Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204)

by Fink, Jesse

  “This is sacrilege to some but I’ve seen Led Zeppelin play a couple of times and while I was a fan of the first couple of records, I went and saw them live and just went, ‘You fucking kidding me?’ They made unbelievable fucking records and because a lot of it was so grand you couldn’t produce it live with those guys. But as far as studio records go, fucking absolutely in a world of their own. For me, you dig a band because of their recordings and you go see them and say, ‘Oh fuck, that was even fucking better than the record.’ To me that’s the greatest compliment you can give a band.”

  Says Stewart Young, for a time AC/DC’s manager with Steve Barnett: “They are brilliant; still probably the best live band I have ever seen.”

  Yet for some arcane reason, “Jailbreak” fell between the cracks in AC/DC’s coming assault on America. In fact, it disappeared into such a chasm of corporate ineptitude it wasn’t released in the United States until 1984 on the ’74 Jailbreak EP because the original album on which it appeared, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, was shelved by Atlantic and left to gather dust. Even when Dirty Deeds finally hit American record stores in 1981, outrageously straight after the multiplatinum Back in Black, “Jailbreak” was mysteriously left off.

  “American record companies. Go figure,” says Evans.

  Jim Delehant asserts somebody inside Atlantic Records, possibly Jerry Greenberg’s successor Doug Morris, now chairman and chief executive of Sony Music, felt it was “too horrific for teenage consumption.” Phil Carson, who was in charge of Atlantic’s operations outside America, says he can only “recall some discussion about that but I had turned my back on the project.”

  Yet not before it very nearly claimed Carson’s career. As a sign of how important he was to AC/DC between 1980 and 1981, he’s the only man at Atlantic personally thanked by name on the sleeves of Back in Black and For Those About to Rock. (The latter album’s cryptic mention of “Springfield” refers to Carson’s time playing bass with Dusty Springfield.)

  “By the time AC/DC decided to fire Mutt Lange [after For Those About to Rock], Jerry Greenberg had left Atlantic and A&R decisions were being handled principally by Doug Morris and his cohorts in New York,” he says. “I had become a little disenchanted with the way things were developing with the band. I told Doug that releasing Dirty Deeds [after such a hiatus] was a massive error. I told him it would disrupt what we were starting to create with Brian Johnson. AC/DC’s audience had accepted more or less the unthinkable notion that Bon Scott could be replaced. What Doug did was to confuse our audience and destroy a large part of AC/DC’s fan base.

  “He brought an abrupt halt to the building process we had set in motion to elevate Brian. The band had to deal with yet another comparison between Bon Scott’s AC/DC and Brian Johnson’s AC/DC. At the time, Doug’s argument was purely financial. Back in Black had already sold over five million copies. Because of those numbers, Doug told me that Dirty Deeds would sell at least two million. I told him he was right about that, but that it would also create a new sales plateau for AC/DC.”

  Carson was proved correct. Certified platinum six times, Dirty Deeds (the one scandalously without “Jailbreak” on it) remains AC/DC’s biggest selling album in the United States post Back in Black and their third-biggest selling overall behind Back in Black (22 times) and Highway to Hell (seven times). For Those About to Rock has been certified platinum just four times. Even The Razors Edge (five) and Who Made Who (five) have outsold it.

  “Doug’s motivation was purely greed driven. His comment was that we would all get bigger bonuses because we had made our numbers and that I should stop thinking like an artist. To this day, I am proud of the stand that I took on behalf of the band. Releasing Dirty Deeds was one of the most crass decisions ever made by a record-company executive. God knows how many albums For Those About to Rock would have sold had Doug waited for that to come out first. He really changed the band’s history with that stupid decision. I blame the lack of success of Flick of the Switch and Fly on the Wall, to a large degree, on the inane decision of releasing Dirty Deeds right after Back in Black.”

  Not only would Flick of the Switch and Fly on the Wall gobble like turkeys (achieving only single platinum apiece) but they would also ensure an infuriated AC/DC left Atlantic. It’s not hard to imagine that it would have been particularly galling for the Youngs to hear that Dirty Deeds, the record considered so substandard in 1976, was enthusiastically promoted by Atlantic with beach balls.

