by Fink, Jesse
Anthony O’Grady was standing by the stage: “Stevie was so hyper he was almost levitating.”
* * *
On Boxing Day, 2004, a 9.2-magnitude earthquake in the Indian Ocean off northern Sumatra triggered a tsunami that devastated the nearby coasts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand, killing 230,000 people.
The response of the international community was swift, including Australia’s rock fraternity, which came together for the WaveAid charity concert at the Sydney Cricket Ground on January 29, 2005, with the aim of raising donations for charities helping victims of the disaster. One band that played that day was The Wrights, a supergroup of Australian musicians from various outfits including Powderfinger, Jet, Grinspoon and You Am I that had originally got together with producer Harry Vanda to record all three parts of “Evie” as a way of raising money for Wright, who had fallen on hard times. It was released as a single the following month and went to #2, three decades after it had first appeared in the charts.
Phil Jamieson of Grinspoon sang Part III in the studio and recorded Part II, but couldn’t nail it. In the wash-up, the “Engelbert Humperdinck” section was performed by Bernard Fanning of Powderfinger.
“I always loved Stevie’s voice and I thought that all three parts of the song showed how versatile it was,” he says. “I was more than happy to sing the ‘Engelbert’ section, which has that vulnerability that isn’t really on display in Part I. Again it’s a pretty difficult song to sing and sound as convincing as Stevie does. I remember hearing it when I was really young—along with ‘Black Eyed Bruiser’—pumping over the AM airwaves in the family Falcon 500, so when Nic Cester [from Jet] asked me to be a part of it I jumped at it.”
“Part III was pretty hard,” says Jamieson. “Mind you, when Stevie performed that on the Opera House steps he was doing backflips as well, so I’m pretty sure you’re going to have a bit of trouble singing and doing backflips at the same time. It was challenging. I was very nervous singing that song. It wasn’t an easy song to sing by any stretch of the imagination.”
Wright has his sympathies: “It’s a hard song to sing because it’s so long. But you do get a break in the slow part to get your wind together for Part III.”
“‘Evie’ was my earliest memory of listening to a song on the radio,” continues Jamieson. “I remember being with my dad in the car and him turning it up. I might have been four or five. So for me it’s a really formative song. Part I is quite a tricky, difficult part. For Kram [of Spiderbait], it wasn’t an easy song to play on the drums. It’s as straight ahead as AC/DC but it’s a bit groovier. The drums are doing this crazy shuffly straight thing underneath it all. But the first part’s an amazing rock song. And I think that’s why it was such a hit. Nic Cester can sing the phonebook, so he did a great job vocally on it as well.”
It was the job of Tim Gaze from Wright’s backing band, the All Stars, to play Malcolm Young’s solo on Part I when the song was first taken on the road. He was living at Newport Beach on the northern beaches of Sydney and would drive his neighbor, Wright, into the city with him for rehearsals. There he jammed with Angus and Malcolm.
“I always thought that solo was really funky, because it had this spontaneous throwaway thing about it I liked—the way Malcolm hit that low string and let it ring while he did the big rundown—kind of street savvy and, as history has shown, a great guitar player in the old school of bending and vibrato. I love it. As far as playing that solo goes, it would have been slightly different each night, so I guess I did it in my style at the time, which was still pretty raw at that stage.
“There is no doubt at all that ‘Evie’ is a crafted piece of thoughtful writing, like the way it has been proffered as a song with three distinct sections or emotional journeys. And the playing by all those who are on it is just great. When George and Harry go to work on something, they sure as hell bring it out the other side just how they want, and ‘Evie’ is a classic example of their efforts.”
* * *
That this incredible song never topped the charts overseas is an injustice as much as Wright’s life has been tragic and wasteful. Perhaps had it got the airplay and acclaim it deserved it may well have changed the course of that life and Wright would not be where he is today, which is living virtually broke on the south coast of New South Wales (save for the occasional royalty check) and using up the few favors he has left.
