Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

THEY LOVED TO DRINK at this pub. Most of the clientele were big, tattooed, musclebound, ugly motherfuckers in blue singlets and shorts. And that was just the chicks. No, not really. Not all of them anyway. Saturday nights most of the girls dressed to the nines, their hair tied back and their dresses hiked up high, smelling like the makeup section of a department store. There were some beautiful girls. The blokes were all smooth-talking, hard-drinking, fast-car-driving, salt-of-the-earth, working-class Australian blokes who knew how to have a good time. They would punch and kick each other for fun but if anyone else had tried to do the same they would have been killed. These were the sort of mates you read about in books, the kind of guys who joined the army to fight in Gallipoli because their friends were going. The kind of blokes who would take the shirt off their backs to give you if you needed it, or rip your head off your shoulders if you deserved it. They drank hard, lived fast, laughed and cried together, all in this beautiful pub. We were lucky enough to get the chance to play for them and they took us to their hearts.

  I spent every cent I made drinking in that pub and when I had no money, I was still there, because one of our mates always had enough to go around. And if for any reason none of us had money, the publican would let us drink for free. This place was home to me and the band and a bunch of wild misfits just like us. In the Pier we found a place where we belonged, and for a lot of us, this was the first time we had felt that.

  I remember singing there one night and I heard the distinct bang of a shotgun over the roar of the band. The roof above the stage collapsed on me. The band went quiet.

  ‘What are you stopping for? Fuck, come on mate. Play your fucking guitar. We’re just having a good time!’ One of the guys liked the band so much he had gone to his car and got his shotgun and blown a hole in the roof above us. This was his way of showing us his appreciation. This place was like the Wild West.

  Football teams from Broken Hill and marauding bikie gangs from Melbourne all turned up on the steps of the Pier, hoping to beat the locals, whose fighting ability was legendary, only to be beaten to a pulp and sent packing with their tails between their legs and their teeth missing. The Pier was a tough pub. It was where we learned to hold our own in the rock’n’roll business. By the time we were dealing with the big guns and thugs in the music business, we had seen it all. Nothing scared us.

  LES HAD MOVED BACK in with his parents. He really didn’t want to leave in the first place. I moved back in with Mum and my stepfather Reg in Elizabeth for a little while.

  My mum had lived a harsh life. And even though she’d made it through that life and didn’t have to fight anymore, she still felt more comfortable when trouble was happening. The worse the trouble, the more comfortable she was, so much so that if it wasn’t happening she would start it herself. Reg was the opposite. He just wanted to stay home and have peace. They were a match made in hell. He would have been content to live a simple life without anybody judging him, look after his newfound family and stay low under the radar, but that was never going to happen. Not with my mum anyway. By the time I went to stay with them again, Mum was sick of him. She needed to escape from him and his quiet fucking life, and he knew it. I didn’t want to be there and I got out as soon as I could.

  BEING BACK IN ADELAIDE was a bit of a roller coaster. We were playing the same circuit, the same gigs, over and over, so the same people worked out they could see us whenever they wanted. If they didn’t come out Thursday, they could see us Friday somewhere else, or even the next week if they really wanted to. We would go from full houses to empty houses and then back to full houses, all within a month. We were like goldfish swimming around in a very small fishbowl, only unlike goldfish, we remembered everything and everybody we had seen. We were going crazy.

  We did runs to Port Lincoln and back, stopping anywhere in between we could. Our crew at the time included Ian’s big brother, Peter Moss, who had joined us when we got back from Armidale. He was our sound guy and truck driver, and he was a man of few words.

  ‘Are you all right, Peter?’ I would ask.

  ‘Ahhh, yeah,’ was all he would say.

  ‘Can I get you a drink, mate?’

  He never wasted a good sentence. ‘Ahhh, yeah.’

  Even if I asked for more I never got it. ‘How did the band sound tonight? Were we loud enough?’

  ‘Ahhhh, yeah. I guess so.’

