Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  When Bon first arrived in Sydney in late September he stayed at Dennis Laughlin’s flat in Cronulla. Bon knew Laughlin from when Fraternity used to play gigs at Jonathans, and he liked him.

  Bon was mucking around with Malcolm and Angus, comparing musical notes. He was convinced AC/DC could be a world-beater. He was astonished by the musical acuity and empathy of Malcolm and Angus, despite their youth, and he was swept along by their single-mindedness. It was as though he’d been reborn. Any lingering pain from his injuries was overridden in the general rush of it all. And Bon gave something back to Malcolm and Angus in return.

  GRAEME SCOTT: “I think Ron put a bit of life into it. I think it was what Malcolm and Angus were looking for.”

  “Bon was the biggest single influence on the band,” Malcolm has admitted. “When Bon came in it pulled us all together. He had that real stick-it-to-’em attitude. We all had it in us, but it took Bon to bring it out.”

  “When I sang I always felt there was a certain amount of urgency to what I was doing,” said Bon. “There was no vocal training in my background, just a lot of good whisky, and a long string of blues bands, or should I say ‘booze’ bands. I went through a period where I copied a lot of guys, and found when I was singing that I was starting to sound like them. But when I met up with Angus and the rest of the band, they told me to sound like myself, and I really had a free hand doing what I always wanted to do.”

  The band played its debut proper, with Bon singing, at the Brighton-le-Sands Masonic Hall. They had to get their shit together quickly because they were due to go out on the road in the second week of October. Laughlin had booked gigs in Melbourne, then over in Adelaide, then back in Melbourne again. Then they would return to Sydney to start recording.

  LAUGHLIN: “The biggest problem I had with AC/DC in those early days, being a touring unit, and not having much money, was keeping everything together, keeping everyone happy. There’s a few dope smokers in the band, right? Instead of giving everyone fifty bucks a week, it’s like, alright, whatever you need, we’ll get. Thirty bucks a week plus a bag of dope, a bottle of Scotch. Well, Angus was a pain in the arse, because he says, Fuck ya, I don’t drink booze, or fuckin’ take drugs. I’d give him a bag of fish’n’chips, a Kit Kat, a packet of Benson & Hedges and a bottle of Coke.”

  In Melbourne, the band played the suburban dance circuit, some of the new pubs, and the old discos. On October 16, for the first time, they played Michael Browning’s Hard Rock Cafe on its gay night.

  From Melbourne, the band headed to Adelaide, where Vince had booked them into the Largs Pier for three nights. Bon was extremely pleased with himself, being back in town with what he believed was the hottest band in the land. However, with the exception of Uncle, who got up one night to have a blow, Bon’s old friends were dismissive, reckoning Bon was selling out to a simplistic three chords. It was the sort of condescension AC/DC faced continually, and would hold against Australia in later years. Bon’s attitude was, Fuck ’em. He trusted only his own gut feelings, and they were good.

  Adelaide would be the final showdown for Dennis Laughlin.

  MICHAEL BROWNING: “They came down to Melbourne. They had a manager who was a sleazeball. I was just the guy running the club, and I really liked them. They came to collect their money at the end of the night, and told me they were going to Adelaide the following day. So I said, Well, seeya when you get back. Next thing, I got a phone call from Adelaide to say the guy had absconded with all their money or something, and that they were stranded.”

  LAUGHLIN: “I got the shits with them one night in Adelaide. Angus was complaining, Oh, Bon’s got a bag of dope, a bottle of Scotch, and I ain’t got nothin’.” So I said, Fuck ya, I’m not workin’ my arse off anymore, here’s your books, you’ve gotta be in Melbourne by one o’clock tomorrow, I’m going home, seeya later.”

  BROWNING: “I sent them money so they could come back to Melbourne, so they could fulfil their commitments to everyone, including me. When they got to Melbourne, they came and saw me and we talked about management. I’d only seen them once then, and I just remember being totally knocked out. They had a new singer then too—Bon Scott—and my immediate reaction, I suppose, was a little skeptical, because my image of Bon Scott was as the singer in a teenybopper group, and AC/DC were more of a street rock’n’roll band. But it worked. Malcolm and Angus hated anything that was pretentious, or plastic, poofy, and Bon just exuded character.”

