Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

  ‘Give him a fucking break, would you? He’s my mate. Just fuck off out of here or I’ll do you in.’ I was normally too crazed to take on. Full of whisky and speed, so they would walk away. I don’t know what happened to James when I wasn’t there. Maybe he could fight too, I never asked him.

  The bathroom had been decorated by the girls and was wall-to-wall covered with great nude shots of beautiful girls, topped with a coat of varnish. It looked amazing and was a very popular spot in the house for lots of different reasons.

  We needed a place to do a photo shoot for the cover of the EP and someone, I’m not sure who, suggested this bathroom. As it was very small, only Ian and myself were in the photos, instead of the whole band. We got into doing the shot and I said, ‘I feel a bit weird doing a photo shoot in a toilet with Ian, with all the naked girls all over the walls.’

  Ian agreed. ‘I think it would be better with a real girl in here too.’

  Georgina was the only girl around at the time. Jan was in the lounge room putting on some music.

  ‘Georgina, will you come in this photo with Ian and me?’ I said.

  Now Georgina was a great girl, and not overly shy. She jumped at the chance. She laughed and said, ‘Sure. Let me in there with you, boys.’

  But the photographer had a vision. ‘Sorry, but you do know that you have to be naked or at least nearly naked, don’t you?’

  She laughed. ‘Of course. I knew that. Not a problem. I’ll just get my gear off. Watch out boys, here I come.’

  But still the camera demanded more. ‘Hey Georgie, can we hang your underwear on the guitar too?’

  ‘Whatever you need to do,’ she laughed.

  Then the photographer said, ‘You know, Georgie, it would look really good if you were on your knees biting the underwear.’

  Georgie, not wanting to be a spoilsport, said, ‘Lucky I was here, eh? This would have been a boring photo.’

  We scrawled the title of the EP on the mirror with Jan’s lipstick and boom!, we had a cover. The record went on to become a real collector’s item, and at that time was by far the closest thing you could buy if you wanted to hear what Cold Chisel really sounded like. Live and loud.

  CHAPTER TEN

  you clowns had your chance

  A NOTE ON SUPPORTS

  OVER THE YEARS WE played a lot of supports. Supports open up for the main band, by the way. We never really liked doing them but we picked up a lot of fans.

  Sometimes we would be treated well and other times we wouldn’t. A few bands were a bit cold towards us, others were out and out rude. I learned from this that no matter who is opening for you, you have to give them a good chance to get their message out. Nowadays I make sure that if a band opens for us, we show some respect for them and do what we can to make their job easier. If we’re not good enough to follow them, that’s our problem – but it hasn’t happened yet.

  There is a long list of bands that were all right to us. But there’s a shorter list of bands who didn’t give a shit. Little Feat sang in one of their songs, ‘The same dudes you misuse on your way up you might meet up on your way down’. I think about this when I see a young band starting out. If you give them a little leg up, it might just be the break they need to go further. Who knows, you might be supporting them one day.

  Little Feat were one of the bands who didn’t give a shit about who was opening for them. We all really loved Little Feat’s music, and I still do, so when we got the chance to open up for them we were very excited. Come the night of the show, we arrived at the Adelaide Festival Theatre ready to meet and work with them.

  They came nowhere near us. Never said a word. In fact, they made it harder for us to play than they needed to. They wouldn’t give us any room to set up. We weren’t allowed to move a thing.

  There used to be a roadie called Bear . . . one of three Bears I knew, by the way. Anyway, Bear, as his name suggests, was a big unit. He was our mate after this day, but before this incident, he hardly spoke to us. But he was always a pro, he did his job. He was working in the Australian crew on the Little Feat tour. The overseas road crew did not want us on their stage at all. And so they refused to give us any space suitable to set up and play.

  We were about to give up when Bear came to the rescue. He walked on stage and shouted, ‘Let the fucking young band set up, you fucking arseholes.’ His voice was not soft and he wasn’t asking anything, he was telling them. The American crew stood there looking at him, not knowing what they should do. ‘Well if you won’t move your fucking gear I will.’ He walked on stage and began unplugging things and pushing them out of the way.

