Lost in the 30s

I was born into the target audience for rock 'n' roll: Bill Haley in Grade 1, Beatlemania as I turned thirteen, and soul, folk-rock and psychedelia by the end of high school.  

In my 30s, though, I went for months when I listened to almost nothing but the music of the 1930s, bookended by a little late 20s and early 40s. 

I was mainly drawn to the swinging big bands, the golden age songwriters, and the sweet British dancebands (sweet isn't my word: it names a genre). I knew when I'd wandered too far into maudlin 40s dancehall ballads or cheesy novelties from the 20s. 

My pathway was through the ABC's Saturday evening radio show Sentimental Journey. I used to hear some of it when I left the station on after the 7 o'clock News. I ended up staying for its full two hours every week. 

I could not miss one episode, and I recorded many of them on C90 cassette. One Saturday after the News, the ABC neglected to switch its regional network across to the city network that carried Sentimental Journey. I phoned the ABC in Brisbane and was put through to a sceptical technical chap who finally took a look and fixed it.

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ABC Radio 1984 [link]

Sentimental Journey’s music was pre-rock 'n' roll but skewed to the wartime 40s and to its true heart, the 30s, with forays into the late 20s. 

The title Sentimental Journey was from the song of that name, first recorded by Doris Day with the orchestra of co-writer Les Brown in 1945. It suggests that the program was aimed at my parents' generation for whom returning to the music of the 30s and 40s might indeed have been a sentimental journey. 

But that was the only hint in that direction. As I recall, the word nostalgia or notions of reliving the good old days were rarely, if ever, mentioned (although nostalgia was in presenter John West's own vocabulary). There were no cliches like What you were doing when you first heard this? or Ah the days when you could get an ice cream cone for a halfpenny!  Certainly nothing like They don’t write songs like that any more.

In fact, this was its strength. There was this unspoken integrity about treating the music with respect, and allowing it to stand on its own merits, always. 

The enthusiasm was for the music and its creators, not for its association with anyone’s golden memories. That was left to the listener to fill in for themself. Or not, as in my case. 

For a newcomer like me, this was perfect. Because there was no assumption that the listener was here to relive the past, I was able to experience the music directly, without feeling I was eavesdropping on the reminiscences of another generation.

If at first some of the arrangements and productions sounded old-fashioned, the more I immersed myself in the era the more it felt like familiar territory, free of any superficial cultural associations.

As a primary schoolteacher I used to run a lunchtime movie club where I played black and white silent-era comedies to 8- to 10-year-old film buffs. At the first session I told them these would be unlike other films they’d seen, and I had them mime putting on their "old-time movie glasses", like putting on sunglasses for the beach. 

At first it was like that with me and 1930s music. It wasn’t exactly the same as listening to any genre that was familiar to me: I was adjusting my ears by putting on an imaginary pair of custom-made 1930s headphones.  

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John West 1989 [link]

The host of Sentimental Journey, John West (1924–2008), covered theatre for the ABC for many years through his program The Showman. He was urbane and briskly articulate - he never wasted a word - and he had a mischievous wit that he never overdid.

Also presenting segments were collectors or aficionados of old records, notably Graham Evans whom I remembered from Melbourne commercial station 3AW. Other features would appear, including a fine series of reminiscences by golden age songwriter Sammy Cahn. (His recurring phrase the phone rang inspired my website’s catchphrase eventually, someone emails.)

British danceband singer Al Bowlly (who was new to me) popped up regularly. This reminded me of the 1970s cartoon in Stereo Review showing a man listening to a radio. Played now by the orchestra of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields says the announcer, and the parrot answers back Neville Marriner conducting. If that same parrot had heard the words Al Bowlly on Sentimental Journey, it would have squawked out Ray Noble And His Orchestra. 

In the request segment at the top of the program, the most popular track was Cole Porter's Begin The Beguine as sung by Chick Henderson with Joe Loss And His Band (1939). I'm sure this became the definitive recording of the song for Sentimental Journey listeners like me.

