by Fink, Jesse
They most certainly don’t.
8
AC/DC
“Back in Black” (1980)
Back in Black didn’t just signal a darker, heavier sound for the decade that was to follow for AC/DC but stands even today as a signpost of when Angus and Malcolm Young came into their own as musicians. Even, it’s not a stretch to say, as men.
Malcolm was 27 years old and Angus had turned 25. They’d changed managers, had to accept artistic and spiritual relegation for their older brother George and lost their lead singer, friend, guide, muse and lyricist. There was a new bloke with a big mop of curls out front and another, altogether odder one behind the mixing desk—someone more demanding and finicky but undeniably more brilliant than anyone they’d ever encountered in the music business.
But after four weeks of recording at Compass Point, west of Nassau on the Caribbean island of New Providence, then 12 days of mixing at Electric Lady Studios in New York City they delivered not only a great album but the best song of their lives: the title track. It remains the most penetrative AC/DC song in popular culture. It’s been covered by Santana, Muse, Shakira, Foo Fighters and Living Colour (the latter brilliantly) and sampled in music by Nelly, Limp Bizkit, Eminem, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys and Boogie Down Productions. Why?
“It’s a song that is very important in the history of rock ’n’ roll and moving on in life in general,” explains former Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum. “I always look to that song as the ultimate statement in ‘never give up.’ The greatest resurrection of a band in history.”
“Their licks, those themes they came up with,” coos Jerry Greenberg. “Oh. My. God. It was absolutely unbelievable. I just thought it could be one of the biggest all-time rock records ever and it proved right.”
But not everyone was sure. Atlantic’s head of singles, Larry Yasgar, who was on the ground ordering stock for record stores, was worried Brian Johnson wasn’t going to take with fans.
“We didn’t know if the kids were going to be turned off or what was going to happen,” he says. “Well, we found out. It didn’t matter.”
* * *
“Highway to Hell and Back in Black really are the seminal albums for the band because so many things came together,” argues Tony Platt. “The culmination of things at that particular point meant that AC/DC were at their peak at the moment that they had the best set of songs. I would say that the band was at their first peak playing-wise and Mutt Lange was at his first peak production-wise. Plus the overriding factor of having had such a tragic and important death in the band, and with the emotional aspects permeating every facet of the music, there must have been just an amazing perfect storm going on.
“The songs were direct and powerful, the playing was incredibly impactful, nothing was out of place. And the enthusiasm and prowess of Brian Johnson, with his desire to prove himself, cannot be overlooked.”
Even Mark Opitz, who’d had to make way for Highway to Hell engineers Mark Dearnley and Tony Platt in the crossover from Vanda & Young to Lange, agrees the Youngs pulled out something special with Back in Black.
“Back in Black’s very good,” he says. “Highway to Hell was okay. But you can see Highway to Hell was a transitional experience for them. Powerage went, ‘Okay, that’s too far to the left; now we’ve gotta swing right because the record company wants it and we’ve got to learn how to do it so we like it.’ You could see that transformation happening there. If Back in Black hadn’t worked they would have gone home. That was crucial. A huge album. The mere title. Fuck. If we’re going to do something, it’s going to be fucking good. And we’re going to do it as best we can, no matter what. And we’re going to bunker down with Mutt; he fucking understands us. And you listen to Back in Black [against] something like Def Leppard’s Hysteria—two different records, same producer—and what needed to be done on Hysteria didn’t need to be done on Back in Black, that’s for sure. Because these guys could play.”
In the no-frills clips for the title track and five others off the album filmed in one day in Breda, The Netherlands, and directed by AC/DC: Let There Be Rock directors Eric Mistler and Eric Dionysius, Malcolm Young is not much bigger than the white Gretsch Falcon he’s playing. Him? Producing that unbelievable riff? Johnson looks like he’d tear your head off in a bar fight. But that little guy? He’s the one driving all of it. And then there’s Phil Rudd, whose desiccated, heavy drumming is eclipsed by the twin guitar work of the Youngs in the AC/DC “experience” but is as much a part of the AC/DC sound as three-chord riffs and flyaway solos.
