Abstract
Over the past 50 years, rock music has been the prime mover of an emergent national recording industry in Australia. In this study, which has two parts, we survey record labels, recording techniques and forms, and the music that was bought and sold. Part One narrates the emergence of modern record production, the rise of rock music, and the development of a local recording industry in Australia between 1945 and 1970. Part Two (to be published in Thesis Eleven 110) recounts the rise and fall of Australian local, regional and national rock music cultures and the ebb and flow of independent labels and their labyrinthine relations to the transatlantic centre of the world-system of the rock music industry. In particular, we focus on four aspects: technological change, infrastructure, business logistics/markets, and musical production/repertoire. Since the digital revolution started eating away firstly and most conspicuously at the recording industry, the 50 years from 1945 to 1995 can now more clearly be seen as the rise and fall of rock music and its major technological form, the vinyl record. This is why we call it ‘the vinyl age’. This story has not been told in full previously, and this two-part article is a first step to bridge this gap in the historical and cultural sociology of popular music.
Introduction
Popular music has always been at the cutting edge of technological innovation in the arts (Sassoon 2006). But this is rarely recognized by cultural commentators who seem besotted with visual communication (cinema and television) to the occlusion of the other performing arts. Rock music as popular expressive art has the volatility and mobility to be a DIY art of the people. It is as though rock music’s very familiarity and ubiquity leads to its under-valuation. It is rarely appreciated as a significant marker of modern civilization or even of cultural production in general.
Rock music is the main vehicle for the development of the recording industry in Australia between 1945 and 1995. The record business itself tells a tale of the cultural production of music – the site where technology meets culture in everyday life and in turn is integrated and exploited as a global industry for profit. This is a story in turn of increasing size, complexity, diversification, and sophistication, before its ultimate decline into the 21st century. Australian rock music sub-cultures have been characterized by their highly local and regional character, but the emergent industry around these DIY scenes has been organized at particular sites in metropolitan cities and these in turn have been linked into the world-system from the outset. In world-system terms, Australian rock music production and consumption can be characterized as provincial sub-cultures and peripheral markets that have been closely modelled on, and connected to, if not wholly organized by and from, the metropolitan centres of Britain and America. The Australian record business after the war, therefore – like so much of 20th-century Australian economic, political and social history – is one of lessening British influence, increasing American influence but above all increasing Australian initiative as its local markets grew and its national culture took on more confident shape in response to local initiatives and incorporation of a wider experience and purview of the world beyond the UK and America.
Even before the Second World War, American popular culture was colonizing the world, including Australia, via Hollywood movies, Detroit automobiles, crime fiction, fast food and new musical styles and dances. American modernism became globally dominant, and no less in Australian cities, as shown by Bruce Johnson for jazz music (2000), Bernard Smith (1993 [1945]; Smith et al. 2001) for art, Terry Smith (1993) for design, and Robin Boyd (1960) for architecture. In music, the American military in Australian cities during the War ensured that the Americans were on hand to teach the local women the latest dance steps and perform the latest songs. One million personnel across a three-year period in three east coast cities to a local population of less than 7 million ensured that American modernism had arrived as popular culture in Australia before the rise of the mass consumer culture (Altman 2006: 151; Kirkby 2006: 181). Most importantly but less noted by historians, the American military brought with them their own bands, radio station, and recording printing technology.
The story of Australian rock music in the 50 years after the Second World War, therefore, reveals a shift in focus and modus operandi from Britain to America. The Australian record industry – like the rock music that was being composed, performed, and recorded – was dominated by Sydney and Melbourne as the main sites of production and organization. These cities in turn are dominated by London – as cultural imaginary and organizing centre of the British Commonwealth. By mid-20th century, America is the emergent and dynamic hegemon of modern technological and cultural innovation, but for Australia much of this is mediated through existing channels of communication and technology between Australia and London. But this is not a story of mere cultural and economic dependency. Neither is it a story of exploitation by the centres of its dependent periphery as the world-system theorists would have it. Australians are not only consumers of cultural product from the metropolitan and imperial centres. Indeed, Australians proved to be such avid consumers that they also aped its producers and in doing so produce variations of its forms (imperfect copy is always and everywhere creative reinterpretation and invention). Through this mimetic process, the locals produced new products and new variations of institutional forms in economic, social and technological spheres of culture industries. Out of imperfect copying comes cultural creativity and technological innovation – variations of a musical theme as it were.
