The formative deep-south of New Zealand has produced many musicians and composers during the past fifty years, from the country and western sound of the Tumbleweeds crooning Maple On The Hill to Craig Scott and the 1990s college alternative sound of Chris Knox and Martin Phillips. This memoir starts as a songlist for a reunion of Dunedin musicians from the 1960s era when bands became groups, Wonderful World by the Shadows and the supper waltz were replaced by Gloria and Hey Joe, and beer-fuelled backyard parties and oil-slide sitdown concerts marked a transition through marijuana and LSD opulence to punk.

Beat Groups & Courtyard Parties documents the emergence of originality among the covers bands playing faithful renditions of mainstream pop that led to Dunedin's first all-originals album, the crazy times that put the ex-bible class circuit musicians on a jet plane to perform in Auckland while other hippies were driving a bus, the vitality and finality of the weekend band romances: "The beat groups scatter back to their social ashes, dustmen and dishwashers to judges and millionaires, rich and poor kids again beyond the social whirlpool that brought together Catholics and Presbyterians, Bach and Wesley before the altar of pop, a loose mostly inarticulate culture with a self-taught language of guitar chords and songs memorised by ear, meanings pierced together from mumbled lyrics and backstage hours in tall temples of stacked black speakerboxes, lineups as lasting as a weekend romance. Like birds of paradise they collect and serenade the courtship avenue, then lapse silent as empty cocoons blown and scattered about in the cold southerlies."