Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

MARY WALTON: “I was surprised by that. And that there was no one there from the music business. Maybe that was because it seemed like it was a private affair, maybe because it was Perth, I don’t know.”

  The band arrived in limousines. Unschooled in the social graces, Malcolm and Angus didn’t know how they were supposed to behave. They were pleased to see a familiar face in Mary.

  Maria was there with her family. So were all the Hendersons. Vince’s parents. Brian Gannon, Bruce Abbott, the Valentines who’d stayed behind. Ted Ward.

  MARY: “Everyone was just in shock more than anything else—I know I was; no one really showed much emotion. So everyone just sort of stuck together.”

  Still nervous, Malcolm had to ask Fifa if it was alright for Mary to ride in the limo with them after the service.

  MARY: “We went to the parents’ place afterwards, and then I went with the boys back to their hotel. I went out sailing with Phil in the afternoon, then had dinner at the hotel, then caught the last flight back to Melbourne. That was it.”

  Phil and Cliff went on to Melbourne too, while Malcolm and Angus flew straight back to London. Pressure was already mounting to get back on track. After the breakthrough made by Highway to Hell a huge amount of expectation now surrounded AC/DC, and with or without Bon Scott the machine couldn’t just stop.

  Then a few days later, a strange, eerie thing happened: everyone got cards from Bon. Christmas cards. He hadn’t put enough postage on them, so they arrived late. For the recipients all around the world, it was a touching postscript to his final sendoff, a reminder of one reason why they held him so dear in the first place—Bon always made an effort.

  The obituaries, testimonials and tributes hit the music press, all echoing the same sentiments—that Bon was a great bloke, a great talent, but tragically, yet “another victim of rock’s deadly grind.” In RAM, alongside its four-page cover story obituary by Vince, the names “Harry & George” appeared undersigned to a full-page testament which read simply, “A great singer, a great lyricist, a great friend, one of a kind. We’ll miss you.”

  Vince wrote: “How or why you died, Bon, I don’t give a damn. I only know and care that it was too soon.”

  MOLLY MELDRUM: “Bon dying hit me like John Lennon dying [which happened only nine months later]. People say to me today, How can you still have the enthusiasm? Well, it’s been our lives. If Bon was alive today, he’d have the same enthusiasm he always had. If you have to react to it like, Oh, I’ve got to get up and do this, go to the recording studio—that’s when it’s time to pack it in. It’s got nothing to do with age—you just love it.”

  Fittingly, the man who replaced Bon in AC/DC, Brian Johnson, would pay him a tribute which was not only full of humility, but also cut through the bullshit. “That poor boy was loved by thousands of people worldwide,” he said. “When we did a warm-up gig in Holland, this kid came up to me with a tattoo of Bon on his arm and said, This bloke was my hero, but now he’s gone, I wish you all the luck in the world. I just stood there shaking. I mean, what can you say when people are prepared to put their faith in you like that? Since then, I feel like I’ve been singing for that kid and so many others like him.

  “I think Bon Scott had a bit of genius. It annoys me that nobody recognized that before. He used to sing great words, write great words. He had a little twist in everything he said. He had such a distinctive voice as well. Oh great, when the man died they were starting to say, Yeah, the man was a genius. That was too late, too late.”

  ISA: “Angus always used to say, It should never have happened. We used to say too, If only he’d done this, if only he’d done that. But you only said that long after he’d gone. Why didn’t somebody watch him? But you couldn’t watch him. He went his own way, and nobody could stop him.

  “If only someone got onto him and made him dry out somewhere, that’s all I say.”

  GRAEME SCOTT: “I always thought he was meant to die when he did. A lot of times earlier, he could have died.”

  Unable to articulate his grief more appropriately, Malcolm took a swing at Mick Cocks one night when he bumped into him.

  MICK COCKS: “That was when they were looking for scapegoats. He put everybody off side—Angry [Anderson], everybody. It was a moment of sadness for everybody, so it was just stupid. Normally, I would fight back, but under those circumstances, I didn’t. I thought, This is not right. A lack of respect. I don’t mind celebrating somebody’s death; I don’t have negative thoughts about Bon in terms of, Oh, he was hard done by, or that he missed out on this or that, or that he was emotionally not together, or that he was drunk. To me, that means nothing. To me, he lived and died the way he wanted to. We were friends.

