Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  WYN: “We used to sneak into the 6KY record library late at night and go through the old stuff looking for singles that had the big hole in the middle. You’d find something and say, Who’s this?”

  With their matching blue sharkskin suits, the band was also developing a sensational stage act which would soon even incorporate flashbombs.

  In January 1967, the Valentines played in front of their biggest ever crowd—over 3,000 teenagers—at a concert for Torchbearers for Legacy in Perth’s Supreme Court Gardens. The Sunday Times praised the band: “with lead singers Bon and Vince clearly demonstrated [sic] their vibrant personality.”

  Life, then, for the band was good. They’d all quit their day jobs. There were always parties, and everyone was young and pretty. Bon and Maria made a handsome couple, even if they squabbled a lot. Maria liked to play cat and mouse with Bon. But when the games became too much to bear, Bon took up overtly with a go-go dancer by the name of Lyn. Maria soon lured him back though.

  “Now established as one of the star attractions on the Perth scene,” as a 6KY fan club flyer put it, it was inevitable that the Valentines would link up with Clarion Records. Headed by Martin Clarke and distributed by Festival (Australia’s own major label), Clarion was one of the many independents that sprang up and fostered local talent in Australia in the sixties. The Valentines thus went into a primitive studio off Hay Street in the center of Perth very late one night, and emerged the following morning clutching a one-take, two-track tape of two simple tunes.

  “Everyday I Have To Cry” was a rolling, melodic song originally cut by black US country-soul singer Arthur Alexander; while “Can’t Dance With You” was a B-side for the Small Faces, a prime slice of proto-funk/rock. As a debut single by a band from the backwoods of Perth, it wasn’t bad, and when it was released in May 1967 it duly climbed into the top five in the Western Australian charts.

  The Vallies, as they were affectionately known, were on a roll. When the all-conquering Easybeats played two shows at His Majesty’s on June 12 on their return tour from England after the worldwide success of “Friday on My Mind,” the Valentines supported. The Easys took a real shine to them. It was likely on this occasion that songwriter-guitarist and fellow Scot, George Young, first noticed Bon, how reminiscent he was of his own band’s front man, “Little” Stevie Wright. Of course, of all the Easybeats, Bon idolized Little Stevie particularly, to the point of consciously aping his moves.

  The Valentines partied with the Easybeats back at their hotel, as hordes of screaming teenage girls littered the footpath below. The two bands swapped shirts like opposing Grand Final football teams, and the Easys even knocked up a song on the spot for Vallies. Not much of a song, it’s true, but one that would constitute the Valentines’ second single.

  “She Said” was the first of three songs the Easybeats would give to the Valentines, and it was the start of the lifelong relationship George Young would have with Bon.

  Bon and Maria had kissed (at most!) and made up, but just as soon, Maria was taking off for the big smoke, Melbourne. There had to be something more there than working in the pay office at the Fremantle docks.

  MARIA: “I was ready to go, but I don’t think I would have gone if I didn’t know that somewhere down the track, Bon was going to come too.”

  Wyn Milson, by this time, had effectively moved into the Scotts’ North Fremantle home, rather than having to commute all the way to Medina all the time. “Bon just said, Come and stay at my place; didn’t ask his parents, and basically, they just accepted me. When I think about it now, if someone lobbed at my house, and was coming in at three every morning making hot chocolate, leaving burnt milk in the saucepan, and then went to bed in the lounge room so you couldn’t go in there till one in the afternoon, I would throw them out. But they never said a word.”

  “She Said” was released in July, backed with a lame version of Phil Spector’s “To Know You Is To Love You.” It was a step back for the Valentines, probably only recorded because it was penned by the Easybeats. Bon blew a recorder, presumably just because he could. Not even all the Valentines’ hometown hero status could save “She Said.” It stiffed.

  The irony is that even as the single couldn’t get out of the blocks, the band won the State final of the Hoadley’s Battle of the Sounds. The Valentines flew to Melbourne to compete in the national final, and though they were beaten out of first place by the Groop, they made a good impression. Tastemakers Ian “Molly” Meldrum of Go-Set and DJ Stan “The Man” Rofe both gave them the nod. Vince, of course, got in some serious networking during the visit; and so, flying home, the Valentines had no second thoughts as to where their future lay.

