play every show like it is your last
ON THE ROAD, 1976
WE DROVE FROM TOWN to town, playing every gig that would have us and a few that didn’t want us. Every night we got better and every night we pulled more people, well, most nights anyway.
There were a few nights when we played to empty houses. One that sticks in my mind was in Geraldton, Western Australia. We were booked to play a pub on Thursday and Friday night and it was looking pretty good. Thursday was packed to the rafters and we killed them, left them yelling for more. At the end of the night we were having a few drinks with the bouncers and I made a comment about how good it would be on Friday, going on how busy Thursday was. One of them turned to me and said, ‘Oh no, tomorrow they all go to the drive-in.’ We just laughed, thinking he was kidding. Next night we went on stage at eight-thirty and there was not one person in the audience. Apparently, they all went to the drive-in. The bouncer caught my eye and smiled. He was right, but what could we do? So we took requests from the barman and all the staff and played covers all night. No one turned up and after a few sets they let us stop so they could save money on staff. We treated it like a rehearsal and just had fun playing. The bouncers and barmaids were cheering and laughing with us, and we all had a good night.
I learned a lesson that night. It doesn’t matter if the house is empty or packed, you play every show like it is your last. Give it everything. The manager of the gig liked us, and because we played regardless of the fact that no one was there, he hired us again. That’s how we built our following, one gig at a time.
THE BAND STARTED DOING shows in Sydney and Melbourne. Melbourne took to us right away, so we spent a lot of time there. There were dozens of pubs waiting to pay a young band next to nothing to play for them. In fact, a lot of Saturdays we could play two or three pubs in the same day. These shows bleed into one another, but a typical Saturday would consist of a lunchtime show at one hotel, an early support at another pub and then a late-night session at a club in St Kilda, at a place called Bananas.
Lunchtime shows were normally quite sedate. People nursing hangovers from the night before, me included. I would vaguely remember finishing the lunchtime gig. We drank a lot but we rocked and got wilder than the audience were expecting at lunch. It was good for everyone involved. I would only have foggy memories of the second gig. One of them I kind of remember. We were loud and aggressive and not really happy to be at the Croxton Park Hotel, supporting a band that weren’t better than us but were better known than we were. They were called Supernaut. They had one big hit, a song called ‘I Like It Both Ways’. I’m not sure how many ways I heard that song, but I didn’t like any way it came. So I wasn’t happy to be on first. I thought we were a million times better than they were, but the mobs of young screaming girls who came to their shows thought differently. Anyway, we went on and got a pretty good reception and left the stage to a smattering of applause. Supernaut came on to a deafening roar from the crowd.
‘Good evening!’ the singer shouted. Then with the first crash of the first chord, of the first song, the band let off a huge display of pyrotechnics. Bang! The power for the whole pub blew. Poof! The whole place filled with thick grey smoke. It looked like it was burning down and everyone had to be evacuated. The band ran shrieking, side by side with the punters, from the smoke-filled room. Fire engines and police cars turned up with sirens screaming and lights flashing. The firemen and police who went through the pub wearing breathing apparatus weren’t happy with the situation at all. There was no fire, just smoke. The publican, who had spent a fortune promoting the night, expecting to sell a truckload of beer, was furious with the band’s lighting guy for being so stupid. The support band – us – was trying not to laugh too much, but it was very difficult. And the hordes of young girls, with eyes weeping from the thought of being that close to their idols, went home, coughing but still thinking that it was one of the best gigs they’d ever been to. Even though the band they paid to see only got to play a single note.
‘I touched him. He bumped into me in the dark. Did you see him?’ One girl wept as she sat in the gutter while the singer was led away, coughing into a towel, by the stage crew to a waiting car.
‘He coughed on me. Oh, he’s so cute!’
So I guess the second show wasn’t a complete waste of time. By the time we got to the third show, we were a mess. I’d have no memories of it at all. I think the crew had to carry me in. I heard that it was a great gig. And we all partied through until sun up.
