Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  AC/DC were connecting because they were rock’n’roll and they were real, and American audiences, at least in part, were starting to tire of bland FM radio fodder. It was another sign of the emergence of the new wave.

  Back in New York by the start of August, the band repeated a familiar routine, blowing Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow off stage at the Palladium, before pulling out again for the South. Powerage was selling respectably, especially considering it wasn’t getting any airplay to speak of.

  The road was simply a way of life for AC/DC. On August 12, they headlined over Cheap Trick and Molly Hatchet in Florida stronghold Jacksonville, and sold out 14,000 seats.

  “I enjoy touring; I’ve had some great times,” Angus told Sounds. “I think touring is what you make of it. I do get fidgety if we have a day off, because touring is geared around twiddling your thumbs and getting ready for the show. If the show’s missing, the day just doesn’t feel right.”

  MICHAEL BROWNING: “There were grumblings sometimes, because it’s hard for these young guys to appreciate that you can play to 14,000 people in Jacksonville, Florida, and earn whatever it was, 20 or 30 grand, and then you could drive 100 miles up the road and play to 20 people! There were a lot of gigs, I guess, that they questioned. But it was all part of the building process.”

  “It’s sometimes a drag being in a different hotel every night,” Bon allowed, “but it’s not as bad as being stuck in front of a lathe every day of your life for 50 years. I am here and I am free and I’m seeing new faces every night and touching new bodies or whatever. It’s great, there’s nothing like it.”

  “Bon is fine,” said Angus. “We call him the old man, but he’s always there. And he will be in the future.” It was almost as if Angus was trying to convince himself of the fact. He admitted, after all, in a contemporaneous interview, “You can have so many women and so many drunken nights, but it’s going to take its toll some day.”

  Rock’n’roll bands on the road in America don’t have to pursue sex and drugs—sex and drugs pursue them. Cocaine is chopped out under your nose. Bon found it difficult to just say no.

  Vince Lovegrove and Bon hadn’t seen each other in a dog’s age when Vince met up with the band in Atlanta, Georgia. After wearing out Adelaide, Vince had moved to Sydney, and then Melbourne, where in 1978, after a stint producing Channel Nine’s Don Lane Show, he worked up a proposal to make a documentary for Channel Seven on the international emergence of Australian rock’n’roll. AC/DC naturally occupied a prominent place in his script (along with the Little River Band and Air Supply), and so he sought them out. They were playing a show that night at the Atlanta Symphony Hall, with Cheap Trick supporting.

  Vince found a lump coming to his throat as he watched from the side of the stage, his old mate “struttin’ across the boards like the eternal Peter fuckin’ Pan he was . . .” After the show, when Bon had changed out of his ragged denim stage threads into a very flash plaid drape coat he’d just bought, and grabbed the bottle of Scotch that was always included in the band’s rider for him, he and Vince repaired to his hotel, the very plush Peach Tree Inn, to catch up.

  Vince wrote in RAM:Very impressed, I was. Personal driver, ritzy hotel, the best lookin’ groupies I’d ever set eyes on. I mean, it was the real thing. I thought, if anyone deserves it, Bon does. He’s been at it for long enough, and at last, he was showing ’em. He said he’d make it and he was making it . . . in style.

  Out of the car, and up into Bon’s room. Not yer average hotel room, but one that reeked of a very determined effort to emulate all the comforts of a luxurious home away from home.

  So there we were. Bon and me, an Australian photographer, a few groupies, and the odd Seedie wandering in and out in an attempt to find the action. Not that there would be too much action in Bon’s room that night. The groupies would eventually be bored, the photographer would almost nod off to sleep, room service would be cut off at 2 a.m., and Bon and I became self-indulgent about the good old days . . . and to top it off, there was nothing to smoke. We used the completely legal drug of Scotch to ignite the memory cells.

  “I’m getting tired of it all,” he finally confessed. We were both wasted. Totally. There were no inhibitions. His burbled confession came as a total, almost sobering shock. I mean, his scenario appeared complete. Success was almost there, and so were its trimmings. And Bon tells me he was getting tired of it; he must be joking.