  “I just took it as everybody not being sure how to react, I mean, sometimes it’s nice to be able to blame somebody. And maybe they felt a little guilty, maybe they felt they should have been paying a bit more attention to what he was doing. But I don’t think that’s true either, I think it was just one of those things that can’t be helped. Bon was his own man, and one thing you couldn’t do was tell him what to do.”

  JOE FUREY: “I thought it was nice that he got right to the top. Chronologically, it might look like the top came with Back in Black, but he was aware that was happening. It’s like letting go, you maybe feel the sense that the angels are calling and you look back and think, I’ve done it, I don’t need to keep fighting. The body’s not enjoying this anymore. That’s the way I like to see it. He’d done it and he was called.”

  Of course, the question always remains, What if? There’s no doubt that Bon was really only just hitting his stride as a writer. He was capable of so much more, and indeed, he was talking about a solo album; he may even have contemplated leaving the band sooner or later. But such musings are hypothetical and pointless, if not presumptuous. The legacy Bon left is rich enough as it is.

  AC/DC, it’s true, went on to much greater success. But Bon never defined success in terms of numbers. He wasn’t so naive as to deny it—because it put money, however filtered down, into his pocket—but what was just as important to Bon as people buying his records was that they were listening to them, “getting off on it,” as he would have put it.

  Bon’s life and work were inevitably intertwined, but it wasn’t as if he had trouble distinguishing between art and reality. It was more a matter of whether or not, besieged by the pervasive loneliness of life on the road, he chose to know. Because in the end, he was painfully aware of what was important and what wasn’t. In that, Bon was like most of us, a spiritual battler who grappled with the bigger questions and was probably just befuddled by them. He just wanted to do the right thing.

  Larger than life in his own time, in death Bon became an icon. That’s how most of us remember him—the public figure. His friends remember him according to their individual catalogues of memories. Bon chose his own way of life and he lived it to the full, realizing most of his dreams. That was one of his successes.

  That he is remembered so fondly by all who knew him, almost without exception, as a person of sincerity, humor and great generosity of spirit, is another success.

  But if the commercial success AC/DC found even in Bon’s lifetime seemed in itself empty to him, if he found he still had the same personal problems, it was not a failure that he was unable to resolve them—because that’s the nature of life: it doesn’t necessarily provide a novelist’s neatly resolved ending.

  Transcending a life’s fleeting fame, Bon’s soul became public property as he assumed immortality.

  It is cold comfort for the loved ones left behind.

  (Roger Gould/Juke)

  EPILOGUE: BACK IN BLACK

  On Countdown Molly Meldrum was spouting that Stevie Wright would replace Bon in AC/DC. It seemed an obvious conclusion to jump to, but Alberts quickly stood on it. “We don’t know where he got that from,” a spokesperson said, “but there’s absolutely no truth in the rumor. Stevie’s got his own thing to do, and AC/DC have theirs.” Stevie’s “th
ing” was his heroin addiction, which had effectively seen him frozen out of Alberts altogether.

  Molly himself was attacked for tastelessness in even raising the issue of a replacement. “That’s just absurd,” he snapped back. “I’ve known Bon for 12 years, longer than most of these other people who found it tasteless, and I know he wouldn’t have minded. Life goes on; if I dropped dead, I’d expect Countdown to announce a replacement immediately and keep going.”

  And indeed, as soon as Malcolm and Angus returned to London from the funeral, they “got straight back to work on the songs [they] were writing at the time it happened.”

  Given the band’s deep suspicion of the press it was amazing, as Dave Lewis wrote in the Sounds feature “The Show Must Go On” of March 29, that “the ever articulate Angus allowed himself to become the band’s spokesman at a time when many others would sulkily shun the glare of publicity.” But Peter Mensch wanted it to be known that AC/DC would not fold—were in fact auditioning new singers even then.

