1 THE EASYBEATS   "Good Times" (1968) It took a teenage vampire movie and nearly two decades for "Good Times," The Easybeats' maracas-driven thunderclap off 1968's Vigil album, to break into the charts, reaching #2 in Australia, #18 in the United Kingdom and #47 in the United States. The only other song by the band to break the top 50 in all three markets was "Friday on My Mind," and that had happened round about the time it was supposed to: in 1967, not 1987. There has never been any rhyme or reason to success in the music business, especially the fortunes of The Easybeats, and this confirmed it. The movie was The Lost Boys , starring Kiefer Sutherland and directed by Joel Schumacher, and easily the best thing about it was the Australian song, a duet for Jimmy Barnes, former lead singer of beer-soaked pub giants Cold Chisel, and the late Michael Hutchence of INXS, featuring the backing of his five bandmates. Containing three talented Australian brothers of its own-Andrew, Jon and Tim Farriss-INXS was on its way to becoming an arena act with 1987's megaplatinum Kick , while Barnes was pushing hard to do the same thing with the self-titled and radio-geared Jimmy Barnes , a repackaged version of the For the Working Class Man album that had gone to #1 in Australia. But unlike INXS, he had failed to fire in the States. Now, though, the Glaswegian shrieker had an accidental American smash on his hands. A hit no one involved with the recording saw coming, "Good Times" having been initially covered to promote Australian Made, a loss-making Australia-only summer concert series conceived by Barnes's manager, Mark Pope, and INXS manager Chris Murphy as a means of showing that a homegrown festival featuring homegrown acts could compete with big international tours for bums on seats.

That all changed when Ahmet Ertegun got personally involved, as he had with AC/DC in the late 1970s. With his elder brother Nesuhi, the urbane Turkish-American co-founder of Atlantic Records came to belatedly get behind AC/DC, even after the band's second US album, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap , had been rejected by his own artists and repertoire (A&R) department. Ertegun heard the INXS-Barnes cover by chance in February 1987 and was bowled over. "They don't make rock records like this any more," he said. Accordingly a "softened up" US radiofriendly remix was put on The Lost Boys soundtrack and went on to sell a couple of million units. "Good Times" was a shrewd choice by Pope and Murphy: a four-on-the-floor ripsnorter begging for the sweat and spittle of Barnes but which also managed the feat of transforming the normally effete, slightly soft Hutchence into a figure so ballsy and cocksure with the microphone it was like the ghost of Jim Morrison or Bon Scott had entered his body. Mark Opitz, who produced the single, could see similarities with AC/DC's late figurehead, at the time only seven years dead: "Like Bon, Michael was a real gypsy. A singer in a band that wasn't necessarily the same as the rest of the band.

" But beyond the two impressive lead singers, then at the height of their powers, and the not-too-shabby group of musicians behind them, the choppy guitar riff was the star. It felt familiar, almost AC/DC like. For good reason, hinted at by the mysterious credit. This remake of a forgotten Easybeats song was the first time much of the MTV generation on both sides of the Pacific had heard something composed by George Young, the Jor-El of AC/DC. *   *   * When it was released as a single in 1968 under the US title of "Gonna Have a Good Time," having been recorded and produced the year before by Englishman Glyn Johns, "Good Times" sank without a trace, not even the backing vocals of Steve Marriott of Small Faces or the piano of Rolling Stones session pianist Nicky Hopkins able to cut the Australian band some chart slack. The only love it got in the States was an obscure but totally rocking, organ-scorched 1969 cover by a group of previously uncorrupted Mormon sisters from Utah, The Clingers, a cleancut rival act to The Osmonds. Looking for an image buster, they recruited Michael Lloyd and Kim Fowley as producers and released it under its US title. "Michael and I found it on an Easybeats album," says Fowley, a notable songwriter for Kiss, Alice Cooper and Warren Zevon, among others, who went on to create, manage and produce the greatest female rock band of all time, The Runaways, and would guide Guns N' Roses before they exploded on the rock scene in 1987.

