Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  It goes to show just how dull most British bands were, unable to generate even this modest amount of excitement. Punk was really still waiting in the wings. The “Lock up your daughters” tour had set the wheels in motion. Playing the Marquee residency, every Monday night through August—and playing other gigs in and around London—AC/DC really caught fire.

  Recalls Dave Jarrett, an Atlantic Records promotion man who worked with AC/DC, “Monday night in London is called Swede Night, because they’re the only people who go out, Swedes. The first Marquee show, there was about 18 people there. So what we did, the record company just took everybody we could down to the gig, it was an unlimited guest list. I mean, I used to go down to my local pub, say to the guys, Who wants to go out, and they’d say, How much is it going to cost? They had no idea who they were going to see. But it built up very quickly, to the point where you couldn’t get in the door.”

  MICHAEL BROWNING: “There was another group called Eddie and the Hot Rods that were happening in London at the time, both of them had a residency at the Marquee, and it was very much like a competition between the two groups to see who could break each other’s record. I think AC/DC to this day still hold the record for the most people in the Marquee. It was quite a small room, and I think we had something like 1,400 people there. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything as hot and sweaty as that.”

  It was a stinking summer in 1976. With the fetid aroma of punk in the air, it was no summer of love; but London when it sizzles is worlds apart from London at any other time of the year—people go out, and get crazy. Hot August nights, indeed.

  “You wouldn’t believe the weather,” Bon wrote to Debbie Sharpe. “It’s been a hotter summer than we had in Australia early this year. It’s particularly bad ’cause we’re 60 miles from the nearest beach and if you happen to fall in the Thames they treat you for a week with tetanus injections.”

  AC/DC were one of a hot summer’s hottest items. Molly Meldrum flew in to shoot a segment at the Marquee for Countdown. Phil Sutcliffe reported from deep in the club’s mosh pit, “The heat is beyond belief... Guys take their shirts off and within half a minute they look as though they’ve stepped out of the shower. The girls say they wish they could do the same . . . And that’s just for the disco!

  “AC/DC stroll on unassumingly, Bon grins an evil grin and says, This one’s just to warm you up.”

  Angus was making a ritual of the flashing routine he’d unveiled initially at the Lifesaver back in Sydney in March; and even that spotty visage, in—or rather out of—soiled jocks, didn’t turn people off.

  “E’s the best fing I’ve seen since Pete Townshend,” a punter said to Meldrum, who was down there in the mosh-pit with everyone else.

  MOLLY: “It was just this tiny room, and there were all these kids dressed in school uniforms there—which was pretty exciting to me, I can tell you right now! But the thing was, AC/DC weren’t doing anything different to what they ever had, and they never have. It was the same as the first time I saw them. They’ve never had to alter their music.”

  The Marquee established AC/DC as the only band in London getting anywhere who weren’t a punk band. That they were swarmed by female fans backstage was proof of the fact—and welcome relief for the band after a veritable drought of feminine attention.

  MOLLY: “By that stage, Bon was certainly drinking a lot. Because it was just part of rock’n’roll, it was part of getting to the next gig, doing the gig . . . Bon would be there, and he would have his bottle of whisky, and so we were soul mates in that respect, I guess, because I was into whisky then too, and so we’d be going arrgghh, you know . . . In those days, quite frankly, you didn’t have to worry about it catching up with you. Why would you? You weren’t hurting anyone, you were having a lot of fun, and you were doing your job.”

  SILVER: “He was drinking a bottle of Scotch a day, even back in those early days of success. I mean, what he was getting in wages wouldn’t have covered his Scotch bill.”

  High Voltage may not have cracked the charts—if only because its sales, which totaled 50,000 by year’s end, were spread over several months—but with the vibe the Marquee generated, even the mass-circulation tabloid Sun (despite being outraged by bare bottoms and bad language) had to admit that “AC/DC are a band we will learn to live with.”

  RICHARD GRIFFITHS: “What was happening was that AC/DC were playing at the Marquee, and just up the road in Wardour Street at the 100 Club, the Sex Pistols were playing, so they sort of got caught up in the whole thing. But what they were, they were a rock band who were different to what had been going on.”

