Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

  We got to rehearsal only to be told, ‘Guys, you’re going to have to change the lyrics to “Khe Sanh” if you want to get on the show.’ A representative told us this while I was watching Rod Stewart writhe and scream about ‘Hot Legs’ and what he wanted to do with them. ‘You can’t say “Their legs were often open but their minds were always closed” on national TV. No way. It’s obscene.’

  Meanwhile, Hush leered and thrust their hips at girls so young they should have been with their mothers, and Mark Hunter from Dragon sang ‘Are You Old Enough?’, drowned out by prepubescent girls screaming and wanting to throw their underwear at him.

  It didn’t make any sense to us. ‘We’re never going to change our words for you,’ we announced, and were quickly told we would not be appearing. ‘So do yourself a favour and get out of our sight!’

  We knew what a couple of appearances could do for us but we didn’t want to compromise ourselves. WEA, our record company, was begging us to make some effort for them. Why did we have to be so stubborn?

  ‘Fuck guys, come on. Skyhooks play on there all the time.’

  We weren’t impressed.

  ‘Even AC/DC go on the show.’

  This was true, even if it was with Bon dressed as a schoolgirl. That was very funny and I wondered if Countdown saw the irony, Bon driving the young girls wild while dressed as a young girl, covered in tattoos and with lipstick smeared across his face. That was good TV. Even Iggy Pop appeared, spitting on and scaring the shit out of the kids standing in the front row waiting to see John Paul Young.

  Eventually, and reluctantly, we agreed to play. It was around the time of our second album’s release. ‘Breakfast at Sweethearts’ was the song we played. I use the term ‘played’ very loosely here. Countdown would not let bands play live. That would have given them too much control. Don and Steve sat pretending to be playing chess while Ian and Phil pretended to play their guitars, looking smooth, waiting for their close ups. This was not the way our band behaved. We never sat still.

  We wanted to smash up the show. But that would have to wait. Instead, we were miming a song about a café in Sydney that was frequented by junkies and hookers. And I was walking around a set that was made to look like the Marble Bar at the Sydney Hilton, where we had shot the cover of the album late one night. We would never have been allowed into the real Marble Bar while it was open by the way. We weren’t the kind of guys that went there. But here I was, miming the song while chewing my lips, with my eyes darting from side to side, residue of the speed I’d had the night before.

  We hated it. We felt we had sold out. But we also felt the impact almost immediately. Record sales jumped. The live shows were even more packed. The band had made a leap from a medium-sized bar band to across-the-board acceptance. We were suddenly like an overnight success. But we had done the hard yards. We were completely prepared for what was to come. We knew how to build a show. We knew how to take hold of an audience. A lot of the bands that went on Countdown didn’t, and were gone as quickly as they had arrived. But we were only just getting started and if the people from Countdown wanted to help us, we’d let them. It didn’t mean we liked them or their fucking show and they knew it.

  AROUND THIS TIME, ROD Willis teamed up with John Woodruff and Ray Hearn, one of our old Adelaide managers, to form Dirty Pool. Dirty Pool both managed and booked The Angels, Cold Chisel and Flowers (later called Icehouse), but this is a very simple description of what they did. Before Dirty Pool came along, bands in Australia had been subject to the same poor conditions for years. If you wanted to perform you had to go through one of the agencies that had a stranglehold on virtually all live work in this country. These monopolies in each city took high commissions and charged flat fees for shows, regardless of a band’s following. It wasn’t unusual for a band to sell $5000 worth of tickets and fill a pub with drinkers but still only get paid $750. That fee had to cover PA/lighting costs, crew wages, travel and commissions before the musicians received their first dollar. Someone was making lots more money than they should have been and it definitely wasn’t the bands.

  Dirty Pool demolished that system by introducing ‘door deals’, where bands kept nearly all of the ticket receipts and therefore got paid according to the number of people who turned up to see them. This meant popular bands could keep ticket prices down and still end up making a lot more money than they used to make on flat fees, and that made punters happy and bands even happier. Lots more people started going to gigs and lots more pubs started booking bands because ‘door deals’ meant the publicans didn’t have to risk paying a fee and having nobody turn up. Live music exploded around Australia. Dirty Pool helped save an industry that was coughing up blood and turned it into a very big business.