In a 1991 interview with German AC/DC fanzine Daily Dirt, reproduced in Howard Johnson’s Get Your Jumbo Jet Out of My Airport: Random Notes for AC/DC Obsessives, Rudd says: “I don’t think about making things faster but heavier. A big hit at the right point can improve the song. The trick is the same with all the instruments. Look at the old blues players. Three notes get right to your soul whereas others can play 50 million and not touch you. That’s my style. I don’t do a lot but I do it right.”
When he left the band for those Martin Guerre years in the 1980s and early 1990s, the band had lost one of its limbs. The Youngs had to shaft him first, though, to realize it.
“Big fucking cement slabs,” says F-word factory Rob Riley. “One of the greatest fucking drummers that ever fucking lived. He just lays it down. He’s absolutely fucking fantastic.”
“Phil Rudd is the heart and soul of that band,” says Mike Fraser. “He’s got really interesting placement of where the cymbals go. It’s not always on the one and three or the two and four. He’ll do sort of offbeat cymbals, though not a lot of them. So it keeps the drum part powerful and driving but still interesting.”
Sorum maintains the unshowy, languid Rudd has been there so long it’s all become symbiotic.
“It’s really the way Rudd sits in the groove. It’s all moving together, although there is a push-and-pull from the other guys that makes it so in the pocket and sexy.
“Phil’s a guy that is the ultimate example of meat-and-potatoes drumming while being very musical at the same time. He’s not the ‘Hey, look at me, I’m the drummer’ type, which really is what’s so cool about Phil.”
As with “Highway to Hell,” a catchy chorus was paramount to “Back in Black,” along with the angular, spiky rhythm.
“It sort of stores up the energy then pumps it out in little spurts,” says Platt. “The orchestration, and the way that the arrangements are set, every instrument is really doing its part. Nothing’s getting in the way of anything else. So when the vocal is spitting out that rhythmic verse the guitars are just underpinning it. They’re not trying to be clever in any way. And then when it hits the chorus the riff just riiiiips through the whole thing and the riff is as good as the melody.”
Back in Black was also an album where AC/DC happily deployed the benefits of technology to augment their sound and make it fatter and bigger, with the caveat that the tricks used weren’t obvious. For Highway to Hell, says Platt, the guitars were overdubbed “quite extensively” and the album was a “little less live” than its successor.
“Back in Black is a very honest, truthful, upfront album and I think it reflects that in the sound. One of the most important things that I remember from working with the Youngs was that you can use effects but don’t let them get heard at all. So there are plenty of effects lurking in the background of the albums that I worked on but you’re not aware that they’re there. They’re tucked in behind the natural sounds and they don’t impose in the slightest.”
Johnson’s vocals, however, were true to his capability. Contrary to rumor there was no double tracking.
“There are some reverbs and some little tweaks and tricks that are sitting there that thicken the vocal out but there’s no double tracking. On choruses there are sometimes backing vocals that are singing the same note, the melody notes, the unison notes. Mutt was particularly good at getting those kind of football crowd–type choruses without it sounding
like a football crowd.”
Yet most of it was recorded with outdated equipment.
“It’s somewhat ironic because the desk that was in that studio at Compass Point at that particular time was an MCI, and it is looked on today as one of the lesser of the period desks,” says Terry Manning. “But it didn’t seem to matter, did it?”
The band that arrived at Compass Point straight after AC/DC was Talking Heads. They were there to cut Remain in Light, an album containing one of the most extraordinary songs in pop-music history: “Once in a Lifetime.”
Equipment didn’t matter at all.
