PLAZA HOTEL, KINGS CROSS, 1980
MY FIRST TRIP TO Scotland was an eye opener. I immediately knew that this was where I was from. Everywhere I looked I saw glimpses of myself in the people I met. On the street, in the bars, in fact everywhere. Some of the people reminded me of good things in my life but a lot reminded me of the bad. So I was happy to have gone there but I was also happy to leave. I wasn’t quite ready to confront all my demons yet. I had to get back to Australia. The album had been released and we were ready to start work again.
The band had run off in all directions looking for inspiration and a chance to put some distance between us. We had lived in each other’s pockets for a long time. I think that if we hadn’t gotten away from each other we might have broken up earlier than we did.
Just like my pilgrimage to Scotland, Don had made a pilgrimage to New York, in search of ideas. I’m sure he found some in the coffee shops and bars of downtown New York. I figured Don had spoken to every character that inhabited the Cross and he needed some new people to write about. New York was full of wild and wonderful people. I don’t know if that’s what inspired him, but his new songs were darker and more worldly.
So, after a short break, we all assembled back in Sydney with a new lease on life. Rested and ready to work. Well, ready to work anyway. I hadn’t really rested that much. I’d hardly slept while I was away unless I passed out cold. In the UK I drank a lot, smoked a lot and snorted a lot of drugs. Speed, coke, whatever I could lay my hands on. So it was good to get back to work and some sort of routine before I died.
EAST WAS A SMASH. A huge success. Much bigger than any of us had imagined. Of course Countdown was right behind us. They were in our corner now. The people who ran Countdown, including Molly, were smart, and they knew that we were good for their show. They didn’t need to be fighting with all the best rock bands in the country. They already had a feud going on with Midnight Oil, who refused to have anything to do with them. But we knew that as much as we disliked aspects of the show, it was better to use it for our own good than fight against it. Next time we played, we were allowed to have live vocals. ‘Cheap Wine’ became almost a regular on the show. They even played the film clip we made for the song. I was blasted across TV screens all over the country, half naked and wearing eyeliner. We were wearing them down, bit by bit. Record sales kept climbing and so did the numbers of people who came through the doors at our shows. We would use Countdown as much as they used us.
We shot the cover for East the day I arrived back from overseas. We were set up in an apartment in Elizabeth Bay somewhere, in the same block of apartments where we would eventually shoot the film clip for ‘Cheap Wine’. The idea was to base the cover on a famous artwork, The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David. Revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat was murdered in the bath and this painting was one of the most famous images of the French Revolution, one of the first times politics and art collided. East was an album where Don, in particular, had lyrically painted a picture of an underlying feeling of discontent with social justice in our country. This idea, this image, seemed to fit with that feeling. I turned up for the shoot with a headband that I had picked up in Tokyo. The headband had a bit of a story to go along with it. There had been protests in the streets of Tokyo while I was there. The protesters called it the Spring Offensive and a lot of the marchers wore headbands with slogans like ‘Death Before Dishonour’ and ‘Fight for Freedom’ written on them. I liked the idea of this so I grabbed one of their headbands, not knowing what I would do with it. For some reason I brought it along to the photoshoot. It seemed perfect for the shot, so I wrapped it around my head and lay in the bath. Everyone loved the image. I wore the headband for years.
It wasn’t until about ten years later that a Japanese fan stopped me after a show and told me, ‘Hey Jimmy. On the cover of your album East, you have the headband on upside down.’
What could I do? I laughed and pretended I knew all along.
THE GUYS IN THE band will all have different memories of things like this but I remember us meeting at the Plaza Hotel. Don wrote a song about this place:
I’ve been living
In the Plaza Hotel
It ain’t the Hilton
But I live well.
Ian had to sing this song because I refused to.
Anyway, at this meeting I said to the band and management, ‘I want a pay rise.’
‘Er, not really a good time to be asking for more money at the moment.’
‘Why the fuck not? We’ve just done a sold-out tour. Don’t you guys want more money to live on? Look where you’re living.’ I looked around the sleazy hotel room, trying to make eye contact with one of the band.’ Any one of them would do.
‘Na. I don’t need any more,’ Steve said. ‘What would I fucking spend it on anyway? I got everything I need, I can drink at the gigs and I’ve got money for chip butties and I got a place to stay. What fucking else do I want?’
‘Look at this fucking place. It’s a shithole,’ I pleaded.
‘Looks good to me,’ Steve quickly shot back, in his thick Liverpudlian accent that made everything sound like a joke. Maybe he was kidding. I wasn’t sure anymore.
‘Well, I need more,’ I stated. ‘Twenty-five fucking dollars a week is not enough for me to live on. We’re one of the biggest bands in the country and I think I should be able to earn enough to rent a house.’
Don was next to speak up. ‘You could stay in the hotel like me.’ Now Don was in a different position to the rest of us. He was making a lot of money from his publishing by this time. None of us begrudged him making the money because he worked really hard, writing some of the best songs we had ever heard for the band. I felt privileged to be singing them. But Don could afford to stay anywhere he wanted. He liked living in the Cross. I think the filth and the desperation of the place were inspiring to him somehow. But not to me. I’d seen enough filth and I’d lived through enough desperation.
