Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

  One morning John let the dog out into our very small backyard to have a pee, then went back to sleep. By the time he woke and went out to check on the dog, it had jumped the fence into the neighbour’s yard, and ripped all his washing off the clothesline. What was left of his clothes lay in pools of mud around the backyard. John quickly jumped the fence and managed to get the dog back over, then proceeded to pick up all the guy’s shredded clothes and hang what was left of them back up on the clothesline, as if no one had touched them. The guy next door never said anything to us. I think he was scared of John and the dog.

  The house was not comfortable or particularly clean, like most houses that I shared with John over the years. It was a place to crash if we needed to. Otherwise we were out on the town.

  MOST YOUNG BANDS DON’T have a lot of money to spend on promotional material. Cold Chisel was no different. We couldn’t wait for our name to be on everyone’s lips, but that takes time.

  We wanted to be big now, so we figured we needed our posters plastered around town. But we couldn’t afford to buy posters to put up. What was worse, we really didn’t have that many shows to promote. It was decided that we would write our name directly onto walls around town. I think this was Don Walker’s idea. All he needed to do was find someone who wasn’t afraid of getting into trouble. Someone who liked to get on people’s nerves. Someone he could talk into doing it. Someone stupid enough to not care about getting caught. He came to me.

  ‘Sure, I’ll do it. It’ll be good fun,’ I said.

  ‘That’s good, Jim. It’ll be for the greater good of the band but you’d better not get caught. It wouldn’t look good, one of the band doing this. We want people to think it was done by diehard fans. Not the singer. You know what I mean?’ Don said in his slow Queensland drawl. I’d heard him use the same tone of voice as he tried to talk agents into booking the band into a pub that didn’t want us.

  ‘Yeah, no worries, Don. Nobody’s going to catch me,’ I said, rubbing my hands together. ‘Big Alan will help me. We’ll go on his bike so we can get away quickly.’

  Alan was sitting on the couch, not really listening to us. ‘What? What did you say?’ He looked at me with a blank face.

  ‘I was just saying you and me would go around town painting the name of the band on people’s walls, won’t we?’

  ‘Fuckin’ oath!’ he said, getting up. ‘Are we going now?’

  ‘No, I think we should think about it a bit. At least we should wait until it gets dark,’ I said, looking like I had a plan. I didn’t.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, good idea. I like that about you Jim. You’re an ideas man. Will we have to fight anybody?’ Alan was getting excited now, I could tell.

  ‘Maybe. We’ll do what we have to do, Al. Let’s just wait and see.’

  ‘Cool. But it’ll be more fun if there’s some fighting involved.’

  ‘I know, mate.’

  My plan was to wait until after midnight then head out on Alan’s motorbike and hit as many places as we could in as short a time as possible. Then get back to the house before the cops caught us. It was a Monday night, so there wouldn’t be too many people out and about. It would be a piece of cake.

  Before midnight, Alan and I had a few drinks and a line of speed just to sharpen our very dull wits and then headed off.

  ‘Let’s just hit the usual walls where they put up posters and that should do us,’ I said, sounding like I knew exactly what I was doing.

  ‘I know a couple of places that would be good to splash a bit of paint onto,’ Alan laughed. I could tell immediately that things might get out of hand. We headed out into the dark night. Unfortunately, it wasn’t dark enough.

  While we were busy writing ‘COLD CHISEL’ in two-foot-high letters on a brick wall in Alberton, some do-gooder stopped his car and shouted, ‘You blokes shouldn’t be doing that. That’s public property!’

  Alan turned, hoping for an argument, and walked towards the car. ‘What’s your problem, you fuckin’ bozo?’

  The guy took one look at him and sped off, the car fishtailing as he fled the area as fast as he could.

  ‘What a pussy,’ Alan sniggered.

  ‘Okay Alan, let’s go before he gets the cops.’

  We put on our helmets and jumped on the bike.