  The band’s plan was to get together the money to pay for the move to Melbourne. They got onto a winner in an all-day every-day gig at the State Fair, with visiting Victorian star Ronnie Burns.

  WYN: “You’d do a half hour on stage, then go out the back so they could throw everybody out, and then you’d go up and do it again.”

  Bassist Bruce Abbott fell victim to the dreaded fiancée disease, and decided to stay behind in Perth and get married. He was replaced by John Cooksey. Bon wrote to Maria just a week before the band was due to leave for Melbourne:We have had no end of complications with our trip. It looked almost as though we would have to call it off till we got more money. Vin and I are going to Perth tomorrow to sell everything we can lay our hands on . . .

  I guess that you’re having a great time going to all the new places. I hope we can both have a good time together when I arrive. I hope that it works out this time. If it doesn’t I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll be so flippin’ lonely.

  VINCE: “No one in Perth could understand why we wanted to leave. They said, It’s paradise here, it’s sunny, we’ve got all these beautiful beaches. What could you say?”

  The band finally got it together and they all met at the station to catch the train. The scene was like something out of Exodus. Mothers were sobbing, fathers stoic. The boys were beside themselves.

  They felt like explorers or crusaders. The trip across the Nullarbor Plain was all of four days—somehow they would have to contain their excitement—and at the other end, Melbourne was still very much an unknown quantity. But they were blessed with the hope of the age, the confidence of their youth and their innocence.

  If and when they returned to Perth, it would be as stars, conquering heroes. And so it would be.

  The Valentines go bubblegum. Left to right: Vince Lovegrove, Doug Lavery, Wyn Milson, Bon, Ted Ward, John Cooksey. Vince: “Melbourne was a lot more teenybopper oriented, which we foolishly catered to because it was good for the ego. But it wasn’t really doing us much good musically.” (courtesy Vince Lovegrove)

  5. MELBOURNE

  The Valentines arrived in Melbourne on Friday the 13th of October, 1967—drawn inextricably to the city which was at the time indisputably Australia’s pop capital.

  The rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney is one of Australia’s oldest. Sydney, city of water, speed and light, is the New World to Melbourne’s Old, with its long winters and its somber, more rarefied air. The rock’n’roll scenes in the two cities have always been as distinctly different as those of Los Angeles and London, and have always vied for supremacy.

  In the very early sixties, both Sydney and Melbourne played host to thriving teenage dance circuits. The music was almost entirely instrumental rock’n’roll—surf music in Sydney, while Melbourne bands had a brassier sound. When the Beatles exploded and every instrumental band in the land scrambled to find a singer—not to mention grow their hair—it was Sydney, for some reason, that produced the first rush of hits, via the Easybeats and the Aztecs. But Sydney’s dominance wouldn’t last long. By the end of 1965, the emphasis had swung to Melbourne. It would not return to Sydney till the start of the eighties.

  Success in rock’n’roll, like most fields, takes more than talent, and Melbourne had more than just bands. It had the Anglophile mod look that sunny Sy
dney could never quite approximate. It quickly became Australia’s media capital, too, the home of Go-Set magazine, the weekly bible of the sixties Australian pop scene, and of TV’s Go!! show and other national shows like Kommotion and Uptight.

  Melbourne also boasted a whole new breed of young entrepreneurs who helped build up its live circuit. Although Australia is now famous for its bands bred in pubs, pubs didn’t really open up to live rock’n’roll until the licensing hours were extended in the early seventies. In Melbourne in the sixties there were two types of gigs, neither of which allowed alcohol: teenage dances in the suburbs, held in halls, church halls, town halls; and, for the older, more sophisticated audience, late-night clubs, called discos, which were unlicensed too (licensed clubs remained the preserve of adult entertainment, jazz, cabaret or comedy). With varying degrees of success, bands straddled the two circuits, from, say, the Q Club, a dance in suburban Kew, to city discos like the Thumpin’ Tum, or Sebastian’s in St. Kilda.

