by Fink, Jesse
What is it about AC/DC’s music that is so regenerative and restorative? That transmits that power to make us change the way we feel, alter our outlook, give us the strength we need to get through our darkest moments?
There’s even a tour operator in Port Lincoln, South Australia, who’s found that playing AC/DC to sharks attracts them like no other music. Matt Waller told Melbourne’s Herald Sun: “We know AC/DC’s music works best by trial and error … I’ve seen the sharks rub their faces on the cage where the sound is coming from, as if to feel it.”
The answers to these questions, whatever they are, strike at the heart of what makes the Youngs’ music exceptional.
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And it all began with the brother who rarely shows his face in public.
George Young, who turned 68 in 2014, stopped playing on his own records with Flash and the Pan, another project with longtime writing and producing partner Harry Vanda, in 1992. He has kept his hand in with production, most recently helming AC/DC’s Stiff Upper Lip in 2000 to add to the music he co-produced for the band with Vanda between 1974 and 1978 and again in the late 1980s. Most famous as rhythm guitarist for The Easybeats, he was also co-producer with Vanda for Rose Tattoo and The Angels (aka Angel City), and co-wrote with Vanda songs such as The Easybeats’ “Friday on My Mind” and “Good Times,” Stevie Wright’s “Evie,” John Paul Young’s “Love Is in the Air” and Flash and the Pan’s “Hey St. Peter,” “Down Among the Dead Men,” “Walking in the Rain” (covered by Grace Jones) and “Ayla,” the latter memorably and erotically used for a dance scene in the Monica Bellucci movie How Much Do You Love Me?. The sight of Bellucci gyrating to it is not a memory easily erased.
“I keep many records at home and I try various pieces of music as I work on my films, which sometimes throws up surprises,” says the film’s director, Bertrand Blier. “I like ‘Ayla’ very much.”
George is the “sixth member” of AC/DC, the leader, the coach, the stand-in bass player, drummer, backup singer, mimic, percussionist, composer, business manager and svengali. AC/DC is as much his band as it is Angus’s and Malcolm’s.
Anthony O’Grady, Bon Scott’s friend and founding editor of the 1970s Australian music newspaper RAM, spent several days on the road with AC/DC throughout 1975–76. When we meet in Sydney’s Darlinghurst he’s wearing a newly minted replica of AC/DC’s first T-shirt, circa 1974, on which the band’s name had been daubed in white house paint.
“George used everything he’d learned—mostly to his detriment—from The Easybeats,” he says. “It’s one of those stories about, ‘You can be in a band that has an international hit and end up in crippling debt. This time is going to be different.’ And it was. He would like to have done it himself, I’m sure. But, by God, he certainly programmed Malcolm and Angus to do it without surrendering control to record companies, management or agencies.
“Don’t deviate. That’s what he drilled into Malcolm. Angus was the electricity and George and Malcolm were the power station. They directed the flow. And they were never distracted by musicianship. A number of times Malcolm has said to me, ‘Angus can play some really clever jazz stuff, but we don’t want him to play really clever jazz stuff.’”
As for George’s two younger brothers in AC/DC—Angus, lead guitarist, who turned 59 in 2014 and Malcolm, rhythm guitarist, who turned 61—not much needs to be said. They are so recognized, so adored all over the world that they are almost above introduction, having come up with some of the best songs and most memorable guitar riffs in rock. It’s impossible to separate them. They are, as they are with their guitars, utterly symbiotic while dedicated to very specific roles. It wasn’t always so. They started out trying to outgun each other, according to AC/DC’s original singer, Dave Evans.
“They always had a healthy rivalry between them on stage,” he says. “In the beginning both Malcolm and Angus played lead and the duels on stage were great to witness as they would go head to head and try to outdo each other. Angus was finally given the sole responsibility of the lead guitar and he relished it. The early songs especially have so much energy and that never diminishes.”
Indisputably, Angus is the star. The “atomic microbe,” as Albert Productions, or Alberts, AC/DC’s Australian record company, once described him in a print ad in the American music press. A diminutive talent so freakish and whose “crunchy, humbucker-driven sound” is so distinctive Australian Guitar magazine anointed him the best guitar player Australia has ever produced.
