One night Phil Rudd and I got into a rave about Berlin.
‘Those people are fucking weirdos, man,’ Phil said.
He told me that AC/DC had just played their first gig at the Deutschlandhalle. Hundreds of fans were crammed down the front. Phil found out why these fans were called ‘headbangers’ when he began playing. Hundreds of them started bashing their skulls into the stage on every beat, every ‘One-two-three-four’ was accompanied by the crashing of flesh and bone on hardwood. After a few songs these guys were starting to bleed.
‘When all this fucking blood was all over the stage, man, I just had to stop playing,’ Phil told me. ‘I couldn’t take any more.’
Welcome to Berlin, Phil.
The downside of the Lifesaver was that heroin was considered dreadfully chic. I’d get so irritated trying to talk with friends who were scratching relentlessly or nodding off, both smackie traits. Worst of all, they all wore that smug, self-obsessed junkie’s smile.
I knew Paul Hewson, Dragon’s keyboard player and a great songwriter, but had no idea of his shocking medical state, which had something to do with a congenital condition in his spine. This led to his heroin addiction—it eased the terrible pain in his back. But I only learned this later. Paul used to really piss me off. I had enormous respect for him as a writer but would start getting agitated when he’d nod off into his beer while I was trying to talk to him about getting off smack and having more respect for his great talent. Sometimes I’d get scared that he’d overdose right there in front of me. That made me angrier still. I thought Dragon were fantastic; they should have become one of the biggest bands in the world.
So many strange things happened at the Lifesaver. I was once standing at the men’s urinal and a fan of mine insisted on shaking my hand while we were standing there pissing away. One of the guys from a flavour-of-the-month band walked straight up and pissed all over our handshake. I would have smacked him in the mouth if I wasn’t such a pacifist. I was still a bloody hippie.
I’d heard about people lacing the fish tank with illegal drugs and all the fish dying, which could well be true. The Lifesaver was that kind of place. The air was always blue with dope smoke and illicit drugs were everywhere. And yet no one ever seemed to get busted. As for me, I was getting into very heavy binge drinking; Southern Comfort or tequila were my poisons of choice. I’d only recently become a novice pot smoker, but Michael and I did like to drink ourselves stupid. Mandrax, a pharmaceutical that I guess was the forerunner to ecstasy, was rife at the Lifesaver; it encouraged all things sexual—and the Swap certainly was a hotbed of sexual activity.
Everybody was in bed with everybody, and if you were too drunk or stoned to make it to bed, well you’d just fuck in the car park or the dressing room or under one of the tables. The roadies used to notch up their visits to the ‘Blue Clinic’ in Macquarie Street—you weren’t an elite roadie unless you’d tested positive for gonorrhea at least half a dozen times.
By comparison, my sexual career was somewhat conservative. I always had a steady girlfriend—they nearly all became de factos for a protracted period. My volatile Melbourne girlfriend landed on my doorstep one day and told me bluntly that she was moving in. This was not a woman to be messed with but I found her irresistible.
We soon slipped back into our alcoholic ways; heavy drinking became a way of life. Along with Michael and his girlfriend, I think we were all probably drunk every single day for months on end. It was not all bad though. My girlfriend was quite the connoisseur of fine food and wine, with fine cognac and even finer sex to follow. When she found a job as a waitress—and a new sense of purpose—our domestic life got a bit more under control.
In early 1976, when I began recording Mainstreet Jive with Richard Batchens at Festival studios, I insisted that I’d pick the band we used. The mood at the early sessions was hostile, very negative.
There was always an unpleasant power play going on between Michael Hegerty and Batchens, but there were some funny moments, too. At one point, when things were especially tense, Batchens relentlessly attacked Hegerty, criticising every little thing.
‘Your bass is out of tune,’ he told him.
We all sat out in the studio, waiting and waiting, as the drama unfolded. The glass window of the control room obscured Michael’s hand; he was pretending to be turning the tuning peg on his bass, the source of the problem. From the other side of the glass, Batchens couldn’t quite see what Michael was doing. Michael sat poker faced, pretending to fix the problem, but actually doing nothing.
‘No, you’re still flat,’ Richard would call out. Michael would pretend to turn the tuning peg again.
‘No,’ Richard shouted, ‘now you’ve gone too sharp!’
The rest of us sat out in the studio, straight-faced, trying hard not to explode into hysterical laughter. Michael probably should have been a comedian.
Batchens managed to sabotage my band and hired a line-up of his own. Fortunately, these players were among Australia’s finest; most had played in the legendary jazz-fusion outfit Crossfire.
