Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  Arriving back in London and playing the Hammersmith Odeon, even the NME had to admit AC/DC was here to stay: “The emcee only just ducks into the wings and out of the firing range when the Odeon stage explodes deafeningly. Bruised about the head, their breath stolen by the sheer impact of noise, the security men are caught off guard and trampled to the floor as the audience immediately besieges the front.

  “And then this schoolboy brat up on the rostrum smirks maliciously as his opening power chord painfully rattles through our bones and makes the unnecessary triumphant gesture of wildly tossing his cap to the floor, as if to say: This is our day.

  “The day, Gawd ’elp us all, AC/DC conquered London.”

  Dave Dee and Phil Carson, and Michael Browning and Coral, and everybody, knew that they’d cracked it. The 4,000 seat theatre was only just over half full, but it wasn’t so much the quantity as the quality of the crowd that convinced them. It was clear then, with even a few kids in the audience dressed in school uniforms, that the band’s appeal extended beyond the merely musical. Particularly satisfying to the band itself was the fact that this success was achieved without having to alter its act.

  Even the Times reviewed the show. Said rock critic Clive Bennett, “My objections are to their music, not their words, which simply express without inhibitions what most of us have discussed innumerable times with equal frankness in private. Music of any sort must surely require more from performers than just the capacity mindlessly to bash their instruments into oblivion. It is in this primal state that AC/DC exist.”

  Any sort of acknowledgement by the Times was signal enough: AC/DC had arrived. It was, indeed, a meteoric rise. Their standing in Britain could certainly still be improved upon, but the new frontier now was America.

  MICHAEL BROWNING: “There’s an amazing photograph of Bon from that first time they headlined a major venue in London. Bon said he’d make his own way to the gig, which of course, we were all a bit nervous about, but anyway . . . We were all there backstage worrying that Bon wasn’t going to turn up. In the meantime, because the band’s name was on the marquee out the front, I asked this photographer if he could go around and get a picture of it, you know, “Sold Out—AC/DC.” So he did that, and then Bon turned up and everything went fine.

  “Anyway, this photographer brought the proofs in to show me the next week, and who should be walking past on his way to the gig in the picture but Bon! He was just casually walking to the gig. And that just really summed up Bon, you know, the first ever big headline gig, no lights or anything like that. He’s just casually strolling along. He would have just got off the tube at Hammersmith station.

  “And to his credit, he would do things like that.”

  Welcome home at Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport, November 27, 1976. (courtesy the Herald & Weekly Times)

  12. THE LITTLE C**NTS HAVE DONE IT

  The story ran on the wire around Australia on November 26:A small crowd of screaming girls today welcomed home the controversial rock band AC/DC. The screams, the hugs and the odd tears assured the five member group that it had not been forgotten during an eight month absence in England and Europe. And the members said they ensured that the English public and police force would not forget their act too quickly. At almost every performance the local police vice squad turned up. Guitarist Angus Young provoked the attendance of the law by stripping off his clothes on stage. In two cities, Glasgow and Liverpool, he was threatened with arrest.

  The media was intent on getting something out of AC/DC. Another story went out that teenage female fans were getting tattoos in emulation of the band, which led to an uproar (as the papers put it) among health officials, who feared the risks of backyard tattooing. But if this was a storm in a teacup, it was only the beginning.

  AC/DC themselves were happy to be home, although on a professional level, they weren’t so sure. They were in line to cop more shit than they ever had before. The matter of AC/DC even got so far as parliament, where one particularly crusty old member expressed fear at the threat the band posed to the nation’s morals.

  The controversy only confirmed AC/DC’s suspicion that Australia was a backwater, and even though the band would make a tradition of coming home every year for Christmas, after this tour they would never play an Australian show again (at least not an official one) while Bon was alive.

  AC/DC would ride out the so-named “Giant Dose of Rock’n’roll” tour—or what was left of it after bannings and protests—and then go back into Alberts to cut a new album in January.

  Bon and Silver had not traveled out together. Bon flew in with the band; Silver went overland from London to Adelaide, where she spent Christmas with friends. She then joined Bon in Sydney in January as the band worked on the album.