In February 2012, in a rare public appearance during a performance of Stevie: The Life and Music of Stevie Wright and The Easybeats, a touring Australian tribute show about his life put together by the actor Scott McRae and producer Chris Keeble, Wright sang the “Engelbert” section. (He’d later fall out with the pair, accusing them without basis of ripping him off.)
It was heartbreaking to see the shrunken, ghostly, frail man he’d become but inspiring to see how the song—and singing it, with all the sweetness and emotion he’d mustered to record it—lifted him. Like he was Stevie Wright, rock star, again. Not Stevie Wright, junkie.
“Sharing the stage with the man that had consumed the last few years of my life was an amazing experience, regardless of the fact that I had to keep my eye on him and do my best to help him shine,” says McRae. “It was in a way a reward for all my work, a thank-you and a moment that would stay with me forever.”
Nearing his 65th birthday, Wright could still hold a tune.
“It was a moment that I knew I may never see again, and I believe the audience thought that as well,” says Keeble. “It was unrehearsed, unplanned and an incredibly bittersweet moment. He hit every note. There was absolute silence from the crowd. He just filled the air and owned the space like the showman he is or perhaps was.”
But America just didn’t get “Evie” or Wright. Like it didn’t get most things coming out of Australia at that time.
Jim Delehant was the head of A&R for Atlantic Records from 1969 to 1981 and first got wind of “Evie” when Coral Browning, the sister of AC/DC manager Michael Browning, turned up in his office in New York with a copy of Hard Road.
“I loved ‘Evie’ and Hard Road,” he tells me, ruefully.
Delehant signed a deal immediately and “thought it would happen here too” but it was a dud. A promotional trip to the States had been a disaster because of Wright’s heroin use. His mind was not on the job. While there he’d asked, according to Glenn Goldsmith, “someone from the record company” for smack. Desperate for a fix, he’d flown home to Sydney early. “Evie” and Hard Road bombed. Yet in a consolation of sorts, Rod Stewart had a stab at the title track and Suzi Quatro later covered Part I.
“I got it played,” says Steve Leeds, who first started at Atlantic in 1973 and rose to head of album promotion. He now works as vice-president of talent & industry affairs at SiriusXM, a satellite radio station in New York City. “Atlantic got first dibs on anything Vanda & Young put out. But nothing happened. It was just here and there, you know. ‘Evie’ wasn’t like everything else. Radio was looking for things that were familiar and sounded the same. Homogenized. It didn’t make waves.”
But Coral Browning’s next package from Australia would do the complete opposite.
3
AC/DC
“It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)” (1975)
For a band that has so steadfastly forged its own brand of rock, AC/DC’s influences since its beginnings in 1973 are surprisingly many: Free, Mountain, ZZ Top, Buddy Guy, Billy Thorpe, The Coloured Balls, Cactus, T. Rex, Ike Turner, The Rolling Stones and—you can hear it clearly on “Shake a Leg” on Back in Black—the odd echo of Eddie Van Halen (though Angus Young was tapping before Van Halen cut a record; it’s there on 1976’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”). They are nothing if not a product of many outside forces, though you won’t often hear the Youngs admitting to it beyond the usual, predictable nods to Chuck Berry or Little Richard.
Just as you won’t hear them talking too much about their Australian roots. The Youngs’ formative ye
ars in the western suburbs of Sydney are something that they seem to have gone out of their way to play down, preferring to talk up their Scottish heritage. All three brothers have spent a deal of time outside Australia at their homes in England or Europe. Those days in Burwood are long gone, literally and figuratively. AC/DC is no longer a pub band. It is now, in the words of Derek Shulman, “the quintessential rock/punk band of the 20th/21st century.”
Yet there was a time when the Youngs embraced their past.
Malcolm was asked by a French TV interviewer in 1983 if AC/DC had opened a door or erected a bridge internationally for other Australian acts, such as INXS and Men At Work.
“Not really, maybe The Bee Gees or something,” he said, guffawing. “We formed in Australia and it’s something you can’t get rid of. But we’re proud of the fact we formed in Australia.”
