The project lapsed into an orgy of booze and drugs. Half the band was tripping, the rest were stoned. I was still not much of a druggie, and as usual found the drug taking irritating, but tried to remain tolerant for the sake of the album. My album. Soon enough, though, I became a complete drunk, unable to cope with the relentless tension. I kept waiting for the next bomb to go off.
I was totally miserable. I desperately wanted to quit the album because I really didn’t believe that we’d ever finish it—or survive. But I knew I’d relinquished the opportunity to relocate to America or to Europe, and was damned if I was going to let this bring me down.
How on earth we managed to record that album in that state still amazes me. Because I was short of material, I came up with an idea.
‘Let’s get totally trashed,’ I announced, ‘and I’ll write a song “while-u-wait”.’
Why not?
Kirk was stoned and late for the session. By now Batchens and I were drunk; we started calling Kirk a ‘pussy’ and a ‘wimp’. After threatening to quit there and then, Kirk reluctantly plugged into the powerful amp that I’d hired for him, a 100-watt Marshall. I sat in an isolation booth utterly wasted, and just started playing. I was so drunk, I started doing a Captain Beefheart impersonation, growling rather than singing. You can hear me bursting into laughter throughout the track, which was called ‘I Can Talk to You’.
The intensity was incredible. Kirk detested Cleis and vice versa; the dogfight between these two for solos I think created one of the best moments in Australian recording history.
As the album progressed, things worsened, if that was possible. Richard stayed drunk; I was either stressed or depressed. Batchens still insisted on humming ‘hook’ lines to Kirk Lorange, which caused enormous friction between them. Ironically, the ‘guitar hooks’ on ‘Deep Water’ and ‘Lucky Country’ were actually Richard Batchens’s, so maybe his ideas weren’t that bad.
Kirk and Richard’s war climaxed during a night at the ‘Pyrmont Hilton’, where a scuffle broke out. Richard had to be restrained from wanting to seriously bash Kirk; he may have even landed a couple of punches. Kirk quit the album and I went to meet Jim White, the general manager of Festival.
‘I can’t work with Richard,’ I told him.
I felt really awful, because I loved Richard in a very odd sort of way, but he was so out of control that he was sidelined. I set to work producing most of Kirk’s guitar parts myself but Richard produced Kirk’s solo on ‘Deep Water’, which he played while he was perched right up against the brand new $10,000 speakers in Festival’s control room, his guitar literally five centimetres from the speaker cone. I shudder to think of the consequences had we blown up their new speakers. Sounds great, though.
Richard Batchens eventually talked his way back onto the project, and we closed off the studio from the outside world, including the band. We brought in session players to apply the finishing touches.
The last stages of the album were intensely emotional. Richard and I were still reeling from all the earlier dramas. I must say, in all fairness, that Richard did an excellent job with recording my vocals; no longer did he demand repeated takes. I would never concede that those vocals are my best, but this is where I really learnt to sing in a recording studio.
We ended the album as we’d begun: drunk. We’d drink in the afternoons and watch the sun go down over Pyrmont—and then we’d walk down to the studio and work until early morning.
I have always been frustrated about the lack of real insanity or ‘pushing the envelope’ in Australian recordings. My theory about the enduring popularity of Goodbye Tiger is that it was the first homegrown album that captured a journey to the outer stratosphere. All the anger and bitterness actually manifested itself into something quite passionate and beautiful. Don’t ask me why; it just worked. It was worth the pain.
There was a lot going on elsewhere in my life during the few months of recording Goodbye Tiger (a marathon by local standards, incidentally). I was befriended by the legendary radio DJ Billy Pinnell, who introduced me to Stan ‘the Man’ Rofe, the music guru of 3XY. Billy so passionately believed in ‘Capricorn Dancer’ that together we gatecrashed the pub where Rofe drank in private.
Stan the Man was Melbourne radio; quite frankly, this little stunt could have seriously damaged both our careers. It was a very risky punt. But we managed to get Stan on side, and he singlehandedly made ‘Capricorn Dancer’ a big hit and set up the Goodbye Tiger album nicely. Even before the album appeared in October 1977, pre-orders had exceeded 35,000 copies, ‘gold’ status, a first for me.
I was still frequenting the Lifesaver and it’s there I met the first of three Susies in my life (so far). She’d been married to a fairly successful rock guitarist but the marriage didn’t last. Straight away, I was besotted with her—to me, Susie was a girl in a woman’s body.
There were some good times, too. Michael Hegerty and I used to frequent the Astra on Bondi Beach, eat French or Mexican food in the many restaurants on Bondi Road, get pissed and invariably end up at the Lifesaver. The one time Michael and I took Mandrax was during some of the early photo shoots for the Goodbye Tiger cover.
Chris Murphy was still in charge; however, Michael Chugg, a business associate of Chris’s, slipped in behind his back and asked me around to his place in McMahon’s Point. It was the first of several thousand nights with Chuggie that I have great trouble remembering. Some are lost completely.
