Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  At the same time, O’Grady remembers that at the end of that night, back at Burwood, Bon and he were ushered outside to wait in the car when George wanted to “talk business” with his brothers, and Bon happily acquiesced, proceeding to simply pass out in the back seat.

  HELEN: “I know that when you get a bit successful, because the pressure and everything else increases, you do drink too much. Especially if you’ve just done a fantastic show or something, you come off stage and you want to . . . But it didn’t rule his life. It was part of his life, but it wasn’t the major feature. The major feature was purely and simply getting up on stage and doing it, he just loved that.

  “He used to gargle with Coonawarra red [wine] and honey, every morning. This is giving away trade secrets. But that was the secret to his great voice.”

  Dirty Deeds was rushed; but then, everything was a rush for AC/DC at that time. With the UK release of the High Voltage album (which was in fact a compilation of tracks from the Australian albums High Voltage and TNT) now scheduled for May, and a UK tour supporting Paul Kossoff’s Back Street Crawler locked in for April, the flight to London was finally booked—for April Fool’s Day.

  When they finished recording it, Dirty Deeds was put into cold storage. It had turned out as an equally inconsistent echo of its predecessor. The title track was more sloganeering; “Big Balls” is pure vaudeville double entendre; and “There’s Gonna Be Some Rockin’” and “RIP (Rock in Peace)” are pretty much the same song, both mindless chugalug boogies. “Squealer” was an inferior sequel to “Rocker.”

  The remaining four tracks save the album. “Problem Child” fittingly became a staple of the band’s live set, a crunching, threatening flurry. “Ain’t No Fun (Waiting Around To Be a Millionaire)” is a boogie elevated by a superior lyric and greater extension on the band’s part.

  But it was the album’s closing two tracks, “Ride On” and “Jailbreak,” that were its killers, a double-punch equal to that which opened TNT. “Ride On,” despite borrowing the chords from ZZ Top’s “Jesus Just Left Chicago,” is a statement of Bon’s tomorrow-never-comes credo whose poignancy has acquired a rueful dimension since his death. It segues abruptly but perfectly into “Jailbreak,” a virtual manifesto for AC/DC—relentlessly thudding release.

  In March, as the track “TNT” was released as a single, the band flew to Melbourne to attend a gold record reception and formal farewell party. Three plaques each for High Voltage and TNT were presented. The band regrouped in Sydney to play one final show at the Lifesaver before they left (it was at this show that Angus stripped for the first time, flashing his bare behind, a routine that features in AC/DC’s shows to this day). The night before flying out, a celebration was thrown at Burwood for Angus’s nineteenth birthday.

  HELEN: “It was a very quiet affair, just a couple of pizzas and a Billy Connolly record. Bon was excited, but skeptical about it [going overseas]. You know, being 30, not that that’s old, but in terms of starting a career, internationally, in an industry in which at that stage, if you were an Australian band, you may as well not have existed.”

  As “TNT” climbed the Australian charts, eventually peaking at number eleven, Michael Browning played down the band’s departure. He’d been through it all before. “I’ve seen too many Australian groups say, Oh yeah, we’re going over to England and we’ll be big, and when it doesn’t happen straight away, no one in Australia wants to know about them anymore,” he told RAM. “AC/DC are an Australian group and we don’t want to spoil anything we’ve built up here.” Maybe he was just trying to cover his arse.

  The band couldn’t have cared less. As Angus told Record Mirror & Disc shortly after arriving in England, “Success there [in Australia] means nothing. We left on a peak rather than overstaying our welcome, and set out to plunder and pillage.”

  Spencer Jones, whose own band the Beasts of Bourbon would later cover “Ride On,” remembers seeing that last show they played. “It changed my life. There was this girl there, and she got up on stage and started to do a strip. She was quite a big girl, and she was just dancing around without any clothes on. So Bon picked her up. He just put one hand around her neck, and one on her crotch, and he just raised her above his head and stood there with her aloft like that. It was the most macho, sexist pose imaginable, but Bon could get away with things like that.