WE LOVED MELBOURNE BUT we didn’t want to live there. The time came to move on to Sydney in the spring of 1976, and we left with mixed emotions. Everyone we had met in Melbourne would tell us how much better Melbourne was than Sydney. They told us we sounded more like a Melbourne band than a Sydney band, but for the life of me I couldn’t work out what a Melbourne band or Sydney band sounded like. I thought, if anything, we sounded like an Adelaide band, although I never admitted that to anyone before now. They also told us how much better life was in Melbourne than in Sydney, the gigs were better, the weather was better, the hotels were better. Oh my God, how could we possibly find a hotel as bad as Melbourne’s Majestic Hotel in Sydney? There couldn’t possibly be another like it. But there was. I soon came to realise that there were hotels just like it all over Australia. In fact, we managed to find them all over the world.
We rolled into Sydney to work and to see what we thought of the place. We found a place to stay, a motel near Tamarama Beach, in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. Sounds posh, but it wasn’t. The motel was on a hill at the back of Bondi Road and might have been nice in about 1960, but not anymore. It was too far from the beach to see the water and too close to the main road to hear the surf over the roaring of the local hoons’ cars as they sped down to the beach, hoping to impress the local chicks. It was a classic motel, where you can park your car outside your room. There have been a few of these motels where I’ve been tempted to drive the car inside the room, but not this one.
We holed up in it for about six weeks, over the spring of ’76. The owner was an English chap, who obviously had dreams of moving to Australia and buying a motel on Bondi Beach and he and his family becoming surf bums. But this was not the motel for that. It was run-down and dirty and no one wanted to stay, which is why we ended up there. It was really cheap. In fact, the guy let us stay and only pay him as our money came through.
THE BAND HAD FOUND a few allies in Sydney on the trip they did without me. One of those allies was a great music guy named Sebastian Chase. Sab, as he is known, was managing Dragon, a very wild band from New Zealand, and also a band called Rose Tattoo, who were equally wild. I knew a few of the Tatts from a band called Buster Brown, who we’d worked with in Adelaide. Both of these bands had bad – or good – reputations; it depended how you looked at it. For me they had great reputations. They liked to party and play music and get crazy. What could be wrong with that? So it seemed to me that we were right up Sab’s alley. He talked us into staying in Sydney. He was going to manage us. It sounded good, as Don had been reluctantly looking after everything and it was driving him nuts. He had no time to write music or even enjoy playing in the band, he was too busy trying to keep our heads above water.
In retrospect, I think Sab had the toughest job in music at that time, between the three bands he was trying to look after. The Tatts were always drawing attention, normally from the police. They looked like they were out for trouble, and maybe they were, but they were a great rock band. I think the obvious tattoos and henna-red cropped hair made them a scary proposition to the police. The most dangerous to my mind was one of the founding members, Ian Rilen. Ian was a rebel. He was rock’n’roll and everything it stood for, freedom, rebellion and equality. Ian first came to my attention in The Band of Light, a Sydney blues-based rock group that I was a big fan of. He had been in a lot of bands that helped change the face of Australian rock before he joined the Tatts in 1976.
So Sab was trying to get this band across to people – and then there was Dragon. Dragon, besides being a bunch of real troublemakers, were a brilliant pop band. When we joined up with Sab, they had just released their first big single in Australia, called ‘This Time’, and it shot up the charts. I use the term ‘shot up’ very carefully because that happens to be the biggest problem Dragon had in those days. Some of the members were junkies. Their original drummer had died of an overdose in 1975 and they were very out of it by the time the record hit the shops. But they were about to become huge and Sab was trying to steady the ship – a ship that was already heading for the rocks.
THE AUSTRALIAN MUSIC SCENE had a dark history that people didn’t talk about – heroin. For a long time, I’d been watching and working with bands and I’d noticed pockets of roadies and musicians who didn’t seem as, how can I say it, grounded. I don’t know if that’s the right word but there were people who were vaguer or darker than others; not all the time, it depended when you caught them. But I soon worked out what was going on behind closed doors. Hard drugs. Heroin was something akin to the bogeyman. Our parents had warned us about it and the little media we were exposed to told stories about drug-crazed killers and degenerate jazz musicians, sneaking away and injecting heroin. There was definitely a stigma attached to it. Well, I started meeting heroin users and most of them I wouldn’t have suspected, so they couldn’t have been that bad. But they did hide it.
