Hope I Die Before I Get Old. Not.

From their 1972 album Teenage Heaven, please enjoy awesome antipodean rockers Daddy Cool and a song which is the unsuspected missing link between Eddie Cochran and Alice Cooper -- the epochal "Teenage Blues."





I posted about these guys a couple of years back, but for those of you who missed it, here's the short version:

I used to have this album on vinyl -- a consequence of being on the Warner Bros. Records freebie list as my old college paper's in-house rock crit -- and although I vaguely recalled enjoying it (or at least some of the songs) I lost my copy ages ago and more or less forgot about it. So when it turned up on a now shuttered download site, I auditioned it under the headphones mostly from idle curiosity.

And flipped my geriatric lid.

I have since been informed by estimable PowerPop commenter Peter Scott, who blogs about Down Under bands over at Peter's Power Pop, that these guys are about as iconic as you can get in Australia; their biggest hit -- "Eagle Rock" -- was Number 1 on the Ozzie charts for ten(!) weeks back in 1971. Peter also informed me that said hit is so utterly ubiquitous in his homeland that it took him years before he could get over being sick of it and actually appreciate how great a band they were.

In any case, this stoner sort-of haiku from "Teenage Blues" -- "I've been thinking a lot/About getting a job but/I'm paranoid about my hair" -- has got to be one of the greatest opening lines not just in pop music but in the entire history of literary endeavor going back to the Greeks.

And this later bit -- "Don't wanna get a job/Don't wanna go to school/Just wanna hang around/street corners like a fool" -- is actually even better.

I should further add that I was moved to write about all this after having discovered this 2009 live performance -- with the song's composer, the obviously years past teenage Ross Wilson belting it out with undiminished aplomb -- on YouTube the other day.



The album does not seem to be available legitimately over at Amazon, BTW; if I can find another site where you can download it, I'll let you know.