  “The Sex Pistols, and bands like the Clash and the Damned, are important because they have brought rock down to earth again,” Caroline Coon wrote in Melody Maker. “The musicians, unimpressed by the trappings of stardom, are as close to their audience as rock’n’rollers have ever been.

  “Their lyrics, eschewing the cultural irrelevancies of American R&B, are committed, searching comments about the new morality and tough environment they grew up in. Their music is fast, intensely emotional, fierce and devoid of presence.”

  Just like AC/DC. “The trouble with these bloody punk bands,” Bon told Juke’s Christie Eliezer, “is they try and look tough but musically they’ve got nothing, not even a hint of originality.”

  The punks also liked to claim they were working class, but if they were that at all, they were—like Pete Townshend and Keith Richards before them—art school dropouts. The real working-class kids, the punters, didn’t know what they were supposed to like, they just knew what they liked. And it became emphatically clear that what they liked was AC/DC. This was especially true outside trendy London, in the industrial wastelands of the North—not just in Scotland but in cities like Manchester, Newcastle and Liverpool, where the London-based music papers held less sway. AC/DC, in turn, didn’t condescend to their audience.

  GRIFFITHS: When you compare them to what was going on in England at the time . . . They came over, and they were so great, because they’d been playing all these gigs, and English bands hadn’t been playing. So you had the raw excitement of the Sex Pistols or the Clash or the Jam or whatever else was going on, but you just had this real rock’n’roll band, with this extraordinary guitarist, showman, and Bon who was just great. Kids just loved Bon.”

  It probably had a lot to do simply with musicianship. AC/DC, with their greater prowess, got across aggression so much more effectively. With even a measure of flash. AC/DC also attracted older fans—like bikers, who always liked their rock’n’roll loud, hard and fast.

  Not only that, they had genuine character and they put on a show. Malcolm, Mark and Phil at the back line—a rhythm section as tight as any—looked like any real, ordinary young blokes. Out front, Angus was pure vaudeville—the errant schoolboy imagery stretching all the way back to comic-book character Billy Bunter—but the thing was, he was a freak, he could really play that guitar. And Bon—Bon was simply larger than life; but at the core he too was all real. If the band mostly copped stick from the press, it didn’t matter, because the kids knew what was what.

  GRIFFITHS: “It was all word of mouth, the record wasn’t doing much; Sounds was supportive, nobody else, and they were just touring all over. But they were building an incredible live following. Funnily enough, everything was building towards a peak, because by then we were about to come in with the second album, and we thought they were going to explode from the Reading Festival. But in fact, they played Reading and they didn’t do very well, and I’ve never really understood why, because they had a great slot—the Saturday or Sunday afternoon—and they played well, but they really didn’t go down very well.”

  The annual Reading Festival is an institution in British rock, a showcase that can make or break bands. Sharing a bill in 1976 with Brand X, Ted Nugent, the Sutherland Brothers and Quiver, Black Oak Arkansas and Osibisa, AC/DC had the same hopes for Reading that they’d had for Sunbury back home in 1975. But before
a crowd of nearly 50,000 they would again be thwarted.

  An entourage accompanied the band to Reading, including Michael and Coral Browning, George and Harry, Richard Griffiths, Phil Carson, even Silver. On the way there, they stopped in at Richard Griffiths’ parents’ place for lunch and a quick game of croquet. Griffiths remembers that Bon, of course, utterly charmed his mother.

  But as Melody Maker’s “Reading Report” put it: “If you think the Sex Pistols are a gang of untalented jerks, then prepare yourself . . .” John Peel admitted he slept through AC/DC’s set—“probably the first person ever to do so”—but somehow still managed to note, “Anticipation was high for AC/DC, and response was agitated—people seemed to think them either absolutely awful or great fun. The loutish element definitely dug them, as did I.”

