Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  Bon was still officially living with the band in Barnes, but he started spending time at Silver’s flat in ritzy Kensington.

  From the Red Cow, the band graduated to the Nashville. Coral managed to woo a couple of important journalists down to see the show—Caroline Coon and the NME’s Phil NcNeill.

  Under the headline I WALLABY YOUR MAN, the NME ran Phil McNeill’s assessment. “In the middle of the great British Punk Rock Explosion, a quintet of similarly ruthless Ozzies has just swaggered like a cat among London’s surly, self-consciously paranoid pigeons . . . and with a sense of what sells rather than what’s cool, they could well clean up.” Faint praise indeed. The taste-makers at the NME decreed that AC/DC were unfashionable.

  Even though punk was in one sense very traditional, in another sense, it was almost avant-garde—and this was where AC/DC and punk most distinctly digressed. If, as is often suggested, the Rolling Stones’ great worth was as an advertisement for the blues/R&B artists they ripped off, then the same could be said of punk and the Velvet Underground, the Stooges and the New York Dolls. Today, these three bands are acknowledged as seminal forces in rock’s history; but at a time in 1976 when they were still regarded with contempt—if they were recognized at all—punk discovered them and absorbed their ground-breaking influences. With its do-it-yourself ethic, punk turned to its advantage a rudimentary or minimalist, even inept, technique. AC/DC, who wore their proficiency and strictly orthodox blues-based roots so obviously on their sleeves, seemed old-fashioned next to something so apparently modern. Besides, they had long hair and tattoos. Punk was rude and crude, but it was never gauche. But it was precisely because AC/DC bridged the gap between the old and the new, the traditional and the iconoclastic, that they would be so successful.

  By now, Back Street Crawler had found a new guitarist, and a handful of gigs were arranged for May, to pay tribute to Kossoff if nothing else. AC/DC would still support. A showcase was held at the Marquee, the famed London club where bands like the Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin and Yes had all paid their dues.

  Sounds magazine’s Phil Sutcliffe reviewed the show and was so taken by the resurrected Back Street Crawler—who subsequently imploded—that he feared, “the mere wildly exciting excellence of AC/DC could be forgotten. It shouldn’t be. They are heavy, will be huge.” Sutcliffe would go on to be one of the band’s most stalwart critical supporters.

  The album was released on May 14. The British version of High Voltage was actually mostly the Australian TNT album, minus two tracks (“School Days” and “Rocker”), and in their place “Little Lover” and “She’s Got Balls” from the original Australian High Voltage album.

  The NME did not deign to review the album, but Sounds’ Geoff Barton awarded it four stars out of five. He called it “a tonic in the midst of the all-too serious, poker-faced groups of today.” Melody Maker’s Mike Oldfield, on the other hand, commented, “It’s the same old boogie . . . Still, there’s hope. The lyrics have a brashness and lack of sophistication that’s always useful in the heavy brand of rock.”

  In late May/early June, as “Jailbreak” was released as a single in Australia—it would reach number five—AC/DC were playing occasional pub and club gigs in England. Alberts crowed that the band had passed the million dollar sales mark, with TNT still shifting 3-4,000 units weekly. The release of Dirty Deeds was delayed for that reason.

  On June 11, the band embarked on the 20-date tour for Sounds, which had been prophetically dubbed “Lock up your daughters.” The band got around in a Transit van, which most of the time was driven by Phil, a full-scale car buff and petrolhead who wasn’t really comfortable unless he was behind the wheel. Long-time Australian roadies Ralph and Herc traveled in another van with the gear.

  MICHAEL BROWNING: “That was incredibly significant in terms of raising the profile of the group. I mean, we were on the front cover of Sounds—for a group that was totally unknown, that had just come from Australia, that was a pretty good score.”

  The shows were like a revue. After a DJ had regaled the crowd with tracks by Led Zeppelin, Kiss, the Pretty Things, Black Oak Arkansas, Alex Harvey, the Who, Free, Status Quo and Alice Cooper, and some Stones filmclips had been screened, AC/DC played a 50-minute set.