I remember seeing the Tatts play at the Bondi Lifesaver, a famous venue in the Sydney scene. I was standing at the mixing desk, enjoying the band. One of my friends, a guy called Panther, was the sound guy. I don’t know if ‘sound’ is the right word to describe Panther, but he was my good mate and we had a lot of fun together. I knew that he dabbled in some serious drugs but he always kept it together when he worked. I don’t know how he got the name Panther. He wasn’t particularly sleek or fast on his feet, but his eyes did glow yellow in the dark.
Well, this night Panther seemed to be having too much fun. I noticed that Rose Tattoo was getting louder and louder. Not unusual for them. They were a fucking loud band. But this night the sound was changing every few bars. I looked over and there was Panther with his hands on the master faders, nodding off. As he fell asleep he leaned onto the desk, pushing the faders and the volume up. I gave him a nudge just before he blew up the system. His head snapped back and his eyes rolled open as he looked at me and smiled, with the butt of a cigarette almost burning his lip. He yelled, ‘They sound fucking great, don’t they?’
I laughed and I had to agree. ‘Yes mate, they do sound fuckin’ great,’ I said. The Tatts played on and Panther went back to sleep.
Most of the heroin users I knew only dabbled. When I saw someone lost in it, I was really saddened. Not because it was worse than anything else to be addicted to, because I’d seen alcoholics who were nastier, I’d seen potheads who were more desperate and I myself had certainly been more smashed. But this was different, it was as if shame was a part of the high. I don’t really know what the high was, it wasn’t my drug of choice. I did try it by accident one night and I’ll tell you about that in a minute. But like all drugs it changed the user and this one seemed to erode all self-worth from anyone who came close to it.
Dragon was a great band that survived for decades in spite of heroin tearing them apart. It’s hard enough to get by in the music business, never mind bringing heroin into the equation. The fact that Dragon were so good and had so many hits is a testament to their great talent.
But Sab had to deal with those guys and he didn’t have time for us, so after a short while something had to give and again, we were the first to go. I don’t think the Tatts lasted much longer.
We were back to square one, with Don grudgingly doing the work of a manager instead of enjoying the music and writing songs.
HEROIN. I TRIED IT by accident one night. I was flying when I left our show in the suburbs of Sydney somewhere. We drove into the Cross to find some real trouble. I found it at a party I’d heard about, in one of the hotels on Macleay Street. An American band, which I can’t remember the name of, was playing in town and they were having a big party at one of the suites in this hotel. I managed to talk my way in. I usually did.
I stood next to a wardrobe, looking for something to do. I managed to find a few drinks while I waited for the party to really take off. People were in all sorts of states, staggering from room to room. At one point a young woman walked past and smiled at me. She was a beautiful girl and she was staring at me. I offered her my hand and we disappeared into the wardrobe. The room was packed but no one seemed to notice or care. We banged and bumped away inside the cupboard for about twenty minutes and then fell back out into the room. She smiled again and kept walking. I straightened up my clothing and looked around the room. Now what could I do?
I noticed two suspicious-looking blokes ducking into the toilet. I knew what they were up to. They were taking drugs and I wanted some. I burst in as if I didn’t know that they were there.
‘Oh, sorry guys. Hey, what are you up to?’ I asked, but it was obvious what they were doing. One of them had a big bag of white powder that he was in the process of emptying onto the counter.
‘Do you mind if I join you? I knew you wouldn’t,’ I said before they could answer. I loved uppers and coke – but who could afford it? Anyway, it looked like these guys had plenty to go around.
They didn’t seem to mind. ‘Ah, no, ah, help yourself.’
Sssnnniiiiifffffff.
I already was. I took most of the mound they had poured out in one huge snort. ‘Thanks, guys!’ I was out of the door before they could say a word.
This coke really burned my nose. My legs buckled and the room took a definite shift to the left. I wasn’t sure if my feet were working properly. ‘Fuck. That wasn’t coke. What was it?’
I started to panic. It must have been smack. Heroin. I had no idea how it would affect me. But I knew I had been a real hog and consumed a lot of it. I had to get out of the place fast. I staggered towards the door. With each step the room spun a little more. By the time I was in the lift I was bouncing off the walls. I could no longer tell which way was up and which way was down. I fell out of the lift and through the front doors of the hotel and the last thing I saw was the sidewalk crashing towards me. I was rolling around in the gutter of one of the main streets of the Cross.
