Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

AC/DC Record: “Carry Me Home” (as yet unreleased)

  Before the band left London for Europe, they shot a video for their new Australian single “Dog Eat Dog,” the first to come off Let There Be Rock, for the special fifth anniversary episode of Countdown. With “Carry Me Home” on the B-side, it went nowhere. When Let There Be Rock itself was released in May, it went in and out of the charts without getting higher than number 20. Ironically though, as Mark Evans put it, “That was the point at which things started to look really strong, that was when America started.”

  With the British release of Let There Be Rock in the offing, Atlantic in New York was finally starting to come around. New A&R manager John Kalodner was much more sympathetic to AC/DC than his predecessor; plus there were two other new executives, Michael Klenfner and Perry Cooper, who were prepared to pin their own careers to the band’s. At the same time, AC/DC signed up with a new booking agent, Doug Thaler of American Talent International.

  MARK EVANS: “The reason the band always had a level head was because there was always something to do, a new objective. We always seemed to be starting at the bottom and working our way up.”

  The tour with Black Sabbath would prove ill-fated, and precipitated Mark Evans’ sacking. Sabbath, by 1976, were well past their prime, and AC/DC were all but blowing them off stage. Only the showmanship of Ozzy Osborne kept Sabbath alive. Substance abuse within the band was rampant. It was in this atmosphere, then, that relations between the two bands came to an ugly head, when Sabbath bassist “Geezer” Butler apparently pulled a flick knife on Malcolm. Fistic retaliation was swift, with the end result that AC/DC were simply shown the door.

  EVANS: “I don’t think the band took too kindly to being on the road in Europe for some reason. Every time we went to Europe, things seemed to get strained. When we were in England, Scotland, no problems. And yeah, things did get very tense between Angus and me, basically, I suppose, because we just didn’t get on. And so what happens, if you’ve got your brother in the band, and somebody doesn’t like your brother . . .

  “Europe could be a lonely time for Bon too. He never socialized with the band. It would not be unusual for us to be out, and not return with Bon. He would just wander off in some other direction. Do whatever it was he did.

  “The last six months I was in the band, his drinking did escalate pretty quickly, to the point where he started showing up at gigs with a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

  “In hindsight, after we had a problem with the Americans, going, What the fuck is this? knocking back Dirty Deeds, I think with the negativity of that, and then getting thrown off the Black Sabbath tour, I think I was made a bit of a scapegoat. It was, What’s going wrong, we’d better make a change. And it was gonna be both me and Bon!

  “I didn’t know, and I’m sure Phil didn’t know either, that Dirty Deeds was knocked back in the States. We just weren’t told. We were in Helsinki after the Black Sabbath tour, ready to fly to America, right, we’re going, but then it was like, Guys, sorry, we’re not going, you’re going back to England. Things aren’t ready yet.”

  Next thing, as RAM reported on June 3, “Mark Evans, the quiet, well-behaved member of AC/DC has left the group.”

  All Mark said at the time was, “Both me and the band are better for it.” He was sent packing, given a $2,000 golden handshake in lieu of all future royalties. He returned to Melbourne, where he continued a career in music, initially as bassist with a band called Finch. And though it would take him ten years, he eventually won a settlement over the subsequent royalties which had been denied him.

  MICHAEL BROWNING: “I got a phone call from Malcolm and Angus, and they said, Could you come over, we’ve got something important we want to talk about. At that stage I had a sense the Americans were a little bit negative towards Bon, I had a sense it might have been something to do with that. So I got there and I was actually surprised they wanted to get rid of Mark.”

  MARK EVANS: “When I got the bullet, Michael Browning rang me and said, Listen, the guys are going to call a meeting, what do you know about it? I said, Michael, you’ve called the wrong guy, I don’t know anything about a meeting. He said, Well, it’s at Malcolm and Angus’s place tonight, I think they’re finally going to give Bon the arse. I said, I don’t know about any meeting, so I said to Phil, Do you know about a meeting, and he said, Yeah, I do. And I said, Michael, it’s me. And Michael’s words on the phone were, Oh fuck. He said, I thought it was going to be Bon.”