  MARK EVANS: “That was playing some weird places, it was really breaking the ice. We were booked into some weird little clubs. One place was called the Club 76, I’m sure because it could only hold 76 people! Another place we played in Wales, called Mumbles, in Swansea—five people turned up.”

  The dates in Scotland, though, were treated as a homecoming by the band and audience alike. Said Bon, “You can imagine what that was like . . . hoots, with an “H”, mon!”

  The Ardrossan Herald commented, “One fault with Scott’s voice is whereas it might be undistinguished most of the time, it does, at others, sound rather like Alex Harvey. This may prove unpopular with Glasgow crowds who might feel that he is imitating their idol.”

  But Glasgow was obviously flattered. A Sounds review of the gig was glowing. “The audience even at this early stage,” it began, “have nearly demolished the staid City Hall. Bon, halfheartedly and mischievously, asks us all to sit down, ‘or else the management will turn off the power.’ Nobody attempts to find their seat.”

  This minor act of civil disobedience was reported back home as a “riot.” “As in Australia,” the RAM news item went, “the group are attracting a young, volatile working class audience.”

  While Malcolm and Angus spent a couple of days off visiting long-lost relatives in Glasgow, Bon hired a car with Phil to go sightseeing. Scotland was his birthplace, after all, and so he thought he might try to find some of his roots. The pair made a circuit of Loch Lomond. But the highlight of the trip, as Bon wrote to old mate Pat Pickett, was coming across two bears shagging in the woods. Phil, the camera buff, filmed the occasion for posterity.

  The tour wrapped up in London at the Lyceum on July 7, two days before Bon’s birthday. Save for the fact that lighting engineer Herc had an accident at the soundcheck, falling from the rigging (and having to be sent home as a result), the show was highly successful. MC’d by John Peel, it featured a competition for the “Schoolgirl we’d most like to . . .” The winner was one Jayne Haynes from Harrow, Middlesex, who went home with the first prize of an Epiphone Caballero folk guitar, plus a bonus, bassist Mark Evans—much to Bon’s chagrin, mock or otherwise. “She was beautiful . . .” he rued, “really sexy. Garters, suspenders. I was really lusting for her myself . . . we all were. But Mark won out. He’s just too handsome for me to compete.”

  Against all his own forecasts, Bon had made it to the Big 3-0. The band threw him a party, which was missing only one vital ingredient—the birthday boy himself. Bon, as was his wont, had gone AWOL.

  One of the few birthday cards he got from Australia was from Mary Walton. He replied, “Thank you for remembering my B. Day. Not many did. I wrote myself off for about three days and even managed to miss my own party.”

  Bon told Anthony O’Grady, who interviewed him over the phone a few days later, “Y’know what I did last night? I fucked my birthday in . . . started at 11.50 and finished at 12:15 . . . It’s the first birthday I’ve done that.”

  The band sat around the table at the Russell Hotel waiting for the guest of honor, getting drunk. All except Angus, of course. Bon never did show that night, and he wouldn’t do so for a couple of days to come. The band could only surmise he was off with Silver. At that stage, he still hadn’t actually moved in with her.

  MARK EVANS: “The basic thing about the band—it was very insular. There was no real camaraderie, and so being on the road, it could get lonely. And Bon, being a very outgoing person, and older, I don’t think there was enough within the band to satisfy his social needs.

  “Bon very much needed that space away from the band. So he could do what he wanted to do without having to worry about what we were going to say. Because we used to call him an old hippie. I me
an, Bon used to wear his leather jacket and all that, but he was always wearing a kaftan and sandals underneath.”

  For one thing, Bon was a self-confessed pothead. This was a hippie crime which Angus barely tolerated. But Bon would still go off, to be with Silver. He also became friendly with Coral Browning, who like Silver was nearer his own age.

  Bon and Silver had lost time to make up for. They say you can never go back, but in this instance, Bon was picking up where he’d left off. The cynical view was that Bon and Silver’s relationship was mutually beneficial, in that Silver provided Bon with an entree to the London scene, and he provided her with a ready-made rock’n’roll star. While this may be true, the fact remains that Bon fell passionately in love with Silver.

