Left to Right: Beeb Birtles, Rick Brewer, Darryl Cotton, Rick Springfield

In 1960, for my twelfth birthday, my parents bought me a second hand combination radio and record player from one of the other Dutch migrants who had sailed to Australia on the same boat as us. He decided life in Australia was not for him and wanted to migrate to the United States. Not only was I given the radio/record player, but at the same time I inherited his record collection.

It was a Kriesler, one of those that had the round dial in front for selecting the radio stations and a lift-up lid for the record player. This radio is what awakened my passion for music! Every week the local paper printed 5DN's Big Sixty chart and I would cut it out and keep it on a clipboard, eager to see which songs dropped out of the chart and which new ones entered. I could tell you which songs were the five predictions every week! In other words, I became obsessed with music and the pop charts!

Here I am playing bass with Zoot--I'm left handed, so I had to play bass upside down in those days!

Most of the friends I had made at Netley Primary School went on to Plympton High with me. One of those friends, John D'arcy, was a recent arrival from Manchester, England, who worshipped his hometown heroes, The Hollies. He and his family were living in Glenelg Migrant Hostel. Many of the English migrants brought with them the latest clothing and music that was popular in England. They followed suit with letting their hair grow long and would come to school in their mod shirts, super thin leather ties and Beatle boots, often to be reprimanded by teachers and headmasters alike.

It was at this time that my friends started calling me B-B Eyes, soon to be abbreviated to B.B. John played guitar and we started hanging out and meeting after school to rehearse the songs of our favourite bands, The Hollies, The Who and The Move. We would meet at Tony de Vries' house, not far from the Glenelg Migrant Hostel, and practice after dinner on school nights. Another reason for going to Tony's house was that he had a very attractive sister whom I admired secretly!

John D'arcy's family moved out of Glenelg Migrant Hostel to Christies Beach which was about twenty miles from Adelaide. By now I was so hooked on the music thing that I started hitchhiking to Christies Beach on weekends, spending the nights at John's place or with whoever would have me. If I couldn't find a place to stay, I would sleep in bus shelters rather than hitchhike back home. Christies Beach and Port Noarlunga were two popular areas for surfers and musicians. We met Ted Higgins, a drummer, and started rehearsing in his bedroom, which was out the back of his house. I didn't play an instrument at the time so I was the lead singer.

Left to Right: Beeb Birtles, Rick Springfield, Rick Brewer, Darryl Cotton.

My memories of this particular time are somewhat vague. I do know that we found a bass player but I can't recall whether or not we had a rhythm guitarist. It seems like it took forever until we felt we were ready to play a show. Our first public appearance was in a scout hall somewhere near Marion Road in Plympton. It must have been very disappointing because after the show, the bass player quit! That was my one and only chance at being a lead singer and you know it's always the singer who gets the girls! So now what? John said to me, "you're going to have to learn to play bass and sing at the same time". I didn't have a bass guitar but John knew how to measure out and lay the frets on the neck of a guitar and I asked my Father if he would build me the body for it. We bought a cheap pickup to make the guitar electric and I got a loan to buy a Goldentone bass amp and away I went with learning how to play bass and sing at the same time. Sitting in front of my beloved record player, I spent hours picking out the bass parts of the songs we were rehearsing.

We named our first band Times Unlimited and John and I shared the lead vocals. We started getting more and more gigs in the Christies Beach/Port Noarlunga area, even though we were not the most popular band around. Our competition was The Murrmen, a band made up of local musicians who were unique in that they had three lead singers. Darryl Cotton was one of them and Rick Brewer was the band's drummer. When The Murrmen broke up, Darryl approached John D'arcy to become our lead singer. At the time I was against lead singers in bands but I relented because Darryl was a very visual front man with a good voice and good looks. Whereas I am not sure of the lineup of Times Unlimited, I am sure of the lineup of Down the Line, a Hollies song after which we named ourselves once Darryl joined. Darryl Cotton was lead singer, John D'arcy was on lead guitar, Ted Higgins was the drummer and I was the bass player. Later we added Gordon Rawson, an old school friend of mine, on rhythm guitar.

It was this lineup that was approached by Doc Neeson (The Angels) and a friend shortly thereafter, offering to manage us. They had reservations about our name and suggested that we change it to something short and punchy like Zoot, a word that had no meaning. After kicking it around for a few days, we decided we liked it and changed our name to Zoot, but we never heard from the management team again.

Zoot worked their way up and became one of the most popular bands on the Adelaide music scene between 1966 and 1968. Music became the love of my life and it is with regret that I confess I didn't finish high school. My Father had approached a German man who owned the North Adelaide Tiling Company who took me on as an apprenticeship ceramic tiler but I was making twice as much money at night playing with Zoot!

Left to Right: Ted Higgins, Steve Stone, Darryl Cotton, Beeb Birtles.

