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

  The move surprised many, failed to impress others. Anthony O’Grady, for instance, will only listen to them on vinyl.

  “AC/DC were made for vinyl. Because vinyl has the bass,” he says, with a wistful look in his eye. “They were a band that used to go into stores and rearrange the racks so that their albums were up the front.”

  There will be a time soon, no doubt, when they will give in to hip-hop artists and license samples of their music. It brings the catalog back. It introduces a whole new demographic and market to their music. Public Enemy, Beastie Boys and other acts have tried to use AC/DC’s music officially but been knocked back. Jimmy Douglass, for one, is puzzled by their continued holding out against the inevitable.

  “Without a doubt sampling, when it’s done right, is the ultimate flattery,” he says. “It’s a new form of art. That’s all it is.”

  They use huge stage sets with bells, cannons, Angus statues and inflatable fat ladies. They repackage greatest hits albums in the guise of box sets and soundtracks. Paramount Pictures used 15 of their songs on a compilation for Iron Man 2.

  But O’Grady argues that they haven’t sold out: “They’re always very aware of context. So they would sell their songs to Iron Man because there’s a shared context between Iron Man’s audience and their audience. They wouldn’t sell them for any movie that would use them in an ironic context, for example. If Woody Allen had have come up to them and asked, I think they wouldn’t even answer his letters.”

  * * *

  Go to eBay, type in “AC/DC” and you’re confronted with branded merchandise ranging from light-up red devil horns to baby bibs. AC/DC have their own range of wines, both whites and reds. They have their own self-branded German beer, each can of which contains an “individual code that fans can use to buy attractive devotionalia or bid for prizes.” (The company behind the beer also released an accompanying “High Voltage” energy drink.) They have their own line of Converse Chuck Taylors, their own Monopoly board game and their own high-end headphones. Their most recent tour grossed nearly $450 million, making it the second-highest earning concert series in history, behind only The Rolling Stones. In 2011, they were the first musicians to ever make Australian BRW magazine’s Rich 200 list. In 2013, in the same magazine, they were adjudged the 48th richest family in Australia, with a combined fortune for the previous year of $255 million—the only entertainers on the list.

  For brothers who pride themselves on a “no bullshit” philosophy, the reality of what the Youngs do and the mountains of money they make does jar. But like the way ZZ Top and Aerosmith reinvented themselves from loose, raw, “rough and ready” beginnings in the 1970s to become commercial behemoths in subsequent decades, Tony Platt sees AC/DC’s transformation into an arena band as a sign of their character.

  “That’s the strength of the guys,” he says. “They reacted to a developing music market. As the audiences’ penchant for bigger, more bombastic, and so on and so forth grew, as good artists, as perceptive artists, they developed to take full advantage of that.”

  Phil Carson, who’s put his neck on the line for them several times over his career, doesn’t begrudge their success for a moment, even if it has come at the expense of some relationships: “AC/DC have found a real connection with their fans, and for the Young brothers it has always been paramount that the fans come first. That’s why they kept ticket prices low while all the other bands of their ilk were charging more and more. Musically, they found a formula that worked, and they funneled their creative energy into staying within those parameters. They kept going even through the difficult periods of Flick of the Switch and Fly on the Wall and emerged at the end of it stronger and better.”

  * * *

  But left a trail of blood in their wake.

  Witness the way the Youngs have discarded some band members, producers, engineers, managers and anyone else who rubbed them up the wrong way for whatever reason: Dave Evans, Mark Evans, Mutt Lange, Phil Rudd (kicked out for a decade after an almighty blue with Malcolm over a personal matter during the sessions for Flick of the Switch), Chris Slade, Michael Browning, Ian Jeffery, Peter Mensch, Steve Leber, David Krebs and a bunch of others, including a small army of forgotten drummers and bass players from their early days in Australia. The names Colin Burgess, Peter Clack, Larry Van Kriedt, Ron Carpenter, Paul Matters, Russell Coleman, Rob Bailey, Noel Taylor and the late Neil Smith only function in the AC/DC story as index entries or band trivia. When Smith died in April 2013, he didn’t even rate a mention on AC/DC’s official website (29 million “likes” on Facebook at time of writing—and counting).

