Bon visited his mum and dad in Perth. Chick and Isa were very impressed by the boys. It was the first time they’d all met each other, and they were such nice boys, Isa thought.
The band worked their way back to Melbourne playing through South Australia, visiting even the towns of the dreaded Iron Triangle again.
Right on the back of recording TNT, the band was in blistering form, but it didn’t always get the reaction it might have liked.
“We had been on a tour with AC/DC which led to our first recording . . . our big break,” Angels singer Doc Neeson recalled. “And because we were a covers band and they were an original band, we were getting encores and they were getting booed. People knew our songs and thought that they were a dirty heavy metal band.” AC/DC, nonetheless, went home and told George about this hot new band called the Keystone Angels and, as the Angels, they would serve Alberts well.
MARK EVANS: “The band itself wasn’t hyped, it was good, a good band; but the mechanics of the thing, it was hyped-up, there’s no question about that. I don’t know any successful band that isn’t. But if it had have been left to the reaction from live gigs alone, we would have been struggling.”
The fact that Angus was pushed as the focal point didn’t bother Bon. Armed with an axe and a fag and dressed in his school uniform, Angus provided an image so readily identifiable, it became a symbol for the band. In fact, Bon was almost relieved that some of the heat was off him on stage. Jealousies simply weren’t possible anyway. The power structure within the band was set, and if you didn’t like it . . . Nobody apart from Malcolm and Angus was indispensable, it seems, including Bon. And though Bon was granted special dispensations, he almost went too far on occasion. Like when he OD’d. But even then, the Youngs couldn’t think of sacking him. Blood was thicker than water, after all.
Bon was elusive, and though he could be annoying on a day-to-day level, he always came through in the end. He was always running late, and he might often be the worse for wear, but he never once failed to show, and he always gave everything he had.
Back at the Freeway Gardens Motel in Melbourne, where the band now based itself, Bon was still likely to wander off by himself. But more often than not he was hanging out with Pat Pickett. Pickett had been living in provincial Geelong, employed at the local meatworks, when he heard about AC/DC. He immediately made a beeline for Melbourne. He joined the band’s crew in a nebulous role—similar to that he had enjoyed with Fraternity—as Bon’s consort, his partner in crime. Bon’s frame of mind was pure reckless abandon.
MARK EVANS: “We were always looking after him, looking out for him, and we were only kids ourselves. You’d say, Hey, where’s Bon? I remember carrying Bon home and putting him into bed. But he had this thing about him where you wanted to take care of him.
“You could see his charm kicking in. You could also see Bon Scott the singer of AC/DC kicking in when the press was around, you know.”
The Freeway Gardens, a shabby motel at the mouth of the Tullamarine Freeway in North Melbourne—devoid of any sort of garden—was a haven for many bands, including the Ted Mulry Gang.
HERM KOVAC: “Bon used to carry around this little shaving kit. That was his whole baggage. It contained a toothbrush, toothpaste, one pair of jocks and one pair of socks. That was it. He’d wear his jeans till he might wash them at the hotel, and so he’d just get around in his jocks till they were dry. But otherwise, he’d have a pair of jocks and socks on the go, and he’d wash them each night in the sink, hanging them up in the bathroom, and get the fresh pair out of the little bag. He’d rotate them. He traveled very lightly.”
MARK EVANS: “He would do anything. I remember one time he made this bet. It was the middle of winter in Melbourne and he said he’d dive into the swimming pool. Someone took him on for five dollars. A stupid bet. He said, Make it ten. So we went up to the third floor, the balcony, and he just dove straight in. Got out, Where’s my ten bucks? He’d do these things that were just over the top.”
Mark didn’t know Bon had a history of high diving.
The debauchery of Lansdowne Road continued unabated at the Freeway Gardens. The band, after all, was even bigger now. And so, it seems, were some of the fans. It was at the Freeway Gardens that Bon met Rosie, subject of the all-time great paean to large ladies, “Whole Lotta Rosie.” The band held in very high esteem anything that was what they called “depraved,” “evil” or “filthy.” Put Pat Pickett and Bon together and the conversation would take a seriously funny downward turn. Scatology was a favored topic, but that was just the beginning. The band ran an ongoing competition—the prize being booze which they would all hoe into—to see who could pull off the most disgusting, depraved, filthy act.
