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

  When the band played its first Bristol concert in 1976, at Colston Hall, even the venue’s owners were dismayed by just how much AC/DC’s music had an unstoppable effect on its patrons.

  “The management were rather perturbed to find a normally passive audience leaping out of their seats,” wrote a snippy local reviewer.

  * * *

  Bon Scott never got the fame and riches he was due while he was alive, but the Youngs have achieved more financially and in terms of celebrity than even they would ever have dared to imagine and perhaps even wanted. As far as your standard rock-star narrative goes, their success has been counterintuitive. They’re by most reasonable measures unattractive, short, eccentric and highly combustible and good taste has been known to frequently desert them: for some reason they have approved or been behind some of the worst album-cover designs in the history of music (Fly on the Wall, Flick of the Switch, the original Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap). For so many reasons they shouldn’t be as big as they are. But they’re going to get bigger, even after they’ve stopped playing music.

  It’s almost a contradiction of their enormous drive to make it that they are private, almost obsessively so. One could make an argument it’s a form of aggression born of inferiority complex because of their stature, modest background and lack of formal education; the Youngs spent a lot of time in their early days fighting among themselves and with others and telling anyone within earshot to fuck off. In the public realm, only a few photos exist of all three of them together; one of those is from 1978’s Powerage sessions by Australian record-company executive Jon O’Rourke, at the time a music journalist who’d been invited into the Youngs’ private realm by Alberts’ house drummer Ray Arnott. A number of O’Rourke’s photos are published for the first time in this book. The most ubiquitous picture of the three, by Philip Morris in 1976 and the cover image for The Youngs, was taken during the Dirty Deeds sessions.

  “I didn’t realize at the time the significance of it,” says Morris. “I haven’t seen any photos that have got them together that close. It was hard to get.”

  Four decades later, nothing much has changed. They are frustratingly inaccessible to anyone outside their super-tight circle of trust.

  Unlike the relatively amiable Gibbs of The Bee Gees (only one of whom remains alive), the Youngs have a reputation for being brusque and as short with their temper as they are in their stature. George, who’s been characterized as “very volatile” by his own music partner, Harry Vanda, and “a genius with the extreme character that goes with that” by Mark Gable, is a recluse who rarely speaks to the media. So reclusive that for years an Australian man was able to impersonate him and swindle gullible concert promoters and investors. But he remains active in the affairs of AC/DC. One anonymous insider described his work to me as “the equivalent of being the chairman of the board of whatever network of structures is in place to maximize the revenues to the band and the Young family … he has an extremely canny business brain.”

  “George is definitely a recluse. Not a recluse from everything, but a recluse from the past,” says Mark Opitz. “He’s a recluse from things he doesn’t need to be involved with any more or that aren’t interesting to him. Before Pete Wells from Rose Tattoo died in 2006, they had a concert for him at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney, and George was in the third row, standing down the front by himself. Came out of nowhere and disappeared just as quickly. I wouldn’t say he’d be a recluse from anything that’s interesting to him because he’s got too big a brain and values his life too much.”

  Gable’s first encounter with George lasted just about as long as the great man’s appearance at “the Enmore.”

  “When I first met George I was in awe of him; I had idolized him for years,” he says. “Even though he was short in stature he was a giant creatively. As I got to know George I realized there was a dichotomy: unbelievably talented with amazing business acumen on one hand and yet there was this other side. There’s more to him than meets the eye. It’s something that I only understand now that I’m older.

  “I remember going to the Bondi Lifesaver either in late 1978 or ’79 and a very young Sam Horsburgh [the Youngs’ nephew] came up to me and said, ‘My uncle George is at the back; come up and say hello.’ I trotted up to the back of the room to find George at a table by himself holding what looked like a glass of scotch. At this time I was a complete teetotaller, so alcohol did not impress me at all. It wasn’t so much that George had a glass of scotch in his hand; it was that he seemed to have maybe 20 in his guts. As I approached he lifted both his right hand and the glass in recognition of me. As soon as he had half-lifted his hand, it and his upper body collapsed forward onto the table.”

