Then things got really crazy at the house of stoush.
All these rockers and bodgies and widgies started jumping and jiving around and I thought my dad would be shocked at what was happening both on stage and in the crowd. Maybe he’d make us leave—but when I looked at his face, it wore a great big smile and I knew that it was okay … that gig changed my life.
For Wilson, the concert was the rock and roll equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount and he was now a fully ordained disciple. A couple of years later he went to Festival Hall again and saw Crash Craddock and the doo-wop band The Diamonds, as well as Santo & Johnny who played their instrumental hit ‘Sleep Walk’. Again, the earth moved. Gradually a plan was crystallising in Wilson’s adolescent mind, ‘I didn’t have any great ambitions, I just thought that maybe, just maybe, I could leap around on stage and sing just like JOK and Jerry Lee.’
But then Buddy Holly went down in a plane, Jerry Lee married his thirteen-year-old cousin and disappeared, and Elvis enlisted in the army. The rebel yell of rock music had become a polite enquiry from the likes of Pat Boone, Connie Francis and Frankie Avalon, hardly the soundtrack to inspire a teenage revolution. The void was filled with folk music and traditional jazz. Radio started playing The Weavers, Pete Seeger and Joan Baez records, and dances all over Melbourne staged jazz nights with bands like The Red Onions Jazz Band, featuring a couple of members who were fellow students from Wilson’s school, Haileybury College. ‘So it was like, wow you can play and do stuff around town, so they were my first role models’ he remembers.
As a teenager the first regular things I went to weren’t rock and roll shows they were jazz dances. I used to follow the Red Onions to places like the Onion Patch at the Oakleigh RSL (which became The Caravan Club many years later) the Beaumaris Community Centre (all from Melbourne’s south-east). Often after the dance had finished we’d hitch hike into town to Frank Traynor’s Folk and Jazz Club in Exhibition Street in the city and eat toasted raisin bread, drink coffee and check out the groovy bearded folkies types singin’ songs about farmers in Victoria or something … oh and check out their gorgeous girlfriends.
Then Wilson discovered the ‘crowbar blues’. There were a few things on TV that really got Wilson’s attention, like The Robert Herridge Theatre, which was a thirty-minute music anthology series made for CBS, aired between 1959 and 1960. Each show dealt with a particular aspect of jazz and had titles like ‘The Sound of Miles Davis’ and ‘The Modern Jazz Quartet and the Art of Jazz’.
One day Robert Herridge announced that a very famous blues man was to appear on the show: Lightnin’ Hopkins. Well he started playing and holy shit … I was transfixed … what was that? How does he play like that? So I asked my mother what was he doing and she said he was playing twelve bar blues. But I heard it as ‘crowbar blues’, which kind of made more sense to me, like he was playing a crowbar and singing like a pile driver. So I went to school and started telling my friends that ‘there was this great music called Crowbar Blues’ and ‘you really should check it out’ … Then a show on ABC TV hit the airwaves called, Five O’Clock Club, it was a kind of kids pop show from the BBC and had Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated as the resident band with Cyril Davies on harp! Some kids show! It often featured the American blues guys who happened to be touring Europe at the time: Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters … so I began to put things together.
Wilson started researching the origins of this new esoteric music in stores around town, especially at Frank Traynor’s Folk and Jazz Club.
The gigs were staged in a room at street level, but up the stairs there was a record store run by Tony Standish on Fridays and Saturdays. It was there I found John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf. Howlin’ Wolf man, when he sang, ‘I Asked for Water (She Gave Me Gasoline)’ I thought holy shit, like he was from Mars, it was so bizarre I loved it. Then because of the jazz thing there was an Australian label called Swaggie that put out great jazz stuff, like every Louis Armstrong track from 1929 to 1940 on seven inch thirty three and a third EPs. It was on that label that I discovered ‘Sleepy John Estes’.