Bon’s bedding of Rosie was a big winner in these stakes, but as the lyrics to the song suggest, he derived a lot more pleasure from the experience—“Whole Lotta Rosie” is actually very affectionate—than the band might have imagined.
Rosie was a Tasmanian mountain woman who had started showing up at gigs. An open challenge was thus issued.
PAT PICKETT: “We were sharing a room at the Freeway Gardens, and I woke up one morning and looked over at Bon’s bed and I thought, Jeez, he’s done it! There was this huge pile of blubber lying there, but I could see underneath it, this tiny little arm with tattoos on it was sticking out!”
EVANS: “The one myth about the band which was actually pretty true was the amount of females we used to get hold of. It was ridiculous. I used to be fairly lucky, but I was nothing on Bon. He had four days in a row where he got what we called a trifecta, three different girls each day for four days in a row. The man was a genius, I don’t know how he did it. He had a huge . . .”
Penis is the word that might complete that sentence. At least several reports suggest that Bon was extremely well hung. He liked to show it off too, dressing all to one side in jeans that were inevitably almost sprayed on.
EVANS: “This other myth, the image the band had as this heavy drinking, you know, brawling bunch, it couldn’t be further from the truth. We never got thrown out of one hotel.
“Bon didn’t get into any more trouble than your usual bloke on the road. The whole thing was this huge image. There were a couple of instances, a couple. I remember once at the Matthew Flinders, Angus, because he used to spin around on the dance floor, a couple of guys started kicking into him. I remember Pat, Phil and myself jumping off the stage, and getting into that. Phil actually broke his thumb, and so we had to get another drummer for a while, when we were in Perth, we had to get Colin Burgess back.
“But Bon, you could hit him over the head with a baseball bat, and he’d just say, Hey, what are you doing? But if you hit someone he was with with a baseball bat, you couldn’t hide anywhere. Ladies particularly. Guys, he might say, You asked for it. If one of the guys in the band got into trouble, Bon would tell them the next day, You were an idiot last night. But if it was someone you were with who obviously couldn’t take care of themselves, my God!”
Pat Pickett remembers a time when Bon was at a pub with Irene, who moved to Melbourne, and a guy was hassling them, perhaps just because Bon was Bon. The guy was a well known hard man. Bon ignored him, until he went too far. As they were leaving the pub, the guy pulled Irene’s ponytail. Bon had a breaking point, and he had just reached it. He took the guy outside and gave him what witnesses remember as a fist-beating to within an inch of his life.
EVANS: “He was really a pretty mild mannered sort of guy. I mean, I never saw him lose his temper. He had this equilibrium, and he was very, very polite, a real gentleman. Once I saw him get the shits, and it was the strangest thing . . .
“The band appeared on the TV Week 1975 King Of Pop awards show . . . We played live, and Bon had a terrible time, everything went wrong for him; the mike lead got caught in his shoes, everything. When we got off stage, we went downstairs, and we had to break the lock on the door to get into the bar. There were just all these stacks of TV Week there, with [Sherbet s
inger] Daryl Braithwaite on the cover, the King of Pop. Bon was just standing there staring at them, and he said, Have a fuckin’ look at this! And then he started just laughing, maniacally, he said, I don’t believe this, and he started ripping up all the magazines. And then, from that point on that night, he was the most uncouth, awful, rude person I’ve ever seen. To the point where he took this turkey off the table and was drinking champagne out of it. He just had this turkey under his arm, drinking out of it, offering it to everyone. Something snapped, that one time.”
The band headed out to play rural Victoria, and then ran through Sydney, before returning to Melbourne at the start of November to play a special Melbourne Cup Day show at Festival Hall. Hush supported.
Michael Browning, meantime, was in London. Atlantic Records had gone crazy for AC/DC. A deal would be struck. The album would be released, and the band would go over, sometime in the new year.