  SILVER: “He never made any friends of his own, which is sad. Like, he had friends in Australia; but in London, because of the pressure of everything, he never really got a chance to do that. But then, he had a ready-made assortment of my friends . . .”

  When Silver had first arrived in London a year earlier, she lived in a house with, among others, a guy who worked for Rolling Stones’ Ron Wood, as his percy. A percy is a personal assistant, a common appendage to most big rock stars—a minder and a gofer, who is often little more than a drug supplier. Silver met Ron Wood and became friendly with him. She met a few other bands on the scene too, like Thin Lizzy and UFO. If it’s not exactly fair to say Silver was on the game at the time, certainly she was supported by sugar daddies.

  SILVER: “They weren’t older so much as guys with money. There was a few rich men hovering, I wasn’t short of rich men, I traveled around on the strength of that. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time.”

  Silver lived comfortably in a flat of her own in the West End. She was a bit of an old hippie, an intelligent woman, a reader, who introduced Bon to books, and no shrinking violet. Like Bon, she enjoyed a smoke; where they differed was that while she didn’t really drink, she had a growing taste for heroin.

  MARK EVANS: “Everyone was very wary of her. Malcolm would have sussed she was involved with drugs. And once again, that was the band mentality, if Malcolm decided . . . And Angus, he was very possessive of people, he was funny. Like, when we were living in Barnes, I ended up matey with a few of the guys down the pub, the local garbagemen actually, and you know, it took Angus a while to warm to the idea of that.”

  Malcolm and Angus would have felt threatened by anyone who wasn’t on their own payroll, let alone a strong woman.

  SILVER: “I think part of it is that they feel inadequate. They’re suspicious of anyone that might be in the least bit intellectual. Although they were always very good to me; my personal relationship with them was good.”

  They were also two-faced.

  SILVER: “I think it was just that they were young boys that got very successful very quickly, and so they were like fish out of water. They didn’t have time to enjoy themselves, I mean, that lifestyle, there was just so much happening. In all the years I’ve been around, I’ve never known a band that worked like that band worked.”

  To Bon, Silver was his refuge.

  By the time Bon returned from his few dirty days off celebrating his birthday, the band was due back on deck.

  RICHARD GRIFFITHS: “We then started booking them around London. I made sure Jack Barry, who booked the Marquee, saw them, and they were incredible. Jack said—it’s a famous quote, but I don’t remember it exactly—”The most exciting band I’ve seen play at the Marquee since Led Zeppelin.” So we then sat down and worked out a strategy with Jack to basically break AC/DC out of the Marquee.

  “This was the summer of ’76, a very exciting time in London, incredibly hot summer, and we worked out that they’d do this residency at the Marquee, every Monday night, and then they would get a great slot on the Reading Festival. And somehow, during all this, we went to Sweden too.”

  MICHAEL BROWNING: We were just totally unfashionable, and so it was hard work, persevering, trying not to worry about the criticism.”

  The band recorded a 20-minute segment for Mike Mansfield’s Super-pop TV program, which also featured T Rex, and then headed off to Sweden.

  GRIFFITHS: “They went off to Sweden for some time, because Tomas Johansen, the promoter there, represented Abba, and he couldn’t get Abba into Australia, so we did this sort of exchange. He took AC/DC to Sweden, and Abba went to Australia!”

  MARK EVANS: “We played what they call folk parks, which were like these outdoor barbecue areas with swings and all that, like recreation areas. It was weird because there was a lot of young kids there, but they had blackjack tables and beer, and they were selling beer to 14- and 15-year-olds.

  “But it was enough for the hype to start, and we took hold very quickly in those places.”

  Bon was under instructions to keep the Australian media informed, and so in another open letter, this time to the Melbourne Herald’s Debbie Sharpe, he wrote:They love rock’n’roll bands because all the Scandinavian bands are real cabaret. People dance to jigs and polkas, and the bands play Swedish beer drinking (oom-pah-pah) folk songs. The beaches and swimming pools have topless bathing (and I’m a great swimmer!).

  AC/DC, however, kept their heads down, unimpressed by travelling to new places, seeing new things, meeting new people.

