I heard Jimmy talking about his mate Ralph—as most people referred to me—and in my drunken stupor thought this was the cue for me to get up and sing with Jimmy. I struggled on stage, and stood there swaying. Jimmy didn’t know I was there. When he finally turned around and saw me he yelled: ‘Not now, Ralph, ya stupid cunt! Get off the fucking stage. I’ll call ya up later!’
By now I was feeling humiliated and plain awful and just wanted to escape. Unfortunately, Michael Gudinski insisted that I couldn’t leave until I’d joined Jimmy onstage for the encore. He set to work trying to sober me up.
Jimmy finally got me on stage and threw a guitar around my neck. This particular guitar, a Steinberg, has an unusual design, and as soon as I put it on it swung around behind my back. Jimmy asked me to start out the chords to Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, but the guitar kept swinging around and around. I was still so drunk I was getting confused.
‘Can someone get me a guitar?’ I’d ask, even though the damn thing was on my back.
Jimmy repeatedly swung the guitar around, only for it to swing around again. And I continued asking for a guitar. Jimmy and I were doing our own Laurel and Hardy slapstick routine, the audience exploding with laughter. According to eyewitnesses, I stayed on stage long after Jimmy, winding the crowd up to chant for more encores. I don’t recall a thing.
The next morning I woke up with the most depressing hangover and a serious bout of paranoia. I didn’t have the nerve to phone Jim until late afternoon. When I did, I launched into profuse apologies. To my amazement, Jimmy kept assuring me that I’d been an asset to his gig. Everyone found the incident hilarious; really it was okay.
‘Don’t worry about it, Ralph.’
It was a great example of the camaraderie and unconditional bonds that I was lucky enough to experience in the Australian music industry.
In the eighties I’d elevated my entourage and myself to much classier establishments. For many years, the Southern Cross in Melbourne was like a second home. The incredibly tolerant night manager was the brother-in-law of one of Australia’s iconic rock stars. I can’t ever remember the hotel admonishing us for anything.
A well-known and very Spinal Tap-like British band were partying loudly one night at the Southern Cross. They kept phoning room service, requesting that drugs be sent up to their suite. Finally, a waiter was dispatched with a room service trolley bearing a large silver plate covered by a silver dome. The party animals lifted the lid off the tray and found six neatly rolled joints and six lines of coke, just as they’d ordered. Now that’s service.
A friend of mine, a guitarist with one of the biggest bands in the world, told me all kinds of stories about high times at the Southern Cross. His band all carried chainsaws housed in road cases, and after leaving large cash deposits with the hotel management would often proceed to redecorate their rooms. This guitarist had a bad drug habit and kept his paraphernalia in the pocket of his guitar case. He left Melbourne, bound for Sydney to catch a connecting flight back to the United States, and in the rush to check out of the Southern Cross had left his guitar behind. When he reached Sydney, the hotel contacted him but he denied that the guitar was his. He was so paranoid about getting busted that he flew home without his $50,000 guitar.
In 1986, I was still managed by Michael Chugg and remained signed to Mushroom. They approached Neil Young about having me as support act on his six-week Australian tour. They left some of my albums with Neil. He must have been impressed because he agreed to have me as his support, and also insisted that I perform for an hour and play encores if prompted by the audience. Hardly the usual deal for a support act!
Two weeks prior to Neil’s arrival in March, my band and I went to a party in Sydney’s Double Bay after a gig at Cronulla Leagues. There was a bevy of beautiful girls at the party and there were all kinds of shenanigans going on. I had such a good time I passed out; when I woke up in the morning I found myself in a large bed with a Penthouse Pet. My bass player was over the other side with his own Pet.
My sleeping beauty eventually opened her eyes and began squawking at me.
Thus began my very short-lived relationship with Donna the Penthouse Pet. I couldn’t remember what had happened the night before. All I knew was that we’d missed our 11 a.m. flight to the Gold Coast. I didn’t see Donna again for a couple of weeks.
