by Fink, Jesse
Is this a source of resentment for the band?
“Yep. They have resentment because we own the catalog. Yeah, yeah. Definitely resentment. All of our bands resent the fact we were smart managers and kept the positions in the catalog.”
So what’s his cut?
“Can’t say but it was a good situation. But life goes on. I was angry about them leaving me. We did a great job. I was pissed but hey, listen, those things happen. We didn’t get the proper recognition for breaking them when everybody else turned their back on them. I always felt that the band kind of, like, didn’t appreciate the job we did. It happens a lot. But there’s only one time in the history of a band when they really need you—and that’s in the beginning.”
So what hurt more? Losing AC/DC or Aerosmith?
“They both hurt. But there’s a difference. With Aerosmith, I ripped up their contract because they were heroin addicts and I didn’t want to kill them. And they kept on getting more and more money from me but [Steven Tyler and Joe Perry] couldn’t get off heroin, Steven especially. I didn’t want to see him die. And John Belushi had just died—before that they were friendly—and I realized that Steven was going downhill. I had sent him to many, many institutions. I wasn’t going to stay away from three kids and I wasn’t going to spend all my time with him. He needed someone who could—and would. So even though Aerosmith owed me five more albums and they had just signed a long-term contract with us I threw them out and ripped it up.”
Krebs backs this account.
“We really threw them out. They didn’t fire us. They had gone too far. I had spent over five years trying to cure them, ineptly.”
“Steven later hugged me and appreciated the fact that I’d saved his life,” reveals Leber. “Because of course, again, they don’t like to admit those things. So that one, Aerosmith, I canned them. AC/DC: they canned me—for no real reason—and that pissed me off. If they’d canned me because I was doing a bad job, I could accept that. But don’t fire the guy who broke you and did a great job over money.
“I’m not bitter about it at all. I laugh about it all the way to the bank because I kept the Aerosmith catalog and publishing. I kept the AC/DC catalog. After all these years, I still have it. More than 30 years later I still get money every year and it’s a lot of money. But at the same time I love the guys. I would have liked to have kept the relationship.”
For tens of millions of reasons.
Says Krebs, matter of factly: “Back in Black has outsold the highest selling Aerosmith album two to one.”
9
AC/DC
“You Shook Me All Night Long” (1980)
Lyrically, it’s the strongest song on Back in Black. Musically, despite undeniable flecks of Head East’s opening riff in “Never Been Any Reason,” it’s become the good-time anthem of a band that can’t help writing them: a perfect combination of straight-ahead rock and melodic pop that by AC/DC’s already peerless standard is so exceptionally radio-friendly it’s been covered by middle-of-the-road divas Celine Dion and Shania Twain.
“Just so much going for it. How could any rock song be better?” says Terry Manning. “It’s got a great beat. It’s just so incredibly simple. There’s so much space around the punctuations that start it off. And then when it all comes together and the chorus starts with the bass coming in and everything, it just rocks. It’s rock ’n’ roll. Every time I hear it I’m excited by it. I could literally listen to that song a hundred times in a row and not be tired. It keeps you going.”
Yet when Tony Platt presented “You Shook Me All Night Long” to the marketing team at Atlantic Records at 75 Rockefeller Plaza he was shocked to discover those who liked it were outnumbered by those who didn’t. The head of the department dug it but he was in a minority.
“I remember two or three of these marketing guys going, ‘Nah, I don’t see that as a single at all,’” he says. “That’s one of the biggest rock singles of all time. So that framed my idea of marketing people within the music industry, that’s for sure. It’s a song that stands up for itself.”
“Head and shoulders above everything else,” agrees Phil Carson. “It epitomizes rock ’n’ roll that embodies lyrical humor, along with a musical construction that surrounds a great melody. Hearing it in strip clubs all over the world doesn’t hurt either.”
But it’s a song that dogs Angus and Malcolm Young like Banquo’s ghost. Is it, along with other songs on the record, actually one of Bon Scott’s?
