For Australia as a whole, the girl of the moment was Little Pattie, née Patricia Amphlett, from the southeastern suburbs of Sydney (Eastlakes, where the local beach is Maroubra). She was her school’s star pupil and aspired to a career as a neurosurgeon – something her parents were willing to support her in and which was clearly not beyond her – but was sidetracked by singing at a young age. She was not some kind of Gidget figure: she was originally nicknamed ‘Little Pattie’ by schoolfriends because she had two taller friends with the same name.74 Winning a talent contest (‘because nobody else entered’, she said later75) launched Amphlett on a pop career and she scored early with her exceptional ‘He’s My Blonde-Headed, Stompie Wompie, Real Gone Surfer Boy’, backed with ‘Stompin’ at Maroubra’. The record reached no. 2 late in 1963, and Amphlett was thrown into a pop tempest which took the unglamorous form of endless touring, often by train, with her manager Philip Jacobsen and his brother, Col Joye. It must have required enormous stamina to cope with being an intelligent teenager and yet routinely treated as ‘a bit of fairy floss.’76 She has since claimed that one of the few times she was taken seriously was the night she spent with the Beatles in Sydney, celebrating Paul McCartney’s 22nd birthday at their hotel.77 By the mid 60s she was doing panto – The Ugly Duckling, with Johnny O’Keefe78 – but her career had not devolved into fluffy irrelevance. She also found herself literally on the front line, when she and Col Joye performed in Vietnam for Australian troops and were unwilling witnesses to the battle of Long Tan. This was not what politicised her, though; it was more the casual way in which she had been treated by the industry as a young girl in show business. She later lent her name and talents to left-wing causes and has become prominent in arts and entertainment union organisation.
OLD WAVE
Another surf music success story was the Atlantics, named not after the ocean (which doesn’t touch Australian shores) but after a briefly popular brand of fuel. The group members met on a bus travelling between a Sydney beach and their home suburb of Randwick in Sydney in the summer of 1960-61.79 Their biggest and best-remembered hit was 1963’s ‘Bombora’, written by guitarist Jim Skiathitis and drummer Peter Hood before surf music had become big but released to capitalise on the craze. ‘Bombora’ sold half a million copies in twelve countries.80 Sven Libaek, later known as a composer of remarkable film and television soundtracks, was an A&R man for CBS at the time and the group’s producer. Instrumental rock/pop in the surf music and/or ‘Shadows’ style enjoyed broad but brief popularity, but the Atlantics would move away from their instrumental base to back the established singer Johnny Rebb. They would never recapture their early success, though Peter Hood’s song ‘Come On’, released by the Atlantics in 1967, is an acknowledged classic. Guitarist/keyboard player Theo (Thaao) Penglis, guitarist and collector (perhaps metaphorically) of empty whiskey bottles81 would go from surf music to Hollywood success; he played Andre DiMera in the American television soap Days of Our Lives from 1981.
Instrumental groups everywhere could see the writing on the wall. The Mustangs, a popular Adelaide dance band, advertised for a singer in late 1965: ‘They had to catch up or fade away’,82 writes Jim Keays; he saw the group as ‘virtually from the old wave.’83 Keays, who had arrived in Adelaide’s comfortable eastern suburbs from Scotland with his adoptive parents at the age of five,84 joined the Mustangs and helped transform them into a different group, the Masters Apprentices. Whether he had a vision of what they would become is uncertain; what he was armed with was the memory of a genuine vision – an apparition – from his early adolescence, which had told him unequivocally that he would go on to lead the biggest band in Australia.85
ROCK AND ROLL’S SENSIBLE PROFESSIONALS: THE JACOBSENS
Colin and Kevin Jacobsen, the sons of cabinet makers in a family of five, jumped on rock and roll at the appropriate time and, while it might have seemed in the early 60s that they offered a less interesting shadow version of the extravagant and rambling exploits of Johnny O’Keefe (of whom more later), they were without doubt the greater success story in the long term.
Both Jacobsens played in the jazz group the KJ Quintet in the late 1950s (Kevin on piano, Colin on guitar and vocals), then discovered that rock and roll was simply ‘country music with a backbeat’. Interviewed for the television show Talking Heads in 2006, Joye declared ‘I was in the right place at the right time.’86
My brother started a band and they played for the local football club, weddings, and things like that. Then I came to sit in with them, and sing songs and play guitar. So Kevin Jacobsen became – he was KJ, so it was the KJ Quintet. But we had to get out of the name of KJ Quintet when we were booked to do a big show, because that sort of didn’t work. And we had to get a good name because all the names were Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, roll-off-the-tongue names. And Colin Jacobsen didn’t roll off the tongue. So we had a meeting with a clairvoyant lady and she came up with the name of Col Joye and the Joy Boys. We got into show business, I suppose, inadvertently in a way, because we were playing dances and weddings and cabarets and things like that. And one day Brian Henderson had Bandstand running, and he said, ‘I’ve been getting letters in about Col Joye and the Joy Boys, but I don’t know how to find them, but they tell me they’re pretty good.’ So from that we played other shows, and we were asked to record for Festival Records, and then we had a number one record.87
Joye makes it sound easier than it probably was: the group had gone through a number of incarnations and unsuccessful records before ‘Bye Bye Baby’ made the top five in both Sydney and Melbourne midway through 1959. Joye would go on to become known as a gentle, reasonable, pleasant star – in sharp contrast to Johnny O’Keefe, with whom he would have considerable conflict.
In terms of drama, O’Keefe’s story is more compelling – he certainly hurt more people, including himself. But Joye and the Jacobsen management/recording/touring empire were a consistent presence on the Australian scene for decades.
ROCK AND ROLL’S IGNORANT, ARROGANT PIGS
An argument could be made that the most significant difference between folk, jazz, and rock and roll stars was the way they conducted themselves. Rock stars – with the possible exception of Johnny O’Keefe, who had to have a finger in every possible pie – had not yet begun to project themselves in an intellectual, social-commentary framework. Rockers like Dig Richards, who would not shine as a creative performer until the 70s and his Harlequin album, seemed to be cartoon characters, more Flintstonian than anything else. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if I have the evil eye on me,’ Richards joked to TV Week in 1961. Not only was his career at a standstill – echoes therein of Peter Sellers’s comedy record ‘I’m So Ashamed’ – but he was forever having car accidents (he was ‘branded “the worst teenage driver in show business”’) and made news for trivial clumsiness, such as when he hit his head in a swimming pool.88 The early rock and roll singing stars, young and reckless, often played up to the goofy light the press shone on them.
Whatever the fascinations of his particular story, his (questionable) status as an innovator, and the undoubted talents of his backing musicians, Johnny O’Keefe’s real talent lay in self-promotion. This is a rare and important knack, but it does not necessarily make one’s recorded music legacy pleasant listening. The mid-80s telemovie Shout! The Story of Johnny O’Keefe presents the whole O’Keefe story in telling ways: O’Keefe, as played by Terry Serio, is bratty, cocksure, and always doing first in Australia what others had done a few years previously in the rest of the world.