Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

  I woke a few times during the next twenty-four hours. I had no idea where I was. I vaguely remembered being loaded into a cab and driven somewhere. And I was lying on a mattress on a floor. Every now and then I would see an angel floating above me, wiping my brow.

  ‘Are you all right? Just stay there. You’ve been very sick, but I’m here to look after you.’

  I drifted off again. I woke up after a few more hours. I was better than I had been but I was thirsty and I smelled of vomit.

  ‘Here. Drink this. It’ll help you.’ The same angel I had seen in the Cross was sitting on the floor next to me. She was nursing me. I didn’t know who she was. But she was beautiful. I passed out again.

  When I awoke next, I was alone. I sat up and the days before slowly came back to me. Where was I, and how did I get here? I stood up and called out, ‘Hello?’, quietly at first. ‘Hello. Is anybody there?’

  I didn’t get an answer. I found my shoes, put them on and left. I was somewhere in Redfern. I had a picture in my head of a pretty young girl who had helped me. But I couldn’t find her to thank her. To this day I don’t know who she was. But she saved my life. I know it. If she hadn’t helped me I would have been found dead in a gutter in the Cross. If you read this and remember me, thank you, whoever you are.

  FROM THE TIME THE band hit the road, my drinking started elevating. Every night I had a little more and every night I got a little bit wilder. There was good wild, and destructive wild, and for a while the good wild was winning. The show got better, more intense, and the audiences loved us more and more, but my stage antics became unpredictable. Some nights I didn’t remember finishing shows. In fact, I notice that writing this is harder than writing about my younger years. Those years were lost in the darkness because of fear and trauma, whereas these years, since leaving home, were lost in a sea of booze and cheap drugs – and eventually not-so-cheap drugs.

  At the start, I would only drink a little bit on stage. Then there were the odd times that we took drugs on stage, whether by accident, like if a show came in at the last moment and we’d already taken them, or just because I wanted to try it out, to see if it was fun. But things started to snowball quickly. My drinking was fine at first, because if I drank too much then I couldn’t do the show – it was that simple – but later, somewhere along the road, I worked out that if I swallowed a handful of cheap speed pills I could drink all I wanted to and not stumble. My behaviour was like that of someone who was blind drunk, but I didn’t fall over.

  I knew I came from a long line of alcoholics but I never allowed myself to think about it. My take was that if you could keep up a front and no one noticed how bad you were, you didn’t have a problem. I was also convinced that there was no problem if you could afford to drink – if you didn’t feel desperate or seem desperate to other people, then there was no issue. As long as there were drinks and drugs available, I was all right. In the music business, as in my life in general, there always seemed to be drinks and drugs around if you looked for them. I knew how to look, and how to get hold of most things I needed. This way of thinking – or not really thinking, when I look back on it now – was going to cause me big problems as time went by and my habits got more and more out of hand.

  Another thing that went along with this whole merry-go-round was, once you got out of control on stage, what did you do after you left the stage – be out of control then too? That meant more drinking and more fighting and lots and lots of sex. There seemed to be no end to the availability of drugs and booze, and there certainly wasn’t any shortage of sex either.

  Even before I joined the band I was never short of someone to sleep with, but after joining things just got crazier and crazier. Just like the drugs and booze, the more I had, the more I wanted. I’m not going to sit here and brag about this. I’m not proud of all I’ve done. This behaviour has been nothing but destructive in my life. It started out as something that filled a gap, something that made me feel good about myself, but after a short time all these encounters added to my feelings of not being worthy and I began to dislike myself even more. This of course started long before I recognised what was going on. These feelings, as much as I pushed them to the back of my head, were slowly driving me to a point where I could see no way back. I was fucked, and nothing, I thought, could be done about it. I couldn’t stop getting smashed, I liked it too much, because when I wasn’t smashed I had to live with myself, this bloke I had been running from since I was a small child. If I didn’t like myself as a kid, who had done nothing wrong, how I was going to live with myself as an adult, whose every step was one giant leap into self-loathing? I was on the road to ruin. The highway to . . . no, someone else wrote that, but we were all on the same road. I think some of us had more baggage than others to carry, but it was hard for everyone on that journey.

