Ross Wilson Initially Struggled To Get Eagle Rock Off The Ground

This week marked the 50th anniversary of Daddy Cool’s classic ‘Eagle Rock’ commencing its 10-week run at number one in Australia but Ross Wilson initially had trouble getting interest in the song.

Ross Wilson wrote ‘Eagle Rock’ pre-Daddy Cool and played it for his previous band. “Sons of Vegetal Mother were the first guys I’d already played it to,” Ross tells Noise11.com.

“Ross Hannaford had a little band when I came back from England. I was running around and saw all my old friends and was trying to get songs to them. I got ‘Make Your Stash’ to Mike Rudd who’d been in The Party Machine. He started Spectrum so he took that and did it on their first album. And I took ‘Eagle Rock’ around to Hannaford. He had a band called Quinn which was a country rock band with a couple of other guys I knew. I took it around to one of their rehearsals and said “try this out guys”. They started trying it out and I left. Hanna told me they said “no, we don’t want to do that.”

Quinn had a missed opportunity and didn’t last much longer anyway. Hannaford and Wilson teamed up again and after the short-lived Sons of Vegetal Mother came Daddy Cool. “Once we got the Daddy Cool four piece together in the back room of the house in South Yarra with it was like sounding great. We got to play at the TF Much Ballroom and that was when we started to realize that the song was going to have longevity, that it could potentially become a classic. We would play it at Daddy Cool’s first gigs in Melbourne very late October 1970”.