Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

  courtesy of Cold Chisel

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was a serial runner

  ON THE WAY TO ARMIDALE, 1974

  WHOOSH. THE TRUCK LURCHED to the left as a semitrailer roared by. We all held our breath as the wind gripped us in its twisted hands, picking us up for a second before throwing us back onto the winding road. Bang. We all breathed out.

  It was the beginning of 1974 and I was finally leaving Adelaide, the place that had been my home since my family fled Scotland in 1961. We always seemed to be running from somewhere. My ancestors had run from famine in Ireland to find a new life in Scotland. But all they found was pain and more hunger. Eventually my folks had to start running again. This time they ended up in Australia. This was the last chance. The end of the line. We would have nowhere left to run. So this had to be it, the place where we would find peace. Where the family could stop being afraid and get on with living. But it didn’t work out.

  Now I was running away from my family. I had tried this many times as a young kid but all I ever managed to do was escape for a few hours. I was a serial runner. Running as far as the sea then stopping. Standing, wide-eyed and alone, looking out to the ocean, trying to breathe in the cool clean air before I made my way back to Elizabeth and the life that was slowly suffocating me. I came from a long line of runners. The whole family took turns escaping. My brother John left home at thirteen years of age because of what was happening to him in the place where he should have felt safe, our house. My mum left because she could no longer stand the sight of Dad or us or even herself in the mirror. Dad ran away because he knew he had let us all down and couldn’t face anything anymore. My big sisters ran from all of us and I ran from all of them. The only ones who couldn’t run away were my little brother and sister. If they ran at all it was to the place in their heads where kids go when they don’t want to see what is happening around them.

  This time I was running to New South Wales with the band. Cold Chisel. We were following our leader, Don Walker. Don was a bearded university student. He dressed like a country boy: straight-leg jeans and shirt always tucked in perfectly. He never looked ruffled in any way; not a hippy by any stretch of the imagination. He looked more like a mountain man, with thick hair and intelligent eyes that always seemed to be watching, taking in everything. He always thought long and hard before he spoke.

  Don was the piano player but he was much more than just that. He was the guy the rest of us looked to for advice and guidance. He was a little older than us and we all saw him as a sort of big brother.

  ‘Now Jim. Why don’t you give this record a listen? I know he’s not wearing silver platform boots like the other bands you listen to, which might put you off a bit, but he’s a pretty good songwriter. I’ve got a feeling you’ll like it,’ Don said to me one day. He was being a little sarcastic but that’s what his sense of humour was like. I didn’t mind it. I could give as much as I got. He then proceeded to play Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., Bruce Springsteen’s first album. He was right, I loved it. The words Bruce sang painted pictures, they told stories. Some I could relate to and some sounded like the scripts to old movies I’d seen on TV.

  ‘It’s great, Don. But I’ve seen photos of him and he always seems a little underdressed to me. What do you think?’

  Don smiled. ‘If you like that one, take this one too, and give it a listen later.’ He was holding Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan.

  ‘No, you keep it. One badly dressed hippy a day is my limit.’

  Later on, I would discover it. Highway 61 Revisted was a great album. Over the years I would listen to it many times. I remember the first time I heard ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’, I could almost feel the wind blowing through my hair. It was as if I was sitting on the back of an open carriage of a freight train leaving town. The words transported me away from the life I knew, and I loved it. I hoped that one day I would write songs like this. I’m still hoping, I haven’t given up yet.

  Don was leaving for a year to finish his Honours degree in quantum mechanics, which would be as useful to him as a bicycle to a fish. Rock’n’roll is not rocket science, you know. The only degree I ever got was the third degree from the police. But Don was smart and we all knew it. I was smart too, despite how I behaved. Don knew this and encouraged me to broaden my horizons a little.

  ‘There’s a lot of good music out there, Jim, that you probably haven’t heard, you know. I’ll see if I can find more for you if you like,’ Don said one day as he packed up his room at the university in Adelaide.

  ‘Yeah. That’ll be good.’

