Rock history records that Bon Scott played the bagpipes on “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)”. Rock history is technically correct and spiritually incomplete. The truer statement: Bon Scott learned the bagpipes for “It’s a Long Way to the Top”, mid-session, on an instrument bought that afternoon, because correcting his producer’s mistaken memory would have been less fun than living up to it.
George Young’s imperfect recollection
The song came together in 1975 during the T.N.T. sessions in Sydney, under the production team of Harry Vanda and George Young — elder brother of Angus and Malcolm, and the band’s de facto architect. Kicking around ideas for the track’s grinding, marching drone, George recalled that Bon had been in a pipe band back in the day and suggested bagpipes.
It was a half-memory. Bon — born in Kirriemuir, Scotland, raised in Fremantle — had indeed marched with a pipe band as a kid. As the band’s associates later confirmed, he’d been its drummer; he had never played the pipes in his life. Presented with a producer’s confident error and a chance at mischief, Bon did the most Bon thing imaginable: he said nothing to derail it, went out to a Park Street music shop, and came back with a full set of bagpipes for AU$479 — serious money in 1975 — and started teaching himself on the spot.
Learning in public
Anyone who has heard a beginner on the Great Highland bagpipe understands the scale of the bluff. The instrument fights back: constant air pressure, a chanter with baffling fingering, drones that punish imprecision. Bon wrestled it well enough, with tape loops assisting where his lung-and-finger coordination ran out, to get the parts on tape — and the result became the track’s signature: pipes trading call-and-response with Angus’s guitar over that relentless boogie, the drone welded to the riff as though the two traditions had always been one.
Released as the opening track of T.N.T. in December 1975, the song turned an absurd studio gamble into the band’s mission statement — a weary, hilarious, utterly sincere catalogue of the touring musician’s lot that has served as Australian rock’s unofficial anthem ever since. Live, Bon marched the pipes across stages with a showman’s delight, milking the sight gag of rock’s dirtiest frontman armed with Scotland’s most respectable instrument.
The song around the pipes deserves its own salute, because the gimmick would be a footnote if the track beneath it weren’t a masterpiece of self-description. “It’s a Long Way to the Top” is the rare rock anthem with an accurate job description in it — the ripped-off nights, the underpaid promoters, the grind dressed up as glory — delivered by a man who had spent ten years living every line before anyone paid to hear him complain about it. The pipes work precisely because they sound like effort: strained, human, slightly absurd, refusing to quit. It is the sound of the lyric.
Why the story is so perfectly Bon
Plenty of rock legends involve musicians overstating their skills. This one inverts the formula: a producer overstated Bon’s skills for him, and Bon simply refused to let the truth spoil a good idea. It’s the whole man in one anecdote — the chancer’s nerve, the grafter’s follow-through, and the total absence of preciousness about method. Where other singers of his stature protected their mystique, Bon’s charm was that he never pretended the job was magic: you bought the pipes, you squeezed the bag, you found out.
There’s also something fitting in the biographical loop. The Scottish boy who’d emigrated at six, drummed in a Fremantle pipe band, and spent a decade grinding through Australian bands finally hit the world’s ears fronting a song about how long that grind takes — while playing, badly and gloriously, the instrument of the country he’d left. The pipes on “It’s a Long Way to the Top” aren’t ornamentation. They’re autobiography with a chanter.
The instrument itself passed into relic status — the famous Namur-to-Fremantle trail of AC/DC pilgrimage sites includes more than one set of pipes claimed, with varying credibility, to be the pipes — and the live footage of Bon marching them through “Long Way” remains among the most rewatched AC/DC film in existence, part rock show, part Highland games, entirely him.
The band never performed the song live again after Bon’s death — the pipes retired with the piper, an honour no committee had to vote on. Fifty years on, the drone still opens the T.N.T. album and still stops rooms — surely the highest chart position any set of hastily purchased pipes has ever achieved — and the lesson still stands for every musician handed a job beyond their credentials: sometimes the correct answer to “you can play this, right?” is to go buy the instrument and make it true by Friday.
