Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  So Kinnear found himself stranded on the street, with Bon out cold in the car: “I rang Silver for advice. She said that he passed out quite frequently, and that it was best just to leave him to sleep it off.”

  SILVER: “I said, Well, why don’t you take him back to your place? He got him back to his place, and by then, Bon had completely blacked out. By then it was probably three in the morning.”

  KINNEAR: “I drove to my flat . . . and tried to lift him out of the car, but he was too heavy for me to carry in my intoxicated state.”

  Kinnear rang Silver’s place again.

  JOE FUREY: “Alistair rang again, about three in the morning, saying Bon was passed out in the car, what could he do about it? It was three flights up or something to his flat. Alistair wasn’t the sort of guy who was built to throw someone over his shoulder.”

  SILVER: “He said, What’ll I do? And this had happened many, many, many times, so I just said, Just take some blankets down to him. Bon had never been to this place—it was in South London—so I said, Leave a note for him, saying which flat’s yours, so when he comes to, he can come up.”

  KINNEAR: “I put the front passenger seat back so that he could lie flat, covered him with a blanket, left a note with my address and phone number on it, and staggered upstairs to bed. It must have been four or five a.m. by that time, and I slept until about eleven, when I was awakened by a friend, Leslie Loads. I was so hung over that I asked Leslie to do me a favor of checking on Bon. He did so, and returned to tell me my car was empty, so I went back to sleep, assuming that Bon had awoken and taken a taxi home. At about 7:30 that evening I went down to my car, intending to pay a visit to my girlfriend, and was shocked to find Bon still lying flat in the front seat, obviously in a very bad way, and not breathing.”

  Kinnear immediately drove Bon to Kings College Hospital, but it was too late: as the death certificate states, Bon was pronounced dead on arrival. “Hindsight being 20/20,” Kinnear explained to Metal Hammer, “I would’ve driven him to the hospital when he first passed out, but in those days of excess, unconsciousness was commonplace and seemed no cause for real alarm.”

  He gave the hospital Silver’s name and number, as the nearest person he could think of to Bon’s next of kin. The hospital called Silver.

  SILVER: “I went down there with Joe. Joe had worked in hospitals. They didn’t tell me he was dead. They told me he was there, and it was serious, would I come down. When we got there, we got shown into a little room, I mean, English hospitals are pretty bloody basic. So it was a bit of a surprise being put in this little room. And then they brought us a cup of tea, and Joe said, Look, this isn’t right. They don’t do this, he must be dead, they’re going to send a doctor in to tell us.”

  JOE: “The body was already identified, he had ID on him.”

  SILVER: “I just freaked right out. I mean, I didn’t get hysterical or anything. I just shut down. I gave them Mensch’s number.”

  JOE: “After that point, the machine took over, all of a sudden they were interested. It was inexperience; they were like, We’ve got to control the media, otherwise it might affect our career, we’re on the verge of . . . It wasn’t like, Hang on, Bon’s just died, we’ll worry about anything else later. I’m not saying any of that came from Malcolm or Angus. But this was the way the new management was handling it.

  “I mean, it was devastating, at the time, but the real hurt came in the way it was all handled by the management.”

  Although she can’t actually remember doing so, it had to be Silver, in shock, who phoned Angus. Angus later told Sounds, “Peter, our manager, got to the hospital as soon as he could to find out exactly what had happened and identify him, because everyone was in doubt at the time. I immediately phoned Malcolm ’cos at the time I thought maybe she had got the wrong idea, you know, only thought it was Bon. And Ian, our tour manager, said it couldn’t be Bon ’cos he’d gone to bed early that night. Anyway, the girl gave me the hospital number, but they wouldn’t give me any information until the family had been contacted. Anyhow, Malcolm rang Bon’s parents ‘cos we didn’t want them to be just sitting there and suddenly it comes on the TV news, you know.”

