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

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  For Tony Currenti and Mark Evans and in memory of Michael Klenfner

  Violence and energy … that’s really what rock ’n’ roll’s all about.

  —Mick Jagger

  TRACK LISTING

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: “Gimme a Bullet”

  PREFACE: “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution”

  1. THE EASYBEATS “Good Times” (1968)

  2. STEVIE WRIGHT “Evie” (1974)

  3. AC/DC “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)” (1975)

  4. AC/DC “Jailbreak” (1976)

  5. AC/DC “Let There Be Rock” (1977)

  6. AC/DC “Riff Raff” (1978)

  7. AC/DC “Highway to Hell” (1979)

  8. AC/DC “Back in Black” (1980)

  9. AC/DC “You Shook Me All Night Long” (1980)

  10. AC/DC “Hells Bells” (1980)

  11. AC/DC “Thunderstruck” (1990)

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE: “Who Made Who”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)”

  BIBLIOGRAPHY: “Ride On”

  DISCOGRAPHY: “High Voltage”

  APPENDIX: “What Do You Do for Money Honey”

  INDEX: “Up to My Neck in You”

  Photographs

  Praise for The Youngs

  About the Author

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  “Gimme a Bullet”

  We all have a story when it comes to this band.

  I can’t put a date or a time on mine. My memories of the occasion are blurred by the whiskey fog that eventually wiped me out that dismal eve. Home alone on another Saturday night, wondering how I’d ended up in an untidy room in a damp, shitty, below-street-level flat in inner-city Sydney, Australia, when for so long I’d had it all: the comfortable suburban home, the happy family, the beautiful wife, even a scrawny pound dog with a waggy tail. And now I’d been reduced to sorting black socks to pass the time before it was late enough to safely go to sleep and not find myself waking up at 4 am. If being up at 2 am is lonely for a newly divorced man, 4 am is unbearable.

  Wanting to go out and be with a woman, any woman—just to hold and touch someone; and I’d done enough emergency “dating” to get through such nights—but paralyzed by the fact that the one woman I still loved and wanted to be with was with someone who wasn’t me. I felt powerless, angry and, more than anything, stuck. I was totally depressed. My situation was quite pitiful.

  And then—it was as simple as “then” in this tale of wretchedness—I grabbed my battered old MacBook, opened up iTunes and put on some AC/DC.

  The song I chose wasn’t “Back in Black,” “Highway to Hell,” “Thunderstruck” or any of the Australian band’s catalog of arena standards. (Aussies still claim AC/DC, even if Angus and Malcolm Young have gone out of their way in recent years to effectively disown their antipodean heritage.) It was “Gimme a Bullet,” a largely forgotten track off a release that had somehow slipped through the cracks of mainstream acclaim and bypassed mass album sales, 1978’s Powerage. Their fifth album, the last studio album produced by the ex-Easybeats duo of elder brother George Young and Harry Vanda in AC/DC’s golden period of 1975 to 1980 and the band’s unshowiest, most artistically realized recording. There isn’t a bad track on it.

  Oh, she hit me low.

  Yes, Bon, my woman did. Was this band reading my mind? I’d heard AC/DC before, of course, but that night, sitting on the end of my bed, I was utterly transfixed by what I was hearing. The flinty tone. The rising power. The delineated but somehow enmeshed guitars. No Angus flourish to speak of—rare for AC/DC. Just the Youngs interlocking with a driving groove from their rhythm section. And the words: lyrics that were a balm to the part of my soul that had been torn open by my wife’s leaving. Finally, I was getting it. When it was over, I had to listen to the whole album—and then all over again.

  More than anything they did before then or have done since, Powerage, clocking in at under 40 minutes, is a sonic Polaroid of real life, in all its domestic ordinariness, as seen through the lens of a group of disreputable-looking men that can lay serious claim to being the greatest rock ’n’ roll band of all time.

