For the second time in forty-three years I spoke with Little River Band's singer/songwriter and guitarist, Mr. Beeb Birtles.
Q - Beeb, the last time we spoke was August 12th, 1978. Little River Band performed at the Landmark Theatre in Syracuse, New York. The group was staying at the downtown Holiday Inn and I conducted the interview with you at the Top Of The Inn, Holiday Inn's nightclub. The band was sitting at a long table while this group, Command Performance was playing. Just a little bit of history for you.
A - Oh, wow! It wasn't too noisy up there if it was a club?
Q - We made the best of it, didn't we?
A - (laughs) I guess we did!
Q - Well, I guess the most obvious question is, why have you chosen to live in Nashville? Is it because Nashville has this reputation of being a place where songwriters gather? And publishing companies, can't forget that.
A - That's one of the reasons. The main reason is that after I quit Little River Band in late '83, I was at a bit of a loss to know what I wanted to do with myself. I produced a couple of projects for different people in Australia. I always kept writing because that's my first love. To me, my thinking was what more can I do in Australia, having been in Little River Band with all the hits that we had over there. It just seemed to me there wasn't another rung on the ladder that I could take up. My wife is a native American from Missouri. I kept badgering her, saying, "Why don't we move to the States?" She wasn't willing at first because she really, really loved her life in Melbourne and it's not that I didn't either. I still love Australia. I loved growing up there. But to further my career I just thought it was a step to take in the right direction. If felt also, as far as my songwriting was concerned, I felt there was more that I could learn, and Nashville was the obvious place to come because it was such a songwriter's community.
Q - So, in 1983 you left Little River Band and in 1992 you moved to Nashville. What did you do for money in those nine years? Did you make enough money off of songwriting royalties to live on?
A - Yes. That's always what's kept me going, my songwriting royalties.
Q - In 1998 you and Bill Cuomo started a music publication company, Sonic Sorbet, to produce albums for recording artists.
A - That's right.
Q - You produced your first solo album, "Driven By Dreams" for the company, but who else did you produce?
A - Well, they're mostly unknown people. Unfortunately none of their projects hit pay dirt. But it really did keep us busy. Of course Bill and I, having so much experience in recording studios, we used that experience to produce people who were new to recording and didn't know how the whole thing worked. So we worked with people like Pete Benz from Texas, who was kind of like a Hispanic Texas artist. We worked with Lauren Moses. She was from West Virginia I think. Just various artists. You wouldn't know their names. Bill and I did project after project, and that kind of kept us busy.
Q - What kind of reaction has your autobiography, Every Day Of My Life been getting?
A - Oh, it's been getting very great, great reviews. There have been some people who have written some very nice things about my memoir. It took me about seven years to write it. On one of my trips back to Australia, when I returned to the States, I thought to myself, if I don't start putting my memories down in some form, I'm going to start forgetting them. And the minute I opened up the Word document in my computer, it just all kept pouring out of me. Then along the way what I did was, if I wasn't sure about a time or event that took place, I would reach out to old friends and family about a particular situation and they would write me their reply. That's what made me think, you know, it's kind of interesting not to write the book just from my perspective all the time, but to have people put in their comments for people reading it who would understand it from a different angle. I think that's one of the things I loved about writing my memoir is the fact that it's not always me talking. It's other people's inputs as well.
Q - It was reported that Little River Band lost all of their tapes in Universal Studios' 2008 fire. Are we talking Master Tapes, and what does that mean for the group?
A - You know, I don't know about that. I can't tell you much about that because I don't know much about it. A lot of our Master Tapes actually existed in Australia, not in America and so we still have access t0 a lot of our tapes and over the years we have re-mastered a lot of the "Greatest Hits" and "Best Of" and all that sort of stuff. I'm not too concerned over that Universal fire thing.
Q - Little River Band was very popular in the U.S. and Australia, but what other countries did the band do really well in?
A - Well, the band was extremely popular up in Canada and also in the country of my birth, in the Netherlands. We were huge there. We were very popular in Germany. Japan was also a great country for us as far as touring. I'm talking about the places we toured. There's more than a few countries where the band's music was popular, for sure.
Q - Before Little River Band you in this band Zoot with Rick Springfield.
A - Yes, that's right. That was my first band.
Q - Where did Zoot perform? Was this when you were a teenager or in your twenties?
A - Yeah. Well, I started with Zoot under a different name. It became Zoot a little bit later on. But I would've been maybe 17, 18 years old when I first started. Zoot came from Adelaide, which is the capitol of South Australia. In August of 1978, the band, after becoming very popular in our hometown, moved to Melbourne which was the big smoke of the music business, and our career took off from there. We were extremely popular in Australia and also in New Zealand.
Q - Did you think Rick Springfield would go on to have a career in music?
A - Well I mean, we were all so young back then. It's not something we really thought about. But when the band broke up in 1971 we kind of all went our separate ways. Darryl Cotton and myself were in a duo for a year after Zoot. And of course Rick took off to America. He's lived in the States since 1972. His career took off not only as a musician, but as an actor. So he's done very, very well for himself. We were so young, we didn't think about it. I had no preconceived ideas that Rick would become as big an artist as he has become over the years. Obviously he's done extremely well.
Q - Beeb, why don't the original members of Little River Band get the rights back to their name from Stephen Housden (the group's guitarist from 1981 to 2006) so you can use the name? He's said he will not let the original members of the band work together as Little River Band in his lifetime. That sounds like a guy who's very upset about something. Maybe you address this question in your autobiography, I don't know. I haven't read your book. So, why don't you guys pool your money and get your name back?
A - You know what? I do address that in my memoir. But just this morning I watched a thirty minute interview with Graeham Goble on the original Little River Band page on Facebook that I suggest you take the time to listen to and that will answer the question as to why we can't do anything about the Little River Band name. It's almost futile for me to explain it to you because it's so involved, but Graeham gives a great explanation of what the whole thing is about and why we can't use the name of the band anymore.
Q - Of course, at this time (2021) you can't tour and there's no more record business. So then, what could be accomplished?
A - (laughs) That's exactly how I feel. What's the point anymore? We're all in our seventies now. You'll hear Graeham say it would be lovely to be able to do a farewell tour in Australia. Just a one time thing, saying farewell to all of our fans. But without the name, there's no point in doing it.
(see Beeb Birtles on Facebook)