As a showman he is almost without peer, one of the most enduring live attractions in rock ’n’ roll. David Lewis, music writer for the late British music newspaper Sounds, evocatively described Angus’s “frenzied schoolboy lunacy as he traverses the stage, making Chuck Berry’s duckwalk look like a paraplegic’s hobble and oozing sweat, snot and slime like some grotesque human sponge being savagely squeezed by the intensity of his own guitar playing.”
Or as Bernard McGovern said in the London newspaper The Daily Express in 1976: “Angus is not a schoolkid but a crazy Scots rocker. His onstage antics … include throwing tantrums, smashing things, tearing up school jotters, smoking, ripping bits off his school uniform and tossing them into the audience, falling down and skinning his knees, sticking pins through voodoo effigies of teachers, and playing a very effective rock ’n’ roll guitar while lying on his back shrieking and kicking.”
Lisa Tanner, a former Atlantic Records staff photographer who contributed some exceptional AC/DC images from the 1970s and ’80s to this book, remembers Angus putting so much into his performances that he would literally vomit.
“After or during the first song of the set he would come offstage and hang his head in a trash can and puke while still playing guitar,” she says. “The first time I saw him do it I was with [Atlantic Records promotion executive] Perry Cooper and I was like, ‘Is he okay?’ Perry replied, ‘Yeah, he does that every show.’”
Even today, though quietened down by age and creaking joints, in televised interviews there remains something almost child-like about Angus. His dedication to practicing and playing his guitar has been the obsessive habit of a lifetime, according to O’Grady: “He was the precocious kid. He could express himself on guitar far better than he could express himself through schoolwork or language, and he was encouraged to do so. [It was always a case of:] ‘Don’t bother Angus; just let him play.’”
Says David Mallet, who has directed AC/DC’s videos and concerts since 1986: “Pink Floyd is about a spectacle. Each song, each number in concert has a different type of spectacle. AC/DC is about the same spectacle every time. Called Angus Young.”
But it’s the middle brother who is the king of AC/DC. And he’s not a benevolent one. Mark Evans, the band’s bass player from 1975 to 1977, described Malcolm rather unflatteringly in his autobiography, Dirty Deeds: My Life Inside/Outside of AC/DC, as “the driven one … the planner, the schemer, the ‘behind the scenes guy,’ ruthless and astute.”
A description not far off an early Atlantic Records press release but for an important rider: “Not only is he a great guitarist and songwriter, but also a person with vision—he is the planner in AC/DC. He is also the quiet one, deep and intensely aware. This, coupled with his good looks, makes him an extremely popular member of AC/DC.”
Curiously, none of the other band members had their physical appearance appraised.
Malcolm is the brother who calls all the shots, who directs the band and drives the rhythm. Even when private issues have forced him to stop playing, AC/DC remains his band.
“Malcolm and Angus were brought up in an environment where George was a massive pop and rock star,” explains Evans, now a little thinner on top in his 58th year but still fit and as handsome as he ever was, over a coffee in Sydney’s Annandale. If anyone had the good looks in AC/DC it was Evans. “It’s not a big jump for them to think we’ll put a band together and take it overseas. It wasn’t like a dream, ‘I want to go and play for Glasgow Rangers’ or someth
ing. The dream was inside his house. It was a tangible thing. Malcolm picked up a lot from George. George and Malcolm are very similar in a lot of ways. Although I do believe Malcolm is the most driven of the lot of them.
“One of the things that’s amazed me over the years is that Angus and Malcolm, not so much George, are portrayed as not being all that sharp—maybe because it’s their persona. But, man. I haven’t met too many guys in my life that have been sharper than Malcolm.”
Where his younger brother duckwalks, moons, spins and does whatever the hell he pleases, Malcolm, stiff and twitchy, immovable as a menhir, can be relied upon to stay anchored down the back of the stage in front of the Marshall stack.
“Live, they put on a great show but it’s not flash,” says their longtime engineer, Mike Fraser. “It’s amazing for me. You sit there and watch Malcolm play. He’s actually leading that whole band from standing there beside the drums. Everyone watches him for the cutoffs. ‘Let’s do another round.’ He’s got all these little nods. Little flicks of his hand. Everybody’s got their eyes on him. Even Angus, as he’s flying around, flipping around backward. He’s watching Mal for everything. It’s quite awesome to watch.”
