Jimmy Barnes: from sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll to doting grandfather
Australia’s most famous working class man has changed, and for the better, as he writes in his third book Killing Time.
In the final pages of his third autobiographical book in four years, Jimmy Barnes breaks the fourth wall to let the reader in on his experience of writing the previous 400 pages. “The act of writing used to be a painful process for me,” he notes. “Trawling through the wreckage that was my childhood caused me immense pain, but I had to do it. I needed to look at it all in the cold, clear light of day, so that I could let it all go.”
Then his thoughts are interrupted by the voice of his five-year-old grandson, Dylan, whose sense of innocence and wonder is infectious, and whose life experience is untainted by the misery that Barnes went through in the 1960s.
“I’m so happy for Dylan,” he writes. “Every day he goes for rides on the river or long walks through the forest with his dad. Things he will remember for the rest of his life. And I get to share them with him. The only walks I remember my dad doing were the ones when he walked away.”
These closing moments of domestic, familial bliss are remarkable for their sheer ordinariness. For decades, popular culture has promoted the fallacy that rock stars should live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse. Such narratives are total bullshit. Why shouldn’t musicians be allowed to live long, fruitful lives like the rest of us? Why does society hold performing artists – particularly those that surround themselves with loud electric guitars and thundering drums – to a different standard than just about every other profession?
“My house is full of music and laughter and love, and even as I write these words my eyes begin to water just a little,” Barnes, 64, writes on the penultimate page of Killing Time. “I am no longer consumed by pain and fear. These days I am living, not dying … Life is beautiful.”
Such bald sentimentality would have been all but impossible in his hellraising, intoxicant-influenced earlier years, wherein Barnes rarely left a drink undrunk nor a powdered line unsnorted. But as he has exhaustively canvassed in his two prior works, 2016’s Working Class Boy and 2017’s Working Class Man, he eventually came to realise that his self-destructive fuse was lit in a childhood coloured by poverty, neglect, abuse, unquenchable anger, fear and self-loathing.
From a young age, escape was what the boy born James Swan craved. As a man, he found it in numbing his senses while also becoming one of the most popular singers in Australian music, first fronting the Adelaide rock band Cold Chisel and then as a solo performer from 1984 onwards.
After exorcising many of his demons in the preceding 800-odd pages comprising those two books, Killing Time is a much different proposition that offers a series of vignettes taken from across the decades. Packaged as “short stories from the long road home”, there is a strong emphasis on the in-between, offstage moments that make up a life in music.
“I’ve been on the road for over 50 years,” Barnes writes in the introduction. “But I’ll let you in on a little secret here. Rock ‘n’ roll is not glamorous. You spend most of your time travelling from town to town, hoping to make it to the next venue in time for your show.”
Touring is all about waiting until you can finally get out and spend an hour or two actually playing music to people. “All in all, I’ve spent many, many more hours killing time than making music,” he writes.
It’s a fine way to set up a collection that is by turns hilarious, moving, entertaining and occasionally forgettable. Unintentionally perhaps, the book mimics the scope of a long tour by a polished rock band, where inevitably most of the shows are good, a few are sub-par and a handful are truly transcendent and life-affirming for all involved.
Similarly, not every story Barnes tells here is a hit, and perhaps a few of them could have been cut for a stronger overall result. But it’s clear that his recent experiences in book-length writing have served him well. He has a commendable ability to craft a narrative that contains just enough essential details to build a picture in the reader’s mind, without getting too bogged down in minutiae.
Early chapter The Yakuza Driver is one of the book’s best stories, particularly because of the way Barnes sets up the character of his Cold Chisel bandmate Don Walker, who surprised the hell out of his long-time friend in 2013 by revealing a sudden passion for skiing in Japan. “This was a guy who, as far as I knew, never did anything fast,” writes Barnes. “Even his speech was restricted to the kind of language that could really only be spoken when you were in deep thought and sitting down on solid ground. Preferably flat ground. Flat and mostly dry. And, if possible, not only dry but also cleared as far as the eye could see.”
The caper itself is centred on the two tourists and their families visiting a tiny, remote restaurant that only takes cash as payment, and it’s a ripping read, shot through with plenty of humour and colour gleaned from the author’s many visits to South-East Asia since meeting his Thai-born wife Jane.
Yet the following chapter sees Barnes’s mind flashing back several decades to an otherwise unremarkable night in Sydney where he happened to witness a man leap to his death from a neighbouring apartment balcony.
“It took a long time for help to arrive,” he writes. “Meanwhile I sat on the ground next to the body. I cried and I sang and I told him my darkest secrets. I felt for him. I was just like him, but I hadn’t quite sunk as low as he had. I would, of course – I just didn’t know it then. But not until much, much later.”
The stark contrast between these two chapters is representative of Killing Time as a whole: from one page to the next, you never know what you’re going to get with Barnes, although you can be sure it’ll be well-written either way.
This is a book where the author’s present zest for life regularly rubs shoulders with memories of despair, and if nothing else, it’ll keep you on your toes. The chapter concerning the life and death of his beloved dogs, the “Schnauzer Brothers” Oliver and Snoop Dog, are heart-rending. The pure love with which he writes of his animals is more than enough to make any pet owner hug theirs closer.
For his many fans, it’s another valuable contribution to the ongoing story of one of the most fascinating and multifaceted public figures this country has ever seen. Not many musicians could pull off the task of writing three long books about their lives in relatively quick succession, but Barnes doesn’t just get away with it – he deserves the time and space these books demand.
Andrew McMillen is The Australian’s national music writer and author of Talking Smack: Honest Conversations About Drugs (UQP, 2014).
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