  “I remember doing a promotion with WBCN in Boston,” says Judy Libow. “We’d decided to do a summer promotion and we took the song ‘Big Balls’ and we had these huge beach balls made up and the station would give them away. They’d be all over the beaches. We had a great time with the band and the music.”

  Why did Morris fail to appreciate what AC/DC were about?

  “Doug appreciated AC/DC in his own way,” says Derek Shulman, who at sister label Atco, in one of the most magnificent intra-corporate grifts in music history, managed to nab AC/DC from Morris in a trade for The Who’s Pete Townshend. “The problem, from what I felt, was the band’s slight disdain for anyone on the ‘record business’ side. They related to musicians but not particularly well to the people who worked for them in the ‘biz.’ Doug certainly knew they were unique and fantastic sellers; however, I believe their less-than-showbiz personalities never allowed the ‘biz’ into their insular world.”

  Mark Gable got a sense of that insular world in his professional and personal encounters with the three brothers.

  “My dealings were more with George on a professional basis, though I did meet Angus once and was lucky enough to have beers with Malcolm on a few occasions. Malcolm is very shy, not a loudmouth and not even the slightest bit arrogant. He’s very switched on about music and in particular the business side of things. When I met Angus we chatted for a while but he didn’t get my sense of humor. One thing I learned about the Youngs is that they do take themselves very seriously. Along with the huge talent comes a certain fragility. They are very careful about people they don’t know. There is a sense that we are on the inside and you are not. That was always my impression when dealing with both Albert Productions and the Youngs.”

  Shulman, however, managed to see a side of the brothers most never see.

  “I haven’t seen them in a while now. The last time I saw them on the road was a couple of years ago. I really love and relate to the guys. They are great people who live life by their own rules without any interference or manipulation from the outside. Just sitting in the dressing room with Angus nursing his cup of tea and cigarette and discussing issues not business related is completely refreshing.”

  There’s some irony in the fact that Dirty Deeds, the album that in 1981 practically destroyed AC/DC’s relationship with Atlantic, was the same album that Atlantic very nearly used as an excuse to cut their ties with AC/DC five years earlier. But it wasn’t going to end any other way. The Youngs’ Glasgow mentality—If you put it on me or mine, I’ll get you back—made sure of that.

  * * *

  After failing to convince the suits at Atlantic in New York that Dirty Deeds was a sellable proposition, AC/DC was in a state of shellshock. The adventure that had started in 1976 with the US version of High Voltage looked to be over as soon as it had begun.

  “It just pissed us off,” says Mark Evans. “The band never took criticism well. Especially coming from the record company, the guys who were supposed to be in the same tent, saying, ‘No, mate, it’s not good enough.’ The band was pissed off.”

  So the well-reported story goes, Jerry Greenberg wanted to drop the band but Phil Carson managed to persuade Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun (misspelled as “Neshui” in the Wall biography) to keep them at the label on the condition their advance was reduced on future albums.

  Carson reiterates the account for this book: “There certainly was discussion about dropping the band at Atlantic in New York. The A&R department thought the group was going nowhere and that they wer
e very derivative. That’s why Dirty Deeds was never released in sequence. However, they did have the sense to consult me before actually dropping the group and, by that time, I was making very serious inroads with the group in Europe, and we were certainly recouping the $25,000 that we had to pay for each album.”

  The wash-up?

  “Nesuhi Ertegun was able to tell the Atlantic team that the international people were right behind AC/DC.”

  Yet Greenberg remembers differently. He rejects suggestions that he didn’t like the band or that he didn’t care about the band. He rejects the story, put forward by Michael Browning in the Murray Engleheart book, that Carson went over the top of him to petition the Erteguns for mercy.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” he says. “There was some conversation about [dropping the band]. But it wasn’t my decision. There was someone in the A&R department, who I basically trusted, who said that we should drop them. I never, ever was thinking about dropping the band. The band was touring Europe at that time; they hadn’t played a date in America. Phil Carson was the day-to-day person [for AC/DC at Atlantic]. What I remember basically is Atlantic—and that was everybody, not just necessarily me—was not that excited about that record.