Sales
This new popular music form and youth culture was a consequence of the bigger booms of the period: the sustained post-war economic boom and the baby boom, plus the spread of new technology like vinyl records, transistor radios, record players, televisions, electric musical instruments and magnetic tape recording. Rock‘n’roll met the social needs of an exploding young generation with money to spend, and its impact was so deep it not only reflected the times but sometimes anticipated and helped shape them as well – all via these millions upon millions of little black plastic platters. These spinning disks had an almost hypnotic effect on generation after generation and transcended all cultural barriers across the globe. Statistics are hard to come by but nonetheless what data we do have tells something of a tale of rise, boom, and decline. 1
The growth extended from units sold in the early ’50s, when the population was barely ten million and post-war shortages still acute, of only a few million (single-play shellac 10-inch discs) per annum, to around six million per annum toward the end of the ’50s, after rock‘n’roll had hit and vinyl singles and albums had been introduced; to eight million by the early ’60s, 20 million in 1970 (by which time the national population was 13 million), 35 million in 1975, to 47 million at the start of the ’80s. This steep curve in the ’70s was due to the growth of albums, not only on vinyl but now also cassette. Sales hovered around the 50 million mark through the ’80s into the ’90s, and if they slowly grew to a final peak at the turn of the century – around 60 million per annum after the entrenchment of CDs and growing discounting in the wake of the 1991 Prices Surveillance Authority (PSA) inquiry – this was just as the decade-young internet was really starting to bite into the way music could be consumed. Since then volumes have plummeted inexorably. By now, the landscape and ground rules of music culture are totally changed from its classic, late capitalist model of the previous half-century. 2
The biggest growth area was rock albums. Sales of 45 revolutions-per-minute (45 rpm) singles proportionately declined as rock became an album form after the late ’60s. Even as cassettes actually overtook sales of vinyl in the ’80s, those cassettes were still formatted to emulate the Long Playing album (LP), with 20 minutes of music per side of tape; the LP remained the sonic optimum and form-defining medium. Rock and pop music claimed the lion’s share of all sales during this period, at somewhere between 75 and 90 per cent of the market. In 1990, when Price Waterhouse reported for ARIA (Australian Record Industry Association) in its submission to the PSA inquiry into music prices and parallel importing (one of the first times, as it happens, that the rock industry was so examined and quantified), a 1989 table has contemporary or pop music (meaning rock, country, soul, folk and so-called ‘Middle of the Road’ (MOR) music) claiming 87.5 per cent of the market, classical 4 per cent, jazz 2 per cent and ‘other’ 6.5 per cent – ‘other’ meaning non-western, ‘ethnic’ music, what might now be termed ‘world’ music (Price Waterhouse 1990: 2.2).
The lion’s share of all sales could also be claimed by the major multi-national record companies. Australia was long dominated by a Big Six: Britain’s EMI, America’s CBS (now Sony), RCA (now BMG) and WEA (now Warners), and Europe’s PolyGram (originally Philips, now part of Universal); Australia’s own major, Festival Records, rounds out the six. The majors’ number might also include Melbourne’s Astor Records if a major is defined as distributing its own product as well as manufacturing and marketing it. At any given time these ARIA-member labels were shifting up to 75 to 90 per cent of total local record sales (Price Waterhouse 1990: 2.12), with the remainder made up by successive waves of independent start-ups, some of which – like Mushroom, Alberts and Shock – persevered to become virtual majors themselves. Local artists, increasingly encouraged by rising radio-play quotas, have variously claimed between about 10 per cent and 35 per cent of total sales (Australian Broadcasting Tribunal 1986: 77).
The Australian music industry, by its old definition, still rhapsodizes over its ’80s. The biggest of the big, Cold Chisel or INXS – the apogee of Australian ‘pub rock’ – were bigger than Australian music had ever been. Cold Chisel could sell nearly a quarter-million per album in Australia alone. AC/DC, after the death of lead singer Bon Scott, bounced back in 1980 with Back in Black, a huge hit then and now with sales estimated at 50 million worldwide, simply one of the biggest rock albums ever released. And then INXS broke in the US to sell six million copies of 1986’s Kick, and Australia was the flavour of the month, with films like Crocodile Dundee and other bands like Crowded House and Midnight Oil hitting similarly huge numbers. The boom was completely in keeping with the blockbuster excess of the greed-is-good decade.
The growth of the record business from a worth of $140 million in 1980 to $340 million in 1989 (Price Waterhouse 1990: 2.3) was not due to a real number of increasing sales, but rather to a combined impact of two other factors, namely an inflation in the retail prices of records and, in the latter years of the decade, the introduction of the CD, whose early sales were dominated by back catalogue, in other words were being bought as replacement technology for old records. This was a great gravy train for record companies. Nevertheless, real sales volumes started to plateau despite a steadily rising population. This was one indication that rock music was starting to lose the primacy it had enjoyed in the ’60s and ’70s. Its decline is not only a matter of technological change but rock music recedes as a social force also in the face of changing demography (the dominant Anglo-Australian population were ageing, combined with a growing multi-culturalism brought about by migration policies that opened up national borders to non-European source countries), and financial and trade deregulation (which in cultural terms equates to a post-colonial and a post-nationalist opening up to ‘world music’), among other things.
As early as the mid-’90s, at the height of the grunge movement, with the CD already entrenched, the music industry hype of new bands like Silverchair or You Am I who were topping the charts was not convincing to the old timers who noted that this new generation of stars were selling only a fraction of what Cold Chisel and the rest of them did in ‘the good old days’ of the late ’70s and early ’80s. And this decline was before the internet. By the turn of this century, the internet was stealing swathes from the record sales market, across all genres of music. The recording industry is predicated on the manipulation of copyright. Today we can see that its decline in profit is due to its inability to monopolize copyright in the face of the internet challenge. Rock music is no longer hegemonic popular music culture and recorded artefacts are no longer the core business. While it remains a vital social phenomenon and large global business that thrives on the net and above all in live performance, the golden days of the vinyl age are over.