It wasn't all British dancebands, though, and the playlists ranged widely. Among the highlights was discovering the likes of Annette Hanshaw and Ruth Etting, good-humoured pioneers of electric recording who were able to tone down their delivery to a more intimate, conversational level (Hanshaw would finish a song with a cheery "That's all!"). Bing Crosby's forthright, less mannered early recordings were a revelation, as I had known him only from later years when he had adopted the almost self-parodying persona of a senior crooner. I fell for Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman, and reflected on how exciting it would have been to be hearing their music when it was new, just as it was exciting for our generation to have heard Elvis Presley or The Beatles or Aretha Franklin for the first time. 

 

Sentimental Journey continued after John West’s retirement in 1989 but ended early in 1996 (to some crotchety reactions). It was eventually replaced by a flashback show that was all about remembering the good old days. Unlike Sentimental Journey, the word "nostalgia" was mentioned early, and I soon tuned out.

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This affinity with old-time records didn’t come completely out of nowhere. I had been softened up by hearing  the Red Onion Jazz Band a few times at Melbourne University from 1969. They played good-humoured trad jazz at its joyous best. When I sought out a song they played, Diga Diga Doo, I found it on Flaming Youth, a renowned album of Duke Ellington tracks from the 1920s that I ended up playing as often as any other LP I owned.

My parents bought a lot of LP records in the 1950s, so they would have been able to hunt down reissues of music from their teens and twenties. But the only authentic pre-war music I ever heard in our house was on an LP released in the wake of the film The Glenn Miller Story (1954). Mum and Dad were early adopters of stereophonic sound, so when the old songs turned up they were often in orchestral versions that exploited stereo to full effect (Clebanoff, Mantovani), and sometimes by other recyclers of old tunes such as Ray Conniff And His Singers or Mitch Miller And The Gang. I'm assuming that for my parents, and many others, a return to the authentic music of their teenage years - the years of Depression and the outbreak of war - did not offer a sentimental journey.

This meant that I heard a lot of music during my school years, but not much from the pre-war years. By the early 80s my whole collection of 20s-30s-40s music had been Ellington's Flaming Youth and one album each by Fats Waller, Django Reinhardt, and Count Basie. Oh, and one outlier by British comic actor and talented ukulele player George Formby, known to me from TV reruns of his old films from the 30s. (I recently rewatched his 1935 film No Limit to groans from the other half of the household.)

When I discovered Sentimental Journey in the 1980s it was a good time to be buying good quality reissues of records from the era of 78 rpm discs. 

I bought an audiocassette of The Songs & Stars Of The Thirties (1980) an anthology that covered similar territory to Sentimental Journey, including vocalist Sam Browne's stirring version of Irving Berlin's Let's Face The Music And Dance. A World Record Club double LP set The Great British Dance Bands Play Jerome Kern 1926-46 (1983)  had 38 Kern compositions including the excellent Denny Dennis singing The Folks Who Live On The Hill, a definitive version with Roy Fox And His Orchestra. Those two fine and prolific vocalists, Browne and Dennis, were previously unknown to me and probably familiar only to the aficionados these days. 

The ABC itself put out some fine series of albums curated by Robert Parker including Jazz Classics in Digital Stereo (from 1984) and The Golden Years in Digital Stereo (from 1986): nicely restored 78s with just a touch of stereo.

In Dennis Potter's TV musical series Pennies From Heaven (1978-79) the characters frequently mimed lesser-known British songs from the 30s. Although Potter seemed to me to be taking the mickey a bit, the collections of songs that spun off from the series bore names that I'd never heard of until Sentimental Journey but were now familiar: Carroll Gibbons And The Savoy Hotel Orpheans, singers Denny Dennis and Elsie Carlisle, and orchestra leaders Roy Fox, Bert Ambrose, Lew Stone, and Jack Hylton. And yes, the ubiquitous Al Bowlly with Ray Noble And His Orchestra.

