Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

  ‘I’m counting out the number of syllables I need for this verse. I’m doing research. This is like an assignment at school and I want to get an A+.’

  I laughed quietly to myself. ‘That’s not how you write songs. You don’t have to count like that.’ She had obviously got the whole thing wrong.

  ‘You do it your way and leave me to do it my way.’ She walked away. I thought I’d let her do it her way, then I’d help her at the end. But she didn’t need my help. When she had finished she played it to me.

  ‘It’s really good. How did you do that?’ I asked her.

  ‘I have my own way of doing things. Music is like maths to me. It’s a language of its own. When I was little and living in a lot of different countries, the only common language was maths. So I saw maths as a language. Music is the same.’

  I had no idea what she was talking about but she was obviously right because the song was a cracker. I played it to Mushroom, who had their song specialist look at it. He rang us up and said, ‘Listen. I’m not sure it will work. You should write something else.’

  I was gobsmacked. ‘What don’t you get? It’s hooky and it has a great melody. This is a good love song.’

  The songsmith thought for a second and then replied, ‘Love songs don’t sell anymore.’

  I hung up. He had no idea what he was talking about. I told the record company to put it out as it was. They did and the song hit the top of the charts late in 1996. Apparently people did still like love songs. Who knew? Not the songsmith from Mushroom anyway. ‘Lover Lover’ was my first number one airplay hit as a solo artist. If I had to write a report for Jane it would have gone like this: ‘Jane Barnes has been very attentive in class and has done all her homework. For songwriting I have given her an A+.’

  But having a number one just made things harder for us. The song was everywhere, so I was away more often and I was suddenly back in the public eye. I didn’t cope well. I was falling apart. I was crumbling. Cold Chisel was looming on the horizon and I wasn’t ready for it.

  ENOUGH TIME HAD PASSED for us all to forget why Cold Chisel had broken up. Besides, when we looked back, it wasn’t that important anyway. We just needed some space to grow up a bit. I wasn’t sure how much I had grown up but I knew that I wanted to play with the band again. I missed the feeling of belonging to something bigger than just my own band. I needed to reconnect with my brothers. I think I needed them more than ever.

  I was happy that I had a big album with Hits, so I wasn’t walking back with my tail between my legs. I was rejoining my mates, with a full head of steam. My bad habits had become worse and my sanity was on the line. I needed to belong.

  We started writing and rehearsing for the making of an album and, if all went well, a big tour. I started singing with the band but most of what I could see was through the bottom of a bottle. I knew they were worried, but we ploughed on through. Some days I was bad, and others I was worse.

  MICHAEL HUTCHENCE CAME INTO Sydney looking tired and flustered. I remember seeing him on TV and thinking he needed to rest. I thought I knew how he was feeling. I needed a rest too, and Hutch’s life was a million times more hectic than mine.

  I spoke to him on the phone. ‘Yeah, yeah, let’s catch up. I’m busy and I know you’re busy. You’re here for a while, we can catch up soon,’ I said. I was living around the corner from where he was staying. I might have walked by his hotel a few times. But you never expect to run out of time, do you? There is always later.

  Everyone in Australia wanted a piece of Michael from the minute he stepped off the plane. I didn’t want to be one of those people. Jane and I could wait. We’d find a moment when the madness died down to connect and say, ‘So how are you holding up?’

  Hutch was rehearsing. He was flat out. I was busy trying to keep my head above water. Then I heard the news. No. It wasn’t true. Fucking press. They’d write anything for a headline. Of course Michael wasn’t dead. They were always writing shit about him. But the reports kept coming in. Phone calls from hysterical mutual friends. It was true. He was gone. It was 22 November 1997. He had been found hanging in his room at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. Everybody wanted a piece of him but he died alone. I felt a shiver run down my spine.

  This was a sad day, not just for his friends, or his millions of adoring fans. I could only think about his baby, Tiger Lily. She would not get to grow up with her dear, loving father. How could he have done this to her? How desperate had he been? I didn’t notice how bad things were when I talked to him. He seemed fine, but he wasn’t. What sort of friend was I?

