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)
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 it. 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 easier 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.
“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 anxious 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-Newsreported: “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.”
AC/DC were connecting because they were rock’n’roll and they were real, and American audiences, at least in part, were starting to tire of bland FM radio fodder. It was another sign of the emergence of the new wave.
Back in New York by the start of August, the band repeated a familiar routine, blowing Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow off stage at the Palladium, before pulling out again for the South. Powerage was selling respectably, especially considering it wasn’t getting any airplay to speak of.
The road was simply a way of life for AC/DC. On August 12, they headlined over Cheap Trick and Molly Hatchet in Florida stronghold Jacksonville, and sold out 14,000 seats.
“I enjoy touring; I’ve had some great times,” Angus told Sounds. “I think touring is what you make of it. I do get fidgety if we have a day off, because touring is geared around twiddling your thumbs and getting ready for the show. If the show’s missing, the day just doesn’t feel right.”
MICHAEL BROWNING: “There were grumblings sometimes, because it’s hard for these young guys to appreciate that you can play to 14,000 people in Jacksonville, Florida, and earn whatever it was, 20 or 30 grand, and then you could drive 100 miles up the road and play to 20 people! There were a lot of gigs, I guess, that they questioned. But it was all part of the building process.”
“It’s sometimes a drag being in a different hotel every night,” Bon allowed, “but it’s not as bad as being stuck in front of a lathe every day of your life for 50 years. I am here and I am free and I’m seeing new faces every night and touching new bodies or whatever. It’s great, there’s nothing like it.”
“Bon is fine,” said Angus. “We call him the old man, but he’s always there. And he will be in the future.” It was almost as if Angus was trying to convince himself of the fact. He admitted, after all, in a contemporaneous interview, “You can have so many women and so many drunken nights, but it’s going to take its toll some day.”
Rock’n’roll bands on the road in America don’t have to pursue sex and drugs—sex and drugs pursue them. Cocaine is chopped out under your nose. Bon found it difficult to just say no.
Vince Lovegrove and Bon hadn’t seen each other in a dog’s age when Vince met up with the band in Atlanta, Georgia. After wearing out Adelaide, Vince had moved to Sydney, and then Melbourne, where in 1978, after a stint producing Channel Nine’s Don Lane Show, he worked up a proposal to make a documentary for Channel Seven on the international emergence of Australian rock’n’roll. AC/DC naturally occupied a prominent place in his script (along with the Little River Band and Air Supply), and so he sought them out. They were playing a show that night at the Atlanta Symphony Hall, with Cheap Trick supporting.
Vince found a lump coming to his throat as he watched from the side of the stage, his old mate “struttin’ across the boards like the eternal Peter fuckin’ Pan he was . . .” After the show, when Bon had changed out of his ragged denim stage threads into a very flash plaid drape coat he’d just bought, and grabbed the bottle of Scotch that was always included in the band’s rider for him, he and Vince repaired to his hotel, the very plush Peach Tree Inn, to catch up.
Vince wrote in RAM:
Very impressed, I was. Personal driver, ritzy hotel, the best lookin’ groupies I’d ever set eyes on. I mean, it was the real thing. I thought, if anyone deserves it, Bon does. He’s been at it for long enough, and at last, he was showing ’em. He said he’d make it and he was making it . . . in style.
Out of the car, and up into Bon’s room. Not yer average hotel room, but one that reeked of a very determined effort to emulate all the comforts of a luxurious home away from home.
So there we were. Bon and me, an Australian photographer, a few groupies, and the odd Seedie wandering in and out in an attempt to find the action. Not that there would be too much action in Bon’s room that night. The groupies would eventually be bored, the photographer would almost nod off to sleep, room service would be cut off at 2 a.m., and Bon and I became self-indulgent about the good old days . . . and to top it off, there was nothing to smoke. We used the completely legal drug of Scotch to ignite the memory cells.