  But he was a great guy. Loyal and hardworking. He smoked too many cigarettes and he liked a beer but didn’t really need much more than that to make him happy.

  Tooley and Mick McDermott, another good mate of mine from the Pier, were helping out too. They set up our gear and then drank with me all night. These guys knew how to drink.

  I started hanging around with a guy from the Pier called Alan Dallow. Big Al, as he was known around the Pier, was six-foot-two with not an ounce of fat on him. He was quick on his feet and had a sharp wit that could easily provoke a reaction and often did. Alan and I would drink jugs of scotch and Coke all night, every night of the week. We were the first ones at the bar and the last to leave. We knew all the bouncers and the barmen and were on a first name basis with every waitress that ever worked a shift at the Pier.

  Alan and myself used to terrorise everybody who came near us, even our mates. We became inseparable, travelling to shows all over the state on Alan’s motorbike. He rode a Honda 750 k1. Alan was a bit of a mechanic, so his bike flew and saved us from many a dangerous situation. He was a good-looking guy and all the girls had a bit of a soft spot for him. We went out with two girls who we’d met at the Pier. Brioni was a quiet little girl who looked like a doll. She had long blonde hair and used to dress in a cheongsam. I was smitten by her when I saw her knocking back drinks at the bar of the Pier. Cathy was her sister and she could drink like one of the guys. She was a great girl too and both of them would hang around the gang at the Pier. So after every show we’d jump on Alan’s bike and make a beeline back to Largs to drink and hang out with the girls. It was an on again, off again sort of thing but we had a good time with them while it was on.

  Alan was afraid of no one. He loved to fight, but not to hurt people, he did it just for fun. So he would get into fights with people who deserved to be punched. Gangs of marauding hooligans from all over the state were knocked to the ground by Big Al. I was his sidekick, never really having that much to do but always there just in case he needed backup.

  One night we were riding down the road near Elizabeth somewhere and Alan spotted this big guy hitting a girl. I don’t know how he saw it, we were travelling at about a hundred miles an hour on his bike, but he spotted this domestic out of the corner of his eye. He turned the bike around and pulled up next to this monster who was back-handing his girlfriend, knocking her to the ground in the middle of the day, out on the street. People were walking past and doing nothing. This guy was so big and ugly that he scared everyone off.

  Alan walked up and said, ‘That’s enough, mate.’

  And the guy turned around and walked towards him. He roared something in caveman at Alan, in a voice that would have made most men tremble with fear.

  ‘Are you for fuckin’ real?’ Alan laughed. He had that look on his face like he was thinking, good, finally someone who might be able to fight and he walked up and hit this guy so hard that his jaw swung in the breeze, broken. He collapsed on the street in a pile, and Alan just stood and laughed at the state of this wife-beating moron.

  What Alan didn’t see was the guy’s wife, who had had her eyes blacked and her teeth knocked out by the thug, get up and run at Alan screaming like a banshee.

  ‘Don’t you hit my man!’ she yelled, and punched, kicked and spat at Alan, who quickly stepped back and held her at arm’s length from himself. She was still swinging like a windmill as Alan waved at me.

  ‘Quick, get back to the bike. She’s crazy,’ he shouted. Then he pulled his arm away and ran for the bike, managing to get on and moving before she could get her bearings and attack for a second time. We
sped down the road in silence and after a few miles, Alan turned to me and said, ‘If I ever stop to help anyone again, no matter who it is, I want you to slap me. All right?’

  WE WERE GETTING WORK through a new Adelaide booking agency called Jovan. Jovan was basically Vince Lovegrove and his wife, Helen, a good rock’n’roll team. They both looked like rock stars and were wilder than most of the bands they booked. Vince loved the spotlight and basked in it as often as possible, while Helen was happy in the shadows doing all the hard work. She loved Vince and was used to him. He had spent a lot of his adult life in that spotlight. As a young man he had sung in a wild band called The Valentines, sharing the singing duties with Bon Scott, and although those days were gone, he still acted like more of a pop star than anybody else I ever met. He was dramatic and funny and loved life. He had a story for every situation and was always happy to tell it to you. Helen, on the other hand, was dry and equally as funny, if not funnier.

