The Long Road to Overnight Success, page 10
Some of my other jobs have been a little more unusual. Through Gang Show I was doing two-hander comedy routines with my mate Damien Lippiatt, him as the straight man and me as the goof again, just like in those early days of Gang Show. Right from when we were seventeen or so, we were doing corporate shows here and there. When we had just turned eighteen we started doing a slapstick comedy act at Rumpole’s Theatre Restaurant in Melbourne. We got free drinks, a free meal and $20, and to us that was a big deal: we were actually getting paid to do comedy. With our other mates Wayne Motton and Keith Stubley, we did vaudeville-style comedy acts and barber-shop quartets, musically led by our friend Alex Boemo.
Even though I always seemed to have more jobs than I knew what to do with, some of my riskier ventures have terrified Dad. Dad has always held job security in great regard and he said to me before I headed off to Sweden at the age of 22, ‘You’ve got a job as a sales rep, 120-odd clients and a mobile phone and a brand-new car, and you’re going to quit it all to follow a girl to Sweden. You’ve got a perfectly secure job! If you come back you’ll have no money. And don’t go thinking you’ll get any from me if you’re foolish enough to give up a wage.’
Maybe because of the tough times he’d been through when he was young, Dad hated the idea that I was going to throw in a job to go travelling. Mum and Dave were more relaxed about it all. Their attitude was, ‘Oh well, he’s going to go and experience the world.’
When I came back from Sweden after being there close to a year, as soon as I arrived I started ringing people and saying, ‘I’m back in town, what’s going on? Is there any work around?’ Within a week or two I got a job at French Knickers, a theatre restaurant in Richmond.
They were good times. I worked at French Knickers every Friday and Saturday for two years. They presented a themed variety show for their customers, and when I was there the theme was horror. As customers arrived at the door I greeted them dressed as the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Once everyone was in, I went upstairs, got changed and set up the back of the stage. Then when the show started I was the stage manager and operated the lighting and the sound. For a while there I would go on stage at the very start of the show and perform as the Hunchback, alongside a girl in the cast, Bindi Edwards, who’s become a friend of mine for life; we were flatmates for a while too. Quite often if they were a bit light on in the kitchen I’d help serve meals at intermission, then I’d go backstage again to reset the stage for the second half. When the show was finished I’d go and turn the stage into a dance floor, put up the hand rails and then I was the DJ.
One night some trouble started: a massive guy came in and was terrorising people. I quickly learned that I was also the bouncer. Before the police arrived I was the one who had to throw this enormous guy out; in the process he spun around and hit me in the side of the mouth with his elbow and knocked a corner off one of my teeth. We certainly put on a show for the patrons that night.
The backstage work did a great deal to satisfy my urge to be part of a performance, as well as appealing to the side of me that was fascinated with how things worked. But every now and then, when he saw me heading down these dirt tracks of distraction, Clay would turn up and say to me, ‘You know, you’ve just taken a wrong turn again. If you want to be on the highway that leads to a town called entertainment, what you’re doing right now is taking a back road. Sure, it’ll get you to that town, but it leads to the south side, and that’s not where the stage is.’ He was right, of course. I was doing little bits of entertainment that gave me enough nourishment to feed the bug, but it wasn’t the full dream. It’s the difference between kicking a football around the local oval with your mates and running out in front of a packed stadium as a professional player. I was kicking a football with mates.
Those years held a lot of back roads for me. My mate Wayne’s dad and his family owned a company called Motton Hire, and I worked part time there for a while too. At the time I was singing in a band and doing fireworks with the Lawtons, then on Saturday mornings I worked for the Mottons, hiring out concrete mixers, jackhammers and the like.
Of all those jobs, the most enduring was fireworks, which was what I did in my time off from full-time jobs. I did that for thirteen years, both outdoor and indoor fireworks, working on shows for bands like Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses, U2, Prince, AC/DC and Dire Straits on their Brothers in Arms tour — the list is longer than an orang-utan’s arm.
Concerts like Bon Jovi certainly opened my eyes: as a seventeen-year-old I was watching women throw underpants and bras on stage, with notes tied to them with their phone numbers and information about what they would be willing to do to try and make the lead singer of these bands a little bit happier than he already was. There were mounds of underwear and teddy bears all over the stage afterwards; I remember taking a bundle of bears and a few of the underpants and bras home and giving the toy bears to my little sister Nat, and showing my stepdad David some of the notes on the bras and undies, saying to him, ‘Read that! That’s unbelievable!’
I loved the song ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’, so when I worked on the Poison concert at the National Tennis Centre I decided to ask Bret Michaels where he got the idea from for that song. He was really nice; during a break in one of the sound checks he sat down on the front of the stage with me and we had a bit of a chat. Many years later I realised that would be the one question he got asked every single day. It’s like someone asking me, ‘Where did you and your brother get the idea for Kenny?’ I try to keep that moment in mind and remember that I’m no different from anyone else, asking the most obvious question.
