Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  There was something about Bon that set him apart. Maybe it was the tattoos he’d become so ashamed of, as if they were indelible watermarks of an uncool, cruel youth.

  JOHN FREEMAN: “I don’t think anybody ever saw the real Bon, I don’t think Bon ever knew the real Bon, that was his trouble.”

  UNCLE: “He was always willing to look for it!”

  FREEMAN: “That was running away from it. He had such charisma it was difficult for him not to be on stage 24 hours a day.

  “You know, he could walk into a room at a party and sit down in the corner, and he would be instantly surrounded by a crowd of women, who would put down their lives for him. My mother said he could put his slippers under her bed anytime, and my mother’s a very conservative old woman.”

  UNCLE: “My mum too. Bon had this thing about him, he really touched people when he met them, in a way you thought he really cared about you. So many guys considered him their best mate.”

  FREEMAN: “Life was only ever a transitory thing to Bon. He would drop a trip without worrying if there was anything he had to do that day. I know him to have gone to the dentist, for major surgery, whilst he was tripping. I’ve never known anyone else that would do anything like that.”

  UNCLE: “Bon lived for the moment. Forward planning, I mean, I don’t think that was a part of his life. But I can never remember Bon not trying his hardest. I remember him living for the show, being alive during the show, and everything else being an anticlimax.”

  In September, Bon met the woman who would become his wife, Irene Thornton. Irene had just returned from a year-long working holiday in England. She knew Vince’s girlfriend Julie, and through her and Vince, met Bon. She decided, as so many women did, that she fancied him. The difference was, she snared him.

  Born in Adelaide in 1950, Irene was a nice girl from suburban Prospect. That she had just returned from England made her very cool. That she was also strikingly attractive, quite tall, with long, straight blonde hair and a slender figure, and was very down to earth—she liked a drink, wouldn’t say no to a smoke, and enjoyed a joke, dirty or otherwise—made her irresistible to Bon.

  Irene went with Vince and Julie to a party up on the farm. It was then that she first encountered Bon. Looking for the toilet, she burst in on him in a bedroom, sucking some woman’s toes. The next time they met, at the Largs one night, she was more impressed: “He was funny. Chatting away, you know, he just came out with comical things. We just hit it off.”

  It was a whirlwind, fairy-tale courtship. For their first date, Bon and Irene went to the drive-in, and both sat bolt upright all night. Such was the effect Irene had on Bon, he was uncharacteristically nervous in her presence. They would go out and hold hands, and Bon would plant a peck on her cheek as he sent her inside at her parents’ place at the end of the night. Irene was a princess, just as Maria had been, but unlike Maria, she would extend her golden braids out from the ivory tower. Irene fell in love with Bon, and she loved him for what he was. She remembers a night they spent early on in their relationship poring over the recently released book of comic strips, The Adventures of Barry MacKenzie, both cracking up. “I suppose we just had the same sort of sense of humor,” she said. Indeed, it’s impossible to overestimate the value Bon placed on laughter, and this he shared with Irene.

  Bon and Irene on their wedding day, January 24, 1972, just prior to leaving for England with Fraternity. (courtesy the Scott family)

  Irene was amused by his banter, and his high jinks. One time, to shock Irene’s teenage sister Faye, he took off all his clothes and bounded past her and a girlfriend watching TV like he was Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. Faye was mortified; Irene, like Bon, was reduced to tears.

  Soon Irene was staying over at Norwood, and before long she moved in.

  The headline on Vince’s column read, THEY’VE FAITH IN ADELAIDE: TO RECORD IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA, but the fact of the matter was that Fraternity didn’t trust anyone in Australia to produce them. If Adelaide studios were inferior, at least if they were at home Fraternity could produce themselves. But the battle was the same all over Australia.

  SAM SEE: I don’t think [the sound] was ever caught on record, as a lot of Australian acts at that time weren’t. The bands were victimized by the studios.”

  BRUCE: “The live gigs were the greatest satisfaction. We could not get it down on record. But we had some great live gigs.”

