Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

  WE GOT TO ARMIDALE, New South Wales, and suddenly it felt like we were in Woodstock circa 1969. There were hippies everywhere. But not just hippies. The hippy population was mixed with a lot of country folk. Farmers with big hats and moleskin trousers walking around the streets, looking at the weirdos in cheesecloth who smiled at them as they passed by. I wasn’t sure about either of them. I didn’t know any farmers. And I didn’t think you could trust people who smiled as much as the hippies did.

  I’d never spent any time with people like this before. If you dressed like a farmer or a hippy in Elizabeth, you were screaming out to be beaten. Most of the Adelaide hippies lived in the hills or somewhere out of sight. I don’t mean ‘outtasight, man’ either.

  But everyone seemed to get along and all the people I met were very warm and friendly. It wasn’t that long until I began to drop my guard. It seemed I didn’t need to be ready to fight anyone. Within a month I was wearing cheesecloth and smoking pot and listening to Crosby, Stills & Nash and eating only vegetables. The girls in the area appeared to eat only vegetables and rock singers, which suited me down to the ground.

  WE BEGAN LOOKING FOR gigs and had no trouble getting work at the local university, colleges and schools. We were the only band that remotely resembled a rock band within a hundred miles, so we managed to get gigs from Tamworth all the way up to Glen Innes and everywhere in between.

  We found ourselves a place to stay, a little farm twenty-five miles out of Armidale, on the way to Tamworth, at a place called Kentucky. The house was next to an apple orchard. It wasn’t too flash, but it was clean and it was cheap and there was no one near us for miles and miles. We loved it, we could play music whenever we wanted to and no one cared. We could walk out to the trees outside the house and pick apples to eat, which we did a lot because we didn’t have much money. There were always a few slices of bread and butter lying around, so we didn’t starve. And, let me tell you, getting an apple straight off the tree is the only way to eat one.

  There were a few drawbacks. To go to the toilet we had to take a shovel and go out into the paddock, and we had to build a fire in the stove or else we had no hot water. If we wanted to go into town we all had to go, because if you decided to stay home, you were basically trapped, with no vehicle, ten miles from the main road and twenty-five miles from town. It could get a bit lonely and a little scary out there alone. I was always first in the truck, ready to go to town and drink or do whatever we were going to do. Just as long as I wasn’t left behind, I was happy.

  We found some contacts through friends of Don who sorted us out with pot and there was no shortage of booze, so everything was all right. Even I was happy smoking pot. It seemed that the environment around New England suited stoners and I didn’t feel worried about letting my guard down.

  I was becoming relaxed in my new surroundings. There was no trouble at the house. A few little arguments but nothing serious. We all got on like a house on fire. There were a few nights where we nearly did set the house on fire, come to think of it. We became good mates. Mick seemed to be getting a little withdrawn but we all just presumed he missed his mum’s cooking or was smoking too much pot – this was more likely – and shrugged it off.

  I was missing nothing from home at all. I had nothing to miss. These guys were my family now. I was happy. Waking up in the country without having to see Elizabeth or the inside of the foundry suited me down to the ground.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Thunderbolt’s Rock

  ON THE FARM, 1974

  THE GIGS WERE DIFFERENT every night. We’d get one gig at the teacher’s college and that would be wild and boozy and then we’d play at the university and the place would be full of hippies. I remember playing one night at the university and the crowd seemed really small but we started the set anyway. Right next to the stage there was a small window which was next to a drainpipe that ran one storey down to the ground floor. The band had just started when I noticed a leg coming through this very small window. The leg was attached to a foot that was not wearing shoes and I noticed that there were beads tied around the ankle. The foot was followed by a pair of ripped and torn flared pants with crochet around the bottom. Next came the very thin vegan-looking waist of a young hippy girl followed by a head of unbrushed, blonde hair. As her leg touched the floor in front of the band it started dancing, even before the rest of her body was through the window. By the time she was completely inside she was in full motion, interpretive dancing around the dance floor in front of me, with a huge smile. She had shining, if not slightly bloodshot, eyes, and was staring at me. Close behind her, about twenty more hippies danced their way through the window and onto the dance floor. They all seemed to love the band.