  On the road in America. Left to right: Phil Rudd, unidentified ligger, Bon (with perm, and bottle), new bassist Cliff Williams, Angus, unidentified liggers, Malcolm, Michael Klenfer and Perry Cooper of Atlantic Records, and AC/DC manager Michael Browning. (courtesy Perry Cooper)

  13. AMERICA

  The replacement of bassist Mark Evans by Cliff Williams indicated that AC/DC was shifting its operation up a gear, clearing the decks in readiness for its first assault on America, the biggest and most competitive music market in the world. With the stakes now so much higher, nothing could be left to chance, no excess baggage would be trucked. Cliff Williams would be expected to hold his end up, no more, no less. You had to know your place, or else forfeit it. Nobody was indispensable.

  There’s no reason to believe Bon was beyond this law either, even if the Youngs reserved an inordinate amount of loyalty for him. But Bon knew himself that he’d come too far to throw it all away now. An atmosphere of increasing venality was something he would just have to learn to live with. When he joined AC/DC in 1974, it was a new lease on life for him; but in the end, for the last couple of years of his life, the band became a business, and it was more like a job, a daily grind that Bon endured as the price of finally “making it.”

  As everything other than the music itself congealed around him, Bon drank more and more just to get through the day. Cliff Williams, it turned out, was a saving grace, a new friend for Bon who relieved some of the day-to-day tedium. Bon told Molly Meldrum in an interview for Countdown: “He’s a guy who’s been playing for a lot longer than Mark, so his technique is far advanced. Cliff’s just given us more scope.”

  It was Michael Browning, again, who found Williams and engineered his joining the band. Malcolm and Angus were keen on a bassist called Colin Pattendon, who had previously been with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. But as Browning said, “He just didn’t fit the image. At that juncture, I felt that whoever came in had to look the part as well.” Browning was alerted to Williams by a friend. When Williams passed the audition, Browning gave his friend a tenner by way of a spotter’s fee.

  Williams was born in the Essex town of Romford, just outside London, on December 14, 1949. His musical background was not unlike Bon’s; he had spent the early seventies in an obscure English country-rock band called Home. He was playing with an outfit called Bandit when AC/DC’s better prospects presented themselves.

  SILVER: “It was a bit of a relief when Cliff came in, because Cliff was more our age, our interests. The boys—they were kids. I mean, they were kids from the western suburbs, and they were really aware of it, they had a lot of fronts up, and they weren’t going to change. Whereas Cliff, you know, he was 28, he’d been around, and he read books, went to the movies, had a girlfriend. Because none of the boys had girlfriends at that stage.”

  The band returned to Australia at the start of June to work Williams in, in preparation for touring throughout the rest of the year. America had finally fallen into place. The band would have to be in top form.

  Michael Browning had gone over to New York to meet with Perry Cooper and Michael Klenfner. As the new kids on the block at Atlantic, Cooper and Klenfner needed to earn some kudos. When President Jerry Greenberg came to them one day early on with that same old film of “High Voltage” they saw their opportunity.

  PERRY COOPER: “He said, Look, we’ve got this band, we’ve signed them for the rest of their life, and we put out an album, but we can’t get fuckin’ arrested with it. He said, Why don’t you have a look at i
t. Klenfner says, I haven’t got time, so I go into my office—and I really liked the whole thing.

  “So I went back to Klenfner, and I said, You gotta look at these guys, and so we started talking. We thought, What’s going to break this band? Obviously, radio isn’t. The only thing I could think, If they get over here and tour, if they’re as great live as they look, they’ve got something different. We had to find out, Are they willing to work their asses off, for the next—you know, nonstop, like the Stones. The Stones, in the very beginning, used to just go around in a station wagon. AC/DC ended up doing exactly the same thing.

  “We met with Michael Browning, and it was agreed that they would just come over and work their asses off, touring. Michael said, That’s what these guys do, don’t worry about that.”

  Browning signed AC/DC on with a booking agency called American Talent International, and gigs were lined up.

