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It’s January 1980 and Aerosmith are playing Reefer Head Woman from their new Night In The Ruts album at the Civic Centre in Maine. It’s a sold-out show, but singer Steven Tyler doesn’t care.

Frustrated at having no cocaine to counteract the intoxicating effects of all the booze he’s swallowed since waking – rounded off by two double martinis gulped minutes before taking the stage – he gives up and pretends to pass out. Throwing himself to the stage he fakes a seizure, twitching his leg to make it look authentic.

Such is his level of chemical dependency and alcoholic intoxication, this is the best idea he can come up with to avoid the indignity of playing a gig just plain old-fashioned drunk.

To this point in the tour Aerosmith have just about been getting away with it. Though with guitarist Joe Perry no longer in the band – replaced by JP-lookalike Jimmy Crespo – they are a shadow of their former selves. They’ve played shows where the singer has frequently forgotten his lines, and, when not at the mic has just sat on the drum riser, too unsteady to stand, much less move about.

Tonight it’s worse. The band stop playing, and Tyler is carried from the stage, a faker and a fuck-up.

Elsewhere in early 1980, Perry is touring with his original Joe Perry Project. The guitarist had left Aerosmith the previous year, midway through recording A Night In The Ruts, the “dysfunctional depression” that was crippling Aerosmith forcing him out of his own band. But now his new outfit faces ruin because singer Ralph Morman has turned into an out-of-control drunk.

“One night he showed up in a wild state of inebriation,” Perry recalls in his autobiography Rocks. “I hauled off and decked him.”

There’s an irony to his complaints. Perry was not in good shape himself: a barely functioning drunk addicted to snorting heroin. Career-wise, The Joe Perry Project’s Let The Music Do The Talking album had been well reviewed, but was poorly promoted by Columbia and wasn’t troubling the charts. The gigs, though good, were small-scale. This was a problem – because Aerosmith’s co-manager David Krebs had not long since told Joe he personally owed $180,000 in room service charges and helpfully suggested that a solo album might be a good way to pay the bill.

For Aerosmith and for Joe Perry, however, things are going to get worse before they get any better.

The 1980s began less than four years after Aerosmith’s fourth album Rocks had shipped platinum upon release, rising to No.3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Hindsight suggests that Rocks, the multi-platinum follow-up to the multi-platinum Toys In The Attic, was where the ‘first career’ of Aerosmith peaked. Afterwards, their decline and fall would be as marked and meteoric as their rise had been.

After Tyler’s fake seizure, Aerosmith cancelled a week’s worth of dates – thereby falling a little further – then resumed and limped on to the end of the tour, and more drink- and drug-induced lethargy. When they reconvened, work on a proposed next album was painfully slow. Then that faltering progress all but ground to a halt after Tyler badly injured himself in a motorcycle crash. Silently but inevitably, poverty crept up and was soon crippling them all.

Bassist Tom Hamilton: “For two years, the album we were working on – Rock In A Hard Pace – was always two months away. It was hard times, we [Tom and his wife Terri] sold our house and moved into a condo…”

Drummer Joey Kramer: “It was rough. There was no money. I was on the balls of my ass. I spent everything I had… until, finally, nothing.”

Guitarist Brad Whitford: “No money, no income, all my savings going to alimony and mortgages. Sold my guitars… sold my house…”

Eventually Whitford could stand it no more, and quit. Aerosmith were down to just three original members, Tyler plus the rhythm section of Hamilton and Kramer.

As Perry’s marriage to fellow drug addict Elyssa continued to falter and debts mounted, he released the second Project album, I’ve Got The Rock’N’Rolls Again (featuring new vocalist Charlie Farren) in 1981. Whitford, meanwhile, hooked up with Ted Nugent’s singer Derek St Holmes to release the eponymous Whitford-St Holmes the same year. They toured briefly, but their record didn’t sell well.

On the recommendation of producer Jack Douglas, Aerosmith recruited Rick Dufay to play on Whitford’s side of the stage. It seemed like a good idea at the time, even though Dufay boasted to the singer that he had escaped from a “loony bin” having jumped out of a window and broken his legs…

The older, wiser and sober Tyler now reckons Dufay was “out of his mind”. Back then, though, the singer barely cared.

