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 to 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.
Pam invited Bon over to a lunch she was having the next day, not expecting him to come. But come he did. The scene was quite outside Bon’s experience—polite society almost, the intellectual types that tend to work at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (2JJ’s parent company)—but Bon was the life of the party. Pam was smitten.
All this was enough to keep Bon’s mind off his deeper woes. The theft of his bike a couple of days later, however, threw him back into a spin. At least it wouldn’t be long before the band left for Japan. A farewell party was held at the Strata Inn, a pub in Cremorne. Bon, Malcolm and Angus got up with George on bass and Ray Arnott on drums and played a few numbers. It would be Bon’s last ever performance on Australian soil.
On his last night in town, Pam arranged to meet Bon at the Lifesaver after she’d finished work. When she got there, he was nowhere to be seen. She raced back to the radio station, thinking he might have got the arrangements mixed up. He wasn’t there either. She went back to the Lifesaver, but still he hadn’t shown up. She was dismayed more than anything else. Bon was about to go away indefinitely, and they weren’t going to see each other again. She drove home across the bridge cursing him. Bon, meantime, had managed to climb through a window into her bedroom, and was in repose when she got there. All that was missing was a rose between his teeth.
Needless to say, Pam’s flatmate was horrified when this ravaged, tattooed figure emerged the next morning and went straight to the fridge for a beer for breakfast.
But the band wouldn’t be going to Japan, after all. At the last minute, visas were denied. Bon killed a couple more days at Pam’s place while new flights were booked—the band would now be going straight to Miami. RAM’s Stuart Coupe met up with the band in the departure lounge. Bon, he said, who had Pam on his arm, was “batfaced.” “True to form and reputation he informs my female companion she ‘should look after that great body.’ He looks me up and down and continues, ‘and if he doesn’t, let me know and you can have my phone number.’”
AC/DC were not enamoured of either Eddie Kramer or Miami. “This time of year, it’s an Elephant’s Graveyard for geriatric Jews and totally boring,” Bon wrote to Maria. Maria and her husband Jim had just had their first child, and Bon extended his hearty congratulations on the “wean.”
Bon wrote further to Uncle:
Atlantic reckoned we should use a top Yank producer and appointed one Eddie Kramer to the post. It turns out the guy was full of bullshit and couldn’t produce a healthy fart. He was a good engineer with a big mouth (“I can hear this note . . .”) and a lot of front. We gave him the arse and got hold of one John Lange who we start work with on Wednesday in London.
MICHAEL BROWNING: “I got a phone call from Malcolm in Florida, to say, This guy’s hopeless, do something, he’s trying to talk us into recording that Spencer Davis song, “Gimme Some Loving”, “I’m a Man”, whatever it was...
“Three weeks in Miami and we hadn’t written a thing with Kramer,” Bon told RAM. “So one day we told him we were going to have the day off and not to bother coming in. This was Saturday, and we snuck into the studio and on that one day we put down six songs, sent the tape to Lange and said, Will you work with us?”
These demos were cut by Malcolm, Angus and Bon, with Bon playing drums, as had become their practice.
BROWNING: “I was at that stage based temporarily in New York, I’d met some people who’d invited me to stay with them, one of whom was Mutt Lange’s manager, Clive Calder. I got the phone call from Malcolm, and I got off the phone, and Mutt was there, in the apartment, and I said, You’ve got to do this record. At the time, Mutt had really only done City Boy, the Boomtown Rats, but I happened to think he was incredibly talented. So within a couple of days they agreed to do the record.”
But not before Michael Klenfner lost his job over the matter. It was Klenfner who had foisted Eddie Kramer on the band, and he disagreed violently with the idea of now getting in Lange. But if Michael Browning ever had a reputation for being soft, he stood firm this time. Klenfner was left out in the cold. The band flew to London to start work with Lange.
Bon’s letter to Uncle continued:
A couple of days later: Landed in London yesterday on one of those beautiful rain-drenched two-degree mornings. Today’s not much better. Gee, it’s great to be back . . . We meet our new producer tonight and hit him with fifteen songs that need shaping. My fingers are crossed.
