Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

  This pain was the same pain that I had felt over and over as a child when my parents walked out the door. I can only look back now and wonder why, if it hurt so much, did I keep on recreating the same scenario over and over? I did it with the band, my girlfriends and eventually my wife and family.

  I think that like my mother, who became so uncomfortable when there was nothing to fear or no one to fight, I had become so conditioned to dealing with abandonment that I forced people to abandon me. If that didn’t work, I walked out the door myself, because that pain had become my comfort zone. It is the same way that a four-year-old deals with life, and here I am fighting to stop doing the same thing at sixty years old. They call it arrested development. I stopped growing emotionally at four. I might be giving myself too much credit there; it might have been earlier.

  Anyway, eventually I walked out of Cold Chisel, for a number of reasons. Some I’ll tell you about and some, well, they just aren’t anybody else’s business.

  THE SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, just one hundred kilometres from Sydney, is a place that became special to me. Even in the height of summer it cools down and you can sleep at night. The place has four distinct seasons. The winter, cold and wet, is my favourite. I’m not sure if it’s something to do with where I was born. Let’s face it, Glasgow is very cold and wet and, like I have said in the past, that’s in the summer. Or maybe it’s the name itself, The Highlands, that reminds me of Scotland. Whatever it is, it has been my home and favourite place on earth since I happened to stop by one day.

  I’d driven through the area many times but always at high speed and always in a hurry to get somewhere else. That is until one day just after Mahalia was born. We had been visiting Jane’s family in Canberra and we stopped in Bowral on the way home to see an old friend of Jane’s. Steve Hill had worked in banking. He was the short-term money manager for the notorious Nugan Hand Bank. This was the bank that Jane’s Thai father used to distribute money to his children living in Australia. The head of the bank, Frank Nugan, was her guardian. Jane would visit his office and be sent to see Steve, who was in charge of paying her allowance.

  Steve was a mysterious Irishman with ties to the CIA. He was also ex-British SAS. Unusual qualifications for a banker, I thought. And he looked even tougher than he probably was. He had a long scar that ran from his forehead across his eye and down his cheek. It scared a lot of people but not me. A lot of my parents’ friends had scars on their faces from knife fights. I’d seen bigger, but it was impressive all the same. Steve never told me how he got it because I never asked. But many years later I overheard Michael Gudinski, head of Mushroom Records, ask him about it while they were doing a deal. I could tell it worried Michael from the day they met.

  ‘So how did you get, eh, how did you cut, ah, ah, that mark on your face. How did you –’

  Steve interrupted. ‘Are you asking me about this scar across my face?’

  Michael squirmed a little. ‘Yeah ah, is that too personal? You, ah. You don’t have to tell me.’

  Steve cut him off mid-sentence. ‘It is personal but I’ll tell you anyway.’

  Steve leaned in close to Michael’s face, very close, and said, ‘I fell off my bike. Okay?’ His Irish accent was broad and his voice sounded hard.

  Michael swallowed. ‘Yeah, that’s fine. I was just asking.’

  STEVE HAD LIVED IN Bowral since the collapse of the bank. I guess he thought it was a good time to retire and get out of banking. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t allowed to work in that field of business anymore and he seemed to have a lot of spare time on his hands. He had obviously done well from banking and appeared to be reasonably well off. We spent the afternoon with Steve and his family.

  How had I driven through this place so many times and not noticed how beautiful it was? Well, I had driven all over Australia and hardly seen anywhere. I would sleep in the back of the car, recovering so I could do the next show. But now that I’d opened my eyes and actually seen this place, I loved it.

  ‘This must be a great place to live. Especially with a young family,’ I said to Steve as we were out walking his dogs.

  ‘You should move down here too. Fresh, clean air and space. No one watching you. That’s what kids need. Space.’ He looked around as he spoke.

  I had been daydreaming about living in the country since I’d got there. ‘Must cost a fortune for houses down here. Anyway, if I was going to live down here I’d want to be on some land.’

