by Fink, Jesse
That said, the Youngs might not be reinventing themselves with each new AC/DC record, but that has never been the point of what they do. It’s sticking to a basic palette.
Phil Carson, who signed them to Atlantic Records in 1975, says: “I guess that the Youngs had a realization that rock music should be a driving force that shouldn’t be overburdened with complexity. AC/DC has a unique sound, and the space within it was created by the Young brothers as musicians and producers.”
Says Mike Fraser: “Everybody kinda says, ‘Well, they never change.’ Yeah, but that’s hard to do. [They’ll do] B, G, C; three, four chords in a song. They play it in such a way that it’s simple but it grabs you and really sounds powerful. I find with a lot of other bands—Van Halen, Metallica, for instance—they’re different types of bands in that they create a soundscape. A very nice, complex picture. Great songs. But with AC/DC, it’s red, white, black and that’s it. I think your brain absorbs it better.”
Sure, it’s possible. But then there is the view that trying to divine the secret of what they do is simply pointless.
“I’ve never heard a band so tight in my whole life,” says David Mallet. “Never anywhere. They play and they are tight and the subtleties of rhythm in those riffs and the way they are put together, you could analyze them from now for the rest of your life and you’d never know the way the riffs are played. It’s certainly beyond what 99.9 percent of the population can begin to understand.”
But, hell, it’s worth a shot.
* * *
As The Scream was to the history of modern art—redolent of what had come before it, but just a bit heavier—those AC/DC albums released between 1977 and 1980 were to hard rock. No other band has come close to what AC/DC achieved during that four-year period and nobody has been able to replicate the fury of the Youngs’ guitars. When they come in together—whoomp—it’s like a spark igniting a bushfire.
“I don’t think there’s been a better guitar duo ever,” says Mark Evans.
Perhaps only Guns N’ Roses or Nirvana came close to matching AC/DC during those years in blowing apart the rock paradigm. But AC/DC are still in their own league. They delivered four absolute belters in a row and even in the lean period that followed released the occasional knockout track, like 1990’s “Thunderstruck,” not to mention a slew of unappreciated gems off “lesser” albums: “Spellbound,” “Nervous Shakedown,” “Bedlam in Belgium,” “Who Made Who,” “Satellite Blues” and “All Screwed Up,” among others.
Rob Riley, who should have conquered America with Rose Tattoo but instead inspired Guns N’ Roses to do what his band of illustrated bad boys could not, says he has “nothing but respect and fucking love and admiration for the boys from Acca Dacca.”
“Most people I know reckon, ‘Oh, but that fucking album sounds the same as the fucking last and they sound the same all the time’ and I go, ‘No, I don’t think that at all.’ I think they’re fantastic just for the simple fact that they can come up with that fresh sound. I think they’re great. I love ‘Riff Raff,’ ‘Thunderstruck,’ ‘Ride On,’ a shitload of stuff. Great stories. Like ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top.’”
Even one of their most strident critics, Radio Birdman guitarist Deniz Tek, pays them respect: “I think AC/DC’s strength was singlemindedness and unwavering adherence to a signature sound that millions of fans loved. They stayed true to it, within a narrow operating range. Most bands veer off course after the first few recordings, usually not in a good way. AC/DC never went off the track.
“It’s not my taste in music but their incredible success and worldwide impact cannot be overstated. I appreciate their sticking to their vision and doing what they do best, giving their fans all over the planet exactly what they want over an amazingly long period of time. They certainly are great at it. They obviously worked very hard for their success and they clearly deserve it. They are one of the few handful of bands that have put Australia on the map as a center of uncompromising hard rock.”
George brought a similar lack of compromise to shaping his brothers’ musical and financial destiny. He made it plain very early on that AC/DC should not fall into the same trap The Easybeats did by stretching themselves too thin into different styles of songwriting, muddying their identity and confusing the message of their music.
“Malcolm and Angus were born to be in that band,” says Mark Evans. “A lot of it has to go back to being exposed at a very young age to what George went through. Without The Easybeats I don’t think you’d have AC/DC.”
As Doug Thaler, AC/DC’s first American booking agent, who went on to manage Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi, puts it succinctly: “The Easybeats were a world-class group but they didn’t have world-class results.”