  Knocked together in a handful of weeks in a studio on the fifth floor of the now-demolished Boomerang House in Sydney, Powerage isn’t an album about fucking, drinking, guns or inclement weather. Mercifully there are none of the juvenile sexual double entendres with which the band’s third and final singer, Brian Johnson, managed to spoil some of the Young brothers’ best guitar work in the 1980s. It’s an album true listeners (an important distinction from true fans) of AC/DC’s music can relate to because, thanks in no small part to the input of Bon Scott, it’s about human frailty.

  It’s this glimpse of humility and pathos in Powerage that separates it from the rest of the AC/DC catalog. Other albums feature the same wrecking ball of Gretsch, Gibson, Music Man and Sonor, but the nine songs of Powerage (10 on the European LP release) explore themes that rarely get celebrated in hard rock. Abandonment. Yearning. Dispossession. Aspiration. Hardship: emotional and financial. Getting dealt a bum hand. And, most electrifyingly, risk. The majestic Scott wouldn’t have lived a life by any other credo.

  The chorus of “Rock ’n’ Roll Damnation,” the disc’s opener, says it all: Take a chance while you still got the choice. I eventually did, leaving that room, the whiskey bottle and my unsorted black socks to run off to New York City to hook up with a burlesque dancer who looked like Scarlett Johansson. I wasn’t going to die wondering. I wrote a book. I fell in love again. I got my life back on track.

  But it was “Gimme a Bullet” that knocked me sideways first and still does every time I hear it. When Cliff Williams’s bass breaks through the ramparts of the Youngs’ guitars and Phil Rudd’s beat at around 1:17, the song soars to another level of rock perfection altogether. It’s probably the closest thing the workmanlike “plugger” Williams, as Rose Tattoo guitarist Rob Riley laconically describes him, has ever got to a solo in over 30 years of playing with AC/DC.

  He hasn’t done much else creatively. By most reliable accounts, the hard-nosed Youngs won’t let him. It’s not his band. It’s not his place.

  But was it even Williams’s guitar? Mark Evans, the Englishman’s predecessor in the band, later told me: “My understanding of the situation is that George played bass on the whole album.” Which might just account for why Powerage is so good. Such mysteries abound in any discussion about AC/DC. In any event, the effect it had on me was the same, whoever was playing.

  Hearing “Gimme a Bullet” and being swept up by it gave me resolve and determination to stop feeling sorry for myself. I played it in my car, when I was jogging on the streets around Sydney or pumping iron in the neighborhood gym. My then seven-year-old daughter, normally into Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift and Ke$ha, loved the song so much she’d dance around the room to it. I felt a surge of paternal pride when she presented me with a drawing of a big heart with florid patterning around its edges and some scribble underneath where she’d written, “My dad loves AC/DC and The Rolling Stones.” To be able to connect to your child through music you love is a beautiful thi
ng. At 37, after half a life spent listening to good, melodic but comparatively anodyne music, I’d finally grasped the meaning of AC/DC.

  I can only liken the impact “Gimme a Bullet” had on me that night to the scene in the movie High Fidelity where John Cusack’s character confesses he arranges his records not chronologically or alphabetically but autobiographically. Anytime I hear that song it takes me back to that moment when I thought I’d lost everything, could have easily walked outside and in front of a garbage truck but didn’t. It restored my mood. It made me feel good. It made me feel like I wasn’t alone in the world; that there were other guys out there and before me, Scott among them, who’d got through similar nights of loneliness, gritted their teeth and prevailed. And that is what the best music does. It immortalizes those beautiful, private moments of existential clarity. It makes us embrace life and its vicissitudes.

  When years later, back in New York, I ran across the Brooklyn Bridge in a snowstorm with “Gimme a Bullet” on my iPod, the song propelling my legs forward like it had done so many times before, I had to stop for a moment in the frigid January air—Manhattan on my left, Brooklyn on my right, Sydney and my old life very far away—and smile for regaining my health and happiness. AC/DC’s music as much as anything else had helped me get there.

