Ain’t No Fun (Waiting ’Round To Be A Millionaire)

Well now Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew has got that long, smoky stretch of blues-rock cooking right here on THE ZOO. We're locked into "Ain’t No Fun (Waiting ’Round To Be A Millionaire)" from AC/DC's Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, and this one runs a full seven minutes and thirty-one seconds of pure grind and swagger. It is one of the longest studio cuts the boys ever put down, and it sits right in the middle of that 1976 album like a late-night confession after the pubs have closed.

The seed for the whole thing came from a letter Bon Scott wrote not long after he signed on with the band. Back in January of 1972 the Scottish-born Ronald Belford Scott had married an Australian woman named Irene Thornton. The pair headed over to the UK with Bon's previous outfit Fraternity, riding on the promise of backing from a well-heeled Adelaide promoter named Hamish Henry. That tour turned into a proper disaster, the band fell apart, and Bon found himself writing home. In a postscript to his brother Graeme he scrawled, "If you can still manage the other $50 I'd love ya f'rever. It's no fun waiting round to be a millionaire!!!" Those exact words stuck with him and later became the title and the heartbeat of this track, written with the Young brothers.

There is a heavy irony hanging over every chorus. Bon Scott left this world in London on the nineteenth of February 1980 at the age of thirty-three, just as AC/DC were starting to break through on a global scale. He was living the life the song describes, holes in his shoes and patches on his jeans, yet the millionaire part was finally within reach. Had he managed to wait around a little longer the royalties and the stadiums would have made him wealthy many times over. The song itself is the story of a working musician leaving the hometown job, heading for the smoke, and betting everything on a rock and roll band and a fast right hand. Nothing is going to stop them, the lyrics insist, even while the narrator admits he cannot get any sleep and his mother is the one keeping the lights on with her nine-to-five.

Near the end Bon drops into a spoken bit that has become legendary among the faithful. He calls out, "Hey Howard, how you doin' baby? Oh yeah, next door neighbor... Get your fuckin' Jumbo Jet out of my airport!" It is a cheeky nod to the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes and the fantasy of living next door to that kind of money while still stuck in the everyday struggle. The track is also one of the rare AC/DC numbers that slips in a full swear word, which only adds to the late-night, no-apologies feel of the whole Dirty Deeds record.

Years later the song took on another life when horror writer Stephen King was putting together the soundtrack for his film Maximum Overdrive. King was a massive AC/DC fan, ranking them right behind Creedence Clearwater Revival in his personal list. He tracked the band down and sang "Ain’t No Fun (Waiting ’Round To Be A Millionaire)" straight through, every verse and every chorus, until they agreed to contribute music. The result was the Who Made Who album, a compromise that mixed older tracks with a couple of new instrumentals and gave the boys a foothold in a different world. It is the kind of story that still gets told whenever the Zoo Crew digs into the deep cuts.

All of that restless energy traces back to how AC/DC themselves got started. Brothers Malcolm and Angus Young had emigrated from Glasgow, Scotland, to Sydney, Australia, with the rest of the family in the early sixties. Their older brother George was already making waves with the Easybeats, so the younger pair grew up around guitars and stages. In November of 1973 Malcolm and Angus put the first version of the band together in Sydney, with early vocalist Dave Evans, bassist Larry Van Kriedt, and drummer Colin Burgess. Their sister Margaret supplied both the name and the look. She spotted the letters AC/DC stamped on the back of her sewing machine and thought it sounded electric; she also suggested Angus wear his school uniform onstage because he looked cute playing guitar in it at home. The lightning-bolt slash came from her as well.

Bon Scott entered the picture in September 1974. He had already fronted the bubblegum outfit the Valentines and the heavier Fraternity, and he had spent time as the band's driver in Adelaide. When Dave Evans refused to go on one night, Bon stepped up, downed a couple of bottles of bourbon, and never looked back. The early years were spent grinding through the toughest pubs in Australia, where the crowds drank hard and the band had to keep the car engine running in case bottles started flying. Producers Harry Vanda and George Young shaped the first albums, High Voltage and T.N.T., before Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap captured the band at full street-level power. The international version of that record finally reached American shelves in 1981 and climbed high on the charts, but the core of the music had already been forged on those long Australian nights.

You can dig deeper into the catalog and the continuing story at the AC/DC official website, where the Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap page still lists "Ain’t No Fun (Waiting Round to Be a Millionaire)" as track seven. The boys keep the voltage flowing on their verified social channels as well: the official Facebook page, the Instagram account, and the X account. For the true believers there is also the long-running public Facebook group AC/DC, one of the largest gathering spots where fans trade stories, photos, and memories of the Bon Scott years right alongside the later lineups.

So crank it a little louder, Zoo Freaks. This is the sound of a band that knew the wait was brutal but refused to quit, a letter from a broke singer that turned into a seven-minute anthem, and the high-voltage rock and roll that still cuts through the static. The Zoo Crew will keep the needle on the deep cuts as long as the Freaks keep listening.