“We toured around in a station wagon,” Angus told Guitar World. “We got put on with Kiss. This was when they had all the make-up and everything—the whole hype. They had everything behind them, the media, a huge show and stuff. And here we were—five migrants, little micro people.
“It was tough to even get into the show with that station wagon. Many a time they wouldn’t let us into the venue ’cause they didn’t see a limo!”
On the road, Bon drank even more than he did at home.
MICK COCKS: “What happens, you’re playing to 5 to 10,000 people a night, an hour and a half on stage, it’s fantastic, it’s real high; and when you come off, you travel in the bus back to the hotel room, you’ve got to come down, it can be really difficult to find something to do that makes sense. And if you’re doing a long tour, it builds up, you know, and you drink, there’s not a real lot of alternatives. I once did a tour without drinking, and phew, you can keep reality.”
Silver joined Bon as the band played through a blizzard in Chicago with Kiss. Stoned though she may have been herself, she hated to see Bon drinking himself into oblivion.
SILVER: “I couldn’t deal with seeing this incredible, together, really wonderful person that half the world was in love with, and then seeing this dribbling mess that you could have no respect for. I found it just too hard in the end. He wasn’t like that all the time either, but when he went, he went. He was one of those drunks, he wasn’t aggressive, he was just unmanageable. He wouldn’t know what city he was in, he’d just lose it.”
Silver was starting to think that maybe she’d had enough.
The band swung back through New York in the first week of December, before returning to Australia, Bon and Silver travelling together. They played a radio broadcast from Atlantic’s studios on December 7 (the source of a very collectable promo-only recording, released officially only much later as part of the Bonfire box set), then opened for Kiss at Madison Square Garden, and then flew out of JFK to Sydney.
The band hoped and planned to tour Australia again.
Bon and Silver checked into a serviced apartment at Coogee. They needed some space of their own. At Coogee, they were right on the beach—and it was going to be a sweltering summer.
SILVER: “A lot of the hoohah had died down by then, that teenybopper thing was over, so it was much more laid-back. Bon hired a motorcycle to get around. You know what it’s like on the road, you get sick of eating out all the time and that, so at least at this place you could have some stuff in the fridge, and a frypan and that, some of your own stuff. Because we were there for three months.”
No tour materialized. With an English bass player now as well as a British road crew, the absurdly protectionist Australian immigration authorities refused to issue AC/DC the appropriate visas.
“We used to think of ourselves as an Australian band,” Angus told RAM, “but we’re beginning to doubt that now. The fuckers won’t even let us play here.” The band found itself with time on its hands, since they were not due to return to Britain until April, after the album was cut at Alberts in January.
With their local profile slipping, AC/DC could have used the exposure afforded by a tour. The 11 months the band had been away from Australia this time had seen many changes on the scene, changes which would have been greatly to AC/DC’s advantage—changes which they in fact had played a considerable part in bringing about. Sherbet and Skyhooks had both dropped right off. Countdown still held sway, but its reign was no longer dictatorial. Pub rock was taking root, and this was music which by definition sold itself through live performance.
Pub rock left no room for punk. Any Australian new wave was consigned very much to the fringes. The old hippies who had only just got their act together and assumed seats of power in the music industry were hardly about to hand the reins over to a bunch of young punks. First generation Australian “new wave” bands like the Saints, Radio Birdman, Nick Cave’s Birthday Party and the Go-Betweens were forced to go overseas to find a significant audience.
“We don’t have the kind of culture punk needed,” Ross Wilson once explained. “We’re quite comfortable. Groups like the Angels and Rose Tattoo transferred that aggression into a macho rock, using better musicianship than the punks.”
It was in Sydney that pub rock really came to the fore. Rose Tattoo actually formed in Melbourne but moved to Sydney because their work prospects were better there. Adelaide bands Cold Chisel and the Angels also gravitated to Sydney. Dragon had arrived from New Zealand. And Sydney itself produced Midnight Oil, Mental As Anything and Icehouse. Melbourne bands like the Sports and Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons trailed the leaders.
