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

by Fink, Jesse

  Who or what exactly is Leidseplein Presse B.V.?

  There are few clues but a 1981 article in Billboard mentions AC/DC “was establishing a Netherland [sic] Antilles corporation, Leidesplein [sic] B.V.” More interestingly, in a typed 2004 letter from Leidseplein Presse B.V. to the United States Commissioner of Trademarks, the name Stuart Prager has been written, in pen, over the top of AC/DC manager Alvin Handwerker. It is signed by Prager.

  The letter begins: “Stuart Prager declares that he is a proxyholder of the managing director of applicant corporation and is authorized to make this declaration on behalf of said applicant.”

  In 2004 Prager, of New York law firm Clark & Prager, was AC/DC’s attorney. Leidseplein Presse B.V. gives its address in tendered documents as being in The Netherlands, suggesting that if it was originally created in the Caribbean, it had since moved to Europe.

  But why a Dutch entity in the first place? One explanation could be tax. Or rather, little or no tax. The very same reason AC/DC had recorded Back in Black in The Bahamas, a country with virtually no taxes. It was in AC/DC’s interests to stay out of England to avoid “tax resident” status.

  Writes Martin Van Geest, author of the Dutch book Het Belastingparadijs (in English, The Tax Haven), for Amsterdam magazine The International Correspondent: “Earnings derived from intellectual property such as royalties are taxed at rates close to zero in The Netherlands. This makes it extremely lucrative for artists to transfer a part of their assets, such as the copyright on songs, to a Dutch entity.”

  The Rolling Stones is one such act.

  “Arguably the most tax-savvy band of all. According to legal documents that were made public a couple of years ago, three band members, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, have channeled over 340 million Euros through their Dutch ‘headquarters.’ All in all, they have paid just 5.6 million Euros in taxes on those earnings, or 1.5 percent. Makes you wonder what their song ‘Gimme Shelter’ was really about.”

  And it may possibly account for why the Youngs have spent so much time outside of Australia, given its oppressive tax dragnet.

  * * *

  Even when their records stink, there are still fans willing to fork out $20 for an AC/DC T-shirt because, well, they look really fucking cool because of Huerta’s logo. Chicks dig it. Wimps can walk tall wearing it.

  Huerta hasn’t received a dime.

  “No royalties. Although it would be nice to have earned a bit on the merchandising so I can get my last kid through college.”

  In Murray Engleheart’s biography of AC/DC, the logo is credited to Bob Defrin, Atlantic’s creative director, but Defrin only came up with the cover image for the album. The logo, one of the most important and recognizable in music if not design history, was the invention of Huerta, then a 25-year-old from Los Angeles who’d also come up with the lettering for High Voltage’s US release in July 1976.

  “Bob put together the visual of the band and sky for the cover,” says Huerta. “Typically he would hire me, as most record art directors did, to produce multiple sketch ideas and then one was chosen for a final. I produced [the AC/DC logo] as finished full-color artwork, a combination of India-inked outline, color overlay film and airbrushed gouache.”

  For a man who has contributed such an important element of AC/DC’s branding, and consequently could be seen to have helped make the Youngs and their record companies a fortune in merchandising sales, you would think Huerta would get a royalty, especially when the logo was designed for one album, not for AC/DC’s use for perpetuity. Not so. He only ever got his original commission fee. Nor has he ever had any contact with the band. Not a phone call. Nothing. He hasn’t got lawyers involved; he’s just let it be. The original artwork is stored away in a box in his archives, untouched.

  “It was April 25, 1977 when I completed that artwork,” says Huerta, who’s also designed logos for Boston, Foreigner, Time magazine and Pepsi. “I was living and working at 210 East 53rd Street in New York City. My studio was a second bedroom and I had been freelancing for a little over a year; this was after a year and four months’ employment at CBS Records as an album-cover designer.

  “I came to New York right out of school. I had a portfolio that reflected more of a Los Angeles influence, and that included the record business out there. In New York most of the lettering solutions tended to be more conservative or corporate, and my solutions tended to be more experimental, something certainly suited to the record-business art departments that were always looking for something unique.”