George, the mastermind, made sure his little brothers were never going to fail in that regard and was happy to get them horribly tangled up in Forster’s “noose” in the process.
It was a price all three were willing to pay for the riches that would follow.
* * *
The Youngs wouldn’t cooperate with Clinton Walker for his pioneering book about Bon Scott, just as they haven’t for the shelf of AC/DC books that followed and I set out writing this one fully expecting not to be given any help at all. It seems anybody who’s wanted more out of them than a few far-from-enlightening soundbites for magazine or TV interviews and goes the official route to contact them gets short shrift from their minders, who are notoriously protective.
“You’re setting yourself a hard task, as you know,” Walker warned me before I’d even started.
Emails were exchanged between myself and Fifa Riccobono and Sam Horsburgh, the trio’s gatekeepers in Australia. Riccobono poured cold water on my chances from the outset but at least asked me to send through some written questions for George Young and Harry Vanda. But it didn’t get me anywhere. Nor did an approach to Vanda’s new studio, Flashpoint Music. I even walked past Vanda on Sydney’s Finger Wharf one day but as he was sitting down to lunch with his family and it being a public holiday, I thought it best to leave him alone.
“I have sent this through several times but it hasn’t been picked up,” Riccobono wrote back to me after a long hiatus. “I’m sorry I can’t be of help … I told you in the beginning that it would be a long shot.”
Horsburgh, the point man for Angus Young and Malcolm Young at Alberts, replied: “I will forward your request explaining that you are approaching [your book] from a different angle but they—Angus, Malcolm and George—usually decline book requests.”
Nothing eventuated. I made a follow-up inquiry and got no response. How to explain the shutout?
“Once AC/DC became a printing press, they really closed ranks around the family,” is how one insider explains Alberts’ almost paranoid protectiveness of the band.
In New York, I emailed then called the office of their manager, Alvin Handwerker, and explained what I was doing. Again, there was no response.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Musicians, even the best of the lot, aren’t always terribly articulate about what it is they are doing in their work. The Youngs, though fantastically astute operators and smart men, even if Angus and Malcolm were once described by their former British booking agent and now One Direction manager Richard Griffiths as “thick,” aren’t renowned for their erudition. They like a bit of blue language and got to the top amid a whirl of stewed tea, groupie sex, bar fights and a few too many long drags on cigarettes. As Melbourne’s The Age said in its review of the Engleheart biography of AC/DC, when not enclosed in their “famous dome of silence” Angus and Malcolm deal in “foul-mouthed, grammatically garbled quotes” and are “hardly the most eloquent commentators for this legend.”
“AC/DC remain as guarded and uncooperative as ever, leaving their loathed biographers to join the dots with old magazine interviews and whichever witnesses dare talk.”
Conversely, though, there is the argument that music doesn’t need explaining. It’s a fair call yet one I
have tried to resist. But writing this book was made doubly difficult by the fact that many people still within or that used to have a place in the AC/DC universe outside of the Youngs are either dead, declined interviews, didn’t respond or eluded contact, didn’t feel they had anything worthwhile to contribute or won’t talk to anyone. Formal approaches were made to interview the three non-Young members of AC/DC but I didn’t get anywhere through Handwerker. Trying the backdoor approach, I got a typed letter personally presented to Brian Johnson through a friend in Barcelona. It had to be printed out or he wouldn’t read it. Again, no dice. As my disappointed mate had warned me beforehand, “If he doesn’t do it, it will be the Young issue.”
The Young issue. It became abundantly clear to me that not everybody who’s worked with the Youngs wants to talk about them, for a variety of reasons. Even members of their own band.
As for the Switzerland-based Robert John “Mutt” Lange, the great thinker/obsessive behind the megaplatinum success of Foreigner, AC/DC, Def Leppard, Shania Twain, The Cars and Maroon 5, it was futile to approach him, according to two of his friends, Terry Manning and Tony Platt. Like Guus Hiddink, the Dutch soccer manager, Lange subscribes to a very particular style of dealing with the media: say nothing, ratchet up your mystique and increase your asking price. It’s paid dividends. He’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet the producer of Highway to Hell, Back in Black and For Those About to Rock is the elephant in the room of the Youngs’ story, the one they’d probably prefer you didn’t know yet the one who was fundamental to the development of their sound and their fortunes. The fact is AC/DC did develop a sound. They weren’t static from the outset.
