If you grew up in Australia then you're well versed in the music of Daddy Cool...whether you know it or not. Daddy Cool are a phenomenon in this country. Indeed, tracks like 'Eagle Rock' and 'Come Back Again' are part of the nations collective unconscious right up there with 'Waltzing Matilda' and the national anthem. 1971 saw DC as the most popular band in Australia. 'Eagle Rock', their very first single, topped the charts. Their debut album Daddy Who? Daddy Cool was the biggest selling record in the history of Australian music. They were an up, good time band equally inspired by 50s doo-wop as the progressive concerns of the early seventies. Indeed, Daddy Cool was born out of a Melbourne project with the unwieldy prog moniker Sons of the Vegetal Mother that featured all DC's core members - singer/guitarist Ross Wilson, guitarist Ross Hannaford, bassist Wayne Duncan and Gary Young on drums - stoner dudes with long hair and beards singing classic doo-wop with a real 70s attitude. They released two albums, an EP and a fistful of singles before a premature split at the end of 1972. Re-united to play the first Sunbury Festival in early 1974 they released a live album and a couple more 45s before, again, breaking up. I've spoken to Ross a few times about the music of Daddy Cool for a variety of publications. He's an intense guy, well aware of his talent and his place. But it's always enjoyable. Below is a compilation of our various chats.

Why do you think Daddy Cool captured people's imaginations back in 1971?
For the same reason 'Eagle Rock' still works today. We delivered what we promised. Our manifesto was to make a joyful noise and get those bodies moving. From our first performance we achieved our goal and then later managed to capture it on tape with the help of producer Robie Porter who understood what we were doing.

Was Daddy Cool formed by serious musicians as an antidote to the 'serious' music of the late 60s/early 70s?
Although Daddy Cool acted as an antidote to the prog rock floor sitter music that was the underground alternative to 70s pop, it was more a reflection of my habit of including humour in all of the bands I had formed up to that point, together with a genuine desire to tap into the naïve innocence and energetic good times of early 50s rock, pop, R & B and doo wop. All four members had a good practical knowledge of these forms and we were really lucky that we had the full harmony vocal range between us too; my falsetto, Gary and Wayne's tenors and Hanna's bass vocals allowed us to explore doo wop convincingly.

It appears you guys had one foot firmly in the doo wop camp and another in the progressive concerns of the early 70s.
Singing doo wop, or any four part harmony, is a lot of fun but I was also blending pre-war Mississippi Delta Blues sounds with post-war influences and that's where 'Eagle Rock', 'Come Back Again' and 'Hi Honey Ho' are coming from. The first album was very much the love affair I was having with early 50s R&B and pre-war rural blues whereas, by the time we started preparing the second album I felt I had explored that area enough and was hankering to return to more contemporary themes ala my pre-Daddy Cool groups The Party Machine and Sons of the Vegetal Mother. So you get 'Love in an FJ' and 'Make Your Stash' in counterpoint to 'Bom Bom' and 'Lollipop' - the good Daddy Cool versus the evil acid dropping, dope smoking Daddy Cool. I still do that today - just because I helped pen 'A Touch of Paradise' doesn't mean I feel I shouldn't offer 'No Soul' as a serious piece with a social message.

How did the name come about - was it taken straight from the Rays' song called 'Daddy Cool'?

No. We were rehearsing the four piece and calling it Daddy Cool when a neighbour of mine, Peter Scott, said he had the disc called 'Daddy Cool'. I'd never heard of it so he brought it over and we learnt it straight away. Synchronicity I guess.

Now these days Australian radio has boiled Daddy Cool down to two - at most three - songs; what rewards do you feel there are for fans wanting to delve deeper?
I feel very fortunate that we still receive any airplay at all thirty years after the fact. The great thing is that those two or three songs that have endured are fantastic signposts to the quality of Daddy Cool's work - on certain material the 4-piece Daddy Cool is peerless. There have been very few attempts at Daddy Cool tribute bands because once you try and analyse what is going on in, say, 'Eagle Rock', then try and to emulate it, its just impossible for other people to sound like that magic combo. So those two or three songs are our calling cards and new listeners with good taste and ears do discover our other material. The only negative is that it is compilations and not entire original albums that they are led to but now that BMG have acquired the Daddy Cool catalogue, we are working together on getting the original albums released in tact in CD format for the first time.

