Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

Isolated Anglophile Australia could not have even begun to anticipate rock’n’roll. In the United States, rock’n’roll, for the early fifties, was a thundercloud brewing on the horizon, the music and the attitude of the urban black ghetto and rural white trash alike. In Britain, restless kids—tomorrow’s teddy boys—were just waiting for something like rock’n’roll to come along.

  In the early 1950s, however, Australia still clung culturally to Mother

  LEFT: Harvest Road, Fremantle, 1956. Bon (right), younger brother Derek (center).

  RIGHT: In fancy dress. Graeme Scott: “He loved the attention.” (courtesy the Scott family)

  England’s apron strings. Accents and attitudes on the radio assumed British parentage. Australian country music was a unique, indigenous innovation, but it meant little in the cities.

  Australian kids at the time, to borrow Nik Cohn’s description of pre-rock’n’roll English teens, “shared everything with their parents . . . danced to the same music, sat through the same films, [wore] the same clothes.” Bodgies and widgies were inner city toughs who had emerged during the war in response to visiting American servicemen and all the cultural baggage they carried—the stylish cut of their clothes, the music they liked to dance to, their exotic slang—but even after the war, bodgies were still reveling in archaic swing jazz. There had to be something more than Frank Sinatra.

  “Rock Around the Clock,” then, was a revelation. Elvis, not much later, sealed it. Overnight, a Sydneyside Frank Sinatra/Johnnie Ray imitator, Johnny O’Keefe, became a Bill Haley imitator. Haley himself was nothing more than a second-string hillbilly singer who got lucky on a black R&B trip. And this was the very birth of Australian rock’n’roll—an imitation of an imitation.

  Both Britain and Australia produced little first generation rock’n’roll of much worth because neither country had any tradition in the American

  “Old Year’s Night,” 1957. Bon and Chick dressed up to play. Isa: “He was mad on pipe bands until he got to 17, and then he went right against the kilt.” (courtesy the Scott family)

  roots of the music. Britain went on to produce great rock’n’roll in the sixties—in contrast to Australia’s very erratic output—because young British musicians sought out those roots and consciously emulated them. Australia, on the other hand, was denied the opportunity to hear the great body of American black music because local record companies, colonial outposts to British head offices, refused to release it.

  Johnny O’Keefe couldn’t help but be a mere facsimile of rock’n’roll, an entertainer sooner than a singer, who simply changed his stripes. But even if O’Keefe started a long way from the source, and even if he admitted himself he was a limited singer, he became a convincing enough rock’n’roll performer because he found in rock’n’roll something that aligned directly with his own larrikin spirit. O’Keefe became a star for the very reason that Australians identified with him as one of their own—and that was an epochal transcendence of the “cultural cringe,” Australia’s traditional inferiority complex. For perhaps the first time ever, urban Australians embraced a musician because of his Australianness.

  In O’Keefe’s wake, rock’n’roll stormed the barricades. It was grappling in the dark—guitarists had to build their own instruments, copying designs out of photographs of American bands—but it was naive enough not to become discouraged.

  Said Bon himself in the film Let There Be Rock, “Back in about 1957 or ’8, I used to sing in the shower, and my mum used to say, Ron, if you can’t sing proper songs, shut up; don’t sing this rock’n’roll garbage.”

  Australian kids had got a hold on rock’n’roll, even if it was only a toehold, and they weren’t going to let it go. Bon was absorbed by the drums.

  CHICK: “What was he, novice champion at 12? And then he was under-17 champion for five years.”

  GRAEME SCOTT: “He played on TV one time, he went on and played drums while there was this girl who did the highland dancing, there was a piper there.

  “He loved the attention from the girls. He was in the paper one time, in the Scottish get-up, with two highland dancers, about the same age as him, 12 or 13, and he had this big smile on his face.”

  But even as Chick and Isa took pride in the lead Bon set, he was courting disaster. Going down to the river now was a less innocent exercise. Boys would be puffing on cigarettes, and sneaking off behind the bushes with girls. School was a meeting place that was only barely neutral. Kids in gangs from surrounding neighborhoods converged at school, enacting an uneasy truce which would be broken as soon as they were out of their school uniforms.

