The Aztecs had started out as an instrumental group called the Vibratones; they had a recording agreement with a label known as Linda Lee (there was clearly something about this kind of alliterative name in the early 60s: Lonnie Lee and Laurel Lea were stars during this period, and it might even have had an impact on Barry Lyde’s decision to become Lobby Loyde). The Aztecs’ manager John Harrigan operated Surf City and another venues such as Stomp City and the Beach House. Writing in 1996 of his first – unrehearsed – show with the Aztecs backing him, Thorpe described it as a synergistic success that marked a new chapter in the development of rock: ‘the unstoppable rolling excitement of something new.’165 Thorpe told Dillow:
They didn’t have a singer at that stage so Harrigan informed them that if we could get together he could probably record us . . . We put down a thing called ‘Blue Day’. It was shithouse, but it got to about No. 10 in Sydney. A funny buzz.166
Second guitarist Tony Barber had joined the new group around the same time as Thorpe, and had written ‘Blue Day’; by 1996 Thorpe had revised his opinion of the song to ‘a great first record’.167 Through its relationship with the distributor/label Festival, the new group including Thorpe was able to record at the larger company’s studio.168
Later, while Harrigan was on an overseas trip, his mother signed the group to Alberts. Though this publishing house-cum-production company was later to prove very important to Australian music, Alberts were not yet a label in their own right and – not to put too fine a point on it – the Aztecs were no Missing Links (though they did have much greater commercial success). Thorpe continues the story: since ‘Blue Day’ had been a ‘moderate success’,
we recorded again. This time it was “Poison Ivy”. I don’t know to this day what happened. One week we were virtually unknown – the next week we were being chased down the street . . . I was only 16, you dig, and there I was, meeting all these incredible people, travelling around the country. Staying in the best hotels, drinking booze, screwing my head off.169
Barber was a creditable songwriter, but Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs’ biggest early hits were pedestrian covers, the unsurprising ‘Poison Ivy’, ‘Mashed Potato’ and, most dismally from an artistic perspective, the string-laden horror that was their ‘Over the Rainbow’. ‘Sick and Tired’, however, is a good demonstration of the group’s dynamism. Though they were based in Sydney, they were also exceptionally popular in both Melbourne and Perth.170 The group released its first album on Parlophone in 1965; it did not contain any originals.171 There were strains, as Thorpe told Dillow: ‘At the time we were all young kids. There was so much stress and we were so important in the business. So many offers being made to us individually – I guess that’s what happened.’172
Tony Barber was the first to quit the Aztecs because, he told Dean Mittelhauser twenty years later, ‘It got tedious . . . We met people that we’d never meet again, and had to be on our best behaviour . . . ALWAYS! Nicely dressed because in those days all the bands were smartly dressed.’173 Barber’s subsequent solo career was patchy, but nevertheless artistically greater than Thorpe’s in the same period. Thorpe, who died in 2007, is held in high regard in the early 21st century because of his work in the late 60s and early 70s, when he reinvented himself for the alternative festival circuit; in his earlier days he was little more than an eager performer and, not unrelatedly, a sexual colossus, if his memoirs are to be believed.
Other stars comparable to Thorpe began to emerge. Normie Rowe was a trainee telephone technician who sang on the Melbourne dance circuit, usually with the band the Thunderbirds. 3KZ DJ Stan Rofe encouraged him to go professional.
He said, “Do you have any aspirations of being a singer?” And I didn’t know what an aspiration was. He explained it to me, invited me off to some of the bigger dances in Melbourne. I met some of my idols. And then I started working in these places, and it gave me the background. From the dances, people saw me and invited me to appear on shows like The Go Show and Teen Scene.174
Rowe’s early hits, like Thorpe’s, were often notionally updated versions of old chestnuts such as ‘Que Sera Sera’ or ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ – great records, but hardly creative milestones. Rowe’s career, like Col Joye’s, would become that of a performer in a light entertainment/cabaret style; Rowe’s was arguably ruined by his own Vietnam experience – mirroring Elvis Presley, he was required to be a member of the armed forces. As will be seen in later chapters, Johnny Young would have a major impact, as the writer of what was far and away Rowe’s best song, ‘Hello’ (not a huge hit, for the usual inexplicable reasons), and of a truly masterful song about Rowe – ‘Smiley’, sung by Ronnie Burns. Rowe would also give the world, via his transformed backing band the Playboys, one of the great and (relatively) unsung experimental pop groups of the late 60s, Procession.
MOVERS AND SHAKERS
Much is made of the British or other overseas origins of Australian pop stars of the 1960s, particularly in non-Australian accounts. This connection between migrant status and success as an entertainer is easily explained by reviewing the biographies of popular performers from all over the world: the ability and willingness to entertain is a valuable skill for any child whose family is new in a neighbourhood, and particularly for those who regularly move around. Families whose parents are in the military, or the public service, and so on have a high proportion of children with the skill to entertain. The mobility of the Gibb family is almost certainly the formative element of the Bee Gees’ success, for instance. The country of birth of an Australian pop star is no indication of anything; the fact that they were migrants at a young age was in many cases the impetus that drove them to be entertainers.
Consider, for instance, a major talent like Wilhelmus Arnoldus Maria Francis Groenewegen. Though fondly remembered in some quarters, he left Australia for the USA in the mid 1970s – and left rock for jazz soon afterwards. As a result, his contribution to Australian pop music has been marginalised in the collective memory. He had moved from the Netherlands to the regional NSW town of Orange in the late 1950s with his three brothers, three sisters and widowed mother, and picked up a guitar at the age of 14. Through his job as a chemist’s delivery boy, he was able to buy an acoustic Nightingale Jackaroo from a pawn shop; ‘it had a stencil of a Jackaroo,’ he recalls, ‘with a hat with corks – he was sitting against a tree with a billy boiling.’ Soon, Groenewegen was playing top-forty songs by ear.
After the family moved to Sydney’s north shore, Groenewegen began to play Friday night dances in the suburb of Brookvale with Bix Bryant and the Raiders. The group was evidently a hoot; he recalls a prank they played, pretending the house they lived in was haunted, that was written up in the Sunday papers and made them famous to the extent that tourists would pass by to stare at it.
Groenewegen’s bands morphed from Roland Storm and the Statesmen, mentioned above as playing at Surf City, to the Epics and the Questions; he saw Doug Parkinson play at a talent quest and ‘blow everybody’s mind’. The creative relationship between Groenewegen – who would soon go by the name Billy Green, for commercial reasons – and the powerful singer Parkinson will be outlined in chapter 4.
Joe Camilleri’s early musical experiments are similarly interesting, both because Camilleri would later become a major star in Australia with Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons and subsequently the Black Sorrows, but also because his experiences, like Groenewegen’s, show that rock and pop music was a good way for a recent immigrant to become socially accepted. Camilleri was born in Malta in 1948; his family came to Australia when he was two.175 His early life in music reads like a script for a poignant film:
Rock & roll singing was always what I wanted to do, even when I was very young. Our family didn’t have a gramophone but this lady down the road did, and we’d go down to her place and listen to the rock & roll records and