The Easybeats: From power pop to Oz rock

The Easybeats, and Gordon ‘Snowy’ Fleet in particular

The members of the Easybeats were all migrants. The Young family came to Sydney from the Cranhill tenements of Glasgow in late 1963 or early 1964. ¹ George was one of seven brothers with one sister. When the family migrated, the elder brother Alex stayed behind. He played saxophone with the Bobby Patrick Big Six who had formed in Glasgow around 1960. The group was one of the earlier bands to go to Hamburg where they had become friendly with the Beatles (Warburton, 2016). The Bobby Patrick Big Six subsequently became an incarnation of Saint Lucia-born singer Emile Ford’s backing group, the Checkmates. Ford had a number of hits in the UK between 1959 and 1962. Alex was a founding member of Grapefruit in 1967, a group with close connections to the Beatles and, as it happens, sometimes identified with power pop. In the early 1970s Alex, George and Harry formed a song-writing unit. A Vanda/Young composition from this period ‘Shot In The Head’ was recorded by the English blues rock group Savoy Brown on their 1972 album Lion’s Share and shows another step in Vanda and Young’s move into melodic hard rock. Alex played with George, Angus and Malcolm in the Marcus Hook Roll Band, a transitional and short-lived group before AC/DC, who made one album, Tales of Old Grand Daddy, released in 1973.

George Young was 16 when the family arrived at Villawood Migrant Hostel. Stevie Wright, born in 1947 had come to Australia in 1958. He had been in the country considerably longer than the others. Harry Vanda was Johannes Hendrikus Jacob van den Berg when his family reached Sydney in 1963. He rapidly anglicised his name. Vanda had been born in 1946. In the Netherlands he had played in a mostly instrumental group influenced by the Shadows called the Starfighters. The other Dutch member of the Easybeats was Dingeman Adriaan Henry van der Sluijs who similarly anglicised his name to Dick Diamonde. The Anglicisation of names was common among non-English-speaking migrants to Australia during the period when assimilation was government policy. Diamonde was born in 1947 and his family had stayed in the Villawood Migrant Hostel between 1951 and 1959. Like Wright, Diamonde had been in Australia for some years, growing up there, and would not have been familiar with the developments taking place in British popular music.

Gordon ‘Snowy’ Fleet was very different. ² Fleet was born and raised in Liverpool. He had arrived in Australia with his wife and young daughter in 1964 and had been placed in the East Hills Migrant Hostel. His date of birth is given as three different years in different places. John Tait (2014: 227) notes that:

In early Easybeat profiles, Snowy’s birthday was given as 16 August 1945. Later profiles such as in the Easybeat Anthology cover notes quote it as 16 August 1940. His immigration application states his date of birth to be 16 August 1937.

It used to be said that Fleet had been a member of the Mojos. ³ The Mojos had a top 10 hit in England in early 1964 with ‘Everything’s Alright’. Whether the idea that he had played with the Mojos came from Fleeti, it would seem to have been a good way of legitimating his ability and musical knowledge to associate him with a group who had a hit shortly after he left. However, Fleet never played with the Mojos. Tait (2014: 15) adopts a fall-back position, suggesting: ‘He had played drums in a local; group called the Nomads, which was to become the Mojos.’ This, though, would seem to be incorrect. Robin Bell (2016) writes that: ‘The Mojos began life in Liverpool in 1962, when the trio of Keith Karlson (real name Keith Alcock), lead guitarist Roy Wood and drummer John “Bob” Conrad got together to form the Nomads.’ Conrad, sometimes spelt Konrad, was a founding member of the Nomads and the Mojos and stayed until the group split up in 1966. It seems that Fleet was never a long-term member of any Liverpool group. At the same time, Fleet has told a story about meeting up with Paul McCartney at his flat in London’s St John’s Wood when the Easybeats were riding their fame with ‘Friday On My Mind’. It seems that McCartney had invited the Easybeats round. As Fleet tells the story in the SBS television documentary on the Easybeats, Friday on My Mind (2009):

And McCartney walks up to me and the first thing he says was ‘I know you, don’t I?’ I said Paul, how about St John’s Hall in Bootle where I used to play in Liverpool, England. He says, ‘eh, How could I forget that place.’ Then the whiskey came out. I really think we drank him dry.

Fleet seems not to have been a committed musician. He had sold his drum kit before coming to Australia and had taken a job as a tool maker. Perhaps he felt he was getting too old for the popular music scene, he was, after all, even five years older than McCartney, and, besides, had the responsibility of a wife and child. In Australia, Fleet has been very clear about why he joined the Easybeats:

When I first met the boys they were, quite frankly, pretty rough in their music. They were playing Shadows-type music which was old-hat in Britain. I wasn’t keen on playing at first, but I was lonely and knew no-one. I stayed with them because they were the only friends I had at the time. (Tait, 2014: 15)