  To grow up working-class in Australia in the fifties was to grow up tough. You had to be able to fight, and if you didn’t keep your guard up vigilantly, you would be knocked down. To be knocked down was to be weak, and being weak meant you were the lowest of the low.

  As William Dick wrote in A Bunch of Ratbags, his classic documentary novel of growing up a bodgie in mythical Melbourne suburb Goodwood, a thinly disguised version of Footscray: “If you didn’t belong to a mob, you just didn’t belong. The kids in mobs picked on you and you got belted up and made to fear them. But if you belonged to a mob, you were given a certain amount of respect.’

  GRAEME: “Ron and his friends Terry and Moe formed the nucleus of a gang, and once they got their cars, they were full on.”

  Bon was drumming, swimming, learning to fuck and learning to fight. School came a poor last and he left as soon as he legally could, when he turned 15 in 1961. He got a job as a farmhand on a market-garden, driving a tractor. Later his friend Terry got him a job on the crayfishing boats, as hard a way to make a living as there is.

  Being a fisherman proved too much even for Bon though, so he quickly chucked it in and got a job working for Avery Scales, as an apprentice weighing-machine mechanic.

  Bon was a rocker. Rockers superseded bodgies. Bodgies had abandoned Johnnie Ray to jump on the rock’n’roll bandwagon, but the move—to rockers especially, who, as their name suggests, were born of rock’n’roll—was typically transparent. Rockers could be identified by their slicked-back hair, leather jackets and skintight pants (as opposed to bodgies’ preppier Tony Curtis crew-cuts and cardigans), and they were into Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry. Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, and the like were considered weak, far too tame and clean cut. It was the bad boys that rockers like Bon were into.

  Perhaps only the details distinguished one cult from another, however. Sidney Baker’s definition of the archetypal larrikin could equally be applied to bodgies, rockers or mods, and would certainly seem to apply to Bon. “He dressed with exaggerated precision, he extracted comfort from being a member of a gang, he was alleged to have too much money and to lack parental control, he looked upon refinement in social conduct as a form of weakness . . . he was given to spasms of violence . . . [he had] contempt for anything effeminate.”

  “It was all rock’n’roll, jiving,” said Maureen Henderson, who hung around with Bon and her brother Terry, Bon’s best mate. “Me and Bonnie, we were a couple of the best jivers in Fremantle. He was a good jiver.”

  Movies, which Bon went to see at the drive-in, were a primary source of inspiration—The Girl Can’t Help It, Hot Rod Gang, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole. All things American, like rock’n’roll itself, were exotic and attractive. Everybody was especially into the cars. Befinned and chromed American tanks were a symbol of everything truculent young Australians aspired to—they were flash and fast and dangerous.

  Bon was thumbing his nose at authority. Although there was an impishness about his defiance—a bravado that rather innocently asked, who says I can’t—Bon could turn nasty when provoked, striking back with unforgiving viciousness. He was only small, but he had a fearsome reputation as a street fighter, who could not only tear a bigger man apart, but would himself refuse to be beaten.

  MAUREEN HENDERSON: “They went up to East Perth to get tattoos. Terry got “Death Before Dishonour” on his arm, and Bon
nie got that one, just above his hairline, when he pulled his jeans down. Terry was sitting on one side of him, I was on the other side, and tears were just rolling down his face. He couldn’t do his jeans up for weeks, he had to stay at home. Because he used to wear these . . . we used to call them stovepipes, and his were so tight, he put them on by turning them inside out and rolling them up his legs.”

  GRAEME: “In those days, in Fremantle, it was all gangs. Gangs were pretty hard in those days. There was nothing else to do. Other gangs didn’t come into your neighborhood unless they wanted to fight.”

  Said Vince Lovegrove, who would later form the Valentines with Bon, but then lived in the more sedate, semi-rural Applecross: “I used to play football, when I was about 14 or 15, and we used to be shit scared of going down and playing South Fremantle, because they were the rough team.

  “Fremantle was always looked down upon by the rest of Perth. It was a scary place. There was a picture theatre there, and I went to see a movie there one night, I had to get a bus, and I remember my parents giving me this lecture, Come straight home, don’t hang around, there’s a lot of bodgies and rockers there, just be careful.”

