Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

  Mark and Richard were my agents once I left Chisel, which meant they booked all my live gigs. I trusted and liked Mark. He was a creative thinker. Richard was a great agent. Both were passionate and ready to tackle the industry with me.

  JANE AND I WERE spending as little time as we could in Sydney. In the country, we would cook and spend time with Mahalia, doing things that normal people did, even though I was far from normal. I tried to keep off drugs and stay sober as much as I could. I did smoke a little pot, something I never did much on the road. When I was touring, I didn’t want anything to slow me down. I preferred uppers. But I found that the pot calmed me down at home somewhat.

  Life was blissful. We would walk in the country with our baby, up through the forest at the end of the road, through the volcano crater and up to the lookout. I had found out that Mount Gibraltar was in fact an extinct volcano. I liked the idea of there being something else that might once have exploded, just at the end of the street. But it was extinct, whereas I just lay dormant. Calm on the surface but ready to blow everything to pieces when I could take no more. I hoped that the longer I spent there, the less chance there was of me exploding, just like the volcano.

  I WAS WRITING AND finishing up songs for the album I had to make. I had never written more than two songs an album with Chisel, so the idea of writing a whole album on my own scared me to death. I had ‘No Second Prize’ and a couple of others, and I had a few ideas that I thought were not bad, but I still worried whether they were good enough.

  A couple of songs I had presented to Cold Chisel at one time or another. ‘Promise Me You’ll Call’ and ‘Daylight’ had been done as demos by Chisel, but not that well. Cold Chisel didn’t like big distorted guitars. I liked them doubled and tripled, layered until they roared out of the speakers, but I’d found that whenever I wrote a song, I couldn’t get the band to give it the treatment that I was hearing. Cold Chisel had one guitar, and a lot of the time the band would only want to put one guitar on the record. If I really fought, I might get two, but never as distorted as I wanted. I couldn’t get my ideas across, and the band nearly always knocked them back. In the end, this was part of the reason I left.

  It was always hard to write for Chisel. Who could write for that band better than Don? It was intimidating to say the least. But even though Chisel rejected them, I thought, with a bit of reworking, my songs could be good. ‘Promise Me You’ll Call’ was a song I wrote for Mahalia. A little message in a time capsule. If she grew up and was anything like me, she would leave home and I would never see her. That’s what I did when I left home. I was never going back, and the less contact I had with my past, the better I was. I had to force myself to call home. And I thought she might hear this song and call me.

  ‘Daylight’ came about after an all-night recording session in Paradise with Chisel. I had gone home to the apartment Jane and I were renting. This place had no block-out curtains. As I lay awake, trying desperately to sleep, the sun was burning my eyes. I only write songs about things that happen to me. ‘Daylight’ was all I was thinking about.

  Another night I had left the Paradise studio rattling from copious amounts of speed, coke and vodka, every cell in my body vibrating, and I wanted to write a song about it. All I could come up with was something that moved as fast as my heart was pounding. I would either write a rock song or have a heart attack, one of the two. A song jumped out of me the same way my heart was jumping out of my chest. ‘Paradise’ was that song.

  Jane tried to inspire and educate me. She would find books that she thought I should read, a list of what she thought was required reading – a selection of classics that I would have read at school if I had stayed or paid attention. There was a whole world of literature out there that I had missed, lost in the trauma and fear I felt as a child and then drowned in booze and speed as I ran away from my past. By the time I left school I couldn’t sit still long enough to read a book.

  Jane looked for titles that might get my attention. She tried to give me Shakespeare but I couldn’t make head or tail of it. Eventually she found me Tales from Shakespeare, a book for children by Charles and Mary Lamb, and I started to get it. She gave me Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson in an attempt to appeal to the Scotsman in me. I loved it, but the first book that really grabbed my attention was Lord of the Flies by William Golding. It was about society breaking down and violence taking over. I could relate to that easily enough. I’d lived it, so I devoured it, read it in a couple of days. I remember as soon as I finished it I went into my studio and wrote ‘Boys Cry Out for War’. I was angry and wanted a guitar riff that showed how angry I was. The song was a simple grinding assault on the senses. I could hear how the band would play it live, intense and loud like a battering ram. This was the sort of music I wanted to make.