  Led by the Loved Ones, Bobby & Laurie, the Groop and Ronnie Burns, a second wave of acts exploded out of Melbourne in 1965, leaving every Sydney band except the Easybeats eating dust. Further strengthening the scene, the Masters Apprentices and the Twilights moved to Melbourne from Adelaide, and then Johnny Young arrived from Perth.

  Little of the music itself was actually very good—Australian musicians, without any background in blues-based rock’n’roll, were still just trying to get a handle on it—but the seeds of something greater were being sown.

  When the Valentines pulled into Flinders Street Station on that Black Friday morning late in 1967, they had no tangible plans.

  VINCE: “We had Ronnie Burns’s phone number. We called him from the station. He came and picked us up and took us to a Chinese restaurant. We stayed at a hotel that night.”

  The West Australian had reported on the eve of the band’s departure, “The Valentines are willing to start at the bottom and work hard and these qualities have proven to be most necessary.” Indeed the Valentines would struggle for some time yet.

  Within a week of arriving in Melbourne, the band was being managed by former Loved Ones singer Gerry Humphries, in partnership with Johnny Young’s drummer Don Pryor—for what it was worth. The pair threw a generous reception to launch the band along with “She Said,” but then . . . nothing. Humphries and Pryor’s interest dropped off. On the rebound, the band signed on with AMBO, the Australian Management Booking Agency, which farmed out the talent to a large proportion of Melbourne’s discos and dances. But with “She Said” going nowhere, getting gigs wasn’t going to be easy.

  As if by way of a rude baptism, the Valentines were sent bush, on a tour of rural Victoria. They got around, gear and all, in a Kombi van they’d bought and daubed in psychedelic colors.

  Renting a house in the far eastern Melbourne suburb of Burwood, the band almost literally starved, earning barely enough to cover costs from unattended midweek gigs. They would go into supermarkets and eat in the aisles, or steal milk money on the way home late at night. Though most of them were in their early twenties, the Valentines were still boys who had barely broken away from their mothers’ apron strings, and they had no idea how to look after themselves. Female fans helped.

  Vince wrote: “Bon was the only guy in the band unruffled by our seemingly hopeless situation. He was a great positive inspiration in those days when we needed it most.”

  Bon would occasionally stay with Maria, who had a flat in the same block as Humphries and Pryor, in swish South Yarra. But their relationship would always be problematic. Bon had chosen his path in life, and Maria seemed unwilling to accept the reality that it entailed—that he would be away a lot, on the road; that he would attract a lot of attention, particularly female; and that he would make no money, at least not initially. They were always arguing. The rest of the band, in turn, resented Maria for the hold she had on Bon. However, even with her taunting, Bon was hopelessly romantically in love. Whenever he was away, he would write her love letters, sometimes several times a day.

  MARIA: “He used to talk about how when the group was successful and it would be on the road in Australia, and America, it would have a tour bus, and on the back would be a little caravan attached for he and I!”

  Bon was possibly a little intimidated by the sophisticated, cliquey Melbourne scene, and so was happy to put his faith in Vince, who seemed capable of scoring the necessary social points. It suited Vince’s ego to be making decisions for the band. Strangely, there was a quite subservient streak in Bon. It was not so much that he craved acceptance, rather that he wanted to please people, and at his best he could be quite unselfish. So for the meantime at least, he was bowing to both Maria and Vince.

  VINCE: “It was a confusing time anyway, for guys. Bon always seemed troubled by something, whether it was his creative desire as opposed to feelings of inadequacy due to his working-class origins, or lack of education, I don’t know. But there was some sort of conflict there, where he was unsure of himself. He had a lot of bravado, but really he was a softie underneath.”

  Vince pulled off a coup when he managed to sell the band away from AMBO to Ivan Dayman. Dayman was the agent behind Sunshine Records and Normie Rowe; from his base in Brisbane he controlled a circuit of venues all over Australia.

