Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  Bon, however, was a quite different type of person to any of the Youngs. He was outgoing, good-humored, and trusting, while the Youngs were a closed shop, uniformly suspicious, almost paranoid, possessed of the virtual opposite of Bon’s generosity of spirit, and prone to sullenness. Just as nobody can find a bad word for Bon, few people who have had dealings with the Youngs can find a good word for them. But Bon was united with Malcolm, Angus and George because they let him in, as they did so few others, and they shared a common goal—the music—and if nothing else, a ribald sense of humor.

  Gradually, though, as the band became more successful and the mood within it more businesslike (if not downright venal), and as everyone cultivated their own individual personal lives, Bon found himself more alone than ever. In the end, he really did have nowhere to go.

  The other tragedy in Bon’s death was not so much that he didn’t live to make it (Highway to Hell, his last album with the band, was big enough, and after a certain point the magnitude of success becomes academic); it was rather that as a writer, he was only just hitting his stride.

  AC/DC never received their critical due during Bon’s lifetime. Bon was contemptuous of the critics who didn’t even try to understand AC/DC; nevertheless, while there are few artists who don’t crave success on both critical and commercial fronts, what was most important and satisfying to Bon was that people simply “got off on it.”

  But if it’s true, as Matisse contended, that an artist’s greatness is measured by the number of new signs he introduces to the language, there’s no doubt that AC/DC are one of the great rock’n’roll bands.

  There’s something about listening to old AC/DC albums now, as if, even with all the vitality they still exude, they’re preserved in amber. At the time the band was making those records, however, there was nothing else that sounded like them; that so much sounds like them now is testimony to their greatness.

  The crosscut riffing which soon became AC/DC’s trademark—due to the telepathic communication between the two guitarist brothers, the Gibson and the Gretsch—had a seminal influence on rock as it lurched into the eighties. AC/DC laid the blueprint for what would become known as stadium rock—but also for its official antithesis, the grunge of the ’90s (not to mention contemporary “new rock”). The grunge-metal axis which revitalized rock in the nineties owed as much to AC/DC as it did to Led Zeppelin, the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols, Neil Young, the Ramones and Black Sabbath. Kurt Cobain, after all, taught himself guitar by playing along with AC/DC records.

  Critics were slow to acknowledge all this. It’s ironic though perhaps understandable, that Brian Johnson, as an outsider who joined AC/DC at a time when they were a fully realized band, has become their one spokesman capable of self-analysis. As he told RAM in 1981, “. . . with AC/DC it’s so easy and simple, critics can’t get into it and therefore they can’t describe it.” He’s saying that AC/DC have none of the identifiable elements that critics like to latch onto, whether they be literary—lyrics that beg to be analyzed—or the obvious signs of traditions inherited, sources updated.

  The wordy Bob Dylan is the orthodox rock critic’s yardstick against which all else is measured. Dylan invested rock with meaning, made it something “serious” (like it’s not serious when Elvis declares, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” and turns the entire Western world upside down!). But too many critics suffer from an inferiority complex in the face of their “high art” brethren who look down on rock’n’roll; they seem to think rock’n’roll needs elevation. What they fail to realize is that rock’n’roll was born of base instincts, of disposability and banality—the commercial imperative—and it’s still at its glorious best when it revels in these qualities, accepts them only to transcend them, becomes like the brilliant implosion of a dark star which itself dies but burns an indelible mark on those who see it.

  It is pretension, not intelligence or sensitivity, that is rock’n’roll’s worst enemy. A pretension that is ashamed of rock’s gutter origins.

  Music, by definition, transcends the literal, and rock’n’roll is at its best when it springs purely from instinct, uncluttered by intellect. Simple and direct, it can have an immediate power that doesn’t have to preclude resonance. If Bon fails to fit the orthodox Dylanesque measure of a great rock lyricist, then more power to him. The real point is a matter of attitude, tone, and honesty. Bon was a storyteller who had a terrific eye for detail yet liked to get straight to the moral of the story, and who also, importantly, rejected self-censorship (he was aware, for instance, of the inflammatory nature of a song like “She’s Got the Jack” even when he wrote it, but he still went ahead with it).

