Then in the winter of 1964, Melbourne specifically, and Australia in general, was about to be hit by a rock and roll tsunami that would change everything.
When the Beatles flew in to play Festival Hall in Melbourne on 14 June 1964 the city was ready for change. The first of the Baby Boomer generation were coming of age and flexing their economic muscle. Young people born after 1945 were asserting themselves in fashion, music and the broader cultural landscape. The mere presence of the four Liverpool moptops opened the generational floodgates and all that was old and stale was swept away. So what did the deluge look like?
Twenty thousand screaming fans greeted the band at the airport and many thousands more lined the streets as the Beatles made their way to the Southern Cross in the city, only to be greeted by 20,000 more fans packed into Exhibition Street. Melbourne had never seen anything like it. Private school girls climbed the outside of the hotel trying to get into the band’s rooms, people filled the hotel foyer and Beatle parties raged at the Southern Cross until four in the morning. The older generation was shocked at such behaviour. Tony Charlton, a doyen of television commentators at the time, asserted that any mother with a child screaming outside The Beatles’ Southern Cross Hotel should be ashamed. As one commentator said ‘It seemed that, almost overnight, everybody over the age of twenty suddenly feared for the moral integrity of this nation.’
The three Beatles concerts were nothing short of hysterical, characterised by fainting and screaming teenagers. It was barely possible to hear the music over the crescendo of crowd noise. Suddenly pop music had taken on more significance than just simply being an entertainment; it had transitioned to be an expression of rebellion. Pop music, at least for the foreseeable future, signified the idea of autonomy; it was the vehicle for the celebration of youth and a means for young people to forge their independence. The Beatles had opened teenage ears to the new direction music was taking and we obsessively scanned our radio dials to hear the new sounds. Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, and later Jimi Hendrix, The Kinks, The Who and Cream all demonstrated the disruptive power of rock music and further eroded the long held values and institutions so prized by our parents.
When The Beatles finally departed our shores at the end of June they had not only exploded a cultural H-bomb throughout the country, they had also inspired a generation of performers such as Normie Rowe, Johnny Young, Bobbie Bright and Laurie Allen, Ray Brown, John Farnham, Russell Morris, The Master Apprentices, The Twilights, Billy Thorpe, Wendy Saddington to follow their lead.
And so 1964 was the year that young people in Australia got their hands on the cultural levers. Their youthful attitudes to fashion and language, life choices around sex and drugs and rock and roll outraged and alienated everyone over the age of thirty. This was also the year that four teenagers from Melbourne’s suburbs—comrades Wilson, Hannaford, Young and Duncan—took up arms and joined the revolution.
Wilson would never have imagined how much his life was about to change as he entered the church hall on Marriage Road, Brighton one faithful Saturday night in 1964. He was there to play harmonica in his mate Keith Glass’s band The Rising Sons. ‘I think I played on “King Bee” and a couple of other songs from The Stones’ first album,’ explained Wilson. But it was the support band playing wild surf music that peaked his interest. The band featured a couple of guitar players, the first was Rick Dalton—who went on to join Running Jumping Standing Still—and the other was a short twelve-year-old dumpy kid with big glasses that played like a demon. The kid’s name was Ross Hannaford, and the band was The Fauves.
Most young men (and it was mostly young men) in the early to mid-1960s joined bands to get pissed and pickup girls. The music was often a secondary consideration, a means to an end—and that end was a good time. But for Wilson playing music was a far more serious matter. He had, from the very start of his career, what his long-term friend David Pepperell described as a ‘career attitude’ to music. ‘Ross stood out because he was so serious about his craft, he was always trying to learn, to create and improve. He saw music as a viable career, a vehicle to not only practice his art, but also earn a living.’ Some would argue that the tension between the need to earn a good living by playing in a popular band and the need to be defined as a creative, viable artist would characterise Wilson’s musical journey over the next fifty years.
Born in Armadale in Melbourne’s inner-east in 1947, Wilson’s parents were middle class and musical. ‘My dad, Ron, was an accountant with the public service but his passion was jazz’, Wilson explained. ‘He was trumpet player with a huge trumpet collection and a massive jazz record library I could access. He never played in a band but would often sit in the car with a muted trumpet and play lines from jazz records.’ It was a hobby that no doubt soothed the demons he had gathered fighting the Japanese in the Borneo jungles during World War II. It was Wilson’s mother, Innes, however who initially led Wilson down a musical path. ‘Mum was a trained musician, she learnt violin and played the piano and she had a great ear for music.’ Her own musical aspirations had been sidelined by the war and her need to look after her returned husband and two small children.
The view from on top of 1950s Melbourne was of the vision splendid: detached bungalows stuffed with televisions and fridges sprouted like mushrooms and suburbs sprawled over farmland and bulldozed bush, as new factories—filled with migrants—belched smoke and money into the booming economy. But the fifties, for all of its economic growth and prosperity, was not a great time for women, particularly women with artistic interests outside of the home. With two small boys at her heels and a husband locked in the car with his muted trumpet, Innes could only sate her musical appetite by singing in choirs.
‘After a while she insisted my elder brother Bruce and I also sing with her at the Holy Trinity Choir in Hampton’ recalled Wilson. They rehearsed every Thursday night and performed twice on Sundays.
I didn’t know it then but it was great training, I learnt to sing a harmony line and I also came to understand the association with music and money. Sections of the choir, mainly the boy sopranos, were often hired to sing at weddings and special events and we got paid, like a dollar or ten shillings as it was.
It was only natural that Wilson was drawn to music. He listened to his father’s jazz records on his parents Stromberg Carlson radiogram and at night indulged in the secret pleasures of the Top 40 hits burbling through his transistor radio. At first it was all Patty Page and Perry Como, but then young Wilson discovered R&B and rock and roll. He loved Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and The Diamonds and wanted to hear more. And so, saving all of his choir money, Wilson became a record collector, like his dad. ‘My dad worked in town so I would give him my choir cash and ask him to buy me records … two of the first singles I bought were “Little Darlin’” by The Diamonds and Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ “That’ll Be the Day”,’ he recalled. And of course Daddy Cool ended up playing both songs live. ‘The next record was “Don’t You Just Know It” by Heuy “Piano” Smith, backed by “High Blood Pressure” … so like, wow pretty cool!’
Life for young Wilson revolved around school, Thursday night rehearsal, the odd Saturday wedding gig and singing in the choir on Sunday. But it was the guilty pleasure that poured out of the three-inch speaker of his transistor radio tucked under his pillow that really excited him. ‘Hi-di-ho-di’ he heard Stan Rofe announce on Melbourne’s 3KZ, and far off Sydney stations pumped out R&B hits that were fresh, original and dynamic. Wilson had indeed entered a ‘cool world’.
But then early in 1958 life got really interesting for the ten-year-old when lightning struck in Dudley Street West Melbourne.
My dad took me and some friends to Festival Hall to see a wild rock and roll show promoted by Lee Gordon. On the bill were Buddy Holly and The Crickets, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny O’Keefe. Paul Anka, who didn’t impress me much but was there as well. It was out of control, JOK was rolling about