  Reclusive or with 20 scotches in his guts, he remains a pivotal figure in the direction of AC/DC, according to Opitz.

  “They’re brothers. The older brother is the older brother and always shall be. Particularly when you get a close-knit family of Scots. They’re like Italians. Family is everything. When you’re struggling in Glasgow and your father’s working down the mine you have a fucking shitload of respect. The women work hard at home, cleaning or doing other things, and the kids do it tough. Running around in the streets. The brawls. These guys came out here for a fresh break and they walked into fucking sunshine, thinking, ‘Can you believe this is here? Can you believe this? And all these fucking fat Aussies aren’t doing anything about it because they’re so used to it. Fuck that.’ Just like the Italians and the Greeks who got out here and went, ‘Fuck. I can’t believe it. Let’s go.’ It’s a hard choice to take in life to follow your dream. But that was something they did because they came from nothing. And when you come from nothing you want to go to somewhere.

  “I can remember walking into the A&R offices of Atlantic Records in New York, at that time the biggest record company in the world with the Stones and whatever else on its roster, and talking to the head of A&R and I said, ‘How big are AC/DC to you?’ and he said, ‘Who do you think pays the fucking rent for the Rockefeller Plaza?’”

  * * *

  As for George’s younger brothers, their aversion to any form of public exposition outside what they can dictate is legendary.

  Clinton Walker, who wrote Highway to Hell: The Life and Death of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott and got no cooperation from the Youngs, was damning: “A closed shop, uniformly suspicious, paranoid almost, possessed of the virtual opposite of Bon’s generosity, prone to sullenness. Just as nobody can find a bad word for Bon, few of the people who have had dealings with the Youngs can find a good word for them … Angus and Malcolm had this incredible tunnel vision where no one else counted … insularity bordering on paranoia. Malcolm and Angus were not blessed with many social skills.”

  Evans was scarcely more charitable in Dirty Deeds: “Mal and Angus were very guarded guys, almost to the point of suspicion … there was a coldness about them that I hadn’t experienced before. It did have me wondering about them; matter of fact, still does.” Most of the time, though, they were “morose, grumpy, sullen and generally not too much fun to be around.”

  So what kept Evans looking so happy all the time? There’s scarcely a photo from those halcyon days of the band where he isn’t smiling or having a lark with Angus or Malcolm.

  “That was one side of them,” he says. “They could actually be a lot of fun. There was a sense of humor around that band. While we were all very serious about it, for God’s sake: you’re playing in a band with some fucker up the front dressed as a schoolboy. We’re not trying to be Pink Floyd here. There was a certain attitude—a lightheartedness—to the band when Bon was in it, owing to his lyrics. There were a lot of fun times in AC/DC and to be around was a lot of fun. But by the same token there were darker times too.

  “It was just a normal relationship. Being in a rock ’n’ roll band on the road playing with that intensity is never going to be a bowl of cherries. I think in all great bands there’s a fair amount of internal angst. The Stones. The Who. Aerosmi
th. Metallica. There’s a friction inside the band that becomes believable.”

  But in his dealings with the brothers, Atlantic Records president Jerry Greenberg didn’t find them difficult, instead finding them “kind of, like, shy.”

  Jay-Z’s and Justin Timberlake’s engineer Jimmy Douglass, who got his start as Atlantic’s in-house engineer, remembers them being “cordial and responsive … freaking cool human beings.”

  It’s a softer side of their personality few people get the privilege of seeing.

  Opitz recounts a story of Malcolm delivering “four or five quick jabs to the head” of a much taller concert promoter over a dispute in Detroit in the late 1970s.

  “They were tough customers, the Youngs,” he says. “They knew what to expect and weren’t afraid of it. You didn’t cross Malcolm. Great guy. No question about it. He’s a strong-minded fellow. He’s like George. He’s got that determination—I can move mountains if I so wish—without the bullshit attached to it, because they’re working-class Gorbals boys, so they’ve got that innate toughness that gets born into you if you’re Glaswegian.”