Since Pennies From Heaven, Al Bowlly has become something of a go-to voice of the 1930s for filmmakers. For example, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and French favourite Amélie (2001) each used two Bowlly tracks, and another one appears in Withnail And I (1987). The Internet Movie Database lists over 40 films and TV series that have used Bowlly's records on their soundtracks since 1980.

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As a child of Buddy Holly, Beatles and (to keep up the alliteration) Big Brother  & the Holding Company, I was surprised to see how deeply I had become immersed in the works of Al Bowlly, Benny Goodman and Billie Holliday.

When you think about it, though, it is not impossible to find links between pre-rock 'n' roll music and post-Beatles pop. For a start, we had the ironic approximations of old music by the likes of The New Vaudeville Band (Winchester Cathedral) and even The Beatles (Honey Pie, Your Mother Should Know). More than that, as Keith Glass tells it in a Melbourne context, the beat and r&b bands of the 1960s were often formed by folk, skiffle and jazz musicians who adapted to the British Invasion sounds. 

Indeed, three former members of the Red Onion Jazz Band, including vocalist Gerry Humphreys, formed Melbourne's Loved Ones, a critically and commercially successful r&b-oriented pop-rock band far removed from the sound - and visuals - of the Red Onions. 

Far removed except for one thing: strong foot-tapping rhythm was a feature of popular music in both the 60s and the 30s. Anyone from my generation who thought the music of the old days was all slow, syrupy ballads got it badly wrong.   

Further reading: My post about the rhythmic 1930s "Jazzing It Down"

See also: 1. "The ABC of West's Journey", The Age, 1 July 1989, on John West's retirement. 2. Posts at this blog labelled 30s music, 20s music, 40s music.

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Spotify playlist (𝟑𝟑 tracks):

Sam Browne And The Rhythm Sisters - Let's Face The Music And Dance (1936)

Les Brown And His Orchestra, Vocal Chorus by Doris Day - Sentimental Journey (1945)

Joe Loss And His Band (Vocalist: Chick Henderson) - Begin The Beguine (1939)

 

Duke Ellington - Diga Diga Doo (1928)

Lew Stone And His Band - P.S. I Love You (1934)

Annette Hanshaw - We Just Couldn't Say Goodbye from Captain Henry's Radio Show (1933)

Chucklers Weekly (3): Pat Boone, Bob Rogers and make a book cover!

Previous Chucklers Weekly posts: covers and comics.

Apart from the comics, Chucklers Weekly included short stories, puzzles, general knowledge features, pop music news, competitions and readers' advertisements (Exchange Corner and Penfriends). The content was wholesome, even educational, fare. (Crystals are interesting!) There was nothing here that would upset parents at a time when comic books had had some bad press.

The pin-up boy of Chucklers Weekly was Pat Boone, the clean-cut American crooner and movie star who had hits with whitebread versions of Little Richard and Fats Domino songs and otherwise occupied the lighter end of the pop spectrum. He even wrote an advice book for the youngsters called 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty that I remember being promoted through Chucklers Weekly. In fact, looking back, Chucklers Weekly was nuts about Pat Boone, almost an Aussie branch of his PR team.

Of the two white-collar-and-tie disc jockeys featured here, Bob Rogers from 2SM in Sydney was the most famous nationally. Five years later, by then with 2UE, he was embedded with The Beatles' tour of Australia, an arrangement that was continually crashed by 2SM's Mad Mel, a wacky deejay from America who would have seemed shocking in 1959.

Click on an image to enlarge it.

Slow versions

Sometimes you hear the original of a slow-burning song and find that it started out as something altogether peppier. The obvious example is Joe Cocker's revelatory version of With A Little Help From My Friends, which sounds just as convincing as a dramatic soul ballad as it does as the rhythmic kick-off to The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper.

Nothing prepared me, though, for Marvin Gaye's downright bouncy 1963 original of Wherever I Lay My Hat (That's My Home). I'd already become attached to Paul Young's slow, haunting version from his 1983 album No Parlez.