  “No way, Vinnie. I really am getting tired. I love it, you know that. It’s only rock’n’roll and I like it. But I want to have a base. It’s just the constant pressures of touring that’s fucking it. I’ve been on the road for thirteen years. Planes, hotels, groupies, booze, people, towns. They all scrape something from you. We’re doin’ it and we’ll get there, but I wish we didn’t have these crushing day after day grinds to keep up with.”

  I’d never seen Bon like it. He managed to laugh it off and have another swig. He set a fast pace, the old Bon, but if you dug deep enough, you found an accumulative exhaustion that threatened to sap his upfront energy.

  “Rock’n’roll, you know that’s all there is,” he said. “But I can’t hack the rest of the shit that goes with it.”

  From the South, the band dashed across the continent to the Northwest, where they played shows with Aerosmith, before dropping in on LA for a headline show of their own at the Starwood. In September, they played a few more dates with Aerosmith through the Midwest before heading back to Britain.

  Aerosmith, then hitting their drug-addled midcareer crisis, suffered in the face of AC/DC’s hunger and were regularly blown off stage. In LA, AC/DC managed to drive a typically jaded LA audience “wild and calling for encore after encore.”

  The band wasn’t exempt from crises of its own though. If Bon was beginning to feel, if not show, the strain, it also was around this time that Phil Rudd buckled under it. Phil had always been highly strung, and in the bleak American Midwest heartland, he was suffering what might only be described as an acute case of white-line fever.

  SILVER: “When Phil cracked up, Bon was pretty upset about it. I mean, Bon wasn’t one to rock the boat, but he was pretty freaked out by the way they just propped Phil up and made him perform.

  “I think it was a bit of a strain for Bon too, because he did all the PR. Like, if there was a radio station, Bon had to do all that, pretty much.

  “And I mean, that’s what happened to Phil, because he was doing a lot of the driving as well. And because he was the quiet type. I mean, I’m getting this second hand, I’m getting this from Bon, what happened to Phil.”

  Like Bon, Phil was a dedicated pot-smoker. He was also always partial to a toot. Put that together with life on the road itself, and the result can be pure paranoid dementia. Phil was a mess. On a couple of occasions, he had to be hauled off to hospital for sedation.

  SILVER: “Instead of, like, giving him some time out . . . there was no actual concern for Phil’s long-term well-being. And basically, that was pretty much their attitude to Bon too, with his drinking. Nobody really seemed to give a shit that he was killing himself, as long as he got out there and did it. If I wasn’t there to make sure he caught the right plane, then someone else would be, and that was it. As long as they could do the job on the night.”

  Bon wrote to Irene:Hi there. Tis about four in the morn (Mon) . . . the bar’s closed . . . the bottle of Black Jack [Daniels] is empty . . . we’re outta dope . . . the TV’s finished . . . I don’t have anybody to fuck . . . I’ve dropped a quaalude [downer] . . . I could go on all night but I won’t . . . We’re two days from the finish of our US summer tour . . . It’s been fourteen weeks and of course we did a month in England before that. We have six days off before touring Europe and England again for a month . . . Boring innit. I should be back in Sydney around Nov 16th. We’re recording for maybe a month and hopefully January will be off . . . Now I’ve had days off since I joined this band . . . But not one whole thirty-one day month.

  The band lande
d back in Britain in October, just as the live album If You Want Blood, You’ve Got It was released, a mere six months after Powerage. Alberts had been planning a greatest hits album called Twelve of the Best, but at the last minute changed its mind. The greatest hits in live form would obviously extend the album’s appeal and indeed, while If You Want Blood wasn’t exactly planned, it turned out to be the record that paved the way for AC/DC’s breakthrough. Live albums, which tended to be double or triple sets in which songs short in their studio versions were stretched out into extended tedium, were for some reason popular in the seventies. If You Want Blood reversed that trend. Culled by George and Harry from tapes “recorded live” (as the sleeve notes asserted) “during Australian, UK and American tours,” the album was indeed just like an AC/DC gig. Packaged simply, bearing the indelible image of Angus impaled by his own axe, with Bon glancing over his shoulder, it boasted a blunt ten tracks and, allowing for nothing extraneous, got straight to the point, that being raging AC/DC rock’n’roll. For a band whose forte was live performance, it was the perfect souvenir, and the punters responded accordingly. In Britain, they pushed it to number 13, a new high for the band.