Poison continued their tour around Australia after that but about a week later they had to come back to Melbourne to do another gig, this time at Festival Hall, a much smaller venue. We had to fit the same show into Festival Hall, and it didn’t actually fit. The back lighting truss was so low it would have hit Rikki Rockett, the drummer, in the head, so they had to pull lights off the truss just to get the whole set to squeeze in that venue. At one point, Bret Michaels came backstage with his girlfriend. He introduced me to her and we chatted for a few minutes. As they walked off together I remember thinking to myself, ‘That’s the most attractive girl I think I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m not even sure if she’s real.’ She was only about 21 at the time, but later the name Pamela Anderson meant considerably more to me and to the rest of the world.
They were amazing days. I was doing rock ’n’ roll shows, stadium concerts and festivals, being blown away by sitting next to massive sound systems and being blown off my feet. I’ve seen fireworks closer than I ever want to see them again.
Working in fireworks you get used to things going bang next to your head; if you’re not used to it you do get a bit of a fright. When I started out we fired them by hand, and things could get a little hairy at times. One of my favourite shows ever was Skyshow, a fireworks display that happened simultaneously all around the country on Australia Day. Each year hundreds of thousands of people would come along to the Melbourne show; everyone would bring a radio and tune it in to Fox-FM, and the fireworks were timed to the music. In Melbourne the Skyshow was held at Albert Park Lake, where the Formula One Grand Prix is now held, so throughout the display the whole park was alive with music; it was fantastic.
The Melbourne Skyshow took us all week to set up, so that accounted for a week’s annual leave from Westpac. We set up the fireworks in the middle of Albert Park Lake. One year a camera crew came out to the island to film us in action. At one point during the show a ten-inch shell went up in the air, failed to go off and landed back on the ground. A ten-inch shell is the size of a bowling ball, so imagine a bowling ball falling out of the sky and cracking you on the head. Luckily this thing hit the ground without taking out anyone with it, and still didn’t go off. There were a lot of people around so if it had, then quite a few could have been hurt, or worse. I made the decision to grab it, make a run for the water and throw it in.
‘You guys may want to get out the way,’ I shouted at the camera crew. I scooped up what was essentially a large bomb, and ran towards the lake holding it in my hands and my breath in my lungs. I made it to the edge of the water and threw it in.
‘What was that?’ one of the film crew asked.
‘That was a ten-inch shell,’ I replied.
‘What do you mean?’
‘That was one that didn’t go off; it came out of the sky.’
At that point both the cameraman and producer said, ‘Nope, you guys can have this job. This is rubbish, this is bullshit.’ They ran and hid inside the back of a truck and didn’t film another thing that night.
Crazy things happened sometimes simply because we were moving so fast. We were doing the Rose Festival in Benalla one year and time was running out. We were darting round like dogs with Dencorub on their dates just trying to get everything done, setting up a fireworks show right on the edge of the river. It got to the point when I only had about two more things to wire up. There was an effect called distorting that used to come in a box that you’d sit on the ground and wire to an electrical detonator. Once it went off it would shoot about 99 individual ball-bearing-sized fireworks up fifteen or twenty metres in the air and then off they’d go, firing rapidly one after the other. I had two of those to set up so I ran out and set them up on the riverbank, head down and bum up. We’d been there all day but there was just so much to do; in fact the show had already started while I was still finishing setting up the two distorting effects. I finally went over to where they were firing some of the show and then it was time for the distorting box to be fired. As it went off I watched these fireworks fly out of the box and start to bounce off the limbs of the gum tree beneath which I’d set it up. It sounds impossible but I’d had my head down in the rush and just hadn’t looked up to see what was above. The fireworks were hitting the branches and bouncing around, and the crowd was going ‘Ooh!’ ‘Aah!’ ‘Oh, wow!’ ‘Gee!’ and all the kids were cheering; it looked beautiful as this whole tree came to life. And somehow it never caught fire.
After the show finished the organisers and the Mayor said to Des Lawton, ‘That effect you did in that tree was amazing.’
‘Yeah, yeah, we’re pretty happy with that,’ he said. ‘It was a bit of an experimental thing; they’re pretty hard to come by; we’re not sure if we’ll be able to do it again.’
When John Farnham played a New Year’s Eve concert at the Myer Music Bowl one year, we had all these fireworks called airbursts attached to the truss, and a big sign saying Happy New Year at the front of the stage. The airbursts are what we call cold flame, they don’t hurt; you can fire them right beside your skin and they’re fine. But the sparks that came off the set piece that spelt Happy New Year would be hot. On the floor of the stage there was a bank of speakers, what we call foldback wedges, facing back at the singer and the musicians. We asked the organisers several times, ‘Have the foam inserts on those speakers been fireproofed?’ ‘Yep, yep, they have been,’ they kept saying. Come the countdown to midnight, John Farnham began belting out ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top’. While he did that we got ready to let off the sign saying ‘Happy New Year’. The moment arrived and the fireworks went off. All the sparks came down off the set piece and slowly started setting fire to the foam on the speakers in front of John Farnham. John started kicking into the wedges to put some of the flames out. The audience must have been pretty impressed, thinking, ‘Wow, John Farnham is rocking this song so hard,’ when in fact what he was doing was trying to put out some of the flames.