  As Dayman booked the band into Adelaide for a week in February, Clarion released a third Valentines single, “I Can Hear The Raindrops”/ “Why Me?” These were the first two original songs cut by the band—written by Vince and Ted Ward—but both were eminently forgettable, and the disc, again, died a death.

  In March, the band ventured for the first time to Brisbane, then to Sydney and then back to Melbourne. It was an experience that taught them just how grueling life on the road could be. They lived, collectively, on a bare $300 a week, which was what Dayman paid them. They traveled by bus, train, car—however they could. They lugged all their own gear; they stayed in boarding houses and seedy hotels, and they played dives. But they wouldn’t have changed things for anything. This was the life they’d wanted.

  By the middle of April, they were back in Sydney for an extended eight-week stay. This was a turning point for the band and for Bon.

  Staying at the shabby Americana Hotel in the red-light district of Kings Cross—then buzzing like a boom town, due to the influx of American servicemen on R&R leave from Vietnam—the band was still strapped for cash, pooling funds to eat fish’n’chips. But they were getting somewhere at last. Go-Set stringer David Elfick proclaimed that the band’s “performances at Sydney’s Op-Pop disco justified their rating as Perth’s number one group . . . They have a distinctive sound . . . they play Pickett, Redding type numbers, straight top 40 and comedy (‘Would You Like To Swing On a Bra?’).” No band, at that time, played its own material on stage, unless those songs were already hits.

  Bon wrote to Maria that posters for the band were plastered all over Sydney, and that while they were going down well—had even drawn “the biggest crowd in six weeks at Op-Pop”—it “could be a lot better”, and so the band was “going to have a meeting to try to find out how we can best improve ourselves”. The band was geed up in anticipation of going into Festival Records’ Pyrmont studios with ace producer Pat Aulton. Bon wanted to try out some Dusty Springfield songs.

  The Valentines were a bit like babes in the woods in Sin City, Sydney, but they quickly took to it all.

  MARIA: “In his letters, he would say, Don’t worry, I’ll be faithful. What a liar he was!”

  Drugs were a new dimension altogether.

  VINCE: “We met this piano player called Bobby Gebert, who turned Bon and I onto our first joint. We didn’t know it then either, but these guys were gay. We were so naive, we just thought they were in fancy dress. They had licorice papers, to roll joints—it was the whole thing. We were sitting there looking at each other, giggling like two little kids, saying, Has it affected you yet? Then we realized, we were just these two guys sitting in the corner at this party, we wer
e stoned, and so we panicked and ran out of the place. We got back to the hotel and the other guys said, You guys have had drugs, you’re out of the band—because we had a rule, no drugs—and so we said, yeah, well, okay . . .”

  At the end of April, Maria paid Bon a visit in Sydney. Long-distance love affairs are inevitably hard to handle, and Bon and Maria’s was starting to show the strain. But the couple spent a happy weekend together. As soon as Maria got home, however, the push and pull started all over again. The band had gone up to Brisbane. Bon spent all his time and money on long-distance phone calls. Maria was sick of Bon’s absence—she knew there were other women—and she was talking about going back to Perth. Bon began to fear that Maria might have taken up with someone else herself. When the band returned to Sydney, Maria came up again. It was plain to both of them then that it wasn’t going to work. They had been each other’s first love, but they’d grown apart.

  For the second time in just over a year, Bon saw Maria off on the train—but this time, there would be no reunion down the line. Maria would always occupy a special place in Bon’s heart, and he remained in touch with her right up until he died. More immediately though, there was too much going on to waste time moping and any number of willing young women to help take the pain away.

  The band finally got into the Festival studio in Sydney in late May and cut their next single, “Peculiar Hole in the Sky,” another Easybeats song. This they did with a session player on drums, as Warwick Findlay had buckled under the financial pressure, having a wife to support, and had left the band to find a real job. The Valentines were over the moon about “Peculiar Hole in the Sky,” and rightly so. It was a quantum leap for them, a good song done justice, cut in an almost modern studio with a capable producer, invested with all the appropriate psychedelic overtones. It was released in July. Go-Set, strangely, was not terribly impressed and it didn’t sell.