Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  AC/DC would outlive teen pinupdom because when the little girls abandoned them—as the little girls are wont to do—the boys came back. This to the band was a transient phase, as Australia itself was—a stepping stone to greater things.

  At the end of March, as both the single and album entered the charts, and AC/DC were playing a good eight gigs a week in Melbourne and elsewhere, Bon’s relationship with Judy King came to an ugly climax.

  Smack was never far from the surface of the seventies rock scene. Most people still came on like hippies, but the heady days of communal tripping were over. The me-decade demanded a more self-centered high. Harder drugs came in: at the up end of the spectrum, cocaine and speed; at the down end, heroin. No less an icon of cool than Keith Richards was a brazen junkie.

  Bon’s drinking had been on the increase ever since he joined Fraternity in 1970. As AC/DC progressed, Bon consumed more of everything. His drinking could be on and off—he was a binge drinker really—but the grog was a persistent presence. And smoking pot was a habit he never kicked, never saw the need.

  But if there’s ever been a suspicion Bon was more deeply involved with narcotics than it seemed, the fact is that he never really got into heroin. Certainly though, he dabbled in it, as Judy King went down on it. On at least one occasion, in Melbourne in early 1975, he almost died of an overdose. But that, it seems, was enough to warn him off it, even though heroin would surround him and touch him as a codependent for the rest of his life.

  Until the Vietnam War, heroin had been only a minor presence in Australia, mainly in Sydney’s Chinatown. In the early seventies, though, the drug spread out of Kings Cross. Supply reached Melbourne, where it flowed through massage parlors and hamburger joints on Fitzroy Street, St Kilda.

  Judy King was working in the parlor and spending every penny she earned on smack. One night, Bon found her and Christine out of it as usual. But rather than just being on the nod, they were in high spirits, mischievous as sisters can be. They began goading Bon, trying to entice him to have a taste. Of course, if there was one thing Bon couldn’t resist it was a dare, even if it went against his better judgement. He rolled up his sleeve.

  The girls tapped out a measure of brown rocks into a spoon. Adding water and a dash of lemon juice over a match, the heated mixture dissolved. Judy drew it into a syringe through a filter from a cigarette. Bon took off his studded belt to use as a tourniquet. Judy found a vein, which wasn’t difficult on Bon’s sinewy arm, and shot him up.

  Bon felt the warm, sickly sweet rush—and then . . . nothing. He slumped in his seat. He had no tolerance, and he was small-framed, too. He turned a hideous blue-gray color. But he was still breathing. Judy was hysterical. Stoned as she was, Christine thought quickly enough to shoot Bon up with some speed in an attempt to negate the heroin. She moved in a panicked sort of slow motion, fumbling with the syringe, having difficulty finding the vein without any tension left in Bon’s body. When she did, he let out a whimper, but that was all. It wasn’t enough. An ambulance would have to be called. The girls did so. As they waited, a scared Judy paced the room as Christine gave Bon mouth-to-mouth and massaged his heart.

  When you overdose on heroin, it is a near-death experience, but it has no romantic qualities. There’s no light, or St Peter waiting at the gates, just a falling into a deep gray void. Your life does not flash before your eyes. You are not privileged with the opportunity to repent for your sins.

  Bon sat bolt upright into consciousness when the ambulance officer revived him. He felt like he had been set rigid in cement, alive, looking out, but hit so hard upside the head he didn’t know where he was. Certainly, he had no immediate past. Then he remembered, and that was the worst part, when he looked up and saw the scene: Judy in tears and Christine relieved, the ambulance men packing up their gear and shaking their heads. He remembered everything, and he felt so bad.

  Later in life, Bon resented forgetting. After his body and mind had taken so much for so long, his memory, both short- and long-term, was eroded. Remembering may be bad, but not being able to remember was worse. When he was younger, though the pain was sharper, his body was also stronger, more resilient. The spirit, spunkier.

  Bon didn’t blame Judy. But if this was a case of his non-judgmental attitude getting the better of him, he was about to have the illusion literally beaten out of him.

