Highway to Hell Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Preface

  PREFACE TO THE FIRST US EDITION

  Introduction

  1. ADELAIDE, 1974

  2. SCOTLAND

  3. FREMANTLE

  4. THE VALENTINES

  5. MELBOURNE

  6. FRATERNITY

  7. UP IN THE HILLS TOO LONG

  8. THE YOUNGS

  9. LANSDOWNE ROAD

  10. SYDNEY

  11. ENGLAND

  12. THE LITTLE C**NTS HAVE DONE IT

  13. AMERICA

  14. HIGHWAY TO HELL

  15. FEBRUARY 1980

  16. TOUCH TOO MUCH

  EPILOGUE: BACK IN BLACK

  Acknowledgments

  BIOGRAPHIES

  DISCOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  PREFACE TO THE SECOND US EDITION

  I’ve always said it was easy to write Highway to Hell. I mean, with material this good it’d be hard to fuck it up. When I started work on the book in the early ’90s, I remember feeling I should be looking over my shoulder all the time, because this amazing story was just sitting there, untouched—I couldn’t believe I had it to myself, as I did at the time. The book has struck such a chord that it’s never been out of print, and since it seems to have taken on a life of its own, I’ve been disinclined to tamper with it as it went through its various editions, even though it has faults I now find glaring.

  For this new edition, however, it became necessary to go beyond the usual bit of panel-beating and significantly rewrite the last chapter and the epilogue. For one thing, while my original reconstruction of Bon’s last hours was essentially correct (and I take some pride in that), despite the pressure exerted by various conspiracy theories over the years, I was able to confirm and flesh out the details in the book’s final chapter after mystery man Alistair Kinnear (who had been with Bon that night) issued an important public statement in 2005. Furthermore, as Back in Black—AC/DC’s first post-Bon album and their tribute to him—has grown in stature over the years, the questions that still surround its genesis have become more pressing; I’ve examined these questions more closely here than in previous editions.

  Ultimately, though, as I re-read the book I was struck all over again by this amazing character and his amazing story. I am confident that new readers will find the same—the power of it is such that it can survive any of my inadequacies as a writer. There’s no doubt—Bon (still) lives!

  C.W.

  Sydney, 2007

  PREFACE TO THE FIRST US EDITION

  Rock’n’roll was invented in America, for sure—but it was quickly appropriated by the British. And then, in Australia, it was appropriated all over again. For years our music—like so many things in Australia—was only an “equivalent” of something American or British.

  In some ways, despite our isolation, our tiny population, and our colonial inferiority complex (what we refer to in Australia as “the cultural cringe”), it is not so surprising that this English-speaking country should have become the world’s third-largest producer of rock music. But because it largely mimicked US and UK models for so long, audiences in other countries have only recently become aware that Australian acts are, in fact, Australian.

  As a music writer who started out in the late seventies when punk was reinventing rock’n’roll, I saw members of my own generation—the Saints, the Go-Betweens, Nick Cave, and their successors—play a leading role in a worldwide uprising. Having this year produced a book/film/soundtrack called Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music, I remain committed to telling the stories of the emergence of original Australian music.

  In Bon Scott, I found a legendary character who already had a grip on people’s imagination, and whose career with the Spektors, the Valentines, Fraternity, and then AC/DC encapsulated virtually the entire narrative of Australian rock’s evolution. After seeing the early AC/DC constantly on Australian TV’s Countdown in 1975-76, I had tended—like many other observers—to write them off as some sort of teenybopper boogie band. And then they left the country, to seek success on a bigger stage. Meanwhile, the late seventies seemed to flash by—it was an incredibly exciting time for all of us. Then suddenly, in 1980, Bon Scott was dead. He was 33.

  Twenty years later, having survived many rock’n’roll indulgences myself, I know how young 33 is. Yet I am still astonished at the amount of life Bon Scott packed into those years. His life, career, and death had all the drama, comedy, and tragedy of a classical narrative.

