Every Day OF My Life
Published by Brolga Publishing Pty Ltd
ABN 46 063 962 443
PO Box 12544
A’Beckett St
Melbourne, VIC, 8006
Australia
email: [email protected]
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission from the publisher.
Copyright © 2017 Gerard Bertelkamp
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Beeb Birtles, author.
ISBN 9781925367973 (paperback)
9780648150886 (ebook)
Subjects: Birtles, Beeb.
Zoot (Musical group)
Mississippi (Musical group)
Little River Band (Musical group)
Rock musicians--Australia--Biography.
Composers--Australia--Biography.
Lyricists--Australia--Biography.
Musicians--Australia--Biography.
Dutch--Australia--Biography.
Popular music--Australia.
Popular culture--Australia--History--20th century.
Cover design by Emmie Birtles
Typesetting by Elly Cridland
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Email: [email protected]
Every Day OF My Life
Beeb Birtles
A Memoir
Edited by Jeff Jenkins
In memory of John D’Arcy and Darryl Cotton
For Donna, Hannah and Emilia
CONTENTS
Foreword
Beeb Birtles
Prologue
Preface
1 amsterdam, holland
2 adelaide, south australia
3 times unlimited
4 zoot
5 frieze
6 mississippi — phase one
7 mississippi — phase two
8 mississippi — phase three
9 mississippi — phase four
10 little river band — phase one
11 little river band — phase two
12 donna marie brucks
13 little river band — phase three
14 hannah michelle bertelkamp
15 little river band — phase four
16 little river band — phase five
17 little river band — phase six
18 emilia brook bertelkamp
19 little river band — phase seven
20 for the record
21 river of no return
22 midlife
23 the move to america
24 sonic sorbet records
25 birtles shorrock goble
26 zoot reunion
27 in memoriam john d’arcy & Darryl Cotton
28 watching the sunset
Acknowledgements
Awards and accolades
FOREWORD
The phone rang.
“Hi Baz, have you heard from the stubborn Dutch prick lately?”
“Hi Skinny,” I replied. “In fact, I did receive an email from him a few days ago.”
“Obviously, he’s got the shits with ME this time then!” she said.
The ‘stubborn Dutch prick’ nomenclature has been around from 1968 when I shared a flat with Beeb Birtles. I had moved from Adelaide to Melbourne to join a band called The Town Criers as lead singer. In October ’68 Beeb and his fellow Zoot band members accommodated me in their rented flat in Beaconsfield Parade, St Kilda for about a month. Then, in early ’69, my cousin Lynny (aka Skinny), my sister Wendy, Beeb and I moved into a flat in Tiuna Grove, Elwood. Beeb and I then shared flats for the life span of Zoot and the Criers.
Skinny and Wendy returned to Adelaide and two friends, Dianne and Pam, also from our hometown, moved in with us for the following two years. During this period, it was only natural that we all got to know each other’s idiosyncrasies. Beeb was renowned for his stubbornness as much as I was for my laziness. Beeb was always only into the music and never really comfortable wearing the pink outfits that Zoot chose to wear whilst performing, and he made a point of steering clear of the make-up rooms at various TV studios.
I remember him digging in his heels and refusing to appear on the national TV show Happening 70. He walked into our flat looking decidedly pissed off.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“They tried to make me wear make-up,” he retorted. “It’s one thing to wear fuckin’ pink, but make-up as well?” He didn’t appear with Zoot that day. Fortunately, those shows were mimed and lead singer Darryl Cotton strapped on Beeb’s bass and bluffed his way through their song. That particular clip, to the best of my knowledge, is still around.
Beeb and I were pretty green and naïve in those days and we were happy to accommodate fans who requested our address with the intention of writing to us. It was fairly common knowledge that generally the lead singer got the chicks, a theory I was looking forward to verifying after being thrust into that position after spending a couple of years as a bass player. Ironically, that was how I met Beeb in ’67. He answered the ad I placed in the newspaper to purchase my Hofner Beatle bass. Small world. We also discovered his father, Gerry, a carpenter, knew my father after working for him when my father was a builder. Beeb, inadvertently, proved that lead singers didn’t always have a mortgage on the ladies. I first became aware of this after going to the letterbox to collect our ‘fan mail’. There were days when there’d be more mail with his name on it than mine, which, to my mind, wasn’t the way it was supposed to be ... after all, I was the lead singer! If I got to the mailbox first and Beeb had more mail than me, I’d collect it and put it on his bed. If I had more than him, I’d leave it all in the box for him to collect.
We soon became aware of the repercussions of recklessly handing out our address to anyone who asked for it. In no time at all there were young girls constantly knocking on the front door, climbing through the bathroom window, waking neighbours demanding to know which flat Beeb and Barry lived in