  In a report in Melbourne’s notorious Truth newspaper, under the headline, POP STAR, BRUNETTE AND A BED: THEN HER DAD TURNED UP!, Bon told Dave Dawson: “The girl’s father had warned me once before not to sleep with her. But she is 17 and capable of making up her own mind. I had returned from Sydney the night before and she was there waiting for me. We were making love when our roadie Ralph knocked on my bedroom door and said someone wanted to see me urgently. I told him to come back in two hours because I was busy. Eventually I went to the door and was sprung by the girl’s father. I was wearing only shorts. He said, I can see you’ve got your fighting shorts on. He took out his false teeth and said, Come outside.

  “I followed him outside where he had two of his mates aged in their 30s. He said, Where’s my daughter? I said, She will have gone by now. You are always bashing her up. Suddenly, he started punching me in the head and body. He knocked me into a rose bush and dragged me through it. Then his two mates came over and dragged him away. They could see that because I was just 5’ 5” I didn’t have a chance.

  “That was the worst beating I have ever had. My manager Mike Browning took me to a dentist who couldn’t stop laughing when I explained how my dental plate was smashed and my teeth were knocked out. It wasn’t so funny for me because the dental bill will be at least $500.

  “The girl’s father has never given her any love and he certainly showed me none.

  “After he bashed me he said, If she is not home by night I will send another ten blokes around to bash you. I’m certainly not going out of my way to see her again.”

  Eerily, Bon had almost predicted this incident in the lyrics of Fraternity’s “Annabelle.”

  Annabelle’s got problems,

  The doctors can’t repair . . .

  When her daddy gets here,

  He’ll come knockin’ on my door,

  The next thing I replace

  Bear-skin rug on the living room floor.

  Bon was in disgrace.

  In April, AC/DC played two momentous shows in Melbourne as “Baby, Please Don’t Go” peaked at number ten nationally. The High Voltage album also reached the charts, where it stayed for an unprecedented 25 weeks. Overseas, Michael Browning’s sister Coral was sniffing around.

  Coral, who’d met the band in Melbourne earlier in the year, was based in London, where she was well positioned in the music business, working for the management company that handled Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Gil Scott-Heron. She was very enthusiastic about her brother’s new charges.

  AC/DC’s staple Hard Rock gigs in Melbourne remained. On Sunday, April 13, the band played a “Heavy metal rock nite” with the Coloured Balls; the next Saturday, with Richard Clapton. The very next day, they played bottom of a big bill on a Freedom from Hunger show at Myer Music Bowl. The following week, they supported the Skyhooks at Festival Hall.

  It was a freezing cold Melbourne Sunday, but in spite of that, 2,500 still showed up at the Music Bowl. They paid $3.50 or $2.50 to see the Moir Sisters, Ayers Rock, AC/DC, Jim Keays, the La De Das and Jeff St John with Wendy Saddington. AC/DC, as one newspaper report read, “got the best audience response . . . As they walked off the stage at the end of their set, nearly half the audience decided to leave as well.”

  “Sure surprised us,” Angus said in RAM. “Everyone always told us we were shit compared to real bands like Ayers Rock.”

  Perhaps as a gesture of appreciation, AC/DC were presented after the show with supergroupie Ruby Lips. A good time was had by all, so much so that Bon later eulogized Ruby Lips in Let There Be Rock’s “Go Down.”

  But not even success opened AC/DC up. Quite t
he opposite, in fact. Countdown was an opportunity for bands to get together—when they were all busy working by themselves they seldom saw each other—but AC/DC didn’t fraternize with other bands. Malcolm and Angus always regarded themselves as separate, if not superior, to other bands. Bon would often go off on his own and meet other people, but when he was with the band, even Bon hesitated to break formation.

  MARK EVANS: “We hated everyone as a matter of policy, the same way we hated hippies. No other band existed, except for maybe the Alex Harvey Band. Little Richard. Chuck Berry. Elvis. But no one admitted it. We just didn’t even talk to other bands.

  “Bon could get on with anyone, but Angus and Malcolm had this incredible tunnel vision where no one else counted. It must have had an effect on Bon too. There were times, I’m certain, when Bon would have gone home and said, Fuck this, I’m not putting up with it anymore.”

