by Jimmy Barnes
‘Fuck me, Jimmy. I’ve mixed you for years and that was the loudest you’ve ever sung. I had to turn your microphone down by at least a third or you were going to blow up the fucking PA system. Your pitch was good too. Welcome back, you fucking idiot. You should have done this years ago.’
I thought for a second. I felt like I could do another show right away. That’s when I knew that I’d been nobbling myself for years. I couldn’t have made my job any harder if I’d tried. So now I knew I could sing straight. But I would have to get used to seeing my audience this way too. There were people absolutely mindless in the front row, watching the band. Well, I think they were watching the band. I had seen one guy, his eyes rolling back and booze spilt all down the front of his shirt, with his arm around a girl who was blowing kisses at me. Lucky his eyes were rolling, I guess. I had been told I would need to keep my distance from drinkers for a little while. That’s what they told me at AA as well. If the people you hang around with drink or take drugs, change the people you hang around with or you will relapse so quickly you won’t even see it coming.
But I wasn’t going to be one of those guys. I had met guys like that in the States. ‘Hey man, I don’t mind you having a good time but could you not do it around me,’ they’d say.
I didn’t know what the fuck they meant. ‘What, you want me to have a good time by myself and a shitty time around you? I fucking do that anyway. You are as boring as batshit,’ I used to joke, but they never laughed. Now I knew why. I told myself that no matter how hard it got, I would never stop my friends from getting smashed. I could take it. It was my problem, not theirs. And that’s what I did. Some nights it was hard, other nights it was harder, but I had to be strong. This went on for years.
BEFORE REHAB I HAD tried to write a book. Somehow I wanted to purge myself. Spilling everything out and onto paper might help me get through it. But as I have said before, I was so out of it I could only make light of the state I was in. I didn’t understand what I was up against. In fact, if the truth be known, I think that I’m only just starting to see it all now, and it still scares me. It did occur to me to write again now that I was clear-headed and fresh from rehab but I really didn’t have any answers yet. I had spread all the pieces of my life out on the table, like pieces of a jigsaw. But I had lost the box, so I didn’t know what the picture was supposed to look like.
I had been a lunatic and I had almost gotten whiplash from slowing down so quickly. Every night I would fight the urge to deal with things the old way. I knew that model was broken so I took all the shit that was running through my head and I shoved it as far back as I could. Hopefully I would never see it again. Everyone kept telling me how well I looked and how well I was singing. How proud they were of me. How much nicer I was to be around. But inside it was a battle. All that shit that had been unlocked at rehab wanted out. It wanted to be dealt with. I just kept saying, ‘No. I’m not ready to talk to anyone. I can do this alone.’
I was a stubborn bastard. Then, at night when no one was around, I would cry and look into the mirror. Just like I used to when I was smashed. I could see the other me, still there. The real me.
‘Fuck off. You’re not going to win. I can do this. I can do this.’ Then I would try to stop myself from breaking down and crying. I would not be ready to write for another few years, if ever.
Tsh Tsh Tsh . . .
Later, when I wrote my first book, Working Class Boy, I talked about my mum’s life being like a pressure cooker, ready to explode. That feeling was back. Only this time, it wasn’t my mum.
Tsh Tsh Tsh . . .
Stop it. I don’t want to hear it. I would turn the music up, do anything to distract myself – well, within reason now.
Tsh Tsh Tsh . . .
This time it was me. I was the pressure cooker. I was the time bomb. I was ready to blow. I would knock myself out with a sleeper and hope that I wouldn’t dream. I wanted peace. Nothing else. Just peace. I would wake up and the sound would be gone. I was all right. Every day started this way and then slowly as the day progressed . . .
Tsh Tsh Tsh . . .
… it would return. This was a battle I knew deep down I couldn’t win, but I had to try.
IN THE MIDDLE OF 2003 Cold Chisel was back. Ringside was on the road. The band wanted to play again. I wanted to play with them. Even Cold Chisel had gone down a few rungs on the ladder. The tour before, we were doing Entertainment Centres, about 12,000 people a night. Now we were doing Hordern Pavilions, more like 5500 people. We told ourselves that it was because we wanted to do smaller venues, but no one really wants to do smaller venues, and don’t believe them if they say they do. But we would do the best shows that we could. I had hardly ever sung straight with Chisel and I wanted to do it and do it well. It was so much easier this time. The band were relaxed and happy to be around me, although I could tell that they were still a little wary in case I fell apart.
Every day Steve would walk up to me. ‘How’s it going, our kid? Are you holding up all right?’
I was fine. It was always a bit of a battle but I had fought much worse. ‘Yeah mate, I’m good. Thanks for asking. You just do your fucking job and I’ll do mine.’
Steve laughed. ‘You know, you are a bigger twat sober than you are pissed. I think I liked you better before.’