When the tour ended he “got deeper and deeper into drugs”, hanging out with and scoring heroin off his friend Richie Supa (with whom he’d co-written a live favourite called Chip Away The Stone). Somehow, stoned and hallucinating, he eventually managed to write enough lyrics to finish Rock In A Hard Place in time for release in August 1982. Good in parts, but a long way from former glories, it wasn’t a record that suggested the epic amount of time spent on it had been a wise investment. A Gold sales award – ending a string of Platinum hits for Aerosmith – and a Billboard chart peak of No.32 confirmed this.

Eventually, Tyler admitted to himself he needed help. He first tried detoxing at the Good Samaritan Hospital in New York in 1983 but, as he admitted in his 2011 biography Does The Noise In My Head Bother You?: “One of the reasons I wanted to go to Good Samaritan was that I heard they did
tests on heroin… I thought: ‘Can I be one of the guinea pigs?’”

By then, Aerosmith’s Krebs was hiring psychiatrists to meet Tyler and report back with their thoughts. Domestically, Tyler’s fights with his wife of 12 years, Cyrinda, had turned physical and violent. Once, as she prepared to drive off, he jumped on her car and smashed the windscreen.

Tyler: “Cocaine insanity! She got out of the car and a violent, uncontrollable fight erupted. We were punching and scratching, and we fell over and rolled on the ground…”

For Perry, domestic life was no sweeter. Elyssa continued to spend money extravagantly, as if he were still a member of the 70s Aerosmith.

He recalled: “I was on the verge of losing my house. I was fucked up from drinking. I thought I was at the bottom, but every day that bottom kept getting deeper and darker.”

Sometimes, though,, rock bottom can become a solid foundation on which to build a new life.

That new life – or “second career” as the five original, once-again-Platinum-selling members of Aerosmith are wont to describe it – was still a way up the road.

Perry was taking any gigs he could to earn cash – sometimes supporting the likes of Heart and the J Geils Band, always travelling in a van and staying in cheap hotels to keep costs low. Back home, he took the life-changing decision to walk out on Elyssa, after six-and-a-half years together – but paid a heavy price in the battle for access to their infant son Adrian.

He was happy to play with the Project, but the debts he faced weren’t going away. One good thing was happening in the guitarist’s life, though. He had hooked up with a new manager, Tim Collins, who became “the only steady force in my life”.

The deal was sealed after Perry tested Collins’ commitment by emptying a drawer in which he kept his unopened mail: mostly bills, IRS claims and foreclosure notices threatening repossession of his home, but also some unsigned death threats (presumably from drug dealers he owed money) and royalty cheques worth thousands of dollars. Collins took them away in a grocery bag and came back a week later offering to pay off “a big portion” of the guitarist’s debts, no strings attached.

Asked why, Collins simply reasoned: “I figure I need to do this to win your trust. I believe in your talent. I believe your best years are ahead of you. I want to manage you.”

One of his first moves was to negotiate Perry out of his deal with Columbia and get him a new one with MCA. Perry disbanded the old Project and hired a new one (fronted by singer Cowboy Mach Bell) on smaller salaries to record their third album, Once A Rocker, Always A Rocker, in 1983. It wasn’t as good as the first two, but the band got to open for ZZ Top on some of their US Eliminator tour. The headline gigs they were playing, though, Perry says, “were getting smaller and smaller”.

He did persuade Whitford to join the line-up, however, and the rhythm guitarist stayed for a month. Kramer later played drums at a few dates, too. Much more significantly, though, Perry was about to meet his soulmate, who was discovered when the Project were about to make a video for their last chance at a hit, a song called Black Velvet Pants.

Perry: “Tim Collins had a bunch of books sent over by talent agencies, I thumbed through half-heartedly until I came to a picture that stopped me in my tracks – a headshot of a beautiful blonde called Billie Montgomery. There was a look in her eyes that got to me, heart and soul. I had to meet her.”

When he did meet her, it was love at first sight. And their relationship would endure long after the video shoot had wrapped, to this day.

Aerosmith, meanwhile, were in trouble. They were playing bigger venues than the Project but, as Tyler has admitted, the tour for Rock In A Hard Place was “a disaster”.

Tyler: “By 1983 I had no money and no future except getting further into the pit. Back in 1976, when I read stories about guys who lost everything and blew a million bucks snorting all they had, I used to say: ‘That’ll never happen to me.’ But in the end, I blew $20 million.”

