by Fink, Jesse
“Less is more with AC/DC,” he says. “Always supporting the song is the message. The power is in the simplicity and it is subliminal in tone. Not much distortion on the guitars. The low end of the bass and groove make it swing. Each member has a job to do which makes that work perfectly. It’s that old expression of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.’ Working-class boogie rock ’n’ roll at its best. Guys dig it and girls love to dance to it. Hearing great bands go back to their roots is always refreshing. I wish more great rock bands stuck to their instinct and weren’t wavered by trends.”
This coming from a man who played all those repetitive fills on “November Rain” (one of Rose’s ideas, according to Sorum). He should know. Guns N’ Roses’ detour into pompous balladry was really the beginning of the end for the most exciting rock band since AC/DC. Apart from the egregious miscalculation of “Love Song” in 1975, AC/DC has never done an out-and-out ballad. They just come up with flat-out rock songs anchored in feel, melody and groove. A perfect alchemy—like AC/DC’s other holy trinity of guitar, drum and bass—that anyone can understand and to which we all respond by rocking, a state Sugerman cannily describes as an “impulse every bit as instinctual as a child putting his finger in the fan.”
“I think playing in The Cult was the closest I came to playing an AC/DC style,” continues Sorum. “Songs like ‘Wild Flower’ and ‘Lil’ Devil’ I would always think of Phil Rudd in my approach. Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver always looked to all the great bands as influences, AC/DC at the top of the list. But at the same time we were trying to do our own thing.”
Rob Riley, the Falstaff of Australian rock and a man Mark Evans anoints as Australia’s greatest living guitarist (no small praise considering he played in concert and in the studio with Angus and Malcolm), is an avowed fan of the Youngs: “Most people can understand AC/DC. It’s not fucking complicated. It’s people friendly. You don’t have to be a fucking fantastic musician to get your head around it. It just rocks. And they were and still are the exponents of rock. It makes me tap my foot and bang my head.”
Says Stevie Young, the Youngs’ nephew and the only man at time of writing who has ever taken Malcolm’s place on stage: “They’re honest about what they do. That’s why they’re a great band.”
* * *
But that is still not enough for some people.
The critics, especially in the United States, long ago would have preferred these rough-looking, guitar-slinging homunculi crawled back under the Gorbals rock from whence they’d sprung.
Robert Hilburn is one. The Johnny Cash biographer and rock writer for the Los Angeles Times from 1970 to 2005 once cut them viciously: “Someone ought to pull the plug on AC/DC.” But when contacted for this book he shows some remorse.
“The review was a live show and I must have been disappointed by it,” he says. “I felt the band was slipping or something—because I wasn’t an anti-AC/DC critic. I had written approvingly of them before and have them—in my mental list of bands—on the positive side, though they were in no way on my top shelf, which was reserved for bands that had more literary sensibilities and uplifting messages: The Band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, U2, Nirvana, The Replacements, Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails, REM, The White Stripes and Arcade Fire.
“Every artist or band that I’d call truly great in rock history has pushed boundaries because the artist and/or band should reflect life’s experience, and life changes as time goes by. The music should reflect those changes. Their curiosity as musicians, for instance, should lead to opening new doors—look what The Beatles and U2 did in that sense: The Beatles going from ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ to Sgt. Pepper’s, U2 going from The Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby. Similarly, the lyrics and themes should change to reflect new ideas and emotions.
“AC/DC deserves credit, most certainly, for not simply recycling its music; it didn’t just play the same record or song over and over again, like lots of big commercial forces. But I think the group’s history would have been better served if they moved from their early energy and fun to something more substantial … as it is, they are a band you think of fondly, but don’t hold in awe—a band of its time, so to speak, rather than a band of the ages.”
Dave Evans concurs with Hilburn. He claims he’s never owned an AC/DC record since splitting with the band—and is perhaps well entitled to have completely turned his back on them, given the treatment he received when he was sacked in 1974 and the disparaging comments made about him since then by the Youngs. The fact is, though, he has a healthy career out of his association with the band and plays it up for all it is worth.