What Fleet brought to the group was his intimate and sophisticated knowledge of beat music, gained from growing up in Liverpool and playing drums albeit in a more part-time manner than the impression that was given to his young band-mates. Before he joined the group, they had taken to calling themselves the Starfighters. At this time Vanda was obviously the most influential member as he had already been in a group. His idea, it would seem, was to recreate his Dutch instrumental group. At the same time, we know that before Wright joined, the group was covering Beatles’ songs. John Bell, the singer replaced by Wright, says in the same SBS documentary: ‘We could imitate anything the Beatles did to a t. It was just a beautiful thing to be in’ ( Friday on My Mind, 2009). Bell, also an English migrant, thought he would remain the singer in the group because of the way his voice harmonised with Young’s and Vanda’s (see Tait, 2014: 14). He also thought he would be chosen because, he says, Wright sang off-key. It is unclear why the group chose Wright over Bell, perhaps for his lyric-writing skills, perhaps for his immense energy and stage presence, perhaps for his looks, which helped to galvanise the group’s female audience. ⁴

It was Fleet who renamed the group. Easybeats is on the model of Merseybeats, the group who were running the show at which the Beatles played at St John’s Hall, Bootle, back in 1962. The change of name also signals the change in musical style that Fleet brought with him. In this there was certainly agreement between Fleet and Young. Young’s sister Margaret had a large collection of rhythm and blues records. Clinton Walker (2015/1994: 107) explains:

It was eldest sibling, Margaret, who was largely responsible for turning the boys onto rock’n’roll; who would, in fact, go on to name AC/DC and put Angus in the school uniform. After the Second World War, British seaports like Liverpool and Glasgow were on a direct shipping route to the United States, and so, as rock’n’roll lore has it, Merseybeat itself was inspired by the American records – R&B, blues and hillbilly records – which were accessible there, landing as they did off the boats. Margaret was listening to Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino even before they were stars.

That the Starfighters were already harmonising on Beatles’ songs before Fleet became a member was no doubt Young’s influence. The UK chart was transformed through 1963. The Beatles’ first chart entry ‘Love Me Do’ had been in October 1962, followed by ‘Please Please Me’, which reached no. 2 in January 1963. The Beatles then had three top placed tracks over the rest of the year, ‘From Me To You, ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. As the year progressed there were also hits for Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Fourmost and the Searchers. Instrumental groups like the Dakotas were taking on singers, in their case Billy J Kramer, to keep up to date. This was the other influence that Young brought with him. When Ted Albert decided to sign the Easybeats it was because he had heard one of their demos called ‘Say That You’re Mine’. Quoting Albert, Tait (2014: 22) writes:

‘They did some Rolling Stones songs, which were fun, but when they did “Say That You’re Mine” I almost broke my neck getting a contract drawn up.’ This was an original song, the very first Vanda and Young composition that featured George and Harry singing together and George singing the middle eight on his own. To a music publisher like Ted, a group that could write original songs of this quality was irresistible.

The Missing Links, ‘We 2 Should Live’ and the Easybeats’ ‘For My Woman’

The Easybeats were not Ted Albert’s first signing; that was Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs. Shortly before signing the Easybeats, Albert signed the Missing Links. The driving force behind the first edition of the Missing Links was Peter Anson. David Nichols (2016: 59) writes that: ‘Anson’s father had introduced him to jazz, and he’d been listening to it from an early age: “I collected books about it and records. All those books mentioned the origins of jazz in early black music.”’

Anson also bought records by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Anson’s interest was in blues and its relationship with the genre called rhythm and blues. He started playing with a drummer called Danny Cox. When the Rolling Stones began releasing records: ‘the emergence of the Rolling Stones inspired the pair to have a proper crack at getting an electric R&B band together’ (Marks and McIntyre, 2011: 87). The newly formed Missing Links started playing around Sydney about the middle of 1964. In October the group recorded some demos for Albert.

The Missing Links took their cues from the British rhythm and blues groups, the Rolling Stones but also the Animals and almost certainly the Yardbirds and the Pretty Things. The Stones were a formative influence on Australian rhythm and blues groups. In Melbourne the Spinning Wheels were named, evidencing a disturbing degree of cultural colonisation, after the Rolling Stones by their manager Ian Oschlack. The group had played Beatles material when they started but the mother of the vocalist, Rod Turnbull, lived in the UK and sent him one of the two EPs the Stones released in 1964. The soon to be named Spinning Wheels had found their model. ⁵ Richie Unterberger (n.d.) has described this first version of the Missing Links ‘as a very raw, Kinks-like combo’. The group played a benefit in November 1964 for the editors of OZ, Richard Neville, Richard Walsh and Martin Sharp, who had been charged with publishing an obscene magazine. Neville later said of the group:

They were wild, rebellious, accessible. That’s how we felt on the inside, that’s how they looked on the outside. Plus, their rock attitude was much more extreme than the mainstreamers. Johnny O’Keefe with his short hair and tight pants wasn’t The Wild One anymore – if he ever was. The Missing Links made all Oz ‘legends’ look so straight. After them, even the Beatles seemed dull; the Links’ genre was much more the Stones and the Animals. If Sydney was larger then, and they’d written more of their own material, who knows? If Malcolm McLaren had seen them, they would have died young, rich and famous. (MilesAgo, n.d.)

