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

by Fink, Jesse

  David Krebs concurs on that point.

  “I think that’s true. But our management philosophy was if you loved Aerosmith there were other artists whose music we represented that you would love, so Ted Nugent broke off from Aerosmith, AC/DC broke off from Aerosmith or Nugent, Scorpions the same. We had a really good knack for picking great live acts and we tried to make sure that our support acts did not blow away our headliners or we could not do this.”

  Krebs was at the Rainbow in March 1977, the same night as Doug Thaler, and instantly wanted to sign the band. He got it straight away; as you do when you’re more of a Rolling Stones and Ten Years After man than you are a sucker for The Beatles. Krebs was in the business of music with a harder edge and AC/DC fitted the bill. When he approached an initially “receptive” Browning on behalf of Leber-Krebs to offer a co-management deal, he got turned down.

  “I was foolish,” he laughs, stirring a coffee in a booth at Three Guys, a Greek diner on New York’s Upper East Side. “You know how you re-examine things you did?”

  Krebs’s mistake, it appears, was his involving a third party. Browning blames Peter Mensch, who was at the summit with Krebs, of talking out of school and for undermining his relationship with the band.

  “It fell apart because the guy who was going to run with them, Mensch, went back to the group and mouthed off about what went down at the meeting, so the confidentiality went out of the equation,” says Browning. “I think that got in the way of us being able to do a deal.”

  Sighs Krebs: “I should have made a deal with him then.”

  Though short of an alliance, Leber-Krebs got AC/DC dates supporting his bands. The Australians were about to hit rock music’s biggest stages.

  “I thought they were fabulous,” says Krebs. “I just loved the band. I tried to help them by putting them on some of my tours. It was good for them because I had two major headliners [Aerosmith and Ted Nugent], so from a standpoint of touring I ensured the fact that they could have the right exposure.

  “The move [to Leber-Krebs] eventually happened. In the course of that Aerosmith tour Peter Mensch became friendly with them, they had a falling out with Michael Browning and they wanted to sign with us for worldwide management if we established an office in London that was run by Peter. The real day-to-day manager of AC/DC was Peter Mensch.”

  * * *

  One of the enduring legends of the band is that they got their break by blowing the by then severely drug-addicted Aerosmith duo of Steven Tyler and Joe Perry off the stage, destroying their confidence, bruising their egos, and the rest was history.

  But Steve Leber disagrees: “No one could really destroy Aerosmith. They were a great band—they really were sensational—and AC/DC broke because of Aerosmith. Because of Aerosmith’s popularity, they rose, and because of Aerosmith allowing them to be the opening act. I wouldn’t say they killed Aerosmith but AC/DC had their own personality, their own excitement. It was different than Aerosmith’s.

  “By the time the guys broke, really, Bon was gone. They brought in Brian Johnson and he really wasn’t as good as Bon. I wouldn’t say as good. Brian was a different kind of lead singer. I would say the big difference is that AC/DC is led by a guitar player, Angus Young. And Aerosmith is led by a lead singer, Steven Tyler. Angus is probably one of the all-time greatest, if not the best lead guitar player in the world because he has personality besides having the ability to play. He’s special and unique compared to other guitar players out there. Angus was one of a kind. Is. Not was. Is one of a kind.”

  So was Aerosmith pissed off that AC/DC were so good?

  “I wouldn’t say pissed off. Just aware. They didn’t throw them off the tour. They also didn’t do any other tours together. But they broke them. And so did we.”

  AC/DC, contends Krebs, also benefited from a privileged time in music history: the days before expensive videos with high production values and record-company pressure of having to come up with hit singles every release.

  “If you come from the 1970s,” he says, “you come from a philosophy of this kind of music, which is: ‘I like to have one hit single every two albums.’ In the 1980s, with the advent of MTV and giant advances for groups like Aerosmith, it’s four, five hit singles. It’s a whole different mentality. How many hit singles did AC/DC ever have in a pop sense?”