“They have kept to the original and unmistakable AC/DC simple sound and it’s amazing that it has been so popular for so long,” he says. “I like music to give me different feels and messages even though the band will still have its own style. It’s like rap, which is the same-old, same-old but is highly popular, and hip-hop, which all sounds the same to me and is also huge. I don’t understand it. Being an avid Beatles fan, what I loved about them was that they kept evolving and exploring music and feels and took the whole world for a fantastic musical ride with them and influenced so many bands and their audiences too with new and exciting sounds without losing The Beatles sound. Whatever it is, AC/DC is the most popular rock band in the world today.”
In 1976, the year a repackaged High Voltage featuring the killer chugalong single “It’s a Long Way to the Top” hit American record stores, Rolling Stone’s Billy Altman slagged off AC/DC as “Australian gross-out champions” who had “nothing to say musically (two guitars, bass and drums all goose-stepping together in mindless three-chord formations)” and a singer, Scott, who “spits out his vocals with a truly annoying aggression which, I suppose, is the only way to do it when all you seem to care about is being a star so that you can get laid every night. And that, friends, comprises the sum total of themes discussed on this record. Stupidity bothers me. Calculated stupidity offends me.”
Altman, still a music journalist but now also a teacher in the Humanities Department of the School of Visual Arts in New York, doesn’t back down when I ask him if he thinks he was too tough on the Australian band.
“I didn’t think I was being tough,” he says. “Just doing my job. And in the context of 1976, that is exactly how they struck me. So, yes, I’d certainly stick by what I wrote—at the time.” He then proffers a review he wrote of Stiff Upper Lip for MTV/VH1’s website in 2000 as an example of coming to the party. “It’s all a matter of perspective, yes?”
Once feral against AC/DC, the American music press has come to begrudgingly accept that this band won’t go away and started to tolerate its existence, even given praise to albums that really aren’t a patch on the product they mercilessly slagged in the 1970s and early ’80s. Damn the good stuff. Praise the crap: Stiff Upper Lip is one example. Black Ice another.
Altman’s new review was hardly a music critic’s mea culpa, though he’d managed to detect that Angus could play guitar a bit. A degree of contempt for AC/DC is still there, but it’s disguised through caveman metaphor (“pointy little arrested-development heads”) and intellectual ridicule (“recalcitrant yokels”).
What was once “calculated stupidity,” Altman now recasts as “organic rock … as in two-guitars-bass-drums, verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-verse-chorus-chorus, screaming banshee-vocals, stoopid lyrics, riffs-from-Stonehenge rock.” AC/DC, he posits, “can now probably lay claim to the title of longest playing broken record in the entire history of rock. All their songs sound the same—yes!—and what a damn good song it’s been.”
The same begrudging charity didn’t extend to “It’s a Long Way to the Top,” one of the greatest rock songs of all time, when it mattered. Not nearly enough, way too late.
Like most critics, Altman and, to a lesser degree, Hilburn just don’t recognize the cleverness of AC/DC.
It’s a shame that Angus never cut a jazz or blues record
, sure. But AC/DC is not in the music business for the purpose of pushing boundaries, even though that’s what they do so well by not giving in to trends and fashion. It’s a primal thing. Catchy hooks and boogie rhythms are essential for primal music. But primal doesn’t sit well with critics.
Clive Bennett in The Times used the very same word in a review of one of AC/DC’s shows at the Hammersmith Odeon in late 1976: “My objections are to their music, not their words, which simply express without inhibitions what most of us have discussed innumerable times with equal frankness in private. Music of any sort must surely require more from performers than just the capacity to mindlessly bash their instruments into oblivion. It is in this primal state that AC/DC exist.”
So. The. Fuck. What.
Says Tony Platt: “If you manage to strike the seam of that, the last thing you want to do is go messing it up or covering it up or confusing it by dressing it up in any different way. You’ve got to keep returning to that really raw, primal core. The critics are not really understanding the essence of AC/DC; what’s at the core of the music.”
Mike Fraser also shares that opinion.
