Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

  The demos that Cold Chisel had done in Trafalgar Studios without me sounded pretty good. As Geoff and his posse were heading interstate to find themselves a deal, we gave him our demos in the hope he would corral us a deal too. He went to Mushroom Records in Melbourne and played Stars and Cold Chisel to Michael Gudinski, the best independent music man in Australia. Michael had a reputation for knowing what was going to work and what wasn’t. He was sharp and used his own money to back whatever he saw a glimmer of hope in. He had signed both Split Enz and Skyhooks before anyone else even noticed them. (How could anyone have missed them is what I want to know.) Michael took one look at Stars’ hats, boots, sheriffs’ badges and pretty faces and then one look at our bad press photos, without hats or badges or boots, and shouted, ‘Boys, you’ve got a fucking deal!’

  And he signed Stars to a lucrative recording contract. We were left in the paddock. Any contract, by the way, was a lucrative contract when you didn’t have one.

  WE DID A FEW more demos at Peppers Studios in Adelaide. A couple of these songs actually made it onto the first album. I think ‘Northbound Train’ and ‘Just How Many Times’ were in this bunch of songs. The studio wasn’t great, which was fine because we weren’t that great either, we just thought we were. You need to be confident to get ahead in music. The studio didn’t have the best gear or the best isolation happening. I remember doing ‘Just How Many Times’, and as the song was finishing and the sound was fading out, leaving the audience holding their collective breaths – at least that’s what we thought they’d be doing – someone from the studio office went to the toilet, and you could hear it flush on the recording because the vocal booth was right next to it. We didn’t have time or money to do it again so that was it, there was a toilet flushing on the song. That sort of summed up the demos actually.

  Things got a bit lean for us for a while there as Geoff got more and more caught up with Stars, recording and touring. Eventually Geoff had to go and we were looking for a manager again. As we weren’t doing anything, I decided I had to get out of Adelaide for a week or two. We had no work booked and I was going stir crazy. I took the job as stage roadie for Stars, who were heading off to Sydney to do some gigs. The boys from Stars were good guys. I only make fun of the cowboy thing because they were my mates. I was basically their singing roadie. I never carried a lot of gear but I sang whenever they needed me. I would go to the gigs early and help set up and the band would turn up and do their thing and towards the end of the night they would get me up to sing and that would work for all of us. The gig got more exciting because suddenly they had two singers, one with boots, badge with name and hat, and one without, working the crowd, and I would get noticed by people, other musicians and industry types and, more importantly to me, girls. By the way, in case you didn’t work it out, I never got the boots, badge or hat. I didn’t stay long enough to earn my cowboy gear. We were staying in some dodgy hotel in Coogee Bay, but thanks to the boys getting me up to sing I don’t think I ever slept there. I was always out drinking or getting up to no good. So the whole trip was a bit of a holiday for me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  play every show like it is your last

  ON THE ROAD, 1976

  WE DROVE FROM TOWN to town, playing every gig that would have us and a few that didn’t want us. Every night we got better and every night we pulled more people, well, most nights anyway.

  There were a few nights when we played to empty houses. One that sticks in my mind was in Geraldton, Western Australia. We were booked to play a pub on Thursday and Friday night and it was looking pretty good. Thursday was packed to the rafters and we killed them, left them yelling for more. At the end of the night we were having a few drinks with the bouncers and I made a comment about how good it would be on Friday, going on how busy Thursday was. One of them turned to me and said, ‘Oh no, tomorrow they all go to the drive-in.’ We just laughed, thinking he was kidding. Next night we went on stage at eight-thirty and there was not one person in the audience. Apparently, they all went to the drive-in. The bouncer caught my eye and smiled. He was right, but what could we do? So we took requests from the barman and all the staff and played covers all night. No one turned up and after a few sets they let us stop so they could save money on staff. We treated it like a rehearsal and just had fun playing. The bouncers and barmaids were cheering and laughing with us, and we all had a good night.