  We spent the next two hours painting walls all over the suburbs of Adelaide. We wrote on the wall of the local Prospect Police Station. That was Alan’s idea. We even found a beautiful big white wall that surrounded the house of the then biggest promoter in Adelaide. He ran quite a few gigs around town and on Sunday nights he ran a gay evening. It was the only thing open late and most musicians ended up there at some point in the night. People from all walks of life rubbed shoulders at the club: judges and criminals, musicians and gangsters, all sharing tables, listening to music and watching drag shows. The highlight of the night occurred about 1 a.m. That’s when the weekly ‘slave market’ was held. Punters who had had way too much to drink would offer themselves up for auction to be some lucky bidder’s ‘slave’ for the next few hours. I never volunteered to be sold, or bought anybody myself. But people would pay up the money and take whoever they bought out the door and leave. What they did was their business, I guess.

  Anyway, that promoter probably wouldn’t like us much after this night.

  ‘What do you think, mate? This’ll look really good. And fuck him, he doesn’t give us many gigs anyway,’ I said.

  ‘He definitely won’t give us any gigs now,’ Alan laughed.

  We wrote it so large that ‘VOTE 1 COLD CHISEL’ was easy to read for the next few months as you drove past his house, even at high speed. He tried to scrub it off but it refused to be gone. He painted over it but it still bled through. He would not forget us in a hurry.

  We were satisfied that we had done our job as well as we could. ‘The band is going to be so happy with us,’ I shouted against the wind as we roared towards home at high speed.

  We were nearly home when I yelled out to Alan, ‘Stop. Stop the fuckin’ bike!’

  Alan locked up the brakes and the bike screamed to a stop. ‘We can’t miss this chance, can we?’

  There, right in front of us, was a big new wooden fence. The sun was coming up, but I figured we had just enough time to do it then get to fuck out of there. The band lived just around the corner, so we could escape quickly before anyone noticed us. This fence looked down the main street that led from the city to the airport. By seven in the morning it would be gridlocked and would stay that way for hours. No one would be able to sit in their car without seeing the name ‘COLD CHISEL’ in big black letters.

  ‘I’ll do the painting, you keep an eye out for any cars,’ I said to Alan as I leapt from the back of his bike.

  This was the big finish, the pièce de résistance. We were exhausted. We took off and turned the corner and headed down the street back to the house.

  I was woken by the sound of Peter, who was responsible for our truck. He was screaming out at the top of his voice. ‘What the fuck is that?’

  I looked out the window and there, written on the side of our truck in big black letters, was the word ‘FRANK’.

  ‘I don’t know. We never did it. It definitely wasn’t there when we got home. I don’t think,’ I said, rubbing my eyes.

  We found out later that the guy who owned the last fence that we vandalised knew of the band and knew where we lived. Apparently his name was Frank. He left us a note under the windscreen wipers telling us never to touch his property again or he’d carve his name into our foreheads.

  ‘That’s pretty funny,’ I said and went back to bed. Peter spent the next four hours getting Frank’s name off the truck.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Deep Purple overdosed on methedrine

  FRATERNITY, 1975 OR THEREABOUTS

  SOMEWHERE DURING THIS PERIOD, a harmonica player named John Ayres started turning up at our gigs. John, or Uncle as he was known, was a crazy guy with his hair shaved all the way from the c
rown of his head down to where his beard started under his chin. This included his eyebrows, so he looked like a cross between an alien and a garden gnome. Uncle played harp for Fraternity, one of the bands I used to look up to at the Pier Hotel. They started out as a sort of hippy band, with recorder solos and gnome beards. But they were great. They ended up changing their name to Fang, moving to the UK and becoming a hard rock band. By the time they got back to Australia they were jaded and on the verge of breaking up. But some new blood was injected into them via a few new members, and they were in the process of reinventing themselves when their singer, Bon Scott, left and joined another band.

