JOK was not a matinee idol nor naturally blessed with a great voice but he skillfully developed a vocal style appropriate for his range and he had an incredible drive and stage presence, his wardrobe included leopard print, gold lame, lizard-skin shoes, and white buckskin moccasins, and he possessed a distinctively irrepressible larrikin Australian spirit. Such deals with DJs would result in the “payola” scandals in the US in the future which would engulf high profile American DJ and promoter Alan Freed and ruin his career. Tony Withers (above) was a 2SM disc jockey who was essentially “credited” with providing air-time to promote the record, Withers was taking cues from Alan Freed and Dick Clark (below), two high profile American DJs and promoters of the time, who invented similar royalties-sharing arrangements. The version of this song subsequently released in the USA in 1958 by Brunswick and Coral (UK) was apparently a remake of the song, retitled Real Wild Child, which did not feature any crowd sounds, and is generally regarded as the superior version of Wild One. JO’K tore up the vocals and revealed the influences of his idols Little Richard and Bill Hayley, and after The Wild One hit the charts and climbed to #20, he became the definitive embodiment of the Wild One. The song was released on the EP Shakin’ At the Stadium in 1958, and featured driving saxophones from Greenan and Owen, slap bass by Keith Williams, echo-inflected drums from Johnny “Catfish” Purser (recorded via the toilet in the studio), percussive finger snaps, pounding boogie-woogie piano by Mike Tseng and insistent guitar riffs from the talented Lou Casch, crowd noises were added on the album version of the song.
Although Iredale was more comfortable producing classical records, and he had many animated discussion with O’Keefe during the recording sessions, he was also a very innovative sound engineer, who devised an ingenious system of washers and lead weights to change the tempo and thus the pitch of the record, and he was one of the first to use the hard surfaces of toilets to create a distinctive echo chamber effect. (Syd.), with producer Robert Iredale, it was essentially a live recording as overdubbing wasn’t an option. What would become The Wild One was recorded on a two-track Ampex tape machine at Festival Records, Harris St Studios in Pyrmont. I suppose you could say that it was what became known as the permissive age.” The brawl inspired the lyrics “real wild children/real wild one /I gotta shake, I gotta jive.” Owens and Greenan (right and left above with JOK) came up with a 12-bar blues chord progression, O’Keefe started to pick out a simple melody on piano, he added the lyrics “ shake her till the meat comes offa the bone”, they were about to make rock and roll history. According to JO’K the violence was sex rather than alcohol-related as he revealed in an interview with Sydney DJ Bob Rogers in 1975 “There was never much grog associated with the early days of rock and roll. A savage brawl ensued, Johnny and the band observed the melee from the relative safety of the upstairs balcony, the police and numerous paddy wagons descended on the venue, it was Australia’s first rock and roll brawl, and the band went back to Dave Owen’s place to wind down.
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The band were performing a typically raucous gig on the top floor of the three-storey MUIOOF Hall in working class Newtown (Syd), while an equally lively Italian wedding reception was in full swing a floor below, the groups merged in the toilets where harsh words were exchanged and the honor of the Italian girls was impugned. The Wild One (A Withers/D Owen/J Greenan/J O’Keefe) – Johnny O’Keefe and the Dee Jays 1958
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