Hooks provide passport to rockin' past

The treadmill provided a welcomed respite from the news this morning -- terror plots to blow up airlines -- and Skyhooks provided a perfect passage to the past.
Ask 100 U.S. rock fans about Skyhooks and you might get 99 blank stares. Ask 100 Australian rock fans about Skyhooks, and most would probably tell you they helped trigger the Down Under explosion that flung AC/DC onto our shores.
Skyhooks' singles topped the Aussie charts three times and their 1970s albums racked up unprecedented sales.
However, America already had a rock band that painted their faces (although Skyhooks beat KISS to that gimmick) and a musician who dangled his long tongue in front of an audience (again, Red Symons edged Gene Simmons on that one).
So us Yanks mostly missed out on Australia's biggest band of the 70s.
Skyhooks performed on the first day of color TV transmission down under and their delightfully smutty anthem "You Just Like Me Cos I'm Good in Bed" was the first song played by 2JJ -- later known as Triple J -- the national pop music radio station.
In Greg Macainsh they had a songwriter who could pen odes to the Melbourne suburbs (as opposed to Aussie rockers who were still singing about Memphis and other less-than-local subjects) and in Graeme "Shirley" Strachan they boasted a singer with one of rock's great, distinctive vocals.
So I immersed myself in Skyhooks this morning, at least until it was time to return to the present world of carry-on luggage limitations, official announcements of heightened alerts and an increasing loss of innocence.