  Bon was tired from slogging it out with Fraternity in the UK. By the time they returned to Adelaide he was over it. In May 1974 he was riding a motorbike around town and drinking way too much. A bad combination. He had a serious accident and recovery took a long time. It was during this time Bon and I became friends. I had looked up to Bon for years. Even though Fraternity had limited success in the rest of Australia, in Adelaide they were huge. I had always watched local Adelaide bands and admired them even when they didn’t talk to me. These were guys from the same town I was living in. Hometown heroes, I guess. But a lot of the local bands were pop stars. They seemed to have more attitude than they should have had. Bon was different. He was a good guy. He drank down at the Pier with the locals and that’s where I started hanging out with him. At this time, I remember Bon’s drink of choice was a Harvey Wallbanger, a weird mix of vodka, Galliano and orange juice. Bon didn’t have a lot of orange juice with his. I drank these with him one night. I could never look at Galliano again. Ever.

  Bon was a hard-rocking guy from his head to his toes. He had the swagger of a rock singer and the look of a rock singer, but unlike most of the other people around Adelaide who tried to be rock stars he had the goods to back it up. He could sing higher and drink more than most, and more than one time drank me into the ground. Even I was shocked by how much he could consume. But he was a funny, warm, down-to-earth bloke, and he stayed that way for as long as I knew him. No matter how famous he got, he never changed.

  The band that Bon was to join were from Sydney. They already had a reputation as a band that was going places. They knew how to rock. Before Bon joined them, I had seen them at Chequers Nightclub in Sydney on our way back from Armidale, and was blown away by the power of the two guitar players. They were a great band who needed a great singer, and Bon was a great singer. The band he joined was called AC/DC. Bon and AC/DC were a match made in heaven. They went on to make a few of the best rock’n’roll records ever.

  SO FRATERNITY FOUND THEMSELVES in the market for a new singer and my brother John was in the market for a new band, and he decided to join Fraternity. It was all going great when suddenly the drummer, a guy called JF, left the band. JF had had a big fight with Bruce Howe, the bass player and leader of the band. My brother, who always had a plan B, said, ‘No worries. I’ll play drums and we can find another singer.’ At that time, he was more comfortable behind the kit.

  This was around the time Uncle started turning up at our shows. We got him up to play with us at the Pooraka Hotel and it was pretty wild. After the show he cornered us and said, ‘Maybe I could get up and do some more shows with you guys.’ He was a charmer.

  ‘Yeah, that sounds good.’ We all agreed.

  ‘Well, maybe you could pay me a little wage. You know, just for petrol and pot. My band is building a PA system so we need all the cash we can get.’

  Whatever his band was building had fuck-all to do with us, but our crowd loved him being up there and so did we.

  ‘Yeah, all right, we could pay a little bit. We don’t make that much.’

  We all had the feeling we were being conned, but in a nice way, so we hired him anyway. I was loving the energy that he had, and the volume he played at. He was deafening. I always liked people who grabbed my attention. It wasn’t long until my brother John was hanging around too. And Uncle and John came up with a scheme to get me to leave Cold Chisel and join Fraternity.

  I talked before about how John had a way of getting me to do whatever he wanted. Uncle and John’s Fraternity proposition was a bit like that. Before I knew what was happening, they had me leaving Cold Chisel, a band that I loved, and joining a band that no one had heard. This was the plan.

  ‘It’ll be so good, Jim. You and me in the same band.’ I had heard this before when John joined Cold Chisel. It didn’t work out that time. ‘I’ll play drums and you’ll be out front singing. We’ll kick arse, I’m telling you.’ John could see it all in his head. ‘We will kill it. How could we go wrong, eh?’

  Uncle watched on as John spun his story. Even he was impressed.

  ‘Listen Jim, these guys have been around for a long time. They’ve played overseas. They have a shitload of experience. With a bit of energy from us two we’ll blow the business wide open.’

  I looked at John and could see in his eyes that he believed what he was saying. This meant a lot to him.

  ‘What do you think, Uncle?’ John asked, looking for support.

  Uncle was almost as sucked in as I was. ‘Ah, yeah mate. This could be the start of something really good for all of us.’

  Even though he had no eyebrows – maybe because he had no eyebrows – he always looked a little startled. Naive looking, like a deer in the headlights. But I felt I could trust him. Uncle was a bit crazy, but he had a good heart. I looked at the two of them and decided then and there to join Fraternity.