  Fame and adulation are not healthy, they really screw with a person’s focus in life and sense of reality, and if you add mind-altering substances into that mix the road becomes even more treacherous. I was travelling through my life at breakneck speed wearing a blindfold.

  I think in the early days I was easier for the band to put up with, but as things progressed, I became more and more volatile. We used to finish shows and if the band didn’t go as crazy as I did, I would scream and yell. Most nights they went along with me and everything seemed fine. Whether they were unhappy or not, I’ve never had the heart to ask them. You’ll have to wait for their books to come out. But like I said, most nights were cool. It was like cooking in a lot of ways, add a little of this, and a little of that, and, oops too much, add a little more of this to counteract that, and so on and so on. If all goes well, the final result is good or at least bearable, but one slight miscalculation and all hell breaks loose. I would be flying at a hundred miles an hour, jumping out of the plane without a parachute, attacking anybody that disagreed with me. So quite often I would end up fighting with someone, or storming off alone or with someone who wanted to do the same things as me. There was always someone who wanted to do the same as me. They just didn’t want to do it every night of the week.

  STEVE WAS FOND OF a drink too, and sometimes he would get enough under his belt to become unbearable. Even if he didn’t, he might get up enough courage to tell me to fuck off, and then it would be on. He would say something and head-butt me – he always seemed to be coming up when I wasn’t looking and head-butting me – then I would tear into him with everything I had. To an outsider it looked like we hated each other, but it was the opposite really. We were the best of mates. We’d both seen the tough side of life and survived with our sense of humour intact.

  I have to say, for a pacifist, Steve liked to fight, and knew how to start trouble. He wasn’t good at it, but he had a go. I would jump all over him and punch the shit out of him but Steve had a secret weapon, his head. Steve’s head was as hard as a rock, and he had these big Liverpudlian front teeth that were, as far as we could tell, unbreakable. He told stories of diving into a swimming pool and smashing his teeth onto the bottom and cracking the tiles. Whether this was true or not I’m not sure, but I know that I punched him hard in the teeth so many times, and the next day when we woke up there would be Steve, not a mark on him, while my hands would be cut to ribbons by those teeth. Steve also had a habit of getting drunk and the next day not remembering anything that happened. I would wake up still steaming and angry and walk out and bump into Steve and he would be smiling, showing those big teeth, and offering to buy breakfast. He was a hard guy to stay mad at because he was so funny.

  The other guys didn’t fight with either of us. They were reserved and quiet and hardly raised their voices. I know it wasn’t because they were scared of me or Steve; it just wasn’t in their nature to be aggressive.

  I still have difficulties with problem-solving. If something is too hard to fix I tend to throw it across the room, but I don’t fight anymore. My aggressive side softened a lot when I met Jane, which I will tell you about when I get to that point in
my life.

  IN THE MEANTIME, WE kept driving from one end of the country to the other, doing what we loved – playing music. The fights weren’t happening all that often. I think the band let me be wild because they liked me and they liked what it did for the shows. Some nights were crazier than others but most went down so well that the promoters wanted us back, which is exactly what we wanted too.

  Some gigs took us in and really treated us well. The Mawson Hotel in Caves Beach, the Pier in Adelaide, the Bombay Rock in Melbourne, Hernando’s Hideaway in Perth, and many other gigs across the country. Whenever we hit one of these pubs the band cut loose. I think we did some of our best shows in these places that allowed us the freedom to go crazy.

  We lived in and played at the Rising Sun Hotel in Broken Hill, a wild town filled with miners and girls. We tore this place down. They fed us, they gave us free booze and treated us like we were part of the family. There was always a smiling face behind the bar, ready to make the rest of the night go as well as the gig. So we would drive from state to state playing in pubs and getting run out of town and then hit an old favourite and recharge our batteries.