  October saw two “new” Fraternity singles released. The band had by now left Sweet Peach, and so in retaliation the label exhumed a track left over from the Livestock album sessions. “The Race” was a lyrically complex Doug Ashdown song described by Go-Set as “not [a single] which will help the group.” The other new slice of vinyl was “If You Got It,” which the band cut itself in Adelaide, and put out independently on its own Raven label. A straight boogie, it climbed to number two on the South Australian charts.

  The band was now talking about going to America by June or July of the following year, 1972. Meantime, it’s not as if they put their heads down at all. It was summertime, and the living was easy.

  UNCLE: “There was this one party, the Three-Day Party . . . I think we’d played these two gigs, the Largs Pier, and the Bridgeway, there was 2,000 people there, it was Christmas or New Year’s Eve or something, and so everybody was invited up to our place for a party. It went for three days. There was barbecues, security guys, whole bars full of spirits, bonfires all round the lawn. I had children born in my bed and grandmothers die; I remember picking up my sheets with a broomstick and taking them out to the bonfire at the end of the three days, I wasn’t going to sleep in them again. I haven’t been to a three-day party since. Those days are gone.”

  Bon and Irene were getting on swimmingly. Bruce was a lot happier too, because Hamish had flown Anne out from England to be with him. That was the sort of thing Hamish did. He believed, and he put his money where his mouth was. When the band needed a new Hammond organ because this particular song called for that particular sound, he got it for them. He had the foresight to form a publishing company for the band, so that they owned their own songs, which few bands do even today.

  “With hindsight, I’ve got a lot of respect for Hamish,” said Peter Head, who was also managed by him. “We all used to rubbish him at the time, can him about being rich—we had no appreciation whatsoever of the value of money—but he was the one who made things possible.”

  As big fish in a small pond though, Fraternity were getting nowhere fast. Even Vince dared suggest they needed to “get off their arses and get some hard work done.”

  SAM SEE: “Even though there was a sense that Fraternity shows were special, we were still doing the same gigs week in, week out. In those days, the concept of making it had no reality at all.”

  By January, plans had changed again. The band was now going to go to England. This was yet another mistake—the wrong place to go, at the wrong time—but it was where Hamish had connections. In the past year, as he’d tried in vain to get both T Rex and Yes out to tour Australia, he’d at least made some contacts over there. The plan was to finally use the free recording time they’d won at Armstrong’s, then play a tour of South Australia for the Arts Council, then leave.

  Again, the band spent a mere few days in the studio, cutting the album which, in a fit of Australianness, would be called Flaming Galah. It contained only three all-new songs—“Welfare Boogie,” “Hemming’s Farm” and “Getting Off”—alongside rewritten and re-recorded versions of old material. Hamish set up a deal to release it through RCA.

  The decision to leave was a bad one not only because the climate in England at that time wouldn’t suit a band like Fraternity, but also because Australia itself was just about to bound into the future. Only weeks before Fraternity left, Billy Thorpe acquired the first remote mixing desk ever seen in this country. Of course, right then, Fraternity couldn’t wait to get out of Australia.

  HAMISH: “We had this supreme self-confidence, coupled with a certain n
aiveté, and so we couldn’t see any barriers whatsoever.”

  Prompted by Hamish’s offer to pay for wives—but not girlfriends—to go overseas with the band, Bon and Irene decided to get married. They’d known each other for only a few months.

  IRENE: “Everyone seemed to be doing it at the time. Bon had asked me to go away with him; then he told me that Hamish would pay, and so there was a few weddings going on. But we were really wrapped up in each other.”

  Bon and Irene’s wedding merged into a blur along with Bruce and Anne’s, and John Freeman’s. Uncle had taken up with Freeman’s wife’s sister Vicki and while they wouldn’t actually tie the knot, Vicki would go to England anyway. John Bisset and Mick Jurd had both been married all along; only Sam See was unattached.

  BRUCE: “I didn’t like the idea of Bon getting married to Irene, I thought it was premature. They didn’t really know each other that well. But she was a nice girl.”