  “And while all this was going on, Angus was up on someone’s shoulders, and he was trying to get to the bar, this long bar they had at the Lifesaver. The place was packed, you couldn’t move, but somehow they punched their way through, the people sort of parted like the Dead Sea. Angus hopped off at the bar and he did the duck-walk. Meanwhile, Bon’s just standing there with this girl on his shoulders. It was incredible. And then when Bon let her down, the roadies came on to help her, but they didn’t just throw her back into the audience, she was ushered backstage.”

  HELEN: “No one else could get away with that stuff. I think that was what Bon actually loved about doing what he was doing, he really could, if he wanted, do anything he wanted. And he loved that. He loved that freedom.”

  Shortly after the band’s arrival in the UK. Bon’s shades conceal a fresh black eye . . .

  11. ENGLAND

  It was a hot summer in England in 1976—a long, hot summer. It was the eve of the Queen’s 1977 Silver Jubilee, and the country was gearing up for a prolonged, jewel-encrusted celebration of royal irrelevance. It was simultaneously on the verge of a revolution.

  To chic, would-be subversives, all the Jubilee did was provide a target for pot shots. Following their December 1976 debut single “Anarchy in the UK,” the Sex Pistols’ incendiary rewriting of “God Save the Queen’ caused the sensation it was designed to. In doing so, the Pistols sparked the world-wide cultural sea change called punk rock.

  Bon had left Scotland with his family to come and live in Australia in 1952, the year Queen Elizabeth ascended to the throne. Now he was returning to Britain in time for her jubilee. He couldn’t have cared less. He didn’t care much for punk rock either.

  Punk rock, British-style, liked to think it was a political movement, but it was first and foremost an aesthetic one. It was an aesthetic decision inspired negatively, by an unspeakable hatred for hippies and for practically all the music that then prevailed.

  Its anger was well-directed; punk was a necessary and overdue flushing out of the stagnant waters rock’n’roll had become. Rock had never been in a worse state than it was in the mid-seventies; it was almost exclusively the corporate domain of boring old farts, to use the preferred punk term.

  Punk ultimately changed the face of rock’n’roll, and more beyond. But like glam, punk was nothing so much as a return to rock’n’roll classicism: the traditional values of teen rebellion and hit-single songwriting. It was getting back to basics because rock’n’roll—if it could be dignified with the name—had lost touch with its underclass roots. It’s just that punk was packaged in apocalyptic urban-guerrilla garb.

  When AC/DC arrived in London in April 1976, the storm was still brewing. The scene was still very sluggish. One of the first UK gigs that AC/DC played, later that month, was at the Nashville Rooms in Kensington, where the Sex Pistols had played their first-ever legitimate gig on the venue’s “new bands” night only weeks before.

  “We got people like the Sex Pistols,” Angus recalls. “The Johnny Rottens would show up, cop a look—in fact, the guy looked like a clone of Bon the first time I saw him!”

  “It’s hard to believe now, but AC/DC were sort of caught up in that punk thing,” said Richard Griffiths, AC/DC’s first agent in England, who booked that Nashville Rooms gig. “This was the very early days of punk. The Sex Pistols were playing, the Damned were playing, and AC/DC were playing. There was another band playing, called Eddie and the Hot Rods, who I was also agent for. So there were two things happening at the same time, and they got slightly intermeshed.”

  Punk was largely a media-driven phenomenon. The British music press,
which wielded even more power than Countdown did in Australia, latched onto punk and propagated it as the new anti-fashion. But if AC/DC couldn’t count on press support—because they failed to conform to the punk stereotypes—it wasn’t the end of the world. They’d never been critics’ darlings anyway. When they got to Britain, their strategy was simply to do exactly what they’d done in Australia: build it up from the grass roots on the live circuit.

  It was precisely because of the climate that gave rise to punk that AC/DC also found an audience—and so quickly—in Britain. There were plenty of kids just as fed up with all the boring old farts as the punks were—as AC/DC were—but who couldn’t get into punk because it was so theoretical and confrontational that it was itself alienating. AC/DC had a lot in common with punk—an almost back-to-mono sensibility, a keenness to upset the applecart, and a hatred of hippies—but they were much more accessible because they had orthodox R&B roots.