On almost any given night in the late seventies, Sydney venues like the Bondi Lifesaver, Chequers, the Stagedoor Tavern, the Civic Hotel and the Grand Hotel would be pumping. Suburban beer barns like the Manly Vale Hotel, the Comb & Cutter and Selinas were taking off, too.
But even as Sydney was buzzing with new energies, the most pervasive influence on the scene was still Alberts. The Alberts label put out Rose Tattoo and the Angels, but Alberts’ mere presence, its independent heritage and its innovative drive, perhaps did even more to reinforce its patriarchal hold.
CHRIS GILBEY: “I don’t think Alberts set out to become a rock’n’roll label, but it became a rock’n’roll label due to the momentum set in motion by rock’n’roll bands like AC/DC.”
Everybody, but everybody recorded at Kangaroo House, where the vibe George and Harry generated was palpable—and something they all hoped would rub off on them. With the Angels and Rose Tattoo specifically, George and Harry took the work they had started with AC/DC to its logical conclusion, orchestrating and stylizing a unique—and uniquely Australian—brand of rock’n’roll.
Cold Chisel set the standard for pub bands. But for all their maverick spirit, Cold Chisel owed AC/DC—and Bon especially—an enormous debt. Cold Chisel had come out of Fraternity’s alma mater, the Largs Pier, and their singer and fellow Scot Jimmy Barnes (who had briefly replaced Bon in Fraternity) saw himself as Bon’s heir apparent. AC/DC had become a given in Australian rock’n’roll.
The Angels and Rose Tattoo institutionalized pub rock. The ferocity which was their trademark became one of the distinguishing fundamentals of the genre. “[People] come to our gigs, or to gigs generally I guess, to let something go, as a sort of catharsis,” Angels frontman Doc Neeson once told Rolling Stone. “We always feel that there’s this implied confrontation between band and audience. They’re saying, “Lay it on! Do it to us!” and it’s like a veiled threat that if you don’t, you’ll get canned.”
Rose Tattoo’s debut single “Bad Boy for Love” was released in October 1977. By December, when Bon arrived back in town, it was near the top of the national charts.
MICK COCKS: “It was the first record I’d ever made. It went top five. I thought, This is easy!”
Cocks was among a number of reprobates, including Joe Furey, living at the time in a big old hotel in Kings Cross called the Eaglefield. “We just took this place over. Downstairs we had a music studio and an art studio—the girls painted, the boys played music.”
The scene was riddled with drugs. Killer weed was equaled in abundance by speed, mandies and heroin. In the late seventies, top-grade smack was plentiful and cheap in Sydney, as it was in London.
MICK COCKS: “Bon came back to town, and he would stay at this hotel he liked in Coogee with his girlfriend, and I got into him one night and said, Oh, come and stay with us if you like, because things weren’t going so well with his girlfriend, and so he’d come and crash at our place.”
Powerage, as AC/DC’s new album would be called, was cut like every other AC/DC album—quickly.
JOE FUREY: “Of course, with the album being recorded, and guitar parts going on later, Bon had done most of his stuff; he was sort of hanging loose around town, so he used to drop over. The Tatts were playing around, the Lifesaver was happening, it was pretty rockin’.”
Powerage
followed closely in the footsteps of Let There Be Rock—so much so, in fact, that there was something almost rote about it. It contained some great individual tracks—“Rock’n’roll Damnation,” “Riff Raff” (which would become a highlight of the band’s live set), “Sin City” and “Gimme a Bullet.” “Gimme a Bullet” was perhaps Bon’s most accomplished piece of writing to date, in which his penchant for hardcase metaphors finds more genuine pathos and humor than it had before. Even the album’s second-string tracks sustain a more consistently high standard than earlier albums’ fillers. Yet taken as a whole Powerage seemed to lack the uncompromising coherence, the relentless body and soul that made its predecessor so great.