  Ian Jeffery, who went with Peter Mensch to the hospital, identified the body. He was struck by the fact that Bon’s neck was twisted, and showed bruising. However, it was accepted then—with an autopsy yet to be performed—that like Jimi Hendrix, Bon had choked on his own vomit.

  ISA: “It was the day after my birthday, on the 18th, we got the phone call on the Wednesday. I nearly tore my hair out.”

  CHICK: “We’d been over to the club for senior citizens . . .”

  ISA: “. . . and the phone was ringing when we came in the door, could-nae get in quick enough, and I heard the voice, and I said, Oh, Ron, and it wasnae Ron, it was either Angus or Malcolm. it wasnae Ron at all, he used to phone me . . .”

  CHICK: “He always used to phone home.”

  ISA: “He used to give us a ring wherever he was. We got a shock.”

  Isa rang Irene, in Melbourne. Irene had spoken to Bon only a few days earlier, when he rang her and told her he wanted to set something up for her; and she had just been talking about him then, on the phone to Mary, about how he had a Japanese girlfriend, and they were laughing together, Well, he’s had every other nationality . . .

  Irene rang Vince in Sydney. The papers were soon ringing Vince.

  The news then hit Australia. Even the cynical tabloids, beneath their sensational headlines, seemed genuinely shocked and saddened. “When Bon Scott died in London yesterday,” the Sydney Telegraph’s Roger Crosthwaite wrote, “a little piece of Australian rock history ended.”

  There was, indeed, almost a sense of national mourning.

  PETER HEAD: “I was playing in a piano bar in Alice Springs. My wife rang and told me, I was half way through a show, playing to about 20 people I guess, quite a few Aboriginals. So I just went out and said, I’m sorry, I can’t go on. The audience was shocked too, they just got up and left.”

  Pat Bowring reported in the Melbourne Sun: “No funeral arrangements have been made [yet] and the offices of EMI Records in Perth, where his parents live, are handling the flood of flowers and other tributes pouring in from Bon’s friends and fans.”

  Ted Albert wrote to Chick and Isa:We have just heard the tragic news and are completely stunned. I would like to try and express to you both, and to Derek and Graeme, our feelings for you at this time, and to send you the deepest sympathy from all of us.

  We have lost a really good friend. There are not many people in the entertainment world, unfortunately, who you could call a friend, though the public often are made to think differently, but Bon was one of the real exceptions—a genuine person with a generous nature and a real wish to make others happy—a gentleman in the truest sense.

  His only interests were his family, his music and living. He was not one, as so many of us are, to always be dreaming of better days and hoping for better things. He was a realist who lived for the present and was quite happy to live each day for itself and to be content with his lot. He gave absolutely everything he had to his music and the living of life—and you cannot ask for more than that.

  Unlike many who pass through life without leaving any trace, Bon has left behind a heritage through his music, records and films, that will be for the benefit of others for many years to come. Only today we learned that the boys’ latest album had sold one million copies in the USA alone, which to me represents a million people whose lives have been enriched by Bon’s work.

  I can’t tell you how saddened we are by our loss, but we know that this can in no way compare with your own loss, and we want you to know that our thoughts are with you at this time.

  GRAEME SCOTT: “I was in Bali. There was a telegram for me. Funny thing was, I was on the ship in Hong Kong, at Christmas, and when you go there, there’s these guys, they set up shop, in the alleyways, and I bought a cassette of Highway to Hell, and there was no p
icture of Ron on the cover. And then a couple of months later, he died. It was strange.”

  The autopsy was held on Friday, February 22. The verdict was “Death By Misadventure—Acute Alcoholic Poisoning.”

  The Coroner, Sir Montague Levine, said Bon was “the captain of his own destiny,” and concluded that “this young man of great talent was a consistent and heavy drinker who died from acute alcoholic poisoning after consuming a very large quantity of alcohol.”

