Music is a way of remembering, and I guess we all remember differently. This is how I recall a trip across North America when I was hot shit for a few weeks …

A limousine picked me up at Los Angeles International Airport and whisked me to my suite at the Beverly Wilshire. This hotel, former happy hunting ground of Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Warren Beatty, is the one people think of when they think of Hollywood. Julia Roberts bedded Richard Gere here in Pretty Woman. I was meeting the head of Arista Records, Clive Davis, who was ensconced at the Chateau Marmont. Virtually every important figure in film and rock had stayed, partied or died at the Marmont, which looked like a castle in France.

My room was a cut above my usual: a flat on top of a shop in Malvern, where my girlfriend and I lived. It was a little overpowering, all that marble and a gigantic bed, with mirrors on the ceiling and TV sets wherever you turned. Instead of enjoying it, I immediately grew anxious: this much opulence would come at a price I could not imagine ever being able to afford. I was not rock-savvy. I was passionate about music. The idea of selling lots of records seemed highly unlikely. Though record companies do not like to acknowledge it, I was sure that success had more to do with luck than talent. This belief of mine would slowly drive managers and the rest of the group nuts.

A record company minder drove me to meet-and-greet dinners with journalists, record shop owners, radio station-types. Los Angeles was exactly as I imagined from reading about it in rock mags: one huge urban sprawl broken up with factories, shopping strips, traffic problems and antique oil rigs. A good coffee was impossible to get. Away from the main drag the only pedestrians you saw were winos. I didn’t drive, so exploring was out. I did little sightseeing at all, which was dumb, as I was a huge fan of Raymond Chandler and Christopher Isherwood and the theosophical movement, which was based in Pasadena. I loved the Spanish mission bungalows. They reminded me of Murrumbeena.

Drugs and sex were available but I was speedy and neurotic already; I didn’t need help. Alcohol was my social lubricant. I wasn’t much interested even in that. All I drank was Pernod on ice, and I only drank that because of the constant references to it on The Velvet Underground’s Live at Max’s Kansas City album. It was frustrating, being a control freak, not getting out more or letting myself go. In my head I was waiting for someone to leap from the shadows and scream: ‘Go home, twit. You’ve had your glimpse of Aladdin’s cave. Now piss off.’

I was lingering over a bad coffee and a cigarette when my record company minder picked me up for my meeting in Clive Davis’s castle hideaway. That did make me feel special. Americans are different; within two minutes they are telling you the most personal details about their life. Clive Davis was a giant-maker in wire framed glasses. His hair was thinning. Underneath his expensive suit, a gold pin on the lapel, he was carrying a few extra pounds. Davis was a low talker, and as he spoke he leaned in towards me: ‘You could be a special artist. I know what’s a hit and I can tell what’s special.’

Things went quiet for a moment or two. I was thinking, Clive Davis has an incredible track record and Clive Davis is looking at me. He coughed and said more formally: ‘I like you and I want to sign you.’

He informed me that I was a fabulous singer, then whoosh – I was off to New York and Arista HQ that afternoon. Davis appeared genuine. But I was still anxious. He had asked me about the new album we were about to record in London that would cost Arista another $250,000. He hoped it would be radio-friendly, though he didn’t put it as crudely as that. Davis was known as the most considerate and pro-artist executive in music. Still, once you take the money, the record company calls the tune.

Lunch the next day was with my record company minder at the Russian Tea Room in New York. Among the many men I spoke with that afternoon was actor Michael York, who played a reserved and well-spoken English academic in Cabaret. That’s how he was in real life too. We promised to send a copy of our album to his people. The day wound down with photo shoots in white warehouse apartments and retail therapy at a SoHo retro store that had a neat range of I Love Lucy stuff. The shop assistant, an up-and-coming actress, said The Clash had been in the previous day and bought heaps. This was when The Clash were going through their wise-guys meets-rockabilly look. I think I purchased a couple of nifty Flintstones bowling shirts, nothing as grand as the retro gear I’d find at the old menswear shops in Albury, Beechworth or Warracknabeal.