  If Bon had liked Dennis Laughlin, he was, however, quite prepared to defer to Malcolm and Angus. If Michael Browning was it, then fine.

  Browning himself had been looking for an act to get involved with for the past six months—since May, when he had resigned from managing Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs after five years. “One tends to become a little complacent after such a long time,” Browning explained to Go-Set, but more likely, he was disappointed that Thorpe had failed to give it a serious shot overseas.

  George Young went to Melbourne to see Browning, and again was impressed with Browning’s track record, and his ambitiousness. Browning and George shared a vision: George wanted to get AC/DC out of Australia as soon as possible. Browning wanted a band he could take overseas.

  BROWNING: “My sole personal ambition to be the manager of an Australian band that broke internationally was a motivating factor in AC/DC’s success. I mean, it was one thing for Alberts to say, We want to break this band internationally, but without someone to come along with the drive, and the game plan, well, it really wasn’t going to happen.”

  Michael Browning was, indeed, one of the first Australians to seriously consider going overseas with a band. The first band he ever managed was Python Lee Jackson, which itself made a pioneering foray to England in 1968, only to turn up in America in the early seventies with an album called In a Broken Dream, which featured Rod Stewart on vocals. Browning went on, in the late sixties, to join Bill Joseph at AMBO, at which point he also took on management of Doug Parkinson. Doug Parkinson In Focus was probably the biggest band in Australia in 1969, having hits like “Dear Prudence” and “Hair.” But if Parkinson was never going to go the distance, Browning picked up Billy Thorpe on the verge of his second coming.

  By 1973, Thorpe was still a big draw, but his star was descending. Moreover, Consolidated Rock, the Melbourne booking agency Browning had formed with Michael Gudinski and Bill Joseph after the demise of AMBO, had itself folded. Gudinski had formed Premier Artists in its place—the agency that still has a stranglehold on live music in Melbourne today—and then went on to launch Mushroom Records, the definitive Australian label of the seventies and eighties.

  Michael Browning was in need of a new initiative, too. The scene offered few immediate prospects, but with a more solid infrastructure now in place it was ready and waiting for a resurgence.

  Over the Australia Day long weekend of 1974, Browning trooped out to Sunbury yet again with Billy Thorpe. The whole thing was becoming rather routine. Neither the Aztecs nor Sherbet nor the reformed Daddy Cool delivered anything worth getting excited about. But when a new Melbourne band by the name of Skyhooks took the stage and proceeded to tear it apart, people sat up.

  Michael Gudinski jumped first and signed the Skyhooks to both management and recording contracts, and by the end of the year, they’d saved the floundering Mushroom’s skin.

  Between that and the new ABC pop program Countdown, launched at the end of the year and fronted by Molly Meldrum, the resurgence was finally on. Michael Browning saw AC/DC and he knew that they could not only be part of it—they could also transcend it.

  BROWNING: “No doubt about it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have undertaken it. I mean, I was married, and eventually I had kids and all the rest of it, we dragged them all around the world, and there was no way I was going to do that if the group didn’t have the quality that people now recognize. They were definitely special. And still are.”

  AC/DC were not strictly speaking a product of the pub circuit. Nor were Billy Thorp
e and the Aztecs, Chain, and the Coloured Balls, but AC/DC followed on from them in paving the way for pub rock.

  It was a process of infusion. Sharing the same influences (Chuck Berry, blues, boogie, the Stones, a trace of metal), AC/DC played to the same audience Billy Thorpe had found—an audience that was young, male and left right out. An audience that liked its rock’n’roll hard, fast and tough. And loud.

  In 1974, these suburban boys had nothing they could call their own. Their sisters had all the poofy pap Countdown could throw at them, like Skyhooks and Sherbet. Their older siblings were bonging on and getting into art rock and California soft rock. To these guys, all that stuff was hippie shit, and they hated hippies.