  “The feeling from the people at Atlantic was, ‘I don’t know if we should put this record out.’ I cannot deny that. Atlantic did not want to put the record out, there’s no question. That’s a fact. But as far as ever wanting to drop the group, I don’t believe we ever wanted to drop the group.”

  So what was the true involvement of the Erteguns, the top executives at Atlantic, in the fate of AC/DC? The younger, Ahmet, told Billboard he’d seen the Australian band for the first time at punk club CBGB in New York City in 1977 but wasn’t sold even then: “I’m not sure I would have signed them when I first heard them … they were pushing the envelope … and very ratty-looking.”

  “Ahmet wasn’t really around much during those days,” says Greenberg. “He was traveling a lot. The first tour I remember AC/DC came over and we had them at the Whisky A Go-Go [in Los Angeles]; we had them playing all those little clubs, and Ahmet wasn’t very much involved [at that point].”

  But when they took off, says Larry Yasgar, Atlantic’s head of singles, “Ahmet jumped right in.”

  * * *

  Judy Libow, who went on to become vice-president of promotion & product development at Atlantic, backs the Carson version: “There was a point in time when there was talk of dropping the band.

  “I remember going down to a WEA convention in Florida. WEA was the big distribution arm for all the labels—Warner Bros, Elektra, Atlantic. This one year [1977] Atlantic decided to have AC/DC play down there for everybody: all the labels, all the staff, all the WEA people. And most people hadn’t yet seen them play. It was a small venue. I’ll never forget they came out into this club that was packed with all these industry people and they did their thing. Angus was on Bon’s shoulders, up and down the stage, he’s mooning everybody. It was just an incredible thing to see.

  “Sometime later, years later, I was on the West Coast, on a road trip in California, and I drove with our West Coast promotions guy, Barry Freeman, into Fresno; AC/DC was going to be playing there, and there was not much going on in Fresno back then. It was barely a city. And AC/DC came out and Angus pulled down his pants. We were standing on the side of the stage and the crowd started throwing garbage at them. It was crazy. They didn’t expect it. They hadn’t yet heard about this part of their performance. It was wild. Garbage was coming from everywhere. They just kept going. The band just kept on playing. They were very professional. They were always responsive. They always did whatever we asked them to do. Everybody who worked with them loved them.”

  But offstage AC/DC was doing it tough. Nick Maria was senior vice-president of sales at Atlantic. He was with Libow at the WEA Records convention at the 4 O’Clock Club in Fort Lauderdale, the last show of the first leg of their first American tour.

  “They were in the restaurant having breakfast and they didn’t even have enough money to pay for it,” he says. “I did the first allocation for them [of High Voltage] to ship out to the entire country. I think it was only 4000 to 6000 units.”

  “The first album stiffed,” says Larry Yasgar. “It didn’t happen at all. I think it did about 50,000. We knew what we had but we didn’t know how big it would get.”

  By 1979, AC/DC was shifting ten times that amount.

  * * *

  There had been no crossed wires between Phil Carson and Atlantic’s Gene Wilder–lookalike president, Jerry Greenberg, when the pair flew to Hamburg, Germany, to see AC/DC in the flesh in September 1976. Greenberg had had his own band in the 1950s, Jerry Green and the Passengers. By 1964, he was working as a record promoter. By 1974, only 32 years old, he was Atlantic’s president, personally appointed by Ahmet Ertegun.

  “I flew to London and Phil said, ‘You have to see this band,’” he says.

  “Every year, at least once, Jerry would come over, usually for the international meetings that took place in the autumn,” remembers Carson. “I seized on an opportunity to take Jerry to see AC/DC at a club called Fabrik in Hamburg. The place was packed and people were literally hanging from the rafters.”