‘Fuck, what have I done? I’m going to die,’ I thought to myself. I was falling in and out of consciousness. I looked up and there in front of me was a young Aboriginal girl.
‘Are you all right?’ she was asking me. Her eyes were bright and warm.
‘Help me, I think I’ve overdosed on something.’
I passed out.
I woke a few times during the next twenty-four hours. I had no idea where I was. I vaguely remembered being loaded into a cab and driven somewhere. And I was lying on a mattress on a floor. Every now and then I would see an angel floating above me, wiping my brow.
‘Are you all right? Just stay there. You’ve been very sick, but I’m here to look after you.’
I drifted off again. I woke up after a few more hours. I was better than I had been but I was thirsty and I smelled of vomit.
‘Here. Drink this. It’ll help you.’ The same angel I had seen in the Cross was sitting on the floor next to me. She was nursing me. I didn’t know who she was. But she was beautiful. I passed out again.
When I awoke next, I was alone. I sat up and the days before slowly came back to me. Where was I, and how did I get here? I stood up and called out, ‘Hello?’, quietly at first. ‘Hello. Is anybody there?’
I didn’t get an answer. I found my shoes, put them on and left. I was somewhere in Redfern. I had a picture in my head of a pretty young girl who had helped me. But I couldn’t find her to thank her. To this day I don’t know who she was. But she saved my life. I know it. If she hadn’t helped me I would have been found dead in a gutter in the Cross. If you read this and remember me, thank you, whoever you are.
FROM THE TIME THE band hit the road, my drinking started elevating. Every night I had a little more and every night I got a little bit wilder. There was good wild, and destructive wild, and for a while the good wild was winning. The show got better, more intense, and the audiences loved us more and more, but my stage antics became unpredictable. Some nights I didn’t remember finishing shows. In fact, I notice that writing this is harder than writing about my younger years. Those years were lost in the darkness because of fear and trauma, whereas these years, since leaving home, were lost in a sea of booze and cheap drugs – and eventually not-so-cheap drugs.
At the start, I would only drink a little bit on stage. Then there were the odd times that we took drugs on stage, whether by accident, like if a show came in at the last moment and we’d already taken them, or just because I wanted to try it out, to see if it was fun. But things started to snowball quickly. My drinking was fine at first, because if I drank too much then I couldn’t do the show – it was that simple – but later, somewhere along the road, I worked out that if I swallowed a handful of cheap speed pills I could drink all I wanted to and not stumble. My behaviour was like that of someone who was blind drunk, but I didn’t fall over.
I knew I came from a long line of alcoholics but I never allowed myself to think about it. My take was that if you could keep up a front and no one noticed how bad you were, you didn’t have a problem. I was also convinced that there was no problem if you could afford to drink – if you didn’t feel desperate or seem desperate to other people, then there was no issue. As long as there were drinks and drugs available, I was all right. In the music business, as in my life in general, there always seemed to be drinks and drugs around if you looked for them. I knew how to look, and how to get hold of most things I needed. This way of thinking – or not really thinking, when I look back on it now – was going to cause me big problems as time went by and my habits got more and more out of hand.
Another thing that went along with this whole merry-go-round was, once you got out of control on stage, what did you do after you left the stage – be out of control then too? That meant more drinking and more fighting and lots and lots of sex. There seemed to be no end to the availability of drugs and booze, and there certainly wasn’t any shortage of sex either.
Even before I joined the band I was never short of someone to sleep with, but after joining things just got crazier and crazier. Just like the drugs and booze, the more I had, the more I wanted. I’m not going to sit here and brag about this. I’m not proud of all I’ve done. This behaviour has been nothing but destructive in my life. It started out as something that filled a gap, something that made me feel good about myself, but after a short time all these encounters added to my feelings of not being worthy and I began to dislike myself even more. This of course started long before I recognised what was going on. These feelings, as much as I pushed them to the back of my head, were slowly driving me to a point where I could see no way back. I was fucked, and nothing, I thought, could be done about it. I couldn’t stop getting smashed, I liked it too much, because when I wasn’t smashed I had to live with myself, this bloke I had been running from since I was a small child. If I didn’t like myself as a kid, who had done nothing wrong, how I was going to live with myself as an adult, whose every step was one giant leap into self-loathing? I was on the road to ruin. The highway to . . . no, someone else wrote that, but we were all on the same road. I think some of us had more baggage than others to carry, but it was hard for everyone on that journey.