  Highway to Hell was written with the belief that it could go around the world despite the “cultural cringe,” so I’m delighted to see it published now in the USA. Compounding my joy—as well as having actually received an advance!—is the fact that, though revised and updated with new information, it remains an Australian story told from an Australian perspective. Great credit and thanks, then, go to Verse Chorus Press.

  From the response to this book’s original edition in 1994 I learned the power of a single personality. Bon Scott touched so many people in his life that my attempt to portray him touched people too. Those I relied on as sources also gave me praise for having accurately captured something of him, while Bon’s parents, as I’d feared, didn’t like seeing his seedier side aired so publicly; and the AC/DC machine, inevitably, remains unmoved-.

  After an unsuccessful referendum in 1999, Australians are still debating their future as a nation. There is a growing movement that will sooner or later succeed in transforming this country—a onetime penal colony still nominally ruled by the British monarch—into a republic. The whitefella who first arrived here and stole the land from its Aboriginal inhabitants was a British convict. So when it’s time to choose a new national anthem, I’ll be pumping for AC/DC’s “Jailbreak”—because all of us in Australia, black and white, need to break the shackles of the recent past we all have in common. In his own way, Bon Scott tried to do this, too.

  I believe American readers and rock’n’roll fans will respond to Bon as a character in the same way Australians already have: his human qualities are universal. Beyond that, I hope new readers will discover the things that Australian rock’n’roll has in common with its American and British cousins—and also what makes it unique.

  C.W.

  Sydney, December 2000

  (Graeme Webber/Australian Rock Folio)

  INTRODUCTION

  When Bon Scott died in London in February 1980, AC/DC was on the verge of the breakthrough that established them as one of the most popular rock’n’roll bands of all time.

  AC/DC was then still a new band on the world stage, as the schoolboy get-up of spotty young guitarist Angus Young emphasized. But Bon himself was a veteran, the self-confessed old man of the band, a 33-year-old who had already been around the block twice since the sixties. When he was pronounced dead on arrival at Kings College Hospital, the cumulative grind of nearly 20 years on the road had finally caught up with him.

  Bon Scott was a man who lived for the moment. And when those moments had run out, his reputation solidified into legend—this was indeed one of the last true wild men of rock. The graffiti BON LIVES! is still to be found scrawled on walls all over the world.

  Dead rock stars are often deified on the basis of martyrdom alone, however senseless. But Bon Scott was a working-class hero in life, and he became an icon in death.

  AC/DC carried on after Bon died—as he would certainly have wanted them to—but while the later line-up of the band, with singer Brian Johnson, has enjoyed the greatest success, it is impossible to shake the feeling that it ain’t what it used to be. The Young brothers, Malcolm and Angus, who formed AC/DC and still run it, have acknowledged it was Bon who set t
hem on their path, and the band today has only a faint echo of the earthiness, humor and honesty he invested it with.

  AC/DC’s back catalogue has never been out of print, and is still selling. In 2003, when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the US, AC/DC could claim worldwide album sales of over 120 million, making them the fifth-biggest rock act of all time behind only the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Eagles (and ahead of the Stones, the Bee Gees, everyone). “I’ll go on record as saying they’re the greatest rock’n’roll band of all time,” says Rick Rubin, arguably the most important record producer of the last two decades, and a man who measures all his work against one album—Bon’s swan song, Highway to Hell.

  By 2005, by which time streets had been named after AC/DC in Madrid and Melbourne alike, and Bon’s grave in Fremantle was listed as a heritage site by the National Trust following the 25th anniversary of his death, AC/DC’s influence was so pervasive that new Australian band Airborne incited an international bidding war on the basis that they sounded more like AC/DC than all the other young “new rock” bands trying to sound like AC/DC. Like Bon-era AC/DC, of course.