The Twilights were the first Adelaide group to break nationally, late in 1965, and it was one of their lead singers, Paddy McCartney, who brought us to the attention of their record producer, David McKay. Zoot drove to Melbourne to record their very first single, "You Better Get Going Now" at Bill Armstrong Studios in Albert Park. The song was written by Jackie Lomax, a friend of George Harrison. The flip side was a song called, "Three Jolly Little Dwarfs" which was a very silly lightweight song. We had no management at the time but once again through Paddy from The Twilights, Wayne de Gruchy, a Melbourne manager, came to check us out in Adelaide. Wayne had the vision to turn us into the biggest teenybopper band Australia had ever seen by dressing us in all pink clothes and creating the slogan, "THINK PINK - THINK ZOOT". He persuaded Tony Knight, a nightclub owner in Melbourne, who with his brother Philip, owned the clubs, Berties and Sebastian's, to launch the huge promotional event at Berties.

My job for the owner of the North Adelaide Tiling Company had become a thankless one as I could never please him no matter how hard I tried. I guess I just wasn't cut out to be a ceramic tiler and when he and I finally had it out, I impolitely told him where to go and quit. For the last six months I lived in Adelaide, I worked at the Chrysler plant in Christies Beach, tooling parts for car doors. I knew we were leaving Adelaide to go to Melbourne and I was saving up as much money as I could.

John D'arcy had told us that he would not be staying with the band if we turned professional because he wanted to continue his studies at university. We recruited Steve Stone from another popular Adelaide band called, The Silhouettes, to fill the lead guitar position.

Darryl Cotton, Roger Hicks, Beeb Birtles, Rick Brewer

Zoot turned professional and moved to Melbourne in August 1968 and on September 3rd they launched their "Think Pink - Think Zoot" campaign at a now legendary media party at Berties. Tony Knight and Wayne de Gruchy had decked out the whole of Berties in pink. Pink champagne, pink carnations, no matter where you looked, everything was pink!

The four of us were holed up in a two bedroom flat on The Esplanade in St. Kilda and I didn't do well living with three other guys! Having always been very neat and tidy, compared to me, they were slobs. I could be a moody prick in those younger days and I gave poor Steve Stone a hard time. It wasn't long before Ted and Steve quit the band and headed back to Adelaide. Darryl and I had no intentions of going back and we contacted Rick Brewer, the drummer from Darryl's first band, The Murrmen, and asked him if he would be interested in joining the band. We started asking around about guitar players and found Roger Hicks who lived with his parents in the Melbourne suburb of Toorak. Roger was a classically trained guitar player who was into Jimi Hendrix and Jose Feliciano. He could work out any intricate voicings exactly the way they had been recorded on albums.

We dyed a friend's afghan hound pink as part of a publicity stunt for our single, "Monty and Me." Left to right: Hairdresser Edward Beale, Beeb Birtles, Darryl Cotton, Rick Brewer, Monty the Dog (front).

It was this lineup which recorded Zoot's second single, "1x2x3x4", written and produced by Terry Britten, lead guitarist for The Twilights. The single was released in December 1968. It was a moderate hit in Melbourne reaching #32 on the charts, firmly establishing Zoot as a teenybopper band. In June 1969, Ian "Molly" Meldrum, produced our third single, "Monty and Me", written by Hans Poulsen and Bruce Woodley. (The flip side was "Little Roland Lost", the first writing collaboration between Darryl and me.) The song was about Monty, a dog, and we dyed a friend's afghan hound pink for publicity which went hand in hand with the pink car and other such Zoot apparel. It reached #33 in Melbourne but went to #1 in Brisbane where the band was wildly popular.

A month later we embarked on our first tour, slogging through the wilds of Queensland alongside Ronnie Burns, Jon Blanchfield and The Sect, with teenybop frenzy in abundant supply throughout. Two months later, in September, we joined Russell Morris, Johnny Farnham, Johnny Young, Ronnie Burns, The Valentines, The Masters Apprentices and Doug Parkinson In Focus on Operation Starlift - a monstrous (and financially disastrous) tour of the capital cities by the absolute upper echelon of Australian rockdom. In December we visited Tasmania with Russell Morris, as an amazing 1969 came to an end (despite the loss of the playoff final of Hoadley's National Battle of the Sounds to The Nova Express in August).

Back in Melbourne, Zoot - now managed by Darryl Sambell (Johnny Farnham's manager) and Jeff Joseph (Ronnie Burns' manager) - lost guitarist Roger Hicks, who had finally reacted against the escalating "pretty pink pansies" ridicule by defecting to The Brisbane Avengers. The Avengers took on Roger Hicks after losing their first choice, Rick Springfield. Rick was an exceptional looking guitarist/songwriter of considerable talent. He had toured Vietnam bases with a reformation of MPD LTD. and was playing in Pete Watson's Wickedy Wak when a Johnny Young composed (Ian "Molly" Meldrum produced) single, "Billie's Bikey Boys", thrust him to general attention. Both The Avengers and The Valentines were vying for his services but they were soon joined by Zoot, who had spotted him on their northern tour (apparently I had sung harmonies on "Billie's Bikey Boys").

