Daddy Who?. Craig Horne
Brighton. Wilson saw the two guitarists from The Fauves checking him out from the side of the stage. At the end of the night it was Rick Dalton who approached Wilson and asked if he sang as well as played the harp. ‘They were primarily an instrumental band but were interested in playing more R&B material and they needed a singer,’ explained Wilson.
I’d been singing in local choirs for years and I had developed a good ear, so yeah sure I could sing. Rick invited me to a rehearsal at Hannaford’s place the next Saturday, ‘Sure why not?’ But when I got there, there was already this other singer wailing away, so why did they need me? But eventually I sang a couple of numbers and I was in and the other singer was out. My first lesson in the harsh realities of show-biz.
The band couldn’t have made a better choice; Wilson at sixteen years of age was an extremely musically literate young man, with a deep knowledge of jazz and the origins of the blues. ‘I joined the band and coincidently almost overnight, the jazz dance thing died, basically because the Beatles had hit and changed everything. So all of a sudden venues started to think well … maybe this R&B thing might fly.’
The first gig The Fauves landed with Wilson as singer/harp player was at the Downbeat Club which was an old jazz gig above Clements Music in Russell Street in Melbourne’s CBD. Mostly only friends and family came to see the band but no matter, they were launched on the R&B high seas. The Downbeat Club shows were augmented by a few local church dances and lots of rehearsals. Then fate intervened. ‘One day we saw an advertisement in the paper, R&B bands wanted, no experience necessary … well that was us … we played R&B and we had absolutely no experience!’ The advertisement was placed by a couple of likely lads interested in managing R&B bands, Ian Oshlack and his sidekick Peter. ‘We applied for the job’, Wilson remembered, ‘and we were in.’
They started booking us for gigs but they didn’t like our name, so we needed another … Ian suggested the Pink Thinks. They said they’d dress us all in pink shirts and play up the whole pink thing. We said, yeah sure whatever. But we got a Christmas gig at a local hall supporting Olivia Newton-John and the poster read Olivia Newton-John and the Pink Finks, which we thought sounded much better so we kept that name.
The band’s sound kept evolving towards tougher R&B and blues; The Rolling Stones, Yardbirds and Pretty Things were a big influence. Jenny Brown, in her blog Flaming Hoop, quotes Wilson describing the catalyst for this direction: ‘We got into early John Lee Hooker. We went wow—he could just make stuff up. So that’s what we did too.’ Brown commented the two boys were made for each other. ‘Yeah we could bounce off each other. We felt we knew what the other one was going to do next. We could naturally go to harmonies without even thinking about it.’ It was now time for the Pink Finks to pay their dues; they needed to start playing live regularly.
Ian ran a dance down in Rosebud for the summer holidays so we were booked to play over the summer of 1964–65 with The Rising Sons and that was our first real gig. It was called Bluebeat Club and we played that dance virtually every night of the week, alongside bands like The Flies and The Spinning Wheels. Teenagers paid their two shillings and off we’d go. It was wild, we shared a shitty little fibro house, well you can guess the rest, it was our first time living away from home so it was great fun and we learnt how to play.
It was during this time that Wilson became aware of soul music.
At the fun fair was a trampoline and between gigs we’d hangout there. The guy running the whole thing played these great records like Otis Redding, Booker T and the M.G’S, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett. I asked the guy what this stuff was and he said soul! I’ve always asked the right questions, it’s been a great way to learn. So once we got back to Melbourne I headed straight to Batman’s and the Coles 200 Store to look for this new music. I found it on Atlantic London out through Festival. I think I first heard BB King and ‘Rock Me Baby’ which was out on Astor, I bought it for two and six.
The band was getting noticed. They were gigging around coastal haunts as well as a host of suburban dances and their sound was hardening, less Stones and more Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. It was time to take it to another level, which meant going into the studio. In May of 1965 the five schoolboys got one hundred pounds together and walked into Crest records in Mont Albert. They wanted to record a song they heard The Rising Sons perform live. They had never heard the original.