  I learned a lesson that night. It doesn’t matter if the house is empty or packed, you play every show like it is your last. Give it everything. The manager of the gig liked us, and because we played regardless of the fact that no one was there, he hired us again. That’s how we built our following, one gig at a time.

  THE BAND STARTED DOING shows in Sydney and Melbourne. Melbourne took to us right away, so we spent a lot of time there. There were dozens of pubs waiting to pay a young band next to nothing to play for them. In fact, a lot of Saturdays we could play two or three pubs in the same day. These shows bleed into one another, but a typical Saturday would consist of a lunchtime show at one hotel, an early support at another pub and then a late-night session at a club in St Kilda, at a place called Bananas.

  Lunchtime shows were normally quite sedate. People nursing hangovers from the night before, me included. I would vaguely remember finishing the lunchtime gig. We drank a lot but we rocked and got wilder than the audience were expecting at lunch. It was good for everyone involved. I would only have foggy memories of the second gig. One of them I kind of remember. We were loud and aggressive and not really happy to be at the Croxton Park Hotel, supporting a band that weren’t better than us but were better known than we were. They were called Supernaut. They had one big hit, a song called ‘I Like It Both Ways’. I’m not sure how many ways I heard that song, but I didn’t like any way it came. So I wasn’t happy to be on first. I thought we were a million times better than they were, but the mobs of young screaming girls who came to their shows thought differently. Anyway, we went on and got a pretty good reception and left the stage to a smattering of applause. Supernaut came on to a deafening roar from the crowd.

  ‘Good evening!’ the singer shouted. Then with the first crash of the first chord, of the first song, the band let off a huge display of pyrotechnics. Bang! The power for the whole pub blew. Poof! The whole place filled with thick grey smoke. It looked like it was burning down and everyone had to be evacuated. The band ran shrieking, side by side with the punters, from the smoke-filled room. Fire engines and police cars turned up with sirens screaming and lights flashing. The firemen and police who went through the pub wearing breathing apparatus weren’t happy with the situation at all. There was no fire, just smoke. The publican, who had spent a fortune promoting the night, expecting to sell a truckload of beer, was furious with the band’s lighting guy for being so stupid. The support band – us – was trying not to laugh too much, but it was very difficult. And the hordes of young girls, with eyes weeping from the thought of being that close to their idols, went home, coughing but still thinking that it was one of the best gigs they’d ever been to. Even though the band they paid to see only got to play a single note.

  ‘I touched him. He bumped into me in the dark. Did you see him?’ One girl wept as she sat in the gutter while the singer was led away, coughing into a towel, by the stage crew to a waiting car.

  ‘He coughed on me. Oh, he’s so cute!’

  So I guess the second show wasn’t a complete waste of time. By the time we got to the third show, we were a mess. I’d have no memories of it at all. I think the crew had to carry me in. I heard that it was a great gig. And we all partied through until sun up.

  WE LOVED MELBOURNE BUT we didn’t want to live there. The time came to move on to Sydney in the spring of 1976, and we left with mixed emotions. Everyone we had met in Melbourne would tell us how much better Melbourne was than Sydney. They told us we sounded more like a Melbourne band than a Sydney band, but for the life of me I couldn’t work out what a Melbourne band or Sydne
y band sounded like. I thought, if anything, we sounded like an Adelaide band, although I never admitted that to anyone before now. They also told us how much better life was in Melbourne than in Sydney, the gigs were better, the weather was better, the hotels were better. Oh my God, how could we possibly find a hotel as bad as Melbourne’s Majestic Hotel in Sydney? There couldn’t possibly be another like it. But there was. I soon came to realise that there were hotels just like it all over Australia. In fact, we managed to find them all over the world.

  We rolled into Sydney to work and to see what we thought of the place. We found a place to stay, a motel near Tamarama Beach, in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. Sounds posh, but it wasn’t. The motel was on a hill at the back of Bondi Road and might have been nice in about 1960, but not anymore. It was too far from the beach to see the water and too close to the main road to hear the surf over the roaring of the local hoons’ cars as they sped down to the beach, hoping to impress the local chicks. It was a classic motel, where you can park your car outside your room. There have been a few of these motels where I’ve been tempted to drive the car inside the room, but not this one.