  I had spent years fighting with Cold Chisel, pushing them to play louder. Now I had a chance to play as fast and as loud as I wanted. That’s what I would do.

  When I pulled all these songs together I felt I was almost ready to record. Now I needed a band.

  LEAVING THE SECURITY OF Cold Chisel was tough but putting a band together was even tougher. Chisel was still right there, The Last Stand still ringing in my ears. We had only finished the tour two months before. But I wanted to hit the ground running. This was what I did best.

  I needed players I felt safe with. Players who, like the guys in Cold Chisel, had been around. Players I’d worked with before. Ray Arnott, the drummer, was the first to join. Ray and I had become good friends since he’d worked with Chisel. As I mentioned before, he had played with The Dingoes, one of the few Australian bands that Cold Chisel looked up to, and also Mighty Kong, a band that formed after the breakdown of Daddy Cool, one of the greatest bands Australia has ever produced. So Ray had the credentials.

  He had also recently been through the same wringer that I was caught in. He had given up drugs and drinking. In the old days, Ray could put it away with the best of them, so if he could give up, maybe there was a chance for me. But I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I just needed some steadying influences in my band. Ray was the first.

  The second player I approached was probably the most influential musician in my life besides Don Walker. Bruce Howe was the bass player from Fraternity. He had a style like no one else I’ve worked with. As far as I could tell, Bruce only played upstrokes on his bass, so his sound was very aggressive. His playing was very pushy but still in the pocket.

  As I said earlier, when I joined Fraternity for six months in 1975 I learned more about singing from Bruce than I have from anyone else. He was tough and demanding but he encouraged me to drag more out of myself. And now, just like in the days when I was in Fraternity, he would lean on me when I sang, listening to every note and every inflection in my voice and hitting the back of my head with his bass if he thought I wasn’t giving enough. Bruce always wanted me to sing harder and louder. He wanted my pitch to be perfect and he wanted me to use as little vibrato as possible. Vibrato was for pussies.

  I can’t thank Bruce enough for working with me after I left Chisel. He was the one musician I needed around me at that crucial time in my life. In years to come, my kids called him ‘Big Old Bruce’. He was mean and tough and a bit scary but as soft as a marshmallow once you gained his trust.

  I spoke about Stars earlier, the band that Michael Gudinski signed rather than Chisel way back. Not long after Stars signed to Mushroom, a bloke called Andy Durant joined their band. Andy wrote a new batch of songs for them, songs about love and Australian history instead of guns and horses. They lost the hats and stars, and seemed to grow up as a band. The Stars guitar player was a guy called Mal Eastick. Mal had always been a reasonable guitar player but when Andy joined the band he seemed to find his stride. His playing got better every time I saw him.

  Tragically, Andy passed away in 1980. Mal and his band put on The Andy Durant Memorial Concert in Melbourne and they asked a bunch of musicians to join them in celebrating Andy’s life. I was h
onoured to be asked to join them for a few songs. The concert was moving and heartfelt but the thing I noticed most was Mal Eastick. The loss of his dear friend made him dig very deep inside himself, and instead of finding just a hole full of grief, he found himself as a guitar player. Andy would have been so proud of him. Anyway, I left St Kilda that night amazed at Mal’s guitar playing. He was the next person I asked to join my band.

  Like Bruce and Ray, Mal was a steadying influence on me. He was a passionate guitar player and he cared about music. I had surrounded myself with three very similar characters. All three were different musically but all three were like big brothers to me. I thought at this point about getting a piano player but I knew the comparisons to Chisel would come too thick and fast. But I did need another instrument to fill the sound I heard for these songs; they were loud and guitar driven so I knew I needed another guitar player.

  I had worked with the best guitarist in the world in Ian, so I didn’t just want a gunslinger, hotshot guitar player. I wanted someone who could bring some depth to the band. I had a feeling that I would need a lot of volume to cover up what was missing in my songs.