  Heavy metal pioneers like Black Sabbath were already past it. The only new light was Status Quo. Or, if you were really hip, Alex Harvey or Lou Reed. No one had even heard of the New York Dolls. The local scene was an absolute desert. The sharpies (a rat-tailed Australian variant of skinheads) had had the Coloured Balls, but sharpies were dickheads, and the Coloured Balls were falling apart anyway.

  It was into this yawning gulf that AC/DC stomped—too late, too ugly to be glam; too clever to be metal; too soon, too dumb to be punk.

  They were at once a culmination and a fresh start for the push of what Anthony O’Grady, editor of new Sydney-based rock rag RAM, described as “high energy heavy metal boogie bands.” AC/DC were distinguished, to begin with, by the telepathic guitar interplay between Malcolm and Angus, which determined their unique dynamic texture. Bon added color to movement with his street-smart edge, strangled vocals, gift for narrative, and mischievous sense of humor. George’s sensibility and savvy helped pull it all together.

  It was just what the suburban boys wanted.

  BROWNING: “There were a lot of suburban dances, the sharpies used to go to them; there were certain dances that were just sharpies. The big groups of the time were Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, and Lobby Loyde and the Coloured Balls. It was a scene, an atmosphere, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. AC/DC came in on the tail end of that. I’d stopped managing Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, and there was this club called Berties, which had closed down, which I was also a part of. I’d been to London to the Hard Rock Cafe, and I thought, Oh, let’s just deck it out and call it the Hard Rock Cafe. So I did that, and that’s where AC/DC came in. They became fairly regular performers at the Hard Rock Cafe.”

  George was of the old school that doesn’t believe a band can even call themselves a band until they’ve played at least 200 gigs. The heavy roadwork AC/DC did was as important as anything in shaping them.

  ANGUS: “When we started, as a band, I don’t think there was anyone around really that was doing what we did. I think here [Australia] was really what geared it for us; when you first start here, a lot of the places you play all everybody wanted to hear was rock’n’roll, you know. The faster the better. For us, that was great,’cos that’s what we do best. And we were lucky, because of George and Harry, from their time in the Easybeats; they always said that the best time they ever had was just playing rock’n’roll songs, and you know, they said, That’s what you guys are going to do.”

  Michael Browning proposed a scheme whereby his company Trans-Pacific Artists, which he ran in partnership with Bill Joseph, would absorb AC/DC’s debts, set them up in a house in Melbourne, provide them with a crew and transport, and put them out to work, covering all their expenses, and paying them a wage. It was if nothing else an entrée to the Melbourne scene.

  BROWNING: “Basically, they were broke. They needed an injection of capital, and an infrastructure placed around them, in order for them to continue.”

  George decided Browning’s offer was a fair one.

  Bon, like Malcolm and Angus, had already signed a recording-publishing contract with Alberts. Hamish Henry had been prepared to give Alberts his rights to Bon’s publishing, but Bon said, Ask them for some money, you never made anything out of me before. So Hamish sold for $4,000. The recording deal Bon signed, calculating back from royalty statements, was for an equal share, as one of five members of the band, of 3.4 per cent of retail. Standard rate today is around 10 per cent; back then, it was around 5 per cent. Alberts has always been known for driving hard deals; no favoritism was extended just because Malcolm and Angus were family.

  Before the band were dispatched to Melbourne, they went into the studio with George and Harry and cut what would emerge as their debut album, High Voltage. They were barely roadtested after only six weeks of gigs, but ready or not the market was crying out for them.

  It is significant that the first single lifted off the album was a cover of the Big Joe Williams blues standard, “Baby, Please Don’t Go.” Widely covered during the sixties, the song had been in AC/DC’s set almost since day one. Of the album’s remaining seven tracks, at least one, “Soul Stripper,” was credited only to Malcolm and Angus; another, “Love Song,” sounds like a leftover from Bon’s Fraternity days, even though the credit is shared. The remaining five tracks bear the Young/Scott/Young credit which would become so familiar. But to a great extent—and hardly unexpectedly—the album was half-baked. The story goes that the band already had a number of instrumental backing tracks arranged, and so Bon simply dipped into his notebooks full of rude poetry to find lyrics to fit. Drummer Peter Clack was asked to stand down during the sessions; the job was done by session-man Tony Kerrante.

