by Jimmy Barnes
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
lost at sea
WITHOUT STEVE, 2011
AFTER THE LOSS OF Steve, none of us thought we would ever play together again. It was too much for the band to take. But we still had business to take care of. We would meet and there was an empty seat that seemed like it could never be filled. Steve was gone and we could never replace him. We didn’t want to play without him. But after a while the conversation changed.
Steve was the one who always wanted us to get over it and make music together. Sitting at a band meeting without him drove this home. If Steve was there, he would be telling us, ‘Come on lads, pick yourselves up and play some music. At least finish the fucking record.’
But it was hard. How do you replace someone like Steve? You can’t. We couldn’t replace him. So instead of trying to replace him, we thought about who else we could play our music with. No one would be able to fill his shoes, but maybe we could find someone to bring something else, something new, to the band. That’s what Steve would have wanted us to do. There weren’t many names tossed around. I’m not sure there were any before Don suggested Charley Drayton. Charley was a musician with incredible feel and depth. He had played on some of the best records I’d heard, with some of the best musicians in the world.
Charley was dealing with his own heartbreak. The love of his life, Chrissy Amphlett, was very sick and he was facing life without her. We couldn’t take away the pain Charley was feeling about Chrissy. And Charley couldn’t take away the pain we felt at losing Steve, but maybe, just maybe, we could make music together and help each other deal with life. Charley agreed to come down from New York and play with us. He told us, ‘You know man, it’s weird. Here’s the thing. When Chrissy and I heard about Steve passing, just like everybody else we were hurting for you guys. But Chrissy said to me back then that if you guys ever wanted to record again, I should offer to do it. And now here I am.’
Chrissy was close to the band. We loved her and she loved us. We had grown up together. But Chrissy, being Chrissy, felt strongly enough about us to think about sharing Charley at this time, when she needed him most. Maybe she was doing it for Charley as much as for us. He would need something to be part of when she was gone.
We had played without Steve before during the life of the band, but that was through choice or because of a random act of stupidity, like Steve falling over drunk and breaking his wrist. We never wanted to play without him, not really anyway, unless we were fighting. But here we were playing Cold Chisel songs with someone else. Charley didn’t play like Steve. He didn’t try to. He respected everything that Steve had given to the band and played like himself. Anyone else would have copied Steve, or at least tried to, and that wouldn’t have worked. Charley brought new life to the band, and now whenever we play together I can close my eyes and still feel Steve’s spirit driving us. But when I open them up I see Charley, proud and soulful. That’s one of many things he and Steve have in common. They are both proud and soulful and know how to drive a rock’n’roll band.
BY THIS TIME, I was on a downhill track with no way, that I could see, of turning back. Jane and I had not dealt with all the shit that had come between us during my life of destruction and mayhem. I had somehow got myself straight but I hadn’t been able to, or been ready to, deal with the real cause of all my problems. My childhood. My traumas. My life. It was always there, lurking in the shadows, waiting for me to stumble and fall. And it took a little time but I did fall. I couldn’t face the pain I had felt as a child, and I couldn’t stand the pain I had caused as a man. I started drinking again. Just a little at first. Alone in my hotel room. One drink to help silence the voices in my head. Blur the face that was staring at me from the mirror. Those same feelings of loss, and loss of contact with the world, were back and stronger than they had ever been. I was closer to stepping off than ever. That one drink led to another and then another. And when that didn’t work, I needed something harder, something stronger, so I found drugs again. Lots of them. But there weren’t enough drugs or booze in the world to block the shame and guilt anymore. No matter what I swallowed, snorted, punched, kissed or ran from. I was back at my darkest place. I felt like I was drowning in a dark pool of pain and someone had pulled the plug and I was spinning down. I could see everything rushing out of control. Nothing could stop it this time. Down into the emptiness I went again. It was over. I couldn’t fight it anymore. It was just a matter of time until it took me away for good.