  Bon’s gang consisted of him and Terry, his best mate, and Moe, Dave, Archie and Dick, plus Maureen and a couple of other girls. Girls were very much second-class citizens. The gang cruised, and hung out. On weekends, they went to dances, which were as good for blues as they were for sheilas, for fighting and fucking. They seldom went to pubs; occasionally, they’d down a couple of bottles, or pass around a flagon of port, but drinking was not a priority. The big thing was just hanging out, in Fremantle, at the Cafe de Wheels. The car park would be packed with Customlines, Ford single-spinners, Chevys, Dodge Customs, and all the boys would be milling around them. Brawls erupted like flash fires, over nothing—it was merely testing your mettle. At other times, down dead-end back roads or at deserted beaches, there were gang bangs.

  It was a lifestyle uncannily similar to that described by William Dick’s hero Terry in A Bunch of Ratbags: We’d been running with the pack for nine months or so, and were we tough! We had proved this in our many street brawls. I hadn’t had so much fun in my whole life since I had become a bodgie and joined the boys. We had plenty of sheilas knocking around with us, and there was always one of them willing to indulge in love play with us. There were also the other real tough widgies, who thought nothing of taking on a dozen or so of our boys in a back-up [gang bang]. I had been in a couple of back-ups since joining up, and I thought they were terrific fun. All the boys reminded me of a lot of dogs chasing after a bitch that was on heat when they were arguing about who was next and worrying about missing out on a turn.

  Like they’d seen in the movies, Bon and his mates further tested their mettle by racing their cars.

  MAUREEN: “There was one time, they had this drag down at Port Beach, Terry had this car, it was a Ford, single-spinner. They were mad on cars. They used to pinch them too, go for a ride. Anyway, there were dragging, and Bonnie hit this FJ, a ute [utility van], split it in half. Oh, they used to drag down there all the time.

  “They used to go out and knock fuel off. I would have to go look-out while they siphoned it.”

  In early 1963 Perth was experiencing what West Australian columnist Athol Thomas said, “appears to be one of Perth’s worst outbreaks of lar-rikinism.” Bodgies “plagued” the Windmill Tearooms, forcing it to move from the city to Subiaco, and finally to close. Police were called in to break up, as the West Australian reported, “between 150 and 200 youths [who] caused an uproar in a North Fremantle snack bar on Sunday morning.”

  Bon and Terry were well known, by the cops and everyone else alike, as two of the toughest kids in Fremantle. When you’re boss cocky, someone’s always coming along who wants to try and knock you off your perch, so Bon and Terry had to fend off challengers all the time; fight them and beat them. They also had to put up with the constant attention of the police. If anyone was going to get pinched for anything in Fremantle, Bon and Terry were the first suspects. One time, Terry copped a hiding off the police for something someone else did. Things were starting to get serious.

  Bon was running wild in the streets and local legend had him responsible for the vicious beating of a copper.

  At the height of this war of attrition, Bon moved in around the corner with Terry and his family. Whether he jumped or was pushed is unclear, but even if his parents weren’t entirely naive, Bon wouldn’t have wanted them to know the worst, and so he may well have left of his own accord. Either way, he wound up with the Hendersons, where he was accepted unquestioningly. Olive and Jim Henderson already had nine kids, and so with a few other extended-family members also floating around their big house, Bon was hardly noticed.

  Bon was drawn to danger; it got the adrenaline flowing and attracted attention in the same way that diving off the high board had all those years ago in Sunshine. But even as he ran by night with the boys, by day he was a diligent worker, and he won Avery’s Best First Year Apprentice Award.

  Bon listed as his previous occupations: weighing machine mechanic, crayfisher, postie, farmhand. As a postman, 1965. (courtesy the Scott family)

  ISA: “At that age, you couldn’t follow him. He had a mind of his own, that lad. He was mad on pipe bands until he got to 17, and then he wouldn’t wear a skirt no more. He went right against the kilt. We just had to go along with him because it was his way. We never said, Don’t do that, Ron—if I did say, Don’t do that, he would just go out and do it.

  “So after he gave up the drums in the pipe band, well, that was all he thought about, music, he wanted to get in a band.”

