Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  Fraternity scored only the odd gig. They’d had the wind knocked out of their sails. Sam See remembers one of the last gigs he played with the band. “We were all in the bus, the juggernaut, rolling down to Bournemouth to support Status Quo. The only thing we knew about them then was ‘Pictures Of Matchstick Men’; it would’ve been just before they broke again with Piledriver. This was probably the last sign of the Fraternity arrogance which I always loved. As usual, on the way to the gig, we’re having a few drinks, we reckon we’re gonna cream ’em. So we’re sitting there in the bus, waiting for the hall to open, because we were egalitarian, we all used to help lug the gear in. No stardom for us—bullshit! Anyway, so we’re sitting outside the Bournemouth Odeon, and these two Bentleys pull up, and these guys resplendent in Kings Road finery get out. We’re there, you know, ‘Look at these pooftas,’ Bon’s going, ‘Yaarrrgh!’ We’re at this point extremely confident we’re going to make a name for ourselves in Bournemouth. So we went on, we did quite well, didn’t get an encore but did okay, and then Status Quo came on, and they’d changed out of their satin and bells into the familiar Status Quo jeans and T-shirts, and they were three times as loud as us and twice as polished. They were hot.

  “We lurched back to London with our tails between our legs. It was probably one of those nights where someone had too much to drink and punched somebody else, I can’t remember for sure. But something went wrong within the ego of the band, definitely. By the time winter rolled around, I’d had it.”

  Sam moved on to Canada to rejoin the Flying Circus, where they were enjoying a modicum of success. “It was really the end I think, because we could all see that the band had lost its fight.”

  During the winter, Billy Thorpe, in all his arrogance, blundered through London. Fraternity were glad to see a familiar face. Thorpe hit town expecting to lay ’em in the aisles. He left after blowing one gig, at the self-same Speakeasy, where he had the plug pulled on him, ostensibly for being too loud. Thorpe’s convenient excuse was that the imminent second Sunbury festival wanted him back, for a record fee of $10,000 plus air fares. He was on the first plane he could get.

  Some time early in the new year Fraternity changed their name to Fang, “to fit in with the current English trend,” whatever they thought that was. To Hamish, this marked the real beginning of the end.

  In April 1973, Fang played a couple of gigs with Geordie, the Newcastle upon Tyne band whose singer, Brian Johnson, would eventually replace Bon in AC/DC. Graeme visited England at that time, and remembers those shows. “They had the bus, and the thing was, if they’d support a band, they’d take the other band’s equipment too, and they were booked to go with Geordie. I think we went to Torquay first, and then we packed up that night and went on to Plymouth. Brian used to carry his guitar player on his shoulders too, I think that’s where Ron got the idea, because when he joined AC/DC there was no one around doing that sort of thing. Angus was the perfect guy to carry around. He was so small.”

  Fraternity, now renamed Fang, play their last-ever gig, an outdoor show at Windsor, outside London, August 1973. L-R: Bon, John Freeman, Uncle. (courtesy John Freeman)

  In May, the band played a short tour of the provinces with Kraut-rock doomsayers, Amon Duul. The headliners, the Gloucestershire Echo said, were “an enormous contrast to the raucous Australian band who started the concert [whose] unambitious but multi-decibel bedecked set sounded much like the rhythm and blues material that was churned out by a million would-be Rolling Stones in the early ’60s.”

  Relations within the band and its extended family were deteriorating to the point that final implosion was imminent. Uncle hocked Vicki’s Mixmaster to buy hash. The drinking became increasingly heavy, putting a surly spin on things.

  GRAEME SCOTT: “It was the boredom I think. They were hardly doing any shows, making nothing, and there was a lot of arguments, wifely troubles as well as band troubles, not just Bon and Irene but a lot of them; nothing was going right, and so I think the drink really came into it then.”

  Bon was feeling desperate, and one day he again seriously tempted fate.

  IRENE: “I was at work, and when I came home, he was crawling around like a gibbering idiot.”

  He’d eaten datura, a poisonous plant once believed to have hallucinogenic qualities. Most self-respecting heads wouldn’t touch it.