  I thought long and hard about it and then I had an idea. The Dingoes’ guitar player, Chris Stockley, played rock, old-style rock, like Little Richard and Gene Vincent. I had watched him night after night as a young fellow. I had spoken with him after shows. He was a wild guy but a very serious musician. I wasn’t sure he was hard rock enough for what I was doing but I thought he could bring a lot to the table as far as songs and arrangements were concerned. He agreed to play and my band was formed.

  BEFORE RECORDING, I WANTED to get out and play some music live, but I didn’t want to play in the big cities. I was afraid of living in the shadow of Chisel. So I bought the guitar players the biggest amps I could find and we headed to North Queensland and worked our way down the coast. We didn’t spend a lot of time rehearsing. Most of our rehearsals were done during the first few shows in front of an audience. This was a tough way to pull things together. Every night we laid our heads on the chopping block and only the experience of the players, the volume of the band and the sheer brutality of the treatment of the songs got us through. We played every song at breakneck speed. There were no ballads. We were relentless and we wouldn’t stop to let people think.

  I went from filling stadiums with Cold Chisel to playing to half-empty pubs and clubs as a solo performer. It was hard but at least I was playing. Not everyone knew who I was and not everyone cared. Some people hated me because Cold Chisel had ended and nothing any of us did would ever be as good. A few people would come along to see how bad I was. They’d stay for a few songs and then I’d watch them leave halfway through our show, shaking their heads and unblocking their ears. They didn’t know if they had enjoyed us or if they had been violated. But, by the end of a show, the people who stayed definitely knew they had seen a rock’n’roll band. We sweated and bled for every song. We played mostly my songs but we needed a few covers to fill out the set. I didn’t have enough material. We played ‘Mercury Blues’ and ‘Resurrection Shuffle’, a song that has made it through to this day, still getting a spot most nights in my set, and ‘Piece of My Heart’, the Janis Joplin song that made it onto the first album.

  The songs, like the band, got more polished as we got more and more shows under our belts. But the better the band got, the more I wanted from them. I wanted them to be harder still. I wanted the show to be wilder. I would stand right at the front of the stage, staring into the eyes of doubting punters, all the while pushing the band to play faster and louder. A lot of people left because of that, thinking I was going to attack them. But I didn’t care. If they didn’t like it, they could fuck off. I was crazed. I was consuming more speed than ever and a few of the band started joining me in an attempt to keep up. We drank too much, played too hard, and slept too little to stand a chance of getting ready to record. I would have to worry about the album when I came to it. We would have work to do in the studio.

  By the time we got back to Sydney we were red-eyed but match fit and we wanted to get into the studio as fast as possible. But I still had the same nagging doubts. How would people take my music? This definitely wasn’t Chisel. I lost a lot of sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  rock is dead

  ON MY OWN, 1984

  LONG BEFORE I LEFT Cold Chisel, I had talked to Mark Opitz about doing a solo record, so he was the first and only person I approached to make the album. Mark had a track record as long as your arm. He had worked with The Angels on Face to Face, an amazing record. He had produced Cold Chisel, INXS, The Divinyls and many others.

  We went into a new Sydney studio called Rhinoceros and set about finding a sound. We didn’t stray far from what we did in the shows. The sound was hard and loud and not very polished.

  I was back in the recording studio less than four months after finishing with Cold Chisel. All I could think about was being compared to my old band. I didn’t have Don’s songs. I didn’t have Mossy. I would be laughed at. I couldn’t do this on my own. So I did what I always did in this sort of situation, I drank and I got smashed. If I didn’t care, it wouldn’t matter if no one liked it.

  Every morning I would wake up and walk to the studio panicking, wondering how long until it was all over. But Mark and the band would be there waiting, excited about the record. This gave me a little confidence but it would disappear as each day went on. By the end of every night I would be mindless and broken, staggering home to Jane, smelling of booze and shaking from too much speed and coke. I would toss and turn and hardly sleep, then get up and go straight back into the studio to beat my head against the wall.