All November was spent on the road. The bus was in service when distances weren’t too great, and speed not of the essence. After Cup Day, the band spent a week in Adelaide, then toured through the deep north of Queensland. Back in Sydney, they played at the opulent State Theatre on November 30. The first two weeks of December were spent in and out of Sydney, swinging through Canberra, before making a quick dash to Brisbane to play a Festival Hall show on the 14th.
It was a hectic time, and Bon was obviously feeling the strain. He wrote to Irene:What a cunt of a night. Just got back from Canberra a day early and no one is expecting us up until tomorrow. Got no booze, no dope and no body except my own to play with. Shit. And to top it off I left my black book in the bus, which broke down in Canberra . . .
I reckon we’d have to be the hottest band in the country at the moment. Not bad for a 29-year-old 3rd-time-round has-been.
I don’t care if I never get a divorce cause I’m not planning on marrying again unless she’s a millionaire and I think my chances of finding one are scarce. But when I pull out my photy album I like saying, And this is my wife. They all fancy you and tell me what taste in spunk I’ve got . . .
I’m going through a fucking funny period at the moment. Hope you don’t mind a heart balm letter. Don’t wanna settle with anybody because I’m always on the road and won’t be here long and on the other hand there’s twenty to thirty chicks a day I can have the choice of fucking but I can’t stand that either. Mixed up. I like to be touring all the time just to keep my mind off personal happenings. Become a drunkard again and I can’t go through a day without a smoke of hippie stuff. I just wanna get a lot of money soon so I can at least change a few little things about myself (more booze and dope). Not really. I just wanna be famous I guess. Just so when people talk about you it’s good things they say. That’s all I want. But right now I’m just lonely.
After Brisbane, AC/DC worked their way down the coast to reach Sydney by Christmas Eve, to play a big shebang at the Royal Showgrounds. Bon spent Christmas with the Youngs, then flew to Adelaide to spend some time with Irene and Graeme, and his girlfriend Faye. “My wife and her boyfriend, that is,” he wrote to Maria, from whom he had received an unexpected Christmas card. “Graeme wants to marry my sister-in-law. I’m saying nothing.” Bon also dealt with some legal matters in Adelaide pertaining to his bike accident. He was still paying off bills.
The band played in Adelaide on New Year’s Day. Again, as Molly Meldrum reported in his column in Truth, “The street punk kids of Australian rock and roll, AC/DC, were the cause of a minor riot.” The band had the power cut on them and Bon, inevitably, incited a storming of the stage in protest. “Power or no power, they were not going to be deterred,” Molly went on. “Because, would you believe, Bon Scott appeared in the middle of the crowd, on someone’s shoulders, playing bagpipes!”
Bon wrote further to Maria:I’m out on the road again but this time between Melbourne and Adelaide on the coast route. It’ll be the third town tonight and there’s twenty-one more to go. We’ve had a week off between Xmas/NY but now it’s back to work. Got a couple of weeks off after this tour to record and tie up all the loose ends before leaving for England.
All this touring has worn me out. But it’s selling a lot of records and I’m seeing a lot of the country and people that you don’t realize exist, so it can’t be too bad.
I’m finally making money, Maria. About $500 a week and it’s all in the bank . . . I just hope I’m not still stupid cause now I can make a good start at doing something good. Don’t know what though. I haven’t finished rocking yet and that’s all I want to do right now.
With the Atlantic deal now finalized, the rumor was that AC/DC would support labelmates ZZ Top on a British tour to coincide with the release of their first album; then maybe even do something with the Stones, who were also on Atlantic. Either way, the band’s departure was now certain. It was just a matter of exactly when.
Bon had dreamed as a boy of leading a pipe band, marching beside it swinging the baton, feeling the sounds flow through him, feeling responsible and proud, the agent of so much joy as the drone and flutter reverberated in the air all around him. Now the dream was coming true.
A performance through the middle of Melbourne, on the back of a flat-top truck, was arranged by Countdown so they could shoot a video of “Long Way to the Top,” AC/DC’s new single. Three professional pipers accompanied the band.
This was different to what Bon had originally envisaged, but it was better. Bon was singing his own song. It was rock’n’roll—and it was the pipes.
