Jimmy B

28 August, 2010

LOST AND FOUND – On the Road with Jimmy Barnes

© David Astle

“Oh my god,” says the air hostess. “Are you Jimmy Barnes as in the rock star, Jimmy Barnes?” Jimmy shrugs. Sure. It’s 9am. Not a good time for icons. But the hostie can’t let the moment rest. “Maybe if you sign your boarding pass”¦”

Landing in Rockhampton the mania continues. Baggage handlers pause at the conveyer belt. Three women – a teen, her mum and grandma – flip open the family Nokia for an impromptu portrait. No matter the chapter – Cold Chisel from the late 70s, the two solo decades, or the recent Choir of Hard Knocks – Barnesy is a hero to each generation.

At 51, in purple tee and wire brush hair, the man has covered some territory. He ducks and weaves about the carousel like the boxer his Dad was, quipping in Glaswegian ocker. If fame isolates the famous, then the cliche hasn’t reached Jimmy Barnes.

Outside in the glare, five musicians try to squeeze 13 cases into two Taragos. Elly-May Barnes, 18, Jimmy’s youngest daughter, knows better than to give advice. She’s dressed in sunnies and Dollbaby polka dots. “It’s like watching Tetris,” she says. “Bad Tetris.”

Later tonight, across the Divide, the band is due to play to 5000 coalminers, the first touring show for Jimmy since heart surgery in May. Off the table, and onto the road – and the butterflies still flutter. “I always get nervous before a gig,” says Jim behind the wheel. “No matter where I am in the world, the heart starts racing a few hours before the show.”

Even a rejigged heart. The first operation was in February. Surgeons at St Vincents cracked open the singer’s chest, draining his blood, clamping off his artery, all to remove a faulty valve. “It had nothing to do with my lifestyle,” says Jimmy, driving past a fiberglass bull. “Basically I had a bicuspid valve that should have been tricuspid.”

To operate, surgeons needed to stop the heart completely – putting the man’s life on hold to insert a new valve. Barnes woke up with a zipper scar – and photos.

“Before I went under I gave my camera to the doctor and told him to take some snaps. A few days later, after Intensive Care, I’m looking through my camera and suddenly there’s my chest wide open. They use this medieval-looking car-jack-thing to split the breastbone. I’m looking at my own heart”¦it felt weird.”

Maybe for Barnes, yet not those who love his music. From the wild Chisel reign to the 16 versatile albums since that mayhem, Jimmy has been melting mikes across 35 years, selling over eight million records, standing on stages Pentridge to The Palais, baring his heart most nights of the week. The men of Dawson Mine will see nothing different.

We skirt Rockhampton Hospital. “That’s where Mahalia, my oldest daughter, was almost born.” Jimmy has five kids, including singer David Campbell, the child of a teenage fling back in Adelaide. His Thai-born wife, Jane Mahoney, was very pregnant back in 1982 – the Chisel heydays – and Jimmy thought a loll on Great Keppel Island was the remedy.

“I dug her a hole in the sand so she could rest her stomach, but then her waters started breaking. I was 26 at the time and Jane was 24. We went to the doctor who said get the fuck off the island. We ended up grabbing a midwife from Rocky and flew with her back to Sydney. It was a very close thing.”

Slaughteryards line the Capricorn Highway. We’re escaping the Beef Capital of Oz, heading for Emerald, but Jimmy stays with the memory. “Prior to having a child I had no responsibility. Having a family probably kept me alive.”

Heart trouble is only one hurdle in the Barnes bio. Vodka, dope, speed – name a drug of dependence, and the younger Jimmy was there depending. “I spent 35 years abusing myself. Part of that was genetic,” he reckons.

“With the Scottish thing I was drinking whiskey, aged four. My father drank like a fish, my grandfather, my grandmother”¦.I come from a long line of fish.” The gravel laugh infects the van. “Maybe it’s why I like fishing so much – I get to meet my ancestors.”

The general cackle rises, and Jimmy can’t resist an audience. “It’s probably why I’m so good at scales and writing hooks.” Elly-May groans. “Dad!” she squeals. “No more, OK? All puns are off the record.”

