The Easybeats, "Sorry" (1966)
Great garage mod punk from The Easybeats (1966). According to Frank at Save vs. Death, "George Young, the rhythm guitar player, is the older brother of Angus and Malcom Young and produced the first six AC/DC records. How's that for an awesome pedigree?" There's a family resemblance for sure!
(If you like this kind of music, you should listen to Little Steven's Underground Garage on Sirius, which plays the greatest songs from the 60 years of rock and roll. Drew Carey has a DJ spot a couple of times a month, too! You can listen to the show from the website, too.)
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Oh that as good! There is a real treasure trove of garage rock footage on you-tube - this is definitely one of my favorite genres of music. 1966 is arguably the best year ever for rock and roll music. I'll take your Easy Beats and raise you a Count 5:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODR6rGcluRs
If you like this, check out the first three Easybeats LPs (Easy!, It's 2 Easy, and Volume 3). "Sorry" is just one of many standout singles and album tracks. If all you know is "Friday On My Mind," you are in for a treat.
To add to the above, Easybeats George Young and Harry Vanda were the production team behind all the AC/DC albums till Highway to Hell.
And while I'm at it, Little Steven's show is ok, but he's a creep and his show is a rip-off of Bill Kelly's Teenage Wasteland on WFMU (listen online at wfmu.org). Whoops, is my personal dislike of Steven showing...?
Friday on My Mind. Da Explosive Device.
Little Steven's weekly show is on the radio in many areas, usually Sunday night. It is great, both the music and his commentary.
Markus
Yikes, Bingo! Little Steven always has great stories on the program, and his taste in music (along with the other hosts) is a very close match to my own taste. That said, I'm looking forward to adding WFMU's Teenage Wasteland to my playlist!
"Friday on my Mind" currently stands as Australia's favourite rock/pop song. Consistantly wins the vote.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvcP58TqBq0
@ Mark
Haha! Well, I'm biased and I freely admit it.
I don't know if your tastes run this way, but WFMU has a couple other totally great shows, particularly Music to Spazz By and Fool's Paradise. Archives are online, so you don't even need to wait for them to air!
But really, he's such a creep...
:)
#1: Arguably. I've been partial to 1965. Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home & Highway 61; the Byrds, Mr Tambourine Man & TurnTurnTurn and The Beatles, Rubber Soul. And of course, Zappa's debut, Freak Out. Pretty good stuff.
I don't know if I'd call the Easybeats underground, although they were kind of garage at the start. The Easybeats were a pretty big pop sensation, albeit one that never made it outside of Australia (it would take another decade and AC/DC for that).
That video isn't 'garage' and 'lo-fi' it's just an example of the Australia being *way* behind the times when it came to media technology :-P That's probably the best the ABC could put together at that date...bearing in mind we inherited all our gear and techniques from the beeb, and second hand by several years...
btw, the Easybeats singer was Little Stevie Wright, not to be confused with Little Steven :)
Vanda + Young put out a wonderful record in 1979 under their new moniker "Flash and the Pan". Sort of a new-wave, paranoid, rocking, sung/spoken-through-a-radio-speaker, synth-laden, oddball pop sound. Amazon has it packaged as 2 discs with their 2nd record included. iTunes has the 1st record on its own with audio previews here:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?id=299122550&s=143441
Great song. Anyone into the 60's garage psychedilic stuff should dig the Nuggets series series. It covers the period between 1965 and 1968 and focuses on the more grungy bands of that period that certainly were the ancestors of the late 70's punk explosion. It's wild stuff. I remember discovering it during my 80's punk days and being blown away by the raw energy of some of the tracks.
Another streaming radio recommendation:
Radio 1190 (KVCU), the student station in Boulder, CO has a show called Under the Mattress from 4-6 (Mountain time) on Sundays. They play garage, psychedelic, rockabilly, and other assorted music from the '50s and '60s. Here's the show's MySpace.
Radio 1190's whole Sunday lineup is full of awesome from alt. Americana to punk to New Orleans to garage.
The Three O'Clock (formerly known as the Salvation Army) covered this song in 1982 on their 12" Baroque Hoedown.
Thanks for all these tips, everyone! When am I going to find the time to listen to it all?
I have the Three O'Clock's 12" cover of "Sorry". And the Salvation Army's debut lp. Too bad I don't have a record player any more...
As an addendum, here are some proper skinny legged jeans on the Three o' Clock :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqallqnkvQ8
This will very much date me, but I saw the Three O'Clock perform this live at the Stone on Broadway in SF in the early 1980's, and this unknown band, The Bangles, opened... No Leonard Nimoy on hand, however...
I had always heard it was attributed to early Bee Gee's, but apparently not the case?