  FOR A WHILE, THE band had moved into the Plaza Hotel in Kings Cross. Don ended up staying there for several years. It was so dirty the rats were looking for better digs. I stayed one night there and then decided to take my chances in the big world outside the Cross.

  The Plaza was a stone’s throw from the infamous Manzil Room, the place where most rock bands drank after they had played in Sydney. It was the scene of many a nasty fight between drunken country boys and drug-rattled Croatian gangsters. Punters were found dead in the alleys and even in the skip bins outside.

  The hotel was almost across the street from where the Les Girls shows had been a huge part of Sydney nightlife in days gone by. Now the alley where the hotel stood was a little darker and the building was a lot dingier. The street outside the hotel had become a place of work for some of the young ladies who lived in the hotel. They could take their clients upstairs, get their business done and then belt something into their arms that helped them not to think about who they were fucking next. Then it was back down the stairs and out onto the street.

  ‘Hi girls. Not working too hard I hope,’ I would say as I made my way out of the Manzil Room and past the hotel.

  ‘Never, Jimmy. It’s a quiet night tonight. Want to come up for a freebie?’

  ‘No. I’ve had it. Gotta go home.’

  The sun would be coming up and the girls wouldn’t look quite as pretty as they had twelve hours earlier. Below the reception of the Plaza was a Lebanese takeaway. It looked dirty and small but the food was great. I staggered into this place at all hours of the day and night, drunk and stoned. If I was heading home, they would make a special coffee to help finish me off, a double shot of espresso with a large squirt of liquid hash oil from a sauce bottle.

  ‘Here you go, Jimmy. You drink this down and you will sleep like a prince, my friend.’

  I never argued. ‘Shall I give you some money for that?’ I asked.

  They laughed at me. ‘Don’t be foolish. You don’t think we make our money from this takeaway, do you? There is plenty of this oil to go around. We like you, Jimmy. Now go home.’

  Anyway, like I said, I’d decided not to live in the Plaza. I had everything I needed in a small kit bag. Leather pants that had been sweated in so many times they almost stood up and walked to gigs by themselves. A couple of black T-shirts and an oversize off-pink shirt that I wore on stage. I remember buying it in a shop in Double Bay one afternoon.

  ‘Could I have a look at the biggest, ugliest shirt in the shop?’

  ‘Any particular colour, sir?’

  ‘Na, any colour. Wait, what do you have in pink?’

  ‘We have this pink shirt but I don’t think your father will like it, sir. It’s very ugly, sir.’

  ‘Perfect, I’ll take it. Don’t bother wrapping it. Just shove it in a bag.’

  ‘As you wish, sir. Will there be anything else? I have a huge, vile pair of pants that will go with that.’

  ‘Na, that’s it. Cheers.’

  In my kit bag there were also one or two pairs of socks and underwear that I would wash in the sink wherever I ended up, a cassette of Johnny Burnette and the Rock’n’Roll Trio that I took to every party I went to and forced them to play as loud as their stereo could handle, an
d that was it. I had no home for two years or so. Every night I just ended up somewhere. Someone’s couch. Someone’s bed if I got lucky, or someone’s floor if I didn’t. I was quite happy to drink until everything closed and then try to sort it out. I always found somewhere to crash. This lifestyle got me into a lot of tight situations, if you get my drift.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  not really groupies

  A NOTE ON FANS

  I REMEMBER WHEN WE first started out, if I thought I saw a person at two shows I was over the moon.

  ‘Hey, guys. There’s a girl out there who was at the last show. I think she likes the band!’

  After having a look out front, Don would tell me, ‘No, Jim. She works for the agency. She’s counting how many people are at the show.’

  But I never listened to him. As far as I was concerned she was a fan and she was following us around. We were on our way to the top.