* * *
Certainly the best lines (and song titles) on Back in Black and their punchy brevity have all the hallmarks of Scott’s handiwork and it’s very tempting to make a case for it on that basis alone—despite Malcolm’s declaration to Classic Rock magazine in 2003 that the mere suggestion was “complete bollocks,” the repeated assurances of the band that the whole album is “a tribute to Bon” and the uncredited but generally widely accepted lyrical contributions of Mutt Lange and even Tony Platt, who says, “Lots of lines used to get put forward. They just came from everybody.”
First up, Angus and Malcolm themselves have confessed that right before Scott died they were working on some songs (barely more than titles at that stage) that found their way onto Back in Black and that the late singer had jammed on drums with them in a rehearsal studio on bare-bones versions of “Have a Drink on Me” and “Let Me Put My Love Into You.”
It certainly tallies with Doug Thaler’s recollection of how the band operated as a songwriting unit around the production of Powerage.
“From the early days when I was down there in Australia, I know that what the band did was sit around and come up with titles. And then they would write the song after they had the title to it. ‘Kicked in the Teeth,’ onward and onward. And Bon would work on the lyrics. Before they wrote any music or any lyrics they had a list of titles. And then they would figure out what song they could write behind the title.”
More compellingly, though, there are the “scraps of paper” or “notebooks” containing lines for songs that allegedly appear on Back in Black. Depending on whose version of events you’d rather believe, they were either found in Scott’s flat by Ian Jeffery and production manager Jake Berry or left behind at Jeffery’s flat by Scott.
I ask Jeffery where they are now.
“I think I still have them somewhere,” he says.
In an interview with Classic Rock in 2000 Malcolm further admitted he took possession from Jeffery of “a note with some scribblings of Bon’s” with “a couple of little lyrics on there” but “nothing with a title or that would give you any idea of where his head was at.”
Startlingly, Angus contradicts him in the same magazine in 2005. While conceding “a lot of ideas, choruses, song titles and lyrical snippets were already in place before Brian arrived” he also says “there was nothing from Bon’s notebook” on the album.
“All his stuff went direct to his mother and his family. It was personal material—letters and things. It wouldn’t have been right to hang on to it. It wasn’t ours to keep.”
The brothers can’t have it both ways.
In any case, we know now for a fact that Jeffery claims to be in possession of something that was Scott’s. Not everything went back to the Scott family. Which begs the question: if there were lines from those scraps of paper or notebooks on Back in Black, why are they still being held by Jeffery?
“Bon used to come round to mine every Sunday for dinner and then [go to the] pub and would quite often leave stuff at my place,” he says. And then he starts backtracking. “Not totally certain about Back in Black but I seem to remember a couple of words, lines [of Bon’s being on there]. Maybe not.”
Berry supports Jeffery’s account for this book. Speaking about the day he entered the apartment of the dead AC/DC singer, Berry says he didn’t see any notebooks in Scott’s flat. “I never saw anything like that. Never saw any books.”
But, all that aside, what really gives weight to the theory that Scott may have
contributed to Back in Black, even the unforgettable title track, is what was going on in his personal life and his disenchantment with life on the road.
“On the last tour [he did] of the US, Bon was in very bad shape,” says Thaler. “He was at a point where he’d drink till he passed out and he’d wake up and start drinking again. And the shows were suffering. The guys in the band were getting upset with him because he’d always been more of a leader, but his life had really started to take a bad turn. I think he was depressed. He had an Italian girlfriend named Silver [Smith], who he was living with in Sydney when I came down there in the winter of ’78, and a story he told me was that they had a little savings account and she just up and took off and cleaned out their bank account. He wasn’t quite right after that.”
Anthony O’Grady has a similar memory: “Bon was reeling from the effects of age, excess and pressure. But some say he’d written close to half the album that would become Back in Black. He’d started out thinking, ‘Thank God I’ve got a gig with young rock ’n’ rollers and I’m not with old farts like Fraternity any more. I’m 28, or whatever he was at that stage, and I’m hanging out with 17-year-old kids and getting 15-year-old girls and I’m so grateful for this second chance in life.’