Then there was Angus, who told an Australian TV interviewer in 2008: “Everyone knows we started from Australia. [AC/DC] was formed there and it probably wouldn’t have come out of any other country. Because the music of that time, it was the right climate, the right time, the right people. Australia’s got that kind of rawness about it; it’s got that kind of rough edge about it. And if anything we’ve always had that rough edge.”
Or did. When Mutt Lange took over from Vanda & Young, he filed those rough edges. What was once light, carefree and rebellious gradually became dark, bombastic and commercial. The success Angus and Malcolm desperately craved came not just without their big brother behind the mixing desk but at the expense of something intangible that had made the band unique in the first place.
And that was the sound that took AC/DC to the top, the sound that came before the Lange-shampooed Highway to Hell and Back in Black.
As much as it tries, AC/DC cannot shrug off where it came from because the music of that period doesn’t lie: it sounds Australian. And more so than with any other band—more than Daddy Cool, more than Billy Thorpe—it is hearing AC/DC’s songs from that 1974–78 period that makes Australians feel Australian.
In 1976 British music newspaper Record Mirror listed Australia’s top exports thus: “Tinned peaches, cuddly koala bears, imitation kangaroos, sheep, stuffed ducked bill [sic] platypus, souvenir boomerangs, cold lager, Rolf Harris paintings of billabongs and AC/DC.”
The sound of AC/DC’s best music is Australia, in all its lack of adornment, its primitivism and its contempt for authority: on their own, appealing qualities. A sound that George Young, Harry Vanda and, to a lesser extent, Bon Scott coaxed out of Angus and Malcolm with complete singlemindedness and lack of interest in what the critics made of it.
“Bon was the biggest single influence on the band,” Malcolm once admitted. “When he came in, it pulled us all together. He had that real ‘stick it to ’em’ attitude. We all had it in us, but it took Bon to bring it out.”
Says AC/DC’s current engineer, Mike Fraser: “I know their roots began in Scotland, but for me their sound has always been Australian. Maybe that’s because Australia was where they defined it? Hard rocking beats. Whereas American and British rock is very processed; more soundscape than honest.”
Honest. A word you cannot escape when it comes to discussion of the Youngs. And no song is more honest in their story than “It’s a Long Way to the Top.”
The subject matter is grist for any rock band’s mill. But AC/DC put in the hard yards more than most. Three gigs a day at times, over a hundred gigs a year at a minimum. Just pausing to go home to Burleigh Street, shower, get a feed and then go out there and do it all over again.
“It was their lifestyle,” explains John Swan. “It wasn’t just their job. They were writing about being in a rock ’n’ roll band. If you think it’s easy doin’ one-night stands/Try playin’ in a rock ’n’ roll band. Listen to the banter. It’s just like being a fucking football fanatic, you know.”
AC/DC’s first international release—it’s still one of the greatest songs the two junior Youngs ever wrote, with considerable input from their older brother and Bon Scott—“It’s a Long Way to the Top” is so identified with Melbourne, where the band first took off, where the film clip was shot and where a laneway has since been named after them, that it’s used before matches by Australia’s biggest sporting organization, the Australian Football League.
Touring shows, books and documentaries have borrowed its name. Most recently it was added to the Australian National Registry of Recorded Sound, a repository for “sound recordings with cultural, historical and aesthetic significance and relevance” that “inform or reflect life in Australia.”
It is also Fraser’s favorite AC/DC song.
“The melody of it. It’s got a really cool build to it and when the bagpipes kick in and start wailing it gives me goosebumps every time.”
He and millions of others, including Jack Black, Motörhead, Nantucket, WASP, Dropkick Murphys, John Farnham, Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins and former Pantera vocalist Phil Anselmo (who covered it as a spoken-word poem).
Why? Because more than the crunchy opening riff—which is as good as “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or “You Really Got Me”—or the bagpipes or Scott’s rapier-slash vocal performance or the storm of bass, drums and guitar that builds in the final stanza, it is the way “It’s a Long Way to the Top” trails off, like a car on a highway going to a place unknown, that is its true power, that uplifts.
Says the man who played bass on it, Mark Evans, it’s what you don’t hear as much as Malcolm’s rhythm guitar that makes it so memorable.