  But beyond the shiny garlands and concrete monuments, beyond his musical legacy, beyond even the timeless appeal he exerts on successive generations, Bon has an iconic status which is intangible, a given in our popular cultural heritage. As an Australian musical icon, he has a wider appeal than Dame Nellie Melba, Johnny O’Keefe, Nick Cave, even Slim Dusty. Appellations like “an Australian Jim Morrison” are simply degrading—Bon is the world’s one and only Bon and nothing less.

  Bon embodies the tearaway spirit, and no one he’s touched—even though they may “grow up” and leave rock’n’roll behind, shear their greasy locks and trade their denim jacket for coveralls or a shirt and tie—will ever forget his example, the mischievous glint in his eye and the screeching call to arms.

  Bon’s image was not so emblematic that he might now be mass produced like a Ned Kelly or a Kiss or Elvis doll, or even an Angus Young doll; nor does he exist in the Australian collective memory as faded black-and-white newsreel footage, like, say, that of cricket legend Donald Bradman cutting an English field to pieces. Nor is he a still photograph, even for all the forceful motion it might capture—as so many indelible images of Elvis do. No, we are more likely to remember Bon fleetingly, flashlike, mercurial. He will be performing, on TV’s Countdown maybe, or at a show you went to but can’t fully remember after all those years and the rush and haze it was at the time anyway. He will be a splay of elbows and skin and tattoos, grinning with evil intent, grabbing at the microphone, screeching in his inimitable fashion, the center of a driving storm of volume, rhythm and blues that enveloped everything, that simply lodged itself in the atmosphere as part of the air you breathed and so to which reaction was involuntary, the body jerking in tandem motion. This was rebellion and release superior to any other available in spiritually bereft suburbia. And Bon was its advocate, a denim-clad Pied Piper with a bottle in his hand, a lady in waiting and the hellhounds on his trail . . .

  Bon updated the Australian larrikin archetype. He was “the original currency lad,” as Sidney J. Baker defined him in The Australian Language: “tough, defiant, reckless,” plugged into the urban, electric twentieth century. Part of Bon’s appeal was vicarious, as it always is with rock stars—they live out our fantasies for us, and Bon very much lived the life of excess his audience could only dream about. But his immortality is not the result of nostalgic yearning. Even after his death Bon remains potent, the brute poet of the inarticulate underclass, a spokesman for not a generation but a class, a class with little influence or barely even so much as a voice. In railing against conformity, mediocrity and hypocrisy, Bon’s rebellion was blessedly not nihilistic, however, but rather the opposite—it expressed a lust for life that knew no bounds. With a disregard for all the niceties—even though, ironically, an impeccable politeness was one of Bon’s endearing personal traits—he might have been saying nothing more than, Believe nothing they tell you! Break free! Find out for yourself! Live life!

  Bon regarded AC/DC’s 1976 hit single “Jailbreak” as one of his best songs, and indeed it might well stand as his most succinct autobiographical statement—jail being a blunt metaphor for the straight life.

  It’s true that Bon himself grew up hard, even served time, but he had no chip on his shoulder. Nor was he motivated by the short man’s syndrome that seems, at least in part, to drive an Iggy Pop or a James Brown. Like Elvis, Bon loved and respected his parents; it was just that he rejected their way of life, as he saw it, the slow quiet suburban death of stolid conformity and insincere gestures. No gesture was ever so sincere as the finger Bon gave to all of this—to polite society, the silent majority, which, with its blinkeredness and apathy, was to Bon the antithesis of what life was all about.

  Bon surmounted the odds to become a rock’n’roll star, a singer and songwriter. He wasn’t so much a singer as he was a screamer. He could play drums, as he did with his father in the Fremantle Pipe Band. But leaving school at 15, he hardly had any grand plans. It would probably have been enough that he stayed out of trouble. It is testimony to Bon’s strength of character, his pure desire, that after his stint behind bars he never went back there.

