by Fink, Jesse
“You guys were hot,” he says, grabbing them by their shoulders and about to hand over a brown paper envelope stuffed with $10,000. “You were great. Insane. I’ve gotta record you!”
In 1978 Klenfner’s influence on AC/DC had already returned handsome dividends: a hit with “Rock ’n’ Roll Damnation” in England, the Live from the Atlantic Studios promotion, and concert bookings on both coasts, where his personal connections came into play. Now he was right behind the push for South African Eddie Kramer to supplant Vanda & Young and flew to Sydney to break the news to the Australian pair that they were history.
Kramer was best known for his work with Jimi Hendrix, Kiss and Led Zeppelin.
“I didn’t dig Eddie Kramer’s work,” says Thaler. “I didn’t think there was anything special about what he did. And I got hold of Clive Calder and I said, ‘Clive, do you think Mutt would have interest in working with AC/DC?’ I just thought it would be a great choice. He was starting to hit his stride as a producer and I’d already given him a project, The Outlaws. I was curious to see if he would even be interested since [AC/DC] were much harder than anything he had done to that date.
“So I put forward the idea of Mutt working with the band, as I knew George and Harry were open to other ideas to help push them over the top. When Clive said that Mutt would be interested, I passed the suggestion on to Michael Browning. It really wasn’t my place to do much more than that. I may have suggested Mutt to someone at Atlantic as well; I just don’t clearly recall. As City Boy’s agent and AC/DC’s agent all I could really do with respect to producers was make suggestions and that’s what I did. I believe Clive was already in talks with Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Greenberg about a deal between Atlantic and Mutt.”
This is confirmed by Greenberg, who says the first time he heard the name Mutt Lange was inside Atlantic.
“Yes,” he says. “It was one of the guys in my A&R department: John Kalodner. Kalodner wanted to sign City Boy.”
But Greenberg also says he maintained a direct line of communication with Browning.
“Oh, all the time. All the time.”
Did Browning ever mention Lange?
“Um, he may have. I’m not sure. I will tell you that I was the guy that Browning had to come to quite often for what we called in those days ‘tour support’ to keep the band alive.”
Phil Carson recalls the chronology of events clearly.
“Jerry brought Mutt into the fold via an album that he had produced for an Atlantic group, City Boy. The album got some pretty good airplay, but never made the grade. Jerry and John Kalodner both thought that Mutt had something special to offer AC/DC.”
Meanwhile, Klenfner had got his way with Kramer. But the sessions, first in Sydney and later in Miami, collapsed in acrimony between the producer and the band. Kramer didn’t understand their methods. They didn’t like him. The Kramer disaster is part of AC/DC legend. As Thaler describes it: “When that experiment blew up, the shit hit the fan.” Even with Kramer’s production pedigree, it wasn’t working.
Mark Opitz had been seconded to work with Kramer while in Sydney.
“Malcolm saw through Eddie pretty quickly,” he says. “Didn’t like the idea. He was like, ‘Fuck you,’ because he’s that kinda guy. Didn’t like being told what to do.”
It didn’t improve when they shifted to Florida.
“I got a phone call after a week or two [of the Kramer sessions] from Angus [in Miami], and he said they were going home,” says Greenberg. “They couldn’t work with Kramer any more. I said, ‘Sit tight. Give me a couple of days. Just sit there and enjoy the sun.’ I was ready to sign City Boy and the producer was Mutt Lange. The production was incredible. I called Clive Calder; I got him on the phone and I told him about AC/DC. I said, ‘Listen, they’re in Miami, can I get Mutt to come over and produce the band?’ He said, ‘I’ll put him on the next plane,’ and history was made.”
So how does Kalodner fit in?
“Kalodner wanted to sign City Boy. I heard City Boy and Kalodner was crazy about the production and said, ‘Mutt Lange: this guy’s a great producer; listen to the production,’ and at that point that’s when—I don’t care about whose suggestion it was—I made the decision to call the boys and talk them into Lange and make the deal with Clive. So you can word it any way you want.
