By Brendan Mitchell January 2007.
About '76 , '77 there was a bloke by the name of Nils who used to do the art work for various music venues , bands , music press , that sort of thing : the Fred Negro of the '70's .Bernie Slattery was telling me about one particular flyer for the Station hotel in Prahran that had the line---come to the Station hotel where all the dead livers hang out---or something like that . Bernie said "what a great name for a band" and I thought well no , not really , it's a #.)%! of a name .
Sometime later while driving a taxi and making up songs I came up with the
"ballad of a dead liver" which was very similar musically to " Amazing Grace used to be her favourite song " by the Rhythm Aces, which was my favourite song at the time . During this time I had been playing a bit with Mick Schack Marty Atchison and at home with my brother Edward . We got a bit of a band together for a couple of BBQ's at Mick's house which went OK . So I started getting pretty keen on getting a band going and calling it the Dead Livers after the song .To launch the band Edward and myself threw a party at our house in North Rd and put out a flyer / invitation announcing " Mitchell and Mitchell present the 1st annual beer and country festival at 320 North Rd on April 16 1978 "
The band had pretty well settled then with Mick on bass Marty on vocal Tony
Pizzi on drums and Edward and myself on guitar . Also on that day we had Yvonne
Cohn on vocals . It was a great party and the band went down well and started
getting bookings at pubs party's and footy clubs .
So that's the story about how that band got it's name . Btw that first annual
beer and country festival was the first and last although the spirit of that day was carried on at Des Dorey and Garry Green's house for a number of years .
