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Topic: Discovered: rock'n'roll's scratchy start (NSC) Return to archive
June 7th, 2005 08:24 AM
Ten Thousand Motels Discovered: rock'n'roll's scratchy start
June 4, 2005

Was Vic Sabrino the singer who unwittingly introduced rock music to Australia?
Steve Waldon reports.

This little detective story involves three 78-rpm records, an indigenous singer, more than one pivotal moment in the history of rock music, and a recording secret lost in 50 years of hazy memories.

The late Johnny O'Keefe is regarded as the true founder of Australian rock'n'roll, his 1957 song The Wild One being the first of its type recorded here. An Australian-composed rock song by an Australian artist, it lives on 48 years later in Iggy Pop's version Real Wild Child, which has propelled the ABC music show Rage for nearly two decades.

That would make 2007 the 50th anniversary of Australian rock'n'roll. O'Keefe is not alive to celebrate it.

Nor is George Assang, aka Vic Sabrino, who died in Nowra in 1997, but who just might have beaten O'Keefe by a year or two. Assang was born on Thursday Island in 1927, with Aboriginal, Islander and Asian blood flowing in his veins and a hearty voice that got him plenty of work fronting dance bands.

Not many people remember Assang now. Once emphysema cut short his singing career, he co-starred in some Australian television series in the late 1960s - including a gig as diving expert Jack Meuraki in Barrier Reef.

As singer Vic Sabrino, Assang carved his place in music history. He recorded a few tracks with Red Perksey and his orchestra. Three old 78s now being held at ScreenSound Australia's Canberra archives were pressed on the Pacific label of Australian Record Co. Their provenance is unknown.

The A-side is The Magic Of Love, but it is the B-side that has historians scratching their heads: a jazzy version of Rock Around The Clock, recorded more famously on April 12, 1954, by American Bill Haley and His Comets. This is intriguing, because the song did not become a hit until it was used in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle.

If, as some archivists conclude, Sabrino's recording is from 1955, there must be some conjecture about whether he had heard the song before he recorded it. Fifty years ago, it was still common for artists to learn a song from sheet music.

Certainly, the Sabrino-Perksey rendition can scarcely be classified as rock'n'roll. It has more of a jazz-swing feel, and Sabrino's lead vocal is more Dean Martin than Bill Haley.

Some people involved in this detective story believe Sabrino's recording was more likely from 1956. He must have seen the film or heard Haley's single to have considered recording it, they reckon. And the record's catalogue and matrix numbers are more closely aligned to other records cut in 1956-57.

In his book Buried Country: The Story of Australian Country Music, Clinton Walker also says Sabrino's version of Rock Around The Clock was recorded for Pacific in 1956.

But recording session production notes indicate a 1955 date and this is backed by Mike Sutcliffe from Australian Record Collector magazine, who places the recording session at June-July 1955 - just on 50 years ago. He bases this on a catalogue from the period that lists Sabrino's 78 as being released in August 1955.

ScreenSound's audio services manager Nick Weare concedes it is a mystery.

"This is where the story gets a bit confused," he says. "We don't know whether Sabrino had heard Rock Around The Clock. When you listen to his version, it's so different, you have to wonder . . ."

Weare knows Australian popular music veteran Col Joye, who has told him Sabrino's version is the first Australian recording of Rock Around The Clock. Everyone, it seems, agrees. ScreenSound archivist Dan Fernandez says the argument about what constitutes Australia's first rock'n'roll record gets down to semantics.

Fernandez believes Sabrino's would probably be the first rock record cut in Australia, but Australia's first rock song was O'Keefe's Wild One in 1957.

ScreenSound Australia is also known as the National Screen and Sound Archive. In its Mitchell vaults it holds an abundance of Australian cultural history. As Weare and collections manager Victoria Ramshaw point out, ScreenSound experiences the same dilemma as other institutional collections: what is worth saving, and what are they going to do when the storage facility is choked?

Mr Weare is buoyant when The Age visits. In the warehouse is an extensive collection of studio tapes, records, production notes and other paraphernalia from INXS's recording career.

What troubles Mr Weare, Mr Fernandez and Ms Ramshaw is the amount of material in the hands of private collectors, who are secretive about items in their possession. "We say to them, 'Look, we've heard you've got it, we're not trying to take it from you, just lend it to us so we can copy it for posterity and we'll give it back to you'," Mr Weare says.

"You know, the only film copy we are holding of Russell Morris' The Real Thing is a video copied from a television screening. Someone must have the original film, and we know it's not Russell or us."
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