Traffic stopped as the boys drove slowly through the city and fans ran alongside to catch a glimpse of their idols. Stomping along the length of the moving truck’s tray-top (just like Elvis), Bon looked up to see the buildings of Melbourne passing above him under a blue sky and looked down at the adoring faces, and sensed everyhow the power of the music. It infused all his senses, his own body was as if wired, responding involuntarily. Bon was swimming with the power. This was what he lived for.
“Long Way to the Top” has become an anthem. Certainly, it was AC/ DC’s best single to date. Bon was best when he was working to his own brief, rather than writing to order—he expressed himself more honestly, more evocatively.
In “Long Way to the Top,” it’s as if Bon acknowledges he’s living on borrowed time, and luckily at that. But even then, or perhaps for that very reason, the song remains celebratory.
At the end of January, “Long Way to the Top” peaked at number five. Three singles, three hits, and each outperforming the last—it’s a record any act would envy.
When the album was released, sent out to the media wrapped in a pair of ladies knickers, it sold 11,000 in the first week, and shot to the number two spot, kept out only by Bob Dylan’s Desire, which had just displaced Abba.
It was decided then that the band should go back into Alberts to cut another album, not knowing how long it might be before they got another opportunity to record. “In those days,” said Michael Browning, “you didn’t take two years between records. It was nothing to record two or three in a year.”
The band’s rapidly rising star was acknowledged when they arrived in Sydney in February and checked into the Sebel Town House, the five-star hotel still chosen by visiting rock royalty.
HELEN CARTER: “I was with Bon the day he got a $500 royalty check. They were staying at the Sebel, so obviously by then they were making a bit of money, but this was the first royalty check he’d got which was substantial, and he was just like, Look at this! His face lit up, he was just really happy at being paid for something he loved doing.
“He was of the old school, where rock’n’roll was everything. To him, it was still rebellion. I mean, it wasn’t like he was a guy who was saying, Oh, I’ve been doing gigs for years now, how come I haven’t got any money? That didn’t come into it. He was an innocent, I suppose.
“By that stage, everywhere you went there’d be women hanging around, in the hotel foyer, outside the venue, or the dressing room. So Bon would say, Here’s the
key to the hotel room, I’ll be up in half an hour; because he had to deal with not just women but fans. And he really felt he had an obligation to hang around and talk to them.”
The band cut Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap during February. So quickly after TNT, they had virtually nothing up their sleeves.
MARK EVANS: “Angus came up with the title. I remember when I heard it, I thought it sounded familiar, and ten years later I worked it out—it’s some cartoon character, off Beanie and Cecil, the villain, Captain Pugwash, he used to say that.”
HELEN: “Bon would play demos of music he had to write to. He’d just sit around the hotel room and have it going in the background, formulating ideas. He always had a cassette player, and at the time, his favorite song was “Love To Love You, Baby”, by Donna Summer. Which shows another side to him, musically.”
Bon still sought a lot outside the band.
HELEN: “Angus is pretty straightforward. Bon was almost an intellectual in comparison. The only way he could gauge anything, or write about anything, was to talk about other stuff, and we did a lot of talking. It wasn’t like we went back to his room, had sex for 12 hours and that was that. To be quite honest, I don’t think, say, talking to the road crew or whatever would have been terribly stimulating to him.”
But of course, Bon could mix it with anyone. And if women weren’t present, at least not ladies—as distinct from those with whom your secret was safe—then Bon could be a very bad boy. Bon’s mythic persona was further fuelled by the subsequent publication of a feature story in the Australian edition of Rolling Stone, which opened on Bon vomiting after a show, the victim, apparently, of a “bad bottle of Scotch,” whatever that means. In reality, his drinking was fair to middling. Anthony O’Grady witnessed the same episode, as the band played a few final gigs in Sydney whilst recording the album, and he reported in RAM: “[Bon] sometimes gets the same look that battle-scarred alley fighters have—a look of indifferent bloodlust. Kick ’em in the teeth and they’ll just spit blood and get up again.”
Highway to Hell Page 19