  In a way, AC/DC never fitted in. Clearly, they’re not heavy metal, as they’re commonly described. Few heavy metal bands have a sense of humor, to start with. AC/DC developed in isolation, in Australia in the mid-seventies, citing only pure, classic fifties rock’n’roll as a source—Little Richard, Chuck Berry—and it’s perhaps because they sprang so directly from this untainted well that, whilst their sound might have seemed generic, it was actually because it was so original that it defied description.

  Even Britain’s New Musical Express, AC/DC’s erstwhile critical archenemy, had to admit upon the release of Highway to Hell, “By taking all the unfashionable clichés and metaphors of heavy rock, discarding every ounce of the genre’s attendant flab, and fusing those ingredients with gall, simplicity and deceptive facility into a dynamic whole, they have created an aesthetic of their own.”

  Says Rick Rubin: “When I was in junior high in 1979, my classmates all liked Led Zeppelin. But I loved AC/DC. When I’m producing a rock band, I try to create albums that sound as powerful as Highway to Hell. Whether it’s the Cult or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I apply the same basic formula: Keep it sparse. Make the guitar parts more rhythmic. It sounds simple, but what AC/DC did is almost impossible to duplicate. A great band like Metallica could play an AC/DC song note for note, and they still wouldn’t capture the tension and release that drives the music. There’s nothing like it.”

  There is something uniquely Australian about this. AC/DC’s down-to-earth, no-frills style—a sense of modesty almost, even in their arrogance; a passion more appropriate to amateurs, and a disdain for self-indulgence—coupled with a spirit of belligerent independence, a devout work ethic, and a profound sense of irreverence, has provided a model, one way or another, for practically every other Australian rock’n’roll act that has subsequently succeeded overseas, from INXS to Nick Cave to Silverchair to Jet.

  Bon was color to the band’s movement. As such, as a rock’n’roll star, he was granted license to exercise a total lack of restraint, in both his life and art. His fans admired him because he wasn’t afraid of anything; it seemed that he never stopped to think, just leapt straight in—he gave. He drew his art from life, the rampant fornicator stripped bare. The classic bluesmen addressed many of the same issues, only with more finesse—as does a contemporary black artist like Prince—but Bon, free of all artifice and pretension, talked plain to such a point that it went under the heads of many.

  But even if Bon might have had better writing ahead of him, that he still left us with such classics as “High Voltage,” “Long Way to the Top,” “Jailbreak,” “Live Wire,” “She’s Got Balls,” “Ride On,” “Let There Be Rock,” “Whole Lotta Rosie” and “Highway to Hell,” is enough. Certainly, AC/DC has produced little of equal stature since; to this day, the guts of their live set derives from their first six years with Bon.

  By 1979, AC/DC was an altogether different entity to what it once was. Torn by ambition, paranoia and betrayal, the band had become big business. Bon’s de facto family had left home. Both Malcolm and Angus were buying houses and had girlfriends, whom they would eventually marry. Bon meanwhile, on a return trip to Australia, bought a motorcycle. With customary bravado, he joked that he wasn’t ready yet to settle down. But in reality, unimpressed by all the glitt
ery excess and phoniness of stardom, and, if nothing else, just plain tired—or maybe, just finally starting to become a little jaded—he was determinedly trying to remain in touch with his roots, with the old friends he had who he knew were true friends. That he lacked the soul mate he so desired ate away at him. The bottle, and rock’n’roll—always the music—was all that sustained him meantime. He was working on new material for an album he knew would be as huge as Back in Black turned out. He was excited at the prospects. But then, suddenly, surprisingly, his life, his body, demanded its own back.

  For too long, Bon had pushed himself too hard. He could give no more.