  DON’S SONGS WERE REALLY starting to strike a chord with the crowd, and with us. We were playing them better and better and the band just kept getting tougher and tougher. The right people were taking notice, but we still fell back on Led Zeppelin covers more than we should have.

  ‘Come on, guys. Surely we could drop the Zeppelin covers now? Our own songs are as good as any of them,’ Don would say to us over and over, only to be met with a wall of self-doubt from the rest of us, especially me.

  ‘I like playing them. We smash them anyway. We play them better than Zeppelin do.’ I’m sure I was trying to convince myself as much as Don. ‘The crowd always go crazy when we start them. So what’s the problem?’

  ‘We should have already driven them crazy with our songs for a couple of hours. We don’t need to play somebody else’s songs to finish them off. Plus, I’m sick of playing them. I don’t want to be in a covers band all my life.’

  Don was right again, but I still had that nagging fear. Were we good enough? ‘We’re not a fucking covers band. But I think we should play “Rock’n’roll” in the encore just to finish them off. It fucking works,’ I said.

  For a long time, we ended up doing whatever I said. I’m not sure I didn’t subconsciously sabotage the set so that the only way it could be saved was to do what I wanted. It sounds like childish behaviour by a singer with arrested development, doesn’t it? I had no idea what arrested development was at this time. I only knew that if we ever did something that was challenging, I was afraid.

  It was only once the rest of the band got on side with Don that our covers-to-originals ratio changed. I would try to convince them I was right, but in the end I wasn’t and they knew it and so did I. Eventually the only covers we played were songs that we wanted to play. Well, a lot of the time, they wanted to play them.

  ‘Why don’t we play that Dylan song “Mozambique”?’ one of them suggested.

  ‘Yeah that’ll be great, I love that song.’ Ian would be enthused.

  ‘There must be a Dylan song that rocks,’ I would say under my breath.

  But Steve was running with it by this point. ‘Yeah, that’s got a good groove.’

  ‘But we’re a fucking rock’n’roll band.’

  ‘I know but it’d be great to play some different types of songs, wouldn’t it? Like an African groove would be good. We don’t play anything like that. I’m fuckin’ bored playing the same shit all the time. Come on. Fuck it. Let’s do it.’ Steve was always happy to throw in his two cents worth.

  ‘We don’t need to play songs with an African groove. We’re not fucking African, are we?’

  ‘Neither is Bob Dylan but he does it.’

  ‘But he fucking wrote it. Besides, we’re not playing in Africa, so we don’t need to play African fucking music. Do we? Play something that rocks.’ My head would be spinning.

  ‘You just always want to play the same old shit, don’t you? Come on man, fucking try something new,’ Steve would tell me.

  Eventually I stopped fighting them. ‘Yeah, all right then. But I think Ian should sing it.’ If it was something I didn’t think would work, Ian was singing it as far as I was concerned. ‘You could sell this one really well, Ian. Give it a go,’ I’d try to convince him.

  ‘Aw, I’m not sure. I think that you should be singing it,’ Ian said looking at me.

  ‘Come on you lazy fuckin’ bastard. Sing it. You’re the fucking singer,’ Steve would say. He’d be laughing and taunting me by this point. ‘If I can play drums, you can sing the fuckin’ thing.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll fucking sing it. But don’t blame me if it fucks up the set.’

  And guess what? It worked. ‘Mozambique’ was in the set for a while with me singing it, albeit a little more rock than the original and a lot harder than the band pictured it. The crowd loved it. What do I know?

  Don would suggest we cover a song at soundcheck and we would learn it and make it work and do it that night. It wasn’t always to please or excite the crowd. In fact, I would see the confusion on their faces when we would pull out an obscure Conway Twitty or Bob Dylan cover or the like. The set would take a momentary dip while we satisfied what I thought was our self-centred musical indulgence and then, when it was over, we’d whip it back into warp speed. Most of the time these would not have been the songs that I would have chosen, but I went along with it anyway, and tried to make the band play them hard and fast.