‘For My Woman’ has a similar rhythm and blues feel, but much lighter and less intimidating than the feel of ‘We 2 Should Live’. Ian D Marks suggests the track was influenced by the work of the American blues artist, Leadbelly. Marks and McIntyre (2011: 89) describes ‘We 2 Should Live’ as beginning ‘with a decidedly folk-blues 12-string acoustic guitar figure. The vocals, meanwhile, are pure Jagger…It was by no means a particularly commercial choice for a single.’ The point here is that the track was not commercial. The members of the Missing Links were not concerned with having a hit. They were more interested in making the kind of music they liked. Later singles by the second edition of the Missing Links were released by their new label Philips in amounts of only 200 (Marks and McIntyre, 2011: 95).

It was different for the Easybeats. Young wanted the rhythm and blues sound but he also wanted a hit. ‘For My Woman’ ‘was an ominous garage punk bolero, featuring Stevie Wright in an agonized lament, accompanied by brittle, bluesy rhythm and lead guitar parts that called to mind the early Kinks’ (Eder, n.d.). Perhaps the closest comparison is with the Yardbirds’ single ‘For Your Love’. Even the titles echo each other. Both singles were released in March so it is hard to say if the Yardbirds’ track could have influenced ‘For My Woman’. However, they have a very similar feel. ‘For My Woman’ has an analogous structure to ‘For Your Love’. Both tracks have a bluesy, R&B atmosphere to them. ‘For My Woman’ is musically much simpler, and indeed lyrically simpler also. Both start with repeated chords and where ‘For Your Love’ uses bongos, ‘For My Woman’ uses maracas. Both have a great deal of lyrical, and musical repetition; ‘for your love’ is constantly repeated in the background of ‘For Your Love’ where ‘IIIII want you for my woman/IIIII want to be your man’ is a repeated couplet within the verses – there is no chorus – of ‘For My Woman’. The repetition is reminiscent of that in blues verses. ‘For Your Love’ was a departure for the Yardbirds. It was written by Graham Gouldman, a freelance composer whose songs ‘Heart Full Of Soul’ and ‘Evil Hearted You’ were also later recorded by the group. ⁶ The Yardbirds had wanted to move away from their blues purism and attempt something more likely to be commercial and give them a hit. At the same time, Gouldman has talked about how he was inspired to write ‘For Your Love’ by the chord progression in the Animals’ single ‘House Of The Rising Sun’, a traditional song from New Orleans that the Animals had found on Bob Dylan’s first album (Torem, 2014). ‘The House Of The Rising Sun’ is not a blues but it has a similar feel to a blues lament. Nevertheless, ‘For Your Love’ was far enough removed from the blues to have been legendarily instrumental in guitarist Eric Clapton leaving the Yardbirds because he felt they were selling out. ⁷

‘For Your Love’ retains a blues, and rhythm and blues, feel in the same way that this can be found in ‘For My Woman’. One consequence of this suppressed relationship with black American music is that both tracks have an uncanniness about them. Gouldman noted in an interview with Uncut in 2009 that: ‘The harpsichord was an absolute stroke of genius. The record just had a weird, mysterious atmosphere about it’ (Warner, 2012); while Marks and McIntyre (2011: 120) writes that: ‘[“For My Woman”] is an intense slice of tremolo-charged mellow R&B in E flat; Stevie Wright’s vocals are passionate to the point of melodrama, whilst maracas, tom-toms and droning harmonicas provide a suitably voodoo-tinged background.’

The Yardbirds’ track got to no. 22 on the Australian chart; ‘For My Woman’ reached no. 33. Marks and McIntyre (2011: 120) tells us that Mike Vaughan, the Easybeats’ manager, and Ted Albert, ‘were reasonably happy with the performance of the single’. In 1996, Vanda described ‘For My Woman’ as ‘a really good, sleazy R&B track. It was the sort of thing the Easybeats would have carried on playing if we hadn’t got side-tracked into pop’ (Tait, 2010: 24–5). But they did get side-tracked, or rather took a different mainline, because they wanted a hit.

‘She’s So Fine’ and the importance of being a migrant in the 1960s

In 1965 the Easybeats were disappointed with what they saw as ‘For My Woman’’s lack of success. In the SBS documentary, Wright says that when he asked why ‘For My Woman’ had not been a hit he was told: ‘We need a song that they can dance to; really dance to. And we come up with “She’s So Fine”‘ ( Friday on My Mind, 2009). The ‘they’ here are girls. What the Easybeats were beginning to understand is the gender binary between the minority appeal of rhythm and blues groups such as the Missing Links who appealed to hip boys who did not want to dance but wanted music they could emotionally relate to and a spectacle that suggested rebelliousness, and charting pop music for girls who wanted music they could physically express themselves to; that is, dance. Girls who wanted to dance made up the larger singles market. In the documentary, Young comments that: ‘I felt we want[ed] something really in your face, up and at ‘em. So I come up with the riff for that, and the chorus, [for “She’s So Fine”] and that seemed to do the job’ ( Friday on My Mind, 2009). ‘She’s So Fine’ climbed to no. 3. It was a huge hit. It was pure pop with its hint of rhythm and blues kept to a minimum except for the constant soulfulness of Wright’s voice.

The ‘About the Easybeats’ webpage describes ‘She’s So Fine’ as:

one of the great records of its era – musically, it flew out of the gate like a rocket, a frantic, hook-laden celebration of female pulchritude from the point of view of an unrequited male admirer that grabbed the listener and wouldn’t let go, across two minutes of raw excitement. (Eder, n.d.)