Well, let me ask you about those songs. Let's start with 'Eagle Rock'...
How I wrote 'Eagle Rock' has been well documented. It was while I was in the U.K. in 1969 singing and writing with Procession there was a Sunday Times liftout magazine A-Z on music. In the before blues section there was an evocative photo of rural black Americans dancing in a dirt poor juke joint - the caption was along the lines of "some negroes 'cut the pigeon wing' and 'do the eagle rock'". I was mucking around on guitar trying to get a bluesy finger pickin' thing going and had come up with the 'Eagle Rock' riff. It sounded so good I went around asking band members if they'd heard it before cos I thought maybe I'd nicked it. Everyone said they hadn't heard it before so I reckoned it was mine. I decided that this song would be called 'Eagle Rock'. I didn't write the chorus until I'd completed the overland trek through Europe, India, and South-East Asia and arrived back in Melbourne early 1970. When I put Sons of the Vegetal Mother together we started performing the song at the T.F.Much Ballroom shows at Cathedral Hall, Brunswick St. Then when Daddy Cool splintered off Sons of the Vegetal Mother it became a principal song in our repertoire. People loved the song so much we would play it twice a night and by the time we hit the studio early 1971 it was in the finely tuned form that made it to disc. Now I reckon it is part of our oz collective consciousness & DNA. Long live 'Eagle Rock'!

Tell us about the 'Eagle Rock' film clip - it still gets a fair work out today.
It was put together quickly for $300 and shows the band in some old Melbourne haunts including the Dolphin Café in Clarendon St., South Melbourne, St. Kilda's Aussie Burger Bar opposite Luna Park and live shots from the 1971 Myponga Festival held in South Australia. Everybody assumes that concert footage was shot after we cut the record but it wasn't. There were all these people going nuts at a festival and they were seeing us for the first time and that was months before we'd even been in the studio. To me that documents what was happening because we really were going down a storm.

What about 'Come Back Again'?

'Come Back Again' was written as we neared recording time and I wanted some material similar to 'Eagle Rock'. It's in the same key, A, and I use the same syncopated thumb and forefinger picking style. The repetitive eight bar form is probably one of the purest things I've ever done and live Daddy Cool would jam on it for up to ten minutes at a time - its beautiful. The lyric uses 'blue' and 'crazy' too many times but the story of a loser who won't take no for an answer is just great and funny and ties in well with other Daddy Who? material like 'Blind Date'. The first verse about 'moping around the streets late at night / worried because you ain't treatin' me right' and the later one 'went to the dance but I went all alone / watched you dance and then I followed you home' have a perfect psychotic-lite quality to them. The ones about her mum and dad are good too. 'Come Back Again' is one of my all time faves because of its anachronistic style and its simplicity. 'Eagle Rock' gets flogged so much that I'm sure many people are sick of it but I've never heard a bad word said about 'Come Back Again' and it still goes down a storm. Because of 'Come Back Again' country feel we cut a C&W flip 'Just as Long as We're Together' to go on the single. It has great lap steel by Daddy Cool producer Robie (Rob.E.G) Porter.

Tell us about 'Bom Bom' - the B-side to 'Eagle Rock' - written by you and Ross Hannaford only days before your first recording session...
It's got a lot of momentum. It just sits up and it's really fast and bouncy. It's probably the fastest song we ever did. It came together in the studio too. What really made it happen was when Robie Porter sat down and overdubbed the piano and we slowed down the tape and sped up the backing vocals to give it that slightly chipmunky flavour. The first album and the EP have this very nice enthusiasm. We really captured that naïve thing and that's why little kids still love those records. They love 'Bom Bom', they love the 'Daddy Cool' song and they love 'Lollipop'.

Your second LP was titled Sex, Dope, Rock 'n' Roll: Teenage Heaven - how did this go down in 1972?
This title didn't go down too well with the conservatives in 1972. In fact some of the fans we made with our first album were surprised to find that their cuddly, funny, lollipopping, eagle rockers were actually subversive counter-culturists as well who were letting their TF Much Ballroom roots show. A Catholic Mothers' Association complained and Myers (department store) withdrew stock which definitely hurt sales and stirred the controversy pot. I thought the title was spot on. In the US it became simply Teenage Heaven which probably would have done the job ok here too without the flack.