John Swan, a fellow Scot, venerable rock figure in Australia, one-time singer with Bon Scott’s old band Fraternity and to this day a close confidant of the Young family, agrees: “Everybody looks at Angus as being the man, but for me, Malcolm’s the man. Take ‘Live Wire.’ He’ll play the chords in that song and the dynamics he uses all the way through are really quite brilliant. And he’ll change one little pattern. Rhythm players play it and then play that same pattern over. He’ll change that one thing that’s so subtle you have to be a fan of Malcolm’s playing to be able to get into what he’s actually done there. It’s that one little piece that’s different that makes it rock just that bit more and makes the musician who’s listening to it love it a bit more. He and Keith Richards are the best rhythm players in the world.”
ZZ Top and Led Zeppelin engineer Terry Manning, co-owner with Chris Blackwell of Compass Point Studios in The Bahamas, where Back in Black was recorded, goes further, contending that the only comparable rhythm players are Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple and blues legend Steve Cropper, “but when you look at just distilling the essence of rhythm guitar I think Malcolm has it better than anybody.”
Together, though, they don’t need to be compared to anyone. The light strings of Angus’s slim-necked Gibson SG and the heavy-gauge strings of Malcolm’s Gretsch Firebird manage the seemingly paradoxical feat of being a single force yet remain remarkably distinct. No other pair does what they do as well as they do. They are inextricable.
So much so that Joe Matera, an Australian rock guitarist and internationally published guitar journalist for magazines such as Classic Rock and Guitar & Bass, says they would cease to be effective if separated.
“It is a chemistry where one needs the other and vice-versa for it to have such an explosive sonic effect,” he argues. “It’s such a strong combination that without the other, the result would be most non-effective.”
Georg Dolivo, lead singer of California rockers Rhino Bucket, the one band among a rash of imitators that has probably got closest to the sound of Powerage-era AC/DC and which even had ex-AC/DC drummer Simon Wright play with them for a time, tells me: “The interplay between the guitars and the bass and drums is second to none. Every note counts. Angus and Malcolm both play off each other so well that it almost sounds like one massive wall of power.”
Joel O’Keeffe, frontman and lead guitarist for Airbourne, a group that live is about as close to AC/DC at the Glasgow Apollo in 1978 as it is possible to get, explains the AC/DC sound as a process of reduction and austerity: “It’s as much what the Youngs don’t do as what they do. It’s those precision-timed spaces in the riff, like the small space after the first three A chords in ‘Highway to Hell,’ or the ‘ANGUS!’ chant space in ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’ that makes the hairs stand on edge. And when they’re both in it’s not just two guitars, it’s guitars to the power of.”
“The Young brothers are two of the best guitar players I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with,” says Fraser. “Not only are they talented, they are very hard workers as well. In the studio they know exactly how to play dynamically to make the song rock. This is often hard to do in a studio, as the atmosphere can sometimes be clinical and uninspiring. It is tough to play in the studio with the intensity you would when playing live, but to make a great record that’s exactly what you have to do. Malcolm and Angus have that ability down to a tee. It’s truly remarkable to witness.”
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Scores of bands, with varying degrees of success, have tried to replicate part of the sound and “no bullshit” ethos of AC/DC: Guns N’ Roses, The Cult, Airbourne, The Answer, Mötley Crüe, Krokus, Kix, The Four Horsemen, The Poor, Dynamite, Hardbone, Heaven, ’77, Starfighters, Accept, Rhino Bucket, Jet, the hard-rockin’ and French aristocrat-dressin’ The Upper Crust and more. Many indulge in pastiche. Then there are the straight ripoffs. Listen to “Dr. Feelgood” by Mötley Crüe against AC/DC’s “Night of the Long Knives” off For Those About to Rock (We Salute You). Or David Lee Roth’s “Just Like Paradise” against “Breaking the Rules” off the same album. Or The Cult’s “Wild Flower” against “Rock ’n’ Roll Singer” off TNT.
