AND BACK, MOSTLY 1988
‘I’M HOMICIDAL, NOT SUICIDAL,’ I used to joke whenever I would hear about some poor soul ending it all. ‘Why would I want to hurt myself? What have I done wrong? Nothing.’
I’ve never felt so bad about anything that I’d want to end it all. Life is good. Well. I do remember sitting by the sea, thinking about swimming out as far as I could swim. I hadn’t really thought about getting back. But that doesn’t count. I was a kid, for fuck sake. Kids do stupid things. Anyway, I never did it. I was too scared. So that doesn’t count.
I must admit that when I climbed out the window at night when I was little, I knew there was a chance that someone could hurt me, even kill me, but I didn’t care. What did I have to lose then? Nothing. No one would have cared if I had died anyway. No, I was all right.
I once sat on cliffs at the South Head of Sydney Harbour, drinking whisky. It was late at night and I was alone. But my friends were at a party across the road. They knew where I was. I was sure I’d mentioned it to them. ‘I’m just going across the road to look at the sea. I’ll be back.’ I was sure I said that.
It was dark and I couldn’t see anything but I could feel the waves crashing onto the rocks below me. They came in sets. I liked sitting there alone, counting them. Then there would be nothing, just for a second. And then crash. Another set would begin. I liked that sound. Crash. Another. Crash. And then another. It was calming. The noise of the waves shut out the sound of my own voice in my head talking shit to me. Why was it always the same story? Why did I always feel like a fake? Like I was running out of time. Like at any minute I would be found out. I heard that voice in my head even when I was a kid. I remember it on the beach.
Another wave brought me back to the moment. I looked down into the darkness. It looked so black and empty. But I liked it. I’d better get back to the party before I did something bad.
But that was just the booze. I wasn’t suicidal. Far from it. Everyone had drunk themselves into oblivion at some time or other. I knew I tended to do it a lot, but hey, I liked it. What was it that I liked about it? Maybe it was because I didn’t feel. Maybe it was because I didn’t care what happened. I used to drink for fun. Didn’t I? I always drank more than my mates. More than anyone really. But I was just showing off. Surely. Or was I? I never wanted to stop. I never wanted to sober up. Even as a kid. Shit. I’d never thought of this before. Now I was getting worried. I’d always thought it was just the booze talking when I sat and looked in the mirror. No one else was around so no one would think that I was crazy. But I never got any answers.
‘What’s it going to take, eh?’ I would look into my own eyes, trying to see something. ‘What will it take to kill you?’
There were never any answers. My eyes were empty. Like the rest of me.
I needed a drink. I hated feeling like this. Maybe that’s why I smashed so many mirrors over the years. In dressing rooms, in cars, in hotel rooms. Shit, I remember diving off my go-cart onto one in Scotland when I was four. There was a whole yard to jump off in and I jumped just where there was a mirror lying on the ground.
I didn’t want to see me. But I was always there, looking straight back at me.
‘I’m suicidal, not homicidal. Fuck, what am I going to do?’
TOURING HAD GONE FROM big to bigger each year. Every tour I took out more lighting, more sound gear. My band had more amplifiers on stage and I hired more roadies to help us run the beast. I hired backing singers to make the whole thing sound sweeter and then another guitar player because it was getting too nice. It was like a wildfire, swallowing everything that came in its path, including any money I earned. But it didn’t matter, I was on a one-way ride to the top. No stopping and no passing go. I couldn’t put a foot wrong. Yet I was losing the battle with my past. As fast as I ran, it wasn’t fast enough. I could always see my past in my peripheral vision. I could feel it snapping at my heels, waiting for me to fall.
But I didn’t fall. Fuelled by musical success and the love of a beautiful family, not to mention copious amounts of uppers, I didn’t show any signs of slowing down. Even the ghost of Cold Chisel couldn’t catch me. I had number one album after number one album. I had already sold more records than the band ever did. I was winning awards and I could do pretty well what I liked. I thought I had beaten the curse of Chisel. Every now and then, though, someone would write something in the paper. One sentence in a long article, mentioning that maybe, just maybe, my songs weren’t as good as Chisel’s, and I would start to panic and throw more money into the fire, trying to compensate. It seemed that the harder I worked to get out of the shadow of Cold Chisel, the longer that shadow grew. I was playing to packed stadiums every night, screaming ‘Khe Sanh’ at the top of my lungs, and every night someone would go home and say, ‘Man, Cold Chisel had some good songs. I must buy them and listen to them again.’
Cold Chisel grew at the same time as I did. The band’s music was played at every backyard barbecue in Australia at some time. Our songs became part of peoples’ lives. We were always connected to our audience, partly because I was out there playing those songs every night, but there were other reasons too. The most important reason was our songs. I guess they touched people even when we couldn’t. No other band in Australia has seen that sort of growth after they were gone. Cold Chisel doubled their sales post-Last Stand. The band never really went away. They were just waiting in the wings. They were always going to be a part of my life, but for a long time I could not come to terms with that simple fact.
‘Let’s bring in some of those great players from America to play live with me,’ I regularly suggested to my management.