  I don’t know what pushed him over the edge that day. I have stood on that same edge looking down but something always stopped me stepping off. I wish someone or something had stopped him. That moment of bad judgement was all it took. We can all be sad, and we can all be angry. We can all have an opinion, but we were not in his shoes that night. We were not lost in the dark like he was. If there was a way out I’m sure he would have taken it. But he just couldn’t see any other way. Oh Michael.

  Jane and I went to say goodbye at a funeral home in Bondi Junction. There was a body lying in the room but Michael wasn’t there. I would not remember him like that. Michael was alive and vibrant. He loved life and he loved people. Michael could walk into a room and light it up. Jane wrote a poem for him and I slipped it into his pocket. He would never get to read it.

  The funeral was a massive event. I’m not sure Michael would have wanted an event. I’m not sure Michael wanted any of this. The fame, the hurt, the loneliness. But the world wanted to say goodbye. There were fans scrambling to find a spot where they could pay their respects. Friends in dark sunglasses that couldn’t cover the tears. And family, lost and confused. ‘Into My Arms’ floated across the church and out the doors, fading as it was blown by the wind down the streets of Sydney.

  WHEN THE LAST WAVE OF SUMMER album was released in October 1998, it debuted at number one on the charts. But it didn’t happen easily. Chisel started rehearsing new songs and I would roll up still drunk from the night before and the night before that. I was barely capable of standing up, but for some reason I could still sing. I was an animal. I would snort and drink my way through rehearsals and then go straight out to clubs, without going home, then turn up at rehearsals wearing the same clothes the next day.

  Finally, we went into Festival Studios to make the record. Don had written a lot of great songs as usual, but for some reason they seemed to resonate even more than normal with me. It was as if Don had been reading my mail. Every song felt like it was telling the story of some part of my life falling apart. I would sing each one and feel the emotion overwhelm me as soon as I opened my mouth. So I drank more to calm the nerves. I never hid anything from the boys by this time. Cocaine and weed and bottles of vodka sat on the bench next to the mixing desk, and I would shovel them into myself throughout the day and night while we worked. Sometimes it seemed like the band wanted to test me, waiting to catch me falling apart. It would be three in the morning and we’d have been recording for twelve hours straight. My eyes would be almost crossing as I sat slumped in a chair in the corner of the control room, and Don would say, ‘Hey, why don’t we do Jimmy’s guitar take now?’

  The rest of the boys would look at me in disbelief, waiting for me to admit that I was too out of it. Don would look straight at me, ‘What do you think, Jim? You up for it?’ His eyes probing, testing my ability to cope.

  I’d be having trouble focusing my eyes on him at all but I didn’t let him know that. ‘Fuck, yeah. I’m ready. Are you guys all too tired to work? Pussies. I’m fine. Let’s do it.’ And I’d stagger into the booth to try to tune my guitar.

  ‘Hey Tony,’ I would call through the talkback microphone, ‘could you send Mossy in here to tune this fucking thing? I can play it but I can’t tune it.’ I was talking to Tony Cohen, the engineer. Tony disappeared a few years after this, and eventually turned up living in the country. Tony was a wild boy in his day too and his health
was damaged. He died recently. Another great member of the music community gone.

  I don’t know how much of my playing they used on the record. I can hear it in a few places. Maybe Don just liked sloppy guitar playing? I got it done quickly and walked back into the control room. They were all staring at me.

  ‘How the fuck did you do that?’ Tony asked. He’d seen everything I had consumed.

  ‘It’s too easy,’ I lied, trying to make it to a chair before I fell over. ‘Anything else you want me to do?’ And I sat down and poured out another gram of coke.

  Many nights the sessions would end in fights, but not directly because of me. Don and Ian seemed to be fighting a lot. Maybe Don needed to take out his frustrations with me on someone who cared. I felt nothing. It would have done him no good to talk to me.