Robert John “Mutt” Lange was a South African who, after getting his start in music as a singer and songwriter, crossed to the other side of the mixing desk. He was reported to have felt on trial with AC/DC initially. But the band—unused to outsiders in the studio—felt vulnerable, too. Over time, they developed a guarded respect for one another.
BROWNING: “It turned out, he was the best person on earth to do it.”
The band virtually moved into the Roadhouse Studios in Chalk Farm, spending the best part of three months there. That, to start with, was a shock to AC/DC, who had never previously spent more than three weeks on any one album.
Highway to Hell—as the completed album was called, after the name Angus had given the band’s last American tour—was as much of a progression upon Powerage as Let There Be Rock was on Dirty Deeds. But more than that, it was ground-breaking in any terms.
“Mutt was brought up on the rough side of town, which helped him in the studio,” Malcolm told RAM. “He’s like Harry, a bit more commercial. We learnt a lot. You really need an outsider because we can all go too far and disappear up our own anuses.”
Sessions for the album—15 hours a day, day-in day-out, for over two months—were grueling. Songs were worked and reworked. Staying at the Swiss Cottage Inn, Bon bore up under the prolonged pressure, maintaining a brave face, but none felt it more deeply than he did.
SILVER: “He was a bit lost. I mean, I still ran his bank account for him. He was never in one place long enough to keep it together. He got used to me organizing everything, keeping the bills paid, all that sort of stuff. Plus the emotional stuff—like, he was no longer in a relationship that he was dependent on—stuff like that.”
Silver was herself by then a fully-fledged junkie.
The album was finished at the end of June, having been mixed relatively quickly at Basing Street Studios, near Ladbroke Grove, in eight days. Lange managed to inject a greater sweep into the band’s sound on Highway to Hell, and it was this, plus the smoother touch of melodic backing vocals, but without losing any of the band’s characteristic dynamic crunch, that gave the album its poise and potency.
The title track, which opens the album, assumes anthemic proportions even before Bon’s vocal comes in. Few albums in rock open quite so ominously, and few, as this one proceeds, are ultimately quite as monolithic. Bon’s lyrics were more universal—few characters appeared in the songs and the narratives were more compact—but they were no less evocative. His turn of phrase, and better-balanced vocalizing, counterpointed perfectly the band’s controlled explosive grind. Every track except “Love Hungry Man,” which the band quickly disowned, became an AC/DC staple. Mutt Lange had achieved precisely what George and Harry couldn’t—a blend of accessible polish and raw power which satisfied both the band and Atlantic.
MICHAEL BROWNING: “When they were in England recording, I spent a fair bit of time in Australia, so I wasn’t really part of that process. I was also having a few immigration problems with America, so I was waiting for that to be resolved too. I next saw the group in New York, after they finished making the record. By that time, I think a few American management companies had started to sniff around.
“At that point we were strapped financially, the whole thing had put such a strain on the whole financial system, and so this guy Peter Mensch, from Leber & Krebs [one of the most powerful US artist management companies at the time], had damaged my position, and so I think they were quite impressed by the prospects in that.”
Alberts was already deep in the hole (touring America as a support band is a money-losing proposition), and simply couldn’t afford to increase the amount they were putting into AC/DC. Michael Browning had been talking to an upstate New York promoter by the name of Cedric Kushner with regards to him buying in on the operation. Malcolm and Angus were understandably reluctant to see another outsider staking a claim on them. It didn’t help, either, that Kushner was questioning the band’s deal with Alberts, among other things. It was clear that it was now time to give Browning the chop, too.
PERRY COOPER: “He [Browning] was getting pressured by a lot of people; people were going over his head at times. The band had its own mind—and when they make up their mind, they don’t talk to anybody about it. So whatever happened—Michael gave his all for that band. But they’re as tough as nails, these guys. There’s an old saying, Off the charts, outta your hearts, and when you’re off their charts, forget it. But the guys, I’ve gotta say, they always were very cooperative with us.”