  PERRY COOPER: “You know what I think it was? I think it was just a bad night. Like John Belushi. We had John Belushi on the label too, and he used to come in, and he’d have his bag of cocaine, but I never knew John to inject himself, and so when I heard how he died, I’ve gotta tell you, it just had to be one of those unforeseen things that happen, maybe he was depressed or something . . . The same thing happened with Bon. It was just a bad night.”

  Bon was alone when he died. Under the accumulated strain of more than 15 years on the road, and in a conspiracy of circumstances, his ailing system finally gave way. He was already receiving treatment for liver damage, it was later revealed. He hadn’t eaten, and he was extremely drunk. His heart was heavy, his head spinning. The temperature outside was around freezing point. Unable to find a comfortable position, curled around the gearstick, his neck cricked. His dental plate dislodged. The bile rose up in his stomach and his asthmatic windpipe constricted. Whether it was hypothermia, asphyxiation, liver failure, or even cardiac arrest, a combination of those things or none of them, he would be a free man in the morning.

  ISA: “When they did the autopsy, I thought, Oh God, don’t tell me there’s going to be something else.”

  JOE: “That’s what they were supposed to find. It would have been directed at finding that. That huge Fleet Street system would have been paying people to find something.”

  But not even Fleet Street could find a scandal, even though, as Australian Rolling Stone’s London correspondent Bruce Elder reported, “AC/DC’s manager Peter Mensch did his best to play the whole story down,” which only further fuelled the conspiracy theories.

  But one rumor that swirled around at the time did prove to be essentially true: Bon’s flat was mysteriously broken into and rifled through, although not on the night of his death, as was first suggested, but rather a few days later.

  SILVER: “There was a lot of weird shit after he died. The flat was closed off, and that’s probably the sort of thing that would send people off on conspiracy theories, because it suggests there’s something to hide, and there’s nothing to hide.

  “I rang up and said, Look, can I go around to the flat and get my stuff, because I’d lent Bon a lot of stuff. Forget it. Mensch was friendly, polite and pseudo-helpful right up until the time Bon died, and after that, I was no longer relevant. The other thing was, Bon wanted to be buried in Kirriemuir . . .”

  Anna was shut out, too, even though she was still staying at the Jefferys’ place, the virtual center of the storm.

  JOE: “She was ringing us—and her English wasn’t that good—saying, Do you know what they’re doing? She was in a totally foreign environment, her key in the whole situation was Bon, so imagine how she would have felt. She was really distraught. Also, you know that if Bon was there and that was going on, he would have got fairly pissed off! That generated a lot of hate towards Mensch.”

  Anna was desperate to know what happened that night, what might have been going through Bon’s head. It was more likely Bon was thinking about Silver, or even Irene—certainly, he called Coral Browning in LA, but all he got was her answering machine—but Anna didn’t know that. She phoned Alistair Kinnear. “When I saw him at the flat, he was already so drunk,” he told her. After they’d been to the Music Machine, he said, “I took him to the flat but you weren’t there.”

  ANNA: “I couldn’t have kept Alistair on the phone so long, as he sounded depressed, shocked and so weak.”

  Anna thought Bon’s feelings may have been reflected in something he wrote that night. All she had to go on otherwise were some lines he had written earlier and shown her, which she learnt off by heart:I’m enjoying myself while

  I could be writing a song

  that’s the end

  They’re bye bye

  Everybody knows

  Everybody accepts

  Everybody knows

  Let them talk about you

  As they think about me

  The only other documentary evidence of Bon’s frame of mind around that time to surface is a scrap of paper on which he’d written a few lines. It wouldn’t do to read too much into a verse titled “Hairy Kerry,” but given Bon’s predilection both for things Japanese, and for word plays, it is tempting. “Hairy Kerry” read:Who’s gonna clean it up

  Someone’s gotta clean it up

  Is nothing sacred?