But I knew he was kidding and he knew I was only kidding too. It was our way of breaking the ice. I needed to know that the boys were all behind me and they were. Every night before the show I went through my little ritual. Remember I said I have compulsive tendencies? I just had to change what I was compulsive about. So instead of being compulsive about destroying myself, now I was compulsively moderate.
I would get to the gig at least an hour before the show. In the old days that gave me enough time to get drunk and consume all the drugs I needed to get through the night. But now that meant I could walk to the stage and get a feel for the place, then find a room backstage and put out my clothes and look at the set. Play a bit of music to calm me down. I used to play the whole Highway to Hell album every night for years before I went on. Now I only played some of it. Then I’d sit and try to meditate. I wasn’t always successful, by the way. I would say the serenity prayer and I was ready to rock. But if that routine was broken I was at a loose end, unsettled, unfocused. I thought that as long as I stuck to my routine I would be all right. Simple. But the fact that when it was interrupted I was thrown so far out of whack was a big warning sign and I knew it.
The Ringside tour was difficult for all of us. We had never played in the round before. The audience was all around us, which meant we couldn’t have our usual wall of amps and gear to hide behind. The guitar amps had been almost like security blankets for us. We could wind and wind them up until they were so loud that we would settle. All of us were like that, I soon found out, not just me. But for Ringside all our gear was under the stage. It was bare. It was as if we were standing naked up on the stage. That took a lot of getting used to. It was just one more thing to distract me from my real problems. I could worry about that instead of worrying about the drug dealer in the third row, who I hadn’t seen in years, with the two hookers on his arms, motioning for me to join him after the show. In the old days I would have been obsessed with the idea of taking off with them for the rest of the show. Not now though. I had enough on my plate. I had to get this band to rock. And I was happy. I had a job to do. My friends needed me to be at the top of my game. I wasn’t digging myself a hole anymore. I was getting on with it. Sure it was hard, but it had been so much harder before. And I didn’t want to turn the heat up under the pressure cooker at any cost. If it blew again, the damage this time would be total devastation.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
all roads seemed to lead to me
BACK IN THE STUDIO, 2005
IT WAS TIME TO get back on the bike and try to make a solo record. It was 2005, so it had been five years between records. In the old days I had sometimes made two records a year, so I had s
lowed down considerably. For me it was a long time between drinks. Figuratively and literally.
The new album would also be my first since signing to Michael Gudinski’s new label, Liberation. About six years before, Michael had sold Mushroom to Rupert Murdoch. I never in a million years thought that my music would be owned by Rupert, and if I’d seen it coming I would have taken steps to avoid it. I have nothing personal against Rupert but I didn’t like my music being owned by someone who didn’t have a music background. When the change came it was swift and clean, like a slice from an open razor. It seemed Michael and Rupert both did business a lot like it used to be done in Glasgow. It was cut-throat. Someone would lose out on the whole deal, and at the time I thought I was going to be the one to bleed. I went from being signed to one of the best independent labels in the world to being owned by one of the biggest men in media. Thankfully Michael had organised my deals so I didn’t have to be stuck there on my own. I eventually moved on. So now, in 2005, I was back to making independent music.
I hadn’t made a record since Soul Deeper. This time everything was different. I was straight. It was time to get back in the game.
I started working closely with Warren Costello, who was running Michael’s new label. Warren and I have worked to keep my recording career on track ever since. Sometimes I have been so off track that Warren has had to keep the whole thing in line without me. Warren is a gentleman, which in the music business is a rare thing. He says what he means and means what he says. There are no hidden agendas. We have fought but only about things we both think need to be done. We always come to an agreement and we have stayed friends. Michael was still in charge though and we settled back into our old rhythm. We eventually had more success and got our friendship back on track, but Liberation could never be the same as Mushroom for any of us.
I got a bunch of songs together for the new album. It soon became apparent that it would include a lot of collaborations. Maybe I should do all duets. The Double Happiness album was the result. Michael originally wanted a single disc, mostly of safe covers, but Warren and I had different ideas. We wanted to write and find new material as well. The finished product was somewhere in between. I recorded more than twenty songs and most of them made the album.
Double Happiness was a lot of things, including my way of saying thanks to the people who had helped me pick myself back up and start living again. Most importantly, my family. I wanted the record to be a celebration of friendship and family. I did songs with lots of friends, members of my extended family, and with my children. Diesel produced a few tracks and sang with me. Mahalia wrote and sang a song with me. EJ wrote and sang with me. Jackie played drums on a lot of the album and sang a duet with me. Even Elly-May was confident enough to sing with me. I wanted my son David to be on the record, so we found a great old Jimmy Webb song to do. And then to round off the whole thing, I asked my big brother to sing with me. This was like going back to the start and wiping the slate clean. That’s what I thought. I had started singing with my brother as a kid, so what better way to show that everything was all right than to sing with him again?
