Song Of The Day 7/11/2013: Fraternity - "Seasons Of Change"
Our Australian chief correspondent Colin Donald from Melbourne -- AC/DC's Ground Zero -- talks about Bon:
I’ve read a lot about AC/DC and Bon Scott (the biography by Clinton Walker is a great read) so whatever I say is bound to be lacking. He was from Western Australia (driving home prompted him to write "Highway to Hell") but was essentially nomadic. But wherever he was, he took his notebooks and would scribble down song lines as they came to him.
Two particular things endeared him to Melbourne. In the Melbourne ABC studios the TV show Countdown was filmed in front of a live audience – usually school age kids. In a very early AC/DC appearance Bon came on as a school girl and smoked a cigarette. The kids loved it and parents were appalled. Not long after, the video clip for "It's A Long Way to the Top" was filmed live in the streets of Melbourne. It’s a famous moment when the band travels through the city on the back of a flatbed truck and Bon breaks out the bagpipes. That was Bon’s enduring moment, and the band have honoured that memory by never covering the song with Brian Johnson.
He was a hard rockin’, hard drinkin’ ladies man. To roughen up his voice in the studio he would gargle with whisky – to the point of passing out. It’s strange that he would first come to notice singing in the hippie band Fraternity, but he remained friends with members of that band when he left for the "dark side." His alcohol based death in 1980 is – of course – legendary. Some years later it was immortalised in song by TISM (This Is Serious Mum). And there are rumours his last book of song notes was never found.
(He'll Never Be An) Old Man River
Drank the slab, drank the slab
Drank the slab that Bon Scott drunk
I drank the slab that Bon Scott drunk
I injected some of Hendrix's junk
I booked a seat on Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane
Mama Cass' sandwich? I ate the same
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