* * *
Barry Diament is widely regarded as one of the godfathers of mastering. For Atlantic Records, he was one of the first sound engineers entrusted with a newfangled technology called the compact disc. For a man whose name is synonymous (at least among audiophile geeks) with some of the biggest rock albums of all time (Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction, Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, U2’s October, Bad Company’s Bad Company) his face should be on a few black T-shirts. For AC/DC alone he’s created compact-disc masters for High Voltage, Let There Be Rock, If You Want Blood, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Highway to Hell, Back in Black, For Those About to Rock and Who Made Who.
And mastering is big business. When AC/DC signed to Sony in 2002, the first announcement made by their new record company was that the entire back catalog would be digitally remastered and reissued. Those 2003 reissues have gone on to shift tens of millions of units. The same catalog was put through the mastering laundry again when it was made available on iTunes. From an audio perspective, this constant remastering of remasters of old masters can amount to a whole lot of nothing but, with fans as passionate as AC/DC’s, it’s a license to print money. In the band’s first week on iTunes in the United States in late 2012, there were 50,000 downloads of its albums (15,000 of Back in Black alone) and 700,000 single downloads.
Mastering, unlike producing, is a solo, largely thankless activity; Diament didn’t work with any members of the band on the AC/DC catalog when he was at Atlantic. His job, he says, is to look for “the sonic truth” when he masters an album—rather than “editorialize or beautify the sound”—in order to keep the original recording and the finished master to as much parity as possible. And it’s all about dynamics.
“It is the dynamics that make a record powerful sounding,” he says. “Dynamics are the differences between the loud parts and the quiet—or less loud—parts. Dynamics determine just how much ‘slam’ the listener experiences in the drums, just how much ‘weight’ there is in the attacks of the bass or in the guitar chords and just how much ‘bite’ there is in the lead guitar solo. One of my prime goals in mastering AC/DC’s albums for CD was to preserve 100 percent of the dynamics in the source tapes.”
As was protecting AC/DC’s distinctive “space” in their music. A job that began with Tony Platt in the recording studio.
“I had room mikes up,” explains Platt. “I just controlled how much of each instrument was leaking onto the other instruments’ microphones. So that when you combine them together, it’s what I call ‘acoustic glue.’ It enables the sounds to actually feel like they’re being played in the same place and at the same time, because of course they are. So it just helps to stick it all together. And that only works if you’ve got a band who is capable of playing tracks live—two guitars, bass and drums—and can get it right.”
When the tapes got to Diament, the onus was on him to retain that space rather than augment.
“Space is one of those things that can very easily be diminished, obscured or completely eradicated by too much processing, by compression of dynamics or by a less than optimal signal path in the mastering room. In addition to preserving performance dynamics, space and air are important considerations.”
That focus on preservation included some of the incidental sounds from the recording, such as the drag on Brian Johnson’s cigarette in “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” and Phil Rudd counting down the beat in “Back in Black.”
“When we experience a musical performance, it isn’t just the instruments in isolation that make up what we hear,” he says. “The humans playing the instruments and the space between and around the humans and their instruments are all part of the total experience. If the original recording engineer captured these, I would consider them crucial to the whole.”
Unlike some bands, AC/DC also manages to be powerful without being teeth-shatteringly loud.
“Some artists have mistakenly been led to believe that raising the level encoded on their CD—making the record itself ‘hot’—makes their recording cut through more on the radio. In fact, the opposite is true: radio compressors tend to clamp down even more on this type of record, resulting in rather wimpy sound rather than powerful sound. It would seem many record-company executives also believe people buy records because they are loud. I don’t know about this as I’ve always bought records because I like the music. Neither do I know anyone who ever said, ‘Wow, that record is loud, I’ve just got to get a copy.’
“Making the record itself loud means other aspects of the sound must be compromised. Prime among these are the dynamics—the very place where the slam and power of the recording come from. This is why so many modern masterings have no real energy. In addition, the compressed dynamics lead to a stress response in the listener. No wonder folks aren’t buying as many records as they used to. Joe and Jane Average might not be thinking about it consciously but they know their newer records just aren’t as much fun to listen to as records used to be and they don’t listen to them as many times as they’ve listened to purchases made years ago.