In addition, he came to admit that he was missing his buddy: “During the years that Joe and I were broken up I realised I wasn’t half the musician I thought I was without him.”

The two had kept in touch, though.

Perry: “I’d occasionally call Steven, or he’d call me… ‘How’re things going?’ Great, I’d lie. How about you? ‘Great!’ he’d lie… The bullshit flew thick and fast.”

Tyler: “I went to see the Joe Perry Project perform at the Bottom Line, then Joe came to the Worcester Centrum in the spring of 1983 to see an Aerosmith concert. We did a few lines of heroin in the dressing room – just for old times’ sake…”

The heroin took its toll on Tyler, who collapsed on stage in front of 14,000 people… and although it had been Tyler’s wife Cyrinda who supplied the drug, Perry took the blame.

“It’s just like the old days, Joe,” Tom Hamilton told him angrily. “You’re no good for this band. Look what you did! Why don’t you just stay the fuck away from us?”

Yet the idea of a reunion persisted.

In early 1984, Tyler and Perry met with Tim Collins and, despite some initial friction, Tyler – by then living in a hotel on $20 a day – agreed the original line-up should get together for a meeting at the only place available: Tom Hamilton’s house.

Perry: “If you want to put it on the IQ meter, Tom is a really smart guy, but I think he had just been more conservative with his money and watched what was going on. Also, he didn’t have to go through a divorce. He’s the one who’s been married the longest among us.

“Any professional who has to go through a divorce, the finances are going to take a real hit. It’s one of those things in life, it isn’t peculiar to rock’n’roll. If you’re making a lot of money, they take a lot of money.”

Once it became apparent that Joe would only rejoin the band on the condition it cut all ties with Leber-Krebs Management and joined him with Tim Collins, they set about discussing a way forward and naming a scapegoat for all their problems. They settled on David Krebs.

Perry: “The main influence that the drugs will have had was that we were partying too much and didn’t notice the kind of money we were spending or take care of the decisions we were making – I don’t think we could have spent that much on drugs! And it’s not like we all had three houses and 16 Maseratis. We all had one house and a couple of nice cars, and that was it.

“I look back and just think we were taken advantage of, maybe in some quasi-illegal ways. You just have to do the numbers in your head: all those years we were selling out so many arenas, so many times. So to sit there and be told that the band’s kitty was empty, I mean – did they do something illegal? I don’t think so. We couldn’t prove anything. Was it immoral? Yeah!

“They weren’t taking care of us in terms of taxes and things like that. I should have been more on top of it but that was my own naïveté. There was a lot of money there, just lying on the table, and people took it because they could. That is the story. I can’t prove anything – but I was constantly asking for accountings and things like that, but it was kinda tough to get the rest of the band to lock up.”

While the reunion idea was left hanging, a third party was about to plant a crucial seed. Alice Cooper was looking for a new guitarist, and his manager Shep Gordon called Collins to sound out JP. Seeing no long-term future for the Project, Perry jumped at the chance and went to Gordon’s county pile to meet and jam with Alice. The next day, while Alice played golf, Perry called Tyler to gloat.

At the time Tyler pretended not to care but deep down he was incensed. His book suggests he remembers the incident differently to Perry, but says that he later called him back. “Are you seriously going to be his guitar player? What the fuck?” the singer wrote. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard! Just stop. The shit’s over. Why don’t you just come back with Aerosmith?”

Well, since Tyler had asked so nicely, how could Joe refuse? Within months, the Toxic Twins would reunite and the crazy train would be back on the rails.

Additional quotes: Rocks: My Life In And Out Of Aerosmith by Joe Perry, Does The Noise In My Head Bother You? by Steven Tyler and Walk This Way – The Authorised Biography Of Aerosmith by Stephen Davis.

After exploring the gothic menace of Edgar Allan Poe on Tales Of Mystery And Imagination, The Alan Parsons Project looked to the future for their second album. Coinciding with the late-1970s science fiction boom, I Robot gave producer and engineer extraordinaire Alan Parsons a showcase for his studio mastery. He told Prog the story in 2013.