  Besides the music I’d grown up with at home, if I didn’t hear it on the radio in one of my mate’s cars as we drove around Elizabeth looking for fights, or on the jukebox while I was batting my eyes and flirting with the girls wearing tight skirts in the coffee shop, then there was a good chance I missed it. We came from different planets, Don and I. But as different as we were, I think that we were very similar in a lot of ways too. Both wanting something that was there for the taking. Something that was calling out to us. Both scrambling, looking for ways to grab onto it. A dream, a life, a future. Whatever you call it, we wanted it.

  He wanted his parents to be happy. So did I. He wanted to live up to the expectations they had for him. So did I. But we went about it in very different ways. He got his uni degree, hoping that would make them happy. I got a job in a factory and tried my best to be the loser they always thought I would be. I guess we were same, same but different.

  THE TRUCK WE WERE leaving town in was an old Tip Top baker’s truck. It wasn’t very big but it was perfect for us. We didn’t have a lot of money or gear at the time. So we piled everything we needed to make music into the truck and filled the rest of the space with a mattress so that we would have something to sit on. Threw what little luggage we had on top of the gear and we hit the road.

  Cold Chisel, even then, felt special to me and I was sure it did to the others too. There was something that happened from day one that excited all of us. A certain spark when we played music that we hadn’t felt before.

  These four guys would eventually become my family. The family I always needed. We would laugh and cry together and have huge fights too. When I fought at home with my real family, someone always got hurt, a deep hurt that took too long to heal. But the band would fight and then go on stage and it would all be forgotten. The music pulled us through everything. This became a bond that not even sharing the same blood could match. We had each other’s backs.

  Don came from a different place musically to the rest of us. He liked Charlie Mingus and Bob Dylan and a lot of American bands like The Doors, music I’d never really listened to that much. The rest of us liked British rock, blues and soul music.

  Steve Prestwich had come from a band that played progressive rock. Their repertoire was filled with Yes songs. He knew every song and rhythm that Bill Bruford, the Yes drummer, ever played. I was more of a no man myself – ‘No I can’t count that, no I can’t sing to that and no I don’t like your face or your fucking band.’

  Steve was an immigrant, just like me. His family moved from Liverpool in England and ended up in Elizabeth. But our families were very different. His dad was a musician and his mum was a beautiful woman who loved her family dearly. Steve, instead of joining gangs and fighting like I did, was a gentle, easy-going, almost hippy-ish sort of guy and a very serious musician. But he had a razor-sharp tongue and I wasn’t always sure if he was kidding, so I was a little wary of him. I would watch him for a while in case I had to belt him.

  Ian Moss, our guitar player, listened to a lot of different types of music but was obsessed with Ritchie Blackmore and Deep Purple. Ian was born and bred in the dead centre, an Alice Springs boy who moved to Adelaide to finish high school. He seemed to look down at his feet a lot. I could tell that he was gentle and sensitive, not like most of the guys I grew up with. But when he did look at you, his eyes seemed to look deep inside you,
searching, looking for something; something he hoped would make it easier to reach out and connect with.

  Les Kaczmarek, our original bass player, liked Golden Earring and other weird European bands. It didn’t matter, as long as they were hard rock. Les was a middle-class Polish boy. He had lived with his mum and dad until we left town in the back of our truck. He didn’t live with them because he needed to, not financially anyway. I got the feeling that he stayed at home because he loved his mum. He was the driving force behind getting this strange group of guys together. He had the best, shiniest and newest equipment that I had ever seen. I had never been in a band with a guy whose amplifiers were so big. Even at this time he looked like he was ready to be playing stadiums. But like the rest of us his playing was still barely out of the garage.

  I listened to anything my big brother John liked. Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck. In the end, all these different styles seemed to gel together somehow when we crashed our way naively through the songs we played in the rehearsal room. It sounded exciting.