  BRUCE: “That’s when the darker side emerged, and you really knew you were dealing with a person who didn’t care if he lived or died. There was this fatalistic side to Bon which was always there. He was fatalistic because he took risks. He took risks with drugs, it’s true, it’s not a myth.”

  IRENE: “Impulsive is the best word. He liked being outrageous. When he was pissed, he could either be the life of the party, or else, you could see it happen, his eyes would glaze over, almost go black, like there was something there really crapping him off, and a nasty side would come out.”

  Irene was in a panic trying to find out what he’d done, what he’d taken. “I was trying to get him to drink a glass of water or something, but he was just so completely off his face, he couldn’t even talk. Uncle was frantically telephoning the hospital trying to find an antidote. Eventually, we gave him some lemon juice, and he just threw up.”

  By the summer of 1973 the band had ceased paying rent. Vicki, who was subsequently diagnosed as schizophrenic, was behaving increasingly erratically. John Bisset insulted Mick Jurd’s wife Carol one time too many, and that spelled the end of him. Bon and Irene were at each other’s throats. Resentment was also growing towards Hamish, who the band perceived as living in the lap of luxury at their expense.

  In August, the band played what would be its last ever gig, a two-bit festival at Windsor. Hamish bailed out. He’d had enough. He’d sunk a small fortune into Fraternity, and he could no longer see any prospect of a return. The dream was over.

  HAMISH: “I think the real reason Fraternity failed in England was because they were just too loud!”

  The band lingered in London, shell-shocked, just wondering what to do. Bon got a job in a nearby pub, behind the bar. Unsurprisingly, he was a natural. But his and Irene’s days were numbered.

  The band started limping back to Adelaide. Uncle was the first to arrive, in November. “We just didn’t make it in England,” he told Vince in the News. “It’s good to be back. [The others] will be home soon.”

  Bon and Irene arrived after Christmas, and went their separate ways. Irene stayed at her parents’ place; Bon moved in with Bruce and Anne and their infant son, into a tiny house down near the Port. But hope springs eternal. Bruce especially was hopeful that Fraternity would rise again; and Bon, that he and Irene would get back together.

  But you can’t undo the damage done. And the damage ran deep.

  Finally back in Adelaide, Fraternity were in suspension, licking their wounds. Bon felt loyalties strongly, but even he wasn’t sure that Fraternity, as such, had a future.

  He sat tight, or rather even while he fidgeted, he held his tongue. He had enough to worry about as it was, with his separation from Irene.

  IRENE: “It just got to a stage where you’re arguing about everything, and there’s just all this bitterness. We were just arguing about anything and everything, stupid little things that you wouldn’t normally . . .”

  BRUCE: “The thing that went wrong with their relationship was that Irene just needed more intimacy, not sexual intimacy—communication, you know. I think she just felt like sometimes Bon just used to shut up shop.”

  Isa, never one to mince words, said: “They both liked getting their own way too much.”

  Bon was reeling. It was maybe just as well then that he had to go out and get a job. No one else was going to support him, and it might keep him out of trouble. So, like Bruce who was supporting his young family by working as a builder’s laborer, Bon started a day job for the first time in almost ten years. He loaded trucks at the Wallaroo fertilizer plant. It was a monumental comedown, but it was what he had to do
to stay afloat. Bon could be stoic about such things.

  He got a bike, a big Triumph, to get around on. He was mucking around with Peter Head’s Mount Lofty Rangers, a band, of sorts, which at least allowed him to keep his hand in. He would drop in to see Irene at the place she’d found for herself in Stepney, but all that did was upset them both.

  Bon’s stoicism didn’t extend to matters of the heart. He would have willingly succumbed to the ways of the flesh, and damn the consequences. Had Irene let him, he would have happily climbed back into her bed, and ridden off the next morning. That was his whole philosophy—tomorrow would never come. Bon refused to accept the truth—the marriage was over—and his visits only served to hurt himself as much as Irene.