In the same way, I'd got to know the 1924 Isham Jones-Gus Kahn song It Had To Be You through a slow version. It was on 'S Awful Nice (1958), an album by Ray Conniff, whose wordless-chorus-plus-brass arrangements were a big part of the soundtrack of our household when I was a kid in the late 50s and early 60s.

I heard enough slow arrangements of It Had To Be You to make me admire it in the same way as I admired Ray Noble's The Very Thought Of You, another slow, sweet and romantic song from songwriting's golden age.

I didn't hear Isham Jones's own recording of It Had To Be You until recently, and it turns out to be an upbeat Roaring 20s dance number in the vein of Tea For Two. For me it doesn't have the same allure as it does as a slow song.

It might depend on how you first hear a song, and I might need to soften my harsh opinion of jazzing it down.

A few words from our lyricist

I keep getting emails from people looking for lyrics, usually to some obscure local hit that's impossible to find at any lyrics site. The other day, someone was after Frankie Davidson's Ball Bearing Bird.

Really, I'm the last person to ask about lyrics. I'm a poor listener: I notice the beat, and the arrangement, and the vocals... but it's only the odd line or phrase that sticks in my mind.

It's not that I don't care about lyrics, but with many rock or pop songs I'm happy if the words just sound right: in fact I hate it when they don't sound right, whatever their meaning is.

If the vowels and consonants sound good with each other it doesn't matter so much if I don't take in the meaning, in the same way that Italian opera or Brazilian pop are incomprehensible but still enjoyable. Scat singers knew about that, and John Lennon's Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé always sounded fine to me: I mean, let's face it, goo goo g’joob!

I'm not, like, against lyrics, nothing extreme like that: I always dug Simon & Garfunkel's words, and you can't listen to Nick Drake or Joni Mitchell or Tom Waits without taking in the lyrics. It's just that it's mainly fragments I notice or remember, the odd line or phrase. Fragments like these:

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said,
Though I knew she was sleeping
Simon & Garfunkel - America (Paul Simon - Art Garfunkel)
On Bookends, 1968

So you think you’re having good times
With the boy that you just met
Kicking sand from beach to beach
Your clothes all soaking wet
Traffic - Paper Sun (Jim Capaldi - Steve Winwood) 1967
The lyrics are by Jim Capaldi. See the 2002 Usenet discussion about the second verse's pitching lips, heard (plausibly) by some as hitching lifts. (The 'Lindsay Martin' in the discussion is me.)

"C'est la vie," say the old folks,
It goes to show you never can tell.
Chuck Berry - You Never Can Tell (Chuck Berry) 1964
Neat use of assonance. Check out those vowel sounds: C'est-say; old-folks-goes-show; never-tell.
The whole song is a slice-of-life masterpiece, a short story writer's catalogue of everyday details.

You study 'em hard and hopin' to pass...
Chuck Berry - School Days (Chuck Berry) 1957

And so it's my assumption, I'm really up the junction.
Squeeze - Up The Junction (Chris Difford - Glenn Tilbrook)
On Cool For Cats, 1979.
The lyrics are by Difford, I believe. This is the final line of the song. See the annotated lyrics from SqueezeFan.com (now off-line: archived). First, there's the nice near-rhyme of assumption and junction. Second, it uses a word that is unexpected in a pop song: assumption. Third, I love a song that leaves the words of the title right till the very end, rather than chanting it desperately all through the chorus.

I don't like you, but I love you.
The Miracles - You've Really Got A Hold On Me (Smokey Robinson) 1962
Genuine use by William 'Smokey' Robinson of the oxymoron as a literary device (not just any old contradiction, which most people these days seem to believe is an oxymoron). Also recorded famously by The Beatles on With The Beatles, 1963

Daniel is travelling tonight on a plane
I can see the red tail lights heading for Spain
Elton John - Daniel (Elton John - Bernie Taupin)
On Don't Shoot Me I'm The Piano Player, 1973.
Words by Bernie Taupin. Puts a picture in my mind that sums up the song.