“But by the time 1978 came around, and he was on his umpteenth tour of America, he was starting to really feel his age. From what Vince Lovegrove was telling me about Bon in 1980 when he met up with him in Los Angeles, the clock was winding down.”
He had started to call old friends out of the blue.
Recalls Thaler: “I know the last time I spoke with him it was strange. About a week before he died I got a call from him, and he was in England, and he never used to call me from England—I mean he’d call me when he got to the US; when he’d come to New York he’d come over and hang out at my apartment—but I got a call from him and he sounded like he was in good spirits. I said, ‘You’re finally going to the bank.’ He goes, ‘Well, I gotta tell you, mate, nothing’s changed for me. I’m still rubbin’ two nickels together.’”
A reading of the lyrics to “Back in Black” suggests it is not a memorial to Scott but a paean to money, a favorite Scott theme, and even references a Cadillac. The American car is first mentioned in “Rocker” off TNT, but more significantly on Powerage in “Down Payment Blues,” a song about being poor. “Back in Black” is its logical sequel: a song about being rich, of fortunes turning around. In his book Dirty Deeds, Mark Evans revealed Scott had wanted to record a solo album of Southern rock, of “Lynyrd Skynyrd kind of stuff, but really ballsy, something that swings.”
If indeed he’d written “Back in Black,” was it his fantasy of cashing in and perhaps even getting out?
Scott’s late mother, Isa, told Lovegrove in 2006: “He always said he was going to be a millionaire. I just wish he’d been alive to see it and enjoy it, you know? Almost every Christmas, Ron [Bon’s real name is Ronald] came home to visit. The last time we saw him was Christmas ’79, two months before he died. Ron told me he was working on the Back in Black album and that that was going to be it; that he was going to be a millionaire. I said, ‘Yeah, sure, Ron.’”
The line held by the Youngs has never deviated. As Angus told Guitar World in 1998: “The week he died, we had just worked out the music and he was going to come in and start writing lyrics … I wouldn’t say that he was disgruntled. He was itching to go … basically, the music had been finished before he died. The bulk of the tracks were the same.”
The credit on the album is final: “All songs written by Young, Young and Johnson.”
* * *
Lyrically, a better case can be made for Bon Scott’s involvement in “You Shook Me All Night Long.”
When he got chosen as AC/DC’s new singer Brian Johnson hadn’t even been to America, let alone toured it with the band, so why was he getting all hot and bothered by his memories of “American thighs?”
Johnson, by his own explanation, was fantasizing about what he hadn’t had.
In an interview with a Finnish website (no longer available online), he said: “We were in [The] Bahamas [recording Back in Black], and I had seen a couple of American girls. They were just so beautiful. They were blond, bronzed, tall … so I was just using my imagination; what I would do if I could. But Bon had done it all.”
He changed his tune slightly for VH1’s Ultimate Albums: “I’d seen them [American women] on the TV. And I’d always wanted to fuck one! They just looked fab. Everything pointed north on them.”
In the same interview Johnson speaks of being possessed by something unexplainable when he wrote the song in his room at Compass Point.
“I was just sitting working on a song and I was a little worried about it being up to the standard of AC/DC and was it good enough and who the hell am I to try to follow in the footsteps of this great poet. He was a great poet, was Bon Scott, not just a songwriter. And something happened to me and I don’t like to talk about it. But something definitely happened to me and that’s all I’m going to say about it. And, uh … er … it was good. It was a good thing that happened.”
The tale is expanded in the 2013 book Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal: “I don’t believe in spirits and that. But something happened to me that night in that room. Something passed through us and I felt great about it. I don’t give a fuck if people believe me or not, but something washed through me and went, ‘It’s all right, son, it’s all right,’ this kind of calm. I’d like to think it was Bon but I can’t because I’m too cynical and I don’t want people getting carried away. But something happened and I just started writing the song.”
Possessed by Scott’s ghost? Johnson’s a lovable figure but it stretches credulity.