  MARK EVANS: “We drove back to London, and George at that stage had come over with Harry, and we had a pretty heavy meeting, because everyone had the shits. George came back, we were going to play cards, and Malcolm and Angus started arguing. I tried to split them up, and it was the first time George ever said anything more to me than, No worries, mate. He’d given Malcolm and Angus a blast, saying, Who the fuck do you think you are? I don’t think it was the band’s fault, I think it was the crowd, but George blamed us. And he turned to me, and said, And you! He kept calling me Dave, you know, that was the old singer, Dave Evans—and I said, At least you could get my name right. And then they all set on me.”

  GRIFFITHS: “I didn’t like George at all. I felt that George was out to fuck with Michael. In fact, I got the sense that the Alberts people were out to fuck Michael off.

  “But then Michael fucked me and took the band away from my agency! But you know, it was probably the right move. Because I was a small little agency, and he needed someone bigger.

  “The last tour I booked for them would have been August/September. The first gigs we did with them in London they were getting ten pounds a night; by then we were getting £500 to £750 a night, which was pretty decent money in those days.”

  Announcing that they’d joined the prestigious Cowbell Agency, which handled such top-line British acts as Jethro Tull, Roxy Music, Rod Stewart and Alex Harvey, AC/DC were “bought on” to a September European tour supporting Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. A buy-on is when a band pays for the privilege of playing on the bill with another, bigger band. It cost AC/DC a not inconsiderable sum to open on 19 dates for Ritchie Blackmore. The legendary status of the former Deep Purple axeman guaranteed AC/DC an audience which would be not only large, but also almost certainly the right audience.

  Every territory has its distinctive likes and dislikes, and Germany, the third largest market for music in the world, next to producing its own avant-garde strain of rock, has always had a real fondness for the hardest of hard rock. To the Germans, AC/DC must have seemed made in heaven.

  AC/DC had excited Germany even before they arrived there. The High Voltage album shifted 16,000 copies in its first week of release. Prior to the band’s joining the Blackmore tour, they played three gigs of their own, and a fourth—a major show for Bravo—in Duisburg. Bravo was the top rock magazine in the country, and every year it held its own hit-pick concert. Sharing the bill were Suzi Quatro, Slik and Shaun Cassidy.

  The band arrived in Hamburg by ferry at 9:00 on the morning of September 15. They were greeted by George, who had made his own way over, and brother Alex, who was based there at the time. It was a family reunion. Bon checked into his hotel room where a letter was waiting for him from Atlantic’s German International Product Manager Killy Kumberger.

  “Welcome to good old Germany,” it read. “May I tell you that we at WEA are sure you will be one of the major rock’n’roll bands in the future. Your sound seems to be perfect for our market. With your fantastic live appearances, you should soon be able to attract a wide audience. The first reactions to the single and the album have been very positive.”

  Accompanying the letter was a schedule for the day, which was typical:

  On tour in Germany, October 1976. Mark Evans: “Jeez, Bon was on the turps early that day.” (courtesy Mark Evans)

  9:00 - Arrival harbor Hamburg

  12:45 - Pick up at hotel by Hannelore Kring, promotion co-

  ordinator

  1:00 - Interview at Cafe Boheme with Martin Meister, journalist

  for music magazine Joker

  2:00 - Interview at Cafe Boheme for magazine Pop with Brigitte

  Weckelmann

  3:00 - Interview at Cafe Boheme for daily newspaper

  Morgenpost with Mario Scheuermann

  4:00 - Fabrik open for road manager

  6:00 - Rehearsal

  8:30 - Concert

  11:30 - Dinner at Bratwurstglockle with journalists from

  Sounds, Pop-Foto, Musikexpress, etc and WEA people

  In Hamburg, the boys in the band indulged in the not-so illicit pleasures on offer in the world’s most notorious red-light district. All except Bon that is, who delighted as he was by window displays of real live naked ladies, had a date lined up with a fräulein he had met when Fraternity visited Germany.

  Apart from an uncooperative stage prop—a huge model rainbow which, like Spinal Tap’s miniature Stonehenge, kept falling over—the tour was marred only by Blackmore’s bad temper.

  AC/DC played with Rainbow in Geneva, Marseilles, Paris and Belgium before returning to England by mid-October. If the French have any particular predilections, it’s for the wild men of rock, its gutter poets; and so again, AC/DC must have seemed like a dream band.