  The body count was not always to the brothers’ advantage. The losses of Mensch, AC/DC’s manager at the height of their fame, and Lange, the best producer the band ever worked with, were for many years catastrophic commercially and artistically.

  It strikes me that AC/DC bang on about how much they do it for their fans because the fans, unlike some band members, managers and journalists, don’t give lip. They don’t say no. They don’t ask tough questions. They swallow the hype. Buy the merchandise. Don’t challenge the Youngs’ authority. AC/DC, anecdotally, is as welcoming to outsiders as a Mongol’s yurt. As Mick Wall says in his book, “the heart of the AC/DC story” is that they are “more of a clan than a band.” Yet when an American filmmaker and AC/DC superfan called Kurt Squiers decided to make an affectionate film called Beyond the Thunder, about how their music connected with fans, they didn’t want any part of it. There is an inherent contradiction at play here. At time of writing, the documentary, some years in the making, hasn’t been released. Squiers and his partner, Gregg Ferguson, are hoping to go into a partnership with AC/DC’s management and get the band’s blessing for a worldwide distribution deal.

  Dave Evans paints a picture of insularity: “The Youngs were always tight knit and I remember George telling me that when he was with The Easybeats they were millionaires on paper but ended up broke because of being ripped off by management. The brothers closed ranks and none of us were privy to the meetings they often had which did not go down well with the rest of us.”

  Anthony O’Grady, who’d been to singalongs at the Youngs’ family home in Burwood, what he called “a genuine, ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’ sort of situation,” also shares this view: “I think the band was representative of the Young clan. I don’t think there’s any doubt at all that AC/DC are the frontline troops of the Young clan and that Malcolm is the general of the band and Angus is the strike weapon of the band and everything else fits around that.”

  He saw this at close hand, being asked to leave the house at one point and sit in a car outside with a passed-out Bon Scott to “listen to the pelting rain on the roof” while band business was being discussed inside with their then manager, Michael Browning. O’Grady sat the sozzled Scott upright and patted him on the back a few times when AC/DC’s legendary frontman sounded as if he were choking. (If only he’d been with him in that Renault 5 in South London in 1980.)

  But this is a family steeped in the rules of the Glasgow mean streets, in Protestant/Catholic rivalries. A band that started out playing roughneck pubs in front of crowds of “Sharpies”; that right from the beginning attracted the street element and a working-class audience.

  John Swan, who was living in a migrant hostel in Adelaide when he met George and saw The Easybeats when they came through town, explains the Glasgow mentality: “Mine is the same philosophy as theirs: if you put it on me or mine, I’ll get you back. It doesn’t matter when. I will get you. If you beat me today I’ll be back tomorrow. That was given to us by generations before us in Glasgow. You’re brought up like that. So you bring that to this country and you tend to live that out. In Australia the average guy that was in a band would come from a fairly stable family, who had reasonable parents who didn’t believe that one’s a Catholic and one’s a Protestant and they should fucking kill each other. If you fuck with someone in our family, then you will wear it.”

  Another Glas
wegian, Derek Shulman, was struck by how much George continued to play a crucial role in the decision-making of the band. Shulman had performed in his own group, Gentle Giant, with brothers Phil and Ray before becoming a record-company executive and launching the commercial juggernaut known as Bon Jovi into American arenas.

  “When I worked with the guys, I realized that the fraternal bond was extremely close knit,” he says. “Having been in a group with my brothers I understood that this ‘bond’ was one that needed trust from all three brothers. Also being born in Scotland myself I knew instinctively where, how and why the Young brothers kept their distance—as the Shulman brothers did in the past. Their ‘clannishness’ really was intrinsically part Scottish reticence and part fraternal insularity.”

  Yet this clan loyalty didn’t stop Angus and Malcolm agreeing to ditch George as their producer after Powerage stiffed, even if they did so with his blessing. As long as he continued to pull the band’s strings behind the scenes, it was a compromise they could live with. They are nothing if not pragmatic.

