THE MASTER'S APPRENTICES

The people who make these decisions have chosen to categorise Masters Apprentices as 'proto-prog', but in truth they were latecomers to prog, even by Australian standards. They began in the mid 60s as one of Australia's best R&B/garage-punk bands, set apart by the rapidly maturing songwriting skills of original rhythm guitarist Mick Bower. This album catches them towards the end of their garage stage. Like most Australian albums of the period, it is a collection of previously recorded single sides, and a few hurriedly recorded filler tracks. The filler includes five cover songs, generally the lowlights of the CD, particularly the dreadfully insincere cover of "My Girl". The remainder of the album is made up of Mick Bower originals - four previously released single sides which represent their hard-edged garage-punk side, and three newer songs which show a more sophisticated pop side (including "But One Day", which maybe sounds a little bit too much like the Yardbirds' "Still I'm Sad"). Not a strong album, and not even remotely prog - on it's own merits, as a garage/R&B record, it probably deserves 3 stars, but for a prog site, it gets only 2.

There is apparently a later version of this album floating around which leaves off some of the covers and includes a few later single sides - the track listing on this site appears to reflect that version. It's probably a stronger album for those changes. The Aztec re-release restores the original track order, but adds their subsequent 1967-8 single sides as bonus tracks, including the classics "Living In A Child's Dream" and "Elevator Driver". It also includes a bonus CD of demos and rehearsal recordings from 1966,

Originally starting out as a surf rock band called The Mustangs in 1960s Adelaide, Australia, the quartet of Mick Bower on rhythm guitar, Rick Morrison on lead guitar, Brian Vaughton on drums and Gavin Webb on bass was forever changed after The Beatles toured Australia in 1964 and found their largest audience to date in Adelaide with an estimated 300,000 attendees amongst a population of 668,000. The band changed direction and ventured into the world of British beat music which resulted in the name change to THE MASTERS APPRENTICES and the addition of Scottish immigrant Jim Keays as lead vocalist / secondary guitarist.

The band's name refers to its allegiance to the masters of the blues such as Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed, Elmore James and Robert Johnson and after engaging in a healthy live scene around Adelaide, the band become one of the city's most popular beat bands and slowly but surely captured a larger national audience which resulted in the band relocating to Melbourne where they recorded their debut self-titled release that emerged in late 1967. There were actually two self-titled releases. A four track EP emerged in 1967 with the songs "Undecided," "Hot Gully Wind," "Buried And Dead" and "She's My Girl" before the full-length album came out in October with 12 tracks.

THE MASTERS APPRENTICE became one of Australia's most innovative early progressive rock bands in the 1970s with popular albums like "Choice Cuts" but at this early stage the band was a fairly typical 60s sounding garage rock / freakbeat / mod act in the British tradition only a few years behind the curve as the actual British acts had evolved into the world of art rock by 1967. This debut adopted the usual approach of many 60s acts by only releasing a handful of original tracks and padding the rest with cover tunes which in this case included everything from Bo Diddley's "Dancing Girl" and The Beatles' "I Feel Fine" to Otis Redding's "My Girl," "Don't Fight It" by Wilson Pickett and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode."

At this point it's virtually impossible to predict that MASTERS APPRENTICE would amount to anything as this is one of the most generic debuts possible which shows no signs of individuality or creativity whatsoever. Sounding something like The Rolling Stones as far as the loose rhythm and blues guitar licks and vocal style are concerned, the band found minor success with its singles "Undecided" and "Buried And Dead" on the self-titled EP which hit the Australian top 40 singles chart and the primary reason a full album's worth of material was rushed to cash in on the momentum. While cited as psychedelic rock, this album was behind the times and was pretty much in the same style of the British Invasion acts from 1964 and 1965.

This is a listenable album but not very compelling as its primarily a platform for the singles and a couple of extra originals with several mediocre covers. It's a fairly typical copycat album of the era with nothing really to offer other than experiencing the debut album of one of Australia's more famous bands that went on to better things in the 1970s. Personally i find this to be a decent dance hall type of band but not one that i would rush out and buy the album as the covers are far too faithful to the original and the band's very own songs are much not better in terms of quality or creativity. Pretty much relegated to the hardcore fans and even then it wouldn't be that much of a loss if you skipped this one altogether. It would take another full three years for the band's second release "Masterpiece" to hit the market which finally did add some psychedelic elements but once again was woefully behind the times.