“It’s the guitar intro, it’s the set-up of it, it’s Malcolm, plus the actual sentiment of the song.”
“It’s a Long Way to the Top” is one of those rare pieces of music that leaves you with a question you need to ask yourself: What do you want and how much do you want it and how hard are you prepared to work for it?
The Youngs answered it themselves 40 years ago.
* * *
Holger Brockmann claims he was the first disc jockey on radio anywhere in the world to play “It’s a Long Way to the Top.” In 1975 he was certainly the first man to say anything on 2JJ, Australian national broadcaster ABC’s youth-oriented music station, so the idea holds some water.
Now almost 70 and still working in radio, he spends most of his time on a farm in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales with his wife, Marianne, and, for relaxation, blasts AC/DC into his cow paddocks.
“Joooom,” he says, throwing his hands into the air for effect. “Up to 11!”
Brockmann first saw AC/DC at the Hornsby Police Boys Club in Sydney.
“It was late 1974 and I got dragged along to the Police Boys, didn’t know much about it, must have been after their first record came out, and it seemed like there were 12 people there. There were probably more. I went on from night shifts to breakfast in ’75 and I remember somebody bringing in ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top’ and saying, ‘Have a listen to this,’ and I just played it, and it was so fucking good that I just played it again and again. Five times in a row.”
Did people call the station in protest?
“Saying more, yeah!” he laughs.
But why five times in a row?
“Why wouldn’t you if you heard it the first time? Can you imagine? The very first time? Fuck. The bagpipes got me. All of a sudden the bagpipes come and phoooom. Bagpipes! It’s this fucking rock ’n’ roll band and it’s full of bagpipes and it sounds brilliant. And you put it on now and it sounds just as good.”
A comment that absolutely nails the essence of what AC/DC does so well. You can play their songs five times in a row, a hundred times in a row, and they still sound as evergreen as the first time you heard them. With “It’s a Long Way to the Top,” it’s not the bagpipes that reel you in, though they’re a stroke of genius from George Young, who only recorded one take in the studio and looped. Rather, it’s the second you hear Malcolm’s guitar tearing through that single speaker. You’re hooked. His riff propels the entire song.
“George and Harry are really good,” says Rob Riley. “They have a natural ability to recognize a good song, how to write a good song, how to arrange it. George has definitely got a skill for that. He’s very fucking canny and very, very clever. George was the studio guru. He really had his finger on the pulse. George was instrumental with the sound of AC/DC in the early days, with the way they put the songs together.
“But the boys were pretty clever themselves. They knew what they wanted. George would have helped them with any hurdles with his incredible knowledge of song, but Malcolm’s contribution to the sound of AC/DC is just massive. His guitar playing is absolutely fucking crucial. He puts a beautiful, big, solid bed under Angus, which leaves him to run around the fucking shop and do what he does. Malcolm’s a huge part of it.”
Terry Manning, who engineered Led Zeppelin III and ZZ Top’s Eliminator, backs this critique: “Malcolm has an absolutely perfect, amazing ability to extract the simplest, most powerful rhythm guitar elements of anyone I have ever heard. No unneeded note is ever there. Malcolm is the bedrock of the songs in my book. Then Angus, playing off what Malcolm lays down during the vocal sections, can add the extra rhythm flourishes needed. When the solos come, he has a solid bed to just explode over. He doesn’t have to play as a virtuoso like Jeff Beck, or speed along like Eric Johnson. He puts his own thing in there, always doing just enough, never quite too much, and always with fervor.”
But Derek Shulman explains it best: “Usually the rhythm section of the band—the bass and drums—drives a rock band. However, with AC/DC it is Malcolm’s rhythm guitar that drives the forward movement of the songs. The drums and bass are completely spare and only play four to the bar without fills or frills. Hence the space and the ability of Angus to shine when he rips his lead guitar solos.
“Other bands can try to recreate the feel of AC/DC but only AC/DC can actually pull it off with such ease and brilliance. This way of driving the band from the top down rather than the rhythm section up is completely unique. There is no wasted chord, drum fill or notation. The complexity in its simplicity cannot be recreated by other bands.”
