Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  ROB BAILEY: “That place was a bit of a madhouse. A really big, beautiful old house, it had a flat out the back, with what I’m sure were hookers living there. You’d wake up in the morning and there’d be bodies strewn all over the place, nothing left in the fridge . . .”

  Bon divided his time between the house and Mary Walton’s flat in Carlton. He and Mary had consummated their old friendship, since both their marriages had dissolved. But as much as Bon needed that retreat, he also joined in the fun and games down at Lansdowne Road. He wasn’t going to be denied his second youth.

  Over Christmas 1974, AC/DC was out on the road in South Australia.

  BAILEY: “We had this Ansett Clipper bus, we’d put the PA in the back, but every trip we did, it would break down. It was supposed to be the logistical answer to all the problems we had, but it just became a bigger logistical problem.”

  Spending Christmas in desolate steel town Whyalla might not have been so bad for Malcolm and Angus, because everything was so new to them, and besides, they had each other. But Bon was hit by it. He thought of Irene, and where he found her he found Graeme, because Graeme had taken up with Irene’s sister Faye, and they all lived together in Adelaide. And he thought of his folks in Perth, and his other brother Derek, who had a couple of kids by now.

  So he had another drink, and rolled a joint. Bon had made his bed, he accepted that, and he knew these little pangs of longing would pass. The Youngs were his surrogate family now, and the music, to borrow Duke Ellington’s phrase, was his mistress. And he could always count on the music’s transcendence. The band was starting to find, and define (if not in so many words) its own identity—and self-discovery is an exhilarating process.

  As part of that process, however, Malcolm and Angus decided the rhythm section had to go. Peter Clack just wasn’t good enough, and Rob Bailey, while he played well, insisted on having his wife with him all the time. And that was a pain in the arse. Besides, he was too tall.

  On returning to Melbourne in January, Bailey and Clack were separately summoned by Bill Joseph and given their marching orders. Russell Coleman, former sticks man with Stevie Wright, sat in for a few weeks before Phil Rudd joined. Rudd, nee Rudzevecuis, had been playing behind singer Angry Anderson in latter-day Melbourne boogie band Buster Brown. Erstwhile Coloured Ball Trevor Young (no relation) told him about AC/DC’s vacancy, and he would become the band’s secret weapon, a rhythm machine that created the space within which Angus and Malcolm could move around.

  Finding a new bassist proved more difficult. One guy lasted all of a few days. “It’s a pretty rare type of bloke who’ll fit into our band,” Bon told RAM. “He has to be under five feet six. And he has to be able to play bass pretty well too.”

  Meantime, the band would play as a four-piece, with Malcolm on bass.

  Late in January, George flew down to Melbourne to discuss with Browning plans for the release of the single and the album, and to fill in on bass when the band appeared at Sunbury.

  Sunbury was a big part of Browning’s marketing strategy. He had seen the reach the festival could have, even though it was declining fast, and he wanted to use it as a launch pad in the same way Skyhooks had the year before. But this year the whole affair was a disaster, one that spelled the end of Sunbury, in fact. Deep Purple had been flown in as an exclusive international attraction; and, as Michael Browning put it, they just jerked everybody around, especially AC/DC. First Purple said they wouldn’t play, so AC/DC had to be located in Melbourne and dragged out to the site to deputize for them. Then they changed their mind. Angus remembers being disgusted when AC/DC arrived backstage to find one of the two caravans reserved exclusively for Deep Purple, while all the Australian bands had to share the other one. Then, when Deep Purple finished their set they refused to let AC/DC follow them. In response, AC/DC simply took the stage as Deep Purple’s crew was still pulling down gear. A full-scale brawl ensued, on stage, in front of 20,000 people.

  BROWNING: “What really pissed me off on that occasion, and what really made it clear I had to get AC/DC out of Australia, was the fact that the local crew people actually sided with Deep Purple.

  “It just really brought home how subservient Australians were to anyone from overseas. How if you really wanted to gain respect you had to go overseas.”

  The High Voltage album and “Baby, Please Don’t Go” single were released simultaneously in February 1975, with the Hard Rock Cafe throwing a “Special AC/DC Performance, New Album, Adm. $1.00.”