Leber & Krebs co-founder David Krebs first encountered AC/DC in England in 1977. After the band’s American agent Doug Thaler took him to see them, Krebs proposed a co-management deal to Michael Browning. Browning rejected the idea, but nevertheless Thaler worked with Krebs to get AC/DC some choice support slots with top acts Leber & Krebs represented, such as Aerosmith and Ted Nugent.
Leber & Krebs had been formed in 1972, when Krebs and Steve Leber left the William Morris Agency to set up their own operation. They made a mint out of musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar and Beatlemania; then, in 1974, whilst also acting as US agents for Focus, Argent and Hawkwind, they took on management of Aerosmith and Nugent. In 1977, those two clients alone grossed them nearly ten million dollars.
Leber & Krebs capitalized on the fact that, as Steve Leber once explained to financial magazine Forbes, “an unknown group couldn’t walk into Citibank and get a loan if they tried to use their talent as collateral. But we’re willing to be the banker for the artist.”
The marriage of Leber & Krebs and AC/DC was made in heaven. Not only could Leber & Krebs inject cash into AC/DC, but the band was impressed by their aggressive, evasive style. In return, AC/DC was just the hot prospect that might give Leber & Krebs a further boost. Malcolm himself wanted Peter Mensch to handle the band personally. Though Mensch was a relatively lowly Leber & Krebs accountant, he’d befriended AC/DC when they were on the road supporting Aerosmith.
Michael Browning still had a year to serve on his contract, but he accepted a payoff. His removal provided some comfort, at least, to the smarting George back in Sydney, though he thought the settlement was too generous. Browning, of course, thought it was too little.
Bon had no strong feelings either way about Browning, but he was saddened to see the end of Coral, whom he’d always liked. He stayed in contact with her when she moved to LA, calling her regularly.
Browning himself returned to Australia and continues to this day to work at a high level in the music business. On the immediate rebound from AC/DC in 1980, he formed Deluxe Records, the label that first signed, among several other fledgling pub bands, INXS.
MICHAEL BROWNING: “It was hurtful, no doubt about it. I personally think I did a pretty amazing job. Sure, we made a couple of mistakes here and there, but it was a pioneering situation. And what made it more hurtful was that over the years, everyone, me included, with the Youngs and AC/DC, tends to get written out of history. It’s like you never existed. Even Mutt Lange, who did an amazing job of delivering to Atlantic Records exactly what they wanted, it’s like, Mutt Who?’
AC/DC hit the road again in America in 1979 at the end of June, with Highway to Hell due out in a matter of weeks. If You Want Blood was still selling, had by then, in fact, surpassed the quarter-million mark, neatly maintaining the rising curve of the band’s sales. The band would play its own first stadium headline tour, through partisan territory like Texas and the South.
Atlantic had high hopes for Highway to Hell. Perry Cooper said at the time: “I don’t believe you can break an act in the United States 100 per cent by touring. It takes you to a certain level and then drops dead. The only thing I can equate AC/DC with over here are Cheap Trick and Van Halen. They’ve both toured extensively over the years and neither one of them has broken from touring. They’ve created albums that are a little bit more acceptable and bang! they’ve become platinum artists. AC/DC can do that too.”
Bon called Pam Swain to invite her to join him on the road. He also asked her a favor—could she get him some money from Alberts? A thousand dollars would do. The request struck Pam as strange, but she told Bon she’d do what she could.
Highway to Hell was released simultaneously in Britain and America on July 27. It immediately registered the desired response—good reviews in Britain, and airplay in America.
Even the arch NME now had to come to the party, though it wasn’t without snide qualification. “THE GREATEST ALBUM EVER MADE (IN AUSTRALIA),” read the headline, the review going on to describe AC/DC as “a band who practice the science of overstatement to a ludicrous degree and succeed.”
Highway to Hell quickly became AC/DC’s first British top-ten album, going to number eight, and their first to crack the American top 20, peaking there at number 17. European returns were also very encouraging. Stalwart support continued in Germany and Scandinavia, while the single went to number 15 in Holland in its first week of release, and France too looked better than ever.
AC/DC promo shot from 1979 featuring bassist Cliff Williams (second from left), who joined after Mark Evans was fired. (courtesy Matt Dickson)
This was the big time. Strangely, Bon was still harping on to Pam about the money. Maybe it was because the band was caught in the transition between Browning and Leber & Krebs that there was no cash around; whatever, Bon seemed desperate.