  This particular group of people became the core of our support in Armidale for the next six months. We were, by this point, wearing no shoes and flares ourselves, so we fitted right in with the audience. After the show we left the hall and followed our newfound friends to a farm where the young vegan girl lived and that’s where I stayed for the next few nights, listening to Van Morrison and smoking weed and eating vegetables. I never realised I liked Van or vegetables that much, but suddenly he was my favourite singer. This lasted until I left her farm. Then I went back to listening to Deep Purple and eating steak whenever I could.

  MICHAEL OUR ROADIE WAS becoming more and more depressed. He decided he needed a friend to talk to because none of us wanted to talk to him anymore, so he bought a dog, a cute-looking little beagle.

  As the dog got older he started eating anything that wasn’t put up high, including guitar leads, shoes and records, and we all stopped liking this poor little dog when he pissed on the PA. His popularity was dwindling to the point of non-existence when one day we arrived home from a shopping trip, just before dark. There, on the floor, were the tell-tale signs of the party the dog had been having – a trail of aluminium foil, covered in teeth marks and ripped to pieces all through the lounge. The rubbish bin had been raided and rubbish was scattered all over the kitchen floor. ‘Michael, I think your dog has eaten the hash. We’re going to have to kill it,’ I shouted back towards the truck.

  I followed the trail of silver paper, like a tracker, looking for the culprit. I was going to have to give this dog a good talking to. Then I spotted him, just his tail at first, wagging ever so slightly. He was lying behind the door to the front bedroom. So I snuck up, and jumped around from behind the door.

  ‘Hey you little bastard, what the fuck have you done?’ I yelled, expecting the dog to hit the ceiling. But to my surprise he didn’t move. The poor dog lay on his side with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. He still didn’t move, except for his eyes, which followed me around the room like the Mona Lisa, and then rolled around his head like a dog insane.

  I couldn’t be mad at him as I had felt the very same way many times after a big night. I’d eaten a lot of rubbish in my day too, so I immediately knew what I had to do.

  ‘Are you all right, man? Hey, one of you guys get him some water. He’s really fucking stoned.’ I picked him up and carried him into the lounge room where it was warmer and whispered, ‘Ian, get him a drink of water.’

  The dog drank as if he’d just crossed the Simpson Desert on foot. Steve covered him with a blanket and turned down the lights. ‘It’s a bit too bright for the wee bastard.’

  Ian lit some incense and I put on Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. And then we stood back looking at him. ‘He looks happy there doesn’t he?’ I said.

  After about twenty-four hours he got up and started walking around but something had changed. He no longer looked for things to piss on, or to tear apart. No, he had become a pacifist and a hippy dog. So we did the only right thing. We packed him into the car and took him out to the farm where the cute young hippy girl with the dishevelled blonde hair and the small waist and the crochet around the bottom of her jeans lived and gave him to her. He never chased another cat or ate another bone. I believe he lived out his days happily eat
ing lentils and barking along to George Harrison albums.

  LIVING IN ARMIDALE, I had almost forgotten what it was like to have to worry about watching your back. Then we got our first gig in Glen Innes. Now Glen Innes looks like a lot of other Australian country towns, so we just set up the gear and went about playing our set as per usual. But this was not a normal pub and they weren’t a normal crowd. These were hardcore country boys who wanted a good time. A good time being a skinful of booze, a slap on the face from a young girl and a good fight.