  With the wedding scheduled for January 24, Bon’s mother Isa came over from Perth. She wasn’t terribly impressed by the whole business either.

  Bon and Irene, however, were extremely pleased with themselves. Bon loved Irene as she loved him; but as much as that, he loved the idea of her: that is, the most wanted woman in Adelaide was his.

  SAM SEE: “Bon and Irene, when they got married, I remember it being like, I was going to say, Paul and Linda—it was all a bit glam, you know.” civil service was held in town, with Bruce and John Bisset as witnesses. The bride wore a cream crepe forties-style jacket and a long crepe skirt; the groom, a poo-brown suit with flared trousers and wide lapels. A reception was organized up on the farm afterwards. “It was like the best party I ever went to I think,” Irene said.

  Bon and Irene get married, Adelaide, January 24, 1972. Graeme Scott: “It was a surprise to me, because not long before, Ron was telling me, ‘You don’t ever want to get married!’” (courtesy Irene Thornton)

  All possible futures seemed golden.

  At the very same time, at a site 50 kilometers north of Melbourne, the first Sunbury festival was taking place. Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs headlined. It was this performance that crowned Thorpe’s ascent. The resultant double-live album, released later in the year, outsold every other Australian album released in 1972. Everybody who was anybody was at Sunbury that weekend—except Fraternity.

  Any ideas of a honeymoon that either Bon or Irene may have harbored were waylaid in excited anticipation of going to England. Besides which, the band was due to hit the road on February 12, on a tour devised by the Arts Council to take a bit of urban rock culture to the bush.

  Trucking through South Australia in a big black bus, Fraternity were their own merry pranksters. Bon, Ronnie Roadtest, was in fine form, even if he was away from his new bride—or maybe because of it. Bruce Howe remembers one incident in particular, at Port Lincoln.

  BRUCE: “It was one of those really still, hot South Australian days, and Bon said, I’m going for a swim. So he put his bathers on, and we walked out on the jetty. All these people were there. At the end of the jetty, they had these scales, for hanging the sharks they used to catch—the big white pointers. The water was so still and so clear you could see everything, and you could see it was just a sea of great big huge stingers, jellyfish, you know, with tentacles ten feet long, all just beneath the surface. Bon looks around, sees he’s got an audience, and so what does he do? He climbs right up to the top of the shark tower and dives in. He swims underwater out of the reach of these things, and climbs back up. Of course, everybody on the jetty sends up this big round of applause. That’s the sort of thing he was capable of. I was amazed.”

  Back in Adelaide by early March, the band played two concerts as part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts program, another first for rock music in the State. Repeating a role created by Tully in Sydney, Fraternity accompanied singer Jeannie Lewis and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe’s “Love 2,000.” It was a last gasp for the band’s “classical” aspirations.

  “Welfare Boogie” was released by RCA as a single later in March. It did nothing, except perhaps provide a glimpse of the sort of themes Bon would later explore more fully with AC/DC:I’ve got me a problem, a real social problem

  I can’t find employment for more than a week

  You might think I’m sleazy, but you know it ain’t easy

  Finding employment’s a job for a freak.

  The album followed in April. But the general attitude to Fraternity seemed to be that they’d frittered away their potential. By then though, the band was in England—not so much a band as a juggernaut, an entourage numbering 16 people and a bus (plus Clutch the dog of course!). As far as Australia was concerned, Fraternity would be heard from no more. All the unfulfilled promises would be forgotten; the name Fraternity would just fade away.

  England in 1972 was teetering giddily on the stack-heels of glam rock. The glittering stars were T Rex, David Bowie, Gary Glitter, and the Sweet. Fraternity were a bunch of bearded wonders playing what was more than once described as “country-rock.” It was all they could do to polish their RM Williams stockman’s boots.

  Fraternity’s 18 months in England would do nothing but grind the band down—and finally out. The experience also took a heavy personal toll, as interpersonal relationships, including Bon and Irene’s marriage, soured. For the first six months they were there, they did virtually nothing. They found a place to live—a big four-storey house in Finchley—and sat around waiting for something to happen.