More curiously, Malcolm Dome, a British AC/DC biographer, wrote in Classic Rock in 2005: “I can personally attest that Bon did indeed write some lyrics in preparation for the record, having seen a few sheets myself. This was just a couple of days prior to the man’s death, at a venue called The Music Machine in Camden, North London … one line sticks in my mind as being on one of those sheets: She told me to come but I was already there.”
The best line in “You Shook Me All Night Long,” if not the best line on the whole album.
It’s more than enough for Thaler.
“As a comrade in the band, as a good guy, someone that has the right temperament and disposition to fit into the band, Brian Johnson was a great choice,” he says. “As far as a singer, I thought he was a very strong choice that way. Where he lacked, I think, was that Bon Scott—to my mind, for the kind of music that they did—was a great lyricist. And I don’t care who tells me anything different: you can bet your life that Bon Scott wrote the lyrics to ‘You Shook Me All Night Long.’
“It’s Bon Scott’s lyrics all over the place. As you got further into [AC/DC’s career], by the time you got to For Those About to Rock the lyrics weren’t clever any more. They weren’t the tongue-in-cheek tough-guy lyrics like ‘Whole Lotta Rosie.’ Bon had a style. Brian couldn’t really match that. And by The Razors Edge you see that Brian’s not even part of the writing team any more.”
Mark Evans is not so sure.
“My idea about it is that there was this crossover of lyrics,” he says. “I’ll underline that I don’t know either way. But what I will say is that with Angus and Malcolm, they had a history of writing lyrics before Bon came along. If you go right back to ‘Can I Sit Next to You Girl’ and even ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Singer,’ that’s their lyrics. The lyrics of ‘Can I Sit Next to You Girl’ are great. People think that’s a real Bon-esque lyric. That’s actually Angus’s and Malcolm’s writing. ‘TNT’—Angus used to walk around reciting that; it used to be his catchphrase.
“To me, the lyrics on Back in Black, it’s not a big stretch for me to think that it’s Angus and Malcolm writing them. Because they wrote great lyrics; they came up with a lot of the titles.”
So what about Brian Johnson writing those lyrics?
&nbs
p; “I dunno,” he says, fixing me in the eye. “Has he written much after that?”
* * *
The other eight songs, then?
There was the claim made by Anna Baba, Bon Scott’s Japanese girlfriend at the time of his death, that “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” was a title he’d been playing around with and, in the words of Clinton Walker, was “inspired by the time when the caretaker at Ashley Court [Scott’s apartment building in Westminster] complained about loud music late at night.”
In 2005, Walker told Australia’s Rolling Stone magazine: “There are trace elements of Scott all over the album; titles and couplets that, if he didn’t write, certainly do him proud.”
Consider the lyrics in “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” about taking a look inside a bedroom door and a girl looking “so good” lying on her bed. It’s a natural companion piece to Highway to Hell’s “Night Prowler,” with its lines about a girl lying naked on her bed and the protagonist slipping into the room. You can hear Scott singing “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” even if it’s another guy, Johnson, getting the words out.
“I think that’s where the confusion comes from,” says Evans. “People look at Bon’s lyrics and hear that really cheeky scallywag attitude. And ‘Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution’ really fits that premise. But it goes back to prove my point. People also connect ‘TNT’ and ‘Dirty Deeds’ to that Bon thing. But I know both were ideas from Angus, the actual lyric. He didn’t write the whole thing but TNT/I’m dynamite and the lyric Dirty deeds/Done dirt cheap were all Angus’s influence. So, for me, being inside the tent at that point, I do see it flowing on.”
Which would support what the Youngs have said about the song. Malcolm told VH1 in 2003 he and Angus “bopped it down in about 15 minutes” when they needed a tenth song to round off the album. Said Angus to Classic Rock in 2005: “The last track we completed was ‘Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution,’ which Malcolm and me actually wrote [at Compass Point] … we spent a few days writing it in between guitar overdubs and the other things we were doing on the record.” And Malcolm again: “The song was about London’s old Marquee Club when it was in Wardour Street. It was in a built-up area and there was this whole thing about noise pollution in the news, the whole environmental health thing. That’s where it came from.”