“It won’t happen; I can tell you that for sure,” laughed Manning when I told him I wanted to interview Lange. But I went ahead anyway and emailed Manning some questions to forward on.
A few weeks later, Manning got in touch.
“I know for absolute certain he will not answer the first three, but perhaps I might get a comment on the next to last one; maybe the last one as well. Will let you know when and if.”
The first three were about working in the studio with AC/DC. Months rolled by. Nothing came back.
“As I suspected,” Manning eventually informed me, “he preferred not to answer questions in a public way.”
* * *
Fortunately, though, I spoke at length with five men who between them have engineered AC/DC’s best records, worked with them at close quarters and know their sound perhaps better than anyone else alive outside Mutt Lange and George Young himself: Mark Opitz (Let There Be Rock, Powerage), Tony Platt (Highway to Hell, Back in Black, Flick of the Switch, Let There Be Rock: The Movie—Live in Paris), Jimmy Douglass (Live from the Atlantic Studios), David Thoener (For Those About to Rock) and Mike Fraser (The Razors Edge, Ballbreaker, Stiff Upper Lip, Black Ice, Backtracks, Family Jewels, Iron Man 2). Their humor, technical insight, knowledge of music and generosity to me during what often felt like a quixotic project won’t be forgotten.
Other people involved with the project proved to be illuminating or vital: Easybeats icons Stevie Wright and Gordon “Snowy” Fleet; rock producers Terry Manning, Shel Talmy, Kim Fowley and Ray Singer; AC/DC mastering engineer Barry Diament; AC/DC’s first vocalist, Dave Evans; AC/DC, Marcus Hook Roll Band and Stevie Wright session drummer John Proud; AC/DC and Stevie Wright session drummer Tony Currenti; AC/DC bassist Mark Evans; AC/DC managers David Krebs, Steve Leber, Ian Jeffery, Michael Browning, Cedric Kushner and Stewart Young; Australian rock musicians Rob Riley, Bernard Fanning, Joel O’Keeffe, Tim Gaze, Chris Masuak, Phil Jamieson, Allan Fryer, John Swan, Mark Gable, Joe Matera, Deniz Tek and the late Mandawuy Yunupingu; rock journalists Billy Altman, Robert Hilburn and Anthony O’Grady; rock photographers Lisa Tanner, Dick Barnatt and Philip Morris; rock promoters Sidney Drashin, Jack Orbin and Mark Pope; Guns N’ Roses, The Cult and Velvet Revolver drummer Matt Sorum; Back Street Crawler vocalist Terry Slesser; John Wheeler of Hayseed Dixie; Dropkick Murphys frontman and bassist Ken Casey; Rhino Bucket lead singer and guitarist Georg Dolivo; record-company executives Phil Carson, Chris Gilbey, Jon O’Rourke and Derek Shulman; and, most of all, the indefatigable Jerry Greenberg: at one point in the 1970s arguably the most powerful man in music by virtue of his position as president of Atlantic Records.
Greenberg in particular was exceedingly generous with his time and his black book and, even after several phone calls from Sydney and New York, went out of his way to meet me in the bar of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. Greenberg now promotes and tours tribute bands of old Atlantic acts such as ABBA, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones. It’s a growth industry. Through him I got privileged access to a part of the AC/DC story that had hitherto been locked to outsiders and almost completely untold. I am in his debt.
To my knowledge this is the first book that has got both Leber and Krebs of the extinct but powerful Contemporary Communications Corporation (aka “Leber-Krebs”) together on the record about AC/DC; the first to get a comment from Jake Berry, AC/DC’s production manager in 1980, about the events immediately after Bon Scott’s death; as well as the first with the input of Cedric Kushner, Jerry Greenberg and a cast of important Atlantic staffers: Steve Leeds, Larry Yasgar, Nick Maria, David Glew, Jim Delehant, Mario Medious and Judy Libow. For different perspectives, I also talked to decorated American war hero Mike Durant, whose incredible rescue in Somalia in 1993 (with a bit of help from AC/DC) formed part of the story for the film Black Hawk Down, and Australian war photographer Ashley Gilbertson, who was on the ground with US forces in 2004 when “Hells Bells” ripped through the Fallujah night to drown out Iraqi insurgents.