“I think maybe [the Youngs] knew who [Lange] was, I don’t remember. But I’m sure that somehow Michael Browning was involved at that moment also. Lange came in as soon as Kramer packed up and left. You keep talking to a lot of people you’ll put it together.”
* * *
It’s worth trying to put together because Doug Thaler’s, Phil Carson’s and Jerry Greenberg’s version of events completely contradicts that of Michael Browning in the Murray Engleheart biography of AC/DC, which downplays Thaler’s involvement, saying only he “played a role in securing Lange’s services from Atlantic’s end” and that Browning was “sharing a house” with Calder and Lange and took a call from a distressed Malcolm Young in Miami. Virtually the same account appears in the Clinton Walker, Susan Masino and Mick Wall tomes, but in Masino’s book Browning is “visiting” Calder and Lange and in Wall’s book Browning is sharing with Calder and Browning’s business partner, Cedric Kushner.
Says Browning in Walker’s Highway to Hell: “I was at that stage based temporarily in New York. I’d met some people who’d invited me to stay with them, one of whom was Mutt Lange’s manager, Clive Calder. I got the phone call from Malcolm, and I got off the phone, and Mutt was there, in the apartment, and I said, ‘You’ve got to do this record.’ At the time, Mutt had really only done City Boy, The Boomtown Rats, but I happened to think he was incredibly talented. So within a couple of days they agreed to do the next record.”
Or as he puts it in Engleheart’s AC/DC, Maximum Rock & Roll: “I just turned round to Mutt, virtually as I had Malcolm on the phone, and said, ‘Mate, you’ve got to do this record.’ That was it.”
And again in Wall’s AC/DC: Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be: “I just didn’t stop. I just hammered them and by the end of the night I’d convinced Clive and Mutt to do it. I called Malcolm back and said, ‘It’s cool. I’ve got Mutt Lange’ … so that’s how the whole thing with Mutt Lange started.”
Wall writes, dramatically, “It was to be a game-changing decision for all involved.”
But from the testimonies of Thaler, Carson and Greenberg it would appear that isn’t exactly the case. And, crucially, Clive Calder’s former partner Ralph Simon seems to support them.
In a 2011 interview with celebrityaccess.com he told music writer Larry LeBlanc: “I remember [Clive and I] getting [Lange] AC/DC in 1979. We suggested to AC/DC that they needed to improve their backing vocals. Make it a little more commercial, but without losing their edge. It was a big fight to get them to do that on Highway to Hell but it proved to be correct.”
Yet Browning won’t have a bar of alternative versions: he maintains it was he and he alone who came up with the idea and that Thaler is wrong.
“No, that’s not correct,” he says. “He’s big-noting himself.”
He insists his mentioning of Lange to Malcolm Young was the first AC/DC had ever heard of City Boy’s producer.
“Absolutely.”
Had you heard of Lange from inside Atlantic before you suggested his name to Malcolm?
“No, the idea didn’t get to Atlantic until I presented it to them.”
And you got the introduction to Lange through Calder?
“Through Clive, yeah.”
The most AC/DC themselves have said about the affair was contained in an interview with MOJO magazine in 1984. According to Malcolm, he was unhappy with Kramer and told Browning: “This guy’s got to go, otherwise you’re not going to have a band.”
He went on: “[Browning] did a bit of wheeling-dealing and got a tape to a friend of his, Mutt Lange … we told Kramer, ‘We’re having tomorrow off, we need a break,’ and we went in and wrote nine songs in one day
and whacked them off to Mutt. He got straight back and said he wanted to do it.”
Thaler holds to his story that Lange was raised with AC/DC and Atlantic well before any Malcolm SOS to Browning.
“Oh, absolutely,” he says. “I never acted behind Michael’s back. I felt it was my responsibility to counsel and advise him as best as I could for the sake of AC/DC. We never acted in opposition to each other. While I maintain that I got the ball rolling with putting AC/DC together with Mutt, I simply was playing a role on the team. We were all working together for one common purpose—to get this band’s career over the top as we all felt it should be.