  Bon meant little to Mensch personally; his primary concern was simply that the band’s momentum was not lost. And everybody, Bon included, had believed this next album was going to be the one. For Malcolm and Angus, their supreme ambition was a bulwark against grief. Besides, they had been granted the highest approval. When they were leaving the funeral, Malcolm has recalled, “Bon’s dad said, ‘You’ve go to find someone else, you know that.’ He said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t stop.’” Quitting the band would have been the travesty, not continuing it, and Bon himself would have expected no less.

  “We got a little rehearsal studio and songwriting became our therapy,” Angus said. “Then our manager kept pestering us about what we all dreaded: don’t you guys want a new singer? We kept putting it off . . .”

  They can’t have resisted too strongly: after getting back to work two days after their return to London from Bon’s funeral, they were auditioning singers within a couple of weeks; within a month, they’d settled on Brian Johnson, and within six weeks, they were in the Bahamas recording Back in Black. If leaping back into the fray with their blood brother still warm in the ground seems in any way graceless, well, no-one ever called the Youngs great sentimentalists.

  What was perhaps even more extraordinary, though, was that they made it work. Where bands like the Doors—and later Nirvana and INXS—failed, AC/DC succeeded, and then some. Not only is Back in Black the greatest resurrection act in rock history, it is one of its biggest selling albums.

  The gift in all this was Bon’s anointing. Bon’s generosity of spirit, even in death, outdid anything most people could muster in life.

  In their Pimlico rehearsal room, Malcolm and Angus worked over song ideas. It was a bit weird without Bon, but they could still hear him, ghost-like, when they got really pumping on a riff. Even in absentia, he was still, as he himself had said, “the lightning bolt in the middle” that charged the two poles on either side.

  Alberts’ Fifa Riccobono announced, “Nine names have already approached them for the job, although of course I can’t say who they are. It will be quite a gap to fill, but the band will be auditioning lead singers almost immediately.”

  Speculation was rife. Melody Maker ran with the Stevie Wright rumor; NME and Juke suggested it would be one Allen Fryer. Fryer, erstwhile front man with a small-time Adelaide band called Fat Lip, was George’s choice. Hailing from Elizabeth, near Adelaide, he was another Gorbals boy, a mate of Jimmy Barnes. But George’s opinion was carrying less and less weight, given the way everything was going. (Ironically, Fryer would go on to sing alongside Mark Evans in Heaven, an ’80s heavy metal band managed by Michael Browning.)

  Other names bandied about included Steve Marriott, the former Small Faces/Humble Pie frontman, who was even older than Bon (and a singer Bon had covered and greatly admired); former Heavy Metal Kid Gary Holton; ex-Back Street Crawler Terry Slesser; and another couple of Australians: Adrian Campbell, who’d previously sung for a band called Raw Glory, and Scottish-born John Swan, who—along with his half-brother, singer Jimmy Barnes—had joined Fraternity (on drums) after Bon left in 1974.

  Holed up in the rehearsal studio, Malcolm and Angus conducted the cattle call under the scrutiny of Peter Mensch and Mutt Lange. Gary Holton might have seemed like a good fit but the team was wise to decide against him, since he too would die young, in 1985. They were wiser still to pick Brian Johnson. Johnson at the time was working in a garage back in his hometown of Newcastle upon Tyne, after abandoning the musical career he had dreamed of since the first time he saw local hero Eric Burdon in the early sixties. His band Geordie had enjoyed a couple of minor hits in the early ’70s, but by the latter half of the decade their run was over.

  The story goes that an AC/DC fan in Chicago sent Peter Mensch a tape of a Geordie album, and Mensch was immediately interested. Geordie was an undistinguished sort of hard rock outfit, but Johnson possessed a pair of lungs of the capacity required by AC/DC. Malcolm and Angus knew who he was—Bon had told stories of seeing this guy sing one time when Fraternity supported Geordie in the UK. Johnson was located, he squeezed an audition into his “busy” schedule, he impressed with versions of “Whole Lotta Rosie” and “Nutbush City Limits,” and he got the gig. “He’s got the range,” declared Mutt Lange. Bon wasn’t five weeks in the ground and Johnson was already the new singer in AC/DC.

  Meanwhile in Newcastle, New South Wales, just north of Sydney, AC/DC’s original singer Dave Evans sat by the phone, dressed head-to-toe in leather and studs, waiting for a call which would never come.