  Steve smiled at me. ‘How much land did you have in mind?’

  He took us for a drive across town and up a hill called Mount Gibraltar. He pulled into the driveway of an old farm and said, ‘What about this place?’

  Jane and I looked at each other and then got out of his car. We were on the crest of a hill, looking down a valley. There was a small wooden cottage at the end of the driveway. I looked at Jane. ‘This is the sort of place I want to live. It’s beautiful.’ But once again I was dreaming. ‘I have to work in Sydney all the time. I couldn’t live down here.’

  Steve looked at me. ‘It’s only an hour and a half to Sydney, Jim. You can commute. A lot of people do, in fact.’

  I loved the place. ‘Is it for sale?’

  Steve laughed. ‘Everything’s for sale, Jimmy. Everything’s got a price.’

  I presumed he knew who owned it. ‘Do you know what they want for it?’

  ‘I do actually. It’s mine. I’ll sell it to you for what I got it for. It’s a steal. You need a place like this. You’ve worked hard for it. You deserve it.’

  I didn’t need convincing. As usual I turned to Jane. ‘Can we get it? I love it.’

  Jane didn’t even think twice. ‘We’d have to work out the money but we should be able to. You guys earn a lot of money you know, Jimmy.’

  Steve was next to talk. ‘Get the bank to give you the money, Jim. They’ve got way too much and they’re dying to give it all away. Believe me, I know, I used to work for one of them.’

  COLD CHISEL HAD GONE from success to success, sold-out tour to sold out tour, but we were still making very little money. We had a huge live album in Swingshift and an amazing studio album and tour in Circus Animals. For this tour we once again took risks. Most bands at the time would have gone out and played stadiums or even big pubs. But we decided that in keeping with the name of the record, we’d play in a circus tent. The name, by the way, came from Don. He thought that playing in a rock’n’roll band was a lot like being in a circus. You roll into towns and do the show and roll out. We were freaks, misfits, drifters. And people came to stare at us and see what we looked like up close and then went home to the safety of their normal homes.

  We liked the idea. We joined the circus and every night we performed under the big top. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing pleasure tonight in the big top, we bring you Cold Chisel!’ The band would start playing as the fumes and the noise from the wheel of death died away. The wheel of death was two motor bikes racing at high speed around and around inside a small cage, missing each other by millimetres. The crowd would roar. This was entertainment. Sitting, eating their popcorn, waiting for someone to die.

  By the end of every show I would be singing and drinking vodka straight from the bottle as I balanced on a trapeze underneath a motorbike as it sped up a tightrope over the heads of the audience. Fire eaters and camels and jugglers scattered throughout the crowd, who sat with their mouths wide open, mesmerised, waiting for me to fall. But I never did. I had found my calling. This was where I belonged. In a circus. In a cage. I was an animal.

  But even with all this going on our wages had hardly gone up. Not since we signed our record deal four years earlier. Jane got more money a week for pocket money from her dad. I was embarrassed. I knew something was wrong. The only way I could front up to the band and ask for more was to get angry and start a fight. I didn’t want to do that.

  COLD CHISEL HELD THEIR monthly meeting in the Cross. The meetings were always the same. I would turn up and sit recovering
with sunglasses on, not saying much. There wasn’t much point in talking. It was always the same discussion. Rod would tell us how well he was working the record company and we would ask where we were touring next. But I wanted to ask about money. It didn’t go well.

  ‘I need some money for a down payment for a house.’

  Rod was quick off the mark. ‘Yeah. Don’t we all. I need a new fucking Ferrari but I’m not getting one am I. Can you guys give me the money for one? I don’t fucking think so.’

  So I snapped back, ‘I’m fucking serious. I have a family now and I don’t want to be renting some shithole for the rest of our lives.’

  The rest of the guys were quiet. They always were when I asked for money.

  ‘You can’t just take money out of the business. If one of you takes it then you all take it. Do you guys need money?’ Rod turned to the band. They all looked at the ground.