Yet family secrets are open slather. “My Mum left me Dad when I was 12. It was round then I worked hard to make people like me. Growing up [joining Chisel at 16] I’d always drink more than anybody else, take more drugs than anybody else. As bad as that got it also created who I was. If you want to be a singer you don’t have to be a compulsive-obsessive and an extreme showoff – but it helps.”

Barnes sees kindred gifts in his first child, David, despite the boy learning his father’s identity only in his early teens. “He’s very strong, very focused, and he tends to be compulsive. Though he’s much more disciplined than I am.”

Jimmy’s own madness peaked six years ago when a bleeding ulcer failed to curb the hell-raising. “I actually got out of my hospital bed, a drip in my arm, and walked to the Albury Hotel outside St Vincents, dressed in a gown, and ordered a double vodka.”

If Barnes missed the warning bells, then his family helped him to hear. “The kids would tour with me all the time. Mahalia used to ring my room. If she got no answer, she’d get my key, thinking she’d find me dead. That was a horrible, horrible moment.”

Enough to spur the singer across the ocean in 2001. A fresh start was needed, but not before taking “three grams of coke on the plane, and drinking a couple of bottles of champagne along the way. I arrived in LA a mess. I spent thee days in detox.” And then the hard part started.

Cottonwood de Tucson is no “pop-star place”. It’s hard-core rehab in the Arizonan desert, where the only place to run is down “the corridors of healing”. Jimmy responded in that all-or-nothing way.

“I went to every class they had.” He counts on the steering wheel. “Group therapy, family therapy, private psychiatrist, trauma group, acu-detox”¦” For Jimmy, “the hard part wasn’t stopping, but staying stopped.”

The man to emerge, says brother-in-law Mark Lizotte, alias Diesel, is “no rehab cliché with the whole resentment thing. He’s still got that wild look in his eye. He’s still encouraging – and incorrigible!”

His wife Jane saw the suffering, and the healing, up close. “We learnt to understand that addiction was a sickness. Since Arizona he’s essentially the same man – a kind and courageous man – but his choices aren’t coming from a fear-place.”

Among those choices was tp pick up a pen. Exiled to a bed for six months, the outpatient took to writing songs. Even a relapse of cardiac pain – known as Dresslers Syndrome where the body rejects initial surgery – didn’t cruel the project.

“Major trauma helps you focus,” says Barnes. “It felt like every emotional nerve endings was raw. And that started coming out in lyrics. Dare I say it helped get stuff off my chest.” Elly-May flashes a glare, and her Dad beams. “The album’s not looking for redemption, but reevaluating, you know.

“Admittedly there were a few songs where I felt sorry for myself, leave me-here-to-die sort of thing, but they didn’t make the cut.” Was that a pun? Nobody twigs, as a roadhouse looms on the horizon, and every stomach demands a refuel.

Fly zapper. Ceiling fan. This is Barnesy heartland, a replica of the grunge cafe captured in the Chisel clip, Forever Now. (“We invented that place inside a Paddo pub,” laughs Jim.) Every soul in remote Duaringa wants to say hello to a man they feel they know.

While Pete Satchell (of Dallas Crane), Tommy Boyce (The Casanovas), Yak Skerritt (The Injectors) and Dario Bortolin (INXS Mark 2) order burgers through the hatch, Jimmy stalks the grocery wing in search of a thermos cup. “These days I drink hot water and honey before a show.”

Keyboardist Tony Featherstone softly taps a tune on the table edge. “I’m having Khe Sanh nightmares,” he whispers. “I’ve only been with Jimmy a couple of shows, and if I stuff a tune better known than the national anthem then not just Jimmy will know.” His fingers keep busy.

Suddenly three red-faced women burst in. “Barnesy!” shrills Kate, in her 20s, “you’re a miracle worker: this is the first time I’ve run in my life!” The girls hail from the bone-dry golf course across the road, near enough to hear the murmur of a rock legend lobbing.

“If I have any phobias,” says Jimmy quietly, hunching amid his flushed admirers, “then it’s probably a fear of being alone.” But before the camera can click, the phone on the counter rings – a call for Mr Barnes. A local along the bush telegraph offers the singer and his crew a meal. “Thanks,” says Jim down the blower, “but we got a show to do in Moura.”