Chronicles
Sales and platters tell a significant part of the story of the Australian recording industry, but another aspect – that of record labels themselves – is intrinsic to a critical understanding of the industry. Yet, paradoxically, its own story remains obscure. Tracking the record businesses and labels is not an easy task, partly because there has been no careful documentation of this history, either by public or private institutions. 3 It is also difficult because of the nature of the business itself – like many capitalist markets in highly elastic consumer markets and so-called creative-culture industries, it is characterized by opportunism, adventurism, piracy, speculative investments that all result in high volatility and change. Record labels come and go and only a few thrive, while the more common fate is for those local firms that do not go bankrupt to be subjected to aggressive takeovers by larger and foreign companies or seek mergers with their peer competitors.
It is because of this complexity and volatility that business histories often resort to the mixed metaphors of ecology (of life-cycles and food chains), or of domestic furniture and spatial imagery (of ladders and chairs). Indeed, the record business – both globally and locally – has been like a food chain crossed with a big game of musical chairs, in which record labels of varying shapes and sizes are eaten up, spat out and shuffled around via territorial copyright deals that figure and reconfigure world-wide networks. This is why it is sometimes very hard to keep track, historically, of record companies, because bits of them are always coming and going.
In Australia, a far-flung outpost of metropolitan centres of the UK and America, the record business was founded on these sorts of arrangements, and it grew in much the same types of cycles as it did everywhere else, with, on top, multi-national licensing deals accounting for a local order of major labels and, at the bottom, independent labels fostering grass-roots music which then in turn starts climbing the ladder – or not.
Here we recount these constantly shifting interconnections by tracking the record business traffic into, out of, and within Australia. In particular we focus on four aspects: 1) technological change: including the arrival of the vinyl record, its triumphant form first as the single and then the album, its usurpation by cassettes and then compact discs but the ultimate decline of all formats in the rise of the internet and the i-pod; 2) infrastructure: the development of the recording industry as a system of recording studios and record factories, as a system of impresarios and musician management, and also as a system that integrates performance circuits, radio, television, film, and eventually computer, product placement, advertising, and promotion through the cultivation and manipulation of taste markets in consumer culture etc.; 3) business logistics and markets: the tracking of the record labels, their struggles for markets and copyright control, local and global; and, 4) musical production and repertoire. We offer the following chronology, in two parts: Part One: 1. 1945–1955: pre-rock: England provided the infrastructure, America the ideas and new technologies like vinyl that Australia adapts to local needs. 2. 1955–1964: rock‘n’roll arrives: global musical chairs and the rise of the local record label, Festival. 3. 1964–1970: the Beat(le) boom. Part Two: 4. 1970–1977: the rise of rock music festivals, albums, television, and of Aussie rock labels, especially Mushroom and Alberts. 5. 1977–1982: pubs, punks, and discos: diversification and DIY 6. 1982–1995: Australian rock goes global: corporatization, stratification and the arrival of the digital compact disc format. 7. 1995: post-rock, post-vinyl: internet eats the record business.
1945–1955: Australia’s pre-rock days
English infrastructure, American innovation, Australian adaptation
For some years before and after the Second World War, EMI had a virtual monopoly on recorded music in Australia. A local recording industry boomed in the ’20s, with international as well as home-grown players entering this brand new field, but the Depression of the ’30s killed it off. Over five thousand commercially issued recordings had been made in Australia by 1950, but the most productive decade of the first half of the 20th century was the swinging ’20s with at least 4 million and as many as 12 million gramophone records being produced annually in Australia. But post the Great Depression, 10-inch, 78 rpm shellac discs and their players – the hi-tech of the day – were an expensive luxury people could no longer afford. By 1933, having amalgamated with AWA, ‘EMI was the only record company still active in Australia’ (Laird 1999: xii–xiv, 307–12).
In its popular culture and social aspirations at least, mid-century Australia still looked to Britain for inspiration, emulation, and reassurance – even as the nation-state itself began cautiously to shift its geopolitical, economic, and demographic priorities, policies and programs to the Asia-Pacific region within the umbrella of the new world hegemon, America. America was the number one world power not only in military and economic terms but was a definitive force of cultural forms of modernity. Twentieth-century popular music was an American invention, and by the ’30s there were record companies throughout the US cutting jazz, blues, country, pop: all new sorts of music, embracing new forms of production, and developing new instruments, new sounds, and louder amplification. Hollywood films travelled outside the continental US all round the world, to Britain, Europe and Australia. American records reached the rest of the world only via licensing arrangements, and so for Empire countries like Australia, that meant via the great patriarch of English recording, the soon-to-be-named EMI conglomerate (which included such labels as Parlophone [eventual birthplace of the Beatles], HMV [His Master’s Voice] and Regal-Zonophone). EMI in London made licensing deals with the three biggest record companies in America – Columbia (eventually CBS), RCA (now BMG) and Decca (later MCA, now Universal) – meaning that, in Australia, American music only filtered down here via EMI in England. And EMI Australia released locally only a fraction of the deep catalogues they had the rights to (Walker 2006: 5–7).
The story of a music-starved Australia establishing a record business after the war is one of the ending of EMI’s monopoly by challengers arriving from overseas as well as by labels springing up locally. This too was the period of the birth of the modern music business as a global system and industry, with the biggest record companies in their home territories itching to expand in every which way: EMI enters the American market as does the Dutch company, Philips, at the same time Philips arrives in the British and Australian markets. CBS, RCA and Decca also go worldwide, from America to Europe, Asia, and Australia. American tobacco, oil, and soft drink companies were doing the same thing at the same time. It was a pop-cultural revolution in a new era of consumer capitalism of a nature and a scale unprecedented in world history.