“As long as I have known the band, they have always played their music as they wanted to do and are never worried about what critics think. As Angus once said to me: ‘We play music that we like and want to play. If the fans like it and want to buy it, that’s just a bonus.’ So I think it is very important to the boys to do work in a vein they love. In all of the records they’ve done, they have never done a song trying to keep up to an era or fad. No keyboards, no disco beats, no horn sections. When you buy an AC/DC record you know what you’re getting and I agree with your argument: this is really them pushing a boundary. And I think only AC/DC can pull it off because they never get boring to listen to. Who could get bored of the passion they play with?”
Their hundreds of millions of fans don’t, as Angus once pointed out.
“We’ve got the basic thing kids want. They want to rock and that’s it. They want to be a part of the band as a mass. When you hit a guitar chord, a lot of the kids in the audience are hitting it with you. They’re so much into the band they’re going through all the motions with you. If you can get the mass to react as a whole, then that’s the ideal thing. That’s what a lot of bands lack, and why the critics are wrong.”
Says John Swan: “I don’t think AC/DC are capable of changing their format because they have no desire to. It’s a work in progress. As long as my arse points toward the floor, AC/DC will be AC/DC and they will never be anything else.”
It’s really as simple as that.
* * *
One man who understands what AC/DC are about, Sounds journalist and later band biographer Phil Sutcliffe, wrote in 1976: “The rhythms hit your heart like a trip-hammer … the two Youngs’ music is like a forge in a black night, beating heat and energy together into something almost beautiful it’s so strong.”
There’s an exceptional passage in Mark Evans’s Dirty Deeds, to this day the only autobiography written by a member of AC/DC, which perfectly conjures the palpable, totally unique energy of the band. They’d arrived in London in 1976 after packing pubs in Sydney and hadn’t played for a month. The five members—Angus Young, Malcolm Young, Mark Evans, Bon Scott and Phil Rudd—were busting to play and landed a booking at the Red Cow in Hammersmith. A free gig in a tiny pub in front of maybe 30 punters, soon to be blown away.
“We opened with ‘Live Wire,’” Evans remembers. “My bass intro drifted in the air, Mal’s ominous guitar chords joined in, Phil’s hi-hat cymbals tapped away and then the song exploded when Angus and the drums absolutely fucking erupted. I felt like I was lifted off the ground, it was that powerful. It just sounded so much like AC/DC. That may seem a ridiculous thing to say, but we hadn’t played a gig for ages and we were ready to make a statement. There was that great feeling of power; not the chaotic, noisy, out-of-control power that is very common in bands, but the AC/DC brand of power. Loud, clean, deep, menacing and full of rhythm. We were back and firing and Bon hadn’t even opened his trap yet.”
Evans was lifted off the ground. That’s what the music of AC/DC is supposed to do—and he was playing it.
Says Barry Diament, who mastered a suite of their albums for compact disc: “I think it is precisely in the relative simplicity of the music that Malcolm and Angus achieved the power of their music. I’d use the word ‘primitive,’ not in any pejorative sense but as a positive attribute, describing the rawness I hear in their music. It is an ‘in the gut’ experience the listener can feel immediately.”
* * *
There’s nothing wrong in what AC/DC does or with the music they make. They’ve just been victims of lazy journalism and, at a base level, class prejudice. The music of the Youngs, and more generally, rock ’n’ roll, deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as any great painting, book or example of architecture, because it is a form of art—which I would define as any craft elevated to another plane because of skill, creativity, talent and imagination—that makes you feel alive. That it is considered lowbrow, beneath serious appreciation, because so many of AC/DC’s devotees get around in black T-shirts, drink cheap beer and buy their CDs at Walmart, is contemptuous bullshit. No other act on the planet has brought as much good music into stadiums, arenas, bars, cars, truck stops, nightclubs, strip clubs, bedrooms, living rooms and sports fields than AC/DC.