In Australia, the single was released first, in August, and it climbed to number 24, marking the return of AC/DC to the charts after an absence of nearly three years. When the album followed in October, it completed the strategy of reestablishing the band in Australia. After the last two albums had failed to chart altogether, Highway to Hell went up to number 13.
The road snaked its way to the Midwest. Billed as an “Australian-Scottish new wave punk band,” AC/DC were special guests on good friends Cheap Trick’s gala fourth of July show in their hometown of Rockford, Illinois.
Pam Swain joined the band in Chicago, and traveled with them to Omaha, Nebraska. She felt like she really shouldn’t have been there. Bon seemed distracted, a different person altogether to the one he had been in Sydney. It wouldn’t have helped his mood that Pam couldn’t bring any money either. Alberts had refused to write a check. But Bon still tried to accommodate Pam.
With a full entourage numbering 25, the band was by now travelling in greater style, which meant a fitted-out bus. It was a home away from home that could never be. But Bon didn’t have a home to go to anyway. He was just another weary traveler on that lost highway.
“Some days you wake up and you never want to see the blokes again,” tour manager Ian Jeffery told Pam. “But those days never come near the others when you can see what you’re working for—five, ten, 15 thousand people shouting their heads off for the group.”
That was what kept Bon going too. “I’m in love with rock’n’roll, that grows, you know,” he told KSJO San Jose radio show Livewire. “I’m more in love with a couple of things, but . . . I was in love with one, but, ahh, she left me . . . I just hope rock’n’roll never leaves me.”
Bon fed off the crowd, finding fresh inspiration for songs he’d sung literally hundreds of times. Fifteen thousand faceless heads, all bobbing in unison, hair swinging, arms outstretched, fists punching the air, just a-spittin’ at the moon.
The band was still playing a lot of the same songs they were when they first arrived in Britain over three years ago, still opening the set with “Live Wire,” and running through “Problem Child,” “The Jack,” “High Voltage” and “Rocker.” “Riff Raff” and “Sin City” were more recent, off Powerage, but even “Let There Be Rock,” “Bad Boy Boogie,” “Hell Ain’t a Bad Place To Be” and “Whole Lotta Rosie”—the band’s standard encore—were over two years old. But as a support act, you can’t afford to muck around.
They say that performing is like making love to an audience, and yet then at the end of the night you find yourself alone in a hotel room. But if the experience is less like making love than having sex, Bon was always prepared to personalize his audience. A lot of artists won’t do that, preferring to remain inside their cocoon. But Bon was too much a true man of the people. He happily spent time with fans—and not just groupies—having a drink and a smoke, entertaining them; perhaps it allayed his loneliness.
“Often he would trail off with fans who came back after a show,” Angus later told Sounds. “He took people as they were and if they invited him somewhere and he was in the mood to go, he went.”
For a story she wrote for RAM, Pam asked Bon on the record whether life on the road was glamorous.
“Bloody oath,” he replied almost indignantly. “What do you think I do it for? The money, or the music? I do it for the glamour. The women and the whisky . . . What else is there in life? Let me think . . .”
“You get used to being on the road,” Malcolm said. “You can get boozed up like Bon. He can get right out of it. Then you get sick and have to stop drinking. Now I’ve learnt to pace myself it works better, because you’ve got so many hassles all the time.”
Privately, Bon was talking a lot about settling down. He was telling Pam he wanted to buy a house somewhere.
On July 30, 1979 a headline ran in the Melbourne Herald: “TWO SHOT AS FANS RIOT AT AC/DC SHOW.” Sharing a bill with Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, Journey and Thin Lizzy, the band had appeared at a huge open-air gig in Cleveland, Ohio, which turned very ugly. One youth was killed and another seriously wounded when a gunman let loose among the crowd of over 60,000. Three hundred police were called in. Over the course of the day, nine people were treated for stab wounds and 75 were arrested, mainly on drug charges.