“There was a South African promoter that lived in New York that I was very close with at the time, Cedric Kushner. Cedric lived in a luxury apartment building on West 58th between 5th and 6th Avenues. Clive Calder lived in England but had begun making more frequent trips to New York by 1978. Cedric was in talks with Michael Browning about joining with him to co-manage the band. And Clive used to stay at Cedric’s apartment. Clive and Cedric were born in South Africa and bonded over that fact. And I’d go over there and we’d sorta hang out.
“Michael got an apartment about a block away from Cedric, on West 58th between 6th and 7th. Michael and his wife, Julie, had stayed with me at my apartment for a couple of weeks in ’78.”
So I ask Kushner, the man whose apartment Browning was allegedly holed up in, to give his version of events.
* * *
Cedric Kushner was briefly co-manager of AC/DC with Michael Browning and made his name promoting acts such as The Doobie Brothers, Fleetwood Mac and The Rolling Stones. Today he is a boxing promoter and still lives in New York City. He has not spoken about his time with AC/DC before now.
Kushner, a lampooned figure in previous books about the band, almost as much as Michael Klenfner, told me he had been “happy to turn” his good friend Clive Calder on to AC/DC and was “very disappointed that they ended up leaving me.” Without his input, he says, Calder would not have met Michael Browning.
“Michael was staying at my place, we all became friends; this was also at a time when the band had a hard-on for Michael,” he says. “They wanted to bail out of the relationship. That relationship had gone its course. Peter Mensch was romancing them. I don’t think Michael put the band in touch with Mutt Lange. I think the fact that Clive Calder and Ralph Simon were friends of mine—they were representing Mutt—made a very good situation. That gave them more of an opportunity to spend some time with Michael. That helped bond that relationship.”
So does he believe Mutt Lange-to-AC/DC was an idea that suddenly came to Browning?
“No. That he woke up and said, ‘Gee, I’d love to get a good producer?’ No, no.”
But he concedes it is “quite possible” Browning picked up the phone to Malcolm Young in his apartment and suggested Lange, which is corroborated by Malcolm’s own statement on the matter.
Thaler agrees: “Absolutely possible and probable—I simply wasn’t privy to that call between Michael and Malcolm. The story of the phone call at least seems consistent with what I had been trying to engineer for several months.”
Does Kushner believe the Calder-Lange connection with AC/DC predated that conversation?
“I believe so.”
Kushner also says he never once suggested to Calder that Lange produce AC/DC, even though he was involved in a business relationship with Browning. The Australian, sensing that Mensch was circling, had entered into a partnership with Kushner, but instead of solidifying his hold on the band it had blown up in his face.
“I wasn’t thinking that far ahead because I didn’t think that Browning was going to last that long,” says Kushner. “Everyone likes to take credit and I don’t claim to take credit.”
Had he contemplated taking over the band from a weakened Browning?
“I wasn’t thinking that way. I was thinking more along the lines that it would just be an overall strengthening of my presence in the music business. My objective was just to raise my profile.”
Kushner, like Greenberg and Carson, fully backs the Thaler story and even says AC/DC’s humble American booking agent personally introduced him to Calder. And through Calder, he met Lange and Simon. One night, he went out to dinner with Calder and Simon in London.
“By the end of dinner I felt like I’d known these guys for a long time.”
They got on so well Kushner offered them the free use of a room in his two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, the same apartment where Browning says he took the phone call from Malcolm.
“Michael stayed at my place on a few occasions,” says Kushner. “Clive was a good friend of mine that I introduced to Michael. And they ended up doing a deal for the publishing. Mutt was managed by Clive, so when we all sat down obviously Mutt had a very good reputation. It wasn’t too hard to sell him. Atlantic were very much in favor of Mutt doing the album. Obviously Clive was. Mutt was excited about it. It was a good situation.”
Was Lange actually living with you at any point?
“No.”
The Browning-Kushner management of AC/DC lasted all of six months and today Browning says it was “a mistake … I needed the money.”
There is no love lost between the two men.
Says Browning of Kushner: “He was just an absolute total mistake all round.”