  I remember singing ‘The Things I Love in You’. That night we were overdubbing vocals and bits and pieces at Trafalgar Studios. This song was like a raw nerve for me. It’s the story of a relationship breakdown. Whenever I sang it at rehearsals, it hurt. But the night I did the final vocal it nearly tore me apart. I was destroying my relationship with Jane, the girl I loved, and I knew it. She was the most important person in my life and I was hurting her. But I couldn’t stop myself.

  I sang the song with such fury and venom that when I finished it, my blood was boiling. I smashed up the studio booth. I took off my headphones and walked into the control room with tears in my eyes. ‘There’s your fucking vocal.’

  I stormed off into the night alone. Every time I hear that vocal I get a knot in my stomach. I was a different person when I sang it. I don’t know who I was or where I wanted to be, but I know that I was in pain and I wanted it to end.

  When the album was finished we sent it to New York to be mixed by an engineer called Kevin Shirley. Kevin would play a huge role in the lives of Cold Chisel and myself for many years to follow, but it didn’t start well. We all arrived in New York separately. I turned up to the studio once and spent the rest of the time in a drug-crazed haze, holed up in the Mercer Hotel in Soho. Why Kevin chose to work with us after that I’m not sure. Perhaps he could see something that I couldn’t. Maybe it was because we’d made a hit record. Despite all the pain we felt while making it. Despite the wild way we recorded it and despite the state I was in as I sang it. We had made a great record and it entered the Australian charts at number one. Cold Chisel was back with a vengeance.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  it’s a gift from God

  A NOTE ON SONGWRITING

  SONGWRITING COMES EASY TO some people but not all. Some folks spend months, even years, building the perfect set of lyrics. Others, like me, just don’t have the time. I can’t sit long enough to think about words in too much depth. Maybe I should, although the best songs I have written have come in a flurry: a title followed by the storyline, which steamrolls to a crashing conclusion. Probably exactly what is going to happen with this book you’re reading. But they have a point or a meaning or even an emotion that I need to get across. Something I need to say and once I’ve said it I let it go and walk away. It’s just the way I work.

  No two writers are alike. I like people who tell stories. No matter how they go about it. I have worked with a lot of songwriters along the way, some who spend forever trying to express exactly what they mean. Don Walker is one of these people. Don has presented a set of words to me and then within days taken the song back. As far as I can tell he has given up on it, when out of the blue I will see a trace of the song I once heard written into a new story and it is perfect. He has waited patiently for the right vehicle to come along and then it finds a home. A good example of this was ‘Four Walls’ off East. When he first wrote it the chorus ended with the words, ‘Four walls, washbasin, hotel bed’. The whole song was about being trapped in a sleazy hotel. I’d have left it at that but Don kept tinkering. A few months later he changed one word and that changed the whole song – ‘Four walls, washbasin, prison bed’. Apparently patience could be a virtue. Who knew? I love the way Don writes. The pictures he paints. They sound like my stories. Things that I might have done or seen. I feel lucky to be the one who has had the chance to tell Don’s stories, to sing his songs.

  I have seen all sorts of writers. Most are quiet, deep-thinking, gentle souls but there are a few exceptions. Many years ago, a songwriter came out from America to write with me at home in Bowral at the White House. He had written beautiful, soulful songs and had won Grammys and a load of awards. But when he arrived he was not your usual sensitive songwriting type. In fact, if I had to sum him up, I’d say he was a redneck. He arrived at my house and started telling me how he did things.

  ‘I know you have kids, Jimmy, but I don’t want them down here in the studio with me. I don’t like kids.’

  My blood started to boil.

  ‘And another thing, I don’t eat that Oriental food I saw up there in your kitchen. I want American food. You know, just kill a beast and cook it. Plain and simple.’

  By this point I wanted to take him out and put him on a spit and roast him, so I left the room and rang my record company. ‘Get this guy out of here before I kill him,’ I told them, but they begged me to give him time.

  ‘He probably has jetlag. He’ll settle down tomorrow. This guy is a great writer.’

  So I gave him time. That night he went into my wine cellar and drank six bottles of pink Dom Pérignon Champagne. Not that that is so bad, but this guy drank it without asking me and he mixed it with orange juice. He was uncool, he had no manners and he had bad taste. I think he knew I was angry because the next morning when I walked into the studio and looked at the empty bottles, he asked where he could find a store to restock my cellar.