Anyway, the thing is, what I really mean,
Yours are the sweetest eyes I've ever seen.
Elton John - Your Song (Elton John - Bernie Taupin)
On Elton John, 1970
Bernie Taupin again. British diffidence, summed up in colloquial language, and all the more romantic for it.

You stay home, she goes out...
The Beatles - For No One (John Lennon - Paul McCartney)
On Revolver, 1966
Routine language for a romance gone routine. For me the most perfect Beatles song, written by Paul, it's more like European cinema than a pop song. I was going to cut and paste the whole song, but see SongMeanings instead.

Here comes the twist:
I don't exist.
The Bonzo Dog Band - I'm The The Urban Space Man (Neil Innes) 1969
Produced by Apollo C. Vermouth, aka Paul McCartney.

Joneses, Joneses, all I see, page 19 to 23
Big big world can be unkind, the phone just took my last dime
Johnny Burnette - Big Big World (Fred Burch - Gerald Nelson - Red West) 1961
I know it ain't poetry, but it was on the radio a lot back then, and it tells a story, and it stuck with me.

South Silicon Way...
It's an address, right? Maybe in a suburb of some English industrial city?
Sooorry... It's a misheard lyric, one I was so convinced of at the time that I couldn't believe it was actually So Sally can wait. That's the line in Don't Look Back In Anger by Oasis, 1995, on (What's The Story) Morning Glory.

Mad Dogs and Originals

Listening again to Joe Cocker's live album of the Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour, I was startled to realise that this is now a generation old, a bit over 35 years.

At the time it was a joy, and I still marvel at how far rock'n'roll had come since my early teens, when the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion took off. Joe Cocker wouldn't have been a star in 1963, he would've been laughed off the stage, and yet here he was in 1970, unkempt, idiosyncratic, unlikely and just wonderful.

I was thinking, as I do, about the sources of the songs, songs that were often reworked and transformed into something fresh. Apart from Cocker's (then) alarming delivery, credit is due to the arrangers, notably Chris Stainton - a member of Cocker's Grease Band - and Leon Russell, who produced Cocker in the studio and was the musical director of Mad Dogs & Englishmen.

Here's a list, with writers and original versions. I'm guessing that the Ray Charles versions of some of these songs would've been the significant ones for Joe Cocker.

Honky Tonk Women (Mick Jagger - Keith Richard)
The Rolling Stones, 1969.

Sticks and Stones (Titus Turner - Henry Glover)
Ray Charles, 1960.
Ray Charles had the original release: an earlier recording by co-writer Titus Turner was unreleased at the time. It was also recorded in the 60s by Billy Fury, Manfred Mann, The Zombies, The Righteous Brothers, and Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels and others.

Cry Me A River (Arthur Hamilton)
Julie London, 1955.
Slow burning torch song rocked up by Leon Russell.

Bird On The Wire (Leonard Cohen)
Judy Collins, 1968.
Recorded by Leonard Cohen himself (in 1969), among others.

Feelin' Alright (Dave Mason)
Traffic, 1968.
Writer Dave Mason was a member of Traffic, along with Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi.

Superstar (Leon Russell - Bonnie Bramlet + Delaney Bramlett)
Delaney & Bonnie, 1969.
Nothing to do with the rock opera, but a song originally issued as Groupie. More details at my own Superstar page at PopArchives.com.au.

Let's Go Get Stoned (Valerie Simpson - Nickolas Ashford - Josephine Armstead)
The Coasters, 1965.
Once again, Ray Charles had a version (1966), among others.

I'll Drown In My Own Tears (Henry Glover)
Sonny Thompson & Lula Reed, 1951.
Original title: I'll Drown In My Tears. Notably recorded by Ray Charles (1960) among others.

When Something Is Wrong With My Baby (Isaac Hayes - David Porter)
Sam & Dave, 1966, but hang on a minute:
The Originals gives the original to Charlie Rich, by a couple of months.