  Well, none that broke the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. Aerosmith had eight; nine if you include their 1986 reprise of “Walk This Way” with Run-DMC. The highest position AC/DC ever reached was #23 with “Moneytalks” in 1991, though they’ve since gone to #1 three times on the Mainstream Rock charts with “Hard as a Rock,” “Stiff Upper Lip” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Train.”

  “Jailbreak” never did any real business as a single, only on the 1984 EP that was cynically recast in the liner notes to the 2003 reissue as “a testament, a salute to AC/DC’s tenth anniversary.” It ended up going platinum. All of which, of course, made their coming world domination even more remarkable.

  5

  AC/DC

  “Let There Be Rock” (1977)

  If Atlantic didn’t know what to make of Dirty Deeds, they were right to be scared out of their wits with Let There Be Rock, an album that was recorded in a matter of weeks in early 1977 and sneerily delivered by AC/DC to their truculent overseers at 75 Rockefeller Plaza with unmistakable intent.

  Let There Be Rock and its volcanic title track consigned much of the swing of High Voltage, TNT and Dirty Deeds to the scrapheap. Wherever AC/DC ended up in the annals of rock history, this album would stand for all time as an expression of their unrivaled might as a guitar band. Its buzzsaw electricity demanded that Jerry Greenberg and his dithering pals in New York stand up and take notice.

  But they were taking a big gamble.

  “AC/DC’s music was difficult,” says Steve Leeds, at the time Atlantic’s head of album promotion. “It was the weirdest sounding thing; the weirdest thing on the musical spectrum. It just didn’t sit with anything. It was loud, noisy rock ’n’ roll. It was stripped down and the production was very austere. It wasn’t slick. It was raw. The vocals—Bon was like, growling. And it was filthy. She’s got the jack. He’s got big balls. It didn’t fit in. It was atypical. Vanda & Young always pushed the envelope. With Flash and the Pan, Cheetah, AC/DC, even ‘Evie’ by Stevie Wright, these were things that were atypical.

  “All of AC/DC’s songs had that repetitive, hard-rock rhythm, with Bon screaming over it. It was different. It didn’t fit in with what was going on at the time. Bagpipes! There are no bagpipes on the radio, even today. George and Harry were fucking geniuses. They figured it out. Conventional wisdom says, ‘You guys are crazy.’”

  But having seen AC/DC at Fabrik in Hamburg, the man who mattered most—Greenberg—was now a believer. Asked if he was happy with Let There Be Rock, he says: “Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.”

  * * *

  In June that year Let There Be Rock was released in the United States (albeit with “Crabsody in Blue” missing) and Greenberg’s touring, touring, touring edict was followed to the letter. By the end of July AC/DC was playing its first show (tickets $5.50) in the United States—as support for Canadian band Moxy at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, Texas, having been lured there by promoter Jack Orbin. He’d heard the band played on radio station KMAC/KISS by Lou Roney and the late Joseph Yannuzzi (aka “Joe Anthony”). In a 1978 feature, Texas Monthly magazine hailed KMAC/KISS as “the champion of hard-rock radio and the last vestige of true progressive-rock programming in Texas.”

  The next night the band played San Antonio, then Corpus Christi and Dallas.

  “Those were the good old days for the music industry,” says Orbin. “Lots of good bands being played on AOR stations. However, AC/DC always stood out as something special. Perhaps it was the raw rock ’n’ roll beat that they drive home so well. At any rate, Lou and Joe played them and I wanted to promote them immediately. They were destined to become popular from the outset. Mo
xy was also a San Antonio favorite. However, AC/DC even back then played second fiddle to no one. How could they?”

  Orbin won’t have a bar of Jacksonville’s claim to breaking the band.

  “Jacksonville? Where is that? San Antonio has the reputation and the history. It was the breeding ground of some of the best, if not the very best, hard-rock bands ever. San Antonio broke all the strong hard-rock bands: AC/DC, Rush, Judas Priest, Trapeze. That’s why San Antonio has the label of ‘Heavy Metal Capital of the World’ and my company helped break them. The bands broke out of San Antonio and we used that fact to help promote them in other cities, especially in Texas. These bands all were new and upcoming but were also the cream of the crop of hard rock back then, so after the initial promotions, once they played in front of a decent audience, they exploded. Rightfully so.”