  Michael Browning went via New York, where he was going to have to pull some rabbits out of a hat if Atlantic was to continue its relationship with AC/DC. Support was building for the band in Britain and Europe, but they weren’t selling truckloads of records. And in America, they’d sold next to none. Then they’d failed to get into the country to make personal appearances, and the album they’d presented as a follow-up to the first, Dirty Deeds stunk—at least as far as Atlantic was concerned.

  MICHAEL BROWNING: “The band really didn’t want to do that tour [of Australia]. I can remember arguing about it. But we needed money, because that was the time when the Atlantic contract was in question, so it was one of those things we had to do just to keep the machine running. I think the band thought Australia was all just a bit rinky-dink, after doing things on a reasonably professional level in England.”

  Alberts was determined to distance the band from punk rock. They issued a press release in which the closing question “Were they a punk rock band?” was answered decisively by Bon. “No,” he said, “we are a straight ROCK’N’ROLL band.” But it was the specter of punk that was constantly evoked as the band was broadly decried as obscene and disgusting.

  With all the hype—plus the fact that Dirty Deeds was still sitting in the top 10—AC/DC might quite reasonably have expected the tour to sell out. But the other major disappointment of the summer was that attendances were down. This was probably largely due to the fact that at that stage AC/DC were caught between audiences. The teenyboppers had lost much of their interest in the band in its absence. Yet the image of AC/DC as a teen phenomenon still persisted, so the emerging headbangers were still very wary of them. What made all this especially galling for the band was the fact that they were in such fine form, playing like demons.

  Some muck-raking wowser had actually bothered to listen to an AC/ DC record, and found that the songs’ subject matter was quite frequently less than squeaky clean. At the same time, as Truth gleefully reported under the banner “POP HIT MAKES WIDOW’S PHONE RUN HOT”: “A wealthy widow was shocked and upset when she began to receive obscene telephone calls.” Kids had taken to dialing the number 36-24-36, which Bon suggests calling in “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.” Chris Gilbey issued a profuse public apology.

  But it was the sight of Angus’s spotty behind at every turn that really upset the media. Bon gasped in mock shock. “You see his backside in the papers more than you see his face—which is preferential as far as I’m concerned,” he told RAM.

  The tour kicked off in grand fashion at the Myer Music Bowl. The full complement of tickets, at $5.50 and $4.50, was sold out. The show was the triumphant return everybody had hoped for. But things only went downhill from there.

  Molly Meldrum reported in TV Week that AC/DC was the “cause of yet another hysterical riot,” bringing “a 5,000 fan crowd to fever pitch” (other reports had a further couple of thousand outside the cyclone-wire fencing).

  “With scenes like this,” Molly went on, “there is no doubt that AC/ DC have become a huge threat to the top positions held by Sherbet and Skyhooks.”

  The scene in Australia hadn’t changed much. The most successful new talent was a cabaret nostalgia act called Ol’ ’55, whose
debut album Take It Greasy won out over even Sherbet’s Howzat as the year’s biggest local seller. Split Enz were still too weird for Countdown, although sophisticated Rolling Stone readers voted them “Best Band.” Hush had already faded away. Punk was still just grumblings in the underground, not taken seriously at all.

  Debbie Sharpe said of the Bowl show in the Herald: “Lead singer Bon Scott played with the audience, singing to them, acting to them . . . and oh, that glint in his eye.” Bon was, in fact, doing everything short of what Jim Morrison got arrested for in Florida in 1970 (when he exposed himself) in an attempt to incite the crowd.

  Sharpe went on later that night to see the Bay City Rollers, on tour in Australia for the second time in 12 months, and whilst she conceded that the scenes at Festival Hall were not as hysterical, “for both bands Sunday night was successful.”