  I stood on the stage singing for a couple of sets, watching the crowd, and something felt very familiar about the place. No one was dancing while the band was playing, but that was normal in a lot of places. They were drinking lots and lots. That was pretty normal too. But it wasn’t until the third set when we started playing our harder stuff that the place exploded. It was as if the first chord of one of our harder rock songs was the bell ringing to start the fight. As Mossy played the opening chords, I watched as every bloke in the place turned to the bloke next to him and proceeded to tear into them. The whole place broke into a bar-room brawl. It looked like a scene in a western movie. One person punched someone, who fell onto someone else, who turned and punched them and so on, and so on, until the whole pub was swinging and punching each other. Suddenly I felt comfortable and started winding the band up to play louder so that we weren’t drowned out by the sound of breaking glass and screaming girls. This was just like home.

  After the show we were worried that the publican would blame us for the riot. ‘I hope he fucking pays us. Look at the fucking state of this place,’ Steve said as he looked around the room, which was being hosed out by this point.

  But we did get paid. In fact, the publican turned to us and said, ‘Thanks boys, that was great. One of the best shows we’ve ever had. You guys are going to have to come back more often.’ He smiled as he tucked his ripped shirt back into his pants. ‘I’ll book you right now if you’d like me to. The crowd loved you. You could lose a few of those slower songs you played at the start, but it was great once it got going.’

  We all smiled nervously.

  ‘Well, I suppose you want your money, eh?’

  We stood and looked at him and nodded.

  ‘Hey guys. Why don’t you stick around and have a drink with me and a few of the local lads? Maybe I can win my money back in pool?’ He laughed but I got the feeling he was serious.

  The locals were all black-eyed and standing around in ripped T-shirts smiling at us, with teeth missing and blood trickling from their noses.

  ‘Shit. You know we’d love to but we have a long drive ahead of us and it’s getting late. We should hit it. Thanks for asking though,’ Ian said politely and we all headed out the door. We jumped into the back of our little truck and left town as fast as it would take us, laughing and counting the money we had made, all the way back home.

  A LOT OF THE people we met were like Don, studying to be scientists or mathematicians and whatnot. But they all seemed to be a lot looser than Don. They were taking drugs and drank like fish, whereas Don hardly drank at all and I’d never seen him look at drugs at this stage. But they all got up every morning to study or teach or whatever they did. I would sleep until lunchtime and then get up wondering where I was, how I got there and what I had done. Then I would shake off the cobwebs and start to think about the next gig.

  One guy, Phil, had worked out a way to send opium from South-East Asia to himself, or to a post box at the university actually. Phil was a funny, intelligent man. He had travelled the world and had a story about everything. He became a bit of a mentor to us younger guys, guiding us through the ins and outs of living and working around a university campus. He had a thick head of curly hair and drove a VW that always seemed to have smoke billowing from the windows and Pink Floyd blaring out as he drove around Armidale.

  He had smoked quite a lot of opium on his travels overseas and told us wondrous tales. ‘Boys, you would have loved this. I was lying on a bed in Bangkok, in a room lit only by candles, the smell of cheap perfume, Nag Champa and opium filling the air. I was being massaged by a couple of naked, well-oiled, beautiful golden-skinned Thai girls at the time. Every now and then one of the girls would grab hold of the pipe. That’s the opium pipe by the way, not a euphemism, you dirty little bastards. And then she’d bring it to my mouth, while the other little angel would lean over me, sliding her slippery body over mine, and light it for me. And then, then, well, you can just imagine what happened then. Some things you have to experience for yourselves.’

  He laughed out loud, looking at us as if we were his students and he was the master. We were hanging on his every word. Well, he had me sold on smoking opium. The massages and the naked girls just sealed the deal. In my head I was already buying the massage oil and booking an airline ticket.

  Luckily for us, one of Phil’s parcels arrived just in time for a party we were having at the orchard on the coming Saturday afternoon. We were all really excited by the prospect of trying this wondrous drug for ourselves. Where we were going to find the golden-skinned Asian beauties was something we would have to work out once we had the opium.

