Ringside: Rod Willis on the surprises and thrills of managing Cold Chisel
For all but three years of his time managing Cold Chisel, Rod Willis and the band operated on a handshake deal – a risky business, but one evidently based on enduring mutual trust.
It wasn’t wrapped or topped with a bow, but for his 50th birthday, Rod Willis received something that many Australian music fans would cherish as a priceless gift: a private performance by Cold Chisel.
What made the occasion even more surprising was that, by that point in 1997, the Adelaide-born rock ’n’ roll quintet had not played before an audience in 13 years.
Unusually, given his hands-on role in getting the group back together as its longtime manager, Willis was none the wiser as to what was in store that night at the Avalon RSL, on Sydney’s northern beaches.
“Somewhere between my second and fifth shots of vodka, one of my surfer mates sidled up to me and asked, ‘Are Chisel playing?’,” he writes in his forthcoming memoir, titled Ringside.
“I laughed at the thought and reassured him that The Hurricanes would shake the place up plenty. But then I noticed a piano on the side of the small stage. No way, surely, I thought to myself.”
Yes, way. In the music industry, few tasks are as thankless, as stressful or as potentially despair-inducing as the role of the manager – those peculiar individuals who take it upon themselves to steer the careers of the flighty, often insecure people we call artists.
Yet the birthday anecdote highlights the high esteem in which Willis was held by one of the nation’s most popular rock bands, with whom he worked for 32 years, from 1977 to 2009.
For all but three years of his tenure, too, Willis and the band operated on a “handshake deal”, beyond the realms of contract law – a risky business, to be sure, but one evidently based on enduring mutual trust.
“When the contract lapsed [in 1982], the relationship between us is a little bit different than a normal manager,” Willis, 75, told The Australian. “The relationship worked; there wasn’t a necessity to sign another contract.”
Published on Tuesday by Allen & Unwin, Ringside details Willis’s life before he first saw Cold Chisel perform in 1977, including a decade spent working overseas on tours for acts including UFO and Savoy Brown.
It also delves into the inner workings of a famously fractious musical group fronted by a singular singer named Jimmy Barnes. The band’s early years weren’t without struggle, but once it broke through to the national consciousness with its third album in 1980, titled East, it became firmly lodged in the Australian psyche.
That’s where its music remains today, almost four years since Cold Chisel’s last concert in February 2020. When the four surviving musicians recently gathered for a dinner to celebrate the band’s 50th anniversary, Willis was a guest of honour.
“We went through a lot together,” he said. “I managed on two major occasions to get them back together [in 1997 and 2003] – and let me assure you, it might have been easier than getting peace in the Middle East at the moment, dealing with them at that point in time.”
The thrills far outweighed the thorny moments, though, because of the strength of the songs: with great fondness, he recalls surveying the waves alone one day in the early 1980s, when a carload of young surfers pulled up beside him, with Chisel blasting from the stereo.
“That was such a buzz, and it’s still a buzz when people talk to me on social media,” Willis said. “I’m ever thankful. To many millions, it was the soundtrack of their lives.”
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