“I’m getting tired of it all,” he finally confessed. We were both wasted. Totally. There were no inhibitions. His burbled confession came as a total, almost sobering shock. I mean, his scenario appeared complete. Success was almost there, and so were its trimmings. And Bon tells me he was getting tired of it; he must be joking.
“No way, Vinnie. I really am getting tired. I love it, you know that. It’s only rock’n’roll and I like it. But I want to have a base. It’s just the constant pressures of touring that’s fucking it. I’ve been on the road for thirteen years. Planes, hotels, groupies, booze, people, towns. They all scrape something from you. We’re doin’ it and we’ll get there, but I wish we didn’t have these crushing day after day grinds to keep up with.”
I’d never seen Bon like it. He managed to laugh it off and have another swig. He set a fast pace, the old Bon, but if you dug deep enough, you found an accumulative exhaustion that threatened to sap his upfront energy.
“Rock’n’roll, you know that’s all there is,” he said. “But I can’t hack the rest of the shit that goes with it.”
From the South, the band dashed across the continent to the Northwest, where they played shows with Aerosmith, before dropping in on LA for a headline show of their own at the Starwood. In September, they played a few more dates with Aerosmith through the Midwest before heading back to Britain.
Aerosmith, then hitting their drug-addled midcareer crisis, suffered in the face of AC/DC’s hunger and were regularly blown off stage. In LA, AC/DC managed to drive a typically jaded LA audience “wild and calling for encore after encore.”
The band wasn’t exempt from crises of its own though. If Bon was beginning to feel, if not show, the strain, it also was around this time that Phil Rudd buckled under it. Phil had always been highly strung, and in the bleak American Midwest heartland, he was suffering what might only be described as an acute case of white-line fever.
SILVER: “When Phil cracked up, Bon was pretty upset about it. I mean, Bon wasn’t one to rock the boat, but he was pretty freaked out by the way they just propped Phil up and made him perform.
“I think it was a bit of a strain for Bon too, because he did all the PR. Like, if there was a radio station, Bon had to do all that, pretty much.
“And I mean, that’s what happened to Phil, because he was doing a lot of the driving as well. And because he was the quiet type. I mean, I’m getting this second hand, I’m getting this from Bon, what happened to Phil.”
Like Bon, Phil was a dedicated pot-smoker. He was also always partial to a toot. Put that together with life on the road itself, and the result can be pure paranoid dementia. Phil was a mess. On a couple of occasions, he had to be hauled off to hospital for sedation.
SILVER: “Instead of, like, giving him some time out . . . there was no actual concern for Phil’s long-term well-being. And basically, that was pretty much their attitude to Bon too, with his drinking. Nobody really seemed to give a shit that he was killing himself, as long as he got out there and did it. If I wasn’t there to make sure he caught the right plane, then someone else would be, and that was it. As long as they could do the job on the night.”
Bon wrote to Irene:
Hi there. Tis about four in the morn (Mon) . . . the bar’s closed . . . the bottle of Black Jack [Daniels] is empty . . . we’re outta dope . . . the TV’s finished . . . I don’t have anybody to fuck . . . I’ve dropped a quaalude [downer] . . . I could go on all night but I won’t . . . We’re two days from the finish of our US summer tour . . . It’s been fourteen weeks and of course we did a month in England before that. We have six days off before touring Europe and England again for a month . . . Boring innit. I should be back in Sydney around Nov 16th. We’re recording for maybe a month and hopefully January will be off . . . Now I’ve had days off since I joined this band . . . But not one whole thirty-one day month.
