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Drugs, sexism and a proposition from George Harrison: memories from the world’s first female roadie

Tana Douglas was just 15 when she ran away from home and became AC/DC's roadie - Rockpalast
Tana Douglas was just 15 when she ran away from home and became AC/DC's roadie - Rockpalast

Bumping into the Queen at Windsor Castle while trying to stop Princess Margaret lighting up with a truck driver; stealing lines of cocaine off David Bowie and house-sitting David Essex’s mansion are just a handful of the extraordinary stories Tana Douglas tells in her memoir, Loud.

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. 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.

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.

Now 64 and living in Los Angeles, Douglas appears over Zoom against a wall of platinum records, her white dreadlocks piled elaborately on top of her head. “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.

Tana Douglas worked with the band Status Quo, here pictured with their crew
Tana Douglas worked with the band Status Quo, here pictured with their crew

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?”

Loud is no diatribe, however. Instead, Douglas offers a compassionate look at rockstars beyond the limelight, revealing most of them to be pressured young men looking for a good time. Though their behaviour was wrong, their intentions were often not. She writes humorously about how Francis Rossi’s idea of a joke was to demand a new guitar pick while performing with Status Quo. Douglas went rummaging in the pocket of the guitar tech, only to find her hands forced into the side vents of his costume, under which he wore no underwear. Recalling the story, Douglas hoots with laughter. “I was mortified! I was just so embarrassed! But I got off the hook quite easily, really. I was so naive, and it wasn’t coming from a bad place. They just wanted to wind me up.” She does admit, however, that if such a stunt happened today “it would probably end up in court”.

Tana Douglas with AC/DC's Bon Scott
Tana Douglas with AC/DC's Bon Scott

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.

Douglas tells me she never got star-struck, but gravitated towards “people who were down to earth”. She enjoyed doing the newspaper crossword with Deep Purple’s Jon Lord as much as she relished the 72-hour parties with Wings. Her greatest birthday present was a life-size plastic HMV dog, bestowed upon her by Iggy Pop after she turned 21, more to irritate his label than make her happy. She refuses to name the bands whose riders included “a certain number of good-looking girls or a certain amount of cocaine”, but admits the latter was always fun, because the crew would look for a hit before the show. “If it’s free, what else are you going to do!”

Tana Douglas wrote her memoir to make sense of her chaotic time on the road - Lisa Johnson
Tana Douglas wrote her memoir to make sense of her chaotic time on the road - Lisa Johnson

Between all the raucous parties and trashed hotel rooms, quiet tragedy ripples through Loud. Douglas hid an accidental pregnancy from her crew mates, and never properly reconciled with her estranged son. After the millennium, she was so fed up with the industry she gave her priceless collection of tour jackets to the homeless population of Venice Beach. She set up her own international production company before retiring.

But it was, she says, all worth it. “Writing the book put it all in perspective, because I was at a point where I thought, ‘Did I waste my life? Should I have done something else? But I think I did the right thing. I don’t know how else I would have got out of that childhood situation that I just ran from. I got to see the world, I got to meet amazing people. I got to learn a career. I don’t think an easy life was ever on the cards for me.”


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