  One day we went around to Vince and Helen’s house with a proposition. We didn’t really expect them to agree.

  ‘We need to step things up. Take it to the next level. We’re getting a lot of work and we need a manager,’ I said.

  Vince sat listening. ‘I know how much work you’re getting. I’m giving it all to you.’

  ‘But if you managed us you could get us work at places you don’t run, too.’

  Vince laughed to himself. ‘Yeah, you’re right there.’ He looked at Helen. ‘What do you think? Can we do it?’

  I think it was Vince who officially managed us, but we all knew that Helen was doing the hard yards. We had watched her running the office for months.

  ‘It’ll mean a lot of work but why not?’ she smiled. ‘Let’s all have a drink to celebrate.’

  They put us in pubs and clubs all over Adelaide. They had their hands in the running of the Pier Hotel, the Pooraka Hotel, the Mansfield Park Hotel and a number of others, including the Mediterranean Hotel in the middle of the city. The Mediterranean was the home of a gig called Countdown, the same as the TV show. It was in the middle of Hindley Street, at the sleazy end of town. It was the Kings Cross of Adelaide. You could get laid or laid to rest on Hindley Street, it all depended on how lucky you felt. If you wanted something illegal or wild you could find it on that street. I felt more threatened there than I did in the Cross. People were out of control, so we fitted in just perfectly.

  BY EARLY 1975, DON was ready to rejoin the band and he felt it was time to get serious. ‘I think it’s time to start learning some original songs.’ While he was studying, he had written a whole repertoire for us. ‘We’ve got to stop playing cover songs. Now that I’m back we could take a break and learn new material.’

  The rest of the band looked at each other. We were worried. ‘But the audiences are loving the songs we’re playing.’ I didn’t want to throw away anything that was working.

  But Don had decided that if we were ever going to make it, we needed to be playing our own material. And we needed to do it now. We were still playing Led Zeppelin songs – faster and harder than Led Zeppelin ever did, but the fact was they were still not our songs. We all knew we needed to make the change. I must say Cold Chisel have never been afraid to shake things up a bit. Especially Don. And this is a trait that has helped us sustain people’s interest for over forty years.

  Vince wasn’t so sure it was time to change though. ‘Why fix it if it isn’t broke? People are loving the way the band plays. You guys are crazy.’

  I had a feeling Vince didn’t want Don back at all. He had no control over him. We were already filling rooms, and Don just meant more gear, less room on the stage and more people to share what little money we were making. I also think that Vince knew that the rest of us would do almost anything he said, and he wasn’t sure if he would wield the same power over Don.

  ‘If you guys drop all those songs, the crowds will leave you and go to someone else. I’m telling you.’ He kept trying but it was decided. Don was one of the band and we wanted him back in. So Don rejoined us and we took a bit of a break to learn our new original repertoire.

  COLD CHISEL HAD FIRST got together and spent quite a few months practising at the Women’s Liberation Hall in the centre of Adelaide. As a struggling young band, we didn’t have a lot of money but these fine women were kind enough to let us use the premises for next to nothing. We never got in their way and they never bothered us, and we began rehearsing there again when we returned from Armidale. That is, until one day when Vince Lovegrove came in to watch us work.

  Now Vince had the attention span of a small soap dish and before long grew bored with us struggling through our songs. To amuse himself, unbeknown to us, he sat and wrote a few messages in the women’s comments book. Vince was not politically correct; he was an opinionated bloke who didn’t mind sharing his opinion with whoever would listen. And as the women who frequented the hall were not there to tell him to shut the fuck up, he ranted on and on about where he thought a woman’s place was. We finished the rehearsal and left thinking we would be back the following week. I’m not sure exactly what Vince wrote but it was clearly offensive and we were told in no uncertain terms to hit the fucking road and never come back. We couldn’t blame them. Vince could offend anyone. When Helen heard about this she was disgusted, but she had to laugh a little. She always told us Vince could be an idiot sometimes.

