Malcolm placed an ad in Sydney’s Sunday Morning Herald and recruited bassist Larry Van Kriedt and former Masters Apprentices drummer Colin Burgess. Ironically, vocalist Dave Evans had just left the same band Malcolm had been in when he saw the ad and called the number listed. He was more than surprised to hear Malcolm pick up the phone.
Dave Evans had grown up in a musical household as well. Born in Carmarthen, Wales, his family had also immigrated to Australia. Dave sang at school concerts and in the school choir. As a young teenager, he listened to The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, and The Beatles. By the time he started playing in bands, he was into Led Zeppelin, Free, and Deep Purple. It has been said that Dave was hired more for his image than anything else. The look of the day was glam rock and Dave definitely had that nailed down.
Malcolm’s new band started rehearsing in an office complex in Newtown, at the corner of Wilson Street and Erskineville Road. Once Angus’s band fell apart, Malcolm asked the rest of the guys if his brother could audition for them. Even though they were brothers, Dave remembers Malcolm being very considerate to ask first, instead of just telling them Angus was joining. Originally Malcolm had planned on adding keyboards, but changed his mind and decided a second guitar was what he was looking for. Once Angus joined the band, he and Malcolm would—for a while—alternate between playing rhythm and lead guitars.
They had tossed around ideas for a band name and came up with Third World War. Their sister Margaret had a better idea when she noticed the phrase AC/DC written on the back of her sewing machine. Some sources say it was a vacuum cleaner, but I’m sticking with the sewing machine since Margaret would eventually make some of Angus’s first schoolboy uniforms. Although in an interview with Dave Evans, writer Peter Hoysted noted in an article for Axs Magazine, “Malcolm claims it was a vacuum cleaner, and it was his sister-in-law Sandra, George’s wife, who came up with it.”
Regardless of who came up with it, they agreed on the name AC/DC because it suggested power and electricity. Although for years the band would have to fend off the theory that it referred to their sexual preferences. Malcolm once told me the first time he realized the sexual connotation was when a cab driver asked him about it. He quickly shot back, “What, are you trying to start a fight or something?” If you consider how much this band loves the ladies, the very idea is completely comical.
AC/DC’s first professional appearance was at a small club called Chequers at 79 Goulburn Street in Sydney on New Year’s Eve, 1973. Much of their set included covers of songs by Chuck Berry, the Stones, Free, and The Beatles. Dave Evans remembers how well they were received: “From the very first gig at Chequers, the crowd just reacted to the energy of the band which did not let up from the word go and actually intensified as we neared the end of our set. Our attitude was to absolutely KILL the audience, and that is still AC/DC’s attitude today.”
Angus’s stage antics were encouraged by George. One night when he was still playing in Tantrum, he tripped over his own guitar cord and fell down. Instead of getting up, he used it for effect and rolled around on the stage screaming in pain through his guitar. It was the only applause they received all night. When George heard about that, he suggested Angus make it part of his act.
His inability to stand still goes back to the way he feels about music. He simply can’t stay in one place while he’s playing. Angus claims he’s a rotten guitar player when he can’t move around. He once told Jim Miller of Newsweek, “An Australian audience likes to drink a lot…So I used to jump on tables, anything to get them to stop drinking for 10 seconds. They would be throwing beer cans and I thought, ‘Just keep moving,’ and that’s how it all started.”
Their sister Margaret suggested he wear his schoolboy uniform, remembering how he looked after school, sitting in his room for hours playing his guitar. Angus explained the original plan in 1982 in Circus magazine: “The uniform was originally a one-off thing. The drummer in my previous band talked me into doing something outrageous, so I dressed up like a school kid. The idea was to become a nine-year-old guitar virtuoso who would play one gig, knock everyone out, and disappear into obscurity. I’d have been a legend. But then I kept doing it. Now…well, I’m stuck with it.”
Wearing the schoolboy uniform started out as a gimmick and ended up being an international trademark. Try thinking of another everyday inanimate object that is so universally connected to a rock ‘n’ roll band. Obviously, instruments and elaborate Kiss costumes don’t count!