  Back in London, the band had barely a week off before it was due to go out on the road again, headlining, for the first time, their own British tour. The plan was to do that, and then in mid-November go to America en route to Australia.

  A return tour of Australia was booked for December. RAM suggested that promoters Evans-Gudinksi had considered calling the tour, “The little c**nts have done it.” In America, at least two gigs at the Starwood in LA were on offer.

  Meantime, High Voltage was released in the US, and both the Dirty Deeds album and single were released in Australia. Britain would see the release of the “High Voltage” single and the slightly amended Dirty Deeds album by the beginning of November.

  Reviewing Dirty Deeds, RAM suggested the band was simply repeating itself, though had to admit “they’ve shown positive signs of a NEW DIRECTION”—even if it came down only to “Ride On” and “Jailbreak.”

  America bore both good and bad news. High Voltage—surprise—had polarized reaction. With new cover artwork yet again (Angus struck by a bolt of lightning), industry bible Billboard listed it in its “Recommended LPs” column: “Australia’s newest entry is a cross between Led Zeppelin and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Lead singer has a very unique sounding voice and the twin guitars are front and center from the first cut. Expect airplay on progressive stations.”

  Rolling Stone, on the other hand, was contemptuous. “Those concerned with the future of hard rock may take solace in knowing that with the release of the first US album by these Australian gross-out champions, the genre has unquestionably hit its all-time low,” said Billy Altman. “Lead singer Bon Scott spits out his vocals with a truly annoying aggression which, I suppose, is the only way to do it when all you seem to care about is being a star so that you can get laid every night. Stupidity bothers me. Calculated stupidity offends me.”

  As it transpired, the band wouldn’t make it to America in 1976. Michael Browning was unable to arrange visas, since not only Bon but he himself had Australian criminal records for pot convictions. This certainly wouldn’t have impressed Atlantic—not so much having been busted in the first place, but not being able to get around it, and not coming to America to make some promotional appearances.

  Critical reaction to Dirty Deeds in Britain echoed that in Australia. Comparing Dirty Deeds and High Voltage, Geoff Barton said, “So alike are they that tracks could be interchanged quite easily” (which was of cou
rse perfectly true). The single “Jailbreak” was inexplicably omitted, thus undermining the album’s killer ending; so too was “Rock in Peace.” Replacing them were “Rocker,” the TNT track dropped from the first English album, and “Love at First Feel,” a track the band had up its sleeve which would only see release in Australia as a single the following January. Dirty Deeds was more of the same, but in Britain, the groundswell of fans had only one previous album to go on, and so it was quite welcome.

  Nevertheless, neither the album nor the “High Voltage” single went anywhere near the charts. AC/DC’s rise was a live phenomenon.

  DAVE JARRETT: “AC/DC and Van Halen, who I also worked with, did a very similar thing. Van Halen did two tours of England, very, very quickly, one supporting Black Sabbath, and then headlined themselves. When they came over and supported Black Sabbath, we’d never heard of them. So it was the young turks with the old warhorses. And they were so exciting, I mean, Dave Lee Roth was in the band. The audience was very responsive. It was fantastic, and again, a very similar situation to AC/DC.

  “What you had to do, you only had to do a good support or two, and you could cover the whole country, and kids would come out and see you the next time, you didn’t need hit records.”

  On October 27, the band played the first gig of its headline tour at Southampton University. Oxford Polytechnic refused to grant them permission to perform because their repertoire contained “blatantly vulgar and cheap references to both sexes.”

  Heading towards Scotland always brightened the band’s spirits.

  “Glasgow would be our favorite place in Scotland, in the whole of Britain, because the kids are really mad—like, half of them are Angus and Malcolm’s relatives anyway,” Bon told RAM. “The first time we ever played down there, there were about two rows of seats just demolished. And so this time they had extra men inside and the riot squad outside. But if the cops had stopped the show and arrested Angus the kids would have gone mad. And no one goes mad like Glaswegians, believe me.”