  We holed up in it for about six weeks, over the spring of ’76. The owner was an English chap, who obviously had dreams of moving to Australia and buying a motel on Bondi Beach and he and his family becoming surf bums. But this was not the motel for that. It was run-down and dirty and no one wanted to stay, which is why we ended up there. It was really cheap. In fact, the guy let us stay and only pay him as our money came through.

  THE BAND HAD FOUND a few allies in Sydney on the trip they did without me. One of those allies was a great music guy named Sebastian Chase. Sab, as he is known, was managing Dragon, a very wild band from New Zealand, and also a band called Rose Tattoo, who were equally wild. I knew a few of the Tatts from a band called Buster Brown, who we’d worked with in Adelaide. Both of these bands had bad – or good – reputations; it depended how you looked at it. For me they had great reputations. They liked to party and play music and get crazy. What could be wrong with that? So it seemed to me that we were right up Sab’s alley. He talked us into staying in Sydney. He was going to manage us. It sounded good, as Don had been reluctantly looking after everything and it was driving him nuts. He had no time to write music or even enjoy playing in the band, he was too busy trying to keep our heads above water.

  In retrospect, I think Sab had the toughest job in music at that time, between the three bands he was trying to look after. The Tatts were always drawing attention, normally from the police. They looked like they were out for trouble, and maybe they were, but they were a great rock band. I think the obvious tattoos and henna-red cropped hair made them a scary proposition to the police. The most dangerous to my mind was one of the founding members, Ian Rilen. Ian was a rebel. He was rock’n’roll and everything it stood for, freedom, rebellion and equality. Ian first came to my attention in The Band of Light, a Sydney blues-based rock group that I was a big fan of. He had been in a lot of bands that helped change the face of Australian rock before he joined the Tatts in 1976.

  So Sab was trying to get this band across to people – and then there was Dragon. Dragon, besides being a bunch of real troublemakers, were a brilliant pop band. When we joined up with Sab, they had just released their first big single in Australia, called ‘This Time’, and it shot up the charts. I use the term ‘shot up’ very carefully because that happens to be the biggest problem Dragon had in those days. Some of the members were junkies. Their original drummer had died of an overdose in 1975 and they were very out of it by the time the record hit the shops. But they were about to become huge and Sab was trying to steady the ship – a ship that was already heading for the rocks.

  THE AUSTRALIAN MUSIC SCENE had a dark history that people didn’t talk about – heroin. For a long time, I’d been watching and working with bands and I’d noticed pockets of roadies and musicians who didn’t seem as, how can I say it, grounded. I don’t know if that’s the right word but there were people who were vaguer or darker than others; not all the time, it depended when you caught them. But I soon worked out what was going on behind closed doors. Hard drugs. Heroin was something akin to the bogeyman. Our parents had warned us about it and the little media we were exposed to told stories about drug-crazed killers and degenerate jazz musicians, sneaking away and injecting heroin. There was definitely a stigma attached to it. Well, I started meeting heroin users and most of them I wouldn’t have suspected, so they couldn’t have been that bad. But they did hide it.

  I remember seeing the Tatts play at the Bondi Lifesaver, a famous venue in the Sydney scene. I was standing at the mixing desk, enjoying the band. One of my friends, a guy called Panther, was the sound guy. I don’t know if ‘sound’ is the right word to describe Panther, but he was my good mate and we had a lot of fun together. I knew that he dabbled in some serious drugs but he always kept it together when he worked. I don’t know how he got the name Panther. He wasn’t particularly sleek or fast on his feet, but his eyes did glow yellow in the dark.

