Bon Scott’s mysterious missing week: “I don’t know”
When Angus Young was asked what his favourite AC/DC album was, he wasted no time offering up their 1977 record Let There Be Rock. “Let There Be Rock, for me, is the album,” he said, “My brother, George, [asked] me and Malcolm… ‘What sort of album do you wanna do this time? And Malcolm just looked at me, and he said, ‘We just want an album that’s just gonna be pure hard rock guitar.’”
They released this album when the cultural landscape of music was shifting, and many rock bands were moving elsewhere with their ideas. By making a record like Let There Be Rock, AC/DC showed the music industry and listeners their intention to remain as a heavy guitar band.
To match the intense sound that the band were putting out, they needed one hell of a singer, and they had that with Bon Scott. Scott had a voice that could project perfectly, keeping a rock n roll grit buried into syllables while also being pitch-perfect during high notes. The way he screeches as he proclaims, “Let there be rock,” acts like a rallying cry to a head-banging army.
Not only did Scott have the perfect voice for AC/DC’s heavy rock music, but he also lived a rock’ n roll lifestyle that perfectly aligned with the band’s image. Though this lifestyle was incredibly reckless, it gave way to a few stories that band members look back on and laugh at. In remembering Scott, Angus Young recalled one of these tales where he let his reckless side take over.
“His mother put him on a plane once; he went to see his folks in Australia,” said Young, “She put him on a plane in London. Guy, who was doing our tour managing, went to collect him, you know, he was gonna meet him at the airport, and he got the airport and called us up, and he said, ‘No Bon’.”
Bon Scott was nowhere to be seen at the airport, and he didn’t turn up for an entire week, at which point he acted like nothing had happened. “A week later, he gets a call from the airport, and Bon said, ‘I’m here. Can you come pick me up?’” says Young, “Guy got there and says, ‘He’s standing there, and he’s only got a pair of pants on’. He’s got no shirt, and it’s like, the middle of winter, you know, freezing.”
Relieved to see Bon but curious about where he had gone, Guy asked the AC/DC frontman why he was over a week late in arriving at the airport. “’Where you been? Everyone’s been worried,’ and he says, ‘I don’t know’. But yet, his mother had put him on the plane. She had seen him getting on the aeroplane. He says he thinks he followed some girl when she got off the plane in Bangkok or something.”
Young laughs as he tells the story. Though Bon Scott’s lifestyle proved dangerous, it would be silly for Young to mourn the behaviour that epitomises his friend so well: “He didn’t know where he had been or what he’d got up to.”