Ah, thank someone that the brain cells are not yet gelatinous, another person thinks it early bee gee's, in this here youtube link to the Three O'Clock version...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_44fzAp9zf4
And there you have it.
The Easybeats "Friday on My Mind" was a better song than this. It was #1 in Australia, #6 in the UK, #16 in the USA, and charted in several other countries. In 2001, it was voted "Best Australian Song" of all time. It's been covered by David Bowie", Peter Frampton and others.
BTW Little Stevie Wright - the lead singer of The Easybeats - went on to become addicted to heroin. He tried several solo comebacks but never made the "bigtime" again.
It would have been nice if you'd pointed out that this was an AUSTRALIAN BAND. As indeed are AC/DC.
Garage? check
Mod? check
Punk? sorry, not punk.
It's straight up 60's rock, which is great, but it was happening before rock got pretentious and needed a punk movement.
This is great stuff, but it's not punk. Why does everyone feel the need to tack 'punk' onto stuff to give it 'street cred' or something?
Noice!!
as we say in Oz.
If you are looking for a slice of Aussie garage,
might I suggest Slave Girl by The Lime Spiders
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tci64zdwIYc
incidentally, just so you know, a Lime Spider is not an arachnid with a proclivity for citrus fruit, it's ice cream and lime soda.
That song does rock.
Since we've got some recommendations going on, ya'll might be interested in checking out The Monks (the original 1960s "U.S. Army guys stationed in Germany" Monks as opposed to the 70s UK Monks)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monks
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=tOLS8NeGL4U
@kperkins - It's your opinion, sure, but the opening riff wouldn't have been out of place in '77, if you ask me. Seems like people have been referring to 60s punk for years, starting before the mid-seventies punk movement even began (liner notes to the first Nuggets comp, amongst other place, I think...)
mmmm, that riff in this song is delish.
There's also Johnny O'Keefe, from quite a few years prior to the Easybeats. It's not what you'd call melodic but it's certainly catchy and woke up what was up til then a fairly sleepy country.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kP3BS23PNE
Was JOK punk? I dunno. Iggy Pop did cover the Wild One (and I thought it was hilarious that he did a new version with Jet, considering they ripped him off a bit, but then rock's full of that.)
Also, it wasn't so much "Mods" in Australia as Bodgies and Widgies, but I suppose easy categorisations make for easy patronisations. Culture wasn't quite as globalised then as it is now, and it certainly didn't all come from a single source (though it must be said that the children of post-war British immigrants did have a fair bit to do with the early years of rock in Australia).
Punk? OK, try The Saints.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-GueNOKolo
I guess they got lumped into the punk marketing category for real around 1975-76. On the strength of "Stranded", which they funded themselves, they signed to EMI after word had reached England and put out the first album (before "Never Mind The Bollocks", mind), they got bored with "punk" too early and moved right away from it in the next couple of albums, which didn't make EMI happy, didn't make the punk fashionistas happy, before too long the line-up broke down and so on and so forth.
(Though they did reunite for ATP in Australia just in the past week, where apparently Kuepper was the only one who looked interested.)
@ Gths - Radio Birdman (as I'm sure you know) are another wicked Aussie band (some members being US and Canadian ex-pats) that got lumped in with the 70's punk movement despite (from my understanding) not really wanting to be apart of it. I missed them on their last couple of tours but heard they were great.
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=zxIjYhLKb7c
btw @ Gths - the Johnny O'Keefe video is pretty awesome, thanks for sharing that!
#21 and #25, I agree with John Lydon's definition of "punk", that it is anti-social, where pop music is social. That's why I never believed in the pop-punk genre.
#11, I remember Flash & the Pan. They had a minor hit "Walking In The Rain":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJFB0roVxaM
Not Aussies but I discovered The Monks via Kali Fontecchio's blog. Not even gonna attempt the musical taxonomy on these guys.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZK_olqwHwk
@ Chris L - Monks are the Anti-Beatles! Anti-social for sure with song titles like "I Hate You".
Easybeats! nice. the music featured on this page is getting better by the day.
I see parallels between garage music of the 60s with bedroom music of the 00s; there are going to be lots of gems to uncover from the last 10 years, just as we are still discovering an endless supply of killer garage music from the 60s.
sites like garage hangover and dynamite brain are good places to watch.
I saw Richard Thompson on his "1000 years of popular music" tour the other night, and "Friday on my mind" was one of the tunes representing the '60s (the only decade with more than one song). In a perfect world he'd have picked a Monks (FTW!) number instead, but the selection criterion was "popular"...
Great Camera work, Panning/tracking, Lens Flare, Shot of the Monitor to start the scene, and Hot Groovy chicks that are probably Grannies by now.