  “The trouble with eulogizing a Janis Joplin,” concluded George Frazier, “is that, in doing so, we are eulogizing not achievement or artistry but a lifestyle that did no one any good, neither her nor those who idolized her. To try to pass off as art what was merely drunk and disorderly is to mislead the young. There are times when to speak ill of the dead is not to do a disservice, but to endow a wastrel existence with a certain significance—a cautionary memento mori to would-be disciples. In other words, what comfort is Southern Comfort when it contributes to the early end of a foolish little girl? Sometimes the young are very stupid.”

  “Jailbreak” became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like the song’s hero, Bon broke his shackles—but only to be shot down in flight.

  Up in the hills: Bon helps prepare the site for the Myponga Pop Festival outside Adelaide, January 1971. (courtesy John Freeman)

  1. ADELAIDE, 1974

  Well, I feel like a shirt that ain’t been worn

  Feel like a sheep that ain’t been shorn

  Feel like a baby that ain’t been born

  Feel like a rip that ain’t been torn

  Wish I’d done something so I could boast

  But I’ve had one less than the Holy Ghost

  And I hear that he’s had less than most

  I been up in the hills too long

  That old sow’s gettin’ too old now

  I been up in the hills too long

  Ain’t a thing on the farm that’s safe from harm

  I been up in the hills too long

  Well, I feel like a song that ain’t been sung

  I feel like a phone that ain’t been rung

  I feel like a barrel that ain’t been brung

  Feel like a murderer that ain’t been hung

  Wish I’d done something so I could brag

  I feel like a squirrel that ain’t been bagged

  25 years and I ain’t been shagged

  Been up in the hills too long

  Well, I feel like an egg that ain’t been laid

  I feel like a bill that ain’t been paid

  I feel like a giant that ain’t been slayed

  I feel like a sayin’ that ain’t been sayed

  Well, I don’t think things can get much worse

  I feel my life is in reverse

  One more fuck it’ll be my first

  I been up in the hills too long.

  —Bon Scott, “Been Up in the Hills Too Long” (1974)

  FEBRUARY 1974. Bon Scott was working on the weigh bridge at the Wallaroo fertilizer plant, down by the docks at Port Adelaide, South Australia. Loading trucks. Unloading trucks. It was backbreaking work, but Bon had never been afraid of work. He was a Scot, after all, and the Scots virtually invented the Protestant work ethic.

  He sweated it out in the heat and grime, listening to a transistor radio. Bon was a small man—5’ 5”—but somehow he was imposing. He had an implacable sort of frame. It took punishment well. The tattoos completed the picture.

  No, Bon wasn’t afraid of hard work—Bon Scott wasn’t afraid of anything—it was just that he preferred not to have to do it. That, after all, was why he had got into rock’n’roll in the first place. It wasn’t even so much for the chicks, because Bon could always score—women just seemed to like Bon, and Bon loved women. It was work Bon wanted to avoid, the daily, nine-to-five grind of selling that too-large a piece of your soul in return for what? A nagging wife, an interminable mortgage, screaming hungry mouths to feed? The last thing Bon ever wanted was to feel a yoke around his neck.

  Bon wanted to be able to wake up when he felt like it, wherever he found himself. He wanted to do as he pleased, see the world, try everything. He wanted to be able to get on stage and strut his stuff and feel people appreciated it. He wanted to be able to believe in himself.

  But Bon’s rock’n’roll dream had recently gone wrong. He’d just returned from England with, or rather without, Fraternity, the band he’d joined after the Valentines broke up. A wastrel tribe of spoiled hippies, Fraternity had gone overseas expecting success to land in their lap. When that didn’t happen, they were stumped. Eventually they straggled home, embittered and in disarray.

  With his young marriage also in tatters, Bon was altogether without a rudder. It was the first time since before he joined his first band, the Spektors, in 1964 that he was not in a band; and being in a rock’n’roll band that was going somewhere, or at least entertained the hope of going somewhere, was what justified Bon’s life. Not since the Spektors turned pro had Bon worked a day job. He didn’t even have his wife Irene to support him now.

  Bon was crashing at a tiny place former Fraternity leader Bruce Howe had in Semaphore. He was getting around on the new bike he’d bought—a Triumph, which everyone told him was just too big—and seeing Irene and squabbling with her.