  Rob Bailey was shocked to discover that his work on the album had not been credited. But then the packaging of High Voltage gave precious little away at all (and when it did, incorrectly attributed “Baby, Please Don’t Go” to Big Bill Broonzy). The story that got around was that George played bass on the album, though that story is still disputed by Rob Bailey, who certainly has never seen any money from Alberts.

  Critical consensus, such as it was, had it that High Voltage was, indeed, premature. That’s when scribes weren’t simply damning AC/DC as altogether rude, crude and uncalled for. But certainly the single, with its driving arrangement reminiscent of Golden Earring’s 1973 smash “Radar Love,” looked set to do business.

  Mark Evans joined the band just after the record’s launch. Evans, born in Melbourne in 1956, was working in the public service at the time, living with his mother in a council flat in Prahran and just mucking around on bass. There is no truth in the myth that Evans’ introduction to AC/DC came when Bon stepped in to save him from copping a hiding off the bouncers at the Station Hotel. In fact, he was mates with one of AC/DC’s roadies, who told him about them.

  MARK EVANS: “I just went down and saw them—Malcolm was playing bass then—and they gave me a copy of the album, I took it home, thought, Okay, that’s fine, auditioned—straight in.

  “That’s all it was. I think it was more the look I had than anything else. I don’t know how many times people would find out there was two brothers in the band, and they’d think it was Malcolm and me.

  “At that stage, the band was on the bones of its arse. Like, I remember at one stage, Phil even running out of drumsticks, so we had to go and get pieces of dowel from the hardware store and fashion them into drumsticks.”

  But it wasn’t long before Evans was convinced to quit the public service.

  EVANS: “We had this roadie called Ralph, and he drove me home in the bus after I’d rehearsed with the band once, and he said, Oh yeah, things are looking pretty good, we hope to be in England this time next year. The whole arrangement for the band was to get out of Australia. And I remember thinking, Yeah, sure! But once I’d spent a month with them, I realized they were dead serious. One thing I will give them, they had an absolute solidity of purpose.”

  Still, it would be some time before Evans met Bon.

  EVANS: “The audition was held in their house at Lansdowne Road. Bon wasn’t there, I didn’t actually meet Bon until the first gig. He was never at rehearsals. But I knew his name, I kept on hearing about Bon, and I knew, I’d seen the Valentines when I was a kid, at a concert, and I thought, That guy was called Bon, I wonder if they’re the same one. I had this suspicion who he was.”

  The scene at Lansdowne Road was one of pure debauchery. AC/DC encouraged every kind of rock’n’roll excess Melbourne had to offer—and Bon, Ronnie Roadtest, would again come very close to going over the edge.

  EVANS: “Bon’s personality, and demeanor, would lend him to getting into areas where he would endanger himself. Just from, I’ll try that! And just being lonely, I think, just being isolated.”

  Bon offset the deeper rapport he shared with Mary Walton with the pleasures of the flesh available down at Lansdowne Road.

  EVANS: “A huge amount of women were hanging around, the only thing that kept [the band] going was the girls that would come around.”

  Trudy Worme was one of the teenage girls who was in love with Bon: “I used to visit the guys frequently at Lansdowne Road, tidying up for them an
d having a lot of laughs. And that’s all it was, too—we were most definitely not into the groupie scene, although several other female visitors were! I used to bake these chocolate cakes, mainly for Angus, every time we called in—it was greatly appreciated as there was rarely any food in the house. My mum used to drop us off and pick us up on our Sunday afternoon visits. My mother had full trust in Bon and the other guys—she considered them a lot safer than ‘real boys,’ the ones our age from school who she thought had more than music on their minds. Angus was only a year older than us, but anyone who liked chocolate cake so much and didn’t drink was okay in my mother’s eyes.”

  It was the groupie scene that inspired “She’s Got the Jack,” though it’s ironic that the song places the blame on a woman when it was the boys in the band (or so the self-proclaimed legend goes) who were always running off to the clinic. Bon was well aware of the inflammatory nature of the song. When he wrote to Mary in April after she’d gone to London, he admitted it “may get us castrated by Women’s Lib,” and the recorded version also predicted an outraged crowd reaction.