  Had they gone to America as they’d originally planned, they might have fared better; they would have fitted right in on the West coast. But from the moment Fraternity arrived in London, it was obvious it wasn’t going to be the picnic they’d expected. The mountain of gear they’d hauled half way round the planet was already antiquated.

  Hamish Henry set up shop with his partner, former DJ Tony MacArthur, as the Mainstreet Gramophone Company. MacArthur was managing French crooner Charles Aznavour, and acting for Dutch art-rock band Focus. Hamish got Fraternity on the books with a powerful agency, MAM, but he had little to sell the band on. That they were almost the next big thing in Australia just wasn’t enough.

  With more than a dozen people living under the same roof in Finchley, it was inevitable friction would occur.

  IRENE: “Being young, you have expectations. I was 21, Bon was 25. The thing in England didn’t help matters, because it wasn’t conducive to normal life—a lot of pressure, not enough money, no one really with any privacy. If you wanted to go out to the back yard to hang out the washing, you had to walk through someone’s bedroom. It was pretty hard to live like that, coming from Australia, having to live on nothing in miserable conditions. I think everyone got to really hate England.”

  The girls all had to go out and look for work to support the boys. Bruce and Anne—Anne who was at once pregnant and bedridden with a broken leg—holed up in the attic, above it all. Everyone was feeling the strain. England was cold and gray; Fraternity were nobodies there, and they were broke. Sparks started to fly. The only consolation the band found in England was the price of hash. They smoked red Leb by the brick.

  In November, they played their inaugural English gig at the Speakeasy. It was a non-event. Beyond that, all the band really had lined up was a short German tour. At least it got the boys out of the house.

  John Freeman wrote home to the News, “We are now moving into top gear in a flat-out bid to gain the necessary exposure that is vital for a new group such as ours.” That flat-out bid consisted of infrequent gigging—the most Hamish could hustle—playing supports with bands that were second division at best—Atomic Rooster, Sparks, the Pink Fairies, Mungo Jerry. The most impressive bill Fraternity shared was with Fairport Convention.

  SAM SEE: “The basic scam was that the wives went out to work and the band loafed at home. Really, to be honest about it, not doing much of anything, just sort of goofing off, watching telly and play
ing cricket in the back yard. It was really a bummer. And so maybe it’s idle minds, I don’t know . . .

  “It really was a very squalid house, full of people who weren’t united by anything except the music. I mean, the different personalities in that band, I don’t think I’ve ever played in a band that was so diverse. And so when the music dropped off, all these personality differences came out. There was all sorts of cross-pollinations, violence both physical and verbal, mostly verbal.”

  Bon didn’t know what to do with himself. He became frustrated when he was denied the release of performance. His whole being was thrown into question, he feared.

  HAMISH HENRY: “The essence of Bon was when he was on stage, his thumbs stuck in his jeans and his chest sticking out, strutting his stuff. That was all he ever wanted to do.”

  Bon was reduced to getting a day job, like the girls. He went to work in a factory where he knotted wigs. He got Sam a job there too. He and Irene were squabbling constantly. Bon could be distant, cold almost, certainly brusque, and Irene felt the brunt of his frustration. They both grew resentful. It was a vicious circle. Irene gave as good as she got. She and Bon both had sharp tongues, and when they were downcast, especially after a few drinks—which was most of the time—neither of them was prepared to give an inch. If one slipped, said the wrong thing, the other jumped on it. Or else Bon just clammed up.

  But there were good times, however few and far between. Irene remembers fondly how Bon was perplexed by the English propensity for forming queues—he would brazenly jump them, for no other reason than to rock the boat. She also remembers how he went to see Little Richard, one of his oldest heroes, and came home mortified, since it was obvious that the Georgia Peach was gay. Bon, in his innocence, never would have thought . . . Alex Harvey, however, was a different matter. Already thirty-something in the early seventies, the godfather of Scottish rock’n’roll was then at his peak, and Bon became one of his biggest fans. His humor, his storytelling bent and his energetic showmanship had a profound effect on Bon.