Bon later claimed that AC/DC knew nothing, at the time, of this unrest, but it can’t not have touched the band. At least, that’s what Pam Swain thinks. She had got off the bus in Omaha to go to New York for a stay, and when the band got there, a few weeks later on August 11—to open for Ted Nugent at Madison Square Garden—she found Bon to be more remote, dark even. Maybe it was just her, she thought, but maybe it was other things too. Maybe it was the kid shot dead in Cleveland. Maybe it was just all the pressure. Maybe it was the booze and drugs—Bon was gobbling down pills by the handful. Maybe he was just having a bad few days. Pam would never see Bon again after that.
Molly Meldrum was in New York for the Madison Square Garden show. He saw a different Bon. “He was as fine as ever. He was being warned by the doctors, Stop drinking, and I said to him, Are you going to stop drinking? He said, Of course not. I’ve never been sick for a day in my life, and I think that’s one of the reasons why! Any germs that get into my body, Johnnie Walker goes, Pow!”
PERRY COOPER: “As far as the drugs and stuff? I mean, he did a little blow—and everybody was doing it—and he had his marijuana, but he never got to the point where he had to have it, or he was paranoid.”
The band had been invited by the Who to appear with them on a one-off London show at Wembley Stadium on August 18. It was an offer even AC/DC couldn’t refuse. The Who were one of the few bands Malcolm and Angus had any time for, and so it was an honor to be asked to share the stage as they made their return to live performance after a three-year hiatus, and debuted new drummer, former Small Face Kenny Jones, who had filled the chair left vacant by the death of wild man Keith Moon. As such, the Who wanted to make a grand entrance, and so a bill was assembled that was meant to stand as a sort of state-of-the-rock roll call. It featured the latest American guitar-slinger Nils Lofgren, and new wave old farts, the Stranglers, as well as AC/DC. The gig stamped AC/DC with a seal of approval and broadened their scope further.
Checking into the Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn, Bon was pleased just to get back to London, where at least he had a few friends. And old friends were becoming dearer to him as it became increasingly difficult to tell who your real friends were.
JOE FUREY: “Touring all the time, you can become cut off from people, you’re unable to sustain friendships. You just end up living the whole rock’n’roll stereotype on the road. Bon knew how important it was, keeping that family of friends he had together. People like percys, they keep that side of an artist’s life intact. You’ve got to have that infrastructure, and I think when Coral Browning went, you lose that, when you suddenly go with another management company that doesn’t know.”
SILVER: “Once they signed with Leber & Krebs, it was getting to be big business by then, the personal touch was gone. That social thing, where you saw everybody around, was over. The band had their respective lives they were leading. Angus was close to getting married. Malcolm was with Linda. Cliff had a girlfriend, and an ex-wife he saw as well. So it was fragmented socially.”
JOE: “A lot of the time, when Bon lobbed into London, he was just completely hanging loose. So in a lot of ways, that was the relationship Bon and I had, because he could always get in contact with me when he got to town, and I’d know where so-and-so was, you know.”
Joe was then working as a Percy for UFO guitarist Paul Chapman.
JOE: “The feeling in London when Peter Mensch came in and started trying to run AC/DC was that he was just like somebody’s nephew or something, you know, an accountant who was related to the boss at Leber & Krebs in New York, where it was like, let’s give Peter a job, you know—and he came in, like, This is the way it should be done. He was treating it like you would have run a factory, you know, and it doesn’t work like that. Bon would only get a phone call from them when they had something for him to do.
“But he worked within it. Those last couple of months, there was definitely the feeling, I mean, they were the hottest band in the world. They knew they could blow anybody off the stage. And Bon was aware of that too. But he was never one to bitch about things, and that comes back to his professionalism. He was smart enough not to do that. He was going to reap the bounty of what he’d just spent 20 years pushing to do.”
The Who’s Wembley show was indeed a “gathering of the tribes,” as hippies, punks, old and revival mods, and headbangers alike all made their way in the summer sun down to the famous Twin Towers. But between the tepid Nils Lofgren and the turgid Stranglers, it was only AC/DC who aroused the crowd’s unanimous enthusiasm. Read Juke’s review of the show: “AC/DC are not “good” or “bad”. They are perfect AC/DC, a heavy metal archetype overblown to the point where stereotype meets parody. Is Bon Scott serious or what? Is he just playing out a real-life comic strip of an HM lead singer? Do they smirk when they write those giant three-chord riffs? Or do they just know that the world will love something this crass?”
