Gonna Have a Good Time: The Complete US & UK Singles Collection - Best Hits for Parties, Road Trips & Music Lovers

The Easybeats represent part of my personal evolution through music. For whatever reason, the song 'Friday On My Mind' has always stood out in my own mind as an AM radio highlight, well before underground FM radio began blowing my mind away in the late 1960's. Other AM radio delights lodged in the recesses of my psyche along with 'Friday On My Mind' are 'Live For Today', 'Dirty Water', and 'G-L-O-R-I-A'. All are garage-rock classics, and that's what floated my boat before artists like Crosby, Stills and Nash and Dave Mason splashed on the scene. While I never became an Easybeat convert, seeing the band's scintillating live stage persona recently on a DVD collection convinced me to check out one of the many Easybeat compilations available. 'Gonna Have a Good Time', which collects together the band's US and UK single releases, seemed to fit the bill at the right price.The Easybeats are known as an Australian band, but the band members actually hailed from Scotland, England, and Holland. The most prominent members are lead singer and Davy Jones look-alike Stevie Wright, and songwriters George Young and Harry Vanya. Young and Vanya claim virtually all of the writing credits (Wright secures a co-write on 'Women'), and Young has an additional claim to fame as the elder brother to Angus and Malcolm Young, the driving forces within AC/DC. Young and Vanya put together some exceptional garage rock tunes, but their mistake was wandering into some of the other, more demanding genre's of the era, ignoring the adage to "keep it simple, stupid". They simply tried to do too much with too little.'Gonna Have a Good Time' is a lyric taken from one of the band's finer compositions, 'Good Times', which appears on track seventeen. 'Good Times' leads off a salvo of five late-career numbers that seem to represent a return to basics by the band. Of these last five tracks, four are wicked enough to produce shudders, and a decent piano-inspired instrumental, 'Lay Me Down and Die', somehow sneaks itself in (how many instrumentals are good enough to be released as singles anyway)? Although it features tinkling piano runs, it also boasts a piledriver beat and slick guitar that would probably impress Angus and Malcolm. And with fun lyrics like "Bony Marony's gonna be with Jim, Long Tall Sally's gonna be with Slim", it just cannot miss! Track nineteen brings us 'St. Louis', which topped out on the national charts at number 100, the band's most successful release save 'Friday On My Mind', which peaked at number sixteen. 'St. Louis' should have done for St. Louis what 'Dirty Water' did for Boston. 'Can't Find Love' follows and this song is another pure winner, featuring a thirsty beat and naughty guitars that run the table as an instrumental before morphing into an engaging blues-romp. The closer, 'Rock and Roll Boogie' is all it says it is (which is plenty), laying nice rhymes over a heavy, Chuck Berry-ish beat. And the song brings Long Tall Sally and even Wilson Pickett to the fore once more.The first five tracks are similarly appealing. Highlights include the Stray Cats/Ramones style churning garage-rock of 'Women', the urban, workingman anthem 'Friday On My Mind' (which makes great use of a simple "dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit" under "she is out of sight to me" in the chorus), and 'Made My Bed', which is reminiscent of early, frustrated Who tracks like 'Happy Jack'. The band was fond of experimenting outside of their forte, however, and the excursions seldom produced. One exception is the opener, 'Come and See Her', which uses a heavy bass thump for a melody, and lays a heavy bass background vocal on top of it for good measure. Tracks six through sixteen detail the band's slide into obscurity, hitting bottom with 'The Music Goes Round My Head', featuring a harpsichord and a melody that sounds like a bad rip-off of early Traffic, or even The United States of America. Echoed vocals announce the psychedelic-lite sounds of 'Come In You'll Get Pneumonia', where the band literally and figuratively may be trying to find themselves, and the piano-plus-strings ballad 'Hello How Are You?'. Tracks thirteen through fifteen are all lost love ballads, while 'We All Live Happily Together' has a chant comparable to "we all live in a yellow submarine", and for some odd reason includes annoying air raid sirens. 'Saturday Night', a natural follow-up to 'Friday On My Mind', is a mediocre, guitar-driven tune, as is 'Who'll Be the One'. 'Pretty Girl' layers some complex vocals in an Association or Hollies manner, and 'Heaven and Hell' got itself banned in England for some tart-ish lyrics, but really should have been banned for its weak melody and arrangement.All in all, too bad the boys didn't stick to the garage-rock, which they could really cook on. Retroactive includes an informative fifteen page booklet with the disc, probably telling you all you really need to know about the band. It also features quite a diverse collection of period photographs and artifacts from the band's heyday. And if you stick to the five opening tracks and the five closing tracks, the disc will live up to its moniker. Well worth a listen, and subsequent cherry-picking for 'Friday On My Mind', 'Women', 'Good Times', 'St. Louis', and 'Can't Find Love'. I've heard worse.