  The big day came. We had the whole day planned. Phil would arrive with the opium late in the afternoon. In the meantime, we would have a few drinks, play some music and generally get a bit loose. Another friend turned up with bottles of magic mushroom juice for us to drink. Mushrooms were a bit of a staple up there in New England and we’d all had them before, so they wouldn’t be a worry. We cranked up the music, rolled a few spliffs and started drinking mushy juice and Coke.

  The day was going really well. I had invited a young lady called Nicki who I’d met at one of our gigs at the local high school. She turned up looking absolutely gorgeous. Nicki and I were good mates the whole time we were in the area. She was a great girl. I was trying to control myself a bit and not be so wild that I scared her off. But this girl, I soon found out, could hold her own with the best of them. I wasn’t a problem.

  Everything was perfect, the sun was shining, the music was pumping, beautiful Nicki was with me and we could not leave each other alone. I felt like I’d died and gone to heaven even before Phil arrived with his stash. We went into the kitchen, where he pulled out a block of golden, almost black, treacle-like stuff. It looked a bit like hash to me.

  I stared at it for a minute and said, ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Wait a minute, would you?’ he said and proceeded to pull out the pipe he’d told us that he smuggled in from South-East Asia.

  ‘Where did you hide that? It’s pretty big.’

  ‘Never you mind, young fellow.’

  I quickly tried to stop thinking about that. I was more interested in what was in front of me. ‘I’m already flying, Phil, so I’m ready to give this a good go.’

  ‘All in good time, young man.’

  Phil told us a few stories as he prepared his party trick. I, of course, didn’t really want to listen. I wanted to eat the whole fucking block immediately. But he talked me down.

  ‘Listen, mate. Grown men have disappeared off the face of the earth after just one pipe of this magnificently evil concoction I have in my hand. And you – you, young fella, are about to try it.’ He laughed. ‘Wealthy sailors travelling the world have stumbled upon this stuff and given away everything, their boats, their money, even their families, in exchange for a life being massaged on a bed in Thailand smoking this golden treasure.’

  If he was trying to scare me off he was going about it all the wrong way.

  Finally, he got down to business. He got the tiniest piece of opium on a pin and started burning it over a flickering candle flame. Was it my imagination, or did Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir start spinning on the turntable? No, it couldn’t be, that album wouldn’t even be released for another year. Man, this stuff was good. The treacle then expanded into a tiny ball. It was getting bigger as you used it. I liked that.

  Phil placed the ball on the pipe.

  �
��Here we go, lads.’

  As he put a light to it he breathed in. A thick cloud of blue smoke swirled up into his mouth and nose. His eyes rolled back in his head and he let out a low moan as if he was in the throes of some incredible orgasm. He held it in, it seemed for an eternity. We all stood around saying nothing, barely breathing. Then he let the smoke billow from his lips until it filled the room and turned it from a country kitchen in New South Wales into a Siamese den of pleasure.

  Opening up his already bloodshot eyes, he stared at me with a crazed expression and said, ‘Fuck, that’s good. Who’s next?’

  ‘I’m ready,’ I said, jumping to the front of the queue.

  Everyone else waited in line. They were all excited about what they were about to do, but they were all slightly afraid as well. Not me. I was in. I had my first pipe. I stood, waiting to be swept away from reality, which was going to be difficult, because I hadn’t seen reality for a long, long time. Everyone else quickly had their turn. I stood there, quietly waiting. I was willing it to take me and transport me to a new level of consciousness. A place of peace and beautiful colours and, of course, naked girls.

  But nothing happened. Everyone else was obviously floating around the room so I reached up and pulled Phil back to the ground and said, ‘Hey, fill her up again, chief. I think my one must have been too small.’

  He restocked the pipe.

  ‘Thanks.’

  I grabbed the pipe and I breathed in the smoke like a free diver before going down into the deep blue sea. I held it in until my lungs nearly exploded and then breathed out, imagining myself breaking through the surface of the Mediterranean. Nothing happened.