Fame and adulation are not healthy, they really screw with a person’s focus in life and sense of reality, and if you add mind-altering substances into that mix the road becomes even more treacherous. I was travelling through my life at breakneck speed wearing a blindfold.
I think in the early days I was easier for the band to put up with, but as things progressed, I became more and more volatile. We used to finish shows and if the band didn’t go as crazy as I did, I would scream and yell. Most nights they went along with me and everything seemed fine. Whether they were unhappy or not, I’ve never had the heart to ask them. You’ll have to wait for their books to come out. But like I said, most nights were cool. It was like cooking in a lot of ways, add a little of this, and a little of that, and, oops too much, add a little more of this to counteract that, and so on and so on. If all goes well, the final result is good or at least bearable, but one slight miscalculation and all hell breaks loose. I would be flying at a hundred miles an hour, jumping out of the plane without a parachute, attacking anybody that disagreed with me. So quite often I would end up fighting with someone, or storming off alone or with someone who wanted to do the same things as me. There was always someone who wanted to do the same as me. They just didn’t want to do it every night of the week.
STEVE WAS FOND OF a drink too, and sometimes he would get enough under his belt to become unbearable. Even if he didn’t, he might get up enough courage to tell me to fuck off, and then it would be on. He would say something and head-butt me – he always seemed to be coming up when I wasn’t looking and head-butting me – then I would tear into him with everything I had. To an outsider it looked like we hated each other, but it was the opposite really. We were the best of mates. We’d both seen the tough side of life and survived with our sense of humour intact.
I have to say, for a pacifist, Steve liked to fight, and knew how to start trouble. He wasn’t good at it, but he had a go. I would jump all over him and punch the shit out of him but Steve had a secret weapon, his head. Steve’s head was as hard as a rock, and he had these big Liverpudlian front teeth that were, as far as we could tell, unbreakable. He told stories of diving into a swimming pool and smashing his teeth onto the bottom and cracking the tiles. Whether this was true or not I’m not sure, but I know that I punched him hard in the teeth so many times, and the next day when we woke up there would be Steve, not a mark on him, while my hands would be cut to ribbons by those teeth. Steve also had a habit of getting drunk and the next day not remembering anything that happened. I would wake up still steaming and angry and walk out and bump into Steve and he would be smiling, showing those big teeth, and offering to buy breakfast. He was a hard guy to stay mad at because he was so funny.
The other guys didn’t fight with either of us. They were reserved and quiet and hardly raised their voices. I know it wasn’t because they were scared of me or Steve; it just wasn’t in their nature to be aggressive.
I still have difficulties with problem-solving. If something is too hard to fix I tend to throw it across the room, but I don’t fight anymore. My aggressive side softened a lot when I met Jane, which I will tell you about when I get to that point in my life.
IN THE MEANTIME, WE kept driving from one end of the country to the other, doing what we loved – playing music. The fights weren’t happening all that often. I think the band let me be wild because they liked me and they liked what it did for the shows. Some nights were crazier than others but most went down so well that the promoters wanted us back, which is exactly what we wanted too.
Some gigs took us in and really treated us well. The Mawson Hotel in Caves Beach, the Pier in Adelaide, the Bombay Rock in Melbourne, Hernando’s Hideaway in Perth, and many other gigs across the country. Whenever we hit one of these pubs the band cut loose. I think we did some of our best shows in these places that allowed us the freedom to go crazy.
We lived in and played at the Rising Sun Hotel in Broken Hill, a wild town filled with miners and girls. We tore this place down. They fed us, they gave us free booze and treated us like we were part of the family. There was always a smiling face behind the bar, ready to make the rest of the night go as well as the gig. So we would drive from state to state playing in pubs and getting run out of town and then hit an old favourite and recharge our batteries.