I would stagger into the studio, hardly able to stand up and sing a few takes and then run away and hide in a room where I didn’t have to see anybody. The band looked worried whenever I walked in. They had lost Steve and they were expecting to find out they’d lost me too. Jane and I would stay awake for days, trying desperately to work out where it all went wrong again. It wasn’t her. She knew that and I certainly knew that. But she loved me and had been trying to save me since we met. She couldn’t save me, not this time. No one could but me.
We finished the record that we had started before Steve left us. Kevin Shirley was at the controls, guiding us through the tears and the grief. The result was No Plans. The album title said it all. We were all lost at sea. None of us had come to terms with the loss of our brother Steve. We weren’t ready to make any long-term plans. We didn’t know how it would all work out, or if it would work at all.
MID-2011, I WENT BACK into rehab. This time in Australia. I had to do something or else I would die. The Sanctuary in Byron Bay was a high-end, very expensive way to dry out. But I couldn’t do this in the public eye. I had already fallen apart in clear view of everyone in Australia, so I needed privacy if I was to have a chance at getting it together. Four weeks seeing therapists and eating well and taking nothing but supplements gave me enough clarity to make it through the forthcoming Light the Nitro tour. But not long after leaving the place, I started drinking and taking drugs again. It wasn’t the fault of the clinic. They would have needed me to stay for a year or two to really help me. Once again, I had scratched the scab off my life and it was weeping. I didn’t have time to fix things. Not now anyway. I had work to do.
That reminds me. At my first AA meeting many years earlier, I talked with a well-known actor, who shall remain anonymous – hence the name, Alcoholics Anonymous. After the meeting, he came up to me and said, ‘So Jimmy, what’s your poison?’
At that time, I wasn’t ready to say that I was a drug addict and an alcoholic to just anyone, especially a total stranger, even though it was obvious to everyone who looked at me. So I answered him, ‘Look, the only problem I have is when I work. That’s when I drink and that’s when I take drugs, when I work.’
He looked at me and I had the feeling he understood me. He said, ‘Oh, it’s so obvious. You’re a workaholic.’ And laughed and walked away. But he was right. Work had become one of my problems too, but I didn’t see it. I was fine as long as I was wrapped in bubble wrap and away from the world.
I left rehab and I went back to work and back to drinking and everything else.
IN AUGUST 2011, the Light the Nitro tour went on sale and Cold Chisel sold more tickets in a shorter time than any Australian band in history. Thirty-six shows sold out. Three hundred thousand tickets in record time. The public, it seemed, had not had enough of us. Maybe they wanted to share in our grief, help us get through it.
We played much better this time around. Better than the Last Wave tour. And different to Ringside. That had been practically an unplugged tour. This was a rock tour. The band was firing. Charley had breathed new life into us. It was as if he, and the rest of us, tried harder to make it work for Steve, and for ourselves. A certain amount of tension was gone. It was different. Not better than with Steve, but different. I think that losing Steve had made us all grow up. We weren’t playing to fight against the world like we had in the past. We were playing to make sense of a world that was spinning faster and faster, as we tried desperately to hold on. Even in my failing state, the shows were
still good. Amazingly, I sang much better than I ever had before with Cold Chisel.
Jane and I travelled with the band. Every day we would meet in the lobby of the hotel, eyes covered by the darkest sunglasses we owned. The lack of sleep was beginning to show on my face. It was even beginning to show on Jane’s beautiful face. We would sit next to each other, unable to talk or even look at one another. Every night we would end up consuming everything we could get our hands on and then start going through our life together, looking for clues that would help us mend the wounds that were killing us. We never found any answers, just more wounds. It was a cycle that we repeated every night, for what seemed like years, never getting the answers we wanted.
No one really spoke about me falling back into my old habits, although Eric Robinson, who was again running all our production, didn’t pull any punches. ‘Good to see you looking so healthy, Jimmy,’ he said sarcastically as I fell into the backstage area one day. We both laughed but he was genuinely worried for me. Eric had a tough exterior but we all knew he was a softy inside.