‘This hotel’s a cesspool. It’s full of cockroaches. They ran over me in bed when I was sleeping when I stayed here!’
‘You could just pull your bed away from the wall a bit,’ Steve quipped.
‘I did. They fucking pulled it back.’ We all laughed; it was an old joke but a goody. But I was sort of serious. ‘The place is full of hookers and drug dealers.’
‘And you have a problem with that suddenly, do you?’
I wanted to punch Steve in the face. ‘No, I don’t actually, but the doors don’t lock properly and you have to share a bathroom with the hookers’ fucking filthy old drunken clients. It’s fucked.’ I was sick of talking about it. Couldn’t they see that? ‘And that’s why I won’t stay here.’
‘I think it’s okay.’ Ian had finally joined the argument.
I glared at him. ‘Glad you like it. You stay here. I don’t fucking want to. Anyway, I want more money.’
‘You’ll just waste it if we give it to you,’ Rod said, baiting me.
‘I’m allowed to waste my own fucking money. Where the fuck is it anyway? Give me some.’
‘Well. Now is not a good time.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s a business thing, Jim. You wouldn’t understand. It’s about cash flow or the lack of it, if you really must know.’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I do need to fucking know.’
‘The accountant tells me that this is not a good time to outlay money. We’ve invested all the money in a few projects that should pay you guys big dividends if you can just be a little bit patient.’ Rod’s voice always became calm and monotone when he tried to sell us on something. He was a hard boy and there was always an underlying touch of aggression to what he said, but he never tried to intimidate us. He had been on the road too long, like us, and he could just sound aggressive at times. I’m glad I never had to fight him. I reckon he could go, but I trusted Rod with my life. He was one of us. He was honest as the day is long and hardworking, but I still wasn’t sure we were investing wisely.
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘Listen, you ungrateful bastards don’t know the work that your accountant is doing behind the scenes.’ Rod’s voice was raised slightly. He knew our accountant was honest and doing his best too. So did we.
‘Is he even a real accountant yet?’ I was asking for trouble now. This subject always got Rod’s back up. Our accountant was doing an accounting course through the mail at one time. ‘He might be out of his depth.’ I kept digging.
‘I think he’s doing the right things with your money,’ Rod defended him.
‘Like what?’
‘Well, he’s invested in a really great gold scheme we heard about. Nobody has caught onto it yet. You guys are going to clean up.’
This particular scheme ended up being known as the ‘bottom of the harbour scheme’. It was illegal and that’s why no one was talking about it. We lost a fortune. It’s an expensive exercise to run a band at the best of times, but when what little money you have is involved in schemes like this, it doesn’t help.
‘Well, I hope it pays off soon.’
It never did, but at least none of us went to jail. Another thing we did on his advice was buy a block of apartments in Glebe. ‘You guys are going to make a killing with this. We got them for two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. We can strata title them and sell them off and you will make at least a cool million. Can’t go wrong.’
Famous last words there. We sold them four years later for less than we paid for them. It appears we were the only people to lose money from the property boom in Sydney.
‘Well, meeting over then,’ Rod said.
‘Wait a minute. I can’t live on twenty-five dollars a week.’
‘Leave it with me and I’ll look at the books and see what we can do. Good talking. Very productive, I thought.’ Rod smiled and walked to the door.
‘Fuck, Rod.’
He stopped. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he said and winked at me.
‘Thanks.’
‘We really should have meetings like this, every week. We get so much more done. Bye.’ Then he disappeared into the corridor and was gone, quicker than one of the hookers’ clients.
‘What the fuck happened? I never got an answer?’
‘Oh, don’t worry, he’ll get back to you,’ Don drawled. ‘Anybody want to get a coffee?’
‘Yeah, I’m in,’ Steve and Ian said at once.
‘Yeah, me too, I’m starving.’ Phil was up and heading for the door.
The band walked off, leaving me alone with my friends the cockroaches in their lovely hotel. This had been a typical Cold Chisel meeting.
I was propositioned by a young lady as I walked down the hall towards the stairs.
‘Sorry love. You’re asking the wrong bloke. I’m a musician. I’m broke. Maybe another time.’
AFTER SIX MONTHS JANE moved back to Sydney and we moved in with some friends while we found a place to live. My old friend Vince Lovegrove and his girlfriend of the time let Jane and I live at their house for a while, but it was too wild a time for all concerned. Vince was crazier than I was, so we needed to find our own house. Jane’s best friend Victoria was spending more and more time in Sydney and I introduced her to Mark Opitz. They immediately took to each other, so we all thought it would be a good idea to move in together. Jane found us a house in Brown Street in Paddington.