  Fraternity mark two was a really good band, made up of these great players who had years of experience in the music business. Bruce Howe and Uncle had toured the world with Fraternity mark one. Mauri Berg, the guitar player, was from a band called Headband. They had been huge in Adelaide when I was a young fellow. We had John on drums and a young virtuoso named Peter Bersee on electric violin and second guitar. This guy was amazing but had never been in a rock band before, so he was a wild card. He kept getting tangled up in his guitar cord and falling over. It was great to watch, funny as hell.

  We would rehearse in the cellar of the Fraternity house in Prospect. In that cellar Bruce would read the riot act to us all. ‘Listen, if you play drums like that on the night, the crowd will walk out the fucking door. And I don’t want to be fucking there if they do, okay?’

  John didn’t take criticism well. It was a family trait. ‘What’s wrong with the way I’m playing?’

  I could see John wanted to hit him. Bruce would be red in the face. He had told John a million times what he wanted. ‘Just keep it simple and in time. Try to play the kick drum with the fucking bass. That’s all. You don’t have to get all fancy with it. You’re not in a fucking cabaret band now, you know.’

  Bruce yelled at everyone. Most of the time no one listened. But I did. I listened to everything he told me. ‘You don’t need fucking vibrato, Jim. Hit the fucking note and hit it clean. Don’t wobble it around. You’re in a rock band. Don’t slide up the notes, just hit them pure and clean. It’s fucking that simple.’

  I filed everything away, never forgetting it.

  The band built its own equipment, guitar amps and PA system. This was all new to me, as we didn’t really even know how to turn ours on. I was very impressed by it all. We rehearsed and went about announcing our first show at the Largs Pier Hotel.

  The band were really something special; they sounded like a cross between Little Feat and J. Geils Band. Uncle and Bruce had written most of the songs and they sounded different to any songs I’d sung before. They were heavily influenced by Captain Beefheart. They were loud and aggressive, and the combination of their experience, and the out of control factor that John and I brought to them, was very exciting.

  A couple of the guys’ wives decided to make me a stage outfit. There is a photo of me somewhere wearing a pair of patchwork satin pants. How they talked me into them I’ll never know. I looked ridiculous.

  Well, the big day came and we put the final touches on the PA. It
had never been fired up before the gig, so anything could have gone wrong, but surprisingly it all worked. The PA consisted of these massive bass bins that were made up of two open boxes, each containing four front-mounted fifteen-inch speakers that were bolted together, forming a monstrous wall of subsonic sound that could make a human being lose control of their bowels. On top of that, on each side, were two midrange speaker boxes, called 45/60s, this alone was as big as most PAs I’d seen in pubs in Australia. Then on top of that were these two large fifteen-cell multi-cellular horns. Uncle had stolen the horns from a drive-in movie theatre. The cops caught him but somehow he managed to keep the speakers. Then a ninety-degree JBL horn and tweeters. This setup was as big as what bands used when they were playing outdoors.

  The stage gear was no smaller. Each guitar amp contained four fifteen-inch speakers, as did the harmonica box, and the bass player had eight fifteen-inch speakers, all with huge, hand-wired amplifiers. The reason I’m telling you all this is to paint a picture of what was about to happen when we turned on this wall of speakers for the first time, which was only minutes before we went on stage at the Pier.

  The scene was set, the band members were nervous and pacing around backstage. We were ready. Or were we?

  ‘Where the fuck’s Swanee? I haven’t seen him for a while,’ shouted Bruce. Bruce was a bit of a worrier. ‘I fuckin’ knew something would fuck up. Now we won’t be able to go on and we’ll never get booked again. This is all fucked.’

  ‘Settle down, Bruce, he was here ten minutes ago. He must be having a drink with some of the boys in the front bar. He’ll turn up,’ I said, trying to cover for John. I hadn’t seen him for a while either.

  ‘Oh Jesus, I fuckin’ hope so. We have to talk through the endings of the songs, and he’s the one who fucks them up, not me. I know the fucking things. If he’d stayed sober for one day he’d know ’em too. I fucking tell you, it’s fucked. This is not a professional outfit.’ Bruce was pacing back and forth in the dressing room, whipping himself into a frenzy.