  Assuming it was purely coincidental, there’s a touch of AC/DC’s font in Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell font by Richard Corben, which was released in October 1977. Let There Be Rock was released in June. How did it come about?

  “I had produced a lettering design for a live Blue Öyster Cult album in 1975 called On Your Feet or On Your Knees. The cover showed a distorted ominous photo of a church with a limousine in front. It was photographed by John Berg, the creative director at CBS, and with some multiple photo composition and retouching it was great. As I viewed the photo and began sketching, it occurred to me that Gutenberg-inspired letterforms might make an interesting look for this fire-and-brimstone photo. Being influenced by the limo, I combined the letterforms with a car marque metallic beveled-lettering style and was happy with the result. A couple of years later when sketching up the AC/DC lettering, again the Gutenberg style seemed to work with the art of the band and the dark ominous sky on the cover.

  “So the letterforms are based on the first printed book, which was the Gutenberg Bible. You can see many samples now on Google Images, although it took a bit of research in those days. Gutenberg developed movable type and alternate characters of letters so that his work would replicate the hand-lettered work that scribes produced. This style was certainly German but I think in both cases where I used the type style, the twist in making it a car marque on BÖC or the dimension and tight packing together of the letterforms on ‘AC/DC’ gives it a different context.

  “The drawing of the AC/DC lettering, with its less than generous letter spacing and the lightning bolt that is drawn as if it is a letterform, makes it read not as five individual characters but one complete symbol or mark. Its perimeter is serrated and sharp. A traditional ‘A’ is a triangle shape, a traditional ‘C’ is based on an ellipse or circle, and a ‘D’ is a combination straight and curve. All of these letterforms have been forced into a perfect vertical and slightly adjusted 45-degree angle. One comment I make about this lettering: it is the only piece of lettering I have done that is made entirely of straight lines.”

  And one that has gone on to be almost a cliché. Hard rock and Gothic-style logos go hand in hand.

  “I have not found anything predating this style for a band but I could be wrong,” he says. “I did not intend that it should be the look for certain kinds of rock, as I was just designing what I thought would work for an album cover and a band. But when I saw the Blue Öyster Cult–influenced Spinal Tap logo in the ’80s, it was clear this look had become the classic rock parody.”

  Surely it irks him that he hasn’t got the acclamation and financial reward that some would argue he is due? I ask him how he feels about the logo being used on virtually all of AC/DC’s albums and merchandise when it was done for a stand-alone album.

  “You did these jobs, then another, and another, and so on. There was a break in the use of that art and by that time I was on to other work. You see, that same year, 1977, just a few months later I worked on another four-letter word, the masthead for Time magazine, which paid probably 10 times what a piece of lettering for an album did.

  “I was moving into other areas and was pretty much out of the record business by 1979. Technically, Atlantic did not own the rights to use it on other albums but I am not one to go after people. Art never paid well enough to even hire a lawyer. It takes too long for what you are paid.

  “You can’t copyright fonts because you can’t copyright a letter of
the alphabet. So you do your art and move on. Besides, the effect to my own business of having done that art is difficult to calculate, but certainly positive. For every AC/DC there are quite a few more that are much more beautiful and interesting to me, but didn’t have the legs for whatever reasons.”

  When you see how big AC/DC have become do you feel a sense of satisfaction that you were part of creating their image?

  “In a word, yes,” he replies. “But one must understand that there are two components to a successful brand identity. One is the design. The second is the exposure. This band is still touring after more than 40 years and you now have generations who have seen and associated the band with this logo. That has more to do with the success of the logo than its design.”

  Maybe so, and it says a lot about Huerta that he can show such equanimity having potentially been denied a fortune, but his stroke of inspiration was still a part of the Youngs’ success. He deserved more from AC/DC and their record company.

  But arguably so do many others in the AC/DC story who have similar tales of lack of recognition or under-appreciation.