At the same time in the US, there were waves of new independent labels that would change the music and the business. The first and most powerful, Capitol, was launched out of Los Angeles even during the Second World War. Afterwards it hit huge with crooners like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, and it was Capitol Records too that paved the way technologically when it recorded singer Mary Ford’s partner Les Paul’s innovations with the electric guitar and multi-track tape recording. Chicago’s Mercury Records was another that would develop into a virtual new major after being bought out by Philips. Beyond that, the music was transformed by a slew of new, often regionalized independent labels (‘indies’) like Atlantic (Ahmet Ertegun’s New York-based label), Specialty (LA), Sun (Memphis), Chess (Chicago), King (Cincinnati) and countless others who tapped into the new electric blues, R&B and hillbilly genres – all the strains of roots music traditions that would feed into rock‘n’roll.
EMI in Australia was selling all the 78s it could press, whether they were British classical recordings, the schmaltziest of American pop or the most rustic of Australian hillbillies. EMI in Australia could not have kept up even if it had the motivation and will. The demand was insatiable and growing but food was not the only staple rationed after the Second World War, and there were shortages of records relative to consumer demand. Charles Higham wrote in the Bulletin in the early ’60s: ‘In 1948, something memorable happened in Sydney: J. Stanley Johnston’s music counters received large stocks of Capitol records – the first overseas consignment since the war – and Stan Kenton and Ella Mae Morse were heard loudly in Johnston’s halls. It was the beginning of the flood. By the early fifties, ARC and EMI were expanding, more record players were bought’ (Higham 1962: 13). EMI, to its credit, probably produced as many popular music styles as it could handle. Before the war EMI pushed local singing stars like Peter Dawson and Gladys Moncrieff and recorded dance bands and even ushered in Australian hillbilly music when, in early 1936, Tex Morton cut his first sides for the Regal-Zonophone label at the old EMI Homebush studio. Early Australian hillbilly music, arguably Australia’s first vernacular pop form, was fostered almost exclusively by EMI. During the war, A&R manager Arch Kerr signed Buddy Williams, and after the war one of the first new artists he signed, in January 1946, was Slim Dusty.
After the war EMI even started recording some local hot jazz – the ultimate acknowledgement of the centrality of American modernism to the social imaginary of the 20th century (Johnson 2000). In practical, immediate terms it was recognition of the fact that hot jazz boomed as dance music in Australia during the war, not least of all thanks to the Yanks here, and so straight after the war new independent labels sprang up to record it, among them Jazzart, owned by Melbourne nightclub and record shop entrepreneur Bob Clemens, and Wilco, owned by disc-jockey and critic Ron Wills. Ampersand was another label that released a string of titles around this time.
In 1949, EMI bought the 301 Castlereagh Street site in Sydney where it would build the famous 301 studio. At around the same time also in Sydney, the Australian Record Company, or ARC, was launched. ARC had actually started out even before the war, as a radio transcription service, pressing big acetate discs for broadcast. By 1949 it was ready to branch out as a record company in its own right, with two distinct labels under its umbrella – Rodeo for hillbilly music and Pacific for pop. Jack Argent’s first signing to Rodeo was Reg Lindsay; the label released Ralph Peer’s recordings of Tex Morton. Pacific was run by Sydney boogie-woogie pioneer Les Welch. Welch took as his model the groundbreaking American Capitol label, and set himself the brief, in essence, to produce knockoffs, or covers, of Capitol’s hits. It is a long and noble music business tradition, getting a version of a hot new song out first. It is not just the Australian cultural cringe – British rock was founded on it too, and the American record companies have always vied to beat each other to this sort of punch. Because Capitol was a new label without international links yet, its records were not available in Australia, and so Les Welch could cover its (proven American) hits here and expect much the same result, which he did get. As a producer as well as a performer in his own right, Welch’s name was the key one on many, many records that sold many thousands at the time (Walker 2006: 6).
In 1951, ARC made a deal direct with Capitol to lease its recordings for release in Australia – which in turn put Les Welch out of a job. On the rebound, Welch left ARC to form arguably the most important Australian record company of them all, Festival. With backing from powerful financiers, Festival opened in an old theatre in Gladesville re-fitted with ten record presses. Its first release, on the Manhattan label, was a 78 by Welch himself, a version of the then-current US hit ‘A Man Called Peter’, and it reputedly sold over 100,000 copies (Cox 2001: 13). One of Festival’s other earliest releases (FM-6) was an album by Welch, a 10-inch 33 rpm microgroove vinyl LP called Tempos de Barrelhouse, which is sometimes described as Australia’s first album. But, as even a cursory amount of research reveals, the title of Australia’s first vinyl record is actually still open to debate.
Vinyl was first used to make 78s in the US during the war, when shellac supplies ran out after the fall of Singapore. After the war, the two biggest majors, RCA and CBS (who were not just record companies but also broadcasting empires and electrical goods manufacturers), developed the vinyl record: CBS concentrated on the ‘microgroove’ LP, initially a 10-inch but ultimately a 12-inch 33 rpm long-player, which was launched in 1948; and RCA fostered the 7-inch 45 rpm single-play, which it launched in 1949. These formats were gradually adopted throughout the world, although the shellac 78 would still take a good decade to fully die (and three-speed record players, born in the early ’50s, would persist till well into the ’70s).