Immortalised by Homer Simpson as ‘some sort of hovercraft’, The Alan Parsons Project created classic prog albums even while defying the conventions of what constituted a band in the first place. As an in-house engineer at Abbey Road Studios, Parsons’ place in prog history was assured when he worked on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. With credits that included The Beatles’ Abbey Road, Parsons was right at the forefront of what could be accomplished in the recording studio; and his expertise was much in demand in the 70s when he worked with Paul McCartney, The Hollies and Cockney Rebel, to name just three.

Not content with just being an engineer and producer, Parsons teamed up with songwriter Eric Woolfson to form the Project and provide a platform for their musical ideas. Joined by a host of guest musicians, the duo released their debut album, Tales Of Mystery And Imagination, in 1976, inspired by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. It impressed Clive Davis sufficiently to sign them to Arista Records for their follow up, I Robot, which took its name and concept from the science fiction writings of Isaac Asimov.

“I wasn’t familiar with his work – it was really Eric that instigated the thing,” says Parsons about the inspiration behind the album. “I certainly was a science fiction fan – I used to read short stories quite a bit; although I wasn’t really much of a reader; never was, probably never will be. I read I, Robot cover to cover once the idea came up and I thought it was great.

”I think it’s fairly well documented that we don’t follow his philosophy at all, or the story. We had opposing ideas about the relationships that man and machine would have. But it was a good link to have because a lot of people knew of Asimov’s work long before our album came out.”

Parsons’ name may have fronted the group, but at the time his role was very much focused on the technical side of the music. “Clive Davis signed us without really knowing anything about the way we worked or who contributed what,” he says. “It was always my role to put my engineering hat on and try to make best use of what the studio could contribute to a recording or to a composition.

“There’s no question that some of the time the production itself would shape the composition, and that’s why I felt justified in sharing the composing credits with Eric because we very much worked together towards the end result. Sometimes he would literally come up with a complete song but I would change it in certain ways and make it slightly different and therefore I had my stamp on it.”

The core of the group that played on I Robot came from Scottish rock band Pilot, for whom Parsons had produced the hit single Magic – Stuart Tosh on drums, David Paton on bass and guitarist Ian Bairnson. Joining them was a stream of a different lead singers – eight in total – that included Allan Clarke from The Hollies and Steve Harley from Cockney Rebel; Parsons having worked on Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me). “I think Cockney Rebel were actually quite progressive. Because of their appearance they were possibly considered to be rather glam rock and glam pop – but I think their music was really quite prog,” says Parsons.

For an album hailed as a prog classic, I Robot features remarkably few musicians with previous experience in the genre, particularly on the vocal front. For example, Lenny Zakatek came from the pop group Gonzalez, who scored a disco hit with I Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet – as far from prog as can be. “I think people liked to do guest appearances,” says Parsons. “I don’t think Allan Clarke had ever been asked to guest on anybody’s album before, nor had Steve Harley as I recall.

”I think the choices we made were a little on the unexpected side. Allan Clarke from The Hollies – wow, that’s a strange choice! We felt there was a strength there. Dave Townsend, who sang Don’t Let It Show, was not known as a singer, but was very well known as a writer because he wrote Miss You Nights, a hugely respected ballad that Cliff Richard had a hit with.

“The other thing was purely practical. I’d worked with Allan for years with The Hollies. All I had to do was pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, can you come and listen to a song and see if you’d like to sing it?’ Nearly everybody we worked with right through to the last album tended to be people we knew or people whose managers we knew. Rather than desperately trying to find somebody that we thought would fit the bill we tried to think of people that we knew or that we’d worked with before in some capacity.”

One unique challenge from this way of working was that the songs were invariably written before Parsons and Woolfson knew who would end up singing them. In the case of Some Other Time, when they couldn’t find one singer who fit the tune, they ended up with two – Peter Straker, best known for being the star of the musical Hair, and Jaki Whitren, who took the first crack at the track.

“I got her in to sing the song and I thought she totally nailed the choruses but I didn’t get the right effect on the verses,” says Parsons. “Then Peter Straker came in and had a go at it. What was interesting was that the voices were actually very similar. Most people haven’t realised the song is sung by two people – one voice on the verses, one voice on the choruses.”