Shortly afterwards we joined Neil Young and his band Crazy Horse. I was so excited to be on the tour—Young was a real hero of mine—that I forgot all about Donna the Pet.
Our first night was at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. My band and I were ushered into our dressing room, and then I heard Gudinski and Chugg shouting out my name down the corridor.
I poked my head out the door and Gudinski had a rolled-up newspaper, which he was smacking against his hand, while shouting: ‘Ralph, you sex god! All the money in the world couldn’t buy publicity like this!’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I asked.
They unfurled a copy of the Melbourne Truth. The headline read: ‘Rock Star. Penthouse Pet. Love Child.’ There was a promo photo of me, with a promo photo of Donna right alongside. Apparently, Donna had been Penthouse Pet of the Year several years running, but her career was in decline. So she launched her own publicity campaign in which she claimed she’d had sex with Julio Iglesias and me, was now pregnant with a child and didn’t know who was the father. This was, of course, complete bullshit but it was a hell of a headline. (Neil Young got a copy of it, as he later told me, and had it framed on his studio wall.)
After our set at the Entertainment Centre, we came back to the dressing room and bumped into Donna and a bevy of her Penthouse Pet friends. This just sent the Crazy Horse guys wild.
A true rock’n’roll circus was set in motion. Donna and I continued our relationship for a few weeks but she was a real handful—too much for me.
Neil Young was one of my earliest icons and biggest influences. I took the tour very seriously, at least initially. Neil kept pretty much to himself for the first few gigs, but I hit it off with Crazy Horse from the outset. We partied hard almost every night. It became like one of those legendary tours you only read about in music biographies. There were Penthouse and Playboy centrefolds hanging around. The partying would go on and on, with only a few hours’ sleep between gigs to recharge.
Neil had distanced himself from the rest of us; he obviously didn’t need to be around a bunch of hard-living loonies.
When we first played Sydney, Neil stood behind my amplifier for the entire set. He grabbed my arm as I ran off stage, and in view of the cheering audience insisted that I go back out there and play another song. Which I did, of course. Hell, it was Neil Young.
Next time I came off stage he grabbed me again, put his arm around me and said: ‘So you’re Ralph, huh? You’re a bad boy, Ralph. My band hasn’t been to bed for two days. I’m gonna change the name of my tour from Rust Never Sleeps to Ralph Never Sleeps!’
He led me down to his dressing room where he had his own private bathroom. Then he took me into the toilet cubicle and locked the door. I assumed that he was going to offer me some drugs, but instead he picked a newspaper off the toilet floor. He was chuckling uncontrollably as he showed me the headline: ‘DEAD GIRL ASKS FOR COKE’.
Some y
oung girl was clinically dead for a few minutes, and when the doctors revived her they asked if there was anything she wanted. She asked for a Coca-Cola.
Neil just laughed and laughed, then picked up another newspaper with a headline and accompanying photo of ‘flying rabbits’. (It was, of course, a hoax.) Neil told me that Aussies were his favourite bunch of people because we were so weird and wonderful. I couldn’t argue with the man.
After the gig that night, I started another party with Crazy Horse members Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina. I asked the guys if they remembered a gig at Wembley Stadium from the seventies. A friend of mine had been at the gig, and told me that Neil was so ‘out of it’ that his entire on-stage repartee consisted of two comments.
Between songs, Neil slouched over his acoustic guitar and mumbled: ‘Go to Miami. Everybody gotta go to Miami. It’s cheaper than it looks!’
His only on-stage props were a palm tree in a bucket, a stepladder and a light globe up in the branches of the palm tree. Neil would say: ‘Hey, Hal—shine a little sun on me now!’ Then an on-stage extra would mount the ladder, get up into the palm tree branches and twist the light globe to turn the sun on.
Billy and Ralph thought this was an exceptional story, but dismissed it as a rock’n’roll myth. A little later in the evening, Billy asked me what year it might have been.