Les Welch’s album Tempos de Barrelhouse was not released, according to press reports, until early 1953. And there were plenty of other claimants to the title of Australia’s first vinyl record prior to that. By the late ’40s, Australia was rife with new, independent record companies, many of which began on 78 and equally pioneered the new microgroove format. In September 1951, Music Maker magazine reported, ‘Diaphon Scoops Pool with First Australian LP Disc’ – a 10-inch album of the Civic Symphony Orchestra recorded in performance at the Great Hall of Sydney University under the baton of Haydn Beck. Diaphon was one of the new local labels that would go on until the mid-’50s to release a string of pioneering albums. Also released during 1952 were Midnight Melodies by the Art Ray Quintet, and the first of Melbourne label Spotlight’s 50 10-inch albums to follow, guitarist Bruce Clarke and the Samballeros’ Evergeen Rhythm. In October 1952, Music Maker magazine reported that Jazzart had released the first Australian jazz LP, by Len Barnard’s Band, at the regal cost of 37 shillings and sixpence, and two months later, in December 1952, Plattavox released the album Music for Pleasure, by William Flynn and his Orchestra with vocalist Darryl Stewart, and Diaphon released a live album of the Horrie Dargie Quintet in concert at the Melbourne Town Hall. All of these records were released prior to music magazine Tempo reporting in March 1953 on Tempos de Barrelhouse: ‘This time Les has put down on disc the first microgroove efforts of any group of Australian musicians.’
EMI in Australia was initially sceptical about the new formats and slow on the uptake. ARC, on the other hand, quickly started relaying Capitol album releases. Capitol was one of the pioneers of the LP form, with classic hits like Sinatra’s first title for the label, 1954’s Songs for Young Lovers, sometimes called the first concept album. The LP was obviously tailor-made for longer-form styles like classical music (which was always severely compromised by the shellac 78’s three minutes a side) and show-cast recordings. It also encouraged jazz to be recorded the way it tended to be played live, with longer improvisational pieces. When EMI in Australia finally got with the program, one of its early album releases, the original Broadway cast recording of South Pacific, was reputed to be one of Australia’s first hit LPs.
Spotlight and Diaphon were just two of the leading Australian independent labels pre-rock‘n’roll. There were plenty of others. There was Prestophone, Fidelity, Celebrity, Esquire, Tempo, Magnasound and Paramount, Radiola (owned by AWA), Swaggie. Spotlight had a country division called Round-Up. Also in Melbourne, like Spotlight, there was Planet, whose first two releases in 1951 were two 78s by Allan Rhodes with singer Bob King Crosby. When these four sides were soon compiled onto an EP (Extended Play) called Jump Time,this might have been Australia’s first slice of 45 rpm 7-inch vinyl.
The two Melbourne labels that would survive the ’50s, though, to become ultimately the most important outside of Sydney, were Astor and W&G. Astor was an electrical goods manufacturer that started a record division on the basis of a licence deal with new American label Mercury, and it generated almost no local product of its own, at least at first. But it had a distribution network. W&G, on the other hand, an outgrowth of the White & Gillespie plastics business, did nothing but local releases, including distribution of the Diaphon catalogue.
This was a decade of firsts, but we have only a shadowy sense of when and what they were: What was EMI’s first local album? Is it Nine Australian Folk Songs, by Burl Ives, which was released around 1953? Can this title be considered the first commercial recording of Australian folk music? Certainly it predates either Diaphon’s Excerpts from Reedy River, the soundtrack of the stage show from 1954, or Wattle Records’ first 10-inch of Australian songs sung by Briton A.L. Loyde. Was Australia’s first country LP Planet’s Hillbilly Classics, by Kenny Arnott, or was it the Johnny Ashcroft Philips release, Songs of the Western Trail? Even the ever-popular Slim Dusty did not release an album until 1960. Was Ashcroft’s preceded as the first local album for Philips by piano-accordionist Herbie Marks’s offering, Music for Romance? Philips was the European major that completed the record company landscape in Sydney in the early ’50s, having set up shop here very quickly after the company was first founded in Holland at the start of the ’50s, as a software outlet for a hardware manufacturer, like, say, RCA in America. Was the first 12-inch album pressed in Australia the Philips release of 1951’s Ellington Uptown? Was the first Australian 12-inch album Diaphon’s Evergreens of Rogers and Hart by Wilbur Kentwell, in 1954?
Australia’s first 45 rpm single is usually cited as Festival’s release of Darryl Stewart on ‘A Man Called Peter’, in 1955. Or was it? Collector James Cockington recently turned up a 7-inch by Frank Johnson and his Fabulous Dixielanders, a version of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’, whose Magnasound label copy reads that it was recorded on 21 February 1954. Certainly, Festival’s second 45 and one of its last 78s, in July 1955, was Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’. Nothing was the same again.