After repeating the performance supporting the Who again at a couple of similar European summer festivals, the band flew back to America more confident than ever. The rest of the year was mapped out for them: after doing another lap of America, they would return to Britain in late October to tour, then tour Europe, and then they’d be free to head downunder, as usual, for Christmas.
Bon wrote to Irene late in August:
Hi kid, how’s tricks. At the moment I’m in California to start our Fall tour. We’ve been running round like blue-arsed flies this past couple of months between America, Europe and the UK doing all kinds of concerts, TV shows and promotion shit for the new album. Have you heard it yet? I don’t even know if it’s been released in Australia yet. It’s on the charts all over the world and selling like hot crumpet. I think we’ve done it with this one. Should be able to pay the rent for a couple of years. I wanna buy a house in California, a place like Fraternity had. I have some friends here who are in the real estate business and I’ve had some good offers but it’ll take another year and I’m in no hurry. It’s just a nice feeling to know you can do it at last . . .
I might get a chance to see you round Christmas-New Year. I plan to get to Sydney round the 23rd of Dec, buy a bike and ride to Perth. I’ve got a couple of weeks off and I just want to take it easy and unwind (this touring takes it out of you) . . . I’m still a very single man and having a ball right now. America’s certainly the place for a good time. I’ve become a bit of an alco (what’s new) but I’ll cut down when I go on holiday and leave off for a couple of hours . . . I’m not doing a lot of letter writing at the moment you might have noticed but I’m always thinking of you. Say hi to Graeme if he’s still alive.
The band toured America through September, into October, headlining exclusively in big venues over bands like Molly Hatchett, Sammy Hagar and Pat Travers. Bon somehow still managed to find enough energy to get into trouble.
A famous incident was recalled by Angus: “We were going from California to Austin, Texas, and we stopped off at Phoenix for fuel. We were just taking off again when someone says, Where’s Bon? He’d followed this bird off the plane and we reckoned he’d drunk so much he wouldn’t even know which country he was headed for . . .”
“We’d been drinking in the airport bar for about ten minutes,” Bon picked up the story, “when I says, Don’t you think it’s time we caught our plane? She says, What do you mean our plane? I’m staying here. I run back and the fuckin’ flight’s gone.” Bon went on to describe, true or otherwise, the night he spent in a Mexican bar whipping all the regulars on the pool table, before he was chased off by a fierce-looking black lady of Rosie-esque proportions. He managed to get on another flight to Austin just in time to make the gig.
With “Girl’s Got Rhythm” out as a single in Britain, the tour the band was due to start there on October 26 was practically sold out before they left America. They didn’t even stop over in London on their way to Newcastle, where the first gig was at the Mayfair.
DAVE JARRETT: “I flew up to Newcastle, and when we got there, there’d been a small fire in the hall, so they had to cancel that night’s show. So I thought, Alright! Back to the hotel, party time! The band all went to bed. It was just me and the road crew. I think they were all just so tired.”
Prior to concluding in Leicester on November 9, the tour played an unprecedented four-night stand at the Hammersmith Odeon, which unequivocally confirmed AC/DC’s status in Britain as, simply, one of the biggest bands on the circuit.
The band then headed to Europe. They were accompanied by freelance photographer Robert Ellis, who had somehow convinced a “loud American” (Peter Mensch) that he could serve the band well. He wrote later of Bon: “Like Keith Moon, he was a real danger to himself and needed constant minding . . . but he was nearly always the first down in the lobby of a morning, spruced up and ready to go. I warned him and anyone within earshot of the impending danger, but no one took much notice, least of all him.”
Due to public demand, another, albeit shorter, tour of Britain had been hastily arranged for the first week of December. Two more shows at the Hammersmith Odeon were locked in. The tour’s first gig, at Southampton, had to be cancelled when a leg muscle Bon had pulled in Europe became inflamed.
