I began leaking news about my secret departure to my best friends, including David N. Pepperell and Dave Dawson. Pepperell jumped on the first plane to Sydney, already drunk, and insisted that we were going to see the gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson at the Town Hall. He had a few of his Melbourne bohemian buddies in tow—also inebriated—and I went along very reluctantly.
David and his crew began interjecting loudly. Thompson was handling it, but only just. Pepper must have had a lot of speed because he was garbling garrulously and not giving Thompson a chance to reply. I was embarrassed and physically dragged David and his mates out of the Town Hall and into a sleazy pub over the road. We proceeded to get totally obliterated. We then went back to David’s hotel in Potts Point where he ordered French champagne by the case. We partied till dawn and trashed his room in the process.
I had been sneaking musical equipment over to Berlin without my girlfriend knowing. They were my only real possessions. The day after the Thompson debacle I had the worst dispute yet with my girlfriend (my blinding hangover didn’t help), so I stormed out of the flat and grabbed the first taxi I could find.
‘Mascot airport, thanks,’ I told the driver. ‘And fast, if you could.’
Somehow my girlfriend found out about my escape. I ran into the airport—I still had valid papers for Berlin—and asked to be put on the first flight to Germany. There was one leaving soon. Perfect. I went inside the gates, seeking sanctuary, and just as we were starting to board, I saw my girlfriend outside, stamping her feet furiously and shaking a fist at me. I could still see her from my window seat; by the time they towed the plane back I could see she was crying, her face pressed to the glass. I deeply regretted slipping away under cover of night, but this relationship could not possibly have succeeded. We were both alcoholics, which, as any educated person knows, is one evil drug. I really had to drag myself away from her, for both our sakes. But I may have shed a tear, too.
I arrived in Germany the next day in a blinding snowstorm, having drunk a lot on the plane to ease my fear of flying. Volker and Andrea had only recently moved into a new apartment on Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse—much smaller than Klausenerplatz, but better situated. There was plenty of room for me.
When we arrived back at the apartment, I sat down and wrote ‘Goodbye Tiger’ all in one go. Dr Pepper called me ‘Tiger’, an old ocker expression of endearment. It’s a real blokey nickname. The lyrics may sound fictitious and poetic but the words are virtually literal, and journalistic in their own way. The lyric was pretty much a transcript of our conversation back in David’s hotel room a few nights before, my itching to be ‘chasing those dolce vita times’.
It was nearly the end of Volker’s semester at the university, and he’d rented a farmhouse on Nørre Nebel, the northernmost tip of Denmark. It had been a long time since I’d last seen Denmark and I was keen to return. We drove up to Hamburg, and I met Andrea’s mother for the first time. She was a senior editor at Stern, the famous German magazine, and was a fascinating person to talk to. At the end of the war she’d ended up with an anonymous American soldier when the troops arrived in Hamburg. One night later and he was gone, leaving her with Andrea.
From Hamburg we drove through incredible blizzards to Nørre Nebel; the farmhouse was just wonderful, like something out of an Ingmar Bergman film. (Maybe it was.) It snowed so hard we could barely get the front door open, so we agreed to stock up on supplies and not bother leaving. I holed up in my room with the door closed and songs flowed out of me. I couldn’t have dreamt up a better environment for writing.
I already had the basic idea for ‘Deep Water’, an invented story about Michael Hegerty’s sister, Christine, down on Bondi Beach. Christine was a real ham, hence all the stuff about doing the foxtrot on the beach at night with the fireflies dancing in the promenade lights. I decided to marry that part of the song to the Palm Beach Road incident. I’d been toying with the idea of writing an opus that would encapsulate Sydney life within that seven minutes and it all fell into place.
‘Lucky Country’ was next, another quick and painless birth. The first time I went out in the snow I walked down to the frozen beach; it all struck me as incredibly weird. There I was, up near the North Pole, writing songs about the Antipodes. And yet it was so easy. I’ll die happy knowing that I wrote three of my best songs—‘Tiger’, ‘Deep Water’ and ‘Lucky Country’—in just a few days. Bang, bang, bang!
We returned to the city and I settled into Berlin life as if I’d never left. I was back with my old friends and began speaking ‘Berliner’ immediately and effortlessly. I’d enjoyed my few years back in Oz, but I felt better in Berlin, more at home. There was something about my life there that was much more fulfilling, although I wasn’t sure exactly why. I began making plans to put down roots in Germany.
Royalties from Australia kept me living quite well for a few months, while I hustled English and German record companies for a deal. I’d always found those running the German record companies to be very frustrating to deal with. However, I befriended a really cool guy in Hamburg, by far the best industry person I’d met in Germany. He’d worked for a big label but had decided to go it alone. I spent lots of time in Hamburg, staying with Andrea’s mum and trying to formulate some sort of plan with the guy.
Unfortunately, his spirits were low and he wasn’t sure if he even wanted to stay in the industry. But he had enormous belief in me. I told him that I felt that if handled correctly I could break out of Germany and into the United States. Sadly, we just couldn’t get any of the German record companies to commit to the extent that we hoped.