1955–1964: Rock‘n’roll arrives
Global musical chairs and the rise of the local label, ‘Festival’
On top of the advent of rock on 45s, the record business in the mid-’50s was already lining up for a sea-change through a profound realignment of the global alliances. EMI, looking for a foothold in America, got much more than that when in 1955 it completed a buy-out of Capitol. As a result, EMI had to divest itself of the Commonwealth licences it had long held with the biggest three American majors: RCA, CBS and Decca. In turn those labels were freed up to pursue their own direct expansion into territories outside the US. Philips too was about to fully buy out Mercury the same way EMI bought up Capitol. What this meant for Australia was: EMI here now took the local licence on Capitol away from ARC, while it lost CBS, RCA and Decca rights. CBS, in turn, got into bed with ARC, forming the unique Australian Coronet label. RCA opened its own office in Sydney with distribution through AWA, just in time to capitalize on its new sensation, Elvis Presley. American major, Decca, switched its representation in Australia from EMI to Festival after one of the most embarrassing gaffes in all rock history. In 1955, EMI in Sydney demurred on its option to release the Decca title, ‘Rock Around the Clock’, by Bill Haley and the Comets. With the rights now up for grabs, Festival’s savvy Les Welch pounced on the record and it transformed the company, as well as music generally. The single sold a reputed 144,000 records – an astonishing number for Australia at the time – although that was likely because many people bought it twice, first as a 78 and then as a 45 (just as they would later do going into the 1990s, replacing old albums with new CDs) (Cox 2001: 13). Thereafter Festival handled Decca material here, which included subsequent hit rock‘n’rollers like Buddy Holly and Jackie Wilson. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ signalled the rise of a new sound, a new medium, a new youth culture, and a new market.
The rise of rock and the 45 rpm 7-inch vinyl single went hand in hand. The album, as it grew from 10 inches to 12 inches, was an expensive format for grown-ups who could afford it. 4 The single was cheaper and faster, the jukebox quick shot that suited teens and the times. Festival further went on to virtually scoop the entire pool of first-generation Australian rock‘n’roll, signing up the Big 5, Johnny O’Keefe, Col Joye, Johnny Devlin, Digby Richards and Johnny Rebb.
EMI, ARC/Coronet, RCA and Philips trailed miles behind Festival in terms of tapping into local rock‘n’roll. RCA was busy enough pressing all the Elvis records it could to meet the insatiable demand of a new world market in popular music; Elvis was global business unmatched until the Beatles arrived in popular imagination some seven years later. EMI was busy with its extensive local hillbilly roster and with its new licences with Capitol and other new American independents, which brought it hits like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent and others. Coronet and Philips, like their parent companies overseas, seemed more interested in MOR, that is, middle-of-the-road singers and light orchestras, although, bizarrely, Philips might have released the very first Australian rock‘n’roll side of all, when in 1955, in an attempt to beat everyone to the punch, Musical Director Gaby Rogers got Vic Sabrino to cut a knockoff of ‘Rock Around the Clock’. Sabrino was the nom-de-plume of George Assang, a Torres Strait Islander who sang blues and skiffle, and though his version of the Haley anthem was manful, it did not stand a chance against the original when it soon enough came out. Later, in the early ’60s, Sabrino would return to Philips to cut an album of gospel songs with his brother Ken. ARC did a deal with promoter Lee Gordon to back his label, Leedon, which both leased American sides from (the Mafia-backed) Roulette Records and also generated its own local titles under the stewardship of the Wild One himself, Johnny O’Keefe.
It was in this climate in the second half of the 1950s that Australian record sales finally passed the previous, late 1920s’ height of four million per annum. The 45 rpm single grew from next to nothing in 1955 to two million in 1957, and four million in 1958. The four million figure was double the sales of two million LPs in the same year (Baker 1981: 480–3, 499). Most of the pre-rock independent labels died with the already noted but notable exceptions of Astor and W&G. Bob Crawford’s label Planet metamorphosed into Crest Records. The first charts came in around this time. The first Australian Number One, in the winter of 1958, was Slim Dusty’s ‘Pub with No Beer’, which reputedly sold 130,000 copies (Wills 1959). It was Slim’s last shellac 78 before EMI graduated him to its more prestigious Columbia label and the two new vinyl formats, 45 and 33. The numbers ‘The Pub’ generated were unprecedented for an Australian artist.
The record business is one in which most of its products lose money for its owners. It is one big gamble in which every release hopes to be a hit. Ninety-nine per cent are not – and even then, many hits are but one hit wonders. The holy grail for a record label is the paradoxical overnight sensation with staying power – the superstar act. Record companies exist in pursuit of these profit-makers, and the difference in earning power between the superstar act and even the top of the second division is so enormous that record companies have sometimes almost been able to retire on one star alone (like RCA did with Elvis!). Sometimes whole catalogues have been bought and sold on the basis of one act. And so at the same time EMI was hitting with ‘The Pub’, its Regal-Zonophone 78 of Jimmy Little’s ‘Give the Coloured Lad a Chance’ was the first Aboriginal protest song on wax (Walker 2001: 35). The first black Australians on wax were the singing duo Olive and Eva, whose first release was a Prestophone 78 in ’55, ‘Old Rugged Hills’ b/w ‘Rhythm of Corroboree’. Johnny O’Keefe was already a star in 1958, but the first rock‘n’roll Number One wasn’t till late 1959, when Col Joye’s ‘Oh Yeah, Uh-Huh’, his fifth Festival single, hit the spot. The first rock‘n’roll album came in 1958, whether Johnny O’Keefe’s 10-inch album, Johnny’s Golden Album,or Henri Bource’s All-Stars’ 12-inch album, Rock ’n’ Roll Party, on Melbourne’s Crest Records.