It was the summer of 1963–64 and Wilson was fully immersed in trawling around the jazz and folk haunts of Melbourne listening to people like Martyn Wyndham-Read, Brian Mooney and Danny Spooner, as well as Smacka Fitzgibbon, Frank Traynor’s Jazz Preachers, Brian Brown and Judith Durham. He was also buying records and listening to as much blues as he could get on the radio. But then disaster struck. He was hitching down to Torquay, just south of Geelong on Victoria’s Surf Coast and had got as far as the Flinders Street Extension Melbourne. The car stopped at the Mission for Seamen and as he got out of the passenger seat he was cleaned up by a passing car. He suffered, amongst other injuries, a badly broken leg. Summer was suddenly over for young Wilson.
I ended up in hospital in traction for six weeks! I was so bored I had nothing to do but listen to the radio. But it was while I was lying in hospital that I was attracted to the harp, I heard it played by John Lennon on The Beatles’ ‘Love Love Me Do’ and ‘I Should Have Known Better’ not to mention all that Stones stuff. While I was in hospital I saw their picture in a Sunday paper under the headline ‘The Stone Age’. Wow, I thought all that stuff was pretty cool … When I finally got out of hospital I was in plaster and immobile so I asked Dad that rather than buy me records with my pocket money how about he buy me a harmonica. So he bought me a Hohner Echo Super Vamper, I think it was in C. and so throughout that lost summer I learnt to play harp by copying stuff I heard.
Wilson’s harp progressed quickly, ‘I copied harp lines from records, I played a lot of chords rather than lines, most harp players try to sound like Little Walter or something which is impossible, so I stuck to playing chords.’ He kept buying records like EMI Stateside Authentic R&B. It was from that record he learnt to play songs like ‘King Bee’ and heard the influential harp player Lazy Lester.
In a very short time his leg healed to the point where he could get out of his plaster and start playing music with other people, like with the band of his neighbour and friend Keith Glass, The Rising Sons. Whenever the Rising Sons played local gigs, Wilson would come along to accompany with his harp. It was at one of those shows that he met the then twelve-year-old Ross Hannaford
Like Wilson, Hanna was prodigiously talented. From an early age he showed dual abilities as a musician and as an artist. Sometimes these two creative outlets would form a tension in his life that he found difficult to resolve.
Hanna was born in December 1950 in Newcastle New South Wales, but grew up in Bentleigh East and Moorabbin in Melbourne’s south-east. He went to Cheltenham Primary then on to Brighton High School, largely because it had strong drama and art programs, then Mentone Grammar followed by art courses at Prahran Tech and RMIT. He often said that he ultimately wanted to be a painter not ‘a guitar player man, but I pestered my parents for a guitar at eight or something, I took lessons but then it got to theory, music was a sideline back then; I always wanted to paint.’ But his guitar teacher recognised that even as an eight-year-old he was showing real talent by working out the songs of Elvis, Buddy Holly, Ricky Nelson and Hank Marvin. ‘I used to play banjo in a kid jazz band and fooled around with a little Canora acoustic that was fitted with a pickup shoved in the sound hole and played through a shitty little amp, it did the job.’
A few years later a short, rotund twelve-year-old Hanna teamed up with his guitar playing mate Rick Dalton and formed the instrumental band The Fauves. The band had taken their name from a loose group of early twentieth century modern artists that included Matisse, André Derain, Jean Puy and Georges Braque. Art critic Louis Vauxcelles disparaged the movement and the painters as fauves, or wild beasts. It seemed a rather precocious name for a bunch of Melbourne school kids playing Ventures and Shadows covers, but Fauves they were. Hanna explains, ‘I didn’t even own an amp, man. I plugged my guitar into an old television set and my mum had to drive me to gigs and hang around until we finished cause I was so young.’ After a while all the surf music The Fauves were playing was getting kind of naff. The Stones and Beatles had hit and everyone was either listening to or playing the blues and The Fauves wanted to go down that path as well. But they