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

by Fink, Jesse

  More recently, though, there was a startling allegation made on Sydney radio by Mark Gable that Scott wrote the lyrics not for just one or two songs on Back in Black but for the entire album.

  “I did get this from the inside,” he tells me. “My understanding, from several sources of people who were with Alberts back in the day who were close to the band, is that even though Brian Johnson is credited with writing lyrics on Back in Black, Bon Scott’s estate gets one-third of the publishing royalties. This is becoming more common knowledge throughout the music industry.”

  So not just the one song? The whole album?

  “Apparently.”

  Is that as far as you can elaborate?

  “What I was told was that it was the whole album, yes.”

  Even Isa Scott supported the Gable story in Walker’s 1994 book, Highway to Hell.

  “They were going to hit the top this time,” she told Walker. “They called it Back in Black. They had to give it a name, you see, but Ron, I think, did all the words.”

  Not convinced yet? Oddly, the 1980 vinyl edition put out by Alberts doesn’t even have a lyric sheet.

  So if Ian Jeffery has the infamous/apocryphal notebooks, and he’s on the record as telling Wall that “a few lines” of Scott’s “are in there” on Back in Black, what songs are they?

  “Tough one,” he says. “Can’t really remember.”

  Right. An odd statement for someone who said in the same book that being sacked by the Youngs was the “darkest day of my life.”

  With time, has that hurt eased at all? How does he regard the Youngs now? Does he stand by his words?

  “Was and still is [the darkest day of my life]. I was giving them 100 percent as I always did. No, it has not eased. I still wish I was with them. I just feel really sad. They were my whole life. They say time is a healer; maybe so. But it does not take away the sadness I still feel every time I hear an AC/DC song. Especially Bon.”

  * * *

  Yet so much of the Back in Black conspiracy theory doesn’t wash.

  Where Bon Scott’s lyrics were known for being naughty, sly and mischievous with accompanying melodies, in the words of John Swan, “narrated, tugged, pulled and almost spat out with venom,” Johnson’s lyrics are too frequently the opposite: obvious, graphic and crude. And so many of the songs on Back in Black are just that.

  If Johnson was possessed by Scott’s spirit and managed to write the lyrics to “Back in Black,” “You Shook Me All Night Long,” “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” and “Hells Bells” off his own bat, then great—all power to him and any royalties that flowed his way. Because that creative eidolon conspicuously deserted him on “Shake a Leg” and “Shoot to Thrill.”

  Outside those four standout tracks, too many of the other songs on Back in Black are steeped in a kind of juvenile chauvinism that Scott, a rogue but one who loved women, was careful not to allow to cross over into outright crassness. That, in all honesty, can’t really be said for “Givin’ the Dog a Bone.” (The original spelling in the title—“Given”—remains on the band’s website, though has been changed for some reissues.)

  Anthony O’Grady remembers that his early interviews with the Youngs “tended to degenerate into smutty tales.” He spent some time with them on the road, where what he quaintly describes as “adventures of the day” were plentiful.

  “They were very typically Scottish-Australian and blokish in the sense that they only had time for one sort of girl: and that was the groupie mold, the sort that didn’t mind being a possession and thrown around. They would accept groupies from other bands when they were touring in the country and in different cities and they would roll up one of the groupies or a couple of them in a carpet and give them to bands who were coming to Sydney.”

  Phil Sutcliffe, who had spent time with AC/DC in 1976, wrote eloquently of the band’s view of women for Classic Rock in 2011.

  “They stand for everything I disagree with about our chauvinist view of the woman’s role, yet they’re so totally honest, open and funny about it that I got carried away with liking them, and became aware again how life, for all the fine ideals we raise and cling to, insists on turning out like a seaside cartoon postcard. A belly laugh is often the sanest reaction. And that’s what AC/DC are into.”

  David Mallet, who directed the second 1986 video for “You Shook Me All Night Long”—featuring a blonde bimbo in black leather astride a mechanical bull—played consciously on this “seaside cartoon postcard” humor.