What separated the Easybeats from the Missing Links? The first and most important thing is that the Easybeats were all migrants. The members of the Missing Links came from Sydney and the northern coast of New South Wales. Being Australians by birth the members of the Missing Links were more self-confident, more certain of being accepted even when they grew their hair long, wore scruffy clothes. When ‘one venue owner commented that the group looked like “a cross between man and ape”‘ (Marks and McIntyre, 2011: 87) the jibe resulted in the group’s name. The Missing Links were also more middle class. While teenager Anson worked as a clerk in a fibro company, in addition to his book and records collection mentioned earlier he owned what at the time would have been an expensive Gretsch semi-acoustic guitar and his father knew the entertainment director for Millers Pubs (Nichols, 2016: 61). ⁹ All circumstantial evidence that Anson’s background was more middle class than working class. Anson shared a flat with the brothers Norm and John Stannard who were university drop-outs at a time when the expense of going to university reserved it for the children of the middle classes (Marks and McIntyre, 2011: 87). While not members of the group, the Stannard brothers were closely involved with it. John Stannard cowrote ‘Untrue’ and a number of other songs. The Stannard parents were generous in their support: ‘The new group was able to rehearse at John and Norm’s flat in the Sydney suburb of Ryde – thanks to the fact that their parents were away in England on an extended business trip!’ (MilesAgo, n.d.). The Stannard parents’ generosity did not end there:

[The group’s] musical influences – helpfully topped up by supplies of the latest records from the UK, sent home by the Stannards’ parents – kept them ahead of the game, and the Stannard ‘care packages’ also included prized Carnaby St clothes – no neat matching suits for these guys! (MilesAgo, n.d.)

The members of the Easybeats were impecunious migrants. In the 1960s Australian migration was dominated by the White Australia policy and migrants were expected to assimilate into established Australian society (see Stratton, 1998). This was as true of British migrants as those from other countries. As I have remarked elsewhere: ‘British migrants were simultaneously denigrated and silenced’ (Stratton, 2000: 34). In their oral history of British migration, Ten Pound Poms, A James Hammerton and Alistair Thomson (2005: 148) note that: ‘Adjustment to a new school system was hampered by racist taunts and bullying; indeed the ferocity of the Pommy bashing suffered by many British school children in post-war Australian schools is shocking.’ They include this extract from an interview:

In 1964 Ann Hawkins’s children started primary school in Redcliffe on the coast near Brisbane: ‘The first day at school resulted in a cut lip and black eye for our eldest, which I have to say didn’t appear to bother him much, and a plaintive enquiry from the youngest: ‘what’s a Pommie bastard mum?’. (Hammerton and Thomson, 2005: 148)

Beatlemania and Easyfever

It was with ‘She’s So Fine’ that Easyfever, as the media called it, exploded across Australia. If ‘For My Woman’ was generically more of a boys’ song, ‘She’s So Fine’, written for girls wanting to dance, was a girls’ pop song. In energising female sexuality the focus was on the Easybeats’ singer ‘Little’ Stevie Wright. Being short seems to have made Wright less threatening and more adorable – much like later boy bands. At the same time, Wright’s charisma and dynamism gave him a sexual edge. Rock journalist Maggie Makeig described a gig at Brisbane’s Festival Hall in 1965 that the police shut down because they were worried the crowd, which was predominantly female, were getting out of control: ‘A high-pitched roar hit the ceiling. Little Stevie, hair flying, hips gyrating, hands stabbing the air, threw himself into the spotlight. The atmosphere was electric’ (Tait, 2010: 35).

There is a much-told story of Everybodys, an Australian teen magazine, publishing the addresses of 75 ‘Top Pop Stars’. Most of the addresses were of fan clubs or groups’ managers’ work places but, somehow, Wright’s address was given as the home address of the Young family with whom he lived. As Tait (2014: 33) tells the story: ‘Ten-year-old Angus Young innocently responded to a knock on the front door of his family home in Burwood, Sydney. The last thing he expected was to be skittled by a stampede of school-girls intent on finding Little Stevie Wright.’ Mrs Young, Angus and George’s mother, had to call the police to remove the girls.

By this time the Easybeats’ performances were being drowned out by girls screaming. Nichols (2016: 126) remarks that this was not a new phenomenon: ‘Similar episodes of mass hysteria half a century earlier had focused on movie stars.’ He is right and, indeed, Frank Sinatra had provoked a similar reaction in the early 1940s:

Sinatra’s fame had been building for three years or more. His first major breakthrough came during his first Paramount season in December 1942, when he was billed as ‘Extra Added Attraction’ to the Benny Goodman Orchestra: the moment he was introduced, the theatre erupted with ‘five thousand kids stamping, yelling, screaming, applauding’. These scenes were amplified when Sinatra returned to the Paramount in May 1943: ‘This time they threw more than roses,’ remembered his factotum, Nick Sevano, ‘they threw their panties and their brassieres’. (Savage, 2007: 443)

As the Beatles continued to tour, audience attitudes became increasingly energised: ‘By the summer of 1963, thousands of fans were turning up at the stage doors of the small venues they played, blocking the entrances and threatening to riot’ (Millard, 2012: 31). On 13 October the group was overrun by a mass of girls after a concert at the London Palladium. ‘From Me To You’ was released on 11 April. André Millard (2012: 31) notes that: ‘As “From Me To You” raced up the charts, the screams increased.’ Millard (2012: 33) explains that: ‘What got Beatlemania noticed was its scale. When Pam Am Flight 101 left London airport, about one thousand fans screamed their farewells, but an estimated three to five thousand welcomed them to New York.’ Millard (2012: 33) quotes reactions from various officials including ‘This is kind of like Sinatra multiplied by 50 or a 100.’ The Beatles had flown to New York on 7 February 1964.

