The Austrian Evergreens

Founded in 1961, house band at the Star Club Wien

The Austrian Evergreens were formed in late 1961. A year later the young singer and compère Hannes Patek heard the band in Transdanubia, the Viennese districts across the Danube, and hired them on the spot as his backing group. He also made them the regular house band of his weekly “Junge Generation Ottakring” series at the Albert-Sever-Saal in Vienna-Ottakring, which a little later became the Star Club Wien.¹ Patek had founded a youth club in the hall in 1961 that grew into the largest and most successful youth club in Austria.² There the Evergreens shared the stage at short intervals with show stars such as Udo Jürgens, Ralf Bendix, Gus Backus and Mike Rogers.¹

In late 1962 the band’s first single appeared on the tiny Wienerlied label Rex Roval, “Susi-Twist / Tabu”: on the A-side Patek with a German version of Bill Haley’s “Where'd You Go Last Night”, on the B-side the band alone with “Tabu”, a rock ’n’ roll version of the well-known exotica theme. It was recorded live on stage with a Revox tape machine and a handful of microphones. “There was no such thing as overdubs,” the organist Peter Cabla remembers.¹

“Olymp”: the first composition on record

About a year and a half later the scene repeated itself. On the stage of the Albert-Sever-Saal, Patek recorded “Skinny Minny”, the signature tune he sang every week at the Star Club, again for Rex Roval and again in a do-it-yourself studio set up on stage within an hour. The Evergreens backed him and were given the flip side for a number of their own. Their guitarist Harry Pepl “hastily composed a tough ‘Apache’ rip-off”: “Olymp”.³ The model, Jerry Lordan’s “Apache”, had topped the UK charts for five weeks in 1960 in the version by the Shadows.⁴ The Trash Rock Archives introduce Pepl as “Guitar player and later-Jazz-legend” and call “Olymp” “one of the finest instrumental-killers” of early Austrian beat.³ The single “Skinny Minny / Olymp” (Rex Roval 35-6105) was released in 1964. It is the earliest release on which Pepl is documented, and “Olymp” his earliest composition on record.⁵ In 1965 two further singles by Patek with the Evergreens followed, on Polydor and on Supercord.²

Hit parade, bossa nova and Josephine Baker

Until the early 1970s Pepl was under contract with the band, which at times also appeared as “The Austrian Aces”; how the two names came about could no longer be established.⁶ The repertoire included bossa novas, vocal pieces by the Four Freshmen and above all songs from the current charts, among them many by the Beatles. Concerts in cinemas sold out completely, and the band played seasonal engagements and toured Europe. In Seefeld in Tyrol it once accompanied Josephine Baker, then about 65, for Pepl the first star he made music with. He also remembered an LP that earned the band a gold record.⁶ In 1988 the Kleine Zeitung recalled the tours of the “Austrian Aces”, which took them, among other places, to the Graz scene venue “Palette” of the day.⁷

The school of listening

Because not everyone in the band read music, Pepl transcribed the individual parts of every cover by ear and played them to his bandmates until they had them down.⁶ “I transcribed and arranged everything for the band,” he told Nikolaus Kohler. “I think transcribing helped me enormously, because it is very good ear training.” But his passion was jazz: “I always played jazz too, just not in public.”⁸ After the gigs, the Kleine Zeitung writes, he withdrew to his room to keep practising.⁷ Kohler sees in this period one root of something that stayed with Pepl all his life: the knowledge of the perfection that composed music demands.⁹

The move into the studio

In the early 1970s Pepl left the band in the middle of a tour: “Back then I thought that the most wonderful thing must be to be a studio musician, because that way I could always play.”¹⁰ Back in Vienna he met the pianist Peter Ponger at the jazz department of the Conservatory. Soon Ernst Kugler, conductor of the ORF Big Band, heard him and invited him to the ORF studio. This was the beginning of his engagement of several years with the big band.¹⁰

Rediscovered

In 2014 the compilation “Schnitzelbeat Volume 1” reissued “Olymp” among rarities of Austrian rock ’n’ roll and beat from 1957 to 1965.¹¹ The liner notes by the Trash Rock Archives tell the band’s story, drawing on conversations with the organist Peter Cabla.¹