For an album as densely arranged and meticulously produced as I Robot, one of Parsons’ constant battles was against the limits of the studio technology, at a time when state-of-the-art was 24-track analogue tape. “It was always a challenge to make tracks available. You would either mix seven or eight things down to a pair of tracks so you had six more tracks available or you would copy from one 24-track tape to another, condensing all the tracks down to a lesser number so we could add stuff. We quite often added stuff just wild on the mix, particularly effects, and stuff like that would be done at the mixing stage. It was a challenge.

“It was even worse, of course, on 16-track – and remember that Dark Side Of The Moon was 16-track. You were always fighting to find a way to squeeze things on. You would sometimes have to mix a backing vocal track with a sax track just to squeeze it on there.

”That’s the producer/engineer’s job, to know where everything is and how it fits and how to make the mixing process as simple as possible. We didn’t do stuff just to make it deliberately complicated – it was hopefully well laid-out so, had I got run over by a bus, somebody else could have picked it up and made reasonable sense of it.”

Fortunately, no buses interfered with the finishing of the album, which was released in the summer of 1977 – as science fiction was just about to take over the world in the form of Star Wars. “That was just a dream come true; it really was. We were out promoting I Robot and the buzz was starting at exactly the same time – people queuing up all night to go and see this mysterious movie. We all went to see it in Chicago while we were on a promotional trip. I loved it. To this day it’s in my top three movies.”

He describes the reaction to the album as “fantastic,” adding: “I remember one of the principal A&R guys at Arista saying, ‘This isn’t just a record; this is an event.’ Fantastic initial reaction. It was the age when the concept album was fashionable and hip. If I decided to put out a concept album now they’d go, ‘Oh no, Alan Parsons, another concept album, oh dear.’ But that’s the way it was. It was good timing and everybody liked the basic conceptual idea.”

Well, almost everyone. “We barely got a single play on Radio 1. If anything we’d get on Bob Harris late at night, or Alan Freeman. Alan was very good to us; he was well known for being out of the ordinary and supporting real rock music as opposed to Top 10 pop.”

The lack of radio didn’t stop the album reaching Number 30 in the UK chart, while it broke into the Top 10 on The Billboard 200. The music industry was a very different place in 1977: the money was in album sales and big bands put on spectacular tours that bled cash but more than recuperated their losses in record sales. However, the Project weren’t about to venture outside of the comfort of their studio home.

“We made it very clear in interviews at the time, ‘Oh no, we couldn’t possibly do this live; we’re a studio band’ – that was the feeling,” says Parsons. “‘This music is simply too complex, particularly because of the orchestration, to ever play live.’ Nobody was more surprised than I was when eventually we started doing it, and today it’s my main activity.

“The other thing was that I was not a performer on the albums, except for the occasional backing vocal part or rhythm guitar part. We’d muse over what I would do in any live band anyway. Get on the stage and warm up the audience?”

I Robot still holds a special place in his affections. “I remember when Allan Clarke went into the studio and sang for the first time, I went, ‘Oh my God, he’s nailing it!’ And on Genesis Ch.1 V. 32 I was very touched when Clive Davis said to me, ‘This is a great piece of music – congratulations!’”

Anika Nilles has been pulling onstage pranks on Geddy Lee and and Alex Lifeson during Rush‘s hugely successful Fifty Something reunion tour.

Her antics show that she is unfazed at having to step into the shoes of the late, great Neil Peart who died of glioblastoma in 2020 at the age of 67.

Nilles’ latest onstage stunt came as they were wrapping up a performance of Working Man at Little Caesar’s Arena in Detroit, Michigan, on Wednesday night.

As shown in the video below, Lee and Lifeson are waiting for her signal to strike the final chord of the song when she grabs a bag of chips and has a quick snack before offering the bag to the guitarist and bassist.

They decline and she puts down the bag and quickly plays her part in an attempt to catch them off guard. But the seasoned pros aren’t put off and nail the timing.

The prank led one fan to quip in the video comments that Nilles is “all that and a bag of chips.”

Nilles has been pulling similar pranks throughout the tour and a compilation of her best efforts can also be viewed below.

The German drummer, who previously worked with Jeff Beck, came under a lot of scrutiny when it was announced that she would take on the role.

Peart was ranked among the greatest drummers on the planet and Nilles was a relative unknown before being asked to perform with Rush.

She recently told Classic Rock she discussed Peart’s thoughts on music when she met Lee and Lifeson for the first time in Canada.