  Bon himself later conceded, “That album was recorded in a rush.” “It was actually recorded in ten days,” Angus said, “in between gigs, working through the night after we came off stage and then through the day. I suppose it was fun at the time but there was no thought put into it.”

  ROB BAILEY: “Malcolm and Angus would just jam out things, like ‘She’s Got Balls’—it was just two sequences—slap ’em together and away you go. If they worked, Bon stuck some words on them. He used to walk around with lyric books, and they were full of some of the funniest stuff you’ve ever read. You could sit down and read them and just laugh and laugh.”

  CHRIS GILBEY: “Because the band was called AC/DC I said to them, Look, we’ve got to call the album High Voltage. So that was the title.”

  CHRIS GILBEY: “Bon went away saying, What a great title, High Voltage , we’ve got to write a song called ‘High Voltage.’ Well, they wrote ‘High Voltage,’ but not until after the album was finished, so it was too late to include.

  “Then I created some artwork—we were just making it up as we went—I came up with this concept, of an electricity substation with a dog pissing against it. It’s so tame now, but back then we thought it was pretty revolutionary. EMI didn’t want to put it out because of the cover either, they thought it was very much in bad taste. But it came out anyway.”

  After finishing the album, the band left Sydney for Melbourne, via Adelaide. They got to Melbourne at the start of December, and holed-up in the Octagon Hotel in Prahran, until Browning found them the permanent accommodation he’d promised. Bon immediately looked up old mates like Mary Walton, and Darcy and his wife Gabby.

  AC/DC took off in Melbourne like a rocket. Boring old farts like Daddy Cool and the La De Das didn’t know what had hit them when this snotty young support band blew them off stage.

  BAILEY: “It was an exciting time, because we knew the impact we were having. The band sounded right there, we had a pack of very good songs, the act was great, the whole thing was just in your face.”

  AC/DC worked continually, anywhere and everywhere.

  BROWNING: “It was a mixture of pub type crowds to teenybopper girls to gays. There used to be a big gay circuit in Melbourne. Bon used to camp it up, he’d wear his leather stuff, and they fitted into that scene quite well.”

  “I remember I first saw them when they were still kicking around Melbourne,” said Joe Furey, who later became a friend of Bon’s. “There must have been about a hundred people there, and there was this little guy rolling around the floor playing guitar, and the whole thing was exceptionall
y loud, it was about one o’clock in the morning, and everybody was sort of going, Oh, give us a break, it’s late. That was one thing I always admired about them, Angus in particular, was that there was a guy who had his act, and whether there was a hundred people there at one o’clock in the morning or what, he was going to do it. It wasn’t like, Hey, there’s no one here tonight guys, let’s cut the set a bit short. Years later I thought that was probably the difference between them making it and not.”

  If Bon felt any physical strain from his accident, he didn’t let on.

  DARCY: “He was in pain. Those early gigs with AC/DC really stuffed him up. Once you’ve broken something, it’s never the same again. He had to be jumping around singing his heart out, you had to wonder, How’s he going to hack the pace? People wouldn’t see him to the side of the stage hitting his puffer.”

  Juke magazine, which sprang up in Melbourne after Go-Set folded, called AC/DC “new faces refusing to be restricted by an established music scene . . . brash and tough, unashamed to be working at a music style that many describe as the lowest common denominator of rock music, gut-level rock, punk rock.”

  The story went on to describe Bon, “an old face,” as “charged by the unleashed drive in the group around him, as determined as the rest to have a good time on stage and off, as determined to shake Australian rock where it matters . . .”

  Juke was taken aback by “these red-blooded young studs”: “AC/DC quite obviously are not lax to take advantage of the favors in the offering from some of their more ardent female fans. The adjoining motel room was busy with extra bedding and bodies.”

  The party had started.

  The band moved into a house in Lansdowne Road, East St Kilda. Malcolm and Angus had never lived away from home before, and so at the ages of 22 and 17 respectively, they were running amok, free to come and go as they pleased, to smoke and drink and swear and carry on. And fuck chicks.