  Anna went around to Ashley Court on the weekend hoping she might find Bon’s notebooks. But the flat was closed. She did bump into Mr. Burke, the caretaker. It was then that he gave her the note he’d written on the Tuesday morning, which had gone uncollected. He also told Anna that on the Wednesday “two big men” came by and got into the flat. He protested, he said, but they went on about their business, picking through things.

  Even Graeme Scott can confirm this, seemingly—and strangely—unconcerned. “When he died, some people went around and took a few things. Someone had not broken in, but just gone there, and took what they wanted.”

  Anna could only presume that the “two big men” were Ian Jeffery and Jake Berry, another AC/DC roadie, because they were the ones who brought her suitcase and other belongings from the flat to her. When she asked after some other things that were in the flat, sentimental items, Ian told her, “Everything is packed and taken to the office to send to Perth to his parents.”

  JOE: “All of a sudden, they’re telling us we have no right to get into his flat. It was like, Whaddya mean, you didn’t drop by a week ago to see if he had anything in the fridge. It comes back to management, and they are playing it far too hardball.

  “At the level AC/DC were operating, with the financial infrastructure Leber & Krebs put around them when they came in, there was always the feeling . . . you see, most people working at that level have a percy, who would just take care of his house, that sort of thing, and make sure he didn’t end up somewhere where he forgot to go home. It’s pretty standard for management, record companies, to put those people on. So you’d have the situation covered.

  Note left by the caretaker of Ashley Court, where Bon lived. (courtesy Anna Baba)

  “Bon wasn’t that chronic. He had that sense of satisfaction about him, as I said, but physically, he wasn’t that well. So from a rock’n’roll perspective, it was negligence. You take care of people better than that. Because that’s the way the system works. It was a conspiracy of neglect more than anything else.”

  After the autopsy, Bon’s body, accompanied by Malcolm and Angus, was flown to Australia to be cremated. Anna eventually went back to Japan, but she was haunted by Bon, by the questions she never found answers to. On the first anniversary of Bon’s death, in 1981, she went to Perth, to visit his grave, pay her respects to his parents, and hopefully to see his notebooks, which his parents should have had, since Ian Jeffery told her everything was to be sent to them.

  But all Chick and Isa got was a suitcase containing a few items of clothing and a couple of personal effects. No papers, no musical instruments, no records, let alone Bon’s treasured photo albums—nothing else.

  Bon was cremated in Fremantle, on Friday, February 29; his ashes were buried the following day. He lies in the Fremantle Cemetery’s Memorial Garden, shaded from the restless dusty sun by tall gum trees.

  Memorial notices had run in papers all around Australia in the preceding days, placed by friends, family and fans. The funeral notice itself appeared in the West Australian on the Thursday:Scott: The [public] funeral of the late Mr. Ronald Belford (Bon) Scott is appointed to arrive at the Crematori
um Chapel NEXT SATURDAY MORNING for a Uniting Church Service at 11:00 o’clock.

  “Bon’s parents were obviously in a bit of shock about it,” Angus told Sounds, “and they had people from our record company in Australia there with them to look after all the details, but they never got the word about what really happened until we flew out there.

  “The funeral itself was more or less quiet, though there were a lot of kids outside, you know. It was better being quiet, because it could have been very bad if a lot of people had just converged there.”

  Bon’s friends felt left out. Alberts’ Fifa Riccobono went to Perth to organize everything, and the result, in typical style, was overprotective. Not that the funeral wasn’t open, just that arms weren’t. Mary Walton only learned about it because Isa kept Irene informed, who in turn kept Mary informed. Irene couldn’t make it because she was just about to go into labor. Vince, too, was tied up in Sydney, now managing the Divinyls. Mary tried to ring Isa to say she was coming, but Fifa wouldn’t let her talk to her. Even Isa admonished Fifa, “But she’s an old friend.”

  The funeral went unreported even by the local media. A handful of fans congregated harmlessly outside the church. There were no television cameras, newspaper reporters, not even rock journalists.