  “We flew to Hamburg. I’m a drummer. I’m a musician. I understand good musicians and rock ’n’ roll,” says Greenberg. “I flipped out when I saw the band. I’ll never forget after the show I saw them all pile into this little truck; that’s the way I started. When I was 16 years old I had a four-piece band and when we used to have to travel and do a gig 300 or 400 miles away overnight we could only afford to take one car. I used to only take a bass drum and a snare drum. I couldn’t even take my full drum set. And when I saw that, with that band in Germany, all of a sudden it was like I relived my career and I said, ‘Man, I gotta make sure that these kids happen.’

  “I went back to America. We had a video of the group. I called everyone into the conference room. I said, ‘I want you to see what could be the next biggest band for Atlantic Records.’ We played AC/DC on the VHS. Atlantic was a very big rock label but we were a very big pop label, too. We had a lot of older people in marketing that didn’t quite get Angus running around in shorts or on Bon Scott’s shoulders. The expressions on some of the faces I can remember to this day. However, at that meeting I made a proclamation that we were going to break this band in America.”

  Larry Yasgar remembers the troops being read the riot act: “We had a meeting of all departments and were told that the group we had to bring home at that time was AC/DC. [Atlantic general manager] David Glew was the one who had to put the hammer down to everybody once the word came from the top, ‘You’ve got to bring this group in.’ We had a lot of pressure. A lot of pressure. Really bring the group in. All everybody talked about from that moment was AC/DC. We pounded everybody on that one.”

  What of the widespread rumor that Bon Scott was firmly in Atlantic’s firing line?

  Alleges Anthony O’Grady: “He was pretty lucky to survive in AC/DC because when they went over to America the first thing Atlantic said to them was, ‘We think you have to get rid of the singer because we can’t understand him.’ Atlantic ummed and ahhed that Bon was not too easily understood by US boofheads. US record companies had the same problem with Jimmy Barnes and Alex Harvey—in fact, anyone with a Scottish accent. But Angus, Malcolm and George held the line.”

  I put this to Greenberg and ask him if Scott’s place in the band was ever an issue at Atlantic and discussed across his desk.

  “No. I never did,” he says. “I never made that suggestion.”

  His UK counterpart Carson supports him: “There was certainly no such discussion with me. Jerry is one of the most astute presidents in the entire record industry, and he got it in a heartbeat. This was just as well because all those label people in America were telling him the band had no future. Jerry saw something spectacular with his own eyes and set his people to work to come up with a plan.


  “However, it wasn’t until John Kalodner joined the A&R department, and Michael Klenfner came in to head up marketing and promotion, that we got any real traction. Once those two became involved, things changed very quickly for AC/DC and Atlantic.”

  * * *

  Who is this mythical John Kalodner figure with his flowing ginger beard, long hair and John Lennon–style wire-rimmed glasses? Go to his website and his short biography gushes about him signing Foreigner and other acts.

  “John Kalodner not only finds the magic, he also helps to make the magic happen,” it blathers without a hint of humility. “AC/DC had been signed to Atlantic in the UK, but there was resistance to picking up the band for the States. Kalodner was behind AC/DC and knew they could make it. He even physically cut and edited the band’s recorded tapes together for them.”

  On the fan site acdczone.com, he’s also listed among key “AC/DC personnel” alongside Bruce Fairbairn, Mike Fraser, Mutt Lange, David Mallet, Tony Platt, Harry Vanda and lighting director Cosmo Wilson. An elusive figure, Kalodner could not be contacted for this book, despite several attempts.

  “I hired Kalodner in the A&R department for product management,” says Jim Delehant, who remembers the record business in the 1970s as being far removed from the corporate circus of today. “We had some laughs.”

  But a slew of others don’t remember him too fondly. Prime among them is Jerry Greenberg.

  “John Kalodner likes to take credit for signing Foreigner. He had absolutely nothing to do with the signing,” he says. “Once I signed the band, John was the A&R guy who worked with Foreigner. In fact, at one point [Foreigner’s late manager] Bud Prager wrote him a letter and he still hasn’t taken it down off his website that he signed Foreigner. Understand one thing: nobody could sign anything at Atlantic without me saying, ‘Okay’ and signing off on a memo that goes upstairs. So that’s that.”