Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

  The band never budged. They’d seen me threaten to leave before but this time it was different. I had changed. I wasn’t begging. I was telling them what I wanted and how I felt.

  I got up, looked at them sitting around the table and said, ‘I’m finished. You guys do what you like but I’m leaving the band. And I won’t be fucking coming back.’

  I walked out. I was furious. Getting angry was the only way I could show them how I felt. But as I stormed down the road it almost felt like my life was flashing before my eyes. I was drowning. Drowning in fear. The band had given me the only security I had ever felt. These guys were my brothers. We had gone from being a bunch of spotty kids, afraid of looking at an audience, to having all of Australia eating out of our hands. We had grown up in a very tough world together and I was walking away from them. Could I do this on my own? I needed them. But I had walked out and this time there was no turning back.

  There was no talking for a while. They thought this was normal. Usually, I would ignore any messages from them and then, in my own time, I would come around and start thinking straight and we would settle back down to work. The difference was that this time, none of us wanted to get back together. I was sure the guys were as worried about their futures as I was, but we all needed to get away from each other. It was time to grow up. Stand on our own, like men. We weren’t boys anymore.

  Management and record companies and friends and fans of the band all tried to talk us into staying together, but it was over. We decided that we would make one last album. We had already recorded a few things. Then we’d do one last tour for the fans and call it quits.

  TWENTIETH CENTURY WAS TO be the band’s swan song. But we had died long before we got to the studio. Steve was gone, and in his place was Ray Arnott. Ray had filled in for Steve a couple of times when Steve was sick. He played simple, straight, four-on-the-floor, rock’n’roll drums. Nothing fancy, nothing that wasn’t needed. We had all been fans of Ray’s since we’d seen him play with The Dingoes back in Adelaide in the old days. But as good as he was, he wasn’t Steve. Steve was inventive and he knew how to swing a track like no one else. Steve was our brother and he thought the same way we did. Ray was up against it from day one in the studio. We were fractured and falling apart. The songs were works in progress. If we hadn’t been breaking up, we would have kept writing for another year or until we were ready. But suddenly here we were without our drummer, making the record we didn’t want to make. Our last.

  One of the songs that was written before Steve left turned out to be one of the best songs the band ever recorded. We used the demo version with Steve playing drums. ‘Flame Trees’, written by Don and Steve, was a song about going back to your hometown and looking at the life you used to live, the people you hung around with and the places you used to go. This song has taken on a lot of different meanings for me over the years. I left a lot of things behind. Maybe more than most people have. And sometimes driving in a car or drinking with mates in a bar can take me back to places I never want to revisit. When I think about going back to Adelaide, I think about nothing but pain and have nothing but bad memories. As the years have gone by, more and more bad memories have surfaced and the song has been even more painful to sing. Some nights, it’s all I can do to make it through without breaking down, but it has remained one of my favourite Cold Chisel songs to this day.

  Every place I left behind me held ghosts of my past, and as I ran away from them I created new memories and new ghosts that I wanted to leave behind. More people I could never look in the eye again. More people who I hurt or who hurt me. I spent ten years on the road with Cold Chisel during our first life and we never stayed still long enough for anything, let alone the past, to catch up to us. Life on the road saved me. I could fall into the car and drive away from anything or anyone. If I was lucky I might never have to face up to anything. But Australia is a small place really. We always had to go back to places that held memories I preferred to leave behind. So I started drinking and taking so many drugs that I didn’t feel anything, and I certainly had trouble remembering anything I had done on previous visits. I went around the country, running in ever shrinking circles, waiting for the world to come crashing down on me. It would eventually, but not for a while. But who needs that sentimental bullshit anyway? Not me.

