THE ROAD TO RUN
From the outside looking in, Bon Scott’s final tour with AC/DC looked like a victory lap. After years of slogging around the globe, propping up a band that had once been big in Australia but weren’t any more, had got biggish in the UK – two Top 20 albums, but nowhere chart-wise in America, where their label had been urging them to ditch their raucous singer – AC/DC were finally breaking through, against all odds, with their sixth album, Highway To Hell.
From the inside looking out, however, Bon Scott’s final tour with AC/DC was one long suicide note. In an article for RAM, Australia’s premier music magazine, at the end of 1978, Bon had been unusually downbeat about his prospects of continuing much longer.
Following a gig opening for Cheap Trick in Atlanta, Bon had changed out of the battered old denims he wore on stage and into an expensive leopard-skin coat, grabbed the bottle of Scotch that was always now waiting for him in the dressing room, and set off for his hotel dressed, as he put it, in his “wolf in wolf’s clothing” outfit; playing the part of rock star in the way everyone now expected of him: by “going for it”, by “getting out if it”, by saying “fuck it”.
Sharing a taxi back to his ‘ritzy’ hotel, the Plum Tree Inn, the writer and Bon’s former bandmate Vince Lovegrove extracted an unexpected confession, as Bon told of how “tired of it all” he was. “I love it,” said Bon. “It’s just the constant pressures of touring that’s fucking it. I’ve been on the road for thirteen years. Planes, hotels, groupies, booze, people, towns. They all scrape something from you. We’re doing it and we’ll get there, but