  “The same humor was in the lyrics and the delivery as was in the videos,” he says. “I just think the videos were an extension. You call a record Stiff Upper Lip, for instance, you can quite easily go away and make a sex-comedy video. When everybody else approaches sex as it’s sexy, we approached it as it’s funny. I think a very significant part of the ‘no bullshit’ thing [with AC/DC] is that if you look at some of the lyrics and some of the song titles, it’s pretty obvious that a comedy video made like that is suitable.

  “You go right back to Mae West in the 1930s. Her humor was exactly the same as AC/DC’s humor: ‘Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?’ That was Mae West’s version of ‘You Shook Me All Night Long.’ It was a particular type of humor that was in vogue in the 1980s as indeed it was in the ’30s. Nowadays people would jump all over it and say it’s not correct or it’s not this or it’s not that. Normally those people have no sense of humor whatsoever.”

  So what is AC/DC’s secret?

  “It’s some sort of musical genius and a totally unique, and I’m glad to say very out of date, sense of humor.”

  And “You Shook Me All Night Long” itself?

  “It’s an obvious song, it’s an easy song, it’s an easy chord progression, and yet the way it’s played, the little breaks, the way that a bar is split up, not into four, but into about 16, is beyond any subtlety of any other rhythm section that I know. I do not understand it. I don’t understand how they are as good as they are.”

  Manning also praises it for its simplicity: “So many other bands, even if they had been able to come up with that song and tried to record it, would have had a lot more ‘stuff’ on it from the beginning. It would have lost the power when everybody came in together.”

  * * *

  Phil Carson won’t have a bar of any conspiracy. He says the very notion that Johnson didn’t write the lyrics for “You Shook Me All Night Long” and indeed the whole album is preposterous tosh.

  “All the lyrics on Back in Black were written by Brian, with a little gentle nudging by Mutt,” he says. “As a lyricist, Bon nailed the elements of rock ’n’ roll, and there was more than a little humor in his approach to writing. When Brian assumed that mantle, he carried on the tradition. Brian’s lyrics embodied the spirit of the band. His lyrics have balls and wit.

  “I thought it was something of a disgrace when he was excluded from the writing in later years. He recently played me some new songs he had written. They were far superior than anything that appeared on the last AC/DC album.”

  So why, when Johnson would appear to have the faculty to be able to knock together a song about an incident he didn’t even witness (1983’s “Bedlam in Belgium,” based on a fracas involving a brandished weapon that broke out onstage at a gig in Kontich near Antwerp in 1977, when overzealous and aggressive police tried to shut the band down for breaking a noise curfew), did Angus and Malcolm exclude him from the writing? Was any reason given?

  In a 1990 interview with Kerrang! magazine reproduced in Howard Johnson’s Get Your Jumbo Jet Out of My Airport, Angus claims that he and Malcolm relieved Brian of his duties to help him through some personal issues and free him up to concentrate on giving his best performance. It would appear that the suggestion, made by Johnson himself, that he simply ran out of ideas for lyrics should be treated with some skepticism.

  Carson has his own ideas but gives a cryptic, albeit heavy hint: “I have never discussed the thinking behind this, ex
cept to draw your attention to the fact that the people who write the songs get most of the money.”

  Who wrote what? Who owns what? Who gets what? How did AC/DC manage to write four of their career-defining songs and the second-biggest selling album of all time in the space of a matter of weeks and without their single biggest influence, Bon Scott, yet write only one song approaching the same quality (“Thunderstruck”) in the following 33 years? No one inside the Youngs’ inner circle wants to talk about it—at least publicly—and why should they? Who can prove anything anyway? Does it really matter?

  Yet again it comes back to Rashomon. One band. So many different versions of an unobtainable truth.

  10

  AC/DC

  “Hells Bells” (1980)

  John Wheeler of Hayseed Dixie is in no doubt.