  In America, it propelled AC/DC into the top 50 for the first time. In Australia, the album went unreleased until Christmas, by which time it was quite apparent the authorities were still not going to relent and allow the band to tour the country, which would ideally have promoted the release of If You Want Blood. The band was suffering for this stupid stalemate. The album sold slowly.

  At the end of October, the band embarked on yet another British tour, playing 16 dates in 18 days. They would return to Australia after that—as had become their tradition—to spend Christmas at home, and cut a new album at Alberts.

  The British tour was an unqualified success.

  At the Glasgow Apollo, legend has it, Bon got lost backstage after walking the floor with Angus, and then managed to lock himself out of the theatre. The only way he could convince the stagedoor bouncers that he was, in fact, the evening’s attraction, was to ask them, Why else would I be running around in the freezing cold without a shirt on? Asked about the incident a couple of days later, Bon said, “I can’t remember that—it was two days ago.”

  DAVE JARRETT: “They had this incredible work ethic, and the fact was that each time they made a record, it seemed to be so much better. So it became a matter of how many Hammersmith Odeons you were going to do.”

  In America too, they were finally taking off. The success of If You Want Blood reflected on Powerage, and by year’s end, its sales, at over 150,000 units, outstripped those of the previous two albums combined. Even Rolling Stone, which had studiously ignored the band since mercilessly panning High Voltage in 1976, was starting to take notice. A news story ran in its November 16 issue. It read in part, “Bon Scott mentions some influences that are difficult to glean from listening to his music. He is particularly impressed by the way Frank Zappa has been able to manipulate his image over the years. Fondly remembering the old PHI ZAPPA KRAPPA poster of Frank sitting on the toilet, Bon suggests a successor: ‘Bon Scott pulling himself.’”

  In London to play two concluding shows at the Hammersmith Odeon, Bon was shunted into Atlantic’s offices to drink the liquor cabinet dry whilst doing phone interviews with the press in other parts of the world. He spoke to the Herald in Melbourne, claiming success hadn’t spoiled him. “All that has changed is my intake of alcohol. I can now afford to drink twice as much.”

  Talking to David Fricke in New York for a feature on the band which would be published in Circus Weekly in January, he bemoaned the lack of critical acuity applied to AC/DC in Britain even as the band scaled the heights. “This guy came to see us at Leeds University. We did two encores that night and the crowd went wild. Then I read the review next week and he puts shit on the crowd—“How could 2,000 mindless people like this bunch of idiots”. He didn’t see what we were doing for the crowd and what they were doing for us.”

  Bon went on, “There’s been an audience waiting for an honest rock’n’roll band to come along and lay it on ’em. There’s a lot of people coming out of the woodwork to see our kind of rock. And they’re not the same people who would go to see James Taylor or a punk band.”

  Asked about the band’s unrelenting touring, Bon kept up a brave face. “It keeps you fit—the alcohol, nasty women, sweat on stage, bad food—it’s all very good for you!”

  But Fricke asked, what if his voice ever gave out?

  “Then I’d become a roadie,” Bon replied matter-of-factly.

  The two sold-out Odeon shows the band played on November 15 and 16 merely confirmed their status. Atlantic threw a party backstage after the first night’s show. Bon proceeded to get so drunk that in the wee hours, according to Melody Maker’s Steve Gett, he “needed the stomach pump before getting to his feet again.”

  Success, for Bon, was bittersweet. He had no one to share it with and no home to go to.

  Angus and Bon: definitely not the Glimmer Twins. (Gary Turner/Juke)

  14. HIGHWAY TO HELL

  “If Bon Scott is lucky,” Pat Bowring reported in the Melbourne Sun on December 9, 1978, “he’ll see his parents in Perth at Christmas.”

  “I haven’t seen them for three years,” Bon, back in Sydney, told Bowring. “I hope they recognize me.”