Bon was happy just to finish his work in the studio. He didn’t necessarily enjoy recording, with its alternating intensity and tedium. “Recording can be a bit of a pain,” he once said. “You have to think. The rest of the time you are just cruising.” You might wait around all day till a track was set up, and then have to get your part down within a couple of takes. It was fortunate Bon was so capable. No other singer filled Alberts’ Studio One with sheer vocal presence the way Bon did.
His obligations in the studio fulfilled, Bon spent long hot days on the beach, sunning himself, swimming and thinking. He was worried. Silver was acting strangely. He knew she was losing patience with him because of his drinking, and at the same time, she’d struck up a friendship with Joe Furey. Bon liked Joe himself, but even if, as Silver always maintained, she and Joe were never actually lovers—their relationship more akin to that of soul brother and sister—and whether there were drugs involved or not, Bon still felt threatened. Knowing the independent Silver as he did, though, he just had to grin and bear it. He decided to try to get off the grog, which he thought might win him back some favor.
He was delighted when Graeme showed up to see him. “He knew that drink was getting to him. He was going to a hypnotist, to stop from drinking. But a hypnotist, you’ve got to do it all the time, not just once or twice. And so of course, touring all the time, I think the loneliness got to him. You drink.”
Sitting on the beach all day at Coogee, the only thing Bon wanted to do once the sun went down was go out raging. He fell off the wagon. It was too much to ask, he had too little to do otherwise.
GRAEME: “He’d go down to the Bondi Lifesaver, and he’d be drunk most nights, and he’d still go home on his bike.”
MICK COCKS: “Bon was one of the last true rock’n’rollers, a real person. It wasn’t a business to him, it was an addiction, something he had a gut feeling for. He lived it. You know, he had that dream—because you’re talking about a period of time when it was a dream, a romantic dream. You were outlaws, that was the only way to look at it. You only sort of paid lip service to the social side of things—like paying tax, or registering to vote—when you had to. You didn’t have any sense of community, you weren’t really interested in what was going on, you didn’t have the same problems the average person had. It was like you were in a different world.
“And when you did achieve it, it’s still a dream, you know, it’s not like it ever becomes a job, going up on stage.”
Perhaps it’s just everything else—the soul-destroying rootlessness of life on the road, the phoniness endemic in show business, the purely exhausting demands of celebrity—that becomes hard work. Bon wasn’t tired of it all yet, and he still had a fair way to go to get to the top, but maybe the only way to do it was in a numb, alcoholic haze.
With Bon going on tour in Britain and Europe, Silver had arranged with Joe to go away together, off on the hippie trail through southeast Asia. They had arranged to meet Bon’s brother Graeme in Bangkok.
SILVER: “I made the decision to break up when we left Australia. Bon couldn’t accept it, he was still very emotionally dependent on me, so we said, Okay, 12 months, have a 12 month break.”
Before Bon and Silver went their separate ways, AC/DC played a couple of shows at the Lifesaver under wraps. Billed as “the Seedies,” as the band was affectionately known, word got out, as it was doubtless meant to, and more than 4,000 people tried to get into the Lifesaver over the two nights.
Let There Be Rock might have only sold a miserable 25,000 copies in Australia, but as Bon pointed out in RAM, it had sold nearly ten times that internationally, and “word builds up when people hear you’ve been going well overseas. People want to see you. A lot of people just haven’t seen the band.” AC/DC had by now completely shed the stigma of being a teenybopper band. They were acknowledged as a force to be reckoned with—and as godfathers of Australian rock. And when they played those two nights at the Lifesaver, they proved the point.
JOE FUREY: “It was probably one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. I mean, you had a band that had moved into virtual stadium mode, a big rock band, playing in the Lifesaver, to a capacity crowd, and the band was on a real high then, playing really well . . .”
In Australia, like Britain and America, AC/DC had to take the step that only a hit record makes possible. A lot hinged on Powerage.
Bon left for London with the rest of the band, clinging to Silver’s promise that he would see her there in a couple of months’ time, after he’d been to Europe and before he went to America again.