  Irene showed the greater strength. For all the love she still felt for Bon—and knew that he felt for her—she knew their marriage wouldn’t work. Cruel to be kind, to both herself and Bon, she had to cut him loose.

  Bon couldn’t accept it. And so it was that one night after he’d had a row with Irene he arrived, already drunk, at a Rangers rehearsal, then stormed off from there, even more drunk, and rode his bike at high speed into an oncoming car. He was almost killed.

  Bon was in a coma for three days. Irene didn’t leave his side. “I remember being there once, sitting there with my sister, looking at the screen, you know, the heartbeat monitor, and the line stopping, and yelling for a doctor. The doctor came and banged him on the chest. It started again.”

  When Bon came to, he asked Irene if he could come home. What could she do? No one else was going to look after him. He was released a few weeks later.

  IRENE: “He was terribly sick, he looked like a thin, frail old man. He was hunched from the broken collarbone, his throat was cut—he had a horrible scar there—and his jaw was wired up. He was just virtually skin and bone. And he must have had some sort of internal problem too.

  “The clearest memory I have of Bon is of him in a blue checked dressing gown, after his accident, with his teeth missing,” said Peter Head’s wife Mouse, “and I guess I remember it because he just looked so shocking. I mean, his face was scarred, and you know, it had an impact pretty much on us all, when it happened.”

  Isa came over from Perth, to tend Bon during the daytime when Irene was out at work.

  Bon never fully recovered from the accident—he bore scars and suffered pain for the rest of his life—but he was quickly on the mend. He was nothing if not resilient. He’d taken beatings before, and he would take them again. He even managed to find something in it all to laugh about. He sent Darcy and Gabby in Melbourne a picture of himself taken not long after the event, leering toothlessly at the camera, bearing the caption, “I left my teeth behind on the road.” He was laid up, but he was still able to roll himself a steady supply of joints. He drank—liquor—through a straw.

  IRENE: “He made a bit of an effort then, but [the marriage] was already stuffed. But it was probably like the friendship was a lot better after it was all over, when the bullshit, the bitterness, was out of the way.”

  It wasn’t long before Bon was back on his feet, if unsteadily. He was already anxious about his professional future.

  IRENE: “We went to a concert, I can’t remember who it was, it was an outdoor concert, and there were people there from the industry who just walked right past him, and he said something like, These arseholes used to be all over me.

  “He thought he was just a has-been.”

  Lacking any other option, Bon joined in rehearsals with Bruce, Uncle, John Freeman and guitarist Mauri Berg, formerly of Headband. (In July, he went into the studio with Pete Head and Carey Gulley and recorded two songs, “Round and Round and Round” and “Covey Gully,” which would eventually see the light of day in 1996.)

  Mick Jurd, like John Bisset, had remained in England. But Bon wasn’t entirely convinced. And when the News devoted a story to Fraternity’s ostensible reformation, it started to smell suspiciously like the bad old days. The band came across as full of all the same old bullshit: “We’ve got a lot of plans, and we’re in no hurry.”

  The last thing Bon wanted was a repeat performance of the last three wasted years. He knew he had to find a ticket out.

  AC/DC’s first photo session, July 7, 1974, outside Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney. Left to right: Rob Bailey, Angus Young, Malcolm Young, Dave Evans, Peter Clack. (Philip Morris)

  8. THE YOUNGS

  Where the water sparkles on the harbor, in the wash of the Bridge and the Opera House, Sydney is one of the postcard prettiest cities in the world. But the daily reality for most Sydneysiders is a massive suburban sprawl. Crawling along Parramatta Road in a gritty carbon-monoxide haze, you are confronted by the bleak brick-veneer vista that is Sydney’s dreaded western suburbs.

  The west is commonly decried as a cultural wasteland. But that’s the exclusive opinion of the snobbish arbiters of taste who believe that art doesn’t exist outside institutions, and don’t understand art that does. The first artistic language of suburbia is rock’n’roll, and Sydney’s western suburbs have a long and impressive rock’n’roll tradition.

