On the road with everyone from AC/DC to Elton John: memories from the world’s first female roadie

By editorial board on August 31, 2022

Drugs, sexism and a proposition from George Harrison: memories from the world’s first female roadie: Tana Douglas reveals what the ‘Wild West’ of rock ‘n’ roll was really like

Loud: A Life in Rock ‘n’ Roll by the World’s First Female Roadie by Tana Douglas is published by HarperCollins on September 15

The first ever female roadie, Douglas was 15 when she ran away from her religious boarding school in Toowoomba, Australia and, after meeting a sound technician at a festival in Sydney, was introduced to AC/DC’s manager, who was canny enough to realise having a female groupie might generate the band publicity.Tana Douglas - The Story of the World's First Rowdy Woman | FUZZ MUSIC

Douglas soon wound up sitting in AC/DC’s living room, becoming not their groupie, but the woman who would keep their show on the road as they became one of the biggest bands in the world. (Telegraph)

For the next 40 years, she learned the intricacies of sound and light engineering, electronics, rigging and scheduling, alongside the perhaps even more delicate art of wrangling rock stars: from Elton John and Ozzy Osbourne to Iggy Pop and Paul McCartney.

“It was the Wild West, you know?” she says of her decades as one of the very few women working in the music industry.

She was subjected to sexist headlines by newspapers (“She does it for the band”), fought off “rabid” female fans who broke into her room to get into the band’s beds (“when she realised there wasn’t a band member in the room she attacked me”), and often had to convince security she wasn’t a groupie just to be able to do her job. Worst of all, she had to navigate the sexual politics alone.Loud (English Edition) eBook : Douglas, Tana: Amazon.it: Kindle Store

Douglas quickly realised that “if you want to survive, you give as good as you get”, learning how to become one of the boys. “I understood very early on that there were different things that I’d be held accountable for,” she says. “I deliberately didn’t wear dresses or makeup or anything like that on days off. I thought it would be sending mixed messages.”

While Douglas and AC/DC’s songwriter Malcolm Young slept together when she was 16, she otherwise avoided relationships with band members. “After that, I decided that I can’t do this. Still to this day, if a male crew member has it off with a member of the band, they’re a hero to the rest of the guys. But if a girl does it, it’s like she’s a gold-digger.”

Still, many tried their luck – mostly married men whose wives were back at home, such as George Harrison and Johnny Hallyday. Harrison abandoned a lapdance from strippers to talk to Douglas, and even proposed to her on the condition she stopped smoking.

“I had no idea how to respond to that and was a little embarrassed,” writes Douglas. When she shrugged him off, she received multiple messages “through a chain of personal assistants”, all of which Douglas rebutted. “Some saw me as a therapist, some as a pal or a buddy, some as a conquest. How could I tell which ones honestly saw me as a long-term partner as opposed to a tour romance?”

 

For the majority of the bands Douglas worked with, a gruelling tour schedule meant that substance abuse – cocaine in particular – was rife. “It was just the era, you know?” she says. “Cocaine was not considered an evil drug. Everyone thought, well, how bad could it be?

Alcohol was something people took to dull their senses. If you do a show, you’ve got to come down from the show and you’ve only got six hours to sleep, someone will down a bottle of Jack Daniels so they can. No one knew about the long-term effects then.” She performed life-saving CPR on AC/DC’s Bon Scott, who later died of alcohol poisoning in 1980, and saw Wings’ Jimmy McCulloch hours before he died of heart failure induced by morphine and alcohol poisoning.

“A lot of production companies would actually supply cocaine because we worked all night,” Douglas says. She kept a stash to get a crew through “a really heavy run of shows, like five shows back-to-back.” But she kept herself in check. “When people were doing it all the time and pretending they weren’t, that’s when it got nasty,” she says.

 

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