DON’S SONGS WERE REALLY starting to strike a chord with the crowd, and with us. We were playing them better and better and the band just kept getting tougher and tougher. The right people were taking notice, but we still fell back on Led Zeppelin covers more than we should have.
‘Come on, guys. Surely we could drop the Zeppelin covers now? Our own songs are as good as any of them,’ Don would say to us over and over, only to be met with a wall of self-doubt from the rest of us, especially me.
‘I like playing them. We smash them anyway. We play them better than Zeppelin do.’ I’m sure I was trying to convince myself as much as Don. ‘The crowd always go crazy when we start them. So what’s the problem?’
‘We should have already driven them crazy with our songs for a couple of hours. We don’t need to play somebody else’s songs to finish them off. Plus, I’m sick of playing them. I don’t want to be in a covers band all my life.’
Don was right again, but I still had that nagging fear. Were we good enough? ‘We’re not a fucking covers band. But I think we should play “Rock’n’roll” in the encore just to finish them off. It fucking works,’ I said.
For a long time, we ended up doing whatever I said. I’m not sure I didn’t subconsciously sabotage the set so that the only way it could be saved was to do what I wanted. It sounds like childish behaviour by a singer with arrested development, doesn’t it? I had no idea what arrested development was at this time. I only knew that if we ever did something that was challenging, I was afraid.
It was only once the rest of the band got on side with Don that our covers-to-originals ratio changed. I would try to convince them I was right, but in the end I wasn’t and they knew it and so did I. Eventually the only covers we played were songs that we wanted to play. Well, a lot of the time, they wanted to play them.
‘Why don’t we play that Dylan song “Mozambique”?’ one of them suggested.
‘Yeah that’ll be great, I love that song.’ Ian would be enthused.
‘There must be a Dylan song that rocks,’ I would say under my breath.
But Steve was running with it by this point. ‘Yeah, that’s got a good groove.’
‘But we’re a fucking rock’n’roll band.’
‘I know but it’d be great to play some different types of songs, wouldn’t it? Like an African groove would be good. We don’t play anything like that. I’m fuckin’ bored playing the same shit all the time. Come on. Fuck it. Let’s do it.’ Steve was always happy to throw in his two cents worth.
‘We don’t need to play songs with an African groove. We’re not fucking African, are we?’
‘Neither is Bob Dylan but he does it.’
‘But he fucking wrote it. Besides, we’re not playing in Africa, so we don’t need to play African fucking music. Do we? Play something that rocks.’ My head would be spinning.
‘You just always want to play the same old shit, don’t you? Come on man, fucking try something new,’ Steve would tell me.
Eventually I stopped fighting them. ‘Yeah, all right then. But I think Ian should sing it.’ If it was something I didn’t think would work, Ian was singing it as far as I was concerned. ‘You could sell this one really well, Ian. Give it a go,’ I’d try to convince him.
‘Aw, I’m not sure. I think that you should be singing it,’ Ian said looking at me.
‘Come on you lazy fuckin’ bastard. Sing it. You’re the fucking singer,’ Steve would say. He’d be laughing and taunting me by this point. ‘If I can play drums, you can sing the fuckin’ thing.’
‘Fine. I’ll fucking sing it. But don’t blame me if it fucks up the set.’
And guess what? It worked. ‘Mozambique’ was in the set for a while with me singing it, albeit a little more rock than the original and a lot harder than the band pictured it. The crowd loved it. What do I know?
Don would suggest we cover a song at soundcheck and we would learn it and make it work and do it that night. It wasn’t always to please or excite the crowd. In fact, I would see the confusion on their faces when we would pull out an obscure Conway Twitty or Bob Dylan cover or the like. The set would take a momentary dip while we satisfied what I thought was our self-centred musical indulgence and then, when it was over, we’d whip it back into warp speed. Most of the time these would not have been the songs that I would have chosen, but I went along with it anyway, and tried to make the band play them hard and fast.
In the end, I realised that they were right. Playing these covers gave us an insight into how to play and write different types of songs. Songs that would free us up from the idea that we had to play straight four-on-the-floor music. And this would eventually take the band to bigger and better places musically, especially once we started recording seriously.