'Please Please America (Hear My Plea)' is a pretty blatant call for Americans to hand over their money to the group. You toured the US a fair bit around this time. Was it played to Americans?
'Please Please America'was our sarcastic response to our first visit to the US in August '71. Like other material on the album it was influenced by the Frank Zappa attitude that we were into at the time. The music came from my previous group The Party Machine. The title of the original song was 'We All Live On A Camel Farm' (Part 3 of a six-part camel suite) which also had a monologue in the middle...about camels.

Did the Americans take you up on your plea?
I think the US critics liked the song. In the states the album re-package deleted 'Make Your Stash' and 'Sixty Minute Man' and included instead the US recorded songs 'I'll Never Smile Again' and 'Teenage Blues', which made for a more compact, listenable album. Recently a friend of mine attended an international music industry wedding in Venice, Italy - not California. Guests included Ahmet Ertegan and others of his stature. Seymour Stein became very excited when he learned my friend knew the guy from Daddy Cool - moi - and requested that a copy of our 20 best CD (Daddy's Coolest) be sent to him. Shucks they do care after all.

As you say church groups objected to the album because of 'Sixty Minute Man' and 'Baby Let Me Bang Your Box'? Did it strike you as funny since these songs had previously been released in the 50s?
We loved doing anything with sexy double meanings. 'Sixty' and 'Bang' were both big R&B hits in the early '50's i.e before white folks "invented" rock'n'roll and decided that those black folks couldn't have any fun anymore. Glad to say it didn't work. If you explore the genres you'll find an amazing amount of blatantly sexual, funny, well recorded, well played black post-war R&B, til R&R took over pop and blanded out.

'Hi Honey Ho' is a brilliant song especially the long 6 minutes 45 seconds version which absolutely rocks along.
'Hi Honey Ho' was a pretty good attempt at writing another Daddy Cool song in the style of 'Eagle Rock' and 'Come Back Again'. Like 'Come Back Again', the single version was an edit of the much longer jammin' album version. Sad to say neither of the extended versions have ever come out on CD with the catastrophic consequence that when the record catalogue was sold to BMG a few years ago they never received the tapes of the long versions and they may well have been lost. The saxes were on this track cos our new member, briefly, Jerry Noone played sax and piano. We got to record a big sax section which is a sound I really like. I was very influenced by the West Coast/L.A. R&B combos that backed Richard Berry, Marvin & Johnny and vocal groups like the Cadets. They had these really tight, punchy sax sections doing Duke Ellington harmonies and having a real sax player in the band we were able to do something pretty cool with 'Hi Honey Ho'.

Some people talk about 'Make Your Stash' in prog-rock terms and it sticks out from the rest of the Teenage Heaven album.
'Make Your Stash' uses one of the themes from Gustav Holsts' Planets Suite. I wrote it while I was in the UK with Procession. when I came back Spectrum recorded on their first album. Mike Rudd had been in Party Machine and Sons Of The Vegetal Mother with Ross Hannaford and me. Later Procession guitarist Mick Rogers joined Manfred Mann and they did a whole album based on the Planets Suite. In the song that uses the 'Stash' theme they also used the bridge that I had written. But I couldn't really complain because we were all using and abusing Holst. Anyway Manfred Mann owes me big time cos their album was an international prog rock hit. And I, once again, owe Frank Zappa as I initially got the idea and feel from the Mothers' King Kong double album. Great album.

Who did the comic book scenes in the Teenage Heaven foldout?
Ian MacCausland did the inner sleeve graphics for Sex, Dope & Rock 'n' Roll and also the great cartoon of Daddy Cool that is used on the cover of the first album and the hits collection Daddy's Coolest. He was really into the band and understood what the second album was about.

I've read that Americans mention you as the stoner version of Sha-Na-Na as a way to describe Daddy Cool. How do you feel about that?
Sha Na Na were a show band who got famous 'cos of the Woodstock movie. We wrote a lot of our own songs and were more interested in pre-rock 'n' roll R&B and doowop. They were into the kitsch of the rock 'n' roll era. We met Sha Na Na on a plane once, then on the same night played a gig with the other eminent US 50's revival band of the time Flash Cadillac and slaughtered them. Musically we were way ahead of Sha Na Na too.

'Teen Love'/'Drive in Movie'/'Love in an F.J.' - it's a concept piece?
The 'Teen Love' trilogy is another Zappaesque excursion that almost comes off. We were being pretty ambitious but time restraints in the studio lead to this being rushed through and I've always always been disappointed in the overall result.