Playing around the clubs in Sydney, Larry Van Kriedt also played saxophone while Malcolm covered the bass. In February, they went into EMI Studios to cut their first single, “Can I Sit Next To You Girl” and B-side “Rockin’ In The Parlour.” George and Harry produced it, with George recording the bass parts and Malcolm playing lead guitar on “Can I Sit Next To You Girl.” A week later, when drummer Colin Burgess collapsed on stage at Chequers, presumably from too much drink, he was immediately fired. Big brother George once again saved the day and played drums for their second set. Soon after, Larry Van Kriedt was let go as well.
When Malcolm was asked to fill in on guitar for the band Jasper, he quickly asked their drummer Noel Taylor and bassist Neil Smith to join AC/DC. In March they all moved into the Hampton Court Hotel in Sydney where they were booked four nights a week. They continued to play as many dates as possible, including opening for Sherbet in Newcastle. After only six weeks in the band, Noel Taylor and Neil Smith just weren’t cutting it and were fired. One can imagine that playing in the rhythm section of AC/DC is a tough job. When the band played a Victory Park concert with the band Flake, Malcolm immediately hired their drummer Peter Clack and bassist Rob Bailey.
Somewhere between Colin Burgess and Peter Clack, there were drummers Ron Carpenter and Russell Coleman. Obviously, both didn’t play in the band very long because Dave Evans remembers Ron Carpenter but not Russell Coleman, and he was there! Luckily, any time AC/DC was minus a bass player, George was always there to fill in. That is, when he wasn’t in the studio with Harry Vanda revolutionizing the Australian music scene.
George and Harry had been busy working with their ex-vocalist, Stevie Wright, who was battling a nasty heroin addiction at the same time he was starring in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar. (Now there’s a thought that should send most of the Bible Belt reeling: Jesus played by a junkie.) Stevie was recording his album, Hard Road, at EMI Studios and Malcolm was asked to contribute some guitar tracks. The record featured the 11-minute hit single, “Evie.” Later, when Wright’s band played a free show at the Sydney Opera House on May 26, 1974 in front of 2,500 people, AC/DC got to open for them. A reported 10,000 fans had to be turned away. Wright’s band that night included Malcolm on guitar, as well as Harry Vanda and George Young. After the show, AC/DC was approached by Sherbet’s ex-frontman Dennis Laughlin. He loved the band and immediately signed on as their first manager.
AC/DC’s performance got the attention of the local press, GoSet, who wrote that, “AC/DC opened the show and showed they’re a force to be reckoned with. They play rock ‘n’ roll intelligently adding their own ideas to sure crowdpleasers like ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and ‘Shake, Rattle, And Roll.’” They also cited Malcolm and Angus’s double guitar attack and compared Dave to the teen idol David Cassidy.
In June, AC/DC officially signed a deal with Albert Productions with distribution through EMI. On July 22, “Can I Sit Next To You Girl” and “Rockin’ In The Parlour” were released in Australia. The single was also released on the Polydor label in New Zealand. It soon became a regional hit in Perth and Adelaide and eventually reached the Top Five. The record received rave reviews: “It starts off like rubber bullets, builds right into a power chord structure just bristling with energy and includes some incredible dynamic effects—like pure fuzz noise echoing from channel to channel, then fading out as a machine gun rhythm guitar fades in, rising to a powerful blast as they scream out the title over and over. Overall, a stunning record.”
The country got its first look at AC/DC live on film when a clip of the band playing at the Last Picture Show Theatre in Cronulla aired on GTK (at the time, Australia’s only national rock television show). Even though Peter Clack and Rob Bailey didn’t play on the recordings of “Can I Sit Next To You Girl,” they appear in the film.
Dave reminisced about seeing “Can I Sit Next To You Girl” racing up the charts and hearing it on the radio every couple of hours each day. The adoration from the fans was “all very new and exciting.” Luckily, George had lots of experience with the pitfalls of rock stardom. He had his dream come true and then watched it fall apart. He urged AC/DC to stay true to their roots, a sentiment they took to heart and have never forgotten.