  ‘You, hey, you can’t touch that,’ one of the Americans said.

  ‘Just fucking watch me, mate. You clowns had your chance.’

  The other crew said nothing. Bear moved their gear to the side of the stage. Suddenly we had plenty of room to set up.

  He turned to us. ‘Well, are you going to stand there all fucking day or are you going to set up? We have a fucking show to do.’

  This was only the start of what would be an eventful night. I heard that a couple of the Little Feat guys had problems with drugs. Couldn’t really understand what they were talking about. I never had any problems with drugs. Well, there were a couple of times that I couldn’t find any. Does that count?

  These guys apparently had a problem with heroin. Maybe that’s why the crew were so uptight. Maybe they were trying to cope with the problems that really hard drugs can create and that’s why they were arseholes.

  I heard that someone from the band told the local WEA representative to find them some heroin before they’d go on, or they wouldn’t play. Now this rep didn’t look like the type of guy who knew where to find anything, never mind heroin at short notice in Adelaide in 1976. But he must have had some dodgy mates. I know he had to run all over town to find it, but at quarter to nine, just after we finished our set, he came running into the backstage area. He was dressed in a slightly sweaty blue satin tour jacket with the logo of some West Coast American band on it. This was the traditional dress of the late ’70s record company rep. He was sweating profusely and looked extremely worried. He didn’t see us or have time to worry about us. He was ushered immediately into Little Feat’s dressing room to deliver the goods.

  Well, he must have managed to find it. I guess I underestimated him. Fifteen minutes later most of the band walked out of the room towards the stage. I say most of them walked. A couple of them looked a little the worse for wear and sort of staggered. The drummer was carried to the stage by two of their roadies. He had his arm over each guy’s shoulders and his feet were dragging behind him.

  ‘There is no fucking way this guy is going to be able to play tonight,’ I heard Bear whisper to one of the stage guys.

  ‘He will, he was like this last night as well.’ The stage guy smiled. They propped him up at the kit and left him swaying on his stool. Then he counted in the first song and proceeded to play better than any drummer I had ever seen. Whatever the record company guy scored seemed to agree with him.

  I NEARLY GOT INTO a fight with Johnny O’Keefe at the Largs Pier Hotel one night. It was on a cold Sunday night, a good night to stay home and watch the television. Which was what a lot of people decided to do, judging by the crowd anyway. We were his support band at the last minute and the gig was half full. Our mates didn’t know we were playing and anyway, although they loved Johnny, it had been a long time since he was at his best.

  He wasn’t happy at all. He was staggering around backstage, I think a bit out of it. It seemed to me like he was a man looking for trouble – I knew that look well – and he nearly found it. Maybe he was just pissed off that he was playing in a half-filled pub after all those years. But that was no excuse. He should have been happy to still be playing at all as far as I was concerned.

  I walked up and said, ‘Hey Johnny, I’m Jimmy Barnes. I sing for your support band tonight. I’m a big fan of your work.’

  He muttered som
ething that I didn’t hear properly but I knew it wasn’t nice, and suddenly I wanted to punch his lights out.

  ‘But this is The Wild One,’ I thought to myself. ‘This was the guy who made me, and the rest of the country, want to shout. Johnny O’Fucking Keefe.’

  No excuse for rudeness. He was a nasty piece of work and could have done with a good slapping.

  ‘Have a good show, you fucking arsehole,’ I mumbled under my breath as I walked away. I didn’t belt him. He didn’t look so tough to me. He did have a couple of huge security guys with him, although I can’t quite remember all the details. It was the Pier so I was mindless at the time, but not like him. I was having a good time, he wasn’t. I didn’t stick around to watch him sing. I’d seen enough.