I’d learned from all the dramas that had plagued the ‘Girls on the Avenue’ recording a couple of years before. I decided to compromise and kowtowed to Richard more than I argued with him. I was passionate about this set of songs and didn’t want to jeopardise the album. I kept my mouth shut most of the time. And I did get to meet guitarist Kirk Lorange and Rita Jean Bodine, a raunchy female singer from LA who was just starting to break into the American market. Although they lacked rock attitude the jazzy musicians produced a nice change from the distinct country feel of the previous album.
Festival, to their credit, adopted a much more respectful attitude to me. I think this is because the staff were much like the public service or corporate office workers. They had quaint archaic attitudes, and respected me for the fact that I’d survived a few years. I must admit that by toeing the company line a little more, rather than fighting for what I believed to be artistic integrity—and thereby pissing them off—the company did well by me. They came up with Mainstream Jive promotional ideas like coasters and matchbooks and T-shirts.
They allowed me to work with David Parker, a Melbourne photographer who went on to become a successful film producer. But there was one very odd incident. Michael Bradley, a childhood friend of mine, was also an excellent photographer. He submitted a great shot of a mime artist busking in Martin Plaza, which we used on the album’s inner sleeve. Yet almost as soon as the record was released in late August 1976 we were threatened with an injunction by the mime artist who, having no rights in the picture, still managed to settle—out of court—with Festival for a tidy sum and immediately bailed for Paris, probably in search of Marcel Marceau.
Regrettably, Mainstreet Jive just didn’t connect. I had moderate radio airplay but nowhere near enough to sell huge numbers. Critics praised the album, but the single, ‘Suit Yourself’, wasn’t a chart success. The album only made the Top Thirty.
It was time to re-evaluate my life. I’d started to view my art as a career, and realised that if I was to survive as a professional musician I was going to have to get used to compromise.
Not only did I have a new outlook, I had an excellent new band. Canadian expat Kirk Lorange joined on guitar, Michael played bass, Iain McLennan drummed and Tony Slavic
h played keyboards. Lori Balmer, who had sung back-up vocals on Mainstreet, also joined. Plus I had a new manager, Chris Murphy, who went on to big things with INXS.
Chris was reckless and probably brought me very near death on a few occasions, but he was one of the most passionate people I’ve ever known. His father was Mark Murphy, a Sydney entertainment agent from the 1960s, who died of a heart attack in his early thirties. Chris always seemed to be on a mission.
The first real fight I ever had with Chris was because I refused to appear in Tamworth after an in-flight drama. Kirk and I arrived at Sydney airport, ready to fly north, while Chris had driven the rest of the band up in a rental car. Kirk and I watched the crew prepare the Fokker Friendship for departure. My first feature story had just run in Rolling Stone, and I was trying to read it, while Kirk kept making paranoid comments about the safety of the plane.
I then realised that he’d smoked a big hash joint and was very stoned. He rambled on and on.
‘That plane’s just a big sardine can held together with flimsy rivets,’ Kirk told me.
My irritation turned to annoyance as we took our seats up the front of the plane. I just wanted him to shut up. The plane took off and I assumed it was normal for a Fokker Friendship to struggle up to 20,000 feet. And the plane did seem to be struggling for some minutes. I had my head buried in Rolling Stone, but Kirk kept persisting with stories about the engines cutting out.
‘Look at that!’ he shouted at me, pointing outside the window.
Aw shit! The propeller was totally dead. This couldn’t be normal. A hysterical hostie came out of the cockpit; an older hostess started threatening to slap her if she didn’t calm down.
‘We’re gonna die!’ she sobbed.
Oh shit.
Panic spread through the plane. Children were crying and their mothers were praying. Kirk, still very stoned, looked like he was going to beat all of us to death’s door—the older hostie thought he was having a heart attack. Then the other engine stopped dead. The plane was gliding with no power. For the first time in my life I was knockin’ on heaven’s door.
Yet I felt quite calm. All of a sudden dying didn’t seem so bad. I was caught in this daze with one eye on Kirk, thinking, well, this is it, huh?
A Tamworth grazier, resplendent in tweed jacket, handlebar moustache, farmer’s hat and jodhpurs, came striding down the aisle and began bashing on the cockpit door. I got up to help the hostesses who were trying to restrain him. He was out of control.
‘Get out here, you bastards!’ he screamed. ‘I demand to speak to the managing director of this airline. This little debacle will make me miss my meeting in Tamworth and I’m gonna lose a quarter of a million dollars. I’ll sue you lot for this!’
I cracked up laughing.
‘Can you believe this guy?’ I asked Kirk, laughing hard.
‘Mate,’ I said to the frantic farmer, ‘we’re gonna die. What the hell are you talking about, you fruitcake!’
A few other people were beginning to see the absurdity of this farce. Then we looked out the window and saw Sydney airport. We’d been gliding for God knows how long; there was no sound, just the gentle whoosh swish of the jetstream. The pilot, who hadn’t said one word during this drama, spoke over the intercom.
‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Johnston and I’ve been your pilot aboard today’s flight. You may have noticed we’ve experienced a slight mechanical problem and have decided to return to Sydney airport. There is absolutely no cause for concern and we will have another plane ready for immediate take-off.’
A slight mechanical problem! Was this guy for real?
A glider landing, as I found out, is so soft you can hardly sense when the aircraft has actually touched the tarmac. When we filed off the plane, Kirk suddenly became full of bravado, whereas I descended into shock.
I phoned Chris Murphy.
‘There is no way,’ I told him, ‘that I’m getting onto another Fokker Friendship. No freakin’ way.’
Chris was upset; in fact he screamed back that he wanted to kill me. His temper, as I was quickly learning, could be terrifying, but I would rather he killed me than I go down in a plane crash.
I think that was the first time I made the front page of the daily newspapers. I must admit that ‘ROCK STAR IN PLANE CRASH’ looked really cool. Hey, what’s good for Buddy Holly and Otis Redding . . .
I did rejoin Chris and my band the next day—by jet, mind you—and so began my first real tour. Just days after the near thing with the plane, Chris was driving the car like a madman along a particularly treacherous stretch of mountain road. He was singing Neil Young’s ‘Cripple Creek Ferry’ out of tune at the top of his voice while careering all over the slippery, winding road. He missed a corner and suddenly we were perched over a cliff with a drop straight down of a couple of hundred feet.
Michael Hegerty and I crawled out of the car.
‘You fuckin’ arseholes,’ Chris screamed. ‘You fuckin’ get back in this car right now or I’ll get out and smash yer fuckin’ faces in. I am ordering you to get back in this car!’
By now Chris was sitting in the car all by himself, bashing the steering wheel while threatening to bash us, as the front of the rental gently rocked up and down in the strong mountain winds. Right then a farmer appeared around the corner in a Jeep complete with towbar and chains and hauled Chris and the car off the cliff. Another close call.
One evening a girl who worked at Festival invited me to her place for dinner. I became a little intoxicated on white wine and she produced an application form for an Arts Council grant. We filled it in together while I was still a bit inebriated and I forgot all about it. Several months later, Festival GM Phil Matthews stopped me as I was going in through the front door of the building. He was waving a piece of paper.
‘Congratulations!’ he said.
‘For what?’
Phil handed me two pieces of paper. One was an acknowledgement of receipt and the other a cheque—just enough for me to buy a round the world air ticket. I don’t know what the hell I put in my application, but I’m sure it was pretty silly.
The bizarre thing about the Australia Council grant, as I soon found out, was that recipients aren’t required to account for anything. I was finally asked for a report of the work I had produced in 1976—in 1996. Fortunately for the Australia Council I wrote the set of songs for Goodbye Tiger with my grant so at least someone—me—produced something of worth.
I went straight down to Qantas and bought my ticket. I then phoned Volker Cornelius in Berlin and told him I’d be returning soon. However, I had committed to working on a surfing movie called Highway One with David Elphick and Steve Otton, which I had to complete before charging off overseas.
Elphick had a beautiful place at Palm Beach where I would regularly work with him. David preferred weekends so we could kick on a little bit. One Saturday my girlfriend and I went up to David’s studios in the afternoon and ended up partying very hard all night. We stumbled out at about 6 or 7 a.m. and drove just around the bend and onto the Palm Beach Road.
Her car hadn’t been all that well recently—despite the fact that it was an almost brand new Nissan
Z—and as we approached Palm Beach the thing just died. There were quite a few happy suburban families meandering down to the beach and coming out of the milkbar with their Sunday papers as we started abusing each other. Loudly. One of us had to take the long walk down the road to phone the NRMA. My girlfriend drew the short straw and stormed off.
I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote these lines: ‘The Sunday drivers are cruising round, wish they’d all go back to town.’
It was ironic, really—I lived in Bondi Junction but because of these lyrics and the song where they’d end up, ‘Deep Water’, some saw me as poet laureate of the Peninsula. I would have liked to have been poet laureate of anything, but I was just a Bondi boy.
My relationship was deteriorating rapidly; the more obsessive my girlfriend became the more I wanted to end things. There was an immediate pressure on me to deliver the Highway One album, and a strong single would enhance the film’s chance of success. But my stormy domestic situation was really starting to hinder my work. Michael gave me a very strong joint one night, I got seriously stoned and ‘Capricorn Dancer’ flowed out of me like water. For some reason I had a mental block on a fourth stanza for the song, but Richard insisted that the song was fine just repeating lines from the second. It worked.
My personal life was by now resembling a Stephen King novel so Richard got me into Festival studios for five days and we recorded an impressive volume of material for the album, ‘Capricorn Dancer’ included. Then I was out of there. It was time to head back to Berlin.
The Best Years of Our Lives Page 9