  When William and Margaret Young and their six children emigrated to Australia from Glasgow, Scotland in 1963, it was here in the western suburbs that they landed and settled. George was 15 (born November 6, 1947); Malcolm was ten (January 6, 1953); Angus eight (March 31, 1955). The rock’n’roll scene was already thriving.

  “Me dad couldn’t get work up in Scotland,” Angus later told Sounds, “he found it impossible to support a family of our size, so he decided to try his luck downunder.”

  Like others straight off the boat, the Youngs were ushered into a hostel—at Villawood—where they would stay until they found suitable accommodation for themselves. “It was like a prison camp,” Malcolm later told Spunky, “all these old tin shacks.”

  The Young family was fairly musical in an amateurish sort of way, as George once put it. It was the boys’ older sister, Margaret, who was largely responsible for turning the boys onto rock’n’roll; in fact, she was the one who gave AC/DC their name and put Angus in the school uniform. After the Second World War British seaports like Liverpool and Glasgow were on a direct shipping route to the United States. As rock’n’roll lore has it, Mersey-beat itself was inspired by the American music—R&B, blues and hillbilly records—which came ashore there. In Glasgow, Margaret was listening to Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino even before they were stars.

  Alex, the oldest Young boy, went into music professionally as a saxophonist in Emile Ford’s Checkmates. He left home before the family emigrated, to join the Big Six, whose claim to fame was that they backed Tony Sheridan after the Beatles walked out on him. The Beatles connection was strengthened when Alex went on to join Grapefruit, a lesser light on the Beatles’ own Apple label.

  George Young was a promising schoolboy soccer player—an interest common among Scots, and one certainly shared by brother Malcolm—but he was keener still on music. Although the Youngs spent barely three weeks at Villawood before they moved into a place of their own down the road in Burwood, George managed in that time to hook up with the best part of a band. His cohorts numbered an Englishman and two Dutchmen: frontman Stevie Wright, who was lured away from surfsters Chris Langdon and the Langdells; guitarist Harry Vanda, formerly of Holland’s premier instrumental combo the Starfighters; and bassist Dick Diamond.

  Burwood, with its wide boulevards and solid, free-standing red-brick Federation homes, might almost have seemed posh to working-class Scots. Indeed, today it is becoming gentrified. But in the sixties, it was a rough and ready neighborhood of “new Australians,” which would play host to violent meetings of rival gangs down at the station on Saturday nights. If the rough streets of Glasgow weren’t indoctrination enough for the Young boys, this was a fine finishing school.

  Burwood also boasted a thriving garage band scene. “Every new English kid that arrived brought all the latest things with him,” remembers native Peter Noble, w
ho played with Brits in a band called Clapham Junction.

  George’s nascent band found a drummer, Englishman Snowy Fleet, then resident at the East Hills Migrant Hostel. Fleet was a Liverpudlian and at 24 was much older and more experienced than his new bandmates. He had come out to Australia with his wife and child after walking away from a choice gig with the Mojos, who would go on to join Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s stable and produce the classic 1964 hit “Everything’s Alright.” Snowy would name the band the Easybeats and initially manage it, too.

  The Easybeats are generally acknowledged as the first truly original Australian rock’n’roll band, but the irony is that its individual members were hardly Australian at all. Still, the band was immediately and passionately embraced in Australia as “our own.” Their first proper gig was in late 1964 at an inner-Sydney joint called Beatle Village. From there, they leapt and bounded to the top of the charts.

  The Easybeats looked good and sounded good. They dressed sharp, which gave them greater sex appeal than their closest Australian rivals, most of whom looked like civil servants. What’s more, they could both play and write rock’n’roll. And Little Stevie was a livewire showman.

  After signing a management deal with erstwhile north shore realtor Mike Vaughan, the band was introduced to Ted Albert, a friend of the highflying Vaughan who was in music publishing. Albert, a budding producer with an ear for the future in beat music, was the middle of three sons of Sir Alexis Albert, whose father Jacques Albert had founded J Albert & Son, the oldest independent music publishing house in Australia. With interests in radio and film, too, Alberts was estimated in the 1990s to have a total worth of more than $45 million.