  Being so antisocial was against Bon’s natural inclination, after all. He had acquired the nickname Bon the Likeable, after Simon the Likeable, a character on Get Smart whose secret weapon was that he was impossible to dislike.

  MARK EVANS: “My mother was in love with him. He’d come around for dinner and say, Can I do the dishes?”

  AC/DC’s aloofness and arrogance was partly due to well-placed self-belief—a quality any artist needs to become great. But it was also a mask for something more troubling—an insularity that bordered on paranoia. It was an understandable defensiveness at the resentment, if not contempt, so often directed at AC/DC; but it was also a shield for insecurities. Maybe due to their sheltered upbringing, maybe just because of their lack of education, Malcolm and Angus were not blessed with many social skills. They were not articulate and were wary of other people. The family had always provided for them, and they saw little need to step outside it now. Bon had to skate around such obstacles.

  The band played with Skyhooks at Festival Hall. “Needless to say what happened,” said Bon cockily in a letter to Mary (AC/DC especially hated Skyhooks). Opening band Split Enz were booed off stage. “Only the little fellows of AC/DC really pulled it off,” reported the Sun.

  Bon wrote further to Mary:I’ve been in the badbooks with everybody lately & I’m really such a nice person. I just don’t understand . . .

  Off to Sydney on the weekend for a couple of weeks. Life is so boring in Melbourne, still no word on Europe but it shouldn’t be too long. I reckon before Xmas or we’ll all go fuckin’ mad. We just keep copping the same shit week in and out. We feel like packin’ it in and going to Sydney and spend all our time putting down songs in Alberts. The rest of the country’s fucked. Don’t I sound like a bloody whinger. Grrr!!!

  The band had started dropping into Alberts on their Sydney visits. They were eager to start recording again, now that they had a proper line-up and even had a few song ideas. AC/DC never rehearsed, as such, but Malcolm and Angus would sometimes sit around together with acoustic guitars. Bon had his notebooks, and he was scribbling away—if scribbling’s the right term because his handwriting was extremely neat.

  Bon wrote to Irene:Times is tough at the moment cause Caruso ’ere ’as lost ’is vocal sound, know wat I mean. Worked so hard this last few weeks, it’s just said, Fuck you lot I’m havin’ a rest. Had to cancel a week’s work but because we’re in Sydney we can spend all our time in Alberts recording our next smash . . .

  I miss ya sometimes ’Rene. Strange that comin’ from me but it’s true. It’s probably the weather.

  Bon was obviously still feeling a little sorry for himself. There can’t have been much money around either, as Bon concludes the letter with a PS to Graeme: “If you can still manage the other $50 I’d love ya f’rever. It’s no fun waiting round to be a millionaire!!!”

  During the May school holidays, AC/DC played a special “Schoolkids Week” of daytime gigs at the Hard Rock. It must have seemed a lot like déjà vu for Bon, being back under siege at the club that had previously been Berties.

  MARK EVANS: “Because it used to be so packed downstairs, we used to get changed in Michael’s office, which was right by the front door, go out on the street, unscrew the air-conditioning ducts and we’d go in through there; they’d close them up after us.”

  On the Queen’s Birthday holiday in June, in anticipation of the release of a new single, “High Voltage Rock’n’roll,” AC/DC played, for the first time, their own headline show at the Melbourne Festival Hall. Stevie Wright and John Paul Young supported. The concert was filmed, and it was this footage, with judicious doctoring, that would effectively argue the band’s case in England.

  CHRIS GILBEY: “We did a video, this was before videos were the norm. I was pushing Ted, We’ve got to do videos. I wanted a video of AC/ DC, and I wanted it to be something really sensational. Anyway, we shot it, it was live, they used four cameras, which was unheard of then, it was quite a big budget. And then we added applause at the beginning and end, which we took off the George Harrison Concert for Bangladesh album, to make it seem like it was live.”

  The gig itself marked AC/DC’s conquering of Melbourne. It had taken just over six months.