But singing with John brought back a whole set of problems. For a lot of reasons, whenever I’d got together with my brothers and sisters in the past, it had been uncomfortable. The past was always there, waiting to explode, unresolved, twisting our feelings for each other, making it almost impossible to relate to one another. We would be happy to see one another but always looking for a way out. A way to escape. This is how I felt, anyway. I loved them dearly and I wanted to be able to spend quality time with them but I just couldn’t do it. I thought that now I was straight those feelings would be gone. But they weren’t. As soon as I spoke with John, I felt the knots twisting in my stomach again. Once we were in the room together I was a nervous wreck and so was he. I wondered if John only felt like this around his siblings, the way I did? Or did he feel like this all the time? It was too hard to ask him these questions, so I stayed uncomfortable and waited for the session to end.
I knew then that stopping the drinking and the other self-destructive behaviour had only removed a big part of my coping mechanism. All the pain was still under the surface, waiting to be dealt with. I hadn’t really dealt with anything. I had taken away the most obvious problem, the drinking and drug-taking, but what was left was just as dangerous, if not more dangerous, without help. It was only a matter of time until I broke down, relapsed or died. Looking at my childhood without booze to soften the memories was too painful. I pushed it away, back, way back into my subconscious, where I couldn’t see it and might not have to deal with it. Not now anyway.
This record was a new start. I had replaced one obsession – drugs – with another – work. And booze, with fame. I didn’t want it to be tarnished by the ghosts of my past coming back to haunt me. So I stuck my head in the sand and kept working.
The record came out in July 2005 and it entered the charts at number one. My first release with the Liberation label became my first number one album since Soul Deep, fourteen years earlier. I was back on track and powering up for another charge. But for how long? Double Happiness had some of the best singers in the world doing duets with me. Why did such good singers and people have time for a guy like me? I had wasted half of my life living in a haze. These people had seen me at my worst and they still liked me. It had me baffled.
Later that year I was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame for a second time. Cold Chisel had been admitted back in 1993, but this time it was for my solo work. Not many artists had done this before me, so it was a big deal. But like all awards, for me it ran a close second to getting myself up and running again. I knew that my future was in my hands and the more I looked after my own career, the better it would be.
IN 2005, I WAS contacted by a young woman after a show in South Australia. A letter with my name on it was slipped to one of my crew. I get letters all the time, some thanking me for coming to town and others asking me never to come back, so I wasn’t surprised. This was just another show and another letter. I put it in my bag and forgot about it. I got back to my hotel and came across it when I was emptying my bag. The letter was from a girl, who told me that she had been looking for her birth parents for quite a while. She had found her mother and all roads seemed to lead to me as her father. The letter was well written, with a gentle tone. It was obvious that the young woman was genuinely trying to find out where she came from. She went on to ask if I would be willing to take a paternity test. I knew I had been a wild boy in my younger days in Adelaide and I thought it could be possible. She sounded like a nice person and even if I wasn’t her father, what could I do but help her?
I had heard stories when I was kid in Elizabeth that a girl might be pregnant somewhere. All the guys I hung around with heard this at some point and all any of us did was hope it would go away. But these things don’t go away. We were too young to realise what it all meant. We were all just kids, sleeping with each other to make ourselves feel good about ourselves or feel wanted or even safe. We were wild but we were just learning about life, the hard way.
If I knew I had children out there, I would want to find them. But I didn’t want to rush into things and have them fall apart, and I didn’t know who I was communicating with. I asked for some help from a dear family friend, Richard Cobden. Richard was studying law in Canberra when Jane was at university there, so he knew Jane long before I met her. He has been a good friend of mine for many years too, so he had a history with the family. He is incredibly smart and absolutely trustworthy and I knew he would be a good person to ask for advice.
Richard was worried that I might be taken advantage of as well. He told me, ‘You never know who you’ll be dealing with, Jimmy. I think it would be best if you leave this to me.’ From that day, he became the family consigliere. He deals with any personal legal problems the family comes up against.
The young woman’s name was Amanda Harrison and all she wanted was to find out who her father was. I agree
d to take a paternity test. Richard handled the delicate matter of getting the test done and checked swiftly and confidentially. And sure enough, it came back positive. I was Amanda’s father. I spoke to her on the phone and organised to meet. I knew as soon as I saw her that she was my daughter. She looked like my mother, which meant she looked like me. Amanda had tried to get a message to me before, but it hadn’t happened.
From the minute I told Jane, she was nothing but supportive. Just like when I told her about David, if I had another child in this world, she wanted her to be a part of our lives. I had married an amazing woman. Now, I had to get to know my new family. Amanda, her daughters Tabitha and Tyra, and her son Toby all looked like members of my family. There was no doubt about it. They were warm and friendly. I got the feeling that Amanda was hurting. Why wouldn’t she be? She had been brought up not knowing who her real parents were. But she was intelligent and loving and warm and I am so happy to have her and her beautiful children as part of our lives now. Amanda was very cool and only wanted to feel part of something. A family, her family.