  * * *

  But all of these intrigues are peripheral. They’re a job for AC/DC’s biographers or for the person who writes the Youngs’ inevitable official biography. This is not it. It does not attempt to be. Their personal and family lives are their own business, even if there are some journalists who fail to respect their privacy. This is a book, ultimately, about the power of their music and how they built the colossus of AC/DC. It’s an appreciation of three brothers whose journey with the two greatest rock groups to ever come out of Australia appears to be coming to an inevitable end, with the announcement in April 2014 on AC/DC’s Facebook page and website that Malcolm was “taking a break from the band due to ill health.” Intriguingly, though, AC/DC says it will “continue to make music.” They returned to the studio in May, with Stevie Young the talk of the AC/DC faithful.

  The Youngs covers nearly half a century of songwriting. November 2013 marked the 40th anniversary of the formation of AC/DC and the same month in 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of The Easybeats.

  Two bands that form the horns of Australian rock.

  1

  THE EASYBEATS

  “Good Times” (1968)

  It took a teenage vampire movie and nearly two decades for “Good Times,” The Easybeats’ maracas-driven thunderclap off 1968’s Vigil album, to break into the charts, reaching #2 in Australia, #18 in the United Kingdom and #47 in the United States. The only other song by the band to break the top 50 in all three markets was “Friday on My Mind,” and that had happened round about the time it was supposed to: in 1967, not 1987.

  There has never been any rhyme or reason to success in the music business, especially the fortunes of The Easybeats, and this confirmed it. The movie was The Lost Boys, starring Kiefer Sutherland and directed by Joel Schumacher, and easily the best thing about it was the Australian song, a duet for Jimmy Barnes, former lead singer of beer-soaked pub giants Cold Chisel, and the late Michael Hutchence of INXS, featuring the backing of his five bandmates.

  Containing three talented Australian brothers of its own—Andrew, Jon and Tim Farriss—INXS was on its way to becoming an arena act with 1987’s megaplatinum Kick, while Barnes was pushing hard to do the same thing with the self-titled and radio-geared Jimmy Barnes, a repackaged version of the For the Working Class Man album that had gone to #1 in Australia.

  But unlike INXS, he had failed to fire in the States. Now, though, the Glaswegian shrieker had an accidental American smash on his hands. A hit no one involved with the recording saw coming, “Good Times” having been initially covered to promote Australian Made, a loss-making Australia-only summer concert series conceived by Barnes’s manager, Mark Pope, and INXS manager Chris Murphy as a means of showing that a homegrown festival featuring homegrown acts could compete with big international tours for bums on seats.

  That all changed when Ahmet Ertegun got personally involved, as he had with AC/DC in the late 1970s. With his elder brother Nesuhi, the urbane Turkish-American co-founder of Atlantic Records came to belatedly get behind AC/DC, even after the band’s second US album, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, had been rejected by his own artists and repertoire (A&R) department.

  Ertegun heard the INXS-Barnes cover by chance in February 1987 and was bowled over. “They don’t make rock records like this any more,” he said. Accordingly a “softened up” US radio–friendly remix was put on The Lost Boys soundtrack and went on to sell a couple of million units.

  “Good Times” was a shrewd choice by Pope and Murphy: a four-on-the-floor ripsnorter begging for the sweat and spittle of Barnes but which also managed the feat of transforming the normally effete, slightly soft Hutchence into a figure so ballsy and cocksure with the microphone it was like the ghost of Jim Morrison or Bon Scott had entered his body. Mark Opitz, who produced the single, could see similarities with AC/DC’s late figurehead, at the time only seven years dead: “Like Bon, Michael was a real gypsy. A singer in a band that wasn’t necessarily the same as the rest of the band.”

  But beyond the two impressive lead singers, then at the height of their powers, and the not-too-shabby group of musicians behind them, the choppy guitar riff was the star. It felt familiar, almost AC/DC like. For good reason, hinted at by the mysterious credit. This remake of a forgotten Easybeats song was the first time much of the MTV generation on both sides of the Pacific had heard something composed by George Young, the Jor-El of AC/DC.