It was a huge terrace house, much nicer than anywhere I’d ever stayed before. I was used to living in hovels but Jane needed somewhere nice. I liked it. Jane made a home for us. The house was on three levels and Jane and I decided we were moving into the ground floor. So we took the ballroom on the ground floor as our bedroom. We didn’t have lot of furniture but it was a great room. And we had room to dance if we liked. No, I never really danced. Mark and Victoria moved in together onto the second floor. I was working with Mark and living with him. We all became the best of friends. Mark and I talked about music all day and night, driving the girls crazy. He had a great sense of melody and had a million ideas on how I could make music, with or without Cold Chisel. Mark and I talked about making solo records long before I actually made one.
COUNTDOWN AND TV WEEK ran the Australian Music and Video Awards. TV Week was a television guide that included one photo of whichever band they chose to fill the centre spot of their cheap magazine each week. Record companies fought hand to hand to get their bands into that magazine. It meant you got free advertising at newsstands and even on television. And of course, this gave the featured band an opportunity to sell more records. So both Countdown and TV Week knew that bands would do whatever they wanted to sell more records. But Cold Chisel knew that they could only push us so far. Then we would turn on them.
By the time East tore up to the top end of the charts and stayed there for six months, we were in the driver’s seat and they knew it. They wanted us to be on the Countdown/TV Week Music and Video Awards show in March 1981 because they knew we would win quite a few of their awards. But we insisted that we’d only play if we could do it completely live, the way real bands do. They were appalled. No one played live on television. Not on their show anyway. But we stood our ground. If they wanted us on, it would be on our terms. The shoe was on the other foot.
They weren’t happy, but what could they do? They had to agree. It was decided that we would go on towards the end of the show and play a song. Not the song they wanted either, but a song that we would choose. We informed them that we would play an album track, not a single, because we were a serious band. We all decided on ‘My Turn to Cry’, a song I had written. It wasn’t the strongest song on the album but we had plans to make it a real show stopper.
We set about buying cheap guitars that we could dress up to look like our real gear. We changed the stickers at the top of the neck, carefully replacing the ones that were there with Fender stickers so they would suspect nothing. Then we went into a secret studio session and rearranged the song to add a little spice to the night.
They never caught on. We had trouble keeping the smiles off our faces on the day when we went in to rehearse the album version of the song for the evening’s broadcast. It all went smoothly. They were happy. Well, as happy as they could be. We weren’t their puppets anymore.
The show started. We had informed them that we would not be picking up any awards we might win, as we wanted to have a big impact when we played live. It would be better television, we assured them. Then, after winning seven of the awards up for grabs, including Most Popular Group and Best Album, we hit the stage. The performance was explosive from the start. If you didn’t know us, like most people, you would have thought we were up to something. I walked on with an open bottle of vodka that I had already half drunk. Phil was dressed in a Nazi uniform. I could see the worried looks of the TV crew as we burst into our song. Then, at a prearranged spot, the band changed the song into something else. It went like clockwork. We went from a song about love lost to me screaming at the cameras like a maniac, telling them,
I never saw you at the Astra Hotel
I never saw you at the Largs Pier Hotel
I never saw you down on Fitzroy Street
And now you want to use my face to sell TV Week.
I then raised my mic stand above my head and smashed it onto the floor. Pieces shattered and flew everywhere. The band all did the same, smashing their respective instruments to pieces. The final words to the song were, ‘Eat this.’
Mossy’s guitar was the last thing to be seen, flying through the air, as the curtain was quickly brought down in an attempt to make us stop. The guitar banged to the floor, barely missing Molly as he walked out with his mouth open. He was speechless. This was a rare occasion. When it was all over there was an awkward silence, except for the noise of our guitars feeding back as the roadies turned off our equipment. It was only quiet for a second and then the crowd went crazy. We walked off stage and straight out the back door, giggling like schoolboys, and left. We didn’t go to the afterparty. I doubt we would have been welcomed. We had organised our own celebration, much bigger and a lot more fun than anything they had in mind. The television world was shocked and angry with us. The punters, the only ones who really mattered, loved us. The night was a great success.
News filtered back to our party. Angry messages were passed on to us. ‘You guys are finished. This is the end of your careers.’
We didn’t give a shit. We had made our statement. We were happy. Our careers weren’t over. In fact, over the last year, the band had become even bigger and thousands more diehard fans turned up every night to see us play music and fight for our rights. Every night I would arrive at our shows and there would be queues of punters lined up around the block and down the street. We were out of control. We played sixty-four shows in eighty-eight days on the Youth in Asia tour, finishing at the Capitol Theatre in Sydney, where we recorded Swingshift, a double live album. Then we went straight out again, on the Summer Offensive Tour. We were like stormtroopers, marching across Australia. We were on top of the world and there was only one way we could go. Down. But that wouldn’t happen for a long time. I drank more, partied harder and pushed the band to play faster and faster. My drug intake was increasing everyday as I woke up wondering what I had done the night before. I smashed up pubs and clubs all over the country, the walls and roofs crumbling down around us. The pace we were keeping was blistering. More towns, more girls, more booze, more drugs, and all in less time. Longer sets, faster songs and even longer drives after shows. Eventually, this pace would bring us to our knees.