  Although we all had our own taste in music, we all listened to Don. We thought he had a plan. A plan that included getting somewhere in the music business. A plan that included a future for all of us. I for one had never had a real future before. This was the reason that I was ready to travel across the country in a truck with a bunch of guys I didn’t really know.

  The back of the truck was as black as night and it wasn’t easy to see one another, or anything else for that matter. I’m sure that like me the other guys were chewing their lips, wondering if they were doing the right thing. Every now and then a wash of light splashed across our faces as we huddled in the darkness.

  Whoosh, another truck barrelled by. The little Tip Top truck swayed and shook and for a moment crossed the white line that split the highway in two. This line was our only protection from the horrors the impact of an oncoming semi could bring. We’d all be tossed sideways as our van grabbed the road again and straightened up one more time.

  Michael, who was driving, was our first roadie and came from Elizabeth too. He wasn’t in any sort of gang but I got the feeling he had been chased by a few, maybe even by me and my mates. He was a bit of a gentle soul. His hair was longish and stringy and his eyes always seemed to be slightly red. I thought he must suffer from allergies until I worked out he was a big pot smoker. He wasn’t in this game for fame. He just wanted to hear nice music and smoke dope, so he was happy to carry our gear and mix the sound. Michael’s passion was music from the southern states of America. The Allman Brothers was his favourite band and he was singing their songs to himself as he was driving.

  ‘Fuck, take it easy would you, Michael? You’ll get us killed,’ I screamed at him and then sat quietly hoping that we weren’t going to die before we even left the Adelaide Hills.

  ‘You guys just sit quietly and drink. You’re in good hands, boys,’ he yelled over the seat and put his foot flat to the floor. The engine screamed but the truck hardly gained any speed at all. It would be a long drive.

  We sat, saying very little. We didn’t really feel comfortable enough with each other to make idle chitchat. Not while we were waiting for death to occur at any moment, anyway. The boys had a slab of beer and were slowly starting to loosen up. I didn’t like beer. I was already quarter of the way through a bottle of whisky.

  ‘You want one of these, Jim?’ Ian asked, offering me a beer.

  ‘Don’t like beer. It’s for girls.’

  Ian just laughed to himself.

  After a few beers, the others were cracking bad jokes and singing songs in three-part harmony. I thought that these guys were geeks. Nice boys, not like the guys I hung around with, but I liked them anyway.

  So Michael was driving and we took turns sitting in the front with him. Whoever was in the back spent most of the time singing and being thrown around the truck. Who said rock’n’roll is not glamorous? But we were free and with every mile we put between ourselves and Adelaide, I could feel a weight lifting from my shoulders. I had come to hate the place and as long as it was fading into the distance in the rear-view mirror I was happy. In fact, at that time, if I never saw Adelaide again it would be too soon.

  This was really the start of our brotherhood. Before that, we were just individuals thrown together by chance, hoping to make some music for fun. Now we were held together by something different; now it was us against the world. These guys needed me and I needed them and it would stay that way until we broke up in 1983. Except for the odd time we fought and stormed off. When I say we stormed off, I mean I stormed off, because I seemed to be the only one who did it. The others just laughed and let me go, as if they knew I’d be back. Maybe they didn’t care if I didn’t come back. But I always did. And right in time for the next gig.

  The whisky and beer soon began to override the darkness and we all loosened up. We laughed and sang and told lies for the first six hours or so then it got quiet. You can only sing ‘Happy Together’ so many times before you start to get a bit snappy with each other.

  ‘That’s not the part you were singing before,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t fuckin’ tell me what part I was singing. I’m the fuckin’ guy who showed you the song, remember,’ Steve snapped in his Liverpudlian accent. He was leading the choir.

  ‘I’ve known this song for years. I love The Tortoises,’ I sniggered.

  ‘They’re fucking Turtles, you fucking twat,’ Steve shouted and we all laughed.

  ‘I know, I know. Tortoises, Turtles, all the same aren’t they?’

  We stopped at a roadhouse for coffee and something to eat. I fell out of the truck and staggered into the truckstop. The boys seemed to be a bit intimidated by the big truck drivers, some of them covered in tattoos and all of them wearing blue singlets.

