A Wanderer’s life

Eric celebrates 60 years of music and 30 years on the buses

Eric Heintze was never meant to be a muso, let alone a successful one.

“Musicians are no hopers” were the words he grew up with as a child on the family farm at Koonunga Hill.

Whilst the statement was well meaning at the time, more than six decades on, Eric’s grin beams with a sense of satisfaction that comes when such naysayers are proven wrong.

“Mum didn’t like musicians – musicians were bad people – they went out with bad women!”

His hearty laugh sets off wife, Joy who is now shaking her head, giggling at the cheekiness she has come to know so well.

Last month, Eric clocked up sixty years as a musician, having entertained generations of Barossans on the piano accordion and keyboard, most notably with “The Wanderers”, a name synonymous with old style dances across the region.

Whilst his decades of merry music making may have started with somewhat sneaky tactics, there was no looking back once it began. “My dad used to be a button accordion player in those days. “I couldn’t manage those things – you push it in and it plays one note, and pull it out it plays another!”

He was allowed to go to Nuriootpa Town Band where the late Mr Elmore Schulz taught him how to read music. “He got a group from the area teaching brass band music. I learned to play the euphonium.”

But Eric wanted more, he wanted to get into a dance band because he loved country style music.

It was during a trip to Adelaide delivering chooks from the farm when Eric, who didn’t have a driver’s licence as yet, enlisted his brother for a ‘covert’ mission without his parent’s knowledge. “We used to take poultry down town and I said to Maurice, I’m coming with. “Could you run us around to the Adelaide College of Music? I said I want to play the piano accordion.”

On the next chook run, Eric picked up his new piano accordion and began a correspondence course through the college. “That’s how I learned, I basically taught myself.

“Mum wasn’t overly happy! Day and night I’d practise and practise. Lunchtime I’d practise and practise.”

Then came the opportunity to do a “few guest spots” around the Valley at Lutheran Youth socials, playing to his peers. “I liked it, I don’t know about them!”

Eric acquired his first keyboard in another “poultry” related incident.

“Fred Helbig, a cousin of mine, he played with us on the guitar and we’d go around giving a few items. Fred said ‘I’ve got an old treadle organ’, I said where is it? “It was up in the pigeon shed! So we pulled it out and it had pigeon poop all over it. We only had the keyboard part with the old bellows on it and I thought how can I play that?

“I cleaned everything out and got all the notes working. We had someone sitting in front pulling the bellows and I was playing – we’d go around doing items like that!”

By now, Eric was getting a reputation as an entertainer and he was asked to provide the music for a youth dance in the Greenock Institute. “I was approached by Malcolm Nitschke, the chaff merchant here.

“One night I got a phone call, can you play for our youth social? I said I can’t! I sort of knew the songs, but never did anything like that before. He said if you don’t do it, we can’t keep going. Whoever was supposed to do it had pulled out.

“I asked them for a programme of dances so I could sit down and try and work out what songs – two steps, three steps, queen’s waltz, tango waltz. I had one that was a square dance that I didn’t know how to play, so we just wiped that one.”

Eric still remembers being “very nervous” sitting on stage as a sixteen year old performing that night. “I was packing it!” he laughs.

“In those days, the girls would sit around the outside of the hall and the blokes had to stand at the back. The dancing was in the middle.

“It just grew from there,” he says.

At 18 years of age, Eric met his future wife, a 16 year old musician, and within six months of courting, he and Joy formed a dance band. With Eric on the accordion, Joy vamping on piano and a drummer, they were the “Hi-Joy Rhythm Band”, performing all over the Barossa.

“In that era we used to do an awful lot of weddings and 21sts, cabarets, sherry parties and balls.”

Eric and Joy married in 1964. They raised four children and when Joy gave up her music for a time, Eric joined her brother Morris Traeger, on vocals and guitar with Marcus Schulz, on drum kit.

“The Wanderers” had arrived and true to their name, they performed around the state and were booked nearly every weekend. “We went all over the place playing. We were off wandering…wondering what we were doing!”

Whilst the piano accordion still made an appearance sometimes, Eric preferred keyboard and demand for the group continued to grow. They were “flat out” as resident band at Die Weinstube for six years followed by regular shows at the Lyndoch Hotel and Barossa Motor Lodge.

“I came across an old diary, that one year we only had one weekend off, we were playing twice a week right through.”

Meanwhile, Eric was working full time in a variety of jobs, but he began having back troubles. A chance conversation with Dirk Meertens in 1986 started the Heintze family on a business venture that this year celebrates its 30th anniversary.

“I bought a bus,” says Eric bluntly – Greenock Creek Charters was born.

“When you’ve got a young family you have to do something. I was pretty crook at that time with the back and I wondered if I could drive a bus and I took one out and yep, my back was okay.”

Eric was lucky to get a job he loved driving a forklift at Cellarmasters. His back handled it well and it was where he stayed for the next 23 years before retiring. So it was Joy who was given the job of bus driver, taking the school run.

“Four months later we bought another bus… then another one.”

They employed bus drivers, school contracts were signed over and soon Eric and Joy began taking holiday tours a few times a year. It was a prime opportunity to mix business with pleasure, with Eric packing the accordion which he admitted was “handy in a blackout”.

“We would have a sing-song on the last night of the tours… we had good fun.”

There were impromptu performances at Remarkable Rocks on Kangaroo Island, and sing-a-longs on the Proud Mary joining a myriad of musical moments in between.

Meanwhile, The Wanderers were hamming it up at old style dances with different themes providing ample opportunity for dressing up and having a good laugh with the crowds.

Over the years Eric’s band colleagues have come and gone, but the old style dances at Greenock Institute are still going, although the dancers and dances have changed over six decades.

Eric reckons now that his buddy and fellow Wanderer for close to 18 years, George Dobie has had to retire through illness, he’s on his own and it’s simply not the same. “We had a lot of good times,” he says reliving the golden days which included the recording of two CDs.

Needless to say, Eric has had fun and enjoyed every minute in the entertainment industry. Whether it was on the buses accompanying some hearty sing-a-longs or on stage dressed in a Hawaiian skirt and coconuts playing a Wurlitzer; the 76 year old can say he has been a successful muso.

“They said that I wouldn’t make a go of it, but somebody didn’t tell everybody else!”

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