  But Mark Evans never got his chance to play with AC/DC on an American stage, having been dumped from the band in May; Cliff Williams played those Texas shows. Let There Be Rock was the last album he’d record with AC/DC. He was only 21.

  “It was a real disappointment,” he says of missing out. “Probably on the same scale as getting the flick from the band. It was an upsetting time. It was a whole bunch of things. When you’re in a band like that it’s pretty much like being in a professional football team. You’re just moving around to all these different grounds or gigs and you’re just taken care of and you don’t have to think of anything other than playing the gig. So once you’re outside that sort of thing, it’s like a divorce. Not only does your employment change but because you’re living with the guys in the band your whole lifestyle changes. It was a wrench.”

  Evans flew from London to Melbourne and straight into a charity gig where George Young and Harry Vanda were making an appearance. There was a domestic pilots’ strike going on and the ex-Easybeats pair had ridden in the back of a limo all the way from Sydney.

  “I remember George’s exact words,” says Evans. “He said, ‘Listen, you know, things happen. I wish it were different. But it’s not.’”

  It was an interesting meeting for another reason; coming not long after the Reading Festival in 1976, where George had given Evans a ferocious dressing-down after a lackluster performance.

  “I’ve got a lot of time for George,” he says. “I took [what happened in Reading] almost like a medal. He got stuck into me like how he got stuck into his brothers. So I didn’t really take that badly. In Melbourne George actually said, ‘You’ve got to come and play bass for Stevie Wright.’ That was when Stevie was still very much inside the [Alberts] building. At that stage he’d started missing gigs [because of his addiction]. George wanted me to go straight into that. Not much later I was approached to join Rose Tattoo.”

  At Alberts, Evans subsequently bumped into George at Studio 2 while recording with Finch (aka Contraband). He’d turn up to sessions to find the tuning on his bass had been fiddled with overnight: George had borrowed his guitar.

  Does he think George had anything to do with his sacking?

  “I don’t think he would have been directly involved,” he says after taking about six seconds to formulate a response. “I’m surmising here. I don’t think he would have had any great issue with it.”

  In fact, Evans says he is still on good terms with George and the last time he saw him they “had a great chat and get on really well, still.”

  In his autobiography, Dirty Deeds, there’s a photo of Evans flanked by Ted Albert, Brian Johnson, Malcolm Young and Phil Rudd, looking at a platinum record backstage at the Sydney Showgrounds in February 1981, almost four years after he’d been cast aside, the wounds still fresh. The pathos is so thick it’s almost painful to behold. How did he feel?

  “I felt good at that time,” he says. “That was a bit of a funny night because really that night was the first time I’d ever seen the band play except for the Station Hotel [in Melbourne, 1975] when they were a four-piece and I first joined them. It was strange. The actual gig had been postponed twice because of wet weather so there was a bit of an unusual build-up. It was the band’s first gig back in Sydney without Bon, so it was a very poignant night. But the relationship between us—I think you can tell by the way Malcolm is and the way Phil’s looking at me, and Brian—we were all happy to be there. We were all very close up until that point.”

  Up until that point.

  Some time afterward Evans launched a legal action over unpaid album royalties against Alberts and AC/DC that dragged on for years and was eventually settled out of court. The terms of the settlement preclude him from speaking about it in detail but he does say: “It took a long time and it was good to get a resolution.”

  In 2003, the year Evans was denied induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite being initially invited to the ceremony with other band members, Malcolm Young ripped into him in an interview with Classic Rock.

  “Mark actually got picked by our manager,” he told Dave Ling. “We never wanted him; we didn’t think he could play properly. We could all hold our own, and so could [AC/DC bass player in 1974] Rob Bailey. What we thought was that when we’d kicked on a bit more we could override the manager and get in a good bass player.”

  It was a disgraceful comment and demands dismantling: if Bailey were so capable, why, as Tony Currenti has said, did George Young play bass on most of the songs on High Voltage and Bailey walk away disgruntled, soon to be sacked? You only need to watch early videos of AC/DC—such as the clip for “It’s a Long Way to the Top”—or listen to a bootleg of a live performance of “Jailbreak” to appreciate how wonderful Evans really was and how well he suited the group, aesthetically and musically.