  WE DID A SHOW at Victoria Park in Sydney with Sherbet, the biggest band in the land at the time. They had hit after hit and everybody loved them. I had watched them play in Adelaide in a pub, but they had become huge, filling stadiums and halls all over the country. By the time we played together at Victoria Park, I remember they had to be taken out of the gig in an armoured truck, the kind you use to pick up money from the bank. I couldn’t believe the reaction they were getting. Girls were passing out from screaming, it was like The Beatles or something. I watched them pile into the armoured van, wondering to myself how it would feel to be that big. Suddenly, in the middle of all the mayhem and madness, Daryl Braithwaite looked across at me and shouted, ‘Hey quick, you better jump in here mate, you’re coming with us.’

  ‘What?’ I said as I snapped back to reality.

  ‘Come on. Come with us. Quickly.’

  I jumped in, grinning from ear to ear. The van was being rocked from side to side by gangs of young girls. They would have torn Sherbet apart if they’d got their hands on them. The band were just laughing as if this was normal.

  No one was after me but it felt good to be in the thick of it. As we drove out of the gig I got a taste of what being a big star felt like. The girls were now throwing themselves down on the road, trying to get to the band.

  ‘This is fucking crazy, isn’t it?’ I shouted across the back of the van.

  ‘This shit happens all the time,’ one of the band said casually. It was great fun to see it all from their perspective. The Sherbet guys looked after me that night. That’s what musicians should do. Stick up for one another. When I talk to young bands coming up I tell them to remember, ‘The same people you abuse on your way up you might meet up on your way down.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I’ll be in the pub if you need me

  IN THE STUDIO, 1978

  OUR SECOND STUDIO ALBUM, Breakfast at Sweethearts, was not all we wanted it to be, not because the songs weren’t good, but because we didn’t enjoy making it and didn’t really achieve what we were after.

  The whole studio process was still foreign to us. We’d spent five years on the road, playing in front of audiences, changing songs as we went along, desperately trying to get some sort of reaction from the crowds. I’d be bouncing off the walls most nights. Normally by the end of a good night, the songs sounded nothing like the songs we had written or learned, somewhere way up in tempo and way beyond where the band was happy to play.

  But in the studio things didn’t work that way. We had already found this out with the first record. We were asked to play the songs over and over, slower and slower until all the life had been wrung out of them. We would all be left looking at each other, worried, while the producer promised it would sound better when we let him mix it. The big lesson we eventually learned was that if something doesn’t sound good when you put it down, no amount of mixing is going to make it any better. Of course, we all know that now, but back then we were at the mercy of the people we let take control of our records. You live and learn.

  We wanted to play new songs in our set and to do that we needed to get a bunch of them out there on a record. We needed the right studio and the right producer for our much-anticipated second record – when I say much anticipated, I mean much anticipated by us, the band – but we didn’t find them.

  We wanted to rock more and get more of a live sound, so we decided to record at Alberts studios, which was turning out some great-sounding rock records – AC/DC, The Angels and Stevie Wright were a few – so off to Alberts we went. Now, everyone knows that it takes more than just the right studio to make a record, but I’m not sure we did.

  No one told us that Alberts had more than one studio. Alberts Studio One was the room where all the great records were made. I had sat in Studio One with George Young and Harry Vanda, watching them record AC/DC. Young and Vanda had been the driving force behind The Easybeats, and were now entrenched at Alberts, writing and producing rock, pop and soul music. Everything they touched turned to gold. I knew how great that room felt.

  Cold Chisel headed into Alberts only to find we were in Studio Two, which was a bit of a turkey. I’m not sure if the management booked it, the record company or the producer, but whoever did made a big mistake. Studio Two felt like you were in the dentist. Pulling good sounds in that room was a lot like pulling teeth, slow and painful.

  WEA wanted us to have a producer, instead of a musician, make the record, and that would have been a good idea, had it been a good producer. They also wanted someone with a track record, someone who had produced hits, and Richard Batchens had been involved in a lot of Australian records. The one that caught our eye was Goodbye Tiger, an album by Richard Clapton, a fantastic songwriter we all respected. This record, we know now, resonated with us not because of the production but because of Richard Clapton’s great songs. It was a great record but not really a rock record. For some reason we thought using his producer might work for us. So when WEA suggested Richard Batchens we foolishly agreed.