  MICHAEL BROWNING: “Building it up in the pubs wasn’t that difficult because there was good word of mouth for it. It was just purely down to the kids that liked that kind of music, and they really got off on it.”

  “We went over to establish ourselves as a road band first of all,” Bon later told RAM, “and then work for a hit single. Sherbet, a few years ago, got the hit single but they couldn’t get anyone to concerts. Then they couldn’t get another hit and they couldn’t work at all. We didn’t want that.”

  Angus concurred. “I think all the good bands are essentially live bands, the great ones, the ones that last, your Stones, Who, whatever. Your only gauge for AC/DC is if we play someplace and people come back to see us the next time we play there. You can’t trust the hype side of it.”

  AC/DC’s initial British schedule was arranged long before the band left Australia. First up, they would embark on an April and May tour of Britain supporting Atlantic labelmates Back Street Crawler, the band fronted by former Free guitarist Paul Kossoff.

  Then, in June, they would tour the country all over again as part of a roadshow put together in conjunction with Sounds magazine. Coral Browning, with her good connections, had convinced Sounds that such a package—boasting a hard rock disco and films, as well as AC/DC, all for the meager admission price of 50 pence—would serve both the magazine and the band well.

  Of the big three music papers, Sounds was the new kid on the block (it had been launched in 1970), and consequently it was out to challenge the traditional supremacy of the New Musical Express and Melody Maker. The NME was the market leader, with its fickle, elitist and intellectual championship of punk. Sounds took a more down-to-earth approach. It threw itself behind punk too, but not to the exclusion, or denigration, of the heavy metal bands it already championed.

  Not surprisingly, then, AC/DC was Sounds’ dream band. When the magazine compiled its “New Order Top 20” at the end of 1976 (in contrast to the “Boring Old Farts Top 20” led by the Stones, Led Zeppelin and Rod Stewart), AC/DC topped the list, ahead of Eddie and the Hot Rods, the Sex Pistols, the Damned, Iggy Pop (and the Stooges), Ted Nugent, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, Motorhead, Judas Priest and in equal tenth position, the Ramones and the Dictators.

  AC/DC’s first UK single, released as soon as the band arrived in April, was “Long Way to the Top.” It would be followed in May by the High Voltage compilation album.

  The deal the band had with Atlantic Records was far from generous—a one-album trial, with an option for Atlantic beyond that—but since they had been the only interested party, Michael Browning was pleased to sign anything. And the band was chuffed just to be labelmates with the likes of Led Zeppelin.

  Atlantic is one of the most celebrated labels in rock’n’roll history. Formed in New York in 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun, the son of a Turkish diplomat, it was one of rock’n’roll’s midwives, making its name with classic R&B. The label survived by adapting to changing trends. By the early seventies, its roster boasted two of the biggest white rock acts in the world—Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. With England further providing it with successful acts like art rockers Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Atlantic stepped up its English presence, opening a London office. The label’s first direct British signing was the Heavy Metal Kids in 1974, followed by Back Street Crawler.

  Atlantic UK Managing Director Phil Carson was sold on AC/DC from the moment Coral Browning walked into his office in 1975. He asked label manager Dave Dee what he thought, and he was just as keen. Dee thought AC/DC sounded like a cross between Zeppelin and Slade. Maybe they would succeed for Atlantic where the Heavy Metal Kids, a similarly street urchin–style outfit, had failed.

  RICHARD GRIFFITHS: “I was at the Virgin Agency in London in 1975, and Michael Browning came in with one of those things—which actually I’ve only ever seen in Australia—it was like a suitcase, and you pulled it up and there was a screen, a machine, and it played a video. And it played a video of a live concert, in Melbourne, it would have been on the High Voltage record, and they were just amazing.”

  Griffiths left Virgin to form his own agency called Headline Artists, taking with him his own charge, Paul Kossoff, and, among others, AC/DC. It was only natural, then, that the two acts would tour together.

  GRIFFITHS: “Then, the way I’ve always told it was that in between AC/DC leaving Australia and arriving in London, Paul died.”