  ‘Na.’ Steve was never short of an opinion. ‘What do I need it for? I’ve got enough. Maybe if you didn’t drink and party so much you’d have some too.’

  ‘Fuck off. It’s my money and I’ll do what I want with it. If you guys don’t want or fucking need the money, that’s fine. You can shove it in an account somewhere. I don’t care where you shove it. Shove it up your fucking arses for all I care. But I want my money.’

  Rod was trying to stay calm. ‘Let me look into it and we’ll see what we can do after the next tour. If you guys can keep the costs down, maybe, just maybe, we might be able to do something.’

  But that wasn’t good enough for me.

  ‘I don’t like the fact that we’re the biggest-earning band in the country and I don’t make enough money to look after my family properly. I don’t want to live and support a family and survive on the road on what we earn. I can’t do it anymore.’

  But the band dug in. And Rod had made his mind up. ‘Look, I have to go. You guys sort this shit out and someone tell me what you want me to do. See you.’

  The meeting had got more and more heated as it went on. I had been talking with Steve Hill and a few other people. I had a few new ideas I wanted to share with the boys but I would have to wait.

  Rod was halfway out the door when he turned around and walked back in. He waved at us all to quieten down. ‘I nearly forgot to tell you. You guys have been asked to do a big tour of Germany with a guy called Roger Chapman.’

  ‘Who the fuck’s Roger Chapman?’ Ian asked.

  ‘He used to sing with a band called Family. They were a bit like Genesis. Now listen, I put a fucking lot of work into this so let me know if you think you’re earning enough money to do it. Otherwise I can cancel the fucking thing. Right. I’m off now. One of you call me and let me know what you think.’

  Rod shot a glance off at me and left. There always seemed to be something that distracted us from the problems we were having. It was as if Rod had been saving the announcement of the tour for a moment just like this.

  The band jumped at the chance to tour overseas again. All other issues were put on the back burner, where they could stew away. Maybe we didn’t need America after all. If we could break into Europe we could continue to tour without burning out our market at home. And we would be all right. So we all agreed to tour Germany.

  THE TOUR WAS CALLED Man Go Crazy, named after Roger Chapman’s new album. He had been big in Europe a few years before we toured with him, and he still pulled a few people. So we were to play fifteen hundred to two thousand seaters across Germany. And we were booked to play a lot of shows. Maybe twenty-five or more.

  Rod informed us a week or so later, ‘Listen guys, we’ll be travelling in a tour bus with Roger’s band. There’ll be no room for families, especially kids.’

  Everyone looked at me.

  ‘Roger doesn’t want any kids on his bus. He doesn’t like them.’

  I didn’t like him and I hadn’t met him yet.

  ‘Why don’t we get our own bus then?’ I was quick to say.

  ‘Yeah, right. Great idea. We’re made of money. We can’t afford a fucking tour bus.’ Rod had all the answers. ‘If you want to do this tour then this is the only way it is going to work. So you’d better get used to the idea.’

  There was no way I was going without Jane and Mahalia. ‘I don’t want to go on his fucking bus. I’ll make my own way around. Hire a car or catch a train. I’ll get there somehow.’

  Nobody liked the idea of me being separate from the band. They were probably thinking that I wouldn’t make it to the shows, but I’d made up my mind. ‘Don’t you guys worry. I’ll be there every night. Jane and I will have fun touring on our own.’

  That was the plan. Jane and I would find our way around Germany and turn up on time to play every day. What could go wrong?