Not that AC/DC didn’t consciously or subconsciously pinch from others when it suited them earlier in their career. ZZ Top’s “Jesus Just Left Chicago” is all over “Ride On” and Them’s “Gloria” (covered by Bon Scott with his first band, The Spektors, in 1965) forms the basis for “Jailbreak,” both songs off the original Australian release of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. Illinois band Head East’s middling 1975 hit “Never Been Any Reason,” written by guitarist Mike Somerville, also informs—if that’s a polite way to put it—1980’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Intriguingly, AC/DC supported Head East for one show at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee in August 1977.
But they still make everything they do their own. As Tony Platt, mixing engineer of Highway to Hell, recording engineer of Back in Black and co-producer of Flick of the Switch told me from London: “You wouldn’t believe how many AC/DC-sounding bands came along after Back in Black was successful, wanting me to work with them. When someone says, ‘Can you get me Angus Young’s guitar sound?’ the only answer I can give is, ‘Yeah, of course I can, but first of all we’re going to need a vintage Marshall cabinet, a vintage Marshall head, a Gibson SG and, of course, don’t forget we’ll need Angus.’
“You do get quite a lot of bands, especially in the rock genre, where the idea of being a rock musician is a little bit more important than getting it right. Whereas these guys were, ‘Let’s get this right, let’s make sure it’s the best that it can be and if we get to be rock stars afterward so much the better.’”
Fraser, who’s engineered Aerosmith, Metallica, Van Halen, The Cult and Airbourne, agrees the task of matching up to the Youngs is futile: “While there are bands that certainly may have borrowed elements from AC/DC’s sound, I would say AC/DC’s powerful simplicity would be difficult to replicate. A lot of bands will double their guitar parts to try to make them sound big and fat. The end result, as good as it may be, will be a different sound to AC/DC.”
Terry Manning, who shaped the sound of Rhino Bucket and The Angels, knows all too well the danger of too much hero worship. He was offered the chance to produce what became the Who Made Who sessions (recorded at Compass Point) by AC/DC’s then managers, Steve Barnett and Stewart Young, but due to a scheduling clash with Fastway at Abbey Road could not commit.
“I was forced to turn that down. I will always regret that,” he says. “No one has ever completely duplicated the AC/DC ethos. Nor should they. A good artist can certainly borrow elements, or be even heavily influenced, but somewhere along the line they must make it their own, put their own personal style and stamp on the music. I know with both Rhino Bucket and The Angels I kept this in m
ind at all times: never clone, but do not hesitate to accept influence. And always help the artist to be the best of themselves that they can be at that moment.”
Manning has never worked with AC/DC but they’ve been a boon to his business and the economy of The Bahamas. Compass Point was booked solid for years by all sorts of rock bands hoping some Back in Black magic would rub off on them.
“How can it possibly hurt to have what will end up being the biggest selling album of all time recorded under your banner? It had to inspire people: Anthrax recorded at Compass Point, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest.”
* * *
There’s a good reason why a band that has sold over 200 million records yet slowed it down only once or twice over a 40-year period became the biggest in the world while others that looked like they might claim the mantle—Guns N’ Roses chief among them, whom the late Danny Sugerman, The Doors’ former manager, praised in his eccentric biography, Appetite for Destruction: The Days of Guns N’ Roses, for “their devotion to the ecstatic omnipotent state of rocking” and in conjuring “the raging sound of Dionysus resurfacing”—fell away into artistic redundancy and ongoing acrimony.
The “Gunners,” led by Axl Rose, had a lot of similar qualities to AC/DC: authenticity, vision, gang mentality, a sound pretty much their own that wasn’t going to be fucked with by anyone and an almost feral hostility to the world and outsiders. They covered “Whole Lotta Rosie”—astonishingly well—in their prime. They played “Back in Black” over the PA in some of their shows. But they didn’t have the juice in the tank to last the distance. AC/DC didn’t allow the partying, drugs, sex and money to affect the music.
Matt Sorum of Guns N’ Roses and later The Cult and Velvet Revolver believes AC/DC has something special “that starts with the Young brothers’ classic riffs and below-the-waist grooves … they know when to play and when not to.”
