In 1958 Johnny O’Keefe released ‘The Wild One’ and Australian Rock & Roll was born. In 2008 we celebrate 50 years of Australian Rock & Roll by releasing a landmark Australian album, ‘50 Years Of Australian Rock & Roll’ featuring 66 classic Australian rock songs packaged in a 3CD deluxe set on Australia Day, 2008.
Rock'n'roll was supposed to last for five minutes, not for fifty years. It was the serious kid in glasses down the block practicing piano or violin for three hours every afternoon who was looking forward to a "career in music", not the misfits who emitted rude, anti-social noises that upset parents and the social order; the young rock rebels considered themselves lucky if they got to make a record, or maybe two. It never occurred to them that they might be making history.
Rock'n'roll transformed western civilisation. It assaulted sensibilities and terrified parents with its menacing energy, its air of rebellion and its exhilarating immediacy. It was young, irreverent and undeniably addictive, with endless possibilities, absolute accessibility and unprecedented charisma.
Whatever civilisation to which we westerners out on the far flung rim could lay claim we were willing to abandon in order to embrace this wild’n’woolly beast that seemed so aligned with our self image. Although rock'n'roll exploded in Australia in 1955 with Rock Around The Clock, our artists didn't really begin recording rock for a couple of years. The sound found a foothold in the suburban halls and clubs that played host to teeming, colourful and almost always violent dances. When it finally made its way into recording studios it was tentative, exploratory and ambitious. It was very much a case of making it up as you went along. Here at the bottom of the world you couldn't even get hold of guitars and amps.
He may not have been the first local artist to cut a rock single but Johnny O’Keefe was the first to grab Australia by the throat and demand attention. From the first moment he set foot on a professional stage, he was a primal wildman. He screamed, howled, cavorted and contorted in a manner that astonished even the international stars who shared the revolving stage with him at the ‘old tin shed’, Sydney Stadium. His signature tune, the locally-composed The Wild One (or Real Wild Child), early in 1958, set a template for that which would follow.
Though J.O’K stood at the head of a community of quality rockers it wasn’t until the mid-60s that young Australian musicians began to seriously write their own songs, develop an original sound and take a crack at the lucrative international market. It was an era in which it was not uncommon for 15,000 near-hysterical fans to descend upon an airport to catch a glimpse of a home-grown rock group or solo sensation; when theatres, television stations and hire cars were reduced to rubble in the wake of kamikaze fans willing to risk any injury in pursuit of their idols.
Singles reigned supreme but a decade on we found, in Skyhook Greg Macainsh's pithy, smartarse lyrics, an element that had eluded domestic rock - observations of the contemporary Australian experience, tales of adolescent lust and confusion from the Melbourne suburbs. With similar offerings from Dragon and Chisel a mirror had been turned on ourselves and massive album sales showed that we liked what we heard.
As countless brick-thick 'dynasty saga' novels remind us, it is the kids who grow up tough in harsh neighbourhoods who become titans of industry and founders of great empires. It's the clawing out of the slag, the single-minded tenacity that separates the men from the boys (and the women from the girls). For Oz Rock the same refining process has long applied. Plying a vast, under-populated land, travelling a thousand kilometres between major cities, playing night after night in suburban concrete beer barns to spoilt audiences who'd just as readily stone a band with cans as applaud it, writing songs and working out arrangements in hotel rooms or on buses. From out of this harsh school came rock performers who could hold their own on any stage anywhere in the world. Performers rendering often tempestuous and sometimes quirky music of considerable imagination, integrity and texture.
"Australian bands are much more intense" Jimmy Barnes once observed. "Most of them cut their teeth live and not in a studio, which is very healthy." And as John Farnham pointed out: "We have a population the same as Southern California and we're a bloody long way away. So to keep what we do interesting we have to give it that little bit extra. I'm not sure just what that is but it has something to do with the fact that we've always had to compete in our own market with the best from Britain and America and we've learned how to glean what we wanted from both and then add something that says who we are."
There is no question that it is who we are which determines how we sound. The much-touted 'Australian Sound' may well be nothing more than an honest, rangy, good-humoured, open-ended approach to making music. On the inside looking out it's hard to come to grips with just how fresh, vital and imaginative Australian music can sound to urban inmates of New York, London and Berlin. Certainly we learned toward the end of the 70s, and particularly by the mid 80s, that what we have, the world wants.
Our mastery of rib crushing, blood curdling, brain damaging, skin blistering, no bullshit rock’n’roll has never been in doubt but by the 90s it was plainly apparent that our finest could also move across genres with ease - from classic and charismatic dark-edged pop to surging dance to compelling 'world music' polyrhythms to frantic funk to 'unplugged' acoustic to dervish diva to ....well, anything you can think of. They could call upon the sounds of ambient atmospherics and jazz, country and folk flourishes, reggae and islander tonings, bits of bubblegum, dollops of disco, bursts of the blues, and rare riffs cooked up in their back room. The cross-pollination was just exhilarating. It still is.
So here ‘tis, from The Wild One to Eskimo Joe - a half a century of music that is real and true, music that defines us, music that we’ve lived with, loved with, screamed at, danced to, roared to the rafters on nights we’ll never forget; music we’ve absorbed into our own consciousness. Try and imagine having grown up without it – the thought fair sends a shiver through you.