  Paul Kossoff had maintained a heroin habit for the latter days of Free. He kicked it in 1974, but related ill health caught up with him by 1976. Bon said in an open letter to RAM back home, “That cunt Paul Kossoff fucked up our first tour (wait till Angus gets hold of him).”

  BROWNING: “We were suddenly stuck in England with no work. We had to adopt the stance of doing what any English group would do, and that was just play around all the little pubs and clubs.”

  Coral Browning had an office at Atlantic. Often, a record company appoints a liaison officer to an act, and even though Coral wasn’t officially on the Atlantic payroll, she served as that and more. She coordinated the band’s publicity, and was its mother hen as well.

  Although “Long Way to the Top’ didn’t dent the charts, it made a reasonably favorable impression. It was Hit Pick of the Week on Radio Luxembourg; and at least late night Radio One DJ, John Peel—the oldest hipster in the world, the man who discovered T Rex—would give it a spin. That was a good start. Record Mirror & Disc’s James Hamilton commented, “These Aussie youngsters boogie Stones/Elton John-style [huh?] with bagpipe noises yes!’ Writing in Melody Maker, Caroline Coon was equivocal: “Up there with the likes of Kiss and Angel . . . mind-boggling,” she began, but concluded cryptically, “Getting ripped off? Keep laughing.”

  Michael Browning and Phil Carson kept chipping away at America. Atlantic over there was not entirely convinced.

  The band stayed briefly at a house in the West End, just around the corner from Coral Browning’s place, before moving to more permanent digs in Barnes. Michael Browning had calculated it would cost around 600 quid a week just to keep the band; this was a bill footed by Alberts, albeit in the form of moneys advanced against royalties. The members of the band received the quite generous wage of 50 quid a week.

  But they were champing at the bit just to play. To pass time, Mark and Malcolm would go down the local—the Bridge Hotel—to shoot pool. Bon went out on an extended pub and club crawl to check out the competition. Of course, give Bon an idle moment . . . He decided to pay a visit to the pub in Finchley where he used to work during Fraternity’s last days in London. He came home with a dislocated jaw.

  MARK EVANS: “He walked in and, he said, he’d only been in the place ten or fifteen seconds—he went on his own—and he got hit in the face with a pint mug! And this is like three or four years since he’d been in the place!’

  No decent explanation was ever offered for the incident. When Bon wrote later to Pat Pickett, all he said was, “It wasn’t even my fight. I didn’t see what hit me.”

  The band had a photo session to do, so Bon donned a pair of wrapar
ound shades to obscure the welts. It was excuse enough though to finally finish work on his teeth. Eight hundred quid spent in Harley Street bought him a new set of dentures.

  GRIFFITHS: “I dug [AC/DC] up a gig at the Red Cow in Hammersmith. This show was probably the greatest show I’ve ever seen in my life. There was no advertising. They came on, they were doing two sets, and to start with there were probably ten people in the pub. They did one set and they did the whole number, Angus on Bon’s shoulders, everything, I’d never seen anything like it. Then the place emptied. About half an hour later, they came out to do the second set, and the place was packed. Everyone had run off and said, You have got to see this band. It was packed, it was incredible; I’ll never, ever forget it.”

  EVANS: “It was a real battle in London first off, I really had doubts that it was going to work. The Red Cow was, well, it wasn’t a regular gig; it had bands on but there was no vibe out on it. People would say, You’re playing where? But the reaction was pretty instantaneous. Browning and Coral were excellent at beating stuff up.”

  Among the Australians at the Red Cow that night was Silver (née Margaret) Smith, with whom Bon had had a brief affair in 1971. She had left her husband in Adelaide at about the same time Fraternity returned from England, and set off around the world, ending up in London. “I’d been away for a couple of years then, so seeing the name AC/DC meant nothing to me. I hated the Red Cow, but I had a friend drop in and say, Why don’t you come and see this band, they’re great; and it was free to get in, so I went down. The place was packed, everybody was really getting off on it, so I weaseled my way to the front, and I got there, and it was Bon! So I went and said hello afterwards. He didn’t go home that night, it was all on again.”