There are so many gaps and holes in the AC/DC story and in what has been written about them previously that even though I purposely set out not wanting to write a biography there were biographical elements that could not be avoided and which deserved exploration. There were details that needed to be filled in, mistakes that needed to be corrected, accepted stories that demanded being pointed out as flat-out wrong or required challenging, as well as unsung figures who were well overdue some credit and recognition: radio identities Holger Brockmann, Bill Bartlett and Tony Berardini; designer Gerard Huerta (the man who came up with AC/DC’s logo but has never received a dollar in royalties from merchandise featuring his graphic masterpiece); late Atlantic Records senior vice-president Michael Klenfner (whose upset over his sacking was revealed to me generously by his widow, Carol Klenfner); neglected session drummers Proud and Currenti; and Doug Thaler, who it would appear from his own and various testimonies worked hard behind the scenes to connect the Youngs with Mutt Lange, a working relationship that would change the course of rock history and bring untold wealth to everybody involved with Back in Black.
* * *
The Atlantic Records side of the story, AC/DC’s early American adventure, was of particular fascination. New York–headquartered Atlantic gets a bum rap in a lot of accounts and from the Youngs themselves but it’s an undeniable fact that Atlantic made the band. They also made plenty of mistakes. But without the label and the unrecognized efforts of people inside it AC/DC might well have ended up like Rose Tattoo: a band that could have been and should have been but never quite got there.
This, in my opinion, is what has been missing from previous tellings of the AC/DC story or at least different parts of that story. The Youngs’ success was not achieved in isolation. Their music and their collective drive weren’t enough just on their own. It required the beneficence, vision and separate talent of a whole host of forgotten and unheralded people who saw something in them when others didn’t. This faith in and loyalty to AC/DC hasn’t always been returned.
When I met David Krebs at a diner in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he was wearing a navy-blue scarf, navy-blue sportscoat and New York Yankees cap. At his peak, Krebs had managed Scorpions, AC/DC, Ted Nugent, Aerosmith and Def Leppard. Apprehensive about being interviewed and wary of the voice recorder on the tab
le between us (he asked me to turn it off after about 20 minutes), he compared managing a rock band to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, in which four separate witnesses to a rape and murder give accounts that contradict each other. No matter the kind of book I was going to write, he said, there were always going to be people who saw the same event in a completely different way. There was no truth, no definitive AC/DC story, there were many different versions, and I shouldn’t try.
Days later, with Back in Black on my iPod, I went for a jog in Central Park. Hopelessly underdressed for the weather—it had begun to snow—I cut back down East 96th Street to seek refuge in the subway and ran into Krebs again, walking down the street. He was dumbstruck: “You and I could be living on the same block in New York for 20 years and never see each other. How’s that?”
Krebs hadn’t seen the Youngs for three decades.
* * *
For all of AC/DC’s Aussie pub posturing, their resistance to backup singers, symphony orchestras, samples and greatest hits albums, their anthems against greed (“Money Made” off Black Ice and “Moneytalks,” an insipid song from The Razors Edge that broke into the top 30 in the Billboard Hot 100, a singular feat for a group that has never seen itself as a “singles band”), the reality is that they own and control one of the most commercial and money-geared brands in the world, right up there with Nike and Coca-Cola.
They do exclusive deals with Walmart. They license their music to game companies, iOS apps and sports franchises. They remaster old records with new packaging—and truth be told don’t sound any better for it. But who cares when they can outsell The Beatles’ back catalog? On November 19, 2012, they finally released their albums on iTunes (plus two iTunes-only box sets: The Collection and The Complete Collection), something they previously refused to do—just like they’d said no to Live Aid in 1985 and big charity gigs in general but turned out for the SARS benefit concert in Toronto in 2003. It was a change of heart with a big payoff. “Highway to Hell” and “Back in Black” entered the British Top 40 singles charts a week later, more than three decades after their original release dates.