For a while, AC/DC auditioned several wardrobe options. Aside from Angus’s schoolboy uniform, he tried dressing as Spider-Man, Zorro, and as Super A(ngus), complete with a fake telephone booth. After he got stuck in it during one of their shows, that idea was scrapped. For a while, the drummer dressed as a harlequin clown, Malcolm was a pilot, and the bass player was a motorcycle cop. Dave stuck with what he knew best and remained a rock god. Now we know where The Village People got their ideas from. Remembering George’s advice, they eventually dumped the costumes, except, of course, for Angus’s schoolboy outfit.
Along with playing the clubs in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, their manager Laughlin got them an opening spot on Lou Reed’s Australian tour in August. They spent much of their time—when they weren’t on stage—riding in the back of a truck. Dave fondly recalled, “In Australia the bands had to endure long hours on the road driving between towns and cities. It would take about 12 to 14 hours to get from Sydney to Melbourne, depending on the weather. When we drove from Adelaide to Perth, it took two days to get there. Most times, band members would try to doze off. There weren’t many humorous moments really. We got to see the countryside as it passed by and, of course, there are some really beautiful parts of Australia, but we were on a schedule and had to keep driving.”
The most humorous thing that did happen to Dave while performing with the band was revealed to Brian Coles in Electric Basement in September 2000. “I remember falling off the stage at the Sydney Opera House,” he reminisced. “It was a free gig and it was packed with thousands outside who couldn’t get in. I overbalanced at the front of the stage and made it look as if I had jumped off. You wouldn’t believe it but right in the middle of the front row was an empty chair that I spun around and sat in, and watched the show along with the audience during Angus’s lead break. Then I jumped up onto the stage in time for my cue for the vocals to begin again. People complimented me on a great stage act, but now I can reveal the truth.”
The most bizarre gig that AC/DC played was a friend’s wedding. The brother of the bride was a good friend of the band’s and had lent them PA equipment when they needed it. The band got quite a laugh when they realized they were playing in a backyard with no stage. Dave told Hoysted of Axs Magazine in October 1998, “We did a set—a bit of Chuck Berry, a bit of The Rolling Stones—the stuff we were doing. The father of the bride came up to me and asked us if we could play ‘Zorba The Greek.’ I said, ‘Mate, we’re a rock ‘n’ roll band. There’s no way.’ Then Malcolm said, ‘Give me a minute.’ He went away and practiced for a while, all from ear. That’s how good the guy was. Then Malcolm said, ‘Tell him, yeah. We’ll do it.’ The band went back and played following Malcolm’s lead. It was an instrumental piece, so I was in the clear. It sounded good. We killed ’em. The people at the wedding danced and cheered when it was over. I hope they all remember that day. The one and only time AC/DC ever played ‘Zorba The Greek.’” Boy, wouldn’t you just love to have a bootleg of that?
By the fall of 1974, AC/DC was looking for a new singer. Tensions had been building with Evans, who was often booted off the stage so the band could jam on blues boogies. Malcolm and Angus both thought the band sounded better without him. At times when they played two to four shows a day, Dave’s voice would give out and Dennis Laughlin, their manager, would fill in for him. Plus, they felt his “glam” image contrasted too much with the rest of the band. An eventual punch-up between Dave and Dennis sealed his fate.
Vince Lovegrove first met George Young when his band opened for The Easybeats. Lovegrove had stayed in touch with George and when he heard AC/DC was looking for a new singer, he recommended Bon Scott. Vince and Bon had shared lead vocals in the band The Valentines and Vince was helping Bon by giving him odd jobs while he recovered from a near-fatal motorcycle accident. When George passed along the information to Malcolm and Angus, they deemed Bon too old for the job, considering he was the ancient age of 28. He was nine years older than Angus.
When Bon saw them live for the first time in Adelaide, he knew he was right for the band. Much has been written about him being their driver and/or roadie, probably because he hung out with them and drove Angus and Malcolm around in his 90-dollar Holden. Bon himself explained how he was hired in the documentary movie Let There Be Rock. “I knew their manager. I’d never seen the band before. I’d never even heard of AC/DC and their manager said, ‘Just stand there,’ and the band comes in two minutes, and there’s this little guy, in a school uniform, going crazy, and I laughed. I’m still laughing. I took the opportunity to explain to them how much better I was than the drongo they had singing with them. So they gave me a chance to prove it, and there I was.”