  I don’t know how he got his good reputation, because he didn’t seem to know what he was doing. You generally have to have some respect for the producer to place your career in his or her hands. I wanted to place his head in his hands. I would have felt sorry for him, but we had so much riding on the record and I didn’t think he did the songs justice.

  I got to the point, when I was singing the final vocals for the record, that I would sing and then take off as quickly as I could, not even sticking around to see if he had got what was needed.

  When it came to mixing the record, I remember we would all be in the studio, trying to make it work.

  ‘Hey Richard. Excuse me.’ I would start the day off with a nice tone.

  ‘What?’ He was so polite.

  ‘Do you think we could turn up the vocals a bit please?’

  ‘I wish you’d just shut up. I’m busy here.’

  There was silence. Smoke was coming out of my ears as one of the band tried to calm me down.

  ‘Hey Don, can I talk to you? Outside,’ I snarled through my teeth. ‘Mate, I reckon this fucking guy hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. He’s fucking up our songs.’

  ‘I know. They’re my songs.’

  ‘What’ll we do?’

  ‘Let’s just give him a go and see if he pulls it together. He might be in the middle of something and we don’t know it.’

  ‘Yeah. All right.’

  A few minutes later Don said, ‘Hey Richard, sorry to interrupt, but can you turn that organ up a little for me? Just to see if it works.’

  ‘Not without turning the floor tom up.’

  ‘Er, what do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve bounced some of the tracks together to make the mixing a bit easier. We do it all the time in the producing business.’

  Don went pale. We all knew our baby, the new record, was fucked.

  ‘Hey Don, I’ll be in the pub if you need me. I can’t stay here any longer,’ I yelled across the room.

  Don sat, not answering me for a while, the voice of Richard the producer still ringing in his head. ‘Yeah, ah, no. I think I’d better stay here.’

  Richard leaned over the mixing console, talking to himself, and seemed to be out of
his depth. To make things worse he seemed angry at us for asking him to be there. In my opinion, the guy couldn’t mix a cake never mind a record. The album was unlistenable to me.

  Miraculously the record, released February 1979, was a hit and took the band one more step up the Australian music industry ladder. I think the album’s success was ultimately all down to a bunch of great songs that Don had written, and the hordes of punters who got drunk with us and listened to those songs every night.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  do yourself a favour

  COUNTDOWN, 1978–79

  DIGA DIGA DIGA DIGA Diga Diga Diga Diga Countdown!

  The intro for the TV show sounded like a bad drum fill. But Countdown would become the most powerful show in Australian music history. Every week on Sunday night the whole country stopped and sat in front of their TV sets and tuned them to the ABC at six o’clock, waiting for the drum fill that would announce the start of the entertainment. What new band would we see this week? Would Molly be able to speak? Why did we care so much? Often we would see the same old songs repeated from last week. Just like listening to Top 40 radio, the playlist was fairly small, which meant as a young band you didn’t have much chance of getting on the show. But if you did, it could break you wide open. Bands that had no profile or following would leap to the top of the charts and become overnight pop stars, with screaming fans who wanted a piece of them. All their dreams would come true.

  Cold Chisel didn’t want that sort of success. We had worked for years, touring the country relentlessly, trying to build a solid foundation for a career that was real and based on our ability to write and play good music. But even then I would sit and watch Countdown, amazed at some of the rubbish that made it onto the show and subsequently onto the charts. ‘S-S-S-Single Bed’ by Fox or ‘I Like It Both Ways’ by Supernaut – Molly seemed to be bending over forwards to promote this song. But the audience swallowed them up and couldn’t wait for their next taste. Eventually Cold Chisel was asked onto the show, but under Countdown’s rules. This was their show and while we were under their roof we would do it their way. It was like they were talking to kids.