We recorded Richard Berry’s ‘Louie Louie’ at Crest, a local studio in Waverly Road. It had two mics set up in this huge room and we recorded the song in two takes, no overdubs. I didn’t really know all the lyrics so I ad-libbed on the spot. We only had limited time so we then quickly cut ‘Got Love If You Want It’ as the B side. We put it out on our own label, Mojo. My brother designed the label and the five hundred copies we pressed were distributed by Crest. Incredibly, even though it was pretty rough and raw, it had wildness about it—maybe that’s why it became a minor hit in Melbourne, making number sixteen on the local 3DB charts! What a blast!
A lot of credit for the record’s success rests with the legendary Stan Rofe, who was the first to play it on the radio and resulted in the demand for the band’s services exponentially increasing, which in turn led to a change in the band’s management arrangements.
Brian de Courcy was a prominent dance promoter around town who also managed performers like Merv Benton as well as other W&G artists. He hired the Pink Finks to play a number of his ‘spectaculars’ around town and it seemed only natural that he would get the boys a contract with W&G. A few months later Ian Oshlack gave way to de Courcy as the bands manager and as a result they ‘started playing more prestigious venues, places like Mentone Mod.’ It was there they played on the same bill as The Strangers, Merv Benton, Les Stackpool and Laurie Arthur. Wilson remembered that the first time he saw Joe Camilleri was with his band The King Bees at Mentone Mod.
Meantime, in 1965 The Pink Finks got signed to the ‘In’ label distributed through W&G—The Loved Ones were also on their register, as was Johnny Chester’s backing band The Chessmen, and Somebody’s Image. The band recorded their second single, the Joe South song ‘Untie Me’, originally recorded by The Tams, backed by ‘Nowhere to Run’. Unfortunately for the band the single didn’t enjoy the success of ‘Louie Louie’, so they went back into the studio and recorded Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Backdoor Man’—an interesting choice for a seventeen-year-old lead singer from Hampton—and backed it with ‘Something Else’. ‘Backdoor Man’ does highlight the great harp playing of Wilson and the emerging guitar talent of Hanna.
The Finks went on to record Johnny Chester’s ‘You’re Good For Me’ and the plaintive ‘Comin’ Home Baby’ for the W+G with both songs produced by Chester, unfortunately the record didn’t bother the charts. The band had previously recorded a variation of the blues standard ‘It Hurts Me Too’ as ‘It Hurts Me So’ and the raucous Muddy Waters song ‘I’ll Put A Tiger In Your Tank’. In a portent for things to come, The Pink Finks were not allowed to perform the Muddy Waters song on the Dick Williams’s ABC television show Hit Parade because of the suggestive lyrics. So the band shelved, leaving the field open for Brisbane band The Purple Hearts to record the Muddy Water’s classic and release it.
With the Finks’ recording career going nowhere it was time for some important decisions to be made. It was the end of 1965 and Wilson was done with school, year 12 was out of the way as it was for most members of the band. Drummer Richard Franklin quit the band to concentrate on his film course at university. It was quite a good career move for Richard—he became a successful film director both in Australia and overseas. His credits include The True Story of Eskimo Nell, Fantasm, Road Games and Patrick. He then moved to America and directed Psycho II, Cloak and Dagger, Link and FX2. Guitarist David Cameron, who had replaced Rick Dalton, decided to go to NIDA to pursue an acting career and subsequently landed roles in the ABC’s Bellbird before moving on to a host of mini-series and feature film appearances including Against the Wind and Dawn. Dalton went on to play with Running Jumping Standing Still, while bass player Geoff Ratz also left the band. The exception was Hanna who was still only fourteen, meaning leaving school for him wasn’t an option. So the two Rosses were left to contemplate their future and come up with a plan. In Wilson’s case this took on some urgency, ‘I’d been