As Elliott remembers it, Bon was equally
impressive off stage. “Meeting your heroes can be
disappointing,” he says, “but not with Bon. He was
great to us. He wasn’t a pretentious prick. He was
a natural talent. And there was always a sparkle in
his eye and a shit-eating grin on his face. He was
at that moment in his life when every light was
green. One night he walked into a bar in his cut-
off denim jacket and saw we had no money, so
he stuck a tenner in my hand and said: ‘Here, buy
yourselves a drink. Give it me back later. See you
down the road.’ And he wasn’t just being flash.
Bon wasn’t like Keith Moon, swinging from the
chandeliers. He liked a drink, but he wasn’t just
a wild man.”
Leppard drummer Rick Allen also has fond
memories of that tour, and of Bon in particular.
When they played at London’s Hammersmith
Odeon on November 1, Allen celebrated his
sixteenth birthday, and his tender age was reflected
in the gift he received from Bon. “He came in to
our dressing room,” Allen recalls, “singing Happy
Birthday in that strange Australian-Glaswegian
voice, and gave me a big bowl of Smarties. That
was his funny way of showing me some love.”
On November 11, AC/DC headed to Europe
with Judas Priest as support act in place of Leppard.
A show at the Pavilion de Paris in the French capital
on December 9 was filmed for the concert movie
AC/DC: Let There Be Rock, which was scheduled for
a theatre release in 1980. But as the tour neared its
end, Bon suffered a freak injury, pulling a muscle in
his leg during a drunken play-fight with one of the
band’s roadies after a gig in Nice. He managed to
get through three dates in England during the run-
up to Christmas, but two more
had to be postponed.
Bon flew alone to Australia
to enjoy Christmas in the
sunshine, see his parents and
look up some old friends. By
this time, sales of Highway To
Hell were close to a million.
But for Bon, going back to the place where his long
journey to rock’n’roll stardom had begun, there
were mixed emotions. Even in this moment of
victory, there was sadness in him.B
on Scott had created his own mythology
with words he sang in 1976: ‘I’m a rocker,
roller, right-out-of-controller.’ He was known as
a hellraiser and a womaniser; a charmer, for sure,
but a man who could use his fists if necessary. And
yet, for all his machismo, he was a complex man,a dichotomy revealed in the first two blues songs
that AC/DC put on record.
The Jack, from 1975, had Bon singing about the
things he’d picked up from sleeping around. As
a self-described “toilet-wall graffitist”, the words
came easily to him. But with Ride On, from ’76, he
sang of the loneliness of the road, the downside of
the rock’n’roll life. Interviewed
in 1978, he said: “I’ve been on
the road for thirteen years.
Planes, hotels, groupies,
booze, people, towns, they all
scrape something from you.”
While in Australia in those
last days of 1979, he paid a visit
to his ex-wife, Irene, who was six-months
pregnant. No matter how high he was riding with
AC/DC, and for all that he was numbing himself
with booze, here was a vision of how his life might
have been if things had turned out differently.
Soon after his return to London in January 1980,
the Highway To Hell tour concluded with eight
shows in France and two in England. The last single
from the album, Touch Too Much, was released in the
UK on January 25. It was not a big hit, peaking at
No.29. But for Joe Elliott, whose band went on tomake their greatest albums with Mutt Lange, To u c h
Too Much was just about perfect. “It’s funny,” Elliott
says, “because as Mutt said to me later, AC/DC
couldn’t stand Touch Too Much. They thought it was
too poppy. But I thought it was the best song on
the album.”
The final night of the tour, at the Gaumont
Theatre in Southampton on January 27, 1980,
turned out to be Bon Scott’s last stand. What he left
behind with Highway To Hell, his last testament, was
one of the greatest rock albums of all time. And
just as Malcolm Young had known they were on to
something big from the moment that riff stuck out
like a dog’s balls, so Bon had known it too.
On August 4, 1979, a week after Highway To Hell
was released, AC/DC had performed for the first
time at New York’s Madison Square Garden,
opening for Ted Nugent. That night, like most
nights, they had the audience up out of their seats
from the get-go. Backstage after the show, Bon
had boasted to Hit Parader writer Andy Secher:
“This is gonna be one of the biggest bands rock’s
ever seen. Give us a year or two and we’ll sell this
place out ourselves.”
Bon was right. Unfortunately he never lived to
see it happen. =“I loved the songs.
I loved the vibe.”
Gene Simmons on HTH
MA
IN:
GET
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SET
: (^) BO
BA
LFO
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ICO
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AC/DC manager^ Peter^ Mensch,^
Bun E Carlos^ and^ Robin^ Zander^
of Cheap^ Trick^ and^ Bon^ Scott^ in^
Germany during^ the^ Highway^ To^
Hell tour^ in^ September^1979.
36 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM