From one old rocker to another

We weren’t there but we wanted to be, writes Greg Bruce

For a brief period, as teenagers, we all want to be rock stars — fighting with our band mates and feeling creatively frustrated by our inability to write hit songs in bland luxury hotel rooms while eating yet another plate of room service scampi.

Then we grow up and, realising there’s more to life, we find safe jobs in law and middle management and we learn to appreciate life without endless acid and groupies. It’s not necessarily everything we dreamed of, but at least we can still hear properly and have adequate kidney function.

But part of us still yearns for the opportunities we left behind, and it’s that part of us that the producers of the new series Brian Johnson’s Life on The Road, which started on Prime this week, have attempted to tap.

The theory behind the show is that by putting one rock star in front of another rock star, more wonderful fantasy-fulfilling stories are more likely to emerge than if that rock star were in front of, say, Mike Hosking.

So, one by one, over six weeks, some of the biggest names from some of the biggest rock groups of all time sit down with AC/DC frontman Johnson for a frank chat.

The first episode opens with Johnson driving a Morris Minor to pick up The Who frontman Roger Daltrey from outside the house where Daltrey grew up. They share some banter, wander the neighbourhood, visit a club The Who frequented as kids, then sit down and chat about life on the road.

Finally we’re into it! Sex! Drugs! Rock ’n’ roll! They are addressed in the first episode in reverse order. The rock ’n’ roll, both in terms of the music and the behaviour, was high-quality, generation-defining, often-stupendous. Keith Moon, the band’s drummer, who died at 32, more or less created the modern stereotype of the rock ’n’ roll star with his destructive behaviour, particularly in hotel rooms.

“Some of those hotel rooms needed smashing up,” Daltrey says, in the show’s finest quote.

Moon once reportedly drove a car up two flights of stairs and into a pool at a Holiday Inn. The bill was $58,000, which at the time, Daltrey says, was a lot of money.

The drugs bit is short: Daltrey talks about once meeting Owsley Stanley, known as the king of LSD, who told him to stay away from chemicals, so he did. He’s never even tried cocaine.

What he lacked in drug use, someone in the documentary says, he more than made up for with sex.

We cut to Daltrey telling Johnson about how he would come back to his hotel room and have to clear away all the girls. “You can have too much of a good thing,” he says.

And that’s it for the sex.

There’s talk about music, hearing loss, the stresses of touring. Daltrey talks a bit about Woodstock, not about the debauchery and drunken parties, but about the bad traffic, and how his father-inlaw got him there, skirting around the long tailback of cars by driving off road. Johnson chuckles along and they have a fine old time. It’s less 1960s Hauraki, more 2017 Coast. It’s pretty easy watching, but it’s not especially wild.