"We played The Clingers the song and they learned it and we recorded it." Like so many bands, The Easybeats were just too far ahead of their time. The spate of covers of the song-some 40 of them and counting-was mostly to come in later years. Before 1970 had rolled around they broke up, "Friday on My Mind" both their biggest hit and their albatross. "The good thing about that Easybeats version is the high backing vocals," says Mark Opitz. "Marriott just happened to be in the next studio. I was a schoolkid when I first heard The Easybeats' 'She's So Fine' on the radio. I just thought, ' Fuck , what's this? This is great.

That's just brilliant.' I was blown away." Doug Thaler, keyboardist/guitarist for Ronnie Dio and the Prophets and later AC/DC's first American booking agent, heard "Good Times" in 1967 while on the same bill as The Easybeats in upstate New York on the Gene Pitney Cavalcade of Stars roadshow. Thaler went on to record the Vanda & Young tune but couldn't replicate the same swing. "It really grooved," he says. "I thought it was pretty funny that 20 years after The Easybeats played that song every night on tour over here somebody finally had a hit with it." Now intoxicated kids around Australia, England and America were throwing up on front lawns, down stairwells and in sand dunes as it shook the walls of house parties or reverberated from parked cars in makeout spots. "Good Times" was exactly as its title suggested: the kind of song you played on a Friday or Saturday night as a gee-up before you went out on the town.

An unapologetic boozing and shagging song: exactly what it was intended to be in 1968. But back then it couldn't resurrect The Easybeats' toxic career. There were rumors of drug use-heroin, no less-by one member (and it wasn't lead singer Stevie Wright) tearing the band apart. This and the band's failure to write another hit of the caliber of "Friday on My Mind" and the fact that for all their success they couldn't rub two pennies together cut George Young deep. He went off cursing under his breath about managers and record-company swindlers, hung around in London playing and recording music with Harry Vanda and older brother Alex Young, then returned to Sydney in 1973 from a "four-year binge" of creativity that his two pimply younger brothers were fortunate to absorb by osmosis and which ignited the beginnings of AC/DC. Some of the best work of this "binge," as George called it, is found on Marcus Hook Roll Band's Tales of Old Grand-Daddy , a 1973 album he started in London with Alex then finished in Sydney with the help of Malcolm and Angus. "Quick Reaction" and "Natural Man" are steeped in the sound of AC/DC. The bass line and power chords on "Natural Man," especially, are replicated almost note-for-note two years later on TNT 's "Live Wire.

" Martin Cerf, reviewing "Natural Man" for the Los Angelespublished Phonograph Record Magazine in 1973 when it was just an import on the Regal Zonophone label from England, described it perfectly as a natural progression from "Good Times" and saw the revolution that was coming when no one else did, not least a bunch of record companies in the United States that didn't know what to do with Marcus Hook. "If you can imagine what The Easybeats would have sounded like four years on should they have stayed together, then you know what 'Natural Man' is all about," he raved. "It's got a snare that tears speakers. It's got protest lyrics. It demands you dance. It's got Beatle harmonies. It's got a riff the best this side of The Hollies' 'Long Cool Woman' and 'Heaven Knows' by The Grass Roots, and a hook, well, now I know the reason for the group's name." Marcus Hook, incidentally, is a town outside Philadelphia.

Declared John Tait in Vanda & Young: Inside Australia's Hit Factory : "The album is pure power rock-a prototype for the sound that was to become the signature of AC/DC." *   *   * In Why AC/DC Matters , Anthony Bozza writes that nothing in The Easybeats' catalog "touches the musicality of 'Friday on My Mind.' It is their most innovative track, and the only one relevant to a discussion of AC/DC." Which is wildly wrong and underscores just how little some American critics really know about the music of The Easybeats, outside of AC/DC the most important Australian band of all time. Wrong because three other songs-"Sorry" (1966), "Good Times" (196.