They arrived in Sydney for their tour of Australia and New Zealand on 11 June. By this time, the practices of Beatlemania, the massive predominance of girls, the screaming, the hysteria, the attempts to reach the members of the group outside of the performance, were all well-established tropes. As Michelle Arrow (2009: 80–1) writes:

Australia’s teenagers did supply a reception the Beatles would ‘never forget’, marking the broad acceptance of the category of ‘teenager’ in the process. Too large in number now to be dismissed as mere juvenile delinquents, Beatles fans – screaming, surging crowds of them – became a spectacle in themselves.

Being familiar with the by now well-known behavioural reaction to the Beatles elsewhere, young Australian women seized the opportunity to express themselves and their sexuality. Johnny Devlin, the New Zealand rocker, was on the bill with the Beatles. Baker (1986: 94) quotes Devlin describing a Beatles’ concert in his book about the Beatles’ tour:

Devlin gives a vivid description of just what effect an innocent gaze from a real live Beatle could have: ‘I saw girls in Adelaide lying on the floor, bashing their heads into the seats until they bled. Just gone, completely gone. It was frightening then and the thought of it is still quite disturbing.’

The Easybeats’ successful shift of focus to their female audience had the unexpected consequence of positioning the group as the local inheritors of Beatlemania, including the girl fans’ urge to consummate their desire. While the poem from a fan that Tait (2010: 36) reproduces from Jim Oram’s book, The Business of Pop (1966), suggests perhaps a good girl’s fantasy: ‘I had a funny dream last night,/I’m sure it will make you laugh,/I dreamt I was a cake of soap,/in Little Stevie’s bath’, there were many other girls wanting to transform that fantasy into reality. Johnny Young (no relation), as it happens another Dutch migrant, has told a story a number of times about how while touring with the Easybeats in Perth he had been promised a song by Wright and Young and, over eager, had knocked on their hotel-room door at 7.00 in the morning:

The door opened to reveal half a dozen naked girls. Clearly no further work had occurred on the song, but a drowsy Stevie went off to his favourite room for writing lyrics. A short time later he came out of the toilet with the verses to ‘Step Back’ written on a notepad, after which he went back to bed. (Tait, 2010: 42)

In April 1966 the Easybeats released their sixth single. ‘Come And See Her’ was more adventurous than their previous singles in that it had as a repeated motif, the bass voice of Dick Diamonde intoning the title. The lyrics ask for the singer’s doctor to come and see the singer’s girlfriend who has lost control:

In the final line the singer, Wright, says to the doctor that he thinks ‘she’s been had’. Quite what this means is obscure but there is a common slang expression used by men who describe a woman with whom they have had sexual relations as having had her.

In one description:

‘Come and See Her’ relies on the ominous bass tones as Diamonde channels a Frankenstein voice, droning the line ‘Come and see her’, as an agitated Wright desperately tries to liberate his woman from chastity. In the background there’s a driving piano pounding away like a stalker as the song changes key with every verse, getting slightly more intense. (O’Donnell et al., 2010: 38)

‘Come And See Her’ can be read as the Easybeats’ reaction to Easyfever, to the out of control girls who screamed at their concerts and who imposed themselves on the group at any opportunity. Insightfully, Vanda has this to say about Wright: ‘Stevie was a good little lyric writer.…He really could sum things up’ (O’Donnell et al., 2010: 36). With a certain irony, the track reached no. 3 on the chart and the release was followed up by the EP Easyfever. Easyfever was a continuation of Beatlemania. Indeed, in the Easybeats documentary there is a clip of a girl arguing with other girls about whom they prefer, the Beatles or the Easybeats ( Friday on My Mind, 2009). What was called Easyfever was an opportunity for young Australian women to express active sexual desire. ¹¹ As such, it helped to break down traditional mores and transform the position of women and their expectations in relationships.

The impact of United Artists and making ‘Friday On My Mind’ a hit

The Easybeats went to London in July 1966. The Easyfever EP was their parting gift to the fans. Mike Vaughan had gone to New York earlier in the year in the hope of finding a record company that would sign the Easybeats to a global contract outside of Australia. He finally succeeded with United Artists (UA). As Tait (2010: 44) tells the story, UA were Vaughan’s last chance and if the label had not come through Vaughan would have been unable to pay his hotel bill. In this context, rather than being an achievement the UA signing sounds more like the result of desperation. UA released ‘Women’ in the United States and when it failed to make a dent on the charts decided the group were better off going to England. In England, UA released ‘Come And See Her’, which failed to chart there. Meanwhile, Albert had been recording new tracks with the group at Abbey Road. As Marks (2011: 129) writes:

United Artists were unhappy with the results of the Abbey Road recordings and spared no-one’s feelings in pointing out that they felt the production was lacking and the lyrics unsophisticated. Stung by the criticism, Stevie lost confidence and withdrew from the song-writing process. Harry Vanda and George Young now became inseparable.