  “Some of the guys in the band are buying places here this time,” he continued. “I’m not. I’ve bought a bike. That’s all I want. I’ll sleep on that. Besides, I’m too young to settle down!”

  With his Kawasaki 900 throbbing between his legs, Bon found a flat in O’Brien Street in Bondi. Moving in, he said to Pat Pickett, “You know, Pat, this is the first time I’ve ever had a flat of my own.” Bon was still aching for Silver, but this new, forward-looking experience was some compensation.

  The band was waiting for the nod to go into Alberts to start work on a new album. Bon threw himself into a strict regimen, getting up at 8:30 every morning to go for a swim, eating well, and drinking only sake—in moderation—in anticipation of a likely tour of Japan in February. He was working up ideas for the new album.

  All the band’s plans, however, were about to come undone. Bon wasn’t lucky enough to make it to Perth for Christmas or anything else. In fact, the developments of the next month or so would be the most traumatic AC/DC had ever endured.

  The story broke late in January when Pat Bowring reported, “The Vanda-Young songwriting and production team may not be working on the next AC/DC record.” The storm had been brewing for some time, right back, perhaps, to the very beginning of AC/DC’s relationship with Atlantic in America. The records AC/DC were selling in America were due to the band’s live profile, not because they were getting any airplay.

  MICHAEL BROWNING: “Atlantic, at that time, quite clearly felt that they weren’t getting records delivered that were radio-friendly, soundwise, for the American market. And it was true.”

  First thing in the new year, Atlantic’s Michael Klenfner flew in to Sydney from New York. His mind was already made up. AC/DC needed a hit single. George and Harry were off the case. Within a week, a new producer had arrived in Sydney and started working with the band.

  BROWNING: “Klenfner’s idea was to get a guy called Eddie Kramer involved. And so Eddie Kramer was flown out to Australia and met the band, and then the band flew over to Florida and did some pre-production with him—they were virtually forced into using this guy.”

  Never one to give anything away, especially to the press, George seemed to take it all in stride. Privately, though, he was fuming. He had made all this possible only now to be unceremoniously dumped. Malcolm and Angus were equally taken aback.

  BROWNlNG: “Outwardly, there were no signs, but I think Malcolm and Angus felt very strange. I think they felt like their brother had been shafted, and that I was part of that process, or that I’d allowed the record company to get away with it.”

  Bon too was perturbed, but he also knew that his was not t
o reason why. He’d seen the axe come down before, and though blood might be thicker than water, Malcolm and Angus were also extremely ambitious. Maybe the Yanks were right, anyway. Besides, if the band didn’t go along with the idea, they could expect few favors, if any, from Atlantic in the future. They agreed to work with Kramer. Kramer’s claim to fame was that he had engineered Jimi Hendrix, and more recently he’d produced Kiss. He came on more like a cigar-chewing hustler than a music man.

  Malcolm and Angus assuaged their guilt at George’s sacking by blaming Michael Browning. From this point on, things would never be the same again. What had been defensive insularity now escalated into full-blown paranoia. It was an atmosphere of fear and loathing that would increase for years to come, and it only exacerbated Bon’s growing sense of dislocation.

  BROWNING: “I think it was really a question of, all bets are off.”

  Bon was running late, as usual, when he was due one night at the Darling-hurst studios of alternative radio station 2JJ for an interview. Presenter Pam Swain was becoming anxious. She’d been warned about Bon; she’d been told, among other things, that she should have a bottle of something waiting for him. All she could afford was a can of beer. It sat on the desk getting warm.

  When he did finally show up, he didn’t touch the beer. He and Pam became so absorbed in the interview that they continued talking together in the studio even after the show was over. Pam liked the guy, found him funny, warm, and sincere, for all his ladykiller charm. When Bon finally climbed on his bike to leave, he promised to give her a call, maybe they’d go out together sometime.

  The band was rehearsing at Alberts, putting material together. Kramer was sitting in. Bon took Pam to the speedway out at Parramatta. It was a lovely night, Pam remembers, marred only by the speeding ticket they got on the ride home.