  “Maybe the greatest melodic guitar signature line ever,” he says. “And yet it’s not particularly difficult to play. But that’s part of its genius. Something doesn’t need to be technically difficult in order to be stunning; in fact the contrary is often true. Beethoven’s most famous piano piece isn’t one of the very difficult sonatas, but rather ‘Für Elise,’ which was just a little trill study he tossed off in five minutes so his student, Elise, could practice her third and fourth finger trills. Yet it’s so simple and catchy that everybody knows that melody. ‘Hells Bells’ is the same sort of brilliance. You hear it once and it bounces around the inside of your skull for the rest of your life.”

  It was certainly a song that American soldier Mike Durant will never forget. Durant was piloting Super Six-Four, a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, during the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 when its tail rotor was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. The chopper crashed in the middle of the city, badly injuring all four crew members on board. Durant broke his back and right femur. He remained trapped in his seat before two Delta Force snipers that had been dropped into the crash site pulled him out. In the ensuing firefight with militiamen and angered locals, they were killed. Durant never saw his crew alive again and was himself beaten with the severed arm of one of his comrades before being taken hostage. The events of the botched raid on Omar Salad and Abdi Hassan Awale, associates of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, chronicled in Durant’s memoir, In the Company of Heroes, formed the basis for Mark Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down and the Ridley Scott film of the same name. In all, two Black Hawks went down, 18 American soldiers died and 73 were injured that day: October 3, 1993.

  During his 11 days of captivity before being released by Aidid, American military helicopters circled the city, looking for any sign of Durant, who was being detained in “a cheap, highway hotel” he called “Hotel Nowhere.”

  My injuries continued to sap a lot of my strength, and I had been dozing again when my eyes suddenly snapped open. The sound of a helicopter flying overhead was louder than before, and in addition to the familiar twirling of Black Hawk rotors, I heard something else. It sounded like some sort of broadcast, as if a large stereo speaker were mounted on one side.

  It was probably a propaganda effort of some kind, I reasoned. The helo was flying in a large circular pattern and the transmission was difficult to discern, fading in and out with the wind and the changing position of the aircraft. I looked desperately around the room, wishing I had some way to signal them. Now, as the helo turned again, the thin sound of tolling church bells grew clearer.

  Bonggg!… Bongg!… and then it faded out for a moment as the aircraft made a turn away from my location.

  When I heard it again I raised my head. What the hell is that?

  It was, of all things, “Hells Bells.” Durant’s would-be rescuers, astonishingly, were playing the opening track of Back in Black, trying to find him. They knew AC/DC was one of his favorite bands.

  I sat straight up. My crushed spine sent jolts to my brain, but I didn’t even feel it. “Hells Bells?” Somebody up there was playing “Hells Bells?” I rubbed my eyes, thinking I must have lost it … [but] this was sure as hell no accident! I was not dreaming. The Black Hawk made a roaring turn right above the Hotel Nowhere and AC/DC’s earsplitting tune about challenging Satan and his forces of evil thundered into my cell and banged off the walls … I smacked my fist into my palm. The Night Stalkers were sending me a message, there was no doubt about it. I had no idea why they were playing that specific tune, but at the time I didn’t care—it was music from heaven. Later, I would learn that it was all part of a plan. Suffice it to say that the concept was brilliant.

  The Black Hawk moved off and the broadcast faded, but I had blasted out “Hells Bells” in my bunk at the compound often enough and I knew the words by heart … I hear you, boys, I thought with an incredible surge of excitement. I hear you! I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me, but I’ll think about it over and over until I get it!

  Pilot Dan Jollota then started broadcasting Durant’s name, assuring their captured comrade that he and his colleagues wouldn’t leave without him.

  The broadcast and the Black Hawk faded away. I listened hard for a good long minute, but they were gone. Yet I knew that they’d be back. They wouldn’t give up. Soon enough, they would find me. Soon enough, it would all be over.

  It was quiet again. The children played and mothers called them home. There was no gunfire. I looked over at the small window of my cell. The orange rays of the setting sun were slanting in through the shutters, and in my mind I could still hear Dan’s voice and promise.

  “We will not leave without you.”