  I thought maybe I had jumped to conclusions. One more thing I forgot to tell you is that when he arrived, I had to find him a jam jar to drink out of. He told me, ‘You know, Jimmy, I’m a simple country boy and where we come from we drink out of fruit jars.’

  Then he drank my vintage Champagne out of one. I wanted to smash a fruit jar over his head. But I showed him where the bottle shop was and I introduced him to the manager so he could get a good price. Everybody in town knew me and I wanted to help. He came home with two dozen bottles of pink Dom, which he proceeded to drink over the next few days.

  Then he told me how he wrote songs. ‘You see, Jimmy, I don’t write them. It’s a gift from God. He writes them and sends them to me. Of course, I keep the money.’

  Now, I thought that if this was true then I had a new reason for disliking God. It appeared it was true. He sat and wrote beautiful melodies that sounded like angels should be singing them.

  Every time I offered any help he would stop me and say, ‘Just wait on there, Jimmy. This song ain’t for you and if you help I would have to give you a share of it and I don’t want to do that. This is my song. It’s my money.’

  I bit my lip instead of punching his and walked away, but after a few days of this I had had enough. I rang the record company again and told them, ‘I’m going to Sydney for the day and he had better be gone by the time I get back or he will be dead.’

  And I slammed the phone down. When I got home he was gone and my house was at peace again.

  I don’t think there are many people out there like him but I have met a few strange ones. Most songwriters have their own way of doing things. They are superstitious. They have lucky pens or a lucky coffee shop. Jonathan Cain used junk food for inspiration. Like I said, each one is different. Some are just weird. Not normal like me and Don.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  let’s ride

  ON STAGE, 1998

  THE LAST WAVE OF SUMMER tour was going to be bigger than Ben Hur. Chisel was going all out. We wanted a massive PA, big enough to pin the audience to the back wall, and lights enough to light up the whole town. We wanted props and dancing girls, all the bells and whistles. And that’s what we got.

  We had a twenty-five-foot-high wave built, to be unveiled halfway thro
ugh the show, like a tsunami rolling over the stage. When it was revealed I felt like I was being turned inside out by the Bondi surf. The wave was like my life, about to come crashing down on me. It was ridiculous. It was built out of steel and weighed a ton. This prop wasn’t made to be transported every night but that’s what we did. It took three trucks to move the thing around. A friend of ours, Eric Robinson of the Jands production company, was running all the production, not because we hired him to do it, but because he was the best man in the world for the job. We had used Eric’s equipment forever. It was the best. Eric shared a long history and friendship with the band, and he wanted to be on the road, sharing this tour with us. Eric was close to most bands that toured Australia. The biggest bands in the world refused to tour the country without him. He was the godfather to nearly every person working in a road crew in this country. Most of them had jobs or got their start thanks to Eric.

  Eric had rushed me on and off that stage so many times. ‘Are you guys going on tonight or shall I see if the hall’s available tomorrow for you?’ he would say while trying to get us all on. Then he met us with that same acid humour as we came off. ‘Do you think you played enough songs? If you played any longer we would have to give out sleeping bags to the crowd.’

  Anyway, half the budget of the tour was spent on the bloody wave. The other half, I felt I was spending on drugs and booze. Well, I wasn’t really spending that much, but I did spend enough money to put a dent in what I would receive at the end of the tour.

  Like I said, we wanted dancing girls, but not ordinary dancing girls. Our dancing girls had to have a certain something, to take the audience somewhere they didn’t expect. Somewhere confronting and wild and scary. So we searched around for the right girls. The band hired a friend of ours, Gary Leeson, to find and produce our dancers. Gary hired a young guy called William Forsythe to do the choreography. Gary had worked with William on some big shows, including Mardi Gras – not the kind of shows that your average Cold Chisel audience would see, so it would be all new to them. Gary, William, Jane and myself and a few of the band started going to strip shows, to see if we could find the perfect dancers. They were hand-selected for maximum impact.