Music, like any art, provokes strong responses, of course, and there are times when I am no doubt unreasonably harsh, or unreasonably glowing, in my assessment of some work or another. Readers should take my meanderings in the spirit they are intended; I welcome correspondence on any subject. My ultimate aspiration is that this work inspires others to tease out more of this history, in new ways and revelatory interpretations.
David Nichols
Melbourne, 2015
‘Rock’ meant SHOCK in Australia. It came crashing in like a wild-beat overture to a massive new morality – or rather immorality – play. It stirred complacent aldermen to apoplexy, sent the record industry into an uncontrollable spin – and produced a species of Australian never before observed – the ‘real mad’ popsters and their ‘real gone’ audiences of screaming young girls.1
Conventional rock music history would have us believe Johnny O’Keefe was the Australian initiator of rock music in Australia. In fact, what he did was far less innovative: he was one of a group of men and women who personified this particular strand of youth culture, and guided the Australian public’s understanding of rock ’n’ roll. The celebration, even deification, of O’Keefe continues in unusual places: vintage footage of an audience reacting to O’Keefe and his group the Dee Jays (O’Keefe said it stood for ‘doovenile jelinquents’2) as they perform ‘Shout’ has since 1987 led off every episode of Rage, ABC-TV’s long-running late-night video-clip show, while on the soundtrack Iggy Pop sings his version of O’Keefe’s ‘Real Wild Child’. O’Keefe, who is discussed comprehensively in the next chapter, has two major records in his legend. The first is his version of ‘Shout’, which Festival Records’ Ken Taylor remembered as:
the first record ever established on the popular market by TV alone. Every radio station banned it because it was a ‘screamer’ – an extremely noisy and (some station managers thought) offensive form of Rock and Roll. But by that time Johnny had been appearing on an ABC teenage television show called Six O’Clock Rock and TV had no inhibitions about ‘Shout’. It took off like a rocket.3
O’Keefe’s second iconic release was ‘Wild One’, a 1958 song he purportedly wrote but which has been more accurately attributed jointly to O’Keefe, John Greenan and Dave Owens.4 It was raucous, fun rubbish, but Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis were sufficiently taken by its vigour to record versions of it.5 Taylor remembered O’Keefe as ‘a cocky, square-cut, jaunty guy with an earnest air under his confident grin’6 and, intriguingly, as ‘a comet in the milky way of Australian pop stardom.’7 O’Keefe appears to have coerced Taylor into signing him to Festival by announcing that it had happened, though it is hard to imagine – particularly at a time when a typical recording contract was strongly in a record label’s favour – why Festival would have considered signing O’Keefe a risky move.8 O’Keefe had already established himself most effectively and lucratively as a rock and roll performer, jumping on a bandwagon at the same time that noted composer and pianist Percy Grainger, at the end of his rich and disturbing life, was predicting rock’s future via his forays into electronic instruments and ‘free music’.
In many respects Grainger’s output is peripheral to the story of late-20th century popular music. His life, however, is very relevant indeed: he was a popular international artist who made his reputation (and money) mostly as a performer rather than a composer; he showed – as so many Australians have since – that his Australianness, rather than being a handicap, gave him an awareness of international cultures and a unique perspective that was to his benefit. Additionally, but perhaps not unrelatedly, many aspects of Grainger’s character would be reflected in the attitudes and behaviour of popular Australian musicians of this period, particularly the penchant for outrageous public declarations and international re-making of the self. Though Grainger was an elderly man in the 1950s, he enjoyed rock music, which he experienced – appropriately – via films, and which he considered to be a branch of the type of modern music also exemplified by the experimental, electronically powered noise generators he helped to create.9 It is perhaps for this reason that Peter Duncan, in his film about Grainger, Passion, has the Grainger character (played by Richard Roxburgh) proclaim: ‘By the end of the 20th century people will be listening to African music . . . they’ll be dancing to African music’. Duncan’s Grainger also presciently claims that the future of music lies with ‘delicately controlled machines’, though he makes one claim too many when he adds that he would ‘one day invent’ them.10
The real Percy Grainger was born in 1882 in the Melbourne suburb of North Brighton,11 the same general beachside area that 60 years later would nurture popular music talents like Keith Glass, Hans Poulsen and Ross Wilson, and some decades later Mick Turner. That Grainger was born into a family of bigots12 was not particularly unusual; bigotry was par for the course at the time. His obsession with racial distinction13 (which included strong elements of Aryan romanticism), his refusal to kowtow to conventional attitudes to incest, and his delight in sadomasochism14 were unsavoury facets of a refracted display of extraordinary, creative, passionate spirit. His tendency towards vegetarianism,15 his passion for folk and ‘free’ music, his frankness and openness were among the more pleasant aspects of his complicated personality. A piano virtuoso, Grainger toured the world from an early age playing the works of others, transcribing and adapting traditional and classical works, and collecting folk music and tangible musical memorabilia.
Grainger’s attitude to his own more conventional compositions (the most famous of which is the jaunty and faintly revolting ‘Country Gardens’) seem to summon up within him the kind of language often used by the more dramatic rock star: for instance, his statement, late in life, that:
The object of my music is not to entertain, but to agonize – to make mankind think of the agony of young men forced to kill each other against their will & all other thwartments and torturings of the young.16
Similarly, and once again evoking passion as a prime motivator, Grainger ‘believed and preached the idea that mere technical skill and excellence were barriers to fine performances.’17 He also sought to blur distinctions between ‘serious’ and popular musics, often incorporating ragtime or folk tunes into his concert repertoire. Teaching at New York University in 1932, he invited Duke Ellington and his band to perform for a class.18 One of his NYU students was Bernard Herrmann, later to become Hollywood’s greatest mid-20th-century film soundtrack composer.19
His biographer John Bird tells us that some of Grainger’s ideas were ‘so crass and mulishly stupid as to make his friends and colleagues want to run and hide with embarrassment.’20 However, his much laboured over, but sadly underdeveloped, ‘free music’ was in many ways his boldest and most intriguing contribution to Australian music. According to Bird:
The roots of Grainger’s Free Music . . . went back to his childhood, the rolling hills of South Australia which he saw from the train that took him from Melbourne to Adelaide, the water which lapped at the sides of the rowing boat