BOOK REVIEW: BON: The Last Highway by Jesse Fink

BOOK REVIEW: BON: The Last Highway by Jesse Fink
Ebury Australia
$34.99
Paperback, biography
November 2017

Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
4/10

Jesse Fink has written about AC/DC before, with his book The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC being published in twenty countries across ten languages, and it seems to have been successful enough for him to delve even deeper into his pet subject.

Bon: The Last Highway is subtitled “The untold story of Bon Scott and AC/DC’s Back In Black,” but it goes deeper still even than that.

With impressive investigative skills and a no-stone-left-unturned approach, Fink travels the world as he tracks down touring buddies, acquaintances, journalists, drinking pals, girlfriends and industry folk who all tell with alarming alacrity of their time with and around the force of nature which was Bon Scott.

Fink is not an objective detective, though: he has his own agenda and more than one axe to grind.

Resolute in his conviction that Bon’s death was the result of his far-worse-than-most-imagined heroin use & alcohol abuse, coupled with uncaring friends who dumped him rather than help him get to a hospital, he makes a strong case that there was a lot more than the commonly accepted story of alcohol involved in his tragic backseat of a car demise.

Similarly, he pours petrol on long-held rumours that Bon wrote the songs on Back In Black, the breakthrough album which was released just six months after his death. We’ve all long suspected that to be the case, and Fink pulls no punches making his case.

But to any long term fan, these are far from revelations, having been explored by Classic Rock Magazine and others in recent years.

There’s also a bitterness to Fink’s writing. He seems personally insulted at Bon’s allegedly gargantuan consumption of alcohol and hard drugs, and disdainful of his keeping a girl in every town on the hook. His scorn at fans who have a drink or leave a tinnie or bottle of liquor as a tribute at Bon’s Fremantle gravesite is, at times, shockingly derisive.

The AC/DC camp refused to allow Fink access to any current member of the band or their entourage or label for his last book, and possibly this is a source of bitterness for the author. It’s also possible that he feels the loss of one of the greatest rock frontmen of all time as keenly as many other fans. But the aggressively judgemental tone adopted by Fink at times is off-putting, and it has been difficult to wade through these 400-plus pages when he repeatedly gets combative.

That said, Fink’s evidence as presented is pretty conclusive – albeit circumstantial (presuming it is all true). That Bon Scott was taking hard drugs is practically a given, considering the times, and the lyrics on Back In Black are far more of his style than that of his replacement, Brian Johnson. But no amount of preaching from anyone should tarnish the reputation of the late singer, no matter how upset the author may be about the grittier side of his personal life.

Category: Book Reviews