  Well, this night Panther seemed to be having too much fun. I noticed that Rose Tattoo was getting louder and louder. Not unusual for them. They were a fucking loud band. But this night the sound was changing every few bars. I looked over and there was Panther with his hands on the master faders, nodding off. As he fell asleep he leaned onto the desk, pushing the faders and the volume up. I gave him a nudge just before he blew up the system. His head snapped back and his eyes rolled open as he looked at me and smiled, with the butt of a cigarette almost burning his lip. He yelled, ‘They sound fucking great, don’t they?’

  I laughed and I had to agree. ‘Yes mate, they do sound fuckin’ great,’ I said. The Tatts played on and Panther went back to sleep.

  Most of the heroin users I knew only dabbled. When I saw someone lost in it, I was really saddened. Not because it was worse than anything else to be addicted to, because I’d seen alcoholics who were nastier, I’d seen potheads who were more desperate and I myself had certainly been more smashed. But this was different, it was as if shame was a part of the high. I don’t really know what the high was, it wasn’t my drug of choice. I did try it by accident one night and I’ll tell you about that in a minute. But like all drugs it changed the user and this one seemed to erode all self-worth from anyone who came close to it.

  Dragon was a great band that survived for decades in spite of heroin tearing them apart. It’s hard enough to get by in the music business, never mind bringing heroin into the equation. The fact that Dragon were so good and had so many hits is a testament to their great talent.

  But Sab had to deal with those guys and he didn’t have time for us, so after a short while something had to give and again, we were the first to go. I don’t think the Tatts lasted much longer.

  We were back to square one, with Don grudgingly doing the work of a manager instead of enjoying the music and writing songs.

  HEROIN. I TRIED IT by accident one night. I was flying when I left our show in the suburbs of Sydney somewhere. We drove into the Cross to find some real trouble. I found it at a party I’d heard about, in one of the hotels on Macleay Street. An American band, which I can’t remember the name of, was playing in town and they were having a big party at one of the suites in this hotel. I managed to talk my way in. I usually did.

  I stood next to a wardrobe, looking for something to do. I managed to find a few drinks while I waited for the party to really take off. People were in all sorts of states, staggering from room to room. At one point a young woman walked past and smiled at me. She was a beautiful girl and she was staring at me. I offered her my hand and we disappeared into the wardrobe. The room was packed but no one seemed to notice or care. We banged and bumped away inside the cupboard for about twenty minutes and then fell back out into the room. She smiled again and kept walking. I straightened up my clothing and looked around the room. Now what could I do?

  I noticed two suspicious-looking blokes ducking into
the toilet. I knew what they were up to. They were taking drugs and I wanted some. I burst in as if I didn’t know that they were there.

  ‘Oh, sorry guys. Hey, what are you up to?’ I asked, but it was obvious what they were doing. One of them had a big bag of white powder that he was in the process of emptying onto the counter.

  ‘Do you mind if I join you? I knew you wouldn’t,’ I said before they could answer. I loved uppers and coke – but who could afford it? Anyway, it looked like these guys had plenty to go around.

  They didn’t seem to mind. ‘Ah, no, ah, help yourself.’

  Sssnnniiiiifffffff.

  I already was. I took most of the mound they had poured out in one huge snort. ‘Thanks, guys!’ I was out of the door before they could say a word.

  This coke really burned my nose. My legs buckled and the room took a definite shift to the left. I wasn’t sure if my feet were working properly. ‘Fuck. That wasn’t coke. What was it?’

  I started to panic. It must have been smack. Heroin. I had no idea how it would affect me. But I knew I had been a real hog and consumed a lot of it. I had to get out of the place fast. I staggered towards the door. With each step the room spun a little more. By the time I was in the lift I was bouncing off the walls. I could no longer tell which way was up and which way was down. I fell out of the lift and through the front doors of the hotel and the last thing I saw was the sidewalk crashing towards me. I was rolling around in the gutter of one of the main streets of the Cross.

  ‘Fuck, what have I done? I’m going to die,’ I thought to myself. I was falling in and out of consciousness. I looked up and there in front of me was a young Aboriginal girl.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she was asking me. Her eyes were bright and warm.

  ‘Help me, I think I’ve overdosed on something.’

  I passed out.