EMI was disinterested in raucous rock‘n’roll but it was very successful in other, more established genres. In 1958, it released the first Australian stereo album, the cast recording of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust’s production of Lola Montez, the stage musical about Australia’s infamous goldfields hoofer. EMI was scoring with other hillbillies like Smokey Dawson, Chad Morgan and Frank Ifield too, and it would add a folksy flavour with Lionel Long, Johnny Ashcroft and ultimately, most successfully, Rolf Harris. It would release two lavish 12-inch album volumes of anthropologist A.P. Elkin’s field recordings of traditional tribal Aboriginal songs, an album of modernist-classical composer John Antill’s symphony Corroboree, and two volumes of Don Burrows’ trailblazing Jazz for Beach-Niks. By now the 12-inch album was almost universal. The period’s revival of traditional folk music was tapped by independents like Wattle and Score. Score released an EP by Barry Humphries, Wild Life in Suburbia, before the future Edna Everage defected to EMI, and it released an EP by Aboriginal tenor Harold Blair. Wattle went on to preserve an extensive catalogue of irreplaceable Australian folk songs (Smith 2005).
At the dawn of a new decade, the soon to be Swinging Sixties, there was another cultural sea-change. Rupert Murdoch bought up Festival, and the American CBS effected a complete takeover of ARC. Murdoch appointed Fred Marks to run Festival and Marks started aggressively seeking new licensing deals all over the world. One of the first was with Herb Alpert in LA, and off the back of the success of Alpert’s Tijuana Brass, A&M Records would be an enduring money-maker for Festival for the next three decades. It scored early with other lucrative licences too, with labels like Imperial, Liberty, ABC and Paramount. Festival improved its own recording studio to an Ampex 2-track set-up, and channelled releases through subsidiary labels like Rex, Teen and Leedon, which it bought from Lee Gordon after his ARC deal expired. In time for Christmas 1960 was JOK protege Lonnie Lee’s lavish album A Night Out with Lonnie Lee on Leedon.
When CBS took over ARC, it started phasing out the Coronet imprint to be replaced by CBS proper, the famous orange and black eye logo, and importantly brought with it the new Warner Brothers Records label too, which was just launching with the Everly Brothers and Peter, Paul & Mary. Coronet in 1960 released what is probably the first album by an Australian woman, an eponymously-titled debut by alluring singer Diana Trask, which was admittedly generated and recorded by CBS in New York, where Trask had moved. The first album recorded by a woman in Australia was likely Filipino singer Pilita Corrales’s Pilita Tells the Story of Love, also in 1960. It was Astor’s first local release. In 1961, Georgia Lee Sings the Blues Down Under, on Crest, became the first album by an indigenous Australian (Walker 2001: 60). Lee was a Torres Strait Islander who started singing during the war and went to the UK in the ’50s, before returning to Australia in 1959 to tour supporting Nat King Cole.
Astor was hesitant about local repertoire. And though it lost its rights to the Mercury catalogue when this Chicago label was absorbed into the world-wide Philips conglomerate, it made up for it by doing new deals with American jazz, folk and blues specialists like Vanguard, Verve and Elektra, and with the British label Pye – all of which would ultimately deliver it hit acts like the Kinks, Donovan, the Doors and others. W&G, on the other hand, with Ron Tudor at the helm and Bill Armstrong behind the console, would tap into emerging Melbourne instrumental rock, and the traditional jazz and folk revivals. Tudor signed the Seekers to W&G.
RCA in Sydney was finally moving into local recording, and the new, now-renamed, CBS operation also leapt into the scene. RCA hired as A&R manager Johnny Devlin even as he was still signed to Festival as an artist, and with a brand new studio in the AWA building in Sydney at the cutting edge of four-track technology, the label went aggressively into folk, rock and the new surf sound. Folk music was popular with labels because it was cheap to record. CBS got in as producer/A&R manager Sven Laibek and hit with the cream of the surf sound, the Atlantics, who cut the timeless ‘Bombora’ and also CBS’s first local album. Just as its US parent had Dave Brubeck and the young Bob Dylan on its roster, CBS here did some sophisticated jazz (LPs by Bryce Rohde and Judy Bailey) and was getting out some folk albums too, launching the careers of Gary Shearston and Doug Ashdown.
But the Beatles-led British invasion was about to change everything again.
1964–1970: The Beat(le) boom
EMI had the Beatles on its Parlophone label, and though it took a few singles through 1963 to break the band in Australia, when the wave landed in the summer of 1963–4 it was not only the records in the pop charts and the hearts of young girls that were breaking but a rupture in a whole way of living across the nation. This was, in the telling expression of Raymond Williams, a new ‘structure of feeling’, the making of a whole new common culture in everyday life, out of which profits could be extracted and new taste markets developed by the recording industry.
Festival in ’65 enjoyed a run of hits by Sydney act Ray Brown and Whispers, but Brown just as quickly faded. Festival was straight away also sourcing material via the new, post-Beatles independents that were equally quickly springing up, like Brian Vogue’s little Linda Lee label, which proffered Billy Thorpe and The Aztecs. Normie Rowe arrived at Festival via Sunshine Records, the label run out of the backroom of the old Cloudland Ballroom in Brisbane by Ivan Dayman, who managed the Melbourne-based Rowe and booked a network of acts and venues all over the country. The Sunshine label was crucial to Festival’s ongoing success in the mid-’60s, as were other new regionalized independents like Spin, which Nat Kipner developed out of Ossie Byrne’s Sydney recording studio, and Clarion, in Perth. EMI got its local content via a production deal with Alberts, one of the oldest and most powerful music publishers in the nation. Young tyro Ted Albert wanted to move into recording and did so with the Easybeats and the head-hunted Billy Thorpe, among others. Leasing the tapes to EMI to put out on Parlophone, the Easybeats and Alberts became a force on vinyl too and would indeed remain so ever more, the Easybeats’ Vanda-Young team blazing a trail for local rock songwriting in the wake of Lennon-McCartney’s example.