‘I figure that it would have been some time in the mid-seventies.’
‘Aw, shit, that’s too bad!’ Ralph exclaimed. ‘In other words, we played to 100,000 people at Wembley Stadium and I don’t even remember doin’ the gig!’
This wasn’t totally out of character. I think the most legendary Neil Young album is Tonight’s the Night. If you are a big fan, you might recall that this is the set of songs (and the subsequent tour) that Neil and Crazy Horse dedicated to Bruce Berry, their roadie, and Danny Whitten, their guitarist, who’d both died from heroin overdoses.
That night in Sydney, Ralph told me that Neil and some members of the band all lost a year of their minds on a cocktail of drugs and alcohol. The blitz just went on and on. He simply didn’t remember the recording sessions, nor did he recall much of the world tour that followed. Maybe they did play Wembley, but he just couldn’t remember it.
At the end of the Neil Young tour, Gudinski and I sat in a caravan backstage at a velodrome in Brisbane. I explained to him that I was disenchanted and wanted a release from Mushroom. I was exasperated by how dominant Melbourne was in the overall scheme of Mushroom Records. I also knew that I finally had enough confidence in my own ability to stand alone. Three hours later, the concert well and truly over, the audience gone, Gudinski and I shook hands and parted ways.
The other reason for my disenchantment meant far more to me. I had written a song called ‘Goodbye Barbara-Ann’ as a tribute to Brian Wilson, celebrating the influence he’d had on all our lives. (Brian Wilson was at his lowest ebb at the time; he was being ‘treated’ by the mysterious Dr Landy.)
I was over at Triple M one afternoon hanging out and was asked why Mushroom hadn’t put more effort into the Solidarity album, which barely scraped into the Top 30. The Triple M people felt it was strange, as I had had so much support from radio and the media with the record. Trevor and Jan Smith, who ran the station, asked me if I was still writing songs. I replied that I’d written this song that I was really happy with, but Gudinski had refused to shell out one more cent on my career, so it remained unrecorded.
I played them ‘Goodbye Barbara-Ann’ and they loved it. I also played it to Charlie Fox, who was the program director. He insisted we play the demo live to air in the drive slot, primetime radio. Among the callers to Triple M that day was a very irate Gudinski, who abused the shit out of me for daring to play an unreleased track on radio.
Much to Gudinski’s further disgust, Sydney radio continued playing the demo. Chuggie stepped in and demanded that Mushroom finance one last single. Gudinski eventually gave us a ‘budget’ of $2000. This paid for 24 hours’ studio time, but musos and people like Chippa, who engineered the session, worked their butts off for free. Unfortunately, the end recording sounded like the dirt-cheap job it was.
I spent much of the mid-1980s living with Jon Farriss and our girlfriends. Jonnie was in a relationship with a Texan gal called Lisa and I’d somehow ended up with Jannike, a Swedish girl with platinum blonde hair and a sexy Scandinavian accent. We’d stay together for a couple of years. For a while, the four of us lived in a smallish flat in Vaucluse, overlooking the ocean. I had been trying to write songs with Jonnie but without much luck.
Things had really started happening for Jon and INXS. They were about to embark on a European club tour to promote the album Listen Like Thieves. Just prior to the band’s departure from Australia, Gaddafi’s terrorists began a campaign of attacks and bombings. We sat there in horror watching the six o’clock news footage of a club in Amsterdam where INXS had been booked to appear—blown to smithereens.
The Farriss brothers went into damage control and stubbornly refused to leave the sanctuary of Australia. Chris Murphy, however, read them the management riot act. The band was going to Europe whether they liked it or not. The girls and I went out to the airport to see off Jonnie and the rest of the band, and were all very concerned for their safety. It was a bloody scary time.