I've Been Loving You Too Long (Otis Redding - Jerry Butler)
Otis Redding, 1965.
Full original title: I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now).

Girl From The North Country (Bob Dylan)
Bob Dylan (with Johnny Cash), 1969.
On Nashville Skyline.

Please Give Peace A Chance (Leon Russell - Bonnie Bramlett)
A Mad Dogs & Englishmen original? I think so.

She Came In Through The Bathroom Window (John Lennon - Paul McCartney)
The Beatles, 1969.
On Abbey Road. Cocker had previously recorded this on the 1969 Leon Russell-produced album Joe Cocker!

Space Captain (Matthew Moore)
This is the original, here on Mad Dogs & Englishmen: Matthew Moore was one of the band. Matthew Moore's own version didn't appear until 1979, on his album The Sport Of Guessing. (The travel guide company Lonely Planet was named after co-founder Tony Wheeler's mishearing of lovely planet in Space Captain.)

The Letter (Wayne Carson Thompson)
The Box Tops, 1967.
Written by Nashville-based singer-songwriter Wayne Carson Thompson, aka Wayne Carson, whose demo version that 'sounded like the Everly Bros' was The Box Tops' source. Wayne Carson released his own version on Life Lines (1972).

Delta Lady (Leon Russell)
Joe Cocker, 1969..
Studio version on the album Joe Cocker! that predates Mad Dogs & Englishmen

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.

Cicadas and Flies: Bizarro Merseybeat World Down Under

Earlier, I wrote about the phenomenon I like to call Bizarro Shadows World Down Under. When it became unfashionable to emulate the Shads and The Ventures, bands in Australia (and they weren't the only ones around the world) caught the Merseybeat bug.

Here, Sydney musician and researcher Terry Stacey discusses Sydney band The Cicadas (pictured) in that context:

The Cicadas were one of the first of Australia's bands to be influenced by The Beatles. Other early Beatle bands were Melbourne's Flies (which gave the world Ronnie Burns), Sydney's Rajahs, who had transformed themselves from 50s rocker Dig Richard's backing band, The R'jays, by putting on Beatle wigs and turbans, and The D-Men, whose main claims to fame were that they were the first resident band at Sydney's first disco, Beatle Village, and came from the Sydney suburb of Liverpool (their lead singer Freddie Cooke later migrated to Melbourne, joined The Vibrants and changed his name to Marc Leon).

The Cicadas, formed in 1963, were originally an MOR band doing TV variety shows under the name The Hi-Fi’s until the Merseybeat boom arrived. They signed to RCA and released their first and most successful single, the Carter-Lewis song That's What I Want in 1964.

This had been a minor hit for UK band The Marauders in 1963 and, unusually, they covered both sides of the Marauders single, the flipside being Hey Wha' D'Ya Say, for their own single.

They then put out a second single, written by veteran rocker, then RCA's A & R manager, Johnny Devlin, with a similar Beatles title, I Need You. This was a minor hit in Sydney.

After a further, unsuccessful, single, a cover of another Marauders single, Carter-Lewis's Always on My Mind, they relocated to the UK and changed their name to The Gibsons. They released a number of singles on various labels there, including the catchy The Magic Book (rated elsewhere as one of 1966's better singles).

Although they outlasted their Beatle boom contemporaries back in Australia, none of their singles was successful. They put out their last single in 1967.

(Contributed)

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).

Bizarro Shadows World Down Under

Standing in the shadow of The Shadows:
Melbourne band The Phantoms, from Canetoad's W&G Instrumental Story.

How many Australian and New Zealand bands of the 60s started out playing instrumentals in the style of the Shadows but transformed themselves in the wake of Beatlemania? See, for a start, The Strangers, The Questions, The Cherokees and The La De Das.

When a bunch of teenagers formed a band in the early 60s their main passion was often to emulate The Shadows or The Ventures (not only in Australia: see my post ¡Viva Los Shads!). Apache and Walk, Don’t Run were standards of the repertoire.