  ‘SATURDAY NIGHT’ WAS A song that came from left field. It took us all by surprise. Don has written a lot of good songs but this one captured a snapshot of Sydney like no other. It oozes with the smells and sounds of Sydney in the 1980s. If you listen closely enough you can almost get a bit of dirt from the Cross on you. And the film clip captures it all. The band walking aimlessly, lost, not knowing where we were heading. Ian and I stumbling into the Mardi Gras parade. The parade is a celebration of Sydney’s gay community but even more, it is a defiant stand against oppression. Even while people judged and scorned this community, its members walked the streets with heads held high, celebrating freedom. Celebrating life. We were welcomed into the parade with open arms on that night and I can feel that spirit every time I watch the clip. Ian and I were just two more lost souls who found some peace in the crowd that walked the streets of Darlinghurst. Many years later I would be asked to play at the Mardi Gras party. It was an amazing honour for me. I have so many great friends within the gay community. I spoke with strangers at that party who broke down in tears, telling me that the only record of friends they’d lost to AIDS was in the film clip that we made that night. Dressed bright as butterflies, proudly dancing on a balmy Sydney night. We didn’t have the keys to the city, but for one night we kicked the doors down.

  Some of the songs on the album could have been written a little better or produced a little better, but we worked with what we had. This was the end and we were all heartbroken to be leaving each other behind.

  THE LAST STAND WAS the name we gave our final tour. It would be a massacre and we would be the cavalry who were led to the slaughter, running head on into the fight, night after night. This would not be an easy tour to complete. Every single show we played was to a crowd who had shared a life with us, even if we hadn’t met them all personally. We had been at their parties. We had sung at their weddings. We had played at their funerals. We were all members of the same family. Every town wanted to give us a send-off. I hardly slept for the first half of the tour, finishing each show and then drinking with friends we had made as we travelled around the country. By the end of the shows in Adelaide, our old hometown, I couldn’t speak. I was spitting blood out while I sang for the last three shows, cauterising the wounds with straight vodka and then screaming again until my throat bled even more. After Adelaide, we had to reschedule the rest of the dates until I could sing. I have always joked that my voice is like a Mack truck, hard to start but once it gets going nothing can stop it. But Adelaide stopped it in its tracks. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to sing ever again after that part of the tour. I’m not sure now whether I ever wanted to sing again. I was finished. Ready to lay down and die.

  But my voice came back. In December 1983 we hit Sydney for the final shows at the Entertainment Centre. Each night we came off wrung out, feeling nothing but empty. I remember singing and the feeling of fear coming over me. ‘Will I ever get to be in such a great band again? Why am I leaving?’

  But I would just take a long drink from one of the many bottles of booze I had on the stage and dive headlong into the crowd and those thoughts were gone. As I crashed to the floor, dragging countless fans down with me, I could only think about surviving, nothing else.

  Patrick Jones Studio

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  this is not a song

  BOWRAL, 1984

  KARAANG KARAANG KARAANG

  Fuck. This guitar sounds out of tune again. I only just tuned it.

  Karaang Karaang Karaang

  It looks right when I play through the guitar tuner but shit, it’s out again when I try to play a song. What song? This is a joke. This is not a song. ‘K
he Sanh’ was a song. This is three chords played by an amateur. What am I going to do?

  Karaang Karaang Karaang

  It’s not getting any better. It must be the cold. Fucking thing. I don’t care about writing songs. Fuck it, I won’t make a record. It was stupid to think I could do this on my own. I’ve got no talent. I’m fucked.

  Karaang Karaang Karaang

  I want to throw the guitar against the wall. Calm down. Put the guitar down for a second and breathe. I close my eyes and lift my head up. A slight breeze brushes across my face. It’s cool and calming. I open my eyes. I can see the stars between the top of the wall and the ceiling, where the wind sneaks through every now and again. I’m in my little farmhouse in the Southern Highlands. It’s not a mansion but I love it here. This is the first place that I have felt at home in my whole life. It’s mine, no one can take it from me. It’s my home.

  In the next room the fire is roaring and it is warm and dark. Jane is asleep in front of the fire with Mahalia in her arms. Every time I take off the headphones I can hear her breathe, deep and slow.