Chuggie was a human dynamo. It was as though this giant rollercoaster that had lain dormant for a long time had now roared into action. I was cruising through life quite nicely enough, but suddenly the rollercoaster took off with Chuggie at the helm—whoosh—and life started moving at a great pace.
Chuggie ordered us into serious rehearsal, barking at us like some sergeant major. He yelled at photographer Violet Hamilton—‘Get the fuckin’ cover finished!’—and at the record company—‘Get the fuckin’ thing in the shops!’
I had been Rolling Stone’s singer, songwriter and artist of the year in 1976—and was voted singer/songwriter and artist of the year for 1977. And I remained in great favour with JJJ, 2SM, 3XY and most radio stations around the country. Chuggie enhanced all this and, I must admit, was a damn good manager. With the record finally in the stores and the charts—where it would stay for six months—we hit the road, hard.
The band was a bizarre combination of personalities: Diane McLennan, Cleis Pearce, Greg Sheehan and mainstays Michael Hegerty and Kirk Lorange. We played the Sandgroper in Perth, the Marryatville in Adelaide, the Lifesaver, Bombay Rock in Melbourne and I reckon a thousand other gigs in between, every gig a full house. This really was the golden age of Australian rock’n’roll.
Perhaps what makes a lot of bands great is the internal warring that goes on night after night. The Goodbye Tiger lineup was a band of extremes, and nobody knew, including me, whether we’d be the greatest band in the world or the worst on any particular night.
Americans Fleetwood Mac were renowned for their volatile in-house dynamics, but they had nothing on us! Kirk was continually flirting with Diane, who’d been going through a tough break-up with her husband, parading around in his undies trying to lure her into his web. Kirk hated Cleis and Greg, who were total acid hippies with their own little love nest going
on. Michael and I kept getting totally wasted, especially when Chuggie was around.
One fateful night in Adelaide, after we’d played one of our greatest gigs, Diane and I somehow became detached from the rest of the band and ended up in a night of furious and passionate lovemaking in a hotel somewhere on Hindley Street. Seriously, it was on par with something you’d see in an Italian ‘art’ movie, and almost as hilarious.
Thus began the most bittersweet relationship of my whole life with this remarkable woman. I always thought Diane knew she was headed for a short life—sadly, she was right—so she crammed in more living than others would in ten lifetimes.
When we woke up the next day, the consequences of our actions really hit home, so Diane started drinking to get drunk and stay drunk. She simply could not tell her husband that their marriage was over. We flew to Perth, drinking all the way, and my voice started giving out on me before we’d played one gig in the west. I came down with pharyngitis; I literally had no voice whatsoever.
The enforced lay-off cost me a fortune, but allowed everyone to laze around the motel swimming pool for several days. When my voice finally returned, we played our biggest West Australian gig, a huge hippie festival in a remote rainforest. The stage was set on the banks of a beautiful river, and as we played, there were naked hippies swinging Tarzan-style across the front of the stage, flying through the air into the river. The air was thick with marijuana and people were tripping off their heads on mushrooms and LSD. It was like going to hippie heaven.
There were many equally legendary gigs on that tour. We played up on the Noosa headland in the lifesaving clubhouse and blew out the power for half the district. Noosa was not the sophisticated resort it has become and it took hours for the power to be restored—when it did we kept playing into the morning. Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum had a very wealthy friend up there, and Diane and I floated around his swimming pool, carefully ensuring that my cocktail didn’t sink. I took a photo of Chuggie the next morning, which ended up on my Past Hits and Previews album. It’s an everlasting testament to just how big a night it was.
The only place in Australia we didn’t tour during 1977 was the Northern Territory. We played hundreds of gigs. When there was nowhere left to play we would go back and play the same gigs again and again. Our tour manager Neil was an abrasive type, who had a habit of yelling every little piece of information. It didn’t help the psychological and emotional stress that built on the tour; I felt as though we were endlessly driving up and down Highway One pursued by a huge twister. This chaos, however, was of our own design; the heavy drinking certainly didn’t help.
I played one of the legendary Gold Coast clubs and the venue was packed, the crowd almost out of control. After the gig, Diane and I had a tiff. She was busy talking to some friends of hers and I was very drunk and wanted to get back to the motel and get some sleep. I managed to wrestle the car keys from her, and stumbled out into the car park and into the band car. I hadn’t had a driver’s licence for some years but managed a perfect three-point turn out of the car park and on to the road.
But I was so drunk I hadn’t noticed that I’d nudged a telegraph pole. No matter how much I accelerated, the car was not moving an inch. There were clouds of blue smoke coming from the burning tyres. I was so clueless that I asked a passerby why the car wasn’t moving.
‘Richard, mate,’ he replied through the driver’s window, ‘it’s not moving because you’re wedged up against a telegraph pole.’
When the inevitable happened and the police arrived, over 200 of my loyal fans, who were hanging around the car park, whipped up some bizarre story about a gang of bikies running the band car off the road. Diane had appeared by this time.