  By the time people really did start to turn up night after night it was different. By this point we were too caught up in putting on the show to worry about it too much. Well at least until the show was over. Then we would bump into them at the bar.

  In the early days a lot of girls would turn up to stand in front of Phil. He was the first one of us to have a following of young girls. Phil was always well groomed, not a hair out of place, with clean, well-pressed clothes. Whereas I was normally drug crazed and covered in sweat and pacing from side to side looking for trouble. And if I couldn’t find any I would start it.

  Ian had a bit of a following too. He was a good-looking young fella with no shoes and even though he didn’t dress as well as Phil, he was always being watched by girls with big doe eyes, who were waiting for him to notice them. He didn’t notice them as much or as soon as they wanted. Ian was always head down, face covered by his thick curly hair as he concentrated on what was coming out of his amps, twisting and flicking dials on his guitar, wringing the wildest sound he could out of it.

  ‘Hey Ian, did you see that girl out there blowing kisses at you all night? She was very cute,’ I would announce in the dressing room after the show.

  ‘Er, no. I, er, was having trouble hearing any top end from my amp. It was weird, it was changing all night. I was sure I had the volume set on seven and then I would look at it and it was flat out. I never touched it.’

  I would walk away, never looking back, not wanting Ian to know that I had been changing his volume all night. Not to fuck him up but to make the band sound heavier and louder. If I’d asked him, he might not have done it. If I could have found a control for Steve, he would have been hitting harder too. But I did find that if I made Ian play louder, the rest of the band followed, maybe because they couldn’t hear themselves.

  Don was a bit of a dark horse. The girls who liked him didn’t stand in front of the stage. They were way too cool to be seen up the front. But sure enough, after the show we’d see Don leaving for drinks with a beautiful young girl.

  There were usually a few girls trying to catch a broken drumstick from Steve, but he was always too busy keeping time and worrying about the rest of us to worry about girls.

  FANS CAME IN ALL shapes and sizes. For most of our career, Cold Chisel was followed around by gangs of blokes. Blokes who I’d drunk with or fought with. Guys who came out every night to see if they could work out how Ian pulled the sound that he did or how he played so fast. Young musicians standing just away from the front, watching to see who was driving the band. Just when they thought they had it worked out, it would change. Depending on which song we were playing it would take another path. A lot of the time I would be the one dictating the pace of the songs, but Don stood his ground when he had to, keeping the band playing at a solid speed despite my efforts to drive it towards certain death. When Don or Steve did that, it was usually the right thing for the song. The band always let me do my thing, pushing and shoving each song about because they knew that I was working off the crowd. If the crowd needed it to go faster, I made the band play faster. If they were getting bored, I made the band play something else. But when it came down to the real nitty-gritty of a song, every member knew that they had to hold the song at the right speed regardless of what I was doing. So really the music was a result of a push and pull between myself and the rest of the band. And this was our secret ingredient. This was what created the tension between the band members. This was what made us exciting to watch. Our fans, I think, knew this and they watched the game we played very night, waiting to see who would win the tug-o-war. Every night something different happened. We could play the same set but it was never the same in reality. Phil and Steve were mostly oblivious to the battle between Ian and myself. They played in a world of their own, unless I was jumping on their backs. Then they either ignored me or had to go with me, depending on how much they could take.

  AFTER A FEW COUNTDOWN appearances, I noticed that the cool musician types were standing further back. It was like they were pissed off with us for going on Countdown, like we had sold out or something. Their place at the front was filled by lots of young, good-looking girls. This suited me down to the ground. I always hated the cool muso types who came to our shows. They were no fun afterwards.

  ‘Yes, so Ian, I noticed that you used your front pickup on that new song tonight. Do you think the tone makes the difference to the mood? Oh and by the way, have you changed the valves in your amp since last night? It’s much brighter.’

  This was the last thing I wanted to do after a show. Talk about equipment.

  ‘Can you get to fuck out of here? You are driving me crazy. Who cares what fucking pickup he used? And leave our drinks alone. Buy your own. Get out of here before I change your fucking valves.’

  Then I would fill the room with girls and be ready to kick on all night.