Kushner, for his part, recalls going to Roundhouse Studios in London, where AC/DC recorded Highway to Hell with Lange, and picking up a “bad vibe.” Thaler remembers it being literally frosty, which wouldn’t have helped the mood: “I went to a rehearsal hall where AC/DC was writing and practicing. It was cold. The place wasn’t heated and they had a kerosene construction space heater on to keep warm.”
“It became obvious to me that Browning was in serious trouble,” says Kushner. “Sometimes you know you’re in trouble. You don’t need someone to tell you.”
But Browning puts down the Youngs’ coldness in London to their antipathy toward Kushner: “The group didn’t want to know about him. I appointed a co-manager they hadn’t approved of and subsequently didn’t like. In management there are ups and downs. It was certainly a tough period, just having changed producers … I wasn’t their most popular person at the time. But it was the Kushner thing that basically took it over the top. It was a mistake.”
“They were a very tough crowd, AC/DC, tough guys to manage,” concedes Kushner. “Rough and ready. They were guys that did what they wanted to do. They wanted to call the shots.”
But they were about to meet their match.
7
AC/DC
“Highway to Hell” (1979)
What is it about this song that makes it so much more powerful than anything else AC/DC had written or produced up to that stage of their career?
Is it the unforgettable chorus? Is it the opening power chord that builds to become a mountain of sound? Is it the production? Is it the good-time lyrics? Or is it the backing, almost baying, vocals that simply erupt when they arrive in the mix?
“That’s one of the things that first caught me when I heard it,” says Mark Evans. “Most of it is Bon. You can hear Malcolm coming through a bit. But you mostly hear Bon, which I found really odd, because it was like, ‘What’s that?’ But hey, listen. The proof’s in the pudding. To me personally it’s their best album.”
In his book Highway to Hell, Joe Bonomo has a shot at divining its secret: “An effortless, head-rocking, arms-elevated, smile-lifting chorus so appealing and fun and full of filthy guarantees, and so layered with harmonized, gang-bellowed vocals that you feel surrounded at a smoky party.”
John Wheeler of Hayseed Dixie has his own theory: “It’s the perfect rock lyric. There are eight lines [in each verse] and a chorus, which is just the same line over and over, not counting ‘Don’t stop me!’ That’s pure genius: to write something so economical that absolutely says it. A lot of bands have a ‘sound,’ but when you strip the sound away and just play the song solo on an acoustic guitar there
isn’t much actually there. That’s not the case with ‘Highway to Hell.’ That song works whether it’s played by a rock band, a bluegrass band or a brass marching band.”
But Tony Platt, its mixing engineer, puts it down to something more primal.
“It’s very spiky and angular,” he says. “But that gives you the punch. Just a damn good rhythm. Very simple and very straightforward. It’s just that stripped-down openness of the rhythm.”
Whatever it is that makes “Highway to Hell” undoubtedly one of the top half dozen in the Youngs’ songbook, it’s the single that not only broke AC/DC in the United States as a radio-friendly band but forced AC/DC’s haters—and there were still many of them in 1979—to stop dead in their tracks.
“When the clip for ‘Highway to Hell’ popped up on TV I had to sit up and pay attention,” says Radio Birdman’s Chris Masuak. “The production was tough but polished enough for my ‘superior’ sensibilities and the guitar sounds were awesome. I went out and bought the record and had my first twinge of regret and guilt for being given a valuable guitar lesson almost too late. AC/DC didn’t rate in our camp but I’m glad that I finally got them.”
* * *
Tony Platt worked on four AC/DC records: Highway to Hell, Back in Black, Flick of the Switch (as co-producer with Malcolm and Angus Young) and the soundtrack album to the film AC/DC: Let There Be Rock, which is contained in the Bonfire box set.
The Englishman had been introduced to Lange through a mutual friend called Adam Sieff, who went on to become Sony’s director of jazz for the United Kingdom and Europe, and found someone who appreciated his pedigree: Lange wanted an engineer who was completely across the “fat” British rock sound and Platt, fortuitously, had worked with its foremost exponent: Free.
