“$10 a night to drive”: AC/DC’s comical recruitment of Bon Scott
When AC/DC was driving down the ‘Highway to Hell’, it was most likely screaming singer Bon Scott behind the wheel of the car.
Scott wasn’t a founding member, but he is probably their most famous frontman from the time that the group were at the peak of their powers, having joined them in 1974 following an impromptu jam session and subsequently landing an audition once it had become clear that their time with Dave Evans had taken a turn down a dead-end street.
But the jam session that led to his eventual hiring wasn’t the first time that Bon Scott had crossed paths with Angus and Malcolm Young, Colin Burgess and Larry Van Kriedt. He had run through a bunch of jobs while trying to get a career started in music, having been a postman, a bartender and a truck-packer.
In the mid-1960s, he started up a couple of bands, handling drumming duties for The Spektors before merging The Winstons to form The Valentines, at which point Scott made his way up the stage and became a lead singer.
By 1970, the band had collapsed due to a combination of creative differences and drug addiction, and Scott was looking for a new gig again.
Having relocated to Adelaide later that year, he started up a new prog-rock group called Fraternity, who would go on to enjoy some small level of radio success before, like The Valentines before them, slowly disintegrating.
In his own words, by 1974 he found himself “in-between bands” again and took up a new line of work to help tide him over while he waited for the right group to come calling, when a friend he’d made in Adelaide who owned and operated an agency bringing bands into the region to perform offered him “$10 a night to drive bands to the gigs and back”, effectively become a chauffeur to the touring stars.
But he wasn’t in the job for long, as the first band he drove for, AC/DC, were also the last. “They knew I was sort of a screamer”, he explained to Ray Lancaster in an interview held at Birmingham Town Hall on October 29th, 1976, “And they knew I was out of work and they hated the guy they had singing for them then, so they offered me a job”, and from there, all he had to do was ‘Ride On’.
Lancaster then asked him if he always knew he wanted to be a rock and roll singer, to which Scott replied that “I always knew I was something other than a worker, you know?” You couldn’t say that he didn’t have the drive.
