the first Beatles composition to chart in the US (it got into the 90s, a bit higher than the Beatles' own initial release), and he'd heard it while touring Britain with The Beatles. So he must’ve been the Beatles' advance scout for a number of Americans.

As for the supposed Beagles: there were at least three US singles by bands called The Beagles in the mid-60s, and at least two of them were Beatles-related. One was a 1964 cover of Can't Buy Me Love on the Hit label, the other was I Wanna Capture You, a 1966 Columbia single from an animated dog cartoon, a cash-in on the British Invasion.

At last, The Beagles!
Full story at Toon Tracker.

More on the Bearded Beetle

Broadcaster and radio historian Wayne Mac emailed to tell me the Bearded Beetle's name was Dave Dexter. He was the panel operator at 3DB who recorded a song called The Bearded Beetle with announcer Barry Ferber in 1964. No other details yet, except that Wayne believes Dave Dexter died in a car accident in New Zealand. I did find a reprinted magazine article from the 70s about Radio Hauraki, the pirate station that became New Zealand's first commercial station, and there is a Dave Dexter amongst the station's disc jockeys. (Not to be confused, I should hardly need to add, with Dave Dexter the Capitol Records producer and executive.)

Aussie aircheck sites

As far as I can see we don’t have an Australian equivalent of Reel Top 40 Radio Repository, the site where you can listen to some 1500 audio clips of US deejay shows from the golden era of Top 40 radio. The British Pirate Radio Hall of Fame also has clips, from the stations that were Top 40 radio in the UK for a while in the 60s (and a surprising number of the disc jockeys were Aussies).

[Update: The Radio Antenna blog has a growing collection of Australian airchecks from several decades, See also their Facebook page.]

These clips are known as airchecks, meaning a recording of a live radio program. I first saw the word on CDs of big bands from the 40s, indicating that a track is from a broadcast rather than a studio session.

The Adelaide station 5KA had a site with a fine collection of airchecks, including many from the 60s and 70s, but it is no longer online. The good news is that the whole 5KA site, including the audio files, is archived at the National Library of Australia’s Pandora Archive. The files are in mp3 format. My favourites are the 1968 clips, which evoke the atmosphere of just about any commercial radio station of the era.

Also at Pandora is the archived Jingles Shrine website, where you can still hear old station jingles from all over Australia (RealAudio format UPDATE 2012: not all audio files work).

I recently mentioned Tony Sanderson’s pages of Australian and British audio files (mp3 and RealAudio) at Bluehaze Media. The real gems here are two complete programs, a 30-minute weekly Top 10 countdown from June 1962 by Ernie Sigley, and a 60-minute Top 20 of 1962 with Barry Ferber from January 1963. Both were broadcast on Melbourne station 3DB and its relay station in the Wimmera, 3LK.

(If those callsigns sound unfamiliar, 3DB became 3TT, then TT-FM, now known as Mix 101.1. 3LK was replaced by still-operating Horsham station 3WM).

The Top 10 is, as you would expect, a nice snapshot of what we were listening to in Vic at that time. At #1 is Toni Fisher’s West of the Wall, one of those Oz-only chart-toppers that Glenn A. Baker put on one of his Hard to Get Hits collections. After my recent post on the topic, I was delighted to find two Bizarro Shadows World Down Under tracks: The Joy Boys’ Southern ‘Rora and Rob E.G.’s 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Zero.

And, I could hardly believe it, for the second time yesterday I found myself listening to I’ve Been Everywhere, a song that seems to be haunting me at the moment.

Barry Ferber and The Bearded Beetle.

The Bearded Beetle, a record by The Beetle Bashers (they spelt it beetle), came out on Melbourne's W&G label in 1964, one of numerous Beatles tribute and novelty records that surfaced world-wide in the wake of Beatlemania. Most sank without trace, but two versions of We Love You Beatles charted in Melbourne, and for some reason ex-Cricket Sonny Curtis’s A Beatle I Want To Be sticks in my memory.

The Bearded Beetle was written and sung by Melbourne disc jockey Barry Ferber. The title came from the nickname he gave to his bearded panel operator.

At a time when 3UZ was the dominant Top 40 radio station in Melbourne, Barry Ferber ran a record show over at the more traditional 3DB. He called himself the Mellow Fellow: the hip American deejay talk sometimes heard on 3UZ was not his style at all.

Ferber was a witty bloke who had a way of sending things up, a bit in the tradition of Graham Kennedy, so it wasn’t surprising when he put out a record that took the mickey out of the current teenage craze. These days, his name is still associated with the Beatles through George Harrison, whose 1964 message to him is anthologised on CD.

The Bearded Beatle and its flipside, The Beetle Bashers Beat, were both written by Barry Ferber, and W&G even issued a further Beetle Bashers single in 1965, co-written by Ferber, Don’t Make Love In The Cornfields. Neither was a hit, but I don’t imagine rival stations would’ve given them much airplay. (Both records are catalogued at Screensound Australia's Second Wave discography.)

Along with Don Lunn at 3UZ, whose American-influenced patter offered a complete contrast, Ferber was my favourite local deejay. So I was overjoyed to find a complete 60 minute Barry Ferber program archived at Bluehaze Solutions' Multimedia Vault.

This is good value: an unedited January 1963 countdown of 1962’s Top 20, sponsored by Love’s department store. It’s great to hear Ferber again, but he’s playing it straight here, plugging the sponsor, reading the commentary, keeping it tight, no send-ups. (It may even be a pre-recorded show.)

Barry Ferber went on to management, first at 4GG at the Gold Coast in Queensland when it first went on air, and later at Radio Fiji. More recently, he's filed columns from Las Vegas for the Gold Coast Bulletin (see above).

But who was that bearded panel operator? [For the answer see the follow-up post More on the Bearded Beetle. The comments are full of further information, too.]


Picture: Barry Ferber, columnist (story in the Melbourne Observer, 20 October 2004).