  That aside, though, Opitz also describes the Youngs as a regular family unit: “I remember going to a Christmas party at the family’s place in Burwood. Playing table tennis. Having a few beers out in the sun. A barbecue. Normal as bloody anything. Just great. I remember thinking, ‘How well has this migrant family done that’s just popped up, stuck together, stuck it out and they’ve had success in ways they couldn’t have imagined?’ And this was in the ’70s.”

  Says John Swan: “Margaret [the Youngs’ sister] was like a big sister to all of us. She would have a big pot of soup on and she’d always make sure you had a feed and a bed to sleep in. They were much more family-oriented than most other musicians were. Most other musicians would do that if it were you and your girlfriend, but they wouldn’t do that if it were just you. [The Youngs] took everybody in.

  “That’s why you’ll find not just for AC/DC but for the Youngs they certainly lived the Glaswegian style of family communication. Everybody lives together. If it’s your mate, it’s our mate. They wouldn’t bring an idiot to the house. They’d bring someone who was a fellow Glaswegian or a fellow Scot or somebody who had a problem that Margaret could help with.”

  They’ve also maintained, at least outwardly, no traces of ostentatiousness, despite fabulous, almost undreamed-of wealth. When getting around they’re sticklers for the Glasgow-style “gallus walk”—head down, hands in pockets, huddling up, a protective instinct—and it’s not a rare thing wherever they are in the world to see them down at the local shops clutching a packet of smokes and wearing cheap clothes as if they’re just average Joes.

  Anthony O’Grady and Angels guitarist John Brewster were members of the private Concord Golf Club in Sydney’s inner west. Several times they linked up with Malcolm and George for a social round. During one such outing, George told O’Grady AC/DC had sold “over 10 million albums” with Back in Black and were now the biggest band in the world.

  “Soon after George had said that, Malcolm, in all seriousness, said to me, ‘This is a really good golf club, isn’t it? How much do you pay to belong to this in a year?’ I forget what the fees were then. I said something like $1500. And he went, ‘Aw, you must be rich! I belong to Massey Park [a nearby public course].’ And I just looked at him and he was a man that could buy half of Florida and all the golf courses on it. They were very aware of being observed not to be putting on the Ritz. Very, very, very aware.”

  Swan relates a similar story about Angus, who was living in Kangaroo Point in Sydney’s southern suburbs. He was driving around in a Mercedes that had plenty of miles on the odometer and Swan, living in neighboring Sylvania, had bought a new Jaguar. Swan asked Angus why he was driving something so “fucking old” when he could afford anything he liked.

  “He said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with that car. What are you talking about? It’s a perfectly good car.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but you’re fucking rich now.’ He said, ‘That’s got nothing to do with it. It’s a good car. I like it.’ They don’t need to drive around showing everybody what they’ve got. Same goes with their shoes. They used to take the piss out of me for wearing flashy runners because they wore Dunlops. Seventeen bucks a pair. And I’d walk in with a $200 pair of fucking shoes on. And they’d go, ‘Ah! Look! Somebody’s in the money!’”

  “They’re really good people,” says Opitz, “but they’re very private people.”

  * * *

  For those readers seeking a conventional biography, the Youngs’ life stories have been dealt with (or at least attempted to be dealt with) adequately in books such as Walker’s Highway to Hell, Evans’s Dirty Deeds, Murray Engleheart’s AC/DC, Maximum Rock & Roll: The Ultimate Story of the World’s Greatest Rock Band, John Tait’s Vanda & Young: Inside Australia’s Hit Factory, Phil Sutcliffe’s AC/DC, High-Voltage Rock ’n’ Roll: The Ultimate Illustrated History, Susan Masino’s Let There Be Rock: The Story of AC/DC and Mick Wall’s AC/DC: Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be. There’s a bunch more of them, in different languages, of varying quality, mostly straightforward chronologies or illustrated guides with little or no critical examination (some verging on journalistic fellatio), even less actually written about the music and why it works the way it does, and most containing some major howlers.