“Where?” eavesdrops the local cop, nursing a coffee. “Moura? You blokes are lost.”

“Isn’t this the road to Emerald?” asks Yak.

“Too right,” says the cop. “But what you want is Dululu, excepting you turn off before Banana.”

Two farmers escort the band along a red dirt road. “This is too Wolf Creek for me,” quakes Elly-May. Her Dad blames Eliza-Jane, the middle daughter, for taking his precious SatNav on her European tour. (All four Barnes kids, aged 25 to 18, pursue musical careers, including drummer-son Jackie who’s studying at Berkeley.) “I’m lost without my gadgets.”

On cue, the air fills with Elvis Presley’s My Baby Left Me – the ring-tone on Jimmy’s phone. The caller is Rick Szabo, the local promoter awaiting sound-checks, wanting to know where they are. “Surrounded by cows,” says Jim, edging the Tarago tenderly amid a Brahmin herd. “After my valve transplant,” he tells us, “which is a bovine valve, I figure I owe cows big time.”

Reckons great mate and record guru, Michael Gudinski, “If you do the right thing by Jimmy Barnes then he’ll be there for you until you drop.” The Brahmin seem convinced; the herd ain’t budging. And sound-check is shifted closer to curtain.

Alp-sized coal heaps fringe the town. We rattle over the railway line, past the Big Shovel, into the Paul Young Reserve. “Gorgeous singer – Paul Young,” says Barnes, and breaks into song, “Coz we’re living in the love of the common people”¦”

Rick Szabo, a former Meatloaf impersonator, is waiting by the rodeo chute, Led Zeppelin logo on his belly, and Blue Tooth in his ear. “Mate, Jimmy, welcome.” Thirty-two speakers hang from scaffold like two wasp nests. Barnes takes a swig of apple cider vinegar, gargles and spits in the dust. He grabs the mike on stage, staring at the empty showground, and blasts out Good Times with full rock backing to test the levels. I swear his wife Jane, at home with the schnauzers in Mascot, could hear the clamour. Sound check? Check.

Doc Neeson’s Angels prowl the salmon-pink motel back in town. Solemn and articulate Neeson recalls, “I first met Jimmy in Townsville in 1422BC. We were both on tour. He’s always been irrepressible.” And next the Belfast-born Doc hums a traditional Scottish tune, “I’m only a common old working chap, as anyone here can see, but when I get a couple o’ drinks on a Saturday, Glasgow belongs to me!” He smiles. “The man in that tune is Jimmy. He’ll take on anyone -and that’s without the drinks now.”

“I’m not ambitious,” says Jim, picking at the Chinese food in the motel dining room. “I’m competitive. I don’t particularly want celebrity but I want to be the best at what I do. Up against everybody, including myself.”

Over in Room 9, Pete and Tommy strum unplugged guitars in sync with Jimmy’s master CD, issued by the agency – Flame Trees, I’d Die, No Second Prize – just to warm the fingers. The man himself is swallowing pills. “In the old days I’d start drinking vodka – recovery, you know.” The handful includes co-enzymes for the ticker, Omega-3 capsules and multivitamins, washed down by honeyed water.

Elly-May enters the porch light, exhibiting her Gothic chic for backup singing duties. A wary gait signals her mild cerebral palsy. “I was born 3½ months premmie. I weighed as much as 750 grams of butter, and had a brain haemorrhage when I came out.” Every three months Elly needs a botox shot in her calf to ease the spasms. She goes to tell us more when a DC-3 engine interrupts.

At least that’s the first impression – the screech belongs to her father in a nearby room, opening with a rumble and building the sound into a banshee shriek. Imagine the word ‘hey’ stretched into infinity, climbing in pitch as you watch the force disappear through a shattered window.

The hour has come. A powdery night has fallen over the Dawson Valley, and Jimmy Barnes is ready. Dressed in purple silk and black jeans, he musters his sidemen into the vans. Moura may seem a speck on the map but Barnes will give his all, swaying onstage (“my chained elephant dance”) and living each tune, swamping his body in familiar sweat. Deep in the list, as grown miners shuffle and women scream and kids with Spiderman faces stand in awe, a flawless Khe Sanh is met with rapture.

(Sunday Life, October, 2007)