Still, the band was on fire and Light the Nitro was a massive success. The tour was healing some of the loss we felt from the passing of Steve. Then, more bad news. Eric was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and left the tour to deal with it. We were all worried for our friend.
THE TOUR ROLLED INTO Adelaide. Even the thought of going to Adelaide worried me. I didn’t know why. I just knew that it was the key to all the pain I felt. And it was waiting in Adelaide. Every street and building held some sort of memory. I knew that the place where it all started was Elizabeth and I never wanted to go back there, but I was starting to remember things. Things that I had pushed back. Things I didn’t want to remember. But they kept coming, scratchy and not really clear enough to get the whole picture, like old super-eight films. I spoke to Jane about my fears. And for the first time I told her I had been abused by a man when I was still very young. I won’t go into this anymore now – I spoke about it in the first book. It was so hard to talk to another human being about this time, even Jane, but I knew I had to start talking to someone. I knew then that there was so much more to find out before I could have a chance at healing. The scratchy films were becoming a little clearer every day.
Around the same time, I was up late watching TV in a hotel room. The longer my life went on, the less sleep I was getting. Jane was in bed and I needed to watch something to distract me from myself. The only movie on the TV that I hadn’t already seen was set in Adelaide, of all places. It was called Snowtown. I knew it was a horrible story but I watched it anyway – it couldn’t have been any more horrible than what was already going through my head. It’s a movie about serial killers and abuse in Adelaide. The ‘bodies in the barrels’ case was very famous. I knew the story roughly. But when the movie started I was shocked. The street that this movie was set in looked like the street I lived on in Elizabeth West. Then it moved into the house and the house looked like our house. I became very scared and turned the TV off. But it was too late. The film had unlocked more about my past than I was ready to deal with. I could suddenly smell the way the house used to smell and taste the fear I felt when we lived there. My childhood started flooding back over me.
WITH THE TOUR OUT of the way I got worse. I could only get so bad with Chisel around, but without them there was no end to how low I could go. I fell so far that I thought I would never make it back. The fear kept growing.
I was getting to the point of no return. The shame I felt kept consuming me and the pressure of being in the corner I had painted myself into made me buckle until I didn’t know which way was up. In the end that shame and pressure took me to sitting alone in the dark with a cord wrapped around my neck in my hotel suite in New Zealand. Waiting, hoping to die.
CHAPTER FIFTY
we share good times and bad
A BETTER PLACE, 2012–NOW
SOMETHING INSIDE WAS POISONING me and poisoning everything I touched. I tried ignoring it. I tried smothering it. I tried drowning it in booze. I tried chopping it up and snorting it but even the hardest drugs had no effect.
Eventually I started writing. I wrote 100,000 words before I even knew it. It was all finally coming out. At first that made the pain even worse but slowly, page by page, I could feel that thing inside me shrinking until it was almost gone. A bit of it will always remain, of course, but writing turned out to be one of the things that actually helped. It was the missing piece of the puzzle. It allowed me to put some of those demons in their place at last.
I HAD ALSO STARTED seeing a therapist once a week. Sometimes I saw him twice a week. Peter Cox was my therapist and if he could have got me to see him every day of the week he would have. I don’t know exactly why but something changed. Peter had connected with me, helped me find a way through the darkness.
One day I woke up and I knew it was over. I had turned a corner. It was up to me to stay on that road. If I wanted to stop the car crash from happening, then I had to stop making the same mistakes over and over again. This was not an act of God. It was not a miracle. It was an act of love. I had been supported for years by a loving family and my beautiful wife. They were the ones I wanted to become a better man for. They were the ones who cheered me on. Every little bit of progress I made, they held me and told me how well I was doing. Every year I had more reasons to live. I’ve been blessed with quite a few grandchildren. Thirteen up to the time of writing this book. As I mentioned, I even have a beautiful great-grandchild. I needed to get over this stuff for all of them. If I didn’t, they would have to struggle with demons that I had brought from my childhood into theirs. Jane says the kids are like us with new software. Every time I learn something and update my software, their software gets an automatic update too. They won’t have to deal with my baggage.