She said: “I had a few songs prepared before I flew over, and we played those. But during the session we also talked a lot about Neil – about his view on music and drumming.

“We spoke a great deal about the feel of the songs. The most important point is simply to capture the feeling – that it feels right for the two of them to play their music again.

“And ultimately it will feel right for the fans as well. We talked about that a lot. The first session was really about getting to know each other and seeing how we function together.”

Rush: Fifty Something remaining tour dates 2026

Sep 02: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 04: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 12: Boston TD Garden, MA
Sep 14: Boston TD Garden, MA
Sep 17: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 19: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 23: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Sep 25: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Oct 05: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 07: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 10: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 12: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 15: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 17: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 25: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 27: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 30: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 01: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 05: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 07: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 09: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 11: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 20: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 22: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 25: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Nov 27: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Dec 01: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 03: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 10: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 12: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 15: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC
Dec 17: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2027

Jan 15: Buenos Aires Movistar Arena, Argentina
Jan 22: Curitiba Arena da Baixada, Brazil
Jan 24: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 26: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 30: Rio de Janeiro Estádio Olímpico Nilton Santos. Brazil
Feb 01: Belo Horizonte Estádio Mineirão, Brazil
Feb 04: Brasília Arena BRB Mané Garrincha, Brazil
Feb 19: Paris La Défense Arena, France
Feb 21: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Feb 23: Amstersam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Feb 25: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Feb 28: Cologne Lanxess Arena, Germany
Mar 02: Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
Mar 04: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
Mar 08: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 10: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 12: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 14: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 16: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 18: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 21: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 27: Kraków Arena Kraków, Poland
Mar 30: Milan Unipol Dome, Italy
Apr 01: Basel St. Jakobshalle Basel, Switzerland
Apr 04: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Apr 06: Oslo Unity Arena, Norway
Apr 08: Stockholm Avicii Arena, Sweden
Apr 10: Helsinki Veikkaus Arena, Finland

Before Bob Defrin helped create some of the most iconic images in rock history, he first had to figure out what AC/DC looked like. And the answer was standing right in front of him: Angus Young and Bon Scott.

Over the course of four classic albums – Let There Be Rock, Powerage, If You Want Blood You’ve Got It and Highway To Hell – Defrin helped define the visual identity of AC/DC’s golden era. He art-directed the covers, guided the concepts, and even oversaw the creation of the now-iconic AC/DC logo, ultimately designed by Gerard Huerta.

He remembered a grin.

Defrin believed an AC/DC album cover should work exactly like an AC/DC song: “It comes in, hits you over the head and leaves,” he told me. “That’s what the cover should do.”

That philosophy can be seen across Bon’s entire AC/DC run. On Let There Be Rock, Bon stands in the foreground darkness as Angus is bathed in heavenly light. On the back cover of Powerage, he smirks behind a crazed schoolboy. On If You Want Blood You’ve Got It he’s singing along as though there’s nothing unusual about Angus being impaled by his own guitar. By Highway To Hell, Bon leans in, wearing mysterious symbols around his neck and with that familiar smile. The imagery became bigger, bolder and darker as the band’s star rose.

“It was a cartoon,” Defrin said of Highway To Hell. “We were just trying to have a good time.”

That sense of mischief was something he recognised immediately in Bon. The best example came during the If You Want Blood photo shoot in Boston. Defrin had flown in with a photographer, a severed guitar neck and gallons of fake blood. After the concert ended, the band returned to the stage and quickly recreated one of the most famous images in AC/DC history: Angus laying ‘impaled’ by his Gibson SG while blood poured across the scene. Most people remember Angus. Defrin remembers Bon.

“Bon’s expression is perfect,” he recalled. “The way he’s looking at Angus. He was just devilish.”

While Angus occupies the foreground, Bon hovers just behind him wearing a grin that somehow manages to be amused, mischievous and dangerous all at once.

“He was into it,” Defrin said, laughing.

Across Defrin’s covers, Angus was often the spectacle. Bon was the wink. The smirk. The guy quietly letting everyone in on the joke. AC/DC were never really about darkness. It was about mischief.

“Artists who don’t know who they are are the ones who give you trouble,” Defrin said. “AC/DC never had that problem. They knew exactly who they were.”

So did Bon Scott. Long before the world turned Bon into a legend, Defrin had already captured the essence of him.

A devilish smile.