  ‘Don’t worry, boys. I’ve dated tougher looking girls than these blokes,’ I joked. I did feel quite at home. This wasn’t scary at all.

  ‘Can I get a coffee and what have you got to eat?’ I said to the waitress as she walked past, trying to ignore us.

  She had to think for a second and then replied, ‘We have toasted sandwiches and, oh yeah, we’ve got toasted sandwiches and that’s about it, I’m afraid. It’s the middle of the bloody night, you know.’

  I ordered coffee and a toasted ham, cheese and tomato sandwich. Steve ordered chips and bread and butter. This was what we lived on for the next few years. Roadhouse food and bad coffee.

  Before long we were back in the truck, singing and drinking again. Loving life and ready for anything the road wanted to throw at us.

  BY THE TIME WE were getting close to our destination, none of us could feel our teeth, our legs, or our arses for that matter from sitting in the truck. We had driven about eight hundred miles, dodging kamikaze truck drivers and kangaroos with death wishes. We had run out of songs to sing and booze to drink and we were happy to just get anywhere in one piece. The back of the truck smelled like a brewery and was full of empty bottles and half-eaten toasted sandwiches. We were dishevelled but excited about our new lives.

  Around four in the morning the truck started to make a few strange noises.

  ‘Shit. What’s that noise?’ a voice from the darkness in the back whispered.

  ‘Don’t know, boys. But I got to tell you, it’s not good,’ Michael announced as the truck came to a grinding halt and refused to move another inch. Luckily we had made it to the outskirts of a small town and could walk to a phone box.

  ‘I reckon the baker’s ripped you off, Mick.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  We knew we were in the mountains somewhere to the west of Sydney but had no idea where exactly. None of us knew anything at all about cars or trucks, so we had to call the NRMA. A guy came and towed us to a petrol station and left us there for a mechanic to help us the next morning. We all needed sleep and started fighting to get a place where we could lie down. It was first in, best dressed. That meant some of us had to sleep on the concrete outside. It was like camping, only
on concrete, which I didn’t mind because at least you weren’t likely to have spiders crawling all over you.

  We were that tired and drunk that we managed to sleep until after sun up. I remember waking up and scratching my head, wondering who the bloke standing over me was. He was kicking my shoes.

  ‘Hey. Get up. You can’t sleep there, mate. This is a bloody petrol station, not a bloody campsite.’ He obviously wasn’t good in the morning.

  ‘It looked like a bloody campsite to me, all right. And don’t kick my shoes. Mate.’ I wasn’t good in the morning either. I didn’t like being woken up at the best of times, never mind by this guy.

  It appeared we had slept in the driveway of a garage in the outer suburbs of Sydney. We slowly worked out what was going on and where we were. Penrith was what the sign said, wherever that was. We managed to scrape together enough money to get the truck moving again and headed into Sydney.

  I’m not sure where, but we stayed in the city for the day. I think at one of Michael’s friend’s houses. We walked around Sydney looking like country mice, staring at the buildings and the people. Some of us were even dressed like country folk. No shoes, and jeans that were just a wee bit too short, with crochet around the bottom. Now that I think about it, that’s what Adelaide was, a big country town. A big country town full of serial killers.

  As the sun was sinking over the harbour, covering the city in rays of brilliant red light, I crossed the Sydney Harbour Bridge for the first time in my life. And we started our long slow trip up the coast. This would be the first of many times I would travel this highway. We lived on that road and we lost friends on that road. We sang about it in ‘Houndog’ and complained about it every time we had to drive it to a gig. By the time the band broke up I knew every turn and hill and every bump and pothole on the highway. I’d slept on that road, I’d walked it, driven it, hitchhiked it. Eventually I knew where to stop for the best coffee, what roadhouse made the best food and where you might find something a bit stronger to drink if you winked at the right waitress. I even knew where you might find a bed if you were a smooth talker. This road became part of my life.