  For all the party atmosphere, though, Malcolm and Angus were deeply suspicious of outsiders—other than chicks, of course. It was part of the clan mentality. Their approach was all or nothing: if you weren’t with them, you were against them. As RAM editor Anthony O’Grady described it: “You’d say hi to them and they’d look at you sideways like, Whaddya sayin’ hi to me for?” Bon was accepted as one of the family, a blood brother, and Mary remembers they were “very, very tight initially.” Malcolm and Angus looked up to Bon as older, wiser and braver. Bon, for his part, was protective of Malcolm and Angus, but he felt more like a conspiratorial uncle than a father figure.

  Mary remembers feeling a bit like mum and dad to them. “They were still just babies, and they’re sort of so straight in a way too. Angus didn’t drink, at least not until his eighteenth birthday, when he got totally blotto, and I don’t think he’s ever had another drink since.

  “They were so family oriented. They would go and buy a roast, a leg of lamb, and they’d bring it around and ask me to cook it. Because they just missed that home life, I guess.”

  Angus once said “Bon gets the women with flats who cook him dinners.” To which Bon replied, “I like to put my feet up. Not to mention other parts of my body. They say to me, Are you AC or DC?, and I say, Neither, I’m the lightnin’ flash in the middle.”

  Bon’s code in life was like his attitude to money: if you got it, spend it. Don’t expect it to last, don’t expect it, period. This was his bravado. He sometimes didn’t even seem to fear for his own safety.

  Mary was in no position to carp, but when Bon took up with a young girl called Judy King, well, her response was to book a ticket to London. Judy King was an innocent set on a path of self-defilement. Maybe Bon liked the idea of bringing home a beautiful bird, and just a chick at that, with a broken wing. But maybe the attraction was more basic, as Darcy put it: “I just think he did his balls over her, she was so young and fit and tight.”

  Bon may or may not have met Judy before she showed up at a gig AC/DC played down the coast at Jan Juc—she was, after all, the youngest daughter in the same King family that Vince Lovegrove had briefly boarded with in 1970. At that time, she was a promising prepubescent athlete, a sprinter. In 1975, at 17, she was an accident waiting to happen.

  Within a couple of days of seeing AC/DC, Judy had hitchhiked to Melbourne. Bon was there, and so was her older sister, Christine, who was working in a massage parlor and maintaining a heroin habit. There were also a couple of other girls hanging around the band who would skip school to do afternoon shifts in a parlor in Richmond. Within weeks, Judy too was on the game, sucked into the vortex, complete with a heroin habit of her own. But if Judy was a working girl, she saved her best for Bon. That she was stoned all the time could be a bit of a drag, but she was caught in the classic vicious circle—she worked to make money to buy dope to make work bearable.

  The affair flared up for the first time when Bon was hauled in by the cops to account for a stack of allegedly pornographic photographs. Phil, a shutterbug, had taken some shots of Bon and Judy rolling in the hay.

  “One morning,” Bon told RAM, “I was in bed—completely out of it—and the chick who was living with me at the time was trying to hitch to work—also completely out of it—well, she got picked up by the police and she’s so gone she can’t speak. [The police were familiar with the house.] So they drive her back and run through the place . . . and what happens but they bust me for pornography!”

  Bon was pushing his luck.

  “Baby, Please Don’t Go” was starting to sell.

  AC/DC enjoyed the support of radio and Countdown. Ever since “Evie” had been broken by 2SM the previous year, radio’s faith in rock’n’roll had been somewhat restored (if only briefly: the arrival of FM later in the seventies saw it turn back to “classic rock”).

  Countdown rose in tandem with the music’s renaissance. Coinciding with the arrival of color television in Australia, Countdown quickly became “all-powerful,” as Chris Gilbey put it: “the driving force behind making a hit single.” At its peak, the show had a fair whack of the country’s population watching it. “It was a tough call,” said Gilbey, “because it was very much Melbourne, very much Molly.”

  Bassist Mark Evans joined AC/DC in March 1975, completing the band’s classic lineup. L-R: Malcolm, Bon, Angus, Phil Rudd, Evans. (Philip Morris)

  Molly Meldrum and Bon knew each other from way back, of course, though their relationship was always awkward. Molly had been a Zoot, not a Valentines groupie. Much later, in 1978, Bon said to RAM, “If you don’t show your arse to Molly Meldrum all the time here, you’re fucked.” But when Molly first saw AC/DC, at one of the Starlight gay discos, he was knocked out, as many people were. And, of course, Countdown too got value out of AC/DC.