I was also trying to consolidate my contacts in England, but was restricted by not having the money to make unlimited trips to London to hustle. I did get one call for a meeting in London, and was in the middle of a week-long fasting diet I’d spotted in Stern, surviving on nothing but water (after another week of scaling down). I went to London and did not let one morsel of food pass my lips, yet I think I’ve never felt better my entire life.
Nothing came of the meeting and I started to just drift along. I still wanted to stay in Europe, but back in Australia, ‘Capricorn Dancer’, which came out as a single in early 1977, looked like it was going to be a hit. Festival’s Phil Matthews implored me to come home and promote ‘Capricorn Dancer’ and record one more album for the label. I made it very clear that Richard Batchens and other people at Festival wouldn’t mess with my music ever again. I was really starting to assert my independence. Phil, an all-round great guy, kept sending me reassurances by telegram.
I’d hit a very big fork in the road. Was I an Australian or a universal traveller? I was getting very confused.
I was dating Inge, the girl from ‘Prussian Blue’, and we had been getting along pretty well. But one night I took her to Romy Haag’s and things changed rapidly. Romy Haag was the most incredible transvestite in Europe, rumoured to be a partner of David Bowie. People came from all over the world to check out his club. It was necessary to book weeks in advance and I kept the evening as a special surprise for Inge.
We arrived and Inge was awestruck by what she believed to be a nightclub full of the most beautiful women in Europe. The floorshow was as close to Liza Minnelli’s Cabaret as I was ever going to see. We’d been there for a while when one particularly camp act came on stage and Inge began to smell a rat. Or a bloke.
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sp; Just then, Romy Haag came swanning up to the bar and sat next to us. Inge was gazing at Romy’s diamonds and beautiful mink hat and jacket. I’d had a few drinks and started teasing her. Romy was beautiful; we couldn’t stop looking at him. Suddenly the penny dropped, and Inge burst into tears, ran out of the club, jumped into a taxi and fled. She refused to see me again.
That was the clincher. I called Phil Matthews.
‘I’ll come home,’ I said, ‘but I want to visit the Dingoes in San Francisco on the way back.’
He agreed. In 1977 I left Berlin with a heavy heart and headed for America, landing in New York. I’d never been to the States before and I was completely awestruck.
Georg and his wife Sabine had been living in Manhattan for several years and were happy to have me stay for a few months. Georgie hadn’t been having the best of times in New York; Sabine was totally immersed in her anthropological studies and Georgie had been very lazy with his English. They were living on Hudson Street in the East Village, just off Bleeker, and I immediately became Georgie’s personal interpreter.
We hung out in all the legendary bars and folk clubs in Greenwich Village. Georgie would order ‘to-killa-yew’ (tequila), which had bar staff in hysterics and immediately endeared us to everyone. I went out every night, hanging out at CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, the Bottom Line and the Bitter End, all great clubs. I saw everyone from John Cale and Lou Reed to David Allan Coe and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
By day I shared some bizarre experiences with the loonies who were so much a part of New York life. One day in Washington Square, Georg and I were both filming with our home movie cameras. A black guy came over and started yelling at us for filming him.
‘We’re not,’ we assured him.
‘You’re racist pigs!’ he screamed back.
Because Georgie’s English was so bad, he misunderstood and began filming the guy. He tried to grab our cameras and we had to run for our lives.
I went to Times Square alone to see the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory and caught the subway at about 10 p.m. It was 32 below, absolutely freezing. I noticed something strange: passengers seemed to be moving down the train every time it stopped. After several stations I found out why. A homeless man entered our carriage naked, bar the garbage bag he was wearing. The smell was nauseating; I didn’t even dare guess what was inside the bags he was wearing. Then I found out. When I finally looked at him, I saw that the garbage bag ‘turban’ he had wrapped around his head was full of human excrement.
After months of living in an apartment with twenty locks on the door, having watched some guy on live eye TV shooting twenty-two of his workmates because he hated the Jewish foreman, it all started to get a bit much. I decided to catch a plane to California, hoping for better things.
Georgie was devastated; he was trapped in New York with no friends. They’d had an ugly and frightening experience with a babysitter—one night he and Sabine came home and the babysitter had kidnapped Saskia, my goddaughter. It was only sheer luck that the babysitter changed his mind and dropped Saskia back outside the apartment, before disappearing forever. (I subsequently named one of my daughters Saskia.) I really felt for Georgie, but I had to keep moving.
The Dingoes were flying high. They were recording an album with Garth Hudson from The Band, and were being looked after by the Rolling Stones’ manager. I stayed with Chris Stockley for a couple of days, but the band was busy, so I decided to take a Greyhound down to Hollywood.
The trip down the West Coast takes several hours, and during the drive it struck me that if you travel by Greyhound in America, and hang out at the YMCA, it must be easy to write songs—there are just so many colourful characters at that level of American life. There were drug dealers and card sharks and con men and all sorts on that bus.