JOE FUREY: “That was the sort of period when Bon . . . well, when he’d come to town before, he was very much the rock’n’roller on the make. But at that point when he came back to London, he almost had a statesman’s air about him, a sort of serenity. I said, So you reckon you’ve made it? and he said, Yeah; not boasting, but satisfied. He knew that he was financially set for the rest of his life regardless.”
Getting back on his feet, Bon climbed aboard a bus bound for the Midlands. He had an unexpected passenger in tow, Mick Cocks of Rose Tattoo, or rather, formerly of Rose Tattoo. Mick had arrived in London in November, after leaving the Tatts under something of a cloud.
MICK COCKS: “Bon said, Look, I’m going on tour with the band, why don’t you come? I said, yeah, alright. He wanted some company, he was pretty lonely. I figured, he was playing in a band, but that doesn’t mean he’s got friends, right?
“What Bon would do, was go and have a drink with people he didn’t really know, and because he was sort of famous, you’d get a lot of hangers-on. He knew who was leeching off him and who wasn’t, but he’d reached the stage where he didn’t really care. He just wanted the company.
“The first four days on the bus, I just sat there before anyone actually spoke to me from the rest of the band. It was a coach, a 40-seater coach, and so Malcolm would sit up the front with his entourage, and Angus had his posse, the rhythm section theirs, and so I just sat up the back there with Bon. The band gave me the impression they were very set in their ways. Every band has its own way of doing things, but it was like, This is what we have to do. If I had any respect for them it was for that. Then I remember one day, one of the roadies came down and said, Malcolm wants to have a word with you. Just this message. So I went down to Malcolm and said, Yeah, g’day. And he said, Well, what are your intentions? I said, What do you mean? He said, What’s the story? I said, Well, Bon asked me to come along with him for the ride. Malcolm knew me well enough, but he was playing the grandfather. So I said, Look, mate, if you think I’m taking advantage of him you’ve got it all wrong. I was sharing a room with Bon; it wasn’t as if they had to spend money on me or anything. And he was just very lonely at the time.
“It gets like that. I’m not putting anybody down, but if you’ve been in a band for a number of years, it’s a bit like having five wives. So what you try and do is, if you can, set up your own little situation that doesn’t create friction, then you go with it. It’s not unfriendly, it’s just the way it is.
“Bon was drinking a bit at the time. But he’d give it a nudge for a while, and then he’d go off it. I think he was looking for some sort of romantic love he knew didn’t exist. You know, because he’d stopped chasing girls. He was thinking about other things. In those days he was talking a lot about his ex-wife, saying he had some things there he wanted to sort out. He was doing a lot of thinking, in terms of how he saw things working out.”
The two additional Odeon shows were merely a postscript to AC/DC’s ascent.
MICK COCKS: “You got the sense, Shit, they’re going to go up another level again. That they were really comfortable with what they were doing, and they just needed a bit of luck to kick on even further.”
JOE: “I think it was at that point in time that everyone knew it was going to happen. I remember we went to Tramps one night, and we were joking about the bill, which Bon picked up, so things were obviously going well.”
MICK COCKS: “He said, Look, I’m going to take you to this restaurant tonight, and he was all giggly. I said, What’s the matter? He said, We’re going to have steak tartare. I said, I love steak. And so these two piles of pink, raw mince [ground beef] show up, and I say, I’m not eating that! And Bon’s sitting there, he says, Okay. He says, Taste it. I say, No. Of course, I’m getting hungrier and hungrier, and so in the end I ate it. It was good.
“The food he’d eat, he was quite fussy about it. After a gig, he’d say, Let’s find a restaurant that’s open; and we’d go and eat. I was shocked. I mean, I used to tell people, I’d say, Oh, I ate this last night, and they’d say, Ah, get away. They’d say, Who took you? I’d say, Bon. They’d say, Piss off. And liqueurs. He had a cultured side that he liked to . . . I used to call him a toff. He used to laugh at that.