  But as much as AC/DC were becoming part of the Melbourne scene, they would always be interlopers. That they were for the most part native-born Scots, who would soon enough virtually renounce Australia altogether, was the least of it. Nor was it the fact that they were by rights a Sydney band that made them so unusual, because Sherbet, Hush and the Ted Mulry Gang were also Sydney bands. (Melbourne’s status as pop capital was because of Countdown, its live circuit, and Michael Gudinski’s growing power. But it was one of the ironies of Countdown’s early days that apart from Skyhooks much of its talent was effectively bussed in from Sydney, including also Marcia Hines, Jon English, William Shakespeare and John Paul Young.)

  In any case AC/DC were like a cat among the pigeons on Countdown—rough and ready, for real. Sherbet were clearly little more than froth and bubble, and while Skyhooks were always likely to be “outrageous,” they were also playing down to their audience. But what really distinguished AC/DC was the sense they gave that they were just passing through, that all this was just a stepping stone to bigger and greater things. It was obvious even then that such favorites of the moment as Sherbet and Skyhooks would never surpass their Countdown heights. But AC/DC had something more.

  Back in Sydney, Alberts was well pleased with itself. Cabal-like even in its hometown, it had penetrated Melbourne and its mafia. Alberts enjoyed an incredible reign during 1975-76, when you would sit down to watch Countdown every Sunday night (along with virtually every other household in Australia), as the show lurched forward, coughing and spluttering and glittering—and if you didn’t love it, you most certainly loved to hate it.

  After “Evie” put George and Harry back on the map, they followed up this success at the end of 1974 with William Shakespeare, a sort of cross between Gary Glitter and Pee Wee Herman, who scored two consecutive number ones with “My Little Angel” and “Can’t Stop Myself from Loving You.”

  AC/DC, with their long-term potential, would become Alberts’ flagship act, but Alberts had other fish to fry, too—and these were bigger in the short term. Between AC/DC, John Paul Young and the Ted Mulry Gang, AC/DC was
the only act not to score a number one before 1975 was out.

  CHRIS GILBEY: “It was an incredibly exciting period. Alberts was so small, it wasn’t like a big record company. We were just making up the rules as we went along. And everything we put out became a hit.”

  John Paul Young’s disco-pop sound was as different from AC/DC as anything could be. George and Harry wrote and produced his material, which only confirmed their range. “Yesterday’s Hero” hit number one in April; “Squeak,” as Molly Meldrum dubbed John Paul Young, would go on to produce a string of hits. Chugalug boogie merchants Ted Mulry Gang, produced by Ted Albert himself, had been on the road even longer than AC/DC—often with AC/DC—when in November, their second single, “Jump in My Car,” went to number one.

  This was good, George thought. He liked to work, just as much as he liked to drink; both of which he did with a peculiarly Scottish zeal. The studio at Alberts was finally finished, complete with a 16-track mixing desk shipped over from England. George and Harry spent every waking hour there.

  Appearing on TV show Countdown changed AC/DC’s audience. The mixed crowd the band had attracted to its live gigs was driven away by the onrush of screaming teenyboppers. Not all the little girls, after all, could swallow the smarmy Skyhooks or Sherbet, or Abba, the Bay City Rollers or Peter Frampton. There were plenty of tough chicks to whom AC/DC’s rough and ready image appealed immensely. “They were everything the Bay City Rollers didn’t stand for,” said RAM. “Maybe it was the way [Angus Young] jumped and rolled around stage like a demented epileptic while not missing a note of his guitar duties. Maybe it was the way Bon Scott leered and licked his lips while his eyes roamed hungrily up and down little girls’ dresses.”

  MARK EVANS: “They could see, I guess, there wasn’t any bullshit involved, like high heels and make-up.”

  Teen fandom is totally partisan, of course, but only to the same degree that it is transient. The difference between AC/DC and Sherbet or Skyhooks was that AC/DC had the vision for longevity. Skyhooks may have been the first Australian band to write hit pop songs that had overtly Australian flavored lyrics, but AC/DC went beyond the literal. They had a deep-seated originality that has stood the test of time.