The major labels may have all been based in Sydney, but by 1966 it was Melbourne that had become Australia’s music mecca. Maybe it was the launch of Go-Setmagazine out of Melbourne at the start of 1966 that cemented it. The city already boasted the moodier, more mod vibe, along with the biggest circuit of suburban dances and city discos, the most powerful new breed of entrepreneurs, and being home to big new national TV programs like Uptightand The Go!! Show, which made Sydney’s long-standing Bandstand look as stodgy as it really was. Adelaide bands moved to Melbourne: the first of them, the Twilights, signed direct to EMI. EMI also ended up with the Seekers after they left Australia and W&G. Brisbane bands like Lobby Lloyde’s seminal Purple Hearts bypassed Sydney and moved to Melbourne, as did Perth’s Johnny Young.
Ron Tudor left W&G around the same time as the Seekers, to go to Astor, and W&G was never really the same again, although it did form the In Records subsidiary which in 1966 proffered the best new band of the year, the Loved Ones. Astor handled the Go!! label, which had grown out of The Go!! Show, and in 1967, Astor launched the best new band of that year, the Masters Apprentices, who’d also moved to Melbourne from Adelaide. Spin scored for Festival in 1966 with the Bee Gees’ breakthrough hit, ‘Spicks and Specks’, their twelfth single. Spin, because it was based in its own studio, was about the only Australian label at the time releasing semi-purpose-built albums. Otherwise, only the biggest acts were privileged enough to cut an album, and even then those albums were usually little more than a couple of hit singles plus filler. Jeff St. John and the Id, Steve and the Board, and the Bee Gees all released albums on Spin.
The other majors in Sydney were less astute. After Johnny Devlin left RCA he was replaced by Ron Wills, the man who’d produce ‘Pub with No Beer’ after folding his own Wilco label, and RCA would become, much like its US parent, quite country-orientated. Like RCA, the local branch of CBS aped its American parent with a penchant for MOR pop, hitting with solo singers like John Rowles and Lynn Randell, but also hitting, it has to be said, with the slick, soulful rock of the Groop, the group that proffered the next best Australian rock songwriter of the ’60s after Vanda-Young and the brothers Gibb, Brian Cadd.
Philips veered wildly from one extreme to the other. On one hand, it allowed the anarchic, magnificent Missing Links to actually cut an album, and on the other, it released Charlie Munro’s groundbreaking 1968 Australian modern jazz classic, Eastern Horizons. If these did not seem to be commercially-driven decisions, Philips finally hit pay-dirt with MOR singer, Kamahl, who was probably the most popular solo male singer in the country for almost the entire 1970s.
Popular music was an integral part of the new consumer culture that included a growing youth market. By the early ’60s sales of albums had caught up with those of singles, or 45s, at about four million each per annum. Before decimal currency came in, a single cost 10 shillings, an EP 17 shillings, and LPs up to and over £3 each. This was still relatively expensive. For one thing, unlike books, records were subject to sales tax; literature was deemed to be a much higher form than popular music. But as records’ prices remained fixed for the next 20 years, they became relatively much cheaper, and as cheap stereos and radiograms also swamped the market, the real boom was on by the late ’60s. By the mid-’60s and the invention of the transistor radio and portable record-players, rock music was an emergent mass market and across the whole nation could be heard at the beach and in the car, in the suburban lounge-room and in the bedrooms of the teenagers. Increasing disposable incomes and more leisure time were potent fuels for combusting a new social revolution.
Between Sets: Conclusion to Part One
1970 is an apt year to conclude the first part of our tale. The late ’60s cultural revolution from Carnaby Street to Bleeker Street, from Haight Ashbury to Laurel Canyon, was about to happen down-under in Darlinghurst and St Kilda – in the ’70s. Australian popular music cultures were emerging from a sustained period of intense copying of fashions, modes, and genres found elsewhere.
This slavish devotion to all things popular in Britain and America was gradually transforming into a new-found local confidence and creativity. By the end of the ’60s, Australian songwriters and musicians (many of whom were also recently arrived migrants) were not only imitating British and American acts but starting to compose and record their own material and getting recognition in the metropolitan centres also (Tait 2010: 23–4). All this energy needed organization and infrastructure. The ’70s were to witness the flourishing of the local and national recording industry to capture and broadcast these new sounds. For one brief period the local was national and the national was matching the globals in the attention of the record-buying publics. Australian population, youth cultures and disposable incomes got bigger, and these were matched to new technologies and more pervasive media by a more sophisticated and multi-layered recording industry. It wasn’t to last, however, and the last two decades of the 20th century are a story of syncretism and diversification of music forms splintering into a thousand sub-cultures even as the rock music industry itself was re-integrated into global markets. Technological innovations in the media of popular music – from the vinyl record to internet downloads – in turn has led to the decline of the industry itself as seemingly it has lost the power to monopolize intellectual property and distribution rights to the music. As the culture transforms so the markets follow. This is the story of Part Two. As the band would have it: ‘we’ll be right back’.