  I’m in the front bedroom. The room is really too small to be a bedroom so I claimed it for my studio. It might have been part of the front porch at one time but someone decided long before I got here that a house with three bedrooms would sell for more money than a house with two, so they put up a couple of badly constructed walls, and there it was, a third bedroom. I have a four-track cassette recorder in front of me and I’m playing a Fender Telecaster, the first guitar I ever owned. It’s black and white and loud and I love it. I’m desperately trying to write songs for my first solo record. If I am to have a life in the music business I have to make a good record and I have to make it soon.

  ‘Take your time, Jimmy. You’ve just left the biggest band in the country. You deserve a break.’ That’s what I’ve been told, but I know, I can feel in my gut, that if I don’t make a record, and make it fast, it will all be over. The longer I wait, the closer everyone will look at what I’m doing, the more it will be compared to Cold Chisel. Even the thought of being compared to Chisel scares the shit out of me. Over the ten years that we were together, I wrote a handful of songs for the band, not all of them good ones either. Suddenly I am on my own and people are going to listen to what I can do without Don writing for me. I was lucky. I was the singer in the band with one of the best songwriters Australia has ever produced. And believe me, I am grateful for that. But now I have to go it alone and I wish I’d never heard of Cold Chisel. Fuck. I pick up my guitar again and put the headphones back on.

  Karaang Karaang Karaang

  It’s not getting any better. I’ll just have to write a song that doesn’t need the guitar to be in tune. I turn up the preamp until the guitar is screaming. My eardrums nearly burst. That sounds better. This is a battle, a street fight, it’s a war. I’m fighting against the voice in my head that’s screaming at me, ‘You’re not good enough. You don’t deserve any of this. You belong back in the gutter.’ It’s always there, always shouting unless I’m so drunk I can’t hear it.

  Karaang Karaang Karaang

  Fuck it. So it’s a war, is it? I hit the guitar even harder. The strings bend across the neck, on the verge of breaking. They vibrate, they howl, until something happens that feels like a miracle to me – they begin to sing.

  Karaang Karaang Karaang

  The opening chords of what would become ‘No Second Prize’ ring out in my ears. I refuse to lie down. Fuck Cold Chisel. Fuck the music industry. If I’m going down, I’m going down fighting.

  I’VE HEARD THAT SOME of the Chisel boys thought I was lured away by promises of more money and more fame, made by Michael Gudinski. Nothing could be further from the truth. Michael had become a friend of mine. I liked the way he worked. He was a bit wild – no wilder than me – and he was passionate about music, unlike the multinational companies I had dealt with in the past. Over the years I had watched Michael pour his own money, not the company’s, back into Australian music. He lived and breathed it.

  Whenever I was in Melbourne we would get together and talk about bands that we loved. Michael even put up with me moaning about the way things were falling apart in Chisel. He always told me to hang in there, that the music is its own reward. ‘Every band makes mistakes, Jimmy. But this is a great band and it’s where you belong,’ he told me night after night.

  When I did finally leave, Michael didn’t know I was going to do it. I rang him from the farm and told him, ‘This is it. I’ve told the guys that I’m not coming back. We’re making one last record and doing one last tour then it’s over. Finished.’

  Michael was quiet at the other end of the phone. Then he said, ‘What are you going to do now? And do you need some help? Someone to talk to?’

  I told him yes and he and his wife Sue were on the next plane to Sydney to see Jane and me. We sat around the fire and laughed and cried together. After a while I told Michael that I wanted to be on an Australian label. Not any Australian label. His label. I liked the way he stuck by bands. I’d seen lots of bands signed up, chewed up and spat out by big labels. It was a case of deliver or pack your bags and shut the door on your way out of the building. This sort of treatment could finish a young band off. But with Michael they were nurtured and given time to find their feet. He stuck with the bands he believed in and I needed him to believe in me. From that day we have worked together, through good times and bad. He has made mistakes and so have I, but we have always been there for each other.