“He never gave me the impression money meant anything to him. The guys in the band, Phil, he’d go out and buy a couple of Ferraris; the bass-player, he was just happy with the security; Malcolm and Angus, I’m not sure, but they always gave me the impression they were pretty level-headed about it. But Bon was like, well, Fuck the money.
(Frank Peters/Juke)
“He was very aware of not owing anyone anything. I remember actually giving him some money one night, not because he didn’t have any but because he didn’t have any cash, and I remember at the time thinking, well, you know, he’d spent hundreds of pounds on me, wining and dining, and he was like, You’ve done me a big favor. I thought, it just didn’t match the ten quid I’d given him. It was a bit silly, really.”
Mick lost sight of Bon then, because Bon went to Australia. AC/DC dropped in on Paris to play a single show with Judas Priest—which was filmed and subsequently released on video as Let There Be Rock—and then Bon flew on to Melbourne. He went straight to Mary Walton’s place in Prahran, where he was always welcome. Mary’s future second husband Peter Renshaw provided him with a serious drinking partner.
Since Highway to Hell had put them back on the charts, the band was all the more determined to get an Australian tour together; but now it depended more on Japan falling into place, which would justify the expense of hauling the huge AC/DC roadshow to the eastern hemisphere.
Bon was doing the rounds of all his old haunts, looking up all his old mates. Irene and her boyfriend Nick arrived home one day to find a bottle of Scotch and a few bottles of beer awaiting them on the doorstep. “That’ll be Bon,” said Irene, who was six months pregnant. “He’ll be back.”
He did come back, and he got stuck into the grog as Nick fired up a barbie. He talked to Nick about music—Nick was an aspiring musician himself, a blues buff. Bon told him about the solo album he wanted to make (Silver also confirms he wanted to make a solo album).
MARY WALTON: Bon was just fine. He was Bon, as he always was. He was drinking a real lot. Too much probably. And really wasn’t eating that well. But that was just because he was partying. He was, by that stage . . . you know, I can imagine Bon getting lonely, getting bored with it all, and really just wanting to settle down, because that was the sort of guy that he was too.”
Bon picked up after Christmas and headed west; first stop, Adelaide, where he stayed with Bruce Howe. Band commitments required him to be back in Britain by the middle of January. They were set to record a new album, and Bon was already toying with a few ideas.
BRUCE HOWE: “Bon wasn’t particularly happy when I last saw him. He was talking about permanent relationships, having children, stuff like that. He looked dreadful. He seemed to sense, the closer you get to the top, you’ve still got the same personal life, and that’s when he started, for the first time, to have this philosophical conversation with me. You could see, he’d been overseas, it was all starting to get really big, and he was still . . . where do you go? You either have a family, or you chase endless relationships with women that make you feel good, but don’t really make you feel good, and the more popular you get, the more money you make, the more you question if it’s you people really love or whatever. It was almost like he was admiring the fact that I’d stayed behind. I said, Well, I think I’m as happy as you are, I’d love to be doing what you’re doing, but I can’t trade off what I’ve got here.
“We were talking about love. Bon always had this trouble with the word love. That day he drank a full 40-ounce bottle of Johnnie Walker. He got really out of it. He was talking about how I’d stayed in Adelaide, and had a wife and son, and he was saying how he could never do that, and then we started talking about love, and I said, It’s only a word, and he said he felt like he could never commit himself totally to one person. He wanted to know why?”
From Adelaide, Bon went to Perth, to see his folks.
ISA: “That time he was home, that’s when he told me, This one I’m working on now is going to be it. They were going to hit the top this time. So that must have been that music that was written; they called it Back in Black. They had to give it a name, you see, but Ron, I think, did all the words.
“Oh, he used to open the fridge in the morning, and I had to bite my tongue, because I don’t like drink. But it was his way of living, I couldnae . . .”
CHICK: “You’d go into any of the rooms in the house and you’d find an empty bottle.”
ISA: “He wanted to buy us a house. But we already had the duplex we were in. I said, Ron, we don’t need it. He did take us out one day and we went around looking at a bit of ground, to build a house. But it fell through or something.
“And then he went away again. I said, Ron, you ought to make a will. He said, I’m not going to die.
“He said, I don’t need to make a will, I’m not going to die.”