  Angus and Malcolm Young might shrug their shoulders and say they’re only playing rock ’n’ roll, be largely oblivious to the personal stories of fans for whom their music has been deeply affecting, shy away from writers and journalists who want more than the soundbites that get occasionally thrown out like burley off the side of a boat when they have a record to promote. But along with George, their reclusive elder brother, mentor and producer, they’re more important than that. The music of the Youngs is about much more than drinking, fucking and rock ’n’ roll. They might not believe it. They can go on protesting for all I care. No one’s buying it.

  For when they’re gone, there’s going to be a lost guy somewhere who’ll hear “Gimme a Bullet” for the first time and decide to wake up in the morning. We all have a Young brothers song that has this kind of effect on us.

  And it’s that special gift of theirs, not the fame, not the record sales, not the incalculable wealth, that makes them worth appreciating.

  —Jesse Fink, August 2014

  PREFACE

  “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution”

  In January 2013 I found myself in a kilometer-long line outside the Museum of Modern Art in New York to see Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The Scream. The line, remarkably orderly, stretched city blocks. It was a Friday night, free admission, and bitingly cold. Well below zero. Even with layers of clothing on, I had to stamp my feet to keep warm. But the discomfort was more than worth it. I was seeing The Scream. An iconic piece of art. Not something you see every day. Especially for free.

  After about an hour I finally made it inside and went up to the fifth floor where all the heavyweights had been collected: Dalís, Modiglianis, Cézannes, Picassos, Van Goghs, Matisses, Monets, Klees. The blockbusters. And there, just 3 ft by 2 ½ ft, was The Scream, one of four versions Munch had made and which had recently been sold to a banker for $120 million at Sotheby’s. It was hard work getting anywhere near the painting. While some of the most notable artworks of history hung in nearby rooms unloved and ignored, The Scream was being mobbed.

  The huddle around it was a hundred thick with locals and tourists, not absorbing it, not pondering its message, but photographing it with their iPhones to put up on Instagram or standing in front of it for happy snaps to load up on Facebook. I waited patiently to stand in front of it, but when I got my chance I was disappointed. The only thing that elevated what I superficially took to be a fairly rudimentary and not that interesting pastel work were the anguished figure’s famously haunted eyes. Never mind that in other rooms meters away there was much better art hanging on the walls and no one was standing in front of those to get their picture taken. This painting had just sold for $120 million. It was important. It was expected of me to be in total awe and then shuffle along. This was serious art.

  I wanted to have it bore into my bones. To be swept away. To be moved. But I felt nothing. I left the building to disappear into the bustling streets of Midtown, untangled the headphones for my iPod and put on Back in Black, just $9.99 on iTunes. Even though by then I’d heard the album a thousand times, it took one simple riff by AC/DC to do what one of the most celebrated paintings of history could not.

  Jerry Greenberg, president of Atlantic Records from 1974 to 1980, the executive who can take credit for overseeing the band’s rise to the top in America, felt exactly the same when we talked weeks later: “Buh, buh da da, buh da da—it’s absolutely incredible.” I had to pinch myself that the man who signed ABBA, Chic, Foreigner, Genesis and Roxy Music was singing AC/DC to me down the phone from Los Angeles.

  The piousness of art, its inherent elitism and suffocating snobbishness is everything the Youngs—Angus, Malcolm and George—rail against but what these remarkable Scottish-Australian brothers have done is more than get lucky with a formula. What they’ve achieved with their music over the past 40 years through dedication, unwavering self-belief and a smattering of musical genius is no more and no less than art in its own right. But you don’t find this art displayed in museums. This isn’t art that was created to be bought and sold by moneyed families or hedge-fund managers. It’s art that doesn’t even want to be called art. It doesn’t need to be called art. It just is.

