Grave-robbing, not giving up, and the wildest show Bon Scott had ever seen
Hard rock acts throughout history have always lived by the belief that you shouldn’t do anything by half-measures, and AC/DC were far from being an exception to this rule.
In fact, in the ranks of the genre’s Australian heavyweights, everything was done to an extreme, including their approach to living the lifestyle commonly associated with rock and roll. Drinking, drugs and chasing women were not things to be taken lightly, and were simply things that were a part of the modus operandi as far as the band themselves were concerned, and a lot of this excessive lifestyle seeped through into the content of their songs.
To an outsider, it made being in the band seem exciting, with free rein seemingly being given to the members to indulge in all of the hedonistic acts that onlookers might secretly want to enjoy for themselves. However, the thing that anyone who follows these sorts of lifestyles has to understand is that there are consequences to one’s actions, and that it can eventually catch up with you and lead to complicating factors that inhibit one’s ability to perform at the highest level.
The question was, how long could they make this way of life survive and work for them while they were still chasing the promise of defying the odds of breaking out of Australia and becoming the biggest rock band in the world?
In amongst all of the moments of glamorous success that they endured in the 1970s, there were also dark times when AC/DC found themselves having to take stock of their actions, especially when the band almost had to give up the dream following the tragic passing of frontman Bon Scott in 1980.
“The worst time was the death of Bon because we didn’t know whether we should continue,” guitarist Angus Young would later proclaim. As much as it gave the surviving members a reality check about whether they could reasonably make things work without their talisman of a frontman, they would later receive some words of advice from other members of the Scott family about where they could possibly go after receiving the tragic news.
Young continued, explaining how he was convinced to continue in the face of adversity. “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.”
While the blessing that Young had received from Scott’s father to continue without his son may have been encouraging, it didn’t solve the issue of the fact that they didn’t have anyone in line to replace him. However, Young would thankfully recall a conversation he and his former bandmate had had about seeing Geordie performing live, and that the performance of their frontman, Brian Johnson, was “the wildest thing he’d ever seen”.
It may have arisen in unfortunate circumstances, but this conversation couldn’t have been more fortuitous. Having that blessing and advice from Scott’s father triggered something in Young and the rest of the band that convinced them to carry on, and Young’s eventual recollection about Johnson being the perfect replacement allowed them to return to their full-throttle approach, and they would never have made Back in Black, had it not been for this sequence of events.
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