  For all their wealth, fame and success, that questionable treatment, and the bad reputation that comes with it, is the Youngs’ cross to bear—Glasgow mentality or not.

  * * *

  Manhattan, New York, early 2013. I walk down Mott Street from Nolita into Chinatown, a teeming, Blade Runner–like warren of supermarkets and pushy old Chinese ladies. Here it’s normal to be confronted by buckets of live frogs and hacked crocodile arms, but instead I come across something more exotic: an old-school video-game parlor.

  Right out the front is an AC/DC pinball machine.

  New York had seen AC/DC play at The Palladium on East 14th Street and legendary punk club CBGB on The Bowery in August 1977, on the same night, but both venues had been demolished and closed down respectively by the time I got there. CBGB had been swallowed up by a John Varvatos store.

  Atlantic’s Steve Leeds was in the club the night AC/DC played.

  “At The Palladium they announced: ‘For those of you who want more AC/DC, we’re going to be over at CBGB afterward.’ Oh my God,” he recalls. “I think it was the last time and only time CBGB was clean because the sound just shook all the spiderwebs and dust out of the place. There were lines around the corner. People couldn’t believe AC/DC were playing CBGB. It was an abbreviated set but it was so packed. You couldn’t move.”

  The old Atlantic Studios, where that December AC/DC recorded Live from the Atlantic Studios (a promotional-only release for radio stations that was included in the 1997 Bonfire box set), are also long gone, though Electric Lady Studios, where guitar and vocal overdubs for Back in Black were recorded in June 1980, survives in Greenwich Village.

  Live from the Atlantic Studios, introduced by Ed Sciaky from Philadelphia radio station WIOQ, is a classic example of the quiet but important behind-the-scenes work Atlantic did for AC/DC. The key people behind it were Michael Klenfner, who died in 2009, and Judy Libow. The late Perry Cooper, who was in charge of artist relations, is credited in the Wall, Masino and Engleheart biographies with having coming up with the concept on his own. Indeed, in Susan Masino’s book he personally takes credit for it: “I had come up with the idea.”

  But perhaps not on his own.

  “Perry helped coordinate the events with the artists we selected and was credited as a co-producer with me,” says Libow. “We sent these albums out to radio and press. It was a series of releases that we initiated as part of the promotion that Atlantic was doing with a lot of these bands. It was great. We would get a different radio station involved. The band would go in. We’d press it onto disc. They would do a broadcast of the show.

  “You have to look at these things as having a cumulative effect on a band’s career. Everything that we did over the years and the evolution of the band musically, it was like a perfect wave. It all came together with Back in Black. The [Live] series was very successful. The radio stations loved being a part of it. It really brought the band very close to the process of what we did to help promote their music. They understood the value in it. At the time it was sort of cutting edge because no other labels were really doing that kind of thing.”

  Jimmy Douglass was Atlantic’s in-house engineer.

  “It was one of the greatest experiences of my life,” he tells me from Miami. “I was the guy doing all the rock stuff. Foreigner. The Rolling Stones. That was me. Working with AC/DC was amazing. The band speaks for itself. And it was before they really broke big. As a matter of fact we had such a great time on that album that when I went to LA I met with [AC/DC] for quite a bit and they were considering me to actually make their next record. We did do a lot of ‘shit’ back then. I’m pretty sure I had one night with them at a club in LA and we saw Blondie.

  “They hadn’t really created that [Mutt Lange] sound yet. Something happened between my schedule and theirs and it just didn’t happen. There was an honest synergy within them that was just pure energy fire. Straight ahead, right up, fastball, right down the fucking middle. I’m talking serious heat. I remember the feeling of standing and just looking at the speakers, listening and going, ‘Hooooly shit.’”

  On radio, though, America was only just waking up to AC/DC’s “pure energy fire.”

  “We saw a reaction with every release,” says Libow. “And the fan base was growing long before radio even got hip to their music in terms of really hitting the charts and getting behind the band musically. It was just a word-of-mouth thing. It was a combination of the press and their live shows. Wherever they played you heard about it. There was a buzz about this band. Even if the radio stations weren’t yet playing their music by the time AC/DC came through their market it wasn’t long after that they were playing whatever was available at the time.