The band landed back in Britain in October, just as the live album If You Want Blood, You’ve Got It was released, a mere six months after Powerage. Alberts had been planning a greatest hits album called Twelve of the Best, but at the last minute changed its mind. The greatest hits in live form would obviously extend the album’s appeal and indeed, while If You Want Blood wasn’t exactly planned, it turned out to be the record that paved the way for AC/DC’s breakthrough. Live albums, which tended to be double or triple sets in which songs short in their studio versions were stretched out into extended tedium, were for some reason popular in the seventies. If You Want Blood reversed that trend. Culled by George and Harry from tapes “recorded live” (as the sleeve notes asserted) “during Australian, UK and American tours,” the album was indeed just like an AC/DC gig. Packaged simply, bearing the indelible image of Angus impaled by his own axe, with Bon glancing over his shoulder, it boasted a blunt ten tracks and, allowing for nothing extraneous, got straight to the point, that being raging AC/DC rock’n’roll. For a band whose forte was live performance, it was the perfect souvenir, and the punters responded accordingly. In Britain, they pushed it to number 13, a new high for the band.
In America, it propelled AC/DC into the top 50 for the first time. In Australia, the album went unreleased until Christmas, by which time it was quite apparent the authorities were still not going to relent and allow the band to tour the country, which would ideally have promoted the release of If You Want Blood. The band was suffering for this stupid stalemate. The album sold slowly.
At the end of October, the band embarked on yet another British tour, playing 16 dates in 18 days. They would return to Australia after that—as had become their tradition—to spend Christmas at home, and cut a new album at Alberts.
The British tour was an unqualified success.
At the Glasgow Apollo, legend has it, Bon got lost backstage after walking the floor with Angus, and then managed to lock himself out of the theatre. The only way he could convince the stagedoor bouncers that he was, in fact, the evening’s attraction, was to ask them, Why else would I be running around in the freezing cold without a shirt on? Asked about the incident a couple of days later, Bon said, “I can’t remember that—it was two days ago.”
DAVE JARRETT: “They had this incredible work ethic, and the fact was that each time they made a record, it seemed to be so much better. So it became a matter of how many Hammersmith Odeons you were going to do.”
In America too, they were finally taking off. The success of If You Want Blood reflected on Powerage, and by year’s end, its sales, at over 150,000 units, outstripped those of the previous two albums combined. Even Rolling Stone, which had studiously ignored the band since mercilessly panning High Voltage in 1976, was starting to take notice. A news story ran in its November 16 issue. It read in part, “Bon Scott mentions some influences that are difficult to glean from listening to his music. He is particularly impressed by the way Frank Zappa has been able to manipulate his image over the years. Fondly remembering the old PHI ZAPPA KRAPPA poster of Frank sitting on the toilet, Bon suggests a successor: ‘Bon Scott pulling himself.’”
In London to play two concluding shows at the Hammersmith Odeon, Bon was shunted into Atlantic’s offices to drink the liquor cabinet dry whilst doing phone interviews with the press in other parts of the world. He spoke to the Herald in Melbourne, claiming success hadn’t spoiled him. “All that has changed is my intake of alcohol. I can now afford to drink twice as much.”
Talking to David Fricke in New York for a feature on the band which would be published in Circus Weekly in January, he bemoaned the lack of critical acuity applied to AC/DC in Britain even as the band scaled the heights. “This guy came to see us at Leeds University. We did two encores that night and the crowd went wild. Then I read the review next week and he puts shit on the crowd—“How could 2,000 mindless people like this bunch of idiots”. He didn’t see what we were doing for the crowd and what they were doing for us.”
Bon went on, “There’s been an audience waiting for an honest rock’n’roll band to come along and lay it on ’em. There’s a lot of people coming out of the woodwork to see our kind of rock. And they’re not the same people who would go to see James Taylor or a punk band.”
Asked about the band’s unrelenting touring, Bon kept up a brave face. “It keeps you fit—the alcohol, nasty women, sweat on stage, bad food—it’s all very good for you!”
But Fricke asked, what if his voice ever gave out?
“Then I’d become a roadie,” Bon replied matter-of-factly.
The two sold-out Odeon shows the band played on November 15 and 16 merely confirmed their status. Atlantic threw a party backstage after the first night’s show. Bon proceeded to get so drunk that in the wee hours, according to Melody Maker’s Steve Gett, he “needed the stomach pump before getting to his feet again.”
Success, for Bon, was bittersweet. He had no one to share it with and no home to go to.