  For instance, in the Wall book, there’s a photo of an old man in a schoolboy uniform hanging out with AC/DC in London in 1976. It’s from Dick Barnatt’s well-known sequence of photos in which Angus Young is drinking milk straight from a bottle. The mystery man is captioned as being Phil Carson, one of the most important figures in the AC/DC story: the man who signed them. So it’s a crucial detail to get right, especially when he’s interviewed for the book. But the man in the photo is in fact Ken Evans, an Australian who was program director for Radio Luxembourg and formerly of pirate radio stations Radio Caroline and Radio Atlanta. He’d recorded an interview with AC/DC to help promote their music and they were there to help celebrate his birthday. Still kicking around in his late 80s but in declining health, he lives in Mona Vale on Sydney’s northern beaches. He remembers little of the day but confirms it was “the one encounter” with the band he had.

  In a brief email exchange, I remarked to Stevie Young, who filled in on rhythm guitar for the American leg of 1988’s Blow Up Your Video tour, when Malcolm stood down to get on top of his drinking, that there was a lot of misinformation out there in books and fan sites about the band. I fell victim to it myself, thinking Stevie’s father was Alex Young because of what I’d read. He replied: “There is. But I like it … my dad was Stevie Young, their eldest brother.” Stevie Sr. was the first of eight siblings in the Young family, born in 1933. Alex’s son, he says, is called Alex and lives in Hamburg.

  There you go. Like father, like son. Hopefully I have avoided making a few mistakes of my own.

  So familiar details don’t need to be rehashed here; retelling the already-told story is not what this book is about. Bigger is not necessarily better. I didn’t want to relentlessly plunder old music magazines for secondhand quotes to fill pages or go over old ground with people who have been interviewed already ad nauseam or those who were sick of talking and would only open up under sufferance. Nothing is more dull, and so many books written about AC/DC have been just that, even the mercifully shorter ones such as Why AC/DC Matters by Anthony Bozza. The American writer says of Australia that the band was “raised there and imbued with the idiosyncratic cultural confluence that makes that island unique,” ventures “theirs is a wild-eyed cry of unruly youths from a country founded by convicts,” that “AC/DC came from the trenches” and that the band “have not reinvented the wheel—they’ve spun it like a motherfucker.”

  You get the drift. Even a slimline 160 pages is hard going with that amount of fanboy guff. The well-intentioned Bozza later admitted he’d done the book in the hope he’d be anointed as AC/DC’s official biographer. It reads as such: verging on h
agiographical. All the same, the title of the book deserved answering. Bozza can be commended for having a crack.

  The thing is, and it’s a point that needs to be strongly made, not everything AC/DC has done has been good. In fact, some of it has been downright crummy (from individual songs such as “Hail Caesar,” “Danger,” “The Furor,” “Mistress for Christmas,” “Caught With Your Pants Down” and “Safe in New York City” to forgettable albums such as Fly on the Wall, Blow Up Your Video and Ballbreaker). Some of it has been crass (“Let Me Put My Love Into You,” “Cover You in Oil,” “Sink the Pink”). But even when the lyrics are bad or in dubious taste the music always manages to sound good—the riffs never let you down.

  For a group that Bon Scott once described as an “album band” it’s ironic that of AC/DC’s 15 originally released, non-compilation studio albums at time of writing, only four (Let There Be Rock, Powerage, Highway to Hell and Back in Black) are truly essential. Their last great album was recorded in 1980.

  As the Australian music critic Robert Forster writes in his book The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll: “The reduction that goes into an AC/DC song, and the tight palette of influences the band has always worked with, gave the early work precision and power, but three decades later it acts less as a liberator and more as a noose.”

  Tony Platt agrees they’ve got themselves stuck in a musical corner of sorts from which there can be no escape: “Their biggest strength, the simplicity and directness of their music, is also their biggest weakness because there’s only so much you can do with that. Where do you go? If you’re David Bowie you can reinvent yourself on a regular basis and nobody bats an eyelid. But if AC/DC reinvented themselves, they would lose their fans overnight. You’d be hearing the outrage from millions of miles away.”