  Bon wrote to Irene:HV (LP) has made a gold album (last week) so it caused a slight celebration. I’m going to give it to mum. So I told her to make a space on her mantelpiece. She told me to write some clean songs for the next one but. Wait till you hear a couple of ’em. The band is nothing like it was when you heard it last. Got a couple of better players, better equipment, and songs, just better all round. So watch out.

  With Melbourne in the bag, and the lease up on Lansdowne Road, Sydney was beckoning. Bon wrote to Mary:I think we’ll be living in Sydney soon and try to get the band as big up there as we are down ’ere. We all prefer Sydney to Melbourne but we wish we could drop in and see you over there instead. This country’s driving us sane.

  In the studio at Alberts, March 1976, during the recording of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. (Philip Morris)

  10. SYDNEY

  “The Lifesaver was an ungilded palace of rock’n’rolling, easy-going degeneracy,” Anthony O’Grady wrote in RAM of the venue which in the second half of the seventies was “the most prestigious place in Sydney for top and soon-to-be top Australian bands.”

  “And if no one could exactly remember the details the next day—like exactly how or why they ended up in bed with Mandrax Margaret, Amphetamine Annie or Tom, Dick or Harry from the band, well, no blame on either side for the oblivion of the night before. In fact, the bed-hop after the bop caused the place to be nicknamed the Wifeswapper.”

  Sydney’s scene at the time was very different to Melbourne’s. In the early eighties, as its pub circuit flourished, Sydney superseded Melbourne as the center of rock’n’roll in Australia, but in 1975 rock’n’roll was only just taking root in Sydney.

  Initially, while the Youngs went back to Burwood, the rest of the band and crew stayed at the Squire Inn at Bondi Junction. Everyone was happy, not least of all because they were in the studio, recording the new album. Coral Browning was on the case in England. Bon was happy just to be away from Melbourne, free to lick his wounds. Of course, it didn’t help that directly across the road from the Squire Inn stood the Lifesaver (this was before both buildings was demolished to make way for a shopping center and car park).

  The Bondi Lifesaver is as much a part of Australian rock lore as the Largs Pier, Sunbury or the TF Much Ballroom. Though it had faded by 1979, in 1975 it was a hotbed, its glory years just beginning.

  “It was the sort of place where you’d be there three nights a week, even if there wasn’t always bands on,” said Helen Carter, a longtime regular. “It was a bar-restaurant, with music, which meant that you would get there at six, and didn’t leave until two.”

  With his room across the road, Bon made a virtual office out of the Lifesaver, where the band also played on occasion. He was able to enjoy his celebrity, because Sydney was now for AC/DC what it had earlier been for the Valentines—less hysterical, less aggravating than Melbourne. Obv
iously Bon hadn’t learned his lesson about jailbait, though, because he took up with the 16-year-old Helen Carter. But then, the gorgeous young Helen wasn’t a fraction of the trouble Judy King had been.

  Helen, who grew up in Bondi, had been going to pubs since she was 13 or 14, and she was a smart kid. She would later form the postpunk agit-rock band Do-Re-Mi, who scored in 1985 with the feminist anthem “Man Overboard.”

  HELEN CARTER: “I saw AC/DC at the Lifesaver—I must have seen them a couple of times—and I just decided one night, I wanted to meet Bon, I wanted to talk to him about what was going on. I guess I thought that sex would be part of it, but I can’t say honestly that I didn’t think I wouldn’t like to sleep with him. So I just walked up one night, and it was quite late, I had to go, so he said, Well, I’ll ring you tomorrow. I thought, Sure . . .

  “Anyway, he rings up, and I was at work, so he came and visited me where I worked, at a jeans shop, and he took me out for lunch, so you know, he was courteous I suppose. He always had that, a gentlemanly manner.

  “He said, Come up to the gig tonight. So I went up and I saw the gig, and I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I know that night we ended up going back to the hotel and I stayed there. And I stayed there quite a lot; and when they went to the Sebel, I stayed there a lot too.

  “When they were staying in this Bondi Junction place, they were all in one room. Bon had the double bed because he was the oldest. Everyone else had single beds. But we would sleep together, with everybody else in the room. That kind of irked me a bit, because it was something I felt slightly embarrassed about, but he understood that, and certainly never forced me to do anything I didn’t want to.