BENZEDRINE
BEAT – The Purple Hearts (Half a Cow)
A music fanatic of my acquaintance and someone with no small depth
of taste recently opined that much-feted Australian ‘60s band the Missing
Links were totally overrated. Just a Pretty Things rip-off, he ventured. And
he has a point – to an 
extent.
The recorded legacy of Australian ‘60s music that was below the
radar (and indeed the commercial stuff) is highly derivative. How could it not
be when the place was as isolated as all fuck and the main source of personnel
for bands doing anything remotely different was the influx of English migrants,
whose own influences were an appropriation of neglected black US music?
So maybe the Masters Apprentices were the first (semi) home-grown Aussie band
to break the mould. It’s a proposition worthy of a Masters degree dissertation,
if you’ll excuse the pun, but the point needs to be made that historical
judgements of these kind are based somewhat on sketchy oral histories. For a
band not playing the cover song game, getting into a studio and committing something
to acetate in the 1960s was as much of a crapshoot as was inspiring some backwater
radio station to play the music. Opportunity only knocked for a handful, and
who knows how lauded the Tol-puddle Martyrs or The Elois would have been if they’d
had the chance to record original LPs or compete in, let alone win, a Battle
of the Bands?
The point of this lengthy intro was to say you can only judge these bands on
what’s survived and putting it in a broader context is difficult. For that
reason I come to praise, not bury, the latest legacy release from Half a
Cow, “Benzedrine Beat”. It collates all the known recordings
of the Purple Hearts, a provocatively-named Brisbane beat band whose only stated
ambition was to make R & B music mainstream.
They probably did do just that for a time, especially after leaving Brisbane
for Melbourne. They also made some pretty great and obscure recordings (with
the emphasis on “obscure”, ensuring a paucity of original songs went
unnoticed). And they did provide a springboard for ‘70s guitar hero
Lobby Loyde to forge a career on blown amplifiers and minds.
Four of the 14 Hearts tunes are unreleased and they’re all (as far as I
can tell) chronologically laid out. The songs chart a clear path of early derivation
(“Talking ‘Bout You”, a faltering “Gloria” and “Louie
Louie”) to re-arrangement and inspiration. You can hear the Hearts grow
in confidence on later songs like the classic “Of Hopes And Dreams And
Tombstones” (a re-arranged American R & B obscurity) and their best
known tune, “Early in the Morning”.
Loyde is the best-known Heart but actually joined the band soon after its founding.
His playing is a joy and a heavy hint of things to come, but the rest of the
band weren’t slouches. Mick Hadley in particular is an outstanding singer/blues
shouter and harmonica exponent. There’s a fire in the playing that sets
the Hearts a step above many, if not most, of their contemporaries, and for this
reason alone you need to hear this disc.
Half a Cow have done their usual excellent job by packaging the whole
shebang with a detailed 36-page booklet, built around an excellently-written
Ben Whitten essay. What’s evident is the previously unsung roles played
by bassist Bob Dames (as co-founder and namer of the band) and fan Clive Murray
White, a UK expat from whose record collection they drew their earliest material.
Rounding things off are seven unreleased cuts from the earliest incarnation of
the Coloured Balls, the post-Hearts spin-off whose name, if not membership, later
became a vehicle for Lobby Loyde to break nationally after his own greasy ‘n’ loud
Wild Cherries dissolved. These tracks are culled from rehearsals and live shows.
It was always going to be a cold day in hell when a Jethro Tull tune got played
in the I-94 Bar, but there are two included (one of them twice). I feared they'd
be done in all their flute-driven mediocrity. In the hands of these Coloured
Balls, they’re
actually not too bad and the closing live “Living in the USA” is
a raucous slice of lo-fi wonder. Hadley took a vocal backseat to main
singer Michael Shannon in this outfit but the enduring Bob Dames was a rock on
bass. Another band thwarted by its abject lack of ambition but enjoyable, all
the same.
Bring on the Wild Cherries retrospective! - The Barman
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