  * * *

  When it was released as a single in 1968 under the US title of “Gonna Have a Good Time,” having been recorded and produced the year before by Englishman Glyn Johns, “Good Times” sank without a trace, not even the backing vocals of Steve Marriott of Small Faces or the piano of Rolling Stones session pianist Nicky Hopkins able to cut the Australian band some chart slack. The only love it got in the States was an obscure but totally rocking, organ-scorched 1969 cover by a group of previously uncorrupted Mormon sisters from Utah, The Clingers, a cleancut rival act to The Osmonds. Looking for an image buster, they recruited Michael Lloyd and Kim Fowley as producers and released it under its US title.

  “Michael and I found it on an Easybeats album,” says Fowley, a notable songwriter for Kiss, Alice Cooper and Warren Zevon, among others, who went on to create, manage and produce the greatest female rock band of all time, The Runaways, and would guide Guns N’ Roses before they exploded on the rock scene in 1987. “We played The Clingers the song and they learned it and we recorded it.”

  Like so many bands, The Easybeats were just too far ahead of their time. The spate of covers of the song—some 40 of them and counting—was mostly to come in later years. Before 1970 had rolled around they broke up, “Friday on My Mind” both their biggest hit and their albatross.

  “The good thing about that Easybeats version is the high backing vocals,” says Mark Opitz. “Marriott just happened to be in the next studio. I was a schoolkid when I first heard The Easybeats’ ‘She’s So Fine’ on the radio. I just thought, ‘Fuck, what’s this? This is great. That’s just brilliant.’ I was blown away.”

  Doug Thaler, keyboardist/guitarist for Ronnie Dio and the Prophets and later AC/DC’s first American booking agent, heard “Good Times” in 1967 while on the same bill as The Easybeats in upstate New York on the Gene Pitney Cavalcade of Stars roadshow. Thaler went on to record the Vanda & Young tune but couldn’t replicate the same swing.

  “It really grooved,” he says. “I thought it was pretty funny that 20 years after The Easybeats played that song every night on tour over here somebody finally had a hit with it.”

  Now intoxicated kids around Australia, England and America were throwing up on front lawns, down stairwells and in sand dunes as it shook the walls of house parties or reverberated from parked cars in makeout spots. “Good Times” was exactly as its title suggested: the kind of song you played on a Friday or Saturday night as a gee-up before you went out on the town. An unapologetic boozing and shagging song: exactly what it was in
tended to be in 1968.

  But back then it couldn’t resurrect The Easybeats’ toxic career. There were rumors of drug use—heroin, no less—by one member (and it wasn’t lead singer Stevie Wright) tearing the band apart. This and the band’s failure to write another hit of the caliber of “Friday on My Mind” and the fact that for all their success they couldn’t rub two pennies together cut George Young deep. He went off cursing under his breath about managers and record-company swindlers, hung around in London playing and recording music with Harry Vanda and older brother Alex Young, then returned to Sydney in 1973 from a “four-year binge” of creativity that his two pimply younger brothers were fortunate to absorb by osmosis and which ignited the beginnings of AC/DC.

  Some of the best work of this “binge,” as George called it, is found on Marcus Hook Roll Band’s Tales of Old Grand-Daddy, a 1973 album he started in London with Alex then finished in Sydney with the help of Malcolm and Angus. “Quick Reaction” and “Natural Man” are steeped in the sound of AC/DC. The bass line and power chords on “Natural Man,” especially, are replicated almost note-for-note two years later on TNT’s “Live Wire.”

  Martin Cerf, reviewing “Natural Man” for the Los Angeles–published Phonograph Record Magazine in 1973 when it was just an import on the Regal Zonophone label from England, described it perfectly as a natural progression from “Good Times” and saw the revolution that was coming when no one else did, not least a bunch of record companies in the United States that didn’t know what to do with Marcus Hook.

  “If you can imagine what The Easybeats would have sounded like four years on should they have stayed together, then you know what ‘Natural Man’ is all about,” he raved. “It’s got a snare that tears speakers. It’s got protest lyrics. It demands you dance. It’s got Beatle harmonies. It’s got a riff the best this side of The Hollies’ ‘Long Cool Woman’ and ‘Heaven Knows’ by The Grass Roots, and a hook, well, now I know the reason for the group’s name.”