  In the end, I realised that they were right. Playing these covers gave us an insight into how to play and write different types of songs. Songs that would free us up from the idea that we had to play straight four-on-the-floor music. And this would eventually take the band to bigger and better places musically, especially once we started recording seriously.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Pig, Bear, Beaver, Spider . . .

  A NOTE ON ROADIES

  SOME OF MY BEST friends throughout my time in the music business have been the guys who carried the gear. There was a quiet strength and dignity to most of them that appealed to me. They took next to none of the money, very little of the glory and did most of the work. They fought for the band and cheered for the band when there was no one else to cheer. Every night when we came off stage it was the crew who would tell us how it was. Good, bad or indifferent. When we felt like chucking it in they took us out for a drink and told us how important it was to keep going. Not for ourselves but for those punters who got out every night, rain, hail or shine, to see and support live music. They laughed at us and with us. And they always had our backs. I know so many good men and women who have worked tirelessly behind the scenes in this business, making sure it moves.

  For a while in the 1970s every roadie in Australia seemed to be named after an animal. There was Pig, Bear, Beaver, Spider, Panther, another Bear, another Pig. It was like a zoo out there on the road. Most were hardworking blokes who were the reason that shows made it to the stage. They hardly slept, hardly ate and drank anything that was offered to them. When they did sleep it was in the truck, in the hire car, in road cases, in toilets, in the dressing room and with whoever would have them.

  But there were a few wild ones too. One night we were booked to play at Chequers in Sydney. Pig was a roadie who worked with Rose Tattoo and he was an animal. He announced to us all that he was marrying a nice young girl from the south of Sydney somewhere and asked a bunch of us to come along. We thought he was kidding. What self-respecting nice girl would marry him and invite us along? The ceremony was to be at 6.30 in the evening so we could go to the wedding, have a few drinks and still get to the show in time to play. Myself and the boys from Rose Tattoo went along as his side of the family. In the backyard of this house in the suburbs the lines were drawn. The bride’s family, a bunch of straight, hardworking, no-bullshit Australians, on one side, staring in disbelief at the groom’s family. Us. We m
ust have looked like the Addams Family. Angry and the boys covered from head to toe in tatts. Me in black leather pants and jacket with studs all over it, still drunk from the night before. And a selection of wild animals who loitered, rather than stood around, drinking copious amounts of beer and whisky straight from the bottle. Pig, Bear, Panther and a couple of others were well and truly pissed by the time we got there. Spider was crying in his drink. Pig had already insulted the bride’s father and there was a lot of tension in the air. The big brother of the bride disappeared and came back with a half a dozen of his mates.

  As the ceremony started, Pig turned and said something under his breath to the father of the bride and then he proceeded to smash him in the face. Both parties dropped their drinks and started belting into each other. It was a bloodbath. We fought our way out of the backyard. One of the boys had a van and a bunch of us jumped in it. Pig came running after us, falling over and busting his already bloody face on the road. We stopped and picked him up. He was absolutely blind drunk so we threw him in the back and drove off at speed. We screamed around a few corners. Unbeknown to us in the front, the back door wasn’t shut properly and was sliding open. I looked back and realised that Pig was gone. We just kept going. I had to get to Chequers for the gig.

  About three hours later, when I was singing on stage, I saw the silhouette of a man staggering across the dance floor. He walked like an animal, funnily enough, limping and dragging one foot behind him. It was Pig. He told us he woke up as we went around a corner. He was sliding across the floor and out the door. He hit the road at about thirty miles an hour. Needless to say the marriage ended before it started. I’m sure the young girl’s family were happy about that.

  Pig had gravel marks across his face. I thought it was an improvement. He didn’t seem to mind that he had gotten married and divorced in the same night. The same hour in fact. He just laughed about it. This would be a good story to tell the boys in the truck after a show and a big line of speed.