“In contrast, when the dynamics of the recording are preserved, the listener will have to turn up their playback volume control, especially compared to recordings mastered in the past several years. What a difference. They can turn the recordings way up without experiencing the painful quality a ‘hot’ record engenders. And they can experience the full dynamics, the full slam, weight and power of the music in ways those ‘hot’ records just can’t achieve.”
Tristin Norwell, a freelance engineer at Alberts back in the early 1990s who relocated to London to work for Neneh Cherry and Dave Stewart of Eurythmics before becoming a composer in his own right, agrees with Diament.
“The recording purist will always want to capture and reproduce the full width of dynamics of an artist’s performance,” he says. “If you go to a lyrical theater, and you are in a good one, you will hear an actor whisper when they are being coy, and when they shout they will get the message across without it being distorted.
“Recording music is the same. But the broadcast mediums are very different and therefore reproduction tricks vary depending on the message being sent. Tools such as compression, limiting and ‘loudness’ are designed to exacerbate subtlety, not retain it. They are designed for an inattentive audience who might only ever hear music when they’re shopping, so any musical message needs to be rammed down their ears at any given opportunity.
“Back in Black works because it’s a beautiful technical reproduction of a great performance and of the space in which they are doing it. With Johnson’s voice carefully balanced between the air of the room and two great-sounding electric guitars, a drummer and a bass player, all performing with genuine ‘intent,’ it becomes a god-sent ear-candy moment.
“Any less dynamic would soften the message, and any more may send a metalhead to sleep. The point is that the quiet bits are as captivating to its audience as the loud bits. This is what an engineer is talking about when he or she talks about ‘space’—dynamic space. Space that is reproduced by a technical exercise in which we, the listener, get to ‘feel’ a performer.
“Classical music is usually the best example of this for the audio junkie, as it requires massive signal-to-noise ratios for transparent reproduction, but Back in Black comes close to this for the hard-rock junkie.”
For all the audio whiz
zbangery of the AC/DC catalog, it hasn’t always been so sophisticated. Tony Platt recounts a story that during the production of the Bonfire box set in 1997, George Young was forced to master the AC/DC: Let There Be Rock film soundtrack from old cassettes Platt had lying about. Norwell recalls that before he moved to the UK he was asked by Alberts to archive the entire AC/DC two-inch tape collection.
“I went into Studio 2 one day and found the in-house building maintenance bloke trying to work out why a tape he’d put on the MCI tape machine wasn’t rewinding. I asked what it was, and freaked out when he told me.
“It was an original AC/DC tape. It was so old—and a notoriously bad batch of BASF—that it was dropping metal onto the heads. By the time I got there it was half a centimeter thick. The tape was ruined. Fortunately, it was probably only about two minutes of an old outtake, but I hand-wound it back on and sent it off to be rebaked.”
Rebaking is an archiving process by which the tape is restored temporarily to allow just enough time to transfer it to a new reel.
“Anyway, with a heavy heart I turned down the job. I would have spent six months transferring every recording AC/DC had made to that date. I don’t know who did it in the end. Hopefully not the mentalist bong-head from the workshop cellar.”
* * *
While Alberts might have been sloppy with their archiving, Lange left nothing to chance in The Bahamas. Back in Black was as much a career-defining album for him as it was for AC/DC. He had under his belt a bunch of City Boy, Boomtown Rats, Supercharge and Clover records, Graham Parker’s Heat Treatment and a ream of one-offs for a gaggle of nobodies. Foreigner and Def Leppard were still to come. The only album he produced between Highway to Hell and Back in Black was the self-titled debut of Broken Home, a side group of the British band Mr. Big, with Platt engineering.