‘You don’t need them, mate. Your band is as good as any in the world,’ Mark Pope or Michael Gudinski would tell me, wondering what was going through my head.
‘But I want it to be even better. I need the players that were on the record. I want them. The crowd needs more.’
I always seemed to be able to convince anyone that I was right. ‘If you think you need it, then that’s what we’ll do.’
I remember dragging guitar players down from the States to tour with me. They were in over their depth. These guys, as good as they were, couldn’t play as hard or as fast as I had pushed my own band into playing. Charlie Sexton, a young guy I first met with Cold Chisel in Texas, came down for a while. Charlie was and still is one of the great guitar players, but he is a blues player, slow in hand and slow on his feet. I brought him out and immediately wanted what I had been getting from my last guitar player, before I burnt him out. Charlie wasn’t up for that sort of pressure. Luckily he knew what he wanted to play and moved on to do his own thing. Now he plays with Bob Dylan and not some hopped-up maniac who is trying to beat the land speed record in music, but we are still friends.
Some guitar players did well, some fell by the wayside. Others were tossed. Dave Amato played on ‘Working Class Man’. He was a great studio guitar player and he had played with some supposedly hard rock’n’roll bands – like Ted Nugent. My grandmother is harder than Ted Nugent. Poor Dave didn’t realise what he was in for. But he came up with the goods. He played nice guitar night after night in front of thousands of people. He would get dressed for the stage as if he was going out with REO Speedwagon, another band that he played with for a long time. He would put on makeup and wear feather earrings and shiny clothes that he had spent a lot of money on, only to have me jump all over him, throwing him to the front of the stage while I turned his amps up to deafening volume. But the Australian audiences liked him. His heart was in it.
Dave joined the band just after the Freight Train Heart album. He was one of two guitar players I had on stage with me. The other guitar player in the band at the time was a young guy from Perth. He made it hard for Dave to sound good. This guy was phenomenal.
When I’d come home from recording that album I had needed to find a great guitar player to help me finish it. The rest of the album was full of blisteringly good guitar playing by Neal Schon, so I knew I needed someone exceptional to finish the parts that were left. All the guitar players I knew were out of town. Even the ones I knew, though, probably weren’t going to sound great next to Neal. Neal had been playing unbelievable guitar since he was about fourteen years old, and had played with John Lee Hooker and Santana.
I was in the studio wondering who to get, when Jane said, ‘There must be some good guitar players playing around Sydney. It’s Saturday night. I’ll go out and see a few bands and see what I can find.’
Now Jane, I knew, was a remarkable girl, capable of anything she put her mind to. But finding a world class guitar player in one night was a big ask for anyone. Out she went, full of optimism. She came back to the studio a few hours later with a big smile on her face.
‘I found one.’
I was sceptical. ‘Really, eh? Just like that?’
But Jane was confident. ‘I went to Sydney Cove Tavern and saw a band called Johnny Diesel and the Injectors. This guy is fantastic. Good looking too.’
I was going to have to check him out. I might see if he could play guitar too.
Mark Lizotte (aka Diesel) was unbelievable and this was who was in my band with Dave Amato. Dave and Mark played off one another for the whole tour. But even with Dave’s years of experience recording and touring in America, Mark stole the show every night. I doubt whether anybody could have played with more fire and taste than Mark at that time. Mark was, and still is, a force to be reckoned with.
WHEN MARK LIZOTTE AGREED to record and tour with my band he would not leave his mates behind, so I hired his band as the opening act and Mark played with both bands. From the day we started working together, I liked him. He was a real musician. He loved what he did and he worked hard. He was always learning and always trying out new things.
Every girl I knew pointed out how handsome he was and I knew how good a guy he was. Jane’s young sister was single. Jeppy was a strikingly beautiful young woman and, like Jane, she was beautiful inside and out. Mark was the same. Jane and I started thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be good if these two got together?’
At first it was just a bit of a joke, then we noticed that they liked each other. ‘Imagine what beautiful babies they would make,’ I said, half-joking. I started matchmaking. I hired Jep as the wardrobe mistress for the tour. Anyone who has seen my band would agree that we needed a wardrobe mistress, but nobody wore what Jep suggested so she had a lot of spare time. Every night when we checked into our hotel I would make sure that Mark and Jep had rooms next door to each other. Adjoining, if I could organise it.
I also started calling band dinners. Everyone had to attend. Then none of us would turn up and Mark and Jep would be left to have dinner alone. This went on for a while. Eventually they started dating. They have now been married for many years and have absolutely beautiful children. I was right. But all jokes aside, they are two of my favourite people in the world and I am so glad that fate, with a bit of help from me, brought them together.
I REMEMBER PLAYING ON the oval on the closing night of the Royal Easter Show in Sydney. Thousands of punters were standing in the rain on a balmy Sydney evening. It rained just hard enough to make the whole night look surreal. The lights sparkled through the mist.