  Worse, Malcolm also took a cheap shot at Dave Evans. No matter what you think of AC/DC with self-proclaimed “badass” Evans out front—and few have kind words for that incarnation of the band—no one deserves to be ridiculed in the manner in which Malcolm spoke of their first lead singer: “The day we fucking got rid of him, that’s the day the band started.”

  Dave Evans is bemused by it all: “I don’t know anything about it as I don’t follow them at all. Malcolm is still resentful that I was so popular, especially with the female fans. He never had a girlfriend the whole time I knew him. He was always pissed off that [drummer] Colin Burgess and I always had plenty of female company. As far as Malcolm was concerned they were all molls. He was quite bitter about it.

  “He was glad to get rid of Colin and myself. If he still has resentment after all these years and his success then let the public judge his behavior … he was always a hater and seems to still be. People usually put others down to try to make themselves bigger in the eyes of other people. It usually is a sign of insecurity.”

  * * *

  To his considerable advantage, Cliff Williams looked even more like a Young than Mark Evans did—and he could play a bit. But the replacement of Evans (and other band members before him) at least firmly debunked one myth about the Youngs. For all their talk of “no bullshit,” how the band looks is important. It’s just a less obvious form of bullshit.

  Was image a consideration in his being replaced?

  “I don’t think it was image that was the problem,” says Evans. “I think the change between Cliff and myself was fairly seamless. I’ve had people send me videos, saying, ‘This is you in England.’ Some I’ve watched two or three times and gone, ‘Fuck.’ The only thing that sets you off [on my difference with Cliff] is the bass. There was quite a similarity.”

  Evans says he never even thought about whether his replacement was better than he was. They became friends and the pair lunch together when Williams is in Sydney. Did Williams ever express to Evans how he felt about taking over the role from him in the circumstances?

  “That never came up. We never spoke about that. Basically because it didn’t really matter. I’m sure he didn’t think and I know I certainly didn’t think it was relevant.”

  Did Evans ever wonder to himself, “Hang on. Why the fuck did you guys re
place me? What’s Cliff offering that I’m not?”

  “That’s interesting. Honestly, I’ve never thought about that.” He pauses. “Because of the way Angus and Malcolm are and the way they do things, it was so damn final when it happened. It wasn’t a surprise; it was a shock. It’s like a death in the family. It just goes bang. And you go, ‘Well, okay, there’s nothing I can change about this.’ So it’s not worth revisiting. There’s really nothing you can do about it. If I were to ask, ‘What’s Cliff got that I haven’t got?’ I think that would only come forward if you were thinking, ‘Well, how can I get back in?’ or ‘What can I do to change this at all?’ Because of the finality of it and the large bucketful of relief that came along with it, it was just like, ‘Oh, okay, fine.’”

  But in Williams the missing link had been located, according to Mark Opitz: “They wanted someone who could really hold down Phil Rudd, and Cliffy did.”

  “Phil’s four-on-the-floor style with little embroidery is the root of it all and Malcolm’s rhythm playing is at its heart,” argues Phil Carson, who famously played bass with them on stage in Belgium in 1981. “When Cliff joined the band, the rhythm section completed the ultimate puzzle. As an ex-musician myself, I know how difficult it is to bury one’s ego for the good of the band and those three guys did exactly that. To this day, if you watch an AC/DC concert, the rhythm section does what it’s supposed to do. It gives space to Angus and to Brian, and the result is an overwhelming juggernaut.”

  Says Tony Platt: “Cliff is the perfect bass player for AC/DC because he does the job. He’s a great bass player. Quite underrated in a lot of respects because it isn’t easy to do what he does and keep it absolutely solid. He’s a great singer as well, so he helps out hugely with the backing vocals. And of course he looks the part.”

  Adds Rob Riley, with typical forthrightness: “Fuck me. Cliff Williams, well, he drops right in with Mal and it’s all simple and accessible. Nice, solid and fucking stompy.”