  EVANS: “It was business as usual. There was never any excitement about anything at all. What was happening to us was taken for granted. Like, there was no difference to us in going from Australia and playing the Red Cow in England, to six months later headlining the Hammersmith Odeon. Having this meteoric rise didn’t faze anyone at all, it was what was meant to happen. It was this tunnel vision that Malcolm and Angus had: this is what is going to happen.

  “You could be driving through Switzerland, through the Alps, the most magnificent scenery you’ve ever seen, and Angus would have his nose buried in a comic. There was nothing that could surprise us, it was just work. The attitude was just, We don’t give a fuck, what time do we go on?

  “If someone interesting came backstage and wanted to party, Bon would be the one who’d go off with them.”

  But if there was an element of joylessness to life with AC/DC, the hour or so spent on stage every night made up for it. Most bands say that going on the road is an excruciatingly tedious exercise, only ever relieved or justified by the actual time on stage itself. The other 23 hours in the day are wasted. You spend a lot of time sitting around waiting: you wait to board vehicles, and then you travel; and then when you get where you’re going, you sit around and wait till showtime.

  EVANS: “That was the good thing about the band, whatever happened off stage—and there was always a lot of shit going down—as soon as we got on stage, it was just easy. Angus and I could have a screaming match five minutes before we went on, but then we’d go on, and it was, Bang! I’m biased, you know, but I think that line-up of the band—we just had this ultimate confidence, we had no sense of insecurity whatsoever; we would have played with anyone, we just didn’t believe we could be beaten.”

  Richard Griffiths remembers being on the road with the band in Sweden: “It was clear to me it was Malcolm’s band. Bon was just a great guy. But even then, I sensed, off Michael [Browning], that he wasn’t sure Bon was the singer to take the band all the way. I didn’t get that from the band, I got it from Michael. It sounds terrible to say it, but I think that if Bon hadn’t died . . .

  “I suppose it was true, he always was sort of separate from the rest. Phil, he was off on his own, he was actually pretty obnoxious. Angus and Malcolm were thick, obviously. And then Mark, you knew Mark wasn’t going to last, he was too much of a nice guy. I mean, these were tough guys, they were pretty tough on each other.

  “Bon did have an ability to get into trouble. But I’ve been around some pretty nasty drunks, and I definitely wouldn’t put him in that category. I just remember he used to get pretty . . . drunk!”

  EVANS: “They would dispute this, but I think they viewed Bon
to be ultimately disposable. In hindsight, it seems preposterous, but at the time, he was always in the firing line. And there was a lot of pressure, mainly from George, and record companies. I think within that camp, there’s been a certain rewriting of history, about how they felt about the guy—no, that’s wrong, how they felt about the guy professionally. Because there was no way you could spend more than 30 seconds in a room with Bon and not be completely and utterly charmed. The guy was captivating; he was gentlemanly, but he had the rough side to him, and he was funny.”

  MOLLY MELDRUM: “When I was in England, AC/DC were breaking there, and breaking in Europe, and I remember Michael taking me aside, and telling me he had this great dilemma on his hands. The Americans wanted to release this group, but what they said was, You’ve got to find another lead singer. Because they couldn’t understand Bon Scott. So Michael was going . . . But I mean, he was never going to get rid of Bon.”

  Back in England, the band relocated into new digs, a house opposite the cemetery in West Brompton, which was chosen because it came equipped with a piano. Bon instead moved in with Silver.

  With the Marquee residency kicking off on July 26, “Jailbreak” was released as the band’s second single. Caroline Coon, wrongly referring to it as “Jail Bait,” described it as “a muscle-flexing fine blast of rock’n’roll,” but as Charles Shaar Murray observed in the NME, “it will not be helped one whit by the fact that “Jailbreak” is also the title of Thin Lizzy’s current album and next single.”

  The Marquee residency was heralded by full-page ads in the music papers, which reprinted Jack Barry’s famous Led Zeppelin comparison and pictured Angus holding up a reproduction of a letter Atlantic had received from the City of Glasgow District Council, which read, “We have been advised that the audience in attendance at the recent concert featuring AC/DC which you produced were for the most of the performance entirely out of control and were actually standing up on the seats. This has caused some damage to the upholstery and has also resulted in a back being broken off one of the seats.”