Every Day of My Life. Beeb Birtles
lead singers, one of whom was Darryl Cotton. Malcolm ‘Rick’ Brewer was their drummer and he lived in McLaren Vale, a suburb near Christies Beach and Port Noarlunga.
John D’Arcy, Gordon Rawson and I kept rehearsing and we added Ted Higgins (who later became Zoot’s first drummer) on drums. Ted lived in Port Noarlunga with his mum and sisters and had his own bedroom out the back, separate from the house. This is where we rehearsed. His bedroom was big enough that we could fit his drums as well as a couple of amplifiers. I wasn’t playing an instrument at that time so by default I became the lead singer. We found a bass player in David Murdoch, a little guy who wore glasses. We practised and practised, learning our favourite songs until we had a set list long enough to go out and perform for the very first time.
We named our band Times Unlimited. Our first performance was at a dance that was held in the Plympton Scout Hall on Marion Road. The gig was an embarrassing night to say the least because we made lots of mistakes, with the guys playing wrong chords and me forgetting the words. It was awful! David Murdoch, our bass player, was so disgusted with the way we played that he promptly quit. When the band was discussing this later, I asked, “Well, what are we going to do now?”
John looked at me and said, “You’ll have to learn to play bass guitar and sing at the same time, lad.” He made it sound so simple! I didn’t own a bass guitar, let alone an amplifier, but we just bulldozed ahead.
We asked my dad to help shape the body of a bass guitar from plywood. John knew how to measure exactly where to lay the frets on the neck and we slapped a few coats of shellac on it for the finish. We bought a cheap pickup (a pickup is a transducer that captures or senses mechanical vibrations produced by musical instruments, particularly stringed instruments such as the electric and bass guitar) and we positioned it where we would get the optimum sound out of the bass.
When we finished building the bass, I had my work cut out for me. I sat down in front of my Kriesler record player and started picking off the bass lines to every song we had been rehearsing. When I had a few songs under my belt we rehearsed them that weekend, and so it continued until I had learned every one of the songs in our set. This may sound like a difficult task – but I was at that age where nothing seemed impossible. The thought, Gee, I don’t think I can do this, never occurred to me. I did it because I loved it.
I still didn’t know if I could play bass and sing at the same time but it became easier with every rehearsal. Much more importantly, through learning to pick what were sometimes difficult bass lines off records, my ear training had begun and that would serve me greatly in the years to come.
I needed a bass amplifier but I didn’t have the money to buy one. As I was still under twenty-one, I asked my parents if they would sign a hire purchase agreement on a Goldentone bass amplifier from one of Adelaide’s music shops. They agreed.
Now I was really cruising. I had my homemade bass guitar and a Goldentone bass amp. It was with this combination that I played all of our earliest live shows in the Christies Beach and Port Noarlunga areas.
Ted Higgins remembers:
When Times Unlimited was formed and we started playing shows, we’d go to the local Masonic Hall on a Saturday night where a guy called Paddy and an English bloke used to hold dances and bring good bands in.
We went to see The Mermen and that’s where we saw Darryl Cotton. We discussed afterwards that for the band to become popular we had to have a good-looking lead singer, a front man who the chicks would like. After we spoke to him, he said he would consider it.
However, we still advertised for a lead singer. Jim Keays applied but John D’Arcy didn’t like him because he was from Elizabeth. I remember John saying he wouldn’t drive all that way for practices and that he thought Jim’s voice sounded like shit. I liked him because he was a good-looking guy.
At Willunga High, every girl at school wanted to go out with Darryl Cotton and, after continually talking to him, he decided to join our band.
I wasn’t very keen on lead singers because they didn’t have to buy any gear. To my mind, they just stood there and sang. It took some time for John D’Arcy to convince me that Darryl would be an asset to the band, that with him as our lead singer we could move up to the next level.
Eventually, I came around because we were limited in what we could achieve with just the four of us. Gordon, John and I all sang but it took the focus off playing our instruments. Plus none of us felt really comfortable talking to an audience and that’s where I realised lead singers earn their weight in gold. Darryl was a good-looking guy and he was a chick magnet. When he joined as our lead singer we decided to change the band’s name.
DOWN THE LINE
Darryl Cotton was born at Henley Beach Private Hospital in Adelaide on September 4, 1949. In his early years he sang in the school choir and one year they were chosen to participate in John Martin’s Christmas Pageant. John Martin’s was a well known department store in Adelaide. Darryl’s ambition was to become a school teacher and, like me, he also went to see Elvis Presley movies, not with his mother but with his aunts; his mother had a couple of much younger sisters who were around the same age as he was.
Rick Brewer happened to overhear him singing ‘Ferry Cross The Mersey’ to himself in a coffee shop in Port Noarlunga one day. Rick thought Darryl had a really good voice and invited him to join his group, The Mermen.
Darryl was the first person to call me ‘Beeb’. He shortened B.B. to Beeb. From the time we met that has remained my nickname. I also took the first part of my surname and shortened it from Bertelkamp to Birtles, anglicising the spelling. From that time on, Beeb Birtles was my professional name.
All of us, including Darryl, were still mad Hollies fans and on their latest album they had a song called ‘Down The Line’. We changed our name from Times Unlimited to Down The Line, though the new name didn’t last long.
Being the kind of inquisitive musician who always wants to know who wrote the song, I have since found out that ‘Down The Line’ was actually called ‘Go Go Go (Down The Line)’ and it was the very first song Roy Orbison ever wrote.
Gordon Rawson left the band. At one particular rehearsal we could tell he was in a really bad mood and he threw his guitar down. We had seen these moods before but somehow it came to a head that day. Not that I’m being critical because I can be the moodiest prick of all at times! I think I inherited that from my dad because his moods could swing one way or the other at the drop of a hat. Anyway, on this particular day we either asked Gordon to leave the band or he quit.
Gordon remembers that day:
I had had a fight with Bev, my girlfriend. I had a bit of a rejection problem in those days. In more recent times while suffering some depression it was traced back to 1965, probably to do with my father’s death. The music used to help get me through.
Our band started gaining a following in the Christies Beach and Port Noarlunga areas. Word was getting around. One weekend, two guys from Elizabeth approached us about management. They were checking out new bands to play at some dances they were promoting in the Elizabeth area.
One of the guys was Doc Neeson and the other was a friend of his, Alan Hale. They said they thought we had a lot of potential but they didn’t like our name.
Doc said, “Why don’t you call yourselves something like Zoot, a short punchy name that doesn’t mean anything?”
I’ve since read that Doc’s inspiration came from his admiration for the English singer Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band. We looked at each other questioningly and thought, What kind of a name is that? The guys left and we never heard from them again. We kept throwing the Zoot idea around and at some point decided that, yes, it was kind of a cool name. From then on we became known as Zoot.
John Rose, the drummer for Five Sided Circle, remembers this:
I was already playing in Five Sided Circle during the early days of Zoot. One Saturday morning our bass player rang excitedly to tell me of a fabulous new band he’d seen at the Port Noarlunga Institute and how he couldn’t get over the