‘I’m the driver,’ she lied to the cops. Because she hadn’t had much to drink, we got away with it. (I’m not proud of this, by the way, and now wouldn’t drive under the influence. It’s hard enough sober.)
We also played the Stagedoor Tavern, a notorious Sydney venue near Central Station. I’d been to dinner with Chuggie and was quite inebriated by the time we arrived backstage. Like most venues, it was packed way beyond its legal limit; the accumulated sweat was condensing and raining down on all of us. It was like some crazy rock’n’roll sauna.
The band and crowd were really connecting and I figured it was time to do something spectacular. I spied what I thought were metal railings attached to the ceiling. I climbed on top of the PA stack, dived off the huge speakers and caught the railings. The crowd erupted and I started swinging jungle-style. But then my weight wrenched one of the railings out of the ceiling. They turned out to be water pipes. Suddenly, torrents of water flowed from every which way; it was pandemonium. God knows what might have happened if the power had shorted out—electricity and water can make a fairly lively combination.
Like something straight out of the film Almost Famous, a sixteen-year-old schoolboy named Ed St John had been commissioned to write a feature story on me for Rolling Stone. After that gig, Ed accompanied Neil and me back to a hotel in Kings Cross at about 1 a.m. Neil and I were both smashed; when Ed asked Neil if he would mind taking a walk through Kings Cross to find some batteries for his recorder, we turned on him like jackals. As Ed later told me, he asked me one question and my answer dragged on for over two hours. I worried about this for some weeks until Ed’s absolutely glowing story on me and Goodbye Tiger hit the newsstands.
The crazier the band became, the more our legend spread, especially within the hippie/surfing subculture. I was obsessed with taking the show to a higher level every night; I became more and more decadent. I was terrorising journalists and record company people, and picking fights with people I perceived to be bourgeois and reactionary. The irony was clear—the more of an enfant terrible I became the more people paid to see me and my travelling madhouse.
But this wasn’t an act. I simply wasn’t coping with all the attention. I was getting drunk to stay drunk, and when the pressure became too much I would turn into a raging bull and devastate hotel rooms. I had genuinely turned psycho. It got to the stage where I just couldn’t cope; I had to get off the road.
I stayed up all night drinking myself into a stupor in Launceston and the next morning refused to board a flight back to the mainland. Neil the tour manager physically dragged me all the way out to the tarmac, but they’d just closed the doors to the plane. He went nuts and stood in front of the 737, screaming and waving his arms like a mad man.
‘Open the fucking doors!’ he yelled at the astonished pilot.
Amazingly, the pilot reopened the aircraft door and Neil dragged me up the steps like a drunken sack of spuds.
My record was on the charts, my songs all over the radio, my concerts were sold out—and I was an absolute mess.
In Melbourne, Festival provided a presidential suite in a five-star hotel for me to do interviews. All my rogue mates turned up and drank the mini bar dry, not just once, but eight times in one day. Late that night, Michael Hegerty wrenched two fire extinguishers from the walls and ran screaming down the hallway spraying foam everywhere. I was incensed and forced Michael to mop up the damage with towels until dawn.
The next night we played the Tiger Lounge in Richmond to a full and drunken audience. Goodbye Tiger was number one in Melbourne that week, but when I proudly introduced the song, I was pelted with beer cans. I was shocked. Som
eone in the band got in my ear and told me that the Richmond football club—otherwise known as the Tigers—had just lost the grand final. Having some New South Welshman singing ‘goodbye tiger’ was simply too much!
But it wasn’t all lunacy in my life. A couple of years earlier, I’d been befriended by George Wayne. George started out in commercial radio in Australia but had relocated to Los Angeles for eight years, where he became very popular with many of the musical icons of the seventies, especially Little Feat and Jackson Browne. When George returned to Sydney, he curiously opted to work at 2JJ rather than a corporate network, but maintained close links with his famous friends in LA.
George had been sending copies of all my albums to Jackson Browne. Jackson particularly liked Goodbye Tiger and George set up a phone conversation. As time went on, Jackson became more interested in me as an artist and talked me up to his record company, Elektra/Asylum, owned by music mogul David Geffen, who also managed Jackson. Jackson was seriously considering becoming my producer and developing my career in partnership with Geffen.
George Wayne was also a close friend of Little Feat and when the band toured Australia in 1978, he arranged for Lowell George, the bandleader, to come in to the ABC so I could interview him live to air. I was a huge fan, but, sadly, Lowell was a ‘no-show’.
Then we heard the gossip. Lowell’s relationship with Little Feat drummer Richie Hayward had hit rock bottom. On this particularly bad day, Lowell had locked himself in his hotel room, drunk a full bottle of Courvoisier cognac and snorted line after line of coke. I was in the wings at the Hordern Pavilion for the show that night, and was gobsmacked at how out of it Lowell was. Then an on-stage feud erupted between George and Hayward, they were cursing each other quite violently—and vocally. George played a guitar solo that was way beyond human comprehension, his intention being to end by hitting a note higher than any man had hit before. I was left reeling from the experience. Again, great art came through anger.
The Best Years of Our Lives Page 11