In Australia, this amounted to something like a movement, a phenomenon I like to call Bizarro Shadows World Down Under.

Aussies were always fond of a guitar-based instrumental. The Shadows were as big here as they were in the UK, and they were still charting alongside the Beatles into the mid-60s: their last hit in Oz was Bombay Duck in 1967 (#3 Adelaide, #10 Brisbane). The Americans preferred The Ventures, but we liked them as well: best of both worlds, down here. When surf music came along we took to it in a big way, and it melded in nicely with the guitar instrumental genre.

We also had our local heroes. Sydney steel guitarist Rob E. G. was often on the radio and the charts in the early 60s, often (but not always) with his own compositions: Railroadin', Si Senor (I Theenk?) and 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Zero. In 1963 Sydney band The Atlantics produced Bombora and The Crusher, two stunning examples of the surf instrumental that give Pipeline and Wipeout a run for their money. The Joy Boys - without Col Joye - had a national Top 5 hit in 1962 with Southern ‘Rora, inspired by, of all things, a new Melbourne-Sydney train service.

Melbourne band The Strangers first charted in their home town with a guitar version of Frankie Laine’s hit Cry of the Wild Goose (1963), a far cry from the soul-tinged vocal pop of 1968’s Happy Without You. Progressive New Zealand band the La De Das were, in their embryonic form, a high school band called The Mergers who played Shadows-styled instrumentals. At the website of guitarist Rod Stone, later with The Playboys and The Groove, you can hear a snatch of his 1962 version of Skye Boat Song, recorded in New Zealand as a 17-year-old in immaculate Shadows style.

It’s not that the instrumental bands didn’t sing at all, but looking back it’s hard to avoid the idea that it was cooler, even more manly, to pick out those precise guitar instrumentals than to sing soppy love songs.

There are a number of Bizarro Shadows World Down Under tracks on W&G Instrumental Story, released by the Australian reissue label Canetoad. W&G was a Melbourne record label.

Some of these tracks sound a bit cheesy, even clunky, at this distance, but that’s a feature of instro-guitar in general. Even so, there’s a good mix of remakes and originals that often stand up well beside their British and American models.

About half the tracks are by Melbourne showband The Thunderbirds, who were really too big, too brassy and too versatile to be put strictly in the mould of the Shads. Their version of The Rebels' Wild Weekend is an Aussie instrumental classic.

Otherwise, tracks by The Cherokees (Thundercloud), The Chessmen (The Rebel [Johnny Yuma]), The Breakaways (The Wheel), The Strangers (Undertow) and The Phantoms (Stampede) wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a Shadows or Ventures album.

When Beatlemania hit, many Aussie instrumental bands did just what the boys in my Australian town did: they shampooed their hair, brushed it down over their foreheads, and never again darkened the doors of traditional barbers’ shops.

Pictures of the Beatles before Ringo illustrate the contrast. Pete Best looked fine and he still had a loyal following. He had that detached, moody, brushed-back look that went back to James Dean and the late-50s teen idols, but (unless my perception is skewed by hindsight) he already looked oddly out of place.

More than just changing the idea of what looked cool, Merseybeat made singing an imperative. The Strangers developed a hip pop sensibility that gave them vocal hits in the late 60s with Melanie Makes Me Smile, Western Union and Happy Without You. The Cherokees dabbled in a number of styles, but they had their greatest success with the comic revivals Oh, Monah and Minnie The Moocher that for some reason never seemed out of place on the charts of the late 60s.

The Atlantics ventured into Brit Invasion recycled R&B with the likes of I Put A Spell On You, featuring Johnny Rebb, an experienced rock’n’roller who had joined the band, and Rob E.G. re-emerged as Robie Porter, this time singing on his records (When You’re Not Near). Sydney band, The Questions also hired a vocalist, and his name was Doug Parkinson.

You thought I was going to say, "And the rest is history...", didn't you?
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See also:
Cicadas and Flies: Bizarro Merseybeat World Down Under