  WE DID HAVE A few laughs at Rhinoceros. Michael Gudinski came up at the end of one week for his first listen to my new material. So we spent a few hours recording one or two cheesy country songs. When he arrived, we all sat straight-faced as I explained my plan. ‘Michael, you know that a lot of people are waiting on this new album. I’m going to be compared to Cold Chisel. You know that, right?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know, but we’ll worry about that later, just play the songs.’ He was chomping at the bit.

  ‘But Michael,’ I went on, ‘I don’t want to be compared to anyone.’

  He started to look concerned.

  ‘I want to do something completely different. So this new material is taking me off in a new direction. Are you ready?’

  I could guess what he was thinking: ‘Just play the fucking things, would you? I’m sure it’s good.’

  I pressed play. A cover of Johnny Cash’s ‘I Walk the Line’ filled the studio. Michael sat motionless, never lifting his head, which rested in the sweaty palms of his hands.

  I played ‘Jackson’ next. I could see beads of sweat forming on his brow. I stopped the tape. ‘Listen Michael, before you hear any more or say a word, I’ve spent a lot of time in America and country music is the new big thing. Rock is dead. This is what I want to do now, okay?’

  Michael looked around the room, coughed and cleared his throat to speak. But I cut him off. ‘You fucking idiot! Of course I’m not playing country music. It’s a joke!’

  The band laughed. Mark laughed. Michael laughed, but he wasn’t happy. He had almost had a heart attack. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very fucking funny. I knew you were kidding. I was just playing along with you.’

  I think if I had decided to make a country record, Michael would have backed me all the way. That’s why I love him. Luckily for both of us, I wasn’t making a country record. I played Michael some of the real songs and I could see excitement in his eyes. I wasn’t as scared anymore.

  We finished Bodyswerve. It came out in September 1984 and entered the charts at number one. I was back on the merry-go-round. It would be the first of seven records in a row that entered at the number one spot. More than Chisel ever had. We were up and running, but Cold Chisel was always there in the background, the yardstick, the measure I was trying to live up to. Driving me harder,
making me fight.

  ELIZA-JANE WAS THE NEXT baby to come along. She didn’t arrive without a few dramas though. One day early in the pregnancy, Jane started to bleed. I rushed her to the hospital to get things checked out, and we were told that she was miscarrying. We were shattered. The doctor told us that it would be best if Jane stayed in hospital for a curette. The baby was dead. We sat crying, waiting for a room to become available for the procedure.

  While we waited a young doctor came in to console Jane. He said out of the blue, ‘Why don’t we have a quick look on the ultrasound while we’re waiting?’

  We followed him into a room and he turned on the machine. It was all very sad until he spoke. ‘I suggest you look at this.’ There was a baby jumping around on the screen. ‘Who told you the baby was dead? There’s nothing wrong with this baby.’

  If he had not asked us to have that ultrasound, we would have lost Eliza-Jane. I can’t begin to think what life would have been like without her. I wanted to belt the other doctor but we were so happy that we let him off the hook.

  Eliza-Jane arrived in December 1984. She was early, so early in fact that we weren’t expecting her for another six weeks. This, as you’ll remember, was the same as Mahalia. She arrived six weeks early too. Our girls have always been a bit impatient it seems, so we should have guessed it might happen. I had meant to be in Sydney for the birth but with the baby’s sudden change of plans, I was caught out. I was waiting to go on stage at the Playroom on the Gold Coast when I got the news that Jane was in hospital.

  There was nothing I could do. We had spent a small fortune setting up to film two shows. We would film one show, then have a day off and then film the second show. But Eliza-Jane was coming and there was no stopping her. I had to resign myself to the fact that I would miss her birth. I hated it. I wanted to cancel but of course I couldn’t. The shows were all set up, ready to go, not just the band’s gear but the cameras and sound recording equipment. We had about twenty people working flat out on getting it all in place, so I was trapped.