  We found a new practice hall behind a church in Hindmarsh, on the same street where I had lived with my mum and Reg. I’d probably sung in the choir there.

  IT WAS AROUND THIS time that we changed bass players too. Les had started the band, and we all loved him for that. But what he wanted to do and what the rest of us wanted had changed. Les was happy playing covers all night, and he didn’t want Don to run the band. In Don’s absence he had taken over running things, and he liked it. With Don back, that would all change and he knew it. Our musical tastes had changed too. We were heading in a different direction now.

  It was hard though. We’d been together from the start, travelling in the back of the truck together. But at some point, up in Armidale, the gap had grown and it was only a matter of time until he had to go. Phil Small joined the band.

  Phil had been in a band with Ian for a short time while Ian was still at school. Phil tells me that Ian used to turn up to play dressed in his school uniform. Phil was now in a blues band with his brother and a few mates and Ian felt that he would be the perfect guy for the job.

  Phil was not only the perfect man for the job musically but was also one of the nicest guys in the world. He was the exact opposite of Les. He was quiet and even a little shy. He was a blues guy. He never dressed too flash or said too much. His bass playing reflected his personality. He was straight to the point, solid and soulful. He listened to what everybody had to say and then carefully made up his mind before joining the conversation. Phil was the sort of guy you would want for a best mate. He was honest and supportive, funny and compassionate. He never started trouble, in fact, he hated violence of any kind. He was a gentleman in every sense of the word.

  WITH THE ADDITION OF Phil and the return of Don the band began to feel complete. We were moving into a new phase. The whole thing kicked up a gear. This was it. New songs, a new attitude and we would be soaring off into the stratosphere.

  We spent about a month learning and relearning the songs that Don had written. Arranging them as we went along. Working all day and night until we got them right. They sounded really good to us. Maybe a little more mid-paced than we were used to but good all the same. We knew that some of them might be a little slower than our audience was ready for, but we pushed ahead. The month flew by and eventually we had two sets of material consisting mostly of Don’s new songs and a few covers that had survived the cull. We moved the gear to the Mediterranean Hotel, ready for the reveal. Our regular crowd must have been chomping at the bit to see us because there they were, lined up ready to hear the band they knew and loved.

  Unfortunately, we were
no longer the band they knew and loved; we were a band who had just learned a bunch of new songs, written by a guy who’d spent the last year or so studying physics and living in college with a bunch of dorks. He was totally out of touch with where the band had moved on to, and the songs didn’t work for us at all that night.

  The place emptied quickly, and by the end of the second set we could hear crickets rubbing their legs together. We were alone in Countdown with nothing but the memories of our old crowd looking very angry and bemused and mumbling under their breath as they left the hall as fast as their feet would carry them. It was a disaster. We were shattered. Even Don knew that the songs weren’t right. Next day we went to see Vince and decided never to play the songs again. There were a couple that worked, but not many. We went back to playing the old songs even harder and faster than we did before, with more anger and just a touch of embarrassment.

  Things settled down and we went on working our way around South Australia. The songs came. Don worked up new songs for us every day and slowly but surely we started to get our own sound, a combination of the raw power the band had learned from playing live to hostile strangers in pubs and the songs that Don was writing. We slowly found a way to marry the two together. We were on our way.

  IAN, STEVE AND DON shared a house with Peter Moss. I spent a lot of time at that house but never lived there. I think this was a good thing for the other three. The last thing they needed was me and a bunch of my drunken mates hanging around the house looking for trouble. But regardless of what they wanted, I still did hang around a bit.

  I lived with John, my brother, in a tiny house near a pub called the Arkaba Hotel, just off Glen Osmond Road. We had two small bedrooms. One for me and one for John and his Great Dane. The dog was the size of a bear. As you can imagine, a dog this size needed a lot of exercise. Unfortunately, John didn’t walk the dog as much as he should have. Consequently, the dog went crazy from being locked up so much.