  My spirit was soaring, but I quickly wiped the wetness from my cheeks and settled down. I wasn’t going to allow the Somalis to witness the heights of my new hope.

  As the sun continued to set on that day, I experienced a wave of powerful feelings. But there was one thing I no longer felt at all …

  Alone.

  “I had a broken leg and back,” says Durant, who has also told his unique story to the Beyond the Thunder documentary. “I could hardly roll over. Hearing it did inspire me knowing my friends were out there trying to locate me so that they could launch a rescue mission. I would say it had a psychological effect, primarily. They also had voice recordings from one of my friends. [Dan] was calling my name and saying that they would not leave without me.”

  A haunting still of Durant’s battered face from a video made by his interrogators ended up on the cover of Time magazine and on his return home he was feted as a war hero. He asked AC/DC’s attorney if he could use the lyrics of “Hells Bells” (no apostrophes for AC/DC, cobber) in his book. He was flatly refused.

  That was until Brian Johnson found out about it.

  “We were just about to give up. Brian found a copy of our request and sent an email to me introducing himself and saying we could use the lyrics for pretty much whatever we wanted. The next day I called his cell and left a message. We were glad to know we didn’t need to change the book and I was actually in line at a retail store buying a new copy of Back in Black on CD when my cell rang and it was Brian calling me back. He explained he was a big military-history buff and again said we could do what we wanted with the lyrics on this project.”

  AC/DC’s unfailingly generous singer also helped John Wheeler when he heard A Hillbilly Tribute to AC/DC, which contains “Hells Bells.”

  “Cliff Williams hired us to play a party for him the year that the album came out,” says Wheeler. “I say ‘hired’ because he insisted on paying us even though we tried to insist on playing it for free. I’ve spoken to Brian on the phone a few times. He actually talked about us a lot to the press in 2001 during their Stiff Upper Lip tour in the States. His endorsement rather silenced a lot of the critics who were very much inclined to trash our record at first. I can’t thank Brian and the rest of AC/DC enough for being good sports, sincerely.”

  AC/DC’s new record company, Sony, was less charitable. Hayseed Dixie’s name had originally been AC/Dixie but lawyers representing the band forced them to come up with another name.

  “AC/DC loved my firs
t record—they were incredibly supportive of it and for that I could not be more grateful. But it was explained to me by ‘legal people’ that [the band doesn’t] control the trademark to their own name; rather, it’s licensed to their record label. This situation is quite common for bands on major labels; hence situations like Prince not owning the rights to use his own name for performance for several years and going by that wacky squiggle symbol—which looked remarkably like a middle-finger salute to me—for several years.

  “Even though I believe we could have won a lawsuit with Sony in court, we would have still essentially lost because it would have cost a fortune that I didn’t have. And it wasn’t a fight worth fighting. Sony has a team of lawyers on retainer just sitting around looking for something to do every day that might help justify their wages to their employers. I couldn’t see any compelling reason to help them do that.”

  So he only ever heard from Williams, Johnson and the band’s lawyers, not the Youngs?

  “Correct. I’ve never met Angus or Malcolm. Although I know that Brian speaks for the band a good deal of the time in the press, but he doesn’t say anything that they don’t all agree with him saying when it’s tour press.”

  * * *

  It’s an odd thing about “Hells Bells” but Mike Durant’s harrowing experience in Somalia isn’t the only time the song, written in memory of Bon Scott according to Angus and Malcolm Young, has been used by the US military as so-called “acoustic bombardment” in the theater of war.

  “Hells Bells” also makes an appearance in Dexter Filkins’s 2008 book The Forever War, which opens with the author describing the Battle of Fallujah in 2004 and hearing the song coming from PSYOP (psychological operations) vehicles while “minarets were flashing by the light of airstrikes,” “rockets were sailing on trails of sparks” and “bullets poured without direction and without end.” The aim of PSYOP in Fallujah was to drown out the call to arms coming from the mosques. The Iraqis, the thinking went, hated rock ’n’ roll.