Did you have anyone in mind when you wrote 'Donna Forgive Me'? Could you see a Bronx corner shop/black quartet vocal group singing it?
Same with 'Donna Forgive Me' which is a beautifully constructed song but only about 80% there in performance, especially my vocal. I didn't have anyone in mind when I wrote it but a Donna I knew in Adelaide thought it was about her and was very touched. The 'ah-ya' vocal backings were a steal from/tribute to the doowop song 'Deserie' by The Charts which I used to listen to a lot.

What about a song like 'Daddy Rocks Off' - to me it sounds like filler.

It was re-written from a John Lee Hooker inspired tune called 'We're Gonna Boogie' we played in the Party Machine. I've got to like that song more than I did originally. I really like the stuff that Hannaford does on it, all those crazy guitars and its got bongos and all kinds of things we didn't usually use. I also like the sentiment of it. Getting across the idea that 'you can call it gospel, soul, you can call it rock 'n' roll, you can call it jazz - I don't care what you do. All sounds the same to me - beautiful music'. Well, that's my philosophy and I think it's really good that it's stated as clearly as that.

What or who was Sparmac Productions?
Sparmac Productions was the label started by DJ Ken Sparkes (Spar) and John MacDonald (mac) owner of the Disc Shop in Bourke Street. We didn't want to go with a major label and John Macdonald knew me from earlier days when I used to buy imports from his shop. Ken Sparkes had just sold his share to Robbie Porter who was blown away when he and Macdonald came to one of our Melb TH concerts where people were going nuts. So we did a deal with them, and Porter, who was based in the US, produced. The first album was done in two and half days. He mixed it in the states which made a huge difference and is why we sound so different to all the other Aussie groups from back then. The second album was done in about a week but we didn't have the advantage of having roadtested the material.

Because of the enormous success of Daddy Who? Daddy Cool! the Teenage Heaven album is very neglected - do you think it's ready for re-discovery?
Overall I reckon we could have done with more time but the pressures of overnight success and all that went with it, messed things up a bit. Also Hannaford and I were angling to get back to Party Machine, Sons of the Vegetal Mother type material which is why 'Stash', 'Please America' and 'FJ', a Sons of the Vegetal Mother song, appear on the record. The public would have preferred stuff like 'Lollipop'. I don't reckon BMG have any interest in releasing any of the albums in their original formats and, like I said, they don't have those long versions, and the Mighty Kong album has disappeared altogether. When Robbie Porter sold his Wizard/Sparmac catalogue to BMG all he gave them was whatever was already on CD. BMG don't know where the tapes are and probably don't care, being content to churn out compilations. Personally, I'd like to see them available in the original forms as well as in 'greatest' packages.

Daddy Cool wore Mickey Mouse ears and Archie caps with propellers but under the good time exterior beat a progressive rock heart. In response to the overwhelming popularity generated by their debut album they released an enigmatic follow up - Sex, Dope, Rock 'n' Roll: Teenage Heaven. It created quite a different stir to the first. The mere title outraged church groups who lobbied hard against it. A cover of a naughty 50s R&B tune - 'Baby Let Me Bang Your Box' - had it banned by department stores. The album went top 10 but bombed by comparison to the debut.

"The title didn't go down too well with the conservatives in 1972," Daddy Cool frontman Ross Wilson admits. "In fact some of the fans we made with our 1st album were surprised to find that their cuddly, funny, lollipopping, eagle rockers were actually subversive counter-culturists as well who were letting their TF Much Ballroom roots show. I thought the title was spot on. In the US it became simply Teenage Heaven which probably would have done the job ok here too without the flack."

Teenage Heaven is an ambitious and adventurous set containing 50s tributes combined with concept tracks, prog-madness and inspired jam outs. The style could best be described as "doo prog". Influenced by doo wop as much as heavy progressive rock. Indeed, Daddy Cool was born out of a band with the unwieldy moniker of Sons of the Vegetal Mother that featured all the members of DC - Wilson, guitarist Ross Hannaford, bassist Wayne Duncan and Gary Young on drums.

"Overall I reckon we could have done with more time but the pressures of overnight success, and all that went with it, messed things up a bit," Wilson admits. "Also Hannaford and I were angling to get back to Party Machine, Sons of the Vegetal Mother type material which is why 'Make Your Stash', 'Please, Please America' and 'Love in an FJ' appear on the record. The public would have preferred stuff like 'Lollipop'."