  I WAS DETERMINED TO buy the house before I left, and with a lot of help from Jane’s father, a little from the band and some advice from Steve Hill, I managed it. The house was only small but it was the first home that any of my family had owned. It made me feel proud. I would stay away from the city, keep it together and try to have a normal life. But this would only happen when I was home in Bowral. Unfortunately, I had to go to work. We were doing shows all over the country before the European tour started and as soon as I left home the old me came out. I was a different person to the man I was at home. At home I was quiet and loving. When I was away I was an absolute lunatic. Drinking, drugging and jumping into bed with women wherever we ended up. All that would have been fine if I was single, but I had a family and every time something happened I hated myself even more. I could no longer look at myself in the mirror without feeling ashamed. Not of where I came from anymore, but ashamed of what I’d become. I no longer could blame my family. This was all my fault. I tried to stop but I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop drinking or getting smashed either. It all went hand in hand. I had made myself into a monster and I could see no way back.

  BY THE TIME THE band got to Europe in May 1983, we were fighting every night. Night after night, we would all be screaming at Steve, urging him to play faster, but he didn’t listen.

  ‘Play the fucking song faster,’ I’d shout in his ear, over the sound of the band. Steve would just look away and ignore me. This had never happened before. He always listened eventually, but not on this tour. It felt like Steve had given up. He fought with me, he fought with Ian and Phil too and eventually even Don and he nearly came to blows. I was tired and fighting with Jane too. My whole life was crumbling around me. The band was falling apart. I was drinking way too much and taking too many drugs. Nothing sounded good. Every night we came off stage disappointed in ourselves. We had never been like this.

  On the last show of the German tour, Steve was having a particularly bad night and I gave in. I kept pouring vodka down my throat as fast as I could. If he wanted to play like shit, so would I. That was when Don snapped. His piano, which was held in a big iron frame that allowed me to climb all over it, came crashing over on the stage, nearly killing me. The band came to an abrupt halt. He walked off. We were over.

  Steve didn’t defend his playing, he just ignored us. We wanted to sack him there and then. This band were brothers. One for all and all that shit. But we couldn’t play with him anymore. We still had shows booked to do back in Australia. How the fuck were we going to get through them like this? We would have to work it out when we got home.

  We returned to Australia with our tails between our legs. One more place that didn’t get us. But this time we knew why. We had played like shit.

  WE MET IN THE Cross like we always did. By this time Steve was on his way out of the band and we all knew it. Not only that, I didn’t like the way our business was being run and I had to tell the guys what I was feeling. We had a lot of things going wrong and our management arrangement was one of them. Not the only thing, but we could fix this, surely.

  ‘I don’t think it’s right that Rod takes his money off the gross. We should all be paying the costs. It should be off an adjusted gross. Why does he not pay for pho
nes and offices and all the other shit that we have to pay for? We pay for everything. It’s not right.’

  I should have been talking about the state of the band but it was all too raw and too soon. So I picked on what I thought was a less sensitive area, the management. Twenty per cent off the gross meant that Rod quite often made more money than the band did. Especially if all our money was being sunk back into the bottomless hole we called a business. We paid for the office, the travel, the hotels, the crew, the truck, the support bands, the lights, the sound systems and all the advertising. There wasn’t a lot left over after that and I was sure Rod was making more than us. It didn’t seem right to me and it wasn’t a good way to run a business. That and the fact that I needed more money as usual.

  Don could tell I hadn’t come up with this alone. ‘Who’s been in your ear then, Jim? We’ve always paid management off the gross. That’s the way it’s always been done.’

  But I didn’t listen. It wasn’t right, no matter how long we had done it. I had talked this over with Jane and I had got some advice from Steve Hill. This was just basic business stuff. ‘I don’t care. I don’t want to pay it like that anymore. I think we have to change the way we do business.’

  The rest of the band didn’t want to change a thing. That just made me angrier.

  ‘Look, this is a democracy. We can vote on it but I don’t think anything is going to get changed today.’ Don was the spokesperson. The others said nothing. They always went along with Don. No matter what we were fighting about, Don had to do the dirty work. He must have hated it.

  By this time, I was feeling completely out of my comfort zone. I was feeling sick, asking for money. I was back as an eight-year-old, begging for money because I was hungry. I snapped, ‘If you guys want to pay twenty per cent of the gross to Rod but don’t want to help me support my fucking family, well you can do it without me. I’m fucking finished.’