Over the years that I had been fighting this battle I had worked with, and received information from, a lot of very clever and caring people. I had spent a lot of time listening to Deepak Chopra as he tried to tell me that life was beautiful and worth living. He was such a good friend to me. And I had sat in a cave in Thailand with Buddhist monks, meditating and looking for answers. I’d read nearly all the books written about helping yourself. I had all the information at my fingertips, but never took any of it in. I needed to use it.
I used to get up and do the same thing every day because I couldn’t cope. But that would lead to more trouble, more mistakes. If you want to change the way you feel about yourself, especially when you feel as bad as I did about myself, then you have to do things that you are proud of. I was like a rat running on a wheel and getting nowhere but tired. I had to get off the wheel. If I didn’t get off now, I would run until I dropped. I tried to stop doing drugs. Well, I stopped doing massive amounts of them. I stopped drinking until I couldn’t feel. I had to be alive. I had to feel. I had to fight if I wanted to live. I no longer felt the need to escape. I was ready to try to deal with life. It might not turn out the way I wanted it, but it would be worked out and I could get on with living again. Jane and I slowly got better. I could see how much Jane loved me and, more importantly, I could see how much I loved my Jane. Life was starting to look good. Even the pain wasn’t so overwhelming anymore.
IT BECAME OBVIOUS TO me that new life was springing up all around me, and I should stick around.
David had struggled his way through his teens, still reeling from a childhood that was confusing and hard to take. For a short time, like most teenagers, he had seemed a little lost and I had tried to reach out to him. I even had him come on tour and sing a song during the set. But David knew that hard rock was not really for him, and I wonder now if this just confused him even more. Did he have to be like me? He had grown up with a whole different repertoire of songs as the soundtrack to his life, songs that I never heard as a child. Crooners and show tunes, melodic and sweet, not like the music his father was making.
He broke away from us for a while. He stayed in contact but his life was separate to ours
. I knew he was making music and involved in musical theatre, but I had no idea what he was singing. When I started to get close to him again it was as if he had gone through a transformation, from a caterpillar to a butterfly. He was no longer an awkward teenager, he was a man. He had found something he loved. Just like me, he loved to sing, but his style was the complete opposite to mine. He had found his own voice and it was beautiful.
Around 1997, I went to New York to see David sing at a very famous nightclub. The Rainbow Room is sixty-five floors up, overlooking the Big Apple. Some of the greatest cabaret singers in the world have sung on its stage. From what I heard in that room, my son David was the toast of the New York cabaret scene. I sat mesmerised as he sang some songs that I had heard somewhere and others that I had never heard before. Most of the audience was in tears as David took them on an emotional journey. I was so proud of my son.
David went on to find the girl of his dreams, Lisa, and it wasn’t long until Leo came along. Leo is a strikingly handsome young man, if I do say so myself. Later they had twins, Betty and Billy. These guys are the most beautiful babies. Funny, cute and smart. David’s life is as far away from the northern suburbs of Adelaide as you could get. I know he still has his own stuff to deal with but he is a happy man with a beautiful family. David, like me, has broken the cycle that his family had been trapped in for generations, and life is good for him.
Mahalia married Ben Rodgers, a great guy and a hell of a musician. Ben studied music in Canberra. Bass is his main instrument, but I soon found out that Ben is capable of getting a tune out of anything with strings. I call him Jazz Boy because if anything was challenging to play, I set Jazz Boy onto it and he quickly has it conquered. Ben plays bass with Mahalia and guitar with me. They had a beautiful baby girl, Ruby, and then seven years later, Rosetta came along. She was named after Sister Rosetta Tharpe, an amazing guitar-playing, soul-singing black woman. Ruby and Rosie, as I call her, moved with their parents down to the country recently and live just a short walk from us. This means I get to spend a lot of time spoiling them.