  GRAEME: “He knew he wanted to do something with music, but I think he just didn’t know how to do it.”

  Rock’n’roll, by the early sixties, was dead in the water. Elvis was in the army, Buddy Holly was dead, Chuck Berry was in jail, Jerry Lee Lewis was in disgrace and Little Richard was in church. The music business was back in charge. Clean-cut teen idols—all of whom seemed to be named Bobby (Vee, Vinton, Rydell)—were the order of the day.

  However, the one new white innovation that did emerge during this period—and hit Australia—was instrumental rock’n’roll. British band the Shadows inspired young middle-class boys all over Australia to pick up electric guitars. It was a style Australia was better suited to. After all, it was surf music as much as anything, and in the early sixties, beach culture was growing as rapidly and naturally in Australia as it was in California.

  Vince Lovegrove was a 14-year-old at Applecross High in 1961, when he joined an outfit called the Dynells. “They were friends of mine, who had a Shadows-type band, because that was the go then, it was just pre-stomps. But they were still mainly surfies we played to. We used to play all the surf clubs down the coast.

  “We used to put our own shows on in the beginning, hire a local hall, buy a couple of crates of soft drink, throw them in a tub of ice, charge double, you know. This was just pre-Beatles. What would happen was, the band would go out and play their instrumentals, and everyone would be up dancing, and then half way through the night, the singer—that was me—would get up to do a few songs. That was when everyone would take a break and go and get a drink!”

  CHICK: “Ron used to go down to Port Beach, they used to have dances down there, and they used to get up and sing there. But he wasn’t in a band then.”

  The Port Beach dances were run by their star, Johnny Young, who would sing a set or two in front of his band, the Nomads. (Young would go on to become one of Australia’s biggest stars in the 1960s.)

  MAUREEN: “We all used to go to the stomps down at Port Beach, but we didn’t like Johnny Young, we thought he was a poof or something, so we used to call out, We want Bonnie! We want Bonnie!”

  Bon would jump up and have a sing, but he wouldn’t do some wimpy ballad, rather a rock’n’roll song, like “Long Tall Sally” or “Blue Suede Shoes.”

  MAUREEN: “All the girls used to go wild over him,
and I think that caused a bit of trouble. Johnny Young used to get pretty upset.”

  The first Beatles single “Please, Please Me” was released in Australia around this time, in February 1963. It stiffed. It would be almost a year before their second, “She Loves You,” went straight to number one.

  Bon, meantime, had been to hell and back.

  CHICK: “Evidently, someone assaulted a girl at the dance . . .”

  ISA: “And he retaliated . . .”

  CHICK: “And the police came . . .”

  An item ran in the West Australian on March 13: A 16-year-old youth pleaded guilty in the Fremantle Children’s Court yesterday to charges of having given a false name and address to the police, having escaped legal custody, having unlawful carnal knowledge and having stolen 12 gallons of petrol.

  He was committed to the care of the Child Welfare Department until he was 18 with a recommendation that he be kept in an institution of maximum security.

  He was put on a five pound bond to come up for sentence if called on in the next two years on the unlawful carnal knowledge charge.

  What happened was that Bon had “gone for a walk” with this girl, who was under the age of consent, and when they got back to the hall, some other guys wanted a piece of her too. Bon launched into them. When the police showed up Bon tried to put one over them—and almost succeeded. He took off in Terry’s car, only to be apprehended trying to get away with some petrol.

  Later, Bon would never much talk about this episode in his life, but he did confide in Silver Smith, a woman with whom he lived for several years. “Something really worried him personally,” she recalled. “He had this thing that he had to make it up to his parents for something that had happened way back when. Part of his drive to be successful was to do it for mum and dad. His grandparents came out from Kirriemuir when he was 15 or 16, and this was a big thing for the family; and Bon got into some sort of trouble, and he ended up in remand at this boys’ home, and when his parents went to see him, he wanted more than anything to go home, but he was so ashamed that he refused to see his parents—he just wouldn’t face up to it. And so he had a choice of either being remanded into his parents’ custody, and it all being forgotten, or going through the legal process, and he made the choice of going through the legal process.