As soon as we arrived back at the flat, I went straight into the studio and wrote the song ‘Glory Road’ for Jon and INXS and how they fitted into the big world picture during those troubled times. In the song, I depicted them as a group of intrepid Australians off to the front. My lyric described a bunch of dudes trying to climb the mountain of success and bring happiness to a lot of people, at the same time not really understanding why life has to be so complicated. I got a good song out of the experience.
My friend Kerryn Tolhurst, who’d been living in New York, had been stricken with cancer. He had no medical insurance and I helped arrange a benefit concert at Selina’s in Sydney. It really was a matter of life and death and I threw myself into a crazy schedule. I only had days to bring together the pick of Australia’s rock talent. A few people in the business thought I was mad.
Colleen Ironside, my agent at the Harbour Agency, willingly threw herself into the project. After several sleepless days we managed to form a coalition of Cold Chisel and Midnight Oil, a homegrown supergroup. The press and Triple M promoted the shit out of the gig and we managed to raise something like $40,000 for Kerryn, who over time recovered. This was probably the first benefit concert for a comrade in need, a great tradition that continues today.
Peter Garrett from the Oils called me soon after. He asked me to help promote a gig at Selina’s to raise funds so he could have a tilt at the Senate. This time I got really ambitious and organised a cast of thousands, including the Divinyls, Jimmy Barnes, James Reyne, Angry Anderson—who’d be the MC—and, once again, Midnight Oil and Cold Chisel playing together.
Peter Garrett went on holidays in the Whitsunday Passage, leaving me to organise his gig. Peter would call me every so often to inquire how it was going. I’d ask him to get back to Sydney and start rehearsing. Rob Hirst and Peter Gifford from the Oils sat out in the beer garden of Selina’s, ribbing me that Garrett wouldn’t front for his own gig.
I became more and more manic; sleep became a luxury I could ill afford. Rob Hirst kept ribbing me about
whether Garrett would even show. I was becoming paranoid. What if he didn’t turn up? What would happen then?
The house was full and the show began. Angry came on as MC and things started out really well. But Angry had a stash of bourbon, and as the night progressed, he got more and more sloshed. It was getting out of hand—and Garrett had still not appeared. As I stood in the wings, Angry just lost it. He’d been criticised a lot for his swearing on stage, and had something he felt he needed to say.
‘A lotta cunts have bin puttin’ shit on me for sayin’ “fuck” too much on stage,’ Angry roared, as I hid my face in my hands. ‘Well, awright, tonight I’m not gonna fuckin’ say “fuck” on fuckin’ stage and all youse cunts can fuckin’ get fucked.’
There were politicians and all manner of toffs in the VIP section. I was freaking out.
There was only one way to solve the problem. I had the only key to a backstage room and recruited Angry’s bodyguard—a man known as Fur—to help me get Angry to this room and try to sober him up. The show needed a sober compere. We grabbed Angry and trooped around to my private room. I opened the door. Lo and behold, there was Peter Garrett, watching TV. Angry morphed into this little raging tiger; he pounced on Garrett, screaming that he was a ‘bald-headed pseudo intellectual arsehole’—or words to that effect.
Fur grabbed Angry with both arms and held him off the ground, his legs swinging in the air, so he couldn’t get to Garrett, who was up on the bed doing some kind of martial arts routine—curiously just like his stage moves. The two Oils roadies were holding Garrett back. I was getting ready for my first heart attack.
A disaster was averted by Fur and the roadies. I calmed Peter down and started working out a strategy for his onstage entrance. I took him down to the stage, where the Chisel/Oils band was working up a storm, playing ‘Shakin’ All Over’. The crowd was peaking. There were about ten, maybe eleven microphones along the front of the stage. Peter calmly walked out on stage and the place erupted. He then methodically removed every last mic stand until there was only one remaining, centre stage. Then he launched into his Peter Garrett routine and it was like a musical earthquake. It was definitely one of the most awesome performances I’ve seen from anyone, anywhere.
The Best Years of Our Lives Page 18