Critical reaction to Powerage was generally positive. Any suggestion that the band was merely repeating itself was offset by the fact that this would only make the album an easier sell. And indeed, it got a strong start out of the blocks.
Bon defended the album. “Look what happened to the Rolling Stones,” he said. “They started looking for a new direction, going off on tangents, and they produced shit. And then the punk bands came along and scared’em, and now you will notice, they are going back to producing what they’ve always done best—rock’n’roll. You progress, sure you do, but you move forward in the same direction. You do not shoot off on some tangent.”
On April 28, the band embarked on its most comprehensively mounted British tour to date. A full range of merchandise—T-shirts, patches, posters—was available—a first for AC/DC and an early example of what is today standard practice, and extremely lucrative, for rock bands.
DAVE JARRETT: “They were right in that era when patches on denim jackets started happening, all that, and so the AC/DC logo was just everywhere. It was really easy for kids to identify with.”
AC/DC were making the transition every band has to make in pursuit of American superstardom, and at which many falter—the transition from a club band to a stadium band; that is, a band able to project to the farthest reaches of a venue so big and cold that rock’n’roll should never have been put into it. The trap is that as every gesture is amplified, the act becomes bloated, bombastic, impersonal. AC/DC somehow managed to avoid that. They scaled up but not out, retaining their trademark leanness and vitality even as they drew so much broader strokes.
Bon wrote to Irene: Hi sugar . . . I’m writing from Birmingham. We’re about half way through the Brit tour and most of us are suffering from the flu or bubonic plague or something. It’s been great so far gig wise as most have been sell outs and we’ve been getting good reviews for the concerts and the album. Stand to make a bit of money at long last . . .
Our album went into the British charts first week at 26 so it looks like being a Top 5 at least. We only have about ten gigs to go on this tour and then it’s off to Germany for two TV shows and then we have three weeks off before America. Cliff and I are going to Paris for a root around. I have some friends in a band there who’ll put us up for a few days. They’re a punk band called Trust. They recorded a couple of our songs in French and just last week got banned from French TV for singing suggestive lyrics. The song they did was “Love at First Feel.” So I’ve struck again!
“Rock’n’roll Damnation” was released as a single in Britain at the end of May as the band left for Europe. It went to number 24, the best performance yet by an AC/DC single.
Bon and Cliff returned to London from Paris in mid-June. Bon was anxio
us because Silver was finally on her way there too. She and Joe hadn’t got far down the hippie trail. They waited around in Malaysia for an old girlfriend of Silver’s who never showed, and then went on to Bangkok, where they met up with Graeme and got “bogged down,” as Silver put it. People go to Bangkok for two reasons—sex and drugs. And these weren’t people who had any kind of interest in either little boys or girls. The best and cheapest smack in the world was available in Thailand.
SILVER: “Bon was in London when I arrived there, he was staying at a friend of mine’s place, and I was a bit pissed off actually, because I’d planned on staying there myself. I felt intruded upon by that, because we had this agreement, and he was just there all the time. He couldn’t kind of let go.”
Angus was dispatched to Australia to promote the release of Powerage. “We drew straws to see who’d come, and I lost,” he grumbled. Neither the album nor “Rock’n’roll Damnation” made any real impact on the charts there, but at least the album sold steadily enough to go gold by the end of the year.
By the start of July, the band was back on the road in America, where the album was now out, playing support spots anywhere and everywhere with the likes of Rainbow, Alice Cooper, Journey and Aerosmith. They were starting to get a reputation as a bad support act, because they were so good, often upstaging the headliner.
In Chicago, playing in front of 40,000 Summer Jam revelers, they pulled the rug out from under bands higher on the bill, like Foreigner, Aerosmith and Van Halen. Working their way to the West Coast, they did the same thing in Oakland, as Pasadena’s Star-News reported: “While the big name on the bill was Foreigner . . . it was little known Australian group AC/DC that brought 70,000 fans to their feet . . . The quintet’s 10:30 a.m. show aroused the crowd with a moving set of power rock’n’roll.”
Highway to Hell Page 26