  Bon Scott was the personification of the old adage, “It’s the singer, not the song.” He was never more at home than on stage, and perhaps more than his abilities as a singer and songwriter, he was great as a performer. His brilliance was that you believed in him; that, as they say, he could sell a song. Maybe it was his refusal to take anything, himself especially, too seriously—maybe it was just his impishness—but there was something conspiratorial in his grin that encouraged people who might otherwise never have stepped out of line to join with him in giving the finger to everything dull and constraining.

  Something touched a nerve, made a connection. Journalist George Frazier, on the occasion of Janis Joplin’s death in 1970, wrote a eulogy to her in the Boston Globe which uncannily evokes Bon: “. . . an unkempt, vulgar, obscene girl (though never malicious and with a certain sweetness) who, given a microphone and an audience of her peers, became a wild child. She really couldn’t sing very well and she was far more gamin than graceful, and yet the young, as is their way these days, responded to her because of her shortcomings, because of her desecration of discipline. She was marvelous because she was so dreadful, so much animal energy and so little art.”

  That Bon too was, and still is, reviled almost as equally as he’s adored only confirms his potency. There is perhaps a little bit of Bon in everyone, only some people don’t want to admit it—people who don’t like getting their hands dirty.

  Bon’s old friends like to say his life was a success story because, it would appear, he got exactly what he wanted. He was initially driven not so much by the need to express himself as the desire, simply, to become a rock’n’roll star, to escape that monstrous suburban straitjacket—and he achieved precisely that.

  Vince Lovegrove, who was co-vocalist with Bon in the Valentines in the sixties, wrote in an obituary to his old friend: “To Bon, success meant one thing—more—more booze, more women, more dope, more energy, more rock’n’roll . . . more life!”

  They say that being in a rock’n’roll band is a sure way of prolonging adolescence, of putting off growing up—and it is. But by the time AC/DC started to become really successful, Bon had been around for so long that the success only served to illustrate to him what was really important. Fame and riches, in themselves, are empty. The tragedy of Bon’s death—along with the fact that in so many ways he died alone in the world—was that he was only just starting to come to terms with a life that had to be lived—which he found he needed to live—beyond rock’n’roll. Off the road. He had always been so busy chasing his dream that he never stopped running. His only refuge was in alcohol and sex. When late in the piece he did find the space and time to glance over his shoulder, or stop at a byway and look a
t his life, at life in general, he realized what he was missing: a home. It doesn’t matter who you are, you need a home to go to.

  Bon was a wild man of rock, it’s true; but the Bon Scott behind the image was a different person, as is so often the case.

  “I encountered Bon Scott a number of times during the seventies,” wrote Australian Rock Brain of the Universe Glenn A. Baker, “and each meeting served to increase my incredulity that a performer’s public image could be so at odds with his real personality. Bon really was a sweet man. He was warm, friendly and uncommonly funny. He did not breathe fire, pluck wings off flies or eat children whole. And while his daunting stage persona was by no means fraudulent, it was most certainly a professional cloak that could be worn at convenient moments.’

  Nobody who knew Bon can find a bad word for him. He had great generosity of spirit, perhaps too much. But while he was a consummate professional, as everyone who worked with him testifies, he always leaned heavily on the bottle. The monotony of life on the road ensured it was so. Alcoholic death crept up on him.

  Being in a rock’n’roll band is also akin to being adopted by a surrogate family, and to Bon “the band”—whichever band he happened to be in at any given time, from the Valentines in the sixties, through Fraternity in the early seventies, to AC/DC—was always the closest thing he had to a home.

  Bon got married during the heady early seventies. But just as the hippie dream went up in smoke, Bon’s marriage too fell apart. Bon was torn during those days, to a point where, literally, he almost killed himself. It was only AC/DC that saved him.

  AC/DC provided Bon with a new purpose, a new family. With Malcolm and Angus’ big brother, former Easybeat George, presiding over AC/DC from his studio lair, the Youngs were a tightly-knit Scots clan that worked on an all-or-nothing, us-against-them basis: Bon, who had the talent they needed, and happily also happened to be a Scot, was accepted as one of them, a blood brother, and that was that.