  Bon was one of a kind and the band knew he could never truly be replaced. Angus would now be the sole front man, the star attraction. Any singer would have to fall in behind him and just bellow. Which is what Brian Johnson did, and still does.

  The next best thing to a Scot is most likely a Geordie, and in terms of temperament Johnson was just the sort of character AC/DC were looking for—down to earth, self-deprecating, and with a salty sense of humor. And Johnson—like Bon—was older, and wise enough to know not to overstep the mark.

  The announcement was made on April 8. The band claimed Bon would have wanted it that way, and they were right. To have come this far and not gone on would have been a betrayal of all Bon’s efforts. Bon wouldn’t have sat around feeling sorry for himself. The ultimate irony, of course, given the American label’s complaints about Bon, is that Johnson’s shrieking style is essentially as unintelligible as Bon’s! He may never have rivaled Bon’s songwriting ability, but—helped by superior technology—Brian Johnson has served AC/DC, and Bon’s memory, well.

  The band spent the first two weeks of April rehearsing with Johnson and Lange in London, and then set sail for the Bahamas, where they were booked into Compass Point Studios in Nassau.

  In the same way they’d claimed they didn’t want a Bon clone—and in Brian Johnson, didn’t get one—the band also claimed they weren’t interested in “grave-robbing” any of Bon’s last song ideas.

  But given the way the famous Young/Scott/Young writing team worked, it’s hard to imagine that, at the very least, some of Bon’s ideas didn’t seep into Back in Black, if only indirectly. And if some of these ideas were used—which would not have been unreasonable, since Malcolm, especially, had provided Bon with more than a few lyric lines and themes over the years—at least Bon might have been awarded a credit—but he wasn’t.

  Highway to Hell had succeeded because Mutt Lange made the band sound bigger and smoothed out some of its rough edges. Back in Black succeeded because it sounded even bigger still, and because within that huge, enveloping ambience, it could afford to restore some of the sharper edges (culling a lot of the backing vocals). Highway to Hell is a warmer-sounding, more well-rounded album than Back in Black, but the overarching sonic vista of Back in Black, the vastness of its dynamic crunch, makes it irresistible, and although the later album is uneven (several of its songs are relatively weak), the superior half of it is so overwhelming, it sweeps everything
before it. It is no surprise that by 2006 it had sold over forty million copies world-wide.

  But Back in Black is more than just dedicated to Bon’s memory, more than a fully fitting tribute to him; it’s like a haunted house, a voice from the grave: Bon not going gently into that good night. It is significant that the graph of AC/DC record sales traces a steady ascent up to Back in Black, and after hitting that peak, begins to decline. It’s hard not to ascribe that to Bon’s fading presence.

  Bon’s death was “the defining moment for AC/DC,” David Christensen wrote in the online journal fakejazz in 2001. “It solidifies the band as the hard living thugs they’d always played themselves to be, but is the inevitable end of the lifestyle they led and championed in their music. It gives everything they had previously released a dark pall and a bitter edge. And it was the event from which they could never recover. Though they released another strong record—Back in Black—the AC/DC of 1974-79 was gone and in their place was something else entirely, as evidenced by the tonal shift of Back in Black.”

  Back in Black’s opening track, “Hell’s Bells,” is one of the slowest dirges AC/DC have ever recorded. Slowing the tempo a bit generally was one of the keys to opening up the band’s sound, but this track, obviously enough, was a funeral march . . .

  AC/DC had a tradition of making ten-track albums, five songs per side. Of the remaining four songs on Side One, only “Shoot to Thrill” and “Giving the Dog a Bone” barely measure up; “What Do You Do For Money Honey?” and “Let Me Put My Love Into You” are both pretty ordinary.

  The real riches lie on Side Two. The double punch of its opening, first the title track (the Greatest Riff of All Time), followed by “You Shook Me All Night Long” (the ultimate frat-house party-starter and pole dancer favorite, the only pop record AC/DC have ever made), cements the album’s impact. The side continues strongly too, with “Have a Drink On Me,” “Shake a Leg” and “Rock’n’Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution.”