  I had left the biggest band in the country to go solo. I wanted to be good at what I did but I also wanted to be the biggest singer in the country, even bigger than Cold Chisel, and that’s what I told Michael. I needed people to like me. I wanted to like me.

  ‘Don’t you worry. That’s exactly what I want too. I want you to be huge. We can do this together,’ he promised.

  We shook hands and went about figuring out the fine details of how we would work together. Michael had his lawyers talk to my lawyers and I would have my new manager talk to him, once I found one.

  I NEEDED A MANAGER. I wasn’t capable of managing myself, so I looked around. I could see no one that appealed to me. No one I trusted with my family’s future. One day I sat in Steve Hill’s car, driving down to Bowral for a game of golf, a sport I’d never thought I would play. It was never a good idea to give me a stick to hit things with.

  ‘There has to be someone you trust, Jimmy. You’ve been in this business for a long time.’ Steve tried to get his head around it.

  ‘Managers are a rare breed, Steve. All the good ones have people they’re looking after and I don’t want to play second fiddle to anyone.’

  We sat in silence, Steve thinking about slowing his backswing down and me thinking about my career going down the gurgler. Then it came to me. ‘Why don’t you do it, Steve?’ Steve had been sidelined, either by himself or the bank, since its collapse. I could tell he was bored out of his mind. He was razor sharp and I knew he was honest, so it seemed like a good idea.

  Steve snapped back to reality. ‘What? Manage you? You have to be kidding. I don’t know a thing about music. I own one cassette, Little Feat Live, and you gave that to me. No mate, you need a manager who knows the music business.’

  I thought about it for a while. ‘I know the music side of things. You know about business. We can do it together. Business is business. You were good at it, weren’t you?’

  Steve was a hard businessman and his entrance to the music industry scared a lot of people. The first person he had to deal with was Michael Gudinski. Michael never knew how to take him and Steve liked to keep him guessing.

  My lawyer was as good as it gets. Peter Thompson worked for Tress Cocks & Maddox (now TressCox), a big Sydney law firm. He was tough and very smart. We have remained friends and I still ask for his advice whenever I need it. Peter drew up the contract, Michael’s lawyers said their bit and we had it all ready to sign. As we sat down, Steve turned up and said, ‘Can I see that cont
ract before you sign it?’

  Michael slid it over to him. Steve picked it up, laid it in front of himself and started writing on it in pen.

  ‘What? You’re amending the contract right now? You can’t do that,’ said Michael.

  Steve looked up at him and said, ‘I just did.’ And slid it back to Michael. In pen at the bottom of the last page, Steve had written:

  Michael Gudinski agrees to pay Jimmy Barnes $25,000 cash on this date every year for the length of the contract as a sign of good will.

  Michael picked it up and gasped. ‘Aw. This is bullshit. You can’t do that. My lawyers have agreed to everything you wanted. You just can’t add shit in pen for the sake of it.’

  Steve stood up. ‘If you don’t want to sign it, well, we can all go home and I’ll find someone who wants to sign Jimmy. There are a lot of people out there bidding, you know.’

  Michael was pale and breaking out in a sweat. ‘Wait a fucking minute here. I never said I wasn’t going to sign it. I was just saying.’

  Steve kept putting the pressure on. ‘Well, I’ve got some things to do.’ He was walking towards the door.

  ‘Yeah, all right, all right. Here you go.’

  Michael signed the deal that would see him and me working together for nearly all of my recording career, through good times and bad. It was good business but we were great friends and will stay that way until the end. Which, I might add, is a long way off. I still have a lot I want to do and so does he.

  MARK POPE, WHO HAD been tour manager for Cold Chisel for a long time, had teamed up with a guy called Richard MacDonald. They had started Bottom Line Touring and Agency after the demise of Cold Chisel. Richard had been the booking agent for Dirty Pool, Cold Chisel’s management. So they weren’t happy when he quit to start his own business with Mark, and lawsuits followed.