I have many good memories of piling into Des Lawton’s Ford Bronco along with Des and Steve, a trailer behind loaded with pyrotechnics, travelling country Victoria. They were good times. We’d turn up in Echuca, or Mildura, or Benalla for the Rose Festival — we’d do it all. Part of me felt like I was going back to the carnie roots of the Jacobson family, heading off to town fairs and festivals out in the bush. I’ve travelled a lot since then, but there was something special about darting across Victoria blowing stuff up.
CHAPTER TEN
MEDICINE FOR THE HEART
For some, there is a time to stop being amusing; for the Jacobsons, that time is never. There are very few circumstances where our family can’t find room for a bit of humour, which can be such good medicine for an aching heart. Humour is what my family is made for, its raison d’être, during good times and bad.
As a teenager I was once about to go on stage to do a show with the curtain ready to fly up. I was chatting to one of the other performers standing just behind me and I made a joke about cancer and death. This lovely girl said to me, ‘Shane, how dare you do that? There are people dying of cancer every day.’ Turning around, I said, ‘Yeah, I know. My stepmother just did, and this is how I choose to deal with it.’
The curtain flew up and we had to go ahead with the show then, but for a moment she looked at me as if she wanted to apologise for what she’d said without knowing my situation, and I tried to signal with my eyes that it was alright: ‘I wasn’t trying to put you in your place, but don’t assume me to be heartless.’ If I could have said anything then it would have been, ‘I know people die of cancer every day, and there seems to be so little we can do to stop it. It hurts so many people and it brings so much pain and sadness, often without a chance to fight back, and that is precisely why I am joking about it. At least I can steal a smile from this horrible situation that leaves so little to celebrate.’
I was ten when Dad’s second wife, Gloria, first became ill, though none of us knew much about that — not even Dad because she had a real aversion to doctors and kept her symptoms quiet for a good while. At first Gloria was treated by a specialist for what he thought was a problem with the nerves in the lining of her stomach. After twelve months of treatment with little improvement, Gloria was diagnosed with cancer of the stomach.
Gloria’s prognosis was not good, but because she was only in her forties her oncologist suggested that it was worth trying a course of chemotherapy. For twelve months she rode the chemo rollercoaster: knocked around with each session of treatment then rallying in between to become her usual bright self again. After the second round of treatment, she started to lose her hair. That was a real blow to her, as it is to so many people, perhaps to women most of all. Men can do the bald look okay, but it’s not so easy for women. So Gloria was fitted for a wig, and Dad recalls that when he took her to pick it up she looked quite splendid. As they walked back to his car, though, a gust of wind sprang up and swept the wig off her head and down the street. They were in the middle of crossing a busy road and, as Dad describes it in his book,
With the oncoming traffic bearing down on us I had to quickly escort her to the safety of the footpath, do an about-turn and, skilfully evading the traffic, effect a brilliant one-handed pickup of the abandoned hairpiece … When I reached the owner of the elegant hairpiece, Gloria and I just looked at each other and burst out laughing.
Charlie Chaplin once said that in times of great sorrow brief moments of humour can spring to the surface. Our family certainly believes that laughter belongs everywhere.
Even so, despite Dad’s courage in caring for Gloria and despite her strong spirit, Gloria passed away in April 1983. I remember looking at her lying in her bed just before she died and thinking, ‘Wow, there’s really not much left of the Gloria that I know.’
Gloria’s passing shook Dad to his core. Both of my parents had endured painful experiences before, but losing Gloria really took its toll on him. My brother Clay stepped up and became a true companion to Dad. The day after Gloria’s funeral, Clay, who was studying at the Swinburne Film and Television School at the time, packed his things and moved out of our home to live with Dad in his flat in Maribyrnong so he wouldn’t be sitting there of a night all on his own. So there was my brother, my roommate, my superhero, moving out just the day after we lost Gloria.
Many times since then Dad has said Clay had to grow up way too quickly at that point. He became Dad’s emotional support and helped him through that time when things could have gone quite wrong for him. Clay lived with Dad for many, many years after that; they were father and son, flatmates and confidants.
Sitting in the car as part of Gloria’s funeral procession, it struck me — perhaps for the very first time — that life can be a very serious thing indeed. Although it looks like a magical world, and in many ways it is, every now and then the carousel stops for what can be very tragic circumstances, and the ride takes a while to start up again. Right at that moment, I realised that the world can be a really cruel place.
My dad had dealt with so much in his life, everything from extreme poverty to health problems of his own, and he was a hero to me. Yet here he was: the world had taken all the wind out of his sails and cut them into pieces, then punched holes in his boat. That man sitting in the car beside me wasn’t the same man as before.
We sat with Dad at the funeral parlour, Clay holding Dad’s hand, and we went with him on to Uncle Norm’s house for the wake. Along the way, something magical did happen. Dad had stitched up his sails, patched the holes in his hull and was sailing again, and within hours he was cracking jokes, smiling and laughing, working hard at the funeral of his wife to make everyone else feel good.
Of course Dad was still torn apart on the inside. He went on to grieve a great deal in private, but standing in my Uncle Norm’s kitchen I watched him entertain that room full of family and friends. I couldn’t help but admire him. He was amazing.