United Artists Records had begun in 1957 as a subsidiary of the film company, United Artists, to distribute film soundtracks. Through the 1960s soundtracks remained the company’s primary interest but they did start signing a broad selection of mostly middle-of-the-road recording artists including Bobby Goldsboro and Jay and the Americans. George Jones, the country and western singer, was on UA’s roster as were a few rhythm and blues groups like the Falcons, who included Wilson Pickett as a member, and the Exciters. Because the label cast its net so wide it did have a few, minor garage bands on the books and for their American releases Manfred Mann was on UA’s Astor label. In England, in June and July, the month UA released ‘Come And See Her’ in the UK, they also released singles by Bobby Goldsboro and Jay and the Americans, English blue-eyed soul singer Long John Baldry, English ex-Vernon Girls singer Samantha Jones, minor English beat group the Force Five and, what the label no doubt thought of as their core business, Ferrante and Teicher’s ‘Theme from Khartoum’ from the 1966 film of that name, which, while not charting in the UK, reached no. 21 on the American adult contemporary chart.

Why did UA decide to release ‘Come And See Her’ rather than any of the Easybeats’ more accessible Australian hits? The answer would seem to lie in the request for more sophisticated lyrics. UA seems not to have understood that the Easybeats’ success lay in their appeal to teenage girls and while a part of that success came from the danceable riffs and beats that Young wrote, another equally important element in the group’s success was the lyrics written by Wright. Often denigrated as slight, Wright’s lyrics told stories of male and female yearning and relationships, many times from a point of view with which girls could identify. When UA asked for sophisticated lyrics, they were thinking of concerns that older audiences might find appealing. Quite simply, UA did not understand the group they had signed, or the market to which the Easybeats played.

However, UA’s request chimed with what Young wanted. As Tait (2010: 60–1) writes:

George was also striving for more complexity for the Easybeats. Stevie’s simple (but effective) lyrics about girls were no longer required. George felt he had reached a point where he needed to work with a musician and bluntly informed Stevie that from now on he would be writing with Harry.

The combination of Talmy with Vanda and Young produced one hit, but it was huge. UA had the cheap success, the quick profit, for which, it would seem, the company had been looking. Lyrically, ‘Friday On My Mind’ moved completely away from the boy/girl concerns that typified Wright’s lyrics. Instead, Vanda and Young composed a working-class anthem; a song that appealed to all workers whether male or female, indeed to anybody who worked five days a week. The implied audience was no longer girls but, mostly, working young men. Melodically, the song climbs through the verse as the singer describes his weekdays and waiting for Friday. In the documentary, Wright comments on the difficulty he had reaching the high notes ( Friday on My Mind, 2009). The tension is resolved as the verse powers to its payoff in the full-throated, and very catchy, chorus where the singer tells us what he will do on his weekend. This involves seeing his girl but the crucial difference is that the girl is not addressed as she was in so many of Wright’s lyrics. The Easybeats’ traditional audience is elided.

Arrow (2009: 2) describes ‘Friday On My Mind’ as: ‘Musically complex, with hard-to-reproduce guitar lines and a driving, energetic beat, perhaps the song’s sentiments best explain its enduring appeal.’ The song has many minor chords, E minor, A minor, D minor, among others. Beat music had always had minor chords. They help to lighten the melody and make the songs more radio friendly. The art of complexity in popular song, as the Beatles knew seemingly intuitively, is to use the complexity in the service of making the song more approachable for the listening audience. This is what Vanda and Young succeed in doing with ‘Friday On My Mind’. However, it is the minor chords that are an important factor in making the song so difficult to sing, and indeed play. When Gary Moore, the guitarist, released a version of the song in 1987 on his Wild Frontier album, and this can also be heard on live recordings available on YouTube, he removed the minor chords. This makes the song easier to sing and changes the focus from the melody to the beat, turning ‘Friday On My Mind’ into a hard rock song. Bruce Springsteen appears to have done something similar when he played the song at the start of his Sydney concert in 2014. ¹³ This transformation shows the way forward towards AC/DC.

The failure of ‘Good Times’

Vanda and Young would not repeat the success of ‘Friday On My Mind’ with the Easybeats. Instead, the group slowly died having lost the energy and direction of its Australian heyday when Wright and Young wrote almost all the songs. However, there is a coda. In 1967 the Easybeats recorded ‘Good Times’ at Olympic Studios in London with as producers Mike Vaughan and Glyn Johns, who had worked as engineer on the Easybeats’ sessions with Talmy and in 1969 would work as engineer for George Martin during the recording of the Beatles’ Let It Be. ‘Good Times’ divides opinions. McIntyre writes that:

‘Good Times’ deserves special mention and is without doubt one of the greatest rock singles ever recorded. Why this track was not a smash hit at the time is hard to explain. ‘Good Times’ is gutsy, hard-driving, no-bullshit rock & roll, highlighted by tasty piano by Nicky Hopkins, a terrific guitar solo by Harry, and a knockout chorus, with backing vocals courtesy of the band’s new friend Steve Marriott. (Tait, 2010: 104)

In this case, the complexity, well disguised, is in the allusive lyrics. ‘Good Times’ is a celebration of the enjoyment of rock and roll that navigates lyrically through a history of the genre. The first thing to notice is the title. While the title is in the plural, ‘good time’ is singular in the lyrics. The plural title echoes Shirley and Lee’s ‘Let The Good Times Roll’ from 1956. This is a rock and roll song played with a New Orleans jump swing beat in which Lee urges: ‘Come on baby, let the good times roll/Come on baby, let me thrill your soul.’ The invocation is very similar to ‘Good Times’’s request that Mary come round to the singer’s house because ‘The folks are gone and the place will be mine.’ However, ‘Good Times’ has a further heritage in Louis Jordan’s jump blues also called ‘Let The Good Times Roll’ recorded in 1946 in which he addresses his listeners: ‘Hey everybody, let’s have some fun/You only live but once, and when you’re dead you’re done/So let the good times roll, let the good times roll.’ In each track the musical urgency to have a good time increases as the rock genre evolves and the address becomes more intimate as the songs move from ‘Hey everybody’ to ‘Come on baby’ to ‘Mary, Mary, you’re on my mind.’

This ‘Mary, Mary’ of the song’s first line can be read as referencing back to a Mike Nesmith song called ‘Mary, Mary’ in which Mary is leaving the singer and he wants to know where she is going and what he has done to make her leave. The song was first recorded by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 1966. Nesmith was a member of the Monkees and their version appeared on the group’s More of the Monkees album in 1967 – the same year as it happens that the Easybeats recorded ‘Good Times’. In ‘Good Times’ Mary has not left. Rather, the singer wants her to come over to his parents’ house. In both cases though there is a separation that the singer wants resolved.

The fourth verse of ‘Good Times’ offers a list of who will be at the party. Bony Moronie is a girl in a song of the same name by the African-American rock and roll singer, Larry Williams. Bony Moronie is going to be with Jim. Long Tall Sally is also going to be there. She is going to be with Slim. This Sally is the title of a track by Little Richard in which Richard sings that ‘we’re going to have some fun tonight’. ‘Long Tall Sally’ is another rock and roll song about having a good time. In both the original songs Bony Moronie and Long Tall Sally are with the singer. In the Easybeats’ song they have partners and will be visiting the party at which the singer hopes to be with Mary – if this is Nesmith’s Mary she would be as white as the Monkees and their audience. Amid this invocation of African-American singers and their imaginary partners there may be a hint of a racial subtext from a group founded by migrants during the era of the White Australia policy.

Another visitor to the Easybeats’ party is Short Fat Fannie. ‘Short Fat Fannie’ is the title of a Larry Williams single released in 1957. What is interesting from the point of view of ‘Good Times’ is that, where ‘Good Times’ references people from songs, ‘Short Fat Fannie’ references both people from songs and other song titles. In the Williams song, he does not want to dance any more with Long Tall Sally and nor does he want to dance with Annie, a reference to the Hank Ballard and Midnighters’ 1954 single, ‘Work With Me Annie’, which was later reissued with clean lyrics as ‘Dance With Me, Annie’. Songs referred to in ‘Short Fat Fannie’ include Little Richard’s ‘Slippin’ and Slidin’’, Fats Domino’s ‘Blueberry Hill’ and Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.

In the final verse of ‘Good Times’ we find out that Jim who will be with Bony Moronie is most likely Jim Dandy who appears in Williams’ song referring to La Vern Baker’s track ‘Jim Dandy’ in which Dandy goes ‘to the rescue’ of various people, including a mermaid queen, in difficult situations. Jim Dandy has a long, African-American folk history in the idea of the black dandy. One iteration was in a popular minstrel song from around 1843 titled ‘Dandy Jim From Caroline’. Echoing the party that Wright wants to have in ‘Good Times’, Williams in ‘Short Fat Fannie’ had been at a honky-tonk party dancing with Mary Lou. This is probably a reference to the Mary Lou in Bill Haley’s ‘Mary, Mary Lou’ (1957), itself a remake of the Sparks’ ‘Merry, Merry Lou’, when Fannie got jealous and started a fight. ¹⁴ Williams had to call Jim Dandy to the rescue.

It would seem that Williams’ track was the model for the Vanda and Young track and, at the same time, provided many of the characters who appear in ‘Good Times’. In the chorus of ‘Good Times’, the implied sexual interest in Mary, who also takes us back to Mary Lou, and the exuberant partying, are directly merged with the song itself: ‘I’m gonna have a good time tonight/Rock and roll music gonna play all night/Come on, baby, it won’t take long/Only take a minute just to sing my song.’ In the 21st century, this level of reflexivity would probably be called postmodern.