Says Phil Jamieson of Grinspoon, who performed on the remake of the Vanda & Young song “Evie” in 2004 to raise funds for victims of the Boxing Day tsunami: “The Youngs are tenacious. They don’t lie down. Among the great hits, the great songs, it’s their ability to just get up without any sort of embellishment, plastic surgery, strobe lights, smoke machines—they don’t need any of that. They just need four amplifiers, a voice and a drum kit. That’s what makes me adore them. They don’t play the backing tape. This is a true rock ’n’ roll band. Nothing really beats it, in my opinion, when you witness something that powerful. That’s what it does for me. It makes every guy with a guitar amp and a drummer and a mate believe maybe they can do it. It’s not defined by people that go to music conservatoriums and can read sheet music; it’s for everyone.”
“As a rock producer you’re looking for the human reaction,” says Mark Opitz, engineer on Let There Be Rock and Powerage. “The emotional reaction. The connection. Lyrics are incredibly important but melody and rhythm, that’s the secret. It makes you dance. It’s a release of energy. It keeps you going. The tempo’s perfect for your heartbeat in most cases. It doesn’t push you too far, not like thrash. It’s got intensity. It’s got that fucking ‘heart feel’ rhythm. And by dance I don’t mean dancing. I mean moving. Stamping your foot like an African. Just moving side to side. Nodding your head. That’s ‘guy dancing.’ That’s testosterone being put out. When you add all that together that’s what happens from it. What is the chemical reaction in the brain that adds it all up? I’m not quite sure. But I know what the result is. Melody and rhythm.”
Tony Platt agrees with the thrust of Opitz’s hypothesis but makes an important observation: AC/DC’s music is also steeped in humor, joy and light.
“There’s a lot to be said for this notion that it’s the resonances of our own body. It’s something that gets the endorphins going. It’s the same as drinking a nice glass of wine or going and doing exercise. It gets right to the core of you and lifts you. AC/DC’s music is not depressing music. It’s fun. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. You take, for instance, Iron Maiden. One of the things I’ve always found quite bizarre about Iron Maiden is how seriously they take themselves, for starters. It’s very difficult to stop laughing some of the time. Their fans take it really, really deadly seriously as well.
“And then there are a lot of those kind of darker heavy-metal bands. You look at how many of those darker heavy-metal bands have had accusations that they’ve been the catalyst that’s caused some poor young adolescent to end his life, and there have been lots and l
ots of circumstances like that. There is music that has this darkness at its heart. AC/DC’s music doesn’t have that darkness at its heart. It doesn’t take itself too seriously but, by the same token, it’s going to make you jump about a bit.”
There is some credit to that argument, but it has holes. No one could ever claim AC/DC advocated violence, but their disingenuous explanation in the wake of the Richard Ramirez “Night Stalker” murders in the mid 1980s that “Night Prowler” off Highway to Hell was just about a bloke sneaking into his girlfriend’s bedroom in the middle of the night convinced very few people. As Joe Bonomo writes in Highway to Hell, his excellent book-form essay on the album, “Bon Scott’s more treacherous imagery pushes the song into regrettably mean places. I’m not sure that the band can have it both ways.” Ramirez, a fan of the band whose name has unfortunately come to be associated with the song, died of natural causes in June 2013 while awaiting execution.
But what Terry Manning tells me cuts to the secret of AC/DC’s success and is a testament to the intelligence and brilliance of the Young brothers: their capacity to edit themselves.
“I think that somehow, whether they know it at the top of their brains or not, they innately know what just the basic, most simple rhythm of humanity is. It’s something gut level, primitive almost. It goes right to the human condition. Basic fight-or-flight emotion. They somehow tap right into that. It never gets too fast. So many bands are too fast, too full, they try to do too much. I don’t ever hear AC/DC try to do too much. They just do what’s necessary. And that’s such an amazing talent that is so hard to find and so overlooked.
“To me it’s like a tom roll or a guitar solo. If you had the toms playing a roll through the whole song, they don’t mean anything. If you have a guitar solo from beginning to end it doesn’t mean anything. It becomes garbage, unlistenable. But if you have the toms come in with a loud, simple roll at the very right spot it just lifts everything. It excites you. If the solo comes in only in the middle or the end of the spot that it’s really needed it lifts everything up; it just takes it to another level. So you have to learn the ability to put the embellishments in the right place. And AC/DC are the masters at doing that.”