  To keep himself out of any more trouble, and just to keep his hand in, Bon was mucking around with an outfit called the Mount Lofty Rangers, and it was then that he wrote “Been Up in the Hills Too Long.” A bluegrass stomp, it referred nominally to the farm in the Adelaide hills that had once been Fraternity’s communal home. But with its mood of discontent, it was perhaps more prophetic than literal.

  One Friday night in late February, the Rangers were rehearsing at the Old Lion Hotel in North Adelaide. Bon arrived on his bike, late, and a bit pissed. There was nothing unusual in that. Bon was always running late, and he always carried a flask of Johnnie Walker or Southern Comfort in his pocket. The heady days of tripping were over, but the scene had now become a pretty heavy drinking one.

  Bon was upset and angry. He’d had a tiff with Irene. That wasn’t unusual either—Bon and Irene fought all the time—but this time Bon had been tipped over the edge. Bon’s fuse was by any standards a long one; but that night, with all the energy that had previously found an outlet on stage pent up inside him, he snapped.

  Bon got drunker and more agitated, and took it out on the musicians. The musicians responded in kind. Absolutely blind, Bon stormed off, telling everyone to get fucked. This was his dark side, when he didn’t care even for his own safety, when his recklessness became purely self-destructive. Everyone told him, Don’t get on your bike, Bon, you’re too pissed to ride. Bon told them to fuck off. He furiously threw an empty bottle on the ground, and, amid smashed glass, roared off.

  The hospital rang Irene in the early hours of Saturday morning. Irene rang Vince Lovegrove, one of Bon’s oldest friends, who lived just around the corner. Calls from his friend at all hours were not unusual, Vince later recalled in the obituary he wrote to Bon, but this time Vince knew something was wrong as soon as the phone woke him. He too had watched Bon ride off into the night.

  “I went and picked up Irene and we went down to the hospital,” Lovegrove said. “Bon was a mess. All his teeth were wired up, he was on a respirator, and he was abusing the nurses, abusing them through this respirator!”

  A report ran the following day in the News under the headline SINGER INJURED. “Well-known Adelaide pop singer Bon Scott has been seriously injured in a motorcycle accident,” it read. “Scott, who suffered a broken arm, broken leg, broken nose and concussion in the accident at Croydon, is in a serious condition at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital intensive care ward.”

  After three days in and out of consciousness, and then four weeks in traction, Irene finally took Bon
home. He had almost died; but maybe, as things so often are, the accident was meant to happen. Bon was certainly one to believe in fate. Mobility was central to Bon’s philosophy of life: it was just, keep moving. And here he was laid up with his leg in a cast, with wires through his jaw, resenting the hell out of his condition, but finally being forced to stop and think.

  He decided that he had to leave Fraternity, Adelaide, even Irene. He didn’t want to give up on his marriage, but he had to. His calling was somewhere out there on the road, and Irene just wanted to settle down. And while he appreciated the fact that Fraternity had opened his musical horizons after the shallow Valentines, he realized he’d had enough of this serious shit. He wanted to rock’n’roll, pure and simple.

  Bon had to find a ticket out.

  When he got back on his feet, Vince, who was working as a concert promoter, gave him some odd jobs to do—putting up posters, driving around visiting bands, painting the office. In August, Vince brought a virtually unknown band by the name of AC/DC to town.

  It was the answer to all Bon’s prayers.

  Vince kept telling Bon how good these kids were, and urging him to come down and have a look at them. They wanted a new singer and Vince had the idea of putting them and Bon together. Bon was skeptical, but he went along to see them one night anyway.

  Hobbling into the Pooraka Hotel, Bon had no idea he was staring his future in the face. But AC/DC was everything he could have asked for—a gung-ho young rock’n’roll band in need of a front man. If Bon had any doubts about himself—that he wasn’t fully recovered from the accident, or that at 28 he was getting on a bit—they were swept aside. AC/DC and Bon were made for each other.

  Within weeks, Bon was playing his debut performance with the band in Sydney. The Youngs had found the link they were after. AC/DC were on their way.