Thirty years later the two albums - Daddy Who? Daddy Cool! and Teenage Heaven have been reduced by radio to three songs. 'Eagle Rock' - a bonafide chart-topping classic that vies for the most played and recognised Australian rock song of all time. The irrepressible 'Come Back Again' and coming in a distant third is 'Hi Honey Ho' - the first single off Teenage Heaven. But, for my mind, 'Hi Honey Ho' rivals both 'Eagle Rock' and 'Come Back Again' as Daddy Cool's greatest track. Punchy and immediate the edited version charted #13 but it's the 6 minute 45 second album cut that's more impressive. Much heavier than the previous singles it sounds like the Stones at Kooyong. Wilson doesn't agree.

"Hi Honey Ho' was a pretty good attempt at writing another Daddy Cool song in the style of 'Eagle Rock' and 'Come Back Again'," he says. "Like 'Come Back Again', the single version was an edit of the much longer jammin' album version. Sad to say neither of the extended versions have ever come out on CD with the catastrophic consequence that when the record catalogue was sold to BMG a few years ago they never received the tapes of the long versions and they may well have been lost. The saxes were on this track cos our new member (briefly) Jerry Noone played sax and piano."

The double entendre sex angle tracks that created a lot of the controversy were both covers of 50s R&B tunes. These days both 'Baby Let Me Bang Your Box' and 'Sixty Minute Man' come off as curiosities rather than great while 'Daddy Rocks Off' is filler. Once again Wilson can't agree. "'Bang' and 'Sixty Minute Man' both rip," he says. "'Baby Let Me Bang Your Box' is as good an interpretation and update of the original as you'll find anywhere. Actually I've never heard any other versions. They may sound old fashioned but that was the point."

However, the Wilson penned 'Donna Forgive Me' is a magnificent song. A doo wop gem written in an Australian suburb but custom built for Dion & the Belmonts and a Bronx street corner. "'Donna Forgive Me' is a beautifully constructed song but only about 80% there in performance, especially my vocal," Wilson says. "I didn't have anyone in mind when I wrote it but a Donna I knew in Adelaide thought it was about her and was very touched. The ah-ya vocal backings were a steal from/tribute to the doo wop song 'Deserie' by the Charts which I used to listen to a lot."

Americans saw Daddy Cool as a stoner version of Sha Na Na but while DC drew inspiration from the 50s they were never a sock hop caricature. "Sha Na Na were a show band who got famous cos of the Woodstock movie,' Wilson says. "We wrote a lot of our own songs and were more interested in pre-r'n'r/ r&b and doo wop. They were into the kitsch of the r'n'r era. We met Sha Na Na on a plane once, then on the same night played a gig with the other eminent US 50's revival band of the time Flash Cadillac, and slaughtered them. Musically we were way ahead of Sha Na Na too."

The release of Sex, Dope, Rock 'n' Roll: Teenage Heaven showed DC were a lot closer to Frank Zappa's 50s doo wop invention Ruben & the Jets. To hear the Zappa influence Wilson points to the concept piece within the album ('Teen Love/Drive-In Movie/Love in an F.J'.) and songs like 'Make Your Stash' and 'Please, Please America (Hear My Plea)' - a blatant cry to Americans to give their money to the band.

"'Please Please America' was our sarcastic response to our first visit to the US in August '71," Wilson explains. "Like other material on the album it was influenced by the Frank Zappa attitude that we were into at the time. The music came from my previous group the Party Machine. The title of the original song was 'We All Live On A Camel Farm' - part three of a six part camel suite - which also had a monologue in the middle ... about camels.

"The 'Teen Love' trilogy is another Zappaesque excursion. We were being pretty ambitious but time restraints in the studio lead to this being rushed through."

Meanwhile the most progressive song on the album is 'Make Your Stash'. It was later dropped from the American version of the album but as the last song on the Australian version definitely takes the music somewhere else. 'Make Your Stash' uses one of the themes from Gustav Holsts' Planets Suite. I wrote it while I was in the UK with Procession," Wilson says. "When I came back Spectrum recorded it on their first album - Mike Rudd had been in Party Machine and Sons Of The Vegetal Mother with Hannaford and me. Later Procession guitarist Mick Rogers joined Manfred Mann and they did a whole album based on the Planets Suite. In the song that uses the 'Stash' theme they also used the bridge that I had written. But I couldn't really complain because we were all using and abusing Holst. Anyway Manfred Mann owes me big time cos their album was an international prog rock hit. I, once again, owe Frank Zappa as I initially got the idea and feel from the Mothers' King Kong double album. Great album."

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