  AC/DC and company repaired to the Tiger Lounge, a pub in Richmond, where the band took over the stage. An unsuspecting punter who happened to be there remembers the occasion: “I’d never seen AC/DC, I mean, I wasn’t a fan. But they came down to the Tiger Lounge, and they just got up and had a blow. They played some blues songs and some rock’n’roll songs . . . Elvis songs. The room was really small and really packed, and it was great. I realized how good they were, even as pissed as I was. But the amazing thing was Bon. He was just this scrawny, ugly little guy standing up there, but he had every woman in the place eating out of his hand. He had this incredible sexual energy, magnetism, and the whole room was electrified by it. No one, men included, was unaware of it.”

  AC/DC turned a few heads that night. The Tiger Lounge was a musicians’ watering hole, and when the cognoscenti (who had only ever condescended to AC/DC as a teenybopper band) saw them that night—just jamming, away from the usual pressure to put on a show, ripping up old blues tunes—they were impressed. Underneath the set moves, it was clear that they had the chops as well.

  Malcolm and Angus didn’t care whether they were respected or not. They just wanted to make the money and run. Or at least, that was what they claimed. Certainly though, they knew themselves how good they were. And though Bon too had developed a thick skin—England had inured him to criticism—he was delighted that his peers at last saw the worth of what AC/DC was doing.

  The band hit the road on Tuesday, December 7. They had barely made it to the Victoria/New South Wales border town of Albury on Wednesday, for the second gig of the tour, when the shit started rolling in. Sale of their tour program was stopped after the first gig as some other wowser had found a stray four-letter word in it. Bon was quoted explaining the theme of “Ain’t No Fun Waiting Around to Be a Millionaire” as follows: “It means it takes a long time to make enough money to be able to fuck Britt Ekland.” Albury’s town clerk claimed to have subsequently received complaints from parents. “If AC/DC want to come here again, they’ll have to change their act,” he said. “I’m a professional artist myself, and their act isn’t entertainment. I’m broadminded, but when you get children going along . . .”

  All over the country, AC/DC would face such self-appointed moral guardians and petty bureaucrats who were determined to place every obstacle in their path. Gigs in Canberra and Wollongong over the next two nights were tempered by warnings from police: they would pull the plug if Angus pulled down his pants. He withheld his brown-eye.

  Support acts for most of the tour were Stars and Punkz. Stars were the Adelaide band Michael Gudinski signed to Mushroom instead of Cold Chisel, because they seemed more manageable. They were that, but they were also less enduring, the appeal of their cowboy boogie sound wearing thin after “The Mighty Rock,” their biggest hit. Punkz later became known as Cheek, Punkz being something of a misnomer from the first. Managed by Glenn A. Baker and also signed to Mushroom, Punkz were a Sydneyside sixties-style act with which Baker perhaps hoped to repeat the success he’d enjoyed with his other retro proteges, Ol’ ’55—but he failed to do so.

  “As a young player, in my first serious band, the thing that made a real impression on me was AC/DC’s utter professionalism,” says Mal Eastick, then lead guitarist in Stars. “And I’ve never seen anything quite like it since. They just knew exactly where they were going.”

  After playing Newcastle on Saturday December 11, on the Sunday the tour played the rather more urbane Hordern Pavilion, in the center of Sydney. AC/DC put on a full-scale show—and no one was known to have gone off into the night speaking in tongues and raping babies. The 4,500-capacity Hordern was barely half full, however. As RAM’s review of the show reported, with the teenyboppers dropping off “AC/DC, like Skyhooks, must start the whole slow progress of winning over and earning the trust of a more musical audience.” But their prospects looked good, since “the bulk of the audience resembled the Status Quo crowd who raged and boogied to their heroes just a week before.”

  The band’s appeal was irresistible either way. “Loud seems too tame a description for the volume they inflict on an audience,” RAM continued, “it’s more a ‘living sound’ that actually penetrates the flesh and bones until movement and rhythm come involuntarily and the audience is swept into the same current . . . behind the insistency lies an excellent rock/blues outfit with an amazing singer out front in Bon Scott . . .”

  Heading out of Sydney, the band played Orange and Dubbo before the Mayor of Tamworth, Australia’s country music capital, stepped in and refused the band permission to play in his fair burgh. Channel Nine’s A Current Affair had a crew following the band around like the Keystone Cops, waiting for the something sensational to happen—which it didn’t, even then. The gig was blown out, the band just had to hole up in their motel, and then move on, according to schedule, to the next town. No savage retribution, no trail of rape and pillage.

  MAL EASTICK: “We actually had to pinch ourselves to believe it, you know, This is really true, they’re not going to let us play. And then the next thing, Mike Willesee arrives in a helicopter, and Willesee was a very big deal on television at that time, and so it was, Hey, this is getting serious! Up to that point, I don’t think they were at all perturbed by the controversy, I think they were probably quite amused. But when it was actually loudly expressed that AC/DC were not welcome to play in Australia, in certain parts, they just couldn’t believe the pettiness, the small-townness of it. I think they were then inclined to adopt the attitude, Well, fuck Australia, we’ll go back to Europe, seeya later.”

  The juggernaut pressed on, from Tamworth to Toowoomba. AC/DC made use of any spare time they had to prepare for recording.

  EASTICK: “We traveled together in a small bus. They were always working on songs, all the time. It wasn’t like, Hey, I’ll wait until I’ve got some privacy, or until I’ve had a couple of drinks, gotten loose—none of that. I can remember Angus playing guitar on the bus, and Bon used to stomp up and down the aisle, he would stand behind the driver and he always had a pad and would work on titles first.”

  After Toowoomba, which a police spokesman said was “quiet and without incident”—if quiet is the right word—the band played Brisbane Festival Hall on Saturday, December 18. Strangely, Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s blue-shirted stormtroopers failed to exert their presence.

  The papers in Sydney still wouldn’t let go of the story. “‘Members of Australian punk rock group AC/DC must decide if they are strippers or musicians,’ the General Manager of radio station 2SM said today,” read one report. “‘Until they do, the station will not associate with them in any way,’ Mr. Garvis Rutherford said. Mr. Rutherford said 2SM would not advertise the group’s concerts or play their recordings.” 2SM may have been one of AC/DC’s original champions, but the station also happened to be owned by the Catholic Church.

  The band headed north out of Brisbane to tropical Bundaberg and Rockhampton, before doing a U-turn and heading back down the coast again. At Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast, the band checked into the Pink Poodle for a well-earned day off. Bon made a beeline for the surf, where the diversions were many besides j
ust swimming. He watched the guy with a spray gun full of suntan oil anointing barely bikini-clad beach bunnies.

  But as occupied as Bon was, he still desperately missed Silver.

  SILVER: “Where I was staying at the beach in Adelaide, this girl didn’t have a telephone, so I was just bombarded with telegrams. Bon was a prolific letter writer, when he was on the road, he wrote almost every day. All those letters I lost. It was sad, because some of his song lyrics were born in those letters, too.”

  EASTICK: “Bon was probably one of my strongest early impressions of a rock star living that rock star life, a hard life, you know, where he wasn’t really sleeping much, nursing a lot of hangovers—there must have been something inside him that was lonely, or unhappy, for him to have acted the way he did. But at the same time, he was a totally dedicated professional. With that strong obsession, like, We’re gonna be better than everybody else.”

  On Thursday, December 22, the band played in Murwillumbah, just an hour or so’s drive south of the Gold Coast, in the lush Northern Rivers of New South Wales, next door to the Aquarian Age commune town of Nimbin. AC/DC made as much sense to the hippies as they did to banana farmers. At least Bon scored a bag of killer home-grown.

  The following night, the band played on the Gold Coast itself, at the Miami High School Great Hall, with the Saints. As if from out of nowhere—or at least from the wilds of the western Brisbane suburb of Oxley—the Saints had set faraway England on its ear with “(I’m) Stranded,” the blazing, pioneering single they’d recorded and released themselves, which went on to become a punk classic. Chris Gilbey had got wind of this and located the band to offer them a gig. They arrived at the gig in a couple of beaten-up old station wagons, a few of the Oxley boys lugging their gear just so they could hang around.