  Over the years our relationship with the fans changed. We were never a band that had groupies. There were girls who followed us around but not really groupies. After a while, the after-shows changed for us. It became more important to have time to recover and figure out what had worked and what hadn’t. We would talk about what we needed to do to take the show to the next level. When I got bored with that I would leave and look for girls. One of us had to do it. I took one for the team.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  your taxi is here

  MOTEL 7, 1979

  LIFE WAS A BLUR. Nothing made sense to me. I would wake up and get in the car and drive to the next town on the tour itinerary. Then try to get myself together in time to do the show. Every town felt the same, every show ended the same. I would get drunk and try to whip the band into a frenzy and then find somewhere to go or someone to sleep with. If that didn’t happen, I had to spend the night alone and out of it, which was like a fate worse than death. I didn’t like most other people’s company, but I hated my own.

  That’s the way it was on 29 November 1979, when the Pooled Resources Tour rolled into Canberra. We pulled up to another motel for another show. The tour was Cold Chisel with The Angels and Flowers, soon to become Icehouse. Both were good bands but both were boring as batshit to hang around with after shows. Their idea of a good night was smoking pot, drinking tea and singing Mamas & Papas songs. Mine was slightly different. I didn’t want to talk or sing, or sit still for that matter. It was mayhem or nothing for me and it was starting to show on my face.

  We had come off the back of a huge tour called Set Fire to the Town, where we played all over the country and destroyed everywhere we went. What we didn’t set fire to, we demolished by hand. That was the plan for this tour too – play music and create havoc everywhere. It was an easy brief for us. We had been doing that for years, well, I had.

  But by now, I felt tired, and like I was completely alone in the world. Even my best friends, the other guys in the band, were beginning to turn on me. Well, let’s just say they didn’t like hanging around with me after shows.

  So we settled into our rooms at the Motel 7 in Canberra and I tried to work out how to shake the cobwebs
off from the night before.

  ‘Hey guys, you want to throw some Frisbee?’ I heard a dorky voice say from outside in the carpark. I recognised it. One of The Angels.

  ‘I hope to fuck these guys don’t start laughing and yelling outside my door,’ I thought to myself. Then I heard a car or two pull into the carpark and stop, followed by the sound of a voice I didn’t recognise. It was a girl.

  ‘Great to see you,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, hi there,’ said the dorky voice again.

  I got up and walked out just as the group disappeared into one of the rooms. I stood alone in the carpark for a minute, taking in the sun. Canberra was normally a cold, cold place. The kind of town that looked better in the rear-view mirror. But today it was sunny and warm. I don’t think I’d seen it in the daytime before. I usually left as soon as I could after a show. It all looked quite nice, but I had a feeling that would change later.

  Before long there was the sound of laughter and the distinct smell of pot coming from The Angels’ room. I was a bit bored by this time. So bored in fact that I decided to walk into the room and see what was going on.

  The door was wide open, so naturally I invited myself in. They were all nice guys, they wouldn’t mind me saying hello. As I walked in I could see them sitting around the room, on chairs and beds and the floor.

  ‘Hi,’ one of them said in that voice that I’d recognised outside my door. It was Rick Brewster.

  ‘Hi. How’s it going? Have you guys soundchecked yet?’

  I was looking around the room and that was when it happened. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, 29 November 1979. I remember it like it was yesterday. Sitting in the corner of the room, not saying a word, was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She looked like a princess, not someone you would see in the Motel 7 in the outer suburbs of Canberra. But it wouldn’t have mattered where I’d seen her. The impact would have been the same. She was something else. Like no one I’d ever seen. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I tried not to stare but I think I might have. Her hair was long and dark and her fringe was almost covering her beautiful eyes. I sat waiting for a sound to leave her mouth. A mouth that was slightly pouted, her beautiful, slightly buck teeth biting her top lip as if she didn’t really want to be there. But here she was. She never said a word. She never even looked at me, I don’t think she even knew I was in the room. My heart was racing, I had to leave the room for a minute so I could breathe.