  “If you had a graph, it just kept moving up: the level of awareness, the support that they were getting from radio and the sales that they were generating with their music. It was the ideal pattern you would want to see with any band you’re working with. The incline was just straight up. That’s how it was once they really focused on the States.”

  However, AC/DC still hadn’t recorded that breakthrough album to get them over the top. It was about to come in short time but it wasn’t to be the one they were expecting.

  6

  AC/DC

  “Riff Raff” (1978)

  It’s Keith Richards’s, Eddie Van Halen’s and Gene Simmons’s favorite AC/DC album, a good indicator that the Youngs must have been doing something right with their guitar playing. But it was also a triumph for the band’s unheralded rhythm section. Says Georg Dolivo of Rhino Bucket: “Every drummer and bass player I know loves Powerage.”

  Armed with their best ever collection of songs, the recording sessions for AC/DC’s fifth studio album were fueled by endless cups of tea, a steady supply of Benson & Hedges cigarettes and Drum tobacco, and a ton of ambition to properly crack America outside of the drudgery of touring and make inroads where it really mattered: record stores.

  “In a way it was AC/DC’s Sgt. Pepper’s,” says Mark Opitz, defining Powerage as a transitional moment for the group. “When we came to do Powerage, George, Harry and the band did serious rehearsals at Studio 2 in Alberts. George playing bass with the band just out in the studio, Harry and me in the control room. Doing rehearsals, basically writing rehearsals, where you have all sorts of riffs. Malcolm was certainly constructing. Angus was too. But you could see Malcolm taking a stronger hand then. They were maturing: songs like ‘What’s Next to the Moon,’ ‘Gimme a Bullet,’ ‘Riff Raff,’ ‘Sin City,’ ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Damnation.’ It was different. We rehearsed at night, followed by midnight-to-dawn recording sessions. Eight o’clock in the evenings we’d start. We’d finish early in the mornings, to the point where Malcolm, Phil Rudd and I would hire a tinny at Rose Bay and motor out into Sydney Harbour with a six-pack of beer and a couple of joints and do a bit of fishing while people were catching a ferry
to work.

  “I’d spend the days testing the Marshall amps till I could find two really good-sounding ones that were the best to record with. They’re all sort of different, amps. In the studio, particularly during Powerage, it was like a family. It wasn’t a normal recording session. It was a project.”

  AC/DC having styled themselves as an album band, Atlantic now wanted them to deliver hits, and they were happy to oblige: “Rock ’n’ Roll Damnation” was belatedly cut for that very purpose after the first edit of the album had received a lukewarm response from New York and it was suggested they record a radio-friendly track. But Powerage was also the album where Malcolm began asserting executive control.

  “Malcolm no doubt was the leader of the band,” says Opitz. “George had had his day with The Easybeats. Not strongly, not overtly, but you could feel during Powerage Malcolm was starting to stake his ground a bit [in the brothers’ pecking order].”

  Family intrigues put aside, Powerage was a high point creatively for the three Youngs, an album arguably superior to the commercially successful Mutt Lange circuitbreakers that followed, Highway to Hell and Back in Black. After Powerage, the boogie and groove largely disappeared. What was left was still great—Lange amplified so many of their strengths—but at the expense of leaching Vanda & Young’s deft touches. Out went the handclaps and the maracas and so much of the rawness. The change of singer had an effect too. Bon Scott’s cheekiness and fun was superseded by Brian Johnson’s heaviness and malevolence.

  If you want an aural marker of how much the band altered its sound between 1978 and 1983, listen to “Landslide” off Flick of the Switch against Powerage’s “Riff Raff.” The songs are both foot-to-the-floor numbers, but don’t compare in quality. It’s hard to ignore the feeling that something was lost in the changeover, even if the Youngs’ good friend John Swan doesn’t agree.