Vanda and Young’s achievement in these lyrics, like their success with the music of ‘Friday On My Mind’, was to conceal the complexity while using it to make the song more appealing and exciting. Listeners need not know all the allusions – indeed Vanda and Young may not have known at the least the Louis Jordan track and possibly the Bill Haley track – but the names are embedded in society’s cultural memory for those who listen to popular music. It is possible to read ‘Good Times’ as a tribute to the importance of Young’s sister Margaret and her rhythm and blues record collection’s influence on Young and the Easybeats; a recognition of the African-American rhythm and blues that lay at the heart of the Easybeats’ music while often being so well disguised it was almost impossible to discern. Tait (2010: 103) remarks that: ‘If [“Good Times”] had been released mid-1967, as planned, it could well have taken over where “Friday on My Mind” had left off. The song was another instance of Vanda and Young going back to their rock’n’roll roots.’ Instead, it was released a year later when the impact of ‘Friday On My Mind’ had worn off. ‘Good Times’ did not make the top 40 in the UK and only got to no. 22 in Australia.

Meanwhile, the Easybeats were well on their way to breaking up. Instead of heralding a new beginning for the group, the chord sequence and the concerns of ‘Good Times’ became a prototype for the kind of music AC/DC would play. Jon Michaud (2014) has commented that: ‘One only has to listen to the opening bars of “St. Louis” or “Good Times” by the Easybeats to hear many of the elements that make AC/DC’s sound so distinctive: precise, cutting, guitar riffs; propulsive rhythms; and infectious choruses.’

AC/DC seem never to have played ‘Good Times’ but there is an echo in the lyrics of ‘For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)’ on their eighth Australian album with its title taken from that track. The album was released in 1981. Referencing Chuck Berry’s ‘School Days’, released in 1957 and a key part of Berry’s corpus, which was so important in the popularisation of rock and roll to white American audiences, the lyrics tell us: ‘Hail hail to the good times/’cause rock has got the right of way’. AC/DC had regularly played ‘School Days’ in their early years and their version can be found on their second Australian album T.N.T. (Daniels, 2013: 23). Here the song can be heard as linked with the Easybeats’ ‘Good Times’, a nod to Angus and Malcolm’s elder brother and his group, establishing a musical heritage as rock is announced as the music of the future. In 1981 For Those About to Rock, We Salute You reached no. 3 on the UK album chart, no. 3 on the Australian chart and no. 1 on the US Billboard chart.

Conclusion

The Easybeats’ often ignored drummer, ‘Snowy’ Fleet, was important to the success of the group. Without his first-hand knowledge of the Liverpool beat scene, regardless of whether he actually played in a beat group as a full member, and without his mentoring as an older and more experienced musician, it is unlikely that the Easybeats would have had the success they achieved. Danny Diaz and the Checkmates released a version of ‘It’s So Easy’ in 1966. Based in Hong Kong, this group was made up of four Filipinos. In their version, the rhythm and blues influence is absent and the song sounds like a Beatles knock off. This is not to denigrate the Easybeats. Rather, it is to suggest how Fleet’s background merged with Young’s to produce the combination of beat and melody that typifies power pop and which Wright’s lyrics melded with so well to fulfil the final part of that definition of power pop quoted earlier, ‘the feeling of being young, in love, and in a speeding convertible’ (Murray, 2012). The slow decline of the Easybeats began around the time Fleet left in mid-1967, after Young started composing full time with Vanda and the group moved away from its Merseybeat-influenced origins.

It should be remembered that when the group broke up in 1969 the other members were still in their early 20s. Cahill, who replaced Fleet as the Easybeats’ drummer, was also older than the rest of the group. Born in late 1941 he was a little younger than the age that Fleet seems to have given his colleagues. In Cahill’s obituary, Tait (2014) writes that:

Harry Vanda told me that they chose Cahill because he was the only one with the ‘chops’ to cope with the complex musical territory that the songwriting team of Vanda & Young were venturing into. ‘We gave him drum beats that no sane man with two arms and two legs could play, he said.’

The story of the Easybeats is conventionally told in terms of their huge popularity in Australia, their one international hit and their inability to capitalise on this in the more competitive British music scene. The compositions of Vanda and Young tend to be given preference over those of Wright and Young even though the latter were, as a whole, more successful. To some extent this is because Vanda and Young became a successful writing team for other artists. Their compositions have been hits for performers as diverse as John Paul Young and Grace Jones, and have been recorded by Rod Stewart, Suzi Quatro and the Little River Band among many others. Vanda and Young have also released tracks themselves under various names but predominantly Flash and the Pan and have had top 10 hits in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, as well as Australia.

When they were recording compositions by Wright and Young the Easybeats were a better group than they are usually given credit for. Young’s genius was firmly rooted in the African-American rhythm and blues tradition that pervaded Glasgow and about which Young and his younger brothers learnt from their older sister (Walker, 2015/1994: 107). Rather than as a pop group, the rhythm and blues influence that can be found even on the group’s early tracks and often gives them a harder beat than most beat groups’ material had suggests that the Easybeats are better categorised as precursors to power pop. By the end of the group’s existence, they were playing melodic hard rock such as can be found in ‘Good Times’ and ‘St Louis’. Indeed the ‘hard rock’ that the group played on their final, unhappy Australian tour sounds like a forerunner for the Oz rock that Vanda and Young would help define with their work for AC/DC, the Angels and Rose Tattoo. Once more the group was ahead of its time.