It was a good beginning as far as beginnings go. Soon I was on a plane to London and a recording studio in Chiswick, with accommodation booked above a Qantas shop. After these recording sessions – notable for bouts of paranoia and a rising tension within the group – The Sports returned to New York. We drove immediately to Boston to start our tour across a bloody big country. Where it would end, no one knew. Talent and good songs will take you only so far if the booker screws up, and the amps blow up, and the audience isn’t receptive, and the songs refuse to gel, and the label loses interest, and the financial wrangling turns messy, and the singer storms out of an interview because he’s got hostility issues.

I had stopped talking to the other group members. I was not having much fun. The world wasn’t how I wanted it to be; it was how it was. A week earlier, our first US album Don’t Throw Stones had entered the shops. Our record company was a prestigious American label run by a future rock and roll hall-of-fame inductee. Our single ‘Who Listens to the Radio?’ had gone top forty nationally and top ten in cities like San Francisco. The moment we arrived, the single dropped five spots and our hit was fading into the void. This did not help my inner stability problems – which was why Michael Gudinski was on board, even though we already had a tour manager named Jeff plus a US manager, Billy Joel’s first wife Elizabeth.

In Buffalo we played at a brown brick motel indistinguishable from all the other brown brick motels. A reasonable crowd came along, considering it was midweek
and winter was closing in. The foldback was shocking. The sound system sucked. And yet everyone, even B.B.King, played at places like this. Maybe I was being a paranoid pain in the neck. I preferred to think of my situation as battle fatigue. A normal day’s touring went: drive, sound-check, visit a radio station, take a dump, eat shit, perform, hit the piss and keep going.

The next day we’d played the New York Palladium with The Buzzcocks and The Fall. A Village Voice review gave us some kind of upbeat recommendation while noting that our songs had too many hooks. It didn’t seem fair. The Fall were a bunch of lads in bad suits with their backs to the audience. Mark E. Smith was not as abusive or as funny as I’d hoped. The Buzzcocks, needless to say, had just the right amount of hooks. Everything was grand in Punkland.

Hurrah’s was the coolest of the cool new rock-disco clubs sweeping New York City. It was a giant warehouse with a stage, a long bar and two female DJs, Meg Griffin and Jane Hamburger. The dressing rooms reminded me of the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda. Spray-painted messages and rough drawings of cocks and tits. Yep, it was cool, and we’d scored a gig there because Gudinski had good pull with the programmers and probably because of our Billy Joel connection. Whatever – it was great exposure. On the night we played, the place was packed with tennis players, musicians, models, hangers-on and Mick Jagger. Billy Joel gave me a pep talk in the dressing room.

I was nervous as all get out. Our moment came and we hit the stage. A certain sense of expectation fizzed round the room: who are these fuckers anyway? I called out ‘Suspicious Minds’. It transpired that only half the group heard me – and that I had committed a sin. The set list had ‘Boys! (What Did the Detective Say?)’ as the opening tune and I had not gone with the set list. The drummer counted in the song. Half the group began playing ‘Suspicious Minds’ and the other half played ‘What Did the Detective Say?’. I was shell-shocked. We tried again. This time the halves swapped positions. We couldn’t seem to get the band playing the same song. I turned my back on the audience. Was there any point trying again? On our third attempt we succeeded and for the next hour
we bashed out an OK set.

Afterwards in the dressing room, Billy visited me once more. His first words were: ‘This is not your fault. There will come a time when you will look back at this and it will be funny.’

Billy Joel knows a thing or two about pain. That’s the price you pay for being the piano man 24/7 and being permanently in a New York state of mind. But I hate
uncertainty.
‘Will it be funny tomorrow, Billy?’
He shook his head.
‘Next week?’
He shook his head again.
‘Next month?’
Without warning Billy was gone. Over his shoulder he told me he’d left a tall babe and a drink with an umbrella at the bar. He also screamed at me to stop being such a fucken prima donna.

I found Billy’s words not very reassuring.

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Edited extract from "Will It Be Funny Tomorrow", Misadventures In Music, by
Stephen Cummings, published by Hardie Grant Books. Available at all good
book stores now.