Lovegrove told No Nonsense in May 1999, “One day Malcolm told me they were going to sack their singer and he asked me if I knew anyone. I told him I did, that it was Bon, and that I’d introduce him that night as they were playing at my venue. They said to me that Bon was too old, that they wanted someone young. I told Malcolm that Bon could rock them ’til they dropped, that he could out-rock them anytime. When I told Bon, he told me they were too young, that they couldn’t rock if their lives depended on it.
“After the show we all went back to Bruce Howe’s place for a jam session. He was the bass player for Fraternity and they rocked on until dawn doing Chuck Berry songs. It worked a treat. Next day, Bon came around to the house, packed his bags, and said he was going to Sydney to join AC/DC. He was in the back seat of their hire car. They were in the front. We waved goodbye and that was that. A legend began.”
Luckily for Bon, he waited to officially join the band until after they completed a six-week stint supporting transvestite Carlotta at Perth’s Beethoven Disco. Bon’s first appearance with the band was actually more of a jam session at the Pooraka Hotel. AC/DC asked Dave to leave after his last concert in Melbourne, and Bon’s real debut with the band was at Brighton-Le-Sands Masonic Hall in Sydney on October 5, 1974. There were no hard feelings between Dave and Bon. After that, Dave ran into Bon on several occasions. “We shook hands, wished each other luck, and had no animosity towards each other.”
Dave told Rock-E-Zine in September 2000, “At first I was shocked and so was the Sydney audience who were my fans, but Bon made his own character work brilliantly with the band and he endeared himself with his cheekiness and he always seemed to have a twinkle in his eyes. Also his voice was unique and had an unusual quality. Some of my favorite rock songs are ones that Bon sings.” Dave went on to find his own success with the band Rabbit, who scored a hit with their song “Too Much Rock ‘N’ Roll.”
On Bon’s first performance with the band, Angus recalled, “For the first gig the only rehearsal we had was just sitting around an hour before the gig, pulling out every rock ‘n’ roll song we knew. When we finally got there, Bon downed about two bottles of Bourbon with dope, coke, speed, and says, ‘Right, I’m ready,’ and he was too. He was fighting fit. There was this immediate transformation and he was running around yelling at the audience. It was a magic moment.” The brothers affectionately nicknamed Bon “the old man.”
Right after Bon joined the band, AC/DC went on a two-month tour of Australia. They also switched managers, leaving Dennis Laughlin and signing on with Michael Browning. They were dissatisfied with the way Laughlin had been handling the band and their finances. When money was tight, he would try to pay the band in booze, smokes, or other illicit materials. That tender worked for most of the band at times, but not at all for Angus, who neither drank nor indulged in anything stronger than a cigarette.
Browning was the manager of the Hard Rock Cafe in Melbourne, not to be confused with the now-famous restaurant chain. He had previously managed the Australian rock star Billy Thorpe and his band, The Aztecs. He gave up, though, after five years of trying to break Billy overseas. George went to Melbourne to check Michael out and was impressed with his vision for the band. His leadership abilities were going to catapult AC/DC out of Australia and into the international music scene.
Chris Gilby, the promotions man for Alberts from 1973 to 1977, said in an interview with No Nonsense in August 2001, “Michael was a really visionary guy who saw the promise of the band and the way to break them. He was really the brains behind the band in the early days. I think that he was quite instrumental in bringing Bon into the band…Frankly it was when Bon joined the band and started writing lyrics that sounded like graffiti that I started thinking that this was a band that was going to go somewhere. Bon was a great guy who had a tremendous attitude and great stage presence—a fantastic communicator.” With rock giants like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath dominating the rock world, AC/DC’s shoot-from-the-hip approach to rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-Seventies was a breath of fresh air—or cigarette smoke—depending on where you were standing.
One of their regular stops for the band was the Hard Rock Cafe, where they played the weekly gay nights. This probably didn’t help the fact that their sexuality was always being questioned, thanks to their name. As long as the band was playing in front of an audience, they really didn’t care. Malcolm remembers the gay nights: “Upfront, bisexual women would come in and hold up vibrators. They had T-shirts on with holes cut out in front, and their boobs would poke through. It was great.” So appropriate for an ex-brassiere factory worker, don’t you think?