We reached the depot at about eleven that night, and I was scared shitless. I’d walked straight into one of the heaviest areas in America, downtown LA, with a guitar, a camera case and a suitcase. The streets were swarming with pimps and drug dealers and gangs; it was a real-life Taxi Driver (different city, that’s all). I hurried into the first hotel I could find. The dude on the desk was Hispanic, gelled-back hair in a ponytail, earring, the works. He spoke just like Cheech Marin.
When I got upstairs I saw why the room was so cheap. The light didn’t work properly; the black-and-white TV was busted. When the hotel’s neon sign reflected on my window I saw three bullet holes. I didn’t need forensics to tell me someone had fired those bullets into this room. I was petrified. I couldn’t go back out on the street now, so I’d have to wait it out till morning.
I sneaked a look under the starched white sheet and sure enough the mattress was covered in bloodstains. Of course, it could have been menstrual blood, but I tend to take the Raymond Chandler view. Welcome to LA. Next morning I couldn’t get out of there fast enough and checked into the Holiday Inn with all the other tourists.
I wasn’t destitute but I was on a shoestring budget and had to choose my tourist adventures carefully. Being a songwriter makes this a lot easier; I found it much more romantic to be drinking Coke with a hotdog at the bus depot on Hollywood and Vine than touring some studio.
I met a black dude who lived in the Greyhound station. He kept all his possessions in a locker. He’d ride the buses all night because it was safer and cleaner than sleeping on the streets with the other bums. Having been a bum myself in Europe, I started to nurture romantic notions of putting my guitar in a locker and doing the same, at least until I was discovered and became a big star! On second thoughts, that was a bit too clichéd for me.
I went to lunch with industry great Jerry Moss, the ‘M’ in A&M Records, which he’d established with Herb Alpert and was home to acts like The Flying Burrito Brothers and Burt Bacharach. He kept buying me Scotch and Coke and I got very intoxicated.
‘I have to go,’ I apologised after one too many, ‘I’m just too pissed.’
Now, Americans have an entirely different definition of ‘pissed’—it’s short for ‘pissed off’.
‘What’s wrong?’ Jerry asked me repeatedly. ‘What’s upset you, Richard?’
‘Whaaaat?’ I slurred. ‘I’m ’aving a great time. I’m really enjoying myself, Jer, but I’m just too pissed!’
It just didn’t make sense to him. How could this weird Aussie be having such a great time if he’s so pissed off?
I eventually booked a flight home to record my album for Festival, after spending some time with Chris Stockley in San Francisco. Part of me wanted to stay in America but I’d made the commitment; studio time had been booked for me to start work on Goodbye Tiger.
Back in Sydney once more, I moved into a little flat, bought myself a bicycle and spent a lot of time just cycling around Bondi and hanging out. I made it very clear to Festival Records that I intended to remain committed to the ‘art’ of this next project; I simply wasn’t comfortable being marketed as some pop star. I was very conscious of Jackson Browne, Little Feat and Randy Newman, real artists. They were my touchstones.
This appeared to present no problem to the label. They very gently steered me back to Richard Batchens. Politely yet firmly I told Richard I’d been very reluctant to return to Australia.
‘Let’s try and make th
is record without any feuds, okay?’
He agreed—but it was to be a short-lived peace.
We were to record ‘Deep Water’ first up. I went into the studio with Michael Hegerty on bass, Kirk Lorange on guitar and a funny Greek drummer called Jimmy Penson (tragically, the first mortality in my career, killed by a drunken driver on Bulli Pass). He’d played in a very successful boogie band called Blackfeather; he was a damned good drummer and all round nice guy. Jimmy was like a hilarious parody of an archetypical Greek. He wasn’t dumb, but he would ham it up just for everyone’s amusement.
In between sessions, we were playing at the Station in Melbourne to a more than packed house. The gig was going really well but a grumpy Kirk Lorange kept screaming at Jimmy to ‘lay back’, musician talk for ‘slow down the beat’. Jimmy had the dopiest look on his face as if he didn’t understand. Every time Kirk would scream ‘lay back’, Jimmy would lean further and further back on his drum stool until he was on the verge of falling off the stage. Michael and I were laughing so hard we could hardly play. That’s Jimmy playing drums on ‘Deep Water’ and ‘Capricorn Dancer’.
Also in the studio with me were Cleis Pearce (on viola) and drummer Greg Sheehan, who’d both played in an ‘acid jazz’ outfit called Mackenzie Theory. It didn’t seem likely, but they were a good fit. Diane also rejoined what was to become the notorious ‘Goodbye Tiger’ band.
Feuding erupted almost immediately between Batchens and the band. Kirk and Michael joined together in one of several factions; they regarded themselves as the ‘sane’ members of the band. Greg and Cleis were Balmain hippies who survived on macrobiotic food and LSD. Richard Batchens’s main ally was John Frolich, the engineer, a Palm Beach hippie and original New Age guy. I was just the pivot for everyone else to cling on to.
The Best Years of Our Lives Page 10