  The band arrived in the US at the end of June 1977. Club dates had been booked along a route from Texas to Florida. The South had produced redneck boogie bands such as ZZ Top and Black Oak Arkansas, and if an opening existed in America for AC/DC, it was here. In 1977 punk rock meant about as much to middle America as it did to middle Australia.

  MICHAEL BROWNING: “One of the important factors in the group’s American campaign was a promoter called Sidney Drashin in Jacksonville, Florida. A radio station down there must have got hold of an AC/DC record and actually listened to it, and just fell in love with it. Programmed about four or five tracks. And so the guy from the radio station was calling up Atlantic, and so was Sidney, saying, you know, What are you doing with this group? So that one town formed the basis, it gave the record company living proof that it could work. And so when we went there to tour, we picked up a couple of dates here and a couple of dates there, we’d play for $500 and travel 500 miles, playing dates with a variety of acts, but we did Jacksonville and played the Coliseum to a packed house.”

  AC/DC supported REO Speedwagon at the Jacksonville Coliseum in front of as big a crowd as they’d ever faced, nearly 8,000 strong.

  BROWNING: “There was Jacksonville and there was Columbus, Ohio, which is a college town, and that was a similar situation there, the radio station people were fanatical for the group. So you just had to go there and build it from the ground level up. It was all done on a shoestring, in hire cars, staying at Red Roof Inns, Holiday Inns.”

  The band headed north from Florida, through Columbus and Chicago on its way to New York. Bon wrote to Mary:I’m enjoying our tour of America. The band is playing good and going over great . . . The money’s good . . . The chicks are outta sight (right now they are outta sight) and everything is better than I ever thought it could be. We’re touring here till Sept 7 and then it’s Europe for eighteen dates, England for twenty, America for another month or so and then Australia for a tour. So I should be able to break your door down early next year. Bon’s love life ain’t goin’ too well at the mo. I haven’t seen my lady for four months and it’s kinda painful . . . Love will prevail. My hair’s getting long and the perm is almost out. I’m a regular shaggy dog . . . But I like it.

  In New York on August 24, AC/DC played on the bottom of the bill at Palladium, under old-wave punk band the Dictators. They then raced downtown to the Bowery, to put in an appearance at CBGB’s, the decrepit, hallowed home of New York new wave, where they were met with stony silence opening for a nowhere power-pop outfit called Marbles.

  Variety at least gave them the thumbs up over the Dictators. Angus’s asshole had been deemed unfit for puritanical American consumption, but the band’s new set-piece—the walking-the-floor routine, Angus astride Bon’s shoulders—had been further improved when Angus acquired a new toy, a cordless guitar pick-up.

  When New York fanzine Punk interviewed Bon and Angus, Bon succeeded in his attempt to outgross the grossout standards of punkdom. The only telling thing he said was in answer to the question, What’s the meaning of life? “As good a time and as short as possible.”

  In some ways, AC/DC were a little confused by America. Britain, Europe, even punk rock, they could understand, but America is so big and so diverse that contradiction is inherent.

  “I hadn’t even heard a lot of the music here at the time—I thought there would be more rock,” Angus told Guitar World. “But when we got here it was a disco type thing. What was real strange was that although the media was pushing this really soft music, you’d get amazing numbers of people turning out to hear the harder stuff. We were playing big stadiums and getting a great reaction.”

  The band was unimpressed when they met the Atlantic staff, finding the stereotypical image of the gold-sporting, cigar-chomping, cocaine-sniffing record company executive not too far from the truth.

  From New York, AC/DC jetted to the West Coast. After gigs in the Northwest with Ted Nugent, they played four well-attended shows at the Old Waldorf club in San Francisco. Then it was on to Los Angeles.

  Bon fully intended to make the most of his first ever visit to southern California. He wasn’t seen without a blonde on one arm and a bottle in his free hand. He and Phil went to Disneyland on a day off. They rustled up a couple of extra special joints for the occasion. They didn’t know what they were in for. The joints were laced with angel dust, a powerful psychedelic, which sent them off on a trip more unnerving than any Disneyland big dipper. It was just a question of who was more put off, Bon and Phil or the regular Disneyland patrons, who couldn’t tell if these two tattooed men walking around wide-eyed and legless, holding hands, were one of the attractions or just some sort of terrible mistake.