In November, they went into the studio for 10 days to cut their first album. The tracks included “Baby, Please Don’t Go” (a Muddy Waters cover), “She’s Got Balls,” “Little Lover,” “Stick Around,” “Love Song,” and with Malcolm on lead, “Soul Stripper,” “You Ain’t Got A Hold On Me,” and “Show Business.” “She’s Got Balls” was apparently a tribute to Bon’s ex-wife, Irene, who wasn’t too happy with it. My guess is the line “Likes to crawl my lady, hands and knees all around the floor. No one has to tell her what a fella is for” is what ticked her off.
When Angus’s amplifier blew up and started smoking during one of their recording sessions, George madly waved at him from the control room to keep on playing. When you listen to the raw energy immortalized on their first album, you can almost smell the smoke! The Australian cover featured a cartoon of a power generator behind barbed wire, littered with empty beer cans. For added disrespect, included in the picture was a dog relieving himself. They most appropriately called it High Voltage.
In a 1992 edition of Metal CD, Malcolm stated, “Back then we never went into the studio with anything more than a riff. In fact, we thought a riff was a song. Fortunately, we had the producers there to turn them into songs and it’s been pretty much the same ever since. Back then we really didn’t know any better.”
George ended up playing the bass, and session drummer, Tony Currenti, cut most of the drum tracks. Drummers Peter Clack and John Proud, who played on the Marcus Hook Roll Band album, appear on one track each.
AC/DC rang in the New Year by playing at Festival Hall in Melbourne. There is a great picture of Bon on stage wearing a pair of red satin-bibbed overalls with no shirt on. God, I miss the Seventies! At Michael Browning’s suggestion, AC/DC had relocated to Melbourne and moved into a house at 6 Lansdowne Road in the East St. Kilda district. Five musicians: hot, single, and ready to take the world by storm. Everyone was in their twenties, except Angus who was just 19. Years later, Malcolm would say that living together in that house was one of the happiest times of their lives…also one of the craziest.
It seems there were two distinct types of female AC/DC fans or, some would say, groupies. There were friends, like Trudy Worme, whose mom used to drop her off at their house on Sunday afternoons so she could cook dinner for them. Being out of the house for the first time, Angus and Malcolm both missed home cooking. She also baked Angus his favorite chocolate cakes.
Then there were the other girls who wanted to do more than cook for them. Evidently, many lovely creatures of the female persuasion came and went. So much so that this is where Bon got the personal inspiration for the song “The Jack.” Bon once said, “The story is, we all had a house together in Melbourne. And we had about 20 chicks who would come around and service the band, the whole thing. So the whole band got the jack. And so Malcolm said one day: ‘Why don’t we do a song about it?’ So we wrote it [“The Jack”] that afternoon and played it that night and during the quiet part in the middle I went around and pointed out all the girls, you know…‘She’s got the jack’ and ‘She’s got the jack’ and so on. And all these chicks are makin’ a mad dash for the door. It was quite funny actually.”
Due to the band’s promiscuity, there was even one horrifying outbreak of crabs that traveled all the way from the house into the band car! Of course, in future interviews the band blamed all this on the roadies. There must be some unwritten cardinal rule in rock ‘n’ roll: “If questioned, blame the roadies.” This medical or sexual dilemma, if you will, inspired Bon to write the song “Crabsody In Blue,” his take on the classic number “Rhapsody In Blue.” And Bon was a classic guy, let me tell you. The boys were kept so busy keeping their slates clean that some say they once had a group rate at the local clinic. If the phrase “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” didn’t originate here, it at least was carried on for future generations to come, and come again…I know. I couldn’t help it.
Once they hired Bon Scott, the Young brothers had met their match. Bon’s love of life, and everything else for that matter, would come through in his stage persona. He loved to sing, laugh, drink, play, and live rock ‘n’ roll. His sexual escapades would inspire much of his lyrics, that is when he wasn’t writing about the rough and winding road to becoming a rock star. Bon’s use of double entendres was at times genius, and his personal magnetism and charisma are now legendary. “The old man” lived a couple of lifetimes before he joined AC/DC. And he barely stuck around long enough to tell us about them.