  It’s this world-class talent combined with their astonishing humility that makes the self-effacing and fiercely private Youngs—three Hobbits of hard rock from a big family of eight: seven boys, one girl—so enduringly compelling.

  The brothers have composed not only some of the most stirring rock music—if not music—of all time but amassed a body of work more diverse and creative than they are ever given credit for. Their impact on the history of rock and especially hard rock has been nothing short of immense. Remarkably, a fourth musical brother, Alex, who was a young man in 1963 when George, Malcolm and Angus left Cranhill, Glasgow, with their parents, William and Margaret, for Australia, stayed behind to eventually get signed as a songwriter by The Beatles’ Apple Publishing and saw his band, Grapefruit, come under the wings of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

  In fact, I would argue no set of brothers, not even the Gibbs of The Bee Gees or the Wilsons of The Beach Boys, has had such a profound impact on music and on popular culture around the world as the Youngs. Their songs have been covered by superstar acts ranging from Shania Twain and Norah Jones to Santana and Dropkick Murphys. Their music has been so penetrative that Australian palaeontologists named two species of ancient arthropod after them: Maldybulakia angusi and Maldybulakia malcolmi. “They are both diminutives,” explained Dr. Greg Edgecombe of the Australian Museum, “and are related and have gone and left the shores of Australia to conquer the world.”

  Their tedious critics—and to this day there are many; they’ve never quite gone away, but eased off in recent years, having realized the more they complain, the more AC/DC makes fools of them—contend that all their songs sound the same. Some of them do. The Youngs don’t want to fiddle with what is clearly working for them. But those critics fail to understand a very important point. It’s their very lack of boundary pushing that is a form of boundary pushing in itself.

  Mark Gable of The Choirboys, an Australian band given their start by George Young and best known for their hit “Run to Paradise,” gives the best description I’ve ever heard of what the Youngs manage to do in their music: “Before I wrote ‘Paradise’ I decided to use only three chords. This restriction or boundary, if you will, creates better art. If you’re allowed to do anything at all, invariably you will show your weaknesses. But if you work within the bounds of what you know best, its expansion seems to go on forever.”

  That AC/DC doesn’t touch on different styles of music, one could argue, is a form of laziness. Then again, you could say
it’s a form of brave creativity of its own. Not many musicians could work within such narrow music parameters yet come up with songs that sound new and fresh every time you hear them. But the Youngs do. Consistently. AC/DC never, ever sounds stale.

  Says former Atco Records president Derek Shulman, probably best known for signing Bon Jovi and for reviving AC/DC’s flagging career in the mid 1980s: “I agree, 100 percent. They have no need to further push boundaries. They have set up their very own boundaries, to which no other band can come remotely close. They were and are leaders and have never been followers and this is something that 99.9 percent of other rock bands should realize and understand if they really want to become a legend, as AC/DC surely are as a band.”

  * * *

  The Youngs’ songs—they have written and recorded hundreds between them over close to half a century—have their own stories. Why have they endured and resonated with hundreds of millions of people and inculcated such fierce loyalty and outright fanaticism? AC/DC concerts are not just concerts. They are rallies held under a band logo that is as powerful as any flag. What has made “It’s a Long Way to the Top” a virtual national anthem in Australia? Why is “Thunderstruck” routinely played at NFL games in the United States and soccer matches in Europe? Why, above all other bands in the world, did a festival in Finland elect in 2006 to have AC/DC’s entire catalog performed live by 16 acts (including a military band) for 15 hours straight? What prompts cities—Madrid, Melbourne—to name lanes and streets after them? Why are there legions of Angus Young impostors on Facebook? Why is “Back in Black” frequently sampled (without permission) by hip-hop artists and mash-up DJs; used in network television, commercials and Hollywood films; licensed to gaming and sporting corporations; and played in helicopters and tanks on the battlefield? At the Battle of Fallujah in Iraq in 2004, American Marines blasted “Hells Bells” from giant speakers to drown out the call to arms coming from the city’s mosques.