#THE HIGHWAY TO HELL HEROES T.N.T. MAC#

At the Los Angeles Forum, a 15-year-old kid named James Hetfield was in the audience. In 1978, AC/DC toured with another leading American band, Aerosmith. “Maybe because he came from a hard background, he was the antithesis of the pretty-boy lead singers of the time. “And I remember he picked up the hotdog in his hand, minus the bun, and put it in his mouth sideways, because he had missing teeth.”Īfter AC/DC’s four shows with Kiss, Simmons concluded: “Here was a band to be reckoned with.” And he saw something unique in Bon Scott. “Angus ordered a hotdog and beans,” Simmons says. I was awestruck.” After this show, the giant Simmons took the little guitarist for a late-night meal at Ben Frank’s diner on Sunset Boulevard. “What struck me was this little lead guitarist who kept moving on stage like a wild man from Borneo, even between the blackouts. “There were lots of bands who played good rock’n’roll,” Simmons recalls now. Their first shows in US arenas had come in late 1977, opening for Kiss at the invitation of bassist Gene Simmons after he saw AC/DC play in an LA club earlier that year. The years had honed them into an electrifying live act: Bon with the swagger of a gunslinger, Angus the lightning rod for the band’s high-voltage attack, and behind them the other three working away like a well-oiled machine. But as a band that thrived on the road, AC/ DC had put in some hard miles all across the States, and from that, momentum was building. This was nowhere near enough to satisfy a record company that had Led Zeppelin on their books. In America, while Powerage sold 200,000 copies, double the figures for Let There Be Rock, it still only made No.133 on the Billboard chart. In the UK, Let There Be Rock and Powerage had made the Top 30. “The whole band means it,” he said, “and you can hear it.”ĪC/DC albums were selling well in other territories. It was much the same with 1978’s Powerage, its visceral rock’n’roll and gritty authenticity, in songs about heroin addiction and the dole queue, famously admired by Keith Richards. The band’s response was to double down with the following album, 1977’s Let There Be Rock, an exercise in overkill, recorded pretty much live in the studio, complete with wailing feedback and guitars wavering out of tune. When we first came to England in 1976, the record company wanted to market us as a punk band.

#THE HIGHWAY TO HELL HEROES T.N.T. MAC#

At a time when FM radio was dominated by soft-rock stars such as Fleetwood Mac and Peter Frampton, and the breakout hard rock act, Boston, had an immaculately crafted sound, AC/DC’s album of that year, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, was so rough and sleazy that Atlantic considered it commercially unviable and refused to release it in the US.

“When we first came to England in 1976, the record company wanted to market us as a punk band,” Malcolm said. The power of Atlantic Records was the irresistible force to AC/DC’s immovable object, and the friction between the two began long before Highway To Hell. It was in reference to these three that Angus once said: “If I saw them walking down the street, I’d run, you know? Probably liable to kill you.” He had his tongue in cheek, but the inference was clear: this was not a band to be messed with. The other three had an edge to them: Bon with his jailbird tattoos, drummer Phil Rudd a surly hard nut, Malcolm the guy who ran the band with a rod of iron.

No matter that the members of AC/DC were all short-arses, that Angus was teetotal and wore a schoolboy uniform on stage, and that bassist Cliff Williams, the band’s sole Englishman, was quiet and easy going. It came from years of graft, sweating it out in the pubs and clubs of Australia, where bottles were thrown if a crowd could smell blood. There was always a toughness about AC/DC, in the music they played – the sound of Chuck Berry and Little Richard and the Rolling Stones jacked up to maximum volume and intensity – and in the way they carried themselves.

The highway to hell heroes t.n.t.