It’s funny but no matter what had happened in the past or what was going on in the world or in my life, I knew I would find peace in the most chaotic and unlikely place. The stage. My world could be crumbling and falling around my feet but it was like being in the eye of a cyclone. I would get on stage after fighting with my record company or screaming at my management, storming out on Jane or wrestling with my own personal demons. After drinking and snorting and smoking and panicking, the lights would go down and the drummer would count 1–2–3–4 and I would feel a sense of peace that I felt nowhere else in my life. I could feel my feet on the stage, firmly planted, my heart would start to settle and, if all was going well, I would find peace. In those moments, I was in control of my life. It was all up to me to do what I knew best and the show would soar. It was like meditation. Effortlessly I would sail through the next few hours, bending the band, the music and the audience to suit my will and lift them up high. It wasn’t the drugs, it wasn’t the volume. It was that connection to the world through my audience. I knew I belonged. This was what I longed for in my life. To belong to something. I could do things that I didn’t know I was capable of doing, the crowd giving me a leg up. Then the show would finish and the eye of the cyclone would pass and I would feel the full force of life again. I would be tossed around like a ship lost at sea – until the next show.
That night at the Easter Show, Mark and Dave played soaring guitar solos that echoed around the stands and out into the dark night. The neighbours must have been up until we finished. The band was loud and we played late but no one seemed to mind. I could see the police, who were supposed to be keeping people in line, watching the band, singing along with the fathers with their children on their shoulders. It was a beautiful night and luckily we were filming the whole show. No one was starting trouble, they had nothing to do but enjoy the music. I walked through the sideshow alley afterwards in a daze, the lights still shining and spinning on the attractions as workers swept away the rubbish and prepared the showground for whatever it was hosting next. Even the cleaners were smiling. It was one of those nights when everything goes the way it is supposed to.
I had to go back to my life and wait until I could stand in the eye of the storm again. Some shows it didn’t happen but most it did. Maybe not for the whole show, but there were always moments. Precious and needed.
THERE WERE A FEW guitar players who failed miserably. There was one guy who played on my next album, Two Fires, who shall remain nameless but let’s just say he had played with a lot of big names overseas. He came out to tour with me and never made it through the warm-ups. He was one of these guys from California who had more front than grunt. He had a lot of issues. Weight issues, so he was on all sorts of wonder diets. He talked about his colon and what came out of it. He had drug issues so he was always on the lookout for Narcotics Anonymous meetings, which was fine, but he talked about them all day. He drove my Australian band nuts. Of course, we could have all done with NA meetings too, but we didn’t want to go anywhere near one. In fact, we avoided them at any cost.
We had done one or two little shows before heading to the big cities, when one day he turned to me in the car. ‘Hey Jimmy, I want to talk to you.’
I remember thinking, ‘Fuck, what has he eaten now?’
But he didn’t want to talk about that this time. ‘Listen, Jimmy. I want us to look like we’re all having a good time up there on the stage. But I don’t want you near me. Don’t touch me. I don’t want any sweat on me, okay? I’m happy to rock out and I’ll make all the right moves and all that. But fuck, we’re only pretending up there, okay? It’s just a show.’
There was silence in the car. The band were waiting for me to kill him. It wasn’t just a show. This was our lives. Every night for years we laid it all on the line. I had bled for shows like this. These shows were the only thing that kept me sane. And this guy thought it was just a show? I was speechless. Was he serious? Is that what he thought I wanted from him? To pretend? I watched the road and he went back to talking about how happy he was since he had gotten his divorce and married that young girl.
For the rest of the trip I thought carefully about what he had said. Was I taking him the wrong way? Maybe I had missed something. We drove into Warrnambool not long before we were due to go on. I kept my distance as I went through my warm-up, which in those days consisted of drinking half a bottle of vodka, snorting a gram of coke and screaming for an hour. By the time I hit the stage I was pumped. I had brushed off what he’d said and wanted to concentrate on doing a great show. About a third of the way through I walked to his side of the stage. I wanted him to know I didn’t hold a grudge. I stood next to him and immediately he went into a stance which I can only describe as Los Angeles Rock Guitar Player Stance Number Seven. But he made sure I was out of his reach. The rest of the band, including myself, were saturated with sweat. This gig was one of those old-style, boiling hot pub shows that we used to do with no air conditioning because the publican had turned it off to make the punters drink more. The rest of the band looked like drowned rats. This guy didn’t have a bead of sweat on him. He’d had the crew set up a small fan just beside him and I could see the creases he’d ironed into his jeans. Now he was pouting and posturing away in front of me. I snapped. I grabbed him by the back of the neck and the seat of his pants and threw him into the crowd. He landed a few rows from the stage. I felt better already. He tried to get back on stage but I blocked the way and shouted over the screaming of the band, ‘Fuck off back to America. Now. You don’t belong here.’
By the time we finished he had packed his guitars and was back at the hotel. Then one of the crew took me aside and told me, ‘Listen Jim, he wants to have a word with you. He says you were out of line and acted totally unprofessionally but he’s willing to forgive you and give you a chance.’
I sent the roadie to pick him up and drive him back to Melbourne and put him on a plane home. He didn’t get it. He never would. I haven’t spoken to him or seen him since. We don’t mix in the same circles.