“You’ve got to keep going”: Angus Young on the one person who made AC/DC carry on
There are no set rules about what happens when a band member dies. The entire mentality of any band can feel like one big happy family, and the minute that one person leaves the equation, it hits much closer to home than any kind of fly-by-night journeyman who plugged in to play all the parts. Although Bon Scott was always going to leave a vacant hole in AC/DC, Angus Young said there was always going to be light at the end of the tunnel if they followed their muse.
But as crazy as it sounds, Scott was looked at as disposable for the first half of his time in AC/DC. The Australian rockers had already gone through a messy separation with Dave Evans, and they were not about to make that same mistake again, so despite being the life of the party every single time they went onstage, Scott would always be on the firing line and kept in check whenever he drank too much or behaved out of order.
Granted, that kind of wild-man attitude is also probably what made him one of the best frontmen of all time. Outside of the hard living he was doing behind the scenes, no one ever captured the spirit of being in a rock and roll band like Scott did, especially when going through some of the band’s classic hits like ‘It’s A Long Way to the Top’. It all seemed like one big party, but Scott made that fatal mistake when he convinced himself the party shouldn’t end.
After a night of heavy drinking, Scott’s death from alcohol poisoning made everyone in the band put things in perspective. The whole reason for being in a rock and roll band was supposed to be about having fun with no real casualties, and now that they had one of their biggest albums Highway to Hell, they had the mouthpiece of their group stripped away.
It’s one thing to lose the musical equivalent of a brother, but Malcolm Young ended up having to do the dirty work. Since Scott wasn’t home when he passed away, Malcolm took it upon himself to get ahold of his parents to let them know what had happened, thinking that it’d be much better to hear it from a member of the band before they got their hearts broken by looking through the tabloids.
Any parent would have been convinced that rock and roll is dangerous after that lifestyle took her son away, but according to Angus, Mr Scott was the reason why they were able to keep going, saying, “Bon’s father grabbed me and Malcolm and said, ‘listen, you guys are young guys, so you’ve got to keep going’. So that took a bit of pressure off us in a way because at the time we felt we didn’t know which way it was going to go, because you might be seen as grave-robbing or something.”
It was already strange to see them bouncing back so soon following Scott’s death, but the minute they hit Back in Black, it was clear they weren’t trying to capitalise on his demise. This was a celebration of Scott’s memory, and no matter how much Brian Johnson sang his lungs out, it was all done in service to Scott rather than trying to showboat on tunes like ‘Hells Bells’ and the title track.
An average fan would have felt a bit dejected seeing one of their favourite bands gutted like that, but AC/DC were never ones to spend their entire lives moping. Rock and roll was always about not messing around, and even when they had setbacks that would kill most bands, they knew the best way to overcome everything was to keep the train rolling.