  In their shows at the Whisky A-Go-Go, LA’s legendary Sunset Strip equivalent of London’s Marquee, AC/DC pulled in a crowd of fewer than 100; but, as Variety again enthused, they made an indelible impression. The band boarded the plane back to Britain feeling quite pleased with themselves. The prospects ahead were looking good.

  AC/DC had 18 gigs in Europe (France, Holland, Belgium, Germany) still to play before a 14-date British tour commenced on October 12 (though their two London shows at the Hammersmith Odeon were already sold out). Bon was only in London long enough to unpack his bags, do his laundry, then pack and leave again.

  The new album had just been released. It could hardly have got off to a better start, gaining good reviews and—for the first time—actually entering the charts.

  Sympathetic critics were in agreement that Let There Be Rock was a more complete AC/DC offering. It would reach number 75 in the British charts, a quite respectable first entry. George and Harry were celebrating back home, because at the same time, Flash & the Pan’s “Hey, St Peter!” was hitting in Europe, going to number six in Belgium, number seven in Holland and also selling well in France.

  The tour confirmed AC/DC’s stature beyond any doubt. Stalwart supporter Phil Sutcliffe of Sounds commented: “Live [they] are the most insanely compulsive heavy rock band I’ve ever experienced . . . who offer the rare combination of wild excitement and consistency. The schoolkid image will have to go one day but at the moment it’s still dead right . . .

  “Bon is vital. He’s the spice and flavor with the heavy hardtack. An appealing rogue and buccaneer, give him a wooden leg and a parrot on his shoulder and he’d be the image of Long John Silver.”

  It was the sheer, irrefutable power and appeal of AC/DC’s live gigs that accounted for their growing following and its diversity. AC/DC traversed Britain’s tribal barriers, pulling punks, bikers, hippies, headbangers, 9-to-5ers, old rockers and young boppers all along.

  The band got back to London on the first day of November. Silver was worried about Bon’s drinking. This was ironic, as he might well have worried about her increasing drug dependency, which he did not presume to do. But even as Silver let her own habit run away with her, she couldn’t bear to watch Bon boozing it up.

  SILVER: “When Bon was drinking and I was drugging, I didn’t know what I was running from, and yet I could see what Bon was running from. It’s always easie
r to be in denial about yourself. I see it a lot differently now. We both really had the same disease, it was just a matter of a different drug of choice. But I was judging him. It was also just really painful; I couldn’t bear to be around him when he was drinking. He didn’t ever nag me, he didn’t have a problem with what I did—but then I was a lot more manageable than what he was. Basically, it was just a lot of people in a lot of pain, trying to rage on regardless.”

  Bon and Silver’s relationship was starting to show some cracks, but the couple enjoyed a reprieve on a weekend away in Paris. The Stones were in the studio there recording the Some Girls album, and Silver’s friend, Stones guitarist Ron Wood, invited them to drop in.

  SILVER: “Ron had been in town, and he said, Come over. The strange thing was, a French punk band [Trust] was recording in another part of the same studio, and they were more impressed by the fact that Bon was there than Bon was by the Stones. Though he liked the Stones. It was good actually, because they took us around everywhere—we didn’t know a word of French. That was a buzz for Bon.”

  Let There Be Rock was out in America by now, confounding the critics. Even Creem magazine, with its metalesque predilections, was succinct in its dismissal of AC/DC: “These guys suck.” Maybe America was just going to be like Britain all over again. The band was succeeding there despite the critics’ best efforts to quell them. Let There Be Rock cracked the Billboard chart at number 187. It’s difficult to enter much lower than that, but it was a start.

  AC/DC returned to America in November, and spent the next six weeks crisscrossing the country. They would be back in Australia by Christmas, like the year before, to record a new album. Their American home base was New York, where Atlantic had its headquarters, and where Michael Browning had by now also set up an office on Broadway. The band themselves stayed at the Americana Hotel near seedy Times Square. They played a few headline club gigs of their own in the South, with support acts like British bands UFO and the Motors, and then they opened big stadium gigs for Kiss and for pomp-rockers Rush.