In the young, popular and obviously pliable Zoot, Springfield saw the best potential for his own future, and so joined later in 1969. At this point, new EMI house producer, Howard Gable, was assigned to Zoot - a relationship which commenced under a cloud of dispute. In Go-Set's "new releases" column we first became aware of the release of our fourth single - a Brian Cadd/Don Mudie song called "It's About Time". It had been recorded as one of a batch of demos for a possible new single and we were fully expecting to re-record it (or whatever else may have been finally chosen) for commercial release. We were very pissed off with EMI for releasing the single without our consent and as we expected, it did absolutely nothing on the charts.

Though Rick Springfield initially wore the pink garb, his disdain of the sub-teen image orientation was obvious and in early 1970 we ceremoniously burned all things pink before the cameras of "Happening 70", a popular Saturday morning music show. The snide sniggerings from media and peers was being supplemented by other, more worrying incidents. In December 1969, Darryl was beaten up in Brisbane by a gang of louts, leaving him with a (well publicised) mild concussion.

Cheek to Cheek: Rick Brewer, Beeb Birtles, Darryl Cotton, Rick Springfield.

By 1970, rock in Australia was drastically changing. Serious "heavy" groups such as Chain, Spectrum and The Aztecs were beginning to draw huge live followings of older, aggressive fans and any acts unwilling or unable to deliver long (often tedious) instrumental jams were dismissed with the ultimate insult of the era as being "commercial". Zoot set to work on their first and only album - Just Zoot, released in early 1970. It emerged as a highly admirable effort - with powerful inventive originals (the likes of "Mr. Songwriter") and two more superb Terry Britten compositions. (Zoot Out in 1971, was just a hits collection). But the most apparent manifestation of the new impetus came in June with the (approved) release of a fifth single - "Hey Pinky". This unsubtle lampoon of our just discarded pink image was heralded by a Go-Set ad sporting a naked shot of our behinds. Whether our naked bums gave us new credibility in the serious music market or whether it merely gave little girls naughty dreams, remains an inflamed point of contention. It achieved what we wanted in response to anyone who put us down.

We had a ceremonial burning of our "Think Pink" image on the popular Saturday morning music show, "Happening '70". Left to Right: Rick Springfield, Rick Brewer, B.B., Darryl Cotton, Ross D. Wylie.

In the same month, we turned the nationally televised Go-Set Pop Poll on its ear. With backs to the audience we hurtled into our own thunderous, extended version of The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" and quite literally brought the house down. In the poll itself we performed rather dismally, coming in fifth (behind The Masters Apprentices, Axiom, New Dream and The Town Criers) after an outright win in 1969. Two months later they narrowly again lost Hoadley's Battle of the Sounds to The Flying Circus.

After the discarding of the pink image, we took popular songs of the day and turned them into heavier versions to fit in with the music of the times. Songs like "Summer in the City", "Hello, Goodbye", "Woodstock" and "Hurdy Gurdy Man". However, the strong reaction from the pop poll performance had Gable insisting on "Eleanor Rigby" as the next single which EMI released in December 1970.

The response was immediate - radio jumped on it the day of release and by the first week of the new year it was on its way to the top three and a 21 week chart run. Cruelly, sales stopped just short of gold single status - a feat eventually achieved in 1979 after a re-release urged by Darryl and me.

On my recent journey back to Australia for the reunion of Birtles Shorrock Goble I was able to reconnect with Darryl Cotton. Here we are backstage at the Manningham Club before a performance by "Cotton, Keys and Morris", June 7, 2002.

In the wake of this sudden success the band's pendulum swung a great deal further left of centre than it should have. We became heavier, louder and more complicated - determined to slap critics in the face by being adopted by the "head" audience. Rick Brewer was the worst offender, becoming obsessed by experimental British rock and attempting to implement his adventurous tastes into what was, after all, a simple pop-rock band. We really began to fire as a band then but it was a bit too late - we just couldn't escape our "Think Pink--Think Zoot" image.

A follow-up single, "The Freak/Evil Child", fared fairly dismally (27 in Melbourne only) and by early 1971, irrevocable disillusionment had set in. I was being threatened with National Service, Rick Brewer wanted to expand musically and Rick Springfield was under considerable pressure to pursue a solo career. The camel's back was broken in April 1971 when RCA America - furiously excited with "Eleanor Rigby" - were thwarted in their attempts to secure Zoot for a US deal, by idiotic Australian beaurocracy. Actually, we split up amicably when the release of "Eleanor Rigby" looked like it wasn't going to happen. As a band there was nowhere else for us to go, we had done it all as a young, teenybopper band and we had tried so hard to change our music with the times in the hope of gaining respect as musicians by fans and peers alike.